Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons: An Anthology of New Chinese Writing

At least for the first criterion, the eight stories, four essays, and 18 poems in the collection all clear the bar. For instance:

Li Jiayin’s “History in Bomi Time” deftly shifts the narrative as we follow a student cheating on a university anthropology paper, which leads to a subsequent university romance and, eventually, a search for a remote tribal settlement. Li brings to focus the ways we construct and understand history while simultaneously calling it into question: “History is but the product of linguistic fabrication, I thought. Between cognition and memory, memory and reconstruction, reconstruction and narrative, there had never been any clear boundaries to begin with.”

The first of Hei Tao’s essays, “吴 (Wú),” juxtaposes four central images and ideas—an old magnolia tree needing support but sprouting new growth, rural tea, traditional figurines made of “Shan Ye mud,” and ears with which to hear the lonely song of the erhu “which itself originates in the melancholy of the southern Yangtze.” Hei’s cataloging of these items becomes a form of nostalgic love letter to the rural south.

Jia Wei’s poem “Me in the World” offers stunningly powerful statements—“Distance does not recognize where you are / as north”—along with equally strong images and play—“each peach tree will have borne a serene bride, not quite covering the hills, / and no one teasing her for being too thin.” In fact, all the poems presented in this collection demonstrate a masterful use of imagery and language, allowing the reader to sample contemporary examples of excellent poetry being written in China.

On the second point—a point of view underexplored in the Anglosphere world—several of the works touch upon themes of cultural heritage and its loss, the literary canon, and communities, tribes, and clans. While these do appear in the Anglosphere, the vantage points and handling of these topics by the writers offer a fresh way of looking at and understanding them. When Mao Jian wonders if, during her college life in the 80s, she missed opportunities being a slacker poet at school, she looks back at her community and surroundings with something much less than regret: “There were no base periodicals, no cliques, novels could be written like essays, essays could be written like novels, [professors] could take up teaching with only bachelor’s degrees, poets could transport the most beautiful girls to Delinghua with just a glance.” This takes us to a freewheeling time in the Chinese poetry community in a way that would be hard to achieve without the perspective of actually being there. The attention to things like gender balance, north and south, and general backgrounds among the contributors also helps ensure that the works offer a variety and freshness to readers.

As for how wrenching an experience these works were to translate, there is no evidence of that anywhere. Each story, each essay, and each poem flows fluently. The translators have done an excellent job rendering the original text into English, showing the craft of the original without drawing attention to itself as translation. The styles of each piece are so different from each other that this was no doubt a challenge to the team of translators, and they deserve to be recognized for the craft they have shown in their own rights.

The editors and translators who worked to put Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons together are all an integral part of the Spittoon Literary Arts Collective, which started in Beijing in 2015. Spittoon has grown to include chapters in other cities and even other countries, organizing regular readings, performances, workshops, and other events.

Very early on in its history, the collective decided to publish a journal aptly called Spittoon Literary Journal as part of its mission of “bringing together Chinese and foreign writers, artists, and literary enthusiasts.” The journal originally featured both works written in English and Chinese works in translation.

With the fourth issue in the summer of 2018, the editorial board refocused the journal to exclusively present contemporary works by Chinese writers in English translation, making it one of the few places where works by Chinese writers were the primary focus and presented in a way that offered English readers a snapshot of the current Chinese literary landscape. As editor Simon Shieh wrote at the time, they intended “to bring a diverse range of contemporary Chinese voices to a Western audience through literature and art that compels, innovates, and surprises.”

After releasing eight issues, the editors are now at another transition point, partnering up with British publisher Honford Star to put out anthologies of contemporary Chinese literature with the aim of bringing this amazing body of work to an even larger audience. Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons is the first offering of this new venture.

Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons meets all the criteria that the editors set out for themselves, and continues the mission of bringing contemporary Chinese writing to a broader international audience. While some publications might put out a special China portfolio or issue, Spittoon has been continuously working to give the public access to the wide range of authors and exemplary works that make up the current literary moment in China. The pieces assembled in this collection are all interesting reads individually, and when placed together in conversation with each other, they show us how vibrant and original the Chinese writing world really is.

Images provided by Spittoon Collective