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Qiao Ye's literary creations are inextricably linked with Chinese literary tradition. In her novels, she transforms many traditional techniques found in traditional Chinese literature in a creative manner, and has gradually crafted her unique writing form of “new novel of society” in her two-decade writing career. Qiao Ye’s unique artistic exploration not only enables the stories in her works to reflect the social conditions, and human nature and human relationships in contemporary Chinese society, but also presents a new, more casual format that uses hybrid discourse and intersections of identity in its literary narrative, thus forming Qiao Ye’s personalized artistic style of analytic/reflective narrative. This should be regarded as Qiao Ye’s creative transformation to the traditional discourse found in Chinese story-telling novels or pan-story-telling novels.
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Since its publication in 2016, Paper Hawk has been studied by literary critics from different angles, such as its inheritance of the Chinese classical literature tradition, its conception of language and structure form, and even its usage of imagery. The historical imagination in the novel has also attracted great attention in academic circles. As one of the clues in the novel, Chinese cuisine enables the writer to outline the setting of the era and human nature, and reflect on traditional culture with a keen insight. Taking food as a starting point, I explores the path of historical evolution, its development as well as its ups and downs. A warm thanks also goes out to Dr. Xu Shiying for her interview on historical writing (Appendix follows), which represents the historical depth of Paper Hawk in a dialogue format.
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As one of the representative Chinese writers who was born in the 1970s, Qiao Ye’s writing exhibits considerable diversity and varied understandings of literature across genres. In her full-length novels, Qiao Ye is exceptionally innovative and exploratory, and each novel is distinct in subject matter and style. However, her medium-length and short stories tend to be more conservative, characterized by a simple and natural style, imbued with the charm of literary tradition. This artistic stance in writing style is different from other writers and unique to Qiao Ye, which is not only indicative of her vivid artistic individuality but also holds value for further research into creative writing and stylistics.
In her novel Baoshui Village, Qiao Ye narrates from a keen female perspective about the awakening and transformation of contemporary rural women, portraying the great changes in rural China in the new era. The “Baoshui Village” in the novel is not only a rural space as the object of writing, but also provides a significant background against which the great changes in rural China are depicted. It also serves as an important means to advance the plot of the novel and provides a way to organize the time of the novel. In the novel, Qiao Ye connects the village and the world outside the village from the dual perspectives of the heroine Di Qingping, to create a new relationship between people and countryside, and between rural areas and cities from a perspective of totality to paint a new picture of rural China.
Novel writings in China in 2023 display a tendency toward locality which exhibits two characteristics: One is the “sense of hometown,” and the other is the “integration of locality with modernity.” Qiao Ye’s novel Baoshui Village is a representative work that achieves “modernity” through “locality.” How contemporary novels portray the changing countryside, and how they handle and grasp the relationship and proportion between change and constancy; how to find the right way to integrate the geographical, ethnic, and modern aspects of a novel; how locality generates modernity; and how modernity can accommodate and activate locality are not only theoretical questions that need to be deeply explored but also issues of writing that need continuous exploration in practice. In this sense, Baoshui Village is worth cherishing.
Baoshui Village, a full-length novel by Qiao Ye, presents to its readers an open, sensitive, holistic, and reflective experiential texture thanks to the writer’s years of preparation spent “going into” and “immersing herself in villages,” as well as her rural narrative focusing on the complexity, contemporaneity, and problem of rural revitalization. The novel employs dual-narrative technique of recounting emotional and village history to advance its plot, paints pictures of village life with polyphonous scenes of village gossip, and engages in participatory observation through the use of the narrator to construct an open subject consciousness that discovers blind spots, surprises, disparities, and paradoxes in the rural experience. By selectively reconstructing the experiences of three archetypal villages and creating the new literary image of a “rural construction expert,” the novel conveys a realistic attitude that values the subjectivity and endogenous power of the countryside. In doing so, this method takes the structure of reality as its core and calls for a pragmatic standpoint that suspends any judgment, so as to “read” the Chinese countryside through the texture of reality.
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Time and culture are rivers without banks. The elegance and archaic style of culture is a kind of blood inheritance, and the myriad types of cooked food in the world are also a kind of passing of the torch from generation to generation. Against the vast backdrop of the century-old history of Lingnan (an area south of the Five Ridges in China), Ge Liang’s latest full-length novel, Food Is Heaven, is a wonderful story about the inheritance of four generations of chefs. It describes the cultivation of the industry as well as self-cultivation and conducting oneself in the world. “To see a world in a line of work, and one bodhi in a karma.” This novel reproduces the changes of the times and reveals the profound history and deep patriotism behind the Chinese food culture. It reflects on the inheritance of cooking skills and depicts the extraordinary roots of fine Chinese culture, and studies how the cohesive force of the Chinese nation in different regions has been unconsciously established through those roots.
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Ge Liang’s full-length novel Food Is Heaven depicts the legendary lives of figures such as Master Rong Yisheng, Uncle Wuju, the Seventh Young Master Xiang Xikun, and many others, in over 400,000 words. Generally speaking, Food Is Heaven is a fictional work using imaginary characters as its protagonists. However, its hidden interplay with important historical events from the 20th century onwards is an undeniable fact. These non-fictional elements employed by Ge Liang are part of his artistic strategy of achieving literary authenticity in Food Is Heaven. The incorporation of major historical figures and events into artistic fiction highlights a certain “epic” quality in the narrative which emerges out of its full engagement with historical essence and historical facts.
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Scarlet Bird and Paper Hawk by Ge Liang have inherited the style of novel of society which began with The Plum in the Golden Vase, carefully depicting scenes of daily life and exuding the great charm of antiquity. This coincides with the trend in contemporary Chinese literature toward using local resources and seeking cultural identity after the 1990s. However, while the neo-classical texts of Ge Liang are quite realistic in appearance, their inner vitality and spirit cannot be easily replicated. In contrast, the “Jiangnan Trilogy” by Ge Fei is far less imitative of classical novels than the novels of Ge Liang, but the pursuit of utopia is used throughout the trilogy to connect the main storylines of the destinies of four generations of the Lu family and is closely related to China’s grand history over the past century. While drawing on ancient Chinese cultural resources, Ge Fei injects brand new and heterogeneous elements into his works, reviving traditional lyrical styles and creating a new “Chinese poetics.”
Food Is Heaven, Ge Liang’s latest full-length novel, is narrated from the perspective of food culture and offers the experience of historical legends to readers by telling stories of simple and repetitive daily routines, forming the writer’s unique perspective of observing and writing about Hong Kong, China. The “eating” in the novel is treated not merely as a daily need in life, but as a reflection on culture and history in the broader sense.
The short stories written by Ge Liang are simple yet sophisticated, always revealing a slice of life through plain narration. His short stories not only allow one to trace the “pioneering” influence of Su Tong but also carry Su Tong’s unique writing style and characteristics. It seems that Ge Liang is able to offer insight into the softest part of humanity, narrating fatalistic yet hardworking characters. His stories are written in a detailed and authentic style, exhibiting the literary memory of a young southern writer in a “more southern” region with a “southern imaginary” form linked to writers of Su Tong’s generation. This form includes cultural, geographical, and daily life features. Every life detail and the aesthetic style contained has become the basic tone and color of Ge Liang’s writing, forming a literary narrative with a distinct style.
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