Some of Lin Chong’s techniques would have served her very well in doing so.
I’m only vaguely familiar with the Chinese classic The Water Margin, but S.L. Huang is clearly a fan, and has updated it with the best traditions of wuxia combined with gender-flipping many of the characters and some pretty clear references to Hong Kong kung fu films. There’s some rather gory violence, but also a real affection for the story and a political sensitivity to what is really going on in the magical empire. Slightly to my surprise, I loved it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer (from last year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile is The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman.
So, I went to Beijing again at the end of last month, my second time in China after visiting Beijing and Chengdu for Chengdu Worldcon in 2023. I was an invited speaker at the 9th China Science Fiction Convention, itself part of the 2025 ZGC Forum, a joint project of the various layers of government in the Beijing region and the China Association for Science and Technology. It was an industry and politics event, showcasing the various economic successes of investment in science fiction (books, films, games), though there was also a substantial presence from the leading Chinese writers, and plenty of student fan groups had stalls in the exhibition area.
My invitation arose out of a conversation I had had at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures, with Gong Weimi, Deputy Director of the Beijing Science and Technology Commission, who was exploring paths of creative structured cooperation between Worldcon and the Beijing Zhongguancun Science Fiction Industry Innovation Center, which is (as far as I could tell) a joint project of the Beijing Regional Government and the China Association for Science and Technology. The fact that there is no permanent Worldcon secretariat makes this more difficult for the industry-oriented Chinese establishment.
The meeting with Icy Chen (on my left) and Gong Weimi (on my right) at Glasgow 2024 which kicked it all off.
The outcome of the conversation was invitations to speak at the conference for me (as Hugo administrator last year and this) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (as Chair of Glasgow 2024). Other foreign guests included Francesco Verso, who has spent years celebrating Chinese SF in Italian and English; Disney storyboarder Grant Dalton Jr; and Vladimir Norov, the former foreign minister of Uzbekistan, subsequently Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. We were very well looked after by Icy Xiaohan Chen, who I had met in Glasgow with Mr Gong, and her colleagues Caroline Yueqi Zhang and Lydia Xia Qian. (I am following the convention that if people have Western names, I use Western name-personal name-surname, but if they don’t, I use surname-personal name; the ladies I just mentioned are Chen Xiaohan, Zhang Yueqi and Qian Xia to their friends.)
Me and Esther with Icy Chen, Caroline Zhang showing off one of the fantastic beasts at the Industry Innovation Centre and me with Lydia Qian.
We were given a tour of the ZGC Science Fiction Industry Innovation Centre, where I tried out a VR helmet and found myself in outer space, then on a spaceship, then on the surface of the moon.
A middle aged white man discovers Chinese VR
Proprietary AI morphed my face into Chinese legend:
Back at the conference there were the inevitable dancing robots.
I talked to aspiring writers and student groups, and I may have committed television.
Some impressive cosplay as well.
Esther and Lydia with Three Body Problem crew
We were also hosted for various meals by a number of organisations. The Future Affairs Administration organised a fantastic Sichuan hotpot for us with the Chinese Doctor Who fans led by Yan Ru. Wang Jinkiang and Liu Cixin on behalf of the Beijing Yuanyu Science Fiction and Future Technology Research Institute hosted us for a Mongolian hotpot. And the China Science Fiction Research Centre and the China Research Institute for Science Popualarisation jointly hosted us for a Cantonese spread with Stanley Qiufan Chen. I must say that I came away with a much greater appreciation of the variety of regional cooking within China – on my first two evenings, I had two very different work-related meals both featuring Yunnan cuisine.
Yunnan fish hotpot, with a business contactWith Doctor Who fans, enjoying the Sichuan hotpot hosted by the FAA; saying thank you afterwardsOn the one hand, Lydia and Esther; on the other, writers Wang Jinkang and Francesco Verso; opposite me are Liu Cixin (writer of The Three-Body Problem) with Yan Ru (the Who fan from Wuhan) and Caroline nearest the camera; Mongolian hotpot between us.The Cantonese spread, and the speech in which I quoted Philip K. Dick’s “My God, What if…???”
I gave my own keynote speech to the conference as well of course, citing Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and Lao She.
Games being such a major part of it all, Esther was in her element (and spoke twice to my once):
The conference was held in a former industrial park in Shijingshan District, repurposed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, so the architecture was a bit unusual.
This modern architecture is overlooked by the Gongbei Pavilion on top of the Shijinshan Mountain, a recent reconstruction on an ancient religious site.
One of the things I particularly came to appreciate is just how huge and varied China is. Beijing is in fact only the third biggest city in China. Shanghai is the second biggest, and Chongqing has the most inhabitants of any city in the world. How many of us could find Chongqing on a map? I met colleagues and fans from all over – from Hainan in the far south to Xinjiang in the northwest, and everywhere in between. Many of them had studied in North America or Europe, and come home to deploy their knowledge profitably. China knows more about us than we know about China.
To address the elephant in the room, I got a sense that for the Beijing folks, the mistakes made by Chengdu Worldcon are an embarrassment and they want to move forward (and incidentally reinforce Beijing’s centrality). I was grimly amused that two people separately recommended R.F. Kuang’s Babel to me; it is very popular in China, and when I replied that it had been banned from the 2023 Hugos, they shook their heads in disbelief.
In discussions with my professional contacts more generally, given that I was the man from Brussels, it will not surprise anyone that the topic of tariffs on electric vehicles came up a lot. I even got to drive one out in E-Town, the BAIC Stelato X9, which is capable of parking itself after you get out.
The Internet of Things is real in China. WeChat / Weixin is the go-to app for everything, and you need to have installed it and Alipay (and linked both to your payment system) before you go. The DeDe car-sharing app is a kind of super Uber – even out at the Great Wall it was possible to get a ride back to Beijing in three minutes. One taxi driver puzzled me as I got in by saying, in firmly interrogatory tones, “wǔ wǔ yāo sì?” I looked blank, so he held up five fingers twice, then one, then four – of course, the last four digits of my phone number, to confirm that I was the right client. (Taxis incidentally are very cheap, but the traffic in Beijing is awful – it took two hours to get from the conference centre on the western side of the city to the Sichuan hotpot on the east.) Shopkeepers and service staff would speak into their translation apps and show the message that they wanted to convey in English. It can be useful to save frequently used phrases as an image.
I did three tourist expeditions. First, the Dongye Temple, a Daoist shrine within walking distance of my employers’ Beijing office, founded in 1319, gutted during the revolutionary period, restored in 2002. The courtyards are full of memorial steles.
The original gateway is now on the other side of the main road.
The joy of the temple is 76 small rooms, of which maybe half a dozen are clearly favoured by regular worshippers. Each small room contains a dozen statues representing a part of the Daoist otherworld, some of them more attractive than others.
Some of the individual statues are quite striking.
It’s a little dilapidated, but clearly still has a faithful following. I noted also a tree with ribbons tied to it, not so different from what you might find in rural Ireland.
The next day, I went to the Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven, one of the landmarks of Beijing. It’s a massive religious complex to the south of the Forbidden City, which I had visited in 2023. This is where the Emperor made the annual sacrifice for the continuing good of the kingdom. This is also where, sickeningly, the Eight-Nation Alliance led by the British and French based their occupying military forces during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, building a railway station on the sacred ground. They didn’t teach you about that in school, did they?
At the sacred stone which is the Heart of Heaven, there was a queue of tourists waiting to stand on it; about half of them prayed when it was their turn, and about half posed for photos.
As with the Forbidden City, many people (almost all young women as far as I could tell) had chosen to dress up in traditional costume and pose for photographs.
Posing is definitely a thing.
And I also went out to the Great Wall, the largest man-made structure in existence. To get the 80 km up to Badaling is only €20 by DeDe, an hour from Shijinshan, and the same back again. Once you get to the base, there is a cable car ride up to the top. (Alternatively, you can hike up or down if you like, but I’m 57.)
It’s crowded, and the path along the top of the wall itself is steep, and there’s no explanation of what’s going on or what happened; but it’s a spectacular structure and a spectacular view. I don’t feel that I need to go back, but I’m very glad that I went.
Anyway, it was a fantastic trip, with good fellowship. Many thanks to Mr Gong and the Beijing Science and Technology Commission, and to my work colleagues, for looking after me for this extraordinary week and a bit. (Arrived 23 March; left, 1 April.)
“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth. He had even come to feel no lack in such conversing. “But it will be odd with only two men in the house!” he continued. “My mother had a woman from the village. I know nothing of these affairs. Is there none in the great house, no old slave with whom you were friends, who could come?”
The best-selling novel of the early 1930s, telling the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who goes from poverty to wealth, his two wives, his evil uncle, and his various children, one of whom is disabled and requires full-time care (as did one of the author’s own children). I am sure that there are many errors of detail, but its heart is very much in the right place, confronting its American and European readers with a vast and ancient culture where the foreigners are probably the bad guys, and where power is shifting rapidly away from the old rulers. I found it gripping and efficiently written. You can get it here.
It would be interesting to know how it is regarded in China, if at all. Its Chinese Wikipedia entry has just a dry plot summary. (Japanese Wikipedia discusses the possibility that it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda.)
The book itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 on the back of this and its two sequels. It bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top book acquired so far this year, top unread book by a woman and top non-sf fiction. Next on those piles are The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (though I may not get all the way through it, it sounds rather dull); The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.
As with India, China is a big place, so I’m looking at the top eight books which are often tagged with the word “china” by users of Goodreads and LibraryThing.
I’m a little uneasy about giving The Joy Luck Club the top spot. The framing narrative is set in San Francisco, and the author has never actually lived in China; but on the other hand it’s clear that the majority of the action of the book is set in China, so I guess I’ll allow it. The Bonesetter’s Daughter has a similar structure of setting.
The Art of War and Tao Te Ching are great Chinese texts, but the principles are universal, and I don’t think there is a single place name mentioned at any point in either, so I’m putting them in italics as not really set in China for my purposes.
Both Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and The Good Earth are entirely set in China but written by American writers; having said which, Kisa See identifies as Chinese, and Pearl S. Buck grew up in China and lived there for much of her life.
The top books on GR/LT which are mostly set in China and are by authors who were actually born and grew up in China are The Three-Body Problem, followed by Wild Swans. (Though I’ll admit that The Three Body Problem has a dramatic passage set in the Panama Canal, and Jung Chang left China in 1978 when she was 26.)
Not sure how long I will keep this up, but next is the USA.
Crouched on the other side of the bars, and still holding my hands, Nicholas Sabine gave a wry grin. ‘I know it’s not usual, Lucy, but there’s no law against it.’
I got this last autumn under the incorrect impression that it was set in Chengdu; in fact only the opening and the climax are set in China, and it’s near the fictional town of Chengfu, not the real city of Chengdu. (There is also a real Chengfu in Anhui Province, but it doesn’t fit the meagre description given.) So I put it aside, yet it bubbled to the top of my reading pile anyway. Destiny, or something.
It’s a romantic adventure story about young Lucy, abandoned in an orphanage in China, who finds herself sucked into a bizarre English feud between two neighbouring families over lost Chinese treasure. There are some vey effective fish-out-of-water moments for Lucy when she first arrives in England. The plot twists are pretty absurd, as hidden relatives turn up everywhere and Lucy returns to China to skip through the Boxer Rebellion, and yet I kept on being sucked back into it to find out what would happen next. I’m sure that the Chinese details are as wobbly as I know the English historical details are; but I admit that I was entertained anyway. You can get it here.
The author, “Madeleine Brent”, is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell, best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise series. I don’t think I have ever read any of them, but I might give them a try now.
Passes the Bechdel test easily in the first chapter, where Lucy is looking after the girls in the orphanage.
At the turn of the year this was my top unread non-genre book. Since then it has been way overtaken by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Pershing picked a blood-fattened leech from the back of his hand. His sleeve had torn and thorns had pulled across his forearm until it looked as if it had been whipped; his legs ached from the effort not to loose his footing and all the water in his body was gushing from his open pores. The motion of his shirt had burst a boil between his shoulder blades.
This is the second of a near-future trilogy co-written by a future Foreign Secretary and one of the founders of Private Eye in the late 1960s, of which the third is Scotch on the Rocks. The scenario is simple: in the mid-1970s, China demands the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control twenty years early, and activates agents deep within the British establishment in order to stay on top of the UK’s nuclear bluff. There is a tremendously tense chase through the corridors of power and less salubrious parts of England, as vital communications in the days before mobile phones require in-person meetings. It’s not all that plausible but it’s well drawn.
I first read it in the 1990s, when Douglas Hurd was still in government and Hong Kong still under British rule, and was struck then by the hopelessness with which the British position is portrayed: the Hong Kong garrison might hold out for 48 hours against a Chinese attack if very lucky; popular sentiment in Hong Kong would certainly shift against the British immediately if withdrawal seemed a serious prospect; the nuclear submarine commander in the Pacific knows that he and his vessel will be destroyed in retaliation if they fire on China. The British establishment is generally weak and in disarray.
This time round, having been in China myself only five months ago, I was struck by the stereotyping of the Chinese leadership. Hurd (who turned 94 on 4 March) was posted to China early in his diplomatic career, soon after the Communist take-over at a time when the foreign ministry (as my friend Peter Martin has written) was probably at its least efficient. In real life, China was consumed with the Cultural Revolution in the period between this book being written and the time it is set. I would add though that the portrayal of Hong Kong is warm and surely based on personal knowledge.
An interesting speculation on a historical might-have-been. You can get it here.
Scrapes a Bechdel pass on page 90 when two (named) Chinese women discuss ways of getting into Hong Kong.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Doom 94, by Janis Jonevs.
I am in Chengdu for Worldcon, but had a couple of days in Beijing first – mostly for a couple of work meetings, but I took time on Sunday afternoon to go and see the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace complex at the heart of the capital.
(By the way, if you have been trying to contact me, I may not have seen your message or may not be able to respond. Google, Facebook, X, Mastodon, WhatsApp, Signal, and a bunch of others are blocked here. There are odd exceptions – Bluesky, my work email, and even this blog, perhaps because it is privately hosted. I can post to Twitter and Mastodon – and this blogpost will automatically go on both – but can’t easily read replies and cannot respond at all.)
Getting to the Forbidden City from my hotel was already an adventure. The hotel advised that it would take ages to get a taxi, so I braved the subway system. Bad news: the ticket machines literally do not work for foreigners, because you have to scan your identity card to get one. Good news: the human ticket desk is always staffed and it only costs 3 yuan (and it’s about 7 yuan to the euro). Also good news: the station names are given in English as well as Chinese. I did not fancy my chances at picking out 天安门西 from a sea of unfamiliar characters. Though it was only six stops on a direct line, which is within my arithmetical skills.
Even the process of getting in is somewhat ceremonial. You need to book a ticket at least a day in advance (but you only have to specify the day of your visit, not the exact time); everyone’s ID cards were checked as we got out at the Tiananmen West metro station; they were checked again at the outer periphery of Tiananmen square; and at the inner entrance to the square there is a full scan of your belongings and a friendly patdown. Tiananmen Square itself is an impressive and evocative public space, but that’s rather difficult to photograph.
On the north wall of the square, which is the south wall of the Forbidden City, the Great Leader observes us all. Lots of tourists were posing for photos with him in the background, some of them saluting, either military-style or with a clenched fist. I asked a friend later if they were being ironic, but she thought it was perfectly serious.
Two more patdowns on the way into the palace complex, and I got stuck behind a group of Austrian students arguing (unsuccessfully) that they were entitled to a discount due to being on an official exchange, and it is a very long walk from the subway, but once I got in, I must say it is just as spectacular as I had expected. The Last Emperor was one of my lockdown Oscar watches, so I felt a shock of recognition. It is an amazing huge architectural / ceremonial / religious / governmental complex. I took photos of all the buildings, but no image can quite convey the experience of being there.
I tried a couple of selfies but was alarmed at just how out of place the bearded white guy looks. Also my selfie game still needs improvement.
Most of my fellow tourists appeared to be Chinese. A number of them were women dressed in traditional costume. I wondered if some or all of them were museum staff, though some seemed younger than you would expect a full-time employee to be. But two local friends in two separate conversations told me that it’s a newish trend to dress up in historically accurate clothes and go and pose at the Forbidden City on a Sunday afternoon – and then they both confidently identified which era each of the dresses belonged to. Cosplay on a broad scale, I guess. The cellphones may not be 100% historically accurate.
These two actually thought I was asking them to move aside to get a clear shot of the architecture, before they realised that I really wanted them in the picture.
And at the back of the Palace, a little girl was playing hide-and-seek with her slightly bigger sister, and winning.
I regret that I came rather late in the day. Jetlag made it difficult to leave my hotel as promptly as would have been ideal, and the Forbidden Palace closes firmly at 5.30; and there was not enough time to look around the inside of any of the art exhibitions. But having read Puyi’s autobiography, and seen the film, and also read a fair bit about his fearsome grandmother Ci Xi, it was interesting to see the places where they had lived.
The Palace of Heavenly Purity, where Puyi was brought up
Having been kicked out, I walked over to the foreign language bookstore on Wangfujing Street. It is a rather lacklustre affair, with a rather old-fashioned assortment of books and not much effort put into presenting them. But it gave me a chance to experience the prevalence of (mostly Western) big consumer brands in China. By now my feet were killing me and I retreated back to my hotel, which incidentally is right beside the spectacular headquarters of CCTV.
I have made maybe half a dozen guest appearances on CCTV’s show “World Insight with Tian Wei” over the years. This was to have a surprising resonance once I got to Chengdu; but we’ll get to that anther day.
I will be in Chengdu next week for the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, and have looked for some contemporary Chinese fiction set there. (Having been deeply unimpressed by a couple of American memoirs.) There’s not a lot available in English, but there is more than nothing.
Death Notice and Fate, by Zhao Haohui, are the first two volumes in a trilogy, featuring the Chengdu Criminal Police and a ruthless serial killer (or killers). The second paragraph of the third chapter (in the original Chinese) of Death Notice is:
Two years prior, Zheng had moved his family out of police housing to a quiet new apartment far from the tumult of downtown Chengdu. Rather than let the aging police apartment lie idle and unused, Zheng still spent nights there whenever he worked overtime. It allowed him to keep in touch with colleagues, and helped to avoid disturbing his sleeping wife and daughter. He called it his second office.
translated by Zac Haluza
Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter of Fate. To my surprise, I found that the original text has a bit more characterisation in it, which did not make it into the published translation.
Captain Pei passed a folder to the commissioner. ‘An unidentified man gained access to our PSB archives yesterday afternoon while masquerading as an officer. He made copies of thirteen files, but this was the one he wanted. From his behaviour and his signature, I’m confident that this man is Eumenides.’
Captain Pei’s expression was calm, and it was difficult to see the emotions in his heart from his face, except that his eyes were slightly red, which was obviously the effect of fatigue caused by staying up late. He pushed a folder in front of Commissioner Song, and while the latter was unpacking the file, he reported: “Yesterday afternoon, a strange man disguised his identity and broke into the criminal investigation archives room. He copied and took away more than ten files, but this one was his real purpose. Judging from his behavior and his signature, we believe that this man is Eumenides.”
Original
Zac Haluza translation
My translation
I have to be honest; I didn’t get a strong sense of Chengdu from these two. There is a certain genre about killers who are superbly able to outwit the forces of law and order – The Silence of the Lambs is the most obvious, but I also recently read Thirteen by Steve Cavanaugh – and there were several scenes where I found it very difficult to suspend my disbelief – though a couple of these are in fact fairly well grounded in local scenery, a murder carried out in full view of the police in front of the Deye Building in Citizens’ Square, and another historical gruesome death at Mount Twin Deer Park, none of which are locations that I have been able to identify on the map. The series is a good enough example of its kind, the tensions between cops from the city and periphery, university graduates and non-graduates, and men and women, all well portrayed against a somewhat implausible backdrop; the means and motivation of their opposition remaining unclear. The situation is sufficiently generic that the first book was adapted without difficulty into a film made and set in Hong Kong, released (after much delay) earlier this year. You can get the two books here and here.
Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun, is a different matter. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I had an ominous hunch that this was Fatty Dong’s trickery. That prat had naturally rushed to sit at the front with the eunuch from Head Office. He looked like an attentive grandson with his notebook spread on his knee, his fat face one big smile. When the time came to make his own report, he gave me another subtle jab in passing: ‘Manager Chen, your skills are great, but you’re not such a good team player.’ I looked at him: the arsehole was wearing an elegant pair of braces, and was bent over writing something in his notebook. I cursed him silently: Are those farts really worth writing down?
translated by Harvey Thomlinson
The novel’s title in Chinese is “Chengdu, Forget Me Tonight“. It is a dark and steamy story of a car salesman who is cheating on his wife with his best friend’s fiancee, among others, and viciously jockeying for position with his colleagues. It was originally published on the online bulletin board of the company where the author worked as, er, a car salesman. Edited to add: The author read this review and contacted me to say that actually he was in HR, not sales, but also that the protagonist was based on a real colleague.
It’s brutally honest self-observation by the main character; not quite Joyce or Salinger, but a gripping window into a society which is not really so very different from ours. Although I suppose a lot of the action could happen anywhere, the setting feels firmly rooted in the sordid suburbs and old-fashioned rural periphery of Chengdu, and the couple of locations that I checked out did seem to really exist. It’s a shame that the protagonist is such an asshole, but of course that is really the point. You can get it here.
The author has since been exiled from China for writing about state corruption and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. I think we’ll hear more of him in the future.
An interesting feature of all three of these books is the ubiquitous internet bulletin-board, which can be either public or internal to a company or organisation. Zhao Haohui’s Captain Pei reflects on the impact on public discourse:
After all, China was changing. Citizens had more options for obtaining information and were more open-minded than ever. The best way to steer public opinion would be to provide people with more information and let them draw their own conclusions.
The 81st World Science Fiction Convention opens in Chengdu a month from tomorrow, and I’ve been looking for books about the city to set the scene. A couple that I saw on Amazon looked cheap and interesting and I bought them without too much investigation. Both are memoirs by Americans about their time teaching in Chengdu. Both are, frankly, terrible.
Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdiel LeRoy, is a consolidation of his emailed newsletters home to friends and family from 2005. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In China, foreign visitors are relentlessly assaulted with bizarre arrangements of English words—symptomatic of a country growing faster than its competence. Among my favorites was a sign above a men’s room saying, ‘Toilet of Man’. More recently, I came across this promotional copy from a bed manufacturer: “Whenever the time that night come, grow to have the Yalisi mattress sweet concomitant, let you fallen asleep safely in the quite night [sic].”
I am afraid this is symptomatic. The author wanders through Chengdu (and in later books, other parts of China) getting fired from teaching jobs because he is basically an asshole with no self-awareness, and zero empathy for the culture in which he has chosen to embed himself. Its only merit is that it is quite short.
Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal, dates from a few years later, 2012-13. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Michael, what will you do tomorrow? We’d like to take you into town!”
This is actually even worse; the books starts by mocking the stewardesses on his flight to China from Seattle for the crime of being over 50, and continues in the nastiest possible tone of snide at the country and the people he meets and teaches. I couldn’t finish it.
Sometimes when people show you who they are, you should believe them, and these two authors show rather more of who they are than I wanted to see. I’m not going to do my usual trick of supplying links to buy these books, because I don’t encourage anyone to buy them.
I do have three other books set in Chengdu on my shelf, all by Chinese writers, which I think will make a difference. Two are the first two books in a promised crime trilogy, Death Notice and Fate by Zhou Haohui; the other is Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, by Murong Xuecun. I’m not sure if I will get to writing them up here before Chengdu Worldcon, but I’m totally sure that they will be a lot better than either of these offensive piles of rubbish.
