Best medium-difficulty Chinese novel?

December 20, 2007 10:58 PM

I want to read a book in Chinese to keep myself from getting rusty. What is a good novel for doing so? It has to be modern Chinese (classical Chinese twists my brain into noodles), and preferably available online.

I tried reading the Harry Potter books in Chinese, but sounding out long strings of characters, only to find that they're phonetically translated names, became tiring rather quickly. The translations were also kind of awkward to read - I'd rather read something that was originally written in Chinese.

I'd like it to be online since that would let me use the Firefox extension pera-kun (a Chinese pop-up dictionary).

I'm not looking for anything along the lines of Journey to the West (xi you ji) or Dream of Red Chamber (hong long meng). I'd like something shorter, more manageable, with a plot that doesn't take too long to get into, if that makes sense. It doesn't have to be anything well-known or especially well-written; I'd just like it to tell a good story, one that is engaging and interesting.

Any suggestions?

Background: I speak Chinese natively, and took 3 years of it in college, but don't have the time to take it now in graduate school. My vocabulary is decent, so I can probably handle a modern novel with the help of the pop-up dictionary.

posted by jasminerain to sports, hobbies, & recreation (11 answers total)

Read something you'd like reading in English? I like Haruki Murakami short stories, and found that even more of them have been translated into Chinese than into English. Ka-ching!
posted by msittig at 1:39 AM on December 21, 2007

I suspect you know lots of the big Chinese net portals have dedicated reading sections, but here's Sina's and here's Tianya just in case. Maybe have a poke about there and see what takes your fancy? The sidebar on the left at Sina is a ranking of what's popular. Despite being quite well educated in all sorts of literary Chinese and having access to good dictionaries I find myself lost with some of whatever the kids are reading as I'm an out of touch old fart now, though (get off my courtyard!). One author recommended to us as foreign learners was Ba Jin, as he's quite straightforward and doesn't overdo the obscure and fancy.
Joel at Danwei (aka MeFi's own zhwj) is very much more up to speed on this and hopefully he'll pop by later to offer his view, but in the meantime here's a couple of things he's written that might give some ideas, and a search of their archives might yield some interest too.
posted by Abiezer at 2:29 AM on December 21, 2007

Looking more carefully at Tianya I see they do a popular list on their left sidebar too. Not ever heard of it before, but this title catches the eye: 那小子真帅 ("That Bastard Is Quite the Good Looker"). Bit of criminal underclass slash-fiction perhaps?
posted by Abiezer at 2:33 AM on December 21, 2007

Sorry, Abiezer, 那小子真帅 is actually high-school romance from a hot Korean writer named Guiyeoni.

Even though Murakami isn't a Chinese original, you could still give it a try if you like his aesthetic, particularly given the fact that the primary mainland translator, Lin Shaohua, came under fire last month for making his translations too smooth.

If you like pulp, the big thing these days is grave-robbing adventure. Try The Ghost Blows Out the Light (鬼吹灯) or Grave-Robbing Notebook (盗墓笔记). Both of these are fast-paced and episodic (due to their origins as online serials), and although they extend over multiple volumes each installment is fairly self-contained.

If you like science fiction, then I highly recommend Ball Lightning (球状闪电) by Liu Cixin (刘慈欣). Synopsis: a boy's parents get fried to a crisp by ball lightning when he's a teenager, and he becomes obsessed with the stuff. It's nicely-paced, the physics hangs together, and the depiction of a secret weapons research project run by the Chinese military is pretty interesting. The root of that site has links to lots of other SF, too.

For more mainstream stuff, Feng Tang is a good bet. His 十八岁给我一个姑娘 is a portrait of life growing up in Beijing in the 80s. Feng writes in a nice mix of elevated prose and Beijing street language. It's a pretty short book, too.

Going back a decade or two, most of Wang Shuo's stuff is online; 顽主 is a nice place to start: urban slackers run a company that does things for people. Wang Xiaobo's a good read, too. Actually, there's lots of good stuff in the XYS archives (and everything's text, so you don't have to worry about the pop-unders and trojans that so many mainland Chinese sites throw at you).
posted by zhwj at 6:00 AM on December 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

I would have to go with msittig on this. That way, since you are already aware of the plot, you have a general idea of what is being written in the event you get "stuck" on something.
I would suggest "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck. There is a trilogy (explained further here on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth) and the author received a Pulitzer Prize for the novel. It is set in China and while I read the book in high school, I remember there being some Chinese in it, though a very small amount. However, it is a great book, in my opinion, about Chinese tradition and insight into human nature and duty.
posted by dnthomps at 6:13 AM on December 21, 2007

My wife enjoyed (but said they were depressing) Yu Hua's Brothers books that were sold by every street corner book seller in Beijing last year. I'm sure Joel and Abiezer have some opinions on these books and Yu Hua in general!
posted by Pollomacho at 6:26 AM on December 21, 2007

Abiezer -- how could you translate 小子 as bastard? I've only heard it meaning son or boy. "That boy's really handsome" is more like it (or you could substitute hot or cute or whatever the current batch of HS girls are using).

jasminerain -- Xiaoshuo.com seems pretty popular, so you might check that out. You have to register, but you can read the stuff online. Glancing at a few of the stories, they seem a lot like what you might find in a Chinese reading magazine geared toward high school and college students.

Also, China's most popular reading magazine is DuZhe, which also has some stories online.
posted by strangeguitars at 7:01 AM on December 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I don't speak a lick of Chinese, but I have always enjoyed reading Lu Xun in translation.
posted by munchingzombie at 7:10 AM on December 21, 2007

Wow, these are all excellent suggestions, thank you!

dnthomps - I actually loved The Good Earth when I read it in English, but didn't think of trying it in Chinese. I'll give that a try!

zhwj, strangeguitars - I like the online magazine links - that might actually be closer to what I need, since it'll be easy to miss details in novels and have that snowball to the point where I don't understand anything. Awesome!

Also, zhwj's articles are great - I've seen the vast collections of novels online, but it's hard to know what's worth trying and what's not. Rankings in English with links - it doesn't get better than that!

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!
posted by jasminerain at 9:04 AM on December 21, 2007

strangeguitars - this was before I'd realised it was a high school drama thing, but you definitely do see 小子 as an insult akin to bastard (or maybe "ya wee bugger") a lot, in northern dialects at least.
posted by Abiezer at 9:04 AM on December 21, 2007

I would second Wang Xiaobo's stuff -- it doesn't have a much Beijing slang in it as Wang Shuo's, so it's a bit easier to read, and depending on your mood you can either read the sexy bits or the serious essays. 黄金时代 is a favorite of mine. If you want to go with Wang Shuo, 顽主 is a good place to start as Joel suggests . Certainly better than his latest indulgence. 《动物凶猛》is pretty good too, though I mainly remember it because it was the basis for the movie 《阳光灿烂的日子》.

Mo Yan may be worth a look as well: his longer novels tend to be, well, long, and to have a lot of rustic vocabulary, but he's got some short stories that should be fairly easy to get through (《司令的女人 》 is one collection that comes to mind, though there are several), as well as some collections of short essays. Yu Hua also has some collections of medium-length and shorter work that should be worth looking at if you don't want to take the plunge and go all the way into one of his novels; I remember enjoying his 《我胆小如鼠》 a while back.

Lu Xun is a delight to read, but he can be a bit difficult compared to some of the other authors listed here. Another great early 20th-century writer who never really got his due is Shen Congwen 沈从文; his work tends to be more finely-wrought than Lu Xun's. He's well worth a look -- either his short stories or the novella 边城.
posted by bokane at 8:32 AM on December 24, 2007