That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction
DOROTHY TSE, ENOCH TAM, ZHU HUI, CHAN CHI WA, CHEN SI’AN, AND YAN GE; TRANSLATED BY NATASCHA BRUCE, JEREMY TIANG, MICHAEL DAY, AUDREY HEIJINS, AND CANAAN MORSE
Reviewed by Samantha Kirby
In this collection of short stories by contemporary authors from China and Hong Kong, a group of translators offer Anglophone audiences a world slightly warped: In “Sour Meat” by Dorothy Tse, a woman discovers the alluring yet predatory origins of her mysterious grandmother’s psychotropic “tea.” A woman similarly finds solace—and pain—in her mother’s past, tending women who grow from woody shoots in Yan Ge’s “Flourishing Beasts.” In Chen Si’an’s “A Counterfeit Life,” a young man subverts the formulas of everyday existence when he discovers he can pretend to be just about anyone. From mushroom houses to disappearing elephants, these stories are as varied as the authors who wrote them, but they all grow from a single root system of worldly dangers: environmental degradation, the overuse of resources, economic inequality, and fame and fortune are all examined through a fantastical yet critical lens. As the man called #1 in “A Counterfeit Life” explains: “There are too many bugs in this . . . program. The bigger bugs may be so big that people like us can only throw up our hands and cry, but the small ones can be fixed and reinstalled by hand . . . I want to reconfigure this unreasonable world by hand.” That We May Live is a reconfiguration of the world in ink, but not in a way that fixes small bugs—rather, the collection presents those bugs to us wrapped in bright paper, and seems to say: Here. I got this for you.
That We May Live is an unforgettable collection, serving as evidence to the fact that sometimes, like a distant star, our world is seen most clearly when viewed askance.