The best books that always take me back to China

Stories can be sticky. They attach memories to places. I first visited San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early nineties. There were no mobile phones then or digital maps, so I wandered the streets and browsed the stores, admiring the green-tiled roofs and bright red lanterns, imagining I was back in Beijing. Growing hungry, I entered the first restaurant I saw. I sat, ordered, and pulled a paperback out of my coat pocket as I waited for my homestyle tofu to arrive. Diners ate. Waiters cleared plates. People picked up their takeaways. And I read. 

A few minutes later, the waiter returned. “You,” he said, “have a phone call.” He pointed at the desk beside the door. The restaurant’s phone handset was off the cradle and lay on the counter. “That’s impossible,” I thought. No one knew where I was. I didn’t know where I was. But there was the phone, waiting for me to take the call. The waiter had already gone. So I picked up the phone. A woman’s voice answered. “Hi,” she said, a little nervously. “I just came to collect my order, and I saw you sitting there. I was just wondering…” She paused. “Where did you buy that book?”

I found this book, authored by Zhang Xianliang, in an academic bookstore in Jerusalem. It’s a grim tale set in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution. A story of personal and political repression, but also hopeful and human. It’s a reminder that beyond China’s green roofs and red lanterns are all the human desires, curiosities, and frustrations that build memories and lives everywhere.

The first of Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series is just a great story. One reason I read is to explore places, and one place I’m always happy to return to is Shanghai.

This book contains events and characters that can only be found in China, and yet the story itself is pure genre, a police procedural centered on a detective who really wishes he were a poet. 

Without the setting, it’s a great read. With the setting, it’s a chance to explore China.

Written in the 1940s, this book takes readers to Hong Kong as the Japanese occupation replaced the British colony. It’s mostly a love story in which the intensity of war reflects the passion of emotions and the restraint on actions. 

But like all of Eileen Chang’s works, it’s also beautifully written. Though the fall of Hong Kong is at the heart of the novella, I’ve always found the city less important in the story than the domestic settings. When the Bai family talks, I’m in the room, sitting in a wingback chair, sipping green tea, and listening.

Jin Yong is the greatest of martial arts novelists. Like Charles Dickens, he serialized his novels in a newspaper, though unlike Dickens, he owned the Hong Kong newspaper that carried his series. But Jin Yong’s popularity might even have outstripped that of Dickens, with his tales of heroism and swordsmanship selling over 100 million copies. 

I like to tell myself that I read this book to better understand the Chinese imagination. But who am I kidding? The first in the Legend of the Condors series is just a great story, and Anna Holmwood's new translations bring it to life.

Of China’s four classic novels—The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Journey to the West—it’s the tale of the monkey king and his friends that stands out most for me.

I might struggle to name the rebels in The Water Margin, and I found Bao Yu’s moping in The Dream of the Red Chamber cloying when I read it as a student. But despite being a monkey, Sun Wukong’s behavior makes him both the simplest and the most human character in any of the books.

But behind that simplicity lies a narrative complexity. Patterns repeat throughout the 100 chapters at regular intervals, reflecting storytelling traditions but also suggesting Buddhist themes of reincarnation and perseverance that lie at the heart of the tale. No wonder it’s a book I keep coming back to.