Having lived in China for three decades, I am naturally interested in the expat writing scene, from the nineteenth century up through the present. One constant in this country is change, and that requires keeping up with the latest publications by writers who have lived here and know it well. As an author of four novels, one short story collection, and three essay collections on China, I believe I have something of my own to contribute, although I tend to hew to gritty, offbeat themes to capture a contemporary China unknown to the West.
I’ve long been interested in China’s Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), the bloodiest civil war in history, with an estimated 20 to 100 million casualties.
Lofthouse’s substantial novel is one of the few in English to take on this topic and successfully forge a love story out of it, and a shocking one at that. Englishman Robert Hart, a real historical figure who would later become inspector-general of China's Imperial Maritime Custom Service and a Qing Dynasty official, is known to have purchased young concubines for sexual purposes.
Lofthouse builds on this to create the most fraught, tortuous, and fascinating love triangle I’ve ever encountered in literature, as Hart is caught in a tug of war between the jealous desires of sixteen-year-old Ayaou, her fourteen-year-old sister Shao-mei, and his own Victorian morality.
An outcast foreigner. A quiet lover. The fate of the Far East.China, 1854. Robert Hart is on the run. Fleeing Ireland to escape a promiscuity scandal, the syphilitic nineteen-year-old arrives in the Middle Kingdom at the height of the Qing Dynasty. And though he buys a woman to share his bed, the libidinous Westerner has no idea she will help him shape the course of a nation.With the insight into the culture and language his beautiful concubine provides, Hart helps the emperor put down the bloody Taiping Rebellion. And as he fights against scheming Brits and Americans during the Opium…
Also set during the Taiping Rebellion, Lande’s engrossing story begins as a sea adventure which drew me in like a Chinese version of Moby Dick, with swashbuckling characters who yell and curse in the eloquent twang of Shakespearean lowlifes.
The action shifts inland along the Yangtze River as protagonist Fletcher Thorson Wood (based on historical figure Frederick Townsend Ward) organizes a mercenary force with Western weaponry to fight off the Taiping.
There is no love story—the central characters are too busy for that—but it’s the texture of the prose, the sheer scintillating, rhythmic mastery of language, and the huge panoply of disparate voices, all superbly wrought by the author, that kept me gripping the helm of this epic narrative.
Only one man dared fight to defend Shanghai from rebel hordes - the American adventurer who called up a ragtag band of deserters to defeat armies of thousands. "A master in hell before a minion in Heaven. I'll be a prince in China, and lord over these heathen beggars, or I'll make a great many of them wish they'd better joss - better luck - than to cross my bow." Arriving in the midst of the bloodiest civil war in human history, Fletcher Thorson Wood takes up the imperial cause against the "Christian" rebels, trains and fights beside native Chinese…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Disguised as a long-lost memoir, this compact Taiping Rebellion tale surprised me by its stately prose, exquisitely controlled by Barre from the first page to the last.
When the fictionalized Rowley is separated from (the historical) Frederick Townsend Ward’s battalion, he is captured by a beautiful but fierce Taiping rebel, Sweet Little Sister. Rowley’s simple, unironic first-person voice is perfectly suited to his worshipful love for his captress, as she leads him around the rebel camp on a leash, alternately teasing and sexually tormenting him.
The full-blown sadomasochism of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O both come to mind, but it requires a special purity of delivery to pull it off, which is why I found Barre’s telling just as exciting and erotic.
China's Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history; somewhere between twenty and forty million people lost their lives, in battle, or to starvation and disease. With the exception of World War II, more lives were lost in this conflict than in any conflict in history. The Taiping rebels fought to spread their own bizarre form of evangelical Christianity throughout China, and to overthrow the Manchus who in 1644 had defeated the Chinese and established the Ch'ing Dynasty. The Taipings were opposed not only by Ch'ing forces but by various western adventurers and professional soldiers who…
I adored this partly fictionalized, richly realized novel, which fleshes out the life of China’s greatest female painter, Pan Yuliang (1895–1977).
Rescued from a brothel by a wealthy government official, she fled to where the action was—1920s Paris—after graduating from art school in Shanghai. Boldly specializing in paintings of female nudes, including of herself, Pan was invited by high-profile artists to return to Shanghai and display her art, only to become embroiled in a series of widely publicized scandals over her nudes, leading her to quit China for good and resettle in Paris.
Her uncompromising devotion to her independence and her art marginalized her into a life of poverty and posthumous fame. It’s precisely these noble qualities that endeared me to Epstein’s treatment of the artist.
Down the muddy waters of the Yangtze River and into the seedy backrooms of "The Hall of Eternal Splendor," through the raucous glamour of prewar Shanghai and the bohemian splendor of 1920s Paris, and back to a China ripped apart by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution: this novel tells the story of Pan Yuliang, one of the most talented-and provocative-Chinese artists of the twentieth century.Jennifer Cody Epstein's epic brings to life the woman behind the lush, Cezannesque nude self-portraits, capturing with lavish detail her life in the brothel and then as a concubine to a Republican…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Hong Ying’s first novel, Summer of Love, was banned for depicting a sex orgy amidst the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests. Almost as provocative, to me, is K: The Art of Love, which plays on the old theme of a wealthy man’s spurned wife, Lin Cheng, with the twist that it’s not the young lover she takes on who liberates her but Lin herself, steeped in Taoist sexual practices, who liberates him with her ferocious passion.
Her lover happens to be historical Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf and member of the polyamorous Bloomsbury Group; Lin is modeled after Julian’s real Chinese lover, Ling Shuhua. What I find most refreshing about Hong Ying’s novels is her frank and fearless sexuality, clearly stemming from her own experiences, thinly disguised.
China, 1930s. Julian Bell, son of the Bloomsbury set's Vanessa, is newly arrived in Peking. In search of fresh experiences, he encounters the beautiful, intelligent and deeply erotic Lin Cheng. Though Lin is wife to a university professor, their passionate assignations blossom into an affair.
Schooled in the ancient Taoist arts of love, Lin instructs Julian in the ways of the East. But if society won't tolerate this union between Occidental and Oriental can their love possibly survive?
Based on a true story this is a tragic tale of romance, betrayal and sexual desire set against a backdrop of conflict…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency. In impoverished rural Shaanxi Province in Imperial China, a constable threatens to expose the Yan family’s rumored polyandry and extorts sex from their beautiful 17-year-old daughter, Qiezi. She happens to be addicted to the psychoactive, poisonous datura flower, and the toxins in her system are fatal to the constable.
Now on the run as a murder suspect, Qiezi leaves a trail of sexual carnage wherever she goes. But a larger cataclysm awaits her when she gets caught up in the White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1804), which caused the deaths of 200,000 rebels, government troops, and civilians. Picaresque action, dark humor, and irony unfold in this visceral and cinematic novel.
