The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world.
I've had it on my wishlist for a while. Here's an excerpt from an interview with the author:
You make the case for studying Chinese fiction: Because it is less censored than non-fiction (although certainly not uncensored), fiction could ironically provide a “truer” portrait of contemporary China. “For many writers, the best way to present inconvenient truths is to do the opposite, to willfully present fact as fiction,” you write. Can you elaborate for those who have not (yet) read your book?
I wrote it specifically in relation to Yan Lianke’s decision to turn his field study about China’s AIDs crisis in rural Henan (caused by unsanitary blood markets in the ’90s) into his haunting novel “Dream of Ding Village.” Yan said he did so to avoid censorship (even though the book was eventually banned anyway), and this is certainly one of the main reasons many other writers also choose to present “fact as fiction” – it is less risky.
But there’s another motivation. Yan’s novel about a “spreading fever,” narrated by a dead child, is arguably a much more immersive and accurate depiction of the nightmarish reality created by ruthless bloodsellers – or “bloodheads” – in these small, rural communities. Like Yan, many other writers – from Yu Hua, Can Xue, and Mo Yan to the next generation of surrealists – have created new absurdist or magical realist literary styles and genres to mirror what they experience as “unreality” in contemporary China.