Chinese Fiction In English

According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient.

Gracie Reed is doing just fine. Sure, she was fired by her overly “friendly” boss, and yes, she still hasn’t gotten her mother into the nursing home of their dreams, but she’s healthy, she’s (somewhat) happy, and she’s (mostly) holding it all together. But when a mysterious SUV pulls up beside her, revealing Chinese cinema's golden couple Wei Fangli and Sam Yao, Gracie’s world is turned on its head. The famous actress has a proposition: Due to their uncanny resemblance, Fangli wants Gracie to be her stand-in.

In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee - whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by secrets and transcendent delusions.

The Last King of Shang is a retelling, in modern Chinese, of the classic novel Investiture of the Gods. It is a gripping story set in ancient China, weaving together mythology, magic, and heroism. It is a story of the rise and fall of powerful gods and mortals amidst a backdrop of political intrigue and celestial conflict. Seduced by Daji, his beautiful fox demon concubine, the Shang king brings his kingdom to the brink of ruin through cruelty and neglect.

A Coward in Modern China is a travel comedy, crime caper and adventure - based on the escapades of bogus professor Robert Runworth. Its first line is: “This is the story of a knowing scoundrel, and of what became of him.” Set largely in contemporary Beijing, and partly in California, it is raunchy and mischievous in its plot and action. Yet the pages are also classically stylish; and historically detailed in their account of life in China today. The book is always entertaining, by its exotic setting and fascinating insights as much as its farcical humor. Here is a good old-fashioned ...

In the year 1850, an adolescent Filipina girl is captured by marauding pirates and tossed into a whirlpool of turmoil. Emerging from her misfortune, she finds herself bravely traversing from Hawaii to The Cascade Mountains and onward into the American Old West. By chance, she stumbles upon a treasure of gold extracted by Chinese miners,and hidden before the Chelan Chinese Massacre.. Fate and her quest to return to the Philippines push her onward. Saddle your horse and hang on as you follow her down the path of her adventure! The trail is laced with actual historical events and Native ...

War in the East is the fourth book in Martin Archer’s acclaimed Soldiers and Marines saga. This is the fictionalized story of the intense fighting and American participation that would likely result if China takes advantage of Russia’s military and political weaknesses, and invades the Russian East in an effort to restore to China the lands that were taken by various treaties when China was weak and Russia was strong. The United States and some of its men are sucked into the intense fighting because Congress approved a naïve American Secretary of State’s treaty to end an earlier ...

Before the rails bound a nation, before love defied all barriers, there was a foundation laid in quiet longing and impossible dreams. Xiulan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants serving the Hastings family, has grown up in the shadow of wealth and privilege, her every day intertwined with the grandeur of the estate. But within her heart lies a secret: an unspoken affection for Robert Hastings, the heir who left for the Civil War when she was just a girl. Now, as the household eagerly anticipates his return, Xiulan’s quiet admiration blossoms into something deeper—something dangerous. ...

Twenty-two-year-old Charlie Wong grew up in New York's Chinatown, the older daughter of a Beijing ballerina and a noodle maker. Though an ABC (America-born Chinese), Charlie's entire world has been limited to this small area. Now grown, she lives in the same tiny apartment with her widower father and her 11-year-old sister, and works - miserably - as a dishwasher. But when she lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio, Charlie gains access to a world she hardly knew exis.

In Search of Hua Ma is one of a series of novels in Chinese that are fun to listen to and proven to accelerate language learning. Every book in the Mandarin Companion series is carefully written to use characters, words, and grammar that a learner is likely to know. The breakthrough level is written using only 150 unique Chinese characters and is intended for Chinese learners who have obtained a low elementary or novice level of Chinese.

Already compared to Hemingway and Murakami, Shuang Xuetao is one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers—his English-language debut collects three dazzling novellas of Northeast China, mixing realism, mysticism, and noir. An enterprising inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, transforms into a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks.

China’s most outrageous character—the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters—returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary’s body in Journey to the West.

A collection of 88 brief poems by ancient masters of Chinese poetry in an anonymous English translation. With titles such as "Contentment", "Wild Geese", "Best Happiness of All", "The Ashes of My House", "Jade Flower Palace", "We Will Grow Old Together", "The Poet Dreams", and "At Midnight", the subjects range across love in all forms, the ravages of war, the glories of nature, the sorrow of homelessness, the death of a loved one, peaceful reveries of hermits, the meditations of the wise, delicate art forms, and the entertainments at court.

In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats. From being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, he becomes the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure, and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war. Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and has been bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts.

In 1931, young English-born missionary Jakob Kellner brings all the crusading passion of his untried Christian faith to a China racked by famine and bloody civil war. He burns to save the world's largest nation from Communism. But when he is swept along on the cold, unforgiving Long March, Jakob becomes entangled with Mei-ling, a beautiful and fervent revolutionary. Soon, powerful new emotions challenge and reshape his faith—and entrap him forever in the vast country's tortured destiny.

In The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, you can dine at a restaurant at the end of the universe, cultivate to immortality in the high mountains, watch roses perform Shakespeare, or arrive at the island of the gods on the backs of giant fish to ensure that the world can bloom. Written, edited, and translated by a female and nonbinary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy.

In this captivating collection from the Shaanxi region, considered the cradle of Chinese civilization, twenty disparate and unique voices come together to show a China caught between new-world advancements and old-world traditions. From the homeland of China’s first dynasty and the world-famous terra-cotta warriors, these tales show rugged rural life colliding with fast-paced city life; hollow arranged marriages juxtaposed with torrid forbidden love affairs; and the vanity of newly minted millionaires clashing with the desperation of the poor.

Hongmei is the perfect Chinese wife: beautiful, diligent, passive. Glen is the perfect American husband: intelligent, caring, well-off. From the outside, Hongmei and Glen's life in the San Francisco Bay Area seems perfect. But at home, their marriage is falling apart. Post-its left on the fridge are their primary form of communication.

May, one of the new generations of Chinese super-rich kids, has outgrown Beijing and has come to California for an exciting life. She meets two American men: a Jewish American Harvard-educated professor named Leaf, and Mentor, a Silicon Valley self-made billionaire. As her relationships with Leaf and Mentor progress, May's past traumas in patriarchal China are revealed, while her cultural naivete leads to divergent interpretations of trust, personal boundaries, respect, fetishism, and sexual deviancy. May's life descends into a mad triangle of deception.

If the Chinese people were to file one by one past a given point, the interesting procession would never come to an end. Before the last man of those living to-day had gone by, another and a new generation would have grown up, and so on for ever and ever. The importance, as a factor in the sum of human affairs, of this vast nation, - of its language, of its literature, of its religions, of its history, of its manners and customs, - goes therefore without saying. Yet a serious attention to China and her affairs is of very recent growth.