Xinran at AWF15: "Buy me the sky"

Parnell Library’s Laura Caygill was impressed by Xinran’s storytelling prowess and contributed this guest post about the session.

I have been a fan of Xinran since my mother gave me a copy of the much lauded Good Women of China. When I was reading it she kept asking, “Have you got to the bit about periods yet?” This was a reasonably alarming question – but not as alarming as the actual revelations about how women in a particular rural Chinese community were managing that time of the month.

Needless to say I was hooked – here was a woman who was sharing eye-opening stories from the world’s most populous country, and doing so with intelligence and compassion. Having read more of her books over the years I had built up the feeling that Xinran could not be anything but wonderful in person.

I was not disappointed when she took to the stage at this month’s Auckland Writers’ Festival. From the moment she charmed the crowd into greeting her with a tentative “Ni hao”, to her graceful and warm-hearted responses to the audience’s questions, this was a lady well-practiced in the art of storytelling.

Her latest book, Buy me the sky, focuses on the impact of China’s one-child policy on the country’s parents and children, who are now having children themselves. The title comes from an interaction she witnessed between a small child, her mother, and her grandparents.

“Buy me the sky!” the girl begged.

The child’s mother said she would not, and was admonished for it by her elders.

“Don’t say no,” they said. “Say we’ll buy it for her when she’s grown up.”

China’s only children are, to Western ears and to Xinran’s own, doted on to the extreme. To the point where some, she says, are so protected growing up that by the time they leave home (often to study in Western countries like New Zealand) they might never have used a kitchen knife. They come to loathe their parents for what they feel is this betrayal of over-protection.

“In a material way they [have] everything, but in a family way… they have nothing.”

For anyone who thought the stories might have been far-fetched, the closing questions from the floor put paid to that.

One young Chinese man approached the microphone and declared, “It’s very interesting to hear you talk about me.” He had been living in New Zealand for five years and had recently graduated from AUT.

“Can you see our [generation’s] strengths and talents?” he wanted to know. “How do you imagine we can change our generation?”

In response she spoke of the expanded view of the world that younger generations have in comparison to that of their parents and grandparents. But, she said, they were still Chinese, and were still raised with a sense of their country’s deep culture and history.

“Because of these roots you will bring China to the world,” she said. As she stood proud on the stage in her brightly coloured silk jacket, combining old Chinese traditions with modern styling, she told the young man to be proud of his background for its cultural strength, not for its social policies.

“Go to see the world,” she said, “but bring your Chinese views and beliefs [with you].”

-- Laura

Emily St John Mandel at AWF15

        

A “very nice, polite apocalypse"

Parnell Library’s Laura Caygill sits in on Emily St John Mandel and Jolisa Gracewood, and provides us with a report and a recommendation:

 Canadian author Emily St John Mandel can’t understand why everyone thinks her books are so nice. “I did kill off 99% of the population with a super-flu”, she muses, wondering how much more brutal she could have been towards her characters in her award-winning novel Station Eleven.

 I was looking forward to hearing Mandel, having read the post-apocalyptic novel in three sittings. I could have happily read it in one, had sleep not got in the way.

 In conversation with Jolisa Gracewood, Mandel was typically (she is Canadian, after all) delightful. Trained as a dancer, she grew up on a small island in British Columbia and now lives and writes in New York. One of the reasons I loved Station Eleven, and it’s something Gracewood alluded to, was the gentleness of the telling of the tale. Mandel focuses on the normalcy of the pandemic and its aftermath, rather than the action of it.

As Gracewood noted, her characters are all stranded in different ways – from their previous lives, from their friends, geographically (petrol has gone stale in the years following the Georgia Flu), and culturally. The Travelling Symphony, the Shakespeare troupe at the centre of the novel, attempts to bridge these gaps, roaming the eastern shore of Lake Michigan in a horse-drawn pickup truck that bears the motto “survival is insufficient”. According to Mandel it’s a line taken from a 1999 episode of "Star Trek Voyager"; the pieces of life to survive this superbug are beautifully random.

 To say that Station Eleven’s is a “very nice, polite apocalypse” (as Mandel self-deprecatingly quipped) is missing the point a bit. This isn’t an action novel. Indeed it’s not even intended to be science fiction. Her previous books have been variously labelled as crime and literary noir, which she puts down to their “crime elements”. Wanting to avoid being pigeonholed as a crime writer she intended her next work to look at the “extraordinary things” in the world we live in. She decided that “the best way to write about the spectacular apparatus of technology that surrounds us was to write about its absence”, and thus Station Eleven was born.

 Like her characters one gets the sense Mandel feels stranded by genre allocations. She is, I believe, much closer to fellow Arthur C. Clarke award winner Margaret Atwood in bridging the gap between literary and genre fiction than any labels (as well as her recent endorsement from George R. R. Martin) might suggest. Mayhem, murder and – yes – a flu pandemic that travels across the globe in mere days, are, she says, “best rendered with the lightest possible touch”.

If you haven’t already, do read Station Eleven. Mandel’s light touch means the book’s 333 pages are ones to curl up with and enjoy. Just maybe listen to the author’s advice first: “It should come with a warning sticker – don’t read this on an aeroplane”.

-- Laura

AWRF 2012: Maurice Gee, inaugural Honoured New Zealand Writer

Laura from Leys Institute Library tells us about this most special of the Festival Special Events. The New Zealand Honoured Writer is an initiative conceived to celebrate New Zealand's most accomplished writers, their body of work and the immense contribution they have made to the literary landscape of New Zealand.


What a treat it was to hear much-loved author Maurice Gee speak on Sunday night, and what a lovely way it was to end this year’s Writers and Readers festival. The normally event-shy Gee said he would have declined the invitation to appear had it not been for the request to be the festival’s inaugural ‘Honoured NZ Writer’. A gracious and humble man, Gee felt it would have been “churlish” to decline, and how thrilled the audience was that he didn’t.

As a keen children’s and young adult book reader, I was nervous at first that interviewer Geoff Walker might focus on Gee’s adult fiction work, but the session managed to cover a great cross-section of the master writer’s material, from Under the Mountain to Live Bodies, The Half Men of O and Plumb. It certainly made you realise what a great force Gee has been in New Zealand literature.

We were treated to a reading from The Prowler (entertained chuckles rang throughout the crowd), as well as a piece of unpublished memoir about Gee’s own introduction to reading as a young boy. We heard how he fell in love with Dickens, and began to write his own stories after becoming acquainted with the world of one Oliver Twist.

But what stuck with me from the session was something Gee said early on about the themes of his books for children and young adults – that of the creek and the kitchen. Gee talked about how he never could seem, in his writing, to get away from the small town in which he grew up and the things that surrounded him in his childhood. He told of an encounter he had when he was small, when out walking with his mother and brother by the creek that was his frequent playground. They came across a swagman bathing himself in the river. His mother stopped and turned her small group around, but there was enough time for Gee to notice the man’s stare and to realise that there had been something about the encounter that he had not understood. The eerie encounter was to become a scene in The Fat Man, but the creek features in another way in all of Gee’s stories for younger people: the creek, he said, came to stand for danger, and the haven that was his household kitchen growing up, for safety. They were always there in his stories – the creek and the kitchen, the dark and the light.

Such is Gee’s touch, turning the simple into the riveting. Sadly Gee said he had put down his fiction-writing pen (for he still writes by hand in exercise books), and had turned to memoir, more for his own entertainment than for publishing purposes. He had no sense of loss about the end of his fiction writing days, as his final words for the evening show: “I look back on 30 or so novels and think, ‘That’s ok’.”

Sunday evening’s session was insightful and entertaining. The standing ovation Gee received certainly showed I was not the only one who thought it a fitting tribute for one of our literary legends.