After the China Story: Chinese-Accented Nonfiction as Creative Nonstories

What do a Missourian who speaks Fuling Chinese and Tahrir Arabic and writes for The New Yorker and a Renmin University professor who writes a bestseller and plays herself in a Jia Zhangke documentary have in common? How did an American writer become a cultural hero in China, and how does a Chinese scholar channel “the voice of the voiceless”, in the recent wave of nonfiction writing (feixugou xiezuo) in China? And does nonfiction manage to tell compelling nonstories without succumbing to the imperative of “telling a good China story”? In this talk, I reflect on these questions as I examine the writings of Peter Hessler and Liang Hong and consider the cultural-intellectual implications of the “nonfiction turn” in contemporary China.

Bio of speaker

Luo Hui is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Languages and Cultures. His research explores Chinese and Sinophone literary and visual cultures, with particular interest in cross-cultural production, translation and reception. He has published work on Chinese cinema, theatre, poetry, ghost tales, crime fiction and issues of soft power.