Customer Reviews

Dictionary of Maqiao

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This book takes me back to my home, a village in Southern Hunan Province, China, and to my childhood. When I was reading, the stories and the people jump out of the book onto my memory. It reminds me of my childhood friends, my relatives, the village doctors, the traveling smith and craftsmen.
When I was 6 or 7 years old, I often grazed water buffalos with my friends in the slops of Wuling (Five Peaks) Mountain. One day we saw a World War II bomb delivered by the Japanese airplane. We were so curious, excited and naïve. We moved it to the grain yard of our agricultural production brigade on the buffalos?back. Fortunately, the explosive was already gone possibly because of aging and weathering. This book forces me to recall the detail of this incident and reassure that nobody was hurt by our ignorance.
During that time our village was often visited by a locksmith, who is the one spoke "xiang qi?accent. He was tall with broad shoulders and white beard. He carried two cabinets covered by glasses on a bamboo pole. Whenever he came, we surrounded his workshop area in the grain yard. He was always accompanied by a young boy of our age. I never figured out why that boy would play with us while the locksmith was making the 5 or 10 cent deals with the adults. The visit was usually about two to three hours. Then they left for other villages. We saw them off in sun and in rain. They did not take away anything from us. But they brought us excitements every time.
In our area, we had village doctors they used to practice Chinese medicine in Jianxi province. They always told us that people from Jianxi province were our relatives. We greeted each other "Lao Biao? I would always have remembered them because I was often sent by my mom to ask for medicine help when our family members felt unease.
Our village also hosted two youngsters from the city. At that time, there were about 16 or 17 years old. They worked hard to learn and to grow up. I didn't know what was their feeling when they lived in our village. But I know the villagers are still talking about them and wishing them well.
I never had the habit to keep a dairy for my past. I have forgot many things about my childhood. The author of this book recorded the language I have used and the stories I have experienced. It reminds me many of my happiness and sadness.
If you want to understand Chinese society, Chinese people, and the rural areas in China, I recommend you read this book. The writing is crisp, the information is practical, and the stories are true. The translation is great.
At this pint, a pop-rice master is walking towards me from the book, with the black, bomb-shaped and air-tight rice cooker, the charcoal stove and the bellow on his shoulder. The black soot covers his face. His smiling reveals only his eyes and teeth. I hear the explosion of the air. Now, I am going to put a bag of popcorn in my microwave so that I will progress with the book and step back to my hometown with my uncle.

This is an unmistakable classic: beautifully written by Han Shaogong and superbly translated by Julia Lovell. Anyone who feels fatigued with contemporary American or British fiction should read this for an object lesson in what is being produced out there, in foreign languages, and how important it is that we keep our translation market alive.

In 1970 16-year-old Han Shaogong was sent to the Southern Chinese village of Maqiao in Hunan Province to plant rice and tea as a member of the Educated Youth. During his years in Maqiao he carefully made notations of the differences in culture, customs, and language that he observed as a stranger. Later in his life Shaogong became a central member of the Root-Searching Movement that aimed to undermine and reverse the thought-control mechanisms instituted by the Cultural Revolution and rebel against the highly-structured controls on literature, language, and aesthetics. Shaogong returned to his observations of Maqiao and developed this book to further the movement. THE DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO is structured as a dictionary with 110 entries, but it is not a tedious index of words and meanings; rather this book provides small vignettes of how life, both human and natural, is lived in Maqiao. Shaogong's position as an outsider provides him with a unique perspective of the village. He detailed the often-eccentric habitants and their distinctive language that differs from his own. By documenting these cultural and custom differences Shaogong demonstrates how there is great variety and fluency of unlike the teachings of the Maoist doctrines. I loved reading this book and would highly recommend it to others.

This remarkable novel was a random discovery; after finishing it I do hope that Han Shaogong finds a larger audience around the world.

A novel structured like a dictionary of a semi-real, semi-fictional town in a rather remote region of southern China, A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO is a remarkable, dazzling creation - each 'dictionary entry' is a vignette unto itself, each of which gradually coalesce into something greater. Shaogong's Maqiao is a bit like Garcia-Marquez' Macondo or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, a semi-fictional place upon which one can examine (and also honor and satirize) the varied contradictions and conundrums of a changing nation.

A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO is set against the backdrop of the cultural revolution, though these political events don't intrude into the center of the story. Shaogong instead emphasizes language, specifically it's mutability and restless, dynamic evolutions, symbolic of life itself, and this tactic (or fascination) does serve to also place external events into some sort of philosophical perspective.

The end result is a novel that is fascinating, inventive and endlessly playful, with a vast cast of intriguing characters, and a captivating, cinematic precision. It didn't seem to get much attention when published in translation, which is highly unfortunate - it's a novel worth going out of your way to read.

-David Alston

Mark Leenhouts translated Han Shogongs underestimated classic of contemporary China in Dutch (De Geus/Novib publishers). A novel in lemmata about the 'doublespeak' of Chinese farmers during the Cutural Revolution. Indirect, absurd references to their situation. Gossip. To enjoy bit by bit."

Han Shaogong's novel "A Dictionary of Maqiao" is well-translated by Julia Lovell, a noted author in her own right. She captures the creativity, depth and inter-connectedness that makes this novel so compelling. The entries vary in length from a few paragraphs to several pages. As they progress the image of this village and of China in a certain time and place becomes clearer. This isn't a story about emperors but rather about a small village and it's people - from a variety of viewpoints.

Simply put, this is one of the 10 best novels I've read and is a must read for anyone with an interest into Chinese culture and literature. If you are traveling to Beijing or Shanghai this book is the perfect counter-weight to those cities and modern China in general.

This masterful and quite heady novel tackles the history of a fictitious town buried deep in China, a place protected by rivers and mountains. When a a "sent-down" worker from the city joins a group of urbanites to live in the town, they discover a place that's almost a metaphor for Chinese life -- cast in reverse.

Han Shaogong guides the reader through the fictitious author's "dictionary" of Maqiao, which acquaints us with a baffling set of customs, and a people who view themselves as a kind of "Middle Kingdom," in which the outside world is shunned. The novel becomes an inventive expose of Shaogong's sometimes profound insights into the restrictions of culture and language. The book's episodes can be rigorously dry or unexpectedly moving.

The diligent reader will be rewarded. The depth and honesty of Shaogong's insights reach to the present day, and his small town of Maqiao is certain to leave a deep impression. This prize-winning novel is a dictionary that compels your interest and enjoyment..

Thank you, Han Shaogong, for a wonderful, thought-provoking novel. The fiction you deliver, cloaked in the garb of a regional history, transcends time, place, and language to offer an incredibly precise and well-crafted definition of 'being.' Your point concerning the importance of defining experience and expression on a scale less grand than that of global village is well-delivered and it imbues A Dictionary of Maqiao with a message of hope. As more readers come to this book, may it gain the recognition it deserves. We in Western culture are lucky to have this story available to us in translation.