audio

New Chinese literature – a story by Zheng Xiaolu, read by Tiffany Lam

Ed: We're delighted to bring you a new kind of feature: audio stories. This is thanks to Anna Savittieri, who got together with her college friends Tiffany Lam and Jacob Spitzer to produce a reading of "Festival of Ghosts", a haunting story by the Chinese writer Zheng Xiaolu about family planning, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping and the text was originally published on Words Without Borders here. Anna has also done a Q&A with the author at her blog here and we've reposted it below. As Anna writes, "Translation is a huge barrier to accessing Chinese literature, but it still seems strange that so little is available in English ... Without access to contemporary culture, we forget the people, combining the state and its citizens under our notion of 'Chinese'." We hope you enjoy listening.