In this event, Chinese Canadian writer Zhang Ling is going to talk about her work on the themes of trauma, war and memory, followed by a movie screening and panel discussion on the award-winning movie Aftershock. At a time full of global crises, including the global pandemic, California fires and Sino-US conflicts, a deeper understanding of trauma, war and memory will increase our understanding of the world and humanity. In the first hour of the event, she will share her experience of writing her most recently published novel, A Single Swallow (written by Zhang Ling, translated by Shelly Bryant), which is Amazon’s #1 kindle bestseller for Chinese Literature & WWII fiction. Through depicting a story about a woman who suffered unspeakable atrocities, the novel portrays how World War II shook the world and changed people’s lives. Then we will have movie screening of Aftershock (2010), which is based on Zhang Ling’s novella, followed by a short panel discussion by Zhang Ling, her translator and Chinese American critic Chen Ruilin.

Register and Join us

We will give out limited copies (hard copies and e-copies) of A Single Swallow to early registrants!

Host: Melody Yunzi Li (Assistant Professor in Chinese, U. of Houston)
Panelists: Zhang Ling (Chinese Canadian writer)
Shelly Bryant (translator, writer, poet)
Chen Ruilin (Overseas Chinese literary critic)
Linshan Jiang (PhD Candidate, UCSB)

Sponsored by:

UH MMI (Media and the Moving Image)

Co-sponsors:

UH Modern and Classical Languages, UH Libraries, UH Language Commons, Houston Chinese Writers' Association

Time: Nov 21, 2020 (Saturday), 7-10pm CST

ZOOM ID: 987 8161 5012

Panelists:

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986. In the mid-1990s, she began to write and publish fiction in Chinese, while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then, she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and Taiwan’s Open Book Award.

One of her novels, Gold Mountain Blues (金山), has been translated into English, French, and German. She has won numerous important literary prizes in China.

In 2009, Zhang’s novella, Aftershock (2010 film), a tale about the survival of the horrific 1976 Tangshan earthquake, was made into China’s first IMAX movie, directed by Feng Xiaogang. This movie became the greatest box office success at the time, and has grossed more than US$100 million at the Chinese box office.

Shelly Bryant is the English translator for Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow (2020). She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, Cyborg Chimera, Under the Ash, Voices of the Elders, Harps Upon Willows, The Lined Palm, Pine the Passing, Numina, Nymph, Mulciber, Mortals, and Unnatural Selection, a short story collection entitled Launch Pad, and two travel guides. Shelly has translated Sheng Keyi’s novels N orthern Girls, Fields of White, and Wild Fruit for Penguin Books, and Death Fugue for Giramondo Press, Chew Kok Chang’s short story collection Other Cities, Other Lives and You Jin’s A Life in Words, Mum is Where the Heart is, and In Time, Out of Place for Epigram Books, Fan Wen’s Land of Mercy for Rinchen Books, Li Xinfeng’s China in Africa for HSRC, Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow for Amazon Crossing, and Li Na’s memoir, My Life, for Penguin Books. Her translations of Khoo Seok Wan’s poetry were featured in the exhibition A Life in Poems by the National Library Board in Singapore.

Chen Ruilin is famous overseas Chinese writer and literary critic. She started publishing novels from age thirteen, and attended Northwest University at the age of fifteen. She came to the U.S. in 1992, ran newspapers, a bookstore, journals and TV programs. She serves as the president of Chinese immigrant writers’ association, vice president of the North America Chinese Writers’ Association, and also is a visiting professors at various universities. She is an acclaimed pioneer in new Chinese immigrant literary studies.

Linshan Jiang is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature and film in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan, interdisciplinary studies of memory and translation, emotion studies and gender studies. Her dissertation project focuses on female figures’ wartime experience and memories of the Asia-Pacific War in modern and contemporary literature and film in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. Her project for the PhD emphasis of translation studies is translation and canon formation of world literature and how Chinese and Japanese contemporary literature circulates in the English-speaking market. She has published translations of scholarly works and literary pieces in China and the United States. She has also published an article about queer studies and emotion studies entitled “Transforming Emotional Regime: Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys”.