Character Sketches: Shenzheners

Shenzheners by Xue Yiwei

Linda Meith Publishing Inc. 

Pp. 176

Considered to be the Chinese Dubliners – the dedication is “To the Irishman who inspires me” – this is a collection of short stories about the people who live in Shenzhen. The young city of Shenzhen has grown astronomically to become a major metropolitan centre; a city in which everyone is a newcomer. The author writes of teachers, taxi drivers, dramatists and peddlers; we see their relationships with their family members and their environment. The prose is crisp and sparse, accompanied by simple but expressive line drawings by Chinese illustrator Cai Gao.

The blurb on the back of the book jacket claims it is, “The first book in English by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei) but on the front are the words, “Translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk”, and the acknowledgments at the end refer to “translator Darry Sterk, who has turned the original Chinese into elegant English with the skill of a magician.” The different spelling of the name may be an unfortunate typo, but the whole thing is a little confusing, especially because language and pronunciation play such a big part in the stories.

Translation battles continue between characters; “I said it was a straightforward line. I couldn’t think of a need to translate it any other way.” The unnamed, omniscient narrator considers their words carefully when describing The Dramatist. “The neighbours called him a weirdo. But I felt that weird was the wrong word for him. From the start, I felt that eccentric would be more apt.” In other stories, specifics of pronunciation place a person in a strict class hierarchy. “Most of my classmates had worse pronunciation than mine, not to mention my teacher, a lady for whom even vowels were a challenge.”

There are aspects of the Chinese culture that are specific to the place, although they are not always remarked upon. One character casually notes, “I reached under my bed to retrieve the envelope with my yearly allowance, which Chinese children receive every Chinese New Year.” We recognise the element of childhood competition in everything from reading and swimming to mastering languages, maths or chess. One character reminisces, “I was a prodigy the whole city had taken note of. I was the apple of my parents’ eye and the centre of public and media attention. I was a role model, and example other parents held up when assessing their own children, a pair of exceptional coordinates on the grid of achievement.”

Most of these characters are male, and the ones who are female are sketchy. The Taxi Driver reflects, “He had never much cared about the expression on his daughter’s face, or about her existence. He was the same with his wife. He’d never imagined that they might cease to exist.”

Apparently The Dramatist had once written a one-act play about a city bus stop. There were no protagonists in the play, just people arriving and departing, as they did every day. He said that he wanted to express the absurdity of life by means of repeated departures and arrivals.” The city bus-stop may be the perfect metaphor for this collection of stories – we only see the outlines of the characters as the stories are remote and distant as if in this society of digital hyper-connectivity, no one knows anyone else at all.

Shenzhen: the tech capital of the world