Bookshelf: Mengfei Chen, Publicist, Penguin China

Bookshelf is a regular feature in the Beijinger magazine in which we query a local personality of distinction about their literary loves and aspirations.

The person’s bookshelf in Beijing I would most like to peek at is Xi Jingping’s.

The books I wish I had written are Beyond the Beautiful Forever’s by Katherine Boo and Calvin and Hobbes.

The books on my shelf that have the most sentimental value to me are Joan Didion’s collected essays because no one writes about southern California the way she does, and a pink handbook that my mom got from the local community health center in Nanjing. It’s a guide to childrearing for new mothers and is illustrated with the creepiest drawings of blonde children.

The last book I bought was R.J. Palacio’s Wonder. I sent it to my little brother, and he tells me it’s now his favorite book.

I can’t pick one favorite “China writer.” I think the first China book that really spoke to me was Peter Hessler’s River Town. I enjoy the quiet humor in his writing and that he writes about the lives of people living outside of the big cities. Lao She’s works are great, especially Mr. Ma and Son. I also enjoy the graphic artist Gene Leun Yang, though he is more of a China-America writer than a China writer. In fact, all three of them write more about navigating the intersection between China and some foreign place than about China, but then the experience of navigating unfamiliar territory is pretty essential to present-day China.

I judge books by their covers more often than I care to admit.

I don’t read on the subway because I don’t use it very often. But I discovered the Moby Dick Big Read project a few months back. It’s all 135 chapters of the novel read aloud by people like Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Sir David Attenborough. It’s perfect for biking or
walking.

The book that I pretend to have read, but haven’t is Tom Sawyer. We were supposed to read it in high school. I think I watched the Wishbone version instead.

The book I brought on my latest travels was Middlemarch. I know vacation reading is supposed to be light, but I see travel as an opportunity to strand myself with something I’ve been meaning to get to. It doesn’t always work.

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Read a version of this interview and others in the February issue of the Beijinger magazine: