Join Zuo Fei for Her Book Launch Tomorrow (Feb 29)

Zuo Fei, or Sophie as she is known by her English name, wears many hats: essayist, poet, translator, writer and more. She has recently published her first book The Reed Cutters (割芦苇的人 gē lúwěi derén in Chinese), and will be having her book launch tomorrow (Feb 29) at 8pm at Chill Bar. Although the book is written in Chinese, this will be an English event with pieces from the book translated and performed in English alongside music with a few other surprises along the way.  

Zuo Fei has loved books since childhood, and in college she devoted herself to writing poems, essays and short stories. She became involved with literary clubs, and would often hang out with poetry enthusiasts, getting published in campus journals and local magazines. She became quite well-known in her hometown of Wenzhou. 

As of 2017, she has been running the WeChat platform 外国诗歌精选 wàiguó shīgē jīngxuǎn that introduces foreign poetry to Chinese readers. As of 2018, she has been involved in editing Spittoon Literary Magazine (www.spittoonmag.com) along with regularly performing at and attending a variety of Spittoon events. 

To learn more about her book and what she has planned for the launch, we reached out to Zuo Fei to find out more. 

Firstly, can you give us a brief introduction to The Reed Cutters? Where did the inspiration for the book come from? 
Except for some critical essays I wrote on themes about home and abroad, ranging from modern Chinese literature to modern and contemporary poetry in the West, the book contains essays I wrote from 2016 to 2018, though a few were written in the early 1990s. They are on two topics: the country life I had as a child a long time ago, and the city life I’ve experienced as an adult. 

For these two purposes, I wrote five essays for five cities that are of great significance in my life: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Wenzhou. I then produced ten essays as a group to honor the bygone pastoral deep south in China, especially my hometown, Wenzhou.

But the nostalgia is primarily for the yore of the whole nation, which witnessed, as I put it, forty years of electric life, that is, urbanization and industrialization, and twenty years of digital life when the Internet became a must. As has been pointed out, in about forty years, China has experienced some tremendous changes that might have taken the West four hundred years. A lot of people have asked me, “I came to see the China I read about; where is it? I don’t see that in Beijing.” Well, I forgot to tell them: There might be pieces of China preserved in certain places here and there, for instance, Xidi or Hongcun in Anhui Province; the grand China in legends may just live in books, and mine is a case in point. 

Where did the title The Reed Cutters come from? 
It’s from a piece in the book also titled “The Reed Cutters.” A few years ago, I was back in my hometown for the Spring Festival, but never before did I feel the loneliness of being a stranger in the very place I was born and the alienation of urbanization I saw. I was like that woman in Antonioni’s movie The Red Desert, stupefied by the alienation engulfing her. 

The pastoral countryside was gone; instead, there were cement-steel jungles of high rises up to thirty stories. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see such a jungle in Shanghai or New York, but to spot that in the dreamland of the deep south was more throat-cutting than mind-blowing. As I was walking in the jungle down a canal, which used to be a river in the wildness, a plane swooped over the tall buildings, and I saw a man cutting the reeds along the bank, which was supposed to be one part of greenery urban planning. That image, however, reminds me of the Reaper, i.e. death. The publisher later suggested the title of the book should be The Reed Cutters; how fateful it is! 

This is the first book you’ve had published. How does that feel? 
On the one hand, I’m thrilled to get a book published. It was on the wait list for five years. Fortunately, I did not lose patience, and I’ve lived long enough to see it printed. Although some lines were left out, I’m not too unhappy about it because the essays themselves are not really what we call non-fiction representing reality in the narrow sense, though all of them refer to reality metaphorically. To be more specific, it’s a collection of essays, but the genre of the essays is hard to define. In my case, there is more imagination involved – a second reality I set to create, a parallel universe I built for myself and my fellow beings, the human species.

On the other hand, most of the essays were made before 2018, so they might not always reflect my views of the world now – a world that went through the pandemic. You may think I have become more pessimistic, like many, but no, I am more optimistic than the book seems to convey. Or, at least I’ve learned to be more pleasant or to please myself a bit more, and that is an eternal task literature is for: to seek beauty in its dazzlingly different versions. As is shown in the preface of the book, the book is about love and what’s there to erode love; it’s about the search for the true freedom of the soul, presenting a world of light to fight against absurdity, loneliness, and predestination. 

But as a physical being existing in this world, I need something physical to preserve the words I’ve written. Though self-publication is almost everywhere and electronic versions of a few essays are available somewhere, a printed book happened to be the ultimate goal, which makes it more legitimate for libraries to store the book and makes it more likely for future generations to read the book. The Chinese I created might not be fit for ChatGPT to translate, though AI might be able to interpret some of the intellectual gibberish these days. In this sense, I’m delighted that I’m able to have contributed a bit to the Chinese language and culture. For that, I am thankful to everybody who made the publication of the book possible.  

What can we expect from the book launch event on Thursday?
I’ve invited friends to read English translations of some of the important essays chosen from the book. But that’s just one part of the story. There will be live music from Nils Henrik Nilsen. For each piece that is going to be read at the event, he has made a piece of music for it, sometimes more than a piece, depending on what the material is about. He’ll be performing live for the audience. He’ll also sing out a poem I made while playing guitar and using looping equipment – all that kind of wizardry that’s beyond my understanding.

When the book came out, Ana Padilla Fornieles was kind enough to offer to translate a very important piece she picked, “Genuine Country Folk.” When I delivered the book to Ben Thompson in Ireland, a poet and translator, he started to translate a couple of pieces about rural life in the deep south. Bernie Feng was asked to put into English the two pieces about urban life, one about Beijing and the other about Shanghai, probably because he has been living in Shanghai for years. 

Reading the Beijing piece will be David Moser, who has witnessed China’s great changes since he came to live in the city of Beijing in the 1980s. Other readers include expats who have experienced life in Beijing for years such as David Horton and Josh Space from the US, and Jessica Medhurst from the UK. There might be other things to show at the event, say, a poem of mine translated by Simon Shieh, a promising poet whose debut poetry book, Master, has just been nominated as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Anthony Tao, the coordinator of Spittoon Beijing, may also have something up his sleeve, but I’m not sure what, so just come for fun and some surprises.

Zuo Fei’s book launch for The Reed Cutters will be happening tomorrow, Feb 29, at Chill Bar at 8pm. The event will be in English and copies of the book (in Chinese) can be bought at the event or through online retailers such as Dangdang, Jing Dong, TMall, Taobao, etc. by searching the name for the book in Chinese: 割芦苇的人 gē lúwěi derén. 

READ: Best of Beijing in Readers' Photos: CNY Dragons

Images: courtesy of Zuo Fei