Chinese literature is tough to find in English. One editor hopes to change that

A nanny for a wealthy family plots to kidnap the child in her care. Unfortunately, her plans go off the rails when the family patriarch gets arrested on corruption charges. It’s a premise to a novel that could take place in Washington, D.C. or Manhattan, but in the tale Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, it takes place in Beijing.

The novel is the first in a new effort from Riverhead Books, led by editor Han Zhang, to publish more translated Chinese language literature. Zhang is hoping to expose American readers to a broader idea of Chinese literary fiction. When people think of translated literature out of East Asia, she said, they think of the famed Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, or the South Korean writer Han Kang, who just won the Nobel Prize in literature.

But ask an average reader for a Chinese writer? “People probably fumble to think of a name,” Zhang said.

There are a couple systemic reasons for that. Zhang said there’s the “general difficulty, both real and imagined, of doing business with a country with a pretty intensive censorship structure in place.”

Eric Abrahamson is a translator who spent nearly two decades living in China working in publishing. And he said it often doesn’t make sense for a Chinese publisher to sell overseas – both politically and financially. It’s just a lot of work for not much expected return. What that historically led to is an unfair burden on the types of literature that did make it to the U.S.

“The earlier era of more academic publishing was very focused on finding the classics,” he said. Which meant “people were expecting that book to do the work of explaining all of Chinese culture and history to them.”

For comparison, you’d be hard pressed to find someone reading, say, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to understand Sweden. Or reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as representative of all Italians.

The books that Zhang is looking to publish aren’t aiming to be sweeping classics. But they’re small looks into contemporary Chinese life. Women, Seated asks important questions about class, labor and feminism. But it also manages to be thrilling, funny and relatable.

“I think, for a long time, the perception of Chinese literature among Western readers has been quite fixed,” said the book’s author Zhang Yeuran. “It’s often seen as either heavily influenced by Chinese culture, or focused on people living rural, impoverished lives. Which has nothing to do with our lives today.”

The next book editor Han Zhang is publishing follows two women during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Another is a coming of age novel out of Taiwan. And another book from Malaysia.

About a billion people speak Mandarin Chinese. It’d be impossible to sum up their lives with just one book. Zhang is just hoping to capture slices of them, with some really good stories.