Delicious Hunger: Book Conversation
Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan is a collection of short stories full of lush descriptions of human character and the rainforest, inspired by the author’s thirteen years in rainforests as part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These stories, originally in Chinese, are now available in English – for this, we have translator Jeremy Tiang to thank.
This session at City Book Room, moderated by Chan Cheow Thia, takes readers into the pathways leading into Hai Fan’s stories. With Cheow Thia, Jeremy will discuss the physical paths, life choices, artistic methods, and personal approach to translation that paved the way into Hai Fan’s stories. The audience will leave with a deeper and more layered appreciation of the uniqueness of the pathways walked by Hai Fan and his stories.
About the Book
From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.
Struggling through an arduous trek, two comrades pine for each other but don't know how to declare their love; a woman who has annoyed all her comrades finally wins their approval when she finds a mythical mousedeer; improvising around the lack of ingredients, a perpetually hungry guerrilla makes delicious cakes from cassava and elephant fat. The rainforest may be a dangerous place where death awaits, but so do love, desire and hope.
Delicious Hunger is a book about the moments in and between warfare, when hunger is so palpable it can be tasted, and the natural world becomes an extension of the body. Deftly translated by Jeremy Tiang, Hai Fan's stories are about a group of people who chose to fight for a better world and, in the process, built their own.
About the Speakers
JEREMY TIANG is a Singaporean novelist and playwright, and the International Booker Prize-longlisted translator of over thirty books from Chinese, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Liu Xinwu and Yu Yoyo. He was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency and for his translation of Zhang Yueran’s Cocoon, and he won an Obie Award for his play Salesman之死. He lives in New York City.
CHAN CHEOW THIA is assistant professor in the Department of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature and co-edited the special issue on “The Worlds of Southeast Asian Chinese Literature” for the journal PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature. As a literary translator, he has published at Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine.
