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Wu Jianren, "New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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To the New Books Network.
- [01:18]
Nicholas Gordon
Hello, I'm.
- [01:19]
Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. What happens if you take one of the classic characters of transliterary fiction and drop them into early 20th century China? That's the premise of Wu Jianren's novel the New Story of the Stone, written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu from the classic dream of the Red Chamber and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion and into the fantastical realm of civilization, a world that in wu's eyes reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs. Liz Weber has just released a new translation on the new Story of the Stone and joins us today to talk about this piece of literary fan fiction and what political points Wu wanted to achieve by writing his work of early Chinese science fiction. Liz Evans Weber is currently a Professor of Instruction at Chinese and Research is a professor at the University of Rochester, New York, which teaches a wide range of courses on Chinese literature and a workshop course on Chinese English literary translation. Proposed translations also include the short story Boundless Night by yu Dafu. In 2025, she was a Warrior Translation Fellowship by the National Drama of the Arts for work on her next translation project, Flower in a Sea of Resentment by Jin Song Sen and Zheng Pu.
- [02:33]
So, Liz, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about the new story of the Stone, which is the COVID calls kind of an early work of Chinese science fiction. And we'll get to that in a second. But, you know, maybe let's start. You know, why don't you tell us about. About the man who wrote this book, Wu Jianren. You know, who was he and where does he sit in the Chinese literary tradition?
- [02:56]
Liz Weber
Well, thank you, Nicholas, for. For having me on. I'm really excited to be here to. To talk about Wu Jian. He is. He's famous for. For a number of reasons. He is one of the. The most prolific authors of fiction from this period, from kind of the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. And what's kind of interesting about him is that he gets his start in kind of tabloid or journalism press. So he has a really interesting eye for kind of gossipy, salacious details. He also has a really kind of witty but also cynical voice. So his writing tends to be quite entertaining. He's a keen observer of the things that go on around him. So there's a lot of really interesting detail that he brings into his novels usually. So there's kind of a literary canon of what are lovingly called the four Great Novels of Critique from the Late Qing. So Wu Jianren is one of those esteemed specifically for a different novel, like 20 years strange events or strange events I witnessed over 20 years. So he is part of this literary canon. And so that work itself is, as you might expect, a work of social criticism. New Story of the Stone is a work of social criticism. This is a theme that undergirds quite a lot of his writing. But he's not purely a writer of, you know, critical novels. He also writes, you know, romances, for example, or he also writes essays. So he's not just one thing. However, I would say even in his romances, for example, Heghai, which has been translated by Patrick Hayden as Sea of Regret, is a romance, but it's still a romance with kind of a core that is commenting on social values, on kind of moral values of this very kind of unstable or kind of rapidly changing time in Chinese history.
- [05:24]
Nicholas Gordon
So you mentioned that he's writing a lot of kind of social commentary about China. You know, what's China's political situation like when Wu was writing his book? What's he reacting to?
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Liz Weber
Oh, that is such a good question. The. The Laying is a really fascinating period of Chinese history precisely because there is so much happening, and intellectuals from this period have have so many different things that they are reacting to, to kind of. I'll go over in kind of brief detail, but there's loads of history on the late Qing that I would recommend to people if they're interested in reading more about it. But in essence, on the one hand, the Qing Dynasty is in decline by this period. It has been for over 100 years. As a result of internal economic pressures, the population has, has tripled over a very short period of time. Food production doesn't keep up with that. So there's unrest internally, there's high levels of official corruption. So money is being drained away from the treasury and preventing the governing bureaucracy from providing all these things that would help. And so kind of in a context of an empire that is already kind of on the wane, we then have, you know, what is famously called like the, the encounter with the west, right. We have the first Opium War which forces open treaty ports, cedes Hong Kong to, to Britain, imposes a massive indemnity on a Qing government that is already having financial problems. So from kind of the 1840s forward, there is a circulating discourse of weakness and humiliation and also a very real fear about what is going to happen to Qing China. By the 1870s, we have intellectuals thinking about, well, it's called the self strengthening movement. There's this idea that China has to kind of pull itself up by the proverbial bootstraps if it is to step, stop losing wars to European powers, for example. So this is usually envisioned in terms of military modernization or scientific innovation, ideally without sacrificing local domestic values and intellectual traditions. This is famously captured in the formula Zhong xue wei ti xi xue wei yong. So Chinese learning as the foundation and Western learning as like a practical tool. So we'll adopt certain scientific principles, but hopefully leave intact our own kind of local traditions and intellectual, let's say, legacies. So by 1895, China loses pretty catastrophically to Japan in the Sino Japanese War. And by then it's generally accepted that technological innovation is not really going to be enough to pull China out of this, this, you know, this, this decline. And so we begin to see more and more fervent discourses about social change, the kinds of things, you know, governmental change, systemic change. So this is when we, you know, in, in talking about this period, you can't really talk about it without mentioning, you know, the two factions like reformists and revolutionaries, both of whom in this period really, you know, gain gained steam. Reformers are arguing essentially we can leave the governing court in place. We want something like a constitutional monarchy where a constitution would protect the people, would empower them to participate politically, because ultimately, you know, we need to build a nation that is invested in the. The political future of China. And by contrast, the revolutionaries are saying, you know, burn it all down. Well, not. Not really burn it all down, but they want to overthrow the. The governing infrastructure and establish a republic. In 1898, there is a very brief period where it looks like the reformists, you know, may actually begin to make some headway with the. The young Guangxu emperor. But he is then overthrown in a palace coup, and the more conservative Empress Dowager CIXI is put in place and kind of puts an end to those reformist efforts. We end up with a number of reformers either fleeing or being executed. And so in the context of all of that, there's a very prominent reformer called Liang Qichao who publishes a number of journals from Japan while he's kind of in exile after the. The end of the 1898 reform movement. And he writes an essay in 1902 on the relationship between fiction and the governance of the people. And there he lays out a vision that essentially says fiction is the only tool powerful enough to kind of educate our people and convince them that they are, in fact, a nation. Right. If we want to reform China, if we want to make China stronger, we have to convince the people that they have a stake in all of this. And literature, and particularly fiction, is the best way to do this. So after the publication of this. This essay in 1902, we end up with kind of a flurry of literary production. All. I shouldn't say all. Let me. I won't say all. A flurry of literary production that is interested in questions of not just nation, but kind of social issues more generally. How can we envision a future China? What kind of future China do we want to envision? How do we convince a readership that they have a stake in that? So Wu Jiren, to go all the way back to him. Now, Wu Jiren is one of these writers who essentially starts writing, or starts writing fiction after Liang Qichao's call. And so that is part of the reason that his novels are largely social in nature, because he views his role as a novelist as having, you know, a role to play in the kind of inculcation of social values in his readership.
- [12:11]
Nicholas Gordon
So let's talk about the book. You know, when I was reading this book and I was kind of figuring out what it was, and it was like, wait a Second, this book is fan fiction. I mean, and I don't mean that like in a pejorative sense, but he's using. He's using kind of this book as. As kind of a. His own, some would say, sequel to Dream of the Red Chamber. You know, I guess, very briefly, what happens in that classic novel? Who are the main characters in that classic novel? And why do you think Wu decided to kind of reset some of these characters in what was his. In what was his present day?
- [12:54]
Liz Weber
That's a great question. So I will do my best. I will endeavor to make this concise, but it may be a bit of a challenge, so I apologize in advance. So in Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, there are a few things I think that are useful for us to know. The first is the general kind of plot of that novel centers on Jia Baoyu, who is the young son. He's about 8 or 9, I believe, when we first meet him, of the very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected Jia family. They are very close to imperial power. They have a very strong kind of network that they use, as, you know, comes out in various points in the plot, often to their advantage, sometimes to the detriment of other people. So it's essentially, on one level, it's a novel about wealth and power and the gradual decline of this family, partially as a result of their hubris and the way that they throw their weight around. On another level, though, part of what is so beloved about this novel is that so while all those machinations are happening kind of in the background, that's the world of adults in the world of children, there's much more innocence, much more genuine kind of connection that is being described. So Jia Baoyu, you know, is often surrounded by his young maids. He also is. He's got several female cousins who live with him. There's a love triangle that is, you know, part of the reason that everybody loves this novel. But the relationships between these young people are very compelling, very earnest. And so that is a major part of why people really cherish this novel. There's a lot of pathos involved that we don't really see. Just to kind of foreshadow your next question a little bit that we don't really see in new story, because as I'll get into in a minute, part of what Wu Jianren is doing is reinscribing Bao Yu with the values that he would like him to have. But before I go on to answer that a little more fully, there is one other major concern of the original novel that we should be aware of. And that is so beyond the kind of political or economic machinations of the adults, and even beyond the very sweet, sincere emotional relationships between the children, there is a metaphysical layer to all of it. The novel itself opens with a framing tale where there is a sentient block of stone who is one of, let me get this right, 36,500 that were forged by the goddess Nuwa to mend the cracked vault of the heavens. And a monk and a Taoist walking through the land of illusion, which is a higher kind of spiritual realm, encounter this stone who just sitting there, bored with no purpose because he has not been used to mend the sky, and they decide to send him down into the human world so that he might be incarnated as a human and live out a human lifetime. And this stone is what will become Jia Baoyu. So there is this higher metaphysical framing that points us to a message about the vacuity and the kind of vanity of human existence and all of the things that people strive for and vie for. By the end of the novel, Jia Baoyu becomes disillusioned about all of the things, like all the people around him, his family, you know, power, wealth, even romance. He becomes disillusioned about the significance of all those things and ultimately kind of goes off, is led back by the monk and the Taoist to live out his days in seclusion, essentially in aromatic seclusion. So the novel is loved because of all of the details about the power struggles and romance, but actually the higher level messaging is that that's all vanity and all of it disappears. And so anyone who cares about those things, who struggles for those things, is bound to suffer because that is the nature of human existence.
- [17:31]
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- [18:27]
Liz Weber
So you also asked why Wu Jianren would choose to build his novel, like on the back of Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber. And I think there are a few different reasons, or at least a few different things that become possible as a result of this choice, one of which is if we think specifically about why he chose Jia Baoyu and decided Jia Baoyu was the person he wanted to kind of fling into the future, part of it is that Jiao Baoyu comes with a set of baggage, right? He is so well known, right? So beloved. Everyone has or will have expectations for Jia Baoyu, who is being repurposed in another novel, right? There's either the early version, the kind of adolescent version of Jia Baoyu, who loves all things feminine. He dotes on his female cousins, he plays with their makeup, he eats their makeup, he does their hair. You know, he takes after his. He takes care of his maids and things like this. All these things that are, like, supposed to be, you know, totally inappropriate for a boy of his age. And so, on the one hand, someone reading another story about Jia Bao, you might say, okay, I expect him to be this version. I expect him to be, like, romantic and sensitive and poetic and kind of mischievous and disobedient. On the other hand, if a reader expects there to be continuity between the end of, or at least the extant end of the original novel and the sequel, then by the end of that novel, Jia Baoyu is sitting in more or less monastic seclusion, cultivating himself, essentially having given up all of the mundane allures of the world. So you might expect that Jia Baoyu, appearing in a new novel, would carry forward some of that religious refinement or attainment. But instead, Wu Jiren gives us neither of those things. Bao Yu wakes up. He basically, almost instantaneously casts off his sense of religious seclusion and thinks, wow, I'd really like to go back. And then, as he's developed throughout the novel, Wu Jianran pretty quickly reveals that he's also not the Bao Yu that we knew from earlier in Cao's novel. He's not romantic. He doesn't really particularly care about women or anything particularly feminine. He's almost immediately interested in society, in politics, in technologies even. And those are things that the previous version of Bao Yu would have had no interest in. He didn't care about scholarship, right? His father was constantly kind of scolding him and trying to get him to take an interest in scholarship and preparing for what would eventually be the official examinations. The original Bao Yu doesn't care about society, he doesn't care about politics. And our new Bao Yu does. So Wu Jianren, in taking Bao Yu and kind of recrafting him, is essentially rejecting both sets of previous baggage or values that the original Bao Yu had. Either the religious kind of escapist version or the romantic kind of self indulgent version. Wu Jianren is effectively saying, like neither of those are things to be emulated. What China needs is someone who is effectively a political agent, someone who is not just interested in, but willing to work toward a stronger China.
- [22:05]
Nicholas Gordon
The other term I would use to describe this book and this kind of reveals the sorts of things that I read. It's an isekai, which is the term for portal anime, but basically it's one character that's brought to another world. And in this case it's first, you know, like in the real world, Ching China, and then this is more fantastical realm of civilization, you know. And what these novels try to do is they try to, you know, either have the world change the character or the character change the world or something. But, but it's that, but it's that kind of new character in a, in a different place that kind of drives the commentary, you know. Why do you think the book kind of has these two different worlds again? The more mundane Qing China and then this more fantastical, futuristic. Yeah, this, this, this more fantastical futuristic realm in the second half of the book.
- [22:59]
Liz Weber
Yeah, I think there are a few, a few layers to this. On the one hand, Bao Yu kind of goes through Qing China. You know, he's flung over 150 years forward from his own time, which was kind of the height of, of Qing China. Right. So the, the China that he knows is, is powerful, has never been challenged, is a regional hegemon, is very wealthy. None of that decline that I mentioned earlier has happened in his time. So he comes forward under two centuries and everything has changed. He spends all of his time in, in Qing China totally disappointed and, and full of rage, often about the things that he encounters. You know, he sees corruption among, among officials. He sees people who are essentially willing to dismiss, like Chinese people who are willing to dismiss the abilities of themselves and their countrymen because they, they valorize the foreigners so much. So there's this sense of outrage on his part as he moves through Qing China. So on the one hand, you know, as an external observer of all these things, someone who has not Grown up in this, he's, he's able to point out very clearly this is wrong, right? These things that maybe all of you take for granted, this is not how it had to be. These are fairly short lived changes in society and we don't necessarily have to just, you know, complacently accept them. Outrage is the only correct response to these things. So on the one hand, you know, he serves that function and then I think his journeys through Qing China serve to kind of foreshadow or at least show us perhaps what the later events in the realm of civilization are really supposed to be responding to, which is really helpful actually. You know, the reader is able to situate themselves in that setting first. Ching China so that when they finally do encounter the realm, it's fairly clear, you know, that these two things are in, in stark contrast to one another. Ching China we have multiple examples throughout, for example of China being dependent on foreigners, foreign technology. There's you know, Baoyu rides at a steamship at one point and the crew are all white Europeans. And when he asks why, the answer is like well, Chinese people couldn't do it. And in the realm we have the total opposite of that. All kind. There are, there are so many different kinds of scientific innovation and it' all domestic led, right? There is no, there's never any doubt that Chinese people are not only as capable as, as Europeans or Americans of, of doing these things, but actually there is, there is a sense of, of cultural and civilizational superiority there. They are a place that has effectively never been been threatened by, by foreign incursions or by foreign, we could call it technical or intellectual imperialism. So yeah, I think the parallel between those two places really shows, really emphasizes on the one hand how far late Qing society has fallen. On the other, you know, Wu Jianren tries to imagine what might have been possible in a China that actually, you know, believed in scientific development on its own and had been working on these things, had been under a major kind of prong of his critique. In the realm of civilization is about enlightened rulership. And if Qing China had had the kind of enlightened rulership he imagines for the realm, perhaps things might have been very different as well.
- [26:54]
Nicholas Gordon
So let's talk about the first half of the book, the part that's set in Qing China. You know, it's, it's Bayou spends the entire first half of the book seemingly offended that the foreigners are around in China. He, he, he like complains about like the presence of watches or something. Like, like, like he's Very. He's very. He's very. He seems quite uncomfortable regarding foreign influence, foreign technologies, kind of the rise of these new morals. But, um, you know, it's probably somewhat straightforward to think kind of the comment he's making about the Qing China of the day. But, you know, what do you think Wu is like specifically trying to convey with some of these comparisons? I mean, the Boxer Rebellion kind of happens during the story. Like. Like what kind of messages do you think Wu was trying to send by having value? And these other characters kind of navigate their way through this.
- [27:53]
Liz Weber
Yeah. So you bring up the example of watches, for example, and so there is an episode in the book where Baoyu's cousin Xie Pan has bought a chiming watch from one of his cronies. And so Baoyu takes kind of an interesting stance here. So I think he believes that a watch is actually a handy thing. It's at the level where it's a chiming watch specifically. And he cannot imagine a scenario where that is a useful thing to have because you either look at it and Xiao Pan says, well, what if you have to look at it in the dark and there's this whole back and forth about how the chiming function in particular makes it a gimmick. And actually it's really revealing at that moment. Bao Yu actually says very derisively, it's like the sort of thing a woman would use. Which gets back to how Wu Jianren has decided he wants this character to be repurposed because the old Baoyu would never have said something like that. The old Baoyu held women in such high regard and would never have kind of thrown away a comment like that about women, you know, being susceptible to gimmicky technology and things like this. But in that moment, what Baoyu is trying to say is Western style capitalism that innovates for the sake of generating profit, when an object is not necessarily actually that useful, has kind of got its claws into the Chinese market and he's very, very concerned about that in particular. And it's here, actually that this is one example where Wu Jiren's choice to take Xue Pan, who is Bao Yu's cousin in the original, and also transport him forward is really instructive. Because Xue Pan is, you know, his nickname is the oaf king. He is like Dai Pa Wang. He's boorish, he's rude, he's violent, he has killed a couple of people. So hardly an exemplar. But he is absolutely taken by the new capitalist sort of emphasis. The commercialism and consumerism of Shanghai in particular. So the two cousins here are instructive for understanding wu's perspective. Bao Yu, who is so critical of, he can appreciate a technology that is functional and useful, but he's derisive of any technology that is essentially just being created to generate profit. Whereas Xia Pan is much less critical. Very happily buys, consumes these things. He himself participates in the selling of these things. And so Wu Jian is fairly clearly criticizing that sort of capitalistic mindset that he views as, you know, spreading through at least Shanghai is where we see most of it in the book. You also mentioned, let's see, oh, you asked about the Boxer Rebellion and that moment too is really important. So on the one hand, it is one of the funniest parts of the novel. Wu Jiangyuan is pretty unsparing in his criticism of the Boxers. Essentially, you know, to, to describe this, the history of it in very brief detail. It is an anti foreign movement, a xenophobic anti foreign movement in the, that kind of sparks off in northeastern China in, in Shandong in 1900. You know, a bunch of people who are dissatisfied with the foreign presence end up kind of going on a rampage and they, they besiege the, the foreign legations in Beijing. They eventually actually get imperial support because the Qing government has been so unsuccessful in doing anything to stop the foreigners in China. So there is some sort of general sense on the part of, of the court that the Boxers might actually be able to achieve what the, the Qing military could not. And the, the way the Boxer Rebellion is, is often talked about, or at least what is, what is important for, for our conversation is that Boxers are, they fall prey to people who try to convince them that, you know, if you burn this talisman, you will have certain spiritual powers. You'll be invincible. You will, you know, if a foreigner fires a gun at you, it will not hit you. And so there's a lot of kind of superstitious practice, what we today would call superstitious practice involved in the Boxer uprising. And this, this ends up being taken, you know, after the fact, after the, the rebellion is, is suppressed by, you know, the, by foreign militaries. There's a lot of discussion after the fact about how so much of China's population was susceptible to these, these promises of, you know, immortality and invincibility. And so it ends up being part of a broader conversation about education. You know, there's a movement in Beijing in 1901 to try to think about why the population or how the population could have been better Educated and so on. And so Wu Jianren seems to be taking this moment to sort of comment on that. And again, he uses the juxtaposition between Jia Baoyu and Xie Pan to make his point. Xia Pan, who is a loyal friend but is, as I mentioned before, you know, not a. Particularly not. Not a critical thinker, is always kind of looking for self benefit and never thinking of any kind of broader picture. He falls in with the boxers because they. They promise him, you know, an official title and. And so on, and he's. He's unable to recognize that they are charlatans. He. He never critically thinks about, you know, is it possible that these claims they're making aren't true? Right. He just kind of believes it because it. It benefits him to believe it. Whereas Jia Baoyu, immediately upon encountering the scenario, think, well, they're. They're charlatans. Right? How could you possibly believe in all of this? So again, between the. The two cousins, we get a sense for Fora whose position here, right? This is. This is absurd, right? Like, why would anybody believe in this? But Xia Pan is there to make the point that people did, right? People did fall for it. People were convinced by it because it was expedient in one way or another. Whether, you know, for Xia Pan in the novel, it's about kind of, you know, achieving some kind of personal position, but for other people, it was really genuinely about, you know, driving the foreigners out. So that moment, which Wu Jianren does play quite comedically, is again, revelatory of some of these tensions at the time. Who falls in with something like the Boxer Rebellion? Why is there not more of a critical eye, the way that Bao Yu looks at this whole situation?
- [35:26]
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Liz Weber
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Liz Weber
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- [36:40]
Nicholas Gordon
Then let's, let's kind of jump forward to the second half of the book on this realm of civilization. Which is, which is such a strange part of the book. It's, it's like if the first half of the book is, is Bayou constantly being annoyed and offended by, by, you know, foreign influence. Second half the book is Bayou just constantly being amazed at all these fantastical devices that he sees around China. You know, which of course, of course are, are, are, are different from, from the futuristic stuff that would be put together by, by, by foreigners. You know, like, like you talked about kind of like the sen. Like if, if China had embraced kind of like enlightened leadership, this is what Wu thought China might have looked like if China had done that. But you know, I mean, how do you think this part of the book then reflects wu's wu's own views on Chinese politics and culture?
- [37:36]
Liz Weber
One of, I think the most important messages of this part is about knowledge systems, epistemologies and the fact that the realm of civilization has never been abandoned and still firmly believes in its own native epistemologies. So in contrast with what we see in Shanghai, for example, where at one point Baoyu Xiapan go to the Jiangnan arsenal and we see heavy equipment being manufactured and these are all imported from Europe. Some of the engineers who work at high level at the arsenal are all Europeans as well. And so in the Shanghai version, we see a China that is trying to modernize, but specifically always with borrowed technology from elsewhere. Whereas in the realm, what wu's trying to do is to say we have this high tech utopia that has achieved this utopia specifically by insisting upon its own, its own knowledge systems, right? Insisting on the legitimacy of its own practices. So for example, you know, there's, there's one of the earliest scenes in the realm, Bao Yu encounters a doctor and the doctor talks through all these, these high tech lenses that they can use now to like look at the body, sort of like an X ray, except for, for all different sorts of things, not just bones, but we have a brain lens. So we can we can examine your in situ while you're still breathing and your heart is still pumping? You know, we can look at the. The marrow inside your bones using a special marrow lens. And the way that conversation goes, that the doctor essentially argues, you know, this is all an improvement over Western medicine. Western medicine, you know, involves cutting people open, it involves anesthesia. You know, their knowledge of the body is based on dissection of corpses that have already ceased to breathe. So how can that possibly give you a full picture of how the body works? So there is this. This insistence upon the. The legitimacy of Chinese medicine that takes a different approach. And so it's often the case. I can't say in every case, but it's often the case that these technological developments that Baoyu encounters in the realm are based on or fleshed out from some native either technology or knowledge system. You know, there is a scene as well. You know, there's a protracted hunting scene. Well, two protracted hunting scenes. And, you know, over the course of these hunting scenes, they see a number. They encounter a number of wild animals, like out in the World. And these are often identified as animals from the Shanghai Jing, the classic of mountains and seas. Again, insisting upon the legitimacy of Chinese knowledge, I think directly in contrast to what we see in Shanghai, where there's this. Oh, what's a good word for this? Effectively, the willingness to cede ground and to say, okay, we're going to import Western technologies and Western ideas, because Chinese ones apparently don't work, aren't as good, whatever it might be. So in the realm, I think, even though, yes, part of what he's trying to do is just to dazzle, right. Some of it is just pure spectacle. Here's this thing. Isn't it amazing? But some of it is also to say, we could have done this without sacrificing our own intellectual histories, basically our own. Our own intellectual trajectories.
- [41:32]
Nicholas Gordon
You know, how. How would you describe the. The book's political stance? You know, it's. It seems at points like conservative with it, with a small C. You know, it's kind of harkening back to the values of an older China. Seems kind of largely skeptical of the change is presented by kind of some of this foreign influence at times it makes the characters, even the protagonists, feel unsympathetic. I mean, and that's maybe my own gloss on this. But, like, how would you kind of describe the. Well, how would you describe the book's political stance? And then how do you, as you were translating the book and Deeply reading it. How did you kind of feel about some of the. Some of the societies that kind of Wu was. Was creating in. In the book?
- [42:21]
Liz Weber
Yeah, I mean, it's. So, yes, I would agree it is. It is conservative in some places. And. And Wu himself is conservative in certain ways. That's not to say he's. He's conservative through and through. There are, There are places where he is progressive or, like, attempts to imagine a progressive alternative to what exists. You know, for example, even outside of the realm. Earlier in the novel, there's a conversation about foot binding. And Bao Yu takes for granted that foot binding should be ended. Right. But then there's. There's like a conservative side to that, which is like, oh, part of the debate about foot binding is that women deserve independence and equality. And Paul Y. Is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute here. So there is, on the one hand, there is like this fairly progressive acceptance, we should end foot binding. On the other, you know, we can see there is a certain conservatism at play. We see that too. In the realm, on the one hand, you know, Bao Yu asks, oh, are women and men still, like, do they have to segregate themselves effectively? Which was normal practice in Chang China, at least among, you know, the. The classes who could afford to have their women be sequestered rather than, you know, working. And the answer basically is we have achieved such perfect morality that. That rule that was effectively designed to ensure moral behavior, right. There. There are no, no illicit affairs and things. Right. If you keep men and women separate, we have achieved such perfect morality that that rule no longer holds and women can just go about freely in public. So on the one hand, again, you know, women have now this. This freedom to go out and go about in public, interact with men, speak to them, what have you. But at the same time, it's because their morality is so perfect. Right? So again, a fairly conservative morality that says, well, we're not going to do any of those things that were prescribed. Right. We're not going to have the illicit affairs because we're so moral. So again, there is even there a little bit of conservatism. And of course, yeah, when it comes to the broader political message, Right. And specifically, there's a long conversation about different governance structures. And in the realm, they ultimately decide on enlightened authoritarianism, which on the one hand, does feel like a comment on contemporary Qing leadership. Right. Because we have achieved this utopia precisely because our leader is enlightened. Wouldn't that be nice? Right? But at the same Time he does talk or that the various characters do talk through, you know, the benefits or detriments of a constitution, of a republic. And Wu is very much against republics. He thinks they are chaotic, he thinks they are inefficient. And really, you know, the idea that you should just have a perfect monarch feels very like Mengxian, like Mengzi, Confucian philosopher, who believes, like, the duty of a leader is to govern in the interest of his people. So this does all feel very, very conservative, particularly in its discussion of, like, which form of governance is best. Although there is also, within that conversation, there is a little bit of nuance in that. You know, they say, well, yes, authoritarianism is best if you have an enlightened ruler, but we accept that many rulers are not enlightened. So in that case, then, yes, it is better to have a constitution. You know, an unenlightened authoritarian government is, is worse, by far, is more damaging to the people. So at least if you have like a constitutional monarchy, then you have officials who can kind of help, you know, prevent the worst abuses of an unenlightened authoritarian government.
- [46:22]
Nicholas Gordon
You know, maybe for this, for this last question, I kind of want to go big picture again. The subheading for the book is an early Chinese science fiction novel. And I guess, do you see this book as a starting point for later Chinese science fiction, where there are kind of trends or ideas that you see parallels in between kind of what Wu was writing and maybe how later Chinese science fiction authors approach the genre?
- [46:54]
Liz Weber
You know, I don't want to necessarily overstate wu's role. In particular, this. This period, you know, the. The 1900s, the first decade of the 20th century, was actually really fertile for the writing of. Of this kind of science fiction novel in China. So I don't want to say that Wu Jianran himself is personally responsible for, you know, the establishment of the genre or anything like that. You know, European and American, and I believe Japanese science fiction had been translated in China starting in the 1890s, 1900s, so it's there to be read. And we have earlier examples of science fiction being written as well. So Wu Jianren's is not the first. I was very careful. My editor was asking, like, can we say the first? I said, no, we cannot say the first because it is not the first. So, you know, Liang Qichao, the intellectual I mentioned before, in 1902, he writes an unfinished sci fi novel like the Xin Zhonggu Wei Lai Ji, the Future of New China, and there are others around this time too. So there is kind of, you could call it maybe a zeitgeist that is leading to this being such a fertile moment for using sci fi in the kind of communication of social critiques. So I would say it's part of a moment. I would not necessarily try to draw a direct line between this novel and the future of Chinese sci fi, for example.
- [48:36]
Nicholas Gordon
So I think with that, that's a great place to end our conversation with Liz Weber about her new translation of Wu Jianren's new story of the Stone. Liz, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [48:57]
Liz Weber
So New Story is available from Columbia University Press. It is available from numerous other online booksellers. I think Amazon, Barnes and Noble. I've seen it. Oh, it's also available as an ebook if folks are unlike me. I still read it in paper, but if folks like ebooks, there is an ebook as well. Other work that is published I translated a short story by Yudafu Bondless night back in 2021 that is available in that was published in Renditions out of Hong Kong, A Journal of Chinese Literary Tradition Translation Excuse me. My next project is working on Niehua Flower in a Sea of Resentment by Jin Song Chen and Deng Po. And I actually I was, I was very fortunate to receive a grant, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts this year for to support work on that project. So that is what I'm currently working on. It's another late Ching novel because this period is so fascinating to me. So that's where I'm kind of in the thick of that project right now.
- [50:16]
Nicholas Gordon
So you can follow me Nicholas Gordon on Twitter ickrigordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asianreviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter ookReviewsAsia.
- [50:29]
That's reviews, plural.
- [50:30]
And you can find many more often reviews at the New Books network and new booksnetwork.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts Spotify Rate us Recommend us Church their friends support interviewing those running in around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more new news coming up on the show. But before then, Liz, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [50:49]
Liz Weber
Thank you so much for having me.