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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Dictionary of Maqiao

A Dictionary of Maqiao

Han, Shaogong
Lovell, Julia

Hardcover

Series: Weatherhead Books on Asia

General Fiction

ISBN10: 0231127448
ISBN13: 9780231127448
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Jul 2 2003
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.29
Height: 0.95 Width: 6.32 Depth: 9.22
Language: English

One of the most-talked about works of fiction to emerge from China in recent years, this novel about an urban youth displaced to a small village in rural China during the Cultural Revolution is a fictionalized portrait of the author's own experience as a young man. Han Shaogong was one of millions of students relocated from cities and towns to live and work alongside peasant farmers in an effort to create a classless society. Translated into English for the first time, Han's novel is an exciting experiment in form--structured as a dictionary of the Maqiao dialect--through which he seeks to understand and translate the local life and customs of his strange new home.

Han encounters an upside-down world among the people of Maqiao: a con man dupes his neighbors into thinking that he has found the fountain of youth by convincing them that his father is in fact his son; to be scientific is to be lazy; time and relationships are understood using the language of food and its preparation; and to die young is considered sweet, while the aged reckon their lives to be cheap.

As entries build one upon another, Han meditates on the ability of a waidi ren (outsider) to represent the ways of life of another community. In this light, the Communist effort to control the language and history of a people whose words and past are bound together in ineluctably local ways emerges as an often comical, sometimes tragic exercise in miscommunication.

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