Te-Ping Chen’s collection of short stories, “Isn’t it nice here?” – Culture

It is impossible to separate the private from the political. Nevertheless, it is tried again and again, with the result that a strange area emerges, an undefined zone between the political and the private, which would like to be only one, but can never deny that it is also the other, a dark place of the Self-deception. The short stories by the American journalist Te-Ping Chen play in this intermediate realm.

One story is about Chinese twins: The girl is highly intelligent and freedom-loving, dreams of a life abroad and a different China. The boy is adjusted and well-behaved, finds his happiness in a harmless profession and professional computer games. She becomes a dissident who criticizes abuses on social media, who goes to jail several times for it and loses her fiancé. He becomes happy with computer games and it is he who is finally allowed to travel abroad.

In another story, a young woman who works in a dreary call center meets her ex-boyfriend Keju again, a choleric and creepy guy who lost an arm in a fire in the factory where he worked. Te-Ping recounts the encounter between the two as follows: “‘At least I’m glad I saw you,’ he said at last, as if there were a certain number of sights in the city and she was one of them. ‘It is simply beautiful here, don’t you think? ‘ There were black uniformed security officers; on the other side of the square, police officers were chatting with tourists, a few were talking on radios. ‘If I’m being completely honest, it scares me,’ said Keju. “

It is the dissidents who have to suffer, who are injured and not just politically maladjusted, who cause problems. The adapted, on the other hand, have a comfortable, almost carefree life. However, Chen’s stories cannot be read as Beijing-faithful, such as some of Mo Yan’s stories. Like this place where Keju meets his ex-girlfriend, the personal relationships in Chen’s stories can be viewed from two perspectives: the one loyal to the government and the one critical of the government, almost like a picture puzzle. Both sides can see what they want to see.

Te-Ping Chen: Isn’t it nice here. Stories. Translated from the English by Anke Carolin Burger. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2021. 256 pages, 22 euros.

This political ambiguity is no self-protection and certainly no kneeling before Beijing, the stylistic device is consistently maintained, Chen even describes the relationships between the characters in a vague and ambiguous manner. In one story, a young Chinese professor of German studies marries an ethnology lecturer, both live in the United States, he studied in Germany and practically fled China as a teenager. He doesn’t want to go back and says little about his homeland. One winter’s day he was found hanged in the park, with no explanation or farewell letter. The narrator knows he was carrying a dark story, but nothing that would have driven him to suicide? Was it suicide at all?

Chen was born and raised in the USA, she worked for American newspapers in China, and now lives in Philadelphia. Your grandfather, that’s what she said in an interview with Pen America, was an intellectual who campaigned for a democratic China. His grave was desecrated during the Cultural Revolution. You think of him often.

The feeling of an indefinite threat does not only affect dissidents and loyalty to the government: the political seeps into the private in other circumstances too, and if it goes unnoticed, it can act like a poison. Chen tells in very clear language, without frills and effects, which sometimes gives the stories something fairy-tale-like and contrasts nicely with the cynicism that smoulders in many of them. A bold and profound debut.

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