Michael Berry
Photo courtesy of Michael Berry
Bio
Michael Berry is a translator and author who is professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has written and edited eight books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Berry's book-length translations include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize; To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library; and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) by Fang Fang.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Chinese of the novel A Soft Burial by Fang Fang. Fang Fang (b. 1955), the pen name for Wang Fang, spent most of her childhood in Wuhan and remains one of China's most prolific writers, with nearly 100 different published editions of her novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. A Soft Burial is generally considered her most important novel of the last 20 years and won the Lu Yao Literature Award after its publication in 2016. It begins with a mysterious protagonist without a name who, decades earlier, was pulled from a river in a state of near-death with a wiped-clean memory. The narrative follows her journey to recovery and the discovery that, as victims of the Land Reform Movement, her entire family was killed and her husband's family died by mass suicide, their bodies given a "soft burial"—haphazardly buried without a casket. This novel has never before appeared in English.
It was just a few months after I submitted my NEA application for A Soft Burial that COVID-19 began to grip Wuhan, making headlines around the world. Knowing that the author of A Soft Burial, Fang Fang, was a longtime resident of Wuhan, I reached out to her to make sure that she and her family were safe amid the outbreak. At the time I had no idea that in late February of 2020, Fang Fang had already begun publishing an online blog that chronicled her experience under lockdown. When I finally read Fang Fang’s account, I immediately decided to put all of my other projects aside and began translating her blog; it was a story the world needed to hear. Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City would go on to become one of the most important and controversial books of the COVID-19 era, attracting more than 50 million readers in China before becoming the target of widespread attacks and a massive disinformation campaign. Wuhan Diary catapulted Fang Fang into the international spotlight, but, in the process, it also resulted in much of her work being politicized and suppressed. News of the National Endowment for the Arts’ support of A Soft Burial comes after more than ten months of protracted attacks against Fang Fang. It serves not only as a validation of this translation project, but, more importantly, as a voice of support for a writer who has been the target of unprecedented online attacks. It also allows a writer who unexpectedly became known for her nonfiction to now have the chance to reveal the nuance and complexity of her fictional vision. A Soft Burial is a novel about the fragility of memory and the erasure of history, which, ironically, cannot be published in China. Now, thanks to the NEA’s support, Fang Fang’s literary vision can finally begin its journey to a new audience in translation.