Samantha Kuok-Leese

Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy.

Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China.

It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has reality caught up with Chan’s fiction.

The novel, which is banned on the mainland, openly questions China’s capacity for selective amnesia, and the moral cost of the nation’s rise. In January, the Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-raised author no doubt ruffled more feathers with the publication in Chinese of his latest novel, which translates as Naked Lives.

It addresses the troubled Tibetan-Han Chinese relationship through the character of Champa, a driver from Lhasa who becomes the kept man of a successful and mature businesswoman in Beijing. He ends up falling in love with her rebellious daughter, an animal activist intent on saving pet dogs from becoming black market meat.

Random House will publish the book in English translation next year, as The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver.

What inspired your new book?

I have always wanted to write about the Tibetan-Han Chinese relationship. It is very complicated, almost like a love-hate affair between two people. The relationship involves all kinds of dependency, manipulation and expectation.

Does it bother you that your books are banned in mainland China?

I know before I write my books that they may not be publishable. 

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