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At the end of the Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1970s Jing, an educated youth (zhishi qingnian) who has spent a few years as a peasant in the countryside, becomes a truck driver in a provincial shipyard. He manages to teach himself English in adverse circumstances while driving his truck, eventually passing the examination to get into the English Class at Donghu University. There, he meets with classmates from vastly different cultural backgrounds and falls in love with Deirdre, the estranged partner of Dr Wagner the English teacher. This engaging and masterful novel explores the aspiration of many to migrate to English speaking countries. Like much of Ouyang's work it subtly deconstructs the mechanisms of colonialism against an increasingly vibrant Chinese economy. The vivid fictional life of a Chinese truck driver who aspires to the western life is beautifully and evocatively realised. The English Class is a triumph, a novel at once wise, brave and entertaining.
William ‘Billy’ Sing was born in 1886 to an English mother and Chinese father. He and his two sisters were brought up in Clermont and Proserpine, in rural Queensland. He was one of the first to enlist in 1914 and at Gallipoli became famous for his shooting prowess. In his new novel, Billy Sing, Ouyang Yu embodies Sing's voice in a magically descriptive prose that captures both the Australian landscape and vernacular. In writing about Sing's triumphant yet conflicted life, and the horrors of war, Yu captures with imaginative power what it might mean to be both an outsider and a hero in one's own country. The telling is poetic and realist, the author's understanding of being a Chinese-Aust...
Poems first written in Chinese but now presented in both Chinese and English, Self Translation is arguably Ouyang Yu’s most lyrical and resonant collection of poetry to date. The verse inhabits China and Australia in spirit and the natural world in both nations. Mellow and beautiful, yet questioning of the author’s own experience of moving between cultures, these are poems that provide a perfect companion to Ouyang’s award-winning novel The English Class. They feel at once Chinese and Australian in the intuitive and often indefinable elements that provide a path between two places.
Ouyang Yu has been one of Australia's most prolific producers of poetry, translations and edited collections for the last three decades. This collection gathers much of this experimental work, with some of the poems collected in this book dating as far back as late 1982.
Anonymous, the keeper of the diary, deputy director of a publishing company in a nameless city in China, is a happily married man with a daughter until he succumbs fully to his sexual desires, forever searching for new erotic experiences and secret liaisons. Anonymous is able to hoard a fortune, by embezzlement or corruption, with which he buys permanent resident status for his wife and daughter in the West. He stays behind in China, a situation commonly referred to as a naked official in contemporary Chinese terminology, one who has nothing to fear when exposed because his family is safely installed overseas with all his money.
"Very big, China." - Noel Coward. Scholarly and scatological, this cornucopia of fun and wisdom is a breathtaking picture of speech, thought and images from the world's richest and oldest culture. ON THE SMELL OF AN OILY RAG gives an insight like no other into how English-language and Chinese-language cultures collide, contrast and illuminate each other. It's about what is lost in translation and what can be gained by it.
Loose' takes place around the turn of this century, partly in Australia and partly in China and its provinces, where Ouyang Yu's brother Ouyang Ming, a famed Falun Gong practitioner who was tortured to death, enters the story. The novel combines fiction with non-fiction, poetry with literary criticism, diary with life writing, with multiple stories weaving in between, told from different points of view by different characters. The story evolves during the heady days of the end of the millennium when the new sexual revolution Chinese-style erupted, when political repression went side by side with burgeoning artistic freedom, and poetic experimentation took a sharp postmodernist turn as poets swung away from Western resources to a rich past and richer present.
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This book includes selection from Ouyang Yu’s poetic work, published or unpublished, for more than a decade straddling the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, in work such as Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes (2002) and Foreign Matter (2003), a selection which provides the best introduction to his work.