The Sacred Clan. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Sacred Clan

Wu Township is hollowing out. Our most capable sons and daughters have long since uprooted from their birthplace on the central plains to fuel China’s economic miracle. The ancient trees now sit in the shade of a modern aqueduct, funnelling even our precious water to the metropolises beyond.

From the marketplace where gossip is traded to the long-abandoned execution grounds, ordinary life carries on. For we who remain, feuds between neighbours compound the burdens shared by increasingly ageing shoulders. But If you know where to look, you’ll find the town still clings to its customs and dreams.

Let me show you around. If we’re lucky, we’ll run into the benevolent doctor or beauty store owner, and if we’re not, the corrupt local official, perhaps even the souls of executed ancestors. Why do you want to visit? To see it before it’s all gone… of course.

Liang Hong is a writer, essayist and professor at Renmin University of China. She is known for narrativising rural China, and is heralded by critics as a trailblazer, focusing on the lives of ordinary rural people and exploring something other than the metropolis. Her own rural upbringing and memories heavily inspire her works, for which she has won a number of literary prizes.

Esther Tyldesley is a graduate of Robinson College, Cambridge who teaches Chinese language and translation at the University of Edinburgh. Her published translations include Xinran’s The Good Women of China, Sky Burial and China Witness, also by Xinran, Confucius from the Heart by Yu Dan and Little Aunt Crane by Yan Geling. In her spare time she reads far too many books and dreams of China.