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Li Juan is a unique voice in the landscape of modern Chinese literature, working from the margins. In 2018, Distant Sunflower Fields won the prestigious Lu Xun Award. In her dispatches, Li Juan writes about the powerful simplicity of an unconquerable landscape set against it the kindness, suffering, and strength of three women working in fragile harmony to raise sunflowers from the barren earth. Christopher Payne has co-translated the award-winning novels Decoded and In the Dark by Mai Jia, and along with his frequent collaborator, Olivia Milburn, he’s also brought Jiang Zilong’s magnum opus, Empires of Dust, to an English-language audience. Christopher holds a PhD in Chinese literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and he has spent more than a decade teaching at postsecondary institutions, most notably Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, and The University of Manchester in the UK. In 2020 he took up a position at the University of Toronto, where he has continued to champion Chinese literature in the English-speaking world.<p><i>Distant Sunflower Fields</i> is like Nan Shepherd’s <i>The Living Mountain</i> ... you unconsciously forget the daily hubbub and sink silently into the embrace of the world her words have brought to being.</p><p><b>Xinran</b><b> </b>| author of <i>The Good Women of China</i></p>
An iron-willed mother, an ageing grandmother, a pair of mismatched dogs and 90 mu of less-than-ideal farmland: these are Li Juan’s companions on the steppes of the Gobi Desert.
Writing out of a yurt under Xinjiang’s endless horizons, she documents her family’s quest to extract a bounty of sunflowers amid the harsh beauty and barren expanses of China’s northwest frontier. Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death.
While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?
Li Juan ... may be as far outside of the system as Chinese writers are able to get and still publish ...
Her literary career has taken what she calls the ‘wild path’ – ‘wild’ being traditionally used in Chinese to refer to things outside the establishment.
Eric Abrahamsen | The New York Times