The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan

Wen Zhu

ISBN 10: 0231160909 / ISBN 13: 9780231160902

Published by Columbia University Press, US, 2013

About this Item

The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan moves between anarchic campuses, maddening communist factories, and the victims of China's economic miracle to showcase the absurdity, injustice, and socialist Gothic of everyday Chinese life. In "The Football Fan," readers fall in with an intriguingly unreliable narrator who may or may not have killed his elderly neighbor for a few hundred yuan. The bemused antihero of "Reeducation" is appalled to discover that, ten years after graduating during the pro-democracy protests of 1989, his alma mater has summoned him back for a punitive bout of political reeducation with a troublesome ex-girlfriend. "Da Ma's Way of Talking" is a fast, funny recollection of China's picaresque late 1980s, told through the life and times of one of our student narrator's more controversial classmates; while "The Apprentice" plunges us into the comic vexations of life in a more-or-less planned economy, as an enthusiastic young graduate is over-exercised by his table-tennis-fanatic bosses, deprived of sleep by gambling-addicted colleagues, and stuffed with hard-boiled eggs by an overzealous landlady.Full of acute observations, political bite, and piercing insight into friendships and romance, these stories further establish Zhu Wen as a fearless commentator on human nature and contemporary China.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780231160902

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan
• Publisher: Columbia University Press, US
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231160909
• ISBN 13: 9780231160902
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan moves between anarchic campuses, maddening communist factories, and the victims of China's economic miracle to showcase the absurdity, injustice, and socialist Gothic of everyday Chinese life.

In "The Football Fan," readers fall in with an intriguingly unreliable narrator who may or may not have killed his elderly neighbor for a few hundred yuan. The bemused antihero of "Reeducation" is appalled to discover that, ten years after graduating during the pro-democracy protests of 1989, his alma mater has summoned him back for a punitive bout of political reeducation with a troublesome ex-girlfriend. "Da Ma's Way of Talking" is a fast, funny recollection of China's picaresque late 1980s, told through the life and times of one of our student narrator's more controversial classmates; while "The Apprentice" plunges us into the comic vexations of life in a more-or-less planned economy, as an enthusiastic young graduate is over-exercised by his table-tennis-fanatic bosses, deprived of sleep by gambling-addicted colleagues, and stuffed with hard-boiled eggs by an overzealous landlady. Full of acute observations, political bite, and piercing insight into friendships and romance, these stories further establish Zhu Wen as a fearless commentator on human nature and contemporary China.

About the Author

Zhu Wen is also the author of I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China. In Chinese, he has published several additional short story and poetry collections and one novel and has directed four films, including Seafood (2001), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and South of the Clouds (2004), which won the NETPAC Prize at the Berlin Festival. He lives in Beijing. Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck, University of London.