Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, The University of Michigan

Type/Location: Hybrid / Ann Arbor, MI

Description:

Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Chang Kuei-hsing (b. 1956, publishes as Zhang Guixing) has spent
decades doing for tropical Asia what Gabriel García Márquez did for Latin America: enchanting
a land with a violent history. Set in wartime Sarawak, The Crossing of the Boars (Ye zhu du he,
2018, rev. 2024), released in English this year, dazzles with a wartime mystery enmeshed in an
ecological fantasia: ghostly colonists mating like guppies, macaques mirroring Japanese war
criminals, bomber storks, ominous urinating porcupines, wildfire-igniting squirrels, monstrous
quagmires, vengeful flying she-vampires, and herd upon herd of insatiable bearded pigs.

Christopher Rea discusses how he and Julie M. Wang rendered this award-winning novel into
English, including the process of researching a historical epic whose architectonic sentences
teem with flora and fauna found only in Borneo. In doing so, he offers answers to a more
general question: When faced with a challenging text, how can a translator get out alive?

About the Speaker:

Christopher Rea is professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia.
His book-length translations from Chinese into English include China’s Chaplin: Comic Stories
and Farces by Xu Zhuodai (Cornell, open access), The Book of Swindles and More Swindles from
the Late Ming (both with Bruce Rusk, Columbia), Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts by Qian Zhongshu
(Columbia), and Zhang Guixing’s The Crossing of the Boars: A Novel (with Julie M. Wang,
Columbia, 2026). He is also the founding director and lead translator of the Chinese Film
Classics Project, the world’s largest free online collection of early Chinese films with English
subtitles.

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