Talk abstract:

Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang began as a blog which ran for sixty days from January 25 through March 25, 2020, documenting the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. The blog quickly became an online phenomenon, attracting tens of millions of Chinese readers. Wuhan Diary also provided an important portal for Chinese around the world to understand the outbreak, the local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. The diary featured a curious mixture of quotidian details from Fang Fang’s daily routine under quarantine, medical insights from the author’s doctor friends, and brave observations about the official response. Eventually, Fang Fang’s account would become the target of a series of online attacks by “ultra-nationalists,” spawning debate about COVID-19, Sino-US Relations, and nature of civil society in China. As the English translator of Wuhan Diary, this lecture will alternate between first-hand insights from the translation process and broader observations on how the diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate in China, ultimately hinting at the power of writing.  

Biography:

Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA at UCLA. He is the author of Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (2009), Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (2014), and Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2021, 2022); the editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader in Taiwan History and Culture (2020, 2022) and co-editor of Divided Lenses (2016) and Modernism Revisited (2016). Current projects include a recently completed monograph, Translation and the Virus, which explores the intersection of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns, and Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary; and a book that explores the United States as it has been imagined through Chinese film, 1949-present.

He has contributed to numerous books and periodicals, including The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, A Companion to Chinese Cinema, Electric Shadows: A Century of Chinese Cinema, Columbia Companion of Modern Chinese Literature, Harvard New Literary History of Modern China, and The Chinese Cinema Book.  He is also the translator of several books, including Wild Kids (2000), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2002), To Live (2004), The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008), Remains of Life (2017), and Wuhan Diary (2020).

He is a two time NEA Translation Fellow (2008, 2021), and has received Honorable Mentions for the MLA Louis Roth Translation Prize (2009) and the Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize (2020); he has served on the jury for the Dream of the Red Chamber Prize (2012-2018) and has served as a Jury Member for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse Film Festival (2010, 2018).