ABSTRACT
This chapter constitutes an experimental proposal: What if we thought about literature in Chinese through the lens of other spaces, spaces that are not conventionally connected to Chinese culture? For instance, the tropical rainforest? The rainforest is certainly not one of the spaces that come to mind when we think of Chinese literature. And yet, in this chapter, I will make the claim that the rainforest is, in fact, an important topos in Sinophone literature: one that is marginal rather than central to Chinese literature, but also one that is global and, hence, greater than Chinese (or even Sinophone) literature.
I will focus on two examples that showcase different approaches. In the first case study, the rainforest enters the Chinese literary world through translation. Another cultural tradition’s rainforest becomes literarily transplanted into China. This is the case in the Chinese translation history of one of the most important rainforest novels (novelas de la selva) of Latin American literature, José Eustacio Rivera’s 1924 novel La vorágine (The Vortex), which appeared first in Wu Yan’s 吳岩 Chinese translation in 1957. The second case study is the 1998 novel Elephant Herd (群象) by Sinophone Malaysian author Zhang Guixing 張貴興. In this text in Chinese from an author originally born in Malaysia’s Sarawak but living and writing in Taiwan now, Borneo’s rainforest becomes a space through which diasporic Chinese negotiate the status of Chinese culture itself. Both texts feature different rainforests as well as different assumptions about the ways in which the rainforest space and Chinese literature can be connected. But both texts rethink Chinese culture, as well as China’s place in the world, through the lens of the rainforest. Both showcase how the trope of the rainforest as a critical, comparative lens both complicates and enriches the worldedness of literary texts in Chinese.
