My father, a 72-year-old former state-owned company employee and businessman, passed away recently and we returned his ashes to his home town, a small village called Ai’s Creek to the south of Fan, a town in Jiangxi Province. A man will only return to his birthplace in the countryside when he is dead. This is our reality.
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‘The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tons of resources trapped beneath the ground.’
‘This disaster has been going on for decades. I want to protest against this as loudly as I can through photography.’
‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’
Fiction by A. Jiang.
‘An enormous black form rose from the water. Uncle Feng told me in a low voice to run fast.’
Fiction by Can Xue, translated by Annelise Finegan.
‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘One day after the next I would figure out what was needed, learn from my mistakes, pay attention to what worked.’
