ANNIE WANG HAS written nine books in Chinese. In 1998, she finished her first book in English, Lili, but the American literary agents she approached rejected it. Finally, in 2001, Lili was published by the US imprint Pantheon Books.
'China simply wasn't the interest of American publishers,' says Wang, 31. 'They wanted me to turn it into an autobiography. They said there has been a record of success if you tell in your own voice about your life. But if it's literature, it becomes difficult.'
When Ha Jin's novel, Waiting, won the 1999 National Book Award, prospects for Chinese fiction were suddenly catapulted to a new level. Pantheon, the publisher of Waiting, snapped up Lili, a coming-of-age story in the shadow of Tiananmen.
Add more success stories, including the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to France-based Gao Xingjian in 2000, and it's understandable why the number of Chinese writing in, and being translated into, English has swelled in recent years. China's ascendance, accompanied by a flood of front-page stories on its economic and political developments, has made English speakers crave a window into this still-mysterious culture. While best-selling authors such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston have offered westerners a sense of what life is like for 'hyphenated Chinese' living in America, now they want 'to read the real China', Wang says.
Authors such as Dai Sijie - whose novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, now also a film, shot to the top of the best-seller lists when it came out in France in 2000 - are giving it to them. About 25 years into China's open-door emigration policy, there's a growing body of Chinese writers such as Anchee Min, Liu Hong and Ha who have been living in the west for years and writing in English. And millions in China today are studying English.
'Everyone can see China is destined to be an increasingly important force in the world, not only economically but politically and culturally,' says LuAnn Walther, an editor at the Knopf Publishing Group, which publishes Ha, Dai, Da Chen and Yu Hua. 'There's a realisation among more and more readers that there are discoveries to make outside our own borders. I didn't go out looking for a Chinese writer, but when Ha Jin came my way, he whetted my appetite.'
