Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy.

Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China.

It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has reality caught up with Chan’s fiction.

The novel, which is banned on the mainland, openly questions China’s capacity for selective amnesia, and the moral cost of the nation’s rise. In January, the Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-raised author no doubt ruffled more feathers with the publication in Chinese of his latest novel, which translates as Naked Lives.