Renowned Chinese writer Yan Geling's first English novel, The Banquet Bug, returns to the author's motherland in simplified Chinese, and is creating quite a buzz among her fans. It has made it to bestseller lists online as well as at bookstores.

"The translation by Taiwanese professor John Chiang-sheng Kuo is longer than I expected," Yan says. "I didn't translate it myself because I do not like to repeat myself."

Yan says every novel that she has written, especially after moving to the United States in 1989, adopts a different approach. She earned her Master's degree in fiction writing from Columbia College, Chicago, and shot to fame with The Lost Daughter of Happiness and Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, and their film adaptations. She currently lives in Berlin with her American diplomat husband.

Based on a news story, The Banquet Bug explores the world of fraud in Chinese society at the turn of the millennium. "Reserve worker" Dan Dong is mistaken as a journalist and invited to banquets where he not only eats for free but is also paid "for his trouble". Having tasted the high life, Dan continues his assumed identity and starts leading the life of a "banquet bug", until he ropes in his wife as his partner in cheating.

Yan says she wanted to expose the bigger scams in society through the trickster Dan.

"I was quite excited when writing the novel for it brought many new challenges to me: writing in English for the first time and centering on a male protagonist."

Yan is currently working on several book projects, including the online serial Buyu's Village Inn, about a kind-hearted woman Zeng Buyu who runs a village inn, and its guests.

Comments