An American Wanted to Bring Chinese Literature to the English-Speaking World. So He Built the Only Website for It | 100 People With Ideas

"How do you really get from Chinese content to readers overseas? Along that whole bridge, where exactly is it blocked? How is it blocked, and how do you clear it? I think I'm slowly working out a more precise idea of my own — how to actually solve this problem."

You have probably never heard of a website called Paper Republic. It draws 300 to 400 unique visitors a day, and it is still the best platform in the English-speaking world for learning about Chinese literature.

It does no promotion at all; almost all of its traffic comes from search. When people in the English-speaking world search for Chinese writers, Chinese works, or Chinese literature, Paper Republic is usually the first result. Every day now, strangers write to Eric Abrahamsen, who founded the site, hoping he will answer their questions about Chinese literature.

Eric is American, stands nearly two meters tall, and speaks Chinese with unusual fluency. The nonprofit project started ten years ago. He was 29, he had become close friends with a few other translators who were also putting Chinese literature into English, and they wanted one place to pool their translation projects, the books they had just read, and their thoughts on Chinese literature. They took it for a form of talking to themselves, and never expected it would later catch the eye of people overseas who were interested in Chinese literature — "some publishing people even use the site to look for Chinese authors, or for publishing possibilities."

Nearly 1.4 billion people use Chinese, but in global publishing China is effectively a "minor language" country. How little the English-speaking world knows about Chinese literature and Chinese writers is one of the central problems Paper Republic set out to solve.

"How do you really get from Chinese content to readers overseas? Along that whole bridge, where exactly is it blocked? How is it blocked, and how do you clear it? I think I'm slowly working out a more precise idea of my own — how to actually solve this problem," Eric told QDaily.

Trying to reach readers directly is far too hard, in his view — "the workload is too large," "there's no way to do it effectively." What matters most is "influencing the people who influence readers," or the opinion leaders. In book publishing, that means editors at literary magazines, bloggers with large followings, influential intellectuals, and so on.

To make Chinese writing easier for overseas readers to take up, Paper Republic launched Read Paper Republic on June 18, 2015. Each week it published one Chinese short story, essay, or poem on the site, free. In its first year the program ran 53 pieces, with more than 20 translators taking part. The works included Wang Anyi's Black Alley 《黑弄堂》, Jia Pingwa's Backflow River 《倒流河》, Shen Congwen's Husband and Wife 《夫妇》, Liu Cixin's The Thinker 《思想者》, Yan Geling's "A Losing Proposition," from Macao Is a City 《妈阁是座城：赔钱货》, Lu Min's The Second Child of 1980 《1980 年的第二胎》, Wang Xiaobo's Uncle's Lover 《舅舅情人》, and A Yi's Hello 《您好》.

"We realized almost no one overseas knew about Chinese literature, and even the ones who wanted to learn didn't know where to go. There are very few books, and a lot of people don't want to pay for one, so we thought, fine, we'll just make the whole experience free — if you're interested, you click and read. At the very least that could hook a few readers or publishers. Because there really is far, far too little information and content out there for anyone to see," Eric said.

Reading was free, and there was no income from ads or anything else, so the standard for choosing pieces was simple: whatever they could get for free. Authors granted rights for free, translators translated for free, editors edited for free, and readers read for free.

Being free is also why the weekly program ended after a single year. "If we do it again, we'll probably have to find some funding," Eric said.

Read Paper Republic was only one of the many "short-term projects" Eric has run — and the quotation marks are there because being short-lived was never the plan.

In 2010, for instance, Eric worked with Canaan Morse, then a master's student in classical Chinese literature at Peking University, to compile news about Chinese publishing. They got a year of funding from the China National Publications Import & Export Corporation, known as Zhongtu, which also used the material in its newsletters and on its website. A year later Zhongtu dropped the funding and the project stopped.

In 2011, Paper Republic teamed up with the magazine People's Literature 《人民文学》 to publish Pathlight 《路灯》, an English-language quarterly for readers abroad. But the magazine's reach was limited — it felt more like a government project — and it had no marketing muscle, so it never caught on.

Its events made more of an impression: two literary salons with the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF), and Beijing Publishing Exchange Week, which it ran with Zhongtu and Zuoshu, an independent publishing-industry outlet whose name means "Making Books."

At last year's BIBF salon, Paper Republic put together more than 20 events, among them The Opium War and Sino-Indian Trade Relations 《鸦片战争与中印贸易关系》, From China to Egypt: Where Is the Village Today 《从中国到埃及：今日乡村何在》, and Writing and the Moments Behind History 《写作与历史背面的时刻》. Writers and publishers including Svetlana Alexievich, Yu Hua, Cao Wenxuan, Liang Hong, Ge Fei, Zhang Yueran, and Chen Guanzhong took part.

Beijing Publishing Exchange Week brings about ten publishers from different countries to Beijing each year. With Chinese publishers and readers they discuss buying and selling rights, how to make a bestseller, how to land good book projects, and how their own countries' publishing industries reach the world.

For a long stretch Paper Republic stayed a one-man operation; Eric alone kept the website and its database up to date. Only when his wife, Chen Dongmei, joined in 2015 and his friend Min Jie in 2016 did it become the three-person team it is now.

"Because we've always been looking for the most effective way to make it easier for people overseas to take up Chinese literature and Chinese writers, we've done a lot of different things along the way — but the final goal has stayed the same," Eric told QDaily.

"Honestly, sometimes I don't know how we're still in business."

Eric was born in Seattle and graduated from Washington State University, and he spent a year as an exchange student at Minzu University of China. He came to China to study in 2001 and lived there until 2016; he has since moved back to his hometown.

In 2006 he began translating Chinese literature — and, as noted, translation and literary exchange are exactly what Paper Republic was founded for.

He has translated Wang Xiaobo, Su Tong, Bi Feiyu, A Yi, Sheng Keyi, and Xu Zechen. He has won a PEN America Translation Fund grant and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) translation fellowship, and he was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association's (ALTA) National Translation Award.

At the start, though, Eric had no plan to work in literary translation or publishing. He only wanted to get out of the United States and travel. The depth, history, and literature of Arabic and Chinese struck him as things "you could never finish learning in a lifetime." That is how he came to China on exchange in his senior year of college. Because he "loved the language, and the society was obviously interesting," he stayed — for 15 years.

Around that time Eric's girlfriend gave him a copy of Wang Xiaobo's My Spiritual Homeland 《我的精神家园》, which opens with the essay The Silent Majority 《沉默的大多数》. He read it, and the urge to translate it came on its own.

"My Chinese wasn't that good then — I'd been studying under five years, so it was fairly early. I felt Wang Xiaobo's voice already sounded a lot like an American writer's voice. The logic, the irony, the sense of humor — those things really did resemble a Western writer's voice. That made it easier for me to take in. And I found a matching English voice right away, and had this urge to translate. There wasn't a reason for it, I just had the urge. I liked it, so I turned it into English," Eric told QDaily.

As with many fine impulses that get turned into reality, what Eric went through to build Paper Republic is more than he can well convey.

"Honestly, sometimes I don't know how we're still in business," he said.

But out of all these scattered projects, something finally began to take shape. In 2016 Paper Republic bought the rights to six Chinese books: Liang Hong's China in Liangzhuang 《中国在梁庄》, Wang Xiaobo's Temple of Longevity 《万寿寺》 and My Spiritual Homeland 《我的精神家园》 (Eric is translating both), Alai's Empty Mountain 《空山》, Wang Xiaoni's 1966 《1966 年》, and a short-story collection by A Yi.

Once it has the rights, Paper Republic finds a translator, or Eric translates the book himself, and then looks for a local publisher overseas to publish it jointly. "It amounts to running a small content workshop," Eric said.

"In the US there are two kinds of publishers. One is nonprofit — you apply for all sorts of grants and funds, and the whole operation runs as a nonprofit. Otherwise you're aiming for profit, and your books have to succeed commercially. He does want the books he makes to succeed commercially, to connect with the book market and with readers, so he chose the for-profit path," Chen Dongmei told QDaily.

But turning a profit on Chinese literature is not simple. The first obstacle Paper Republic hits is the publishing timeline. In China, a translated book usually takes a little over a year from acquiring the rights to publication. An English translation of a Chinese book takes at least three.

Foreign publishers know so little about Chinese literature that a sample chapter is not enough for them; they want the complete translated manuscript before they will even consider publishing. That means a studio like Paper Republic has to put in a great deal of money and time up front. Once the publisher has the full translation, it still has to fit the book into its own editing and marketing cycles, which drags the process out further. "Take The Three-Body Problem 《三体》 — after the contract was signed, it still took two years to come out. And when the contract was signed, they already had the complete translation in hand," Chen Dongmei said.

The bigger problem is the market itself — how little Chinese books and Chinese literature are taken up overseas. For Chinese literature these days, Eric says, a few thousand copies is normal, and hitting 10,000 would be remarkable.

So far only a handful of contemporary Chinese works are widely known abroad: Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem 《三体》 series, Mai Jia's Decoded 《解密》, and a few others. Both owe much of their success to their translators. Liu Cixin's was Ken Liu, himself a science fiction writer; Mai Jia's was Olivia Milburn, a British sinologist who teaches at Seoul National University.

By Chen Dongmei's calculation, each book Paper Republic publishes has to sell 4,000 copies to break even. But Xu Zechen's Running Through Beijing 《跑步穿过中关村》, which Eric translated, sold only a little over 1,000; Cao Wenxuan's Bronze and Sunflower 《青铜葵花》 sold 2,000 in Britain; Ge Fei's The Invisibility Cloak 《隐身衣》 passed 4,000. A publisher's distribution and marketing ability has something to do with this, of course, but 4,000 copies remains a real challenge.

So when Eric picked these six books, the market came first. They are the ones he thinks Western readers are more likely to accept, the ones that fit their reading habits and logic: "strong storytelling," "a fast pace," "logic," "a sense of humor," "personal experience."

All six are still being edited and none has been published. Eric hopes to publish more books over time; enough of them, and the finances improve. One bestseller would change things outright.

"For a Chinese writer to reach the world, to have his work translated into the world's languages, is harder than writing the book."

At 7 p.m. on June 23, 2017, a theater on Meishuguan Houjie in Beijing's Dongcheng District filled up for a talk called Original Chinese Literature Overseas: An Analysis of Markets and Readers 《中国原创文学在海外：市场与读者分析》. The audience had paid 90 yuan a ticket, some wore simultaneous-interpretation headsets, and they had come to hear speakers from four countries.

It was a talk aimed at the trade. The speakers were three veteran editors from Germany, Israel, and Australia, along with the Chinese writer Mai Jia.

As noted above, few people can speak about publishing abroad from more experience than Mai Jia. His novel Decoded once ranked first among all Chinese works on Amazon in both the US and Britain, and was recommended by The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among others. The Economist named it one of the ten best works of fiction of 2014.

Decoded has now been translated into 33 languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, and Russian. That has also made Mai Jia the only contemporary Chinese writer in the Penguin Modern Classics series. The Chinese writers taken into that series before him were the modern-era authors Qian Zhongshu, Lu Xun, and Eileen Chang.

It may not be fair to measure Mai Jia's literary worth by this, since the number of Chinese works translated into English is tiny to begin with — 40 or 50 books a year in all. And as Mai Jia sees it, even getting Decoded published abroad was an "accident." Olivia Milburn's flight out of Shanghai was delayed, and she wandered into an airport bookshop to kill time. That is how she found Decoded. "If that plane hadn't been late, everything you see today might still be sitting in the dark," Mai Jia said.

"To get Decoded published in Chinese, I went through 11 years of grief" — the 11 years he spent writing the book and the 17 rejections it collected. "To make it international, to send it out into the world, took another 12. Twelve is more than eleven, and in a sense that tells you something. For a Chinese writer to reach the world, to have his work translated into the world's languages, is harder than writing the book. This is my own experience, but it also stands for how hard it is for Chinese writers to get out. Getting out is just too hard," Mai Jia said, with feeling, in his talk.

The biggest obstacle to Chinese literature reaching the world, in Mai Jia's view, is language. "English, Italian, French, German — broadly speaking they belong to one big language family, built on logic. Chinese is a pictographic script. It is a world away from them. On top of that, China's reform and opening-up adds up to under 40 years, and for several decades before that we were completely cut off from the world. A whole generation of sinologists went missing. The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were ten years of a closed country. People studying sinology had no opportunities, and that broke the chain of translation. That is what created the bottleneck for our literature going out. A Chinese-to-English translator is not easy to train; it takes a very long time," said Mai Jia, who is 53, to QDaily.

Still, it is a very small circle. "Plenty of people do commercial translation or academic translation, but the number who are willing to do literary translation and able to do it is maybe around 30. I think they can reach a certain level," Eric said. He still chooses to be optimistic.

We also talked with Eric about Chinese literature and Western readers

Q = QDaily

E = Eric

Q: Most of what Paper Republic translates is contemporary Chinese literature, and a lot of it is short. Is that a strategy? Why?

E: Contemporary, probably because I'm here — I know these writers, and I think you naturally go looking for the newest things. And I think Western readers and publishers are also deliberately after somewhat more contemporary Chinese literature, work that can show what China is like now, or how people live now.

Short, because short is easier to handle. It's short, it doesn't cost as much, and you don't have to wait as long. Overall I think Chinese writers are better at writing shorter things — short stories, novellas, or shorter novels. Everyone likes writing very long novels, but I don't think those have much chance of reaching readers overseas.

Q: My sense is that in promoting Chinese literature, genre fiction is the easiest — everyone brings up The Three-Body Problem 《三体》 and Decoded 《解密》.

E: Right. But I think it depends on the genre. Science fiction is different. Sci-fi is sci-fi anywhere; anyone's sci-fi can be translated back and forth, and readers will enjoy it and accept it. Other genre fiction is different — there's a bit of a mismatch. What looks like the same category here and abroad often isn't.

Take detective novels here, or what we'd call crime fiction over there. There isn't much of it in China, and what there is doesn't look much like the crime fiction we know. So you carry it over and call it Chinese crime fiction, and people look at it and say, this isn't the crime fiction I was expecting — what they expect from crime fiction is something else. Mai Jia, in fact, has always objected to having that label put on his novels. He thinks what he writes is literary fiction.

Q: What label does Mai Jia get?

E: Genre fiction — detective, espionage. You can describe the content that way, but he disagrees. And you'll see in book reviews abroad that the Western press will say things like: this book is billed as a thriller, but read it and everyone knows it isn't a thriller. The label is there for the publisher's convenience, to open a path to readers.

Q: I see you also put out a yearly list of every Chinese-to-English book translation (2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012). The list includes Chinese web fiction — Tang Qi Gongzi's Three Lives, Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms 《三生三世十里桃花》, for instance. What is the situation abroad?

E: There are enthusiasts, too. Lately they've all been following a site called Wuxia World. It should be based in the US — locals there are translating popular Chinese web wuxia novels. Its audience is small, of course, but they love wuxia fiction. That's an interesting phenomenon in itself, because with other Chinese literature readers seem to lack that kind of fierce affection. They take a look, or they like it well enough, but they read it a little as a duty. They don't feel, wow, I really love this. With wuxia, they do love it. They just love reading it.

Q: Looking at the list, there are 20 or 30 literary books a year but only a few works of nonfiction. Why so little nonfiction?

E: Nonfiction is harder. I think nonfiction has more fixed patterns for how it is written. Think about it: however you write a novel, it's still a novel, and in a sense the point of a novel is to invent a new way of writing. Nonfiction always follows certain patterns, so when Westerners read nonfiction they come with expectations — they feel nonfiction is written a certain way. Chinese writers are different, they belong to another system, so the way they write nonfiction is something Western readers haven't run into, and it's harder to accept.

Q: I don't quite follow what you mean by pattern.

E: It's how you tell a story. Some people say that when Chinese writers write nonfiction on a subject, they play down the author's own voice. They may write about the subject comprehensively, from a position of authority, but the author never shows any skill as a character on the page. When we read nonfiction, especially about history or about problems in other countries and societies, the author is often present in the book. He is a character in it. Part of the content is his subjective feeling, part is objective observation, and how you balance the two is a very delicate thing. That's a writing method, and a style, that developed slowly over decades, particularly in the US, so we're used to reading it.

Then we look at the Chinese version of the same thing and it feels unfamiliar. In our eyes, Chinese writers often write content that is sentimental, the kind meant to draw tears. To make your heart ache. A tearjerking style of writing. We put a lot of weight on not shoving emotional content at the reader — you let readers have their own emotional response instead of the author forcing one on them.

Q: You touched on this earlier — what kind of work do you think has an easier time making an impact abroad?

E: For fiction, still the ones with very strong storytelling, and certainly with a sharply drawn, living character. With a story like that, however complicated the cultural and historical background is, as long as there's a character and a story, or a few characters, nothing else is much of a problem.

Q: A larger question — what do you make of contemporary Chinese literary writing?

E: I think younger Chinese writers in particular face two challenges. One is that there is too much material in China, too much to write about. A lot of writers say Chinese reality is more like fiction than fiction is — so what's the need to invent anything? ... A lot of writers just take a real story they heard and write it down as a story, so how to give reality an artistic treatment, how to turn it into a work of art with a character of its own, is a real problem for many of them.

There's another issue, and from where I stand it matters a lot: Chinese writers don't treat the novel as a craft. Many see it as art, where everything comes down to inspiration and talent. But a novel in particular is exhausting; it's physical labor. It's like farming a field: you have to do it every day, and it wears you out. Many writers, novelists especially, start from a good place — good inspiration, an interesting character and story.

In the end, though, judged as craft, the execution falls short. And craft is exactly where the West has developed to an extreme. Plenty of Western books don't have especially brilliant content, a brilliant story, or much to say, but their shape, their narrative method, their way of telling a story is highly developed. So to a Western reader, rough craft is a serious flaw. If a book has crude patches in its technique, they notice and they mind. That's another difficulty.

Cover image: Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo, Pixabay; in-text images via Douban and Amazon.