contemporary chinese fiction

Does anyone have any recs for contemporary chinese fiction? I'd really like to understand more what it is like to be there.

How about Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers?

Not sure if it qualifies but a book I liked very much was The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa.

A quick read, I liked Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Not fiction, but I loved the book Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman about this author's experience teaching English in China. It reads as easily as any novel.

Iron and Silk

Have you considered any non-fiction? I highly recommend Red Azalea (touchstone not loading), Anchee Min's account of her adolescence during the Cultural Revolution. Her prose is so fluid and beautiful that it reads like a novel.

i liked Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen

Thanks for all the recommendations. Here is what my wishlist is so far so if you have any comments on any of them I would appreciate it.

Also, thanks for pointing out that I could read non-fiction too! I don't know why I never think of reading biographies.

A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers by Hsiao Li-Hung

Wild Ginger: A Novel by Anchee Min

Waiting: A Novel by Ha Jin

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo

LOVED Waiting...also liked The Crazed

The work of Mo Yan is often overlooked when discussing modern Chinese fiction, which is sad, because he's one of China's best authors right now.

Wild Ginger is good, but I'm interested what you mean by "contemporary"-- the Cultural Revolution was 30+ years ago. A good one on this time period is Red China Blues.

For books about China today, I really like Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler (nonfiction--couldn't get the right touchstone to load)....

Ha Jin's War Trash is one of the better things I've read in the last year or so. I read Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads, but it didn't do much for me.

I have a gally of A Free Life by Ha Jin...have not started it....660 pages.

The three books by Ha Jin I've read, Waiting, The Crazed, and War Trash, were all excellent. I also enjoyed Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie.

I have One Man's Bible and Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize winning author, but haven't read either one yet.

9- To me contemporary would be anything in the last 50 years or so, certainly the last century.

To Live by Yu Hua: The language is deceptively simple, but it touches on all of the major upheavals in 20C China from the civil war onwards.

I also loved In the Pond by Ha Jin and Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min.

Kidzdoc - I wouldn't bother with Soul Mountain - I struggled through about a third of it, getting more and more frustrated with its pretentiousness, deliberate vagueness, and the narrator's attitude to women (pretty stone age, even for Chinese literature). I finally gave up when I realised that I was doing household chores as displacement activity for sitting down with the book!

Su Tong is amazing. He wrote Rice; My Life as Emperor; and the novellas that the film Raise The Red Lantern is based on. I haven't read the novellas, but the two novels are amazing.

There is a short story collection called Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused. Many of the stories in that collection are absolutely stunning.

Finally, Ma Bo's Blood Red Sunset was a fantastic read.

I agree with the commenter above about Soul Mountain. Despite nice bits, its not that good overall. It's the only novel in this category that I often see recommended that I have read and that I would recommend avoiding.

I felt the same way about Soul Mountain. I finished it but it took me forever.

What about The Skull Mantra? I just read it & really liked it. I felt like I was there and it also brought up a lot of questions as well.

I just finished reading the uninvited by Geling Yan. I really enjoyed it, and I thought it gave a real feel for life in China, without hitting you over the head with it. I definitely recommend it.

I recently read Serve the People! by Yan Lianke, a satire of life under a dictatorship.

I just read A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers and loved it. A glimpse of customs in Taiwan that were perhaps in danger of disappearing.

I really liked Green River Daydreams, by Liu Heng; City of the Queen, by Shih Shu-Ching; Language of Threads and Women of the Silk, by Gail Tsukiyama; and Town Called Hibiscus by Gu Hua. Some wonderful memoirs by Westerners in China are Peking Story by David Kidd; Golden Boy by Martin Booth; and Myself a Mandarin by Austin Coates.

I liked Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan – see the review. I immediately ordered more of his books. I’m in the middle of Big Breasts and Wide Hips and I have Red Sorghum on the queue.

I also liked Life and Death are Wearing Me Out although I felt it could have benefitted from a little judicious editing -- it was a little too long for the story, I thought. And I also read Wolf Totem by Rong Jiang recently, but didn't enjoy it. I thought the author created a fantastic sense of place and mood, but it was too didactic for me.

Hello everybody.... hope you all are fine.... My name is Asjad Mehmood.... getting my M.phil research on Chinese novelist Mo Yan's novel Red Sorghum.... the full topic is, "Postcolonial Resistance: A Comparative study of "Red Sorghum" and "Things Fall Apart". please help me in data collection... thank you.