Austin Woerner, Chinese-English Translator

Projects > Su Wei

Su Wei


A novelist and essayist, Su Wei takes inspiration from his years being "reeducated" in the countryside of tropical Hainan Island in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. His fiction takes an unusual approach to this brutal chapter of history, blending the real and the fantastic.

Su Wei left China in 1989 and now teaches in the Yale Chinese department. Though official censorship kept him out of the literary limelight in China for many years, his works have been quietly accruing praise, and critics now consider his novel Witching Vale to be one of the seminal works of literature dealing with the Cultural Revolution.

I met Su Wei during my undergraduate studies at Yale. In the years since, he has become a close friend and mentor. In May 2009 I traveled with Su to the farm on Hainan Island where he spent the years between age fifteen and twenty-five, on which the setting of Witching Vale is loosely based.

About Witching Vale

Witching Vale is the tale of a spunky, nonconformist "sent-down youth" (one of the millions of middle- and high-school age students exiled to the countryside to "re-educated" after the Cultural Revolution) who discovers a hidden utopia, an isolated community of migrants living deep in the jungles of Hainan Island. When their matriarch Jade takes him as lover, he must play a precarious balancing game between two worlds: the haunted society of the "driftfolk," and the twisted irrationalities of Mao’s China.

Samples from Witching Vale

Interview

Ask the Sky and the Earth: A Cantata for the Sent-Down Youth

Ask the Sky and the Earth is a symphonic choral suite commemorating the experiences of China's sent-down youth, with lyrics by Su Wei and songs by Tony Fok.