CHINESE FICTION

An absurd commentary on the life in modern China, overflow with the bizarre: an entrepreneur who opens up a private crematorium, an elderly mother who reminds her son to pay the electricity bill while being cremated alive, an actress who chooses to be eaten by a tiger during the performance to make her lover suffer, or a three-legged talking dog that likes to engage in lengthy philosophical discussions.

A bleak story of Chinese Korean War veterans, who upon their return to China after liberation from the POW camps become the living symbols of the past government’s political failures, realize the historical inconvenience of their survival.

A collection of stories shaped by the author's own experiences. My personal favourites in the collection are "Man and Beast" - a tale of cave-dwelling war-time Chinese labourer in Japan who thinks that the Japanese "blood debt" entitles him to perform acts of cruelty in revenge; and "Abandoned Child" - a harrowing story of an abandoned female baby that nobody wants.

A landowner executed during Mao's Land Reform Movement returns to his home village reincarnated into a donkey and then again in his consecutive lives as an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey and a hemophiliac boy with a large head. Politically-charged grotesque at its best.

A collection of stories, the first one of which, "Raise the Red Lantern" is probably the best known thanks to its film adaptation by Zhang Yimou, a classic work of Chinese cinematography by nowhere near as haunting as the story it's based on. Chilling, haunting as ghostly. Plus two other stories filled with disease, death and opium addiction as a bonus.

A twisted saga filled with cold and self-loathing characters, pirates, rebels, Dutch colonialists, Chinese song-girls, eunuchs and a civet. All set against the backdrop of wars, executions, diseases and a tsunami. And memories trapped in seashells singing to a lady who pierces her eyes with a hot needle and rips her fingernails off to be able to access their secrets.