Francesca Rhydderch, author of The Rice Paper Diaries, and Yan Ying, the book’s Chinese translator, launched the novel at Shanghai International Book Fair and Literature Week. The novel is published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, the largest comprehensive translation publishing house in China.

In a series of essays, published on our website this week, Francesca Rhydderch and Yan Ying, share their impressions:

China day by day

"It was Yan too who made me smile, pointing out how Shanghai people, seemingly unfazed by anything – the humidity, the crazy traffic, the at times oppressive air pollution, the constant busyness – were brought to a complete standstill by one thing: the rain."

Francesca Rhydderch

As we walked back to our hotel one afternoon, listening to the cicadas’ rasping good-night, we passed a shop selling televisions, with the news playing on a loop on every screen. It was a clip of the preparations in Beijing to commemorate victory over Japan in 1945 in a few days’ time: tanks, missiles, two hundred aircraft and twelve thousand troops were due to be displayed in Tiananmen Square, including the anti-ship ‘carrier killer’ missile Dongfeng-21D. I tried to imagine what the security would be like. I’d visited Tienanmen Square the previous year on what had been a quiet spring day in comparison, and even then there had been police and soldiers everywhere. Everyone had to queue up and show the security people what they had in their pockets, and there was a little pile of confiscated lighters on a portable table on the way in. Enterprising hawkers had tried to sell us handfuls of small Chinese flags as we waited. Most people had bought at least one, and I’d wondered if it would look rude if I didn’t. Standing now on a Shanghai pavement in the hot evening air, the smell of food and bodies and dust all around me, I tried to remember that cold March day: car roofs shining in the sun like tortoise backs, the white motorcycle helmets of soldiers in their long, grey coats, a woman holding her young daughter by the shoulder to prevent her from scooting across the road too soon on her pink scooter. I thought of the students I’d met, their jeans, their hair dyed lilac like the students at home, their piercings, their questions, and I looked at the TVs in the shop window, and I thought: Those students are one China. This is another. What words can we find to wrap around the whole of it? It was Yan who used the word ‘flexibility’. We agreed that we weren’t sure if it was the right term for what we wanted to say, but that it had that elasticity we were both looking for, the ability to embrace contradictions, if not to celebrate them.

It was Yan too who made me smile, pointing out how Shanghai people, seemingly unfazed by anything – the humidity, the crazy traffic, the at times oppressive air pollution, the constant busyness – were brought to a complete standstill by one thing: the rain. Look, she said. The pavements cleared rapidly, and street sellers touting cheap umbrellas in bright pinks and yellows, their steel struts sharp as a parakeet’s claw, suddenly appeared on every corner, only to disappear just as quickly as the rain washed away down the gutters. We sloshed along the Bund in our sandals, warm water running between our toes, looking from the traditional colonial district of Shanghai across the Huangpu river to industrial new Pu Dong.

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The Rice Paper Diaries by Francesca Rhydderch was selected to the Wales Literature Exchange 2013 – 2014 Bookcase, our annual selection of recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.

Shanghai Translation Publishing House announced their intention to buy the translation rights for the novel following a symposium on literary and publishing exchange between Wales and China organised by Bangor University in partnership with Wales Literature Exchange in May 2014, to celebrate the publication of a special Wales edition of the influential Chinese magazine, Foreign Literature and Art.

Francesca Rhydderch and Dr Yan Ying’s journey to China was supported by Wales Arts International and Swansea University, with additional hosting generously provided by Shanghai Translation Publishing House.