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Shanghai Daily: Chinatown’s invisible residents

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《唐人街看不见的居民们》|Chinatown’s invisible residents A screenshot of a map showing Chinatown in central London’s Soho. Home to Chinese restaurants, bakeries and other Chinese-run businesses, it is a popular tourist destination. Zhong looks beneath this surface in “Chinatown”. 《上海日报》的英文报道:《唐人街看不见的居民们》(作者:须勤  中文翻译:钟宜霖) Chinatown’s invisible residents By Xu Qin | August 30, 2015, Sunday | ILLEGAL immigrants have rarely been welcome in any place, at any time in history. And by their legal status — or rather lack of it — they are often invisible to much of the general population; non-citizens. “Most people have only the faintest idea of how their life is ‘under the radar’ because, as part of the subaltern class, they tend to hide away from the public eye, and are thus invisible,” writer Zhong Yilin told Shanghai Daily at a recent interview. 非法移民历来很少会在任何地方收到欢迎。由于他们的法律身份--或者说缺乏合法的身份--在大多数情况下,他们都是一个看不见的群体:非居民。 “大多数人对这个神秘群体的生活一无所知,作为底层群体的一部分,他们大多都会试图躲避公众的视线,所以才会变得看不见。”作家钟宜霖在访谈中告

Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 8/8-9/8)

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Yilin Zhong in Sydney. March 2017 https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 8/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 8-9 video length: 12’56’’ Interviewer: (In Chinese)Why do you want to answer these questions in English? Yilin Zhong: The reason I want to talk in English is, even though Chinese is my mother tongue language, some kind of thing is quite weird, that when I was writing this novel, even I was writing it in Chinese, but you know, I was educated in the UK, and all those kind of illegal immigration things and the literary theories, such as subaltern studies, and post-colonial studies, and so on, all those literary terms I’d learned in England, from the English context. So even though I wrote this novel, the fiction in Chinese, actually the main spirit, or the main thought behind this s

Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 6/8-7/8)

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Yilin Zhong in New York, June 2016 https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 6/8-7/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 6-7 video length: 14’07’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) But you know what, now I’m forty, I couldn’t write that book now. Even though all those memories and all those events are still there, and I still remember them all, if you destroy that book and ask me to write that again, I couldn’t do it now. That’s the difference. Because I had passion at that time, I had the passion to write down all those stories that happened around me in Beijing, at that time. I had all those experience, it’s not perfect experience, but I had passion to write them down in that way. Now I’m forty, those stories and those experiences I still have it, but I can never write it down again. Because I lost

Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 4/8-5/8)

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Yilin Zhong in Chinatown. July 2017 https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 4/8-5/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 4-5 video length: 9’41’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) If you look at all those backgrounds, and if you dig inside all those characters’ possibilities, that’s quite another story already, I could have written a pure novel just about his mother. But that’s not my job, my job is trying to focus on A-bao: why she became a prostitute, one by one step. That’s the most important key point, and I couldn’t erase that, I couldn’t delete that part. I couldn’t lie to all my readers, just to make this story seems to be more reasonable, or seems to be more believable, or more like reality. I couldn’t do that. Because it is what happened, and I couldn’t change it on this poi

Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 3/8)

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Yilin Zhong in Paris https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 3/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 3 video length: 11’46’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) I was the lucky one. But to meet those people is not the only lucky part I had, another lucky part I had is, I wrote them. I wrote them down. I didn’t imagine I would have written them down myself, even, but it just happened. I wrote it twelve years ago, it was a book I wrote twelve years ago, but as I said, it was so difficult to get published, that’s why it was just released recently. Because the main society just thought, those people are not important, those people are not existing, why would we bother, to even write about it? Interviewer: (In Chinese) Can you talk about how fiction presenting the theme of reality? My question i

Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 2/8)

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(Novel Chinatown book cover) Novel Chinatown Documentary Interview (Part 2/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 2 video length: 11’48’’ https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Yilin Zhong: (continued) So Chinatown is the best example of that (literary theory). Now that’s the first impression Chinatown gave to me when I was just a student, and I was a tourist as well, at the first week I came over to London, that’s the scene I have seen. So apart from I felt, oh, everything here is from China, that’s so good! So I can have Chinese food, and I could meet Chinese people even in London, that’s quite exciting. But apart from that, nothing more. Nothing much more. Because I only left China for about one week, there’s not much difference I would tell, at that point. However, one year later, when I was trying to finish m

Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 1/8)

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Yilin Zhong in London on 9/9/2017 Novel Chinatown Documentary Interview (Part 1/8) Time: 16 th  February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 1 video length: 11’48’’ https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Interviewer: (In Chinese) Shall we talk about the name, you name this novel ‘Chinatown’, do you think this is the real scene of Chinatown in your heart? Yilin Zhong: The reason I named this book as Chinatown, I have said it in the postscript, that initially I couldn’t find what the main subject or theme of this book is, and that’s why although I had met those people two years ago before I started writing it, in the past two years, I couldn’t have written it, only because I couldn’t find a line, or the story line, or whatever you call the theme, to write about it. And the reason I wrote about it was (two years later) I met Amazon’s