Red Guard Fantasies: and Other Stories

“With unadorned prose and utmost compassion, Qi portrays a range of characters beset by fortune and misfortune . . . Red Guard Fantasies offer glimpses of How to Be Chinese, now that instructions from the Little Red Book no longer apply.”—Gloria Frym, author of Distance No Object

Take a wild ride through contemporary Chinese society, which continues to accelerate at a blistering, unrestrained pace decades after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Red Guard Fantasies blazes a new trail in contemporary literature by forcing a reconciliation between China’s new urban sensibility and its centuries of tradition. The results are certainly not predictable. Shouhua Qi’s stories are witty, poignant, absurd, and shocking. Part autobiographical, they offer a masterful depiction of the myriad world of jaded entrepreneurs, overzealous cops, karaoke addicts, dog lovers, liberated coeds, and frustrated urbanites who move in and out of China’s colorful neon-lit cities and dusty rural villages, transitioning from one world to the other.

Shouhua Qi shows a China that is both superficial and plastic, as well as profoundly righteous and moralistic. He offers a powerful look at a society hanging on for dear life as it continues to shape its own culture at breakneck speed while holding on to its traditions lest they be buried or a skyscraper built upon them.

More than anything, Red Guard Fantasies is a deeply personal and powerfully moving elegy for China’s lost generation.

Shouhua Qi was born in Nanjing, China. He is associate professor of English at Western Connecticut State University.