The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Embroidered Shoes by Can Xue
Matthew Badura

Can Xue. The Embroidered Shoes. Trans. Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang. Henry Holt, 1997. 221 pp. $20.00.

“The Recorder sat in his roadside shed writing down the various dreamlands described by passersby.” Other than a discrepancy of gender—Can Xue is female—the previous line provides a reasonable approximation of Can Xue’s project throughout The Embroidered Shoes, one of the most remarkable collections of short fiction published in 1997. The eleven stories composing this collection—ten short fictions and one novella-length tale—concern characters whose identities and realities have become as indeterminate as language itself. Physical and psychical material transmute with regularity, and, within these indefinite galleries of linguistic time and space, the act of narration becomes conscious of its constructed nature. In the novella-length piece “Apple Tree in the Corridor,” a narrator says, “I haven’t told the story as I intended. I am forever circling around, never able to approach reality. Once I open my mouth, I discover I’m telling something that I have falsified, instead of the thing . . . I never intend to tell anything but only to make some noise.” This realization frees Can Xue to eschew reality and delve into her powerful surreal vision, composing tales of beautiful linguistic “noise” that range from extended nightmare visions to prose passages redolent of symbolist poetry.
This noise also corresponds to Can Xue’s status as one of the few contemporary Chinese writers to oppose that country’s realist literary conventions, despite government opposition to artistic freedom. Although the fictional terrain of The Embroidered Shoes is contemporary post-Mao China, this China has been transformed by Can Xue’s wicked imagination into a truly strange and wonderfully disturbing (sur)reality reminiscent of the dreamscapes inhabited by Kafka, Schulz, and Borges. These three authors are serious company for any author and are not mentioned haphazardly; Can Xue’s work is a welcome continuation of their liberating literary projects. [Matthew Badura]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Embroidered Shoes by Can Xue Matthew Badura Can Xue. The Embroidered Shoes. Trans. Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang. Henry Holt, 1997. 221 pp. $20.00. “The Recorder sat in his roadside shed writing down the various dreamlands described by passersby.” Other than a discrepancy of gender—Can Xue is female—the previous line provides a reasonable approximation of Can Xue’s project throughout The Embroidered Shoes, one of the most remarkable collections of short fiction published in 1997. The eleven stories composing this collection—ten short fictions and one novella-length tale—concern characters whose identities and realities have become as indeterminate as language itself. Physical and psychical material transmute with regularity, and, within these indefinite galleries of linguistic time and space, the act of narration becomes conscious of its constructed nature. In the novella-length piece “Apple Tree in the Corridor,” a narrator says, “I haven’t told the story as I intended. I am forever circling around, never able to approach reality. Once I open my mouth, I discover I’m telling something that I have falsified, instead of the thing . . . I never intend to tell anything but only to make some noise.” This realization frees Can Xue to eschew reality and delve into her powerful surreal vision, composing tales of beautiful linguistic “noise” that range from extended nightmare visions to prose passages redolent of symbolist poetry. This noise also corresponds to Can Xue’s status as one of the few contemporary Chinese writers to oppose that country’s realist literary conventions, despite government opposition to artistic freedom. Although the fictional terrain of The Embroidered Shoes is contemporary post-Mao China, this China has been transformed by Can Xue’s wicked imagination into a truly strange and wonderfully disturbing (sur)reality reminiscent of the dreamscapes inhabited by Kafka, Schulz, and Borges. These three authors are serious company for any author and are not mentioned haphazardly; Can Xue’s work is a welcome continuation of their liberating literary projects. [Matthew Badura]

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