Sunday 27th June - London: 14:00 = Beijing 21:00
lasting a maximum of 1hr.

Online: Zoom - reply to this email with "Count me in for LCSFG's next meeting!" and we'll send you a video call link and password a day before the session.

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"Everyone needs ideals in life, don’t they?
Jia Su’s ideal was to create a machine.
Bubbles’s ideal was to make revolution.
Meiying’s ideal was to make an honest woman of herself.

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In the middle of the lab stood a gigantic figure made of brass, its many arms outstretched like a thousand-armed Buddhist guardian god. In each hand, there were glass containers of different colors and sizes. The liquids they held were of colors seen only in dreams. They oscillated and sang."
 

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We're thrilled to invite author Zhao Haihong to join our next meeting in late June, to discuss her story 1923—a Fantasy, translated by Nicky Harman and Pang Zhaoxia.

In this short story, a great-grandchild discovers an old, padlocked box, kept hidden throughout the Cultural Revolution, that supposedly holds the family’s genealogical records. Instead, the contents intriguingly reveals to be two sealed containers of liquids. They are a part of the great-grandfather's innovation, the 'aqua-dream machine', which was a device that used "the power of water to retain memory.”

1923—a Fantasy is a confluence of narratives in the unstable China of the 1920s: a nearly forgotten moment in a family's history; the love story between hostess dancer Meiying and Western-educated Jia Su; his solidarity with Bubbles the revolutionary, and the haziness of Jia Su's laboratory of liquid and steam memories. Zhao's writing style allows for an intimate-at-a-distance approach to the characters, holding the nostaligia for '20s Shanghai at an arms length by soundtracking the story with an informed contextualisation of the period's social unease.

Without You / 如果沒有你 by Bai Guang / 白光 song
龍華的桃花 / Peach Blossoms Of Longhua by Zhou Xuan / 周璇  song
 

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"! You realize that the test question is: “Prove that you have free will.”

....

You vaguely remember that the slogan associated with the phrase “free will” had an important historical significance, but that was at the beginning of the METÆlTitanic Era.

In modern contexts, this phrase is rarely mentioned.

After all, the words “free-(dom)” and “will” have long since been relegated to the <imprecisebibliotechnicon/> and have been abolished. You’ve only caught glimpses of them by chance, if they appeared to wash ashore as archaeological infofragments. But, unfortunately, being in VR, you can’t access ^[exogenous databases]."

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It was great fun to host author Ti Sha a few weeks ago at our previous meeting, to discuss his story The Final Test, translated by Judith Huang (2021). Thanks to Ti Sha for expanding on his themes with us and our fantastic attendees, calling in from sunny places and even a forest... as always, we appreciate you sharing your time with us!

In this short science fiction piece, you are the protagonist. As you gain knowledge of what you are, you are also demanded by a lab-coated oppressive species to contend with who you could be. With the dominating question of whether free will is a genuine concept you can act on, the opposition being the cause and effect laws of physics, Ti Sha spins philosophy, humour and speculative evolutions of the mind and body in this playful narrative.

To conclude the English piece, writer and translator Judith Huang generously includes a brilliant note on her translation process and highlights specific ideas, like on what 'passing' means here, and the visual interpretation from the Chinese language into English with accents of code script styling. It is an insightful read that reinstates to us the depth of translation works.