Opening the mind to new ways of seeing
The publication of the Chinese version of One Hundred Years of Solitude in June, 30 years after the first appearance of a pirated version in the Chinese mainland, caused ripples in the hearts of quite a number of Chinese writers. Its author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a name less mentioned nowadays, has left a deep mark on the history of Chinese literature over the past three decades.
The new, authorized version is not so much an overdue rectification of the pirated printing of this book in the early 1980s as a reminder of how much Chinese writers have learned from the magic realism of Marquez and other Latin American fiction.
"Oh, my god, fiction can be written this way," was how many Chinese novelists felt at the time when they first read Marquez. The significance of One Hundred Years of Solitude as an eye opener was in many ways greater than the work itself.
