Manoa, vol. 10, no. 1 (1998): The Zigzag Way

This issue is available online via JSTOR.

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

The Zigzag Way: New poetry from China

Guest-edited by Arthur Sze

This issue features the new generation of avant-garde poets from the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Nearly all of the writers featured here live in China under the scrutiny of the government, and the government’s overview extends to those outside the country as well. As a result, as author and translator Wang Ping explains in an interview with Arthur Sze, Chinese writers have learned to avoid censorship while striving to tell the truth: writing, as she says, in a “zigzag way.”

Included in this issue are poetry by sixteen Chinese writers; an interview by Sze with poet and fiction writer Wang Ping; fiction and nonfiction from Hong Kong, gathered for MANOA by Lisa Ottiger; new translations of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize, and fiction by Enchi Fumiko, recipient of Japan’s Order of Cultural Merit; fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews by twenty U.S. writers; and a portfolio of prints by Hawai‘i artist Laura Ruby.