Purple Perilla

Can xue means "stubborn snow"—urban slush that refuses to melt; or, the pure-white caps of mountain peaks. Can Xue, the writer, is both: grounded and exalted by a commitment to experimentation. Her formal education ended at 13 when her father was interned in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, after which she became a factory worker and then a tailor. An autodidact steeped in the works of Borges, Kafka, and Calvino, she took up writing at 30 and soon established herself at the forefront of world literature, lauded by Susan Sontag as the Chinese author most deserving of the Nobel Prize.
Purple Perilla is a cycle of three stories—"An Affair," "Mountain Ants," and "Purple Perilla." It is Can Xue's lyrical response to our current moment. Moving from an urban center into wilderness, they explore humanity's relationship to the unknown. In turn, the stories stack, like strata, to form an island. One that, to journey through, is to be forced into an entirely contemporary mythos.
Writing from Xishuangbanna, in a mountain village four days from Beijing, Can Xue treated each of these stories as a performance, like a dance, staged from beginning to end: written "automatically" for an hour each day. No editing permitted, as is typical of her work, these are "experiments without an escape route."
"Reading my fiction," Can Xue says, "requires a certain creativity. This particular way of reading has to be more than just gazing at the accepted meanings of the text on a literal level, because you are reading messages sent out by the soul, and your reading is awakening your soul into communication with the author's … These works are the product of solitary exploration, and at the same time they are also the product of communication. These two opposing activities are unfolding at the same time, because we, as human beings, are the highest order of spiritual beings on the planet, and communication allows us an unparalleled, expansive vision. In the darkest of places, in times of danger, when it is difficult to make any progress, mother nature's distant call reaches our ears, permeating our bodies and minds."
With Purple Perilla, Can Xue renews our ability to revel in the strangeness of the world.