If you think about it too deeply, this can be a bit hard to follow. But if you just relax, and let the stories wash over you they're haunting and fascinating.

This is a collection of short stories from avant-garde Chinese writer Can Xue. They are set among the dwellings of the poor underclass, but each has its own air of strangeness, and even magic. Sentient animals and trees, shadow people, ghosts, giants, and disappearing buildings are among the devices Xue uses. There are some very interesting stories here, such as the title story and "Her Old Home", but the collection as a whole is uneven and may be a bit too much of an acquired taste for many.

A surreal challenge of a book, Can Xue's I Live In the Slums is a collection of anthropomorphic short stories from Yale University Press, translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.
Within the first few pages, the readers are made aware that the stories are placed in a suspended animation, with little regard for time and narrative constraints. Most of Can Xue's protagonists are unusual - a rat, a willow, a magpie; many living in the shadowy slums. And underneath the many layers lies perhaps the themes of poverty, oppression, alienation and existentialism.
This was by no means a joyful ride. Each story left me with a bewildered feeling, along with a sense of dread and entrapment. Overall, despite the fact that I feel that a lot of the stories washed over me, I sort of feel that this is part of the plan. There isn't really a plot to follow, scenes jump around unexpectedly often culminating in bizzare events.
My favourite stories are Our Human Neighbours, The Swamp, Shadow People, I am a Willow tree.
Can Xue's books evidently caters to a niche reader. But it did captivate me and I thought Can Xue's narrative (and the translation) to be particularly compelling.

This was an ok read, not great and not bad. The author's ability to provide depth to such unique things is a talent. However, I wasn't blown away by this one like I thought I would be.

What is life like for the rodents, birds, shadows, and trees that share their world with human beings? That must have been the question Can Xue asked herself when she wrote the stories in this collection. The stories show the good and the ugly that happens in the world around us from a different point of view. What all stories in I Live in the Slums have in common is a rich fantasy. You read about swamps of the past, people jumping into holes and disappearing (at the lightning speed of two sentences), and buildings without doors.

My favorite stories are Swamp, I am a willow tree and Our human neighbors. The first one is a fascinating story that I won’t even try to recount. I am pretty sure I only understood part of it, but as I said, it was fascinating. I am a willow tree is about a tree’s survival and its neverending struggle against its lifelong tormentor, the gardener. The willow tree and its thoughts about the gardener’s intentions felt more ‘real’ and human than many human characters in other books. An impressive feat.

Our human neighbors is a fresh and lovely short story that felt light but hits you out of nowhere with references to death. For example: “Could it be that people who were near magpies were all fond of killing? My father said that this woman ‘clearly understood the profound mysteries of the natural world.’ In Father’s eyes, she was almost an irresistible spirit. And so Father sacrificed himself early.” Still, compared to the gloomy story before it (Story of the Slums), it was bright and refreshing.

This also brings me to my only negative point about I Live in the Slums: the first (novel-length) story, Story of the Slums, was such a drag to get through. The story had its moments; I like the dry humor (the ‘wicked goat’ and ‘ruthless mice’) and the descriptions of the slums are so good that I could imagine myself exploring the slums. The events are both intriguing and weird and you just go with the flow without any idea about where the story would lead you next. I would have liked this story collection more if it had started with another story or if this first story had been published as three separate parts.

Of all the stories in this collection, I felt most connected to Shadow people. “Where had the people gone? We hadn’t gone underground, nor were we hiding inside the hollow walls. If you carefully investigated the foot of the bed, the back of the bookcase, the corners of the room, the backs of the doors, and other similar places, you would discover pale shadows flexing and twisting. That’s us, the cowards. Worms hide in the earth. We hide indoors. It seems an odd way to live.” It must be the spur of the moment, but aren’t many of us like shadow people right now? I sure feel like one.

Which brings me to another observation: I think the stories in I Live in the Slums will have a very different meaning for every reader, depending on that person’s point of view and state of mind at the moment they read the story. After many of the stories in this collection, I pretty much sat there realizing I didn’t get them at all, which was fine. Maybe all of them are perfectly clear for someone who knows more about Chinese myths and legends.

In short
I Live in the Slums by Chinese author Can Xue is a mesmerizing short story collection featuring stories from a different perspective with elements from the Chinese culture. Every single story is both mysterious and beautiful in its elegance and descriptions of daily life. It is not a story collection I would recommend to most people, just to a select few that want to experience what else is out there. To whoever decides to read this book: skip the first story and come back for it in the end if you like the other stories.

Thank you Yale University Press and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available May 19 2020

An anthropomorphic collection of tales, renowned Chinese author Can Xue's "I Live in the Slums" is a dreamlike subversive exploration of China's many slums. This English translation reads like Animal Farm or other metaphorical tales with simple, yet disturbing, turns and twists. Whether it is a rat who is fending for themselves in neighborhood of hungry butchers or a magpie's obsession with cleanliness, these tales are by turn amusing and horrifying. They work both as individual stories taken at face value or deeper critiques of the Chinese regime and its inability to provide for its people.

Enjoyed this work. I think there is a lot to say about the duality of East vs West and the combination that Xue exudes.

Thank you for the ARC. I Live In the Slums is a new collection of short stories from Yale University Press originally published over a long period (the oldest in 1996), many of which have appeared in translation before but not collected together. They are translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, professors of Chinese history and linguistics respectively, who have previously translated four books by Can Xue.

Yale are generous with us: there are sixteen stories, one of which is more a novella. Story of the Slums, the first line of which gives the collection its title, is the major work in the collection. It is Can Xue’s Mad Max – it only takes a few pages until we meet a mouse chewing on an old man’s heel, and from there on it is a non-stop nightmare of (deep breath) innards, slop basins, pigs, ants, rotten vegetables, vomit, mucus, spit, blood, urine, shit, scars, children with eyes growing together, killing cats, stabbing keys into necks, eating eyeballs and other horrors. It’s familiar territory for the Can fan. Our first-person narrator is a rat – although even that is somewhat ambiguous, as are many of Can’s narrators – poking around in the secrets of a city. In each of the five parts of the story our ratty friend tells of its encounters with various tormentors, loves and other humans. It is a confusing world of oppressors and terrors, but there are tender and curious moments. I liked the rat’s love and admiration for two humans Lan and Woody, its memory of grasslands, its innate honour and pride (it is affronted by the mouse trying to eat it – rats wouldn’t eat their own kind). The rat judges a man for not being masculine enough and washing his feet. It finds the pain of being eaten exciting and reviving and presents itself for more. It is horrific in every sense, but the horror is the medium: we explore fate, poverty, brutality, and ultimately self-realisation in a way that is deliberately clouded and ambiguous by that horror.

Many of the themes are repeated in the other stories. We have unusual narrators (a middle-aged magpie, a willow tree, a shadow), blurry perceptions, and common thematic preoccupations. Whether the impossibility of knowing the minds of others, mysterious geography or surreal creatures, there are no certainties in Can Xue. We can’t trust our senses or our instincts. We can’t trust names of people, places or things: witness ‘Crow Mountain’, which is not a mountain, or the fact that multiple (or the same?) characters called Ayuan and Drum appear in different stories. We can’t trust physical or human geography – not only are there landslides and earthquakes but places and buildings expand and change at will. With so little to grasp onto, it is an exhausting, disturbing read. We can’t trust time – we can assume the stories are modern by their glass buildings and urban geography, but time is indistinct and unspecified (curiously, the year 1963 does get referred to several times). Many of the creatures, ghost-like beings and transformations could come straight from Pu Songling or folk tales.

The highlights for me were Sin, a fairly straight story about generational sin concerning a locked box; and Our Human Neighbours, a tender story in which a magpie witnesses a major fire. With some of the stories I would oscillate between thinking the meaning of the story was crude and obvious, and then being bewildered and worrying if it was beyond me (in the back of my mind is always the quote attributed to Can disparaging those who struggle with her books). Both Sin and Our Human Neighbours had more tangible narratives and meanings, which was undoubtedly their appeal to me. Sin, notably, is also the oldest story in the collection.
The crucial thing, whether I was exhausted or bewildered by the text, is that I very much enjoyed the linguistic ride. The translations are excellent – clear and flowing, conveying the tone and disorientation I associate with Can. The occasional word jars, whether disrupting the tone (‘breakdancing’, ‘sexy’) or conveying an unexpected meaning (‘Why would it matter if you had opened [the box] and looked inside? You’re still too stressed out. You aren’t flexible’ from Sin). Without access to the Chinese I can only assume these are accurate to the original.

It is a shame that publishers have let the side down with some surprisingly cheap-looking cover design. There is a lot to admire in I Live In The Slums, and I enjoyed it - I think.

While I usually prefer novels, some things work better in short stories. Magical realism is one of them. These surreal short stories are beautiful, interesting and just long enough to not turn into ridiculous.
A very good book.