Continuing with this series I found I had such choice for X. I could either do Xia Jia or Xia Jia, you’ll never guess who I chose… Xia is such an energetic person I could almost treat her as several people. It’s actually the pseudonym of Wang Yao and I’m remembering here that the Chinese write the family name first unlike us in the Western world.

Xia is prolific and energetic, as her translator and interviewer states in his Clarkesworld interview

It’s hard to keep up with Xia Jia: literary scholar, filmmaker, actress, painter, translator, and, oh right, speculative fiction author. She speaks fast, as if she has to cram an unusual number of syllables into each unit of time to keep up with the speed of her thoughts.

I find this rather ironic, Xia translates Ken Liu’s works but he also translates her works.

Xia refers to her writing as ‘porridge sf’ a term which seems very Chinese once she explains it.

Chinese people describe steamed rice as “hard rice” or “soft rice” based on the water content, and porridge is obviously softer even than “soft rice.” Porridge SF thus describes a story mixed with so many non-science elements (e.g. myth, legend or folklore) that it can hardly be classified as “science fiction” anymore, like “Tower of Babylon.”

I’ve never considered describing cooked rice in more than one way, it’s either cooked or not cooked for me but they have ‘hard rice’ and ‘soft rice’ with porridge softer than ‘soft rice’. Sounds a little like the many different ways we describe snow or rain.

She’s been published in Clarkesworld Magazine several times and this last link gives you some podcasts you can listen to of her works. Xia’s won several awards, has directed and staged experimental sf films and has a PhD in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics Since 1990” as the topic of her dissertation.

Here’s a link to a rather lengthy article by her and translated by Liu about What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese? I won’t pretend to understand much of it as I suspect you need to have a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and the comments go some way to explaining that there’s a lot I don’t understand. Let me explain that there’s a lot more to Chinese culture than the food and I only eat the food.