editor’s letter—

“This is the winter of the hardest year
And did you dream”

—Kenneth Rexroth

Dreams are among the few things that can remain entirely private, perhaps because they are unfamiliar even to their owners, the dreamers. Yet, literature is one of the few places where they are allowed to live out their sublime and inexplicable lives. To think and to order something into reality, that is the role of the text, and in doing so it creates a place for both the imagined and the real to commune in the sacred, together. 

I speak of dreams because the following pages are ripe with them. Discursive ones that cause one to rise from the bed, curious. Illusory ones that are still startling in their lucidity. Dreams that awaken in their owners something vital. Dreams in the shape of prismatic portals to some place other. But I do not advocate for the escapist qualities of literature; we always leave the pages and return to the world—hopefully, it will be seen as a braver, truer, more intelligent one. 

Mallarmé said that the world exists to be written in a book. But the book has transformative qualities as well. If one can see that, as Hu Xian writes in his long poem, “The Butterfly”: 

When a butterfly flies, the past
becomes something you can describe.

Or if one looks up to the sky to notice what Su Fenglei described as “the blue dome of another world.” 

Or if one asks as Li Wan does in her essay: “Had she been sad in the dream or in reality? She decided to say it was only in the dream.” 

Then through words, it is possible to make inquiries into the impossible. Dreams, frail as they are, behold a fearless curiosity. It is within the aspects of a dream that we refute time, make peace with the unacceptable, and forget forgetting. We may imagine our own death, and then come back from it. In a dream, it is possible to discover the answer to insolvable questions—or even better, to discover more questions. 

Contemporary Chinese writers, alongside most, struggle in the expanse of a world that more and more rapidly comes to resemble the unreal. Amongst a maniacally driving fiscal economy and an even more ruthless attention economy, replete data that reformulates the human equation, and the growing appetite of unapologetic creatures like ourselves, language takes solace in the capacity of the aesthetic to resist enslavement. To write is to reassert the individual as a voice, a body, a dreaming mind. Without nostalgia and with ever-varying ideation, the work of the writers here aim for possibility and immensity. From a drunk who speculates freedom to a young couple enraptured in the isolation of their bed, to short poems that operate within their own, bewildering logic and long ones that travel the streets of their surroundings with widened eyes, the voices congregate here in a chorus of creation. 

This vein of dreaming threading this issue came incidentally, and yet is entirely apt as we conclude this year, the last in a tumultuous decade. By the axiom of Brecht, we do not create for the good old days, but for the bad new ones. We have arrived at the precipice of an era that has absolutely determined our human fragility. There has been loss, unquantifiable loss, built up into a monument to disappeared possibilities, ever more beautiful in their absence. But continually, new waters approach, and so do the senses—uncertainty, dread, wonder. There continues to be desire, pursuits, and colours that deserve names. For every dream that has wilted in the expanse of that hungry creature, time, there are stranger and wilder ones that aspire to live. It is the writer who draws them out, propels them forward, willing them to become material, become reality. 

Become stories. Become poetry. 

—XIAO YUE SHAN