by Xue Yiwei
You see, dear Dr. Bethune, why you must go to China?
Acknowledgements
A novel spanning the life of a generation over a period of four decades, Dr. Bethune’s Children has been ten years in the making and itself has a story spanning three countries and three different languages.
My thanks go first to Gail Scott, who encouraged me to join her 2007 fall semester master class in creative writing. The A+ grade she gave to the portfolio written in English entitled Dr. Bethune’s Children stimulated my ambition to extend it into a novel.
This ambition would not have been realized without the contributions of two close friends to whom I wish to express my deep gratitude. After reading the account of Yangyang’s death in the novel, Shirley Cahn confided that she herself had experienced a similar tragedy as a mother; she devoted so much of her time in her last months to this literary adventure and urged me never to give up. Carole Channer, who is a witness to my hard literary life in Montreal, helped me from the first word to the last period.
I am also grateful to Margaret Atwood, the first colleague to know of Dr. Bethune’s Children and to Ellen Seligman, the first publisher to show an interest in reading it. These encouraging responses in the fall of 2009 provided me with the first rays of hope I had felt as a writer living in a foreign land.
My thanks go to Bei Dao, the most influential Chinese poet since the Cultural Revolution, who on Christmas Eve, 2009, invited me to write about my childhood experiences for the anthology he was then editing, The Seventies. This proved to be a turning point. After completing a long essay for his anthology in Chinese—and essay that was well received—I decided to abandon the English version I had been working on and rewrite Dr. Bethune’s Children in my mother tongue. This second journey saw the completion of the Chinese version by the end of 2010.
The rest of journey oscillated between hope and disappointment. By February 2011, the manuscript had been declined by major publishers in mainland China, always for the same reason. At this point, the nadir of the life of Dr. Bethune’s Children, the marvelous Taiwan publisher Guo Feng decided to publish it, first in instalments in the literary magazine he edits, and then in book form. And he made the decision to publish less than two hours after he received the manuscript. A special thank you to Guo Feng.
I would like to pay tribute, too, to the numerous editors, publishers and scholars in mainland China for their courageous and resolute efforts, so far unsuccessful, to bring this novel to readers there. I feel sorry that I cannot release their names at this point.
Sincere thanks are due to that excellent translator and writer Ken Liu, who appreciated Dr. Bethune’s Children from the day he read it, in 2013, and who helped initiate the novel’s return journey into English.
My thanks also go to the late Sylvie Gentil—the distinguished French translator who exerted considerable energy in translating and in attempts to draw French attention to this novel, which she admired—and to Lucie Rault, a musicologist and lover of Chinese culture, who in 2014 translated a section of the first part of the novel into French.
And my deep gratitude goes to the brilliant team that has made Dr. Bethune’s Children’s return journey into English possible. Linda Leith, my publisher, started orchestrating this new project a few months after launching my first book in English, Shenzheners (LLP, 2016). Her passion, her devotion and her insight have ensured the quality of my first novel in English. Darryl Sterk, the translator I see as a magician, has shown tremendous patience and incredible efficiency in a process that has been immeasurably complicated by my constant rewriting. Tim Niedermann, my editor, has handled the text with delicacy, expertise and hard work.
My gratitude also goes to Cai Gao, one of the finest of contemporary Chinese artists, whose illustrations grace the cover.
I would like to thank another colleague, Madeleine Thien, who was responsible for the first propitious sign for the book when she invited me in January of this year to make a submission to the special issue of Granta she is co-editing.
My special thanks go to Ha Jin, a bridge builder between the English-speaking world and contemporary Chinese writing, for his unswerving support.
And so begins a new phase in the unusual journey of Dr. Bethune’s Children. My greetings to the readers who will give this novel an extraordinary new life.
Xue Yiwei
Montreal, May 9, 2017