Year in Review 2020: The Books That Got Us Through Quarantine

Original Drew Pittock theBeijinger

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The 20th year of this millennium has been the longest yet, and boy are we ready to say goodbye. But hey, if we had to spend it anywhere, then Beijing ain't a half shabby place to do so. In 2020 Year in Review, we're taking a look back at all the happenings in this city that somehow managed to keep us sane while the world went crazy.

It's often said that reading provides an escape into other worlds, an active engagement with a reality wholly different from our own, if only for a few hours in the day. And in that sense, reading did more for us in 2020 than in nearly any other year in recent memory. Not only did it provide a welcome alternative to lengthy Netflix binges during quarantine, but it helped us take our minds off of, what at times, felt like an unrelenting onslaught of bad news. Aside from finally digging into some of the titles that had been sitting on our shelves collecting dust, the year was also particularly notable for a number of new releases, from fiction to historical and gastronomic to ecological. Below, we've compiled a few of our favorites, with a bit of help from Daniel Vuillermin and Deva Eveland, two members Spittoon, Beijing's premier group of literati.

Aspiration and Anxiety: Asian Migrants and Australian Schooling by Christina Ho

Aspiration and Anxiety doesn’t focus on China per se but recent Chinese migrants to Australia, in particular, those who moved from the mainland to further their children’s educational opportunities. Unlike many previous non-Anglo migrant groups who came to Australia with very little –– including my European ancestors –– most recent Chinese migrants have significant wealth, are well educated, and aspire to become part of the Australian middle-classes. Yet with little social capital, such families use their wealth to invest in their children’s education, which is considered the main pathway of establishing themselves in Australian society. As the title suggests, Ho frames the experience of Chinese-Australian students in terms of “aspiration” in the form of the pursuit of high grades, entry to top universities and high-paying professions and “anxiety,” which, conversely, is related to study pressures, relentless competition, economic uncertainty, and the challenges of integrating into Australian culture. Provided by Lecturer and Coordinator of Spittoon Beijing, Daniel Vuillermin

China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism by Rana Mitter

Rana Mitter is the ideal historian – lucid, engaging, impartial – and he delves into past events that continue to resonate today. Whereas Mitter’s previous book China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (2013) focused on the events of the period, in China's Good War (2020) he takes a different approach, which is to examine how the events of the Second World War continue to shape China’s collective consciousness. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, it is perhaps being superseded by big-budget television shows and films. In China, however, we see the addition of real-world “blockbuster” approaches to perpetuating the memory of the Second World War with the building of museums and events such as the parade in September 2015, in which “[m]issiles, tanks, and marching soldiers all made their way past thousands of spectators from China and abroad.” As a student, I regularly visited the Jewish Museum of Australia in my hometown of Melbourne. There I met Holocaust survivors, whose crude identification tattoos were still clearly visible, who impressed upon me and all of its visitors the powerful phrase: never forget. But what is sometimes less considered is how do we remember. Provided by Lecturer and Coordinator of Spittoon Beijing, Daniel Vuillermin

The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography by Brian Dott

If you time-traveled to Beijing in 1491 and asked someone on the street whether they liked spicy food, they might imagine dishes prepared with onions or ginger. The chili pepper was still unknown outside the Americas. This led Cultural historian Brian Dott, while sitting in a Sichuanese restaurant in Beijing, to ask himself Why would the Chinese adopt such an extreme, alien flavor? And how did it become so ubiquitous?

It turns out to be a difficult question to answer, as chilis appear in few Chinese or European records. Dott makes a convincing argument that the plant spread stealthily among the lower classes. Multi-ethnic sailors aboard European galleons used it to flavor and preserve their food. From there, it spread inland to poor Chinese farmers in Hunan, Sichuan, and Guizhou, where it became a cheap replacement for preservatives like salt, black pepper, and the mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorn.

However, the chili pepper does not pertain to cuisine alone. The book also explores its connection to medicine, the aesthetic properties ascribed to it by literati, conservative resistance among the nobility to such a strong flavor, Mao Zedong’s famous love of spicy food, and its symbolism today in Chinese popular culture. Provided by Spitton Beijing's Book Club Coordinator, Deva Eveland.

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A Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo

Acclaimed Chinese author and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo stunned critics once again this fall with the release of her newest English-language novel, A Lover’s Discourse. More than just a title-nod to Roland Barthes’s 1978 text of the same name, Guo’s story is structurally similar, told through conversational fragments between its unnamed narrator, a Ph.D. candidate who moves from Beijing to London at the height of Brexit, and the English-German landscape architect she builds a life with. Set against a backdrop of rising nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment, A Lover’s Discourse examines themes of identity, romance, loss, isolation, and connection through the lens of language, both a unifying and antagonistic force in much of Guo’s work.

Beijing Grafitti by Liu Yuan Cheng and Tom Dartnell

Local photographer Liu Yuan Sheng teamed up with British writer – and retired graffiti artist – Tom Dartnell to create a comprehensive study of Beijing’s street art scene. On the surface, Beijing Graffiti appears as though it would be nothing more than a collection of shots around 798, a lazy and superficial attempt at capturing the city’s seemingly “rebellious” underbelly in a country that, to many foreign eyes, is antithetical to self-expression. This book, however, is not that. Featuring interviews with and profiles on 25 artists, Beijing Graffiti is both an ethnographic and ethnologic account of graffiti’s evolution over the past several decades, set against the backdrop of Beijing’s rise to formidable world power.

Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing by Joshua Goldstein

2020 was a pretty big year for recycling in Beijing, beginning with the January announcement that all plastic straws would be done away with by year’s end, followed by the May 1 single-use plastic ban, the release of a handy English guide to recycling coupled with an app that helps you sort your trash, and finally, the curb on plastic bags for waimai deliveries this past November, so it seems fitting that this year would also see the release of Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing. In it, author Joshua Goldstein examines the last 100 years of materiality and industry in China, as well as shifting perspectives of the nation’s identity with regards to recycling and secondhand goods markets, ultimately revealing a rift between the government’s efforts to laud acts of recycling, while simultaneously turning its back on the city’s “informal recycling networks,” such as the cardboard and plastic collectors still seen in Beijing’s streets today.

Braised Pork: A Novel

This year saw the release of An Yu’s debut English-language novel, Braised Pork, a surreal expanse that effortlessly weaves its narrative through otherworldly dreamscapes and the streets of modern Beijing. The book opens with protagonist Jia Jia finding her husband dead in their bathtub, free from what was, by all accounts, a passionless and suffocating marriage. Her ensuing journey of self-discovery and empowerment is a masterclass in magical realism as Jia Jia attempts to reconcile her past with her present to chart a now-limitless future, all while getting lost in worlds as familiar and foreign as a pencil sketch, bars, apartments, and the remote vastness of Tibet. Without ever fully committing to the strange, nor the recognizable, Yu is able to draw us in with a sincere intimacy and shake us loose with a jarring departure from reality in short order.