Chinese GL

It's been slightly over a year since I started translating To Embers We Return, so I thought it might be a good time to take stock of my progress.

( douqi rambles about stats )

And finally, to anyone thinking of checking out the translation but not wanting to be stuck on too much of a cliffhanger, Chapter 36 (which is coming up soon) is something of a natural stopping point for what I've started thinking of as 'volume one' of the novel. It's been surprisingly tricky to identify stopping points because Ning Yuan is a very good serial writer and therefore puts little hooks in at the end of each chapter to compel you to come back to the next one, but I think this more-or-less works. By chapter count, it's also about 20% of the main text of the novel (19.78% if you add the extras) so I feel that's a nice chunk of book, and you'll get the next chunk about this time next year, kind of like traditional series publishing (that's the hope, anyway).

Was looking through the Yuletide and Festivids 2025 collections earlier and came across two baihe-related entries:

• A Deadly Thread, a Legend of Yunze fic by sephstone
  
• Vigor & Valor, a Couple of Mirrors vid by comm member extrapenguin

Let me know if I've missed anything from this or other festive exchanges!

Pre-orders have opened for the third volume of the manhua adaptation of Her Mountain, Her Sea (她的山, 她的海, pinyin: ta de shan, ta de hai) based on the novel of the same title by Fu Hua (扶华), with art by Huo He Zi (火禾子). This is a mainland edition, and will be in simplified Chinese and censored. Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:

• Zhongxin (the publisher)
  
• Boku
  
• Hanlian
  
• Jinse
  
• Shengshi
  
• Wangou
  
• Xiangxue
  
• Xinshijiao

Happy new year all!

The first print edition of a baihe novel to be open for pre-order for the year is Yu Shuang's tragic contemporary romance The Guest (嘉宾), which is being brought out under the title 别时茫茫 (going to just dodge the task of translation this because my brain is currently not up to the task of translating a Ba Juyi reference). This is a mainland edition and will be in traditional Chinese and censored (I'm kind of curious to see how they're going to manage the censoring of a tragedy that fundamentally arises from institutional and societal homophobia). Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:

• Kuaile
  
• Wangou
  
• Xiangxue

The web version of the novel can be read here. Some details of the book art can be found here. I reviewed this book here.

Nan Hu Tang has been getting a quite a bit of buzz in Chinese baihe fan circles lately, so I thought I would check out some of her work. The major title of hers that I keep seeing recommended is Taking a Concubine (纳妾, pinyin: naqie), but that's a whopping 966,341 words long, so I decided to try out Home for the Funeral (奔丧, pinyin: bensang), which she wrote right after finishing Taking a Concubine, which I've also seen multiple recommendations for and, more importantly, clocks in at a relatively slim 324,756 words.

Advertised as folk horror, Home for the Funeral begins with protagonist Fang Huaiye, a graduate student living in Shanghai, returning to her mother's home village in rural Hunan (which she's only visited for New Year celebrations) for the funeral of a relative, Fang Juanhuai, who died at the grand old age of 106. Fang Huaiye's presence has been specifically requested because she's one of the very few living people left who is technically from the same generation as the deceased (Fang Huaiye's mother was adopted as a baby by Fang Juanhuai's grandmother when Fang Juanhuai was a full-grown adult), and so having her at the funeral is desirable for various ceremonial reasons. The invitation had originally been for Fang Huaiye's mother (who, being a generation older than the deceased, has even more ceremonial weight), but her mother had insisted that Fang Huaiye go in her place instead.

Fang Huaiye arrives at the village, is introduced to the main members of her vast, vast extended family, and also meets eventual love interest (she doesn't know this yet, but the reader does) Fang Zhicui, an occult practitioner (in an environment where this is actually meaningful) and funeral director. Very soon, eerie things start happening: the deceased's granddaughter seems to be possessed by a spirit of some sort, a chicken and a snake have an ominous fight to the death right in front of Fang Huaiye, a photograph of the deceased starts weeping blood, the works. Fang Huaiye also glimpses a corpse hanging from a tree as she's being driven through some fields at night — but when she returns in the morning, there's no tree there, and definitely no corpse. Distressingly, she soon discovers that she's physically incapable of leaving the village: pain overwhelms her as soon as she sets foot on the main highway leading away from the village. With the aid of Fang Zhicui, Fang Zhicui's formidable teacher Fang Zhe, and a couple of other cousins, she tries to work out what is going on, because she doesn't really have a choice.

( spoilers to mid-book )

( spoilers for the end of the book )

The romance between Fang Huaiye and Fang Zhicui was so underwritten as to be practically non-existent. I'm not sure they even display on-page attraction beyond noting each other's attractiveness at a couple of points (and not even in a sexy way, just a matter-of-fact way). It's developed a tiny bit more in the extras, but not by much — and even then they're still in occult-mystery-solving mode, having stumbled across some mysterious happenings in a Miao village. I didn't find their personalities particularly well-drawn either: we're told what they are like as people a lot more than shown. While the (all-women) secondary cast is pretty large, I didn't find their personalities particularly well-developed either: the older generation (Fang Juanhuai & co) were tough and secretive and formidable, and the younger generation (Fang Huaiye, Fang Zhicui and a couple of distant cousins/friends) were plucky and determined, and that's mostly it. A couple of what should have been big emotional moments fell short for me because of this. The first is where one of Fang Juanhuai's co-conspirators accuses Fang Huaiye of actually being a cunning, highly manipulative person who's using an unwitting Fang Zhicui to carry out her ulterior motives. This would have had weight had I been given any substantial sense of Fang Huaiye's actual personality or any hints that she might be something different from what she seemed. The other is where the reader realises that Fang Huaiye's great love for and trust in her mother has basically saved her from having a full-on identity crisis once she learns the truth about her existence. Again, this would have been moving had the author made any serious prior attempt at building up that mother-child relationship, and given us a sense of what Fang Huaiye's mother was like (beyond generic well-educated professional woman).

While the horror/thriller parts of this novel gave me some nicely spooky moments, I can't say that it's exactly motivated me to tackle Nan Hu Tang's longer work, which is rather a pity.

I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC.

Pre-orders have opened for the print editions of three baihe novels. All three are from Taiwanese publishers, so will be in traditional Chinese and uncensored.

The first is Spring Remains the Same (春如旧, pinyin: chun ru jiu) by Ruo Hua Ci Shu (若花辞树), a historical court intrigue novel with a cross-dressing main character. This is coming out from Taiwanese publisher morefate, and has a striking and unusual cover design. The web version of the novel can be read here.

The second is Our Happiness (属于我们的幸福, pinyin: shuyu women de xingfu), which collects two (novella-length?) contemporary romances, authored by Li Zi Li (李子李) and Ling Ling Ren (零零人) respectively. Li Zi Li seems to have a profile on Taiwanese webnovel platform Popo, which features a mixture of mostly danmei and yanqing works. I couldn't find much information about Ling Ling Ren on a cursory search. This edition is published by Caiyi Books.

The third is Whispers After the Spotlight (在流量引爆以后, pinyin: zai liuliang yinbao yihou) by Liu Li (琉璃), a contemporary romance between a cafe owner and an ex-YouTube star. This edition is published by Qianyu. Liu Li (author page here) writes across a range of romance and non-romance genres; her romance-focused titles are predominantly baihe, but there is also some danmei and yanqing. She previously published on JJWXC under the name Liu Li Xing Ren (琉璃星人), and has since terminated her relationship with them. However, a couple of her works (including a femslash fic for Jin Yong's The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Sabre (倚天屠龙记, pinyin: yitian tulong ji), can still be read there.

All three titles can be pre-ordered via Feiqin. The latter two can also be pre-ordered via books.com.tw, which also carry the ebook versions.

I've been meaning to post about this for some time, but these days life and most annoyingly work keep getting in the way. Anyway, The Secret of Girls (如果有秘密, pinyin: ruguo you mimi) is a newish baihe live action mini-drama that made it onto GagaOOLala about a month ago, starring He Lei (who plays Ji Qingqing in When We Met). Here's the official synposis:

Xu Jingxi sets out to Dali, Yunnan, to live her final days without regret. Losing her wallet upon arrival, she turns to Wen Shan, a quiet employee at the guesthouse, and works there to repay her debt. As the carefree Jingxi and reserved Wen Shan share daily life under the Dali sky, they gradually open up, finding warmth, healing, and love in each other’s company - a tender story of courage and connection between two women.

A heartfelt and healing Chinese sapphic mini-series, starring He Lei and Sun Cailun as two women who find love and courage in life’s final journey.

The main page for the drama is here. There are 16 episodes in total, of approximately 15 minutes each. The first two episodes are free-to-view.

This drama (and the team behind it) has had a bit of a torrid time. It originally aired in China via the production studio's own WeChat mini-app. Shortly after that, the studio licensed it to Rakuten Japan. That version featured an extended makeout scene that was not present in the version that was available in China (though enterprising Chinese fans soon found it). Shortly after that, the whole drama was taken off WeChat, leading to an absurd scenario in which a Chinese drama produced by a Chinese studio primarily for a Chinese audience was only accessible through a Japanese platform — and all for the crime of daring to include a kissing scene in its overseas version. Luckily, the drama found a home on GagaOOLala a few weeks later, where one hopes it will stay for the foreseeable future.

I know some comm members have been expressing a wish for a more-or-less reliable list of non-MTL baihe translations. true0bIue has helpfully compiled such a list on this carrd. As regards methodology, true0bIue states in the NovelUpdates list that accompanies the carrd that:

I have gone through nearly all the baihe I could find and only included those for which I could verify they were human translated. This list is based off of knowing the translators personally and on translators' words. The latter relies on their faithfulness, I can't 100% guarantee all of them nor translation accuracy except for the ones I know.

They also provide the following list of confirmed MTL groups: Dragontl, elite translations, little panda, baihe tales, Yami translates, FrostyWitchTranslations, kon kafe, hosted novels, knoxt, shanghai fantasy, dragonholic.