Reading and Discussion with Wu Ming-yi and Catherine Xinxin Yu

8 July (online)

On July 8, 2025 an online conversation with Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi and his English translator Catherine Xinxin Yu was co-organized by the “Taiwan Lecture Series” of the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg branch of the Joint Center for Advanced Studies “Worldmaking: A Dialogue with China—Epochal Lifeworlds: Narratives of Crisis and Change.”

Taiwanese author Wu Ming-yi 吳明益 is one of the most renowned voices of Sinophone ecocritical literature. As an author of factual and fictional literature and an artist whose works often combine drawings and images with text, Wu's literary worlds draw attention to the endangered lifeworlds in and beyond Taiwan. In his stories, lives become entangled, be it of humans, animals and plants, of people with different ethnic and social backgrounds within Taiwan, or of living beings all across the globe that are all threatened by international chains of production and exploitation. At the same time, these works try to disrupt readers’ (and viewers’) habitual ways of perceiving, thinking and remembering: they trace multiple voices and sensations of beings beyond humans.

While some of his works have been translated into, among others, English and German, much of his work is still unknown internationally. It was thus a great opportunity for the students and general audience to get a chance of discussing with Wu Ming-yi and his translator Catherine Xinxin Yu the possibilities of ecocritical writing and the challenges of transmitting a work that already tries to 'translate' non-human languages into words and images into yet other languages. The writer and translator offered glimpses into their ways of working and their motivation and read sections of The Sea Breeze Club and the picture book The Three-Legged Crab-Eating Mongoose and the Giant as well as the short story Cloudland.