Two New Translations from Associate Professor Jeremy Tiang

Cocoon (World Editions) by Zhang Yueran and Nine Color Deer (Levine Querido) by Kailin Duan, both translated from the Chinese by Associate Professor Jeremy Tiang, are out this fall. 

Nine Color Deer is a picture book, an artful retelling of a traditional Buddhist tale. Duan elects to illustrate the book with an eye-catching style of artwork that evokes the age-old origins of the story. The story begins when a legendary deer with nine colors in its beautiful coat rescues a drowning man. In exchange for saving the man’s life, the deer simply asks to be left with his privacy–but the man faces untold temptation to break his promise and expose the deer to the avarice of the world. Nine Color Deer is a heartwarming tale about the triumph of generosity over greed, remission over retribution. In their review, Kirkus calls the book, “An elegant retelling of a timeless story of humility and conservation.”

In Cocoon, two childhood friends reconnect after life, family, and obligation have ripped them apart. Through the long hours of one winter night, they rekindle their friendship and reckon with the real stories behind their families’ ambiguous pasts. The narrative, shifting in both time and perspective, lays bare unexpected truths about the hurdles of homecoming, the far-reaching consequences of social upheaval, and the enduring capacity of friendship. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls the novel “lyrical… a remarkable and tragic story of family and community.”

Tiang told World Editions, “I was blown away by the verve and delicacy with which this novel treats the lingering aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Although I’d already translated two books by Zhang, this felt like such an evolution in her writing style that I needed to find a new voice in English for her. It’s been a pleasurable challenge meeting the demands of this bold, heart-wrenching novel, with its reframing of recent Chinese history from a millennial perspective, and I can’t wait for Anglophone readers to come under its spell.” Tiang’s translation of Cocoon was awarded a PEN Translates award in July 2021, which helped to fund the translation's publication in the UK.

Nine Color Deer is available for purchase now through Bookshop.org, and Cocoon, which will be released on October 4, is available for preorder through Indiebound.

Jeremy Tiang (he/ they) is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. They have translated over twenty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Liu Xinwu and Zhang Yueran. Their plays include Salesman之死 and A Dream of Red Pavilions, and translations of plays by Chen Si’an and Wei Yu-Chia. Their novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and their short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was shortlisted for the same prize. In 2022, Tiang was the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence and an International Booker Prize judge. Originally from Singapore, they live in Flushing, Queens.