There

This vibrant collection of short and medium-length stories employs experimental metafictional techniques, transcending the boundaries of body and desire while also crossing different eras, countries, and urban-rural boundaries to offer a psychologically realistic depiction and deconstruction of various binary oppositions, such as individual vs. state, freedom vs. totalitarianism, democracy vs. dictatorship, and homosexual vs. non-homosexual.

The spatial dimension of "There" spans Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, while the temporal dimension stretches from the island nation and imperial capital of the early 21st century to the Republic of China and Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century. A diverse cast of characters appears on the stage: this is a theater of life performed in a concentration camp by police, detectives, judges, lawyers, doctors, professors, valets, gamblers, soldiers, members of the Malayan Communist Party, members of the Chinese Communist Party, rotten girls, writers, scientists, psychics, religious teachers, translators, straight men and women, lesbians and gays, politicians, bookstore owners, and sleep technicians. This is a biopolitics even more ambiguous and absurd than the panopticonism criticized by Foucault and the state of exception described by Agamben.

Internationally renowned scholar Chen Rongqiang (Associate Professor of English and Head of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York) and renowned Taiwanese queer writer and scholar Ji Dawei (Associate Professor of the Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University) highly recommend this book and have written prefaces evaluating the works in it.

Recommendation:

"Weng Xianwei's novels inherit the humor of his prose, coldly making me laugh when I was off guard...Weng Xianwei wants us to understand through metanarrative the visible and invisible oppression of state and social mechanisms on vulnerable groups. The main characters in the novel all live in invisible concentration camps." - Chen Rongqiang (Associate Professor of English and Head of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York)

"These novels by Weng Hsien-wei once again demonstrate that Malaysian and Singaporean writers are not absent from contemporary Chinese literature—including contemporary Chinese LGBTQ literature—but rather play a vibrant and vibrant role. At a time when contemporary Chinese LGBTQ literature is gaining increasing attention from readers around the world, readers should certainly not only focus on works from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but should also solemnly acknowledge the contributions of Malaysia, Singapore, and other countries." — Ji Dawei (Associate Professor, Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University)

Weng Xianwei

Xu Weixian, whose real name is Xu Weixian, teaches at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is the author of the short story collection "Wandering and Addiction," the essay collection "The Second Face," and the poetry collections "Snail Uprising" and "Unidentified Creatures." His works have won dozens of literary awards both domestically and internationally, including the Singapore Literature Award, the Singapore Golden Pen Award for Short Fiction, the Singapore Youth Short Story Competition, the Peking University Wang Moren Novel Writing Award, the Huazong Literary Award for Prose, and Honorable Mentions for Fiction and New Poetry, the Malaysian National Intercollegiate Literary Award for Prose and New Poetry, and the Yunlifeng Outstanding Writer of the Year Award. His works have also been selected for inclusion in literary anthologies and series in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia. He has also written academic books such as "From Erotic History to Sexual History: Gay Writing and the Construction of Masculinity in Modern China" (National Central University Press), "Chinese-language Films in Post-Malaysia: Dialect Style, Huayi Style and Author Theory" (Lianjing Publishing House), and "Redrawing the Map of the Chinese Language: Cultural Production of Chinese-language Films in Singapore and Malaysia before and after the Cold War" (Chinese and English editions) (Hong Kong University Press). He also co-edited "Memorandum: A Reader of Singaporean Chinese Novels" (Chinese and English editions) with Koh Si-jen, and "Transnational Chinese-language Films: Body, Desire and Ethical Frustration" (English edition) with Brian Bergen-Aurand and Mary Mazzilli.

Preface 1/Seeing the Light◎Chen Rongqiang 5
Recommendation 2/There, it shines——My thoughts after reading Weng Xianwei’s novel◎Ji Dawei9

Novella: Light in the Concentration Camp Chapter 1/Skylight 15
Chapter 2 / Fear of Light 42
Chapter 3 / Astigmatism 60
Chapter 4 / Exposure 67

Short Story Road 97
Safety Island 107
Exorcism 115
126
No Biography 136
There 158

Appendix/Exceptional State: Eight Questions for Weng Xianwei 179
Appendix: Hua Xin’s Naked Life: An Interview with Xu Weixian 196