November, 2023. On the top floor of the Shard, a very modern building near the Thames, there’s a prize-giving for literature in translation. I’m standing at a window, looking at the wintry view, when I hear a voice: “Aamer? It’s Nicky Harman.” I turn around to greet her.

We probably hadn’t seen each other since the funeral of the fine poet Judith Kazantzis, her cousin and my close friend, in 2018. She lived in Weymouth and, though we’d met at literary events and family gatherings over the years, chances of meetings grew rarer when the pandemic and consequent lockdowns caused a long hiatus in public events.

Nicky and I have a shared interest in modern Chinese literature: she as a translator, I as an avid reader. In 2009, weeks before I published Another Gulmohar Tree, Nicky had invited Judith and me to share a platform with two Chinese writers: Han Dong, whose compelling novel Banished! she had translated and I’d reviewed, and Xinran, a popular Chinese writer of non-fiction who lived in London but still wrote in Chinese.

I was excited to discuss fictional ideas across boundaries with Chinese contemporaries; it was an unusually stimulating session. Over a leisurely dinner, the cross-cultural, cross-linguistic dialogue continued, with the help of a young Hui (Muslim) Chinese interpreter.

Nicky and I already went back a long way. It was probably in 2002 that we talked, on a train to Lewes, about K: The Art of Love, a translation she’d just published. It was based on an affair that Ling Shuhua, a celebrated Chinese writer of the 1930s, had with Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Julian Bell, during the time he taught in China. Hong Ying, its author, had been successfully sued by Ling’s daughter for defaming her mother, though names in the novel had been changed.

I told Nicky I’d been introduced to Ling’s daughter Ying Chinnery by Han Suyin, a famous Chinese-born writer who wrote in English in the ’90s — Ying had spoken enthusiastically about her mother’s writings, and also about their erasure from the 20th century Chinese canon — probably, I later surmised, because its evocation of pre-Communist bourgeois society just wasn’t radical enough for post-revolutionary Chinese tastes.

At Judith’s home, where there was an exhibition of work by local artists, we were introduced to Julian Bell’s namesake and relative, who protested against the use of his great-uncle’s adulterous affair in the novel when he discovered that Nicky was its co-translator, though she wasn’t responsible for the novel’s content. Ling Shuhua’s reputation had been revived by a buried scandal, and a steamily erotic novel, rather than by the recognition of her merit.

I’d only read a very few stories by Ling Shuhua, and Ancient Melodies, a heavily fictionalised memoir of her childhood she’d written in English with the encouragement of her Bloomsbury correspondents, including Virginia Woolf. (The memoir, obviously written for foreign tastes, hadn’t impressed me.) At variance with the stories of her contemporaries, male and female, that I’d devoured as a reader in my early 30s, Ling wasn’t given to loud social protest; her critique of marriage, gender politics and class differences, firmly grounded in the milieu she inhabited, was subtle and nuanced.

Born in 1901, Ling published in the years between the mid-1920s and the 1940s; in 1946, she moved to London, and fell silent. The few stories I read by her were enough to make me search for more; finally, I located a collection of eight stories in Italian translation. I was impressed by the skill of her technique, and by her ability — not surprising for a wordsmith who was also a painter — to fill a canvas with minor details that spoke of much more than what she openly said.

Back to the evening at the Shard. Nicky and I had much to catch up with. We met just shortly after at an exhibition at the Tate Britain. Later, over coffee and sandwiches, I mentioned the Italian volume of Ling’s stories and wondered how well she read in the original Chinese. Nicky, who had mostly focused on contemporary fiction, was intrigued and went back to rediscover the work of this writer who actually had been erased from the canon.

We met again, in January 2024. Nicky had, by then, read the stories for which Ling was best known, and was in search of more. “She writes beautifully,” she said; and by the time she moved back to London in March, she had already translated two of them.

I’d read one, ‘Once Upon a Time’, a story of unrequited love between two female students. The other, ‘Taking Tea’, was new to me. A young woman receives a visit from a friend and her attractive brother; the attentions of the latter lead her to believe that he might propose marriage to her; shortly after, though, she receives an invitation to his wedding. In its essentials, the story resembles an Urdu fiction of a very slightly later period; slightly updated, it would also make a delightful television play.

Two of Nicky’s translations were soon published in online journals. Of these, ‘Katherine’ is possibly one of Ling’s best works: characteristically, she uses a children’s game to expose the workings of class structure, when a faithful servant is accused by the mistress of the house of stealing a necklace lost by the daughter of the family, who lies to protect herself. Later, the necklace is found in the garden, but it’s too late to make amends.

Subtle ironies like these — impossible to capture in brief summaries — abound in the stories I’ve read in translation; Ling can also effectively capture the plight of impecunious and illiterate women, as in ‘The Letter’, a poignant monologue in which the eponymous, rambling letter is dictated by one woman to another.

Now Nicky is working on a volume of some of Ling’s stories; her public lectures are reviving Ling’s reputation not only in the world of Chinese studies, but also in the milieu of the Bloomsbury writers in which Ling never quite made a place for herself. We often meet to discuss these times and other matters of common interest. Han Dong is scheduled to visit the UK next month, and we’re hoping for a multilingual reunion midsummer.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 25th, 2025