Narrative
The King of Chess
棋王
Ah Cheng · 1984
Synopsis
In the late 1960s, two educated youths sent to work on mountain farms meet on the train: the narrator and Wang Yisheng, a Chinese chess player. Wang tells how he learned the game: a poor child, he gathered scrap to sell when an old man initiated him, passing on Taoist principles to him. In Yunnan, where food, books and entertainment are scarce, the two friends are assigned to different farms, then find each other again; a tournament is announced during a local festival.
Context
Before writing it, the author told this story aloud; friends who had heard it at a dinner in the winter of 1983-1984 urged him to put it down on paper, according to Almost Island. The text appeared in July 1984 in Shanghai wenxue, in book form the following year, and was followed by two other stories that form a trilogy with it. Liang Wendao sees in it one of the representative works of the search for roots. Cinema adapted it in 1988 in mainland China and in 1991 in Hong Kong. Noël Dutrait translated it into French in 1988 in Les Trois Rois, Bonnie McDougall into English in 1990.
Who it is for
A short, dense narrative, born from a story told to friends; it is read in French together with the other two narratives of the trilogy.
Prizes and reception
Selected among the hundred Chinese books of the century in a series published in 1999 and 2000, according to The Paper.