Delicious Hunger - Paperback

by Fan Hai (Author), Jeremy Tiang (Translator), Tice Cin (Editor)

Winner, 2024 English PEN Translates Award

From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party, and these short stories are inspired by his experiences in the rainforest.

Struggling through an arduous trek, two comrades pine for each other but don't know how to declare their love; a woman who has annoyed all her comrades finally wins their approval when she finds a mythical mousedeer; improvising around the lack of ingredients, a perpetually hungry guerrilla makes delicious cakes from cassava and elephant fat. The rainforest may be a dangerous place where death awaits, but so do love, desire and hope.

Delicious Hunger is a book about the moments in and between warfare, when hunger is so palpable it can be tasted, and the natural world becomes an extension of the body. Deftly translated from Mandarin by Jeremy Tiang, Hai Fan's stories are about a group of people who chose to fight for a better world and, in the process, built their own.

Author Biography

Hai Fan is the pen name of Ang Tiam Huat, a Singaporean writer who entered the rainforest in 1976 as a soldier of the Malayan Communist Party and spent the next thirteen years carrying out guerrilla warfare near the Malaysia-Thai border. His first English debut is Delicious Hunger, translated by Jeremy Tiang. He now lives in Singapore.

Jeremy Tiang has translated over thirty books from Chinese, including Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building (Open Letter), which was long listed for the International Booker Prize, and Yan Ge's Strange Beasts of China (Penguin). He also writes and translates plays. His novel State of Emergency (World Editions) won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He teaches literary translation at Columbia University, and has been translator-in-residence at Princeton and the University of Iowa. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in Flushing, Queens.