Gabriel Garcia Marquez and China

“His works are like delicacies to a hungry man,” veteran writer Mai Jia recalled of his first reading of Garcia Marquez.

“No one was not reading the book. There was a joke that went ‘without mimicking the beginning of the novel, Chinese writers seem not to know how to begin their own stories’,” writer and literary critic Xu Zechen told China Daily.

Xu believes Garcia Marquez liberated Chinese literary imagination and brought a whole new world to readers.

“Then we knew that realism can be magical, but not the stiff and sketching alike repetition of reality,” Xu said. “And he refreshed a sense of space and time. All those are basics to writing.”

“In short, we borrowed handy tools from the master,” he said.

Chen Zhongyi, a top Spanish-language scholar with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Daily that there were historical reasons for Chinese appreciation of Garcia Marquez.

“Being a Latin-American writer from Columbia, when first translated into Chinese, Garcia Marquez belongs to either of the two sides of the cold war, but he gained respect and recognition from both,” Chen said, “which greatly encouraged Chinese writers then.

“They saw hope from him that writers from developing countries can go that far.” The master’s longtime sales in the Chinese book market enjoyed a revival in 2011. It’s said the writer visited China in 1990 but was disappointed by privacy problems and was reluctant to authorize books to Chinese publishers.

After the mid 1990s, things begun to change as China joined international copyright conventions.

“Publishing Garcia Marquez in China has become a dream every publisher crave and we finally made it in 2011,” Li Yao, editor from Thinkingdom Media Group told China Daily.

The publication of authorized versions became a publishing sensation that year, attracting more young readers.