The novelette “Spring Festival” by Xia Jia was published for the first time in 2014 and translated to English by Ken Liu.
In China in the near future old traditions mingle with new technologies. The first birthday of a child has a new importance. The Spring Festival is celebrated in a somewhat different way. Girls find a husband in new ways. A reunion between old schoolmates has particular developments. Grandma Zhou celebrates her 99th birthday differently.
Formally, “Spring Festival” is a novelette but is actually made up of five short stories that describe in various ways possible moments of everyday life in China’s near future. From this point of view, it can be associated with “Tongtong’s Summer” by the same author.
The subtitle of this pseudo-novelette is “happiness, anger, love, sorrow, joy” because the mini-stories that make it up are associated with feelings and emotions experienced by their protagonists. Various technological developments in the near future may have important consequences on people’s daily lives and Xia Jia tries to describe some of them.
Today it’s science fiction but if we think of the changes that occurred in recent decades we see that those described in “Spring Festival” are no less plausible. The information revolution brought into ordinary people’s homes new electronic devices and radically transformed some others. Appliances are becoming more and more real computers and we’re waiting for the Internet of Things’ revolution.
The events in “Spring Festival” could happen in the next few years but if technology will change very much, humans will remain the same instead. That’s why Xia Jia focuses on what the characters feel while they have to deal with new technological developments.
Xia Jia has a neutral stance towards the technologies shown in “Spring Festival”, which are tools that can be used in a positive or negative way. In the end, it depends on the people and on their ability to use technology rather than being used by it. This is one of the elements that I think makes it interesting and worth reading. If you like, you can buy it in an ebook anthology available on Amazon USA
