Imagining China as imperial hegemon

Under the new Qin (formerly China) world order, traditional storytelling—its emotional ambiguities and moral ambivalences—is becoming obsolete.

- Shawn Hoo

THESE MEMORIES DO NOT BELONG TO US By Yiming Ma Fiction/Mariner Books/Hardback/224 pages/$35.92

In its place are Memory Epics, vetted memories and histories transferred as facsimiles across minds through a cranial device called Mindbank.

When the narrator receives an illicit inheritance of memories from his mother, he knows he will soon be labeled a dissident by the Party.

He leaks the illicit memories on an encrypted platform ("certain stories were too valuable to hoard as wealth")—which appear as the 11 short stories in the book—and awaits his reprisal.

Much like English novelist David Mitchell's speculative fiction classic Cloud Atlas (2004), Shanghai-born writer Yiming Ma's These Memories Do Not Belong To Us experiments with stories within stories to create an epic sweep of tales across eras.

Ma's book spans the historical past—when Chinese leader Mao Zedong swam the Yangtze in the 1950s—to a speculative future when America is a Chinese colony.

Both in form and substance, his imaginative dystopian novel is a spirited defense of how stories survive in an age of control and suppression.