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BEIJING—Penguin Canada has put one of its planned 2011 blockbusters in limbo until it is satisfied that the author hasn’t been poaching from the works of Canada’s Chinese Canadian literary elite.
Gold Mountain Blues, written by Toronto resident Zhang Ling, has gathered major awards in China and is being translated into English for publication in Canada and Britain.
Her last book, Aftershock, was turned into a 2010 movie that became the biggest box-office hit in Chinese history, taking in more than $100 million.
But the latest novel, a multi-generational saga of Chinese immigration to Canada, has come under withering assault from various web-based attackers, who claim that Zhang has appropriated some of the ideas, plots, characters and details of a number of Canadian Chinese writers.
The Great Chinese Canadian Literary Feud is now afoot, and it could have global implications: rights to the book have been sold in 10 other countries. Much is at stake.
For a woman who has lived quietly in Toronto for more than 15 years — working as an audiologist by day, writing Chinese-language fiction by night — Zhang had a golden moment last fall, when she helped introduce the movie Aftershock to the world at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Then something horrible happened.
In November, in the freewheeling, Wild West world of the Chinese Internet, where anonymous bloggers roam at will, a new blog appeared with the sole purpose of attacking her new novel.
The allegation: that Gold Mountain Blues, written in Chinese, plagiarizes the works of well-known Chinese Canadian authors who write in English, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee and Paul Yee.
It is an accusation Zhang, 53, categorically denies.
The allegations have not been proved in a court of law, nor in the court of public opinion.
The key blogger leading the attacks, known as “Changjiang,” and identified on his site as Robert Luo, alleges that Zhang has been playing the margins: taking advantage of the fact that Canadian Chinese writers cannot read Chinese, and Chinese readers and critics do not understand English.
The allegations have transformed Zhang Ling’s dream into what she describes as “a nightmare.”
Her defenders are livid, calling such allegations “ridiculous,” even “a joke.”
They say Zhang’s book is bolstered by three years of meticulous, scholarly, on-the-ground research, including three trips to China.
“The allegations of plagiarism against Zhang Ling are totally unfounded,” says York University professor Xu Xueqing, who specializes in Chinese Canadian literature.
Especially upsetting, says Xu, is the fact that the accusers have been able to cloak themselves in anonymity.
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