Biography

Ling Xi was born in 1972 in Chongqing. In 1997 she obtained a postgraduate degree in French literature and found a job in Shenzhen. Admitted to business school in Paris in 1998, she moved to France where she now works as an analyst.

2070, somewhere in China, an old man raises cockroaches. Lost in the tumult of his memory, he sees the time of his youth, when his father abandoned his family to live in France and become a poet. In a working class city, a young man of rare beauty loves opera.

At the end of his working day, painted with white make-up and dressed in silk, he sings in a tea shack. The female role attributed to him ends with the flight of a couple of butterflies ...

In 2006, Li works in Paris. As a little boy in China, his grandparents dressed him up as a girl to distract child abducters. Even today the memory remains ... And it is to the rhythm of the flowering lauriersrosés - the tree with a subtle perfume but poisonous sap -that these three men are faced with the insidious violence in the space between the two worlds. Three fates under the sign of illusion and metamorphosis. Evoking China in the 1980s - and that of the youth of these three characters - mixes together an unusual look at human frailty and the absurdity of the world. Witnessing the decline of a utopia, and that of an idealistic occidentl, Ling Xi unfolds with humor the poetry and the strangeness of her romantique world tinged with derision and despair. (Back Cover)

"Ode to the displaced of this world, Ling Xi's book is in line with its recent predecessors, but at the same time constituting a collection of unusual and fascinating short stories. Playing with a mixture of various sorts, from fantasy to everyday life, the author takes the reader on a
modern picaresque journey, where the quest of oneself in the absurdity of the world operates on a global scale." (Tam Tran Huy, Defector No. 16)