The Shortest History of China author Linda Jaivin on her goal: to tell ‘the whole story of China in a super readable way for normal people’

In her 250-page book Jaivin focuses on individuals, women especially, such as the 13th century runaway bride whose inventions modernised textile production

She often quotes poems to convey the emotional experience of history, explaining ‘With poetry, you get a … very different voice from that of the historian’

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A woman is depicted drinking tea in an 18th century Chinese imperial scroll painting. Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China tells the history of the country by focusing on the lives and experiences of individuals, especially women. Photo: The Palace Museum

Jonathan Chatwin

Published: 6:15pm, 11 Sep 2021

The Shortest History of China by Linda Jaivin, pub. The Experiment

Drinking at a Sydney bar in the 1990s, Linda Jaivin got into conversation with a fellow patron who, it transpired, worked in marketing. “You don’t have a brand,” he told Jaivin, after they had discussed her varied writing career. “That’s really terrible!”

“I couldn’t figure out exactly why it was terrible!” she jokes via Zoom from locked-down Sydney, bright-blue haired and flanked by overstuffed bookshelves. She does concede, however, that the idea of a then China journalist turning her hand to feminist erotic fiction – her first novel, Eat Me (1995), will ensure you never look at a supermarket fruit and veg aisle in the same way again – was a career shift that looked surprising from the outside, even as it made perfect sense to her. “Everyone,” she explains, “has different facets to them.”

Her subsequent 11 books have ranged from a memoir recounting her friendship with Taiwanese musician Hou Dejian (2000’s The Monkey and the Dragon) to a novel inspired by the lurid memoirs of the so-called Hermit of Peking, Edmund Backhouse (The Empress Lover, 2014). She has written books on S&M, and the history of Beijing.

Australian author Linda Jaivin. Photo: Linda Jaivin

Her publishers take a pragmatic view of her output. “We understand that what you do is you have big books, you have small books and you go all over the place,” they told her. “That’s fine. That’s your brand – your brand is that you don’t have a brand!”