Plagiarism case heads to court as Canadian authors file lawsuit against Zhang, Penguin Canada

The controversy surrounding Ling Zhang’s novel Gold Mountain Blues continues to escalate, as a group of Canadian authors are now taking their allegations of plagiarism to court. On Thursday, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee filed a lawsuit against Zhang’s publisher, Penguin Group Canada, for copyright infringement, the Toronto Star reports. The trio of authors are seeking $6 million, plus $1 million each in punitive damages from Pearson Canada, Penguin Canada’s parent company. Also named in the suit are Zhang, for “purposely copying multiple elements” from the plaintiffs’ published works, as well as Nicky Harman, the book’s U.K.-based English-language translator who conducted a review of the plagiarism allegations for Penguin.

Gold Mountain Blues was originally published in 2009 in China, where it garnered literary awards, became a bestseller, and was optioned for film and TV. It was released on Oct. 8 in Canada and 11 other territories. According to the Star:

The suit says the Canadian authors now face “significant potential losses” when they are eventually published in China because “it will appear to Chinese readers in China that the plaintiffs have copied portions of Gold Mountain Blues” when the authors were long-published before the book came out. The suit says the authors have identified more than 50 key examples of original elements that have been substantially copied.

The Star has previously published a list of similarities between Gold Mountain Blues and works by Choy, Lee, and Yee, provided by the plaintiffs’ legal counsel, May Cheng. The list highlights comparable plot points, character backgrounds and dynamics, and historical settings.

On Oct. 3, Choy, Lee, and Yee sent a letter to Penguin Canada requesting a publication delay to allow for an independent review into the allegations. Author Denise Chong reiterated the request, raising concerns around the similarities between her novel The Concubine’s Children and Zhang’s. Days later, Penguin released the novel as they claimed to be satisfied by the results of Harmon’s internal review.

Shortly after the letter was made public, Zhang issued a statement in which she claims Gold Mountain Blues to be the product of years of first-person research and field trips, combined with the shared history of the Chinese diaspora in Canada. The author, who was born in Hangzhou, China, and moved to Calgary in 1986, defended her work again on Sunday in a Q&A with the Star’s Tony Wong. In the interview Zhang touches on her inspiration for the novel and the feedback she has received from readers, and re-asserts the claim that she has not read any of the titles she is accused of appropriating, which include Choy’s The Jade Peony, Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, and Yee’s Bone Collectors and Tales from Gold Mountain. She admits to having read Yee’s Ghost Train and Chong’s Concubine’s Children and lists both titles in the bibliography at the back of the book:

If my memory serves me correctly (as I read the two books a while ago), Ghost Train is an illustrated children’s book and Concubine’s Children is a memoir of a family story, both wonderful and inspiring. Gold Mountain Blues is a multigenerational epic novel of 522 pages. The three books are vastly different other than sharing a portion of common history, with mine covering a longer span of more than 130 years. Ghost Train and Concubine’s Children are both great books which I enjoyed very much. Each of the three books is a unique work of art by its own right.

The allegations of plagiarism against Zhang originated in the Chinese-language blogosphere and caught the attention of  Canadian media back in February.

Ling Zhang responds to accusations of plagiarism

This week, the controversy dogging Chinese-Canadian author Ling Zhang’s second novel, Gold Mountain Blues, flared up again as prominent Chinese-Canadian authors Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee signed a letter asking Penguin Canada to delay publication of its English-language translation of the book. Zhang has been accused of plagiarizing work by Choy, Lee, and Yee, as well as other well-known Chinese-Canadian writers. In their request, the trio criticize Penguin’s efforts to substantiate the accusations and they’ve asked for the delay so that an independent review might take place. (For more details on the controversy please follow the links to previous posts on Quillblog.)

In response, Zhang has issued a statement in which she claims not to have read the works from which she has allegedly borrowed, and expresses her disappointment at the recent turn of events:

Gold Mountain Blues is the result of years of research and several field trips to China and Western Canada. The research data obtained over the years is voluminous enough to allow me to write another complete novel if I chose to. A hundred and fifty years of Chinese-Canadian history is a “common wealth” for all of us to share and discover. I have not read The Jade Peony, Disappearing Moon Café, The Bone Collector’s Son, or Tales from Gold Mountain. I have a great respect for the authors who have already explored this rich territory before me: Wayson Choy, Denise Chong, Paul Yee, and Sky Lee.  I welcome and encourage authors interested in Chinese-Canadian history to do the same. When I started to write this book, I hoped it would serve to bring the Chinese-Canadian community a little more closely together, by sharing such a long and meaningful history.  I am deeply saddened to see that things do not seem to be going in that direction.

Chinese novel alleged to have stolen from Canada’s “literary elite”

The “Great Chinese Canadian Literary Feud” is now underway, according to a Toronto Star story by Bill Schiller. The author at the centre of the supposed controversy is Toronto’s Zhang Ling, whose previous novel, Aftershock, became a surprise bestseller in China when a film version was released there last summer.

For her latest novel, Gold Mountain Blues, Zhang is accused of stealing from a diverse group of Chinese-Canadian authors, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee. An English translation of the novel was due to appear with Penguin Canada by early 2012, but according to the Star, it has been put “in limbo until [Penguin] is satisfied that the author hasn’t been poaching from the works of Canada’s Chinese Canadian literary elite.”

It’s a damning accusation, but the case against Zhang is anything but cut and dried. The accusations of plagiarism appear to stem from an online smear campaign led by an anonymous blogger known as Changjiang. When the Star tracked down and questioned the man supposedly behind the posts, one Robert Luo, he “grew alarmed and then hung up.” Another of Zhang’s attackers, Cheng Xingbang, also refused an interview.

Meanwhile, Penguin has not said it is delaying publication of Gold Mountain Blues, only that it is waiting for the English translation to be complete before making an internal decision about how to handle the accusations. And two of the supposed victims of plagiarism contacted by the Star – Sky Lee and Denise Chong – were equally in the dark, as neither reads Chinese. As the Star reports, Chong, who is also published by Penguin, is hesitant to weigh in on the controversy:

Changjiang’s website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of Chong’s [1994 memoir, The Concubine’s Children] – her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues.

Chong says that without a translation she can’t really comment.

But she did send an email to alert her agent once the controversy hit the Chinese blogosphere.

Reached in Montreal, reclusive Canadian writer Sky Lee, author of the groundbreaking novel Disappearing Moon Café (1990), an instant classic, admits she was “shocked and dismayed” when she first heard from a friend in British Columbia that someone might be poaching her work.

But then she realized that she couldn’t really evaluate the allegations first-hand. She doesn’t read Chinese either.

So she farmed it out to her trusted friend, Jennifer Jay, a historian at the University of Alberta who is fluent in Chinese, who spent a day reading an online version of Gold Mountain Blues.

Jay was careful in a telephone interview, saying she was not an expert, noting she had had limited reading time and, while intimately familiar with Disappearing Moon Café, she had not read it for a while. But she said Gold Mountain Blues did make her feel “alarm.”

“I’m not ready to say this author is a plagiarist,” she says. “At this point I’m saying it’s ‘problematic.’ ”

At the same time, says Jay, she has “a lot of sympathy” for Zhang.

“It must be a nightmare for the author to be going through this if she’s innocent,” she says.