Tash Aw on five great books about China The world's interest in China has never been greater, but also never as confused: we look at it with an uneasy mixture of fascination and fear, contempt and envy. And yet we seem too timid to explore China in a literary sense. Yiyun Li lives in America and writes in English, yet her work is mired in China's recent transformations. Her second collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), casts its eye on the way contemporary China deals with the breakneck speed of development. Ha Jin is perhaps the most prominent Chinese writer living in America. My favourite novel of his remains Waiting (1999), a delicate, gently comic story of a doctor trying to divorce his simple village wife in favour of his educated girlfriend, yet finding himself unable to do so. Set in the frozen landscape next to the Russian border, it has warmth on every page. Yu Hua is one of China's most celebrated literary names - his 2005 Cultural Revolution novel, Brothers, sold millions of copies in China. Yet his collection of essays, China in Ten Words (2012) is, for me, easily his strongest work. Ma Jian is another exiled writer whose works are banned in China. Beijing Coma (2008) is a once-in-a-lifetime novel because of the way it takes a colossally tragic subject (the Tiananmen Square protests) and treats it with tender, sometimes surreal comedy.