present tense and modern language

A few of the reviewers here and on Amazon have commented on the use of present tense and modern language in my novel The Red Chamber--and I wanted to shed a little light on my choices. Dream of the Red Chamber, the eighteenth-century Chinese novel which inspired my book, is written in a lively, almost slangy, vernacular Chinese. I wanted to capture this by having my characters speak more informally; moreover many of my characters are teenagers!

And generally speaking Chinese verbs do not have tenses. So in "translating" (even very loosely) a Chinese novel, it makes reasonable sense to render verbs in present tense, especially since Chinese novels ultimately derive from the tradition of oral storytelling, in which a storyteller seeks to make a story present for his listeners.

I think that historical novels set in Europe may often utilize the past tense and more formal language, but The Red Chamber springs from a very different literary tradition.