Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "china"

Vertical Motion by Can Xue (Open Letter, 2011. Trans. from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping)

The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Other Press, 2009)

I had read Five Spice Street—one of the most original novels I’ve ever come across—by Can Xue, so I knew what to expect when I opened Vertical Motion. The latter is a rather eclectic collection, from the title story, written in a dry, impersonal tone, in the voice of a “little critter” that lives deep under the earth, to more emotionally-colored stories, such as “Cotton Candy,” in which a child, fascinated with a cotton-candy machine, daydreams about being a vendor.

This collection, although less captivating than Five Spice Street, confirmed my impression that Can Xue is one of the most interesting contemporary world writers. Several months later, the power of her novel is undiminished: I am still thinking about it, in spite of a less-than-average translation (which makes it all the more impressive). Surprisingly, Vertical Motion, which has been translated by the same team, is quite a good translation. I am not sure how to explain this: a better editor, more revisions, or simply the fact that the translators are now more experienced?

Immediately after finishing Vertical Motion, I discovered The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel. Considering that this too is about contemporary China, and the stories in both collections have been published roughly around the same time, I thought that a parallel discussion might be interesting.

Tel lives in both Beijing and New York, and, if one is to believe his bio note, he has worked as a quantum physicist and an opera librettist. I am a little skeptical simply because the tone and style of the book are those of someone who could make up his bio. On the other hand, Tel’s writing is so different than that of his American (MFA-ized) contemporaries that maybe he is telling the truth.

The Beijing of Possibilities is one of the wittiest books by an American writer I’ve read in a while. The writing often sounds journalistic (if this were a film, I would say “like a documentary”): few adjectives and apparently simple sentences, but which delve into the described reality in an immediate way (that is, a way that sounds un-mediated, raw and honest); but this narrative approach sometimes takes unexpected turns and veers toward the fairy tale mode or the allegoric-fantastic. I can tell that Jonathan Tel lives in two parallel worlds because the structure of his stories is often “bipolar”: he would start with a story about ancient China, and then move to a story about contemporary China. Little by little the reader realizes that the two are different versions of the same story.

Because of his unusual approach to storytelling, Jonathan Tel has been compared to Sebald and Calvino, but, frankly, I don’t see many parallels, except for the photographs inserted in some of the stories. Personally, I think he is a very original writer, and I am at a loss regarding a possible comparison (which is impressive: how many writers do you know who don’t write like anyone else?)

Whether you are looking for an intelligent book of fiction, or a book on cotemporary China, The Beijing of Possibilities is a great read: as in many places undergoing profound transformations, contemporary Chinese reality is sometimes more surreal than fiction (I’ll only mention the Gorilla man, i.e., a man dressed as a gorilla, whose job is to sing celebratory songs on special occasions to office employees all across the city).

We have become accustomed by now to controversial selections for the Nobel Prize in literature, so in this sense it came as no surprise that the latest choice has, once again, left some people shaking their heads. The difference is that this time the surprise was not over the “obscurity” of the writer, but the political implications of the choice. Not only is Mo Yan no dissident, he has often taken positions supporting the Chinese regime. In this sense, the Nobel jury, which in recent years has chosen writers whose political stances were at least as important as their writings (Orhan Pamuk, Herta Müller, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Harold Pinter, etc.), has surprised us. Some—Ian Buruma, for instance—have claimed that the surprise is a good one, considering that much too often the Nobel prize has been awarded for other reasons that strictly literary ones. Others—those concerned with human rights violations, in particular—have been very critical of the prize.

Although highly appreciated in his home country, Mo Yan has often acted in a way that can not only be categorized as cowardly, but can be said to support antidemocratic and anti-intellectual practices of the Chinese government. Mo Yan has defended himself against his detractors by commenting that literature should not be expected to be “political,” and that for him literature and politics are separate. In principle, I agree with this statement (although the question of what is “political” may have many different answers), but as it happens, Mo Yan doesn’t agree with himself. I mean that literature shouldn’t be expected to express directly a specific political ideology (even “engaged” writers like Sartre knew this, and their best works are only indirectly political). But Mo Yan’s novels are among the most political novels I’ve read, and his statement is dishonest. Red Sorghum (Penguin Books, 1994) is a historical novel, and both Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads (Arcade Publishing, 1995, 2012) are heroic epics concerned with the lives of Chinese peasants at various moments in history. Red Sorghum takes place in 1923-24 and the late thirties, during the war against Japan. The Garlic Ballads is set in the late eighties, and depicts the interaction between peasants and various local Chinese officials. The image of the latter is at best unattractive; at worst, these officials are portrayed as highly corrupt and criminal.

Mo Yan is a very political writer, but he is political in a way that has the seal of approval of the Chinese government. There are many events of China’s history (like the wars against Japan) or the corruption of local Chinese officials that are considered fair criticism. The latter, in particular, is acceptable as long as the system itself is not questioned. Therefore, when Mo Yan speaks against politics in literature, what he really means is that he has no intention to criticize the Chinese government and communism as an ideology per se (truth be told, no one has asked him to mix politics and literature—rather, he was expected to act in a more dignified way in the public sphere situated outside the literary space). My guess is that his defense of the Chinese government is rooted in a strong nationalism (visible in his writings) and a hatred of modernity and materialism (brought to China by the “foreign devils”).

Having said this, let’s take a look at the novels themselves. Both novels are the kind of long epics that require patience and stamina to finish. In a way, they are very Hollywoodian (Red Sorghum, by the way, was made into a very successful film by Jiang Yimou): they are packed with action, killings, guns, policemen, backstabbing, survival after near-death experiences, deeds of heroism and betrayal, and images of gorgeous landscapes. Red Sorghum is set in the village where Mo Yan grew up and which, after he was awarded the Nobel, the government decided to proudly turn into a Chinese theme park. The setting is described with the passionate intensity of the former peasant (i.e., Mo Yan) who longs for his roots: “A boundless expanse of sorghum greeted the reddening sun”; “The space between heaven and earth was filled with the red dust of sorghum and the fragrance of sorghum wine”; “She opens her eyes amid the pearly drops of sorghum”; “Grandma and Granddad exchanged their love surrounded by the vitality of the sorghum field. … My father was conceived with the essence of heaven and earth…”; “[The sorghum stalks] begin to moan, to writhe, to shout, to entwine her.”

Mo Yan is famous for his visceral naturalism, in which he presents the nature of all living creatures in a non-sentimental, raw way (his men fart and belch even in the most romantic moments). Here is an extreme example: “the bloated carcasses of dozens of mules had been found floating in the Black Water River …; their distended bellies, baked by the sun, split and popped, released their splendid innards, like gorgeous blooming flowers.” These descriptions are certainly beautiful, but when the author estheticizes scenes with people killed in horrible acts of violence, something seems wrong.

Red Sorghum starts in 1939, when the narrator’s grandmother, a beautiful young woman of unusual intelligence and courage, is killed by the Japanese while bringing food to the father of her child, Yu Zhan’ao (also referred to as “Commander Yu”), and his comrades-in-arms. From here, the story goes backward, following a hard-to-define temporal structure that is also present in The Garlic Ballads. It would be too simplistic to say that the story moves back and forth in time, though it does move between 1939 and 1923 (before Douguan, the narrator’s father, was conceived), with occasional flashbacks or “flashforwards” to other years, one of them being 1985, when the narrator returns to his native village.

In 1923 the narrator’s (future) grandmother is sixteen and betrothed to a rich man, owner of a sorghum wine distillery, who has only a small problem: he’s a leper. The future bride is transported in a sedan chair pulled by several hired men, including Yu Zhan’ao, who eventually kills the bridegroom and moves in with the bride, with whom he fathers a child, Douguan. The novel is written mainly in the third person, from the point of view of the narrator, who has heard the story from his father (Douguan), but there are moments when the author moves away from this structure to give a voice to other characters.

I confess I didn’t understand whether the fighting with the Japanese described for big chunks of the novel, had occurred only once, twice, or three or more times. The present is always mixed with the past (something specific to many Chinese writers) and the same butchery occurs in all the fighting scenes, so, in the end, it’s impossible to tell when a battle has ended and another one has begun. It all seems like the same, unending battle, to which the writer keeps coming back. Red Sorghum includes some of the most violent scenes I’ve ever encountered in a novel: a scene in which the Japanese order a local butcher to skin a man alive; a scene in which, after murdering with a bayonet a little girl in front of her mother, the Japanese soldiers rape and kill the latter; a scene in which, after a (or several) battle(s) with the Japanese, hundreds of dogs from the neighboring villages come to devour the corpses—a truly nightmarish landscape that proves the author’s penchant for horrific exaggeration.

The Garlic Ballads is less bloody, but very violent, nonetheless. To begin with, the novel has an epigraph from none other than Stalin, which is—ironically—an admonishment to novelists who try to “distance themselves from politics.” My personal guess is that Mo Yan uses the famous name as a password in order to get his “ballad”—which criticizes corrupt Chinese officials and policemen—past the censors.

This novel too has a complicated structure: each chapter is preceded by a quote from a ballad by Zhang Kou, Paradise County’s blind minstrel, in which are summarized the chapter’s events. It is from one of these summaries that we find out that the events take place in 1987 (the book, published in 1988, was, according to some accounts, banned after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989). Like Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads is built around an element that infuses the entire novel: here it’s garlic (in all its states, fresh and rotten, incorporated in dishes and drinks). But don’t get ready for a fiesta of the senses: by the end of the novel, after dozens of pages of putrefied garlic, and men who belch after eating too much of it, you don’t want to hear of anything garlicky for a while!

The story begins with the arrest of several people accused of having participated in a mob attack against the County offices—Gao Jinjiao, Gao Ma, Fourth Aunt Fang, Gao Yang—and then, like Red Sorghum, moves back in time, and then forward again. I lost count of how many times Gao Yang is forced to drink his own urine (whether in school or in his prison cell), and how many times Jinju (Fourth Aunt Fang’s daughter), in love with Gao Ma in spite of her parents’ wish for her to marry someone else, is savagely beaten by her parents and brothers.

A very original narrative technique is that in the next-to-last chapter the excerpt from the ballad sung by Zhang Kou is followed by an authorial intervention: “At this point in Zhang Kou’s ballad a ferocious policeman jumped to his feet and cursed. . . . He kicked Zhang Kou in the mouth, cutting off the final note. . . .” Yet, it is only in the last chapter that the minstrel appears in the story itself, and we are told that he too was briefly incarcerated, released, and then murdered on a sidewalk, his mouth crammed full with sticky mud. Undoubtedly, Mo Yan has conceived the slain minstrel as a stand-in for the Artist who tells the truth—thus (in his vision!) for himself. The technique of the ballad as a meta-story that parallels (or mirrors) the thread of the novel, and the characters’ speech peppered with proverbs and “peasant wisdom” remind me of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, whose novels display the same tension between an old way of life and a society built on communist bureaucracy.

I admit I forced myself to finish Mo Yan’s novels because I believe that he is a good stylist and a master of impressive novelistic structures, but I didn’t particularly enjoy them: it’s not simply that I don’t enjoy reading dozens of pages of war and prison descriptions; what I find hard to swallow is the author’s belief in a “greater” China, a China of the past when men (and women) acted heroically, in contrast with the people of today, only interested in material comfort. Frankly, if Mo Yan’s example of this greatness is that of a time when men ate only “fistcakes” for more than ten years, and spent their lives butchering each other, committing such acts of bravery as stuffing a goat’s belly with five hundred bullets in order to retrieve them later (once again, Mo Yan might have used the word “hundreds” a little too lightly!), I’m with the people of today. Still, Mo Yan is a very complex writer, and his novels are worth reading. Both novels (and, in fact, all of Mo Yan’s novels that have appeared in English) have been masterfully translated by Howard Goldblatt, who deserves at least part of the credit for his Nobel Prize.

Chan Koonchung—who was raised in Hong Kong, has studied in Boston, worked for many years as a successful journalist/editor, and now lives in Beijing—knows what Westerners go for, so he has packaged a novel with all the necessary ingredients: references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, a succinct compilation of the most important events in 20th century Chinese history—this alone is evidence of the audience the author had in mind, as one would only do that for a foreign audience—and criticism of China’s “Golden Age of Ascendency.” There isn’t a cheaper way to success than giving people what they want, and Chan Koonchung knows exactly what a Western, in particular an American audience, wants to hear about China.

The novel’s premise isn’t bad, but to compare it with Orwell, as it has been done, or to call it a satire, when you can’t find a grain of wit or irony in it just shows how gullible Western readers are. The translation may be partially responsible for the cardboard atmosphere, but the main culprit is, no doubt, the author. From the get-go this is a book for fast-food lovers (read: lovers of preprocessed cultural experiences), and this is a novel written as if the author had a list with points to check, all based on market research: does he need a reference to English-language literature? Jane Austen. A reference to French culture? [insert name of] French red wine.

I can see why this novel has gotten so much attention: if you are an American businessman or journalist obsessed with the ascendance of China, this novel contains a lot of interesting information about contemporary China, without being too alienating in its cultural references, which are all carefully selected. But if you are actually interested in literature—after all, this book claims to be a novel—look for something else. The worst thing about this book, however, is not its bad writing and preprocessed message, but the fact that a product conceived in the most abject Capitalist style (that is, by conforming to the expectations of the largest possible market) can actually fool people by pretending that it’s the opposite of what it is.