What do you think?
Rate this book
如焉@sars.come
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 26, 2021
A haunting account of internet activism during the SARS outbreak, Hu Fayun’s 胡发云 *Such Is This World@sars.come*《如焉@sars.come》is a masterpiece among dissident novels.
The novel appeared online in 2003 (https://www.tianyabooks.com/cn/hfy02/...), in print from 中国国际广播出版社 in 2006, and in English as *Such Is This World@Sars.come*, translated by A. E. Clark, from Ragged Banner Press, 2011.
Although heavy and serious, Hu’s novel also offers moments of humor. Among its other functions, protagonist Ruyan’s relationship to her dog balances to some extent the novel's sadness and loneliness. This and other personal relationships frame her concerns and invite deeper reflection on facing not only viral contagion but also moral and political contagion.
As in Camus’s *The Plague* (1947), in *Such Is This World@sars.come*, nature (in the form of the pandemic) intrudes on the characters’ automatic life to force reflection and reevaluation. For the philosophically minded, the novel may thus become a moral parable about resolve, automatism, indifference, compassion or hope.
For the curious, A. E. Clark's English translation offers comprehensive endnotes with crucial explanations. These notes help convey the intricacies of China's cultural politics so well represented in Hu's Chinese original. I've been studying and writing about Chinese literature since 1985, and I have seldom learned so much so quickly. Even a long-time Sinologist will profit from the translator’s notes, which will spare students new to the field countless hours of searching to learn key material.
The novel appeared online in 2003 (https://www.tianyabooks.com/cn/hfy02/...), in print from 中国国际广播出版社 in 2006, and in English as *Such Is This World@Sars.come*, translated by A. E. Clark, from Ragged Banner Press, 2011.
Although heavy and serious, Hu’s novel also offers moments of humor. Among its other functions, protagonist Ruyan’s relationship to her dog balances to some extent the novel's sadness and loneliness. This and other personal relationships frame her concerns and invite deeper reflection on facing not only viral contagion but also moral and political contagion.
As in Camus’s *The Plague* (1947), in *Such Is This World@sars.come*, nature (in the form of the pandemic) intrudes on the characters’ automatic life to force reflection and reevaluation. For the philosophically minded, the novel may thus become a moral parable about resolve, automatism, indifference, compassion or hope.
For the curious, A. E. Clark's English translation offers comprehensive endnotes with crucial explanations. These notes help convey the intricacies of China's cultural politics so well represented in Hu's Chinese original. I've been studying and writing about Chinese literature since 1985, and I have seldom learned so much so quickly. Even a long-time Sinologist will profit from the translator’s notes, which will spare students new to the field countless hours of searching to learn key material.
December 20, 2012
Ruyan@sars.come is the original Chinese title of this novel, a beautifully written book that got wide attention when it was published online in China a couple years ago, and a book that has since been “banned” by the Chinese government, for whatever that’s worth.
Hu Fayun has written the book I’ve dreamed of: historical fiction that truly captures what China was like during the time of SARS, and that in doing so opens a panoramic historiographical window on modern China.
Just as impressive as the book is its translation by A. E. Clark, who has annotated the text with more than 400 footnotes, rather unusual for a novel, and these notes provide nothing less than a primer on modern Chinese history and politics. References to Chinese literature and poetry, slogans from throughout the Mao era, the names of the various purges Mao initiated and their victims, the songs of revolution, euphemisms for the Great Famine and the TSM, hundreds of colloquial expressions and lines with veiled meanings…. These painstaking notes help hold together a book that, to most Western readers (and probably most contemporary Chinese readers), would often be mystifying, or at least incomplete.
Before I go on about the book, let me mention that the breakout of SARS in 2003 defined my outlook on China for years to come. It was my first face-to-face encounter with the government’s capacity for deceit and flat-out dishonesty and I wasn’t at all ready for it. If you dig back into my posts on the Peking Duck blog in April of 2003, you’ll find it was all I wrote about. I was obsessed — just like everyone else in Beijing. For several months, it was SARS that caused me to look on the CCP with nothing but contempt. (My view has been significantly tempered since then.)
That explains why this book resonated with me, why I read it with such fascination, though even had I not been in China at the time I’d still find it invaluable.
Set in “City X,” Such Is This World tells the story of a 40-something widow, Ru Yan, whose son gives her a PC and a little dog before he leaves to study in France. Ru Yan discovers the Internet, and new doors open for her everywhere, universes she never knew existed, tools for talking with her son via video, and forums that allow her to express herself, and that allow her creative talents to blossom. Describing a video chat with her son:
She joins the Empty Nest forum for parents whose children are studying abroad, and her life takes on a whole new dimension. Under the screen name Such Is This World, her essays are picked up and published on other sites, and her life has a new purpose. Through the forum she becomes friends with a brilliant essayist, Damo, and through him Damo’s mentor, Teacher Wei, once a renowned party official and theoretician, a victim of Mao’s purges and later of the Cultural Revolution. By telling Damo’s and Teacher Wei’s past, the author immerses us in the horrors of Mao’s China, an irrational world in which one day you are purging people under you, and the next day they are purging you, where words innocently uttered years ago can put you at terrible risk today,where no one is safe, where guilt by association can instantly ruin the lives of individuals and families whose sole crime was having known the wrong person.Teacher Wei’s family is ripped apart, partly by his association with the disgraced writer Hu Feng, who criticized Mao’s writings, with disastrous consequences for Wei. Later his wife and children’s lives are all but ruined when it’s discovered that decades ago Wei’s brother emigrated to Taiwan.
Tales of guilt by association and never-ending persecutions is a recurring theme in the book. Banishment to the countryside, condemnation during the Cultural Revolution, getting swept up in this purge or that — most of the characters have been traumatized. The most eloquent voice on the sufferings China has gone through is Teacher Wei’s.
Ru Yan’s Internet essays come back to haunt her when she writes too honestly, especially about a strange new disease that soon creates dread throughout the country. It is with the introduction of SARS about half-way through the book that it takes on a new and page-turning intensity. Her essays destroy a promising romance between Ru Yan and a highly regarded deputy mayor and subject her to hateful abuse in the Empty Nest forum.
Three incidents converge at once. The hysteria over SARS, the US invasion of Iraq, and the murder by the police of the young graduate student Sun Zhigang. Again, this resonated with me because it was SARS and Sun Zhigang that most molded my view of China that same year. Yes, there was much more than that to China, but in 2003 I was there, alone, and these disasters became a big part of my world. Hu Fayun reminds us of the outrage the murder generated, and all that it said about the government and its vile “vagrancy” law, that was soon after eliminated. Hu recreates the terrifying scenes of yellow tape covering houses and buildings that housed SARS victims. It brought back to me the day when SARS was discovered in my own office building. I can still hear the shouts in my office, the panic. The book also brings back the insanity I witnessed every day, the huge snaking lines at the supermarket, the face masks everywhere, the empty streets, the taxis that refused to pick me up — Such Is This World @sars.come brought it all back as if it were yesterday.
But SARS is really a small part of this book. The book is about freedom, about artistic liberty, about integrity, and of how even the most ardent of reformers can be bought and paid for by a government dangling goodies and perqs. It’s also all about Mao and the fear he incited. It’s about the intellectual vacuum that Mao ushered in. One of the most poignant moments comes when Teacher Wei cries out that no great author or artist captured first-hand the horrors of Mao’s China. Russia in WWII had the great Vassily Grossman, who chronicled both Stalingrad and Treblinka, and Victor Klemperer who documented the day-to-day sufferings of Germany’s Jews as the noose tightened. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon chronicling the miseries of the Western Front of WWI. And on and on. But no one, Teacher Wei despairs, was there to capture the pain and misery of post-revolutionary China. Terror. The book is really all about terror, for terror was what life under Mao was all about, terror of being informed on, of being attacked by Red Guards, terror of saying just about anything that might be perceived as critical of Mao or the party. Terror, and cynicism, too, as sincere believers in reform become disillusioned and powerless.
According to pieces I’ve read, Ru Yan has become something of a hero to many Chinese, which makes sense. She expresses herself freely and, though by nature unpolitical, she stands up to authority, especially in one of the most grueling scenes of the book, when security guards butcher pet dogs on the streets, literally pulling them apart, another idiotic government decree to fight SARS.
This is a great novel and an unequaled look into contemporary China and how/why it is what it is today. I don’t know if it’s for sale yet in the West, but when it is, buy a copy. It has everything — suspense, intrigue, history, pathos, romance, sex (briefly), philosophy and politics. A great novel with a great translation.
A note on the somewhat awkward title, Such Is This World @sars.come. From the translator’s footnotes:
Hu Fayun has written the book I’ve dreamed of: historical fiction that truly captures what China was like during the time of SARS, and that in doing so opens a panoramic historiographical window on modern China.
Just as impressive as the book is its translation by A. E. Clark, who has annotated the text with more than 400 footnotes, rather unusual for a novel, and these notes provide nothing less than a primer on modern Chinese history and politics. References to Chinese literature and poetry, slogans from throughout the Mao era, the names of the various purges Mao initiated and their victims, the songs of revolution, euphemisms for the Great Famine and the TSM, hundreds of colloquial expressions and lines with veiled meanings…. These painstaking notes help hold together a book that, to most Western readers (and probably most contemporary Chinese readers), would often be mystifying, or at least incomplete.
Before I go on about the book, let me mention that the breakout of SARS in 2003 defined my outlook on China for years to come. It was my first face-to-face encounter with the government’s capacity for deceit and flat-out dishonesty and I wasn’t at all ready for it. If you dig back into my posts on the Peking Duck blog in April of 2003, you’ll find it was all I wrote about. I was obsessed — just like everyone else in Beijing. For several months, it was SARS that caused me to look on the CCP with nothing but contempt. (My view has been significantly tempered since then.)
That explains why this book resonated with me, why I read it with such fascination, though even had I not been in China at the time I’d still find it invaluable.
Set in “City X,” Such Is This World tells the story of a 40-something widow, Ru Yan, whose son gives her a PC and a little dog before he leaves to study in France. Ru Yan discovers the Internet, and new doors open for her everywhere, universes she never knew existed, tools for talking with her son via video, and forums that allow her to express herself, and that allow her creative talents to blossom. Describing a video chat with her son:
In the video frame he waved to Ru Yan, and then the window closed. His voice, too, disappeared in the darkness. Ru Yan thought of fairy tales she had read when she was little, with their mirrors and crystal balls and genies’ lamps haloed in the light, where supernatural beings appeared and disappeared without a trace.
She joins the Empty Nest forum for parents whose children are studying abroad, and her life takes on a whole new dimension. Under the screen name Such Is This World, her essays are picked up and published on other sites, and her life has a new purpose. Through the forum she becomes friends with a brilliant essayist, Damo, and through him Damo’s mentor, Teacher Wei, once a renowned party official and theoretician, a victim of Mao’s purges and later of the Cultural Revolution. By telling Damo’s and Teacher Wei’s past, the author immerses us in the horrors of Mao’s China, an irrational world in which one day you are purging people under you, and the next day they are purging you, where words innocently uttered years ago can put you at terrible risk today,where no one is safe, where guilt by association can instantly ruin the lives of individuals and families whose sole crime was having known the wrong person.Teacher Wei’s family is ripped apart, partly by his association with the disgraced writer Hu Feng, who criticized Mao’s writings, with disastrous consequences for Wei. Later his wife and children’s lives are all but ruined when it’s discovered that decades ago Wei’s brother emigrated to Taiwan.
Tales of guilt by association and never-ending persecutions is a recurring theme in the book. Banishment to the countryside, condemnation during the Cultural Revolution, getting swept up in this purge or that — most of the characters have been traumatized. The most eloquent voice on the sufferings China has gone through is Teacher Wei’s.
In a few decades we lost the ability to express pain and grief. We lost the ability to express love. What we got instead was something paltry and preposterous….When the revolution came full circle and hit me on the head; when I was cast down so low, with almost no hope of ever being rehabilitated, only then did certain questions occur to me. But by then the cataract of revolution was unstoppable, and thousands upon thousands of intellectuals were engulfed in the flood and washed away.
Ru Yan’s Internet essays come back to haunt her when she writes too honestly, especially about a strange new disease that soon creates dread throughout the country. It is with the introduction of SARS about half-way through the book that it takes on a new and page-turning intensity. Her essays destroy a promising romance between Ru Yan and a highly regarded deputy mayor and subject her to hateful abuse in the Empty Nest forum.
Three incidents converge at once. The hysteria over SARS, the US invasion of Iraq, and the murder by the police of the young graduate student Sun Zhigang. Again, this resonated with me because it was SARS and Sun Zhigang that most molded my view of China that same year. Yes, there was much more than that to China, but in 2003 I was there, alone, and these disasters became a big part of my world. Hu Fayun reminds us of the outrage the murder generated, and all that it said about the government and its vile “vagrancy” law, that was soon after eliminated. Hu recreates the terrifying scenes of yellow tape covering houses and buildings that housed SARS victims. It brought back to me the day when SARS was discovered in my own office building. I can still hear the shouts in my office, the panic. The book also brings back the insanity I witnessed every day, the huge snaking lines at the supermarket, the face masks everywhere, the empty streets, the taxis that refused to pick me up — Such Is This World @sars.come brought it all back as if it were yesterday.
But SARS is really a small part of this book. The book is about freedom, about artistic liberty, about integrity, and of how even the most ardent of reformers can be bought and paid for by a government dangling goodies and perqs. It’s also all about Mao and the fear he incited. It’s about the intellectual vacuum that Mao ushered in. One of the most poignant moments comes when Teacher Wei cries out that no great author or artist captured first-hand the horrors of Mao’s China. Russia in WWII had the great Vassily Grossman, who chronicled both Stalingrad and Treblinka, and Victor Klemperer who documented the day-to-day sufferings of Germany’s Jews as the noose tightened. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon chronicling the miseries of the Western Front of WWI. And on and on. But no one, Teacher Wei despairs, was there to capture the pain and misery of post-revolutionary China. Terror. The book is really all about terror, for terror was what life under Mao was all about, terror of being informed on, of being attacked by Red Guards, terror of saying just about anything that might be perceived as critical of Mao or the party. Terror, and cynicism, too, as sincere believers in reform become disillusioned and powerless.
According to pieces I’ve read, Ru Yan has become something of a hero to many Chinese, which makes sense. She expresses herself freely and, though by nature unpolitical, she stands up to authority, especially in one of the most grueling scenes of the book, when security guards butcher pet dogs on the streets, literally pulling them apart, another idiotic government decree to fight SARS.
This is a great novel and an unequaled look into contemporary China and how/why it is what it is today. I don’t know if it’s for sale yet in the West, but when it is, buy a copy. It has everything — suspense, intrigue, history, pathos, romance, sex (briefly), philosophy and politics. A great novel with a great translation.
A note on the somewhat awkward title, Such Is This World @sars.come. From the translator’s footnotes:
The Chinese title ruyan@sars.come involved an untranslatable pun on a phrase and a name, both pronounced Ru Yan… The spelling “.come,” though emended by many a journalist, is not a typographical error but rather a punning experience to the coming of the SARS epidemic which shapes Ru Yan’s experience both on the Internet and off.
February 23, 2023
作者通过小说中人物的对谈和思考，阐述了自己对新中国建国以来发生的运动、官场、社会、人心的看法，深刻且发人深省。单论小说本身的结构和情节，有时因为大段连续的思考对谈描写导致了些许不平衡感，且对情节的展开有时稍显仓促，进入冲突阶段较慢并很快结束。所以，我喜欢本书的立意甚于其作为小说本身。
May 27, 2024
算是2.5星吧。终于把这本书读完，这几月花了好大功夫。要感谢李教授把这本书介绍给我。我其实感觉故事不咋地，无聊没什么事儿的部分的拖了好久，反而有意义的部分的很快就过去了。比如说，不应该花那么多章在茹嫣在网站上做朋友的阶段的身上。可是，总的来讲，我还是从这本书得到了挺大的收获。
anyway, i was first introduced to this book for a meta anthropological/media studies case study as a way to assess chinese internet culture during/after the sars epidemic, especially in light of covid (the course i was taking took place the first semester after we were welcomed back on campus after covid). this was a pretty good window into that aspect, but i felt that other parts were lacking. the characters sketched were humanistic and had rich, complex backgrounds, even if i didn't feel like hu fayun milked the opportunities these backgrounds presented him as much as he could've. (especially the jealousy between 茹嫣 and 江晓力 -- i suppose this is what happens when a man writes a female friendship lol.)
this is the first book i read completely in chinese (with the help of google translate), and it was a really good experience, if only in the sense that it forced me to go way slower and really sit with and think about the characters and the events, which i don't do as much in english because it's so easy to speed through.
anyway, i was first introduced to this book for a meta anthropological/media studies case study as a way to assess chinese internet culture during/after the sars epidemic, especially in light of covid (the course i was taking took place the first semester after we were welcomed back on campus after covid). this was a pretty good window into that aspect, but i felt that other parts were lacking. the characters sketched were humanistic and had rich, complex backgrounds, even if i didn't feel like hu fayun milked the opportunities these backgrounds presented him as much as he could've. (especially the jealousy between 茹嫣 and 江晓力 -- i suppose this is what happens when a man writes a female friendship lol.)
this is the first book i read completely in chinese (with the help of google translate), and it was a really good experience, if only in the sense that it forced me to go way slower and really sit with and think about the characters and the events, which i don't do as much in english because it's so easy to speed through.
August 18, 2012
A review of this book by John Derbyshire in National Review magazine was enough to get me interested in reading it. But I worried that I might not enjoy it since it had made few ripples in the West beside that, it seemed. Even on Goodreads.com there were only one or two reviews. Would the translation be good to read, or would it come off somewhat stiff like a literal translation from Chinese might?
Well, I was pleasantly surprised, and like all books I really like, I dragged my feet about reading it at the end because I didn't want it to be over with. The main character, Ru Yan, is well chosen because she exists partly in innocence and naivete, partly (through her employ) as part of the corrupt Communist system, and partly as a free-thinking member of those who seek to reform the Chinese government (even though she doesn't view herself in that light). It brings out the tensions of modern China, as does the conflict between two disciples of Teacher Wei.
The story smoothly intertwines the personal and romantic world and the world of influence and politics without either being able to claim upper-hand and define the type of story one is reading. I leaned toward favoring the political aspects, but the relations between the character are very gripping and thought-provoking. Back to the political aspects: the use of Teacher Wei to provide the reader with a picture of the turbulent history of modern China, both before and after the Communist Revolution, is very effective. It makes me want to read more of the history of that period in China.
I have purchased the Chinese version (traditional characters) of the novel, and I hope to read that in a year or two. I can't speak to the accuracy of A.E. Clark's translation since I have yet to compare it to the Chinese, but I must compliment him on providing a translation that is very readable without being without Oriental flavor. Also, the copious endnotes to explain some of the linguistic and cultural points to a Western reader are very well done and helpful.
I highly recommend the novel to anyone who has an interest in the recent history of China and the daily experiences of the Chinese people.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised, and like all books I really like, I dragged my feet about reading it at the end because I didn't want it to be over with. The main character, Ru Yan, is well chosen because she exists partly in innocence and naivete, partly (through her employ) as part of the corrupt Communist system, and partly as a free-thinking member of those who seek to reform the Chinese government (even though she doesn't view herself in that light). It brings out the tensions of modern China, as does the conflict between two disciples of Teacher Wei.
The story smoothly intertwines the personal and romantic world and the world of influence and politics without either being able to claim upper-hand and define the type of story one is reading. I leaned toward favoring the political aspects, but the relations between the character are very gripping and thought-provoking. Back to the political aspects: the use of Teacher Wei to provide the reader with a picture of the turbulent history of modern China, both before and after the Communist Revolution, is very effective. It makes me want to read more of the history of that period in China.
I have purchased the Chinese version (traditional characters) of the novel, and I hope to read that in a year or two. I can't speak to the accuracy of A.E. Clark's translation since I have yet to compare it to the Chinese, but I must compliment him on providing a translation that is very readable without being without Oriental flavor. Also, the copious endnotes to explain some of the linguistic and cultural points to a Western reader are very well done and helpful.
I highly recommend the novel to anyone who has an interest in the recent history of China and the daily experiences of the Chinese people.
July 17, 2022
文笔细腻，内容深刻，不止sars，对比之前看的也是疫情主题，加缪的《鼠疫》，这个更有中国特色，读起来更有感觉。 说一个小细节吧，如焉一边骂梁晋生为什么不披露疫情，一边也不告诉儿子姐夫的事情。在上在下也都像是过度的家长心态，“为你好”，以及或许开始如此，后来在这个“为你好”之下又纳入了额外别的东西。
November 6, 2024
我也经历过一样的感情，以为是一路人，最终发现对方不是一个世界的人，都很善良，但是不能走到一起。当时自己懵懂，不知道个中缘由，如今借着作者的笔和赵老师的嘴把事情说清楚了。文中感动的地方有许多，数十载不明不白的骨肉分离，被禁足的恐惧，以及对主人公对被点燃的爱情火苗。这本书，看似是上个时代的产物，但放到如今，放到往后也没有不合适一说。
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews