Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao

by Jonathan Tel

“A remarkable and very moving feat of storytelling.” —Andrew HolgateChina is the center of the world, and the center of China is Beijing, and at the center of Beijing is a billionaire financier named Qin. At the opening of this novel-in-stories, billionaire Qin is lying in state at his funeral, victim of a sudden and premature death. Moving back and forth in time, we meet a wide range of Chinese, all linked to Qin by a degree or two of a property developer, a street artist, a prostitute, a fashion model, a spy, a thief, an expat lawyer, a muckraking journalist. By the end of this biting, post-post-modern cultural observation, the manner of Qin’s death is revealed. Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao presents today’s China in its full and fabulous complexity.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Alta]

A well written and very insightful book of linked short stories set in contemporary China by a remarkable and undervalued American writer. It is rare to read fiction by an English-speaking writer about a non-Western country that neither exoticizes nor dramatizes excessively the setting.

[Bruce Overby · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the book fair at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in L.A. in March, I had a conversation with Ruth Greenstein, the Publisher and Editorial Director of Turtle Point Press, during which she was kind enough to listen to my pitch for the unpublished novel I'm currently shopping. As is my custom, I purchased a book before leaving the Turtle Point table. That book was Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao by the author, historian, and Sinophile Jonathan Tel.

The book is a collection of tales linked in the usual way: major characters in one story reappear as minor characters in another, creating a weave that vividly portrays the many dimensions of modern China. The stories give us a financial fraudster who manipulates his marks, two nymphomaniac "sisters" who manipulate their suitors, an apprentice barber who attempts to manipulate two veteran police detectives, and many more. In "The Average Person In China," an unremarkable medical statistician breathes the rarefied air of the bribe recipient, an experience that promises to change his life trajectory for the better, and in "Year of the Panda," an aging runway model is swindled by a struggling fashion designer, leading her to unwittingly start a new craze: bicycle riders in Panda suits taking to the streets of cities all over China.

At the sentence level, this book is the work of an expert practitioner of rhythm and metaphor. I have to admit, however, that some of Tel's syntactical forays felt a little off-putting. The book's first paragraph, for instance, stretching for nearly three full pages, is presented as a single sentence, even though all Tel has done is insert commas where periods or semicolons should rightly appear. And the final piece in the book gives us one side of a two-person dialog, which both exposes the avarice of the speaking character and holds the reader in suspense for what turns out to be a surprise ending. These devices certainly serve the stories, but they left this reader teetering between feeling impressed as a writer and feeling manipulated as a reader.

That said, in the final analysis, I found Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao a work of excellent literary quality, and a good example of the fine literature one can find coming out of small publishers today.

[Ari Rickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost unreadable for the first few pages, but ultimately wonderful because of it. Tel accomplishes so much in this book. As far as I can tell, it really does get "inside the heads of people living in China today", but even if it doesn't the book is worth it for the playfulness of the storytelling, for the way it captures so many emotional truths that feel like fresh insights at the same time that that seem so true they should be cliches (particularly the observations on money and bribery in The Average Person in China – which reminded me of Independence Square’s main character recognizing that the Ukrainian gangster has experienced so much more of life, both the highs and the lows). I enjoyed Tel's ability to pull off so many types of short stories, from the sweeping historical fiction of The Human Phonograph to the daring one-sided dialogue of The Sadness and the Beauty of the Billionaire. Not every story was as impactful as those two, but almost all are worth reading in their own right. And the way Tel subtly strings them together, with pandas on bicycles and repeating characters who interact and impact each other's lives in ways that would be impossible to envision outside narrative fiction gave me butterfly-effect goosebumps.

[2TReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick and enjoyable read. These stories written by an American author did very well in avoiding 'othering' his Chinese characters. Each could have been a story about a financier from any country, who dipped his hands into too many pots and whose activities had far reaching and interesting effects.

An interesting set of short stories that one by one reveal some connection to or information about Qin, who is introduced in the very first story as being viewed at his wake/funeral.

Each story reveals a bit more of who Qin was and what he did, and how he interacted or was connected to the main character of each story, even if it was just fleeting.

[Apsalz08 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it within a week, which never happens. The stories weave seamlessly together and the author has a real knack for scene setting in China.

[Keith Johnson]

Truly excellent