So, without further ado, back to blogging the bookshelf….

Synopsis: An influential collection of “Neo-realist” fictional novellas from a leading member of China’s “New Generation” of nihilistic authors.

My Take: Part of the reason that I love modern Chinese fiction is the rich vein of conflict that the nation’s ongoing economic and societal upheavals offer the nation’s authors. The fact that the economic and cultural structures that underpin Chinese society have been in a constant flux for more than 50 years offers Chinese fiction writers an enormously rich dramatic canvas on which to practice their craft.

Zhu Wen’s  “I Love Dollars” is close to the paradigm example of this. Released in 1994, “I Love Dollars” pushed Zhu to the forefront of the “New Generation” of post-Tianenmen, “Neo-Realist” Chinese authors. These authors sought to break from the strictures of both the classical and propagandistic Chinese literary paradigms and to portray the changing Chinese society as it is (or more accurately, as they saw it).  The result is a highly unsentimental take on a series of characters trying to adapt in a world that is moving rapidly beneath their feet.

Zhu’s novellas romanticise neither ‘traditional’ Chinese society nor the receding Communist economy, expressing equal contempt for the desire to cling too closely to either world. However, neither does Zhu’s writing express any particular enthusiasm for the future. The economically liberalising China of Deng’s creation is seen not as liberation from the repression of the past, but as a society wide sand-blasting of all human values bar the pursuit of economic enrichment.

As a result, Zhu’s characters seem almost universally cut off from a meaningful life.  Those who have adapted to the new China are often nihilistic or hedonistic souls adrift from any moral anchoring. Those who long to return to either of the nation’s agrarian or communist pasts are viewed as sad, slightly pathetic anachronisms. All however, are victims of the larger forces of Chinese society and the helplessness of the individual amidst the grand sweep of historical change.

While there’s more than enough of interest in the ‘big picture’ themes of Zhu’s books, his prose is also worth checking out. Zhu’s writing conveys the minutiae of modern Chinese life via a sparse and positively caustic prose.  The opening of one of the novella’s in this collection, Pounds, Ounces, Meat offers an illustrative glimpse:

On the bridge by the old Drum Tower I was stopped by a shabby individual, clearly someone who’d wandered in from out of town, with a black bag tucked under his arm and an unnerving gleam in his eyes. He told me my physiognomy was most unusual; he simply had to tell my fortune, he wouldn’t charge a cent. The plastic on top of the bridge had melted tackily in the sun: crossing felt like walking over spat-out chewing gum, or smoker’s phlegm, or snot, or semen, or fresh dog shit. I include these comparisons purely to illuminate, not disgust, you understand. If I were to suggest you imagine it was raw meat underfoot, now that, I admit, would be nauseating. Fuck off, I told him as impatiently as I could manage.

Briefly, all too briefly, the man was transfixed by shock, too transfixed to manage any kind of response, till I’d reached the end of the bridge’s elevation and was about to set off down the steps on the other side. Good luck’s coming your way this year! He screeched vengefully at me across the asphalt. About fucking time, I muttered to myself as I descended. When I was halfway down, I happened to look up and see a girl with a healthily tanned face coming toward me up the steps, carrying a black parasol and a copy of I Love Dollars. My heart began to pound. I wasn’t sure, at that moment, whether this counted as my good luck or not. In subsequent weeks and months, I often thought back over this scene, about this girl and that book, about how she kept the latter pressed beguilingly up against her chest, blinding me to its obvious flatness.

This blunt style of writing caused a not insignificant degree of controversy in the PRC of 1994. However it doesn’t feel affected in the context of the disconnected nature of the book’s characters and the neo-realist ambitions of the author. It’s blunt, but appropriately so.

Highlight:

“Is sex the only thing that matters ? Is there nothing else ?” Father threw the pile of manuscripts to one side, shaking his head furiously.

“Let me ask you a question: how come you only pick up on the sex in what I write, and nothing else ?”

“A writer ought to offer people something positive, something to look up to, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom, stuff like that.”

“Dad, I’m telling you, all that stuff, it’s all there in sex.”

My Take: Those who know me know that I’m a bit of a Sinophile. While the human rights record of the Chinese government is obviously indefensible and deserves public attention and debate, I do get a bit annoyed at the generally simplistic analysis applied to issues involving China.

China is obviously not a free society. Its citizens are constrained by the constant threat of brutal repression. But the trajectory of societal development is clearly towards increased personal freedom. There’s a legitimate discussion about whether the pace of this societal change is adequate, but nobody could argue that China under Hu Jintao is less free than it was under Jiang Zemin, or less free under Deng Xiaoping than it was under Mao. China today is more complex than the totalitarian police state caricature.

China’s people are far from a brain-washed, homogenous mass. While there are still absolute taboo topics with hideous consequences for transgressors, there is currently a vigorous political/philosophical debate occurring in China. Mark Leonard’s book, “What Does China Think?” provides a useful idiot’s guide to these debates. The book’s introduction provides a good synopsis of the ground that Leonard covers:

“Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.

….While it is true there is no free discussion about ending the Communist party’s rule, independence for Tibet or the events of Tiananmen Square, there is a relatively open debate in leading newspapers and academic journals about China’s economic model, how to clean up corruption or deal with foreign policy issues like Japan or North Korea.”

To my mind, the most interesting part of “What Does China Think” is Leonard’s survey of Chinese experiments with new models of governance. There seems to be a lot of experimentation with different ways of making Government more responsive to its citizens – without actually introducing democracy. The result is an interesting series of bounded public consultations – focus groups, opinion polls, citizen deliberative juries – designed to increase citizens’ voice within specific circumscribed parameters, without actually giving them the power to challenge the Communist Party’s power.

As Leonard tells it:

The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the political process, but has supplemented them with new types of deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen “à la carte.”

The authorities certainly seem willing to experiment with all kinds of political innovations. In Zeguo, they have even introduced a form of government by focus group. But the main criterion guiding political reform seems to be that it must not threaten the Communist party’s monopoly on power. Can a more responsive form of authoritarianism evolve into a legitimate and stable form of government?

Leonard terms the result ‘deliberative dictatorship’ and it’s interesting despite its numerous and obvious shortcomings. “What Does China Think” is a useful primer for the way the Chinese elite view the world and the policy challenges facing their nation.

Highlights:

“We are used to China’s growing influence on the world economy—but could it also reshape our ideas about politics and power? This story of China’s intellectual awakening is less well documented. We closely follow the twists and turns in America’s intellectual life, but how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker? Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.”

My Take: I grabbed this wanting an accessible layman’s guide to the quirks of Chinese society.

Unfortunately this collection is very uneven, ranging from shallow and patronising observations about the west to insightful explanations of the Chinese mindset. Given that Xinran is really not a very talented writer she needs extremely compelling content to keep you interested. This book doesn’t deliver on this account.

Xinran is at her best when she’s writing about the Chinese but is simply painful when she ventures into commentaries on the West (apparently Western men are looking for the same things in a wife as Chinese men – A beautiful, quiet woman to do the house keeping and produce a male heir – hmmm). Meh.

My Take: While I have a strong aversion to “suffering Chinese women literature” (eg “Wild Swans”, “Good Women of China”, “Mao’s Concubine” etc etc – I get it ok, women suffered in China, but so did lots of other people and they don’t have their own cottage industry) and this book was written by an oppressed Chinese woman, I took a punt on this book because it didn’t look like it was aimed at the sisterhood.

I’m glad I did.

Lost in the Crowd is an amazingly restrained and detailed account of the author’s time in cadre schools and re-education labour camps during the Cultural Revolution. A prestigious professor of foreign literature before the revolution (ironically, translating Don Quixote into Chinese), Jiang was labeled a “Cow Monster” and was consigned to being a toilet cleaner before being moved to a rural labor and re-education camp.

My Take: While I love Chinese food, I’ve always approached it from a the perspective of an ignorant gweilo – happily eating what more culturally enriched friends recommend, but not really understanding what to look for myself. Usefully, in this book Fuchsia Dunlop manages to explain the nuances of the different Chinese cuisines and the markers of high quality dishes without forcing the reader to digest an entire book about nothing but food. By mixing in elements of travelogue, memoir, culinary appreciation and social commentary on the development of China from the early 90s through to today, Dunlop is able to hold the reader’s attention with a diverse smorgasbord of interesting tidbits while also providing an in-depth explanation of the unique characteristics of Chinese cuisine. I found concepts like ‘mouthfeel’, ‘complex flavours’ and the myriad specialised  ways of cutting ingredients for the wok particularly fascinating.

Highlight: Other that learning that chillies were only introduced into Sichuan cooking in the 16th century by Portuguese traders, the most surprising thing I learnt from this book was the many intricate and highly specialised ways various ingredients could be cut to create different flavours in a wok:

“Every student would be casually carrying around a lethally-sharp cleaver, which took some getting used to. To begin with I retained my European view of the cleaver as a bloody, murderous knife – it was only later that I began to appreciate it as the subtle, versatile instrument that it really is. (The cleaver is usually the only knife in a Chinese kitchen, and it is used for every kind of cutting, from peeling ginger and garlic cloves to chopping through meat and bone; the flat of the blade is also used for crushing pieces of ginger to release their juices, and for scooping up cut foods and transferring them from chopping board to wok.)

….

The art of cutting is fundamental to Chinese cooking. We had to learn all the different knife techniques, and the myriad of different shapes into which food can be cut. There were ‘horse-ear’ slices of pickled chilli; slivers, cubes and chunks of meat and poultry, ‘fish-eye’ slices of spring onion, wafer-thin ‘ox-tongue’ slices of radish and lettuce stem.

Also fascinating was the amount of thought that goes into developing the ‘complex flavours’ for your dish:

A well balanced Sichuan meal ‘will awaken your tastebuds through the judicious use of chilli oil, stimulate your tongue and lips with tingly Sichuan pepper, caress your palate with a spicy sweetness, electrify you with dry fried chillies, soothe you with sweet and sour, calm your spirits with a tonic soup’.

Sounds great!

My Take: A common theme in the ex-pat Chinese authors I’ve read to date (eg Ha Jin, Yiyun Li) is melodrama and The Girl Who Played Go is no exception. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but they definitely turn the emotional torment of their characters up to 11. I’m still trying to work out whether this is an inherently Chinese characteristic or something that has been triggered by the torments of fleeing your home country. At any rate, I think the heightened emotions work in this book and fitted well with the story’s dramatic canvas of soldiers, revolutionaries and teenage girls.

Highlight: From the reviews I’ve read the ending is a bit of a love it or loathe it affair. For my part I liked it and thought it gave the book a much greater impact than it had developed up to that time. I’m not going to spoil it for you though – you’ll just have to read it for yourself.

Synopsis:

My Take: Before this book I hadn’t been sure about what to make of Ha Jin. His most acclaimed book ‘Waiting’ is a justified classic (best described by a reviewer as taking Romeo and Juliet, extending the courtship over 20 years and setting it in North Western China – stay tuned for a much longer post on this in future). But I was less impressed with his collection of loosely themed short stories in “The Bridgegroom“. It was interesting, but nothing special. I couldn’t work out whether he was a great writer or whether he just struck it lucky with one great story.

After reading The Crazed though I’m willing to give him his dues as a great writer. While he has a fairly bare style and a very dark outlook, Ha Jin is able to craft stories with remarkably strong emotional substance. As an ex-pat Chinese author he’s got a rich palette of emotional subject matter to draw on, but he’s careful not to overplay the emotional triggers.

Highlight:

“It’s personal interests, that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history.”