NEW CHINESE WRITING : The Young and the Restless

In the title essay of “Imaginary Homelands” Salman Rushdie describes the novel as “one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of the truth.” In China this is a relatively new role for the novel, which all too often in recent decades has articulated and promoted the “official truth.” But times and circumstances change and readers in China and the West are getting a new look at life in the People’s Republic from those who have the greatest stake in it.

A new generation of novelists has begun to describe in graphic, revealing prose a place where surface stability uneasily masks a society in turmoil. These writers, generally in their 30s, are gaining unprecedented notoriety and acceptance in the West--if not always in their own country, where some of their work does not see the light of day until it is first published in Taiwan or Hong Kong, sometimes even in foreign translation.

In post-Mao China the generational transition process has accelerated to the point where novelists and poets are sometimes out of favor with a fickle and volatile readership within months of being lionized as the latest literary superstars. But in the wake of Tian An Men, an artistic and philosophical rupture of unprecedented significance has occurred. No longer interested in being viewed as state-supported “literary workers,” these new writers, iconoclasts to a startling degree, have claimed their independence from the literary Establishment, publishing abroad to escape ideological and financial pressures as they confidently assert their artistic freedom.

While stretching the limits of taste in their writing, they simultaneously demonstrate a heightened interest in China’s past. For them history is neither circular nor linear, but random and shifting, until the boundaries between past and present are blurred into obscurity. By denying history its traditional authority, they raise fundamental questions about contemporary life, politics and values. Visions of the future, as a result, run from murky to apocalyptic. Unthinkable acts and concepts--from sexual perversion to cannibalism--have become the trademarks of the most conspicuous writers. Historical fiction, once a refuge for writers intent on criticizing specific politics or ideologies, has now become a vast showcase of human nature at its most depraved. Additionally, the more daring among these writers are creating dialogues with their own texts and with their readers that challenge and subvert the very way we approach and interpret fiction.

Not all the young novelists retreat into China’s past for their themes and settings. Wang Shuo, by far the most frequently “featured” and talked-about writer of his generation (though not yet translated into English), has already captured a large urban readership in his own country, and now hopes to win the West with irreverent tales of hedonistic life among China’s restless, often aimless, urban youth--his vaunted “hooligan” literature. Whether the Wang Shuo fad--and I suspect that’s pretty much what it is--carries over into the outside world or not, Wang, more than any of his peers, has staked out territory independent of societal and political pressures. Straying into a sort of “punk-cool” patois and sexy, often comic, contemporary settings, Wang neatly reflects the lives of his city-dwelling contemporaries in novels as well as in the soap-opera scripts for which he has become best known in China. He is a good, often innovative, read, if not always a profound one.

Mo Yan, on the other hand, does not seek to entertain. He is attempting to rewrite the history of 20th-Century China by creating new forms of chronological narration and new approaches to an understanding of the nature and function of memory in a series of big novels beginning with “Red Sorghum” (published here this year by Viking). A disturbing but immensely satisfying tale of three generations of northern peasants who are constantly at war with outside invaders, feudal traditions and each other, it is being read by some as a metaphor for China’s fate, a view that is only partially visible in the movie adaptation. Mo’s latest novel (after “Song of Garlic in Paradise County,” which Viking will bring out here next year) is an ambitious mixture of narrative styles that focuses in part on a fictional locale where children are raised as food for officials whose jaded tastes are mocked unmercifully; it also explores the act of writing itself in a series of intriguing dialogues with the author’s alter ego.

Mo shares the anonymous Chinese countryside as his canvas with a brat-pack of even younger writers, most notably Su Tong, who at the age of 30 has already gained international acclaim through stories that seem ready-made for film while retaining the power to hold a reader’s attention. Like Mo, Su relies heavily on graphic, even lurid, descriptions of sex, violence and bodily functions, what I call “grungy realism.” As the author of “Raise the Red Lantern” (published this year by William Morrow) and, more recently, “Rice,” a powerful novel of self-damnation, and “My Life as Emperor,” an anti-historical tale of cruelty and decadence, Su is the best-known member of a generation that also includes Yu Hua, whose raw description of violence and cruelty are particularly unsettling, and Ge Fei, the most daringly experimental writer in the group. Soon the West will know a new China, thanks to these novelists, who are using their conspicuous talents to probe the dark side of human nature.

The downside of China’s rushed embrace of capitalist consumerism is visible in what may be China’s first truly Western novel, “Black Snow” (published here this year by Atlantic Monthly Press) by Liu Heng, who is best known for the movie “Judou.” The cautionary tale of a former labor-camp inmate who inhabits a world of prostitution, black markets, karaoke bars and street fights, “Black Snow” (and the prize-winning movie adapted from it) shows a seamy side of urban, entrepreneurial China that mirrors the alienation of the urban West. Like so many of the works by his contemporaries, Liu’s novel describes characters with readily identifiable neuroses, even psychoses, and a society that appears to be unraveling in the midst of economic reforms that are supposed to fulfill the national dream of becoming rich and powerful.

Concurrent with recent changes in the way novelists are writing, including the fantastic tales of Can Xue (published here by Northwestern University Press) and the virtually impenetrable works of some of her followers, are changes in the way these fin-de-siecle writers view their role as artists. No longer interested in placing their pens in the service of nation and society, they view the nationalistic zeal of their parents’ generation with skepticism at best, contempt at worst. Not dissidents in the generally understood meaning of the term, they see themselves as independent artists whose works can, and will, appeal to readers and viewers all over the world. Frequently attacked for pandering to Western tastes (for personal gain, of course) rather than writing for their countrymen, they are, if anything, becoming more defiant and self-assured. In their truth-telling about contemporary and historical China, they present a picture of a nation that is turning away from its past and demanding new paths to the future; it may turn out that, like Yukio Mishima, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nadine Gordimer before them, they are appreciated less in their own country than elsewhere.

In fact, these young writers speak to the rest of the world precisely because they no longer care to speak for China. The common thread of misanthropy running through so much of their work--and not just misogyny, of which they are sometimes accused--and the emphasis on skewed family relations and anti-Confucian behavior, which includes incest, rape, murder, voyeurism and more, underscore their belief that they are no more responsible for social instability in their country than are the entrepreneurs who want only to get rich, the students who want only to leave or the petty bureaucrats who want only to get by. Whether their pessimistic views of China turn out to be prophetic or mimetic, it will soon be as hard to believe in a benign Chinese exoticism as it has been to evoke visions of a genteel, kimono-clad Japan in the wake of novels by Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, even the trendy Banana Yoshimoto.

In fact, the comparison with Japanese writers is especially apt, since the lone voice in the crowd, infrequently heard in either society for so long, has recently come to characterize the youthful writing in both. And in the urban centers of the two countries, where images have eroded the power of ideas, and where the pace and nature of daily life are changing so rapidly, darkly cinematic writings are winning over a far more materialistic, cynical readership. “It’s the movies, stupid,” could be the catchword for novelists like Wang, whose fiction has generated a half-dozen immensely popular films in China; Liu, whose latest novel, “Old River Daydreams,” was actually adapted from his own film script; and Su, whose bleak historical movies have earned him an international reputation.

All this recent activity, it seems, is but the beginning. A steady stream of literary offerings by these and other, even younger, writers will surely establish a Chinese presence in international literary circles, just as Chinese films already have in Japan and the West. With their desire to experiment, to shock and, in the words of Wang Shuo, “to be famous till I’m dizzy, without worrying about the consequences, “ they will continue to question the official version of the truth in a country whose only colonizer, in the words of sinologist Ray Chow, is its own government. The transfer of power from Deng and his cronies to a new generation of bureaucrats has little chance of improving the lot of an alienated populace. “The wisdom of the novel,” as Milan Kundera reminds us, “comes from having a question for everything.” We readers are being supplied with a rich source of material from which we can seek answers.