Our News, Your News
By Cindy M. Carter, July 20, '07
Back in 1990, long before I had even begun studying Chinese, I remember Chalmers Johnson - in an undergraduate politics class about revolution, of all things - commenting that "the Chinese have a very scatological sense of humour." At the time, I had no reference point, no way of assessing the veracity of his claim, so I chalked it up to the amiable ramblings of a brilliant professor lulled to boredom by sleepy undergraduates, San Diego's balmy clime and the interminable weight of tenure.
Now, 17 years later, I find myself working on three excerpts by three very different Chinese authors - Yu Hua, Zhu Wen and Li Er - that have inspired me to revisit Chalmers Johnson's observation. In each of these passages, feces plays a starring role. While I'm in no mood to make generalizations about scatology or humour in China, this is marvelous excuse to introduce translations from a few favorite authors.
Yu Hua's Brothers
Protagonist Li ("Baldy") Guangtou sits atop his gold-plated toilet dreaming of his impending voyage into space on a Russian civilian shuttle and remembering his youth. Oh, the hazy crazy days of peeping at female asses through the partition of a public toilet...
Zhu Wen's What is Love and What is Garbage:
On the worst day of his life, protagonist Xiao Ding finds himself (1) the laughingstock of bar hostesses (2) a refugee who flees a bar only to enter the most ungodly toilet imaginable (3) a man without a shred of toilet paper (4) the butt of a prank by an unkind stranger standing at the urinals. On days like this, you might as well just call it quits...
Li Er's Truth and Variations:
While some might see Doctor Bai as a freak or a fetishist, he is in fact an expert in all things excremental: a scholar of shit, a doyen of dung, a professor of piddle, piss and poop. We say this with all due respect to his academic background, interests and credentials.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, July 12, '07
If you live in Beijing, you can catch a radio piece on Paper Republic, featuring Cindy Carter and yours truly, on China Radio International tomorrow. That's Thursday the 12th, both at 8.30am and 4.30pm, on 91.5FM. Or, if you're not local, you ought to be able to find it on their website. Thanks Weiwei!
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 10, '07
A very interesting article in the Washington Post today brings up the damage censorship does to Chinese art, mostly via the example of Yan Lianke and his novels. The bulk of the article is given over to the mechanisms of censorship, and how Yan waters down his work to make it publishable, though I was excited to read this paragraph:
Yan's little compromise illustrates one of the most tragic aspects of the Communist Party censorship that is imposed on journalism and art in China. In many ways, the country's 1.3 billion people are being deprived of the full bloom of their culture, with thousands of artists like Yan forced to calculate how much they can get away with rather than cutting loose with their talent unfettered.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, July 3, '07
From left to right: our gracious host, Feng Tang, Lao Xiao of CCTV, and Lao Luo, once a famous English teacher, not sure what he does these days.
And here is Wang Xiaoshan – blogger, long-suffering journalist, and good man in disguise – author Xu Xing, and Ai Dan (?), who everyone assumed I had heard of, though I hadn't.
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By Cindy M. Carter, July 1, '07
As you can see, we're still in the process of construction - adding slowly but steadily to our database of books and authors. Worth a look are two recent additions to our author database:
Author: Li Er (postings from Cindy)
Truth and Variations (novel)
The Pomegranate Tree Sprouts a Cherry (novel)
Author: Feng Tang (postings from Eric)
Given a Girl at Age 18 (novel)
Everything Grows (novel)
By Cindy M. Carter, June 29, '07
Bashi Niandai Fangtanlu (八十年代访谈录), Sanlian Shudian, 2006. 453 pages.
With a roster of interviewees that includes poet Bei Dao, author Ah Cheng, rock musician Cui Jian and filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zha Jianying looks back on the cultural, artistic and social legacy of 1980s mainland China. Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary China, the book is also filled with fascinating trivia: Who knew that poet/essayist Mang Ke once worked in a paper factory? Or that before cycling around Beijing to make their deliveries, he and the other founders of the influential samizdat literary magazine “Today” took the precaution of altering their bicycle license plates in case they had to make a quick getaway? The interviews are generally very frank, and yield some candid admissions (film critic Lin Xudong’s reservations about Jiang Wen’s films, for example, or his championing of Wang Bing’s “West of Tracks” and Jia Zhangke’s “Xiao Wu” as the two finest Chinese films to emerge in this decade) as well as some startling omissions (Bei Dao’s refusal to discuss contemporary Chinese poetry in any detail).
Unfortunately, the book is not yet available in English translation. Here is a blurb (translation mine) from Zha Jianying’s e-mail interview with poet Bei Dao:
Zha Jianying: Some contend that the 1980s were an era of mainland Chinese idealism, and that the present age is one of pragmatism and materialism - an era in which the vast majority of mainland Chinese intellectuals, artists and writers have either been co-opted by the status quo, seduced by wealth and fame, or simply lulled by the prospect of security and respectability. Would you agree with this assessment? In commenting about a Chinese artist who had traded in a rebellious youth for a career in business, you once wrote: “In the end, commerce trumps everything.” Do you think that the commercialization of our society has eroded rather than nourished, corrupted rather than sustained, contemporary Chinese art and literature?
Bei Dao: I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification. The 1980s posed their own problems; they also gave rise to the 1990s crisis. What you’re implying is that the idealism of the eighties failed to take root. In the 1980s, intellectuals born and raised during the Chinese Cultural Revolution were just beginning to make their mark, but they had yet to establish their own traditions. Nor had they managed to overcome the obstacles that prevented them from carrying on the traditions of the May Fourth Movement (1919), a period in history that constitutes a cultural lifeline for Chinese intellectuals. Any nation in the process of modernization will, at some point, be afflicted by commercialization. The question is: how do we maintain our principles in such a constantly shifting environment?
Zha Jianying: Do you ever feel nostalgic for the 1980s? What are your hopes for the future of Chinese poetry?
Bei Dao: No matter what, I will always feel a certain nostalgia for the 1980s, despite the various crises we weathered. Every nation prides itself on a certain cultural or literary high watermark: the “silver age” of Russian literature in the early 20th century is but one example. I think that the 1980s represented the high point of 20th century Chinese culture. I fear that we may have a long wait before we see such a flowering again, and that our generation may not live to see it. The renaissance of Chinese art and literature in the 1980s grew out of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. As the saying goes, “seismic cataclysms unearth new springs”; were it not for the Cultural Revolution, the eighties would never have played out the way they did. But more important is the way the curtain fell: in the tragi-heroic finale to the 1980s, we witnessed the vitality of an ancient culture, its aesthetic and artistic significance and its latent potential. For all these reasons and more, we have just cause to be proud.
By Brendan O'Kane, June 25, '07
Following the link to Words Without Borders that Eric posted yesterday, I found Allan H. Barr's translation of Yu Hua's "Appendix" (阑尾), which I thought was quite well-done. The story itself, with its black humor and hints at a reference to the 赤脚医生 barefoot doctors, could make for a good introduction to Yu Hua for the uninitiated. Barr does a nice job of rendering it into readable English without any of the clangers and infelicities that marred "The Bane of My Existence."
The original Chinese can be found here.
By Cindy M. Carter, June 24, '07
Just bought Li Hongqi's novel "Lucky Bastard" (李红旗 《幸运儿》). It was the back cover blurbs that caught my eye: high praise from Han Dong and Zhu Wen; few first-time Chinese authors can ask for better that that.
In Zhu Wen's amusing preface to the book, he admits that although he has been "lazy" about writing lately, he was pleased to write a few paragraphs on behalf of Li Hongqi, a young poet-novelist who first came to Zhu Wen's attention with his poem "Friends".
I liked "Friends" so much that I translated it on the spot:
Poem: Friends
Poet: Li Hongqi
In the autumn of 1994,
many people were engaged
in the study of sexual intercourse.
That's about the time I learned it.
Naturally, prior to that autumn
there were a good many people
who'd been having intercourse for years,
and of course a whole lot more
who hadn't mastered it,
even by the autumn of 1994.
If all those interested alumni
of the sexual intercourse
circa autumn 1994
could only find some way
to re-establish contact
with one another,
who knows...
everyone might just end up
making a friend.
(Click "more" to see the original poem in Chinese)
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By Eric Abrahamsen, June 24, '07
Words Without Borders has a new Chinese short story, The Bane of My Existence by Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. It's good to see more Chinese material coming out, but I can't say it deserves the effusive praise that accompanies it. The "hell cat tortures owner" plot feels like a whopping three parts symbolism to one part story, while the piece ends like this, with a sentence made of pure plywood: "All I knew was that I couldn’t bear to even imagine everything the future would bring." Arggh!
By Brendan O'Kane, June 20, '07
It's Duanwu Jie 端午节, the Dragon-Boat Festival. If we were in Hong Kong or Taiwan, we'd get a day off. No such luck here, so I'm blogging on my lunch break in honor of the holiday instead.
The Dragon-Boat Festival commemorates the death of 屈原 Qu Yuan, China's first poet. Qu was a minister in the pre-Chinese state of 楚 Chu during the 战国 Warring States period, and after arguing for more reasonable policies he was slandered by jealous court insiders and exiled by the king of Chu, to whom he was intensely loyal. Heartbroken, his faith in mankind shaken, Qu dashed off a few more poems and then walked into the Miluo River holding a stone. The dragon boats from which Duanwu Jie gets its English name are supposedly rushing to retrieve his body before it could be eaten by the fish, though in reality it's a separate tradition that just happened to get associated with Qu later on.
Qu is the first poet whose name is known, and there are a few works (particularly 离骚 'On Encountering Trouble' ) that are attributable to him with a fair degree of certainty. Others are traditionally attributed to him but clearly the work of later poets, like the poem 怀沙, 'Embracing Sands,' which Qu supposedly wrote immediately before chucking himself into the river. The great Han-dynasty historian 司马迁 Sima Qian recounts the events leading up to Qu's suicide as follows:
Qu Yuan wandered in his banishment, murmuring poems as he walked along the bank of the Miluo River, disheveled and emaciated.
A fisherman saw him and asked:
Aren't you His Excellency the minister? What has laid you so low?
Qu Yuan replied:
For all the world is muddy and I alone am clean; for all men are drunk and I alone am sober -- it is for this that I was exiled.
The fisherman said,
A sage does not stay apart and aloof, but adapts to his environment.
If all the world is muddy, why not beat up the mud and stir up waves?
If all men are drunk, why not lap at their lees and drink their dregs?
Why get yourself exiled because of your deep thoughts and noble aspirations?
Qu Yuan replied,
I have heard that who has rinsed his hair then brushes his cap; who has washed his body then shakes his clothes.
One does not sully his own cleanliness with filthiness.
I would rather jump into the river, bury myself in the bellies of the fishes,
Than suffer my own purity to be covered by the dirt of the vulgar world.
Hearing this, the fisherman smiled and began row away, singing as he went:
When the river water runs clear and fleet
It's fit to rinse hat-tassels in.
When the river water's full of murk,
'Twill still suffice to wash my feet.
And he went on his way without saying anything more.
Happy Dragon-Boat Festival.
(Click the title to see the original Chinese text)
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