Chan Koonchung - The Fat Years

Although the autocracy of The Fat Years is less shockingly brutal than Orwell’s Ingsoc in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the restrained plausibility of Chan’s dystopia brings with it a clear warning about China’s possible near future. Nearing the end of his torture by O’Brien, Orwell’s hero Winston Smith asks his captor why the Party seeks power, expecting some self-loving sentiment about dictatorship being for “the good of the people.” His persecutor has no such illusions: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” He Dongsheng, the representative of the communist leadership in The Fat Years who finally reveals the government’s grand scheme “for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World,” is an altogether softer dictator, whose policies — like those of China’s government today — rely more heavily on the active agreement of his Chinese subjects. The China that he has created, he believes, is “the best option in the real world”: “there is no possible way for China to be any better than it is today … Can China be controlled without a one-party dictatorship? Can any other system feed and clothe one billion, three hundred and fifty million people? Or successfully administer an ‘Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis’? … there must not be [democratic] reform because any reform would lead to chaos.” In The Fat Years, rulers and the ruled are locked in collusive harmony. Did the Office of Stability Maintenance, Fang Caodi asks, inject everyone with a drug created “to make us all forget” the terrifying month of martial law imposed in 2011 during which many more will have died at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army than perished in the notorious suppression of 1989? “It would be wonderful if we did have one,” He Dongsheng wistfully responds. “Then our Communist Party could rewrite its history any way it wanted to … If you ask me for the real reason [why everyone forgot], I can only tell you that I don’t know! You shouldn’t think that we can control everything.” The Chinese of The Fat Years have, according to the logic of the novel, the rulers that they deserve: they have deliberately chosen to forget. “The people fear chaos more than they fear dictatorship,” He Dongsheng summarizes. “The vast majority of the Chinese people crave stability.”

Chan Koonchung has himself felt the ambivalent pull of the contemporary “Chinese model.” The son of refugees from Maoist China, product of Hong Kong’s Anglicized education system, he is an unlikely sympathizer with authoritarian methods. “I grew up listening to the Beatles, watching French films, reading Camus, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett,” he recalled. “My friends and I would have worn black polo-necks, but we couldn’t get hold of any in subtropical Hong Kong, so we had to make do with white T-shirts instead.” But the open-ended questions he scatters through the book express his own uncertain position vis-à-vis contemporary Chinese politics. “Between a good hell and a fake paradise — which one would you choose?” Little Xi demands of Chen at one point. He has just said to her that “no matter what you might say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise is better than a good hell … But there’s always a small number of people, even if they are only an extremely small minority, who will choose the good hell no matter how painful it is, because in the good hell at least everyone is fully aware that they are living in hell.” Outside the book Chan is selectively critical about China’s capacity for mass amnesia: “This is a place where memories get terribly distorted: people in their fifties now say that the government was right to crack down in 1989. And many people forget that 1989–92 was an ice age, before China began marching toward the market. I don’t think ordinary people should have to concentrate on remembering — it’s not good for them, and it’s not their job. It’s intellectuals who shouldn’t forget. These days, they can’t say anything, though. They know the risks of speaking out: that there’s a huge difference between having government approval and losing it, in terms of the housing you’ll get, access to international funding, and so on.” Chan is even able to see the pluses of He Dongsheng’s “Action Plan for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World.” “I saw the economic crisis of the novel as the government’s great opportunity to take control. That was the best way that things could have worked out; mine was the most optimistic scenario.”

Both Chan Koonchung and his fictional namesake in The Fat Years voted with their feet by moving to Beijing from Hong Kong a few years ago; both are, to an extent, seduced by the lure of a rising China: “This place is too fascinating to ignore,” Chan confesses. “The Beijing I described in The Fat Years is basically the Beijing in which I live. There’s nowhere quite like it.” Is it also as frightening as his fictional Beijing? I asked as we left the restaurant after lunch. He gazed about the airy, glazed mall, as we glided down the escalator back to street level on a perfect, blue-skied August day. “Not today. I don’t know about tomorrow, though.”

JULIA LOVELL, FEBRUARY 2011

This book uses the pinyin Romanization system. Only a few letters sound very different from normal English. They are:

c = ts ( Fang Caodi sounds like Fang Tsao-dee)

q = ch before i ( qigong sounds like chee-gong)

x = sh ( Xiao sounds like Shee-ao)

He in He Dongsheng is pronounced something like Huh

Lao Chen, the protagonist, a journalist and novelist with writer’s block

Fang Caodi, an erstwhile friend of his, who has led a globe-trotting, jack-of-all-trades life

Little Xi, another old friend of Lao Chen. Had a short-lived career as a lawyer, now has a marginal existence as an Internet political activist

Big Sister Song, her mother, the owner of the Five Flavors restaurant

Wei Guo, Little Xi’s son, a law student and ambitious Party member

Jian Lin, an acquaintance of Lao Chen, a wealthy real estate entrepreneur, and holder of cinema evenings

He Dongsheng, his cousin, a high-ranking government official

Zhang Dou, a former child slave-laborer, now an aspiring guitarist

Miaomiao, his girlfriend, formerly a journalist

Ban Cuntou, another cousin of Jian Lin, and once a classmate of Little Xi; now a highly influential figure in government circles

Wen Lan, a former girlfriend of Lao Chen; an international jetsetting political adviser

Dong Niang, a high-class prostitute

Zhuang Zizhong, an elderly editor of a literary journal

Hu Yan, an academic, member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, expert on rural China

Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun, organizers of an underground Protestant church, the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground, in Henan Province

Liu Xing, a former classmate of Gao Shengchan, and a local government official

County Head Yang, a young and ambitious local government official

One whole month is missing. I mean one whole month of 2011 has disappeared, it’s gone, it can’t be found. Normally February follows January, March follows February, April follows March, and so on. But now after January it’s March, or after February it’s April … Do you understand what I’m saying — we’ve skipped a month!”