Howard Goldblatt (Editor) - Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today

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From Publishers Weekly
In contrast to the utopian official literature of Communist China, the stories in this wide-ranging collection marshal wry humor, entangled sex, urban alienation, nasty village politics and frequent violence. Translated ably enough to keep up with the colloquial tone, most tales are told with straightforward familiarity, drawing readers into small communities and personal histories that are anything but heroic. "The Brothers Shu," by Su Tong (Raise the Red Lantern), is an urban tale of young lust and sibling rivalry in a sordid neighborhood around the ironically named Fragrant Cedar Street. That story's earthiness is matched by Wang Xiangfu's folksy "Fritter Hollow Chronicles," about peasants' vendettas and local politics, and by "The Cure," by Mo Yan (Red Sorghum; The Garlic Ballads), which details the fringe benefits of an execution. Personal alienation and disaffection are as likely to appear in stories with rural settings (Li Rui's "Sham Marriage") as they are to poison the lives of urban characters (Chen Cun's "Footsteps on the Roof"). Comedy takes an elegant and elaborate form in "A String of Choices," Wang Meng's tale of a toothache cure, and it assumes the burlesque of small-town propaganda fodder in Li Xiao's "Grass on the Rooftop." Editor Goldblatt has chosen not to expand the contributors' biographies or elaborate on the collection's post-Tiananmen context. He lets the stories speak for themselves, which, fortunately, they do, quietly and effectively.
From Library Journal
The 20 authors represented here range from Wang Meng, the former minister of culture, to Su Tong, whose Raise the Red Lantern has been immortalized on screen.
***
Chinese literature has changed drastically in the past thirty years. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) arts and literature of all sorts were virtually nonexistent since they were frowned upon by official powers so that attempts to produce any were apt to cause one’s public humiliation and possibly even death by the Red Guards and other unofficial arms of the government. After 1976, in the wake of Mao’s death, literature slowly regained its importance in China, and by the mid-1980s dark, angry, satirical writings had become quite prominent on the mainland.
In the wake of Tiananmen Square, dark literature faded somewhat, but never vanished. Now Howard Goldblatt, a prominent translator of Chinese fiction and editor of the critical magazine Modern Chinese Literature, has compiled a representative collection of contemporary Chinese fiction entitled Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused. Even with my limited knowledge of modern China I feel certain the title of the book is fairly accurate.
Mo Yan is one of my favorite contemporary writers. His dark, no-holds-barred satires Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads detailed what he sees as the failings of both Chinese peasants (of which he was born as one) and the Chinese leaders. His short story "The Cure" is in the same vein, detailing how a local government representative-probably self-appointed during the Cultural Revolution, although that is never made quite clear in the story-leads a lynching of the village’s two most prominent leaders and their wives. But, as in most Mo Yan stories, the bitterness directed at the lyncher is double-edged with the bitter look at a local peasant who sees the deaths of the two village leaders as a desperate chance to possibly rescue his mother from impending blindness. The story is coldly realistic and totally chilling in the rational way it treats the series of events.
Su Tong is the author of the novella "Raise The Red Lantern", the basis of the wonderful movie. His "The Brothers Shu" is a bitter look at some traditional character weaknesses of Chinese people, and particularly how they affect family life. The Shu family is incredibly dysfunctional. The father nightly climbs up the side of his two-family house to have sex with the woman upstairs until her husband bolts her windows shut. So the woman sneaks downstairs to have sex in the younger son’s bedroom while the son is tied to his bed, gagged and blindfolded. Meanwhile the elder son abuses the girl upstairs until she falls in love with him. When she becomes pregnant, they are both so shamed they form a suicide pact, tie themselves together and jump into a river, where the boy is rescued in time but the girl dies. The younger son so hates his older brother-somewhat deservedly considering the abuse heaped on him by the brother-that he pours gasoline through his bedroom and sets it ablaze.
And so on, complete with beatings and torments worthy of the most dysfunctional American families. While not a particularly likeable cast of characters, the story is strong and thoughtful.
Perhaps the most moving part about "First Person", by Shi Tiesheng is in the brief author description in the back of the book. Shi is described as “crippled during the Cultural Revolution”. So many lives were needlessly destroyed during that tumultuous decade, it is easy to feel that the arrest and subsequent conviction of the notorious Gang of Four was not nearly sufficient punishment for them.
"First Person" tells the story of a man with a heart condition-Shi frequently writes about the lives of handicapped people, according to his description-who is visiting his new 21st floor apartment for the first time. While climbing the stairs very slowly, taking frequent rests, he notices a cemetery separated from the apartment building by a huge wall. On one side of the wall is sitting a woman, while on the other side stands a man. As the man climbs the stairs he fantasizes about why the couple are there, and why they are separated by the wall. Perhaps the man is having an affair, and the wife is spying on him as he rendezvous with his lover?
But then the man notices a baby lying on a gravesite, being watched from a distance by the man, and he realizes that the couple is abandoning the child. An interesting story about the fanciful delusions a person can have, but with no real depth beyond that.
Two stories involve fear of dentists in completely different ways. Wang Meng’s "A String of Choices" is a very funny story that combines a bitter look at both Eastern and Western medicine with perhaps the most extreme case of fear of dentists imaginable. Chen Ran’s "Sunshine Between the Lips" tells of a young girl whose adult male friend exposes himself to her. If that were not traumatic enough, after he is arrested for exposing himself to a complete stranger, he sets his apartment on fire and dies a brutal death. This event, combined with a near-fatal bout of meningitis, creates in the girl a deep fear of phallic objects such as needles and penises. So imagine her trauma when she develops impacted wisdom teeth at the same time as she gets married. While this description might sound a bit ludicrous, this story is very serious and very well-executed.
A strong satire on how history can be rewritten to suit the writers’ needs is Li Xiao’s "Grass on the Rooftop". When a peasant’s hut goes on fire, he is rescued by a local student. The rescue is written up for an elementary school newspaper by a local child, but the story is picked up by other papers, changing radically with each reprinting until the rescuing student becomes a great hero of the Maoist revolution because of his supposed attempt to rescue a nonexistent portrait of Mao on the wall of the hut. While this story is uniquely Chinese in many ways, it resonates in all societies in which pride and agenda is often more important than the truth.
Anybody interested in a look at contemporary Chinese society should enjoy this collection immensely.

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The punishment expert's rage was immediately extinguished by the query. Instead of replying, the punishment expert sank into a deep and boundlessly pleasurable reverie. Crows of memory flew across his features. He counted his inventory of punishments like a stack of bills. He told the stranger that of all the experiments he had carried out, the most moving had involved January 9, 1958, December 11, 1967, August 7, i960, and September 20, 1971. It was clear that these dates hinted at things that went far beyond the numbers themselves. There was something of the aroma of blood about them. The punishment expert told the stranger how…

He had drawn and quartered January 9, 1958, tearing it into so many pieces that it had drifted through the air like a flurry of snowflakes. He had castrated December 1, 1967, cutting off its ponderous testicles so that there hadn't been a drop of sunshine on December 1, 1967, and the moonlight that evening had been as dense as overgrown weeds. Nor had August 7, 1960, been able to escape its fate, for he had used a rust-dappled saw blade to cut through its waist. But the most unforgettable was September 20, 1971. He had dug a trench in the ground, in which he had buried September 20, 1971, so that only the head was still exposed. Owing to the pressure exerted on the body by the surrounding earth, the blood of September 20, 1971, had surged up into the head. The punishment expert had proceeded to crack open its skull, from which a column of blood had immediately spurted forth. The fountain of September 20, 1971, had been incomparably brilliant.

The stranger fell into a silent, boundless despair. Each of the dates of which the punishment expert had spoken concealed a deep well of memory: January 9, 1958, December 1, 1967, August 7, 1960, and September 20, 1971. These were precisely the four events, isolated from the enormity of the stranger's past, that had been pursuing him all along.

The stranger, of course, had long been unaware of their pursuit. The four dates had become four musty breezes wafting toward him. The content that the dates concealed had hollowed, crumbled to dust and nothingness. But their aroma lingered on, and the stranger had the vague impression that if it weren't for these four dates, his strange encounter with the punishment expert would never have transpired.

The punishment expert rose from his chair and walked into his bedroom. As he moved past the white glare of the lamp, he resembled a recollection. The stranger sat motionless in his chair, tortured by a sense that March 5, 1965, was the only memory that he had left. Even March 5, 1965, was far away. It was only later, after he had already fallen asleep, that his features took on the serenity of a memory anchored firmly in the slipstream of the past.

When they resumed their conversation the next morning, there vvas no doubt that their affinity had grown even stronger. As soon as they began to talk, they arrived at the heart of the matter.

The punishment expert had suggested that he needed the stranger's help the night before. Now, he began to explain why: "Of all my punishments, only two have yet to be tested. One of them is reserved for you."

The stranger, in need of further explanation, was led into another black room. The room was empty save for a table in front of a window. A plate of glass covered the tabletop. The glass glittered in the sunlight pouring in through the window. Leaning against the wall was a sharpened butcher's knife.

Pointing at the glass by the window, the punishment expert said, "Look how very excited and happy it is."

The stranger walked over to the table, looking at the chaos of light playing through the glass.

Pointing at the butcher's knife leaning against the wall, the punishment expert told the stranger that he would use this knife to slice through his waist and cut him in half. Immediately thereafter, he would place the stranger's torso on the glass. His blood would continue to flow until he slowly died.

The punishment expert informed the stranger of just what it was that he would see before he bled to death on the glass. His description of the scene was compelling: "At that moment, you will feel a tranquillity you have never known before. All sounds will fade, will slowly become colors that will hover in front of your eyes. You will feel how your blood begins to flow more and more sluggishly, how it pools on the glass, and how it cascades into the dust below you like millions of strands of hair. And then finally, you will catch sight of the first dewdrop of the morning of January 9, 1958. You will see this dewdrop gazing at you from the dimness of a green leaf. You will see a bank of brilliant-colored clouds glowing in the noonday sun of December 1, 1967. You will see a mountain road. The road will wait patiently for you as the evening mist gathers overhead and night falls on August 7, 1960. You will see two fireflies dancing in the moonlight on the night of September 20 1971, shining like a pair of distant tears."

Upon the conclusion of the punishment expert's serene narrative, the stranger sank once again into reverie. The dewdrops of January 9, 1958, the brilliant-colored clouds of December 1, 1967, the warm dusk on a mountain road on August 7, 1960, the fireflies like dancing tears in the moonlight of September 20, 1971-all these memories arrayed themselves like empty canvases before the stranger's roving eyes. He understood the punishment expert's narrative as a promise of things to come. The stranger sensed that the punishment expert had offered him the possibility of reunion with his past. A tranquil smile lit his face, one that indisputably signaled his submission to the punishment expert's wondrous designs.

The punishment expert was boundlessly excited by the stranger's expression of content. His joy, however, was contained- rather than leaping into the air like a grasshopper, the punishment expert merely nodded his head in agreement. Then he asked the stranger to take off his clothes. "It's not for me. It's just that the punishment demands that you leave the world in the same state that you entered it."

The stranger happily complied-it seemed appropriate. He began to imagine what it would be like to encounter his memories naked. His memories, he mused, were sure to be surprised.

The punishment expert stood by the wall to the left, watching as the stranger stripped off his clothes like a layer of leather, revealing skin battered and scored by the blade of time. He stood next to the glittering plate of glass, his body glowing in the sun's rays. The punishment expert emerged from the shadows by the wall, walked over to the stranger's side, and grasped the glittering butcher's knife in his hand. The sunlight danced furiously across the blade. He asked the stranger, "Are you ready?"

The stranger nodded. His eyes were incomparably tranquil. He had the look of a man awaiting the inexorable arrival of unparalled happiness.

The stranger's tranquillity filled the punishment expert with a sense of confidence and certainty. He reached out a hand to stroke the stranger's waist, only to discover that his hand was trembling. This discovery opened up new and unwelcome possibilities. He didn't know if the trembling in his hands was due to excessive excitement or whether his strength had finally deserted him. The punishment expert's strength had begun to ebb long before. And now as he held the blade, his hands began to shake uncontrollably.

The stranger had already turned to gaze out the window in silent expectation of his reunion with the past. He tried to imagine the knife slicing his body in two: a pair of wondrous, icy hands miraculously tearing a blank sheet of paper neatly in half. But the punishment expert's gasps forced their way into his consciousness. When the stranger turned to look, the punishment expert, sighing at his own humiliation, directed the stranger's attention to his trembling fingers. At the same time, he explained that it would be impossible for him to sever his body in two with one stroke of the blade.

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