Reading China Against the Grain

Imagining Communities

Carlos Rojas, Mei-hwa Sung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000216615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through an analysis of a wide array of contemporary Chinese literature from inside and outside of China, this volume considers some of the ways in which China and Chineseness are understood and imagined.

Using the central theme of the way in which literature has the potential to both reinforce and to undermine a national imaginary, the volume contains chapters offering new perspectives on well-known authors, from Jin Yucheng to Nobel Prize winning Mo Yan, as well as chapters focusing on authors rarely included in discussions of contemporary Chinese literature, such as the expatriate authors Larissa Lai and Xiaolu Guo. The volume is complemented by chapters covering more marginalized literary figures throughout history, such as Macau-born poet Yiling, the Malaysian-born novelist Zhang Guixing, and the ethnically Korean author Kim Hak-ch'?l. Invested in issues ranging from identity and representation, to translation and grammar, it is one of the few publications of its kind devoting comparable attention to authors from Mainland China, authors from Manchuria, Macau, and Taiwan, and throughout the global Chinese diaspora.

Reading China Against the Grain: Imagining Communities is a rich resource of literary criticism for students and scholars of Chinese studies, sinophone studies, and comparative literature

PART I
Mainland China

1
ALLEGORIZING HISTORY

Realism and fantasy in Mo Yan’s fictional China

Mei-hwa Sung

In awarding Mo Yan 莫言 the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, the Swedish Academy recognized his achievement in “merging hallucinatory realism with folk tales, history and the contemporary.” All his works – including eleven full-length novels and thirty-odd novellas and short stories – are written in a quasi-autobiographical mode, deploying stories from his childhood memories or from his close observations of contemporary China. Among them, the novels Red Sorghum (紅高粱家族) (1987), The Republic of Wine (酒國) (1992), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (豐乳肥臀) (1996), and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (生死疲勞) (2006) collectively span a historical period from the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s to the Reform Era in the 1980s and 1990s, and share an approach to history that blends realist and fantastic elements. Tending toward the episodic, the narratives draw inspiration from magical realism and from China’s cultural, literary, and folkloric traditions, weaving religious belief, legend, and fantasy with historical subject matter. A forerunner in stylistic innovations new to China’s literati of the mid-1980s, Mo Yan writes about China’s contemporary history by allegorizing the here and now.

In a talk on Gao Xingjian 高行健 and Mo Yan, Liu Zaifu 劉再復 praised the avant-garde Chinese writers who emerged during the 1980s for their attempts to liberate literature from the political dictates of the ruling party, arguing that literature “freed the writers from political ideology, enabling life and talent to explode.” Liu added that these writers were able to “break out of the blockade … [as a result of] opening and searching their souls.”¹ A close look at how Mo Yan juggles history and imagination to represent contemporary China in his fiction may similarly shed light on his flair for presenting a satiric vision of China’s national ethos during the first fifty years of the history of the People’s Republic.

Historicity is a prominent feature in many of Mo Yan’s works. Topical references to contemporary history pervade the narratives as they unfold the stories of individual characters, their families, and the actual events influencing human destiny. As Mo Yan explains in the postscript to Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the national history narrated through fiction needs to be derived from the common people. National history in fictional works, in other words, is not the history that one reads about in textbooks, but rather the common people’s version told in the form of legend (chuanqihua le de lishi 傳奇話了的歷史). It is deinstitutionalized history. Remarking on Red Sorghum, Mo Yan observes, “The only history in my head is the legendary type,”² stressing the importance of a free-ranging imagination and the fact that the history he is writing is actually the version handed down from oral sources about historical figures acting under and upon real-life circumstances. In other words, style precedes content in what he conceives to be storytelling as history writing. This attempt to deinstitutionalize official national history carries a skeptical or even subversive overtone. Paradox may often serve as camouflage by which a confrontation of viewpoints becomes understated in equivocal language. Mo Yan is then capable of appealing to the proletarian values sanctified by national policy makers while debunking the grand narrative of national history.

Narrative authenticity, which ostensibly legitimizes official history, is deliberately problematized in Mo Yan’s works. In this spirit, he allegorizes and comments upon the historical references made in his novels, employing a combination of symbolism, hyperbole, parody, satire, and fantasy to refract historical realities and discredit verisimilitude as a path to historical truth. The result is frequent shifting between fantasy and realism, to the point that the line between the two is emphatically blurred.

Reimagining the Sino-Japanese War

Like most of his fiction, Mo Yan’s first full-length novel, Red Sorghum, is set in Northeast Gaomi township of Shandong province, and the main narrative unfolds against the historical backdrop of the 1930s, during which China was engaged in fierce resistance against the Japanese invaders while also caught up in a civil war involving the Nationalists, the Communists, and the collaborators (hanjian 漢奸) fighting for dominance. The narrator notes at the beginning that Northeastern Gaomi township is “easily the most beautiful and most repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world,”³ and he has subsequently described how he hoped to make Northeast Gaomi township “a miniature of China and even the world.”

The novel takes its title from a local variety of sorghum used for food and for brewing wine, which is identified with the spirit of the land – its shiny dark red color as the blood that flows through the veins of the heroic people who have lived there for centuries. Likewise, the Black Water River is described as being both fertile and toxic, a symbol of life and death: “a river as cumbersome as the great, clumsy Han culture” (102/88; translation revised). The geographic setting is also given a larger-than-life aura reflective of the paradox that Mo Yan sees in its people. In the same spirit, topicality and fabrication are interlaced to render the narrative a hybrid of realism and antirealism.

The narrator opens the story by matter-of-factly announcing the specific day (the ninth day of the eighth lunar month of the year 1939) on which an incident will dramatically change the fate of a family. The invading Japanese soldiers force the local conscripts to drag all vehicles and cattle to the riverbank to build a highway for moving troops and transporting military supplies. To establish the historical credibility of his narrative, the narrator cites from the county gazetteer, which records details of this historical incident: 400,000 shifts of hard labor, severe damage of the year’s crop, and so forth. This military maneuver meets with fierce resistance, causing dire casualties among the locals, including the deaths of Grandma, Arhat Liu, and many other villagers. Amid the descriptions of killing and torturing and the intrigues and betrayals among the local factions, the reader is introduced to the lush waves of ripe red sorghum stalks.

The sorghum in the novel stands for the heroic ancestry of the Gaomi people, “lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry.” Their “unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison.” The narrator laments that “surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our species’ regression” (4). At the end of the novel, he mourns the vanished red sorghum, which “has been drowned in a raging flood of revolution and no longer exists,” having been replaced by a hybrid green sorghum “bereft of tall, straight stalks … devoid of the dazzling sorghum color … they pollute the pure air of Northeast Gaomi Township with their dark, gloomy, ambiguous faces” (377). The red sorghum stands for the golden days of the land and its people that are extinct in modern-day Northeastern Gaomi township and, by extension, contemporary China.

There are, however, some modern-day heroes and heroines who challenge patriarchal constraints and foreign invaders. In flashbacks, the narrator relates the illicit romantic love between his grandparents, Commander Yu and Dai Fenglian. Commander Yu, a coolie turned bandit, is caught in a love triangle with two fearless, self-reliant women, Grandma and Lian’er. Commander Yu commits larceny and murder to snatch Dai, and shortly afterward falls in love with Dai’s servant girl, Lian’er. Sex scenes are presented in an explicit and yet genteel language, highlighting sensuality and an urge to break out of social conventions. Grandma dies on the bank of the Black Water River in a gun fight against the Japanese soldiers, Commander Yu dies seeking to avenge her death, and Lian’er dies after offering herself to the Japanese soldiers in an attempt to save her daughter. The rape and murder scenes are described in graphic detail.

Up to the final chapter of the novel, the story line follows a more or less coherent structure despite the author’s frequent use of flashbacks. The final chapter, however, features a number of unnatural deaths, including a weasel that is beaten to death by Lian’er in revenge for the chickens it has killed, the gruesome death of Lian’er’s daughter at the hands of the Japanese soldiers, and Lian’er’s own prolonged derangement and death when she is brought home by Commander Yu after having been raped by the Japanese soldiers. In his first attempt at the fantastic, Mo Yan turns to Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異, a local literary legacy of the fantastic mode by which he often claims to be proudly inspired.⁴ For instance, he describes how Lian’er was convinced that a weasel

had absolute control over her in some deep, dark place. Whatever it ordered her to do, she did: cry, laugh, speak in tongues, perform strange acts. … Always, the image of the potent black-mouthed weasel swayed before her eyes, grinning hideously and whisking her skin vigorously with its tail.

After a long spell of whipping, shouting, and cursing, Lian’er “crumpled to the ground, spittle drooling from the corners of her mouth, her body lathered in sweat, her face the color of gold foil” (335). She dies only after a famed exorcist has finally been able to rid her of the sinister weasel.

Mo Yan repeatedly insists that he is not a writer of textbook history, but rather of fiction. Toward the end of the novel, in an episode dated to the early spring of 1940, Northeastern Gaomi township lies in ruins as rival local factions continue to fight the Japanese invaders and each other. The supernatural phenomena preceding Lian’er’s death are interlaced with descriptions of gory battle scenes. Battlefield violence and rowdy exorcism are combined in a surreal manner, offering a satirical comment on this historical period.

In The Republic of Wine, Mo Yan further develops this sort of interplay between the realist and the fantastic mode of writing. Consisting of a series of overlapping narrative frames, The Republic of Wine includes fragments from a novel (also titled The Republic of Wine) being composed by a fictional character named Mo Yan, an epistolary correspondence between this fictional Mo Yan and a character named Li Yidou, together with a series of short stories that Li Yidou sends the fictional Mo Yan. Li Yidou is described as being an enthusiastic fan of (the fictional) Mo Yan’s work, particularly his novel Red Sorghum, and the short stories that he sends – in the hope that the celebrated author can help him get published – are all ostensibly inspired by Mo Yan’s own writings. When the fictional Mo Yan receives these manuscripts, however, he finds them utterly lacking in literary merit.

The novel that the fictional Mo Yan is attempting to write can also be viewed as an informal sequel to Red Sorghum. While the primary narrative plane of Mo Yan’s first novel is set during the Sino-Japanese War and thematizes sorghum wine as a beverage for the common people, however, the embedded novel in The Republic of Wine is set in the post-Mao era and uses Maotai and other hyperex-pensive versions of sorghum wine to critique the epidemic of collusion between businessmen and government officials that plagues contemporary China. However, a deeper irony lies in the sharp contrast between the two novels’ subject matter and intent. While Red Sorghum reconstructs a historical period of war and individual sacrifice for the national cause, celebrating and lamenting sex and death in a grandiose manner, The Republic of Wine points to what Mo Yan identifies as “a unique problem in China,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface: Imagining China
• Introduction: My language is not my own: translation, displacement, and contemporary Chinese literature
• Part I Mainland China
• Part II Border regions
• Part III The global Chinese diaspora
• Index