From: xu@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au ()
Subject: CND Books and Journals Review,  January 8, 1993
Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW
Distribution: aus
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 07:17:10 GMT

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/

                            January 8, 1992

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1. The Wang Shuo Phenomenon --
   The Word from China's Kerouac: The Communists are Uncool ............ 68

2. Sage of Peking --
   Wang Shuo, a street tough turned writer, finds fame and fortune .... 137
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

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1. The Wang Shuo Phenomenon --
   The Word from China's Kerouac: The Communists are Uncool ............ 68
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Edited and forwarded by: Gu Zhen (june@bu-pub.bu.edu)
Source: The New York Times Book Review 1/10/93
Written by: Sherl WuDunn

"The Word From China's Kerouac:
The Communists Are Uncool" (feature article)
by Sheryl WuDunn

The puzzle is why the Chinese Government has not banned Wang Shuo. He does
not write about democracy, but most Chinese are not particularly interested
in reading treatises about democracy. What Wang writes is more subversive:
he turns hoodlums into heroes, colors dialogue with curses, and writes about
sex, alienation and frustration as if they were perfectly normal.

Unlike Su Xiaokang and Liu Binyan who are thinkers with a vision of the
political system for the entire nation, Wang, 34, is more destructive,
poking fun at everything the Communist Party takes seriously without
offering any alternative. He romanticizes young, alienated rebels, in much
the same way that Jack Kerouac did in the United States. He explores the
paradoxes and absurdities of the Chinese society. Instead of directly
criticizing the Communists for being politically autocratic, he does what is
far more devastating: he mocks them for being uncool.

Authorities do not seem concerned about what is being called the Wang Shuo
phenomenon, perhaps partly because his works are often referred to by
critics as "pizi wenxue," or hooligan literature. Wang agrees that he sees
the world through roguish eyes, but the term "hooligan," he says, is a broad
concept. Throughout history, he says, China has been driven by hooligans --
emperors, warlords, rebels, and revolutionaries -- ordinary people trying
their best to climb up.

"All of the driving force of openness and reform comes from hooligans," Wang
said. "Hooligans do business, hooligans do commerce, hooligans build
factories and open shops. Their craziness is what makes the society tick.
Those who are really successful -- that is, those who have gotten rich --
all of them are hooligans."

Wang is smart enough not to side with the dissidents. But authority symbols
are the butt of many of his sardonic jokes; so are Government officials,
Communist Party members, intellectuals, propaganda, patriotism, idealism,
commerce and the Communist machine.

In a novel called "No Man's Land," Wang spins a hilarious, complicated
story, a comedy of the absurd, about a politically influential reprobate who
is coordinating an effort to restore China's reputation after a Chinese team
loses in an international sports competition. He and his team select a
simple-minded cabdriver, Tang, to fight in a martial arts match to win back
the nation's honor. Tang learned his art from his father who, at 111, is
considered a "living relic."

In a subplot, the elder Tang is arrested and sent to prison on the ground
that he is responsible for the failure of the Boxer Rebellion. Here Wang
makes fun of the Communist habit of picking scapegoats.

Tang excels in several bizarre endurance contests, including one that seems
peculiarly Chinese: who can be tied up with the least amount of rope. Only
women can compete, so the organizers have Tang castrated because of China's
desire to win at all costs. In the final competition, Tang cuts and peels
off his face to win an Olympic-style medal. The scene mocks how China yearns
to gain face through victory, literally losing its face in the process.

Wang never went to college. After 4 years in the navy, he became a salesman
for a drug company. His lack of college education has tainted his attitude
toward intellectuals, often seen in his mockery of them. In his novel "Hot
and Cold, Measure for Measure," Wang weaves a gripping plot about a hooligan
named Zhang Ming who successfully seduces a naive college student. She falls
for him, becomes a prostitute and commits suicide when their gang is
arrested.

William Morrow & Company in New York is planning to translate one of Wang's
works into English by the end of 1993. A likely choice is a novel called "I
am Your Dad" concerning the relationship between a young man and his father,
who wants to treat him as a friend. Currently, few of Wang's works are
available in English, although excerpts can be found in an anthology
compiled by Mr. Barme and Linda Jaivin called "New Ghosts, Old Dreams."

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2. Sage of Peking --
   Wang Shuo, a street tough turned writer, finds fame and fortune .... 137
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts and Society 11/23/92
Written by: Linda Jaivin in Peking

Sitting in the relatively spacious living room of his new Peking apartment,
Wang Shuo describes in colourful detail the trials and tribulations of
flat-hunting and redecorating in one of the world's most accommodation-
scarce cities. In his thick Peking burr, he weaves an almost surreal tale
involving bribes of dog food, new toilet seats that refuse to cooperate with
old plumbing, the world of wallpaper and the care and feeding of
worker-entrepreneurs. When he sighs dramatically at how draining the whole
process has been, his elegant wife, who until now has been listening
quietly, a smile across her face, rolls her eyes and laughs. After all, she
has done most of the work. He just tells the stories.

Wang Shuo the story-teller has a perfect sense of timing, a terrific sense
of humour, a wild imagination and a fine ear for dialogue. That wouldn't
surprise anyone familiar with his fiction. While some of China's highbrow
critics have trouble coming to grips with the stream of lowbrow prose -
detective stories, love stories, farce and satire - that flows from Wang's
prolific pen (7-8,000 characters on an average working day, few of which he
ever revises), the public laps it up.

Wang, who came to public attention with his story "Stewardess" in 1986,
reached a pinnacle of prominence in 1988 - Chinese cinema's "Wang Shuo Year"
- when no less than four films based on his stories and novels were
produced. He's still going strong today. Publishing in some of the nation's
top literary journals, he enjoys an almost cult-like following that
encompasses university students and blue-collar workers alike. Thanks to
lucrative commissions for film and television scripts supplementing more
modest royalties for fiction, Wang's income last year made him a
"10,000-yuan man" several times over.

At 33, Wang is understandably pleased with his fame and fortune. The
one-time street tough whose father's way of straightening him out was to
enlist him in the People's Liberation Army, ran contraband televisions and
tape recorders from Canton to parts north while still in uniform. He also
has tried his hand at everything from selling medicine in a state-owned
pharmaceutical company to being the bagman for a criminal gang - and has
seen the inside of a few police stations in his time. Wang does not exactly
come with standard-issue qualifications for a writer in the People's
Republic of China. It is definitely a sign of the post-Mao times that he is
now a member of both the Peking and national writers' associations.

Given his background, it's not surprising that Wang's fictional world is
populated with a mob of charismatic crooks, artful dodgers, fast-talkers,
wise-crackers, poseurs, schemers, dreamers, the over-sexed and the
under-employed. He regards them all with an eye that is at once merciless
and sympathetic as he shepherds them through the roller-coaster twists and
turns of his endlessly inventive plots.

The popularity of Wang's work can drive both the authorities and the critics
to the verge of distraction. It was once memorably described by one
exasperated official as "literature by riff-raff, about riff-raff and for
riff-raff." An outraged cadre from a municipal institute for labour reform
accused one of Wang's stories, "Hot and Cold, Measure for Measure" - which
chronicles the misadventures of an ex-convict who seduces a university
student for a lark - of being a "primer for sexual criminals."

Fulminating that it described "in dulcet tones the enjoyment of a
licentious, treacherous and boorish criminal world," the cadre wrote: "It is
as if the author is standing on a grassy knoll in the middle of a swamp,
appealing affectionately to his young readers to gather around and hear his
tale. But I despair for these young readers - I fear they will sink into the
mire and be unable to extricate themselves ..."

Also troubled by the apparent amorality of Wang's works, the critic Zhang
Xiaoping suggested that they are like a comfortable bed on which people who
wish to close their eyes to social responsibility may rest. Zhang had to
admit that, despite his reservations, he'd had a good lie-down himself, and
concluded that his criticism of Wang "could also be seen as a criticism of
my own weaknesses."

This is the funny thing about even the worst of Wang's anti-heroes: it is
almost impossible not to identify with them. This is because Wang seems able
to project himself into everyone's shoes, whether they are the high heels of
a Peking tart or the worn cloth slippers of an old man. Even the most
absurd, pathetic or just plain awful characters are given a sympathetic
hearing, and this lends a psychologically complex edge to even his most
wicked satire. "Sympathy must be just a part of my nature," Wang says,
claiming he's never really thought about the question. "I guess I'm just a
good sort of guy," he giggles.

A "good guy" is not, however, what people expect Wang to be. He is forever
being approached by fans who speak to him in the streetwise patois of his
novels, gangster-to-gangster as it were. "It's awful," Wang insists. "It's a
big misunderstanding." Of all his characters, Wang is probably most like the
narrator in his latest, semi-autobiographical story, "Wild Beasts," who
hangs out with the bad boys, talks tough and sometimes acts that way too but
who is basically a sweet little wimp at heart, less grizzly than teddy bear.

He is, however, a teddy with claws, and when he strikes out it's mainly the
poseurs and the pretenders who have to duck. In "An Attitude", probably the
most devastating send-up of China's literary and intellectual scene ever
written, a group of supercilious layabouts decide over a mahjong game to
become writers basically because it's a good way to get invited out to eat.
They round up the usual genres: one will "express deep concern for the
nation and people," another, who once spent a few months in the countryside,
will compose rural literature, a third gets to do sex and modernism and a
fourth will become a critic and write about the rest of them.

The publish a magazine called "Extremely Deep" in which all the stories also
bear that title; the second issue, which follows the same format, is called
"We are Really Deep not Pseudo-Deep." This cuts close to the bone in a place
where for most of both he mainstream establishment and "underground"
cultural crowd, Art is always capital A and Deep is Meaningful.

Not all of Wang's fiction is set in the milieu of the socially marginalised
and alienated. One of his most recent and artistically successful works is
the novel "I Am Your Dad", which describes the relations between a divorced
father and his teenage son. In his search for the perfect relationship, the
father imposes regimes ranging from authoritarianism to democracy ("don't
call me dad, call me mate, mate") to neglect. Sometimes, their roles
suddenly reverse and the son has to look after his exasperating, somewhat
unstable father like a parent. Full of psychological insight and nuance, the
novel can also be read as a political allegory about the difficulty of
working out a modus operandi between ruler and ruled in any society.

Two other stories published last year are set in an editorial department of
a literary magazine ("Who's the Cretin Here?" and "Just a Few Changes ..."),
one ("No Hand Clapping") centres on a woman flautist, and the hero of all
his detective fiction is a middle-aged public security officer.

Most of his fiction has a contemporary setting, though "Wild Beasts" is the
first of planned cycle of stories about a group of friends that opens
against the background of the Cultural Revolution. But whatever the topic,
style or genre he has chosen to experiment with, all of Wang's writing is
characterised by a dazzling virtuosity of language that all but defies
translation. His playful and evocative prose, deft wit and ability to
capture the special rhythms of Peking speech have been likened to that of
the late humorist Lao She. At least one critic has dared to suggest,
moreover, that Wang has already surpassed the old master in brilliance.

"I believe," Wang wrote in a brief essay published in early 1989, "that
literature ought to have two functions: artistic and popular. I'm always
trying to find a middle ground between the two ... But if I had to choose,
I'd take the latter over the former any day." Asked what his goal in life
is, Wang chuckles, but replies without hesitation yangming tianxia - to have
his name known to all under heaven. Somehow, for Wang, it doesn't seem
overly ambitious.

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