INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Our western image of Chinese industrialisation, and the boom in the country’s economy since the most extreme rigidities of communism began to relax in the 1970s, is Dickensian. When writing about its booming cities, its huge industrial complexes, its vast mines turning out tonnes of everything from coal to rare earth elements, its proliferating power stations, journalists tend to employ the syntax of Hard Times. Much is said about intolerable levels of pollution and the dehumanisation of a downtrodden workforce, and the ruthless forward march of a giant industrial economy bent, it seems, on swallowing the rest of the world whole.
Shi Cheng, or Ten Cities, offers an alternative view, or rather ten different alternative views, of modern urban China, something much funnier, quirkier, more transgressive and generally more human than the received picture drawn by political and economic commentators or those concerned with China’s human rights record. Each story is set in a different Chinese city, from worldly and westernised Hong Kong in the south to frozen Harbin in the far north, whose name, we learn, is a transliteration into Chinese characters of a Russian phrase meaning ‘where fishing nets dry’. While each of these cities lends a distinctive character to its story, the focus is always on the vibrant, eccentric, tragic-comic struggles for life of the individuals living in them.
In Wheels Are Round, for example, Xu Zechen lampoons the rampant consumerism of contemporary Beijing in a bitterly ironic fable about a man who builds a car out of junk, only to find it elevated into an object of consumerist desire worth so much money it is put beyond his reach. Xian Mingliang has come to the capital to pursue a dream, but he never quite manages to live in the city, merely in a suburb where he can look at it like ‘a patch of tropical rainforest, made up of endless tall buildings and the glow of neon lights’ from the roof of his house. His landlord is a man who makes a good living out of forging identity documents. Everything is fake, illusory.
This theme recurs in Ho Sin Tung’s Square Moon, which follows the small, sad life of a girl who set out to become an artist but finished up working in a gallery frequented by foreign collectors. Every day she commutes for three hours to reach her workplace and return home; though a native of the city, she is a stranger in it. As the mysterious westerner she meets and forms a relationship with remarks, as she is twenty-five, and he has lived in Hong Kong for over thirty years, he is more Hong Kong than she is. Their affair is pursued through a journey around the world, but this world is a series of sordid hotels, where rooms can be rented by the hour, named Hotel Rome, Hotel Spain etc. The nameless westerner will not go home because his house is haunted.
The bleak sense of alienation which itself haunts all these stories is, perhaps, at its strongest and least compromising in Ding Liyang’s Family Secrets, in which a young woman newspaper columnist sits alone in her Shanghai office all night, waiting for the phone to ring and people to tell her their secrets. She is part agony aunt, part tabloid reporter, no good at either because she cannot empathise. When a young man rings to tell her he is suicidal after breaking up with his girlfriend, her first instinct is to tell him ‘that slashing your wrists didn’t necessarily kill you, and he’s better think of another way’, even though what she means to say is that ‘he shouldn’t be in such a hurry to kill himself, why not try and find another girlfriend?’ When a girl threatens to jump off the Jinmao Tower, the reporter’s response is that she doesn’t think it’s finished yet. Her feelings remain so suppressed that the only private life she has is with an imagined husband and child; only in the imagination can love be perfected.
The contributors to this anthology represent the most active and liberal-minded group of writers working in China today. Most began their careers underground, before the internet gave them the opportunity to self publish and to reach a much wider audience. Their work, with its implied, and sometimes overt, criticism of the totalitarian system which still governs China, carries risks, as the frequent impositions on the freedom of the artist Ai Weiwei, now much publicised in the west, attest. Several of these writers started out as poets but have resolved to continue their search for new forms and new voices appropriate to their rapidly changing society through fiction because fiction attracts greater public engagement and support. Although the stories are bleak, tough and often without hope, they are also very funny and characterised by writing which is sharp, powerful, refreshing and sometimes lyrical. ‘The sun was the colour of a bad quality soft drink’, writes Cao Kou in But What About the Red Indians?, tailoring the image with skill and vivacity to a tale of those who come to the city in pursuit of their fortune and end up trapped in an impoverished demi-monde of casual labour, illegal immigration, difficult and aimless journeys on intolerable buses, transitory relationships and plastic tablecloths.
Of course, the translators of these stories make a major contribution to our enjoyment by their skill and creativity in transforming modern Chinese idiom into lively, punchy English. The quality of translation in this collection, which includes work by Julia Lovell and Nicky Harman, who are among the foremost translators of Chinese literature into English, is excellent. The English versions, while works of art in themselves, never lose sight of the idiosyncrasy and originality of the authors’ take on the sad, funny, hopelessly optimistic underworld of modern urban China. Not, in fact, unlike Dickens at his best.
Buy your copy of Shi Cheng: Short Stories From Urban China, edited by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu and Ra Page, Comma Press 2012, £9.99 here