The Bonfire of China’s Vanities

[The Smoking Man]

The Bonfire of China’s Vanities
By PANKAJ MISHRA

One cold afternoon last fall I met Yu Hua at the state-run Friendship Hotel in Beijing. Cheerfully, he described to me the incipient international fame of his most recent novel, “Brothers,” one of China’s biggest-selling literary works. He had just returned from Hong Kong, where the novel was short-listed for the Man Asian Prize; he was leaving soon for Paris to receive an award for the book, which had just been translated into French. With the breezy insouciance that unbroken success creates, Yu then began to recount a somewhat irreverent memory of Mao Zedong’s death.

Though nearly 50, Yu, who wears his hair short and spiky, looks relatively young. He speaks in emphatic bursts, his face often flushing red, and he is quick to laugh. It was, in fact, his boisterous laugh that almost got him into trouble on the morning of the solemn announcement of Mao’s death. Responding to orders that blared out from loudspeakers, he assembled with hundreds of other students in the main hall of his small-town high school. “Funereal music was played, and then we had to hear the long list of titles that preceded Mao’s name, ‘Chairman,’ ‘Beloved Leader,’ ‘Great helmsman . . . ,’ ” Yu recalled. “Everyone loved Chairman Mao, of course, so when his name was finally announced, everyone burst into tears. I started crying, too, but one person crying is a sad sight; more than a thousand people crying together, the sound echoing, turns into a funny spectacle, so I began to laugh. My body shook with my effort to control my laughter while I bent over the chair in front of me. The class leader later told me, admiringly, ‘Yu Hua, you were crying so fervently!’ ”

He paused, and then jumped 13 years to a memory of another momentous — and more traumatic — event in China’s modern history. In the spring of 1989, when tens of thousands of protesters filled Tiananmen Square, Yu was living in Beijing, partaking of the cultural excitement and political hopefulness of post-Mao China. Already a major figure in the city’s artistic avant garde, Yu biked every day to Tiananmen Square to express solidarity with the student protesters.

As Yu described the widespread civilian support for the students, a note of passion entered his voice, and the menu he had elegantly snagged off a passing waiter lay open and unread in his lap. “The word ‘people’ was much used in the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “It is a very loaded term in China, it is used a lot, but until the mass protests in 1989 I did not realize what the word meant.”

His voice grew louder as he recalled the bloody suppression and aftermath of the protests. I became nervous. Yu, a short, thickset man with bulging eyes, could easily pass unnoticed in a crowd of Chinese peasants and workers, but he does not exactly strive for self-effacement. We were sitting in the corner of the hotel lobby, partly concealed by a large pillar and surrounded by a thick fog of cigarette smoke. Yu, a restless chain smoker, insists on ignoring China’s new ban on smoking in public places.

The hotel was full that day of young executives from nearby I.T. offices­, any one of whom might have recognized Yu, who is frequently mentioned as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though official repression of the memory of Tiananmen has ensured that few young Chinese know much about the struggles for democracy waged in the 1980s, cybersavvy youth of the kind we were surrounded by are still likely to take a sternly nationalistic line with a Chinese writer or intellectual criticizing the events of June 1989 to a foreigner. Indeed, as Yu spoke, a trendily dressed young woman looked up from the glowing screen of her laptop to squint at him.

Yu seemed totally oblivious to potential eavesdroppers. His face was red as he came to end of his memory of 1989. Turning to me, he said: “Sorry to take off like that. But this was a big turning point for all of us. After June 1989 people in China lost interest in politics. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping made his famous ‘Southern Tour,’ calling for faster market reforms, and the economy started to take off. The ideals of nation and socialism began to look empty. People became focused on making money.

“I, too, began to enjoy the fruits of capitalism,” he added, and laughed.

YYu was only partly joking. For someone who started out in China’s brief moment of counterculture in the 1980s as a writer of bleak, experimental and defiantly unsalable stories, Yu has gone on to receive an ample share of the fruits of capitalism. Published in two parts in 2005 and 2006, “Brothers,” which traces the fortunes of two stepbrothers from the Cultural Revolution to China’s no-less-frenzied Consumer Revolution, has sold more than a million copies in China, not counting the probably higher sales of innumerable pirated editions.

The novel, which will be published in an English translation later this month, may also prove to be China’s first successful export of literary fiction. Certainly, foreign readers will find in its sprawling, rambunctious narrative some of China’s most frenetic transformations and garish contradictions. “Brothers” strikes its characteristic tone with the very first scene, as Li Guang, a business tycoon, sits on his gold-plated toilet, dreaming of space travel even as he mourns the loss of all earthly relations. Li made his money from various entrepreneurial ventures, including hosting a beauty pageant for virgins and selling scrap metal and knockoff designer suits. A quick flashback to his small-town childhood shows him ogling the bottoms of women defecating in a public toilet. Similarly grotesque images proliferate over the next 600 pages as Yu describes, first, the extended trauma of the Cultural Revolution, during which Li and his stepbrother Song Gang witness Red Guards torturing Song Gang’s father to death, and then the moral wasteland of capitalist China, in which Song Gang is forced to surgically enlarge one of his breasts in order to sell breast-enlargement gels.

The reasons for the novel’s commercial success seem clear. It invokes the widely experienced violence and suffering of the Cultural Revolution while also drawing on another resonant theme in China: the outlandish lifestyles of the rich and famous, especially nouveau-riche entrepreneurs like Li. Li represents the country’s new cultural icons, whose large appetites for money, women and cars keep the innumerable Chinese bloggers and Internet chat rooms transfixed with both admiration and revulsion.

Other writers have dealt with the Cultural Revolution and the counter-revolutions of post-Mao China — the wealthy entrepreneur inChi Li’s “Coming and Going,” one of the country’s most successful novels and TV series of the last decade, also provoked much fascinated ambivalence among middle-class Chinese and the many millions more aspiring to be. But Yu brings to his potent mix of market-tested subjects the ambition, energy and flair of a born provocateur. He seems less interested in representing modern-day China through mimetic realism than in evoking it through a bawdy semi-fantastical narrative, in which human bodies are frequently and gruesomely violated in recurring scenes of debauchery, brutality and death.

Yu’s provocations may have succeeded better than he hoped; enraged critics have made “Brothers” one of China’s most controversial novels in recent years. Yu, who is one of the very few literary writers to have flourished in the new China, always seemed a bit suspect to puritanical critics. But “Brothers” has aroused a special malice among many readers, both online and in print, who accuse Yu of caring more for profit margins than for literature. When the second part of the novel came out in 2006, a famous literary critic at Beijing University, who championed Yu’s short fiction in the 1980s, told me that the former avant-gardist had learned how to work China’s new marketplace and “make money.” Other reviewers doubted Yu’s grasp of the details of Chinese life. Online forums debated with special vigor whether it would have been possible for a man in a small Chinese town in the early 1960s to spy on women’s bottoms in a public toilet and then, in the process, slip and drown in a cesspool.

Last year an anthology of criticism titled “Pulling Yu Hua’s Teeth” charged the author of “Brothers” with several crimes: selling out to the very forces of commercialism and vulgarity anatomized in his novel; promoting a negative image of China and Chinese writers to the West; sinking into “a world of filth, chaos, stench and blackness, without the slightest scrap of dignity”; being a carpetbagging peasant who gives himself literary airs.

“Good people are not rewarded,” one critic writes, “the kind do not die a good death, scoundrels take the upper hand, love proves false, only money is praised, but there is nothing behind money but lasciviousness and ugliness.” Opening the teeth-pulling operation with an article claiming that Yu’s writing consists of four bad teeth — a black tooth, a yellow tooth, a false tooth and a carious tooth — the book systematically excavates Yu’s dentures over four parts, ending with a conclusion titled “It’s Not the Toothache but the Pain That Kills You.”

Yu betrayed no signs of postoperative stress when I asked him recently about the reaction to his book. He dismissed “Pulling Yu Hua’s Teeth” as “sensationalism” and robustly rejected the accusation that he performs for a Western audience. “My books are more popular in China than anywhere else,” he said. “If they weren’t, these critics would have a point.”

When I first met Yu one evening in Shanghai in 2006, he confidently described to me his vision of “Brothers” as a social and moral critique of China’s evolution. Yet he was suffering from a version of postpublication angst common among authors — the cankerous feeling that his work, and its vision of China lurching between political authoritarianism, extreme poverty, consumerist excess and moral depravity, was not being taken seriously enough. High sales and popular acclaim had not taken the sting out of the venomous reviews. But almost three years of a sustained critical assault on “Brothers” seems to have hardened Yu. He now sees the attacks in sociological rather than literary terms, as exposing a fault line between generations, and his detractors as typical of China’s new nationalists — people too young to have any memory of their country’s previous traumas but obsessed with boosting China’s image as a rising power vis-à-vis the West.

“The main reason that the book was attacked is because it exposes the dark side of China,” he told me when we met again in Beijing. “A highly respected critic in Fudan University, Chen Sihe, pointed this out. ‘Look at the critics who are attacking this book,’ he said, ‘They are all young. Older critics have a more ambiguous take.’ ”

Yu added, “Younger writers don’t like to see books that reveal the dark side of China; they live very comfortable lives; they don’t believe in the dark side of China; they are not even aware of the hundreds of millions of people still living in extreme poverty.”

Yu himself seems to have rarely turned away from the dark side of things. He first became known in the late 1980s as a writer of surreal short fiction whose raw violence — in one story, a 4-year-old strangles his cousin, a baby, in order to “enjoy the explosive crying”; in another, a young girl is hacked to pieces — brashly defied the hygienic pieties of socialist realism to which China’s state-supported writers were expected to conform.

Yu switched to melodramatic realism in 1992 in his novel “To Live.” This atrocity-rich tale of a forbearing peasant whose son dies after a blood transfusion to save a party official was turned into an internationally successful film by Zhang Yimou, China’s most prominent director. It won the Grand Prix at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Both “To Live,“ and his next novel, “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant”(1995), in which a peasant traffics in his own blood to supplement his meager income, remained resolutely focused on the tragic aspects of China’s modern history. But it was not until Yu traveled to the West that he began to think about a broader fictional canvas that would depict China’s chaotic present as well as its past. In 1995 he went abroad for the first time, to the French seaside town St. Malo, for a literary festival. “The foreign journalists there,” he recalled, “would often ask me about the Cultural Revolution, and it occurred to me what a barbarous and bizarre experience China had had.”

Almost miraculously, “Brothers,” which contains graphic descriptions of the violence of the Cultural Revolution, including the suicide of a man who hammers a nail into his skull, managed to escape Chinese censors. Yu said he profited from his experience with Zhang Yimou, who cannily altered the story of “To Live” in order to make the film version palatable to Chinese authorities: among other things, Zhang made the son’s death seem like a tragic accident. “As he made the changes I became very impressed by how well Zhang Yimou seemed to understand the Chinese Communist Party. But the film still got banned. After that, I stopped caring about what the censors would think.”

It was his publishers rather than the state censors who wanted cuts in “Brothers.” But they relented after Yu threatened to withdraw his book. “They knew,” he said, “that the book would sell; they are willing to take more risks with the censors because they are not state-supported anymore and have to fend for themselves in the marketplace.” For Yu the publication of his novel is a sign of slow but steady progress in China. “Ten years ago, ‘Brothers’ could not have been published,” he said. “It may take another 10 years for a movie to be made out of it.”

We were sitting with Yu’s wife, Chen Hong, a poet who now devotes most of her time to looking after their son, in the living room of the apartment they rent in West Beijing. We were surrounded by the marks of a temporary existence: new Ikea-style furniture, mismatched curtains, piled-up books and a general air of neglect. Yu explained that he and his wife were waiting for their son to finish school before moving to Hangzhou in his ancestral province, Zhejiang. He didn’t like Beijing; it was too big and impersonal. The neighboring apartments, for instance, housed “hair salons,” often a front, in China, for brothels, with bright neon lights. “I tell my friends we live in a red-light district,” he joked, and his wife, a woman with a delicate pale face and loose long hair, broke into a melodious laugh.

One room in Yu’s austere apartment is reserved for surfing the Internet, which is probably the most revealing window on modern China. But Yu said he spends more time in his study, another stark room with a laptop computer on a clean desk. He added that he didn’t need to rely on the Internet; he had personally experienced the weird mutations of China’s consumer culture described in the novel. He remembers turning on the television in the 1990s to find nothing but beauty pageants: every town in China seemed to host them.

He disputes the charge that the details in the novel are far-fetched; reality can be equally, sometimes even more, gruesome in China. “After the book was published, an academic friend wrote to me to say that his father had also killed himself by hammering a nail into his skull,” he said. “Three readers said that their father’s corpse had to be mutilated in order to fit into the coffin. A New York Times journalist who interviewed me in 2006 thought that businesses offering hymen reconstruction was extremely unlikely; he then discovered that they existed all over China.”

When I asked Yu if he had ever contemplated breast-enlargement, like Song Gang in “Brothers,” he and his wife laughed. But both grew somber as Yu recalled his childhood, no less infected by the grotesque for being relatively untouched by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Born in 1960, Yu grew up in a small town called Haiyan in Zhejiang province (a breeding ground of many Chinese artists and intellectuals including Lu Xun, the pioneer of modern Chinese literature). Despite the Cultural Revolution, Yu recalled, life was generally monotonous — except when a criminal was to be executed, when “the whole town would become as lively as festival time.” Yu remembers the executions as the “most thrilling scenes of my childhood, seeing the criminal kneeling on the ground, a soldier aiming a rifle at the back of his head and firing.”

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[The Smoking Man]

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His father was a doctor — but this makes him sound grander than he was, for he worked, Yu said, wearing a bloodstained smock in one small room and lived with his family across the road. Their home also faced a public toilet, where nurses often dumped tumors, and the local mortuary. “On hot summer days, it was cool inside the mortuary,” Yu recalled, “and since the corpses were deposited only at night, I often took a nap there. Sleeping at night in our home, we would be woken by the sound of people crying.”

Yu now attributes the relentless bleakness of his early fiction to his childhood exposure to brutality and death. “I was unable to steer my writing away from bloodshed and violence,” he said, “Writing during the day, I’d have one character killing another, characters dying in pools of blood. At night, asleep, I would dream that I was about to be killed by someone else.”

Yu never went to college. “My entire education was encompassed by the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “I went to school in 1966 and came out in 1976, so I never received a proper education.” Then, like many “barefoot doctors” in China in the late 1970s, Yu underwent only some very basic training before he became a dentist.

He claims he became a writer because he hated his job: “the inside of a mouth is one of the ugliest spectacles in the world.” In the early ’80s he was living in a small town between Shanghai and Hangzhou. From his window he often observed workers of the local Cultural Bureau, the Chinese state’s salaried writers and artists, loafing in the streets. “We were all very poor in those days,” Yu recalled. “The difference was that you could work hard to be poor as a dentist, or you could do nothing and still be poor as a worker in the Cultural Bureau. I decided I wanted to be as idle as the workers in the Cultural Bureau and become a writer.”

Yu wrote a short story and sent it off to a literary magazine in Beijing. An enthusiastic phone call from its editor soon put him on the path to paid idleness at the Cultural Bureau. Yu seems to have relished manipulating the Communist system to his own ends. “I was deliberately late on the first day at the bureau office,” he told me. “Later I would only go once a week, and then finally only once a month to collect my salary.”

In 1993 the royalties from “To Live” enabled Yu to leave his job altogether. “My friends,” he recalled, “say I have enjoyed the best of both ideologies: first receiving a writer’s stipend under socialism and now royalties in the free-market regime.”

Though Yu’s account of his beginnings as a writer is lighthearted, from the first his works of fiction provoked serious critical attention. Published in such major literary magazines as Zhongshan, Shouhuo and Shanghai Wenyi, his stories, with their surreal violence and cruelty, seemed to deftly summarize China’s history; their metafictional devices also spoke of a formal ambition rare among Chinese writers. As early as 1991 the critic Henry Zhao predicted that Yu was “destined to occupy a long page in Chinese literature.”

Remarkably, Yu seems to have had as little apprenticeship in writing as he had in dentistry. Books were hard to come by during the Cultural Revolution, or they would circulate in mutilated form, like the torn copy of a novel by Guy de Maupassant, which Yu read the middle of (“I remember it had a lot of sex,” he said) without knowing its title or author. His formative reading experience was provided by the big character posters of the Cultural Revolution, in which people denounced their neighbors with violent inventiveness. “I remember,” Yu said, “walking home from school and reading each poster as I walked along. I was not so much interested in the revolutionary slogans as in the stories.”

He had never cared much for Chinese writers; only later did he come to appreciate Lu Xun’s resolve to diagnose Chinese society and culture through literature. Like many of his peers recoiling from socialist realism, Yu was drawn to the icons of Western high modernism whose work began to appear in translation in China in the 1980s, in particular Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Borges. The delicate fictions of the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata were also a great early influence. “Kawabata taught me the importance of detail,” Yu recalled. “I would buy two copies of his novels whenever I saw them. One to read and the other to keep in pristine condition on my shelf.”

So why did he abandon avant-garde experimentalism? Yu says he discovered that his characters had their own lives, which he could not control. By the early 1990s, when almost all major works of international fiction were being translated into Chinese, he was also reading more widely, particularly novels by V. S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison. But there seem to have been extraliterary reasons, too, for the general retreat from aesthetic radicalism among Yu’s generation. The critic Chen Xiaoming, who teaches at Beijing University, once told me that by 1992, as China’s economy hectically expanded and the state began to withdraw its cultural subsidies, publishers were increasingly forced to sink or swim in the marketplace. In the new era of mass culture, which TV dramas and popular music dominated, there were fewer takers for avant-garde fiction, and its practitioners had to improvise or face irrelevance.

This sounds true: Su Tong, one of the more famous avant-gardists in the 1980s, turned to writing historical romances. In an apparent concession to his commercial times, Yu scripted an episode for a TV show titled “China Models.” “It was for the money,” he jokingly admitted to me. But he also claims that he was led to a more populist aesthetic by a new idea of his social responsibility as a writer. As he sees it, boldly experimental writing of the kind he and other writers produced in the 1980s was a rejection of the official orthodoxy of Mao’s notion that literature ought to serve the Communist regime’s political ends. “We wanted to say,” Yu told me, “that writing is not in the service of anything other than itself.”

Yu claims that he was forced to reconsider his stance of aesthetic autonomy after the events of June 4, 1989, and reconfigure his notion of the relationship between writer and society, especially as he confronted the problems created by China’s breakneck modernization in the 1990s. This meant embracing the old Chinese model of the writer as social critic and a pared-down style of cinematic brevity and much earthy humor. It meant, too, writing about China’s large but invisible majority in the age of globalization: peasants and workers in villages and small towns.

Yu now looks back wryly on his reputation as a militant advocate of l’art pour l’art. He said he had recently been persuaded to conduct a public conversation with Alain Robbe-Grillet during the latter’s visit to Beijing. He didn’t think much of the high priest of the nouveau roman, to whom he was often and inaccurately compared in the past. “He was just an old codger,” Yu said and laughed.

EExpressing a preference for engagé over ivory-tower literature is unlikely to endear Yu to left-leaning readers in China. “If the right-wingers,” Yu said, “hate ‘Brothers’ for its depiction of capitalism in China, the left dislikes it for its depiction of the Cultural Revolution.”

I put this to Wang Hui, the most prominent of intellectuals described as part of China’s New Left, which maintains that many of China’s peasants and workers have yet to reap the benefits of the newly globalized economy. Wang is an old friend of Yu’s and wrote a foreword to a collection of his essays. (It was Wang who first encouraged Yu to begin writing essays in the late 1990s, publishing them in Dushu, the magazine he edited until 2007.) Yu told me that, broadly, he shared the New Left’s criticism of Chinese-style capitalism, its tendency to create wealth in the cities while bypassing the countryside. Wang, however, seemed reluctant to wholeheartedly endorse “Brothers.”

“The first part reproduces the conventional ‘grand narrative’ of the Cultural Revolution as a time of unrelieved suffering and betrayal,” he told me. “I actually find the second part more interesting, because the author is no longer in control of his narrative. But, you know, we are old friends, and we haven’t really discussed this book.” As he said this, Wang put an arm around Yu. We were at a restaurant in West Beijing that serves the cuisine of Zhejiang, Yu’s native province. I had traveled to it in a taxi with Yu and noticed a strain of writerly competitiveness in his terse responses to my questions about contemporary Chinese novelists: he read mostly Mo Yan, Wang Anyi and Su Tong. No, he didn’t much read young Chinese writers or the Chinese Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, who lives in a suburb of Paris. Ma Jian, the author of the blackly satirical novel “Beijing Coma,” who lives in self-imposed exile in London, is barely known in China. He was more interested in foreign authors; he had recently read Ian McEwan’s novel “On Chesil Beach” and also introduced a collection of the British novelist’s stories in Chinese translation.

Yu spoke warmly, though, of Wang, whom he first met in Beijing in the 1980s and who is one of the very few people he sees frequently. At the restaurant they sat together, presenting a study in contrasts: Wang, unfailingly thoughtful, and Yu, as jaunty as ever. Yet they radiated an easy mutual regard, built upon the shared experience of the tumultuous late 1980s in Beijing and amusement at how significantly things had changed in their own lives since they were provincial students during the Cultural Revolution. Wang seemed to cherish the mischievous — what he called the “jokemaking” — side of Yu.

They had just returned from a trip to Nepal, where they went whitewater rafting together. Yu chortled as he recalled his attempts to hold on to his boat amid the swirling waters. “It’s very dangerous,” he said, “very dangerous.” But he grew visibly aggrieved when I asked him if he followed the Olympic Games in Beijing. The organizers promised to sell tickets online on a first-come-first-served basis, and he tried to buy them as soon as they were made available. But he wasn’t able to get the best seats for the basketball matches and then found empty rows in the stadium whose neatness hinted at early block sales to party bigwigs. “Typical Communist Party corruption,” Yu bellowed, and for once I was glad for the loud Muzak playing in the restaurant.

He fell silent after this, chain-smoking in his quiet but tense manner, as Wang spoke of the Western financial crisis and its implications for China’s export-oriented economy. The stock market was in a steep decline; factories on the coast were closing. The discussion seemed to bore Yu. When I remarked that President Hu Jintao’s then-imminent visit with President Bush was very likely an exercise in futility, he said, “These politicians are mostly a waste of time.”

He perked up only when I asked him what he thought of Zhang Yimou’s contribution to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. He said he felt sympathetic to Zhang, who is often accused of selling out to Communist authorities as well as to commercial interests. “He would have reached the end of his career very quickly had he persisted in making films like ‘To Live.’ He had to live with the realities of Chinese society. And it is different for filmmakers. I can always publish in Taiwan if I am restricted in China. In China, too, the political atmosphere has gone back and forth from closed to open, and I have been lucky in hitting the troughs.”

Later in the taxi home, sitting next to the driver, Yu spoke of a threat to artistic expression in China newer than state control. “I am really worried about the new nationalism,” he said. “Anything slightly critical of China appears in foreign media, and the nationalists are swarming online, attacking it. I tell these angry youth that The New York Times doesn’t criticize China as much as it criticizes America. Basically they are ignorant. They think the American media is always praising American presidents. The problem is that the younger generation hasn’t lived through poverty, collectivism; it is lacking in restraint, its references are very few, the experience is so limited.”

We were moving down Beijing’s stately avenues, past the quasi-imperial grandeur of its postmodern architecture. Yu seemed eager to return to his sparsely furnished study and the room with the Internet. Earlier that day at his home he spoke of how his son, who has known only post-Mao China, would nevertheless witness extraordinary transformations in his own lifetime since the capitalist economy was bound to collapse. Yu barely looked out of his window as he said: “These young nationalists have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities. But when times are hard, their attitude will change, become more mature, and because capitalism in this form cannot go on in China, it has to end, those hard times will come soon.”