by Yan Lianke
Hongmei and I had no choice but to return to the tender land.
The revolution has not yet succeeded, and comrades must continue to struggle.
Goodbye, revolution!
Farewell!
Translator’s Note
There is nothing in the world that is softer and weaker than water, and yet for attacking things that are hard and strong there is nothing that can take precedence over it.
—Dao De Jing
Opening with the enigmatic statement “The Way that can be wayed is not the true Way, and the name that can be named is not the true name,” the sixth century BCE Taoist classic the Dao De Jing is famous for its embrace of conceptual inversions and apparent paradoxes. One of the best-known examples of these paradoxes is the text’s observation that although water has no shape or form of its own, it is nevertheless able to overpower even the hardest substances. The title of Yan Lianke’s Hard Like Water riffs on this observation while giving it an erotic twist. In the novel, hardness is exemplified by the male protagonist Gao Aijun, a soldier-turned-revolutionary whose given name literally means “loves the army” and who throughout the novel brings the revolution to his small Henan town of Chenggang. Gao Aijun’s revolutionary ardor is matched by his erotic passion, and his extramarital affair with Xia Hongmei, daughter-in-law of the town’s former mayor, is the major driving force of the novel. But even as Aijun’s libido is held up as an exemplar of his revolutionary fervor, he repeatedly finds himself attacked by bouts of impotence—with his erection, when most needed, becoming “like water.”
In exploring the libidinal investments that drive both revolutionary engagement and sexual desire, Hard Like Water, first published in China in 2001, builds on a literary subgenre known as “revolution plus love,” which was popular in China in the late 1920s and 1930s. Like Yan Lianke’s later novella Serve the People! (which unlike this work was eventually banned in China), Hard Like Water approaches the erotics of revolutionary activism by turning not to the early decades of the Chinese Communist Party (as with the “revolution plus love” genre) but rather to the tumultuous Cultural Revolution period (1966–76), during which strident calls for adherence to Maoist doctrine and revolutionary change led to widespread suffering and societal disruption. Many canonical works from this period bristle with sexual energy just below the surface, and there is anecdotal evidence that, with millions of school- and college-age Red Guards leaving their families and traveling the country to carry out revolution during the initial years of the Cultural Revolution, this was also a period of considerable sexual experimentation. One of the quirks of Hard Like Water, moreover, building on its premise that revolutionary fervor mirrors romantic passion, is that Aijun and Hongmei find in revolutionary and propagandistic works a particularly potent aphrodisiac.
More generally, the Cultural Revolution period was a study in contrasts. On one hand, the Cultural Revolution demanded a highly doctrinaire adherence to Maoist orthodoxy; on the other hand, it was also stridently iconoclastic, encouraging the totalistic destruction of the so-called Four Olds (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas). In the novel, the most visible manifestation of these Four Olds is Chenggang’s memorial to the Song dynasty Confucian philosophers Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao (known as the Cheng Brothers and both originally from Henan province). A paradoxical characteristic of this era is that although the Mao regime explicitly tried to strengthen the nuclear familiar structure (particularly through abolition of concubinage, prostitution, and so forth), one of the side effects of the Cultural Revolution was a systemic undermining of these same family structures, as individuals were frequently encouraged to betray their own relatives, and accused rightists would often deliberately distance themselves from their families so as to protect them. In Hard Like Water, these iconoclastic tendencies ultimately intersect in the topos of the town’s Cheng Temple, which contains a shrine to the “feudal-era” Cheng Brothers.
Hard Like Water’s racy allusion to the Dao De Jing, meanwhile, is just the beginning of the work’s intertextuality. In addition to quotations from theoretical works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the novel also references many of Mao’s essays, poems, and aphorisms, as well a variety of Mao-era songs, plays, and slogans. These allusions often subtly distort the language—and even the meaning—of the original text, while being seamlessly incorporated into the novel’s own narrative (where their appearance is usually not signaled by means of quotation marks, italics, indentation, and so forth). Although Chinese readers would instantly recognize many of these allusions, even in their distorted form, for the benefit of English-language readers I have placed some of the citations in italics when they first appear in the text. As the work progresses and readers hopefully become more attuned to Yan’s habit of interweaving intertextual references into his narrative, I gradually drop the italics, offering a reading experience that more closely replicates that of the original.
In order to give a taste of how these allusions work in the original text, I will briefly discuss the work’s opening paragraph, which includes references to a 1947 film, a Mao Zedong speech from 1957, and a 1960s opera. The novel begins with Gao Aijun offering a series of first-person reflections immediately prior to what he anticipates will be his own execution. Roughly halfway through the opening paragraph, however, there appear a couple of lines alluding to someone else’s execution: Prior to the execution, I drank a bowl of wine, and did not feel a trace of resentment. Hatoyama prepared a banquet for me, with ten thousand cups. The lines in question are adapted (with slight modifications) from the Peking Opera The Red Lantern (1965), which was one of eighteen socialist-realist works hand-selected by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, for general dissemination during the Cultural Revolution, and which came to be known collectively as revolutionary “model operas.” This particular Peking Opera version of The Red Lantern was based on a 1963 movie and a 1958 novel, which in turn was based on a true story about Communist secret agents working in a rail station in northern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The lines cited in the opening paragraph of Yan’s novel are adapted from a passage near the end of the opera, in which the protagonist, a railway worker named Li Yuhe who has been secretly working for the underground Chinese Communist Party, is about to be executed by the Japanese military police. Hatoyama, the Japanese police chief, has been trying to force Li Yuhe to divulge a secret code he was assigned to convey to the Communists, but Li Yuhe steadfastly refuses to betray his cause. Although at this point Yan Lianke’s readers don’t have any indication why Aijun himself has been sentenced to death, the allusion to Li Yuhe’s execution suggests that Aijun similarly sees himself as a Communist hero who has been unjustly condemned.
A few sentences later, Hard Like Water alludes to the epic film The Spring River Flows East. Centered around a fractured Shanghai family during and immediately after the Second Sino-Japanese War, the film was initially released in two parts in 1947 and 1948, becoming one of the most popular works of the period. The film was rereleased in 1956 during the Hundred Flower Movement and embraced by viewers who saw it as a welcome change of pace from the more doctrinaire worker-peasant fare that by then had become ubiquitous in China. The Spring River Flows East borrows its title from a line from a poem by Li Yu, the last ruler of the Southern Tang, which was composed shortly after his kingdom had been conquered by the Song dynasty. The final line of the poem could be rendered as:
How much sorrow can one man bear?
As much as the spring river flowing east.
In both Li Yu’s poem and the 1940s film, the eastward flow of the river functions as a symbol of historical inevitability (due to China’s geography, all of its largest rivers flow in a generally eastward direction). In his own citation of the line in question, however, Yan Lianke inverts the direction of the river’s flow, and adds another allusion that similarly pivots on questions of cardinal directions: The spring river water flows west, as the east and west winds engage in fierce battle. The lat
ter reference is to a well-known line from a speech Mao Zedong gave in Moscow in 1957, in which he announced:
It is my opinion that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two winds in the world today, the east wind and the west wind. There is a Chinese saying, ‘Either the East wind prevails over the West wind, or the West wind prevails over the East wind.’ It is characteristic of the situation today, I believe, that the east wind is prevailing over the west wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism are overwhelmingly superior to forces of imperialism.
The Chinese saying that Mao alludes to here, “Either the East wind prevails over the West wind, or the West wind prevails over the East wind,” comes from the classic Qing dynasty novel Dream of the Red Chamber, which is a favorite text of Yan Lianke. In this novel the phrase is spoken by the work’s female protagonist Lin Daiyu to describe the vicious power struggles that perennially rage within her socially elite extended clan. Yan Lianke, meanwhile, implicitly builds on Mao’s allusion to Cold War tensions but reverses Mao’s insistence that socialism necessarily has the upper hand. Instead, Yan reverts
back to a version of the original Dream of the Red Chamber formulation, in which the two winds are imagined as being in perpetual battle—suggesting perhaps that the historical inevitability implied by the Li Yu line has not yet been set in stone, or perhaps that continual struggle is itself that which is inevitable.
These sorts of subtle political and cultural allusions recur throughout Hard Like Water. Sometimes they appear in passing, and other times they are developed in a more sustained fashion. For instance, the novel features numerous casual references to famous Mao aphorisms such as “revolution is not a dinner party,” as well as slightly more obscure ones, such as “the only thing the world fears is [the Communist Party’s] conscientiousness” (which the novel ironically inverts to read: “the only thing the Communist Party fears is conscientiousness”). At the same time, the novel also features a more extended engagement with texts such as the model operas The Red Lantern and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy—including several passages that reimagine key scenes from these two works in the form of an opera script (complete with stage directions, music cues, and so forth).
Like The Red Lantern, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1958) was a modern Peking Opera that was based on an earlier movie and novel that, in turn, drew on a real-life incident involving a People’s Liberation Army soldier (named Yang Zirong in the opera). During the Chinese Civil War, Yang successfully infiltrates a pro-KMT (Kuomintang, i.e., Nationalist) bandit camp led by a “bandit chief” named Zuo Shandiao (a.k.a. “the Vulture”). In the novel, allusions to Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy are offered as a commentary on Aijun’s own attempt, at one point, to sneak behind “enemy lines,” even as the novel explicitly cites the opera as one of the works that Aijun and Hongmei use to ignite their sexual passion.
Hard Like Water does not explicitly reflect on the work’s own intertextual practice, and in this translation I have similarly refrained from adding supplementary annotations or explanations (beyond this brief discussion). All the parenthetical remarks that appear in the translation are reproduced as they appear in the original novel, and have not been added for this English edition. Regardless of how familiar or unfamiliar readers may be with the precise textual history of the novel’s various citations and allusions, they will appreciate the work’s engaging story line, its innovative narrative structure, and its dark and often humorous commentary on the potential perversities of revolutionary practice and erotic obsession.
—Carlos Rojas
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin’s Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World’s Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. His memoir Three Brothers was published in 2020. He lives in Beijing.
Carlos Rojas has translated seven books by Yan Lianke.
Praise for
Yan Lianke and Hard Like Water
‘An indefatigable tale of love, delusion and revolution. Yan Lianke speaks to the agitation and absurdity of human existence, and the unquenchable need to believe in a cause greater than ourselves.’
Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow
‘Nothing short of a masterpiece.’
Guardian on The Explosion Chronicles
‘A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess.’
Financial Times on The Explosion Chronicles
‘Mordant satire from a brave fabulist.’
Daily Mail on The Day the Sun Died
‘Dream of Ding Village paints a riveting and disturbing portrait of village life in the grip of epidemic…As an expose of mind-boggling greed, corruption and failure of government in the spread of AIDS through blood-selling, Dream of Ding Village is powerful and peerless.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Based on the blood-selling scandal in Lianke’s home province of Henan, this is a devastating tale…As China rushes headlong into the global economy, it’s a stark warning.’
Adelaide Advertiser
‘Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures.’
Washington Post
‘I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth.’
New York Times Book Review
‘The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention—to write is to risk the hand of power.’
Guardian
‘A fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer. [Lenin’s Kisses] is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: it is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion.’
Amos Oz, New York Times
‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature.’
Jung Chang
‘Exuberant and imaginative.’
Sunday Times on The Day the Sun Died
‘Arch and playful…[Yan Lianke] deploys offbeat humour, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history…A brave, brilliant novel.’
Financial Times on The Four Books
‘It’s a Chinese novel hailed across the planet as a masterpiece, and I’m normally the first to resist such an imposition before I’ve even opened the thing—but for once, the hype doesn’t go far enough… a devastating, brilliant slice of living history.’
The Times on The Four Books
‘No other writer in today’s China has so consistently explored, dissected and mocked the past six and a half decades of Chinese communist rule…An extraordinary novel.’
Observer on The Four Books
‘Stark, powerful and compelling.’
Independent on The Four Books
‘A very funny, sexy, satire.’
Independent on Sunday on Serve the People!
‘Serve the People! drips with the kind of satire that can only come from deep within the machinery of Chinese communism.’
Financial Times
‘Serve the People! is a wonderfully biting satire, brimming with absurdity, humor and wit.’
L.A. Times
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Copyright © Yan
Lianke, 2001
Translation copyright © Carlos Rojas, 2021
Translator’s Note © Carlos Rojas, 2021
The moral rights of Yan Lianke to be identified as the author and Carlos Rojas as the translator of this work have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Originally published as Jianying ru shui in 2001 by Changjiang Art and Literature
Press in China and in 2009 by Rye Field in Taiwan
First published in English in 2021 by Grove Atlantic, New York
Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2021
Cover design by Matt Broughton
Cover art: Zhong Biao, 战斗的青春 Youth Rumble (1998), oil on canvas, 81 x 60 cm