The Past and the Punishments

by Yu Hua

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  Translator’s Postscript

  Yu Hua was born in 1960 and grew up in a small

  town near Shanghai. After working for five years as a den-tist, he published his first piece of short fiction in 1984. In the ensuing years, he has produced a steady stream of shock-ing, innovative, and highly controversial short stories and novels that have earned him not only a place at the forefront of China’s avant-garde literary scene but also (in the words of one prominent mainland critic) a reputation as “perhaps the foremost literary provocateur of our time.”1

  Yu Hua, of course, was not the only “provocateur” to have emerged in China in the second half of the 1980s. He is part of a new generation of young writers (including luminaries like Su Tong and Ge Fei) who rose to literary stardom in the years of intellectual and cultural ferment that preceded the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. This group

  – whose work has come to be referred to as “experimental fiction” – is separated by a very interesting and historically significant kind of generation gap from the writers who preceded them. That first generation of writers to cast aside the rigid strictures of Maoist ideological orthodoxy came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and they are now in their forties. Many of them were “educated youth” who were sacrificed at the altar of Communist Party politics and de-ported en masse from the cities to remote rural regions, where they spent much of the 1970s. These writers (and their work) are indelibly marked by their experiences of 1Chen Xiaoming, “Shengguo fufa: Juewang de xinli zizhuan: Ping Yu Hua Huhan yu Xiyu” (Overcoming the law of the patriarch: A psychological autobiography of despair: On Yu Hua’s Screams and Drizzle), Dangdai zuojia pinglun 4 (1992): 4.

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  revolutionary disillusionment and internal exile. When they finally were allowed to trickle back into the cities from which they had come in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they gradually began to break away from the orbit of socialist realism and the revolutionary doctrines in which they had been schooled.

  Experimental writers like Yu Hua, most of whom are still in their early thirties, began to write after that same orthodoxy had already crumbled. Yu Hua was still a child during the Cultural Revolution. By the time he was in high school, Chairman Mao was already dead. Yu Hua now lives and writes in a nation transfigured by economic reform and a freewheeling quasi market economy. This historical trajec-tory is captured nicely by the last story in the collection,

  “Predestination.” Something of what it was like to grow up during the late 1960s – schools closed, parents absented from the home owing to unremitting political campaigns, the threat of political violence looming in the air – is suggested by the predicament of the two children portrayed here. Their adult incarnations are just as representative of the changes that have swept across China in the 1980s and early 1990s: Chen Lei becomes a wealthy factory owner and hotel magnate who lives in a renovated prerevolutionary mansion; Liu Dongsheng moves to the big city and works in a high-rise office building. As the conclusion of the story suggests, however, neither man (nor perhaps China itself) is able to shake off the specters of the past as easily as he might.

  Another difference between the two generations is more purely literary. Growing up during a period in which the Chinese literary diet consisted almost entirely of the works of Chairman Mao, earlier writers had little or no access to world fiction in Chinese translation. The liberalized cultural policies of the 1980s, however, resulted in a flood of new literary translations. Like many of his contemporaries, Yu Hua was inspired to write by encounters with such modernist authors as Japanese Nobel Prize-winner Kawabata Yasunari, 264 translator’s postscript

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  Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and by the French new novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. These influences are in abundant evidence throughout this volume. We can see touches of Kawabata’s cruel, incisive lyricism in stories like “World Like Mist.” The narrator’s absurd encounter with a truck driver in “On the Road at Eighteen” smacks of Kafka. The

  “labyrinth” that Yu Hua constructs in “The Past and the Punishments” is reminiscent of Borges’ metaphysical narratives of time and space, necessity and coincidence. Throughout the volume, finally, Yu Hua’s attention to the description of surface detail – at the expense of the inner life of the character – may well remind us of Robbe-Grillet’s revolt against the tenets of realist fiction.

  It would be a real mistake, however, to read Yu Hua’s fiction as a derivative “replay” of these earlier literary monu-ments. A large part of what makes Yu Hua’s stories so interesting (and, in the Chinese context, subversive) is his relentless experimentation with traditional Chinese narrative. “Classical Love” is a prime example. In crafting this haunting tale of romance and cannibalism set in premodern China, Yu Hua has mined a rich vein of traditional vernacu-lar fiction (most of which dates from the Ming and Qing dynasties). Indeed, the story is a seemingly “postmodern”

  pastiche of traditional story types and time-honored motifs: romances between “talented scholars and beautiful maidens”

  (caizi jiaren), ghost stories and tales of resurrection from the grave, elegiac laments for fallen cities and ruined palaces.

  Even the horrific scenes of cannibalism are recycled from a Tang dynasty anecdote (which later became a notorious late Ming dynasty story called “A Filial Woman Sells Herself to a Butcher at the Yangzhou Market”). The difference here is that Yu Hua gives us the story in the absence of the moral imperative (filial piety) that made the original tick. What we are left with is the inexplicable cruelty and sheer horror of the grisly acts that Yu Hua so meticulously and unflinch-ingly portrays.

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  “Blood and Plum Blossoms” plays a similar trick. The story is based on a genre of popular fiction that remains wildly popular to this day: tales of knight-errantry (wuxia xiaoshuo). At the heart of the vast majority of these martial arts novels (and the scores of kung-fu movies and television series that they have inspired) runs a single obsessional theme: a hero (or a group of heroes) wanders the “rivers and lakes” of an idealized traditional China in order to take his just revenge on some implacable enemy. Yu Hua’s sophisti-cated retake of the genre has all the trappings of a proper revenge tale, but the moral center of the narrative mold has been hollowed out, casting the reader into an enigmatic world of chance, coincidence, and uncertainty.

  While other stories are not as directly predicated on past literary models, they infuse contemporary settings with echoes of traditional beliefs and practices, to unsettling effect. The claustrophobic yet hauntingly sensuous world of

  “World Like Mist” is cobbled together out of such echoes, its intricate narrative mosaic shot through with Chinese ghost lore, death rites, fortune-telling, and (as is most apparent in the names of the characters themselves) numerol-ogy. The sudden eruption of the supernatural into a story of childhood friendship in “Predestination” is more than a little reminiscent of another classical genre, the “tale of the strange” (chuanqi). Both “1986” and “The Past and the Punishments,” finally, are predicated on yet another sort of textual tradition – ancient historical records that detail the punishments meted out to those who had run afoul of the social order.

  Nor does Yu Hua shy away from taking on more recent traditions. Chinese readers born after 1949 grew up on stirring, brutally realistic novels of revolutionary insurrection against the rural gentry. A second, related genre was fiction eulogizing Chinese popular resistance to Japanese invasion.

  In these works of socialist realism, the world was very sim-266 translator’s postscript

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  ple. Peasants were good. Landlords were bad. Revolutionary violence was h
eroic, and a Bolshevik hero would always rise up to lead the masses to victory, usually sacrificing his life in the process. “The Death of the Landlord” deftly combines these two genres and, in doing so, subtly undercuts them.

  Wang Xianghuo is neither a Bolshevik nor a patriot. Sun Xi, whose lowly background should by all rights make him a hero, is a knave. The violence and brutality of both sides is less glorious than grotesque. The old verities of war and revolution fall by the wayside, and, by the time we reach the conclusion of the story, we have traveled through an ethical and emotional landscape that is infinitely more complex and ambivalent than that of its generic forerunners.

  What unites these restlessly innovative, willfully provocative stories is Yu Hua’s almost obsessive preoccupation with the twin specters of Chinese history (“the past”) and the human capacity for cruelty and violence (“the punishments”). These are preoccupations that he shares with other avant-garde writers of his generation, and they stem directly from an acute awareness of the incalculable suffering that was the consequence of China’s entrance into modernity.

  The laundry list is long and bitter: humiliation at the hands of imperialist powers, Japanese invasion, protracted civil war, followed by a revolution the brightest ideals and noblest aspirations of which were crushed by an ever-deepening spiral of disastrous policies, senseless persecution, corruption, fac-tional violence, and disillusionment.

  It was only with the brilliant cultural efflorescence of the post-Mao 1980s that Chinese intellectuals began to explore this troubling legacy, to ask themselves what exactly had gone wrong. Much of this work was carried out by the generation of “educated youth” who had borne the brunt of the Cultural Revolution. Collectively, they launched movement after movement aimed at freeing Chinese artists and Translator’s Postscript 267

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  intellectuals from the shackles of their Maoist inheritance.

  Some of the more notable of their achievements include the

  “misty poetry” of Bei Dao and others associated with the 1979 Democracy Wall movement in Beijing, the new wave cinema of “fifth generation” directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, and the “roots-seeking” fiction of writers like Mo Yan and Han Shaogong. What all these figures shared was a broad faith in the redemptive power of humanism, intellectual enlightenment, and democracy.

  In this sense, they were little different from their coun-terparts of the 1920s, who had promoted an epochal cultural transformation usually referred to as the May Fourth movement. Indeed, many of the intellectual and artistic developments of the 1980s represented a resurrection of May Fourth-era ideals, ideals that were felt to have been betrayed by the vagaries of twentieth-century history, extremist politics, and the persistence of traditional, “feudal” Chinese culture.

  It is only in this context that we can begin to understand Yu Hua and his contemporaries – because, more than anything else, their work represents a revolt not only against Maoism but also against the grand ideals that have sus-tained Chinese intellectuals and reformers since the May Fourth era. To put it simply, Yu Hua is in the business of knocking over idols, of undermining the traditional faith of modern Chinese intellectuals in the triumphal march of history and humanism.

  A story like “The Past and the Punishments” suggests something of both the stakes involved in Yu Hua’s critique of his forebears and the disenchantment from which it arises. In the “punishment expert,” we have a scholar dedi-cated to compiling “a summation of human wisdom,” a man who quite literally has taken possession of history. And, not unlike generations of idealist Chinese intellectuals, he firmly believes that he has spent his life in the service of 268 translator’s postscript

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  progress, scientific knowledge, and humanity. Ultimately, however, he cannot see the blood of his victims dripping from his own hands. His tragedy, Yu Hua implies, may be that of China as well.

  This radical distrust of all “totalizing ideologies” is, of course, not without its parallels in the West. Indeed, many Chinese critics have been quick to identify the fiction of Yu Hua and others like him as “postmodernist.” In the Chinese context, however, it is probably more useful to discuss the way Yu Hua and others have abandoned the realist tradition in which they were reared. Ever since the pioneering work of Lu Xun, the most prominent of the May Fourth-era intellectuals and the “father of modern Chinese literature,” realism has dominated the Chinese literary scene. Why? Modern Chinese literature has always been a literature of social and political engagement. By realistically portraying the darkness and oppression around them, writers like Lu Xun would enlighten their readers and, in doing so, write a new and brighter world into existence. The time of realism – not unlike that of historical narrative – is linear. And its pri-mary concern is humanity – the portrayal of individual psyches in relation to their social, political, and natural context. These qualities made it uniquely suited to intellectuals whose overriding concern was to refashion China’s historical destiny by means of a progressive literature of social and political enlightenment.

  Yu Hua has largely abandoned these conventions. His stories seldom unfold in a specific time and place. Time does not always flow inexorably forward from some specific start-ing point. Instead, his narratives fragment, overlap, loop back on themselves. Linear history disperses like so much mist into the air. In Yu Hua’s world there is no such thing as progress – only relentless change. Nor is there anyone remotely resembling a hero. We are almost never given access to a character’s inner world. Indeed, as Yu Hua him-Translator’s Postscript 269

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  self has commented in an essay on his own work, “I am far more concerned with a character’s desires [than with his or her personality], for it is desire rather than ‘personality’ that represents the value of someone’s existence. . . . Nor do I believe that characters should be any more important than rivers, sunlight, leaves, streets, or houses. I believe that people, rivers, sunlight, and so on are all the same: just props within the fiction. The manner in which a river flows manifests its desire, and houses, though silent, also reveal the existence of desire.”2

  This passage, I think, goes a long way toward explaining the disturbing power of Yu Hua’s fiction. Yu Hua offers us a textual world in which humans are walking ciphers and ordinary objects are invested with an enigmatic and menacing radiance. It is a world that asks us to move beyond the ethical, political, and stylistic truths of realist fiction and challenges us to make sense of a disorienting, but at the same time enormously suggestive, landscape.

  The extreme violence of Yu Hua’s fiction demands comment. To journey through his fictional universe is to subject oneself to a harrowing series of depictions of death, dismembered bodies, and acts of extreme and seemingly gratuitous cruelty. Reading Yu Hua is not easy; indeed, it can be gut-wrenching. As a translator, I have often grappled with the ethical dimension of this work. Is it right to loose these sorts of representations on an unsuspecting world? How can one reconcile the violence of these stories with the literary virtuosity with which that violence is sometimes portrayed?

  If we find ourselves enjoying Yu Hua’s fiction, are we somehow guilty of complicity with his aestheticization of violence?

  2Yu Hua, “Xuwei de zuopin” (Hypocritical writings), preface to Shishi ru yan (World like mist) (Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1991), 21.

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  These are difficult questions that are beyond the scope of this introduction. Each of Yu Hua’s readers will have to face them in his or her own way. And, in fact, much of the power and provocation of this work derives from the way in which it forces us to confront just these kinds of issues.

  Part of the reason that Yu Hua’s fiction is so very grisly, no doubt, has to do with his own psychological
makeup.

  When I first met him, I could not help asking why it was that his fiction was so liberally littered with corpses. He told me that he had grown up in the hospital where both his parents worked as doctors. On hot summer afternoons, the coolest place he could find to take a nap was the morgue in the basement. “So,” he concluded, “things like that don’t really bother me.”

  This biographical detail may well help explain Yu Hua’s authorial sangfroid, the matter-of-fact lyricism with which he sets about the task of describing things that most of us would rather avoid. It does not tell us (and ultimately I am not convinced that we really need to know) just why Yu Hua is both haunted by and determined to confront the horrors of cruelty and violence in his fiction.

  That this violence is somehow linked to the horrors of recent Chinese history is made clear in a story like “1986.”

  In this tale, the terror of the Cultural Revolution returns to haunt a town caught up in the blissful historical amnesia of the post-Mao economic boom. It would be easy to read the piece as a narrowly political allegory. Easy, but misleading.

  The madman, after all, is treated rather nicely by the Red Guards. His madness goes deeper than mere historical circumstance. Instead, it represents a meditation on the ways in which history, culture, and language collaborate with our seemingly innate capacity for brutality and callousness to create political violence.

  Like all good literature, Yu Hua’s work asks more questions of its readers than it answers. In this sense, Yu Hua’s Translator’s Postscript 271

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  fiction places its readers in a predicament not unlike that faced by the townspeople in “1986.” We can choose to ignore the terror and brutality depicted here. We can nervously laugh such things off as the handiwork of a madman or a charlatan. We can stand around and enjoy the spectacle.