Chinese Literature

My experience with Chinese literature began as a question: why are there so few works available from one of the world’s greatest superpowers? I preface this section also with an opinion: I find the poetry of China to be some of the best in the world.

I searched for a long time to find as many contemporary Chinese authors in translation, but often came to the same wall: many “Chinese” books were Taiwanese, or written by expatriate citizens who either left on their own accord or were forcibly exiled from the country. These works are great, and I will discuss them, but a central problem remains: the literary impact of the Cultural Revolution.

(Privately, I also wonder how Americans have slowed the cultural exchange of contemporary Chinese cultural objects. Liu Cixin’s “The Three Body Problem” remains one of the few mainland Chinese cultural exports landing on our shores to receive acclaim. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon may be set in China, but Ang Lee is Taiwanese. Hero (2002) dir. Zhang Yimou and Genshin Impact are the only exceptions I can think of…)

Chinese Literature & The Cultural Revolution

If my love of reading indicates anything, I am not a Maoist. Book censorship predates the Cultural Revolution back to the Qin Dynasty (immortalized in the film Hero!) where “the burning of books and burying of scholars” was deployed as a means of quelling unrest and uniting the country by Emperor Qin Shi Huang - who happens to be one of my dream dinner guests. Mao took a page out of history after winning the Chinese Civil War with book burnings on another scale. These highly public events were designed, in the words of scholar Raymond Pun “to retain power, to maintain community standards and to protect dogma—in this case, Maoist dogma.”

Yu Hua, a brilliant contemporary author living in China, wrote a chapter dedicated to reading during the Cultural Revolution in his exploratory non-fiction book “China in Ten Words.” He writes:

“In China then, practically all literary works were labeled ‘poisonous weeds.’ Works by foreign authors such as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Balzac were poisonous weeds; works by Chinese authors like Ba Jin, Lao She, and Shen Congwen were poisonous weeds, and with the falling-out between Mao and Khrushchev, revolutionary literature of the Soviet era had become poisonous weeds, too. Since the bulk of the library’s holdings had perished in all the Red Guard book burning, there was very little left to read. The fiction shelf featured only twenty-odd titles, all so-called socialist revolutionary literature of the homegrown variety. This kind of reading has left no traces on my life, for in these books I encountered neither emotions nor characters nor even stories.”

Separately, Bei Dao of the Misty Poets writes of his experience of the Chinese literary canon during the Cultural Revolution as follows:

“We categorized our books according to a strict hierarchy: the works of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao, along with the collected works of Lu Xun, dwelled in the heights looking down, and represented the established canon; the second tier, representing tradition, included classical texts plus modern dictionaries, such as Three Hundred Tang Poems, Ci Poems of the Song Dynasty, Perfected Admiration of Ancient Prose, Romance of the THree Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber, as well as the first major dictionary of the twentieth century, Ciyuan: Source of Words, and the Dictionary of Modern Chinese and the Great Russian-Chinese Dictionary; farther down, contemporary revolutionary fiction represented a moral, Confucian orthodoxy, like Steel Meets Fire, Red Cliff, Builders of a New Life, Wildfires and Spring Winds Raging in the Ancient City, Bitter Cauliflower, among other titles, as well as collections of essays, such as Wei Wei’s encomium to soldiers Who Are the Most Beloved People? and Liu Baiyu’s Red Agate. The latter category served as the prime target of my exerting prowess - those flowery, rhetorical passages embedded into my error-laden compositions littered with wrongly written characters shined with an excessive glare. The lowest rung belonged to the hodgepodge of magazines that represented current cultural tastes, among them Harvest, Shanghai Literature, Study Russian, although the bulk of them focused on the movies, so in addition to Popular Cinema, Shanghai Film Pictorial, and other more popular ones, we subscribed to a pile of specialty periodicals, like Chinese Cinema, Film Literature, Cinematic Arts, Screenplay Magazine, and so on. My reading interests turned the hierarchy on its head, inverting the top and bottom.”

He notes later that revolutionary fiction was popular for young men, including himself, for its explicit material. “Feng Deying became my foremost instructor on sexual enlightenment, his long novels Bitter Cauliflower and Winter Jasmine among the earliest sexually explicit reading material available; they involved brutal violence as well as perversions of the pornographic incestuous variety. Coming upon these passages, my heart leaped and flesh trembled with fear; I wanted to stop but couldn’t bring myself to, and due to my issues with my own class status, intense feelings of guilt followed. I’m convinced that these books had an enormous influence on the sexual awakening of our generation: suppressed sexual violence in the name of revolution lay in the abyss of our consciousness.”

Both authors acknowledge that while many books were banned, they were never too far out of reach of the public eye. Yu Hua writes of how many banned books were transmitted between curious readers, but in the process of moving books the first and last pages were often torn out, leading to a sense of dissatisfaction on how a story began or ended. Bei Dao’s father, an avid reader, secretly stored classic fiction, modernist authors banned after liberation, fashionable magazines from the 30s and 40s, and specialized textbooks.

While the Cultural Revolution officially ended with the death of Mao Zedong and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, Yu Hua states that it was only in the early 80s that literary journals began to flourish in China. He caveats this with the fact that it was nearly impossible to get published without knowing an editor personally, and that this has continued until the emergence of “China of Internet literature” - a genre I know exceedingly little of.

Even during this period, authoritarian tactics were not without precedent. Bei Dao’s poetry has been charged with inciting the Tiananmen Square protests, and he was exiled from the country along with four other Misty Poets. It is also no surprise than many of today’s best-known Chinese authors are expatriates, and often do not mince words about their prior citizenship. This attitude, however, leaves me wondering whether there are political motivations for the popularization of their work above others. Given the CIA’s significant role in forming mid-century literature, it isn’t out of the question.

Since entering office in 2012, Xi Jinping has doubled down on censorship practices. I can’t say that Americans are doing much better on this front. And I'm sorry if my not being a Maoist is not extreme enough. I'm really not in the mental space for a permanent cultural revolution - more of a democratic socialist.

For further reading, I strongly recommend Yu Hua’s “China in Ten Words” and Bei Dao’s “City Gate, Open Up” - both cited above.

An Overview of Literature & Language

Chinese literature, however, is far more expansive than just the present moment. Chinese characters are at least three millennia old - and most of these forms are archaic. When he wasn’t busy burying scholars alive or attempting to brew an elixir of immortality that would ultimately kill him, Emperor Qin Shi Huang worked to reform the written language. Literary or Classical Chinese constituted the vast majority of writings until until the early 20th century, and served as a critical cultural export to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, serving for centuries as the only form of written language.

A favorite line, and I cannot remember the source, is that even after dynasties in China fell, their bureaucracies would continue. Language was essential in the establishment of bureaucracies, and became a core component of the Imperial examination - a meritocratic system that formed during the Sui dynasty but was deployed at scale by China’s only Empress, Wu Zetian, between 660-705 AD (the Zhou interregnum of the Tang Dynasty). Not long after she was overthrown, a new section was added to the examination: the composition of poetry. While this was eventually abolished, scholars in the 12th century were tested on their knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics, a series of Confucian texts ranging on topics from divination, history, politics, law, education, and poetry.

This is all to say that poetry emerged from and had a vital part of China’s bureaucratic function. The earliest examples of literature were often historical or philosophical, but also included records of folk music that would become the basis of written Chinese poetry. It is impossible to say how much of this early record was destroyed by Emperor Qin - he failed to destroy the earliest known anthology (Shijing) which survives to this day. As early as the Han Dynasty, the government collected and transcribed folk poems from the region. I cannot speak much to the content of this earlier work, because I haven’t read it.

But I’m more interested in talking about what I have read, and what you might be interested in reading for yourself. So before I go further, I want to briefly outline a few important eras and their literary significance:

Axial Age (800 BC - 300 BC) - Philosophy, History, Lyrics

Qin Dynasty (221 BC - 206 BC) - Book Burning

Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD) - Poetry

Tang Dynasty (618 AD - 907 AD) - Poetry, Woodblock Printing

Song Dynasty (960 AD - 1279 AD) - Lyrics, Essays, Dramas, Plays, Movable Type Printing ~1040 AD

Yuan Dynasty (1271 AD - 1368 AD) - Lyrics, Essays, Dramas, Plays

Ming Dynasty (1368 AD - 1644 AD) - Literary Fiction

Qing Dynasty (1644 AD - 1912 AD) - Literary Fiction

Republic of China (1912 AD - 1949 AD) - Chinese Modernism

People’s Republic of China Under Mao Zedong (1949 AD - 1976 AD)

Great Leap Forward (1958 AD - 1962 AD) - Industrialization, Famine

Cultural Revolution (1966 AD- 1976 AD) - Book Burning, Revolutionary Literature

Boluan Fanzheng Under Deng Xiaoping’s Influence (1977 AD - 1997 AD) Reform & Opening Up, Relaxed Censorship

Tianenmen Square Incident (1989 AD)

Xi Jinping Era (2012 - Present) - Renewed Censorship

Tang Dynasty: The Golden Age of Chinese Poetry

Po, Li, and Tu Fu. Poems. Penguin Classics, 30 July 2015.

RECOMMENDED

Curiosity can take you in strange directions, and I encountered Chinese poetry purely by happy accident.

Li Po and Tu Fu are often paired as a set, and their works contrast neatly with one another. The lengthy yet informative introduction to this book compares them as the sun and moon; or the yang and yin; or for contemporary readers, the Beyonce and Solange. They were both friends, and the color and tone of their poems shifted with the times they lived in: namely, that of the An Lushan rebellion. Only Tu Fu would live to see the end of those times.

Li Po was a happy-go-lucky wine-drunk whose poems often reflect the circumstances he found himself in. A skilled swordfighter in his youth and well-educated from a wealthy family, he did not take the civil service exam despite his wish to do so. In the past day, purely by happenstance I read two different poets referencing him - Andrew Grace and Brandon Som. He is a metaphorical stand-in for the wine-drunk - a seductive poet who lived joyfully wrote poems thanking those he drank with, journeys, nature, love, and wonder. It is said that, while drinking, he drowned while attempting to grasp the moon’s reflection.

Drinking with a Gentleman of Leisure in the Mountains

Li Po

We both have drunk their birth,

The mountain flowers,

A toast, a toast, a toast,

Again another:

I am drunk, long to sleep;

Sir, go a little -

Bring your lute (if you like)

Early tomorrow!

By contrast, Tu Fu was a much more orderly and composed poet. He was raised, much like Li Po, to be a civil servant, memorizing the Confucian works - his grandfather was a politician during Empress Wu Zetian’s reign. Similarly, his political ambitions were never realized - it is unclear whether he failed the examination, or whether he offered the rank to a half-brother. In any case, he went on his own, meeting the already famous Li Po. He was highly influenced by the encounter, and composed several poems dedicated to him. When Tu Fu was finally offered a minor post to begin his career, the opportunity was taken away by the events of the rebellion. He then largely led a life not of travel for pleasure, but of necessity. Notably, his use of the seven-character line was highly influential on the poets who followed him.

From a Height

Tu Fu

The winds cut, clouds are high,

Apes wail their sorrows,

The air is fresh, sand white,

Birds fly in circles;

On all sides fallen leaves

Go rustling, rustling,

While ceaseless river waves

Come rippling, rippling:

Autumn’s each faded mile

Seems like my journey

To mount, alone and ill,

To this balcony;

Life’s failures and regrets

Frosting my temples,

And wretched that I’ve had

To give up drinking.

The edition I have contains extensive end-notes that help explain much of the context of each poem, although questions still arise around the particulars. I happened to read this collection before the beginning of the pandemic, yet even before then the political tumult and tonal distance between the two authors resonated with me. My biggest gripe with the collection is that the number of poems included is limited. It serves more as a starting point for learning rather than an extensive foray into their artistic work.

Shangyin, Li. Li Shangyin. New York, Ny, New York Review Books, 2018.

MIGHT RECOMMEND

Born in 813 AD, well after the An Lushan Rebellion, Li Shangyin’s life remained colored by the history that Li Po and Tu Fu had experienced. Although the Tang Dynasty was especially prosperous, the government was considerably weaker than it had been before, largely helmed by eunuchs who controlled the empire by proxy. Yet as in all things, life continued, and poetry with it.

Although Li Shangyin would achieve a political position, his alignment against the eunuchs prevented him from ever attaining a high rank. It is perhaps because of this that his poems are much more ambiguous in nature. Translating his work has been, apparently, quite vexing for this reason. He wrote often of love, and unusually many of his poems were untitled.

Composition on Breaking the Willow Branches at Parting Pavilion

Li Shangyin

I.

For now, trust in a cask of wine

To dispatch your weariness.

Stop damaging those worried leaf-brows,

Slender willow-waists.

In the human world,

It’s all separation until death.

How could the spring wind ever begrudge us

These long branches?

II.

Holding the mist, riling the fog,

All of it riotous reaching.

Ten thousand unravelings, a thousand branches,

Rake the settling brilliance.

Tell that traveler for me

To exhaust his excessive branch-snapping.

Half are reserved to say goodbye,

Half are for welcoming a return.

I have all of the love in the world for NYRB, but the introduction and notes in this book are lacking for the challenge that Li Shangyin’s work offers. His poems read as far more symbolist than his predecessors, and while in that sense they offer more space for interpretation (to my mind, one of the better qualities of poetry), I found myself occasionally getting lost in his work.

In the anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems, permitted under the Cultural Revolution, Li Shangyin’s poems are only outnumbered by Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei.

Song Dynasty

Qingzhao, Li. Li Chʻing-Chao, Complete Poems. New Directions Publishing, 1979.

RECOMMENDED

Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung are kind of heroes in my mind. Under New Directions, they were responsible for translating many poems by women in China. And while “Women Poets of China” is an exceptional anthology, the complete works if Li Qingzhao is even better. But that’s also a matter of personal preference - I like to spend time with one poet.

The Song dynasty was better known for the penning of lyrics, or ci poems. And like so many famous poets throughout Chinese history, Li Qingzhao lived through a period of turbulence, as the capital city of Kaifeng was burned and the northern half of their territory was conquered by the Jurchens (their name before Manchurians). Unusually for the time, Li Qingzhao had a profound love for her husband, Zhao Mingcheng - they both loved and collected literature and art, and their work on metal and stone inscriptions was of apparent importance. This love was not meant to last. After the fall of the capital, the couple was able to flee their home with many of their possessions, but along the road he fell ill with a fever and died. She continued to work on their book together, and many of her poems were memories of her husband.

I Smell the Fragrance of Withered Plum Blossoms by My Pillow

To the Tune of “Unburdening Oneself”

Li Qingzhao

Last night, so very drunk

I fell asleep in make-up and jewelry,

Withered plum blossoms still in my hair.

The fumes of wine and blossoms saturated my dream of Spring,

And finally broke through and woke me up.

I could not return to dreams of far-off love.

Everyone was still.

Under the declining moon,

I unfurled the kingfisher-green curtain,

Crumpled the fallen petals,

Lit the remaining incense,

And confronted the passing hours.

I find myself equally captivated by the story of Li Qingzhao as I do her poems. She was afforded an unusual degree of agency during the Song period, and her collaboration with her husband on their joint hobbies was a thrilling display of their love. Her poetry is strongly rooted in feeling in a way that few other poems of the time were, and her poems of loss are poignant.

A new translation of her poems was just released by Wendy Chen. I have not found it yet, but it is something I would be extremely interested in reading.

Ming Dynasty

The Yuan Dynasty was founded when the Mongols overtook China. The Ming Dynasty occurred after they were overthrown. Notably, it is the last dynasty ran by the Han people, the majority ethnic group in China.

The Ming and Song Dynasties were both known for their output of literary novels. Four of the six Classic Chinese Novels were penned during this time, those being the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, The Plum in the Golden Vase, and Water Margin. These novels comprise many, many pages - I doubt that I will get to all of them in my lifetime. However, I have started Water Margin (alternatively called Outlaws of the Marsh) - it’s a classic wuxia novel, and it is surprisingly fun to read! Almost every chapter ends with a sentence resembling “tune in to the next chapter to find out!” It is unsurprising to me that theme parks around China exist celebrating the novel - it is a highly imaginative work. Through much of Chinese literature, there is a throughline of humor - you see it with Li Po, you see it here, and you can definitely see it in the Carnal Prayer Mat.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

UNREAD

Journey to the West

UNREAD

The Plum in the Golden Vase

UNREAD

Water Margin

STARTED, RECOMMEND

Qing Dynasty

The Jurchens, a fierce adversary during the Song Dynasty, would eventually be known as the Manchurians, and their dynasty, the Qing, would be China’s last. It constituted the largest dynasty, and by 1907 had over 426 million citizens. The final two books of the Chinese Classic Novels, The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Scholars, would be written during this time.

My personal experience with these books is limited. When I was in college, a mysterious email was sent out to the students and staff for an event called “Dream Reading Group”. My friend Aaron and I decided to smoke a little weed and head on over, where we were greeted with around five faculty members taking turns reading sections from the Penguin Classics edition of the Dream of the Red Chamber. They were surprised to see us, but welcoming. There were many characters that were difficult to keep track of - in this particular translation, characters were given Western names, and the origin of their names were intended to denote either their lineage or their status.

Perhaps more amusingly, I found a very old used copy of The Carnal Prayer Mat when I was down in Springfield at the Prairie Archives. It is an erotic moral novel about the Before Midnight Scholar, who seeks enlightenment through sex. Where I’m at in the book, he just met a burglar of exceeding quality who promises to find him the prettiest women in China. However, before doing so, he asks to see the Before Midnight Scholar’s penis, and proclaims it to be the smallest he has ever seen. He has just received a surgery that has grafted a dog’s penis onto his own to enlarge his member, and now he must not have sex for months. It’s truly captivating.

The Dream of the Red Chamber

UNREAD

The Scholars

UNREAD

The Carnal Prayer Mat

STARTED, HORNY, RECOMMEND

Chinese Literary Modernism in the Republic of China

To be completed soon... I should probably read Lu Xun before getting to this

Postmodern & Contemporary Chinese Literature

Yu Hua, Bei Dao, Mo Yan, Ge Fei, Liu Cixin, Yan Lianke

Yu, Hua. To Live: A Novel. Translated by Michael Berry, New York, Anchor Books, 2003.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Yu Hua's "To Live" is an understated novel that shines brilliantly with humanity. Taking place within a single village, the novel traces the son of a wealthy landowner who lives frivolously and without thought to those around him. This changes when the revolution swings into town and disrupts his social status, reducing him to a farmer.

Recalling this novel, I still have such a clear picture in my mind of the setting itself and the transformations it experiences. Location, characters, and even animals cohabitate and evolve together. Although the book is somewhat quaint, it is easy to read and powerful in its message of the capacities for human suffering and change.

It is also curious that this book is an example of literary realism. So much of the literature of the time - even Yu Hua's as exemplified by his earlier short stories in the April 3rd Incident - experimented with the avant-garde. This could not be further from that. In many ways, it is more realist and Chinese in character than anything that Lu Xun wrote, with his deference to western literary styles and his psychological fixations.

If you are to read any contemporary Chinese novel, I recommend this one first.

Liu, Cixin. The Dark Forest. New York, Tor, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2015.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND

A core theme amongst most Chinese writers translated into English is their willingness to challenge the norms of style and subject. It is why many of the best known Chinese writers have either left of their own accord or were exiled after the Tienenman Square Protests. Cixin Liu, the science fiction writer who wrote The Three Body Problem trilogy, is a notable exception to this rule. His work is entirely state-sanctioned, and isn't any less for it. Even Obama is a fan.

During the Cultural Revolution, an astrophysicist watches her father get beaten to death. She is recruited for a project to communicate with extraterrestrial life, and sends a message to an alien civilization to wipe out mankind. The premise of the first two books is preparations for their arrival - the journey is projected to take 400 years. The Trisolarans have their own reasons for the journey - their planet is caught between three stars with unpredictable movements that wipe out most of their civilization each time they converge.

The Dark Forest is the second book in the trilogy, and in my opinion the most effective. Four humans are tasked with constructing defenses to protect earth. The problem is that aliens have managed to create an elaborate spying mechanism that makes any written or spoken record of their plans - meaning humanity's only defense is what is in their minds. A terrorist organization tasks human Wallbreakers with foiling these plans in amusing monologues.

While three of the "Wallfacers" use unlimited resources and cryostatis machines to develop elaborate defenses that inevitably fail, sociologist Luo Ji instead spends his resources having a good time. He falls in love, he visits museums, he buys expensive bottles of wine. He is only selected for the role not on qualifications, but his status as the only person selected as an assassination target by the Trisolarans. The ending is phenomenal.

The Dark Forest Theory that guides the book is not a new concept, but animates the story. Why have we never encountered alien life in spite of the vastness of the universe? According to this theory, in any conflict between two opposing nations tensions will invariably result in the survival of one and the destruction of another. Thus, the Dark Forest is a theory of a universe richly populated by alien life that intentionally chooses silence to protect itself. It is a powerful idea that some political scientists argue reflect China's own national interests.

Regardless of how you read this hard science fiction novel, it is a joy to read, a puzzle that is far richer than a goofy book I happen to love: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

Taiwanese Literature

Qiu Miaojin, Xi Xi, Eileen Chang, Chu Tienwen

Expatriate Chinese Literature

Yiyun Li, Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin

Xingjian, Gao. Soul Mountain. New York, Harper Collins, 2000.

NOT RECOMMENDED

I've been very impressed by the Nobel Prize's literature committee over the past 5 or so years. But some years, they really flub it - and that is especially the case for Gao Xingjian's bloated trainwreck of a novel, Soul Mountain.

And I get it - there are interesting subversions of much older themes within this book. The autofictional conceit is great: a man is given a lung cancer diagnosis, but it turns out that he was given someone else's results. He's also a controversial Chinese writer and needs to escape, so he flees to the country. Elsewhere, a character who may or may not be the same character is collecting folklore on behalf of the government (work that has been done for thousands of years!) The travel structure, also, has ancient precedents, and at times can be interesting.

Yet one of the elements that high postmodern writing teaches us is that just because you slap a bunch of disparate ideas together doesn't mean it's going to work. I think often of the episode of 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan, hoping to win an EGOT, blends together every single genre of music with the desire to create something truly original. It didn't work for 100 gecs, and it doesn't work here. While some of the anecdotes from small villages are truly interesting, the sheer volume and slipshod assemblage of them makes the project feel unguided and unintentional. Add to that the "You" character - a displaced Murakami protagonist who is primarily included to discuss sex and offers little to the story. I found myself skimming through his passages.

Ultimately, this book is an unsatisfying hodgepodge of material that could have become a great book with a vicious editor. That this won the Nobel Prize makes me curious about the political implications concerning the committee at the time. Maybe his plays are good? Soul Mountain is certainly unique, but there are many unique things, like white airheads, whose flavor is derived from not cleaning the machine between batches of different flavors.