"Me? I was thrown into the chamber pot as soon as I was born. Because I was steeped in urine, my eyeballs protrude, my neck is soft and weak, and my head was swollen like a ball when I grew up. I have breathed in poisonous air for half my life, My chest is eaten up by tubercle bacillus. My father is a syphilis patient, his nose rotted into two horrifying tiny holes. And my mother...(Skylight 107-108)"
Some of the most vivid dreams I have had consisted of walking through poverty-stricken neighborhoods and wooded villages, the inhabitants devolved to semi-human mutants who rant and slobber at me as I sift, knee-deep, through garbage piled in yards and black liquid flowing in oily rivulets down the dirty streets. I've never know what these dreams say about how I view humanity; I just always knew that it was one of my greatest fears that in life I should not find myself far enough away from any place resembling such sordid environs.
But then here I am, caught up in reading book after book by contemporary Chinese author Can Xue. Marginalized at best by the Chinese establishment, Can's stories are like the worst aspects of these mutant dreams of mine, amplified and rotten. The first story I read, a novella entitled Yellow Mud Street, was one hundred and fifty-something pages of daily life in just such a town, located on the outskirts of a major city, but somehow lost to the world, where smoggy clouds of pollution are respite from the piercingly hot sun, and the residents flee to their attics to escape the rising tide of dirty, stagnant flood water, defecating through holes in their ceilings, the waste dropping on the shoulders of neighbors who drift by in boats muttering and wailing to themselves. Can herself has claimed much of her work is the result of periodic "attacks of madness".
The language comes across as typical of dreams, and has often been compared to James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Others have pointed out its roots in Chinese poetry and painting. One of her translators describes it as "narration as improvisation rather than retelling, the sentence that leads rather than follows." In the short story Skylight, the narrator follows into a mirror her father's colleague, who lives on the edge of a cemetery, his job to cremate corpses, resulting in his often smelling of the dead. They travel into the sky to eat grapes that grow out of the ashes of the cremated bodies. Long descriptive passages evoke disconnected images of agitated sleep:
"The gloomy silhouette of the old house was softened, green water dripped from the eaves. On the roof sat my father, who is suffereing from an advanced stage of syphillis. He looked like a running sore. With him was my fat mother, dying of diabetes. The two supported each other, crushing many tiles under their weight. My brothers were crawling here and there like monkeys. In their transparent empty bellies huge stomachs were convulsing, greenish fluid oozing out. They were all staring at the smoky gray sky with their blank whitish eyes, making a clumsy gesture of expectation. (Skylight p. 109)"
"All of a sudden, the door of the cellar opened wide. My old aunt galloped out on the back of a mad bitch dog. They circled on the slag before dashing back into the cellar. The door banged in a painful sob. From somewhere a bell rang, numerous gray shadows of heads rose from the rubble, a green snake crawled between the shadows. The door was open again. Mother was pushed out in a bathtub. Her head was covered with blood. In one hand she held high a cluster of white hairs with clumps of skin attached to the roots. She couldn't scream because her voice was blocked by a bone in her throat. The bathtub was so tall that she failed time and again in attempting to climb out. The old man moved, his eyelids released two drops of blood, and spasms of white foam poured from his lips. "I'm OK now." He sounded sorry while spitting out broken teeth behind me. (ibid, p. 110-111)"
To say that her stories focus on the mundane is an understatement. Nothing ever happens to the characters, yet the smallest events are cause for anxiety and sickness. Often the focus is on inter-human relationships, which are almost always marked by mutual hatred and mistrust:
"I remmeber that rainy morning when Father stepped in heavily from the outside in his overshoes, messing up the floor with rainwater. The he came near me, telling me in a roundabout way that according to the lab experiment there were leeches in my lungs. While he was talking, his whole body twitched with restrained laughter. He believed that he had fulfilled a magnificent mission. (ibid, p. 108)"
In the collection Dialogues in Paradise, numerous stories focus on burdensome parental figures who wallow all day in dampened blankets, causing stress and sickness for their tortured children. In "Raindrops in the Crevice", a scheming mother figure stays wrapped in a wet quilt, revising a letter of appeal to the authorities, while her daughter sits by reading a novel, every exchange an invective hurled at the mother. The next story, "Soap Bubbles in Dirty Water", is a similar variation, this time about a son who waits with bated breath for his mother to suffocate on fumes from the gas stove in front of which she has bedded down. He later seizes the opportunity to help her into bath water, which ultimately results in her melting away to soap bubbles. (The upshot, however, is not a happy one; the suds wail from beyond her watery grave, driving the son into the street, where he bites a chunk of flesh from the shoulder of an old man who is part of a crowd gathered around to heckle our unfortunate narrator.)
No less surreal than the plot lines (or lack thereof) of Can's stories is the dialogue. Very often exchanges consist of raving monologues, ostensibly directed toward the other interlocutor, yet mutually ignored by all involved. Very often characters live in a virtual nightmare of their own concoction, and most espousals are a way to convey this. Another story in Dialogues in Paradise, "Hut on the Mountain", which follows the fears and musings of a girl who alternates her time between organizing drawers and worrying about rats, wolves and various insects that are constantly attacking their home, relates the following passage between mother and daughter:
"'That light from your room glares so that it makes all my blood vessels throb and throb, as though some drums were beating inside. Look,' she said, pointing to her temple, where the blood vessels bulged like fat earthworms. 'I'd rather get scurvy. There are throbbings throughout my body day and night. You have no idea how I'm suffering. Because of this ailment, your father once thought of committing suicide.' She put her fat hand on my shoulder, an icy hand dripping with water."
However, the most memorable line I have so far read was in Yellow Mud Street, spoken from Qi Ergou to his wife, the latter having just spoken enviously of a neighbor who has grown fat from sucking bats' blood. He complains: "There's a thick layer of dirt accumulating behind your neck. Why don't you wash it when you clean your face? An ant has built a nest there. I hear the chewing sound at night." This in a chapter that consists mostly of ants, centipedes and maggots crawling amidst collapsing houses.
In various interviews, Can Xue (real name Deng Xiaohua 邓小华, her pen name means roughly "the dirty snow (at the peak of the mountain) that refuses to wash away") denies that her stories are overtly political, though there is good biographical reason to assume otherwise. In 1957, when she was four years old, her parents (journalists and editors for The Hunan Daily News) were persecuted as ultra-rightists and sent to separate re-education camps, where they were regularly subjected to public humiliation. Can spent much of her youth being transported between elementary schools and caring for her father through visits to jail. Forced to leave school at age 13, Can was raised by her grandmother (a colorful character serving as the subject of the biographical sketch A Beautiful Day in the South) in the countryside, where starvation was a constant threat and later led to her and her brothers' contracting consumption and then her grandmother's death in 1960.
Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Can worked as a type of nurse known as a "barefoot doctor", as an iron worker in a mechanical factory, and as an elementary school teacher until she taught herself to sew and opened a business with her husband Lu Yong, whom she married in 1978. Working as a full-time tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's anti-spiritual pollution campaings. Her first work was published in 1985, and the first English translation in 1989. She lived in Changsha until moving to Beijing in 2001, by her own admission to escape the humid weather of the south. The author of three novels, six books of literary criticism, a few dozen novellas, and over a hundred short stories, she has been invited to conferences and to give lectures and readings in the US and Europe.
Can stands out among post-Mao Chinese writers for her deliberate breaks with the Socialist Realism that infamously weighs down contemporary Chinese literature. Susan Sontag was quoted as saying, "If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue." Her early translator, Robert Jansson, described her work as thus: "Her fiction appeals to those who would stand against a stifling tradition, those who have grown discouraged, even cynical, in their quest for something real and personal (p. 165)." In a foreword to Old Floating Cloud, Charlotte Innes adds, "while readers will sense warmth, empathy, and humor, they will also be aware of that feeling on the brink of madness which comes when everything around one seems on the verge of chaos--or when reality, as everyone else sees it, runs counter to one's own inner sense of reality."
Despite events in her formative years, Can Xue claims to be uninterested in "superficial" political events, focusing instead on the human psyche and the "soul world", which she explores through her "soul" or "life" literature. Reminiscent of the painter Agnes Martin, she claims high literature should not concern itself with the superficial realm of society. She is disdainful of contemporary American literature, and cites Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Dante Alighieri as her greatest inspirations. She similarly chafes at the label "postmodernist", instead referring to her work as "neoclassical literature". Her style has been compared to Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, but also to Tu Fu, Cao Xueqin and Lu Xun. Can sees herself as crafting a special blend of Western and Chinese traditions: "My works are like a plant. My ideas grow up in the West but I dig them up to replant in China's deep soil, a rich history of 5,000 years. My works aren't like those from the West or from China, bur rather my own creation. Chinese culture is from my heart. I was born here. I live here. I don't need to learn what is from my heart."
Though unassuming in personality, she is not timid about elevating her own literature when discussing it. In an interview with Bill Marx, she claims "Authors like myself, whose works belong to what Harold Bloom defines in 'The Anxiety of Influence' as 'high literature,' should not -- and cannot -- take account of the reader at the moment when they are writing.....I think that my works are suited to a small number of advanced readers...If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it's quite clear that he's not one of my readers." In an interview with Laura McCandlish, Can dismisses contemporary American literature as well as most contemporary Chinese literature, calling Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian naive and "average". She speaks lowly of postmodernism and expresses a distaste for Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Though citing Wang Anyi as a close friend, she is critical of her reliance on traditionalism in her writing. She even calls the early work of Kafka, her greatest influence, immature, preferring later works like The Castle to earlier stories, such as The Metamorphosis.
Can Xue has been largely untouched by the censors in Mainland China. Finally being recognized as a professional writer (and thus elligible for state subsidies for artists), only two of her works were banned at the time of her interview with McCandlish in 2002. She ascribes this as a general inability to comprehend her work on the part of the censors and critics alike: "I'm most afraid of self-censorship-that I myself will control my writing. Of course, I am very hated by the Chinese government. My memoir piece "A Beautiful Day in the South" was also banned, but it wasn't written against the government directly. I write against the authoritarianism of traditional Chinese culture, and the government happens to be from that culture. The current leaders are just like those from ancient times. It keeps getting worse and worse. I hope to change young people's conception of this culture." As Charlotte Innes puts it, "the government is slower to condemn what it doesn't understand...[t]o read Can Xue is more like falling asleep over a history book and dreaming a horribly distorted version of what you've just read."
My guess is that I have Can Xue entirely wrong, at least if authorial intent is considered the correct reading. Obviously, focusing on her two earliest works, I have latched on to the more grotesque, the more vitiating passages. Conversely, she has often referred to her writing as beautiful, of the soul and from the heart of Chinese culture. The Buddhist analogy of the lotus flower is perhaps most appropriate: a thing of beauty that rises out of the cesspool. In her own words, Can echoes this thought: "It is imagination, and only imagination, that allows the people of Five Spice Street [one of her novels] to fly over the gulf of human nature. That is to say, Can Xue flies over the gulf, because while sitting on the polluted earth she can conceive of paradise." As for now, my reading of her work still bobs a few inches below the muck.
When I finished Yellow Mud Street, it was with a degree of relief that I returned the book to the library, glad to abandon a world so bleak and sordid. But I was inevitably drawn back to Can's writings, curious to plumb deeper the depths and crevices of her imagination. I found her other writings to be less scatalogical, but just as surreally disturbing. I have, however, found a way to fully immerse myself in the experience by alternating the music on my headphones between Naked City and Sun O))). The chaos and darkness that pervade the writing are sublimely complemented by the guttural feedback and mincing shrieks in the music. The experience is similar to having a canker sore: the first attempts to ignore the pain fail miserably, which inexorably lead to jabbing the ulcer with your tongue, savoring the excruciating experience.
(See MIT's Can Xue page for links to the cited interviews and biographical sketches, as well as a bibliography of her work and others' critiques.)
