On My High Horse about Chinese Lit (Again); This Time I Have Company

May 24, 2010 — 4 Comments

A book you need to read. Now.

Friends. We need to talk. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but why is it that another Mo Yan novel has disappeared from my bookstores and become unavailable on Amazon? Mo Yan is the undisputed literary star of a huge country with a sterling literary tradition with a lifespan that kicks ours in the ass, and he’s like Marquez plus Kafka except funnier and more vulgar and more bizarre. In other words, Mo Yan is an author that tons of indie lit readers and writers should be reading and loving and celebrating and keeping in print and widely available.

AND YET. No one. Will. Read him. I have recommend him so many times, and no one will take me up on these recommendations. No one. Not friends, co-workers, colleagues, writers,  anyone. No one.  If I told people his name was Zizek Smizek and he was Czech or something, I feel like readers would be flocking to him and I’d actually get to read all of his shit which I can’t because most of it has never even been published here because Americans WON’T READ CHINESE LIT. Why? Why is this?

I feel like this is shameful. I really do. Hardly anyone that I encounter–many of them literary beasts proud of being widely read–has even HEARD of Lu Xun, much less read him. Lu Xun. Who is the father of modern Chinese lit and has been called China’s Orwell. What is wrong with us? I can’t even read Su Tong’s last two books because they STILL have not come out in print here. Su Tong is also a literary superstar in China. And elsewhere in the world as well. But not in America. In America, when I recommend Su Tong, I get polite, deafening silence. Crickets chirp. Wind howls.

People. There are Chinese writers you need to read. Not just because you would love them–and you would–but you need to read them because China is a huge, huge country with billions of people and is growing fast and developing faster and is going to be hugely important in the world in every possible way in the very near future. In fact, not in the future–now. So wouldn’t you want to read their Shakespeare, their Orwell, their Kafka, their Beckett, their Faulkner? Wouldn’t you be interested in what Chinese literary history has to say about their culture and values? Wouldn’t you be interested in what modern young Chinese writers have to say about the same? Shouldn’t you be?

Penguin apparently agrees with me. Thank god. Time Magazine agrees with me. Here’s what Jeffrey Wasserstrom has to say about Penguin’s release of a new collection of Lu Xun’s writings, The Real Story of Ah-Qu and Other Tales of China:

It’s a work that has nothing to do with introducing an up-and-coming writer, but rather seeks to widen appreciation of the long-dead Lu Xun — the pen name of Zhou Shuren, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1936 at the age of 55.

Lu Xun was a towering figure in Chinese letters who deserves to be much more widely read outside his homeland. This affordable volume comprises, over 416 pages, his complete fiction. Julia Lovell’s are arguably the most accessible translations yet of such famous stories as “The Divorce,” “New Year’s Sacrifice” and the eponymous tale of Ah-Q (an opportunistic, inept sometime participant in the 1911 Revolution). Together, they give Lu Xun his best shot to date of achieving renown beyond the Chinese world. If it succeeds in this, the book could be considered the most significant Penguin Classic ever published.

Here’s why I make that grandiose-sounding claim: Lu Xun is critically regarded as the most accomplished modern writer of the most populous nation on earth, and a grasp of his work is thus extremely useful in forming an understanding of much of humanity. In addition to stories, he wrote poetry, an extended history of Chinese literature and hundreds of essays, including small masterpieces like his eloquent 1926 tirade against the warlord government of the time for gunning down unarmed patriotic student protesters. His stories are wide-ranging in style and subject, from the touchingly nostalgic and straightforward “My Old Home” (a poignant look at the gulf that grows over time between two Chinese villagers of different classes) to the fiercely polemical, stylistically experimental “Diary of a Madman” (which offers a crushing indictment of the stultifying effects of Confucianism). Above all, Lu Xun is not just a great writer. He is an essential writer — the kind whose works provide the clues an outsider needs to unlock the cultural code of a nation, and whose work becomes embedded in a nation’s DNA. Herman Melville and Mark Twain are two of America’s great writers, for instance, but only the latter is essential. Foreigners striving to understand the American psyche might find it useful to know about Ahab and the whale, but they must know about Huck Finn and the mystique of the Mississippi River.

So please.  Give Chinese literature a chance. Give it a chance just like you first gave avant-garde  lit a chance, or Eastern European lit a chance, or Russian lit a chance, or Latin American lit a chance, or lit-with-footnotes a chance. I gave it a chance. I knew nothing about Chinese lit when my husband first made me read Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballards. I was hooked from the third paragraph on.

Next time you’re looking for a book to buy, pick this up. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Just give it a try, and if you hate it, you never have to read another thing. But you won’t. You won’t hate it. I guarantee that. I really, really do.