An obligatory industrial scene from Qiqihar, Heilongjiang, hometown of one of the authors of the Dongbei Renaissance, 楊知寒 Yang Zhihan
The latest Autumn 2024 issue of Granta, a literary magazine, spectacularly brought together three extremely high-profile Chinese authors, 莫言 Mo Yan, 閻連科 Yan Lianke, and 余華 Yu Hua. This alone made it an unmissable moment for Chinese literature in translation, but the entire issue is special, featuring original translations of a selection of Chinese authors, specifically showcasing authors from 東北 Dongbei (the tough and blighted northeast, stereotypically known for its working-class culture). Alongside the works of these established authors are included works from upcoming and amateur authors as well.
The resurgence of literature by “workers” (a niche voice in the literary scene in spite of the fact that we encompass the majority of humanity) has a refreshingly bitter flavor: “It’s true that my colleagues and I worked long evening shifts while others made hundreds of thousands in the stock market, and that we were cutting plastic radio shells in the wee hours of the night while others were asleep. But you only get to live once in this world, and Shenzhen was the city that witnessed my precious teenage years,” writes 小海Xiao Hai in “Adrift in the South,” his recollection of a youth spent on the factory floor.[1] It’s a work that has the bitterness of a highly caffeinated drink, a bitterness that rejuvenates. These works are grouped into a literary trend known as 底層文學 di ceng wen xue “Ground Floor Literature.”
Shared sorrow is somehow sweet, bearing the sensation of recognition, like in 範雨素 Fan Yusu’s words in “Picun”[2]: “ ‘Even the most pedantically delusional people know they have to eat.’ I tried to challenge her by evoking Zhang Huiyu, the Peking University scholar. For years, Zhang was a committed mentor and editor to the New Workers Group in Picun. ‘Given Prof Huiyu’s status, his work is not delusional. It’s meaningful,’ Fan said. ‘For people like Xiao Hai and me, getting distracted from making a living is delusional.’”
範雨素 Fan Yusu’s narrative of her farming village childhood and her working life in Beijing became a sensation in 2017, when she published the work online, and for good reason. It’s harsh and well-written, and, just as with小海 Xiao Hai’s work, it grants recognition to drudgery, to the pent-up years of what feels like meaningless work. For one moment, the upside-down world turns right-side up again. She describes the development of a social phobia which is really just shame, the shame that comes from having to work hard just to live in a dump with little hope for the future and being stigmatized for living righteously by leaving an abusive husband. It is not for her to be ashamed, but her employers, living a dissolute life in the shadows, and that’s what her writing does, it rightfully sheds light on this injustice. Her writing is not in this issue of Granta, but her brief words are a much-needed splash of cold water.
The introductory writing representing the Dongbei Renaissance includes masculine, hard-boiled work, which cuts away the cloying pretensions of literary fiction. 雙雪濤 Shuang Xuetao and 班宇 Ban Yu’s works offer readers a stylized gritty realism. 楊知寒 Yang Zhihan is the representative woman writer of the Dongbei Renaissance, but she doesn’t fit the stereotype of brash ruggedness that people have come to expect, as she herself has stated in an interview.
No selection, especially within the limitations of a literary magazine, can include everything and everyone, but selection itself sends a message, and the message of Granta’s China issue is men. Just that. It’s a very manly issue. All of the established authors are great male authors. There are markedly less women authors in the issue than men. In a way, it’s interesting, but it also feels like a throwback to the machismo American literary scene of the 1940s and 1950s. Because 東北 Dongbei was heavy on the manufacturing sector, depictions of it remain stereotypically masculine.
The Chinese modern literary tradition has always included prominent women, and I need to offer a correction to this imbalanced selection. There is no shortage of established Chinese women writers who are from the same generation as 莫言 Mo Yan, 余華 Yu Hua, etc. and are still living and working in China today. 王安憶 Wang Anyi, a prize-winner writer most known for The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, is a good candidate, as is 殘雪 Can Xue, an avant garde author who has claimed to be a greater writer than Kafka, or 方方Fang Fang, whose novel, Soft Burial, which will soon appear in English. These three highly regarded and established authors’ works also deal with sweeping, significant social and historical themes. There are many excellent choices which could restore the balance of this issue.
The China issue of Granta is not a selection of Sinophone literature, but it is specifically a selection of works by authors who were born, raised, and still live in China today. Thus, it does not include works of Chinese dissidents in exile, Southeast Asian or overseas Chinese authors, dead authors of the Republican era, or Taiwanese or Hong Kong writers. These Sinophone writers admittedly have nothing to do with the present-day Chinese experience. However, the editor’s introduction bears the unmistakable marks of a deal made with the party as part of the conditions of access to these present-day Chinese authors, due to its echoing of the official party line. The main thesis of the introduction to the magazine is that China is unjustly feared and maligned in the US, and it shouldn’t be viewed as a threat because it is not an imperialist country. Rather, American imperialism remains the premier threat to global prosperity: “The blunt fact remains: Of all the major powers in the world today, China was the first to withdraw its world-historical ambitions from the geopolitical scene.” This is an odd and incongruous statement that, viewed from the vantage points of Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and others, is also false: “Though the Communist party-state always claims it is building a modern nation-state, the incorporation and governing of the vast and diverse geographical space inherited from the Qing empire necessitate that it adopt ruling strategies overlapping with those of Qing times. This makes the PRC an empire pretending to be a nation-state” (Hung 2022:108).[3]
Reading such an editorial brings to mind Herman Hesse’s writings on WWI and WWII, in which he defended a fervent interest in the love of Japanese literature, art, and culture at the height of wartime, when the public (at least the American public) was propagandized relentlessly to hate everything Japanese, whether it was contemporary or ancient. The present-day world is full of despotism, brutal and cruel regimes which exist simultaneously. Most of the people living in this world, possibly 70% or more, are cursed to have to adapt themselves to the whims of dictators. In capitalist democracies, the majority of society are wage slaves, regardless of their relative global privilege. All of this is equally true. An intense dislike for aggressive, brutal dictatorships, for those who run narco-states and techno-dystopias, does not extend to hatred for the art, literature, and people who were born there and live there. Interest in art and culture, regardless of its origin, should not have to make one into an apologist for a dictatorship or require a statement that equates a dictatorship with a capitalist democracy which is prone to excesses, stating that they are both equally bad.
It is unfortunate that even to access these authors directly requires the editors of Granta to get down and lick the boot. The presentation of Dongbei and China as hyper-masculine, rough-and-ready workers’ enclaves (even when those men may be down on their luck) may be what the party wants to present to the world, ever focused on controlling the narrative, but it is not the full picture of Dongbei’s Renaissance, which includes its own version of staccato trap and a car-wreck (don’t want to look but can’t look away) dance style known as 社會遙 shehui yao.
Having more Sinophone literature in English translation is a net positive, and hopefully this issue of Granta sparks greater publisher interest in sponsoring translations of both contemporary and classic works of Chinese literature, and this will lead to a broader selection of works which can offer some context for the myriad life experiences that will allow the Anglophone reading public to gain a more nuanced view of the situation in East Asia. To make room for literature that describes life rather than promoting one regime’s idealized version of it.
[2] 皮村, a village which is more like a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Beijing where migrant laborers who work in Beijing are living. It became well known for the artistic activities of some of its residents, and Fu Qiuyun, an organizer of Pi Village’s literary group, describes the living conditions of the area in an article here. An informative interview with the director of Pi Village’s Museum of Working Culture and Art can be found here.
[3] Hung, Ho-Fung. (2022). City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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