Sideways Truth: Writing in a Totalitarian Regime
Reviewing ‘Heart Sutra’ and ‘The Day the Sun Died’ by Chinese Novelist Yan Lianke
If you don’t count the hulking novel penned in his late teens and used for kindling by his illiterate mother before it could be published, novelist Yan Lianke began his writing career working for the Chinese government as a propagandist in the People’s Liberation Army.
It didn’t last.
Censor’s Heartburn
“For 16 years he was a model worker,” says Mary-Anne Toy, “writing morale-boosting stories and operas for the army and being invited to join the Communist Party.” But then in 1994 his novella Summer Sunset, published two years prior, was banned by the government for reasons that seem incidental to the work itself.
As his unfair situation became public, Yan won defenders in the Taiwan and Hong Kong media who protested on his behalf. Nonetheless, he was, as Toy says, “forced to write self-criticism for six months.” He avoided more serious punishment, but the threat painted a bright line over which he should not cross.
Yan mostly stayed within the censors’ good graces for the next several years, winning accolades and literary prizes along the way, but then he swerved.
In 2000, the government cried foul over his novel Hard Like Water for its depiction of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. “Complaints about its sexual descriptions and political incorrectness were made all the way to the [Chinese Communist Party’s] Propaganda Department and the State Administration of the Press and Publication,” writes Jessica Yeung. “The novel narrowly escaped banning only after the Wuhan-based publisher went to lobby authorities in Beijing, but a prohibition on any book promotion was imposed in order to limit its impact.”
Yan stepped in it again in 2003 when he published Lenin’s Kisses, a satire about a local official raising money in the wake of Soviet collapse to buy Vladimir Lenin’s corpse and install it in his village as a tourist attraction.
The absurdist tale depicts a supposedly socialist country manifesting the worst capitalist tendencies. And that’s when his fellow propagandists realized Yan had learned his job a little too well. Aggrieved higher-ups in the People’s Liberation Army liberated him from the payroll, though ambivalence again prevailed: While the book was formally banned, Yan secured a professorship at a leading university in Beijing and in 2005 also took home the prestigious Lao She literary prize for the scandalous novel.
Then Yan published Serve the People! which portrays an affair between a lowly soldier and a commander’s wife. Set amid the Cultural Revolution, the title not only appropriates one of the Chairman’s slogans, the story turns on the woman’s kinky realization that desecrating icons of Mao fuels her passion. After reading excerpts in a literary magazine, government censors cracked down.
“Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from it or report on it,” they ruled in a rare, written condemnation. And while Yan’s teenage efforts give the lie to Mikhail Bulgakov’s immortal phrase, “Manuscripts don’t burn,” Serve the People! proved the Russian right. Instead of stifling the text, the censors stoked interest in the work, now readily available outside China—and inside, as well, for anyone eager enough to find it.
Other works—and other bans—followed. From model propaganda department employee to prime cause of the censor’s heartburn: Today, Yan still lives in Beijing but mostly publishes his fiction in Taiwan, where his work is free from state control.
While the peripheral Chinese literary market is vastly smaller than that of the mainland—Yeung mentions a mainland print run for Yan being 115,000 copies and a Hong Kong run of just 5,000—Yan’s work can be read locally on illegal websites and is widely translated and distributed around the world, including his most recent novel in English, Heart Sutra.
Truth Will Set You Free
China is technically an atheist country but does recognize five religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. As Tibetan Buddhists, underground Christians, and persecuted Uyghurs can attest, however, these religious expressions are not permitted free rein.
Just as China exerts control over what gets published, the state controls how religion is practiced within its borders. Heart Sutra takes an amusing and subversive look at that exercise of control.
When the eighteen-year-old jade nun Yahui attends the religious training center of National Politics University in Beijing, she does so to serve her elderly shifu, Jueyu. But Jueyu suffers a stroke when Director Gong persists in hosting mandatory tug-of-war matches between the various religions, Muslims squaring off against Catholics, Daoists against Buddhists, and other combinations.
Students assemble at the center ostensibly to learn about each other’s faiths and form bonds of friendship and understanding. Given the focus, tug-of-war competitions might seem a bit odd. But then, Director Gong is writing a book on the subject. Besides, his management of the center could raise eyebrows for better reasons—cronyism, corruption, extortion, and bribery being only the most obvious.
Nothing at the center works the way it’s supposed to. While Yahui takes classes on behalf of her bedridden shifu, she draws the eye of Daoist master, Gu Mingzheng, who is ready to renounce his vows and enter secular life if she comes with him. Will Yahui renounce her calling as well?
The couple’s romance is cut short, literally, shockingly, irreversibly. But the intrigue at the center only deepens. As Yahui determines to rejoin secular life, she’s dragged into the corruption, where nameless men shake down the compromised, trade influence, and have their way.
As Yahui is forced to trade what matters most to escape, a Protestant pastor who demonstrates kindness to her is jailed and (supposedly) commits suicide in prison (though a person could be forgiven their skepticism).
Behind all of this hover the “deities”—Jesus, Mary, Muhammad, Bodhisattva Guanyin, and Laozi—who visibly appear in Yahui’s apartment perched on her sofa and bed to ask that Yahui not reveal their secret: that they’ve forgotten how to rescue humans from their suffering.
And Myth Will Cover Your Tracks
One way to say things you can’t is to veil them in fantasy and farce. Yan identifies as an atheist but one who believes religion merits attention. While he’s demonstrated a remarkable willingness to mock the excesses and follies of his country, he still lives within its borders most of the year, remains a Communist Party member, and has reached something of an uneasy truce with his government: while marginalized, he’s still permitted to publish.
So how does one get away with critiquing the government’s repression and cooption of religion without drawing more than the usual ire? Satirize its involvement. How to make the bet even safer? Shift the playing field.
The principal action of Heart Sutra unfolds on earth, but Yan brings heaven down to eye level though a side story involving Guanyin and Laozi, revealed in papercut imagery throughout the book, as well as Yahui’s abovementioned conversation with the deities.
The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West uses the heavenly Jade Emperor to satirize earthly bureaucracy. Isn’t Yan following suit? Director Gong’s antics betray the usual corruption and cronyism. Nothing too scandalous there. To level a sharper denunciation requires another tactic. The deities haven’t forgotten how to alleviate human suffering; China’s rulers have, those who permit nameless operators to exploit and abuse. But Yan makes his accusation indirectly, sideways.
Yan refers to his blended style of fantasy and realism as “mythorealism,” and it provides an apt vehicle to describe realities that can’t be tackled head-on. A narrative can be coded like a first-century apocalypse, as Yan does in The Day the Sun Died, published in English in 2018.
The novel transpires over a single night, a night in which no one sleeps, or rather everyone sleeps but carries on as if they were awake, “the great somnambulism.” It feels like a fairytale, though twisted and demented.
Fourteen-year-old Li Niannian serves as narrator. His family runs a funerary shop. “Our family made a decent living profiting off dead people,” he says. Comically, one of his uncles is the novelist Yan Lianke—a self-deprecating joke. Li compares his uncle’s novels to rotten fruit, “but since there were no other books available. . . .”
Meanwhile, another uncle runs the local crematorium. We soon discover the government has banned burials to conserve land and prescribes cremation. Villagers flout the law, but Li’s father, Tianbao, rats them out—at least, he did so for a time.
We also discover that when bodies are cremated, their fat renders out as oil. Li’s uncle runs a lucrative side business unscrupulously selling the “corpse oil” for a variety of uses without declaring the lipid’s morbid provenance. Tianbao, disgusted with the trade and his own complicity, begins buying up the oil himself and stashing it so it can’t be used and desecrated.
Tianbao’s betrayal echoes the culture of snitching and betrayal intrinsic to the enforcement of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But it’s only the beginning as villagers, while “dreamwalking,” denounce each other and inflict vengeance for past wrongs—not to mention vandalize, steal, and otherwise spread havoc and mayhem. As the hours tick by, the entire fabric of the community begins to unravel and the fatalities begin to accumulate.
Li and his family are spared the worst and must act to save their village. But how? “I know how to bring out the sun!” says Tianbao. “I know how to transform the dark night into daylight!” As a wild, redemptive conflagration unlike any seen before finally breaks the spell, Tianbao yells, “I’m awake!” and asks Yan to “write me into your novel as a good person!”
‘A Traitor Who Writes’
Yan defines his mythorealism as “a realism that digs deeper.” Traditional realism, he says, “has been unable to reflect the reality and culture of today’s China, in part because it is bound by traditions and rules”—the kind of rules enforced by censors. “The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert,” he says.
Only by stepping beyond the real—with deities that meet in a Buddhist nun’s apartment to beg favors before she marries a Daoist monk, or a mysterious night in which an entire zombified community acts out their worst (and occasionally best) impulses—can the novelist address reality.
While several of his books have been officially banned, “Since 2016,” says Jiayang Fan, “almost all of Yan’s work—to date, seventeen novels, as well as short stories, novellas, and volumes of essays—has been subject to an unofficial ban.” That is to say, regardless the individual status of any particular work, all of his work is deemed suspect and actively marginalized.
If his name is on the spine, says Yan, it’s yanked from shelves, at least in China. Elsewhere, of course, he’s loved. But that serves to underscore the loss. “In an ideal world,” he says, “I want to write for my countrymen, but I know that’s not possible and likely won’t be possible in my lifetime.”
Generally speaking, The Day the Sun Died offers a parable about human longing and depravity, along with its occasional heroic and self-sacrificial moments. But with his portrait of unthinking dreamwalkers, Yan also takes a jab at Chinese President Xi Jinping’s so-called “Chinese dream,” an interpretation Yan must explicitly reject in public.
“A direct connection to the Chinese dream was not what I intended at all,” Yan told the Guardian. “It would actually have been rather dangerous for me to go around writing a critique of it—and far too simplistic.” It’s a revealing comment. Yan can formally distance himself from unnecessary trouble with the state, while also providing a picture of what it’s like to live and write within such a state. “Dangerous.”
Yan has referred to himself as “a cowardly traitor who writes.” His countrymen might debate the noun, but the rest of us can also read: He clearly deserves a better modifier.
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Thank you for this. I'm so glad to learn about Yan Lianke!
It’s good to hear of this author. My husband and I spent the summer of 1988 in China with a Christian college ministry, and we have been following events in China ever since.