Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [127]
The original title of the book could be literally translated as “China in the Ascendant,” and the novel is indeed primarily concerned with that subject. The main theme is that China is yet another “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” and what that may mean for the world and the Chinese people. This theme is in basic agreement with recent works of nonfiction, and also dovetails with many proposals by young ultranationalist Chinese and high officers in the Chinese armed forces who champion what can only be labeled as fascist ideas. It also reflects several recent warnings by old retired Party leaders who fear these ultranationalists and how they want China to develop.
Unlike a work of nonfiction, however edifying, The Fat Years gives you a full taste of what it feels like to be one of the characters living in the “counterfeit paradise” that is China today. In its original form it was circulated throughout China among concerned Chinese intellectuals, students, and so on, jumping the Great Firewall of censorship. Probably many high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have read it. The Chinese scholars who sent the novel to my wife, and many other Chinese intellectuals we’ve talked to, have all said that this book is “the best description of the way they live today.” I believe it is destined to become a classic in China in the Brave New World rather than the 1984 tradition. Less futuristic than Brave New World, the book is still prophetic and will long be relevant to our understanding of a modern dictatorship of the kind that exists in China today.
In the realism of the novel’s character depictions, we meet a very wide spectrum of almost all the elements of China’s three hundred to four hundred million urban population. They include ultra-nationalist wannabe fascist students, professors, and Party officials (Wei Guo, Professors X, Y, & Z); “ordinary” professors, members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who conduct “ordinary” research (Hu Yan); well-heeled real estate moguls (Jian Lin) and high-ranking officials in the party-state apparatus to whom they are firmly tied by interest and blood relationships (He Dongsheng); editors, writers, and media types (Zhuang Zizhong and unnamed Reading Journal contributors); sons and daughters of “Red Aristocrats”—longtime loyal Party families—who serve the party-state’s interests at home and around the world (Ban Cuntou, Wen Lan); young people of the lumpen proletariat, some of them escapees from slave-labor camps (Zhang Dou); other young professionals who have dropped out of the state-controlled media (Miaomiao); leaders and their followers in the rapidly growing underground Christian movement (Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun); young and old netizens who argue for and against ultranationalism and government policies; foreigners who like Lao Chen have opted to live the good life in a communist dictatorship because it is a good life for them and it does not frighten them; high-priced female escorts and drug addicts who work in places with names like the Paradise Club, catering to the newly rich, the Party powerful, and foreigners (Dong Niang and her boyfriend); youthful dissidents who protested and then escaped abroad or went silent after the Tiananmen Massacre (Shi Ping); and, finally, professional dissidents like Little Xi who refuse to accept the party-state’s version of past, present, and future reality; she is joined by the older, more experienced peripatetic cook and small-time entrepreneur Fang Caodi, and Zhang Dou, the young escapee from slave labor.
A number of groups are, however, missing from The Fat Years. From the urban population, these are the many professors, lawyers, and other professionals who are actively working to change the dictatorship. Also missing are the urban working class and peasant workers (migrant laborers) who toil in the harsh working conditions of mostly foreign-owned factories (owned by American, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hong Kong consortia), and who by