Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [133]
Lu Xun: The pen name of Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), a celebrated Chinese writer. His twenty-six short stories have been repeatedly translated, most recently as The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China by Julia Lovell (Penguin, 2009). He is considered to be the founder of modern Chinese literature and was also lionized by Mao Zedong as a great “revolutionary.”
Maotai: A powerful liquor produced in Maotai in southwestern China. It is distilled from fermented sorghum.
You can drink it without any worries: A reference to the many bogus products in China, including liquor and wine, such as that discovered in a major wine scandal in December 2010.
He was seeking an absolute self-reliance: This is Chinese Communist Party propaganda and not exactly what Mao did. While rejecting the West, China relied heavily on Stalin and the Soviet Union, until Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech against Stalin made Mao worry that he might also be criticized in a similar way. After that, Mao tried to dominate the world communist movement, declared that nuclear war would be an acceptable option if only half the Chinese people were killed, and so on. His actions led to a Sino-Soviet break when Khrushchev ordered all Russian technicians out of China.
Qiong Yao, Yan Qin, Cen Kailun, Yi Shu, and Zhang Xiaoxian: Qiong Yao (Ch’iung Yao, b. 1938) was the most popular and prolific romance-novel writer in Taiwan for over thirty years, from 1963 into the 1990s. Many of her works have been made into feature-length films and television series. In the 1990s, her work began to be read on the mainland and she became one of the bestselling writers in China. Yan Qin, Cen Kailun, Yi Shu, and Zhang Xiaoxian are all popular Hong Kong Chinese writers of romance fiction who are very popular on the mainland.
The Bible says that when the world is full of masters, then the end of our days is in sight: Matthew 24:14, “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all the nations, and then the end shall come.”
Yang Jiang: The wife (b. 1911) of the celebrated scholar Qian Zhongshu, and a major writer in her own right. Her Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder” is a classic memoir of their difficult life on a farm during the Cultural Revolution, including an account of their son’s suicide.
we Chinese are not happy: A satirical allusion to the popular 2009 book China Is Not Happy (or Unhappy China) by Song Xiaojun and others that encourages China to seek world hegemony.
inedia: The ability to live without food, i.e., to fast. Fang Caodi is referring to Buddhist fasting traditions.
Pangu: There are several myths about Pangu. In the prevailing one, Pangu (usually depicted as a primitive hairy giant with horns) emerged from a cosmic egg that had coalesced from the formless chaos of the universe. He set about creating the world, and separating Yin (the earth) from Yang (the sky).
Yandi: Another name for Shennong, the Divine Farmer, who was one of the mythological bearers of culture at the beginning of civilization. His main achievement, according to Han historians, was to have led humanity out of a state of hunting and savagery, toward agrarian utopia.
home church: China’s Christian population has swelled to around fifty million since the government began loosening controls on the practice of religion in the 1970s. Private gatherings have proliferated, and as the government requires Christians to meet only in officially registered places of worship, these are often cracked down upon by officials. The home was the original setting for