Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [3]
Although communist control might be far less visible in contemporary China than it was during, say, the Maoist era, it is quietly ubiquitous: through public and private businesses, local politics, media, and culture. The Party, Chan Koonchung points out, is “the elephant in the room of contemporary China—no one discusses it but it’s always there. The country’s like a Rubix cube—enormously complex, but with one organizing principle: the Communist Party.” When I met him in Beijing in the summer of 2010, he invited me to lunch at a fashionable East–West fusion restaurant in Sanlitun, one of the city’s best-heeled commercial quarters, littered with high-end bars, cafés, and designer stores, through which The Fat Years’ own hero, Chen, regularly strolls feeling “incomparably blessed.” After a smiling, smart-casual young Chinese waiter introduced himself to us in English (“Hi, I’m Darren, I’ll be looking after you today”) then disappeared again, Chan Koonchung conspiratorially reminded me: “There’ll be Party members in this joint venture too, keeping an eye on things.”
Much of the force of The Fat Years, then, springs from its unusual honesty about certain aspects of contemporary Chinese reality. For Chen is almost unique, among his mainland-Chinese novelist contemporaries, in confronting the political no-go zones of life in China today. By 2000, according to many critics, Chinese writers could write about anything they wanted without fear of severe reprisal, and even with the prospect of financial gain—if they did not write directly about politics. What has resulted is a culture often rich in commercial shock value—in its explicit descriptions of sex and violence—but frustratingly weak in its grasp of the political roots of China’s problems. China’s leadership remains a taboo subject—on the Chinese Internet, even writing the names of China’s rulers is prohibited. Acclaimed mainland novelists such as Yu Hua write bestselling books about communist China that evoke the chaos of war and revolution, but that pull their punches when it comes to seeking the deep, institutional causes of post-1949 China’s ills, and that avoid—for censorship reasons—even the most veiled reference to the suppression of the 1989 protests. The violence of the Cultural Revolution, for example, is portrayed as an irrational explosion of thuggery, without any attempt to search for longer-term origins (in, say, communism’s normalization of violence and in mass resentment of its castelike system of class designations). The Fat Years, by contrast, directly faces up to the marriage of mass acquiescence and violent political intimidation that keeps China’s authoritarian show on the road. One contemporary writer did not wholly identify with Chan Koonchung’s vision of China’s near future, but admitted that “at least he’s willing to point out some of the holes in our fancy tapestry. He’s the only Sinophone author to make the attempt, unfortunately. And it’s we mainland-Chinese writers who are to blame for that.”
The mainland-Chinese response to Chan’s novel was revealing. With its explicit references to the 1989 crackdown and to Party censorship, the book—published in Hong Kong—was of course not officially distributed on the mainland. But the Communist Party’s control on information—although extensive—is nowhere near as absolute as portrayed in The Fat Years, and the book was sold under-the-counter in some Beijing bookstores, or by mail order from Hong Kong; each copy that reached the mainland, one estimate ran, was passed between at least six or seven readers. Its mainland audience was seriously shaken by the novel’s “authenticity” (kaopu); by its discussion of how the government has silenced or absorbed its opponents;