Liu Xiaobo’s worry [is] that Chinese writers are trapped in a language that deters or distorts expression of impermissible thoughts.
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Writers who have tried to pull free from Party language have worried about how it affects not only beliefs but behavior in the world. In one of his labor camp novels, Zhang Xianliang tells how a camp inmate (Zhang himself, clearly) is able to escape and to roam around outside for a while, but then returns to the camp of his own accord. There are several reasons why he does so, and one of them is that his ideological training has led him to an undue respect for official correctness. “My ‘thoughts’ told me that I should return to the labor reform camp,” he writes.
The problem continues to the present day for Chinese writers, and the books I am reviewing here in some ways illustrate it. Censorship, broadly conceived, appears at three levels. Level one is: “I wrote X and the censor took it out.” Level two is: “I want to write X but stop myself from doing so, out of fear.” Level three is: “It is awkward even to form thought X in the language that I have inherited.”
Another mode of deflection, which began during the scar years and flourished through the 1980s, was to move into modernist language. “Misty poets”—Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, and others—wrote lines pregnant with meanings that the authorities knew they did not like even though they could not say exactly why. Fiction writers including Yu Hua, Su Tong, Han Shaogong, and Can Xue, whose childhoods or adolescent years were marred by the turmoil of late Maoism, created worlds that were filled with murderous toddlers, belching grandmothers, sunlight so hot that it melts the sand underfoot, horn-blowing deaf-mutes, hoodlums who grin as their electric drill penetrates someone’s kneecap, family history that gets more and more grotesque the deeper one digs, and more. Their surreal tales and bizarre images owed something to their discovery of Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, and others in the outside world. But much of the writing expressed their own shock, indirectly reflected.
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Lilian [a character from A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin] observes that much of the “ardent patriotism” in China today is born of insecurity; a citizen loves the state not because the state is lovable but because it gives a citizen a stronger face to present to the world. Chinese character includes “many good qualities”—“diligence, resourcefulness, modesty, [and] respect for old people”—but also two very unfortunate ones: “petty cleverness and practical-mindedness.” Ha Jin here refers to the tendency, easy to notice in Chinese fiction and life, to analyze all the factors in a situation and figure out the smartest route to personal advantage. This trait, for Ha Jin, gets in the way of doing “what’s meaningful in the long run.”
--Excerpts from a review of recent works by Chinese/Chinese American novelists by Perry Link (NYRB, November 19, 2015 issue) Full article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/nov/19/china-novelists-against-state/
