Yan Lianke: A Writer's Moral Duty

Abstract

Canadian literary critic Laifong Leung explores how author Yan Lianke successfully draws upon his own harsh life experiences and the ordeals of others to speak about the suffering of the peasantry with an insider's authority. Leung reveals how through his often satiric and allegorical style and his distinctive combination of fantasy, folklore, and the grotesque, Yan Lianke has developed his own unique, socially engaged literature of conscience. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

Canadian literary critic Laifong Leung explores how author Yan Lianke successfully draws upon his own harsh life experiences and the ordeals of others to speak about the suffering of the peasantry with an insider's authority. Leung reveals how through his often satiric and allegorical style and his distinctive combination of fantasy, folklore, and the grotesque, Yan Lianke has developed his own unique, socially engaged literature of conscience.

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Exuberant, compassionate, and innovative, Yan Lianke .... is among the most prolific, successful, and controversial writers of China today. Since 1979 he has published fourteen volumes of collected stories and novellas, thirteen novels, and six essay collections, and he has won more than twenty prizes, including the prestigious Laoshe Literary Award ... for his novella Huangjin dong ... (Golden Cave) and the Lu Xun Literary Prize ...twice, once for the novella Nian yue ri .. (Year, Month, Day), and also for the novel Shouhuo ... (Happy). All three are outstanding works dealing with the desire and suffering of the peasantry. Yan Lianke's courage in venturing into forbidden zones-as shown in the controversial novella Wei renmin fuwu .... (Serve the People!), which deals with the illicit relationship between a high-ranking military officer's wife and her soldierservant- also added to his fame. Due to the novella's sensitive nature, it was banned by an unprecedented order from the Central Propaganda Department after the first printing. Yan Lianke is also deeply concerned about the victims of AIDS in his home province of Henan; his observations from the several months he spent in the epidemic zone resulted in his novel Dingzhuang meng ... (Dream of Ding Village), which, like Serve the People!, was banned immediately after it was published. In 2007 Yan Lianke left his position in the army and obtained a transfer to the Beijing Writers' Association. He aroused controversy again in the spring of 2008 when he published his satirical novel Feng ya song ... (Elegy and Acadame), which exposed academic corruption through the eyes of a scholar who was of peasant origin. Yan Lianke's writing reveals human suffering through his portrayals of the peasants who work in the fields, who join the army, and who make their way to the city. He is a high-profile author because of his political courage and compassion for humanity as well as his continuing search for innovative ways to depict rural China.

With the recent success of the English translation of Serve the People!, Yan Lianke has begun to attract readers in the West. His literary achievement is certainly not any less than the internationally known Mo Yan ..., his former army colleague. Yan Lianke deserves more attention than he currently receives. Tracing the development of his life and writing career provides fascinating insights into the important themes of his major works.

From the Village to the Barracks: Finding a Way Out through Writing

Yan Lianke was born to poor peasant parents in Song County in Henan Province, which was notorious for large numbers of starvation deaths during the Great Famine (1959-1961). He had a brother and two sisters; his elder sister suffered from a chronic illness. The poverty and illness that haunted his childhood and teenage years would later appear as central themes in his writing. Due to poverty, Yan Lianke was forced to drop out of middle school and was sent to work as a temporary laborer at a cement factory in Xinxiang, Henan Province. Since 1949 the Chinese government has separated its people into two different categories: the rural and the urban, with the former receiving disadvantageous treatment in most aspects of life. Therefore, people of rural origin would do anything to change their status, a theme Yan Lianke has often expressed as the desire to escape from the countryside to the city. Yan Lianke's personal experience of the injustice against people of rural status gave rise to the love-hate attitude toward the city that is seen in his fiction.

Until recently, the only way for rural youths to change their fate was to join the army. The general expectation was that after being discharged from the army, they would likely become local cadres or be assigned to a job in a city. This was Yan Lianke's dream when he joined the People's Liberation Army in 1978 at the age of twenty. However, it was not his only dream. After discovering Zhang Kangkang's ... novel Fenjiexian ... (Demarcation) and learning that the author-a youth exiled to the Great Northern Wilderness (a remote part of Heilongjiang Province) with the Rustication Movement-had been recruited by the Heilongjiang Writers' Association to become a full-time writer in Harbin,2 it suddenly dawned on Yan Lianke that he too could change his fate through writing. From that moment on, Yan Lianke worked diligently to achieve his goal. Due to his superior writing ability, the army retained him as a cultural instructor in 1981 after he completed three years of military service. Half a year later, he was transferred to Kaifeng, Henan Province, to become a party secretary in the Number 155 Hospital. He took this opportunity to further his education. In 1983 he graduated from Henan University with a major in political education. He then attended the Art Institute of the People's Liberation Army and graduated in 1991 with a major in Chinese literature. In 1994 he was transferred to the Television Art Center of the Number Two Artillery Core in Beijing. Although Yan Lianke realized his ambition of moving to the city, his heart has never left his hometown. The Balou Mountain ... region of his hometown serves as the archive of his personal and cultural memories and is the inspiration for his literary creation.

Although Yan Lianke began writing in 1979, he did not share the good fortune of many post-Mao writers who became famous overnight after the publication of one story that had broken a Maoist taboo, as had Liu Xinwu ... and Lu Xinhua ... Yan Lianke's early stories did not depart from the purpose prescribed by the military. His first story "Tianma de gushi" ... ("The Gift"), which appeared in Zhendou bao ... (Combat News), a journal of the Wuhan Military District ..., is a simple story of an upright army instructor who does not accept gifts from his subordinates. By 1985, when many young writers such as Han Shaogong ..., and Shi Tiesheng ... had already made their names, Yan Lianke was still little known beyond the military despite having published fifteen stories. The situation, however, somewhat improved following the publication of his first novella, Xiaocun xiaohe ... (Small Village and Small River) in Kunlun ..., a prestigious literary journal of the military. It is the tale of a soldier who fakes his death during a combat mission and is sent home after his scheme is discovered. Shunned by his wife and his fellow villagers, he regrets his cowardice deeply. When his village is flooded, he bravely saves the villagers by allowing them to step on his body to safety, but he then drowns due to exhaustion. He gains back his soldierly honour and the acceptance of his family and fellow villagers only through the loss of his life. This tale reveals Yan Lianke's courage in breaking barriers and running counter to the prescribed pattern of orthodox military literature, which eulogizes perfect heroes.

Becoming a "Peasant-Soldier Writer": Narrating the Suffering of the Peasantry and the Peasant-Soldiers

Yan Lianke gained wider recognition in the early 1990s with the publication of his Yaogou xilie ... (Yaogou series), six novellas set during and immediately after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in a fictional village called Yaogou ... (Yao Gully) on Balou Mountain. All the novellas are narrated in first-person by Lianke ... the fact of giving his protagonist the same name as the author lends a sense of autobiographical truth to the series, which follows Lianke from the age of twelve to twenty, creating a sense of structural continuity. Upon publication of the last installment, the novellas were published together as the novel Qinggan yu ... (Prison of Emotion). While unfolding the codified behaviours and devastating poverty that haunt the Yaogou people, Yan Lianke constructs in a realistic style with simple diction and carefully chosen details the heart-rending Bildungsroman of an ambitious village youth. In the best-known novella of the Yaogou series, Yaogou de ritou ... (Sunshine in Yaogou), Lianke's father reveals that he cannot afford to send two children to high school at the same time. Adding to the black humor threaded throughout the series is the story of an old man selling his own coffin to raise money for Lianke's school fees. In the end, despite the collective effort, the total money raised is still far from enough. Yan Lianke has intentionally denied the story a conventional happy ending. As the story proceeds, it is later revealed that the protagonist's sister has secretly arranged to marry an undesirable man for money in order to help Lianke. Upon making this discovery, he strongly objects to the deal and decides to go to work as a brick-maker in the township. As such, his sister is saved from a miserable marriage. The idea that human dignity is not lost in times of poverty gives Yan Lianke's tales of suffering a sense of nobility. The protagonist, having lost his chance for further education, will in the course of action cross the threshold into maturity.

Yan Lianke's rural tales deal not only with suffering, but also with the typical inner workings of Chinese village politics that are characterized by a complex mixture of kinship and marital and hierarchical relations. He often returns to this theme in his later fiction. In his short story "Hei zongmao, bai zongmao" ... ("Black Bristle, White Bristles"), the fear and worship of power are vividly shown when the villagers compete to serve the prison term for the town head, Li ... (who had killed a young man in a car accident), without reciprocation or compensation of any kind from him. Li never personally appears in the narrative and his absence is contrasted with the three villagers' efforts to outdo each other. At this point, readers can't help but ask why would one compete to do such a thing? Beneath this absurd competition lie poverty, fear of the local official, and a desire to gain personal connections (which could turn into material gain) to the person in power. The villagers paradoxically play the roles of both victim and collaborator in the perpetuation of the village power hierarchy. The turn of events reveals the complexity of peasantofficial relations when the victim's parents decide that rather than suing the man who caused the death of their son, they will ask him to accept their other son as his adopted son.

In addition to his successful tales of Yaogou peasants, Yan Lianke has created a different kind of military fiction with his nongmin junren ... (peasant-soldier) characters. For decades after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, the chief mandate of military fiction had been to create brave and patriotic heroes. Whether the soldiers were from the city or the countryside was of no concern because they were supposed to share one dream: to serve the country and the party. By the early 1990s, Yan Lianke had given rise to the new image of the peasant-soldier with a series of works depicting the fates of soldier characters from his hometown, and thus he gained the label of nongmin junren zuojia ... (peasant-soldier writer). His subversive peasant-soldiers are not confident, brave, and selfless heroes; rather, they are generally unhappy, anxious, and fatalistic. They are disillusioned by the hypocrisy of hero-making ("Zhongshi huanxiang" ... ["Return of the Cadet"]), disgusted by the unnecessarily demanding drills that serve only the superior's promotion ("Heping xue" ... ["Peacetime Snow"]), and frustrated by competitions for merits and posts ("Heping zhan" ... ["War in Peacetimes"]). In their attempts to gain recognition, they are often thrown into situations in which they face disappointment or betrayal from their superiors or their clan brothers. Even though within the army they work together with those from the city, they largely remain as the rural "other." To Yan Lianke's peasant-soldiers, the most desirable reward for their military merit is not a badge of heroism and patriotism, but a job in the city or an official position after they return home.

Yan Lianke makes frequent use of a dead peasantsoldier as the first-person narrator in his subversive military tales, an idea deriving from the summoning of the soul by shamans. As a spirit, the dead first-person narrator is empowered to see and do things the living cannot. He can fly freely into someone's living space, which often brings forth unexpected revelations. He mostly speaks in the form of a monologue, revealing his desires, regrets, and reflections, which characterizes Yan Lianke's peasant-soldier stories with a high level of introspection. In "Xunzhao tudi" ... ("Looking for a Burial Place"), for instance, the first-person narrator is a dead soldier whose ashes are being taken by his superior to his hometown for burial. The reader shares the dead soldier's surprises and disappointments throughout the journey home and the discovery upon arrival that because the narrator had died in an accident rather than in a battle, his fellow villagers show no interest in giving him a proper burial. However, his adoptive father in another village is not only willing to bury him but he is also willing to find a newly deceased young woman to be his wife in the netherworld. This turn of events brings the twisting journey to an unexpected end. The spectacle of the wedding for the dead turns the potentially disappointing journey into a celebration of folk culture. Through his detailed depiction of the processions, the mourning songs, the funeral costumes, the rituals, and the wailing, Yan Lianke has brought back folklore practices that had been suppressed during Maoist rule.

From 1990 to 1996, Yan Lianke published on the average six novellas per year on either rural or military subjects. He was so prolific that he could finish writing a short story in a day and a novella in a week. The works he produced during these years had the inevitable tendency to be repetitive. In the late 1990s he expressed remorse over this fanatical rush of literary creation since it had caused great damage to his health. During this time, he also developed severe chronic back and neck pain that prevented him from writing in a sitting position, and he had to lie on a specially made reclining chair to write. Illness, the recurring motif originating with his sister's poor health during his childhood, now truly possessed him. As a result, he has reduced production in recent years.

Expanding Artistic Horizons: Blending Fantasy and Folk Myth with the Grotesque

Toward the mid-1990s, Yan Lianke's narrative strategy markedly departed from his habitual convention of realism when he vetured to blend fantasy with reality within his fiction. He held the convictions of "no imagination, no fiction," and "fiction is that which writes the impossible into the possible." Though he talked about reading foreign works (in Chinese translation) such as A Hundred Years of Solitude, he has made the point that his new writing strategy was derived from "the transformation of [his] village life experience" rather than from the direct result of reading.3 In an August 2002 interview, the author mentioned a striking experience that inspired his use of the fantastic and folk myths. On a snowy winter day he returned to his hometown to attend a funeral and a wedding that took place simultaneously under the same roof separated only by a bamboo partition: the funeral for his uncle on one side and the wedding ceremony for two long-deceased youths-his cousin and a woman from a nearby village-on the other side. In accordance with the local custom, the funeral was decorated with white cloth while the wedding was adorned with red cloth covering the coffins of the bride and groom. What Yan Lianke and the other guests witnessed on that afternoon would change his view of reality. Hundreds of colourful butterflies flew in, covered the surface of the wedding coffins, and, after a few minutes, flew away. But not a single butterfly flew into the adjacent funeral hall. Where did the butterflies come from on such a snowy day? No one knew.

In 1997 the success of the allegorical novella Year, Month, Day, which depicts the lonely struggle for survival of an old man and his blind dog in an abandoned village during a famine, placed Yan Lianke among the ranks of major writers in China. From the late 1990s onward, Yan Lianke manifested his explosive creative energy through several anti-Utopian novels. With greater confidence in his literary ideas, he set out to construct his fictional world with shockingly extreme human conditions, exploiting the absurd, the fantastic, and folk myths. Death and survival are intertwined in his allegorical novel Riguang liunian ... (Sunshine Years), which he spent four years writing. The novel has an unconventional structure; when Yan Lianke was rewinding a video one day, it suddenly dawned on him that instead of progressing from birth to death, his narrative could progress from death to birth. As the chapters progress onward, the lives of the characters regress to earlier stages until in the last chapter the hero is in his mother's womb, eagerly waiting to be born.

Set in Balou Mountain, the people of Sunshine Years live in Three-Surnames Village (Du ..., Sima ..., and Lan ...) and are haunted by a mysterious throat disease that will kill them all before the age of forty. The novel opens with a depressing atmosphere in which the three Sima brothers are measuring the graves that will be theirs, only to find that there will not be enough space for them when they die. In their search for a cure for this disease, the villagers have come to believe that if they dig a ditch that links their village to Hidden-Spirit River, they will be able to drink healthy water and be healed. For this grand project, they will need a strong leader. Yan Lianke portrays the making of the hero Sima Lan ..., the village head, who, as the equivalent of Moses, will lead this otherwise doomed community out of the valley of death. Unfortunately, at thirty-nine Sima Lan is already showing signs of the disease. In order for him to shoulder this huge mission, he must have an operation. It is at this juncture that the human body becomes the focal point. People in this poverty-stricken community will do anything for him: the men sell their skin to the hospital; and the women, including his own lover, sell their bodies in the city. The mission is finally accomplished and the water starts to flow from Hidden-Spirit River. However, the twist on the expected happy ending is astonishing- as if to prophesy the horrifying consequence of ecological disaster caused by human beings, Yan Lianke withholds the happy ending his characters deserve, and the water that flows down to the village is filled with dead animals, junk, and chemicals. Those who pollute nature will eat the bitter fruit. The first chapter ends with the death of Sima Lan, their Moses. The failure of this grand Sisyphean project echoes the many mega projects orchestrated during and after Maoist rule. Another grand project is undertaken in Yan Lianke's highly acclaimed 2003 novel Shouhuo ... (Happy), in which Yan Lianke is even bolder in blending local culture with the grotesque (physically deformed villagers are put on display in a traveling carnival) and the absurd (exhibiting Lenin's embalmed body for profit) to convey an anti-Utopian perspective.4

Satirizing the Army and Beyond: Sex, AIDS, and Corruption

To Yan Lianke, the Cultural Revolution has not only destroyed social order but also the minds of the people and their language. The everyday language has become grotesque in the name of the revolution. This is shown effectively in the confessional monologue of the condemned Gao Aijun ... (whose name ironically means "supreme love for the army"), the hero of the novel Jianying rushui ... (Hard as Water), which is set in the Balou Mountain region at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Yan Lianke has enriched the image of his peasant-soldier character through his portrait of Gao Aijun. The entire narrative monologue is expressed in a highly charged language that blends revolutionary songs and slogans with Mao's sayings to create a frenzied atmosphere in which the power- and sex-hungry hero and heroine carry out their schemes and illicit affairs. In order to satisfy their sexual hunger, they spend a year digging a tunnel linking their rooms. They make love in the grave-like tunnel, listening to revolutionary songs and music and yelling out Mao's slogans when they reach orgasm. The grotesque, the revolutionary, and the sexual are interwoven in the underground. When the affair is discovered by the high leadership, they are detained for investigation and confined together in a room containing fifty-six Mao statues, each facing a different direction and positioned closely together, denying any space to move about freely for fear of changing the position of the statues, which would most certainly lead to unforeseeable consequences. The scene is a metaphor revealing Mao's extreme authority: his real person is absent, but his replica-although an inanimate object-is enough to generate fear and paralysis among the people. Though the couple manages to escape, they are later caught and will be executed for their affair and for murdering the heroine's husband. Through the hero's final monologue, Yan Lianke takes readers back to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and successfully illustrates the destruction of normal human minds through suppression and highly politicized discourse.

Yan Lianke adopted a less intensive style in 2004 for his peasant-soldier tales, but the effect was equally explosive. The short novel Serve the People! progresses in a well-controlled rhythm. It takes place almost entirely within the secluded mansion of a military commander. This commander is away on duty for months, leaving his young and sexually deprived wife, Liu Lian ..., alone with the honest and robust peasant soldier, Dawang ... Tension in the earlier part of the narrative comes mainly from Dawang's struggle to comprehend the situation. Liu Lian, on the other hand, is much more relaxed, as if she has forgotten about her husband. As the time of the commander's return approaches, Liu Lian suddenly finds out that she is pregnant. She then makes arrangement for Dawang's demobilization, providing jobs in the city and residence permits for him and his wife. For a moment, it seems that good things are finally coming his way. However, the revelation to Dawang by the other officers that the commander is impotent gives him a hint of the real reason for his transfer. The pace picks up again when, fifteen years later, Dawang makes a secret inquiry and discovers that Liu Lian has a fifteenyear- old son. A deep feeling of melancholy falls upon Dawang when Liu Lian does not want to see him. Her rejection strongly illuminates the insurmountable gap between the city and the country, and in turn reinforces the notion that the line between the superior and the subordinate must always be maintained.

The key to the novel is the recurrent image of the "Serve the People" sign on the dinner table. Liu Lian instructs Dawang that if the sign is not there, he is needed upstairs in her room. "Serve the people" is a sacred political slogan of the CCP. To use this sacred slogan to imply something sexual is considered extremely improper. Thus it was no surprise that this novel would offend the military. For the first time since 1949, the order to ban this novel was issued directly from the Central Propaganda Department. Yan Lianke's writing had obviously become a closely watched target, but he did not give in.

Yan Lianke's compassion and sense of duty as an intellectual urged him to investigate what had happened in Shangcai County in his home province of Henan, where many peasants were dying of AIDS after donating blood. This tragic happening was and is still to a large extent being concealed by the government. Once again dealing with the subject matter of illness and using a deceased person as the first-person narrator, Dream of Ding Village expresses Yan Lianke's artistic and moral commitment to humanity. The people of Ding Village ... had dreamed that they would be able to escape poverty, only to have their dreams shattered by AIDS. The twenty-two-year-old narrator was poisoned to death ten years previously by angry AIDS-infected villagers in an act of revenge on his father, the "blood king" who made a fortune from his blood-donation business. The omniscient narrator details how the tragedy began, developed, and ended. His kind grandfather had initially encouraged the villagers to donate blood in order to improve lives. However, once he realized that blood donation was causing the spread of AIDS, he immediately stopped it. This realization places him in moral opposition to his son, who was making money off the people's suffering by selling the donated blood and also selling coffins for those who died. The choice between money and morality recurs throughout the narrative. After failing to convince his son to apologize to the villagers, the grandfather kills his own son with a farming tool. The novel ends with the grandfather's release from prison. The sight he sees is apocalyptic. Ding Village and its surroundings are totally deserted: the trees were all cut down to make coffins, those who are still alive have moved away, and those who were ill are dead. However, Yan Lianke still provides hope to this community by borrowing the creation myth of the Chinese goddess Nu Wa ... It was said that Nu Wa created the first human beings on earth from yellow mud. Later, when she found herself too busy to create human beings one at a time, she swung a rope in a pool of mud, splashing out numerous dots, all of which turned into human beings. After a night of pouring rain, a woman emerges from the plain. She swings a twig of willow, flinging out many little human beings who jump up and down and begin to grow, bringing life back to the village by turning to nature as a source of renewal. Despite its hopeful ending, the novel was banned after its first printing.

Yan Lianke's Elegy and Academe, a novel published in 2008, is a scathing criticism of academia. Professor Yang Ke ... discovers the ancient songs that Confucius ... presumably left out in the process of compiling Shi Jing ... (The Book of Songs), a fresh and ingenious idea around which Yan Lianke structures the action. As a key symbol of Chinese classical culture, The Book of Songs deserves respect and appreciation. However, the fact that the research of intellectual hero Professor Yang Ke is ignored by students, vulgarized by modern media, and even plagiarized by his unfaithful wife conjures up a picture of a degraded educational sector. Yan Lianke was criticized for blackening the reputation of Beijing University, where the novel is set.5 In the postscript of the novel, Yan Lianke admits that he is not familiar with campus life;6 he merely used it to vent his disgust of the polluted urban and academic landscape and express his nostalgia for his hometown. As such, whether the novel is a disguised attack on Beijing University is really beside the point. The novel begins with Professor Yang Ke coming home after a research trip on The Book of Songs only to discover his wife in bed with the vice president of his university. This scene gives the illusion that the novel will focus on urban intellectuals; however, as the story develops, the frustrated hero returns to his hometown in the Balou Mountains where, in contrast to the corrupted campus, he has the respect of his fellow villagers and the devotion of his first love. The contrast of the evil, cruel, and unsympathetic city with the simple, warm, and respectful home village reflects Yan Lianke's persistent love-hate attitude toward the city. In this sense, the novel can be read as Yan Lianke's critical reflection on his own youthful dream of going to the city, as is vividly portrayed in his Yaogou stories.

Yan Lianke's most recent novel, Sishu ... (Four Books), which was completed in August 2010, has been rejected by many major literary journals due to its harsh critique of, among other things, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. This is a provocative work that clearly expresses Yan Lianke's artistic and moral courage; as he said, "In general, Chinese writers are working under the pressure of party censorship and self-censorship. In writing this novel, I have tried to be free from all this pressure. I wrote as my pen led me." 7 The fantastic narrative centers on a group of intellectuals undergoing labor reform in the New Education District by the Yellow River. Absurdly, they are led by a teenage party cadre called Haizi ...(child), who is of unknown origin. The names of the novel's few characters are Scholar, Music, Writer, Religion, and Experiment according to their original professions. Red flowers are used as rewards for hard labor and for informing on other workers. The more red flowers one gets, the more benefits-such as a home visit-one gets. Everyone becomes suspicious; betrayal becomes the norm. The tense and suppressive atmosphere is heightened by the claustrophobic location, as no one can escape alive across the Yellow River. The discovery of magnetic stones speeds up the workers' confiscation of any tools made of metal, thereby raising their production of iron and steel for the Great Leap Forward. The ability of human blood-an accidental discovery-to grow bigger wheat brings human frenzy to a new height. Wishful thinking has turned into reality, so it seems. But all of this fails. Widespread famine follows. Yan Lianke has created a narrative that interweaves illusion and reality to critique that horrible page of recent Chinese history: the Great Leap Forward and its disastrous aftermath, the Great Famine. Cannibalism, a taboo in contemporary Chinese fiction, is described vividly here.

The narrative consists of sixteen chapters. The four books referenced in the title include "Tian de haizi" ... ("Child of Heaven"), "Zuiren lu" ... ("Crime Records"), "Gudao" ... ("Old Path"), and "Xin Xixufu shenhua" ... ("The New Sisyphean Myth"). Yan Lianke weaves passages from these "books" into the narrative. Presented from an omniscient point of view and effectively borrowing the rhetoric of Genesis, "Child of Heaven" critiques the deification of Mao. Haizi's selfcrucifixion to redeem his guilt after the famine-a shocking twist of events-shows the influence of Bible tales from the character Religion. "Crime Records" and "Old Path" are written in the first person by Writer, and they embody his (or Chinese writers' in general) split mentality and moral dilemma: the former book contains his records for informing on others for his own benefit, and the latter expresses what he truly feels, sees, and believes. Much of the horror of the famine is found in the excepts from "Old Path." The narrative ends with a short excerpt from the intentionally unfinished and unattributed fourth book, which bears the significant title "The New Sisyphean Myth." Yan Lianke gives a provocative interpretation of the myth: after repeatedly pushing the rock uphill for a long time, the Chinese Sisyphus has become used to the task and is content to perform his duty. After his punishment is changed to repeatedly pushing the rock downwards, which mysteriously requires more effort, he eventually becomes content to perform this duty as well.

Yan Lianke's fiction is rooted in his native place- Henan Province. Drawing from his experience as a poor peasant youth who endured hardship in order to maintain a livelihood, who witnessed the life and culture of rural China, and who joined the army with a determination to change his fate, he is able to speak about the suffering of the peasantry with authority. He has successfully created the new image of the peasant-soldier. Merely writing about the suffering is not enough; his courage in challenging limitations and his energetic exploration of innovative ways to illuminate the breadth and depth of humanity are what generate great interest from his readers and critics. Though sometimes too enthusiastic, his relentless and often allegorical depictions of illness, physical handicap, and death, along with his frequent use of deceased first-person narrators, are unique in Chinese literature. He imparted new life to Chinese fiction with his combination of the grotesque, fantasy, and folklore. He juxtaposed striking images with unusual words, yet maintained the integrity of the Chinese language. Seemingly to work outside the trends of the course of post-Mao literature, Yan Lianke has progressed according to his own rhythm. While many Chinese writers quickly adopted the models found in newly translated works from the West, Yan Lianke walked his own path. Perhaps because he was not hurried by fashion, he was able to construct his own fictional world that could effectively synthesize the indigenous and the foreign.

Footnote

Notes

1 Much information about Yan Lianke's life and works is taken from the notes and tapes of my several conversations with him from August 2002 to December 2010.

2 See interview with Zhang Kangkang in Laifong Leung, Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 229-239.

3 Yan Lianke and Liang Hong ..., Wupo yu hong kuaizi ... (Shaman and Red Chopsticks) (Shenyang: Chunfeng Literature and Art Press, 2002), 88.

4 For a detailed discussion, see Thomas Chen's "Ridiculing the Golden Age: Subversive Undertones in Yan Lianke's Happy," page 66, this issue.

5 For one example of this accusation, see Shao Yanjun ..., "Huangdan haishi huangtang, dusheng haishi xiedu: you Yan Lianke Feng ya song piping mouzhong buliang de xiezuo qingxiang" ... ("Absurdity or Craze, Blasphemy or Obscenity?: Using Yan Lianke's novel Elegy and Academe as an example to criticize a certain negative tendency in writing"), Wenyi zhengming ... (Literature and Art Forum) 8 (2008): 6-15.

6 It would be another two years before he joined the Department of Chinese Literature at the People's University in Beijing in 2010.

7 From my conversation with Yan Lianke in Beijing, December 16, 2010.