When her village was still lush with lotus plant and a crystalline river sparkled in the fields, Sheng Keyi (盛可以), a very clever and very poor 16-year-old girl, watched TV on a tiny black-and-white set at a neighbor’s house.
It was 1989 and the story that the world knows as the Chinese Communist Party’s military crackdown in Tiananmen Square was told in reverse on the grainy screen. The official version portrayed the students as violent criminals. The peasants, including the young Sheng, sitting around the television knew no better.
Now a prominent novelist and denizen of Beijing literary circles, Sheng has fashioned that turning point in Chinese history into a stomach-churning, exuberantly written allegory titled Death Fugue, which recalls Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
In Death Fugue, she tells the truth about how the People’s Liberation Army extinguished the student protest. She also creates a society, Swan Valley, that can be read as China today and in the future, where things seem superficially shiny and sleek, rich and productive.
Except in Swan Valley, there is no sexual freedom. Pregnancies deemed likely to produce children with low IQs are terminated immediately and nursing homes that seem welcoming on the outside are really crematories. The citizens are happy enough, though. The place is free of bribery and a young doctor says he does not have to deal with colleagues from his former life — China in the late 1980s — who sewed up patients’ anuses if they did not get the requisite payoff.
“I am truly disappointed with present society,” said Sheng, 41, a petite woman in skinny jeans, a blue T-shirt and black stilettos.
Over coffee at an outdoor restaurant near her apartment in Lido, one of the cool neighborhoods in Beijing, she added: “When I talk with friends, I reminisce about the ’80s, when everything was not so tainted by the pressure of money, when poets didn’t abandon their work.”
Publishers in China, including Penguin — which released an earlier novel by Sheng titled Northern Girls about the exploits of young women who migrate to the cities — passed on Death Fugue. Chinese editors deemed the storyline too controversial. Sheng said Penguin failed to give her a response.
The novel has appeared in Taiwan and Hong Kong in Chinese, and last month made its English-language debut with a small Australian literary imprint, Giramondo.
For Sheng, being shunned by her publishers at home was hurtful, but not surprising.
“When I wrote it I knew it couldn’t be published in China,” Sheng said. “I discussed it with a friend — she writes poetry at the university of Chongqing — and she said: ‘You write it because you want to.’”
The resolve to tackle a subject as forbidden as the Tiananmen Square crackdown is in character with her tough childhood and her insistence that she is a storyteller prepared to break taboos.
“A novel must have the power to offend,” she writes in an author’s note for Death Fugue.
When it was suggested that some scenes in the novel were almost repulsive, she said: “Then I have succeeded.”
Sheng grew up in the village of Huaihua Di in Hunan Province, the youngest of four children in a home so needy that vegetables and chickens were the basic form of currency. An oil lantern provided the only light at night.
As a child, she was a tomboy and reveled in the nature of her surroundings, a kind of Garden of Eden now so polluted it ranks as one of China’s most cancer-prone places. Back then, she shot birds with a slingshot, climbed trees and fought boys.
“I always won,” Sheng said. “I’m not afraid.”
Yet it was not an idyllic existence: “When I was young, my sisters and brother hated my father because he was like the Chinese government: He made the decisions,” she said.
To pay her school fees, Sheng’s mother — a warmer presence — would sell 50 eggs at the beginning of the semester, then extra eggs for schoolbooks. Her teachers loved her — she was inquisitive, a fast learner and always first or second in class.
At 19, she stole enough money from her mother for a train ticket and with some extra cash from one of her sisters, ran off to the booming southern city of Shenzhen. Her trek echoed one made by millions of rural women eager to break the yoke of the village.
She found a job at a securities firm and there met a man who had been a university student at Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
“He was a person with a lot of morals and he told me all about it,” Sheng said. “He didn’t have anger about the ending, more feelings of pain.”
Gradually, she began to write short stories and on the strength of those, landed a job as a magazine editor. She built a small reputation, but enrolled in a journalism course at a university in Shenyang, believing she needed to polish her skills.
“The living was very cheap,” Sheng said. “I lived on the second floor of a six-story house. I was 28. Every morning, with my hair hanging wildly, I would start to write. I would have no one to speak to. I felt lucky — I was quite successful.”
Northern Girls put her on the map and she headed south again to Guangzhou to write Death Fugue.
Sheng mines for material for her fiction in the rich absurdities of daily life under authoritarian government. She drills down on the collapse of ideals and the power of money in contemporary China.
“Chinese people’s lives are full of unbelievable stories,” she said.
Sheng offered an example from a recent news item: “A couple was resisting having their house demolished by the authorities who wanted to build a highway. They were nabbed in the middle of the night half-naked and taken to a graveyard. They were left there half-naked and in that time their house disappeared.”
The unmistakable message: “We will bury you alive unless you give in.”
Would she work that tale into her fiction?
“I am very interested to know what they were thinking in those four hours,” she said with a smile.
There is much that is dark in Death Fugue. The bureaucracy assigns partners for marriage, and conversations often sound like a satire of party ideology.
“Chaos isn’t freedom. Freedom comes from order,” a character says.
Yet some of the descriptions of beauty hark back to Sheng’s village of years ago.
“He recognized periwinkle, bluebells, marigolds, begonias, petunias and the short blossoms of morning glory,” she writes.
Now, when Sheng returns home she said all that has shriveled, replaced by factories that pour poisons into the river and smelly ditches filled with trash. Elections were held recently in the village, but turned into a farce.
“No one knows what a secret ballot is,” Sheng said. “The villagers respect wealth, so the richest man got elected village head.”
When word spread in the village that she is now a famous author, the villagers had no idea what she had written, but showered her with new respect.
On the basis of her prestige, her father was invited to join the party, a wild paradox given her disdain for the political system, which is little disguised in her novel.
The friend in Shenzhen who schooled her about Tiananmen was impressed with how she transformed that knowledge and channeled her scorn. After reading Death Fugue, he wrote her a note saying: “The little girl has grown up.”
NY Times news service
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