When you realize that Yao also suffers from premature ejaculation, you can't help sympathizing with him in his despairing, all-encompassing wail "This is so damned unfair!"
The second story, Deaf, again features someone afflicted by an apparently arbitrary fate. One minute the narrator is eating his breakfast and watching TV. The sun is shining and he's in the best possible mood. The next moment, like a figure in a Kafka novel, he finds he has gone stone deaf.
Nevertheless, this time the story has no particular social or political significance. Instead, it's a fantasy. Through a mere 50 pages, Liang plays every variation on the theme of deafness you can imagine, and many you wouldn't have thought of until he shows you how.
The narrator's hearing returns, but by then he's been made aware of the advantages of deafness. Yet it's not a simple question of someone preferring to remain deaf rather than return to the comparatively insane world of the hearing, as at first you expect. Far more complex intricacies are explored.
His son, for instance, pens a school essay on his father being not being deaf, for which he scores a high grade. His wife accepts he's deaf even when he isn't, and as they had never understood each other anyway, nothing has really changed. He goes to an opera, Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, with his secretary, taking time to invent poetic phrases of appreciation as the music he cannot hear is played. And so on.
Deaf is in fact far superior to Panic, and has all the appearance of being a minor masterpiece.
This book appears in the University of Hawaii's "Fiction from Modern China" series, of which Howard Goldblatt is General Editor. Goldblatt appears to oversee most of the translations of contemporary Chinese novels currently under way in the US. He chairs a committee here, edits a series there, while translating some of the choicest items himself, often for the most prestigious publishers.
The translator here is Chen Hanming, and he has succeeded in creating a readable and pleasurable text. Deaf, in particular, ought to be very widely read in this version. It would fit conveniently into anthologies and even magazines, and would be sure to create a desire in many readers to see more of the work of this high-spirited and original writer translated into English.
Publication Notes:
Panic and Deaf: Two Modern Satires
By Liang Xiaosheng
159 pages
University of Hawaii Press
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