Introduced in the late 1970s, "short-shorts" have become a major literary phenomenon in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. As an antidote to supersizing and overdose, opting for economy over verbosity, the popularity of the short-short has gradually overtaken that of more conventional fiction.
This at least is the claim of the translator/editors responsible for this new collection from Columbia University Press of recent very short fiction translated from Chinese.
The anthology's title derives from Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) arrogant campaign to eradicate sparrows in 1958. Beijing residents were encouraged to disturb the birds by making the loudest noises they could until, with nowhere to land and rest, the hapless sparrows eventually dropped dead from exhaustion, hunger and thirst. An unforeseen consequence was a proliferation of insects that was at least partly responsible for the Great Famine that caused more than 20 million to die of starvation.
Brevity is, hardly surprisingly, these short-shorts' forte. Often no more than a paragraph in length, they come close to rivaling the Japanese haiku in economy. This anthology is organized under a collection of headings, ranging from "Grooming" through "Creatures" and "(In)Fidelities," finally ending with "Looking Backward and Looking Ahead." The tone is often dry, as with the witty Division by Zhou Rui, about how many men it takes to swat how many mosquitoes (with mathematical interference from the number five destroying the symmetry — you'll have to read the story to understand precisely how).
Others, like Waiting for a Windfall by Wang Yanyan and Little Stray Cat by Zhong Ling, about a cat's memories of a past life, hint at the supernatural as they approach magic realism. In Horse Talk by Mo Yan, a stoical horse appears to be relating to the author her noble military experiences, yet refuses to explain how it was that she came to be blinded.
Elsewhere, the focus is on human interaction. Attention is devoted to the tender rituals people use on each other, as in A Lover's Ear, where ear-cleaning merges with sexual intercourse. In Losing the Feet by Zhong Jufang, a male shop assistant becomes haunted by the vaguely noticeable (though inoffensive) odor of a customer's feet. He almost seems to derive healing properties from them. "When she kicked off her flip-flops and stretched out her feet, all the sounds and actions came to a halt — all was mellow and joyous, all was bright."
Several of the stories carry an overly cerebral preoccupation, which runs counter to the eulogies on short-shorts printed at the end of many, such as this: "Reading a good short-short satisfies the modern man's need to read, a man who is busy and slothful and whose blood is cold and nerves numbed. Undoubtedly it also serves to massage the soul and restore its health." (Chen Xinghui). On the contrary, many of the short-shorts published here suffer from over-intellectualization.
In Self-Murder by Cai Nan, for instance, a man contends with Myself, intended to be a sinister alter-ego intent on usurping his position in life. In grisly circumstances he murders Myself in the bathtub, only to rise, light-footed, to call his partner and inform her that it's his birthday. In opting for economy, the end result of these short-shorts is akin to a fine pen-and-ink miniature, fragmented and fleeting. The reader may engage with a particular one, but its very insubstantiality forces him to move swiftly on to the others.
RSS