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Short-shorts don't measure up

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Jun 10, 2007, Page 18

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.

Among the Taiwanese authors included are Yuan Qiongqiong (袁瓊瓊), a writer of song lyrics and film scripts, and Ku Ling (苦苓), among other things a talk-show host, both of them established practitioners of the genre. Ku Ling contributes a story, Jailbreak, about a man who climbs over a prison wall, not to escape confinement but to get back to the comfort and security of his cell. The editors consider this concept exhibits "modern man's existential dilemma," but readers could be excused for thinking that it was merely a convenient (and not very original) idea on which to base a marketable story that may not have taken above an hour to write.

The editors make much of the amateur status of many short-short writers. Taiwan's Chen Kehua (陳克華), for example, is an eye specialist by profession, while China's Xiu Xiangming is a chef in a Tsingdao rest home. And it's true that the short-short has affinities with the Internet blog. Anyone can have a go, and in both these genres there are fast becoming more writers than there are likely to be very interested readers.

And part of the short-short's essential profile is its emergence in a culture where traditional book-based literacy is giving way to text deriving from the electronic media, both the computer and the mobile phone. Mobile phone fiction already exists and represents an even shorter version of short-short story.

But despite the windy effusions of its advocates (the editors' Introduction is the longest piece of prose in this book), the short-short is severely limited in its possibilities. It may provide useful ammunition for those who want to claim the art of literature is alive and well even if it's true (is it?) that fewer and fewer books are being sold. But real talent demands its natural space, and the traditional forms — lyric, drama, history, narrative fiction — aren't going to give up their right to pre-eminence overnight. Major authors like Mo Yan (莫言) might write short-shorts as a diversion, and to use up ideas they haven't the energy to turn into full-blown fiction, but this doesn't mean they've abandoned the substantial narrative in any real sense. The greatest artists, after all, have arguably carried on creating what they wanted to create irrespective of how many people were going to be interested in the result. There's always posterity, after all, and no one can possibly know what that vast era's tastes are going to include.
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