Liang Xiaosheng, the author of the two novellas, Panic and Deaf, contained in this book is well-known in China, though his works are only now beginning to be translated into English. His best-known work in China is apparently an irreverent novel titled Confessions of a Red Guard, published there in 1988. Six years earlier he had sprung to fame when one of his stories, This is a Miraculous Land, won the All China Short Novel Prize.
Panic is a comedy that tells the story of an unassuming man besieged on all sides by representatives of the aggressive, neo-capitalist generation. At 45, Yao Chungang feels he hasn't done too badly in becoming assistant director of the China Psychological History Research Institute in Beijing. It's true he doesn't feel much enthusiasm at the idea of getting out of bed on a Monday morning, but considering what he and his classmates went through during the Cultural Revolution, when as "educated youth" they were sent to desolate frontier regions to learn the dignity of labor, he considers his position safe, and one that earns him at least a degree of respect.
One by one the characters he encounters shatter this complacency. The position of director of the institute, formerly vacant, is taken over by a retired army officer with no knowledge of psychology. This ruthless schemer is, behind Yao's back, hatching plans to turn the institute into a profitable commercial enterprise with his glamorous young secretary, and not Yao, as deputy.
While Yao is still unaware of this, he is visited by another attractive woman who wants to expand her small clothing factory into a multimillion dollar business under the cover of the institute's official, state-sanctioned authority. When everyone else has left the office, she seduces him. In a state of simultaneous shock and gratitude, he promises to do all he can to get the director's blessing for her proposal.
When he arrives home, however, he finds his wife is embarking on an affair with her boss in order to advance her career. And the next morning he is visited by a former classmate who has become an enormously rich businessman.
These characters -- the ruthless director, the ambitious clothing manufacturer, Yao's wife and his successful classmate -- all exhibit limitless ambition, and a philosophy of self first and devil-take-the-hindmost. When they speak, Liang takes the opportunity to make them espouse beliefs that fly in the face of everything Karl Marx held dear, even if they sometimes pay ironic lip-service to China's backbone ideology.
"People like you were spoiled by the old system," scoffs the classmate. "Give you a cup of tea, a pack of cigarettes, and you'll while away a whole day at the office. Reading newspapers and holding meetings -- that's your idea of work." Sexually, too, they are anti-traditional and opportunistic. The classmate is on his third marriage, but keeps up business connections with his former spouses. He also continues to share a bed with each of them when the mood takes him. Divorce he considers as "a detour to other pleasures."
"My relationship with my ex-wives is more than simply the man-woman kind. We have economic relationships." Then he adds caustically, "Conforms to Marx's theory, doesn't it? The economics of our relationship is mutual benefit."
Again, when Yao visits the nubile clothing manufacturer at home, he's open-mouthed at her four-bedroom apartment and private car. But when he flings caution to the wind and offers to divorce his wife and marry her, she scoffs at the idea. What's the use of marriage, she asks. Let's just take our pleasures when we need them, and then call it a day.
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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