A version of this article first appeared in isis magazine May 2008.
by Cines del Sur
There is an old Chinese saying that ‘literature and history are inseparable’ (文史不分). Reading Xiaolu Guo’s newly translated novel 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth reveals that this can be a struggle for contemporary Chinese authors. Western commentators declare that the twenty-first century is China’s, and yet the country’s last century remains a tale full of silences, both at home and abroad. Few Chinese authors have been translated, and still fewer have reached a wide audience overseas. For those that have, the pressure from readers to find a history of modern China in their work weighs heavy. Guo’s portrayals of young Chinese women navigating dramatic personal journeys are intimate. Yet they contain a robustness; a fighting talk that speaks of the politics of story-telling for Chinese authors.
A filmmaker and novelist, Guo has had success both in China and abroad. She started publishing in China in her teenage years, and her first novel to appear in translation, Village of Stone was released in 2004. Her second novel to be published in Britain, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was nominated for an Orange Prize last year. Her films and scripts have received considerable attention in international awards, most notably at Sundance for her film How is Your Fish Today? (2007). Before approaching Guo with my own questions, I followed her latest leading lady on a voyage of discovery.
Fenfang, the heroine of 20 Fragments, is both determined and lost in her new city, Beijing. Like Guo herself, Fenfang grew up in a small village in the south of China, but she has escaped the oppressive, timeless routine of the sweet potato fields to find the ‘sharp edges’ of modern life in the capital. She is on the search to become a ‘somebody’, to avoid the fate of the ‘peasants’ of her native village, where ‘they died as if they had never lived. They died like an ant dies. Who gives a damn when an ant dies?’ Beijing is where she has decided to create her ‘youth’. In the countryside the people jump from childhood to middle age. She finds work as an extra at the Beijing Film Studios. Her official title, Extra no.6, 787, gives her an identity. There may be competition, but this figure is nothing in comparison to 1.5 billion other Chinese: ‘the important thing was: I had been given a number. From this day on I would never again live like a forgotten sweet potato under the dark soil.’
Fenfang’s journey, however, is just beginning. She moves regularly around the city, and between the intimacies of her two boyfriends, Xiaolin and an American PhD student named Ben. She navigates disappointments, and contrasting feelings of loneliness and claustrophobia. ‘Xiaolin felt like the only person in the world I was intimate with. We were like family – family members always hurt each other. And Ben was not my family, Ben lived for himself. A Western body… His spirit slept alone.’ These differences are not simply about east and west, but reflect the social reality of the manner in which sexual relationships are changing in China. As the focus for nosey neighbourhood committees, Fenfang is stubbornly exploring her own expectations, and yet caught in the expectations of the rest of society as well.
Fenfang is, above all, grappling with her own story, her own voice. The book is divided into twenty ‘fragments’, like staged scenes from a play. Her narrative is fixed in segments of the present, and yet she is haunted by dealing with the reality of her past. She has cut contact with her family, refusing to live a life weaving baskets from sweet potato stalks. ‘Those twisted stalks in the dirt yards hooked these women together for eternity’. A rare visit home reveals that the rapid social change which usually accompanies China’s economic success has failed to transform her small village ‘Despite the boom that had hit the place, everything still felt as it always had been. The same old vinegar, just in a new bottle.’ The timelessness of her home town tableaux cannot provide materials for narrative. She starts writing film scripts in order to create stories where her past will not give her one. To own her story is to be modern. Writing, taking photographs, these are the things that will stop her staying a ‘peasant’, with no record of a past.
When I spoke to Xiaolu Guo about some of the themes raised in this book she echoed Fenfang’s determination to tell her own story. Guo appears the adult Fenfang is struggling to become. Guo rewrote 20 Fragments for its translation, ten years after it was first published. She felt the text needed to mature, ‘the author grows up just as Fenfang does as a character’ she told me. I put it to her that the female protagonists of her two most recent novels have followed her journey, first to Beijing and then to the west. I wandered what kind of impact her experiences had had on her writing. In her answer she was keen to reclaim the universal in her themes, to sidestep any claim for a ‘Chinese’ story:
‘Every individual goes through a journey which shapes his or her life. And in this journey everything is unique because each individual’s mind and situation is different. Regarding mine, perhaps it has been a little bit more extreme.’
She does think, however, that 20 Fragments gives an idea of how she first felt moving to Beijing. At times she gives a bleak image of the city, one in which Fenfang exclaims, ‘you’d die if you didn’t fight it, and there was no end to the fight. Beijing was a city for Sisyphus – you could push and push and push, but ultimately that stone was bound to role back on you.’ Yet Guo clearly feels a personal attachment to the place. She told me that ‘Beijing is a political city, and a city of hope and struggle, so that creates a special youth.’ This hope and struggle is clear in her work.
Guo expresses the difficulties of being a Chinese author and filmmaker abroad, that her national identity can morph the focus of her work into issues of east and west, that others can read borders where she herself doesn’t see them:
‘I don’t see myself as living in the west or east. I live everywhere. As a filmmaker I make films in the places where the stories are set. I am a native-born Chinese, that is the fact.’
Her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, however, does place this dichotomy at its heart. Guo makes the interesting choice to write the story in deliberately bad English. The young narrator, ‘Z’, is finding her voice in a foreign language. Her story will not suffer the external mediation of translation. ‘Z’ is undertaking a ‘translation’ of ‘the self’, she is repositioning herself in a new country, and in a new language. This allows Guo at least to convey the ‘borders’ of east and west from one Chinese perspective. As she is aware, this has its own ‘political’ implications:
‘One thing about writing outside your homeland is that as a writer you achieve a certain sober sense, and a freedom from censorship and judgements. I really love the idea that my creative energy is not wasted on politics, censorship and some sort of artificial persuasion. But again, in the west, there is another type of imprisonment and commercial censorship. As an artist you need to be so strong and clear-minded to stand for your own rights anywhere you live…’
Guo refuses to make her narratives easy; they problematise the individual and the temptation to make her characters’ stories a narrative for China. Fenfang’s struggle with her own (his)story mirrors Guo’s self-perceived creative challenge. China is a country in love with historical novels, epics glorifying civil war heroes and the riches of China’s past. She places herself at a knotty intersection. It is not easy for an individual to have his or her own distinct history, to stand for his or her rights, even if that is crucial to what she believes constitutes a modern life. ‘I don’t see myself as a traditional author, I make strange films and write books – each time is as different as possible in terms of form and narration.’ It is precisely in fighting with form, narrative, and the meaning of a ‘personal history’, that she explores the politics of her own national, and above all, artistic identity.
Chinese books and helping the agents back in London sell the already brilliant authors they represent – Bi Feiyu, Yu Hua and Wang Xiaobo’s estate being notable examples. I am assured that part of this will mean meeting these authors, which I am needless to say extremely excited about.
