The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li and UFO in Her Eyes, by Xiaolu Guo

A recent film adaptation of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li’s acclaimed book of short stories, can be found in Shanghai DVD stores for about $1.50. The plot synopsis on the packaging, presumably taken from a casual internet review, reads, “This movie felt like it lasted over 1,000 years. ... There is not one genuine moment in its bloated running time.”

Such a gaffe—on a blatantly and badly pirated DVD sold against Chinese laws—is a byproduct of China’s increasingly pervious, or at least more strategically positioned, censorship wall. Yiyun Li’s latest work, a novel, takes place when oppression in China was far cruder: 1979, just a few years after the Cultural Revolution.

The Vagrants is a catalogue of genuine moments of despair and desperation set in Muddy River, a young city of 80,000. It opens with Gu Shan’s parents waiting for her to be put to death as a counterrevolutionary. In a nearby alley, a famished peasant girl named Nini eats the flour paste off the back of a freshly posted execution notice.

When rumors of a “democratic wall,” a sort of pre-internet bulletin board on which people in Beijing have been posting political messages, arrive in Muddy River, a few citizens, including beautiful newsreader Kai, are emboldened to stage a protest demanding an investigation into Gu Shan’s death.

Li steps nimbly in and out of her many characters’ minds, giving distinct voices to, for example, an elderly street sweeper, a patriotic schoolboy, and a jaded intellectual. At times she follows the ramification ripples of Gu’s execution into the heads of characters who exist for just one paragraph, like the prison guard who has nightmares after holding Gu down while her vocal cords were cut, or the surgeon who harvested her kidneys and tries to reassure himself that she had to die anyway.

The novel’s unblinking eye for tragedy—Gu’s parents are even asked to pay the Government 24 cents for the bullet used to kill her—occasionally falls on moments of dark humour. Much of this comes from Bashi, a callous and sardonic 19-year-old who lives off the state, and acts like a trust fund baby, thanks to his dead father, a war hero. At one point, Bashi encounters an old woman buying fake money, which Chinese superstition allows can be spent in the afterlife, to burn for her dead husband. Bashi cautions her, "Maybe he uses your money to buy a woman out there?"

For the most part, however, the novel is tense, with political power hanging in the balance. As Kai’s loyal-communist husband Han says, “It’s the same old truth—the one who robs and succeeds will become the king, and the one who tries to rob and fails will be called a criminal.”

The success of The Vagrants lies in Li’s empathetic reach, which carries as easily to those who wittingly and unwittingly become the brutal political ‘kings’ as those who lose their loves, careers and lives as criminals.

Xiaolu Guo’s novel UFO in Her Eyes is also set in a small Chinese town, but it leaves the all too recent past for the imminent future.

On September 11, 2012, Kwok Yun sees an “enormous metal plate” flying over the rice fields outside Silver Hill Village. Three days later agents Hunan 1989 and Beijing 1919—good cop and bad cop respectively—arrive to investigate the UFO sighting.

Like much of China, the small Hunan village has yet to witness the development seen in major Chinese cities. Villagers tell the investigators that they have often had to “eat bitterness,” even enduring a “Man eats Man” incident during the famine brought on by the Great Leap Forward.

Silver Hill modernises rapidly, however, when village chief Chang leverages the UFO incident to petition the Government for funding. The village booms as a tourist destination—China’s Roswell—but not everyone is pleased with the development, and the harmony that the Chinese Government so cherishes becomes threatened.

UFO in Her Eyes is written as a case file, the literary equivalent of the classified US Military footage that makes up 2008 Godzilla flick Cloverfield. It is composed almost entirely of transcripts of the agents’ interviews with locals, supplemented with letters, emails and the odd sketch.

The novel thus reads like a screenplay written in the very plain language of the no-nonsense agents and the simple, often crude villagers. As well as bemoaning “Bitch Bastard” change, Guo’s characters give it context through mentions of major events in China’s past, some of them conspicuously expository.

The novel works better as parable than sci fi realism. Silver Hill’s development is synecdoche for China’s, a connection Guo develops by imbuing arbitrary numbers with historical significance. The agents’ names, for instance, are the dates of two popular uprisings in Chinese history: the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations (1989).

It is also, of course, no coincidence that the UFO is sighted on September 11. In addition to displacing workers and polluting the skies, the modernisation of Silver Village—from which, incredibly, almost no-one seems to benefit—brings with it closer monitoring, hinting at the greater scrutiny that US citizens came under after the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers.

Xialu Guo has inadvertently made her case against monitoring and censorship in another way. Although it shows up on a Google search, her website www.guoxiaolu.com cannot be accessed here in China.

China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation, by Xinran

One of the few florists in Shanghai that doesn’t make bouquets out of dozens of small blue teddy bears lies in a small lane off Wukang Lu. As the sole employee prepared flowers for me one night recently I struck up a conversation with her boyfriend.

He was a student and hoped to marry the florist (who shook her head demurely at the idea) in a year or two when he graduated. He was young and ambitious and caught me altogether off guard when he said, “I think you have a better life than us.”

It would have been disingenuous to argue the point yet it’s a strange thing to consider. How do you weigh your lived life against the vague imaginings of another’s?

Xinran Xue attempts a similarly fraught comparison in her latest book, China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation. Which generation living in China today has had it best, and which has lived the worthiest lives?

Xinran puts these questions, among others, to 17 members of the generation of grandparents living in contemporary China, a group who have lived under a staggering range of social conditions. Many were born before the Japanese invaded in WWII, saw China ‘liberated’ by the Communist Party, endured the paranoia and destruction of the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, have seen their children and grandchildren embrace the admonition attributed to Deng Xiaoping, “to get rich is glorious.”

As young adults, many of the interviewees endured hardships that read like the unhappy beginnings of fairy tales. An acrobat named Yishujia, whose skills included juggling umbrellas with her feet, was so poor growing up that her family “couldn’t even afford soap, you had to wash clothes with a fistful of salt.” When attempts were made to populate China’s icy North West, Sun, one of the region’s first teachers, tells of sitting on her long plaits in the classroom to keep out the cold of her mud-clod chair.

Despite the deprivation and hardships they faced, most recall their youth with fondness and pride. Mrs You, one of China’s first oil prospectors, remembers working in the cold until her socks stuck to her skin and couldn’t be removed. Nevertheless, she says:

I feel a real nostalgia for our enthusiasm and cheerfulness under those conditions: we used to … start up a song on one mountain, and they’d pick up the tune on the next mountain.

Several claim their early efforts have given them boundless energy ever since and lament the failure of younger generations to display the same work ethic. The former acrobat shows Xinran some family pictures. “My son isn’t as handsome as his father. Can you see? He doesn’t have his father’s spirit … The child doesn’t have the spirit we did!”

Likewise, some prefer the social systems that were in place back in their day. Under Mao there was “not so much of a gap between rich and poor.” Also, they say, people were either too tired (before the Communist Revolution) or too frightened (during it) to commit crimes. In contrast, “a lot of people are sick with rage at the empty boasting, bribery and corruption we see nowadays.” While it’s difficult for Xinran to stomach, some tell her that “Mao did a better job.”

Xinran began her journalism career when a Communist Party transmitter used to muddy the reception of foreign radio shows was converted into a working Chinese radio station. She was chosen to host a late night radio show called “Words on the Night Breeze”, which formed the foundation of her first book, The Good Women of China.

Having thus honed her skills, Xinran approaches the interviews in China Witness like an expert interrogator, outlining her techniques for tackling her subjects’ caution and modesty. She doggedly pursues emotional responses, and one topic in particular consistently yields results. Tears fall almost reliably when Xinran raises the subject of her interviewees’ relationships with their children.

Like many Chinese now in their middle age, Mrs You’s kids were raised by their grandparents – concerns for family were seen as “petty bourgeois”, and the good of the country came first. Furthermore, her children were denied schooling when their father was ‘struggled against’ and imprisoned for having received training in the Soviet Union. “I want to make it up to them,” she says, “…and I don’t know if they’re grateful for what I’ve given up.”

There’s more to China Witness than this weighing of a generation’s merits and misdeeds. The book covers mammoth geographical and thematic ground. Xinran talks to a street-side shoe mender with two children in graduate school. She meets a retired prostitute from Nanjing who mocks current contraceptive methods, having put herbs in her clothes and burnt incense while bathing to stave off pregnancy. A man named Wu tells her how he became a professional news singer, and so on.

But again and again Xinran’s attempt to record the histories of a generation of Chinese hints at her need to understand her personal past. She doesn’t write about it in China witness, but Xinran didn’t meet her mother until she was five years old and when she did she called her “Ayi”, Auntie. Two weeks later, during the Cultural Revolution, her parents were arrested and imprisoned for 15 years. Thinking back on interviews with older Chinese who missed out on relationships with their children Xinran writes, “How many times have I dreamed that I was small again and my parents were making a fuss of their little girl…?”

China Witness is a sprawling collection of lives packed with historical curiosities. It’s also an ambitious, heartfelt attempt to better know the older generation as a means to celebrate their triumphs in tumultuous times and, where necessary, to forgive them.

The Gum Thief, By Douglas Coupland

In his 2006 novel Jpod Douglas Coupland gleefully cuts-and-pastes from contemporary culture. The narrative welcomes interjections from a crowd of textual flotsam: gamers’ chats, imaginary ebay ads, Chinese translations of words like ‘pornography,’ and 20 straight pages of pi. The characters, brilliant computer game programmers with woefully low Emotional Quotients, are made for the information-rich, spiritually impoverished milieu that he describes. In The Gum Thief Coupland turns his attentions to those who haven’t adapted so well.

Middle-aged Roger and goth-girl Bethany work dead-end jobs at Staples, an office supply superstore. They barely interact with each other until Bethany picks up Roger’s journal and reads an entry he’s written from her perspective. Though “creeped out,” Bethany empathises with Roger’s melancholy musings enough to write back, hoping to alleviate her boredom.

The story develops as a series of journal entries, letters and emails written by Roger and characters almost as gloomy – his bitter ex-wife Joan, Bethany’s distant mum Dee Dee and so on. Unlike the unfeeling nerds in Jpod, these more human characters have been raised emotional sitting ducks; if “you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.” Bethany and Roger search hard for solace after suffering the deaths of friends and family members, after cancers grow and marriages decay. To begin with, Roger doubts he even deserves his little remaining optimism: “Souls ought to have the legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds.”

Unsurprisingly, The Gum Thief lacks the spontaneity and playfulness of other Coupland novels. It does, however, feature characteristic moments of singular description. On the formation of the asteroid belt, Bethany says, a planet and its moon got “too closely entangled in each other’s orbits and they collided and shattered. How romantic, in a Japanese manga kind of way”. At one point Roger writes about how little culture and technology poor Poe had to draw on for metaphors back in 1849. In the best phrases of The Gum Thief, Coupland really rubs this in.

That said, the author sacrifices much of his creative firepower in the attempt to write realistically as someone who isn’t really a writer. With Bethany’s encouragement, Roger embarks on the novel he’s long planned to write, ‘Glove Pond,’ chapters of which are strewn through The Gum Thief. Roger’s novel is terrible. The catty, alcoholic characters are mere sketches and the imagery often, well, sucks. Ultimately, Roger finds catharsis in the idea that his creations weren’t always caricatures but were reduced, like him, to semi-humans by their personal tragedies. While it’s a nice sentiment, in getting there Coupland shows just how difficult it is to sustain bad but interesting writing, however realistic Roger’s voice may be.

As Roger explores his emotions through his novel, it gradually becomes hijacked by events in his and Bethany’s lives. A creative writing teacher criticizes Roger for failing to lose his own voice in his writing, an argument that is meant ironically but, applied to The Gum Thief, rings true. Coupland struggles to create distinct voices for his speakers, a difficulty exacerbated by the novel’s reliance on written messages, rather than dialogue and action. The characters just aren’t vital and substantial enough to earn our sympathy, a must for a story so focused on the crippling potential of grief.

Transformers (2007)

MICHAEL BAY’s Transformers hit cinema screens in China a week after its international release. Why the delay? Well, for one, even sci-fi flicks with all the socio-political ambition of spray-cheese come under the Sauron-esque searching gaze of Chinese censorship.
Admittedly, Transformers didn’t require much censoring. Sam Witwicky’s own transformation from a gawky teen – who happens upon an eccentric black and yellow Chevrolet Camaro™? – into an Armageddon averting hero is a typical enough progression. And contemporary China has no qualms with the film’s audacious devotion to marketing, fortunately, since the film effectively stars General Motors. Indeed, the (no-doubt upwardly mobile) crowd at Shanghai’s Peace Cinema saved their loudest gasps not for the slick, intricate vehicle to robot transformations nor the face-chewingly speedy and impeccably drawn action sequences, but for the first, eroticised shots of the cars themselves.

In addition to going great lengths for GM, the film sets a new standard in self promotion. One of Optimus Prime’s more sententious lines, ‘Freedom is the ultimate right of all sentient beings’, was written by Carl from Norristown, Philadelphia, winner of a promotional competition.

Freedom is largely the right of sentient beings in China too. The one glitch in the Transformers matrix was a strange backwards-speech sound that non-English speakers reading the Mandarin subtitles would’ve missed. When speculating where an advanced, previously unknown ‘weapons system’ came from a US military man says something like “only [backwards speech] could have the technology” and recommends attacking them. Which powerful military rival he could’ve meant is anyone’s guess...

When Sam first meets a Transformer he guesses, absurdly, that the ultra-sophisticated robot came not from outer space (nor China) but Japan, a gag that went down surprisingly well at the Peace Cinema despite the disdain for all things Japanese you frequently hear here; my closest Chinese friend’s favourite movie is sadly another Michael Bay film, Pearl Harbour.

In actuality it is an ancient inter-robotic war that brings the Transformers to Earth. The Allspark, a powerful and contradictory cube that existed before time began (despite having spatial dimensions), is the first cause in Transformer Astrophysics, and is capable of spontaneously turning your cellphone into a machine-gun firing, missile launching menace. Megatron, freed from an icy prison by his Deceptikons, is determined to find the Allspark to expand his evil empire, a plot the altruistic Autobots, concerned for human welfare, try desperately to foil.

We can tell the Deceptikons are evil. They threaten freedom while assuming the form of official government vehicles (a police car and a US military jet, helicopter and tank) and, in one slick, shameless shot, the camera tracks Megatron in plane form as he drags Optimus Prime through the interior of a tall office building. The wicked Deceptikons seem responsible for both September 11 and the US response to it.

Despite the Autobots being created by the same evil-spawning Allspark, they love human beings. Unlike the ethically prehistoric iceman Megatron, the Autobots seem to have evolved their own moral system, making the creators of Transformers unwitting proponents of moral realism, the notion that we are gradually moving towards absolute agreement on what’s right and what’s wrong, a notion nudged along just a touch, it could be argued, by China’s opening itself and increasingly sharing its values and beliefs with the rest of the world.

In Transformers though, Optimus Prime’s altruism is so hyperbolical (or advanced?) that it’s hard to sympathise with him; the talking Tonka truck (it’s Hasbro, really) goes on about his willingness to die for the cause so often you wish he’d just get it over with. The good/evil divide in the film is so stark that the characters could never endear themselves to modern audiences; that would require the robots to transform into three dimensional characters, ones with flaws and senses of humour.

Transformers is one of many current films marketed at audiences’ accelerating powers of nostalgia, forever gaining on us, born of the same urge to review digital photos immediately after taking them: to mythologise and enrich our past experience as quickly as possible. When this nostalgia carries us back into our childhoods it inevitably references simpler ideas. In the Twenty-First Century, in Post-Cultural Revolution China as much as anywhere, simply asserting who is good and who is evil is dissatisfying, and it’s this that makes Transformers a children’s movie, a pop song, an airport novel. But, depending on how actively you choose to read into it, it can be a perfectly enjoyable one nevertheless.

On Iowa

SAM GASKIN recalls his American sojourn this year as go-between Victoria University’s Creative Writing Programme and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he visited the midwestern state to meet fellowship recipient and poet Alice Miller.

THE SPRING landscape in Iowa is unremarkable, even by Iowan standards. The snow had melted before I arrived, laying bare the empty, beige-brown cornfields. In the town of Iowa City the streets were plugged with leafless trees.

Iowa University, from the Iowa River

Indirectly, it was casino magnate and University of Iowa alumnus Glenn Schaeffer who had brought me to Middle America. Schaeffer’s fondness for literature and for New Zealand (he has a house in Nelson) led him to forge a relationship between Victoria University’s Creative Writing Programme and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the original and most prestigious creative writing course in the United States. Each year since 2000 a graduate of Victoria’s Masters programme has been awarded a fellowship to study alongside Master of Fine Arts students in the United States. I had come to visit the 2005 recipient, poet Alice Miller.

Eager to entertain me on my first night in town, Alice took me to the Hamburg Inn No. 2, the fifty-year-old diner famously home to the Pie Shake: milk, ice-cream and Pumpkin, Chocolate Pecan or such-and-such a pie blended smooth but for the debris of sweet, short crust pastry. My shake and Buffalo Burger at the Hamburg went some way to sating my hunger for Middle American excess, a desire that lasted three or four weeks, ebbing more quickly after attempting malt liquor, Chili Cheese Fries, and with growing guilt at eating ironically.

In truth, Iowa City isn’t all that entertainingly backwards. Roughly half its sixty-something thousand inhabitants attend Iowa University, making it a College town. Old people and children are scarce, and undergraduates, not locals or yokels, are the prime targets for workshoppers’ derision, just ahead of other workshoppers.

During my first week in Iowa, Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, read from his new novel at Iowa City’s pre-eminent bookstore, Prairie Lights. He wore a sports jacket over a t-shirt, also a popular look among workshoppers. As Lethem read the woman sitting immediately behind me occasionally burst out, “mmh” and “ah ya ya”. Creating a narrator with Tourette’s Syndrome for Motherless Brooklyn has earned Lethem some distinctive fans. At Prairie Lights he accepted the woman’s contributions without awkwardness.

Alice hosted an after-party for Lethem at her house, a Workshop tradition for visiting authors. This provided me my first introduction to the poets and fiction writers en masse. It was also, of course, a chance for the writers to meet Lethem and clothes were straightened and breasts repackaged with the aim of making a good first impression. While this was done in jest – the film of irony coating workshoppers’ interactions is constant, as indelible as the orange stain that comes from eating American chips – the workshoppers’ ambition is genuine and palpable.

For the most part, students’ days were spent reading and discussing the fiction of William Faulkner, John Cheever and Joyce Carol Oates or the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery and Federico Garcia Lorca, and writing at the Java House or the Tobacco Bowl. Their nights were spent drinking at the Mill, the Foxhead, the Picador or George’s, bars distinguished by what’s on the jukebox as much as anything.

Iowa workshoppers are known to drink. One student’s lecturer congratulated her on being accepted into the Workshop by promising to join her for a drink when she completed her MFA, by which time it was accepted – again with some irony – that she would be an alcoholic. The long winter, the smallness of the town, the tired drama of long-distance relationships and anxiety over one’s art all help fuel workshoppers’ drinking and their writing.

Like any trope, the notion that emotional instability is essential to creativity is something the workshoppers’ love to reference and manipulate. Confessing to a minor trauma (like seeing Clockwork Orange as a child) is taken as compelling evidence for why someone became a poet. By far the majority of exchanges between workshoppers are similarly good humoured quips, incongruities, and set-ups and subversions of genre. Cattiness is common, the consequence of a tendency towards the dramatic, but voiced in private. In public – for instance at Talk Art, readings organized and given by workshoppers at the Mill – support is raucous. Students present each other with elaborate, glowing introductions before each reading, and cheer raucously for them, willing them to triumph.

On a few occasions, however, workshoppers talked openly about the psychological drain of writing: honing one’s sensitivity to the point of anxiety, working in solitude and bearing one’s art to criticism. In workshops, tutorials of 10-15 students, writers read their work to the class and are then asked to watch in silence while it is dissected, with or without admiration. Twice in seemingly straightforward conversations I found myself reassuring talented writers as their eyes welled with tears remembering workshop criticisms.

Emotional volatility is a bond most workshoppers enjoy sharing, in part for its dramatic potential. One poet even confessed to wondering whether he was too emotionally balanced to write great poetry, a sentiment I was reminded of last night when watching Animal House in a San Francisco bar. In one scene a woman asks her boyfriend not to go to a keg party.

“It’s a fraternity party,” he responds, “I’m in the fraternity. How can I miss it?”

“I’ll write you a note,” she says, “I’ll tell them you’re too well to attend.”

While members of the same fraternity, the poets and fiction writers have their differences. In seminars, the fiction writers’ discussions were more structured and centered on the craft of writing. Ethan Canin began one lecture on Joyce Carol Oates’ short stories by reading selectively from letters his students had emailed him in response to them, a method of generating unmediated feedback from each member of the class.

In the letters and discussions that followed the class admired – among other things – the “high thread count” of Oates’ stories (and the “high thread count” metaphor), her ability to integrate scene description into the narrator’s experience, and her chronological switches. After appreciating an integral paragraph, Canin implored the class to “make it brilliant” when writing key passages. The students laughed at the almost cruel implication that they could simply assume such talent but Canin was unrelenting. Come back to a story over a number of years if you have to.

In contrast, the poets’ discussions ranged more freely and tended towards the conceptual. They pitted enthusiasm for the agility and impact of Lorca’s surrealist images against a desire for a more artful and deliberate internal logic, for example, and intellectual affection for Ashbery’s postmodern realism – relentless non-sequiturs and opaque, sometimes empty allusions – against a longing for more emotional connection. One student asked outright of Ashbery, “where’s the heart?”

In both the fiction and poetry streams, the students’ ambition, energy, intellectual curiosity, humour and closeness as a group make the Iowa Writer’s Workshop an enviable place to be. The students know what they’ve got. Many plan to stay in Iowa after graduation, miles from their more metropolitan homes, even without fellowships or teaching positions to fund their writing.

Victoria’s privileged relationship with the Workshop is unparalleled. When I visited, Alice was the sole non-American attending. In addition, two Iowa graduates receive fellowships to teach summer trimester courses at Victoria, and furthermore, Dora Malech, a recent Iowa grad, is coordinating the MA in poetry at Victoria this year while Bill Manhire takes classroom leave. Based on my time at Iowa, Victoria’s writing programme can only benefit from the relationship.

By my last week in Iowa the temperature had risen and virulent green leaves had quickly spread to almost every tree. The outfield shone around the baseball diamond at Happy Hollow Park where the poets and the fiction writers were duking it out.

By mid-afternoon it was the bottom of the fifth and final inning. A hit high to right-field was easily caught and with this last out the victorious poets whooped, hugged and hi-fived. Both teams lined up and shook hands, hamming up the earnest protocol for restoring civility. Compared to the end of year competition for fellowships no-one had anything riding on the game.

The poets’ coach, a Chicagoan wearing three-quarter-length baseball pants and sporting a slugger’s belly and moustache, called his victorious team over. ‘Take a knee,’ he said. The poets formed a ring around him, dropped down, and gazed up at their coach. He turned and walked and turned as he talked, addressing each of them with typical mock gravity. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.” He paused. “And I kept that promise.”