Analysis
Wang Anyi’s career coincides with an important historical juncture in contemporary Chinese literature. Prior to the death of Mao Zedong and the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, Chinese writers were required to play a subservient role and serve the immediate interests of the government. After the introduction of the economic reform in 1978, however, a relatively ameliorated environment allowed writers to pursue authentic and diversified means of expression with a certain amount of liberty. Wang is one of the young writers who seized such an opportunity. Although she once regarded herself as independent of literary movements, she admits that she has benefitted from trends such as the Literature of Wound, the Literature of Transvaluation, the Literature in Search of Roots, and the Quest for Urban Awareness. These tendencies are evident in her works, but her style is peculiarly her own, and in the end, they also culminate in a uniquely lyrical form of humanistic expression.
“And the Rain Patters On”
Representative of Wang’s short stories is “And the Rain Patters On,” which is reminiscent of the Literature of Wound, a groundbreaking literary trend that has as its theme the injuries, injustices, sufferings, and aftermaths of the Cultural Revolution. In this story, meticulously crafted from lyrical flashbacks, symbols, and motifs, Wenwen, a woman sent to the countryside as an “educated youth,” returns to Shanghai and finds herself to be a spinster and out of place in a world being transformed by modernity. Unable to catch up with the latest fashions, she finds romance to be elusive. While her family has been trying to arrange for her to meet and date a marriageable man (Xiao Yan), she dreamily yearns for a relationship that would somehow be different. One rainy night, after missing the last bus home, she is given a ride on a bike by a man about whom she feels ambivalent. The man is simply an ordinary good Samaritan who happened to pass by, but Wenwen is touched by his casual remark about the beauty of street lamps in the rain and by his account about his having been saved by another good Samaritan. She begins to hope and even trust that she will run into this stranger again. Claiming that she has found a boyfriend, Wenwen rejects Xiao Yan, though to the chagrin of her family it is clear that she is simply daydreaming. Toward the end of the story, the narrator asserts that there are many pleasures in life, and dreaming is one of them; one has to insist on believing that dreams will come true, or else life would be unbearable. Encouraging and disturbing at the same time, this message exemplifies the tensions between the ideal and the real, and the conflicts between the inner life and the outer world. “And the Rain Patters On” also typifies Wang’s persistent efforts in juxtaposing idealistic yearnings and realistic pressures, combining these opposites into a new humanism through lyrical expression and psychological representation.
“Destination”
Such efforts can be found in most of the short stories in Lapse of Time —for example, in “Destination.” In this award-winning piece, because of the mundane pressures of life in Shanghai, Chen Xin is confronted with his family’s suggestion that he arrange to marry any woman who has a room to offer as dowry. Realizing, however, that “ahead of him there would be another ten, twenty, and thirty years” and that “he must give his future some serious thought,” Chen Xin refuses to compromise and is embroiled in a familial conflict, which is left unresolved at the end of the story. In spite...
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of this conflict, however, the story contains an important touch of humanism as the family, fearing that he may commit suicide, comes searching for him after he has disappeared into the streets for the entire night after a quarrel. Finally, Chen Xin is described as being reconciled to the thought that he will be in search of his true destination—a paradox typical of Wang Anyi’s fiction in that her protagonists are deprived materialistically and yet remain spiritually unvanquished.
“The Base of the Wall”
Whether consciously or otherwise, in many of her stories Wang’s new humanism focuses on the pervasive phenomenon of alienation under the socialist regime, though in an existential manner she decides that her protagonists are capable of rising or staying above the mire. For example, in one of her most triumphant stories, “The Base of the Wall,” A’nian (son of a working-class family)—chooses to befriend and assist Duxing (daughter of a supposedly antireactionary family from the other side of the broken wall) after he has had a glimpse, through a diary that he has stolen, into the inner life of the sensitive, intelligent, and ostracized “class enemy” whom he and the other kids used to abuse. By eliminating the bigotry from the children of his own neighborhood and by bringing children from both sides of the wall closer to one another, A’nian has dismantled the barrier arbitrarily set up to pit one part of humanity against another.
Lapse of Time
All the above themes—tensions between the ideal and the real, conflicts between the inner life and the outer world, the paradox between spirituality and materiality, the triumph of humanism over alienation under socialism—are explored to a fuller extent in Lapse of Time. The novella is a series of sketches chronicling the awakening, growth, and transformation of a housewife during the Cultural Revolution. Duanli, a college graduate, is married to Wenyao, the son of a Shanghai businessman. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the properties of the family are seized by the Red Guards. Wenyao is a superfluous man incapable of meeting the new challenges of life; his brother, Wenguang, for fear of being implicated, distances himself from his father. The responsibility of caring for the family of nine falls on the shoulders of Duanli, who finds it difficult to cope with poverty. No longer a “bourgeois lady of the house,” she learns the meaning of life anew, starting from the basics of survival. Gradually, Duanli has in effect become the “guardian” of the household. Upon restitution and the return of the family properties after the Cultural Revolution, fortune again seems to smile on the family, and everyone feels complacent and justified in demanding a better life to make up for the losses of the fateful decade. Duanli, who has become a practical person, feels the same and quits working, but after two years of tiresome and unauthentic social life, she is troubled by the loss of her sense of vitality previously gained from the fateful decade. In the end, she decides to resume her job at the factory, not only to fight boredom but also to continue with her search for the meaning of life and to prevent life from lapsing into oblivion. Full of details about quotidian struggles and the sordid nature of life in contemporary China, the novella most likely will pluck at the heartstrings of millions of readers who, having emerged from a decade of hardships, find themselves entrenched in a whole series of struggles not only to achieve a better economic life but also to establish a significance for themselves.
Baotown
Whereas Lapse of Time enlarges on urban consciousness as a condition for the definition of humanity in an alienated society, Baotown is an attempt to explore the historical, cultural, and symbolic dimensions of humanity in a rustic and remote corner of rural China. The legend of King Yu of Xia (c. 21-16 b.c.e.), the tamer of the great flood and the founder of the first dynasty in Chinese history, is invoked, somewhat ironically, in the preface, in order to situate Baotown in a mythical and historical context. A folk ballad on numbers, which contains quasi-nonsensical cliché references to random events in Chinese history, recurs throughout the story as a leitmotif. The nonlinear plot is constructed intricately around an odd assortment of two dozen characters, four of whom are responsible for the major event in the history of Baotown. The first of these is Picked-Up. Having been reared by his “aunt,” an unmarried woman who claims that she picked him up as a baby from the street, he runs away and settles in Baotown to cohabit with, and slave for, a widow, but he is despised by the community. The second is Bao Fifth Grandfather, an old man who has become an “end-of-the-liner” upon the death of his grandson and only descendant. He is befriended by Dregs, the third character and the youngest son of Bao Yanshan. This little boy, in the end, loses his life for the sake of Bao Fifth Grandfather during a flood, but his body is salvaged by Picked-Up. The fourth character is Bao Renwen, a young man whose aspiration to be a writer is fulfilled when he provides a written account about the accident for broadcast on radio. Unknowingly, he not only immortalizes Dregs but also helps to create a sense of importance for Bao Yanshan and to dignify Picked-Up. Written with a mixed sense of humor, irony, satire, sympathy, and lament, Baotown is a dazzling work thanks to its technical experimentation and its penetration into the human psyche as it is shaped by the historical and cultural conditions of China. The mythmaking process occurring in both the preface and the conclusion of the novella is especially thought-provoking.
Three Loves trilogy
Just Three Loves trilogy as Baotown was still arousing much enthusiasm among its readers, Wang moved on to transcend herself even further, in 1986, by turning out the controversial Three Loves trilogy. The three novellas share the common theme of unorthodox love, but each work has its unique focus. In Love on a Barren Mountain, which deals with extramarital love and sex, Wang focuses on the intensity of an obsessive relationship between a talented but superfluous man and a seductive woman of questionable reputation. They can each be described as married to the right person of their choice, until their fatal encounter tells each of them that the other could have been a better match. It is a poignant tragedy of desire which ends in the lovers’ suicide, though death itself does not seem to constitute a real resolution. The omniscient narrator is careful not to take a judgmental stand, as if to suggest that love of such intensity is beyond any ordinary sense of right and wrong or good and evil.
The second piece in the trilogy, Love in a Small Town, deals with the strange relationship between two dancers of a sleazy troupe. Both performers have been deformed as a result of improper training, the woman being larger and the man smaller in size than normal. Their relationship is full of sadomasochistic contradictions: They both hate and crave each other so intensely that if they are not trying to beat each other’s brains out, they are burning with desire for each other. They are condemned to a relationship that amounts to mutual punishment and destruction through either sexual contact or physical combat. Such a consuming affair drags both parties deeper and deeper into a quagmire. Eventually, actually contemplating suicide, the woman, who has been evading the man for a long period, decides to satiate her desire for the last time as if she were going to die in a battle. Miraculously, this last union makes the woman pregnant and gives her the courage to live for herself and her twins as an unmarried mother and an outcast, whereas the man sinks so low that he becomes a good-for-nothing gambler and alcoholic. The solution to the contradictions in the story is therefore polarized between the rise above and the fall below the line that sets humanity apart from bestiality. In this stunning story, which reads like a parable if not a pathological case study, it seems that the author is raising the question of what to do with the inherent deformity or deficiency of human nature itself.
The third piece of the trilogy, Brocade Valley, differs sharply from the first and the second in that here the focus is on an extramarital relationship that is the result of phantasmagoria. In the story, an editor takes part in a conference held in the Lushan Mountains, a scenic tourist resort. With household chores behind her, she is distanced from her contempt-breeding husband, who has become all too familiar. Surrounded by men of talent, she feels that she has fallen in love with a writer who she thinks is also in love with her. Although the romantic scenery intimates that the romance is real, nothing has actually transpired. Returning to live her life of daily routines, for a while she hopes that the “romance” will materialize even if it entails a terrible scandal, but finally she is reconciled to the thought that it would suffice only to have a wonderful impression of the valley. This dreamy story is a subtle exploration of the distinctive nature of feminine desire and sexual difference in the context of married life in contemporary China. At issue is not whether the woman and her husband love each other, but rather how love itself can stay uncontaminated by the practical concerns of everyday life and survive the wear and tear of familiarity.
The three stories of the trilogy are independent of one another but also interrelated. They constitute a progression toward the resolution of the question of love, sex, and marriage on psychological rather than moral grounds. In these stories, every single character has gone on trial; although in the end no one really triumphs, readers begin to sense that the author’s examination of the characters’ innermost thoughts, feelings, desires, and secrets, however perverse, has sharpened and deepened their understanding of humanity itself. As none of the characters is given a name, the trilogy seems to be inviting readers to witness the introspections of the characters themselves and, in the process, start an introspection of the anonymous man and woman within the reader’s own psyche.
Xianggang de qing yu ai
The development of Wang’s short stories can be divided into three periods. The writings of the first two periods are represented respectively in Lapse of Time and the Three Loves trilogy. In 1996, Wang edited ten of her stories written in the 1990’s into a collection entitled Xianggang de qing yu ai (love and sentiment in Hong Kong). The collection signifies the climax of Wang’s short-fiction writing. The collection contains the love stories “Miaomiao,” “‘Wenge’ yishi” (anecdotes of the ‘Cultural Revolution’), and Xianggang de qing yu ai, as well as the critically acclaimed novellas Beitong zhidi (a land of tragedy), Shushu de gushi (our uncle’s story), and Shangxin Taipingyang (sadness for the Pacific).
In this collection, Wang continues her quest for the meaning of love. In “Miaomiao,” a cleaning maid in a small-town hotel has the daring spirit to adopt the dress style of the big city and explore the meaning of sex and love; ironically, her fashionable dress is seen as “backwardness” in the town and she is repeatedly used and abandoned by men as an object of sex. It does not matter what sexuality means: beauty or adultery. Miaomiao is left with unspeakable loneliness. In “‘Wenge’ yishi” it is not sexual desire or love but a shared sense of loneliness that binds a couple together. Xianggang de qing yu ai, a story of an old rich Hong Kong businessman and his young mistress from Mainland China, examines the idea that the balance in a relationship between a man and a woman depends on equal exchange. Spiritual needs can be exchanged for financial independence. The relationship between the businessman and young woman is sincere but businesslike.
In China, Wang is also known as a regional writer. The majority of her stories are set in Shanghai. In her earlier writings, Shanghai was largely portrayed as a land of exquisite culture and taste, new trends, and passionate love. However, in Beitong zhidi, Shanghai becomes a nightmarish labyrinth of alienation and persecution for outsiders. Liu Desheng, a peasant from Shangdong, misread the market and attempted to sell bags of ginger in Shanghai. Apart from his business failure, he completely lost his bearing in Shanghai. Groping his way in the maze of residential lanes, he was seen as an alien and chased as a “criminal.” He was eventually cornered by a mob and the police at the top of a building from which he accidentally fell to his death. Such a sense of alienation worms its way into the story Shushu de gushi as the corroding power of melancholy. The uncle, who had become alienated from his wife and his environment, became a source of alienation with the rise of his fame and power. His son was so estranged from him that he attempted to kill him. In Shangxin Taipingyang, individual melancholy gains historical and global significance. Melancholy becomes a distinctive mode of narration. It adds sobriety and multilayers of depth to an otherwise simple story.
Having grown up privileged and yet given opportunities to experience and sympathize with the conditions of the deprived in both urban and rural China during a tumultuous age, Wang is a dynamic and conscientious writer equipped with a wide variety of technical resources, including lyricism, cinematic flashes, and psychological realism. Assessing her own career, she has stated that the overall theme that she has been attempting to formulate, after much rational deliberation, is that humankind’s greatest enemy is itself. According to this proposition, Wang believes that a human being has to struggle against not only the world outside but also, more important, the self within. Furthermore, she observes that such a struggle is by definition a solitary and lifelong campaign, but in the sense that it is experienced by all human beings on different battlefronts, it is also a collective endeavor that can be shared. The short stories and novellas analyzed above certainly bear out her characterization of the human struggle. Her preoccupation with such a struggle offers a unique humanistic vision perfectly adapted to the social, political, historical, and cultural conditions of contemporary Chinese literature.