China in Ten Words by Yu Hua
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fishers of Memory

I recently commented to another GR reader that finding oneself in the writing of others about themselves may be the only viable form of ethical philosophy and religion in the modern world. China in Ten Words makes the case better than I ever could. For me the book is a sort of case study in listening carefully to the intended rather than the presumed meaning of the language we use.

I read Yu Hua’s Brothers several years ago. In it he clearly relies on his own experience of the Cultural Revolution and the beginnings of the subsequent transformation of China in order to capture the elusive spirit of a culture as well as a country. China in Ten Words does something similar but I find the autobiographical even more powerful than the fictional.

The book is a meditative memoir on a par with Montaigne’s Essays or Pascale’s Pensees. Its power, I think, derives from its astounding descriptive matter-of-factness. Yu’s childhood was spent in the cultural desolation of profound societal upheaval, the equivalent of a ten year long war of a national community with itself. This was a war begun without apparent provocation, and waged with no idea of what victory might mean. And it was literally total in that every man, woman and child were engaged in it. The weapons of this war in the first instance were those of language, from which violence was provoked and spread.

Yet, despite his horrific experiences - from witnessing non-judicial executions, to the persistent fear of denunciation, to the absence of almost all reading material - Yu, just like his fictional brothers, simply does not complain. He doesn’t even judge. He simply recounts in a manner which suggests that no other experiences could have been his. Nor would he want, apparently, any other experiences.

This is a remarkable stance to take. But it may be even more remarkable as a literary reflection of the entire Chinese nation. China, as it appears in Yu’s writing, is not simply long-suffering, it is accepting of its past suffering as an essential part of what it is. The implication seems to be that the Western ideas of mutual forgiveness and reconciliation are not relevant in a culture mature enough to accept itself and its past completely without regret or recrimination. No apologies, no Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, no apportionment of guilt or trials for crimes against humanity are necessary in such a society.

On the other hand, acceptance of the past does not mean resignation about the future. Yu doesn’t recognise causal connections in the manner of a European historian. Rather he registers discontinuities - abrupt, often unaccountable, changes in culture, politics, and direction like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward - as normal, or at least typical. And although these discontinuities may need correcting from time to time, they are not themselves a problem. This seems to me a common marker of Chinese literature, possibly even of Chinese historiography. Tolerance of discontinuity is the secret weapon of Chinese culture.

‘Revolution’ is the political code word for this reality of discontinuity. Yu asks and answers his own question to this effect. “What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.” Sometimes, according to Yu, revolution is indistinguishable from thuggery. Truly the most remarkable thing about Chinese culture is its robustness in the face of more or less continuous disruption, and its ability to recover.

Yu identifies the incidents emanating from events in Tiannamen Square in 1989 as a discontinuity brought about by state-directed thuggery. The consequences of Tiannamen are mis-directed not for the reason a European might expect - for example suppression of democratic expression - but because the events at Tiannamen ultimately signaled creation of a crassly commercial, inhumane, and essentially un-Chinese state. Political revolution simply stopped - a perverse discontinuity. “Tiananmen, you could say, marked the watershed between two different conceptions of ‘the people’; or, to put it another way, it conducted an asset reshuffle, stripping away the original content and replacing it with something new.” He never uses the word ‘betrayal’ but a European in similar circumstances might have done.

Yu perceives the situation as discontinuous today as it was during the Cultural Revolution: “China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself.” The discontinuity is simply overwhelming: “In the short space of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king.” Economically speaking, China has become hyper-Western. Popular discontent is greater now than when everyone was in the same sinking boat of the 1960’s and 1970’s: “Contradictions were not as acute then as they are now, when society simmers with rage.”

As a writer, Yu recognises, in what I take to be a Chinese way, that the flaw is not individual. Not even Mao was at fault, he implies, for the excesses perpetrated in his name from 1966 until his death in 1976. The problem lies, as it were, across all of society, in every layer of government and economic status. In philosophical terms, the problem is real but transcendent. And its locus is language itself. It is in language as it is spoken that the ideals of ‘the people’ and ‘leadership’ and even ‘writing’ have been transformed into cultural dead ends. The solution to the problem is not formal redefinition of these terms but the telling of new stories which create new contextual meanings for these terms and re-establish national cohesion as an ideal.

If I am right about Yu’s intentions, they are certainly relevant for every society on the planet. But it seems to me that if they can have traction anywhere, it’s likely to be in that society which is most open to the discontinuity called for. China, perhaps uniquely, has resisted confusing national purpose with the much more challenging idea of national purposefulness. The former tends toward fixity and archaic irrelevance; the latter toward that most elusive of all ethical ideals, the continuous re-evaluation of values. This is what China does very well indeed judging by history; and perhaps Chinese writers like Yu do best of all. As Yu says about himself, these writers are “fishers of memory.” I am touched by his metaphor and also pleasantly surprised to find it resonating in myself.

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