The Four Books by Yan Lianke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

No Soap Radio

According to Yan, Maoist China was an absurdist paradise. Based on the many other accounts of the period, there is no reason to doubt him. However, if China has been such a place, I find it difficult to accept that this was a passing cultural phase. There seems to be something anti-rational not just irrational in the collective psyche. Else why would it be necessary for someone like Yan to publicise the common practices that were and are well known. What is the point other than to remind the population of its absurdist core?

Reading The Four Books, I was reminded of the 1950’s New York City practical joke craze ‘No Soap Radio.’ Two collaborators engage in the telling of a meaningless funny story in the presence of a third person. The story concludes with an equally meaningless punchline, like ‘no soap radio’, at which point the collaborators laugh hysterically. In almost all cases, the dupe joins in the hilarity. The two collaborators then stop laughing and with deadpan faces ask the third what he finds so funny.

No Soap Radio is a trivial demonstration of the sociological impetus to conform. We all have it to some degree unless we’re been forcibly housed in a mental facility. In a capitalist society, most of of us work for the equivalent of the paper blossoms handed out in the Maoist Re-Ed camps Yan describes so relentlessly. When we get enough of them we, like the camps’ inmates, get promotion, better food, improved accommodation, and, if were really fortunate, we hit the jackpot and can retire. We might even play the lottery, which doesn’t make statistical sense but that doesn’t matter if there’s even a tiny chance to escape from the rat race.

The difference in China is that no matter how many times the No Soap Radio, bait and switch joke is played, everyone behaves as if they’ve never encountered it before. They know the contradiction in which they are living even as they know the absurdity of the observation that “The Yellow River reversed course and began flowing westward.” Yet they continue to act like the comic strip character Charlie Brown when Lucy promises not to knock the football over as he attempts to kick it - for the hundredth time. The ball is always knocked over. What keeps these people in the game? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.

In the Western capitalist world, even in the most brutal parts of it, if the odds of promotion (much less survival) were anything as low as those those portrayed by Yan, insurrection, or at least conspiracy to such, would be a certainty. Even the Warsaw ghetto had its uprising, Watts its riots, South Africa its Transition and England’s its Peasants Revolt - all in the context of an overwhelmingly pervasive ideology. What is it, one is bound to ask, that is so uniquely powerful in Chinese culture that prevents rebellious action against even a local leader who lacks both arms and available military support?

It’s as if the residents of Re-Ed Camp Ninety-Nine fear being considered un-Chinese more than they fear being starved or beaten or simply subject to administrative idiocy. Not that they particularly like each other. They inform and spy on and persecute other inmates as a matter of course, mostly because it is an enjoyable break from the daily routine. Any show of human concern for another is suspect and reported. The inmates, almost all professionals with advanced education, are willing to admit to any and all ideological imperfections, not because they will otherwise be tortured, but because they otherwise will contribute less to the national enterprise than they could have done.

The society in which the camps are embedded appears equally insane in a very specific sense: Reality is entirely symbolic; there is nothing behind any representation. So targets for grain and steel production are what is real, not the amount of grain or steel that finds its way to the warehouse. Incredible estimates are not lies but signs of good intention; the more incredible the estimate, the more earnest the intention. One is expected not merely to accept leadership from incompetents, but to also praise leaders most energetically precisely when they are most incompetent.

It seems to me that few of these sociological traits are the result of camp life alone, no matter how brutal such life was. Whatever kept that sociology in existence, it wasn’t force of arms, or electric fences, or systematic violence. Something the inmates brought with them and which they shared while never speaking of it has to be the key. But neither Yan, nor any other writer about China during Mao or after, seems able to define what that cultural substance or spirit is (It certainly isn’t the spirit of Sisyphus which Yan interprets as a sort of self-punishment to secretly spite the god of punishment) . It is invisible to those inside the culture, and entirely opaque to those outside. All we can hear is the equivalent of No Soap Radio as the Chinese stare at us with deadpan faces. Is there a joke we’re missing or a joke that never was?

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