The Fat Years (2 page)

But
The Fat Years’
power to unsettle goes beyond its uncomfortable proximity to reality. It sketches a credible likeness of China, then pushes it a touch beyond credibility. Chan’s China is self-satisfied to an uncanny degree. “Now everybody’s saying there’s no country in the world as good as China,” Chan’s hero remarks early in the book, noting “so many celebrated members of the intellectual elite … harmoniously gathered together in one place looking genuinely happy, even euphoric … This really must be a true age of peace and prosperity … Every day I read the papers, surfed the net, and watched the TV news, and every day I congratulated myself on living in China; sometimes I was moved to tears I felt so blessed.” The puzzle of Chan’s blissed-out China is unraveled only at the end of the book. This fictional China is also intellectually repressive and conformist way beyond contemporary standards. Although for well over a decade, for example, the Chinese government has been one of the world’s most assiduous censors of the web, in reality the Chinese Internet still seethes with potential dissent and capacity to organize against the regime, with a lawyer like Teng Biao only one representative of China’s awkward squad. At one point in the novel, Chen tries to find a restrained satire of intellectual life under Maoism, Yang Jiang’s
Baptism,
which is at present easily found in Beijing; the assistant in the bookshop tells him that not only is it not available in that bookshop, but that officially it does not exist—all digital record of the book has disappeared. Chan’s fictional regime has, moreover, apparently erased from mass memory a whole, brutal month of government violence and civil war from just two years earlier. (Although public discussion of the bloodletting of 1989 is impossible in contemporary China, it assuredly lives on in private memory.) Chan Koonchung’s dystopian China of 2013 represents a degraded version of a recognizable state: the iron fist of a harsh, Leninist dictatorship lying inside the utopian velvet glove of communism. To one mainland blogger, the novel seemed both “extremely realistic” and an allegory of “everyone’s common fate. [It] painfully describes the fears that lie deep in our hearts, [convincing us] that the world described in the book is quickly bearing down on us.”

Although the autocracy of
The Fat Years
is less shockingly brutal than Orwell’s Ingsoc in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
the restrained plausibility of Chan’s dystopia brings with it a clear warning about China’s possible near future. Nearing the end of his torture by O’Brien, Orwell’s hero Winston Smith asks his captor why the Party seeks power, expecting some self-loving sentiment about dictatorship being for “the good of the people.” His persecutor has no such illusions: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” He Dongsheng, the representative of the communist leadership in
The Fat Years
who finally reveals the government’s grand scheme “for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World,” is an altogether softer dictator, whose policies—like those of China’s government today—rely more heavily on the active agreement of his Chinese subjects. The China that he has created, he believes, is “the best option in the real world”: “there is no possible way for China to be any better than it is today … Can China be controlled without a one-party dictatorship? Can any other system feed and clothe one billion, three hundred and fifty million people? Or successfully administer an ‘Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis’? … there
must not be
[democratic] reform because any reform would lead to chaos.” In
The Fat Years,
rulers and the ruled are locked in collusive harmony. Did the Office of Stability Maintenance, Fang Caodi asks, inject everyone with a drug created “to make us all forget” the terrifying month of martial law imposed in 2011 during which many more will have died at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army than perished in the notorious suppression of 1989? “It would be wonderful if we did have one,” He Dongsheng wistfully responds. “Then our Communist Party could rewrite its history any way it wanted to … If you ask me for the real reason [why everyone forgot], I can only tell you that I don’t know! You shouldn’t think that we can control everything.” The Chinese of
The Fat Years
have, according to the logic of the novel, the rulers that they deserve: they have deliberately chosen to forget. “The people fear chaos more than they fear dictatorship,” He Dongsheng summarizes. “The vast majority of the Chinese people crave stability.”

Chan Koonchung has himself felt the ambivalent pull of the contemporary “Chinese model.” The son of refugees from Maoist China, product of Hong Kong’s Anglicized education system, he is an unlikely sympathizer with authoritarian methods. “I grew up listening to the Beatles, watching French films, reading Camus, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett,” he recalled. “My friends and I would have worn black polo-necks, but we couldn’t get hold of any in subtropical Hong Kong, so we had to make do with white T-shirts instead.” But the open-ended questions he scatters through the book express his own uncertain position vis-à-vis contemporary Chinese politics. “Between a good hell and a fake paradise—which one would
you
choose?” Little Xi demands of Chen at one point. He has just said to her that “no matter what you might say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise is better than a good hell … But there’s always a small number of people, even if they are only an extremely small minority, who will choose the good hell no matter how painful it is, because in the good hell at least everyone is fully aware that they are living in hell.” Outside the book Chan is selectively critical about China’s capacity for mass amnesia: “This is a place where memories get terribly distorted: people in their fifties now say that the government was right to crack down in 1989. And many people forget that 1989–92 was an ice age, before China began marching toward the market. I don’t think ordinary people should have to concentrate on remembering—it’s not good for them, and it’s not their job. It’s intellectuals who shouldn’t forget. These days, they can’t say anything, though. They know the risks of speaking out: that there’s a huge difference between having government approval and losing it, in terms of the housing you’ll get, access to international funding, and so on.” Chan is even able to see the pluses of He Dongsheng’s “Action Plan for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World.” “I saw the economic crisis of the novel as the government’s great opportunity to take control. That was the best way that things could have worked out; mine was the most optimistic scenario.”

Both Chan Koonchung and his fictional namesake in
The Fat Years
voted with their feet by moving to Beijing from Hong Kong a few years ago; both are, to an extent, seduced by the lure of a rising China: “This place is too fascinating to ignore,” Chan confesses. “The Beijing I described in
The Fat Years
is basically the Beijing in which I live. There’s nowhere quite like it.” Is it also as frightening as his fictional Beijing? I asked as we left the restaurant after lunch. He gazed about the airy, glazed mall, as we glided down the escalator back to street level on a perfect, blue-skied August day. “Not today. I don’t know about tomorrow, though.”

JULIA LOVELL, FEBRUARY 2011

This book uses the
pinyin
Romanization system. Only a few letters sound very different from normal English. They are:

Lao Chen, the protagonist, a journalist and novelist with writer’s block

Fang Caodi, an erstwhile friend of his, who has led a globe-trotting, jack-of-all-trades life

Little Xi, another old friend of Lao Chen. Had a short-lived career as a lawyer, now has a marginal existence as an Internet political activist

Big Sister Song, her mother, the owner of the Five Flavors restaurant

Wei Guo, Little Xi’s son, a law student and ambitious Party member

Jian Lin, an acquaintance of Lao Chen, a wealthy real estate entrepreneur, and holder of cinema evenings

He Dongsheng, his cousin, a high-ranking government official

Zhang Dou, a former child slave-laborer, now an aspiring guitarist

Miaomiao, his girlfriend, formerly a journalist

Ban Cuntou, another cousin of Jian Lin, and once a classmate of Little Xi; now a highly influential figure in government circles

Wen Lan, a former girlfriend of Lao Chen; an international jetsetting political adviser

Dong Niang, a high-class prostitute

Zhuang Zizhong, an elderly editor of a literary journal

Hu Yan, an academic, member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, expert on rural China

Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun, organizers of an underground Protestant church, the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground, in Henan Province

Liu Xing, a former classmate of Gao Shengchan, and a local government official

County Head Yang, a young and ambitious local government official

O
ne whole month is missing. I mean one whole month of 2011 has disappeared, it’s gone, it can’t be found. Normally February follows January, March follows February, April follows March, and so on. But now after January it’s March, or after February it’s April … Do you understand what I’m saying—we’ve skipped a month!”

“Fang Caodi, just forget it,” I said. “Don’t go looking for it. It’s not worth it. Life’s too short; just look after yourself.”

No matter how clever I was, I could never change Fang Caodi. Then again, if you really wanted to search for a missing month, Fang Caodi would be the one to do it. In his life, he’d probably spent quite a few missing months just existing. He was always turning up unexpectedly in odd places like he had vanished for a million years and was being reborn just when you were least expecting him. Maybe someone like him really could accomplish such a politically unfashionable task as restoring a missing month.

The thing is, at first I didn’t really notice that a whole month was missing. Even if other people told me about it, I wasn’t ready to believe them. Every day I read the papers and checked the Internet news sites; every night I watched CCTV and the Phoenix Channel, and I hung around with intelligent people. I didn’t think that any major event had escaped my notice. I believed in myself—my knowledge, my wisdom, and my independent judgment.

On the afternoon of the eighth day of the first lunar month of this year, as I left my home in Happiness Village Number Two and set out on my usual walk to the Starbucks in the PCCW Tower Mall of Plenty, a jogger suddenly pulled up in front of me.

“Master Chen! Master Chen!” the jogger gasped while trying to regain his breath. “A whole month is missing! It’s been missing for two years today.”

The jogger was wearing a baseball cap, and I didn’t recognize him at first.

“Fang Caodi, Fang Caodi …” he said as he took off his cap to reveal a bald head sporting a short ponytail held at the back with a rubber band.

Suddenly, I knew who it was. “Fang Caodi. Why are you calling me master?”

He ignored me. “A whole month is missing! Master Chen, what can we do about it, what can we do?” he repeated rather desperately.

“It’s been more than a month since we last met, hasn’t it?” I said.

“Longer than that. Master Chen, you know, a whole month has disappeared! It’s terrifying. What should we do about it?” Fang said.

I tried to change the subject. “When did you get back to Beijing?”

He didn’t answer and then suddenly he sneezed. I handed him my card. “Don’t catch cold. You shouldn’t be running around. We can meet later. My phone number and e-mail are on the card.”

He put his cap back on and took my card. “We can look for it together,” he said.

As I watched him jog off toward the Dongzhi Menwai Embassy Row area, I realized he wasn’t just out for a jog, he was on a mission.

A couple of days later, I found myself attending the
Reading Journal
New Year’s reception on the second floor of the Sanlian Bookstore on Art Museum East Road. The reception was an annual affair. In the 1990s I used to drop in off and on, but since I moved to Beijing permanently in 2004, I’ve come up every other year to shoot the breeze a while with the older writers and editors, just to let the cultural world know that I’m still alive. I never bother with the younger ones—I don’t know them and they don’t seem to feel any need to know me.

The atmosphere at the reception was somehow different from previous years; the guests seemed quite elated. For the past year, I’ve noticed that I, too, have often felt some sort of unaccountable cheerfulness, but the high spirits that day still took me aback. That day everybody was so euphoric it was as if they’d just knocked back a few shots of Jack Daniel’s.

The venerable founder of
Reading,
Zhuang Zizhong, hadn’t made an appearance at a reception for a while, but this time he turned up in his wheelchair. There was quite a crowd jostling around him, so I didn’t go over to say hello. Besides Old Zhuang, all the staff at the journal—those who were still alive, that is—had all showed up. That was no minor miracle. In all the years I’ve been associated with the Sanlian and its journal,
Reading,
I’ve never seen such a grand occasion. It left me pleasantly surprised. I’m quite cynical about human nature. I’ve never believed that the inner workings of any organization were completely harmonious, especially not any mainland-Chinese organization, and particularly not state-operated enterprises, including state-operated cultural units.

That day all the writers and editors whom I knew greeted me with excessive enthusiasm; but when I started to strike up a proper conversation, their attention had already shifted and they hurried off to someone else. This sort of treatment is pretty common at receptions and cocktail parties, especially when you’re not a star. After being greeted and then snubbed two or three times, I readjusted my attitude and returned to my usual one—that of an observer. I have to admit I was pretty moved by what I saw: so many celebrated and diverse members of the intellectual elite gathered together in one place looking genuinely happy, even euphoric … This really must be a true age of peace and prosperity, I thought to myself.

I was feeling pretty good, but very quickly I got the feeling that it was time to leave. I walked out of the reception intending to browse around in the bookstore. I took a look at the art books on the second floor, and then glanced at the new bestsellers and the business and travel books on the first floor. The bookstore was teeming with browsers. So people are still reading books. Terrific!
“The sweet smell of books in a literary society,” I thought. As I made my way downstairs toward the basement, students were crowding both sides of the stairs, sitting and reading, almost as though they didn’t want anyone else to go down there. Feeling cheerful, I picked my way down the stairs. The basement level is where the Sanlian keeps its extensive collection of books on literature, history, philosophy, politics, and the humanities, and that’s why it’s my number-one destination every time I visit. I’ve always believed that the generous display of these humanities books is one of the things that make Beijing a city worth living in. A city that reads books on literature, history, philosophy, and politics is definitely a special place.

The basement level was very quiet that day. No one was around, and strangely enough, when I got down there I didn’t really feel like browsing anymore. I just wanted to lay my hands on one particular book, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I walked into the room thinking that when I saw it I would know. As I walked past the philosophy section and moved on to the politics and history sections, I suddenly felt I couldn’t breathe. Was the basement air that bad?

So I decided to make a quick exit. I was walking up the stairs trying not to bump into any of the youngsters, when suddenly somebody grabbed the cuff of my trousers. I looked down in surprise, and that person looked up at me. It was not one of the young people.

“Lao Chen!” She seemed surprised to see me.

“Little Xi” is all I said, but I was thinking, Little Xi, where have you been all these years?

“I saw you go downstairs and I thought, that must be Lao Chen!” From the way she said it she seemed to imply that running into me was quite important.

“Didn’t you go up to the reception?” I asked.

“No … I didn’t know about it till I got here. Are you free now?” She leaned toward me conspiratorially.

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

She paused a minute before she said, “Let’s just walk and talk.” Then she let go of my trouser leg.

We started strolling toward the National Art Museum. I walked beside her, waiting for her to start a conversation, but she didn’t, so I asked her about her mother. “How’s Big Sister Song?”

“She’s fine.”

“She must be over eighty now?”

“Yup.”

“And how’s your son?”

No answer.

“How old is he?”

“Over twenty.”

“That old?”

“Yup.”

“Is he at university or working?”

“He’s at university. Look,” she said, “can we change the subject?”

I remembered how much she doted on her son and was startled at her reaction. “Let’s go to the Prime Hotel and have a cup of coffee,” I offered.

She didn’t want to, so we walked instead into the small park next to the National Art Museum.

Little Xi stopped suddenly. “Lao Chen, have you noticed anything?” she said.

I didn’t know how I should respond, but I knew I couldn’t say, “Noticed what?” She seemed to be testing me. If I gave her the wrong answer, it was unlikely she’d open up to me. As a writer, I like people to tell me their innermost thoughts. As a man, I wanted this woman to tell me her innermost thoughts.

I paused, feeling a little awkward, and she asked, “Is it kind of hard for you to express your feelings?”

I gave a small nod. I’ve often felt nothing at all when people have asked how I feel about a work of art or a piece of music. I hate this feeling of feeling nothing, but I’m pretty good at faking an acceptable response.

“That’s great, I knew it,” she went on. “When I saw you going down the stairs, I thought to myself, Lao Chen will understand. Then I sat there waiting for you to come back up the stairs.”

In Little Xi’s mind I’m probably a reasonable, mature, and fairly knowledgeable person.

At least, that’s what I’d like people to think.

“Let’s sit down on this bench,” I suggested gently.

It seemed to work, because after we sat down she relaxed, closed her eyes, sighed deeply, and said, “At last.”

Little Xi was definitely my type. After so many years, her looks and figure hadn’t changed much, but wrinkles had begun to appear on her face from neglect. She also looked pretty depressed.

She kept her eyes closed, trying to regain her composure. I looked at her intently and I suddenly realized how much I still liked this woman. I like melancholy women.

“I don’t have anyone to talk to. I feel like there are fewer and fewer people like us … There are so few of us left that life hardly seems worth living anymore.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everybody’s lonely, but no matter how lonely you are, life still goes on.”

She ignored my banal response. “No one remembers, except me. No one talks about it, except me. Does that mean I’m completely mad? There’s no trace of it, no evidence, so nobody can be bothered.”

I was enjoying the sound of her Beijing accent.

She briefly opened her eyes before closing them again. “Well, how about it? We were such good friends. Why haven’t I seen you for so many years? What happened?”

“I thought you’d gone abroad.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Well, it’s good that you didn’t. Now everybody’s saying there’s no country in the world as good as China.”

She opened her eyes once more and gave me a look. I didn’t really understand what she was getting at, so I didn’t react. She broke into a smile and said, “It’s unbelievable that you can still make jokes.”

I hadn’t been joking, but I immediately went along with her and smiled, too.

“You sound just like my son,” she added.

“Your son? You seem not to want to talk about him. What’s up between the two of you?”

“He’s doing really well,” she said in an ironic tone. “He’s studying law at Peking University and he’s joined the Communist Party.”

“That’s good,” I said vaguely. “It will be useful when he tries to find a job.”

“He wants to go into the Chinese Communist Party Central Propaganda Department!”

At first I thought I hadn’t heard her clearly.

“The Central Propaganda Department?” I ventured.

Little Xi nodded. “He says it’s his life’s ambition. He’s got big ideas! If you ever meet him, you’ll know what I mean.”

I was enjoying a feeling of happiness sitting there next to Little Xi. It was such a beautiful spring afternoon; the sun was so bright and warm that many elderly couples were strolling around the park. There were also a few smokers … smokers? Two of them were standing close by chain-smoking. I like to read detective stories and I’ve even written a few myself, and so this situation left plenty of room for the imagination. It could have been a surveillance scene, but as I was nothing more than a self-indulgent writer of very ordinary bestsellers, why would anyone want to spy on me? Wherever there are people in China there are smokers.

I listened as Little Xi continued to pour her heart out to me. “Am I causing trouble, making a fuss? I know it’s none of my business, but I can’t act just like nothing’s happened. How can things change just like that? I don’t get it and I can’t stand it.”

I was still wondering what had made her so upset. Her son, or the after-effects of her own nightmarish experiences?

“One day in a small restaurant in Lanqiying,” she said, looking directly at me, “I went on a blind date with one of you Taiwanese men—he was a businessman. He was a terrific talker, there was nothing he didn’t know: astronomy, geography, medicine, divination and horoscopes, finance, investments, and world politics, you name it, he just wouldn’t stop and I was bored to death. When I managed to get a word in edgeways about our government’s failings, he called me ungrateful and said I didn’t know just how good I had it. He made me furious. I really felt like giving him a good slap.”