Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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China needs a hero. Dogged by a past of ignorance and oppression and by a present of political awkwardness and hobbling morale, the sleeping giant of the East needs a master, figurehead, martyr and legend all in one government-sanctioned package. He’s one part Bruce Lee, one part Superman, two parts Jesus, with a shot of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, chased down with the party line. This concoction, a 21st century opiate of the masses, is the protagonist of Please Don’t Call Me Human, the latest novel from the People’s Republic’s premier maverick writer, Wang Shuo, a bad-ass even by American standards.

His story of Tang Yuanbao, the common man commissioned to rescue China’s floundering ego from foreign bullies, jumbles political history, comedy, science fiction and fable. He is the man the Party has been seeking: extraordinarily strong yet extremely subservient. Once his superhuman powers of hand-to-hand combat catch the attention of two Party officials riding in his pedicab, the Beijing coolie is pulled from his simple lifestyle into an arena of culture wars and stalled revolution. He is selected to represent the nation in an ultimate boxing match, in which China will show the universe how far it has leaped since the Communist takeover. He becomes the figurehead in the government’s quest for "face"—an ephemeral and quintessentially Chinese concept that translates roughly into "dignity." Yuanbao himself, as a symbol of a historical juncture of modernity and tradition, is a complicated simple man—or maybe not so much a man as a two-dimensional collage of news clippings, textbook pages and comic strips.

Yuanbao’s China is at the brink of something great, but no one knows exactly what that is, and those with the ambition to pursue it are also those with the power to pervert it in the scramble for wealth, prestige and Westernization. The Party faces pressure on both sides: competition from the Western world on one hand, and the legacy of the Chinese empire’s fall from grace on the other. Zhao Hangyu, bleary-eyed Secretary-General of the surrealistic Chinese Competition Committee, warns his comrades, "We might put up the good fight, but if we come away with less than a gold medal, the prestige of our ancestors—their face, if you like—will be destroyed by their no-account, unworthy descendants: us." After combing the earth for the last great Chinese warrior, the exasperated Committee is led straight into their own back alley, which Wang’s scathing parable illuminates with outrageous sarcasm.

Yuanba - half country bumpkin, half urban vagabond - finds himself in the midst of a rigorous training process intended to hone his martial skills. He is the messiah, the Big Dream Boxer, descended from an elite corps from the Boxer Rebellion. Wang plays intricately on history: in the late Qing Dynasty, the Boxer Rebellion was a cult-like reactionary movement that sought to revive Chinese honor and thwart Western influences. Unfortunately, the translated text’s lack of background information makes it difficult for an American reader to contextualize Yuanbao in this historical milieu. But the zaniness of the story still sharply delineates how the chaos of the past intersects the insecurity of the present. Yuanbao undergoes a series of drills, torments and metamorphoses under the guidance of wayward party officials, from exorcism of ancestral spirits to ballet lessons, and finally—to represent China’s self-perversion cultural reform—a sex change. He even gets tossed into the advertising industry for a televized endorsement of the designated "perfect book." Before the camera, he is instructed to act "[l]ike God looking down on earth" and to exude a credo of effective salesmanship: "I’m not selling this book. I’m here to save you."

The Big Dream Boxer is purely a political commodity—everyone wants a chunk of him—hence his reluctance to be thought of as human, or anything but a servant of authority. He professes to Comrade Zhao, "I, Tang Yuanbao, am a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, and if the people are in peril, I cannot be happy. I understand the situation. Snapping the leg of a foreigner is no big deal." Though the reader can’t be sure whether the choppy, robotic speech is endemic to the idiomatically awkward translation, which reads like a dubbed-over kung-fu movie spliced with a Comintern propaganda newsreel, Wang’s prose is acerbic, his cultural analogies deadpan but not monotonously obvious. His vitriol is tempered with playful mockery of cultural hypocrisy. He personifies China’s antagonistic love affair with the West in authority’s transgression of Communist puritanism: Party official Liu Shunming sips tea in bed with the giggling hero and promises to endow him with the gentility of the Western man.

Yuanbao is not the only character in the novel who seems too good to be true, but he is the only one who is honest. Corruption and duplicity lurk just beneath the waxy skins of his leaders, who prove themselves to be densely dogmatic, fanatically insane, or just terribly confused. Yuanbao’s "comrades" attempt to extinguish his individual will through psychological subordination. When one official expresses fear that Yuanbao may "start kicking up his tail" unless the Party is careful, another replies that Yuanbao is simply incapable of independence: "We made him, we can break him." Zhao Hangyu advises that "[t]he publicity should focus on how we took a pile of shit and a puddle of piss and turned it into someone. We must make this clear to the masses," lest they forget the omnipotence of their benevolent regime.

Wang sees the Chinese persona as complacent and intellectually destitute, straddling egalitarianism and materialism while intoxicated by the illusion of controlling its own destiny. The recurrent theme of consumption underscores this political gluttony. Comrade Bai Du proclaims to her eternally hungry comrades at a banquet honoring the Boxer, "We can cut off our queues, unbind our feet, even change into Western suits, but we cannot stop eating." On a table crowded with dishes representing dogmatic party slogans, a roasted pig is anointed "Dying in glory is worse than living in ignominy." The only sensible character in the novel, Bai Du soon realizes that Yuanbao’s leaders are "beasts in human form," equipped with "razor-sharp tongues but hearts made of tofu." But resistance is pointless—Yuanbao’s reeducation has butchered any desire for personal freedom. The Party’s taste for capitalism, its drive to advance in a Westernized society by beating the enemy at its own game, cannot pursue retribution without abusing itself.

This mentality manifests itself in the common folk as base and cynical realism. When Yuanbao’s father, who also carries the legacy of the Big Dream, boasts of his son’s "lofty aspirations," a neighbor chides, "Old man, I haven’t heard talk like that since the Republican era. It’s out of fashion. Nowadays people keep a civil tongue, stressing courtesy and manners, hoping to be among the first to get rich." The assault of material culture on the world’s biggest population forces a dark revision of an onerous, repetitive history.

In his incisive political mockery, Wang is no exception to this grave anti-nationalist sentiment, but where others exploit a stagnant system for financial gain, he exploits the past in order to exploit the present—for a good story. As a pioneer among rebellious authors, he sometimes alludes in the text to his personal gripes and compunctions about political literature. The more pensive aspect of Wang’s narrative irony speaks through a lilliputian, cigar-smoking socialite: "Is something progressive just because it opposes authority or tradition? I don’t think so. It’s far more taxing to a writer’s talent and creativity to figure out how to sing the praises of authority or tradition and attract rather than repel your audience."

Wang’s sardonic oddities form a composite sketch of the post-modern Chinese identity: a haphazard mish-mash of ideologies and principles, papering over cracks in the