Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China

Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China

阎连科关于中国的违禁讽刺小说（节译）

How an Army propaganda writer became the country’s most controversial novelist.

一个军队笔杆子，如何成为了这个国家最具争议的小说家？

By Jiayang Fan

October 8, 2018

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/yan-liankes-forbidden-satires-of-china

Yan is routinely referred to as China’s most controversial novelist, thanks to his scandalous satires about the brutalities of its Communist past and the moral nullity of its market-driven transformation. In “Serve the People!” (2005), set during the Cultural Revolution, a commander’s wife and her young lover become aroused smashing statuettes of Mao and urinating on his books. Since 2016, almost all of Yan’s work—to date, seventeen novels, as well as short stories, novellas, and volumes of essays—has been subject to an unofficial ban. But his international reputation has grown. He won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014, has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, and is often mentioned as a likely recipient of the Nobel. Yan’s style is experimental and surreal, and he is credited with developing a strain of absurdism that he terms “mythorealism.” As he puts it, “The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert.”

由于阎连科对CCP残酷过往和市场驱动下的转型时期国内道德状况所进行的丑化讽刺，他经常被认为是中国最具争议的小说家。在以文化大革命为背景的小说《为人民服务》[1]（2005）中，一位司令员的妻子和她年轻的情人兴致勃勃地砸碎了毛泽东的雕像，并在红宝书上撒尿。自2016年以来，阎连科的几乎所有作品，包括17部小说，以及短篇小说、中篇小说和散文集，都受到事实上的禁止，但他的国际声誉却在增长。2014年，他获得了弗朗茨-卡夫卡奖，并两次入围曼-布克国际奖，被认为是诺奖的潜在获得者。阎连科的写作风格是实验性和超现实的，他发展了一种荒诞主义的风格——"神实主义"。正如他所说，“中国的现实荒诞到令人无法置信，这使现实主义失效了。”[2]

Henan is ground zero for Yan’s mordant imagination, and in his fiction it becomes a world of remorseless venality—of corrupt local officials, amoral entrepreneurs, and peasants with get-rich-quick schemes that prey on desperation and run on an engine of betrayal. “Some of the most memorable events in history happened here, but, during my lifetime, it’s become one of the poorest places in the country,” he told me. “There is no dignity left, and because of that the people of Henan have felt a deep sense of loss and bitterness.”

河南是阎连科头脑中魔幻现实的原点。在他的小说中，这是一个无情的腐败世界——腐败的地方官员、不道德的企业家和铤而走险、想通过背叛一夜暴富的农民。"这里曾见证华夏的历史，但在我的有生之年，它成了这个国家最贫困的地方之一。"没有任何尊严可言，因此河南人感到深深的失落和苦涩。"阎连科说。

Yan does not exempt himself from his critique; his books often feature an alter ego, also named Yan Lianke, a hack writer who periodically goes back home to gather material. In “The Day the Sun Died,” which will be published in the U.S. in December, he writes, “For Yan, this town and this village functioned the way that a bank did for a thief—offering him an inexhaustible warehouse full of goods.”

阎连科没有把自己排除在他的批评之外；他的书中经常出现另一个自我，也叫阎连科，一个定期回老家收集材料的黑客作家。在2018年12月于美国出版的《日熄》[3]中，他写道："对阎连科来说，这个小镇和这个村庄的作用就像银行对小偷的作用一样，为他提供了一个取之不尽的货物仓库。"

The complex where we were staying, a gleaming replica of ancient China built for profit, might easily have appeared in Yan’s novel “The Explosion Chronicles,” in which an unscrupulous village head transforms his community into an environmentally destructive megacity, and enlists its population as thieves and prostitutes. Our host, Zhang Guo, who was in charge of the complex, was an old friend of Yan’s. Previously, he’d been a director of Luoyang tourism, and at the dinner in Yan’s honor he groused about the difficulties of being caught between the expectations of locals and the indifference of officials in Beijing.

我们所在的建筑群是一个很可能出现在《炸裂志》中的，为盈利而建造的古代中国的闪亮复制品。在《炸裂志》中，不择手段的村长将他的村庄改造成了一个对环境并不友好的巨大都市，并招募其居民作为小偷和妓女。招待我们的负责人，也是负责该建筑群的张国（音），是阎连科的老朋友。此前，他曾是洛阳旅游局的官员。在晚宴上，他抱怨很难同時滿足当地人和北京官员的期待。

In China, you keep your principles elastic; a favorite proverb of Yan’s is “It’s best to live life with one eye open and the other closed.”

在中国，你的原则得保持足够的弹性，阎连科最喜欢的一句话是：“最好的生存方式是睁一只眼闭一只眼。”

Steadying himself on a lamppost, Wei halted and, overcome with emotion, pronounced Yan “the pride of Henan.” He said that he was sure he’d read something of Yan’s recently in the People’s Daily—the mouthpiece of the Communist Party and perhaps the last paper on earth that his byline would appear in.

魏称赞阎连科是“河南的骄傲”，他说他肯定读过一些阎最近发表在《人民日报》上的文章——这个世界上最不可能发表阎连科署名文章的地方。

“I don’t dare to think that’s true,” Yan said, a hint of mischief creeping into his smile. Then he turned to me and whispered, “No one here has actually read anything I’ve written, or knows that my books are banned. To live in China in 2018 is to inhabit a reality that makes you question the very nature of reality.” The absurdity of the evening’s events seemed, ever so slightly, to please the author. “The people we met today, they know the name Yan Lianke and that he’s a Henanese who’s come by a bit of fame,” he said. “But, in their minds, I might as well be a character in a story.”

“我不想这么说，但这大概是真的：这里没人读过任何我写的东西，或是知道我的书被禁了。”阎连科的笑容带着一丝悲哀，转头向我小声说道。生活在2018年的中国让你怀疑现实的本质。日常的荒谬感甚至让作家感到一些可笑。“今天我们碰到的人，他们知道‘阎连科’这个名字以及他是一个有点名气的河南人。但在他们的心中，我可能更像个故事中的人。”

The Cultural Revolution had robbed an entire generation of the concept of sentimental value.

文革让整整一代人失去了对人与人之间基本情感的理解。

I asked Yan’s brother if he’d read any of Yan’s books. The older man smiled sheepishly. “I’ve tried, but what’s the point?” he said, kicking at an invisible pebble. “It’s all beyond me.”

Yan patted him lightly on the shoulder in appreciation of his honesty. None of his family members read his books, and what little they know about his criticisms of the government has mostly baffled them. When Yan published “Serve the People!,” the erotic satire of the Cultural Revolution, his brother, looking embarrassed, asked, “Is it true that you have been conscripted to write porn? How hard up are you, brother?”

我问阎连科的哥哥是否度过他的小说。他不好意思地笑了：“我试过，但那是啥意思呢？那些东西完全超出我的理解。”

阎连科拍了拍哥哥的肩膀，称赞他的实诚。家里没有人读过他的书。虽然他们对他批评政府的内容了解甚少，但这还是令他们感到十分困惑。当阎连科发表关于文革的情色讽刺小说《为人民服务》时，他的哥哥尴尬地问他：“你是被要求写色情了吗？你有多硬啊，老弟？”

Yan doesn’t know when he was born. It was only when he was joining the Army and had to fill out a registration form that he needed to find out. When he asked his mother, who didn’t know his birthday or her own, she turned to other villagers for help. Maybe it was that summer when the sweet potatoes grew particularly well, someone suggested; good harvests were rare enough to be memorable. That was how they settled on a year: 1958. A local clerk picked a month and a day.

阎连科不知道他的出生日期，但参军的登记表格中有这一栏。他问了母亲，母亲既不知道他的生日也不知道自己的生日，于是向其他村民求助。有人说，他出生在一个甜土豆长成很好的夏天。大丰收极为罕见因此令人印象深刻，于是他们推测出了出生年份：1958年。当地的登记人员加上了出生月份和日期。

The year 1958 marked the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s catastrophic industrialization campaign, which caused the Great Famine. Some thirty million people died, and Henan was among the provinces hit the hardest. Yan remembers feeling, before he had the words to express it, that his hunger was an appendage, a huge tormenting tail that you couldn’t cut off. His mother taught him to recognize the most edible kinds of bark and clay. When all the trees had been stripped and there was no more clay, he learned that lumps of coal could appease the devil in his stomach, at least for a little while. As we discussed the famine, I happened to call it the Three Years of Natural Disasters, the government-approved term that I had learned growing up. It was the only time that Yan corrected me in our days together. “Language matters,” he admonished.

1958年标志着大跃进的开始。毛主席灾难性的工业化运动，造成了大饥荒。大约三千万人死亡，河南是受灾最严重的省份之一。出生在大跃进年代，饥饿感几乎是与生俱来的。阎连科一直清晰地记得那种感受：饥饿就像一个巨大的无法切断的尾巴，时时伴随着你。母亲教他辨认最能下咽的树皮和黏土。当所有的树都被砍掉，泥土都不剩了的时候，他发现吃煤可以顶一会儿饥。当我们讨论大饥荒的时候，我习惯性地使用从小接受的官方定名“三年自然灾害”，这是这些天来阎连科唯一一次纠正我的用词：“语言是很重要的。”他告诫我。

Early on, language divided the world Yan was born into from the one he wished to inhabit. He told me, “In the villages, nobody calls life the city word for life, shenghuo, but rizi”—ri means “sun”—“so if you were a villager your life was nothing but a handful of sunrises to be endured.” For Yan, whose preternatural gift for metaphor spills out of him unbidden, this made sense. “The country has always been the husk that provides nourishment to that precious seed, the city,” he notes. When he was ten or so, during the Cultural Revolution, educated teen-agers from cities arrived in the village, having been sent to the countryside for reëducation. A few of these “sent-down youth” were billeted at his family’s home, and Yan watched his mother feed them the best of what was available, while her own children went hungry.

早在这之前，语言就将阎连科出生的地方和他想去的地方分为了两个世界。“在农村，没人用城市人的用词‘生活’，而是‘日子’。这意味着村民的生活就是承受一个又一个的日出和日落。”对阎连科来说，这样一个看似超乎寻常的比喻有其来自：“这个国家一直是滋养那些珍贵的城市种子的果壳。”在他十岁左右的时候，正值文革期间，城里的知青下放到农村接受再教育。有些知青住在他们家，他看到母亲给他们吃最好的东西，但自己的孩子却在忍饥挨饿。

The book that Yan claims to owe his career to is a largely forgotten novel, “Boundary Line,” by Zhang Kangkang; he read in an afterword that its publication, in 1975, had secured Zhang a transfer from a farm in rural Heilongjiang to the city of Harbin. “I did not begin writing out of principle or passion,” Yan likes to say. “I saw the pen as a means of escape.” (He couldn’t have known then that Zhang was from a family of intellectuals and had been sent to the farm for reëducation.) While working sixteen-hour days at the factory, Yan stayed up nights to write his own novel, a four-hundred-page manuscript about the Cultural Revolution, which his mother later used for kindling.

启发阎连科写作的是一本几乎被遗忘的小说：张抗抗的《分界线》。他在那本书的后记中读到，这本书在1975年的出版，使得张抗抗得以从黑龙江的农场调到省会哈尔滨市。“我并不是出于某种信念或热情而写作，我将其视为一种逃离现状的方式。”（那时候，阎连科并不知道张抗抗来自一个知识分子家庭，是被遣送到农场接受再教育的。）他白天在工厂工作十六小时，晚上熬夜写小说。那是一部关于文革的小说，手稿有四百页，后来他的母亲拿这些纸引火烧饭了。[4]

Advised to tone things down, Yan tried to comply in “Dream of Ding Village” (2006), but it was a hopeless enterprise, given his topic—the AIDS crisis that ravaged Henan in the late nineties, after the government encouraged people to sell their blood to replenish hospital supplies. Small-time entrepreneurs set themselves up as middlemen, known as “bloodheads,” buying blood from villagers and selling it on, but they heedlessly reused needles and failed to screen the blood. The novel is a nightmare of profit-seeking rapacity: once the blood business starts to fail, because so many are dead, the village bloodhead diversifies into selling caskets.

有人建议阎连科低调处理（小说被禁一事），他投入了《丁庄梦》（2006）的写作。但考虑到小说的主题——九十年代末肆虐河南的艾滋病危机，这注定是一次无望的尝试。当时的地方政府鼓励人们卖血以补充医院的供应。小企业家作为中间人，也被称为 "血头"，从村民那里购买血液并出售。但他们草率地重复使用针头，也没有对血液进行筛选。这部小说表现了一场追求暴利的噩梦：因为死了很多人，血液生意失败之后，村里的“血头”就开始卖棺材。

“Ding Village” cemented Yan’s reputation as a dauntless critic of Chinese society, and, by then, he’d been asked to leave the Army. In 2008, he got a job as a literature professor at Renmin University, in Beijing, one of the most prestigious schools in the country. A few years later, he started teaching one semester a year at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. This, too, seemed like an act of escape: Yan experienced what it was like to scale China’s digital firewall and gaze out at a world filled with information and books banned by his motherland.

《丁庄梦》使阎连科作为一个中国社会的勇敢批评者而被更多人知晓。之后，他被要求离开军队。2008年，他在人民大学获得了文学教授的职位。几年之后，他开始在香港科技大学担任讲习教授。这也是一种逃离：翻过了网络防火墙，阎连科看到的那个世界充满了被祖国所屏蔽的信息和图书。

In April, Yan came to New York, to visit his American publisher, Grove Atlantic, in advance of the publication of “The Day the Sun Died.” International travel makes him apprehensive. Western food disagrees with him, so he stuffs his suitcase with dried ramen and pickled vegetables. He doesn’t speak a word of English except for “Long live Chairman Mao,” a phrase he learned in middle school.

四月，阎连科来到了纽约，和美国出版商谈《日熄》的出版事宜。国际旅途让他颇为担心，他吃不惯西餐，行李箱里塞满了方便面和腌制菜。他唯一会说的英文是他在中学时学的“毛主席万岁”。

Communism, by controlling every aspect of people’s lives, had infantilized generations of Chinese: “People’s sense of themselves as individuals atrophied, so much so that they lost commonsense ideas of how to behave ethically without strict parameters.

通过控制人们生活的方方面面，共产主义把一代代中国人当做小孩对待：“人作为个人的主体意识萎缩了。如果没有严格的规范，他们便缺乏道德和常识。”

After we’d sat down, Entrekin asked Yan about the political situation in China. Yan shook his head and responded that it was beginning to remind him of the Cultural Revolution.

Entrekin’s eyes widened. “Surely it can’t be that bad,” he said.

Yan explained that, particularly since the removal of Presidential term limits, last year, he had sensed a gradual backsliding, especially when it came to issues of free speech. Not only has he frequently been prevented from publishing new books but publishers have also suppressed his backlist: “Anything that has the name Yan Lianke is indiscriminately removed from the shelves.”

There was a brief silence.

“But you are recognized for your talent outside China!” Entrekin said, trying to rescue the mood.

“Every year, when the Nobel Prize in Literature is announced, someone is sent to my home to babysit me in case I’m bombarded by international press and say something untoward,” Yan said. “The worst part is that they make a point of sending my best friend. But of course it’s a smart move: no one to better police you than the people you are closest to.”

坐下之后，美国出版商向阎连科询问中国的政治状况。他摇了摇头，说现状让他想起了文革。

“不会那么糟吧。”

他解释道，尤其是从去年修改主席任期限制起，他逐渐感受到了退步，特别是在言论自由方面。他不仅常常被禁止出新书，重版旧书也变得困难。任何写着阎连科名字的书都要被移出书架。

一阵安静。

“但在海外你受到了认可！”出版商试图挽回低落的聊天情绪。

每年当诺奖颁发的时候，都会有人守在我家附近，防止外媒采访我，说一些不利于他们的话。最糟的是他们派了我最好的朋友，当然这是一个聪明的举动，没有比找最亲近的人来监督我更好的办法了。

Entrekin asked whether Yan now thought of himself as writing for the Chinese or for foreigners. Yan rubbed his chin. “In an ideal world, I want to write for my countrymen, but I know that’s not possible and likely won’t be possible in my lifetime,” he said softly. “That’s why I’m so grateful that translation has offered me a lifeline.”

出版商问他现在预设的读者是中国人还是外国人。阎连科摸了摸下颚说：在理想状态下，我希望为我的同胞写作。但现在这不可能了，在我的有生之年大概都不可能了。感谢翻译给了我的作品存在于世的机会。

In practice, the mechanics of censorship in China are opaque. The ban on Yan’s work is de facto rather than official, and his less tendentious titles remain somewhat available. The state has prohibited publishers from printing new copies, but some bookstores reprint old editions, claiming that the reprints come from their inventory. Pirated copies 盗版circulate on the black market and on the Internet, and Yan devotees will travel to Hong Kong or to Taiwan for new titles. A young man who showed up at a reading Yan recently gave said that he had been detained for seven days after arguing with customs officers who found two of Yan’s novels in his suitcase.

“I’m lucky, because I don’t have to worry about not having a domestic publisher,” Yan told me. More potent than state censorship is self-censorship. “If you are young and obscure, you are likely unwilling to write anything controversial, because publishers will avoid you.”

现实运作中，中国的审查机制是不透明的。对阎连科作品封杀的事实存在，但没有官方禁令。他那些较少争议的作品，仍然是可以流通的。国家禁止出版新书，但一些书店重印旧版，声称那些书籍来自他们的存货。盗版在黑市和网络上流通，粉丝们会去港台购买新书。最近，一名年轻男性在阎连科的读书会上说，因为被海关发现携带两本阎连科的小说入境，他被拘留了七天。

我还是幸运的，因为我不用担心没有国内的出版商。比国家的审查制度更强大的是自我审查。如果你是一个年轻的名不见经传的作者，你不太可能去写任何有争议的内容，因为出版社不会出版这样的作品。

Yan is not exactly a political dissident, and he remains a member of the Communist Party—a club that’s much easier to join than to leave. Over the years, he has honed an instinct for self-preservation through pliancy, deflection, and bemused forbearance. Yan used to joke that the day he managed to learn ten words of English he would move abroad, but he suspects that he wouldn’t feel the same urgency in his work if he left China. “It’s ironic,” he told me. “There is so much anxiety about writing within Chinese borders, but that anxiety is also what I write from.”

阎连科并不是一名异议者，他仍是一名中共党员——一个退出比进入难得多的组织。这么多年来，通过顺从、适应和带有困惑的忍耐，他磨练了自我保护的本能。他曾开玩笑说学十个英语单词就润，但他怀疑如果离开中国，他就不会如此急迫地想要写作。“很奇怪，在国内写作如此令人焦虑，但正是这种焦虑使我写作。”

Yan told me that he intended to probe the inherent falsity of life in China. Communism, he believes, made it impossible to express true feelings in conscious life, and therefore Chinese people are not in the habit of doing so. Because information is so tightly controlled, generations of Chinese have been dreamwalking through life without realizing it, becoming zombies primed to live in accordance with state dictates. Waking up is unimaginable, because living in reality would require one to confront the atrocities of Chinese history, and to understand the catastrophe that the Party has visited on the country. To be Chinese, then, is to live under enforced amnesia, a medicated slumber of propaganda.

阎连科想通过《日熄》这部小说揭示中国人与生俱来的虚假生活。他认为共产主义让中国人难以对自己的生活表达真实的感受，因此中国人也不习惯这么做。因为严格的信息管制，一代又一代中国人在无意识中梦游度过一生，成为遵照国家指示生活的僵尸。清醒是不可想象的，因为活在真相中要求一个人直面中国历史上的暴行，理解党在历史上所造成的灾难。成为中国人，意味着服下政府的宣传药剂，陷入昏睡，被迫患上健忘症。

（说到“梦游”，布洛赫有一部小说《梦游人》，值得一读）

Yan is currently writing a novel about religion. Its working title is “Heart Sutra,” 心经and it centers on five visiting scholars at a university, theologians in China’s leading faiths: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and Christianity (one Catholic, one Protestant). Yan does not believe in God, but religion interests him, because he considers it a mirror of society, of what animates us. It is also, inevitably, a controversial subject in China. The Communist state is officially atheist, and though religious adherence is burgeoning, there has been a crackdown on its expression since the recent consolidation of Xi Jinping’s authority.

阎连科目前正在写一部关于宗教的小说《心经》。这部小说围绕一所大学里的5位访问学者展开，他们的专业分别是中国的五种主要的信仰：佛教、道教、伊斯兰教、天主教和新教。阎连科不信教，但他对宗教很感兴趣，因为他将其视为中国社会的一面镜子，能丰富我们的镜子。当然，宗教在中国也是一个敏感问题。共产党的官方意识形态是无神论。尽管宗教在复兴，但自习近平加强自己的威權以来，这方面的表达遭到了压制。

“In China, the development of religion is the best lens through which to view the health of a society,” Yan said, as we navigated a metal walkway that snaked in and out of the caves. “Every religion, when it is imported to China, is secularized. The Chinese are profoundly pragmatic. We worry about our reputation, our face, the oil, salt, and vinegar of daily life. What is absent in Chinese civilization, what we’ve always lacked, is a sense of the sacred. There is no room for higher principles when we live so firmly in the concrete. The possibility of hope and the aspiration to higher ideals are too abstract and therefore get obliterated in our dark, fierce realism.”

宗教发展是最能反映國內社会健康程度的指標。每一个宗教进入中国后都被世俗化了。中国人特别讲求实际，我们担心名声、脸面、柴米油盐酱醋茶。中国的文明中所缺少的，也是我们所缺少的，是一种神圣感。我们如此坚实地活在这片土地上，以至于没有追求更高信仰的空间。高處的信仰太过抽象，以至于我们只能在黑暗的残酷的现实主义中自暴自弃。

The day before, he and his friend Zhang had been discussing a powerful monk who enjoyed the patronage of a senior Party official. The monk spearheaded the construction of the Spring Temple Buddha, in central Henan. Completed in 2008, it is the tallest statue in the world. People have observed that the face of the Buddha bears a striking resemblance to that of the monk’s patron.

前天，阎连科和他的朋友在讨论一位受到共产党高级官员资助的极有权势的和尚。这个和尚主持了位于河南的中心——平顶山中原大佛的建造。从2008年建成直到2018年，它都是世界上最高的雕像。人们发现这尊佛和那位和尚的赞助人长的极为相似。

What people don’t realize is that, for those of a certain generation, playing these propagandistic songs is more about nostalgia than politics—it’s their youth.

人们没有意识到的是，对那一代人来说，表演红歌更多的是对青春的怀旧，而不是一种政治表达。

[1] 該書已被改編為韓國電影《為人民服務》（2022）

[2] 拉美洲的魔幻現實主義也是為了寫獨裁及其荒謬性。

[3] 該書已于2015年由台灣麥田出版，未在大陸出版。

[4] 《我與父輩》中提到了母親把他三十萬字的小說拿去引火燒飯了。