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| Kissing the Cook
By Liesl Schillinger
| 05/03/2008 | Name: Guest
Comments: You can’t get better publicity for a book than “Banned in Boston.” But as product endorsements go, “Banned in China” sends a more mixed message, even if it still wins points for piquancy. Seeing this legend on the dust jacket of Yan Lianke’s faux-naif novel, “Serve the People!” — the first of his books to be translated into English — you have to wonder what Chinese officials are banning books for these days. Publishing overly frank air pollution charts? Leaking hints on Olympic gymnasts’ floor routines? Indulging in too much of the wrong kind of self-criticism? Too much lead in the ink or too much lead in the pencil — that is, excessive lewdness?
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Yuko Shimizu
SERVE THE PEOPLE!
By Yan Lianke.
Translated by Julia Lovell.
217 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14.
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First Chapter: ‘Serve the People!’
(May 4, 2008)
Yan Lianke has spent much of his adult life refining the highly rarefied, not especially transferable skill of being a provocateur who knows how far he can go without having his quill snapped. It’s a challenging job description: cautious troublemaker. Yan Lianke has won two of China’s top literary prizes for previous novels, but he has also been censured for writing books that annoyed the Party hierarchy. And although he admits to censoring himself to avoid censorship by others, this pre-emptive step hasn’t always been enough. His first book, “Xia Riluo,” described in a Washington Post author profile as a send-up of two People’s Army war heroes gone bad, was banned. A Chinese edition of his most recent novel, which takes place in his native province of Henan, was banned once the authorities understood the subversiveness of its subject. Called “The Dream of Ding Village,” it is reportedly a science-fictiony satire in which opportunists export the blood of peasants by pipeline, as if it were oil. “Serve the People!,” smoothly translated by Julia Lovell, offers an initial sample of Yan Lianke’s writing to an English-speaking audience. A bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases Mao Zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the Chairman’s precepts too literally. To a Western sensibility, the broad strokes of Yan Lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. But then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a Western sensibility. It lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes Chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century China, more than three decades after the death of Mao, a decade after the death of Deng Xiaoping and seven years since China entered the World Trade Organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.Set in 1967, near the outset of the Cultural Revolution and at the height of the Maoist cult of personality, “Serve the People!” tells the story of a docile, doctrinaire peasant soldier named Wu Dawang, whose word-perfect memory of Mao’s sayings (coupled with his excellent kitchen skills) leads to a plum job: cook and general orderly for the commander of his military division. As guileless as a 6-year-old, yet muscular and handy (imagine an Asian Forrest Gump), Wu unquestioningly accepts Mao’s credo that the noblest duty is to “Serve the People!” And he enjoys the slogan’s multiple variations, especially “To serve the Division Commander is to Serve the People!” However, when Wu’s boss departs his residential compound, leaving behind his pretty young wife, Liu Lian, Wu’s Red loyalties slip into a gray area. Yan Lianke builds his story speedily and sparely, as if he were raising a barn against the clock — all frame, little décor. “This is just how things were with this love story,” the author baldly states. “Its beginning, middle and end bereft of the intervening complexities one might imagine necessary to an affair of the heart.” In place of complexities, Yan Lianke deploys similes, like a clumsy coquette dropping handkerchiefs. He compares Liu’s breasts to “fluffily perfect bread rolls,” the curves of her shoulders to “large apples hanging in the gentlest of breezes”; he likens Wu’s desire for her to the hunger of a “starving beggar,” to the “nervous, greedy yearning of thieves before a robbery” and to the thirst of a “parched throat” that craves a “sweet, ripe melon.” He describes their liaison as (among other things) a “honeyed trap,” a “tiger-infested mountain” and “a single rose and a hoe left abandoned in a vast, bare flower bed.” Liu wants to be serviced, not served; but Wu, who is married (to a cloddish peasant back in his home village, though this is a technicality — a “tinny overture to the grand opera into which his affair with Liu Lian would swell”), has no interest in horseplay. Terrified both of betraying the Division Commander’s trust and of wrecking his hopes for advancement, he tries to put off his succubus lady boss when she summons him to her bedroom. But Liu will not be deterred. Instead, she bullies Wu to do her bidding, unwittingly abetted by Wu’s clueless commanding officer, who scolds him when the lady of the house complains of his fractiousness, reminding him of his responsibilities by making him do penance. Chastened, Wu roars, for all to hear, the principle that must guide him: “To Serve the Division Commander and his family is to Serve the People!” 1 2 Next Page »Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
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