By Ian Shaikh

Or: Banned in China! Buy it! Race cars are cool! Plug into Yan Lianke's newly translated novel, Serve the People!

The novel is the only place for a great many of life's truths. Because it is only in fiction that certain facts can be held up to the light
     The novel it is, then, for this particular truth.
     The story I'm about to tell, you see, bears some resemblance to real characters and events.
     Or--if I may put it this way: life has imitated art, re-rehearsing the plot of Serve the People!

~Yan Lianke, Serve the People!

Based upon Mao Zedong's famous slogan, Serve the People! emerged nearly two months ago in the US and more than three years ago in China. Even before the English translation made it here, the book was already being cited in articles on Yan Lianke's newer work. In fact, he's already published (in French from Chinese) another banned novel, Dream of Ding Village (2006), which, like this one, also received glowing reviews.

This all tells us that: 1) the prolific Yan really is the "most controversial man in China" (his words), and 2) the satiric sword wielded by this novel seems to be yesterday's news. However, if held up to the glare of recent events concerning China, its relevance actually hasn't dulled in the slightest.

Like some of America's post-WWI fiction, such as Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Yan Lianke's novel looks at a historical moment in his country's past in order to better understand its present. For the American authors it was antebellum America for post-WWI America; for Yan, it's the Cultural Revolution of the late ‘60s for the contemporary period. His effort needed to be fiction, however; since any informed and candid criticism would be certain to face a quick rejection by China's Central Propaganda Bureau (henceforth the CPB). Then again, it didn't keep this saucy nugget of text from being caught in the act.

In place of an overt journalistic critique, Yan winks with satire and wit. Rather like a one-act play, his short novel focuses on just a few scenes with a couple actors -- Liu Lian (your everyday seductive Eve) and Wu Dawang (Adam repressed). These two take center stage fairly alone. The other cast members -- omnipotent chairmen, furtive officials, fellow soldiers -- are mostly off screen [censored]ing with Maoist pamphlets in their respective cubicles. The text focuses on what happens behind closed doors that "shouldn't," and so naturally focalizes on the lovers' counterrevolutionary love den.

Sex, among a few other of "life's truths," is a [censored] subject in China and the main treat of Serve the People!. The CPB's heavily quoted "advertisement" is informative: "This novel slanders Mao Zedong, the army, and is overflowing with sex...do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from it, or report on it." And it could just be me, or an inaccurate translation, but that "overflowing with sex" bit, as true as it is, impresses on me that a certain CPB reader just might have gotten a little too caught up in his object of scrutiny. Plus -- let's make no mistake about it -- the political messages of this fiction equate with its visceral stimulations and romantic impulses. Both facets share the back seat of the rocking love sedan that is this book.

In other words, it can also be read in unbiased delight, without much notice to the nation of its pages. And it surely should be, especially for American readers. To judge it as a Chinese text for an English audience to view China by is certainly narrow, and risks the inevitable rising and pointing of morally biased fingers toward the east. Rather, I believe, it ought to be read for the mere fun of its scenes and/or as a criticism of government bodies in general, not solely a government in particular, as faulty as it may be.

The story follows Wu Dawang, an ambitious country peasant who is sexually exiled from his wife unless he steadily advances in rank. Fortunately for him, he works up to Sergeant of the Catering Squad in the People's Army. Because of his diligence in the culinary arts and fine knowledge of Maoism, his Division Commander promotes Wu to become his and his wife's General Orderly. But when his position falls into the lap of the (impotent) Division Commander's wife, Liu Lian, she threatens to send him home empty handed if he doesn't learn to "Serve the People" properly. Wu has no choice but to bite her counterrevolutionary apple -- which is, of course, revolutionary.

Echoing Mao's own nymphomania (oh yeah, I said it), Liu regularly tries to entice the rustic Wu into excitement. She insists on an equality between official and peasant by refusing to be called Aunt, asking that "when there's no one else around, you can call me sister." After having locked themselves in the Commander's house for three days, impatiently seeking carnal knowledge, their coupling finally comes to a tired halt. But when a sudden dangerous dare by Liu prods Wu into crushing a sacred bust of Mao (back then punishable by death), they initiate the destruction of all Maoist art in the house, and Yan's opening words (see top) take new meaning.

If Yan's "particular truth" is that "life has imitated art," it operates outside China's borders as well. Take America's No-No Boy as an example, and all the Japanese Americans whose identity was transfigured into a fiction by two questions. Or the tendency of nations to omit certain shames from their past, turning history itself into artifice. Much of the propaganda during WWII -- like posters that falsely represented the Japanese American "relocation centers" -- weren't so different from Mao's.

On that note, Dostoyevsky once wrote: "At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find its very existence from the arts." Mao also has some ostensible art wisdom to impart, which I think Yan was very aware of: "There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics." In the pictures, sayings, and essays compiled, indeed -- by viewing all art as propaganda, as inseparable from politics -- Mao Zedong had painted a government with his face in the center. A government that obliged its governed to realign and reconfigure the outward representations of themselves to Maoist poetry and attitude. Yan Lianke deftly recreates this as Mao's art merges with the minor characters in the novel who (externally and vocally, at least) imitate it; resulting in "reality" falling into artificiality.

Wu and Liu's reprisal, then (albeit for the purpose of sexual provocation), is especially poignant. By interpreting Maoist maxims -- i.e., "Serve the People," "Without a People's Army, the People have nothing," "Fight Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism" -- they accomplish their own liberating desires and competitions.

Because what is art if not interpretable? Interpreting "the people" in Mao Zedong's 1944 speech, printed in the book's "Postscript," we see how creative and ambiguous Mao could be. Juxtaposed with the preceding pages, the promises of this speech are empty and discreditable.

What Wu and Liu's love and discovery amount to, ultimately, is a paradise lost. Wu is left with his nostalgia for a counterrevolution that changed nothing but the awareness of what he lacks. Yet their affair, like the book, while not powerful enough to rattle the censoring reality outside it, clears new space. Their sexual passion and anti-Maoism widen the boundaries of possibility in Communist China, even with the book banned. If we consider past penalties for such unmentionable literature -- death, exile, forced self-criticism -- it's relieving that Yan went quietly unpunished. Admittedly, this might simply have been an effort to minimize his notoriety -- but it also means change.

Published: Friday, May 2, 2008