Zero and Other Fictions Read online

  zero and other fictions

  Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan

  MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE FROM TAIWAN

  Editorial Board

  Pang-yuan Chi

  Göran Malmqvist

  David Der-wei Wang, Coordinator

  Wang Chen-ho, Rose, Rose, I Love You

  Cheng Ch’ing-wen, Three-Legged Horse

  Chu T’ien-wen, Notes of a Desolate Man

  Hsiao Li-hung, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers

  Chang Ta-chun, Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up

  Michelle Yeh and N. G. D. Malmqvist, editors, Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry

  Li Qiao, Wintry Night

  Huang Chun-ming, The Taste of Apples

  Chang Hsi-kuo, The City Trilogy: Five Jade Disks, Defenders of the Dragon City, Tale of a Feather

  Li Yung-p’ing, Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles

  Shih Shu-ching, City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong

  Wu Zhuoliu, Orphan of Asia

  Ping Lu, Love and Revolution: A Novel About Song Qingling and Sun Yat-sen

  Zhang Guixing, My South Seas Sleeping Beauty: A Tale of Memory and Longing

  Chu T’ien-hsin, The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei

  Guo Songfen, Running Mother and Other Stories

  zero and other fictions

  Huang Fan

  edited and translated by John Balcom

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the preparation of the translation and in the publication of this series.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-52805-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Huang, Fan, 1950–

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  Zero and other fictions / Huang Fan ; edited and translated by John Balcom.

  p. cm. — (Modern Chinese literature from Taiwan)

  ISBN 978-0-231-15740-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-52805-4 (electronic)

  1. Taiwan—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. 3. Political fiction, Chinese. 4. Satire, Chinese. I. Balcom, John. II. Title.

  PL2865.F3A2 2011

  895.1′352—dc222010051441

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

  contents

  Translator’s Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Lai Suo

  The Intelligent Man

  How to Measure the Width of a Ditch

  Zero

  translator’s preface

  Huang Fan and Taiwan Fiction

  Huang Fan, the literary phenomenon, is a bright star among Taiwan’s so-called “new generation of writers,” most of whom were born in the 1950s and who became prominent in the 1980s. Huang was such a prolific author during the 1980s that the decade is often referred to as the Age of Huang Fan. He has won every major literary award multiple times.

  Huang Fan was born in Taipei in 1950. He grew up in straitened circumstances and was educated as an industrial engineer but held a variety of jobs, including food processing director and editor. After early success as an author, he turned to writing full-time.

  He is known primarily as an urban writer, a political satirist, and a science fiction writer, but he is also widely considered one of the preeminent postmodernists from Taiwan. Critics tend to categorize Huang’s work by period and by content. His writing has been divided into four periods:

  Political and urban literature period, 1979–85. During this period, Huang focused on political and urban trends. “Lai Suo” is perhaps the most representative work from this period.

  Postmodernist period, 1985–92. In this period, Huang’s work, while retaining its focus on urban and political issues and science fiction, tended to include a metafictional level and often took an absurdist tone.

  Reclusive period, 1993–2002. For almost a decade, Huang wrote little fiction. He spent a great deal of time studying Buddhism and writing essays.

  Reemergence, 2003–present. Since 2003, Huang has reemerged as a major writer, penning two significant novels, Impatient Country (2003) and College Thief (2004), and a collection of shorter works, Surmising Cat (2005).

  Regardless of how critics categorize Huang’s writing, a number of consistent qualities unify the various periods and types of fiction, particularly his black humor and a critical spirit, often satirical in nature. Dr. Johnson said that in satire, wickedness or folly is censured. Huang’s political and urban stories criticize recent trends; his science fiction, as might be expected, tends to censure human activity in a more generalized way; and even his postmodern fiction tends to satirize not only recent trends but also the act of writing itself.

  The works included here were chosen as representative of Huang’s oeuvre as a whole, and serve to illustrate the range of his creativity. Despite being a well-received writer in Taiwan, he has not been widely translated; this is the first collection of his work to appear in English.

  Huang Fan burst onto the literary scene in 1979 with “Lai Suo,” which was awarded the China Times Literary Prize. The story has been widely anthologized over the years and has gained the status of a modern classic. It portrays the pathos and absurdity of the eponymous victim of modern Taiwanese politics. Lai Suo’s tragedy is that of a naïve individual who sees his few political ideals shattered and is himself used as a pawn by the more powerful in their drive for political control. The shifting time frame and stream-of-consciousness narration effectively convey Lai Suo’s psychic dislocations against the backdrop of Taiwan’s transition from Japanese colonial rule to the KMT White Terror, then to the economic takeoff on the 1970s.

  The story was groundbreaking for a number of reasons. It was one of the first stories to transcend the strict political dichotomy by attacking both the ruling Nationalist (KMT) Party and the opposition. Also, the work is urban in focus. In terms of the history of the development of postwar fiction in Taiwan, this is important. Taiwan’s great modernist writers had dealt with the entire spectrum of the Taiwan experience, but with an eye to aesthetic concerns. In the 1970s, there was a backlash against what many saw as the adverse Western influence on Taiwan literature, with a shift to Nativism and a greater concern for rural or proletarian content and themes. Huang’s story directly challenges this position and restores some balance to the depiction of the Taiwan experience. Lai Suo, though a pathetic character himself, seems still to see himself as a cut above his wife’s relatives from the countryside, who are coarse and naïve. The story contains the germ of much of Huang’s later work.

  “The Intelligent Man” was published in 1989. it is a satire-allegory about Taiwanese migration to the United States and the expansion of Taiwanese capital to mainland China and Southeast Asia in the 1980s, as well as the issues of cross-Strait relations and reunification. Yang Taisheng, the protagonist, is a rather typical example of Huang’s urban characters (his name means Taiwan-born Yang). As Taiwan declines on the international stage in the 1970s, Yang leaves for the Unite
d States, where he first works in a restaurant and eventually is able to open his own furniture business in the Chinese enclave of Monterey Park. Later, as the Taiwanese in the States become more prosperous, they begin to long for traditional furnishings. Spurred by competition from a mainland furniture dealer, Yang branches out by importing more traditional furniture from Taiwan. In Taiwan he takes a second wife. Eventually, to stay competitive, Yang realizes that he needs to expand his production network to mainland China, where he takes another “wife.” His other wives learn of this and demand a family meeting at a neutral site; Singapore is chosen for the mock unification talks. Once there, Yang, good businessman that he is, begins to scout out the possibilities.

  Despite what might be termed the unreconstructed gender politics that inform the story, Huang has simply taken real-life accounts of Taiwanese businessmen with a wife in every port and produced an allegory in which the protagonist’s “extended family” mirrors and satirizes the social-political trends of the day. The romanization systems I have used in the translation further underscore the political divisions among the Chinese.

  Huang’s “How to Measure the Width of a Ditch” marked a turn in his writing. Appearing in 1985, it is a key postmodernist text that is often seen as the inception point of the trend on the island. It is an absurdist metafictional piece in which writing itself comes under the author’s critical eye. The story ostensibly deals with the narrator’s reminiscences about his childhood in Taipei. As the plot develops, the reader relives the urban development of the city while being treated to an excursus into the nature of writing and the production of literature. The quirky, humorous text became a common feature of Huang’s work and attracted a number of imitators.

  In 1981, Huang published his first work of science fiction, Zero, which won the United Daily News Literary Prize in the novella category, the first work of science fiction to win a major literary award. It is a dystopian novel in the tradition of Orwell’s 1984—in fact, Huang’s novella contains a sly reference to the earlier novel in that the author of a secret subversive text discovered by Xi De is named Winston. There is nothing decidedly Taiwanese about the story, even on the level of allegory; instead, Huang deals with the larger issues of totalitarianism and utopianism, the individual versus the collective, and the threat of a critical consciousness to a monolithic system.

  When I first read the novel back in 1982, I was taken by its novelty within the Taiwan literary context. I think today we tend to forget the environment in which Zero was written and simply view it as just another bleak dystopian novel. In Taiwan, however, there was a burgeoning demand for political pluralism by a growing middle class, which was met with continued suppression; after all, Taiwan was still under martial law and one-party rule. For example, the Meilidao Incident of 1979 had occurred recently. Opposition political leaders, some associated with Formosa Magazine, held a pro-democracy demonstration in Kaohsiung to commemorate Human Rights Day. The demonstration was suppressed, the leaders arrested, and the magazine shut down. In subsequent months dozens of people were tried in military courts and given sentences ranging from two years to life in prison. The Lin family massacre occurred the following year, when the mother and two daughters of pro-democracy leader Lin Yi-hsiung, who was being held in prison, were murdered, even while under police protection. People who were critical of the ruling party were still being harassed, perhaps with fatal consequences. I recall the case of Chen Wen-Chen. After returning to Taiwan from the United States for a brief visit, the Carnegie-Mellon professor was questioned by security police. The next day his battered body was found on the National Taiwan University campus. The official explanation in the media was that he had committed suicide by leaping off a building, but most people on the street said he was pushed. In Taiwan’s open society of today, many cannot recall the period when politics were discussed only in the privacy of one’s home. Those closed, uncertain times formed the milieu in which Huang wrote his first work of science fiction.

  In Zero, there is a flattening of life, reducing it to a politically correct sort of conformity in which all individualism is discouraged. Most people stay on the straight and narrow, but the main character, Xi De, is different. (With his inquiring and skeptical mind, he is not unlike the writer in contemporary society.) From very early he is fascinated by the Dark Ages, the time before the new world order was established. This leads to discussions with an elderly history teacher. Xi De begins to doubt aspects of the official story and continues to observe things with a quiet skepticism. Eventually he discovers a hidden text by one of the early founders of the new order, and his doubts grow. Soon he is recruited by a revolutionary group that seeks to overthrow the totalitarian state. His rebel activities come to an end when he is captured and executed. In Huang’s novel, even individualism and revolt are manipulated by the totalitarian system, the control of which is so absolute that it includes its own opposition. It tempts, and then destroys those who succumb. The novella is probably Huang’s science fiction at its bleakest. His later science fiction works contain a heavy infusion of a postmodernist sensibility.

  Huang Fan has had a tremendous impact upon the landscape of contemporary fiction in Taiwan. This is perhaps less apparent today, thirty years since he began writing. Through the critical lens of his fiction, with its political and urban content, he was a driving force in the pluralism that became the byword of Taiwan literature in the 1980s. The island’s growing educated middle class was demanding more openness and liberalization. Pushing genre boundaries coincided with and encouraged further movement in that direction in society. It is hoped that this small selection of his work conveys just a little of his creative genius.

  JB

  Middlebury/Monterey

  acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations. First, my heartfelt gratitude to David Wang for supporting this project and to Jennifer Crewe for making this book a reality. I would also like to thank my editor at Columbia University Press, Leslie Kriesel, for another fine job. Thanks also, as always, to my wife, Yingtsih, for her assistance and for her translation of “The Intelligent Man.” I also offer a tip of the hat to the anonymous readers of this book for their useful suggestions and comments. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs as well as The Chinese PEN, in which “The Intelligent Man” first appeared.

  lai suo

  Mr. Han’s face appeared on television, tired and dignified. It was June 24, 1978. No importance was given to the usual disorder in the world that day, nor was any new significance bestowed upon it. But for Lai Suo, who sat properly in front of the television and whose expression was by turns one of anger, depression, and pensiveness, it was the start of a series of losses and confusion run amok through time.

  How to explain this?

  After his initial agitation had passed, Lai Suo entered his bedroom, crying and tearing his hair. His wife stood at the locked door and called his name, but there was no response, so she went back to her cleaning. She liked to hose down everything in sight.

  In the summer of 1979, Lai Suo, who was bare from the waist up and lying in bed in his apartment next to the freeway, discovered that his wife with her big butt, who was lying on her side next to him, was snoring away, whistling like a tea kettle. Throwing his robe over his shoulders, he stood on the balcony, looking up at the star-filled sky, peering into the dreamlike past and the unknown future. Only when the first light of morning from the east shone on his half-bald head, which resembled an egg, did he return to that time when he sat in front of the television in 1978—the beginning, end, and intermission in his life.

  1

  One week after getting out of prison, Lai Suo turned thirty. He wore an old gray woolen suit, was as thin as a matchstick (he had contracted a chronic stomach ailment), and had pronounced crow’s feet at his eyes. His gaze never moved from his feet in order to a
void the looks of others. He stood in front of the desk of his older brother, the jam manufacturer.

  “I can do any job; I won’t make any trouble.”

  “Never mind, Ah Suo, I’m your brother.”

  He didn’t meet his brother’s sympathetic, caring eyes, for they always sent him scampering away in fright like a rat. In point of fact, he was indeed nothing more than a rat. He’d ratted on his fellow prisoners to make himself even more like a rat. At the age of twenty-one, as he stood before the presiding judge of the military tribunal, he once acted like a man. Impassioned, he mumbled his point and even shed tears. But the outcome wasn’t quite what he had in mind, mainly because he was just an insignificant little person. He had stood at the university gate handing out mimeographed flyers, stammering the lines written on them. His strange manner had attracted the attention of the students coming and going, and they were soon laughing. As the laughter sounded, Mr. Han and a number of important subordinates were setting foot on Japanese soil. Several days later he rented a house on a secluded street in the Ginza district. After everything was taken care of, Mr. Han began storing up a great deal of sperm for his four future mixed-blood kids, much like collecting materials for the speech he gave on TV that day in 1978 upon returning home to the motherland.

  Mr. Han was the very last person he worshipped. Later he learned not to worship any living soul because they all would die. The way he saw it was that the great would die, the stupid would die, and so too would he. Upon death, no one, regardless of who they were, seemed bad. Before Du Ziyi died, when he cut a fart, his face would swell and take on the color of pork liver before he released a miserable little tweeter. Du, whose head was filled with nothing but Communism, believed that Marx was something intermediate between man and god. For this reason, he would say to those with no education: “Divvy up the money of the rich”; to intellectuals he would say: “Class struggle is the impetus of social progress”; and to himself he would say: “Have no regrets.” But Du never once shared the food his family brought when they visited him in prison. He was a fat guy with a big round face, the spitting image of what he called the petite bourgeoisie. Just before dying, Du clutched his cellmate, with whom he had shared hardship and misfortune, and said, “Never believe anyone.”