Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

has caused me to offend many of my fellow writers, because what invariably comes out of my mouth is the unvarnished truth. Now that I'm well into my middle years, the words have begun to taper off, which must come as a comfort to my mother's spirit as it looks down on me.

My dream of becoming a writer was formed early on, back when one of my neighbors, a college student majoring in Chinese, was labeled a rightist, kicked out of school, and sent back to the countryside to work in the fields. We labored side by side. At first he couldn't forget he'd been a college student, as his elegant way of speaking and refined manners made clear. But the rigors of country living and the backbreaking labor quickly stripped away every vestige of his intellectual background, and he became a common peasant, just like me. During breaks out in the field, when our grumbling stomachs sent a sour taste up into our mouths, our greatest entertainment was talking among ourselves about food. We, along with some of the other field hands, would trade descriptions of delicious foods we had eaten or heard about. It was truly food for the soul. The speakers would invariably have us all drooling.

One old-timer talked about all the famous dishes he had seen as a waiter in a Qingdao restaurant: braised beef tourne-dos, pan-fried chicken, things like that. Wide-eyed, we stared at his mouth until we could smell the aroma of all that delicious food and see it materialize, as if it had dropped from the sky. The “rightist” student said he knew someone who had written a book that brought him thousands, maybe tens of thousands, in royalties. Each and every day the fellow ate jiaozi, those tasty little pork dumplings, at all three meals, the oil oozing from inside with each bite. When we said we didn't believe anyone could be so rich as to eat jiaozi three times a day, the former student said scornfully, “He's a writer, for goodness sake! You understand? A writer!” That's all I needed to know: become a writer and you can eat meaty jiaozi three times a day. Life doesn't get any better than that. Why, not even the gods could do better. That's when I made up my mind to become a writer someday.

When I started out, noble ambitions were the furthest thing from my mind. Unlike so many of my peers, who saw themselves as “engineers of the soul,” I didn't give a damn about improving society through fiction. As I've said, my motivation was quite primitive: I had a longing to eat good food. To be sure, after gaining a bit of a reputation, I learned the art of high-sounding utterances, but they were so hollow, even I didn't believe them. Owing to my lower-class background, the stories I wrote were filled with the commonest of views, and anyone looking for traces of elegance or graceful beauty in them would likely come away disappointed. There's nothing I can do about that. A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him. I grew up hungry and lonely, a witness to human suffering and injustice; my mind is filled with sympathy for humanity in general and outrage over a society that bristles with inequality. That's what my stories are all about, that's all they could be about. Not surprisingly, as my stomach grew accustomed to being full when I wanted it to be, my literary output underwent a change. I have gradually come to realize that a life of eating jiaozi three times a day can still be accompanied by pain and suffering, and that this spiritual suffering is no less painful than physical hunger. The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of a writer. But for me, writing about the suffering of the soul in no way supplants my concern for the physical agony brought about by hunger. I can't say whether this is my strength as a writer, or my weakness, but I know it is what fate has decreed for me.

My earliest writing is probably better left unmentioned. But mention it I must, since it is part and parcel of my life story and of China's recent literary history. I still recall my very first story. In it I wrote about the digging of a canal. A junior militia officer begins the morning by standing before a portrait of our Chairman Mao and offering up a simple prayer: May You Live Ten Thousand Years, May You Live Ten Thousand Years, May You Live Ten Thousand Years! He then leaves to attend a meeting in the village, where it is decided that he will take his production team to a spot beyond the village and dig a gigantic canal. To show her support for this enterprise, his fiancee decides to postpone their marriage for three years. When a local landlord hears of the planned excavation, he sneaks into the production team's livestock area in the dead of night, picks up a shovel, and smashes the leg of a black mule scheduled to pull a cart at the canal work site. Class struggle. Reacting as if the enemy were at hand, the people mobilize themselves for a violent struggle against the class enemy. Eventually, the canal is dug and the landlord seized. No one these days would deign to read such a story, but that was just about all anyone wrote back then. It was the only way you could get published. So that's what I wrote. And still I wasn't able to see it into print – not revolutionary enough.

As the 1970s wound down, our Chairman Mao died, and the situation in China began to change, including its literary output. But the changes were both feeble and slow. Forbidden topics ran the gamut from love stories to tales of Party blunders; but the yearning for freedom was not to be denied. Writers racked their brains to find ways, however roundabout, to break the taboos. This period saw the rise of so-called scar literature, personal accounts of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. My own career didn't really start until the early 1980s, when Chinese literature had already undergone significant changes. Few forbidden topics remained, and many Western writers were introduced into the country, creating a frenzy of Chinese imitations.

As a child who grew up in a grassy field, enjoying little formal education, I know virtually nothing about literary theories and have had to rely solely upon my own experiences and intuitive understanding of the world to write. Literary fads that all but monopolized literary circles, including recasting the works of foreign writers in Chinese, were not for me. I knew I had to write what was natural to me, something clearly different from what other writers, Western and Chinese, were writing. This does not mean that Western writing exerted no influence on me. Quite the contrary: I have been profoundly influenced by some Western writers, and am happy to openly acknowledge that influence. But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too.

Up to this point, three of my novels have been published in America: Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, and The Republic of Wine. Red Sorghum exposes the reader to my understanding of history and of love. In The Garlic Ballads I reveal a critical view of politics and my sympathy for China's peasants. The Republic of Wine expresses my sorrow over the decline of humanity and my loathing of a corrupt bureaucracy. On the surface, each of these novels appears to be radically different from the others, but at their core they are very much alike; they all express a yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry.

The same is true of my shorter works. In China, the short story has little standing. In the eyes of writers and critics alike, only novelists count as worthy creators of fiction, while writers of shorter fiction are practitioners of a petty craft. Forgive me when I say that this is wrong-headed. The stature of a writer can only be determined by the thought revealed in a work, not by its length. A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.

I venture to say, immodest though it may seem, that my novels have created a unique style of writing in contemporary Chinese literature. Yet I take even greater pride in what I've been able to accomplish in the realm of short stories. Over the past fifteen years or so, I have published some eighty stories, eight of which are included in this collection, selected by my translator, with my wholehearted approval. They represent both the range of themes and variety of styles of my short story output over the years. Once you have finished this volume, you will have a good picture of what I've tried to do in my shorter fiction.

“Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh” is my latest story (it has recently been filmed by China's preeminent director, Zhang Yimou, under the title Happy Days). While at first it may appear to deal primarily with the “downsizing” problem facing today's Chinese workers, in line with the Chinese saying, “Alcoholism is not really about alcohol,” there is more to the story than meets the eye. What I also want to show is how young couples in love are forced to sneak around to share their love. “Abandoned Child,” written in the mid-1980s, concerns one of contemporary Chinese society's thorniest problems – enforced family planning in a pervasive climate of valuing boys over girls. Decades of governmental efforts in implementing a one-child policy have produced impressive results in China's urban centers, where the long-held concept of “boys are better than girls” has undergone a change. But in the countryside, families with more than one child are still the norm, and the general disdain for baby girls is as prevalent as ever. Unchecked population growth remains China's most serious predicament, and a host of social problems emanating from the one-child policy are already beginning to