Search Results for “A. Jiang ” – Granta https://granta.com The Home of New Writing Mon, 02 Dec 2024 17:14:53 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.2 Working Girls https://granta.com/working-girls/ Thu, 21 Nov 2024 08:20:38 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=122349 ‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’

Fiction by A. Jiang.

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]]> Integrated Semiconductor. Plug. Diode. Plug. Resistance. Plug. Capacitor. Plug. A new board. Plug. Plug. Plug.

Over the course of six months my hands grew not only dexterous but automatic and steely. Shielded with calluses, my fingertips stopped aching from pinching the sharp edges of the tiny elements through the thin latex gloves. The unit director Mr Wang no longer scolded me for lagging behind the conveyor belt, or exceeding the standard failure rate, which meant that my mind had the leisure to roam. While I worked, I calculated roughly how many elements I plugged during a standard working day, which consisted of twelve hours including lunch and supper breaks. The clock was broad and round on the wall, visible from every corner of the workshop like a moon, and now and again I glimpsed at it. I varied the unit time from five minutes to ten minutes, to half an hour, and multiplied the number of elements plugged accordingly. I worked out that on a good day I could plug 11, 240 elements.

Later, I would share the mathematics with my roommates and they would laugh and call me ‘philosopher Lili’. I continued to calculate the numbers by week – we worked six days a week – then by month, year, and eventually for my whole working life. In the city, women retired at fifty-five years old, but it was rumored that the age was prone to extending. I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.

I was sixteen. It felt like an eternity. (Plugging.)

 

One day my underpants disappeared. They had been washed clean, dried under the sun, and folded in a neat pile in my tin cabinet. Four of us shared one room, and we each had a table with a chair, a tin cabinet, and above these objects there was a single bed reached by a ladder. It wasn’t the first time that my underpants had gone missing. Once, a pair had gone before I could fetch them back from the balcony, leaving a naked hanger dangling in the air. I asked whether anyone had seen my underpants. The first time no one answered. The second, Nana asked what I meant, then she chuckled and said, ‘What kind of girl has as many underpants as you do anyway?’

I didn’t respond immediately. But a few days later, during an on-bed talk after the lights were turned off, I diverted the conversation towards underpants with another roommate Jiaojiao. Jiaojiao was pretty and exquisite like an urban girl. She had skincare products lined up on her table, which she told us were gifts from the guy she was dating. The two of us agreed that urban girls had at least half a dozen pairs of underpants instead of just a couple, and that they changed and washed them every day instead of once a week. This was the normal, civilized and hygienic way. Nana kept silent in the dark.

The third time my underpants went missing I didn’t mention it. Instead, I looked around when my roommates were using the bathroom. Soon I found one pair under Nana’s rumpled quilt and another under her bed. Neither were the ones that had gone missing lately, but I did find the pair that had disappeared from the hanger on the balcony. They were dirty: the vaginal discharge had dried up and formed a solid layer. I soaked them in tap water and scraped them clean with my fingernail. Later, when they had dried, I moved all my underpants beneath my pillow.

When I was in the village with my granny, she used to teach me that if I went to work in the city one day, I should do as the locals do. ‘Don’t be such a rural girl – dazzled by city fancies, full of blind ambitions, and ignorant of the rules.’ It turned out not everyone had a granny.

 

Little Mei, who worked on my left side on the assembly line, was caught in a mire. She was too young, only fourteen years old, though her ID said sixteen, which is what enabled her to work. She was small and bound her thin, yellowing hair in a shapeless ponytail; her two freckled cheeks reddened unevenly by the biting winds of her village, like apple flesh after hours of exposure to the air. People are treated based on how their faces look. To some faces, everyone speaks with manners; whereas other faces invite a punch. Jiaojiao applied layer after layer to her face every day, wearing fine pores as her armor. As for Little Mei, even dogs would bark more fiercely when she passed by. Little Mei’s roommates were three women in their forties and fifties and they were known as the Aunt Gang. There were other middle-aged workers in the electronics plant, but unlike the Aunt Gang they all slept in their own homes rather than in the dorms. Sister Ya who worked on my right side, for instance, took the shuttles between the industrial park and downtown Chongqing every day. The Aunt Gang, however, remained in the dorm for various reasons. During lunchtime, in front of everyone, they asked loudly why Little Mei smelled so stinky, and why she whined at night, keeping them awake. When Little Mei tried to defend herself, the three tongues swung like swords, blocking Mei’s voice. When Mr Wang passed by, they barked especially eagerly, as if they were his loyal dogs guarding the perimeter of our unit. Little Mei fixed her rheumy eyes on her rice until the women had finished criticizing her and moved away.

‘Rotten pussies!’ Sister Ya cursed in a low voice across the lunch table. ‘What good can they get from this?’

‘I clean the dorm and handwash their clothes, but they’re still like this,’ Little Mei murmured.

‘Why do you wash their clothes?’ Ya frowned. ‘Girl, don’t you know how to say “no”?’

Little Mei shook her head in tears. ‘I don’t dare. The other day they lit a cigarette, got the dorm smoky, and reported me for smoking indoors. The dorm keeper found half a carton from my cabinet, which the aunts must have put there while I wasn’t looking. The dorm keeper warned me to listen to them, otherwise she will report it upwards and get me fired!’

‘Dorm keeper Wu? That bitch is their friend!’ I explained to Little Mei. ‘She’s no superior, she’s not even an administrator. Let them report it. They have their testimony and you have yours. We’ll see who’ll get fired eventually!’

Little Mei wrinkled her forlorn face in silence.

People say wise men mind their own businesses. But I saw a chance coming up for Little Mei when Jiaojiao resigned. Jiaojiao walked out of the dorm gloriously the day her fiancé drove a car to fetch her. He was a Chongqing local and owned an apartment; they were to get married. So, we had a vacant bed in our dorm. I immediately urged Little Mei to visit the administration office and apply for a move. At first, she shivered at the thought of troubling the administration. I told her, ‘If you’d rather live this way, then I have nothing to say.’ So, Little Mei braved the office. I asked Sister Ya to come and stand behind Little Mei with me. The office lady glanced at our faces and enabled the transfer with a few clicks on the computer.

I had my own motive. Nana and Ah Hong soldered printed circuit boards in the same unit; without Jiaojiao, I ran short of an ally in the dorm. Ah Hong was fine, but Nana could be mean. My granny said you should load the gun when the wolf sniffs around your hedges instead of waiting for it to snarl at your door. I wanted to be ready in case the covert rivalry over my underpants escalated into an open war in the dorm.

 

My underpants disappeared again, from right under my pillow. My anger was like a leaking balloon that rose halfway into the air before trembling reluctantly to the floor. I flopped on the bed and pondered whether to get a lock for the tin cabinet. No one locked their cabinets and if I did, it would seem as though I judged the others as potential thieves; this would be an open announcement of mistrust and Nana would definitely have something to say.

I thought of leaving. How could I make it at this low-end post with these low-end people? I chewed the word low-end bitterly, though it stabbed at my heart, too. Because I was one of them. The old saying goes, ‘People climb up and water flows down.’ If I was better than Nana, I should get up and walk out of the plant; I should push myself to a higher place where Nana could never imagine touching a corner of my clothes. But I was too tired. Granny held a different philosophy, though. She said the moon shines on high mountains and deep valleys alike. ‘You revel in your golden house, and I take care of my thatched hut.’ Instead of climbing up, she wanted me to eat well, stay warm and happy, and remember that the moon always shone on me, even when I felt like I was stuck in the gutter.

Thinking of Granny, I recovered some strength. I rummaged through Nana’s bed and found all the previously missing underpants, used and unwashed, except for one pair which I assumed she must be wearing. I washed them clean, dried them under the sun, and folded them. Then, I tidied them away under my cotton-padded mattress, in the middle of the bed, so that they were difficult to reach from every edge. On the mattress, there was a sheet, a cotton quilt, a blanket and sometimes, my clothes. I sat on top of these for a while; then I pulled a pair of underpants out and placed them beside Nana’s pillow.

 

Sometimes, while plugging, I thought about the office lady clicking the mouse before the bulky monitor. My counterfeit Nokia helped to find some ‘help wanted’ ads at local manufacturing plants, listing the requirements for similar jobs. The office lady was probably just a polytechnic school graduate – better than me, a middle school graduate – but far from a fairy. I browsed through the computer-related professions, and soon ads popped up promoting courses to learn Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and Programming, flexibly scheduled, with no need of full-time enrollment. ‘Be careful!’ I reminded myself. There were so many scams. But on second thought, I found no reason to worry, because I didn’t even have any money to be cheated of.

Six months earlier, my mother escorted me here by bus. The bus zigzagged along the mountain roads for three hours. The landscape was like a crumpled sheet, with ridges and gorges lying densely, and my poor home village rapidly slid to the middle of the wrinkles like a pea. When we arrived at the factory my mother shepherded me through the health checkups, signing the contract, settling me down in the dorm, and opening a bank account. After registering my bank card for the coming salaries in the accounting office, my mother gripped the card in her hand. As we stepped out of the office, I realized that she intended to keep the card and I reminded her, ‘I think the meals are not for free in the park. They are only subsidized.’

So we headed back to the office and confirmed it with the accountant. The accountant was a middle-aged woman with a dull bulbous face and wooly curly hair whose silver was eroding the dyed brown from the roots. She hollered, ‘Of course she needs to pay for the meals! She needs also to buy toilet paper, soap, and other necessities!’ My mother told me that she would leave her bank card with me instead. ‘I will deposit some expenses for you monthly.’

The accountant clamored, ‘We only bind the Staff ID with the employee’s bank card. What’s the use of your card in the park?’ She brandished a transparent plastic ruler at my mother’s fist, where my bank card was hidden beneath her fingers. ‘Give it to your daughter! Do you want her to run away with a man for a meal?’

My mother cursed the accountant throughout the walk to the bus transit, saying that her man must have died or that she must be a spinster. Normal women didn’t have such wicked tongues. I kept silent; I sensed that the accountant was helping me. My granny said, there are good people and bad people, good in a thousand ways and bad in a thousand ways. The first half told me to expect both; the second half told me not to make reckless judgments like my mom did.

Before my mother boarded the bus, she stressed several times that each month I should transfer two thirds of my salary back home. She called me on my salary days, only on the salary days.

 

Little Mei and I chatted on the balcony. She was brought up by her granny, too, when her parents were jobbing in the cities like mine. The cities didn’t offer enough space for their kids, though our brothers were always with our parents and attended urban schools. We only ever saw them during holidays.

‘Once, my brother beat me, but afterwards my parents scolded me instead, so I walked to my granny’s hut. I walked into her yard and realized that she had passed away years ago. My parents called me dumb for a reason,’ Little Mei sighed.

I wanted to say that she was lucky to have a hut to visit at all. Last year, when my granny was gone, the homestead was taken by my uncle. The rammed-earth house was torn down, as well as the bamboo hedges covered with pumpkin vines, handmade and planted by Granny and me together. Now, a large two-story brick house stood there, coated in ugly grey concrete, and full of racket from his kids. I never wanted to get too close.

I visited my granny’s grave on the mountain instead. Some villagers chopped down the woods in the area to grow fruits and herbs but failed to manage the land properly. In the damp summer, shrubs such as honeysuckle, privet and persimmon grew high and messy. I stumbled back and forth, but couldn’t find my granny’s grave, sweat dripping down my sleeves and pants. I needed to tell Granny that I couldn’t attend school anymore and I was leaving for Chongqing. But I couldn’t find her. I was pissed off, not sure whether at myself or everyone in this village. For hours I was trapped like a bee in a lampshade. The words that I had prepared collapsed beneath my skin and seeped out as bitter liquid, drenching me from the inside out. I wanted to smash my head against a wall and die. But there was no wall on the mountain, not even an arbor that could offer a solid trunk. There were only shrubs, which shrank back at my collision and tortured me with endless pricks and scratches.

Nana came onto the balcony to hang up her washed clothes. She glanced at us and said deviously, ‘You sisters really have a lot to talk about!’

Little Mei replied, ‘Join us, please, Sister Na! Cool breezes today.’

Nana was clearly overwhelmed and her words slid off her tongue reflexively. ‘No. I have another thing to do. Next time.’ She repeated ‘next time’ before disappearing into the door.

Little Mei and I looked at each other quietly for a few seconds until we giggled together.

The success at the office encouraged Little Mei and her demeanor shifted as she started to understand how the world worked. I also noticed that Little Mei called the others ‘Sister Na’, ‘Sister Hong’, and so forth, but instead of ‘Sister Li’, she just called me ‘Sister’.

 

On Sundays, we crowded into the shuttle to the metropolis of downtown Chongqing. The municipality of Chongqing, directly under the central government, was the size of a province. On paper, I was from Chongqing, too, but if I dared to say so, people would laugh till their teeth loosened. Back home, we squeezed our lives into the crevices of the mountains, while here mountains gave way to human will. Concrete structures climbed and covered the high slopes like creeping vines. Above one ground level, there was another, like the seven-layered wedding cake I once saw a picture of online. Shops, houses, cafes, cars, and people decorated the broad hardened roads layer by layer like cream flowers. The heart of the city was cut into three pieces by the Yangtze River and Jialing River. Vapor rose aggressively from the water, steamed the ferries, bridges, and cables tangled between the banks, and wafted away.

The swarms of people and the steel-reinforced buildings gave us a sense of security. We stopped worrying about landslides or crop failures; rice was always piled up in the market. But somehow, we were still on the run. Grasping each other’s wrists, we wound through the crowds in a chain. As we climbed the stairs, the heads in front turned back every minute or so to check on the heads behind, as if the wrists in our hands could be stolen and replaced with an imposter’s.

We slowed down in an old downtown neighborhood. It was poorly polished and less crowded. Moss and steps had worn down the stone stairs which were now fractured and slippery. Some residences were the old style five-floor buildings and some were even older bungalows. Walls were darkened and peeling, pipes rusted, and people were old. A white-haired granny carried a basket of vegetables up the stairs. With every step, her millstone-shaped butt skewed to the right. But she was still faster than us. My granny was a good climber, too, and walked on the treacherous mountain tracks as if they were hardened roads. She didn’t look sporty, because it was never a sport for her. Sparrows jump on the ground, elephants drink through their trunks, and grannies walk, unglamorous but effective, until their death bed. Meanwhile I plug; not a sport to me, either.

A man approached us. He was short and fleshy, in a black polo shirt, face shaven, and speaking in a strange, accented Mandarin. Ah Hong, first in our row, kept asking What? What?

‘I’m illiterate. I can’t read. Could you read that for me? Just read that for me? Will you? Will you? Will you?’ The man gesticulated in a direction. He was anxious and helpless but he was also confident and eloquent; he spoke like a man.

He could have given us a piece of paper to read but instead he led us to an apartment building. I don’t know why we followed him. I didn’t question it because nobody else showed any trace of doubt. It had been programmed into our instincts that when a man spoke to us like this we would listen and nod and follow him. He led us inside a staircase where crummy ads were collaged onto the walls. As we climbed the man pointed to them and we answered like students called upon in a classroom.

‘Pipe repair.’ That was Ah Hong, nervous about the precision of her pronunciation.

‘Locksmith.’ That was Nana, voicing authoritatively.

‘Photographing.’ That was me snatching an easier one.

‘Funeral supplies.’ Me again. Little Mei had clammed up and clung to me tightly since the man appeared.

The man shook his head and waved his arm, urging us to follow. We crowded up along the narrow steps, besieged inside the old stony construction. On the second floor, he didn’t bother to stop for us to read the collages. ‘It’s higher up,’ he grunted vaguely. ‘They always put it higher up.’ I asked what exactly he was looking for but even though he answered seriously we didn’t understand his reply. It didn’t make sense, and our inability to work out what he wanted felt like our fault.

‘We don’t read much,’ Nana said. ‘I’m afraid we can’t be that helpful.’

‘It’s okay. Don’t worry,’ said the man, forgiving our ignorance. ‘Come upstairs.’

Nana looked back at me as we reached the third floor and her eyes admitted that she was as suspicious as me. Of course she was. As the thief of my underpants, she was far from naïve. And, in turn, I piled my underpants under the mattress and played dorm politics against her. We were quite the pair. When our eyes met, the spell broke. Without a word, I grasped Little Mei’s hand and Nana grabbed Ah Hong, and we rushed downstairs. Little Mei and Ah Hong couldn’t be more willing to go and the four of us kept running, out of the apartment building, down the stone stairs, and all the way to the bank of the Jialing River.

‘That was horrifying,’ cried Little Mei, her mottled face drenched with sweat.

‘It was’, said Ah Hong, although she was still confused. ‘Who the hell was he?’

‘Shit! Can’t you see it? He was going to kidnap and traffic us!’ Nana claimed.

‘But what if he was really just illiterate and needed help?’ Ah Hong reasoned. ‘There are four of us and only one of him.’

‘He’s a man,’ Little Mei pointed out.

‘Is one man enough to doom us all?’

‘There were more men waiting upstairs! Come on! It’s obvious!’ Nana complained.

‘Maybe something was wrong with his head?’ Little Mei guessed.

‘Did any of you look back on the way out?’ I asked.

They hadn’t. So, I said, ‘I did. He was staring at us over the rails, and you know, his eyes were kind of angry and cold, like a snake seeing its prey running away.’

My words put an end to the fuss, though Nana indicated with her eyes that she wouldn’t believe a word from me. We huddled in the shade on the river bank for an hour or two, yawning and chatting idly. After all the running, smells rose from our bodies with the heat. Ah Hong smelled like a rose that had dried up for a hundred years, perhaps due to her fake-brand shampoo; Nana gave out a creamy smell which I believed was her virginal discharge; Little Mei smelled like wet soil after a summer rain, and I could never wash away the rubber odor from my hands. But these smells were all familiar and calmed us down. We lingered into the evening.

When the neon lights were turned on and dyed the river orange, we almost forgot the brief stairwell episode and recovered our glee. We joined the crowd on the sidewalk and moved from one storefront to another, enjoying the tender breeze and the street music. In front of a shopping mall, Nana spotted a boba tea shop inside, the perfect place for us to spend a few bucks.

When we came to the counter, we were surprised to see a familiar exquisite face. Jiaojiao wore a pink checkered apron with the teashop logo printed on the chest. She was attaching an order sticker onto a paper cup for a customer. Surprise and embarrassment flashed in her eyes for a moment, but soon she adjusted her mood and beamed.

‘We thought you got married,’ Nana said.

‘I’m engaged,’ Jiaojiao replied. ‘But even if I were married, I would still work.’

We agreed, of course, and Jiaojiao proposed that the drinks be on her. We declined firmly and she didn’t insist.

As we sat down around a table, Ah Hong taunted, ‘I didn’t imagine this when she left like a queen.’

‘I envy her.’ Little Mei was grateful for Jiaojiao’s leaving. ‘She works in the splendid center of the world. She can see the sun set every day.’

Nana, surprisingly, didn’t say a mean word about Jiaojiao. She looked up at the counter, where Jiaojiao was moving around among paper cups, Lee Lok Pillows, tanks of boba, and tea boxes; even the yellow lamplight around her seemed sweetened.

‘Do you think she can make as much?’ I asked.

Nana glanced at me and shook her head. ‘But it’s easier work.’

‘Sure, it is,’ Ah Hong said. ‘My arm was literally unmovable after the first day holding the soldering gun for ten hours.’

‘Her heels get sore, though,’ I said. ‘They won’t make a shift shorter than six hours.’

We puffed and sipped our tea quietly.

‘Sister,’ Little Mei whispered, holding the transparent plastic cup with both hands. ‘This is not like the colorful ones I used to drink in my town.’

‘The colorful ones use artificial chemicals and are not healthy,’ I whispered back. ‘This brown is the natural color of authentic milk tea.’

She sighed in satisfaction and sucked at the straw; then, she sighed again, ‘Sister, I wish my granny could taste it. I wish she could see this.’

I followed her eyes towards the giant glass window. Behind it, the city center shone like a grand firework. ‘Me too,’ I murmured. Then, I saw the reflection of Jiaojiao on the glass, spinning behind the counter.

‘Have you ever thought of lessening the money you send back home, Mei?’

‘Are we allowed to?’ She asked calmly.

‘We are on our own feet,’ I said. ‘Good or bad, we are on our own feet now.’

 

After the tea, Nana, Ah Hong, and I strolled into the shopping mall while Little Mei waited for us at the tea shop. In the skincare section, I thought of Jiaojiao and her rows of skincare products, and then I thought of Little Mei. I picked up a bottle of face cream from a mass-market brand. It would help Mei’s rotten-apple face. I imagined handing it to her; I imagined modelling my granny’s wisdom and telling her that, ‘In the city, no one needs to know where we have climbed up from.’

Carrying the face cream through rows of shelves, I spotted Nana standing before a stall with a poster promoting ‘discounted underpants’. She picked up a package and then dropped it; then she picked up two and examined them back and forth. Finally, I saw her hesitantly hold a package against her chest, before heading to the cashier. I breathed deeply. Thank goodness. Thank Granny. Mercy was on my underpants.

 

Image © Peijia Li

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]]> A. Jiang https://granta.com/contributor/a-jiang/ Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:07:11 +0000 https://granta.com/?post_type=contributor&p=122418 A. Jiang (Wei Xue) is from China and holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from...

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]]> A. Jiang (Wei Xue) is from China and holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Oregon State University. She teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and is currently working on her first novel.

 

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]]> China Time https://granta.com/china-time/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 07:00:19 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=121700 ‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’

The editor introduces the issue.

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]]> 1

This year I returned to a Beijing I hardly recognized. It was not the capital I first glimpsed as a child in the 1980s, when groups of men in thin jackets stood smoking in the cold, and tides of cyclists seemed ready to carry me away. Nor was it the city of the 1990s, when the muzak of Kenny G poured out of the loudspeakers of Tiananmen Square, or the Beijing of Hu Jintao, when frat boys drank themselves into oblivion under the green skies of Sanlitun, while in hotel ballrooms Western professors conducted seminars on the rule of law. The old poor of the city appear to have been swept out of the picture, and the blaring engines of aproned motorbikers are softened by the silence of Teslas and BYDs. When I approached the Great Hall of the People this time, a guard smiled in a way that faintly suggested: Why do you bother coming here anymore?

Hurtling down the Third Ring Road in her Chevrolet Cruze, the Beijing playwright Si’an Chen told me about the latest tolls on literary life in China. ‘Traditional publishing platforms have become ineffective and some in-depth media has been shut down,’ she said. ‘There are not that many real readers left.’ Earlier this year a play of hers was not permitted to open. The theater speculated that it was related to the pandemic elements in the story. ‘It’s a game where they never explicitly tell you what is off-limits, but you figure out where the line is,’ she said. ‘At first we did really well in the pandemic. Now the pandemic didn’t really happen.’ We stopped to buy a bottle of douzhi, the fermented mung bean drink, and I asked her why she stayed in Beijing despite offers from abroad. ‘Writing in Chinese and living on this land, experiencing all the good and bad that happens, is what my art is about.’

There used to be a time when Chinese writers, if asked about foreign literature, would say a few nice words about William Faulkner. When I met the writers Zhang Yueran and Shuang Xuetao for dinner in Beijing, tall mounds of Yunnanese delicacies between us, the sense of China’s connection with international literary currents was unmistakable. They spoke of Clarice Lispector, John Cheever, Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Javier Marías and J.M. Coetzee with easy familiarity. Traces of Roberto Bolaño in Yueran’s story ‘Speedwell’ in this issue show that Chinese fusion often bypasses the Anglosphere altogether. Much of the consumption of literature in contemporary China happens on phones, where books are discussed on the platform Douban and serialized novels are produced at a staggering rate. It’s a literary world that seems at once incredibly vast and incredibly small. Yueran was able to contact every Chinese writer I mentioned within seconds on WeChat while we spoke, and wrote down the names of the writers I still needed to read.

The most noteworthy development in Chinese fiction has come out of Dongbei in the northeast. The leading writer of the scene, Xuetao, told me how his love of writing was born out of trying to capture the down-and-out characters spit out by his deindustrializing hometown, Shenyang. He’s particularly drawn to losers, who are, in some sense, the heart of modern Chinese literature, which is filled with failed exam-takers, unconvinced revolutionaries, disenchanted bureaucrats, disgraced husbands, bereft women, unlucky gangsters, wistful repairmen and utterly routed ne’er-do-wells. From Lu Xun’s stubborn rogue Ah-Q, who thrives off his own humiliations, to Qian Zhongshu’s fake-diploma-bearing Fang Hung-Chien, to the wife-beating gambler-turned-pauper Fugui in Yu Hua’s To Live, the twentieth-century Chinese canon presents a sharp contrast to the plucky red-cheeked heroes of China’s blockbuster films and television serials. The figures of Chinese fiction brim with resentments, and they take their revenge out on the language itself, disfiguring it and remaking it with their corrosive dialogue. They mock themselves along with their enemies, in some kind of grim acknowledgment that mutual degradation is the way of the world.

 

2

 

If ever a nation were forged by literary writers, it was the People’s Republic of China. In the years following the 1911 Revolution, when the Qing Dynasty fell and the Republic of China was founded, a band of Chinese literati determined that the country required a complete overhaul of its culture. The Xinhai Revolution, they believed, had foundered because it put too much trust in an abstract constitution and arid declarations of rights. It did not reach deep enough into the lives of ordinary people. Centered around the magazine New Youth, a set of young critics made demands that seemed at first peripheral to the main action of the warlord era: the use of vernacular Chinese, rights for women, a critical examination of Confucianism, the banishment of superstition and the consecration of science. In short stories, poetry and novels, the writers described a future in which peasants could read and hierarchies were unwound. They imagined putting patriarchs and landlords against the wall. In a few years’ time, many of them would be.

Not even the Soviet Union, where Stalin spent nights editing poets, could boast of such a focus on literature. The founders of the Chinese Communist Party, many of them trained literary scholars, included Chen Duxiu, the editor of New Youth; Li Dazhao, a librarian; and Mao Dun, novelist and chronicler of Shanghai society.

Mao Zedong, no mean poet himself, proclaimed that writers in the Communist country of the future should serve the people. ‘The thoughts and feelings of our writers and artists should be fused with those of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers,’ he insisted in his famous speech at Yan’an in the middle of the Chinese Civil War. ‘To achieve this fusion, they should conscientiously learn the language of the masses.’ But as a pared-down literary style was encouraged in the 1940s, political guidelines also tightened the scope of Chinese literature. Great writers such as Eileen Chang left the country. Qian Zhongshu – China’s Evelyn Waugh – was tasked with editing Mao’s collected works until he was dispatched to work as a janitor during the Cultural Revolution. As literacy skyrocketed, Western literature became hard to come by. There were only eight novels a year published between 1949 and 1966, and that figure fell lower in the decade 1966–76. China became a people of the book, Mao’s little red one.

The calibrated opening of China’s markets in the 1970s under Deng Xiaoping was also an opening for foreign literature. One of the repeated scenes in Chinese novels and stories of the period is writers gloating over their fresh access to this bounty. Printers in China pumped out cheap versions of whatever they wished, and carpets of foreign literature lined streets in Beijing (Chinese editors like to tell the story of how the country’s joining of the Universal Copyright Convention in 1992 was precipitated by Gabriel García Márquez’s horror at finding how many pirated copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude were for sale). In The King of Trees (1985), Ah Cheng delivered a satire of the literary-discovery scene in which a sent-down intellectual lugs around a precious chest of books that turns out to contain the collected works of Mao that he’s held on to for sentimental reasons.

Having officially declared the Cultural Revolution a catastrophe, Deng at first did nothing to block the rise of the ‘Scar’ literature that appeared in the late 1970s. The movement took its name from Lu Xinhua’s short story ‘The Scar’ (1978), which was written in a single night and posted on a door at Fudan University. It told of a young woman who renounces her petit-bourgeois mother, leaves home for nine years during the Cultural Revolution, and returns only to find her mother is dead. For some Western critics, like Perry Link, Scar literature never ran hard enough against Maoist excess, with the lone exception of the Taiwanese writer Chen Ruoxi. But the next generation of Chinese writers were less keen to participate in try-outs to be the next Solzhenitsyn. Western liberal demands to be on the right side of history smacked too much of the old Maoist drives for purity. Scar literature, with its repetitive, flat-footed tales of tragedy and hardship, rarely rose to the level of literature. Yu Hua once said he first started writing fiction out of his loathing for it.

The ‘Roots-Seeking Literature’ of the 1980s was something else entirely. It grew out of concerns expressed by Han Shaogong and Ah Cheng that a degree of nihilism had crept into Chinese culture. In its incessant drive to modernize along or against Western lines, they believed both the 4 May movement and the Cultural Revolution had lost sight of the riches of China’s regional cultures. Lu Xun once counselled Chinese writers to only read foreign books – and through the process of ‘hard translation’ even to import foreign grammar – but now the time had come for the opposite: to self-isolate from Western literature. Writers like Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa scavenged older peasant traditions, local lore and knowledge, even old recipes, which had been run roughshod in China’s pulverizing race to industrialize. They took some pride in being difficult to translate into English. The Western canon could not be dismissed completely, but it could be manipulated. While working on a state farm without electricity on the Laotian border in the Cultural Revolution, Ah Cheng recited the story of Anna Karenina, refitting it with Chinese characters and customs for his listeners.

In 2014, Xi Jinping reprised Mao’s Yan’an Talks with a speech about the place of literature in Chinese society. ‘Our country’s writers and artists should become the prophets, pathfinders, and heralds of the mood of the age,’ he declared, and ‘inspire the people of all ethnicities in the entire country to become full of vigor and vitality and march towards the future.’ But the stakes were nowhere near as high as in 1942. Like elsewhere in the world, literature in China – once more central to its culture than anywhere else – has become a niche industry indistinguishable from others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For decades, Western publishers have treated Chinese literature like a koi pond from which to pluck Chinese Havels and Kunderas. Yet when relieved of domestic pressure to speak for the people, and foreign pressure to be paragons of dissidence, Chinese fiction and poetry enters a much more fertile terrain. Despite increasing censorship under Xi, much of the literature of China still breathes easier today. More fully connected to the outside world on its own terms, it no longer seems as burdened to unfurl local color or stories whose shape we already know.

 

3

 

At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus. It has become a virtual requirement in recent years for foreign policy experts in the American and British governments to publish tracts against China. With titles like The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, the argument they lay out is simple: China wishes to rid the world of democracy and to impose an authoritarian form of governance. Yet the projection says more about the West, and America in particular, than it does about China. The blunt fact remains: Of all of the major powers in the world today, China was the first to withdraw its world-historical ambitions from the geopolitical scene. Already in the 1970s, Mao was determined to cool down Communist networks which sought to spread peasant revolution in his name to Africa and Asia and beyond. In 1971, Mao’s right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, went so far as to offer funds to help put down a Maoist uprising in Sri Lanka. Later in the decade, the country was humiliated when it fought Vietnam in an attempt to back Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. China, in other words, was already done exporting utopia two decades before the Soviet Union disbanded. That leaves the US today as the last great power whose leaders still think, though perhaps with less certainty than before, that their system is the one to which the rest of humanity should aspire.

In the 1990s, it was still possible to think that the elites of China, the US, Russia and Europe were in the process of stabilizing the world order at the expense of their working-class populations. The so-called ‘war on terror’ was the pinnacle of coordination in which each of these powers pursued punishing – and mutually endorsed – campaigns against Muslim populations in particular: the US and Europe in the Middle East and Africa; Russia in Chechnya; China in Xinjiang. As the promise of globalization splintered national populations, and popular revolts developed against the cosmopolitan mutual enrichment program, new forces and old demons came to the fore. In Chongqing, a charismatic PRC bureaucrat, Bo Xilai, saw an opportunity to channel frustrations into a kind of neo-populist, retro-Maoist political theater that challenged the prevailing Western-oriented consensus in Beijing. Bo was brought down, but Xi appears to have learned something from this episode. In Xi’s time in power, the Party has been less willing to tolerate rampant inequality as the price of prosperity and more willing to exercise repression in the service of ideological values. With an eye to how the Soviet Union broke down, the Party has struck back against the business class; purged corrupt officials on an enormous scale; reined in control of the press; and shut down the English tutoring industry, itself an engine of inequality.

In 2022, while Washington congratulated itself on the largest climate investment in American history – $369 billion to be spent over a ten-year period – China, in that year alone, invested $546 billion. Its status as leader of the ‘green transition’ can no longer be questioned, though its record in extractive zones certainly can be. In foreign policy, meanwhile, Beijing strives to retain room to maneuver. It backs Russia just enough for it to make advances in Ukraine, while worrying that the US and NATO are using the war as a rehearsal for China’s own encirclement. About the massacre of Palestinians, Beijing has spoken of armed struggle as a ‘legitimate’ response to the oppressor, while doing a brisk trade in spyware with Israel. In many ways, the absence of ideology in China’s relations abroad allows it to concentrate on ideology at home, where the ideals of socialism, though sometimes strayed from and often contradicted by policy, nevertheless remain real.

In Shanghai some of the tensions of Xi’s China were on display. The city is recovering its status as an international mecca. Inhabitants include everyone from Dilma Rousseff to Nick Land to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son, Yermolai, who works for McKinsey. In a mansion in the French Concession, I visited one of China’s so-called ‘Red capitalists’, a media mogul with close connections to the government, who regularly defends the PRC in the Western press. Cultural Revolution slogans were scrawled on the outside wall, and peacocks roamed the garden. The Red tycoon greeted me with a merry sense of supremacy. ‘What will your American oligarchy do if the populists take the White House again?’ he asked. ‘You know it’s bad for you when the Chinese students going to America become more pro-Chinese after their time there!’ The quips kept coming. ‘At the age Barack Obama was writing The Audacity of Hope, Xi was writing a treatise on forest management! Who got the better deal?’

The next day I visited the local Writers’ Association, housed in another nearby mansion. Down one hallway the staff of the youth literary magazine Mengya were busying themselves giddily with their new issue, while down another, reclined, chain-smoking and admirably strung out, the editors of Harvest, China’s hallowed literary quarterly, gazed into the void. Later I walked down the Bund with the Shanghai writer Yun Sheng. We visited a series of Shanghai bookshops. ‘This one is a temple to our version of Instagram,’ she told me in a giant cavernous shop, where many of the books lined unreachable shelves. I entered a room full of red and white covers. ‘You’re in the Party literature section, and over there, that’s the Henry Kissinger section.’ ‘If we dress up the Chinese issue of Granta as a Party pamphlet, what are the chances they stock it here?’ I asked. ‘Don’t count on it,’ she said.

 

4

 

It would have been easy for Granta to fill this entire issue with striking Chinese-language fiction and reportage from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Chinese diaspora around the world. The American reception of Chinese literature has until recently been dominated by exiles, such as Ha Jin and Yiyun Li, both of whom now write in English. But Mainland China is a distinct place with a distinct political history and with distinct styles that demand attention.

Yu Hua remains one of the most playful and versatile of China’s writers, and appears in this issue with a story about authorship, envy and the conditions of literary ambition. Our pairing of Mo Yan and Yan Lianke shows the drastically different ways the Maoist period can be handled. In Mo Yan’s work – compulsively, he tells us, he has returned to writing about blacksmiths – the 1960s are treated as a heroic, masculine period of Chinese self-reliance before the internet and the open market spoiled and feminized the population. In Yan Lianke’s story, by contrast, bald absurdity ensnares a young man who descends into despair when he is not permitted to take the rap – and score the social capital – for a government official who has killed someone in a driving accident. The darkness and euphoria of the period coalesce tightly in the vignettes from the playwright and screenwriter Zou Jingzhi.

In the contemporary scene, Wang Zhanhei takes us into the world of a very online influencer, while a touch of the surrealism of Chinese science fiction shows up in Jianan Qian’s story of a Chinese city with an uncanny urban crisis. Shuang Xuetao, the great artist of Chinese disorientation, historical and otherwise – he once featured a character who did not even know what the Cultural Revolution was – gives us a ‘fifth-rate’ actor losing himself in his preparations for playing a contract killer. Ban Yu presents the exhausting hustle of men who chose the wrong time to be born, while a swimming pool becomes the tomb of a relationship in Yang Zhihan’s affecting story of lost youth. All three writers are part of the ‘Dongbei Renaissance’, which Granta has set out to represent in this issue. ‘The most fascinating thing about their writing,’ Wu Qi told us, ‘is how they accurately capture the lost but resigned emotional structure that pervades society, whether it be for an individual, a family, or a nation – the kind of weightlessness that one can only experience in a highly functioning social machine. There is a disease of weightlessness, especially serious, in today’s China.’

The online edition of this issue includes writers such as Wang Anyi, Can Xue, Aviva Jiang, Cao Kou and Si’an Chen. We regret that the Uighur poets living in Mainland China whom we wished to include were not reachable to authorize contracts for their work, a testament, as if one were needed, to the PRC’s effectiveness in suppressing cultural expression from that sphere.

Translation was the chief challenge of putting this issue together. For a long time, the translation of Chinese literature was in the hands of a very few Anglophone translators, some of whom obscured the realities of literary reception in China more than they elucidated it. But thanks to organizations like Paper Republic, as well as extraordinary translators such as Jeremy Tiang, we were able to pursue even the faintest glimmers of promise. The difference in how time in Chinese fiction is structured – how it is less mercilessly linear, and how the past can overtake the present – is only one of the philosophical challenges with which our translators had to wrestle. The results suggest we are now entering a good period for Chinese translation.

In ‘Picun’, the journalist Han Zhang takes us on a tour of a village on the outskirts of Beijing where migrant writers find meaning by getting their lives onto the page. Xiao Hai, one of their number, has written an incandescent account of his time factory-hopping in the 1990s ‘boom’ on the southern coast. The intensity of the scenes is only increased by the precision of Xiao Hai’s prose and the seared slices of experience that he offers to the reader for inspection. Since its earliest days, the People’s Republic of China has officially declared that it wants art that serves working people. It is only one of the ironies of the country that, now, after what the Party ordered has arrived, it views the results with scorn.

TM

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]]> Picun https://granta.com/picun/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:55:02 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=121732 ‘The stories being written by Picun writers and their peers show the effort and the ingenuity required to survive as migrant workers, builders of the economic miracle.’

Han Zhang on the New Workers’ Literature Group of Picun.

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]]> Once in a while I think about how, over time, the life goes out of certain words. The Chinese term ‘huodongjia’, or ‘activist’, for example, is dead. Occasionally, accompanied by somber music, it’s uttered at a quarter of the speed of normal speech when a state news presenter announces a dignified memorial service at Babaoshan cemetery for one of the last Communist revolutionaries. These individuals may or may not have been spirited, shrewd, stubborn, or have had a wicked sense of humor – but they are remembered only canonically, as awe-inspiringly ‘great’. You no longer hear a living man or woman being called a huodongjia. This genre of person still exists – advocates, organizers, activists – but they are called by other names. Unlike their predecessors who rest in glory at Babaoshan, they don’t usually star in the orthodox storyline.

In 2017, a similarly fossilized term, ‘workers’ literature’, was suddenly revived in the Chinese popular imagination, after a plain-spoken essay by a forty-four-year-old nanny in Beijing went viral. Titled ‘I’m Fan Yusu’, it tells the story of the author’s childhood in the Hubei countryside, her wayward youth as a runaway, and how she made a living in the capital by taking care of the love-child of a business magnate and his mistress. The hardest part of the job was not what she had to do but what she was kept away from. Fan had left an abusive marriage and was raising two daughters on her own. Each night she spent tending to her employer’s infant was a night stolen from her own daughters, who huddled together in a rented room at a workers’ colony called Picun just outside Beijing proper. Fan, a tiny woman just shy of five feet tall, who wore bangs and had a faraway look, abruptly became the face of the country’s migrant workers, a population approaching 300 million. Migrant workers – or New Workers, as some of them prefer to be called – leave their rural hometowns in search of employment and better prospects in urban areas. Many of them have ‘left behind children’ or long-distance spouses. In their host cities, they live without residence status. A remnant of the planned economy, the difficulty of navigating China’s mandatory residential registration system has been compared to securing an immigrant visa to the US. Without this status, migrant workers are deprived of basic rights and social benefits such as healthcare and the ability to enroll their children in local public schools. Fan’s stardom transformed one such bardo zone into a pilgrimage site of sorts. Picun drew in reporters, professors, documentary makers, and vaguely lefty bookish types. At the heart of Picun was a small creative universe: a theater, a grass-roots museum dedicated to China’s migrant laborers, and a ‘New Workers’ Literature Group’, where dozens of members like Fan had been reading and writing together since 2014. A movement was born.

One Saturday morning last fall, after years of reading about the cohort, I caught an outbound No. 989 in Beijing, one of two commuter bus routes that share a stop outside the main entrance to Picun. As we drove, the trees lining the streets became sparser; apartment complexes gave way to older, low-rise buildings. The number of Audis and Teslas thinned; trucks, concrete mixers, and men and women braving the cold on e-bikes took over. At my destination, a number of these e-bikes were parked haphazardly by the side of the road, each of them with a quilted shield installed at the front. One of them belonged to the poet Xiao Hai, who greeted me. He wore a black baseball cap backwards, and walked with such a bounce in his step that he almost seemed to trot. The e-bikes are popular, he explained, because you don’t need a license to ride one. ‘These are called windbreaker quilts.’ He pointed to the shields at the front. We had exchanged messages for a while before my visit. I knew that working on an assembly line had made him feel like ‘a screw’, and that he loved Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In person, he was unreserved in talking about bitter experiences and emotions, yet this manner was balanced by a chirpy lightness. We walked toward the gate to Picun, a grayish stately minimalist arch befitting an open-air art center. This oddly placed structure was erected a couple of years after the literature group turned the neighborhood into a cultural attraction. The gate reads, in English, welcome to picun. ‘It’s very magical realism,’ Xiao Hai said. ‘It must have cost them millions of yuan.’ Inside was a typical ‘urban village’, a lively but underdeveloped area where migrant workers lived in close quarters. The main street was packed with modest establishments that served the some 20,000 people living here: liquor stores, grocers, pharmacies. Eateries selling piping hot rice noodles, lamb skewers or roasted ducks opened early and closed late. Their customers often worked shifts far away but preferred to eat here whenever they could, to stretch their paychecks a little further.

Xiao Hai recounted his employment history. It was long, especially considering that he was in his mid-thirties. Growing up in Henan Province, when he wasn’t in class, he helped his family in the wheat fields. He left home at fifteen – since then he had lost count of the jobs he had held in delivery, sales, electronics factories and garment mills. He likes to say he survived these days on Dylan’s songs and Hai Zi’s poems. In 2016, he worked at a kitchen appliance manufacturing plant in Zhejiang Province. As he plugged motors and buzzers onto circuit boards, he thought about how to escape. That summer, he arrived in the capital ‘in search of art’. Art was elusive, but he did find cheap lodging – for less than thirty yuan, or about four dollars, he could sleep in a bathhouse overnight – and a string of odd jobs. The next spring, he started working at a community second-hand clothing store in Picun. As he negotiated the alleyways, I realized I was being given a tour of Picun through Xiao Hai’s imagery. We were not far from the Capital International Airport, and passenger planes frequently passed overhead. Most of Xiao Hai’s peers had never used the country’s high-speed Gaotie trains, let alone boarded an airplane. ‘People in those planes up there are coming to do big business, but down here we’re trying as hard as we can to scrape out a living,’ he said.

We arrived at an open patch of deserted land. Two lonesome trees stood in the middle. ‘Do you see that apricot tree?’ Xiao Hai gestured toward one of them. ‘That’s where our museum and theater used to be.’ A few months ago, buildings in this area – including some of the gathering spaces the New Workers had used for more than a decade – were destroyed. Colonies like Picun offer migrant workers affordable rental housing and a sense of neighborliness, but to the authorities, these areas, with their run-down facilities and crowding of the so-called ‘mobile population’ of migrants, are stubborn impediments to development. In recent years, similar neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital had been demolished one after another. The New Workers braced themselves for what seemed an inevitability.

There had been premonitions of a coming change. For a decade, crackdowns on groups of citizens, including labor activists, has been coupled with a tightening control of speech. In late spring, Xiao Hai and the rest of Picun were confronted by giant red characters that read demolish on the walls. ‘The low-tech and the low-skilled are on their way out,’ Xiao Hai said. I thought of a few pricking lines he had posted on WeChat: ‘Picun, with its surroundings demolished / is like a centipede whose legs are broken / its shivering body wiggles in the directionless frigid wind.’

 

*

 

Back in New York, when I told people I know – writers and editors – about Fan Yusu’s viral essay, they often asked me: Did she go on to become, for lack of better words, a real writer? Did her writing save her from a life of drudgery? I fumbled to answer – not exactly because I couldn’t arrange the facts into a kind of response, but because, despite Fan’s vastly different circumstances, she was struggling with these same anxious preoccupations. How do we evaluate an act of writing if its author hasn’t been anointed by a publisher or a reviewer and enough remuneration to live by?

In 2019, when I first connected with Fan on WeChat, it appeared that, off the strength of her essay, she had a book in the works. But she wasn’t certain if her manuscript would end up in print. Last year, a reputable literary imprint in Beijing released Fan’s debut novel, an autofictional story with a fantastical twist called Reunion after a Long Separation. She joined Xiao Hai and me in the migrant children’s library, one of the last remaining footholds of the New Workers in Picun. It was a sun-drenched room where wooden shelves lined the walls. Among the colorful books on display were Andersen’s Fairy Tales, The Little Prince and a youth edition of How the Steel Was Tempered by the Soviet writer of socialist realism, Nikolai Ostrovsky.

Fan was wearing a lilac scarf, creamy-beige booties and a headband that looked like braided hair. One might reasonably expect her to be basking in the triumphant glow of becoming a published author. Book events had brought her to Shanghai three times. She was a guest on the actress Annie Yi’s talk show. (Yi, who’s a few years Fan’s senior, presents agelessly, like a Korean film star. In a tastefully dim tatami room, Yi gushed about the new book: ‘I read it in one sitting and took it to the bathroom when I had to go!’) At the library, however, Fan began a Darwinistic spiel about her career, as if by beating herself down she might prevent some invisible enemy from doing so. ‘Do I fancy myself a famous writer? I ought to fill a basin with water and take a good look at my reflection,’ she said. Survival, after all, was the most important thing. ‘Even the most pedantically delusional people know they have to eat.’ Slightly taken aback by this intense harshness toward herself and her aspirations, I tried to gently challenge her by evoking Zhang Huiyu, the Peking University scholar. For years, Zhang was a committed mentor and editor to the New Workers group in Picun. He commuted there every weekend to host seminars, and prepared teaching materials on his own dime. ‘Given Prof Huiyu’s status, his work is not delusional. It’s meaningful,’ Fan said. ‘For people like Xiao Hai and me, getting distracted from making a living is delusional.’

Fame had left her worse off than she’d been before, in terms of earnings, she said, letting out a laugh. To make more time for writing, Fan gave up working as a nanny, which paid about 7,000 yuan monthly. The more flexible hourly cleaning jobs she took on paid 5,000. ‘I used to be able to save up about 10,000 yuan at the end of each year. Not anymore. When things are hard, I borrow 500 from Xiao Hai.’ Fan’s older daughter landed an office job, but her younger child was still in school and depended on her. Earlier that day, when we were coordinating via message, I’d worked up the courage to ask – in hindsight, insensitively – if we could meet at her place. She politely declined, and suggested the children’s library. She had lived in the same place – a 100-square-foot room – for more than a decade. The rent had gone up from 200 yuan to 500. ‘An apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom costs more than 1,000 now,’ she said. The inconvenience of using shared facilities buys her a little financial freedom. She was really okay with the situation, though, she said. ‘What is 10,000 in savings good for? Not enough to squander on a meal for the rich,’ she said.

Many in the Chinese literary scene were attracted to these unvarnished voices. Wu Qi, editor of the cultural criticism journal One-Way, describes a kind of ‘directness’ in their prose. ‘There is the urgency that “I have to tell you my story and this is how I feel”,’ Wu said. This doesn’t happen as often with professional writers. ‘I read too many pieces that are bound up in theories. They turn writing into something mysterious.’ A few years ago, Wu invited a few Picun writers to contribute short essays to an issue of One-Way themed around the changing capital city and the people in it. Fan Wei, a carpenter from Shandong, wrote about the night he left home: in the back of a truck a group of young men, strangers to each other, helped load motorcycles. If the authorities checked, the legitimate goods would give cover for the illicit passengers. Guo Fulai, a blacksmith in his fifties, wrote about sharing a shed with a dozen men on a job. Bored and lonely, they near-unanimously voted to keep a rat as their collective pet. ‘This Beijing rat is so pretty,’ one of them said. ‘How do you know this rat is from Beijing? They don’t carry identity cards,’ another shot back.

These eye-level accounts document the particular moments and conditions of the authors’ lives. They no doubt resonate with the countless migrant workers across the country, who have few ways to express themselves, administratively or artistically. It also challenges wealthier readers. As in many places, the prevailing narratives of modern life in China, political or commercial, are shallow versions of the real thing. Take the rise of shopping malls in recent years: in Shanghai alone, there are now 400 of them. Upwardly mobile influencers and consumers are obsessed with new trend-setting brands and rave about Michelin-starred restaurants. The mall cleaners, on the other hand, live in fear of the hype and crowds. In 2023, Zhang Xiaoman, an office worker who invited her mother to live with her in Shenzhen, published the book My Mother is a Cleaner. She describes how, to maintain an optimal environment to inspire spending, cleaners are assigned impossible goals: ‘For every customer who walks into the mall, everything they lay their eyes on has to be clean,’ Zhang writes. If only there were less foot traffic, the cleaners secretly wish, they wouldn’t be inundated with ‘so many footprints to mop, so many fingerprints to wipe, so many milk teacups, dirty tissues, hair, leaflets and masks to pick up’. Another book from last year, I Delivered Packages in Beijing by Hu Anyan, describes the highly segmented lives of delivery workers. The computerized systems they rely on are often unreasonable, so are the human managers who tell employees to strive for ‘above and beyond’. One of them asks his subordinates to help take out their customers’ trash; another makes the case that an imminent pay cut is really a raise in disguise. One demanding customer berates Hu with the American-sounding slogan ‘the Customer is God’. Hu blurts out: ‘But I have to serve so many Gods every day.’ Despite himself, before quitting the job, Hu found himself tenderly bidding a silent farewell to his clients. ‘I felt as if I had participated in and witnessed parts of their lives: their homes, their families, their pets and their different personalities and manners.’

Writers and editors are often hard-wired to distrust obvious storylines. The usual instinct is to explore unusual conundrums and unanticipated twists of fate. This mentality is partly what fueled the popularity of the Fan Yusu story. As one editor put it, ‘It creates this intriguing image: late at night, a middle-aged nanny is engrossed in Leo Tolstoy and Maupassant.’ But what happens next? For middle-class readers living in capitalist societies, the undesirable everyday realities of poverty and exploitations are not just unsurprising, but bone-deep knowledge that dictates their life choices – trying hard to get into good schools, hanging on to dead-end desk jobs and seeking therapy in consumerism. If a story builds a certain kind of tension, a reader might reasonably expect a resolution. There is, unfortunately, no clear way out: Sisyphus still pushes the rock, to borrow Xiao Hai’s favorite metaphor for the daily grind.

Making garments in Suzhou, Xiao Hai often wondered, ‘Am I creating value or am I producing trash?’ He sat at his post in an electronics workshop ‘day in and day out / wielding a soldering iron / on the youthful dreams, lonely longings and feelings of being lost / melding them all onto tiny resistors’.

‘When you chat with friends, you can’t be all pain and bitterness. In poetry, I’m closer to my soul,’ Xiao Hai told me. He prefers being known by his nickname, which means ‘Little Sea’. It reimagines his small life and connects it to something bigger. ‘When people call me Hu Liushuai, I feel like I’m back in a factory,’ he said.

 

*

 

For much of the twentieth century, the idea that Chinese literature and art should be focused on – and sometimes created by – the working and farming poor was not at all unusual. In the 1930s, some of the most revered writers in modern Chinese literature, including Lu Xun and Ding Ling, formed a secret alliance of left-wing writers and wrote to promote the Communist cause to the public. By the mid-century, they had prevailed, so to speak. In Mao’s China, writers and scholars were officially tasked with connecting with the peasants and the working class: to be their microphone, if not their voice. They went on assignments similar to Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, collecting folktales, poems, and getting to know the experiences and perspectives of the salt-of-the-earth that the party proclaimed to serve. This kind of fieldwork was known as ‘caifeng’, or ‘collecting the wind’. A 1963 volume recorded a line of lyrics from southern China, ‘Everything belonged to the slave-owner, only the songs belonged to me.’

All writing in the early days of Communism was geared toward class criticism. Stark inequality, the literature of the time asserted, was a matter of the past. A 1950s hit about a titular ‘White Haired Girl’ who hides in a cave to escape a landlord’s abuses is still performed by ballet troupes today. Zhou Bapi, a greedy landlord from a 1955 novel, who mimics the roosters’ crow to make his laborers start working earlier, continues to be a shorthand for unreasonable bosses. Some literary journals dedicated columns to publish the work of non-professional worker and farmer writers. Hong Zicheng, a Peking University professor of literature, describes how leftist literature or, to be precise, ‘Worker-Peasant-Soldier’ literature became ‘the only legitimate existing form’ in this period, and dominated not only the subject matter of literature, but also the way in which writing was distributed and received.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s wife, the actress Jiang Qing, propagated a rubric for how characters should be created: in short, first, authors had to focus on positive characters, and then zoom in on the most heroic characters. The work that resulted was often varying degrees of dullness. Who wants to read stories without delicious villains and superfluous characters with too much going on in their heads? This cultural shift also contributed to the intensity of the political drama of the times: audiences primed to look for outsized heroes felt at home in a cult of personality. Weary of the predictable patterns of this style of writing, authors began to focus on hyper-realistic depictions of life in the 1980s, and for the most part avoided politics. The aversion was natural enough, but it began limiting the scope of Chinese literature from the other direction.

In a vastly changed country, what was once an orthodox style of writing has now been reborn as a curiosity in the work of the migrant writers. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, China’s population was mostly rural, and people worked and lived not far from where they were born. Today, the majority of the Chinese population live in urban areas. Migrant workers’ day-to-day realities are disconnected from those of their childhoods. The idea of ‘home’ is fading. Policy-oriented, top-down narratives from the likes of the People’s Daily and the World Bank like to celebrate this as progress without recognizing the underside: hundreds of millions of people – the workforce who transformed the country following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – they often say, have been ‘lifted out of poverty’. Who are the most heroic characters here?

The stories being written by Picun writers and their peers show the effort and the ingenuity required to survive as migrant workers, builders of the economic miracle. They describe glaring injustices, prejudices and inequalities without editorializing these realities. One night in 2017, not long before the release of the One-Way issue, a fire killed nineteen migrant workers in a district not far from Picun. The authorities began inspecting buildings and evicting those who lived in the area, referring to them as ‘low-end population’. (Suddenly, the original title of the One-Way issue ‘Beijing Outsiders’ became jarringly pointed. Wu’s team changed it to ‘New Beijinger’.) Fan found this catch-all demeaning. ‘How can the vast majority be “marginal” or “low-end”?’ She turned to me, as if looking for reasons to trust. ‘I guess you must be on the side of the vast majority, aren’t you?’ She recited one of her first-grade lessons from 1979. ‘Workers, farmers, soldiers and scientists. What do you want to be when you grow up?’ The possibilities were endless, the line seemed to suggest, because it was a world in which, whatever path you chose, everyone would be equal.

 

*

 

In a noodle joint on the main street of Picun, I met with the nanny Li Wenli, who uses the pen name Meng Yu, or ‘Dream Drizzle’. She was enjoying her weekly day off. Delicate-looking and softly-spoken, Li wore a pink jacket, and she had an innocent charm about her. When she wasn’t on the clock, she liked to find a quiet place where she could draw or write. She showed me some of her work. In her pictures a long-haired woman is often at the center: she dances; she puts on a nice dress and has a cup of coffee; she enjoys the breeze; she wades into a body of water; she hugs her knees and cries. Li told me she’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, after reading a news story about a thirty-eight-year-old live-in nanny in Wuhan, who’d died with bruises and other signs of abuse all over her body. ‘I stayed awake thinking, why am I doing this job?’ she said. ‘Some employers will tell you at the outset, “Don’t get comfortable. I’ve bought you.” ’ Li was in her fifties, and her three children were all fully grown. A doctor had been telling her she needed to take things easy, but she had no realistic pathway to retirement. ‘My children are all married. They have jobs. This should be what happiness looks like. But I still feel bitter from time to time.’

Nannies might be paid better than cleaners, but that didn’t translate to more respect, Fan said. Stories about families beating their nannies are so common they often don’t make the news, but even when they do, people scroll right past them. ‘If the subject is a child from a wealthy family, then all of a sudden life is precious.’ I asked if she saw herself as a voice for those who were, as she put it, ‘filtered out’? ‘Everyone lives in their own isolation,’ Fan said. ‘I don’t think about writing in response to what’s in the news, or writing about what the readers are interested in. I don’t know this stuff.’ Her first publisher had suggested that she should write non-fiction – the genre that was expected of her. She disagreed, and insisted that the book she wanted to write was a novel. The publisher backed out. After years of fruitless conversations, she finally signed a contract. ‘Having a publisher who is willing to work with me made me stop thinking I was horrible at writing.’ But it was still very hard every time she faced the blank page, she said, lifting up the braided headband she was wearing. It turned out to be securing a wig over her thinning hair.

In Fan’s book, a mystical mulberry tree watches over the protagonist wherever she goes. It roots for her, while her romantic interests and employers fail to. She searches for more from life, but what she finds are menial jobs and deceitful people. Snide and disdainful remarks await her: ‘The temperament of a lady meets the fate of a maid.’ Only the tree spirit sees her for her, untethered from the station she is slated for in this lifetime. When I asked Fan what inspired her, she became animated. She had a hazy, early memory of picking mulberries from under a large tree. She returned to the same place when she was older, but the tree was nowhere to be found. She kept thinking about that tree, longing for the taste of its fruit. She asked her mother about it, and was told the tree had been cut down. ‘A seed fell down in my village god knows how many years ago, and it grew into that tree near my home,’ Fan said. ‘It’s a cold, mean world.’

 

Artwork by Ma Junyan, Fan Yusu and Xiao Hai, 2021
Courtesy of Sixth Tone

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]]> Shot in the 1960s, Printed Yesterday https://granta.com/shot-in-the-1960s-printed-yesterday/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:51:03 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=122058 ‘It is rare to see photos of Daqing from the 1960s that are not part of the official feting of the oil boom.’

Photography by Haoihui Liu, introduced by Granta.

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]]> Last year the photographer Haohui Liu revisited a single roll of negatives left behind by his late grandfather, Zhangming Chen, a professor of geology in Daqing, a city of three million in China’s far northeastern province of Heilongjiang. Daqing occupies a special place in post-war Chinese history. In 1959, oil was discovered in the area. Engineers and technicians such as Zhangming were dispatched to the city to manage the production boom that followed. Many spent the rest of their lives there. In Daqing’s harsh winters, the countryfolk who came to the city for work wore heavy padded clothes similar to prisoners. There are stories of the local police confusing them for runaway convicts when they returned home. In the 1960s, the Western powers, led by the United States, enforced an energy embargo on Mao’s China, an act of aggression compounded by the Sino–Soviet split, when the Kremlin also restricted supplies to the country. Faced with spiraling scarcity – Beijing buses in the period were converted to run off natural gas packs due to the lack of petrol – the ramped-up production of oil at Daqing made the city a savior of the revolution. ‘In Industry, Learn from Daqing’ runs one of Mao’s injunctions from the period. The city’s name, which was given to mark the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic, means ‘Great Celebration’.

It is rare to see photos of Daqing from the 1960s that are not part of the official feting of the oil boom. Haohui’s grandfather was able to borrow a camera from his brother-in-law who had bought one while studying in the Soviet Union. It seems that he used his roll sparingly, taking these photographs over the course of many years. The images capture the grand hopes of these heady times, from a part of China that felt it was pulling the country into modernity. The faraway looks of the figures gazing beyond the horizon appear to funnel the great expectations of the pioneers of modern China. ‘Each face tells a story of endurance and adaptation,’ Haohui said. ‘They reflect the deep interconnection between the city’s people and its environment.’ The legacy of this period of industrial confidence can still be seen in Daqing today, in its sculptures and museums, as well as the pumpjacks that continue to work alongside the roads. The locals call them ‘kow-tow machines’.

Haohui’s achievement with these photographs – collated within his project ‘Shot in the 1960s, Printed Yesterday: The Great Celebration’ – surpasses mere restoration of images that would have otherwise been lost or destroyed. He has employed darkroom techniques that introduce new textures, accentuating the age and wear of the originals. ‘My approach goes beyond traditional printing,’ Haohui told Granta. ‘I experimented with alternative processes to create patterns reminiscent of oil, linking the physical medium of the photographs to the essence of Daqing itself.’ Much of the finessing came from Haohui spraying or damping developer to the paper, creating an uneven finish, as well as using mordançage. The silver gelatin – which is the dark part of the image – was lifted by chemicals, manipulated, and re-fixed onto the paper. The specialized technique requires copper chloride, acetic acid and hydrogen peroxide, so one has to be careful about ventilation.

The history of oil in Daqing in many ways tells the story of China itself. A country that had minimal energy demand in the 1960s started to export its oil in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily to Japan. To think of China as an oil exporter is difficult to imagine today, when the country has become the world’s largest fossil fuel importer. If the story of Daqing is being reprised anywhere, it is in the Chinese factories spitting out electronic vehicles at staggering speed, and in the mines of southern Africa, where Chinese companies extract the ingredients of the Green Revolution. Unlike the fossil fuel craze of Daqing in the 1960s, the Green boom has never been a secret, and its images are plentiful.

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Photography © Haohui Liu

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]]> Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It https://granta.com/tomorrow-ill-get-past-it/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:48:16 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=121905 ‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’

Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.

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]]> 1

 

I’m a humble writer who recently published a pair of short stories in two relatively unknown literary journals. The first story was 3,587 characters, which includes punctuation marks. The second story was a bit longer, coming in at 4,623 characters, also including punctuation marks.

I’m getting ready to write a novel based on a few ideas that have been living inside my mind for the past twenty-odd years. The ideas aren’t the best neighbors; not only do they not get along with each other, but they often get into fights. I know they’re all vying to be the ‘first written’ out of my mind and onto paper. I try to persuade them that being the ‘first written’ isn’t as important as being ‘well written’. But they lack confidence in my writing ability. According to them, I’ve only got one novel in me. They’re afraid that if they don’t make it out first, they will end up dying in incubation. Thanks to their incessant arguing, I haven’t been able to write a single character in twenty years. Of course, this is merely an excuse. The real reason is my lack of confidence in ever getting my novel published.

One afternoon twenty years ago, I cautiously stepped through the gate of a famous publishing house. Following the mottled cement staircase up to the fifth floor, I gently knocked on the unlatched door of the editorial office for literature. A woman’s voice responded:

‘Come in.’

I pushed open the door and went in. Although there were a dozen desks in the room, there were only two people inside, a man and a woman. The male editor looked to be in his early twenties while the woman was around forty. The woman asked me:

‘Who are you looking for?’

I was at a loss as I stared at the tall pile of unopened packages of manuscripts stacked up on the desk. There was another batch of manuscripts stacked up in the corner of the room. The young male editor was sitting beside the desk closest to the door. Seeing that all the manuscripts on his desk were addressed to someone named Sun Qiang, I said:

‘I’m here to see Sun Qiang.’

The female editor pointed to the male editor and said: ‘He’s Sun Qiang.’

The editor named Sun Qiang looked at me in confusion. He couldn’t remember ever having seen me before. I flashed him a modest smile before taking out of my backpack copies of the two journals that had previously published my short stories. I opened them up to the page where my stories appeared and handed them to him, pointing out which one was my first published work and which was the second. He glanced at the magazines before asking:

‘What do you want?’

I said I had a few ideas for a novel that I wanted to bounce off him; if he was interested in any of them, I could go home and get right to work. I pulled up a chair and sat down, preparing to tell him all about my ideas when he interrupted me:

‘Hey, I’m not a doctor.’

I was a bit taken aback. Not understanding what he meant, I hesitated for a moment before going on to tell him about my first idea. I only got through the first two sentences when he interrupted me again:

‘Didn’t I just tell you, I’m not a doctor at some medical clinic!’

‘I know,’ I began to grow uneasy. ‘You’re a literary editor.’

That’s when someone with a woven plastic bag came in to collect the recyclables. He seemed to be close with the editors because he pointed to the pile of manuscripts in the corner and said:

‘Not too many today.’

With that, he squatted down to dump the manuscripts into the woven plastic bag. Meanwhile, Sun Qiang got up and walked out. He didn’t bother giving me a second look; it was as if I didn’t even exist. I sat there awkwardly for a moment before the female editor said:

‘Why don’t you head home? You can send us your manuscript when it’s done.’

I nodded. Glancing at the person in the corner who was still filling the garbage bag with unopened manuscripts, I got up and walked out of the office. Standing on the street, staring back at this famous publishing house, I knew what the fate of my ideas would be if I ever sent them here. They would be crammed into that woven plastic garbage bag, and sold to a recycling center to be made into new paper.

Later, I went to a not-so-famous publishing house where I met an editor in his fifties. While he stopped short of saying ‘I’m not a doctor’, he also had no interest in listening to my ideas. While his attitude was much friendlier than Sun Qiang’s, he still just briefly thumbed through the copies of those two relatively unknown literary journals I brought and told me frankly that it is extremely difficult for an unknown author to publish a novel. Seeing my dejected response, he offered a smile and asked:

‘Do you want to write to be famous, or do you have a real passion for literature?’

‘I have a true passion for literature,’ I responded without hesitation.

‘Then that’s going to be difficult,’ he said. ‘If you want, you can try the route of self-publishing. That involves paying us to issue an ISBN and then finding a printer. You could print around 500 copies to give to your relatives and friends.’

What he said perked my interest so I asked: ‘How much is an ISBN number? What would it cost to print 500 copies of a book?’

‘The ISBN will set you back 15,000 RMB; 500 copies will cost around 5,000 RMB to print. You’re looking at 20,000 to publish your book.’

‘Wow, so expensive!’ I cried. At the time my monthly salary was only 200 RMB.

‘When independent book publishers purchase ISBNs from us, we charge them 20,000. We only offer them 15,000 a title when they buy more than ten from us at a time.’ He paused for a moment: ‘I’m actually offering you our bulk rate.’

‘I don’t understand, why would independent publishers need to purchase ISBNs from you?’

‘Only legitimate state-owned publishers are permitted to issue ISBN numbers. Private enterprises technically aren’t allowed to run publishing houses, so they have to purchase ISBN numbers from state-owned publishers.’

‘And what if I don’t want the ISBN number and just publish my novel on my own by going directly to a printer?’

‘That would be considered an illegal publication.’

‘Is that dangerous?’

‘Well, they could arrest you and throw you in prison!’

I got up and left that not-so-famous publishing house, staggering dejectedly down the street and later staggering dejectedly through every moment of the ensuing years.

I once hoped that my son might take up literature and fulfill my unrealized dreams, but all he was interested in was video games. When he was in middle school my little brother gave him a PlayStation Portable (PSP). Every night he played video games under the covers in bed. Now that he is all grown up and has a job, he doesn’t have to hide anymore and can openly play video games on his phone whenever he wants. My niece, on the other hand, was obsessed with books. My weak literary genes skipped my son and somehow ended up with her. I have always treated my niece like my own daughter, meticulously tutoring her and helping her with her homework, from elementary school all the way through high school. By the time she reached college she no longer needed my help. She began to publish her essays in magazines, followed by a series of short stories. One after another, her stories appeared in print like a flurry of flowers blooming in spring – there was no stopping her.

When her first collection of short stories was published, it was brought out by that famous publishing house. Sun Qiang, the young editor who once told me ‘I’m not a doctor’, was now the head of the house and he personally moderated the discussion at her book launch. Sun Qiang referred to her as ‘Eileen Chang reincarnated’, while the media referred to her as a representative figure in the new wave of ‘attractive women writers’.

That was also when she got pregnant. Out of the blue, she was going to have a child.

She woke up one day in the afternoon and began to suspect that she might be pregnant. Ever since she began her career as a writer, she stopped getting up early and would sleep until noon. After waking up that day, she washed up, brushed her teeth, got dressed and put on her makeup, before telling her parents that it had been two months since her last period and she was going to go to the hospital to check if she was pregnant. With that, she went out the door without bothering to eat anything.

My brother and sister-in-law sat there staring at each other in shock. It took a moment for what she said to sink in. My brother even asked my sister-in-law: ‘What did she just say?’

After thinking about it for a second, my sister-in-law said: ‘She said she was going to check something at the hospital.’

‘Did she say she was going to check if she was pregnant?’ my brother asked.

My sister-in-law nodded. ‘I think that’s what she said . . .’

‘How is that even possible?’ my brother yelled. ‘She’s not even married! Hell, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend!’

‘She may not be married . . .’ my sister-in-law replied, ‘but maybe she does have a boyfriend?’

‘Did she ever mention anything about having a boyfriend to you?’

‘Never.’

‘Me neither.’

My brother called me and the first words out of his mouth were: ‘Do you know if Mianyang has a boyfriend?’

Mianyang, or ‘sheep’, is my niece’s pen name. Once she had gained some degree of celebrity on the literary scene, her parents seemed to have forgotten her real name; instead, they always referred to her as Mianyang.

‘Mianyang has a boyfriend?’ I asked through the phone. ‘What does he do for a living?’

‘We’re actually not sure if she has a boyfriend or not; do you know anything about her having a boyfriend?’ he asked.

‘If you don’t know, how do you expect me to know?’ I replied.

‘There are some things that Mianyang refuses to share with us but tells you.’

Those ‘things’ she shares with me are all related to literature. ‘I don’t know. She never mentioned anything about a boyfriend to me,’ I said.

‘If you don’t even know whether or not she has a boyfriend, how the hell did she end up pregnant?’ he said.

I could hear my sister-in-law: ‘She’s getting it checked out right now, we still don’t know if she is really pregnant.’

‘How is that possible?’ I asked.

My brother started to explain what was happening over the phone, with my sister-in-law repeatedly cutting in. Eventually, my brother grew irritated and barked at his wife: ‘Can you stop interrupting me!’

My sister-in-law instead snatched the phone from my brother and said: ‘She blurted out something about possibly being pregnant and ran off to the hospital!’

‘Maybe she’s in the middle of writing a novel and was just reciting some dialogue from her story without even realizing it?’ I suggested.

‘That’s a possibility,’ said my sister-in-law. ‘Actually, she has been acting a bit strange ever since she became a writer.’

‘Aren’t all writers a bit strange?’ my brother asked.

‘What can I say . . . ?’ I replied. ‘I suppose that sometimes they act normal, and sometimes they act strange.’

‘Then how come you’re always so normal?’ my sister-in-law asked.

‘That’s because my brother isn’t a real writer,’ I could hear my brother explaining to her.

‘Shh, lower your voice,’ my sister-in-law whispered to him.

‘No need to lower your voice,’ I said. ‘I can hear everything, and you’re right, I’m no writer!’

Mianyang came back from the hospital around 4 p.m.; she handed her parents the lab report and told them she was pregnant. Facing their flustered expressions, she casually instructed them that, from that day forward, she would be resting at home to ensure the health of her baby. She would be taking all of her meals in her room and, besides going to the bathroom, would not be leaving her bed until the baby was born. With that, she went into her bedroom, closed the door, and climbed into bed.

My brother and sister-in-law butted heads as they simultaneously looked down to read the result of the pregnancy test – it was indeed positive. My sister-in-law rushed into Mianyang’s bedroom screaming:

‘You’re not even married! How could you possibly be pregnant?’

‘What, you can’t get pregnant unless your married?’

Desperate for help, my sister-in-law turned to my brother, who also began yelling: ‘Since when did you even have a boyfriend? How come you never told us?’

‘You tell me, since when have I ever had a boyfriend?’ Mianyang retorted.

My brother and sister-in-law looked at each other in confusion; it was only after a long pause that my brother finally asked: ‘So you don’t have a boyfriend?’

‘No,’ replied Mianyang.

That sent my sister-in-law into another frantic attack: ‘How could you possibly get pregnant without a boyfriend?’

‘I have a lover,’ replied Mianyang.

My brother and sister-in-law stood there gaping, but Mianyang simply signaled for them to leave her room.

‘Close the door on the way out,’ she told them.

They stood there without moving, still wondering what exactly she meant by the word ‘lover’.

Mianyang began to grow impatient: ‘Hey, I’m trying to rest in order to prevent a miscarriage!’

That night they called me up and asked me to come by their apartment. Since Mianyang became a writer, my brother and sister-in-law had been going everywhere with an expression of pride plastered all over their faces. Now they had a distressed look on their faces, as if they were in need of a good scrub. They couldn’t make head nor tail of the strange words coming out of Mianyang’s mouth. They asked me what the difference was between a boyfriend and a lover.

I didn’t know either, but after thinking about it I had a hunch about what Mianyang meant. I told them that ‘boyfriend’ likely referred to someone unmarried whereas ‘lover’ probably referred to someone already married.

‘What?’ my brother gasped. ‘Don’t tell me that Mianyang is someone’s mistress?’

Tears began to pour down my sister-in-law’s face as she exclaimed: ‘It’s so dreadfully shameful! Just the thought of Mianyang being someone’s mistress, getting knocked up, and even insisting on keeping the baby!’

‘Girls today are different from your generation,’ I said, trying to console her. ‘There seem to be a lot of girls who end up with married men these days.’

Her cries became more audible: ‘If Mianyang gives birth to an illegitimate child, how will we ever be able to face anyone?’

‘This is all your fault!’ my brother snapped at me. ‘Ever since she was little you would buy her those literary books and you encouraged her to become a writer. Well, look at her now, reduced to someone’s mistress!’

‘I did indeed encourage her to become a writer,’ I replied. ‘But I certainly never encouraged her to be anyone’s mistress!’

He raised his voice. ‘Do you think she would have ever ended up a mistress if she wasn’t a writer?’

His ridiculous logic was getting under my skin and I said: ‘Well, you’re the one who ruined my son by giving him that damn PSP! Ever since then he has been addicted to video games and has never had an ounce of professional drive!’

‘I’d much prefer it if things had been reversed. Wouldn’t it have been great if you gave Mianyang a PSP and I helped foster your son’s literary talent?’

Speechless with anger, my sister-in-law spoke for me. She pointed at my brother’s nose, and yelled: ‘What do you know about literature? You think you would know the first thing about how to foster someone’s literary talent?’

My brother remained silent while my sister-in-law pleaded with me: ‘Please try to talk some sense into Mianyang. She always listens to you.’

I turned to my brother but he was avoiding my gaze. I figured, forget it, no sense in being petty with him. I approached the door to Mianyang’s bedroom and, just as I was about to knock, heard her voice talking on the phone to someone and lowered my hand.

I could hear her saying: ‘I’m not coming out to see you. I need to stay home and rest up for the baby . . . don’t worry, I have no intention of breaking up your family . . . I’m keeping the baby. I’ll raise the baby by myself. You don’t need to have anything to do with us . . . I already told you, I’m not going to see you. I need to stay at home resting to ensure I don’t have a miscarriage . . . I’m tired, I need to focus on what’s best for the baby.’

There was a period of silence, and after a while it seemed like Mianyang had hung up.

I gently knocked on the door and heard Mianyang respond: ‘I’m resting, please do not disturb me.’

‘It’s me,’ I whispered.

‘Uncle?’

‘Yes, can I come in?’

‘Uh.’

I opened the door to see Mianyang sitting up in bed with her phone, staring at me. ‘Did they ask you to come?’

I nodded. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m doing great,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘I heard.’

I wasn’t quite sure what else to say. My sister-in-law asked me to come over to talk some sense into her, but she never explained what exactly that entailed.

I stood there like an idiot for a while before saying: ‘Well, you’d better get some rest.’

‘Uh.’

As I was gently closing the door to her room on my way out, I noticed her flash me a warm smile. Returning to the living room, my sister-in-law anxiously asked:

‘So, what happened?’

‘What do you mean what happened?’

‘Were you able to talk some sense into her?’

‘What exactly did you want me to say to her? It’s not like you gave me any instructions.’

It was only then that we realized how confused the three of us were by the previous argument. We talked it over and agreed that the best course of action would be to persuade Mianyang to get an abortion so we could all move past this as if nothing ever happened. My brother’s temper was out of control; he kept yelling about wanting to go find the bastard that did this and make him pay. I told him that was a secondary matter we could worry about later. Right now the main thing was to persuade Mianyang to get an abortion. My sister-in-law criticized her husband. ‘All he ever does is lose his temper without coming up with anything practical,’ she said. My brother took a deep gulp, swallowing the flurry of curses he wanted to unleash upon his wife. They asked me to try talking to Mianyang again, but I refused. I told them that we should give Mianyang a few days to think things over. Who knows, perhaps she would come around on her own and go to the hospital to have the abortion.

Mianyang remained in bed for the next week, she described it as part of the regime to prevent a miscarriage. My brother and sister-in-law were only allowed into her bedroom to bring her food, but whenever they heard her phone ring, they would scurry over to the door to eavesdrop. A lot of the calls came from that person Mianyang described as her ‘lover’; he seemed to be insisting that she go out to meet him so they could talk things over, because they repeatedly heard her say:

‘I’m not going out; I need to rest up for the safety of the baby.’

There were several occasions in which my brother and sister-in-law tried to cautiously feel out what they could learn about this man, but Mianyang would just say: ‘I’m not telling you anything about him.’

At one point, Mianyang seemed to lose her patience and said, ‘He’s an old man, okay!’

My sister-in-law responded in horror: ‘An old man?’

‘That’s right, I like older men!’ replied Mianyang.

My brother hit himself in the face, yelling: ‘How could you end up in a relationship with an old man?’

‘Well, he’s not as old as you,’ Mianyang replied.

It was sometime after that I received an unexpected call. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was in the middle of lunch when my phone rang. I heard a deep voice on the other end:

‘This is Sun Qiang.’

‘Who?’ My speech wasn’t clear since I had food in my mouth.

The person on the other line said: ‘I think we have a bad connection, I can’t hear you so well.’

I spat the food out of my mouth. ‘Who is this?’

‘This is Sun Qiang.’

‘Sun Qiang from where?’

The self-introduction I heard coming over the other end of the phone left me reeling. He said that Mianyang told him I had some good story ideas for a novel and he was quite interested. He asked when I might have time to meet so he could hear about my story ideas.

‘I’m free anytime,’ I blurted out.

‘How about right now?’ Sun Qiang asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Okay, I’ll text you an address. See you soon.’

After Sun Qiang hung up, I told my wife how impressed I was with Mianyang. After all those years of supporting her dream to be a writer, she was now doing something to repay my kindness. My wife didn’t understand what I was saying so I told her about the call. That’s when my phone buzzed; Sun Qiang texted the address. I got up and headed out the door. I could hear my wife calling out behind me:

‘Hey, you still haven’t finished your lunch!’

I was fifty years old at the time and literature was like a pool of dead water in my heart. Sun Qiang’s phone call was like someone tossing a grenade into that pool, setting off an explosion of waves. As I walked down the street, my legs seemed to regain the nimble gait I had when I was young. I squeezed onto the bus, my body felt like I was twenty all over again. After transferring three times, I arrived at the teahouse Sun Qiang had directed me to, filled with a passion and excitement I hadn’t felt for decades.

Sun Qiang was already there waiting for me in a private room. I went in and introduced myself. He was somewhat overweight and stood up to shake my hand before asking me to have a seat. I sat down and looked at him; his smile appeared forced.

‘Mianyang tells me you were the one who first opened her eyes to literature,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure I can take credit for that,’ I replied. ‘I just helped her with homework essays and gave her some writing tips.’

He nodded but didn’t say anything else. I was waiting for him to ask about my ideas for a novel but after a while his expression seemed to indicate his mind was elsewhere. Finally, I decided to take the initiative and tell him about my thoughts.

‘I’ve actually got ideas for four different novels. The first one is a work of historical fiction set against the Revolution of 1911, the second one is a Sino-Japanese War novel –’

‘How is Mianyang doing?’ he asked.

I paused for a moment before responding, ‘Not so good . . .’

‘What’s wrong?’

I hesitated, not knowing if I should share her situation with him.

‘What’s going on with Mianyang?’ he prodded.

‘She’s pregnant,’ I whispered. The second I blurted that out I regretted it. I hastily added: ‘No one knows about this besides my brother, my sister-in-law, and my wife – not even my son knows. You’re actually only the fifth person to learn about this, please don’t let there be a sixth.’

‘Rest assured, I won’t let there be a sixth.’ His expression became stern. ‘Who’s the father?’

‘None of us know,’ I said. ‘She won’t tell us.’

He heaved a gentle sigh of relief. Taking a sip of tea he suddenly remembered the reason for our meeting and asked: ‘So how many ideas did you say you had?’

‘Four.’

‘And what’s the first one?’

‘It’s a novel about the Revolution of 1911.’

‘Don’t touch that one.’ He waved his hands. ‘That is an important historical event that requires approval from the higher-ups. It’s too much trouble. What’s the second one?’

‘It’s set against the Sino-Japanese War.’

‘Forget that one too.’ Again he waved his hands in a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s a topic that has been overdone. Do you know what the greatest battle of the Sino-Japanese War was?’

‘The 1937 Battle of Shanghai?’

He shook his head.

I tried again: ‘The Battle of Changsha?’

He shook his head again and offered: ‘It took place in Zhejiang at the site of the Hengdian World Studios.’

Seeing the confused look on my face, he explained, ‘The number of Japanese killed in Hengdian surpassed the current population of Japan today. And what’s your third idea?’

‘The third one is centered around a new idea I’ve been playing with these past few years, but I’m still working on it.’ I started to feel a bit uncertain about the project.

‘What genre?’

‘It’s a realist work,’ I said, ‘about forced evictions.’

For the third time, he waved his hands, explaining: ‘Let me tell you, I’ve got more than a dozen drafts of self-criticism reports I’ve been forced to write for books like that in my desk drawer. Whenever one of our books is criticized by the higher-ups, I pick a draft version of the report that best suits the current project, do some light revisions, and submit it.’

‘If it is so dangerous, why do you bother pushing ahead with the book’s publication?’

‘Because those are the books that make money,’ he said. ‘After all, we are a state-owned publishing house. But the state doesn’t give us one cent of subsidies and we are forced to make a profit on our own. So in order to make money we have to take certain risks.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But since I’m not famous, I don’t think anything I write will make you any money.’

He nodded. ‘You can start by writing something that isn’t so controversial.’

‘My fourth idea should be relatively safe.’

‘What’s that one about?’

‘It’s an old-style story.’

‘From what era?’

‘The late Qing, early Republican era.’

‘Does it feature the Chinese Communist Party?’

‘No.’

‘What about the Nationalist Party?’

‘No.’

‘What’s the story about?’

‘The vicissitudes of life.’

‘That’s something you can write.’

I lifted my cup to take a sip of tea, the first sip I had taken since arriving at the teahouse. Just as I was about to go into more detail about my fourth idea, Sun Qiang brought up Mianyang again.

‘So what is she going to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘About her pregnancy?’

‘She wants to keep the baby.’

He lowered his voice. ‘That can’t be allowed.’

I looked at him with surprise. He took another sip of tea before looking up and smiling. Speaking slowly, he explained, ‘Mianyang is just starting to build a name for herself in the literary world. If she were to suddenly have a baby it would cause a scandal and the media would eat it up.’

‘We urged her to get an abortion,’ I nodded. ‘My brother, sister-in-law and I all tried to convince her; we told her it would be best to just move past this as if nothing ever happened.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You must convince her to get the abortion.’

‘I’m going to go to her apartment this afternoon to try and persuade her to go to the hospital to have it done.’

Looking at his watch, he picked up his phone from the table and put it in his jacket pocket. He said he had to attend a meeting. As he waved the waitress over for the check, I asked him:

‘So should I go ahead with that traditional story?’

‘Yes, get to it.’

After paying the bill, he got up and reminded me: ‘You’ve got to convince Mianyang to have the abortion so all of this can quietly go away . . . like it never even happened.’

 

2

 

I managed to get 50,000 characters of that traditional story of mine down before I got hit with writer’s block. My emotions were all over the place and my ideas were stuck; there was no way for me to move my plot forward. Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows. I had no choice but to seek out Mianyang for help; I asked her to take a look at what I had written and provide some feedback. I was hoping for some constructive criticism that might give me the inspiration I needed. I had to find a new path forward for this rather traditional story. Mianyang took this 50,000-character manuscript that had already gone through such an arduous journey to finally get on paper and handed it over to Sun Qiang. He was sitting beside her, and she asked him to take a look at it first.

By this time, Mianyang and Sun Qiang were married and their son was already eighteen months old. They took a hands-off approach to parenting, letting my brother and sister-in-law raise their child.

My brother and sister-in-law became specialists in powdered milk. They knew all about the various imported powdered milk brands. They said that domestic brands of powdered milk weren’t made by adding a bit of melamine to the milk powder, they instead added a little bit of milk powder to the melamine! That’s why they insisted on not letting their grandchild anywhere near Chinese-made powdered milk. They talked about powdered milk with such a sense of purpose in their voices. They had Mianyang and Sun Qiang’s phone numbers saved in their phones and every week they called to check on their friends’ international travel schedules to find out which countries they might be visiting. Based on that, they devised a careful plan for which brands of international powdered milk to ask their friends to bring back for them. They increased the number of powdered milk purchases based on their grandson’s growing appetite, factoring in a 50 percent error ratio because sometimes Mianyang and Sun Qiang’s friends forgot to buy it while others were simply too lazy to shop for powdered milk while traveling abroad.

According to my sister-in-law, this chunky little toddler had consumed powdered milk from twenty-one different countries. My brother proudly added:

‘Our grandson has been raised on United Nations milk!’

By this time, Mianyang had published her first full-length novel. It got great reviews and sold well. A Sinologist was even translating the book into French. This news made my brother and sister-in-law go crazy. They said that in a few years, bookstores in all the countries from which their grandson drank powdered milk would have Mianyang’s books on display. But my brother told me not to share that comment with anyone else.

‘That’s the kind of thing you can only say behind closed doors,’ he said.

Sun Qiang was cleaned out after his divorce; his ex-wife ended up with his apartment and all the money in his bank account. He made a triumphant escape by moving into Mianyang’s apartment rental. They put on a lavish wedding with more than 200 guests. My brother and sister-in-law sat at the head table alongside Sun Qiang’s superiors from work, his parents and his college-age daughter.

As Mianyang’s uncle, I was quite honored to sit with a famous writer whom I had long admired. As soon as that writer learned that I was Mianyang’s uncle, he pointed to my sister-in-law and said:

‘I actually think Sun Qiang would be better off with Mianyang’s mother.’

I looked over at Sun Qiang and my sister-in-law sitting at the head table, and nodded my head out of respect for this
famous writer.

‘In terms of age, they would indeed be a better match.’

Sun Qiang invited a television host to serve as master of ceremonies. Speaking through a microphone, the master of ceremonies invited the bride and groom up to the stage. Sun Qiang and Mianyang, who was eight months pregnant at the time, ascended the stage amid a flurry of applause and laughter. The master of ceremonies then invited Sun Qiang’s college-student daughter up to the stage to ask her what she thought about her father’s decision to go ‘out with the old and in with the new’. Sun Qiang’s daughter giggled as she took the microphone and said how much she wanted to congratulate her father on behalf of her mother, but her mother refused, so she could only speak for herself. She said that when she was little, she always wanted a little brother to play with. Her father promised to give her a little brother, but he never made good on that promise; until now! Looking down at Mianyang’s bulging stomach, she made her own promise: when her little brother grows up and wants to start dating girls, she’ll help hook him up.

As Sun Qiang’s daughter stepped down from the stage amid a flurry of laughter and applause, my wife knit her brow and whispered to me: ‘How could she say such a thing in public?’

The master of ceremonies addressed Sun Qiang: ‘So how does it feel to be getting remarried?’

‘Getting remarried feels like . . . getting remarried,’ replied Sun Qiang.

‘And what do you think of the ceremony?’ asked the master of ceremonies.

‘I initially didn’t want to hold a ceremony,’ said Sun Qiang. ‘I just wanted to get registered so we could legally sleep together! But Mianyang wasn’t having it, so I had no choice but to throw something together!’

The master of ceremonies turned to Mianyang: ‘What was it that made you insist on having a big wedding?’

Mianyang responded: ‘I couldn’t let people think that he had secretly crawled into bed with me; I had to prove to everyone that he crawled into bed with me in the most upright manner! That’s why we are holding this ceremony!’

Not liking what he just heard, Sun Qiang turned to Mianyang: ‘Hey, it was clearly you that crawled into my bed! How come all of a sudden I’m the one crawling into your bed?’

Mianyang seemed to be growing angry. She grilled Sun Qiang: ‘The first time, the very first time . . . did I go after you, or did you go after me?’

Not to be outdone, Sun Qiang asked Mianyang: ‘Well, let me ask you, who was the one calling me all the time to ask me out?’

At this point, Mianyang really did lose her temper. She said: ‘I asked you out to discuss literature, not because I wanted to have sex with you!’

Unable to bear it anymore, my wife leaned over and whispered: ‘How could such cultured people utter such uncultured things?’

Seeing the bride and groom starting to really go after each other, the master of ceremonies interrupted them: ‘I can tell that the crux of the argument here all comes down to what happens in bed, so let me ask you: The first time you did it, was it in Sun Qiang’s bed or Mianyang’s bed?’

Sun Qiang and Mianyang looked at each other but before they could respond, the master of ceremonies flashed a sinister smile and asked: ‘Or was it in a hotel room?’

Sun Qiang and Mianyang both burst out laughing. The master of ceremonies turned to them: ‘So, I guess it wasn’t that he crawled into her bed or she crawled into his bed, they both crawled into someone else’s bed!’

With that, Sun Qiang and Mianyang seemed to be even, but just two months later, Sun Qiang lost the upper hand. I’m not exactly sure how Mianyang tamed him, but from that point forward, whenever the two of them appeared in public at various social events, Sun Qiang would always follow Mianyang around like her assistant. He would walk behind her with an SLR camera dangling from his neck, smiling sheepishly. Whenever Mianyang talked to other people, Sun Qiang would stand off to one side taking photos; when she engaged in conversation with people over dinner, he would squat down on the ground to get a good angle to snap his photos. Sun Qiang would often run into old acquaintances at these events, but after exchanging a few pleasantries, Mianyang would always cut them off with an annoyed: ‘Sun Qiang!’ He would immediately scurry over to snap another photo of her. Mianyang had a thing for taking photos with celebrities, so whenever Sun Qiang caught sight of someone famous, he would immediately direct Mianyang to them and click the shutter. Other times, he would direct the celebrity over to Mianyang to get his shot. It didn’t really matter what these celebrities were famous for – playing basketball, running marathons, writing, singing, dancing, acting, writing online sex diaries, undergoing a sex change – Sun Qiang was sure to always snap a shot.

More than a month after Sun Qiang was given a copy of my 50,000-character manuscript, Mianyang called me. She said they were at a party, but when it was over, they would swing by my apartment. Sun Qiang wanted to talk to me. There was a lot of background noise on their end. I anxiously asked what Sun Qiang thought of my manuscript, but she had already hung up. My wife was watching a drama on TV and asked who called; I told her it was Mianyang. She and Sun Qiang were coming over to discuss my novel. My wife immediately turned off the TV and began straightening up the room. I stood there frozen, riddled with anxiety, not knowing whether or not Sun Qiang would approve of what I had written. As my wife got the apartment in order, she told me to run out and buy some fruit to serve to our guests. I left the apartment in a daze.

Sun Qiang and Mianyang arrived around 10 p.m. Mianyang came in and sat down beside me; leaning back sideways on the sofa, she said she was utterly exhausted. Sun Qiang sat across from me, his SLR camera still dangling from his neck. He must have still been wearing the camera from the party they just returned from; I knew he had no intention of using it to take any pictures of us. My wife smiled affably as she poured them tea and served them fruit. I realized that the moment had come that would decide whether or not I would be able to continue on with this traditional story I had been writing. I wanted to smile but my face was frozen. Mianyang lazily munched on a banana before declaring she didn’t want anything else; Sun Qiang started with a banana and then began to leisurely eat a bunch of grapes that his wife handed to him.

I could barely sit still. When I saw my wife approaching with a tray of freshly cut watermelon, I was secretly hoping she wouldn’t bring him anything else to eat – I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say about my novel and more food would only bring more delays. I flashed my wife a look, but misinterpreting what I meant, she handed Sun Qiang a slice of watermelon. Sun Qiang said he was stuffed and placed the slice of watermelon and the uneaten grapes down on the side table before wiping his hands with a napkin. He then removed his lens cap, held up the camera, and said:

‘Mianyang, sit up straight so I can take a picture of you with your uncle.’

Mianyang wrapped her arm around mine and Sun Qiang clicked the shutter. My fifty-two-year-old heart beat like a twenty-year-old. Sun Qiang’s camera was only ever directed at Mianyang and various celebrities, but now it was pointed at her and me. Perhaps there was hope for my old-fashioned story to move forward. That’s when Sun Qiang said to my wife:

‘Auntie, why don’t you come over and join us for a photo too?’

My wife came over and sat down beside me and Sun Qiang snapped another shot. My heart rate reverted back to a fifty-two-year-old; I realized I had been getting my hopes up for nothing.

It was only after Sun Qiang put down his camera that he finally got around to that 50,000-character manuscript. He said that he had carefully read through it twice, but if you counted the sections that he found most fascinating, it would be closer to seven or eight times. As soon as I heard the words ‘found most fascinating’, I could barely believe my ears. However, right after that he added a ‘but’; the ‘but’, as he explained it, referred to the fact that no matter how many times he read it, the entire manuscript felt like it was just an opening section. As soon as I heard that, it was as if I was struck by a sudden revelation. I told Sun Qiang:

‘Those words you just shared are worth more to me than a decade of study! Now I realize why I couldn’t finish it; I had been stuck in the opening. I never realized I hadn’t gotten past the beginning stages of the novel. But if I’m able to move past that section, I’ll be able to continue with the book.’

Sun Qiang flashed me a look of encouragement, saying: ‘That’s right, you need to get past the opening.’

‘Tomorrow, I’ll get past it,’ I replied.

 

Artwork by Ji Zhou, Maquette 5, 2015

The post Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It appeared first on Granta.

]]> Goodbye, Bridge of the East https://granta.com/goodbye-bridge-of-the-east/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:45:14 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=121960 ‘To make sure she was looking her best in the photos, Wu Jiayu avoided eating during our dates, and she didn’t order anything for me when we were done.’

A short story by Wang Zhanhei, translated by Dave Haysom.

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]]> I might be mistaken, but I think that in all my years of dating, Wu Jiayu was the very first repeat customer.

By the time my zodiac year swung around for the third time, my ma and various aunties had all but given up on me. Only Auntie Mei, whose matchmaking powers were renowned throughout the neighbourhood, persevered. She saw me as a blemish on her otherwise pristine record. Still, she wasn’t exactly giving me much to work with: the decline in the quality of dates was evident. Ma was unimpressed. ‘No one’s forcing Auntie Mei to help,’ she said. ‘Why even bother if she’s going to bring us matches like that?’ She didn’t acknowledge that even those matches were unwilling to meet me for a second date.

‘This one is a bank teller,’ said Auntie Mei. ‘A bank teller,’ Ma sneered. ‘What prospects does a bank teller have? Slave away for a decade and you still don’t get anywhere.’ She turned to me. ‘Still, she’s about a billion times better off than you.’ For all her bluster, Ma still pulled out some cash and told me to take this one seriously, to try not to screw it up.

Taking Auntie Mei’s advice, we chose Zikawei, neutral territory, halfway between Jinyang and Xingzhuang. When we met, I learned that Wu Jiayu had left her job at the bank. She described her current work as ‘flexible’. I said mine was too. Actually, she said, she was an influencer – apparently not keen to share the same category as me. She didn’t specify what exactly her area of influence might be.

We met at a conveyor-belt sushi place – her choice. It was a new restaurant that was meant to be fun, full of chattering schoolkids. Every five plates earned you a chance to win a capsule toy from the vending machine. We were unlucky: we tried five times and didn’t win anything. This didn’t stop Wu Jiayu from taking a flurry of photos of the machine and of the little train that delivered the food. Then she busied herself with her phone.

‘So, you’re a food influencer?’ I asked. ‘It’s best not to limit yourself to one niche,’ she said. She showed me her home page on Xiaohongshu, which featured various popular locations. Most of her posts had likes in the single digits, except for one about a Western restaurant that had over a hundred – she had pinned that one to the top. ‘I’m just getting started,’ she said defensively. ‘Soon, they’ll all be super popular.’

The photos had about a 65 per cent resemblance to how she looked in person. In the photos, she could have been fresh out of university. In real life, she wore thick make-up, especially on her nose, which had a shiny patch like the Golden-Horned King in Journey to the West. I wondered what resemblance to the photos would be left minus the make-up.

But all I dared say was, ‘That’s great.’

The meal went reasonably well, mostly thanks to Wu Jiayu. She was a good talker, and it didn’t feel like she was talking just to fill awkward silence. She was comfortable talking about herself, and didn’t seem to care much what others thought of her. And she stayed clear of the standard questions you hear on an arranged date. It was clear she was also there to fulfil a family obligation. After we finished eating, she went to the bathroom and took her bag with her. I almost fell asleep waiting for her to come back and started to wonder if she had taken the subway home. Eventually she returned and took a neat little camera from her bag. ‘Are you up for helping me take a few pictures?’ she said.

I went with Wu Jiayu to the new Zikawei Library and took a few photos according to her instructions. Actually, it was more like several hundred, because we were there all afternoon. I didn’t have time to check the quality of the images. I didn’t even see the finished product on Xiaohongshu – mainly because later I couldn’t remember the long string of characters that made up her username.

I didn’t think too much of this. On previous arranged dates, I had helped move furniture or gone to pick up someone’s kids. So, when we parted at the subway station, I assumed that she would become yet another zombie lurking in the depths of my phone contacts.

A week later, to my great surprise, the zombie came back to life and asked if I was free the next day. We started meeting once a week.

Ma was both delighted and annoyed that I was staying out so long. She vented to Auntie Mei, who explained that Wu Jiayu and I were clearly sleeping together. She had seen it many a time, she said: couples who could not come to a suitable agreement and ended up becoming friends with benefits instead. Ma flew into a rage and announced that she was going to stop paying my expenses. This didn’t bother me – Wu Jiayu always reminded me to eat before we met anyway.

To make sure she was looking her best in the photos, Wu Jiayu avoided eating during our dates, and she didn’t order anything for me when we were done. We went to Dishui Lake, Home Expo, and to every road in town decorated with unseasonal flowers – places I had never been before. She wore a different fancy outfit each time: a qipao, a Japanese sailor dress, the flared trousers and tight top popular with millennials. I didn’t know if she was a hit on Xiaohongshu, but I figured she must have been reasonably satisfied with the pictures I took of her on our first date at Zikawei.

Wu Jiayu sent me the location of a place called B-Link. I looked it up: it was just across the Huangpu River, an easy trip on the Shenchuan Special Line. We agreed to meet in the evening to avoid the heat, with the usual condition that food would not be included.

She arrived before me. This was unusual. Normally she was at least ten minutes late, and would then spend another ten minutes applying her make-up in the bathroom. This gave me a chance to grab a bowl of wonton or some rice from a street vendor. This time, her outfit was retro: the sort of tracksuit students wore to school in the eighties and nineties, her hair in pigtails, a satchel over her shoulder. The thin white stripes on the sleeves and trouser legs made Wu Jiayu look thinner than usual, and she was wearing less make-up, though the shiny patch on her nose still gleamed in the light of the setting sun.

The ‘B-Link’ was a converted factory in the industrial district, and it still retained something of its original Soviet-style design. Wu Jiayu stood at the far end of a red-brick wall, looking out at a vast construction site, all neat lines, sharp angles, and overlapping layers. I wasn’t sure if she was looking at the construction or the clouds above, or perhaps just contemplating her next pose.

I walked over. ‘Which floor would you choose to live on?’ she asked.

Near where she was pointing, a large construction machine moved up and down, sliding like the glass elevators you see on the outside of shopping malls. I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how furious Ma would be if our apartment complex once again failed to pass the referendum on installing an elevator.

‘I’ve already decided,’ said Wu Jiayu. ‘I’d live on the top floor, with the views. Closest to the Yangpu Bridge, furthest from all the bad smells of the Yangshupu River.’ The way she said it made it sound like she’d already acquired the deeds, like a price in the tens of millions was no obstacle.

We stood together for a while, until she came out of her reverie and produced her camera. We took pictures against the wall, on the lawn, and then at the designated photo spot between the two buildings, where a giant red balloon was emblazoned with the words i love b-link. Finally we took a photo at the faux street sign that said, i’m thinking of you in . . . [insert location here]. Wu Jiayu had a standard pose for these sorts of signs: she stood to the left, bent over at a right angle and leaned forward to show one side of her face. I used her favoured ratio: she took up two-thirds of the photo, the other third was scenery. Through the viewfinder, her face and the plaza behind her were tinged red like the clouds.

At one point, Wu Jiayu discovered a zebra crossing with a McDonald’s logo and immediately sat down on the M, with a pout and a V-sign. I reacted quickly, taking a few shots standing up, then a few bending down, but none of them were satisfactory. In the end, she sent me up onto the roof to take some photos from above. I didn’t have an entry card to get into the elevator of the office building, so I went through the fire exit. After a few minutes climbing up the steps, I experienced a moment of sudden uncertainty: while Wu Jiayu was pursuing fame and profit, what was I hoping to find by following her all over town? Sixty stairs and five floors later, I had come up with a couple of answers. First, it forced me out of the house, something I hadn’t done much since losing my job – in other words, a form of exercise. Second, it kept me away from Ma, with whom I had no major conflicts but still preferred to avoid. So, while you couldn’t really say that this was a meaningful use of my time, it wasn’t completely meaningless either. Maintaining a weekly habit was progress of a sort. Did this mean I could learn how to live a life of routine again, perhaps even try to return to work? Realising I was walking through an office area made me afraid to continue this line of thought. Fortunately, by this point I had arrived on the roof.

Wu Jiayu didn’t provide me with any direct instructions. Now that we had collaborated on several occasions, she seemed to trust me enough to simply sit down in the middle of the zebra crossing, exuding confidence, ignoring any side-eyes she received from passers-by. Every few seconds she switched to a new pose, positions she had clearly planned while waiting for me to climb several dozen metres above her. At this point, a third answer occurred: perhaps something deeper could develop between me and Wu Jiayu. The problem was that, like me, she was thirty-six and still living with her mother, which placed her on the lowest rung in the arranged dating marketplace. The only way out was to climb up a level, but unfortunately everyone, at every level, had the same idea. But perhaps we could find some other way out, as we were doing now, existing together somewhere beyond the family, outside the home.

Wu Jiayu stood up and dusted off her trousers, which meant I could come back down. As we wandered over to the other side of the park, we saw nearby residents out for a stroll, fans in hand, or jogging, or chatting loudly in one of the office workers’ designated smoking areas. A few were walking their dogs on the lawn that you weren’t supposed to walk on. We took a few more photos against this background. I knew for a fact that Wu Jiayu looked better in those pictures taken from a distance, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. Before long, it got dark; the lawn turned from green to black, then orange under the light of the construction site opposite.

Wu Jiayu pointed to a light in the distance. Come on, she said, let’s go over there.

We cycled away from B-Link and followed a road that ran alongside the construction site, until we arrived at Changyang Road. I realised with a jolt that I had once interned at a start-up along that road, more than a decade ago now. I wasn’t sure if the company was still there. Back then, I would take the ferry across the river in the evening and walk around for miles before setting off for home. A decade on, neither memory nor reality could really be depended upon. It was probably right ahead, visible if only we continued a bit further down the road. For a strange moment I had the sensation that I was cycling back through time; then Wu Jiayu darted off into an alley, and I had to turn back and follow her. The construction site loomed again. The abrasions of the rainy season had marked the surface of the building, and in the dim evening light it was hard to tell if it was brand new or a decaying shell on the point of collapse.

It was clearly not the first time that Wu Jiayu had cycled to the temporary accommodation building. She stepped confidently past the workers, who gave us curious glances, and towards a thicket of trees beyond. A set of stairs ran down to a riverside path. Everything was finished, neat, smooth, well proportioned, and the warm stench no longer wafted from the Yangshupu River. Downriver, the red pylons of the distant Yangpu Bridge were like two sticks of incense, glowing at each tip, illuminating everything that could see them and everything that could not.

As we walked north along the river, passing stray cats, night-time runners, fishermen with torchlights and gossiping old ladies, Wu Jiayu kept her camera in her bag. When we reached a crossroads, she stopped. On the stone bridge leading to the opposite bank, two panels of rusted sheet metal barred the way to the construction site ahead.

When I followed Wu Jiayu’s gaze, I realised that we had come to the other side of the construction site, the part we had been looking out over before – our path had taken us in a U-shaped loop. Sparks were cast down from a crane up above us, glittering waves that tumbled to the darkened ground.

Wu Jiayu pointed to the only tree on the other side of the river. ‘That’s the exact height of the third floor,’ she said.

She was standing right in front of the metal barrier, looking towards the tree. There was still no camera. In her vintage tracksuit she could have been an actor, or a time traveller from the past. What she said next only reinforced that impression.

The kitchen faced south. When they took out the extractor fan, the soot made the cat’s face even darker. After the typhoon passed, the roof was carpeted with treasure. Pairs of shorts, even some banknotes. Two generations, three. More people, less space. Grandma called, told me to go out into the street and join the demonstration, to help drum up support and carry one of those red banners that said ‘I want relocation’. But the police were already there when I arrived. Five years later, when the relocation finally happened, they really did bring out the drums for the celebrations. Shame my dad wasn’t around to hear them. Me and mum didn’t see any of that government money.

With a wave of her hand, Wu Jiayu traced the edge of the building. ‘Look, these were the Shenxin workers’ quarters, and this was Xifangziqiao, and next to it . . .’

I no longer felt like I was just there to take photographs or provide her with a service. Now our relationship felt more like that of host and guest. But again, I had the vague sense that I had been here before.

Xifangzhiqiao – Bridge of the West. And next to that, was it Dongfangzhiqiao? I asked. Bridge of the East?

Not zhiqiao, she corrected me, ziqiao. The zi of child, or banknote.

When I was an intern, I used to go for walks after work to avoid the evening rush. Some of the buildings had been demolished, others had been emptied out, leaving nothing but concrete husks. After nine o’clock, legs emerged from the cracks in those empty buildings – slender ones, fleshy ones, all lined up against the wall. They smoked, chatted to each other, chatted to passers-by, and their words brought a chill to the evening breeze. I kept my gaze low, listening to the conversations, the accents, never daring to look up. I remember a pair of mauve tights that stood out from the row of black and fishnet; they made the legs look fuller, curved like an aubergine. At that moment, the mauve tights stepped forwards, and a hand reached out to cover my trouser pocket, pressing down hard just as a motorbike roared past. When I came to my senses, the hand was gone, and my phone was still in my pocket. I gave a nod of thanks.

‘Five hundred,’ said mauve tights. ‘What do you say?’

I didn’t answer.

‘I bet your phone cost quite a bit,’ she said.

That Motorola had cost me 1,500 yuan, and she had helped me keep it. So I figured I was saving money, even if I did pay her. We agreed on 300, and I went with her. The way was long and winding – amber street lights, black roads, mauve tights. We finally arrived at a row of cramped slum housing. A single room, no light, no fan, only a cool breeze blowing in off the river carrying a foul smell. In the dark, her body was plumper than it had seemed outside, but surprisingly nimble. Perhaps she was just trying to get it done quickly. She didn’t walk me back when we were done. In something of a trance, I wandered for a long time, unable to find my way out of the maze. When, at last, I ended up back where I started, I saw her climbing onto the back of a motorbike. The bike carried mauve tights away, probably back to their original position, their original set-up, like a game restarting, ready for the next passer-by. Following the fumes of the motorbike, I rushed out of the maze, pausing at the metal gate to glance up at the street sign, the end point of the game: dongfangzhiqiao, the bridge of the east. The world of Shanghai, ‘the Pearl of the East’, felt very far removed from
that place.

Now, many years later, the riddle was solved. It wasn’t ‘Dongfang-zhiqiao’ but ‘Dong-Fangziqiao’: it was bordered by the river, and divided into an east, Dong-Fangziqiao, and a west, Xi-Fangziqiao. I must have misread that one character on the sign, or misremembered. Not that it mattered, because now everything would be new, and this place could be named anything. They could come up with some kind of justification for any old name – just look at the meaningless wording on the advert above the construction site: brilliant riverside, where past and future converge. I had no choice but to believe it.

Wu Jiayu and I walked a long way along the Yangshupu River that evening. Each time the two incense sticks of the Yangpu Bridge loomed up before us, she turned around and we doubled back, like two fish trapped in a weir. When we were tired from all the walking, Wu Jiayu suggested we sit down by some outdoor fitness equipment. She looked through the photos, enlarging each one, as if checking for a particular element. She didn’t speak for a while – she never felt the need to fill silences. Though the length of this particular silence made me wonder if I should leave her to it. When she did finish, she stood up, dusted herself off, and said, ‘Let’s go back.’ Standard procedure: we each rented a share-bike, and set off towards the subway station that offered the most convenient route home.

At the Jiangpu Park intersection, I watched her lock the bike and head into the station. She disappeared down one hole, and then reappeared from another, a dozen metres away, just a few seconds later.

‘Wait, are you up for helping me take a few pictures down by the river?’ she called, with the exact same tone as when she first asked me.

Perhaps because of that night’s episode, I decided to take the ferry home when we were done with the photos. The evening air was cool, and the reflections gleamed in the water – neither the air nor the water had changed with the years.

Ma was not pleased. She followed me to my room and demanded that I tell her exactly where I stood with Wu Jiayu. Since she wasn’t leaving, I decided to provoke her. ‘We’re discussing living arrangements,’ I told her. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said, alarmed. ‘Does this mean you’re paying for a house, or she is?’ ‘It’s an old house we’ve been discussing,’ I said. ‘One that’s already been knocked down.’ A sigh of relief. ‘Oh, so she took you back to the place where she grew up – does that mean you’re serious?’ I picked up my towel and went into the bathroom without replying.

I came out of the shower to a message from Wu Jiayu, forwarded from her Xiaohongshu account. It was the last picture we had taken that night: her and the Yangpu Bridge, composed as she’d instructed. She was a small figure, lit from behind, her face indistinct. In the background, the two incense sticks of the bridge, crimson, solemn, indifferent to the blazing headlights that moved between them. The second image was a copy of an old photo. A small figure, lit from behind so her face was indistinct, the pylons of the bridge – still under construction – rising behind her. The surface of the river was calm, and the sky was broad. In the bottom-right corner, red numbers: 1992.8. It was that same summer.

It was a new post, not yet attracting any interest, but pinned to the top of her profile. The title was ‘Me and Me’.

Without hesitation, I pressed the red heart. Now I had her username, I spent several hours going through every single one of her posts, including the ones that featured my photography, and though none of them really captured what she looked like in real life, I gave each one a red heart.

Before I went to sleep, I wrote out a new message. Where are you going next weekend?

As I hit send, it felt like I had left my room behind and was standing with Wu Jiayu, together in the midnight street.

 

Photograph © Tianhu Yuan, Another Self, 2019

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]]> The Rules of the Game https://granta.com/the-rules-of-the-game/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:41:33 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=122011 ‘It seemed perfectly normal for middle-class writers to tell the stories of the underclass. But the presumed creator of literature has been changing.’

Granta interviews Wu Qi.

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]]> Born in the city of Lengshuijiang in Hunan Province in 1986, Wu Qi is one of the leading literary figures of his generation. He has worked as a journalist at Southern People Weekly and Across, and as the translator of James Baldwin. He currently works at One-Way Space (Danxiang Kongjian 单向空间), an independent bookstore in Beijing, where he serves as the chief editor of One-Way Street Journal (Dandu 单读) and as a board member of the One-Way Street Foundation. The journal specializes in cultivating avant-garde literature as well as the new worker writing in China. Its title is an homage to Walter Benjamin’s 1928 essay. In 2022, Wu Qi published a book-length conversation, Self as Method, with the anthropologist Xiang Biao, which probed contemporary Chinese subjectivity and literary expression. A second volume, translated by David Ownby, will appear next year.

Among Wu Qi’s talents, his skill at interviewing is widely recognized by his peers. Instead of asking Wu to interview someone for this issue, Granta decided to interview the interviewer.

 

Editor:

Does literature in China today occupy a different place than it did in your parents’ generation?

 

Wu Qi:

For my parents’ generation – they were born in the 1950s and 1960s – writing literature was still aspirational. It was still a dream held by many people. Now, it occupies a lesser place in Chinese culture. It no longer has the same exalted status. One can have a very basic and stable career as a writer, or one can storm to great fame. Or, of course, one can be scorned.

The population interested in literature is still quite large, with brand new writers appearing every year. A novel that sells well can make a writer rich in a matter of days. My feeling is that literature today is no longer as abstract and mysterious as it once was – it no longer commands a central position. It has become more tangible, palpable, and arguably even more democratized. But it has also become more vulgar. Once anything starts to be associated with money, sales, fame and power, it is like a cat discovering a mouse. The rules of the game become more complicated.

 

Editor:

What attracted you to literature in the beginning? What writers of fiction were you first exposed to, growing up in Hunan Province in the 1980s?

 

Wu Qi:

Books were scarce before college, but the social climate of the economic opening of the 1980s still had an underlying influence. Even if you didn’t read at all, you’d agree that literary classics were good and important. When I was a kid, I would occasionally immerse myself in big books like Dream of the Red Chamber and The Count of Monte Cristo.

The teachers in middle school encouraged us all to pursue these great books – to read beyond our textbooks. All through school we heard about the Chinese classics, as well as the Western classics – people like Charles Dickens. It might be that you couldn’t actually find copies of all these books, or read many of them, but you heard the names. You knew there was a different world out there.

When I entered Beijing University in 2004, and first had access to its library, I cherished the opportunity to catch up on pioneering literature. It was a frenzy of reading. My peers and I were all reading the works of Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Chi Zijian, Han Shaogong and Han Dong, the writers of the previous generation. I still remember where their books were shelved in the university library. We were captivated by their storytelling skills and their style, but they also collectively demonstrated the possibility of a future that involved reading and writing books, one where writers directly faced and even criticized social reality. For me, this was the possibility promised by literature. That’s where this all began. I think for my generation, we all share this story, more or less.

 

Editor:

What about the generation below you – people born in the 1990s and the 2000s?

 

Wu Qi:

They have a different mindset. What they see is the huge success of these writers from the 1980s and 1990s, financially as well as culturally. But the literary value of this work is less clear to them. They struggle to find writing that addresses what is really happening in society now.

So there is a sort of generational gap opening up. The younger generation have stopped hearing about these older names in terms of literature – rather, they hear of them as success stories. There’s a disconnect. If you really talk to the younger generation – people here in China who actually read, who care about literature, who care about society – you’ll find they are not talking about those classic works. They’re waiting for their own story to be written.

 

Editor:

If I were a young aspiring writer in China, not particularly political, what would I do now? What is a standard trajectory?

 

Wu Qi:

First, you’d start with the internet. Some people emerge with a real bang online, especially with genre writing – horror, crime or love stories. But if you’re talking about literary writing, then you would probably start by looking at literary journals. Official journals are still the main channel for young writers starting their careers. There are also some smaller local journals in different provinces. And people can always come to us, at One-Way, and other smaller independent places.

As a young writer you have to build up your network. Get to know editors, or professors – and you can quickly become connected, because the official literature community is very small. You can also try to get to know the members and even presidents of the various Writers’ Associations, which would give you a much better chance of having your stories published.

If you’re in your twenties, of course, you’re going to hate this. You’re going to hate that this kind of networking is so mainstream. It’s not the only road to success, but it’s a major one. And you will probably persuade yourself to take part, because you will find it so much easier than anything else.

Even ten years ago the story would have been different. Back then, we still had market-driven newspapers and magazines.

 

Editor:

So ten years ago you wouldn’t have to go through, say, the Writers’ Association of Hunan Province, or be connected to various older, well-known writers?

 

Wu Qi:

Back then the best route for people who wanted to write was probably to study journalism – to study it and to work at it, as some kind of alternative to literature. Starting around 2012, newspapers and media organizations began to be regulated by the state once again. Journalists were no longer allowed to do the same kind of stories as before. So the press lost much of its positive, productive function to the writing community, and long-form journalists began losing their jobs. Many of them now focus on books instead of
long articles.

 

Editor:

Because book publishers will still publish and pay for that kind of writing?

 

Wu Qi:

Yes – there’s no other way to do it. Of course you can always self-publish online, for free. But then you can’t make a living. Publishing a book has become one of the few options left open. But to do that you need to have a book in the first place, right? You need an open span of time to be able to finish a book – it’s not like writing an article. And also, if you are a new author, it’s hard to make a career based on the money you earn from books.

 

Editor:

How do writers negotiate censorship? Even such established figures as Yu Hua and Mo Yan have had books banned on the Mainland that are published elsewhere.

 

Wu Qi:

A constant negotiation goes on between writers and the authorities. Every writer knows where the line is. The decisions of writing are major decisions – major political, career-defining decisions. It’s a question of whether you want to have a professional life here in Mainland China. If you say or write something wrong, and it’s published and publicized, you know the consequences. It’s all quite clear. Writers know the deal.

 

Editor:

How did you decide to start your own journal?

 

Wu Qi:

Journalists like me, editors like me, we all needed to find a way to work. I started at the One-Way Street bookstore, which was launched by a group of former journalists, who were still enjoying well-paid careers. They could support an independent bookstore by themselves at that point, and I started working there as an editor.

I thought it was going to be temporary. I thought some other media organization would emerge, but instead the new generation all moved toward social media. Now you need to be a kind of influencer – what people here actually call a ‘Key Opinion Leader’ (KOL) – to support yourself in the media industry. I decided to stay on, and continue using my traditional media skills to edit, translate, and publish.

 

Editor:

When one strolls around Shanghai, there are plenty of bookstores, but some of them seem like palaces for Instagram. Their function seems entirely unrelated to literature or reading. How have bookstores changed in China in your lifetime?

 

Wu Qi:

To start with, in the 1980s and 1990s, we only had one kind of bookstore, the Xinhua bookstore. These were state-owned and there was one in every single city and town. It was one of the only places where you could purchase books. The majority of the books in the shop were geared toward education. That was the story when I was growing up.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we started to have market-driven media after a series of reforms. There was suddenly space for smaller, experimental bookstores. There was a period of growth and opportunity. And then came the tightening of regulations.

Nowadays, independent bookstores struggle to support themselves by book sales alone. Ninety percent of the bookstores in China cannot support themselves simply by selling books. They have to sell coffees or bags or whatever to make a profit. That’s the reality. There are different reasons for that – one is that we don’t have regulations on book prices, and online platforms sell books at a very cheap price.

What makes One-Way different is that we publish books as well. We’re trying to find another angle on the cultural industry. We also run our own literature awards, distinct from the official ones. We have our own cultural foundations – we have a foundation that funds young writers to go to different countries, to travel and to write.

 

Editor:

One-Way put out a special edition of worker writing. What led you to do this?

 

Wu Qi:

There’s been a lot of critical reflection about the cultural elite of the 1980s, especially about how it seemed perfectly normal for middle-class writers to tell the stories of the underclass. But the presumed creator of literature has been changing. Because of the internet and other democratic openings, it matters less now where you come from, or whether or not you have a literature major – authors from different classes have started to write their own stories, shifting the traditional definition of literature.

I see the popularity of ‘diceng wenxue’ (‘bottom-rung writing’) as an opening for a more radical social intervention. The topics and targets of their writing – such as the experience of working as a laborer in a construction site, as a nanny for a rich family, as a parent in an urban village – and the very fact that all these workers and nannies can actually write, will deeply sting the vested interests of this society and its literary system, whether they are capitalist or socialist. You’ll find those two -isms can be humbled in the face of this reality.

 

Editor:

There was once a tradition of proletarian writing across the industrialized world (even in America in writers such as Mike Gold). Was this writing in China basically the same thing as social realism? What happened to this tradition? Is ‘diceng wenxue’ the continuity of this proletarian writing, or is it something else?

 

Wu Qi:

I feel that proletarian literature is more avowedly ideological than social realism, both in literature and art. Social realism is mainly descriptive and presentational rather than offering a set of ready-made frameworks and solutions, and therefore less motivated to mobilize, and less revolutionary.

In the first half of the twentieth century in China, proletarian literature may have been more popular, and especially revered by the officials, but as the socialist revolution declared itself a success and continued to self-declare its successes, the faith in this literature fizzled out. A success story can never be the story of the true underclass.

I would say that the literature of the lower strata that is back in vogue in Chinese society today is much closer to social realism; that is to say, they are confronting and writing about the most brutal and unforgiving parts of Chinese society in the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and illuminating the real price of the high-speed economic development of this period. It’s a reality that’s difficult to summarize in theory.

 

Editor:

Isn’t there something ironic about worker literature being an almost underground phenomenon in a socialist state?

 

Wu Qi:

It’s definitely ironic. This literature comes from the bottom, and is celebrated by the lower and middle classes, but it is not particularly welcomed by the higher rungs of society, and not by the authorities.

The avant-garde writers of the 1980s are now at the top of society politically, economically, and socially. They seem disconnected from this very new, very contemporary literature movement in China.

 

Editor:

And TikTok?

 

Wu Qi:

Of course. Being a writer has always been about saying something about the current or past moment through your writing. Now we have social media, and different kinds of media interviews – a bounty of means of expression. But the writers at the top have ceased fire.

 

Editor:

What do you think the strength of 1980s writing was?

 

Wu Qi:

The emergence of the 1980s generation of writers was a great liberation, a turning point, which was as important as the economic reforms and ‘opening-up’ of that period. Had it not been for them, our generation would not have had the vision, much less the imagination, to dream that our work could converge with the currents of world literature. That it would be possible to re-establish a dialogue between the East and the West.

The 1980s generation provided an existential confirmation for the Chinese literary world. They showed it was not necessary to go into the military or politics to make a difference. They proved there were prospects in life for those who simply loved literature.

 

Editor:

What about the weaknesses of the 1980s generation?

 

Wu Qi:

Some of the most celebrated writing from this period was politically cynical, male-centered and in thrall to traditionalism. As a new generation of writers confronts new realities, it’s hard for them to turn to the experiences of those writing from the 1980s.

The pain, anguish and despair felt by everyone today, the identification with and pursuit of more modern values such as equality, pluralism and independence, have already surpassed the intensities of the 1980s, and it seems that the writers of that generation themselves – as successful writers and as living predecessors of literary history – can no longer provide new ammunition. They can only offer words of consolation.

 

Editor:

Can you tell us something about the history of reportage and long-form writing in postwar China? One has the sense that war reporting flourished – and was a highly reputed genre – under the communists.

 

Wu Qi:

The war reports from the 1930s and 1940s onward, as well as the lengthy social surveys written by a group of journalists and writers (Xia Yan, Xiao Qian, Zou Taofen, Fan Changjiang, and so on), have been called ‘reportage literature’ in China, a concept that emphasizes its literary nature and its similarity to essays and even novels. But as this genre became more official, it also became more closed off and even hackneyed. Excessive argumentation and lyricism make some of these works indistinguishable from ideological propaganda.

The market-oriented reform of mass media in the 1980s renewed interest in this kind of writing. Terms such as ‘investigative reporting’, ‘non-fiction writing’, as well as the ‘New Journalism’ (it was still new for us) from the West had an influence on long-form reporting. There was a maturation of China’s market-oriented media, as both feature writing, which is more literary in nature, and hard-news investigations with a social impact were permitted and became popular.

In the last decade, this phase came to an end with the deepening of control over the media. As I’ve mentioned, journalists have either changed careers or endeavored to become independent writers so that they can continue writing. It is at this point, ironically, because of their active or forced separation from the media establishment, that the independence, integrity and individuality they explore in their writing seems to be most in keeping with the essentials of literariness.

 

Editor:

Where does one find the best long-form reportage in China today?

 

Wu Qi:

The number of such articles has declined dramatically compared to pre-2008, as market-based media platforms have been reduced or been forced to change their editorial strategies. If there are any left, the content they produce is Party-friendly or behind a paywall.

Authors as individuals, and syndicators of authors such as studios, etc., have had to create all sorts of different variants as a result. I’ve observed the following trends in current long-form non-fiction writing, which are mirrored in the way writers approach books: one is that many people are turning to personal, family, and life-history writing, because writing with society as a direct object lacks support and is fraught with risk. Turning to the individual is a natural and at the same time very politicized choice. The second is the academization of non-fiction writing, as more scholars, researchers, and social workers begin to get involved in the field. Or rather, journalists and writers use academic research as a bunker in order to continue writing, so you see the emergence of many field notes, research essays, and academic interviews.

The texture of this writing is very different from classic non-fiction writing and journalism, but in terms of the development of literary history, awareness of social problems, and stylistic self-consciousness, they are one and the same.

 

Editor:

What’s an example of the movement into historical writing as a way of approaching contemporary questions from a more oblique angle?

 

Wu Qi:

There’s an author we published named Yang Xiao. He wrote a book set during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It’s about how in the late 1930s, teachers and students from the top universities in the capital – Peking University, Tsinghua and Nankai – actually walked from Changsha to Yunnan in the southwest in order to get away from the onslaught of the Japanese Army. This was the so-called Long March of the Intellectuals. They set up different kinds of associations and temporary schools to support themselves, including the National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming. So Yang Xiao wrote a book about all of this. But it’s not simply a historical work. It’s also a reflection on what is happening now. He implicitly asks the question: What options does our generation have?

We have to find our own ways forward.

 

Editor:

One hears often of the ‘Dongbei Renaissance’ (东北文艺复兴) from Chinese writers. Many of its authors appear in this issue of Granta. What do you think accounts for the special quality of their writing? What do they capture about the country?

 

Wu Qi:

For me, the most fascinating thing about their writing is how they accurately capture the lost but resigned emotional structure that pervades contemporary society, whether it be for an individual, a family, or a nation – the kind of weightlessness that one can only experience in a highly functioning social machine. There is a disease of weightlessness, especially serious, in today’s China.

The reason why the northeastern, Dongbei region of China has become so representative of this literary phenomenon has to do with the fact that the region as a whole closely followed the main course of socialist development – from the rise of industry to the decline of the economy, from the highest point of collectivist ideals to the lowest point of the market economy – this violent and dramatic movement of the times was centrally staged there. In addition, the landscape and scenery of the northeast, the folk narrative tradition, and the natural sense of humor in the dialect provide rich material for literary expression.

 

Editor:

Is there anything comparable in the south?

 

Wu Qi:

It is difficult to replicate this kind of regional literary grouping elsewhere. In the past few years, there have been different organizations or individuals trying to artificially generate a new wave in the south – in places like Hangzhou and Guangzhou – but most of them have not succeeded, whether in the realm of literature or film and television.

Work of real originality will naturally refuse to be included in a collective concept, which is part of the socialist tradition. I suspect that in the south, where the market economy is relatively more prosperous, creators are more willing to preserve their individuality, even if it means marginalizing themselves.

This is much more in line with the way I perceive literature as functioning. I don’t agree with terms like the ‘Dongbei Renaissance’, which is too general and optimistic – do we have a real renaissance? But professors, and the literary class, need new material so that they can continue on with their professional lives.

 

Editor:

When you pick up a story by Shuang Xuetao or Ban Yu, can you tell it’s been done by a Dongbei writer?

 

Wu Qi:

Their work is easily recognizable because of the language. The climate stands out, and the setting – factories, heavy industry. People seem rougher in their fiction. Rough in the way they speak and the way they act. More authentic and outspoken. But they also make fun of themselves. They make fun of what we’re all facing.

In the south, we’re not that direct. If you think of people in Shanghai, their language is much more polished, and they always try to describe and trace and criticize in a more obscure way.

It is easy to feel lost in the history of socialist development, but you still need to try to find hope in life – in literature for instance. The Dongbei writers keep that aim at the heart of their stories. I think the most important thing about them, probably, is that they write about the real social environment. And people now are desperate for stories that feel like their own. We need stories that describe what the feeling of actually living here in China in the twenty-first century is like.

 

Editor:

How did you first become aware of the Dongbei writers?

 

Wu Qi:

I remember it was around 2015, during the period when traditional media was experiencing a crisis and content-control policies were being tightened. Novels from the northeast began to circulate among a small group of professional readers, literary editors, and media people, at a time when their work had not yet been seen by the marketplace, and it almost seemed like it was circulating underground.

Through word of mouth and media publicity, famous publishers and even movie stars began to notice these books, and publicly recommended them long before they reached a mass audience. Finally, literary critics began to notice them, and to study and
name them.

The next stage for some of these authors was film and television adaptations, where they are now directly involved in writing the scripts, or are responsible for teaching the screenwriters how to write – becoming ‘literary gurus’ in another industry.

 

Editor:

Many highly literary Chinese writers have a close relationship with filmmakers, more so than in the West. Why is this the case?

 

Wu Qi:

I think the reason is that we don’t have a mature enough industry, either in literature or in film. We basically lack a strong creative drive in both fields because of the constant pressures that exist for professional artists. Because of this we don’t have the kind of inputs that results in a mature stream of screenwriters.

Without a wide pool of screenwriters, filmmakers naturally turn to literary writers for material. Writers and filmmakers certainly have many things in common, but most of the time they work separately. They benefit from each other, but the mutual gains are often not enough for them to rely on each other.

 

Editor:

How are articles and books in China discussed today?

 

Wu Qi:

Ostensibly any discussion in China today relies heavily on the internet, especially social media. The influence of literary authority is diminishing, and while the official literary system still functions, it does not provide authentic criticism. The market side of things depends on publicity and marketing, as with the recent trend of live webcasting, where bloggers end up deciding which author wins the bestseller lottery. In reality, publishers are often unprofitable because of how high the discounts on books are.

The most heated social debates still happen on the internet, because it is still possible to speak relatively freely and boldly. The discussion around feminism, for example, is significant enough that it could change the way generations of people, men and women alike, view their own lives.

But I think for books, articles and literature, there is still a need to find more authentic spaces, such as private independent bookstores, especially small bookstores that exist not in overly commercialized mega-cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but in places like Chengdu, Chongqing and Wuhan. There, you are more likely to hear authentic and independent voices, and to take part in open and democratic discussions. You can also find in these places Chinese writers who are truly active in this era, who have a natural identification with and affinity for the margins, rather than being chased by anxiety and burned by success, like their other peers or predecessors. Overall, literary independence is still our unresolved subject. n

 

Photograph © Getty Images, Chonqing Zhongshuge bookstore, 2020

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]]> Power Metals https://granta.com/power-metals/ Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:00:48 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=117398 ‘The city, which is home to more than 300,000 people, is collapsing into the millions of shallow, square holes that have been cut into the ground.’

Nicolas Niarchos on mineral extraction in Manono, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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]]> Every day, barring Thursdays, which are kept as holidays in this part of the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, people try to discover something of worth in the soil beneath the city of Manono. Men, women and many children leave their homes early each morning, shovels in hand, and dig into the fine, sandy soil until they can scoop out a couple of bags of what looks like gravel. The city, which is home to more than 300,000 people, is collapsing into the millions of shallow, square holes that have been cut into the ground. ‘There are minerals all over this town,’ Jean Kiluba Nzenga, the administrative secretary of the local mining ministry told me when I visited, the year before last. ‘People dig in the foundations of houses. If we weren’t here to intervene and stop people, every building would collapse!’ Approach any of the shallow pits and ask the shovelers what they are looking for and they will invariably reply, ‘Cassi!’

The word is said as if the mere invocation of the mineral for which they search will assure them of profits for the day. The pebble and dirt the people in Manono are digging out generally contain what are called minerais noirs, or ‘black minerals’. Cassi is cassiterite, an ore of tin, the most common of the rocks these miners are searching for. That is why this city is pocked with the rusting apparatus of a tin mining concern.

Another rarer find among the gravel is coltan – columbite-tantalite – a black rock that contains tantalum, a metal that is used in electronics to make capacitors. It is one of the heaviest metals, and it has a very high melting point.

Both cassi and coltan are much in demand by a modern hi-tech low-touch world. But in spite of the demand, Manono doesn’t see much benefit. ‘The problem is that mining companies don’t respect their obligations to the local community,’ Kiluba tells me. ‘What people need here is infrastructure. Roads, buildings, communication, everything.’ He goes on to list the minerals in Manono: ‘cassiterite, coltan, which is very valuable, wolframite, lithium, quartz, tourmalines, emeralds, copper.’

It is lithium that has most interested investors recently. An Australian firm called AVZ Minerals has staked out a huge deposit of spodumene rock here in Manono. Spodumene contains lithium, a metal that is a key ingredient in everything from mobile phones to the electric vehicles that use lithium-ion technology to power their batteries. (The metal and its compounds are, AVZ pointed out in a 2019 Australian Stock Exchange Filing, also used to make lubricant greases, glass, ceramics and psychiatric medication.) For the ‘green transition’, lithium is perhaps one of the movement’s best hopes, allowing a future in which fossil fuel emitting vehicles are replaced by cars, planes and even boats that use stored electricity produced by renewable sources.

Lithium is abundant on the earth’s surface, especially in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, but the number of mines coming online barely scrapes the surface of the amount on the metal that will be needed if the world is going to completely electrify transportation. (The movement of lithium ions releases electricity in a lithium-ion battery.) Some metals men, like Robert Friedland, the chief executive of Ivanhoe Mines, a huge copper mine in the south of Congo, have taken to calling this disjunction of supply and demand, ‘the revenge of the miners’.

In Congo, the West worries it is being outmanoeuvred by China, and AVZ might provide a rare counterweight to that trend. In a phrase popularised by the academics Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, policymakers in Washington and Whitehall believe the West and China have begun a ‘new cold war’. One of the key staging grounds for that war, the political scientist Brett L. Carter argued last year in Foreign Affairs, is Africa. ‘China began to replace Western countries as Africa’s key economic partner,’ he wrote. ‘In 2013, China supplanted the United States as Africa’s primary export destination. By 2020, China was responsible for more construction in Africa than France, Italy, and the United States combined. Chinese-backed infrastructure projects opened markets and increased living standards and, at the same time, served Beijing’s interests.’

During the first Cold War, access to oil was key. The prizes this time around are materials like lithium and cobalt, which will ostensibly power the future. The Congolese, trapped in the middle, are usually forgotten at best, and at worst used as pawns in order to acquire these minerals. In a place like Manono, though, all this geo-strategizing can feel downright odd: the town is so remote that the electricity cuts off midway through each evening, and the surrounding region is plagued by crisis levels of food insecurity. What’s more, disputes with groups of isolated peoples in the nearby forests have led to massacres and mass-rapes of Twa pygmies as well as reprisal attacks that have struck into the heart of the town. In December 2016, a Twa militia even assaulted the centre of Manono armed with bows and poisoned arrows, killing at least forty people.

 

On a sweltering day in March 2022, at Camp Coline, AVZ’s exploration office on the edge of town, Mick Brown explained the origin of AVZ’s presence in Manono to me. We sat at a conference table under the obligatory portrait of Congo’s president, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo. Brown, who works for AVZ, is a geologist from western Australia, and, though unfailingly friendly, displays the kind of reserve that a life studying rocks tends to induce. When the subject is geology, however, he becomes animated. Brown has scoured Australia for minerals. Since the late 1980s, he has explored for gold at Gidgee and Wiluna, iron ore at Bungaroo Creek and in the Yandicoogina Channel. ‘Once a mine becomes active, I tend to move on. It becomes like a city. Too many people,’ he told me. He hardly gets back to see his family. ‘I like it when I’m out on the frontier, finding new things.’

Manono’s mineral wealth, Brown explained, comes from a series of subterranean rock formations called pegmatites that were formed in the magma chambers of ancient volcanoes. Sometimes described as ‘cigar-shaped’, these long, rich deposits of minerals were deposited across a broad swath of land from what is now southern Congo, stretching up into southern Uganda sometime during the formation of a supercontinent called Rodinia around 1.2 billion years ago. Within the Manono pegmatites, large crystals, especially quartz, as well as granite, are found bound together in rough-grained rock with valuable ores like cassi, coltan and spodumene.

In 2017, AVZ began drilling forty-two kilometres of holes into the ground to conduct samples, or assays, of five of the pegmatites, which they say total more than thirteen kilometres of length. The ground, they estimated, contained 400 million tonnes of lithium rock, or spodumene. In 2019, Nigel Ferguson, the group’s CEO, said that the firm was ‘confident that the project will continue to develop into production and potentially become a world leading source of lithium and tin.’ As Brown emphasised when I first met him at a restaurant in Manono – ‘it’s the world’s largest lithium deposit. There, I like saying that.’

A world-class lithium deposit could change things for people in Manono. AVZ have planned to bring a modern power plant and a road to the town. The miners here often earn not more than a few dollars a day. There is a risk that Manono will be mined and then abandoned, a little like it was by the Belgians and later the Zaïrian state. Congo is littered with such projects, vines clawing at arrested versions of modernity. All the profits could also go into the pockets of corrupt officials. But there is also hope: some communities, like the town of Bunkeya, to the south of here, have used mining royalties, paid to the central government, to build schools, clinics and farms.

When I visited a bend in the Lukushi river not far from Camp Coline, hundreds of people stood knee-deep in the muddy water, washing minerals that they had just dug out of the ground. The Lukushi is a tributary of the Luvua, the Luvua a tributary of the Lualaba, and the Luluaba a tributary of the great Congo River.

Piles of minerals were laid in the sun on split orange sacks. Ziani Mwamba, a fifty-three-year-old mother of nine, told me she has been working in the cassi and coltan mines for around two months. She wore a red paisley bandana and a tank top with a length of brightly-patterned wax cloth wrapped around her waist. She was once a peanut, manioc and maize farmer, she explained, but she needed to make more money to educate her children. As in much of Congo, almost all farming around here is subsistence and brings home just about enough to support a family, but not to pay for schooling. Education is nominally free but in reality the state leaves teachers’ wages unpaid and parents end up shouldering the financial burden. Mwamba, her husband and four of her children dig minerals out of a nearby hill and then lug them here to be washed. ‘We come here to make money,’ she told me. ‘We come here to make money to pay for our kids’ school, and for our meals, our food, for the children at home.’

 

Manono’s cathedral still bears a plaque with the Latin legend Géomines Aedificavit 1942. Like an inscription unearthed in Greece or Rome, it commemorates an entirely different world, when Manono was a company town, run almost exclusively by a mining firm, with all sorts of contemporary amenities for its workers: an airport, grassy football fields, an Olympic swimming pool, a modern power plant, and of course the red-brick cathedral, which is built in a sort of dour and imposing Flemish style. Of these, only the cathedral still functions. The pool is cracked and clogged with weeds and the power plant has no roof, let alone machinery.

The mines beneath Manono were first mapped out in 1906. Congo was still officially the private property of King Leopold II, which he had seized in 1885. By the time Manono’s mines were being studied, Belgian colonists had already brutally exploited the land for its ivory and then its rubber, killing an estimated 10 million people. As Congo came under state control from Brussels in 1908, a new generation began to exploit the riches beneath its soil. Part of this new wave of exploration was the creation, in 1910, of the Compagnie Géologique et Minière des Ingénieurs et Industriels Belges, or Géomines. On the company’s share certificates, the firm’s ‘Social Seat’ was listed as Manono, Belgian Congo, but the ‘Administrative Seat’ – head office – was in Brussels.

In the boom years before the Second World War, Géomines could afford to spend on infrastructure since it had exclusive access to the area’s tin deposits and enjoyed a monopoly position. This meant that in times of low tin prices, the company could choose to mine in areas with a lower percentage (what miners call ‘grade’) of tin in the ore, and allowed it to invest liberally in the latest equipment. The machines that were brought in to replace people now lie rusting around town.

Over the years, more pits were dug by Belgian miners with African labour. The most famous of these were the Roche Dure and Carrière de l’Est quarries, incidentally the places where AVZ now say the highest grade of lithium ore can be found. Next to the mines, mounds of rejected earth were piled, pale smooth hills of quartz and spodumene, a mineral which the Belgians thought useless. Today, these heaps tower over the town, waiting for someone to truck them out and process them into lithium concentrate. Despite the rush for lithium, the cost of spodumene, which must be processed into lithium carbonate to be used in batteries, is so low that mining of the ore by workers using hand tools as is done for cassi and coltan could never make economic sense. The only thing to do would be to mine it industrially and ship it out in bulk quantities.

Géomines operated their mines until Congo won its independence in 1960. The southern state of Katanga separated from Congo and was recaptured by the United Nations and the Congolese state. The area surrounding Manono was a warzone as rebels and the central government fought for control, but former colonists kept order in town by using harsh methods. ‘Every Indigenous person who behaves incorrectly towards a white person or who “shows off” is automatically thrashed before being tossed into a cell,’ an agent of a Belgian mining concern wrote approvingly to his superiors in a confidential cable from 1962 that I found while researching the region in the Belgian State Archives in Brussels.

In 1965, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko took power with the support of the United States. He managed to quell violence and secessionism in his country using a combination of brutality and bribery. In 1967, the country’s mines began to be nationalised by Mobutu. In Manono, he set out a fifty-fifty deal with a new, Congolese-owned, company named Congo-Étain and, later, Zairetain.

As so often happened under Mobutu’s reign, the company became a vehicle for those in his orbit to enrich themselves. Like the town’s swimming pool, salaries began to dry up, and the football fields sprouted weeds. Foreign workers started to leave. The mines continued to be exploited until 1982 when tin prices bottomed-out – tantalum was still a sideshow. There was now no more revenue for the country’s venal elites to steal, so they began to scavenge whatever equipment and infrastructure they could. All that is left of the town’s famous brewery, which made a beer called ‘Nyota’ (Swahili for ‘star’) until sometime in the 1980s, is a crumbling building off the central roundabout.

Congo spiralled into war and disaster in the 1990s as the rebel leader Laurent-Desirée Kabila took power. What business was left in Manono evaporated when Rwandan troops seized the town in 1999. The Rwandans took control of the cassi and coltan mining along with a proxy rebel group, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie. Even today, Rwanda, a country to which the British government has deemed it safe to send asylum seekers, continues to fund militias in Congo, and the Rwandan government is accused of stealing resources to enrich its ruling class.

 

Coltan, the tantalum ore, has frequently been connected to armed groups by global NGOs, and it carries a quasi-mystical reputation in some Congolese circles. The anthropologist James H Smith recounts in his book The Eyes of the World being told by a militia fighter that coltan was used in his group’s magic rituals because it ‘contained and magnified the power of the forest’.

Towards the end of 2000, the PlayStation 2, which contained a tantalum-heavy capacitor, was released in the US and Europe. At the same time, the Second Congo War between Rwanda, Congo, Uganda and a plethora of militia groups, was entering one of its most violent periods. Tantalum underwent a drastic price spike on international spot markets, jumping around 1,000 percent in value, fuelled partly by Christmas demand for the console. A faction of the Rassemblement Congolaise even started its own mining company. ‘During that time, we would avoid the mines,’ Pascale, a cassi and coltan trader told me in Manono. ‘The Rwandans would steal everything, and they brought their own militias to do mining.’ Wealth and weapons flooded into the Congolese interior, and journalists came to know the period as ‘the PlayStation Wars’.

Around about the same time, in the early 2000s, Kabila called on local militia groups to fight off foreign enemies and their domestic proxies. They were known as Mai-Mai, after the Swahili word for ‘water’, because they believed that water, blessed by a fetish priest, would ward off bullets. The most famous of the Mai-Mai operating around Manono was the self-styled Nkambo, or ‘Lord’, Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga Wa Bafunkwa Kanonga, a wild-eyed former teacher. Gédéon, who added the Kiluba epithet ‘Wa Bafunkwa’, or ‘already dead’, to his name, was accused of using cannibalism to terrify local inhabitants and of recruiting child soldiers. He was convicted of war crimes by Congo’s government in 2009.

The central government was barely able to rule the country, and an area as remote as Manono was far beyond their control. Rumour had it that powerful officers in the army were using Gédéon and his militia to scare people away from the area as they became wealthy from the region’s cassi and coltan. Thierry Mukelekele, a former spokesman for Gédéon, told me that politicians in the capital were complicit in the violence and also earned money from the mines.

At his trial, Gédéon was sentenced to death, but he and his wife managed to escape. Some people claimed that the military wanted to use him to pillage the area around Manono once again. ‘It was easier for him to run away when the army was there than when the police was there,’ Moïse Katumbi Chapwe, the governor of Katanga at the time, told me, noting that ‘the day he got out from the prison is the day the army replaced the police at the facility’. Katumbi believed that elements in the army had sprung him from prison to do their dirty work. Queue two more years of senseless violence, with Gédéon ostensibly aiming to separate Katanga province from Kinshasa’s rule (he renamed his militia ‘Bakata Katanga’, or ‘Cut off Katanga’ in Kiswahili). Katangan independence has been an aim of many in the region since decolonisation, when a short-lived state of Katanga existed for almost three years before being crushed by United Nations troops in early 1963. As Gédéon’s militia threatened civilians in the early 2010s, Manono formed one vertex of what became known as ‘the Triangle of Death’. Over 4,000 people were displaced, according to the UN, and estimates of the dead are hard to come by. Gédéon would voluntarily disarm again in 2016 and then escape house arrest in 2020.

Gédéon is still at large. In a video released just after the most recent Congolese elections in late 2023, he stands at the center of a small village that Congolese journalists believe to be to the south of Manono. He is wearing the red, white and green flag of Katanga, sewn together into a kind of stocking-hat, gum boots and a teal windbreaker. Watched by a crowd of villagers, he reads a declaration of Katangese independence in Swahili. When I asked Katumbi, who was running for president at the time, what he thought of the declaration, he scoffed, ‘and how do you think he will make a separate Katanga? With bows and arrows?’

After the PlayStation Wars period, coltan plummeted in value as trading slowed and long-term contracts were negotiated by technology companies, but the damage was done. An independent panel of experts reported to the UN in 2002 that eighty-five multinational companies, among them twelve British firms and household names like Barclays and De Beers, had profited off Congolese minerals during a war that would kill an estimated 5.4 million people, more than any conflict since the Second World War.

Moves were made to classify tantalum and tin, as well as tungsten and gold, as ‘conflict minerals’, and a tagging system called the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative, or iTSCI, was introduced. ‘The narratives supporting these advocacy themes rely on a colonial image of Black and African savagery that requires white saviours,’ Christoph Vogel writes in Conflict Minerals, Inc., ‘to bring peace, order and development.’ His book shows how the initiative has given rise to an illegal economy of tags and increased violence. iTSCI has driven down prices, directly affecting the lives of artisanal miners in places like Manono, he argues, and has entrenched ‘the exclusion and marginalisation of mining communities that became trapped in markets monopolised by powerful end users.’

 

When I visited Manono’s Carrière de l’Est in 2022, it had become a vast small-scale mine at the eastern end of the city. In the golden light of the late afternoon, men and women worked up to their waists in mud and puddles. Jolie, one of the miners, proffered a metal pan that gleamed in the early evening sun. ‘I come here at seven in the morning and leave at six in the evening. Today I found coltan. Maybe eight hundred grammes, maybe seven hundred grammes. I might be able to sell it for about fifty dollars,’ Jolie told me, excitedly. She would be able to feed her three children for a couple of weeks on what she earned from selling the minerals. Inside, the precious black rocks, chunks the size of a thumb, glistened.

The war years have left Manono feeling hollowed, a carcass plucked clean by scavenging birds. Buildings rot, a stripped power station is taken to pieces for scrap, houses are reduced to deformed grids of brick – here, a right-angle signifying where a wall might have divided a kitchen from a living room; there, doors with broken panes of glass; above, a roof stripped and signified only by rusted metal ribs – their floors carved into tell-tale square pits. People are destroying the ground beneath them in the rush to find cassi and coltan.

Once dug from the ground, the shovelfuls of rock are bagged and humped to the Lukushi river where they are sieved and washed by yet more women, children and sometimes men. ‘It’s after work that we go to sell in the other corner there where there are places to sell our product,’ Ziani Mwamba, the miner with the red bandana told me.

The ‘other corner’ was a clearing under a tree at a crossroads. Men clustered around a rusting Belgian steam engine and haggled over prices. Women with bloodshot eyes cooked the rock on metal discs until it turned to dark grey powder. One of them was Anita Kikungwe, a woman in a black-and-white striped shirt with an improbably tidy lace fringe. The smell of her baking minerals stuck in the mouth. ‘When we smell this smoke we have some problems with our eyes, but we need to do it to dry this cassi and to be paid at a good price,’ she said. Humid cassi is worth less.

Kikungwe had been working since seven a.m., roughly nine hours. She was thirty-four and had been digging for minerals since she was thirteen. She has two children, who stay at home when she goes to work. Her younger sister teaches them, as Kikungwe cannot afford to send them to school – despite the promises of Tshisekedi, Congo’s president, to provide free education to children, schools often charge registration fees that are impossibly high and demand other payments that parents cannot afford. After all, many of the teachers are not paid regularly by the government, if at all. ‘The objective is that the minerals will be dry, so I will be well paid.’ Nearby were potential buyers: Monsieur Pascale, who sat nearby toting a leatherette shoulderbag stuffed with bills, and Monsieur Freddy, to whom Mwamba usually sells her minerals. She estimated she can make between $1 and $7 a day.

Monsieurs Pascale and Freddy loaded sacks of mineral onto motorcycles and brought them to the town centre. There, they ducked into gates built into a stretch of buildings on Manono’s high street. Behind the whitewashed facades of these Belgian-built arcades (a Wild West architectural style of row-houses with elegant gables and crumbling interiors) were the trading houses, which are known as comptoirs.

Stepping into the comptoirs is the first step in a transnational voyage. After all, it is at this early stage, before any international borders is crossed, that Congo’s minerals leave the possession of the country’s people.

Business here is run by Indian firms and a handful of Lebanese traders. Chief among these is Mining Mineral Resources, or MMR. The firm seemed to be trying to occupy a similar space to Géomines in post-Lapsarian Manono, though its ambition has been scaled back to match the town’s dilapidation: public benches about town, including the ancient wooden pews in the waiting room at the airfield, are labelled Don de MMR – gift of MMR.

At MMR’s comptoir in Manono, I saw Congolese men piling cassi and coltan on a concrete floor in front of an office. According to its website, MMR, which is a subsidiary of a group called the Société Minière de Katanga, is based in the city of Lubumbashi to the south. It is certified by no less than eight international supply chain transparency groups. On the website, too, the company engages in the kind of corporate-speak that elides the reality of miners like Kikungwe: ‘We conduct our business with a focus on maintaining and continuously improving the safety and health of employees, contractors, service providers and the public.’ It was not clear that any of MMR’s staff even went to the mines or understood who was digging up the cassi and coltan, let alone focused on improving the miners’ health and safety. They only dealt with money and minerals as they came through the door, sold by traders like Pascale and Freddy.

At the MMR compound, I was ushered into a back room. Mustafa, an Indian mineral trader from the state of Gujurat, sat with his eyes half closed at a desk, in a state of pensive suspension. He never goes out to the minesite, he said, and no, he couldn’t do an interview. The rock is transported out by Chinese truckers, but unlike in the cobalt and copper industry in the south, they had not made inroads into Manono’s tin and tantalum industry.

 

The extractive industry in Africa, and especially in Congo with its decaying roads, depends on logistics. That much had become apparent to me as I tried to get to Manono. The regular airservice from Lubumbashi had been cancelled and I could only get there travelling on the back of a motorcycle.

It was, in some ways, a journey to a different time. For three days, we drove along roads that were marked as highways but were actually small streams along which people pushed bicycles laden with second-hand clothes. At Mulongo, I had to cross the Lualaba river in a dug-out canoe and bunked with Congolese soldiers who had been sent to quell insecurity around a mine. At Kabondo-Dianda, a railway town that is served by a train that comes so irregularly that sometimes people end up waiting for it for weeks, and that AVZ thinks might be the right nexus from which to freight out spodumene, there was not enough fuel for generators to watch a highly anticipated football game between the DRC and Morocco.

Along the way to Manono, there were endless trucks – carrying mattresses, people, food, minerals – stuck in roads that had turned to soup. People pitched tarpaulins next to them. Their drivers – Chinese and African – sat around small fires. Some had been stuck for months.

The problem for AVZ, or anyone who wants to export lithium from Manono, is that the version of the mineral that they plan to export is only commercially viable when trucked out in bulk. Refining it further would entail a complex and electricity-intensive process. (Coltan and, to some extent cassi, are able to be easily refined into a more concentrated product that is worth more, so the current economics of trucking still makes sense.) AVZ would require huge numbers of trucks going back and forth to a working rail depot – or barges crossing Lake Tanganiyka to the east – in order to justify their mine. ‘They’ll never do it,’ a London mine investor told me when I asked him about AVZ’s plan to mine lithium in Manono. ‘Nobody can export bulk spodumene out of a remote place like that.’

AVZ think they can. Their plan is to build a tarmacked road to get their product out. It would certainly change things for the population, whom Jeef Kazadi Kamwanga, a Congolese journalist who travelled with me, lamented had been ‘left to their own bad luck’ by the central government. Road-building would benefit the mining companies of Manono, and though it shouldn’t be seen as altruism, the knock-on effects would be enormous; towns would be connected and all manner of business would have the chance to thrive. The point was rammed home in one town where the population, unaccustomed to seeing foreigners, gathered around me, politely curious. A man started doing a dance and singing. ‘The whites are going to circulate, the whites are going to circulate,’ he sang. ‘And where the whites circulate, money circulates too!’

 

On my final day in Manono, I met Mick Brown again for a tour of Roche Dure. He had been working at the site for five months and his rotation was coming to an end the next day. Brown explained that the ore mined by AVZ at Manono would be first pulverised in a gigantic new crusher and then taken to a refinery. AVZ has said they will build a first-stage refinery in Manono to concentrate the lithium somewhat before shipping it. In 2021, AVZ signed agreements with three major Chinese lithium refiners who would buy the minerals and do the expensive and power-intensive task of refining them into battery precursors in China. More than half a million tonnes a year had been pre-sold: Ganfeng Lithium had agreed to buy 160,000 tonnes for five years, Shenzhen Chengxin Lithium 180,000 tonnes for two years, and Yibin Tianyi Lithium 200,000 tonnes for two years.

For a while, it appeared as if AVZ and the Chinese firms had forged a workable collaboration – after all, the Australian firm is what is known as a ‘junior miner’, a small company that begins with a theory about a certain deposit and then shepherds a mine through the exploration and development phases, before larger players step in and take over operations. The endeavour is replete with risks, and junior miners are often hard-bitten, larger-than-life characters who have grown accustomed to living under pressure. Success for these companies is not only based on the richness of the reserve they have developed, but also how much money they can eventually convince a large operator to pay them. Hence the mining engineer John Hays Hammond’s 1911 admonishment that a mine is ‘a hole in the ground sold by a lying promoter to a stupid investor’.

Brown and I hopped into a battered Toyota Landcruiser and drove to the Roche Dure site, the first one the AVZ plans to work. It has been cleared of artisanal miners, who have been warned off the site by the local government. It is not as if there are a lack of sites to mine at Manono at the minute, but there is a very real danger, like at mines in the cobalt-and-copper mining city of Kolwezi to the south, that artisanal miners will eventually find fewer places to work. After all, industrial mines don’t employ huge numbers of people.

Larger mining firms will argue that artisanal mining is dangerous, unhealthy and that small-scale miners like Mwamba and Kikungwe are exploited in places like Manono by traders, who undercut them on pricing. After all, the large firms argue, they pay hefty taxes and royalties to the government, which should use the money for public works. The problem is that the money is often stolen by politicians in Kinshasa before it can return to the local communities. AVZ’s solution to this impasse, Brown told me, is working with the local community to build essential services, like schools and hospitals. AVZ would probably, however, be able to exert little control on the continuity of such projects if they sell their stake.

At Roche Dure, a series of steps had been cut back in the ground – Belgian or perhaps Mobutist earthworks from years and years ago. Around the edge of the gigantic hole in the ground (for that is what mines end up being), manioc roots had been laid to dry, sliced in half.

‘That’s pegmatite,’ Brown said, showing me samples extracted by AVZ, virtually worthless in such small quantities, but indicative of a far greater wealth beneath.

The tour ended with Brown taking me round to a series of bore holes, from which AVZ extracted its core samples, or assays. They were lain out in a large shed nearby. Scientists had long known that Manono had a huge lithium reserve, but AVZ was the first to put the effort into proving its profitability.

AVZ was established in 2007 as Avonlea Minerals, Ltd. For its first years, Avonlea focused on iron ore and vanadium mining in Namibia. In 2012 the company changed its name to AVZ Minerals. Its new managing director was Klaus Eckhof, a German geologist who had contacts in Congo: in 2003 he began exploration at the huge Moto gold mine in the northeastern corner of the country. (Eckhof would later leave the company under a cloud and claim that AVZ’s executives were, as he put it, ‘racist’ towards their Congolese colleagues.) In 2017, AVZ issued an announcement that it had made a deal to acquire the rights to explore and mine Manono’s lithium deposits.

AVZ had acquired the mining rights from a firm called Dathomir, which is named after an obscure planet infested by evil witches in the Star Wars series. Dathomir in turn had acquired the rights to mine Manono the year before for $6 million, which AVZ promised to pay along with the shares. (The investigative nonprofit Global Witness estimates that Dathomir earned up to $28 million for, essentially, flipping the mine.) Dathomir was partly owned by Guy Loando Mboyo, a thirty-something Congolese lawyer who reportedly had close ties to Congo’s then-president, Joseph Kabila Kabange. Loando was the son of two teachers from central Congo who had grown up in what he once described as a ‘modest family that was rich in love and principles’. In the early 2000s, after his father’s death, Loando came to Kinshasa and studied law, creeping his way into the Kabila government’s power structure. (He was inspired, he claimed, by the principle of ‘working one’s way upwards’.) In 2017, he joined AVZ’s board as Dathomir’s representative and then resigned when he became a senator in 2019 and later a minister in president Tshisekedi’s government.

The majority ownership of Dathomir belonged to a Chinese businessman named Cong Mao Huai, known to most people as Simon Cong. Loando liked to describe Cong as a kind of mentor. A one-time translator who came to Congo with close to nothing, Cong has over the last thirty years built up a portfolio of businesses in Congo, some in mining and others in road construction, though the jewel in the crown is the Fleuve Congo, a luxury Kinshasa hotel that Le Monde once called ‘the antechamber of power’.

A series of investigations called Congo Hold Up, which were coordinated by European Investigative Collaborations, a transnational journalism nonprofit, showed that Cong and Loando were involved in funneling money from Chinese businesses, including mining concerns, to president Kabila. At least one firm, the China Constructions Corporation, listed the Fleuve Congo hotel as its Kinshasa headquarters.

AVZ published the results of its assays in a series of announcements on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2018 and 2019. The tone was breathless: ‘Remarkable Drill Results Confirm Carriere de l’Este Prospect as an Additional Potentially Massive World Class Lithium Project to Rival the Roche Dure Deposit.’ The lithium world was set abuzz. ‘Our total resource is 400 million tonnes at 1.6 percent lithium, total strike length is about thirteen kilometres long,’ Brown says as we tour the site.

Chinese companies were quick to try and work with AVZ. Within a couple of months, a company called Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co., which buys hand-mined cobalt in mines to the south of Manono and has been accused of abetting human rights abuses and child labor, had signed an agreement with AVZ. Then, in September 2021, AVZ signed a $250 million agreement with a company affiliated with CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker.

A US State Department official expressed concern to me that the Manono project would give China even more control over the supply chain for energy storage. Xi Jinping, China’s president, has prioritised the electric vehicle industry, and China’s largest battery firms, buoyed by state infusions of capital, have stepped up to the task; China now accounts for 60 percent of global electric vehicle sales.

Battery makers need to assure safe sources of minerals like lithium for the future. CATL arguably went the furthest of any such company in its search for cobalt, another battery metal, when it bought a $137.5 million stake in the Kisanfu mine, to the south of Manono. The US government, on the other hand, is ‘playing catchup’, the State Department official said, and told me there are no US businesses in Congo apart from a Coca Cola bottling plant. A Washington lobbyist told me that the US government does not help investors who want to buy stakes in mines in Congo, despite overtures from the Biden administration about ‘critical minerals’. Businesses from the US and Europe have to contend with anticorruption legislation, which also exists in China, but only seems to be applied very sparingly to Chinese firms working in Congo.

At Roche Dure, Brown said, the ‘proven reserve’, that is, the amount of rock that AVZ knows is in the ground, is 130 million tonnes. The mine life will be about twenty-nine years. A Congolese state-owned enterprise, La Congolaise d’Exploitation Minière, or Cominière, owns 30 percent of the mining company. Whatever lithium is mined will also be taxed at 10 percent, as it falls under Congo’s mining code for ‘strategic minerals’. Under the legislation, mining companies have to commit to building amenities for the local population. (In a 2021 report, the advocacy organisation Global Witness criticised AVZ for not releasing its environmental impact plan in a timely manner, and expressed concerns it had not yet fully laid out its plans for its work in the local community.) Brown and others at AVZ pointed to plans for a hospital and a school that were already underway. In early 2022 the company’s valuation on the Australian Securities Exchange reached 4.6 billion Australian dollars (around $3.46 billion at the time).

But even as we talked, moves were being made in Kinshasa to block AVZ’s Congolese entity from continuing the project. A member of Tshisekedi’s inner circle had taken a personal interest in the project, and she had been involved with the sale of the Congolese stake to a Chinese firm called Ziijn Mining. Lisette Kabanga Tshibwabwa has family ties to the president’s home province, and is part of an ascendancy of people with such connections who have taken the reigns of power. According to a report by the Congolese Inspector General of Finances, Kabanga was paid $1.6 million by Zijin, just before Cominière sold half of its shares – 15 percent of the entire project – to Zijin.

AVZ was caught off guard: the company’s executives said they thought they had the right of first refusal over the sale of Cominière sales. Zijin started to move against AVZ, and soon their license was revoked. The company’s value started to plummet on the Australian stock exchange before trading of the stock was suspended pending resolution of the dispute. Lawsuits were begun: Zijin sued AVZ for $850 million, and AVZ took Zijin to arbitration court in Paris. In a September 2023 press release, the firm’s representatives said they believed that Zijin, Dathomir and Cominière were ‘acting in concert to crystalise disputes with AVZ and disrupt and delay the development of the Manono Project with the aim of seizing control of the Manono Project. Their conduct has contributed to the delay by the DRC’ – Congo – ‘in granting the exploitation permit.’ The project stalled.

 

At his home in Manono, Pierre Mukamba Kaseya, the government administrator of the region, looked at me through rheumy eyes. He wore a white T-shirt and flip-flops. Mukamba told me that I was the first journalist to come to him and ask about the town in years. I couldn’t tell if he was just being polite. His white, modernist home was dilapidated, and behind him hung a poster commemorating Congo’s leaders – Lumumba, Mobutu, Kabila, but also Moise Tshombe, who led Katanga’s separatist government in the early 1960s.

Mukamba was pensive, but when I described my Greek origins, he brightened a little. ‘You must, as a journalist, help Manono, help put us on the map again. Show the crisis and how people suffer.’ The crisis he was referring to was Manono’s general dilapidation and poverty. Mukamba died last year.

Last November, a report by Global Witness intimated that the old colonial paradigm risks being repeated in Manono, which is certainly one possibility: outsiders get rich, and local people are left with holes in the ground. Or as the report puts it, ‘shell companies profit while Congolese citizens wait for change.’ But the townsfolk are also desperate for services and for infrastructure, and their numbers are growing. Lithium could allow them to develop the area, just as China has done with its shiny, new rare-earth mining cities. With the lithium project stalled, Manono is, in Kazadi’s phrase, ‘left to its own bad luck’. Roads flood, elephants trample crops, food remains hard to come by for many families and preventable diseases like polio spread in the absence of healthcare. The questions surrounding how to balance development with an expanding population remain unanswered.

The Australo-Chinese lithium squabble is still caught up in the courts – no AVZ representative would speak to me for this article, and when I tried to attend a hearing between the parties at the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Court of Arbitration, in Paris, I was told that such proceedings are secret. Graeme Johnston, the technical director for AVZ, declined to be interviewed but he did send me a series of emails. In his last message, he wrote that the Chinese firms trying to wrest control of the Manono lithium concession were ‘a bunch of gangsters’. The cases were in court, he said. ‘We are facing a concerted and well-funded disinformation campaign in the DRC paid for by our Chinese mates,’ he continued. He ended with a geopolitical kicker, the type of thing that the State Department officer had been so concerned with when we spoke. ‘Since this deposit could supply 20 percent of the global lithium supply it is logical to assume that those who end up with Manono will be able to control the world’s lithium price.’

Leaving Manono, I managed to book a seat on a flight that AVZ had chartered from the town’s small airstrip for Brown’s departure. Taking off, Brown and I looked down at the town. He showed me where AVZ planned to build the new hospital and a new power plant, that was, if AVZ stuck around long enough to start extracting Manono’s lithium. The city was elongated along boulevards; from a distance, the houses looked neat and new. We banked southwards and gained altitude. For a second, I saw the mines: two giant holes in the ground, ready to swallow the city whole.

 

Image 1 of 4

Kamina, the office of Air Fast, which had suspended service to Manono, making motorbike the only way to reach the town

Image 2 of 4

Jolie, an artisanal miner who had just found colatan ore

Image 3 of 4

Manono town centre

Image 4 of 4

Patching a tire on National Road 33, between Manono and Mulongo

Photography courtesy of the author

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]]> Introduction: On Staying at Home https://granta.com/introduction-william-atkins/ Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:59:51 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=88360 ‘If the following pieces can be said to have an overriding characteristic, it is that they take seriously the experience of being a stranger.’

Guest editor William Atkins introduces the issue.

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]]> ‘Why do I travel so much when I am so terribly frightened of traveling?’
– Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, trans. Joan Tate

 

It’s a good question. Some years ago, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, in Xinjiang, China, a young Uyghur man asked me another one: why, when I could travel ‘anywhere’, as he saw it, had I come to this place of dust storms and surveillance, which he longed to escape? He couldn’t sleep, he said; whatever he tried, he couldn’t sleep. China’s network of ‘re-education’ camps, where as many as 1.5 million Uyghur people are today enduring internment, forced labour, torture and rape, was then in its infancy, but for him the ‘autonomous region’ was already a nightmare of state harassment and incipient violence. He spoke in a whisper, even in the desert. I had no reasonable answer to his question, and felt, not for the first time, the self-disgust of the European travel writer in a troubled place, who – journalistic pretexts aside – is neither a news correspondent nor an international observer, but basically a tourist with a book in mind: monitored, perhaps, but free to brush off the sand and go home to his desk when he wishes. The feeling lingers.

This volume has evolved with such questions of travel in mind. Since its tenth issue, published in 1984, Granta has been credited with shaping, if not defining, what is blithely called ‘travel writing’. Granta 10’s contents page is a catalogue of the genre’s most influential, and best-selling, modern practitioners, including Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. Its editor, Bill Buford, acknowledged in his introduction that travel writing, as a genre which ‘borrows from the memoir, reportage and, most important, the novel’, is hard to pin down. We needn’t persist with definitions, other than to wonder if travel writing’s resistance to them is one of the things that energises it.

The current volume exemplifies what Buford calls the ‘generic androgyny’ of travel writing, but certain themes recur. Bathsheba Demuth, in far-east Russia, and Eliane Brum (trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty), in the Antarctic, both write about environmental decline, embodied in the whale and in humankind’s treatment of this creature we often profess to love. It’s increasingly clear that the environmental crisis is inextricable from the crisis of human displacement, even while traditional drivers of exile persist. In her essay about the Afghan migrant community in Hamburg’s Steindamm district, Taran N. Khan notes that ‘when we talk of writing on travel, we are often describing borders’. It is partly in the hope of dealing with suppressed trauma that Javier Zamora drives with his friend Francisco Cantú to the US–Mexico border – the border he once crossed as an undocumented child migrant and Cantú once guarded as a Border Patrol agent.

They are not alone in going back, in memory or reality. ‘When I thought about returning, it was only ever in my mother’s language,’ writes Jessica J. Lee, in her mapping of the alleys of Taipei, Taiwan, where her mother was born. Tiring of New York, Emmanuel Iduma returns to Nigeria, where he grew up, recalling the journeys of his father, an itinerant Presbyterian minister, and recognising in himself an inheritance of restlessness: ‘From his impermanence I grew into mine.’

The American artist Roni Horn has been visiting Iceland since 1975, returning with what she calls ‘migratory insistence and regularity’. She describes ‘16 Sheets from LOG’ as a ‘collection of notes, casual observations, facts, quotes, events of weather and private life, news, and anything otherwise notable that came to mind or hand each day’. There can be a feeling of liberation in surrendering to the complexity of any place – especially one that is not our home – and thus to its unknowability. ‘I’m often asked but have no idea why I chose Iceland,’ Horn writes, ‘why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.’

It’s been an interesting time to commission a volume of travel writing. The carbon implications were a consideration from the start – contributors were to be discouraged from flying – but in the event, the journeys they wrote about were by necessity journeys that had already been made. At first Covid was only an ominous whisper, but its spread can be traced across these pages. Aboard a Greenpeace ship, Brum hears of a virus that is ‘devastating the whole world’ and assumes the speaker is describing a disaster movie. Among the volcanoes of the Philippines’ Cordillera Central, Ben Mauk registers rumblings of a ‘novel virus in China that seemed at risk of spreading to other countries in Asia’. Then, around the world, cases erupt. In Kapka Kassabova’s ‘The Ninth Spring’, seasonal workers returning to Bulgaria’s Mesta basin bring Covid back with their pay cheques. Other journeys were abandoned altogether. Sinéad Gleeson’s planned return to that ancient place of healing, Lourdes, had to be forgone in favour of a journey, compiled of fragments of memory, in the footsteps of the Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Both Khan’s reflections on her status as an Indian passport holder and Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s account (trans. Frank Wynne) of his interrogation by immigration officers in Cuba, meanwhile, are reminders that nonchalant global mobility has never been available to most of the world’s population.

One response to Elizabeth Bishop’s enquiry in her poem ‘Questions of Travel’ – ‘Should we have stayed at home’ – might be: ‘It depends who you mean by we.’ According to the writer Charles Sugnet, Granta 10 was nothing more than a ‘highbrow version of the Banana Republic catalog’, guilty of perpetuating ‘colonialist discourse’. Hyperbole, perhaps, but the travel writer of myth – Bowie knife in one pocket, Moleskine in another, off to Patagonia – is a stubborn ghost, and even in the 1980s, often came across as a revenant of the 1890s: alarmingly erudite, unflappable, prone to affectionate generalisations, and indistinguishable in all but style from the emissaries of colonial power that went before.

The genre has lost some of its self-assurance, and that’s a relief. The bluff tone has abated – prompted partly by an overdue postcolonial reckoning, partly by a greater plurality of perspectives, and partly by what scholars of the genre call ‘belatedness’. Tim Hannigan, in his recent book The Travel Writing Tribe, describes this phenomenon as ‘the nagging suspicion that all the truly worthwhile journeys have already been done’. The world having been well and truly ‘discovered’, and thus despoiled, the modern travel writer’s task is to pick sagaciously over its bones. The Amazon basin is a smoking ruin; the sands of the Arabian Empty Quarter are as footprint-riddled as Clacton-on-Sea; the throat singers of Tuva are doing numbers on Instagram. But grief can easily become a posture of art, or lapse into colonialist nostalgia. It’s hard to imagine a future, or even see the present clearly, when we are entranced by dreams of the past.

A second response to Bishop’s question can be found in these words attributed to another American poet, Gary Snyder: the most radical thing you can do is stay at home. Stay at home and it’s hard to colonise, enslave, pillage or fight a war, as Bishop recognised. Had we stayed at home, the human race might not be reeling from a global pandemic, and the globe itself might not be in the state it’s in, with grey whales ‘eating themselves from the inside out’, as Demuth describes. When any long-haul flight can plausibly be described as an act of violence, we’d all do well to learn to dwell better, to know and love our own patch more deeply. And yet precisely because of the peril we face as a species, there remains value in venturing – carefully, reverently – beyond the horizon, as these pieces show, even if we reject the modes of travel that brought the world to this pass in the first place.

One of the contributors to Granta 10, Jan Morris, told the Paris Review that travel, for her, had been a search for reconciliation: ‘with nature but with people too . . . a pursuit [of] unity and even an attempt to contribute to a sense of unity’. Putting together this volume has confirmed to me that conscious, conscientious travel (and writing about it) goes hand in hand with an ethos of hospitality. If the following pieces can be said to have an overriding characteristic, it is that they take seriously the experience of being a stranger. What does it mean to be an outsider, wherever we call home? How do we react when stripped of everything familiar? Who are we, removed from hearth and loved ones? And how can we, in turn, offer the stranger ‘[a] helping hand, a feeling of safety’, in Zamora’s words? Only by doing so, as we continue to go out to meet the world on its own terms, can we begin to imagine an equitable future.

 

 

Extract from ‘Questions of Travel’ from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From Poems by Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto & Windus. Copyright © 2011 Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited; extract from Exterminate All The Brutes by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Joan Tate. Copyright © 1992 by Sven Lindqvist. Translation copyright © 1996 by The New Press. Reprinted by permission of The New Press, www.thenewpress.com, and by Granta Books, www.granta.com.

Map design by Theo Inglis

 

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