by Gao Xingjian
One Man
Gao Xingjian
One Man's Bible is the second novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian to appear in English. Following on the heels of his highly praised Soul Mountain , this later work is as candid as the first, and written with the same grace and beauty.
In a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao Xingjian's lover, Marguerite, stirs up his memories of childhood and early adult life under the shadow of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Gao has been living in self-imposed exile in France and has traveled to this Western-influenced Chinese city-state, so close to his homeland, for the staging of one of his plays.
What follows is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Communist regime. Whether in "beehive" offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, counterreactionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike.
One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.
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One Man's Bible belongs to that sad class of books sold on the strength of their authors having won a prize. But a prize is rather a thin argument for reading it, especially in a wooden English translation. Does one want to know more about Gao Xingjian than his first novel translated into English, Soul Mountain, told? That book had just enough exotic colour to survive its translation; from its portentous title onwards, One Man's Bible has much less going for it. It needs more story, structure, people, situations, atmosphere, ideas – anything strong enough to come through the obscuring veil of alien words.
When, in 2001, Gao became the first Chinese writer to win a Nobel prize for literature, it came as a surprise. The Chinese literary bureaucrats – today's counterparts of the strange Soviet creatures in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita – had long been pushing for one of their trusties to win. Gao was certainly not one of those, but neither was he prominent in any of the exiled literary cliques. Since being driven to leave China in the 1980s he had been living in France, writing supposedly experimental, sub-Beckettian plays with Chinese characteristics that some critics in the Chinese-speaking world thought worth discussing. These plays also suited small, subsidised European theatre companies in search of uncommercial exotica full of the timeless wisdom of the east. While still in China, Gao was best known for Bus Stop, a one-acter about people waiting for a bus that never came. What delighted audiences and infuriated the authorities when the play appeared some 20 years ago was its apparent implied message: the never-arriving bus was the wonderful future that the regime promised but could not deliver.
Soul Mountain was fiction in the form of an autobiography (or vice versa) that told a fragmented tale of a writer on the run in the wilder reaches of the Yangtze valley. The background chimed with Gao's own flight from the thought police, as well as being a celebration of "authentic" China surviving 40 years of the party state in remote and picturesque areas. There was quite a lot of sex, too.
One Man's Bible also invites us to read its central character, again an author, as an alter ego of Gao's. As he looks back from cosmopolitan exile in the present – the book was written in the late 1990s – on his life in China, this author makes much of feeling uncomfortable, and wallows in sententiousness. The book starts with a bourgeois childhood before the Communists seized power in 1949 (when the real Gao was eight or nine), moving on to his family's and his own troubles in the unending series of political campaigns that ran through the Mao era and its aftermath. Much of it deals with the cultural revolution, with our hero as participant as well as victim in a hellish process, and with how all this made him what he is now. Between the earlier life and the recent past there is a gap where Soul Mountain might fit.
Like Gao, the central figure in One Man's Bible is an exile based in France who writes fiction and drama in his own language. He enjoys the freedom not to be caught up in politics, and wonders how he came to be what he is. Invitations to events on the international cultural circuit give us scenes in Hong Kong, Sydney, New York, Perpignan and elsewhere, all of which are much the same. None of it seems to matter very much in comparison with the seriously deranged political movements of his youth which, though hindsight tells him they were wrong, he savours the discomfort of remembering.
If Soul Mountain explored China and Chineseness, One Man's Bible is all about enjoying feeling guilty, but not too guilty. It is about not being at home anywhere, not even in your own skin, and making the best of it; about the middle-aged worry over what you were when you were younger. As the central figure looks back over his life, he tries to accept the great realisation that it hasn't meant anything. Yet for all his attempts to be sophisticated, he can't help but feel disappointed at the pointlessness of life. He has not got over the Maoist urge to preach, though it is now a different sermon.
In the past 20 years, having a hard time under the Communist party dictatorship has been the stuff of a commercially flourishing genre of autobiographical writing in English by people, especially women, who have got out. Gao is not into that sort of soppy stuff. His fiction has rather more in common with a newer popular sub-genre of Chinese fiction for foreign readers: unillusioned fucklit, by younger women writers. The China his central character has left was an awful place, but one that gave him access to plenty of women's bodies. The west has given him freedom and more women for his bed, but not happiness or meaning. It has allowed him to hold forth on life and art, even if what he has to say is banal.
As a self-conscious follower of European modernism, Gao does not give us this fictional life in a chronological sequence. He assumes that readers can find their way through the cut-up narrative of the cultural revolution, picking up references as Chinese people of his generation will be able to. Yet most foreigners will simply be confused. They are more likely to follow the novel through the unending couplings with which its subject tries to fill the voids in his past and present lives. We start with a German-Jewish woman in Hong Kong, where one of his plays is being staged. There is another in France, and others collected elsewhere on his travels, as well as the various sexual partners in his earlier life in China. But on the whole, the bodies do not seem to have brains.
The ideas in One Man's Bible are commonplace, its characters are ciphers, and it is not redeemed by wit, grace or self-mockery. Its solipsism is banal. I hope we will not have to endure a third novel in this series on the splendours and miseries of being a Nobel prize-winner.
WJF Jenner is a translator and expert on Chinese writing.
Gao Xingjian
One Man's Bible
Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
1
It was not that he didn't remember he once had another sort of life.
But, like the old yellowing photograph at home, which he did not burn, it was sad to think about, and far away, like another world that had disappeared forever. In his Beijing home, confiscated by the police, he had a family photo left by his dead father: it was a happy gathering, and everyone in the big family was present. His grandfather who was still alive at the time, his hair completely white, was reclined in a rocking chair, paralyzed and unable to speak. He, the eldest son and eldest grandson of the family, the only child in the photo, was squashed between his grandparents. He was wearing slit trousers that showed his little dick, and he had on his head an American-style boat-shaped cap. At the time, the eight-year War of Resi
stance against the Japanese had just ended, and the Civil War had not properly started. The photograph had been taken on a bright summer day in front of the round gateway in the garden, which was full of golden chrysanthemums and purple-red cockscombs. That was what he recalled of the garden, but the photo was water-stained and had turned a grayish yellow. Behind the round gateway was a two-story, English-style building with a winding walkway below and a balustrade upstairs. It was the big house he had lived in. He recalled that there were thirteen people in the photograph-an unlucky number-his parents, his paternal uncles and aunts, and also the wife of one of the uncles. Now, apart from an aunt in America and himself, all of them and the big house had vanished from this world.
While still in China, he had revisited the old city, looking for the old courtyard compound at the back of the bank where his father had once worked. He found only a few cheaply built cement residential buildings that would have been constructed a good number of years earlier. He asked people coming in and out if such a courtyard used to be there, but no one could say for sure. He remembered that at the rear gate of the courtyard, below the stone steps, there was a lake. At Duanwu Festival, his father and his bank colleagues would crowd on the stone steps to watch the dragon-boat race. There was the pounding of big gongs and drums, as dragon boats decorated with colorful streamers came to snatch the red packets hanging from bamboo poles put out by the houses around the lake. The red packets, of course, contained money. His third uncle, youngest uncle, and youngest aunt, once took him out on a boat to fish for the two-horned water chestnuts that grew in the lake. He had never been to the opposite side of the lake, but even if he went there and looked back, from that short distance, he would not have recognized this dreamlike memory.
This family had been decimated; it was too gentle and fragile for the times. It was destined to have no progeny. After his grandfather died, his father lost his job as bank manager and the family fell into rapid decline. His second uncle, who was keen on singing Peking Opera, was the only one to work with the new government authorities, and this was on account of his Democratic Personage title.
Nevertheless, seven or eight years later he was labeled a rightist. Afterward, he grew sullen, barely spoke, and would doze off as soon as he sat down. Transformed into a listless, wizened old man, he held on for a few years, then quietly died. The members of this big family died of illness, drowned, committed suicide, went insane, or followed their husbands to prison farms and simply passed away, so that the only person left was a bastard like him. There was also his eldest aunt whose black shadow had once engulfed the whole family. She was said to have been alive and well a few years ago, but he had not seen her since that photo was taken. The husband of this aunt was a member of the Nationalist airforce. As ground personnel, he never dropped a bomb but he fled to Taiwan, where he died of some illness a few years later. He did not know how this aunt had managed to get to America, and had not bothered to find out.
However, on his tenth birthday-it was customary in those times to use the lunar calendar, so he was actually only nine-the family was a large one, and it was a big event. When he got out of bed that morning, he put on new clothes as well as a new pair of leather shoes; to have a child wear leather shoes in those days was indulgent. He also received lots of presents: a kite, a chess set, a geometrical puzzle, imported coloring pencils, a pop gun with a rubber stopper, and the Complete Collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales in two volumes with copperplate illustrations. His grandmother gave him three silver dollars wrapped in red paper: one Qing Dynasty "dragon ocean," one Yuan Shikai "big bald head," and one new silver dollar with Chiang Kaishek in full military regalia. Each of the coins made a different sound. The Chiang Kai-shek one made a tinkle, compared with the clank of the thick and heavy Yuan Shikai "big bald head." He put these in his little leather suitcase, together with his stamp album and his colored marbles. Afterward, the whole family went out to eat steamed crab-roe dumplings in a garden restaurant with artificial mountains and a pond full of goldfish. A big round tabletop had to be used to seat everyone. For the first time, he was the center of attention in the family and he sat next to his grandmother in the seat where his grandfather, who had recently died, would have sat. It was as if they were waiting for him to become the bastion of the family. He bit into a dumpling, and hot liquid from the filling splashed his new clothes with grease. Nobody scolded him, they simply smiled, but he was greatly embarrassed. He remembered this, probably because he had just lost his childish ignorance and was aware of becoming a grown-up, and because he felt really stupid.
He also remembered that when his grandfather died, the mourning hall was hung with layers of coffin curtains, like the backstage of an opera theater, and it was much more fun than that birthday. A troupe of monks struck clappers and gongs as they chanted sutras. He lifted the coffin curtains, ran in and out of them, and had a good time. His mother got him to put on hemp shoes and he did, under duress, but adamantly refused to tie white cloth around his forehead, because it looked ugly. It was probably his grandmother's idea. However, his father had to tie white cloth around his head even though he was dressed in a white linen Western suit. The men who came to mourn were also mosdy in suits and ties, and the women were all wearing qipao and high-heeled shoes. Among the guests was a woman who played the piano; she was a coloratura soprano and the tremble in her singing made it sound like the bleating of a lamb-of course this wasn't in the mourning hall but at the wake at home. It was the first time he'd heard singing like this and he couldn't stop laughing. His mother quietly scolded him right in his ear, but he couldn't help laughing out loud.
In his memory, the time of his grandfather's death was like a special festival, and there was an absence of grief. He thought the old man should have died much earlier. He had been paralyzed for a long time, and during the day was always reclining in the rocking chair; that he should return to heaven, sooner or later, was quite natural. Death in his grandfather's case was not frightening, but his mother's death terrified him. She had drowned in a river on a farm. Her bloated corpse was found floating in the water by peasants when they took the ducks down to the river in the morning. His mother had responded to the call of the Party to go to the farms to be reeducated. She died in the prime of life, at the age of thirty-eight, so her image in his heart was always beautiful.
A present he got as a child was a gold Parker fountain pen, given to him by Uncle Fang, one of his father's colleagues at the bank. He was playing with Uncle Fang's pen at the time and wouldn't put it down. The grown-ups all thought it was a good sign, and said the child was sure to become a writer. Uncle Fang was very generous and gave him the pen, it was not on that birthday but when he was younger, because he had written a piece about it in his diary when he was almost eight. He should have been going to school but, because he was frail and sick all the time, it was his mother who taught him to read and also to write with a brush, a stroke at a time, over the red character prototypes printed in the squares of the exercise books. He did not find it hard, and at times filled a book in a day, so his mother said it was enough of that, and got him to write a diary with a brush to save paper. Some composition booklets with small squares were bought for him and even if it took him half a day to fill a page, it counted as his assignment. His first diary piece read roughly: "Snow falling on the ground turns it pure white, people treading on it leave dirty footprints." His mother talked about it, and everyone in the family, as well as family acquaintances, knew about it. From that time he could not stop himself writing about his dreams and self-love, sowing the seeds of future disaster.
His father disapproved of his staying indoors all day reading and writing. A boy should be fun-loving, explore the world, know lots of people, distinguish himself; he did not think much of his son being a writer. His father thought of himself as a good drinker. Actually, he liked to show off more than he liked drinking. At the time, a game known as Charging Through the Pass involved downing a cup of liquor with each person at a
banquet, and anyone who could make a round of three or five tables was a hero. Once his father was carried home unconscious and left downstairs in what used to be Grandfather's chair. None of the men were at home, and his grandmother, mother, and the maid couldn't get his father upstairs to bed. He recalled that a rope was lowered from the window upstairs and somehow both the chair and his father were slowly hauled up. His father hung high, swaying in midair, drunk and with a smile on his face. This was his father's great achievement, but he couldn't tell whether it was fantasy or not. With a child, memory and imagination are hard to separate.
For him, life before he was ten was like a dream. His childhood always seemed to be a dream world, even when his family was on the run as refugees. The truck was careering along a muddy mountain road in the rain and, all day long, he held a basket of oranges, which he ate under the tarpaulin covering. He once asked his mother if this had happened, and she said at the time oranges were cheap, and if you gave the villagers some money, they loaded them onto the truck next to the people. His father was working for a state-run bank, so armed guards, escorting the transport of banknotes, accompanied the family as it retreated with the bank.
The old home, now frequently appearing in dreams, was not the foreign-style house with the round doorway and the flower garden in which his grandfather had lived, but the old house with a well, left by his maternal grandmother. This little old woman, also dead, was forever rummaging in a big suitcase. In the dream, he is looking down at the house, which doesn't have a roof, at rooms divided by wooden walls. No one is there except for his grandmother who is frantically rummaging in the suitcase. He remembered that in the house there was an old-style leather suitcase that had been given a coat of paint and that in it, hidden under the clothes, was a parcel containing his grandmother's deeds to houses and land. The properties had been used to pay off debts or sold a long time before the new government authorities would have confiscated them. When his grandmother and mother burned that parcel of yellow, disintegrating papers, they were in a panic, but he hadn't reported them because no one came to investigate. However, had he in fact been questioned, he probably would have reported them, because his mother and grandmother were colluding to destroy criminal evidence, even if they did dearly love him.
