In China
The title of Zhu Wen’s I love Dollars collection of stories says it all: the love of money is rampant in China and everything and anything can be bought and sold. Value is conceived of only in terms of dollars and yuan and euros: a haircut and dye job, a necklace, food, drink, entertainment, sex. So where do old traditions of family duty and newer old traditions of communism fit in? Filial duties are now judged by money spent (or not) and communism is dead, gone, kaput, only valuable now as a tormentor and extractor of more dollars (bribes).
The stories of Zhu Wen are riotous and honest, freewheeling and relentless. Wen catches the humor in everyday life, and the pathos. Life in China seems consumed by a frantic search for money and sex, one inextricably linked to the other and Wen makes the search a Keystone Cop-like adventure of ups and downs (mostly downs). The first story, a novella entitled “I Love Dollars”, is quite funny but with an underlying sadness as a son seeks to honor his father by securing him a good time with a prostitute. The stories move progressively downwards in mood: the feelings are of oppression and depression and personal misery. Wen writes with love and humor for his characters, but also with hard realism and harsher assessment of the scope of human generosity towards others and even towards oneself. In Wen’s contemporary China, the scope is sheared, the bowl of human kindness shallow. But still, he delivers one or two hapless heroes trying to adhere to old ideas of honor while flinting along on the dream of dollars.
Why has capitalism grown like a boil throughout Chinese society, creating ugly, festering blemishes of bad clothes and movies and books (not this one: this one is riotously honest and fresh and eye-opening) and even worse, a society gluttonous for trash and flash? Certainly the tight and confining living conditions, with little privacy in terms of physical space and no privacy in terms of life choices (family, career, recreation) leads to an explosion of the innate human desire for freedom: but where does that freedom go? What does it reach for?
We define our values and our goals, our dreams and desires, by what is available to us: the mirror of our lives and all its possibilities, is found in our culture. Throughout the years of tight Communist control of culture prior to Mao’s death in 1976, the mirror in China showed only party-line literature, art, movies. Traditional literature was shorn of its liberty and put to use for crowd-control; the freedom in innovative, genuine, beautiful books and paintings and sculpture and movies, was repressed. Great books were suppressed and how can great good come without great books? I am not being facetious here. By denying an entire society access to alive, vibrant, genuine works of Art, the mirror of soul and possibility is shattered and the society suffers. Since the relaxing of strictures on literature since Mao’s death, literature has been allowed to come again into its own but the years lost are still a void, a generation’s worth of lost reflection and creativity.
I Love Dollars was translated by Julia Lovell.
