Dear BACS subscribers,

We are pleased to announce the publication of an E-book of Li Er’s The
Magician of 1919, translated by Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan.

http://makedopublishing.com/li-er/

This review of the print edition appeared in 2012.


Source: SCMP
Li’s tale portrays ‘moral confusion’ racking China
By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

In Li Er’s short story Christmas Eve a retired schoolteacher mourns the
death of his daughter while simultaneously pimping young girls to an
infamous nightclub-cum-brothel. The story is set on the night before
Christmas. But unlike Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a transformative
parable in which the greedy and frozenhearted Ebenezer Scrooge rediscovers
his morality after visits from the three Ghosts of Christmas, Christmas
Eve delivers no such redemption. Instead, the tale follows Mr Chin, a
teacher-turned-newspaper seller, who lives a lonely life eating, sleeping
and relieving himself within the four walls of his newsstand. He
supplements pitiful wages by procuring vulnerable girls for the Garden of
Eden nightclub across the road. Tacked to the wall, above a Panda brand
cassette recorder, is a photograph of his dead daughter – forever frozen
at 25 years old.

Within this world Christmas is a hollow holiday which the young and
wealthy pick up like a fashionable Western accessory, using the foreign
festival as an excuse to booze and whore their way around the city. Li Er
paints a bleak picture of the New China, one in which moral confusion and
antipathy lie at the heart of the nation. The publication of the story for
the first time in English, alongside another short story,

The Magician of 1919 (in a collection titled under the same name, which is
part of the publisher’s “Modern Chinese Masters” imprint), comes at a time
when China is reassessing its own mores: this month, Netizens led a public
outcry over the death of Yueyue, the toddler who was run over twice and
then ignored by 18 passersby before being picked up by a rubbish
collector. The incident has raised questions over the apparent lack of
civil responsibility in China. And the conceit of protecting one’s kin
while acting callously towards strangers, which sits at the very centre of
Christmas Eve.

I meet Li on the roof-top terrace of a popular bookshop-cum-cafe in
Beijing’s downtown. How does Christmas Eve (originally published in 2001
in Chinese) reflect on contemporary moral chaos? “The old man [Mr Chin]
suffers silent, secret heartbreak. But this doesn’t stop him from sending
other girls to suffer terrible hardship,” Li explains. He takes a sip of
his Americano. “So you may think that he is a contradiction but I believe
this reveals something about many Chinese people. This vision in people’s
hearts is very – a moral confusion.”

Li was born in a farming village in Henan province in 1966 and left to
read literature at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Today, the
author lives in Beijing and in September took up a position heading the
China Institute of Contemporary Literature, which manages cultural
exchanges with Asia, Europe and America.

Despite his official duties, Li is a prolific writer with two novels, five
short-story collections and around 50 novellas and short stories under his
belt. More importantly, he manages to artfully act within “the system”
while still pushing literary boundaries in his writing, which often
experiments with
narrative form.

It is a careful balancing act. “My father did not want me to become a
writer,” Li remembers. “He thought it was a dangerous job in China because
you risked unknowingly making some political mistakes in your writing.”

Quite so. Most controversial in Li’s magnum opus (the 2002 novel Hua
Qiang, which is currently being translated into English and is due out
next year) is a scene which describes Mao Zedong crippled on the toilet by
chronic constipation. The novel relates the story of Qu Qiubai, a
controversial former Communist Party secretary who was executed by the
Kuomintang in 1934. In the work – whose title translates as  Truths and
Variations – Li imagines what would have happened had Qu lived. The book
barely passed the censors.

The Mao toilet scene, Li admits, is “very sensitive”, even though it is
historically accurate. To avoid any problems with the censors he was
careful to compile descriptions from other published texts in China and
paste them together to create a collage. “So if anyone says: ‘How can you
write this?’, I can say, well, it’s already been written about here, here
and here,” he says with a faintly triumphant smile. It doesn’t stop there,
however. In the novel, a further passage depicts one Dr Kawata juggling
faeces like “a magician performing conjuring tricks”. It is an absurd
moment but has a hard-hitting point: to demonstrate that the monumental
changes inflicted on the populace were “in many ways just a game. The
juggling represents the game, the lunacy”.

Such passages have earned Li a reputation as a writer with a scatological
sense of humour. It is perhaps undeserved. In person Li is considered,
serious and achingly polite – not crude and rude. What does he believe is
the state of Chinese literature today? “This is a big question. As far as
I am concerned, Chinese writers are in a very difficult position,” Li
says. “What’s worse, they can’t get any help from Western literature or
from our traditional classic literature. As you know, contemporary China
has been through three different periods: the traditional planned economy
before 1979; the birth of the market economy in the 1980s and 1990s; and
globalisation from the late 1990s. It’s quite complex for a writer to make
sense of all this in a single novel.

“Since the reality of China is so cruel and brutal, very few writers are
sufficiently creative to use a novel to explore Chinese social phenomena
and problems,” he says.
The great Chinese novel which encompasses the true brutalities of a
country in constant, shifting change may yet be to come. But surely – with
a range veering from a modern Chinese Christmas tale to Mao Zedong’s
bathroom antics – Li is giving it the best shot he can.

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