Li Er’s The Magician of 1919

We are pleased to announce publication today 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/ The following review of the earlier print edition appeared in 2011.

Harvey Thomlinson <harvey@makedostudios.com>

Source: SCMP (10/30/11)
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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *