MCLC Resource Center Web Publications is pleased to announce publication of “Frozen Waters and Deathly Wells: Ban Yu’s Fiction of Northeast China,” by Qi Wang. The first few paragraphs of the essay appear below. The whole essay can be found here: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/qi-wang/.
Kirk Denton, editor
Ban Yu’s Fiction of Northeast China
By Qi Wang
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2019)
Ban Yu
In my wandering around in the cinematic and literary world of East Asia, I have come upon many echoes and parallels among cultural imaginations across national borders. One such example is that of the comparable pulses I find in the films of South Korean maverick director Hong Sang-soo (b. 1960) and the stories of a much younger Chinese writer Ban Yu (班宇, b. 1986), even though their works deal with very different social subjects. Hong made his debut film, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996), when Ban was still an elementary school kid in Shenyang. Hong weaves a cinema out of numerous rounds of wandering and drinking of frustrated Korean artists and intellectuals; Ban crafts a literary world in which laid-off workers in northeast China and their families try and fail to adapt to life in the reform era. Over the years, Hong’s arthouse corpus has continued to spin tales around waiting and wandering, creating thinking time between stops. This rejection of story efficiency and plot mechanism in which every step is not necessarily a preparation for the next step tends to characterize the art of a number of East Asian filmmakers and storytellers, a propensity that is worth pondering in terms of alternative paths for development. Different rhythms of life, usually appearing slower and more contemplative, seem sorely needed in the contemporary world. The young Chinese author Ban Yu (b. 1986), who started his writing career as a music critic, is a recent example of an East Asian cultural imagination that continues and refreshes this particular inclination for narrative realism. This current essay discusses Ban’s first literary collection, Winter Swim (冬泳), and presents the author as a brilliant thinker and stylist.[1] His prose features an alternative rhythm that is made manifest through kinesthetic arrangements such as waiting, wandering, and swimming. The last, in particular, is the author’s unique invention and characterizes the inner life of some Chinese in northeast Asia from the 1980s to the present.
Prosaic Realism, Poetic Flight
Ban Yu’s seven tales, presented in this debut collection of 2018, capture the fates and pains of workers and their families in northeast China through a brilliant combination of prosaic realism and poetic transcendence. Here is my attempt to summarize Ban’s story world in one imaginary scene:
A man walks along a lusterless winter street lined with few attractions; the sky is colorless. His gait is sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Except for the road in front of him, the ambiguous space seems practically free of any coordinates. Now he finds the road has turned into a river, his body already doing the strokes as if he had been swimming the whole time. Like the road before, this river lacks identity and drifts in a space that is equally emptied of references. The swim then dissolves into a flight in a space that is as dull and featureless as the road and the river before it. Suddenly, the man sees an image that summarizes all that there is and has been in his walking, swimming, and flight. This image burns. In the darkness that follows, the man imagines that far above or in the distance, there might or might not be stars.
Ban’s fiction demonstrates the following impressive characteristics: a layered and angled narration that at first appears straightforward and even flat. Often narrating in first-person flashbacks and frequently assuming the point of view of a child who observes the adults around him, the stories do not shy away from taking up the position of those very adults—often fathers and uncles who are the central characters—to provide information only available to the latter. The temporal register, although we know the setting is in the 1980s and 1990s, feels present and matter-of-fact due to a mostly chronological and unemotional presentation of daily lives and commonplace behaviors. Characters do errands, buy or eat food, wait for jobs, cook for lovers and in-laws, and sleep. They are up and about despite a general sense of disorientation and despair. Their efforts of living a simple life often fail, and sometimes become downright criminal. . . . [continue reading here]