Best Sellers from Beijing

One of China's most popular writers comes to America

Tough Guy: Author Wang Shuo's novels are often set in the urban Chinese underworld.

BY EDWARD WONG

Playing for Thrills brings to English-language readers not only the first major translation of a work by China's most popular contemporary writer, it also exposes its readers to a societal phenomenon. For not only is Wang Shuo a major figure on the Beijing literary circuit, he has tapped a primal nerve in China's growing urban pop-culture scene. His name has come as close to becoming a franchise as is possible in a socialist country undergoing economic reform; its presence on a novel or screenplay is almost a sure guarantee of success. His writing appeals to factory workers as easily as college students or businesspeople, cutting across class and education barriers in a society supposedly devoid of those demarcations.

Wang was an early casualty of the Chinese Communist Party's cultural-cleansing campaign; publication of his collected works was banned last year. He has come to America to try and realize his dreams of international fame. Tom Luddy, a producer at American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola's production company, said Wang is now living in Los Angeles and working on a screenplay for Zoetrope. Whether he can make his mark on the American entertainment scene remains to be seen.

Wang has already struck a chord with millions of Chinese readers. The author has sold 20 best-selling novels, with a total of 10 million copies in print. His portrayal of the disenfranchised has opened up literature to a reality which many Chinese find themselves identifying with. Wang's literary world is populated by jobless drifters, con artists, and underworld schemers; his protagonists could literally make up a rogue's gallery. Chinese critics have come up with a new term to describe Wang's works: pizi wenxue, or hoodlum literature.

Although Wang's novels are often set in the underbelly of Beijing--a milieu as unfamiliar to most Chinese as it is to foreign readers--they all address realistic social issues which confront urban dwellers in the post-Mao era. Wang holds up a mirror to a particular point in China's history, one where the Communist authorities have become morally bankrupt, where revolutionary ideals have lost their sway, where market liberalization means "to get rich is glorious," and where disenfranchised youth--bereft of an ethical compass--drift through society.

"I think he's captured a voice of ordinary people in a way that party pronouncements didn't even come close to, and this was a great relief to people to see the reality they knew reflected back at them through the media," said Orville Schell, a veteran China scholar.

Playing for Thrills serves as an introduction to Wang's thematic obsessions while challenging the reader with its style and narrative structure. The narrator is a typical Wang cool-cat hero--a jobless drifter who spends his Beijing days and nights gambling and looking for women to seduce. Like hard-boiled American pulp novels, the first-person voice speaks tersely in staccato rhythm. The protagonist Fang Yan lives in an existential shadowland where morality holds no value next to sensual pleasures. Drinking and sex are anchors in a life devoid of meaningful human values or connections.

The plot centers around Fang's attempts to find out whether he killed a friend 10 years earlier after the police accuse him of murder. Fang isn't concerned about the ethical implications of the crime. He just wants to find out the truth to save his own skin. In fact, when a friend tells Fang he must be innocent because he doesn't have the guts to commit murder, Fang feels insulted. The situation is Kafkaesque; after being suddenly accused of a murder he doesn't remember, the protagonist reacts with emotional apathy.

As Fang's exploits in the Beijing underworld unfold, we learn that Fang and his circle of friends make their living by hustling for the quick buck. Flashbacks bring us to the city of Guangzhou, where Fang's friends run con games on Hong Kong tourists. In today's southern China, banditry has become increasingly commonplace as the economic boom widens the gap between rich and poor. Wang exposes the moral bankruptcy that has resulted from Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. As one character puts it, "Only poor people will talk to you about ideals. Anyone who's got it knows that money talks." But Wang's deadly satire isn't aimed solely at contemporary mores. He targets a wide cast of characters who embody the last century of China's history: Marxist romantics, intellectuals, pro-Maoist zealots, and the new Chinese capitalists. It's obvious that the author is out to skin more than the Communist Party; he's against any class of society that prides itself on being above the common people. Wang's literary devices turn the narrative into a dream-like conundrum where nothing can be taken at face value. He looks at the same events--often ones which have happened in the distant past--from multiple points of view, calling into question the objectivity and trustworthiness of the speakers. The characters begin switching names, so that almost no one retains the same identity they had at the novel's start. Dream sequences mix with what the narrator presents as objective reality.
		Playing for Thrills By Wang Shuo; translated by Howard Goldblatt; William Morrow & Co.; 325 pp. $23

The last 13 chapters of the novel recount the 13 days that led up to the murder of Fang's friend. They are, however, told in a backward chronology, beginning with the immediate events surrounding the murder. Fang takes a train ride from Beijing to southern China, traveling through a surreal landscape not found anywhere in the country. He arrives in a city which may or may not be Guangzhou: "I believed I was where I was supposed to be, but couldn't shake my feelings of strangeness and alienation."

The nonlinear structure becomes Wang's overarching comment on modern Chinese history and society. He sees both as fractured, each damaged by the changes that have gripped China this century. In a country where narrative can be so easily rewritten, truth no longer matters. Chronology no longer matters. And above all, moral values no longer matter.

Wang's vision is uncompromisingly nihilistic; he offers no solutions. But because he doesn't pull any punches in his bleak outlook, works such as Playing for Thrills have gained in popularity even as they've pushed the sensibilities of Communist Party elders. He has become a voice for an urban generation in Chinese history.

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