Showing Off My Ignorance

 Until the other day, I never heard of Yan Lianke. Turns out he has been a favored candidate for the Nobel. I live in Muncie, Indiana, and that could work as an excuse. Better is that I have been too busy, too lazy, too pre-occupied to keep track of these things. 

So, in the midst of packing and moving and starting during lunch, I googled the writer. The attention given him seems deserved.

Hard Like Water by Yan Lianke review – language as a weapon (The Guardian, 2021)

Yan’s body of work includes 17 novels and more than 50 books of stories, novellas and essays. Almost all his works are banned, officially or unofficially, in China. A resident of Beijing, he is both celebrated and renounced at home, even as his books – some of which are published in Taiwan – are quietly removed from Chinese bookstores. His novels continually change form, as if attempting to both escape and unmask the ever-perforating realities that are contemporary China.

The plot of Hard Like Water is straightforward: in 1968, Gao Aijun, a 26-year-old People’s Liberation Army soldier, returns to his remote Henan home. Study sessions in the army have purified his heart so that it is like “sheets of paper on which one could draw something beautiful”. Arriving in Chenggang Village, Aijun meets Hongmei, a married woman with dreams of leading the ongoing Cultural Revolution. Aijun and Hongmei embark on a sexual adventure fit for their epic love, an affair they believe will propel them to orgasmic heights as well as to high-ranking positions in the Communist party. The Cultural Revolution, entering a stage of intra-party warfare, offers them a stage and opportunities: Aijun will “revolutionise my way into the position of town mayor or district commissioner”, and neither will be treated “as if we were merely made of mud, straw, or paper”.

***

Yan’s knowledge and appropriation of revolutionary language – Mao Zedong’s poems, slogans and most famous directives, plus a heady array of literary texts, songs and propaganda from the Chinese and Soviet revolutions – is formidable. Large sections of Aijun and Hongmei’s speech are borrowed words. But Hard Like Water is neither mockery nor satire; it is a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology. Its mashup of literary and political texts poses the uncomfortable and timely question: how did each of us arrive at our certainties? Language is wielded by Aijun sometimes as a liberatory force, sometimes as a weapon. Driven by vengeance, thirst for status and the understandable desire to “rise high in the sky”, to feel more than ordinary life permits, he and Hongmei nurture the belief that justice is enshrined in their very bodies. As they begin to control the life and death of everyone in their village, their bodies attain, through sexual ecstasy, what feels to them like the limitless yet insatiable power of the immortals. The engine of revolution is fed by bodies like theirs; for the pleasure of the engine, therefore, they are permitted everything.

In Hard Like Water, the individuals who place the basic needs of the rural poor over party dogmatism suffer the most cruel and horrifying deaths. The mass tragedy at the heart of this novel is not satirised or exaggerated; it is all too real. Early in his adventures, Aijun tries to counsel his impoverished mother: “Mother, you don’t understand revolution. Once you get on this ship, you can’t get off, because if you do, that would make you a counterrevolutionary.”

Yan Lianke, writer: ‘Revolutions are terrible. Human progress cannot depend on destruction’ (El País, 2025) is an interview.

 Exploring the emptiness of soldiers in the Chinese Revolution and the cost of China’s supposed progress has earned Yan Lianke, 66, the nickname “the fearless Chinese writer.” His books include Dream of Ding Village — which delves into humanity’s insatiable greed, Hard Like Water — a satire on the revolution, and Lenin’s Kisses — about the downfall of a village in the face of promises of a glorious future. He has won international awards such as the Franz Kafka Prize, been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker International Prize and is repeatedly mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Question. In the epilogue of Dream of Ding Village, you apologize to the readers for causing them pain.

Answer. In China, people were experiencing the happiness of development. Many people were unaware that others were suffering from the AIDS epidemic, which is what the book portrays. Chinese literature has long focused on the positive aspects, it has been like a hymn to the beauty of society.

Q. Why is it important to feel pain?

A. There was very little literature that paid attention to the problems we were facing. Those realities were hidden. That’s why Chinese readers found Dream of Ding Village so incredible. I wrote an epilogue apologizing for interrupting their happiness.

Q. Would you describe the literature of Chinese Nobel laureates like Gao Xingjian or Mo Yan as escapist?

***

Q. “Everyone in China was afraid: the poor were afraid of uncertainty, and the rich were afraid of losing comfort because they knew their money didn’t come from hard work.”

A. Those who have money fear losing it. And those who don’t are worried about their children’s future. There’s also a fear shared by rich and poor alike: the fear of pesticides, the fear of the air we breathe.

Yan Lianke sees “mythorealism” as next phase of modern Chinese literature (International Examiner, 2024)

 Franz Kafka. Leo Tolstoy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yan Lianke?

Mandarin readers may love Yan for polemic novels like Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, and The Four Books. English language readers might gravitate toward the first three literary giants. What about a book by this popular Chinese novelist about the future of realist fiction? In Discovering Fiction, Yan Lianke exegetes 19th and 20th century European and Latin American literature in order to define mythorealism — the genre he sees as the next step in China’s literary journey.

***

So, what is mythorealism? I’ll give you Yan’s definition since I’m still a little fuzzy: “…[M]ythorealism is a creative process that rejects the superficial logical relations that exist in real life to explore a kind of invisible and “nonexistent” truth…” (99). What makes this definition murky is the fact that Yan’s just spent a great deal of time analyzing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which debuted the genre of magical realism. It’s not the same as mythorealism.

Yan Lianke, Hyun Ki-young confront unspoken wounds of nations (The Korea Herald, 2025)

Every nation has its dark chapters and scars. But Chinese novelist Yan Lianke noted that Korea's writers are able to face those shadows openly.

"In China, there are certain wounds left unspoken, something a writer cannot face,” Yan said on Thursday during a press conference in Seoul ahead of the Seoul International Writers’ Festival, which kicks off Friday at Ground Seoul.

“So Chinese literature is under certain constraints. To write in China demands tremendous effort and sacrifice," the Beijing-based novelist added.

The acclaimed Chinese novelist, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, is known for novels sharply critical of Chinese society — many of them banned at home.

***

“I would put ‘the truth of humanity, the truth of literature.’ A writer’s experience, like human experience, is limited. But the truths expressed in literature are infinite. Literature must capture the infinite through the finite,” said Yan.

 Yan Lianke wrote 

My 1994 collection Summer Sunset was also banned in China, but while this work is significant within the context of the genre of China’s military literature and its contemporary tradition of realist fiction, it is less significant if considered within the context of my overall oeuvre. The broader the context, the harder it is to specify a work’s significance. Of all my banned books, I hope that people would read Dream of Ding Village and Lenin’s Kisses, not those earlier works. Similarly, when people discuss me, I prefer that they refer to me simply as an author, not as China’s most controversial or most censored author.

My entire life, I have simply sought to produce good works and to be a good writer, and certainly have not aspired to become China’s most controversial and most censored author.

***

Time, age, reality, and the environment have left me feeling empty, vain, and ponderous. I no longer assume that China’s contemporary reality can be significantly improved, and I certainly don’t assume that literature will be able to change that reality. Even if I can’t change reality, at the very least I hope that reality will not change me. Regardless of how hard I try, I’ll never be able to change reality, although at the same time I recognize that reality is constantly transforming me, my literature, and my literary perspective.

Virtually all my friends and colleagues praise my works from the period in the late 1990s when I wrote Streams of Time, Marrow, and The Years, Months, Days, and they ask why I didn’t continue writing in that manner. To this I laugh and reply, “As the saying goes, after you pass that village, you won’t see that shop again.” Why is this so? It is because China’s current era is no longer the one in which I wrote those works, nor is China’s current reality the same as it was then. My reality and state of mind have changed, and one’s writing must necessarily be grounded in one’s current reality and state of mind. The issue is that reality has changed me and my literature, not that my literature has created, shaped, transformed, or maintained that reality.

***

Second, controversy and censorship are not good things, but they are also not necessarily bad. If an author is controversial, this demonstrates that at least he possesses integrity and magnanimity. To the extent that some authors have integrity, we should preserve their works. On the other hand, given that authors don’t have the ability to alter society or reality, their works are ultimately less influential than a single remark in an official document or a gesture by someone in power. Given that an author’s writings cannot change reality, we must simply ask that reality not change the author. We must try to help ensure that the qualities of integrity and truth in the author’s works might endure.

Third, as for an author’s ability to endure, one hopes this will not result in the author’s becoming increasingly distanced from society, the environment, and most readers. Sometimes persistence is not merely persistence, but it is also an opposition to a consolidated position. I have gradually come to understand that because you persist and don’t want to change, you must continuously be the object of controversy. If you persist but find that the controversy around you has stopped, that will be because it was not you but rather society itself that has changed. But that is such a distant eventuality! It is as difficult to imagine as a scenario where an egg and a rock collide and the egg remains intact while the rock shatters.

Think about it. I think he is onto something important.

sch 9/30