‘I’m a hooligan ( liumang). I’m not scared of anyone’ - Wang Shuo Wang Shuo began a literary movement known as “hooligan literature.” Instead of ascribing to the Communist Party’s goal of ’’spiritual civilization, ’’ he shunned the heroic models common in Chinese literature. Wang Shuo’s novel, Please Don’t Call Me Human, is a simplistic satire of modern China. The story follows Tang Yuanbao, a pedicab driver and son of the last surviving member of the Boxer Uprising’s supposedly invincible Big Dream Boxers. He is seized on by members of the governmental Chinese and Foreign Free-style Elimination Wrestling Competition Organizing Committee. They have watched a hulk of a Westerner on television laying low a series of Asian competitors, and all their efforts go into training up and promoting the pedicab driver to restore the nation’s pride. This farcical plot structure is a framework on which Wang plays out any number of satiric scenarios. Yuanbao’s China is at the brink of something great, but no one knows exactly what that is, and those with the ambition to pursue it are also those with the power to pervert it in the scramble for wealth, prestige and Westernization. The Party faces pressure on both sides: competition from the Western world on one hand, and the legacy of the Chinese empire’s fall from grace on the other. Zhao Hangyu, bleary-eyed Secretary-General of the surrealistic Chinese Competition Committee, warns his comrades, ’’We might put up the good fight, but if we come away with less than a gold medal, the prestige of our ancestors—their face, if you like—will be destroyed by their no-account, unworthy descendants: us.’’ After combing the earth for the last great Chinese warrior, the exasperated Committee is led straight into their own back alley, which Wang’s scathing parable illuminates with outrageous sarcasm. Tang Yuanbao’s mother’s house is torn down by bulldozers as ’’historical research’’ into his family’s Boxer origins gets under way. There’s a comic auction in which Yuanbao’s skimpy and worn-out clothes are sold as memorabilia, to derisory bids. There’s a lunatic circus. And there’s a scene when Yuanbao is fitted out as a woman by fashion experts in a department store. The idea of a government agency offering up an entirely average specimen of humanity as the representative of the nation is itself more than a little subversive. And there are plenty more swipes at official sanctities along the way. The government committee, for example, is re-named the ’’MobCom Directorate’’, in the best interests of modernization.
The Olympic-style competition the story leads up to is not a test of athletic prowess but of the capacity for suffering humiliation. Yuanbao, representing the Chinese people, has high hopes of beating the whole world in the art of self-abnegation and self-abasement. Rather than be a people famed for never opting to lose face, they prove masters of the art of losing it on a grand scale. The style of this book is like a cartoon strip -- gaudy, blunt, grotesque. Cartoon characters engage in cartoon-like actions, two-dimensional and brightly lit. There is no introspection, nothing left vague or ill defined. Comedy, however, is particularly likely to fall victim to the pitfalls of translation. And if, like this book, the work is not only written in the latest slang, but also seasoned with a plethora of local allusions, then the translator’s task becomes even harder. In a note at the start of the book, Goldblatt acknowledges that the text teems with references to things everyone in China has heard of but which are likely to remain mysteries for the rest of us -- TV advertising, recent newspaper stories, official pronouncements, government slogans and the like. It’s quite clear that Wang Shuo’s style, like the style of many satirists, is awash with phrases thrown up by contemporary popular life. This is comedy, and to get his laughs he sifts through all this ephemeral material and indulges in incidental stylistic parodies as he goes along. So we have to settle for something rather less, an absurdist story that engages by its speed and its more obviously farcical elements, but which is not everywhere an easy read. The problem of tone is ever-present. At one point, for instance, a temple Buddha greets some worshippers as follows: ’’Howdy, folks. Come for a game of chess or some Ping-Pong?’’ You can sense how this might be hilarious in the original. But in English it’s just one more piece of evidence of the hazards of all translation. ’’The Propaganda Department has said my works are reactionary and that they ridicule politics. They say the taste and bad language are vulgar. I do not deny this.’’ So says Wang Shuo. But one of the problems with this translation is that there isn’t any bad language to speak of. Better, but infinitely harder, would have been to have had the novel redrafted in the inner-city argot of London, Sydney or New York. Wang Shuo represents the shift from the ’’new era’’ of the 80s to the ’’post-new era’’ of the 90s--an age of commercialization, satire and self-mockery. Wang’s characters, the by-products of China’s market economy, make fun of intellectuals, formal education, powerholders and official culture, while they spend their time swindling, drinking, gambling, bragging, and seducing women. In an interview in Asiaweek (August 9, 1996), he denounced intellectuals for ’’doing too many bad things in China, ’’ and freely admitted that his work “has no moral principles.”