In 1991, a little-known Beijing writer named Wang Xiaobo mailed the manuscript of a novel to the eminent historian Cho-yun Hsu, his former professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The book was about China’s Cultural Revolution, the political purge from 1966 to 1976 that killed more than a million people and sent scientists, writers, artists and millions of educated youth to the countryside.
At the time Wang was writing, Cultural Revolution novels were rather conventional accounts of how good people suffered nobly during this decade of madness. The system itself was rarely questioned. Wang’s book was radically different. THE GOLDEN AGE (Astra House, 272 pp., $26) – the title itself was a provocation – told the tragically-absurd story of a young man who is exiled, witnesses suicide, endures bullying and beatings by local officials… and spends as much time as possible having sex.
Professor Hsu forwarded the manuscript to the jury of one of Taiwan’s leading literary awards. Wang’s story of lust and loss won, stunned China’s literary world and made the author one of the country’s most influential and popular novelists.
Wang’s position in China’s literary canon is notable in that he was never part of the state-sponsored writers’ association – unlike more famous figures like the Nobel laureate Mo Yan, Yu Hua or Jia Pingwa. Wang seemed to have come out of nowhere, and he left almost as quickly, dying of a heart attack in 1997, at the age of 44. In just a few years he wrote an avalanche of novels, stories, essays and newspaper articles, many of them published posthumously.
Only one part of “The Golden Age” was published in English until a new translation by Yan Yan came out this year. The novel chronicles the coming of age of Wang Er, whose life closely resembles that of Wang Xiaobo. Like the author, he was born in 1952, grew up in Beijing, took part in the Cultural Revolution as a teenager and was sent to work in the countryside.
But while Wang Er finds himself in the capital in a series of failed relationships, in 1980 Wang Xiaobo married one of China’s most formidable academics, Li Yinhe, who left a deep impression on him and stayed with him until his death. Part of the first generation of sociologists trained after Mao’s field ban was lifted, Li went to Pittsburgh to complete her doctorate, accompanied by her husband, who earned a master’s degree in Asian studies. At home, the couple published an early (for China) study on homosexuality, and later Li became a champion of the LGBTQ movement.
For Wang, gays were just one of many groups whose voices were drowned out by the state’s monopoly on the media. His thinking was reflected in a hugely influential 1996 essay, “The Silent Majority,” which argued that the state is silencing not only people of different sexual orientations, but most Chinese, from migrants and miners to farmers and students. It is a call to action for civil society to end the silence – and it remains an inspiration to many Chinese today in a new era of overwhelming state control.
The idea of how to resist power underlies ‘The Golden Age’. Initially, Wang Er is stationed in the tribal border area of Yunnan, where he herds oxen and is beaten by a doctor who works in the same municipality. He is 21, cheerful and hungry. “In the golden age of my life, I was full of dreams,” he says. “I wanted to love, eat, and instantly turn into one of those clouds, part lit, part darkened.”
But he is quick to liken these dreams to the harshness of life under a powerful state, and liken it to a local method of castrating oxen. For most bulls it was enough to simply cut the scrotum. However, in temperamental people, the testicles were pulled out and beaten to a pulp with a wooden club. “It wasn’t until later that I understood – life is just a slow, long process of crushing your balls,” our narrator notes. “You get older by the day. Day after day your dreams fade. In the end you are nothing but a crushed ox.”
One way to read “The Golden Age” is to focus on sex — and that’s a lot. But little is described in realistic detail; instead, it becomes a device through which the hero and his lover, Chen Qingyang, revolt against the state. Having a premarital affair, which was taboo in the Mao era, they are forced to write erotic “confessions” to horny Communist Party officials and climb the podiums to describe their deeds to crowds of stingy-eyed peasants. .
Their increasingly elaborate and lurid confessions, demanded time and again by their superiors, fall somewhere between Harlequin romance and modernist poem: “Chen Qingyang and I have committed innumerable crimes in the clearing behind Old Man Liu’s because his fallow, fertile land was almost effortless to erase.” Sex itself is “epic friendship,” as in, “We made epic friendship in the mountains, breathing wet, steamy breaths.” (The narrator is asked to clarify “what is commitment from the front and what is commitment from behind.) The confessions amount to an absurdist critique of unchecked state power, mocking its instruments.
Later, Wang Er returns to Beijing in the late 1970s and becomes a submissive academic, who is eventually forced into submission. But he is haunted by a suicide he witnessed more than a decade earlier, before his time in the countryside, when he lived with his family on a college campus. A faculty member was so tortured that he jumped out of a building window. Officials took his body off for an “autopsy” (diagnosis: no malice, although bruises showed how he had been tortured). But they refused to clean the bits of brains on the sidewalk, claiming it was the family’s responsibility.
The night after the suicide, Wang Er gets up at 2 am and thinks about the man’s brain. He walks to the spot and sees the pieces lit by flickering candles that seem to make them dance. The children were not given a chance to mourn and watch over what is left of their father, a scene the narrator recalls over and over in the novel.
The author’s focus on these details is deliberate. At the end of the book, the narrator recalls that his generation was raised to do something heroic with their lives. When they were young, that meant imitating Mao and being zealous communists, but their idealism only brought violence and suffering in the end. Wang Er is now middle-aged and not sure how to do anything meaningful. His girlfriend tells him to break out of the silence that has plagued him since childhood to “write everything down, including the incredible things and the things you don’t dare write about.” He must report what he has seen – not only the big problems, but also the small, telling details that could make the past speak to the present.
THE GOLDEN AGE, by Wang Xiaobo | Translated by Yan Yan | 272 pages | Astra House | $26