Jason Beerman of thestar.com reviews The Fat Years
2012-01-20 11:31阅读：
thestar.com
Canada
Jason
Beerman
Chan Koonchung’s novel
The Fat Years, newly translated into English, portrays a
China of the very near future that can best be described as
slightly off-kilter. The year is 2013 and, following a calamitous
worldwide economic meltdown, China has emerged seemingly
unscathed.
It basks in a “Golden Age
of Prosperity and Satisfaction,” complete with Lychee Black Dragon
Latte-slinging baristas at Starbucks, which has been acquired by
the Chinese conglomerate Wantwant. China is the preeminent world
power thanks to its economic dominance and its soft power
strategies which, among other things, have resulted in a
Sino-Japanese free trade sphere.
Meanwhile, the
Chinese
people have achieved an accelerated course in yuppiedom thanks in
large part to a rapid rise in domestic demand, which has resulted
in higher living standards for newly urbanized and rural dwellers
alike.
There is a catch,
however. The entire month of February 2011— a brutal and chaotic
period immediately before the beginning of China’s Golden Age — has
gone missing from people’s memories and no one other than the
social misfits who figure at the center of the novel’s plot seems
to realize or care. Simply put, everyone else is too busy making
money.
This sounds like the type
of late night fantasy a Politburo member might have after ingesting
too much baijiu at a banquet. But the premise isn’t a classic
dystopian one per se since the amount of control that the state
exercises over the people remains somewhat of a mystery. A central
plot point revolves around whether the government forced a
collective amnesia upon its people by drugging the water supply or
whether the people simply willed the missing period from their
minds by ignoring it en masse.
The rhetorical question
that lies at the center of the novel is this: “Between a good hell
and a counterfeit paradise, which one would people choose?” Or in
the context of the general Chinese populace portrayed in the novel,
would people choose to forget or ignore an ignominious past in
favor of a prosperous present and future?
The author of the novel,
Chan Koonchung, grew up in Hong Kong and Taiwan but now lives in
Beijing. The Fat Years was written in 2009 after Chan observed a
major change to the Chinese mentality in 2008. Following the
grandeur of the Beijing Olympics and China’s reaction to the world
economic crisis, Chan felt a general domestic confidence boost
vis-à-vis China’s place in the world, and he wanted to write a
novel that examined this phenomenon.
Indeed, the China of 2013
portrayed by Chan seems to have lurched forward into a stroke of
good fortune, and the country scrambles to capitalize on this as
best as it can. This means that while external factors have
catapulted China to sole superpower status, its intact political
system — corrupt, bloated, and paranoid — is ill-equipped to handle
the change.
Chan uses this framework
to poke holes in the country’s current political structure. Call it
prosperity with Chinese characteristics.
For instance, in the
novel, Chinese people have “90 percent freedom.” They’re free to
make money, to be sure, but they’re also free to watch whatever is
on TV, browse whatever books are in the bookstore, and read
whatever articles appear in the newspaper or on the Internet. The
catch is that all this readily available information is tightly
controlled and access to non-sanctioned information remains out of
reach.
Furthermore, the
political narrative of the Communist Party of China originally
revolved around the ideals of class struggle and equality.
Following the dual debacles of the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution, the Party conjured a new storyline of having
saved China from foreign imperialism and humiliation in order to
deflect attention from its own failings. In the novel, its raison
d’être has come to include the idea that it should “accomplish big
things” in order to rationalize one party rule and differentiate it
from democratic systems of governance.
This type of protean
leadership benefits greatly from a populace that willfully
forgets.
The Fat
Years draws easy
comparisons to both 1984 and Brave New World. Like
Winston in 1984, Chen, the protagonist of The Fat Years,
clings to old newspaper articles whose facts have since been wiped
from the official record. And like in Brave New World,
state-produced drugs are used to stabilize the
population.
What makes The Fat
Years even more jarring than either of these classics is that
it is rooted much more closely to current events and it is, at
times, eerily prescient.
Much of the novel’s long
epilogue section is a deconstruction of China’s hypothetical
reaction in the wake of its rise to sole global dominance. The
immediacy of the novel’s time horizon is such that the predicted
trappings that would accompany China’s superpower status — a freely
convertible yuan, an alienated and isolated West, the construction
through Iran of a “Pan Eurasian Energy Bridge”— are really not that
far-fetched.
In our brave new world,
it is this plausible realism that fact makes The Fat Years a
gripping, if not terrifying, treatise on the rise of China, present
and future.
