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Zhang Xianliang (1936-2014) |
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Chinese novelist and poet, who spent 22 years in jails and labour camps and wrote about his politically related imprisonments in China's gulag. Zhang Xianliang's semi-autobiographical protagonist is Zhang Yonglin, whose emotional and intellectual development the author charted in works such as Mimosa (1984) and Half of Man Is Woman (1985), a controversial novel about a man's life in the camps and his sexual difficulties after release. "The great majority of contemporary Chinese literary works neglect a most important law of artistry in the use of language: economy. Thus, our language lacks ambiguity, subtle nuances, and multiple meanings. It is short on understatement and humor. Because we try to write everything that is on our mind, we often fail to set readers off on associated lines of thought of their own. This makes it hard for readers to bring their own creativity into play when they enjoy a piece of writing." ('After Twenty Years of Silence We Lick Our Wounds: Our Battle for a Place in World Literature' by Zhang Xianliang, in Modern Chinese Writers: Self-portrayals, edited by Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, New York.NY: Routledge, 2015, p. 82) Zhang
Xianliang was born in Nanjing into a middle-class
family. His father was a Kuomingtang official and industrialist, who
managed a number of large enterprises including a shipping company.
During the Sino-Japanese War, the family went to Chongqing. After the
Japanese surrender, the family moved to Nanjing, and then in 1951 to
Beijing. At the age of thirteen Zhang Xianliang started to write poems, and had his work published. Zhang's literary and artistic education during the 1940s and early 1950s provided the psychological foundation that was to sustain him during the year he later spent in the camps. Throughout his oeuvre, his familiarity with classics from China and Europe is seen in many references to them. A few years after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China, Zhang Xianliang's father was arrested and accused of spying. He died in a Maoist prison. Zhang Xianliang went to Beijing, where he attended middle school in Nanjing. He joined a group called "Qi Xiondi" (seven brothers). In 1955 Zhang graduated from high school but failed to enter the University. He then moved with his mother and sister to the northwestern region of Ningxia, earning his living as a farm worker. In 1956 he was assigned to teach at the Cadres's Culture School. Zhang Xianliang's poem 'Da Feng Ge' (Song of the Great Wind), which was published in the July 1957 edition of Yan River, achieved a huge success. When Mao Zedong started his anti-rightist campaign, Zhang's poem was attacked by bureaucrats and he was accused of being rightist. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to a labor camp for reform. This started a long period of suffering in Zhang's life, lasting over twenty years. As a result of his ordeal and hunger-related traumas, he became almost a vegetarian. Between the years 1958 and 1979 Zhang was imprisoned several
times. He was held in labor camps, state farms, and prisons. Once he
was taken to the execution ground. With the help of his
family, who sent him things he could trade for food, Zhang
survived the Three Years' Famine, that led to mass death. In 1961
he was released for a time and then sent to jail for three more years.
During the Cultural Revolution he was labelled as
"anti-revolutionary-revisionist." Those tumultuous years he spent in a
Ningxia labor-reform camp and working on a state farm. Later he
described his experiences in Half of Man Is Woman. Gradually Zhang Xianliang's diary entries started to achieve literary self-awareness, but he knew that the society where they lived in did not permit anyone to have individual, private thoughts. As a rule, someone would inform on him, if he tried to scribble something on piece of paper. In 1972 Zhang was set free in the aftermath of the Lin Biao Affair – a plan to assassinate Mao. It was not until 1979 that he was formally rehabilitated. Zhang Xianliang kept a tiny diary in a less stringently
guarded camps, filling its pages with cryptic
descriptions: "17 July Picked through greens, gave two manuscripts and letter for mother to Li Guoliang to mail from Station Three. 18 July Picked through greens. 19 July Morning dug grass – eighteen jin, afternoon picked through greens. 20 July Moved to Main camp, afternoon hauled dirt clods." (Grass Soup, translated from the Chinese by Martha Avery, London: Secker & Warburg, 1994, p. 78) In the late 1970s, Zhang Xianliang started to write again. He joined the editorial staff of the literary magazine called Shuofang. It printed his first story 'Ling Yu Rou' (Soul and Body), later known as 'Mu Ma Ren' (A Herdsman's Story), which was adapted for the screen by Jin Xie. Lü hua shu (Mimosa),
a first-person narrative, portrayed Zhang
Yonglin's struggle during the early 1960s, in the time when the great
famine is already nearing its end. One third of his fellow inmates
died, but Zhang has
managed to stay alive, fighting with rats over food. At the beginning
of the story, he is 178 centimeters tall and weights 44 kilograms.
He is transferred from a prison camp to a state farm, and becomes
engaged to a resourceful but illiterate woman, nicknamed
"Mimosa." Before Zhang can marry her, he is thrown back
into the camps. Though the tone of the story is ironic, it also has lyrical moments. The theme of the possibility of resurrection, the unity of body and mind, was further developed in subsequent works. Noteworthy, the title of one of Zhang Xianliang's very first stories, 'Flesh and Soul,' already dealt with the demarcation between the body and the mind. Mimosa shows her preference for brains over muscle, but the narrator thinks: "To fit in here . . . you had to be tough, proud, fearless and ready to tackle any work. . . . To hell with culture! There are no mediocre jobs, only medioce people." (Mimosa and Other Stories, Beijing: Chinese Literature, 1985, p. 90) In order to win Mimosa's love, Zhang Yonglin has to fight with Hai Xixi, a strong and handsome Islamic drifter, his rival. Nanren de yiban shi nüren (Half of Man Is Woman)
covered the period from 1966 to 1976, before Mao's death on September
9, 1976. The book caused a great deal of debate: it broke both sexual and political taboos. Zhang Xianliang examined how
sexual behavior was repressed by the puritanical policies of the
Communist authorities. He suggested that China's
entire intellectual community is mentally and physically impotent. The
protagonist, the older and more sardonic Zhang Yonglin, spends some
twenty years in labor camps. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" cries the protaginist in one scene, but in general, Zhang do not show
much affinity with Biblical material. While he is
working in a rural commune, he sees a beautiful woman, Huang Xiangjiu,
bathing nude in the river. He meets the woman eight years later, they
marry, but the romantic picture of the woman turns sour. On their
wedding night Zhang suffers from impotence – a reference to the
sensitive issue if the government had castrated "China's entire
intellectual community". Depressed
and considering himself a failure, he
thinks: "The first struggle of mankind was not between man and
man, or man and beast. The earlierst struggle was that between man and
woman. It was a struggle that was unceasing and that still continued.
It demande not oly strength, but a vital spirit, using emotions and
some innate artistic sense in its struggle to find balance, to reach
unity and harmony, to achieve wholeness while maintaining its own
separate self." (Ibid., p. 133)
His wife loses her patience and is taken by a party secretary.
Zhang shows his heroism during a flood and regains his dignity and
sexual power. "That a labor reform camp can represent a haven of safety
and an island of sanity is a scathing commentary on the state of
“normal” society during this devastating period of political upheaval
and human suffering." ('The Death of Desire in China: HALF OF MAN IS WOMAN' by Carolyn Wakeman, Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1988) Getting Used to Dying (1989)
is narrated by two voices
which belong to the same person, shifting back and forth between the
narrator's camp years and the 1980s. Zhang juxtaposes encounters with
death
and suffering in the Chinese camps on the one hand, and sexual
relationships and self-indulgence in the West on the other. In one
scene the narrator is brought into a town to be executed. Parents with
children have come to watch the spectacle. According to the chronology
of the book, the narrator dies in 2001, at the age of 65. The title of Grass Soup was taken from the prisoners' habitual evening meal. Zhang said in My
Bodhi Tree: "How could it be that there was inadequate nutrition? We were most fortunate to be living in the Mao
Zedong era; we were bathed in his nourishing light" (Ibid., p. 190)
The title of the book refers to the tree under which Buddha Shakyamuni
(Siddhartha Gautama) was enlightened. Zhang
had traded everything he had, until there was nothing left, except a
pen. On his was to mental healing, it served as the means for
survival. Much is left unsaid. The diary entries are minimalistic. He
could not record his mental anguish and constant hunger, used as a tool of control. "Zhang’s
language of irony, satire, and self‐mockery becomes the only language
of testimony tolerable to the Party on the historical Great Famine that
has largely remained silenced in the public domain." ('Writing Historical Traumas in the Everyday' by Linchei Letty Chen, in A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Yingjin Zhan,Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016, p. 456) With his autobiographical works, Zhang Xianliang became known along with Cong Weixi and Liu Xinwu as one of the major representatives of the "literature of the wounded" or "scar literature." The Communist party reaffirmed in 1985 that its guarantee of creative freedom for writers was a firm and unshakable one. Without being labelled as dissident, Zhang Xianliang called for economic reform in some of his stories, such as 'Longzhong' (Dragon Seed) and 'Nanren de fengge' (Man of Character). Zhang Xianliang received the Best Novel of the Year Awards in 1981, 1983, and 1984. In 1983 he was appointed a committee member of the People's Consultative Conference, and in 1986 a member of China's Writers' Association. From 1986 he held a chair at Ningxia Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Several of his stories have been filmed. Fallowing the economic liberation, Zhang Xianliang founded the 1990s in Zhenbeibu, about 21 miles from Yinchaun, the China West Film Studio, which grew one of the largest in the whole country. He had discovered the site while being in exile in Ningxia. With its ancient fortress, ruins, caves, and barren landscape, it has fascinated a number of directors, including Zhang Yimou, Stephen Chow, Jeffrey Lau, Kar Wai Wong and Teng Wenji, and has became a tourist attraction. Zhang Xianliang died on 27 September, 2014, at the age of 78.
Selected works:
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