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More reviews by Mary Lee
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The Uninvited by Geling Yan
Just what is at stake in the new capitalist China? In her first English novel, THE UNINVITED, GELING YAN deals with the topic of propaganda masquerading as journalism in contemporary China. Yan's impassive and sometimes detached narrative of modern-day China intensifies the absurdities as veiled truths gradually unfold.
Dan Dong, who is from impoverished Northern China, resides with his wife, Little Plum, in an abandoned factory building in an industrial suburb of Beijing. One day Dan inadvertently scampers into a banquet and receives "money for his troubles" from organizers who mistake him for a journalist. Dan then embarks on a career as a "banquet bug", posing as a journalist, eating exquisite food and getting paid by China's new capitalist class.
As Dan eats his way through lavish corporate banquets that cost god-knows-how-many years of the workers' wages, he begins to grasp the new power of journalists - in spite of his barely being able to write a legible article.
An encounter with the famous artist Ocean Chen draws Dan further into the horrors of the corruption prevailing behind the magnificence, and he begins to confuse his two selves: the banquet bug who cares only about earning a comfortable living and not getting caught, and the in-demand journalist who finds himself haunted by conscience.
Both poor people like Uncle Bai and Old Ten and the arrogant, such as company President Wu, appeal to him for an article. Uncle Bai and his companions represent the common country folk who are exploited by the regional officers and with all simple intentions have come to the city for justice, only to be disillusioned. Old Ten, whose existence is only concluded in a number, represents the most vulnerable of the lot. Being a girl from the poor countryside who cannot afford education, she and the countless girls like her can only end up as prostitutes and exploited by wealthy men. In sympathy Dan finds himself picking up the pen for these fellow countrymen, with the assistance of freelance journalist Happy Gao. After several futile attempts to publish his controversial articles, Dan becomes disgusted with the truth and accepts his arrest with stoic indifference.
President Wu, whose lavish banquets could have paid his workers back wages, displays a certain respect towards Dan the journalist with the presumed power to promote or stain any reputation. Not even the famous artist Ocean Chen, with all his wealth and fame, can be free from the evils of the corrupted city. While Happy Gao, the freelance journalist who apparently understands the rules of the game, is anxious to publish an exclusive article of the artist which may earn her significant career prospects, Ocean Chen on the other hand lies at the mercy of the journalists who contribute to his tax evasion controversy.
This class of "journalist", born out of China's turn to market economics, is an ambivalent figure for Yan: the journalist is a middleman in the power relations of the country, both maintaining and being maintained by the authorities. Not everyone, however, is awed by the power of the journalist: some are only too aware of the true state of journalism in China. As Happy rebuffs a disgusted Dan, "Everything is a lie," Yan leads the readers into a labyrinth of "phoney" things: freelance journalists from phantom newsgroups, flashing cameras that produce no photograph, Chinese equivalent of the Potemkin villages, soy sauce made from human hair (this is actually true), magnificent building projects that are never completed, fake documents and identities for everyone, prostitutes presented as virgins with a university degree -- it almost seems that the food consumed in the banquets is the only substantial thing in the decadent city. And journalism is nothing but propaganda.
Or is this only true in China?
GELING YAN, born in Shanghai in 1958, left for the United States after 1989. She is the author to several widely acclaimed works, including The Lost Daughter of Happiness, which deals with a Chinese prostitute in San Francisco during the Gold Rush era. Though left her motherland for long, Yan nevertheless shows an immense concern for contemporary China in which, as represented in her novel, are many hidden evils behind all the wonderful prospects promised by the rapid economic boom.
Mary Lee
17/01/2007
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Mary Lee holds degrees in English literature from the University of Hong Kong and University of London. Since 2006, she has been Administrator for the Man Asian Literary Prize. |
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