During the Cultural Revolution, children killed parents, lives were broken irrevocably, millions were beaten and starved to death – and Wang Xiaobo wrote an erotic comic novel about it all.
Now one of China’s most popular modern writers, Wang was completely unknown when he released Golden Age in Taiwan in 1992; now it is available for the first time in complete form in a sparky, earthy translation by the young Chinese American translator Yan Yan. Wang wrote prolifically, torrentially, for the next five years, scandalising the authorities and titillating the public, until his death in 1997, when his novels moved from black-market editions to more freely disseminated, semi-sanctioned copies.
Married to the prominent sexologist and LGBTQ+ rights campaigner Li Yinhe, he spent the mid-80s in Pittsburgh as a postgrad student, returning to China as a part-time history professor, and this may explain his writing’s mass appeal – a hip, jaded insider-outsider, far removed from the reverential, government-approved tragic realist school of Cultural Revolution novels (noble parents, infant mortality, sacrificial animal metaphors). Readers were shocked, outraged, appalled – and have since devoured his work in their millions, just as they have continually asked how it was allowed to be published at all.
“A little bit of criticism here and there sharpens one’s moral compass.” So says Wang’s stand-in protagonist Wang Er, who is sent down to rural Yunnan in the late 1960s and begins his story on his 21st birthday. He is a boy of “average talent, dexterous hands, and a very muddled character”. His days involve hunting for extra food, sexual liaisons, menial subsistence farm work and being publicly abused to foster a sense of community. It sounds like heaven. Wang agrees, partly sincerely – life during the Cultural Revolution may be “a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed”, but it’s his Golden Age, better than the stultifying, unsurely liberalising, globalising world he haunts in the latter part of the novel.
Wang indulges in sex, sensuality and nakedness as a deliberate rejection of bureaucratic Maoism and the young, sexless, amorphously green-jacketed Red Guards that formed the shock troops of the early Cultural Revolution, with their denunciatory posters and executions of the traitorously old doctors, scientists and professors who had betrayed the People’s Revolution. One can only wonder what Xi Jinping, a year younger than Wang and with a similarly brutal young adulthood in Shaanxi, made of this novel.
Wang’s female partner in crime, the doctor Chen Qingyang, is told to “suffer a little more indignity” in her struggle sessions, as she enjoys showing off her beauty too much. A sense of tragicomic futility and going-through-the-motions abound, tempered with a few hysterically bloody execution-beatings.
In the second and third parts, Wang is a biology professor, at first unhappily married, then more unhappily divorced, “lackadaisical at work, and reprehensible in everyday life”. Here, Wang the author perfects his part scatological satire, part deeply moving exposé of the brutality of his youth, to portray life in the emotionally deadened, economically dying 1980s communist state. You can feel the weight of every one of the 20 years it took Wang – who was an eyewitness to Tiananmen Square – to birth the book. The emotional centre of the novel, the suicide of a professor during the Cultural Revolution, his family keeping silent vigil over his brains lacing the uncleaned Beijing pavement, is a masterpiece of understatement.
This is frank, irreverent, bawdy, freewheeling, bizarrely moving writing about politics and sex and death. Yes, maybe a little too much of the narrative describes shapely buttocks and perfect breasts and inopportune postmortem erections. Yes, it can be a bit Confessions of a Sent-Down Chinese Student at times. But Wang is a major, epochal Chinese writer, the vast majority of his work untranslated, and if there is going to be a second cold war, with Yellow Scares, denunciations, state-led deniable pogroms of east Asians from western public life, then it’s exactly this kind of book – deeply human, gloriously alive – that we can wave in the face of the social media panopticon state. It won’t matter, of course. We are herd creatures. We have mortgages to pay. You don’t want to be cancelled, do you?
• Golden Age by Wang Xiabo and translated by Yan Yan is published by Penguin Classics (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
