The Explosion Chronicles Read online

  Also by Yan Lianke

  The Four Books

  Lenin’s Kisses

  Dream of Ding Village

  Serve the People!

  YAN LIANKE

  THE EXPLOSION CHRONICLES

  Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

  Copyright © 2013 by Yan Lianke

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Carlos Rojas

  Cover photograph © Chen Yu, Untitled, 2011

  Series No. 1, 2011/Schoeni Art Gallery,

  Hong Kong/schoeniartgallery.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  First published as Zhalie zhi by Shanghai 99 in 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN: 978-0-8021-2582-8

  eISBN: 978-0-8021-9001-7

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2016

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Grove Atlantic edition as follows:

  Yan, Lianke, 1958- author. | Rojas, Carlos, 1970- translator.

  The explosion chronicles : a novel / Yan Lianke ; translated by Carlos Rojas.

  Other titles: Zhalie zhi. English

  Description: New York : Grove Press, 2016. | Orginally published in Chinese as Zha lie zhi (Taibei Shi : Mai tian chu ban, 2013).

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016023950 (print) | LCCN 2016032248 (ebook) | ISBN 9780802125828 (hardback) | ISBN 9780802190017 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Upper class families—Fiction. | Cities and towns—Growth—Fiction. | Competition—Fiction. | Power (Social sciences)—Fiction. | China—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PL2925.L54 Z413 2016 (print) | LCC PL2925.L54 (ebook) | DDC 895.13/52—dc23

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Translator’s Note

  “… So, they withdrew and wrote their various accounts to vent their frustrations, intent on handing down empty words to make themselves known.”

  Sima Qian, “The Letter to Ren An”

  As every Chinese schoolchild knows, Sima Qian’s first-century BCE historical classic Records of the Historian was—as the Ming dynasty literary critic Jin Shengtan memorably put it a millennium and a half later—the product of a “bellyful of stored-up resentment.” Jin Shengtan’s characterization can be traced back to Sima Qian’s own lamentation, in a letter he wrote near the end of his life, that many rich and powerful figures end up disappearing from the historical record—after which he proceeded to list several famous works authored by figures who, he argued, had found themselves stymied in their quest for worldly success, and consequently withdrew from political life and turned to writing in order to “vent their frustration” (fafen).* For Sima Qian, writing functions as a sublimated expression of the author’s personal frustrations in response to setbacks in the real world—offering the author the possibility of realizing through his writing the fame and influence he was unable to achieve in real life.

  As Sima Qian made clear in this same letter, his discussion of the visceral resentment that may drive literary production had clear autobiographical resonances. He complains bitterly about how, in 99 BCE, he had been accused of offending Emperor Wu of the Han, as a result of which he was sentenced to be castrated. Given that castration was regarded as a fate worse than death, it would have been expected for someone of Sima Qian’s stature to then promptly take his own life—but he instead resolved to live so that he might fulfill the promise he had made on his father’s deathbed twelve years earlier, to complete the monumental historical project his father had begun just a few years earlier. Sima Qian labored for decades over this massive and extraordinarily influential historical chronicle that traces China’s socio-political history from the legendary Yellow Emperor up to what was then the present-day. Like the earlier literary figures to whom Sima Qian tacitly compared himself, he managed to leave an indelible historical mark after his death despite having suffered devastating dishonor and humiliation while still alive.

  Sima Qian’s monumental text would go on to not only be an invaluable source of information on early China, but also to provide a structural and literary model for the cycle of dynastic histories that followed. There are twenty-four official dynastic histories in all, beginning with Records of the Historian and concluding with the Qing dynasty’s History of the Ming. Each of these subsequent dynastic histories was formally commissioned by the imperial court of a new dynasty, and uses a similar approach to chronicle the history of the preceding dynasty. In addition to these official histories, Records of the Historian also provided a model for another historical genre known as “local gazetteers.” Numbering in the tens of thousands, these local gazetteers were regional histories compiled by officials and local gentry. Both the dynastic histories and the local gazetteers typically consisted of a combination of narratives, biographies, anecdotes, and other historical materials, and Yan Lianke uses these two interrelated historiographic genres as a loose narrative model for his novel The Explosion Chronicles. In particular, Yan’s novel uses a similar compositional structure that brings together individual biographies, clan genealogies, and descriptions of pivotal events in order to trace a broad swath of a community’s history.

  In The Explosion Chronicles, Yan Lianke relates the history of the community of Explosion, located in the same Balou Mountain region of Henan province in which Yan has set many of his other fictional works. The novel surveys more than a thousand years of Explosion’s history, but devotes by far the most detailed attention to the post-1949 era, and particularly to the post-Mao period. Two years after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, his successor Deng Xiaoping launched the Reform and Opening Up Movement, which generated a long period of economic expansion, and in Yan’s novel the community of Explosion capitalizes on this opportunity as it metastasizes from a modest village into a town, a county, a city, and finally a provincial-level megalopolis. The Explosion Chronicles tracks the community’s explosive growth by focusing on the complicated relationship between individuals belonging to three of the community’s major clans, using a set of intersecting biographical narratives to detail the history of the community as a whole. At the same time, even as the novel chronicles the history of Explosion, it simultaneously uses the community to offer an ironic commentary on China’s own hyperbolic growth, as the novel uses Explosion as a metonym for the Chinese nation as a whole.

  As the narrative of The Explosion Chronicles traces Explosion’s development, it employs a variety of different measuring systems. For instance, the novel initially refers to the months of the year using the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, but by the end of the novel it is clearly using the Western calendar. (In Chinese, this shift is subtle, since under both systems months are referred to simply as “second m
onth,” “third month,” and so forth, though there is always a one- or two-month gap between, say, the second month of the lunar calendar and the second month in the Western calendar). Similarly, for units of length, weight, and so forth, the narrative often uses a combination of metric and traditional Chinese units. In the translation, I have preserved the metric units, but have translated some of the traditional Chinese units into English ones, for units in which there is a close equivalent. For instance, a Chinese chi is roughly equal to a foot, and a Chinese cun is roughly equal to an inch. On the other hand, for Chinese units that lack a close equivalent in the English system (such as a mu, which is equivalent to about 0.16 acres, or a jin, which is equivalent to 1.3 pounds), I have simply retained the Chinese unit.

  Many of the specific elements in The Explosion Chronicles are clearly fantastical. For instance, one character collects shards of moonlight in order to dry out the smudged ink of an old almanac that contains the fates of the other characters. At the same time, however, some putatively fictional elements actually have real-life correlates, such as a reference to a torrential downpour that is described as being the largest Beijing had seen in more than six centuries, and which was directly inspired by record-breaking rainfall that inundated the capital in July of 2012, just as Yan was completing the novel. As a result, the novel’s use of hyperbolic mimicry has not only a defamiliarizing effect, in that it invites readers to view familiar practices in a new way, but also an uncannily familiarizing one, in that it invites readers to consider the relationship between the novel’s fictional content and the “real world.”

  This interplay between reality and fiction, meanwhile, is further developed in the paratextual material positioned at the margins of the novel itself. The main text of The Explosion Chronicles is framed by a metatextual preface and postface written by (a fictional) Yan Lianke, who is introduced as the author and editor of the chronicles themselves. Modeled loosely on the real-life author, this fictional figure is presented as a prominent novelist who lives in Beijing, where he is a professor at Renmin University. Since this fictional Yan Lianke is originally from Explosion, local municipal leaders have recruited him to write and edit a historical chronicle of their community. He accepts this assignment, but insists that he be given complete autonomy to compose the work as he sees fit, explaining that he does not wish to merely model it on traditional Chinese historical chronicles, but rather to treat it as a creative literary endeavor in its own right. The municipal leaders agree, though the result is perhaps not what they expected.

  Moreover, the entire work (including the main text, as well as the preface and postface) is itself embedded within yet another paratextual frame consisting of a pair of notes that offer additional reflections on the novel and its literary context. First, the book opens with a translator’s note by the work’s English-language translator, which situates the novel within a tradition of Chinese dynastic histories and local gazetteers, while also commenting on the structure and contents of the text itself. At the end of the book, an author’s note by (the real-life) Yan Lianke positions the novel in relation to a literary practice that Yan calls mythorealism, which he defines as the use of a nonrealistic narrative style to explore contemporary China’s underlying reality. In this note, Yan describes how his recent novels are motivated by a sense of righteous indignation in response to the horrifying realities of contemporary China (such as the hundreds of dead pigs that suddenly appeared floating down China’s Huangpu River during the Lunar New Year holiday in early 2013, just as Yan was carrying out the final revisions of the novel), and he implies that the The Explosion Chronicles itself may be viewed as a product, like Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian, of a process of venting frustration—frustration of not only with the situation in which China currently finds itself, but also with the authors’ limited ability to intercede with that same reality.

  At the same time, however, the novel suggests that the process of writing about this history and contemporary reality may be productive in its own right. From the text of the old almanac that can only be read after its pages have been dried out by shards of moonlight, to the fictional text of the Chronicles themselves, Yan’s novel suggests that through a careful study of the past and present, it may be possible to gain insight into the future, establish a new legacy, and create a new historical record. Or, as Sima Qian describes his own project, “I have cast a broad net across the old accounts that have been lost or neglected. Examining these in light of past events, I have gathered together all the evidence for cosmic and dynastic cycles, having studied the underlying causes of success and failure, and of rise and decline… . I have tried to probe the boundaries of heaven and man and comprehend the changes of past and present, thereby perfecting a tradition for my family.”**

  —Carlos Rojas

  * For a discussion of the “stored-up resentment” quote, see David Rolston, ed., How to Read the Chinese Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 131. For a discussion of the “vent their frustrations” quote, see Stephen Durrant, et al., The Letter to Ren An & Sima Qian’s Legacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 28ff. A partial translation of Sima Qian’s historical text itself, meanwhile, can be found in Burton Watson, trans. and ed., Records of the Historian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), in 3 vols.

  ** Stephen Durrant, et al., The Letter to Ren An & Sima Qian’s Legacy, 28–29.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Yan Lianke

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  CHAPTER 1: Prefatory Material

  CHAPTER 2: Geographic Transformation (1)

  CHAPTER 3: Year One of the Revolution

  CHAPTER 4: Revolutionary Biographies

  CHAPTER 5: Political Power (1)

  CHAPTER 6: Traditional Customs

  CHAPTER 7: Political Power (2)

  CHAPTER 8: Integrated Economy

  CHAPTER 9: Nature

  CHAPTER 10: Structural Transformation

  CHAPTER 11: Assessment of the New Era

  CHAPTER 12: National Defense

  CHAPTER 13: The Post-Military Era

  CHAPTER 14: Geographic Transformation (2)

  CHAPTER 15: Culture, Cultural Relics, and History

  CHAPTER 16: New Members of the Clan

  CHAPTER 17: Great Geographic Transformation (1)

  CHAPTER 18: Great Geographic Transformation (2)

  CHAPTER 19: Postface

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER 1

  Prefatory Material

  1. AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  Esteemed readers, permit me to use this Note to clarify a few points. If these thoughts are not to your liking, feel free to curse me but please don’t criticize our other comrades on the Chronicle Committee.

  1) I agreed to put aside the novel on which I was working to accept the role of author and editor of The Explosion Chronicles. Apart from the fact that I grew up in Explosion, another motivation (or tacit motivation) for this decision was the enormous financial compensation that Explosion City offered me—a sum so large it left me speechless. I hope readers will forgive me, but I really needed the money, just as a man with too much testosterone needs a woman. The mayor sent his secretary to Beijing to visit me. “Mr. Yan, the mayor says you should tell us how much you want, and as long as you don’t claim all of the city’s banks, we are willing to agree to anything.” I was overwhelmed by this offer, and was captivated by the promise of riches. Please don’t ask me how much I ended up earning for writing and editing this. All I can say is that after completing The Explosion Chronicles, I’ll never again need to worry about money—whether it be to purchase a house or a luxury car, or even for reputation and social status.

  I therefore agreed to serve as the author and editor of The Explosion Chronicles. I spent quite a bit of time and effort on this project, not only for the sake of my readers and for Explosion City, but also to earn the vas
t sum of money specified in the contract.

  2) Before I began work on The Explosion Chronicles, Mayor Kong Mingliang and the entire editorial committee agreed to my three requests: (A) That I would use only materials and facts I could trust, and reserved the right to decline any examples or requests people might bring me. (B) Given that I am a novelist and a novelist’s primary significance lies in a process of defamiliarization, I wanted to write these chronicles in my own fashion, and not simply copy the format and narrative conventions of traditional Chinese historical chronicles. (C) I asked that the editorial committee assign me a cute and clever secretary, ideally a recent humanities major.

  3) Regardless of how Explosion City decides to print and publish these chronicles, the city and I, as the primary author, will jointly hold the copyright, but if Explosion decides to stop printing the text, I will retain exclusive rights over any subsequent reprintings.

  4) The authorial and financial rights for all translations (including translation into traditional characters for Hong Kong and Taiwan editions of the work), adaptations for film or other media, Internet serialization, and other adaptions will be retained by me, Yan Lianke, as the primary author, and Explosion City and the members of the editorial board will relinquish further rights.

  And so on, and so forth.

  Dear readers, I have recorded all of this, though ordinarily it should not have been made public, just as a gentleman should not air his dirty laundry. Go ahead and read it, and curse me. Any of you can stand on that arch of chastity and curse me for being a prostitute, a whore, and a novelist completely lacking integrity. You may curse me to death and drown me in an ocean of spittle—but before you bury me, I have but one request, like a criminal sentenced to death who wishes to make a final statement:

  Read these chronicles! Even if you read only a few pages, it will be as if you deposited a flower on my grave!