Lenin's Kisses Read online

  LENIN’S KISSES

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Dream of Ding Village

  Serve the People!

  LENIN’S KISSES

  Yan Lianke

  Translated from the Chinese

  by Carlos Rojas

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copryright © 2004 by Yan Lianke

  English translation copyright © 2012 by Carlos Rojas

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  First published in Chinese as Shuohuo in 2004

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-2037-3

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

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  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  “The time is out of ioynt: Oh cursed spight,

  That ever I was borne to set it right.”

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  While still alive, Chairman Mao had insisted that he wished to be cremated after his death, but instead his corpse was embalmed and placed on display in a crystal coffin in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Despite persistent speculation that the corpse currently on display is actually a replica (reinforced by reports by his personal physician that the initial embalming process had been badly botched), the mausoleum remains enormously popular, frequently drawing lines of tourists that extend half a mile or more. Commemorating a man who is credited with founding modern China but is also tacitly blamed for many of its attendant disasters, the Mao Zedong Mausoleum is a curious hybrid—part historical relic, part religious shrine, and part tourist attraction. Emblematic of a broader proliferation of Maoist artifacts that are alternately treated as fetish, kitsch, and good luck charm—a contemporary phenomenon that Geremie Barmé calls “shades of Mao”—Mao’s embalmed corpse literally embodies some of the contradictions that mark the peculiar historical juncture at which China currently finds itself, as it shifts abruptly from communist austerity to what is euphemistically described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

  Taking its inspiration from this fascination with Mao’s corpse, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses revolves around the corporeal remains of another communist forefather: Vladimir Lenin. After learning that Russia may no longer be able to afford to maintain Lenin’s corpse on display in Moscow’s Red Square, a local Chinese official by the name of Liu Yingque proposes to purchase it and install it in a special Memorial Hall that he will construct in his home county. By developing an extensive tourism industry around this communist relic, Liu hopes to bring his county unimaginable wealth. But first he must find a way to raise the vast sum of money needed to purchase the corpse from the Russians, and for this he turns to an isolated village located at the outer margins of his county. One of the distinctive aspects of this village is that most of its residents are disabled and have developed a variety of special skills to compensate for their physical limitations, and Liu therefore comes up with the idea of having the villagers perform their disabilities, reinventing themselves as spectacular commodities.

  The village is said to date back to the Ming dynasty, when a couple of disabled peasants (and an old woman) unable to keep up during an obligatory large-scale relocation from one province to another were permitted to drop out of the procession and establish a home in the mountains. Word soon spread of this unique community in the mountains, and before long disabled peasants from all around came to join them. Throughout much of the village’s history, its residents enjoyed a bountiful existence in which all their basic needs were easily met. Until the 1950s, the villagers were so isolated that they—like the inhabitants in the remote utopian community in Tao Yuanming’s famous fifth-century fable “Peach Blossom Spring”—remained blithely unaware of the political changes unfolding in the rest of the country.

  As a result of this isolation, the villagers speak a dialect of Chinese with many terms and phrases that would be unfamiliar to most outsiders. Some of these terms reflect actual usage in the region (Yan Lianke is from Henan), while others are the author’s own invention. In the novel, these terms are explained in a series of notes labeled “further reading.” For instance, the first note explains the verb shouhuo, translated here as “to liven”: this binome—which is borrowed for both the name of the village and for the original Chinese title of Yan’s novel itself—is composed of two Chinese characters that literally mean “to receive life,” but in the novel’s regional dialect are used to refer to enjoyment, pleasure, or even sexual intercourse.

  At the same time, however, these notes do much more than simply explain obscure terminology. Like Nabokov, who once observed that “human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” —and whose famous work Pale Fire is essentially a volume of footnotes—Yan Lianke uses the extensive notes in Lenin’s Kisses as crucial structural and conceptual elements of the work itself. These notes not only provide a convenient pretext for a series of flashbacks that help flesh out the histories of the protagonists and of the village itself, they also exemplify the peculiar temporal disjointedness that is a central concern of the novel as a whole.

  As the text jumps back and forth between the narrative present and events from years, decades, and even centuries earlier, it generally uses the traditional Chinese calendar’s sixty-year “stem-and-branch” cycle, complemented at times with the corresponding animal from the twelve-year zodiac cycle. For readers who may be unfamiliar with the Chinese calendar, Gregorian dates have been added to the English translation (though it should be noted that few contemporary Chinese readers would know without consulting a chart that, for instance, the wuyin Year of the Tiger corresponds to 1998 and the first several weeks of 1999 in the Western calendar). Similarly, the novel also alternates between the modern metric system and traditional Chinese units for length, weight, area, and so forth. To preserve this distinction, we have retained the metric units while translating most traditional Chinese units into their English equivalents. For instance, a Chinese chi is approximately the same length as an English foot, so we simply call it a foot. For a few Chinese units that don’t have a close equivalent in the English system (for instance, a li is equivalent to about a third of a mile, and a mu is equivalent to 0.165 of an acre), we have retained the original Chinese terms.

  Just as Lenin’s Kisses alternates between disparate chronological periods and measuring systems, it also delicately negotiates a compromise between social critique of political permissibility—like many of Yan’s other works. For instance, his novel Serve the People, in which the Maoist injunction to “serve the people” i
s twisted around to justify the pursuit of erotic bliss, was never officially released in Mainland China, while Dream of Ding Village, which focuses on China’s rural AIDS epidemic, was technically banned after its publication (though it remained widely available). Lenin’s Kisses, meanwhile, was not banned—and, in fact, it was awarded China’s prestigious Lao She Literary Award—though its unflattering portrayal of contemporary China did lead the People’s Liberation Army, which had employed Yan as an author since the 1980s, to ask him to step down. Yan Lianke is forthright about the restrictions that many contemporary Chinese authors continue to face, and notes that he himself often engages in a process of self-censorship, attempting to anticipate what the State censors will find objectionable in his own work. In a recent blog post, he compares these processes of censorship and self-censorship to an act of castration, asking rhetorically, “Is not a literature that can only dance within a tightly constrained space also a castrated literature? Can a castrated literature still be considered literature? And, if it is not literature, then what would it be?”

  Despite his trenchant criticism of the “castrating” effects of the Chinese state’s censoring apparatus, Yan Lianke appears to delight in his ability to dance at the very margins of what is politically permissible. Just as the villagers of Liven learn a variety of “special skills” to compensate for their physical disabilities, Yan Lianke has developed an uncanny ability to use allusion and innuendo to dramatize the stark inequities of modern China. In Lenin’s Kisses, this careful dance with the specter of censorship is reflected in the volume’s unusual numbering scheme, in which only odd numbers are used for the notes, chapters, and so forth. While Yan explains that the work’s discontinuous numbering expresses the tragic sentiment of the novel as a whole (since in China odd numbers are considered inauspicious), we might also view the “missing” even-numbered chapters and notes as a tacit reminder of everything the novel necessarily leaves unsaid as a result of Yan’s delicate courtship with China’s censorship system. In particular, the work’s fantastical descriptions of the hardships and sorrows endured by the residents of Liven speak evocatively to the fate of the countless ordinary citizens who risk falling through the proverbial cracks produced by contemporary China’s tectonic shift from high communism to hypercapitalism—citizens inadvertently sacrificed by a logic of economic progress that purports to be advancing the interests of the nation as a whole. In this way, the structure of the novel mirrors the historical juncture against which it is set—a juncture in which, to borrow the work’s opening description of a freak mid-summer snowfall, time itself might appear to have fallen “out of joint.”

  —Carlos Rojas

  LENIN’S KISSES

  Book 1: Rootlets

  CHAPTER 1: HEAT, SNOW,

  AND TEMPORAL INFIRMITY

  Look, in the middle of a sweltering summer, when people couldn’t liven,1 it suddenly started snowing. This was hot snow.3

  Winter returned overnight. Or perhaps it was more that summer disappeared in the blink of an eye—and since autumn had not yet arrived, winter instead came hurrying back. During that year’s sweltering summer, time fell out of joint. It became insane, even downright mad. Overnight, everything degenerated into disorder and lawlessness. And then it began to snow.

  Indeed, time itself fell ill. It went mad.

  The wheat had already ripened, but the succulent wheat fragrance that had blanketed the land was dulled by this snowstorm. When the people of Liven5 had gone to sleep that evening they hadn’t bothered to pull up their sheets, and had lain naked in bed idly cooling themselves with fans made from paper and cattail leaves. After midnight, however, a fierce wind began blowing and everyone frantically reached for their covers. Even wrapped in their sheets, the villagers felt as though the bitterly cold air was cutting straight to their bones, and immediately started rummaging for their winter quilts.

  When the villagers opened their front door the next morning, the women exclaimed, “Oh, it’s snowing! It’s hot summer snow.”

  The men paused and sighed. “Damn, it’s a hot blizzard. It’s going to be another famine year.”

  The children cried out brightly as though it were New Year’s Day: “It’s snowing! . . . It’s snowing! . . .”

  The elms, poplars, mangroves, and pagoda trees were all blindingly white. In winter, it is merely the trees’ trunks and branches that get covered in snow, but in summer their canopies are transformed into enormous white umbrellas. When the leaves are no longer able to support the weight of the snow, it cascades to the ground.

  This hot snow came just after the wheat had ripened, and many sites7 throughout the Balou mountains were transformed into winter wonderlands. In one field after another, the wheat stalks were pinned cruelly to the ground by the snow, and while an occasional ear of wheat might be visible, the vast majority of the stalks were splayed out as though they had been blown over by a tempest. If you were to stand on the ridge above the fields, however, you would still be able to smell the scent of wheat, like incense that lingers long after a coffin has been carted away.

  Look, the hot snow that fell in the middle of this sweltering summer transformed the entire land into a winter wonderland, leaving everything pristinely white.

  Needless to say, for the village of Liven—nestled in a valley deep in the Balou mountains—this snowfall in the fifth month of the wuyin Year of the Tiger, 1998, constituted a veritable natural disaster.

  Further Reading:

  1) To Liven. DIALECT (used mostly in western Henan and eastern Henan’s Balou mountains). The term means to experience “enjoyment, happiness, and passion,” and also carries connotations of finding pleasure in discomfort, or making pleasure out of discomfort.

  3) Hot snow. DIAL. Refers to summer snow. People from this region usually call summer the “hot season,” and refer to summer snow as “hot snow.” They sometimes also speak of “hot flurries” and “hot blizzards.” It is unusual for snow to fall in the summer, but upon consulting local gazetteers I discovered that there is generally at least one such snowfall every decade or so, and there have even been periods in which there was hot snow for several summers in a row.

  5) Liven. Legend has it that the origins of the village can be traced back to the Great Shanxi Relocation near the beginning of the Ming dynasty, between the reigns of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors. Imperial regulations specified that in each household with four members, one person would be exempt from the relocation order; in households with six members, two would be exempt; and in those with nine members, three would be exempt. The elderly and disabled in each household stayed behind while the young and healthy were relocated, and during the resulting exodus wails of partings resounded across the land. The first wave of relocations was followed by vigorous protests, which led the Ming court to announce that those unwilling to cooperate should gather beneath a large pagoda tree in Shanxi’s Hongdong county, while everyone else should return home and wait to be summoned. News of this announcement spread like wildfire through the region, and soon virtually the entire county was headed toward the tree. It is reported that there was one family in which the father was blind and the eldest son was a paraplegic, and in order to demonstrate his filial piety the family’s youngest son used a cart to haul his father and elder brother to the pagoda tree, whereupon he himself returned home to await relocation. Three days later, however, Ming troops forcibly relocated the hundred thousand people who had gathered beneath the tree, while allowing those waiting at home to stay behind.

  For the purposes of the migration, no distinction was made between the blind, the crippled, and the elderly, or even between women and children. Consequently, the old blind man with a crippled son had no choice but to trudge along with everyone else, his son strapped to his back. The sight of a crippled boy guiding his blind father, who was carrying his son with his own elderly legs, was absolutely heartrending. Each day, the procession would start at dawn and march until nightfall, gradually making its way from Sha
nxi’s Hongdong county to the Balou mountain region in Henan province. The old man’s legs became swollen and his feet bloody, while his son cried and repeatedly tried to kill himself. The others watched them in despair, and petitioned the officials to allow them to drop out of the procession and return home. Each official relayed this petition to his superior until it finally reached the minister of migration, Hu Dahai. Hu’s response, however, was vicious: Whoever dares to release even a single person will be executed, and furthermore his entire family will be exiled to a distant province.

  Everyone from Shandong to Shanxi to Henan knew about Hu Dahai. He was originally from Shandong, but near the end of the Yuan dynasty he fled famine and ended up in Shanxi. He was reputed to be ugly, but robust; straitlaced, but evil; unkempt, but heroic; outspoken, but narrow-minded; powerful, but lazy. The people held him in deep contempt, and when he went begging for alms everyone avoided him like the plague. Even if he showed up at people’s homes while they were in a middle of a meal, they would refuse to let him in. He arrived in Hongdong one day hungry and thirsty, and saw an expensive tile and brick house. He extended his hand to ask for alms, but not only did the owner of the house refuse to give him any food, he taunted Hu by taking a freshly baked scallion pancake and using it to wipe his grandson’s butt before feeding it to his dog.

  As a result, Hu developed a deep and abiding hatred for the people of Hongdong. He subsequently made his way to the Balou mountain region in eastern Henan, and by the time he arrived he was famished, parched, and on the verge of collapse. He saw a thatched hut in a valley, and inside an old lady was preparing a simple meal of grain husks and bread made from wild weeds. Hu hesitated, but eventually decided not to ask her for anything. As he was about to leave, however, the old woman suddenly gestured for him to come in. She offered him a seat, gave him some water to wash his face, then cooked him a delicious meal. Afterward, Hu showered her with appreciation, but the old woman didn’t utter a single word in return. It turned out that, in addition to being as thin as a rail, she was also deaf and mute. Hu decided that Balou’s generosity was the precise inverse of Hongdong’s depravity, and became determined to express his gratitude to the former while seeking vengeance against the latter.