Unraveling the ties that bind

Reticent novelist Lin Zhe's wonderful panoramic tale of 20th century China is now available in an English translation. Chitralekha Basu reports

Novelist and screenwriter Lin Zhe is not exactly the interviewer's dream subject. She is self-effacing to a fault. In an age when being able to talk about one's work is seen as an essential skill, this writer of 15 novels and several screenplays, seems unfashionably reticent.

In fact, Lin Zhe - a pseudonym, her real name is Zhang Yonghong - despite being one of the most prolific writers in China today, would probably have remained a mystery, living in relative obscurity, unknown and unread outside the Chinese-speaking community, had it not been for the efforts of a Swedish literary enthusiast, Lars Ellstrom.

Ellstrom, who has divided his time living on Oaxen Island and in Beijing for nearly 40 years, called George Fowler, a banker turned freelance translator, and his 1970 contemporary at Nanyang University, Singapore, urging him to have a look at Lin Zhe's novel, Waipode Gucheng (literally, Grandmother's Old Town). Any other project Fowler might have had in mind could wait, Ellstrom insisted.

Fowler didn't need much persuasion once he began to read the book, a voluminous novel running to over 500 pages in the translated version.

Two years and several drafts later, the Seattle-based polyglot, who has spent much of his working life in Asia, picking up Chinese, Indonesian, Malay and Tagalog along the way, was ready with the translated manuscript.

"It's a book that grabs you and does not let you go," Fowler says. "This is a book I wanted the Anglophone world to read, it is a story about real flesh and blood people."

Both Ellstrom and Fowler, confirmed sinophiles, were also keen to challenge the perceptions about the Chinese often circulated in the Western world.

"Westerners often have very simplistic ideas about the Chinese. In that respect this book is very, very educational. It's full of humanism and that goes with the contradictions and inadequacies inherent in the characters," Ellstrom adds.

Perhaps predictably, the translation failed to find a taker, confirming the prejudices the Western press seems to hold against Chinese themes. Many Western publishers felt the book was too rich and heavy with historical and ethnological detail to appeal to a Western readership. "This was a book that did not fit the mold," Fowler explains.

He decided to publish the book himself, retaining every little allusion, and refusing to omit or explain Chinese cultural connotations in terms of a Western frame of reference.

"I wanted the Western reader to read this book from the perspective of a Chinese reader," says Fowler who added family trees and a timeline of important historical events in 20th-century China to help the reader follow the characters' stories as they unfold against a rapidly and drastically changing historical backdrop. He also added a personal gloss to liven up the near-hundred annotations.

Waipode Gucheng was published last month in translation by George Fowler as Riddles of Belief and Love - A Story.

It is a masterful work, narrated with disarming candor. It is almost dauntingly ambitious in scope, the narrative spans five generations and unfolds through the dramatic events that transformed China in the 20th century, and yet is realized with intuitive ease.

The novel's main characters, Ninth Brother and Second Sister, witness to almost a century of Chinese history, live apparently inconsequential lives in the archetypal "Old Town", situated somewhere in southern China.

Born and married in the new Republican era after the 1911 Revolution, Ninth Brother and Second Sister live through the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), in which Ninth Brother joins as a military doctor but is soon disillusioned by the corruption and brutalities waged by the Kuomintang leadership. They endure days of unmitigated suffering and estrangement when the Japanese onslaught is at its peak, and Ninth Brother is stuck in Shanghai while Second Sister flees Old Town to escape the bombing with her three young children and a band of dependent - and somewhat dubious - family members.

Reunited, Ninth Brother and Second Sister then witness the founding of New China in 1949, excitedly welcoming the Communist Party's rise to power. But they are left bewildered by the excesses of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when they endure the trauma of public denunciation and hunger. In later years they remain largely unaffected by the turbulence of the age, but nonetheless pained by the confusion and restlessness that plagues the lives of their children.

The story of Hong'er, the granddaughter of the lead characters and the narrator, runs like a counterpoint emerging as interludes between the main track. Hong'er and her estranged husband Chaofan, third-generation Old Towners, live the antithesis of the simple, struggling lives their grandparents led. Hong'er and Chaofan, despite their material successes and wider exposure to life and cultures, end up as radarless wrecks, driven by desire but too scared to love.

At a time when young people in China are burning incense sticks and praying at altars in conspicuous numbers, Waipode Gucheng underscores the importance of "spiritualism" in everyday life. "It is an important glue that can hold relationships and the family together, it is necessary to steer people away from materialism," Lin Zhe says, reiterating one of her major motivations to write the story.

"There is, certainly, a lot of me in this novel," she admits. "If life can be compared to rice I am the yeast which ferments the wine, that is the novel. This is a story about people I have known but I have reinvented them."

Discarding the notion of exhaustive research to write a novel in which history is so thoroughly examined, Lin Zhe says, that though she did conduct some research into the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, "halfway through it, I felt it was not essential".

"I didn't want to know everything in accurate historical detail. My family history was something I already knew, there were stories I could remember vividly," she says, looking back fondly on her childhood days spent in Fuzhou, Fujian province, on which the mythical Old Town is partially modeled.

A TV series based on Waipode Gucheng was telecast last year. Lin Zhe is writing the screenplay for the sequel, due to screen sometime this year. "I want to bring the suspense and the fast pace of the original to the TV adaptation," she says.

While she brings the unobtrusive clarity and strong visual imagination of a seasoned screenwriter to the written word, whether she would be able to make her screenplay pulsate with the throb of real lived experiences will be worth watching out for.

(China Daily 04/16/2010 page19)