A slice of life close up

Wang Anyi finds drama in fine detail as she examines change

In a corner of downtown Shanghai a young man with a stammer forms a friendship with an elderly button-shop owner who, after a stroke, can barely talk and has opened the shop to keep himself occupied.

Both struggle to get people to understand them, but using simple speech they manage to understand one another.

"It's impossible," the old man says, knowing that if he utters anything longer he will be reduced to stammering.

"That's right," the young man replies, with a Shanghai accent.

Their friendship flourishes until a woman from the country's northeast arrives on the scene and rents a corner in the old man's house, where she draws on her wiles to sell cheap clothes.

In this novella in which the characters live on the rough edges of Shanghai, the author Wang Anyi pays tribute to China and the way it is changing.

Critics have lauded Wang for the way she depicts torrents of human emotion wrought by changes in Chinese society as cities become more commercialized.

"Wang seems to have found the key to recording the Chinese urban experience," says the author Zhao Yu.

"She uses a segment to reveal the big picture. It's the best novella I have read in the past few years.

"The old man and his domestic arrangements epitomize how Shanghai has changed in recent years. The young man stands for those at the bottom of the ladder and the woman stands for migrants."

The novella, with six short stories, is in Wang's latest book Zhong Sheng Xuan Hua (The Noisy Life), written after she finished her longer work Scent of Heaven.

Wang was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011 and is a winner of the country's prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2000 for The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. She was hailed as "the most prolific and critically acclaimed woman writer in contemporary China" when Cornell published her Years of Sadness: Autobiographical Writings of Wang Anyi.

A judge for the Man Booker prize, Carmen Callil, said Wang "is such a great writer it was easy to see her worth despite some rather bad American translations".

Wang is best known for her novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, which some say puts her in the category of nostalgic writer. She says that is not so. "I'm a strict realistic writer and I write about contemporary society."

It is too easy to put labels on authors, she says, and she refuses to be categorized as a feminist writer.

The most common label attached to her is "Shanghai", the setting of many of her works.

Wang, born in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, in 1954, moved to Shanghai with her mother, Ru Zhijuan, also a well-known writer, the following year. The city has nurtured her writing talent, her first work being published when she was a teenager in the late 1970s, and she still lives and works in the city.

"My relationship with Shanghai is full of tension," she says. "I don't like the place, but I can't avoid it. I know it so well that I have no other option."

Wang creates characters with compelling traits who can most easily be found among marginalized groups. This is a result of social change, she says.

"As with the problems the two men in the novella have in speaking, such characters are able to avoid the overwhelming influence of so-called mainstream thinking."

Wang says she never clutters her stories with unnecessary characters.

"Everyone has a mission," she says, adding that before she does anything else she sets the tone for her characters.

Chen Sihe, a literary critic, says that at a time of great change, Wang's novella depicts concern for people. She can be encouraging about change, "while keeping a vigilant and sober mind on the possible pain it can bring", Chen says.

Wang says: "I welcome change, and I have changed, too. But I want to remind people about the value of things that remain unchanged, such as the power of literature and faith in literature."

She is fortunate to have made her mark before society became too commercialized, she says.

"I was able to publish the six short stories with the novella. A debut writer submitting those stories would have been rejected."

The six short stories are in fact philosophical works in which there are no human characters, and their experimental nature has been the subject of much debate. She is not new to experimenting with words.

"In the 1980s, as I tried to be different, I wrote things that I now find difficult to read, too."

She was rebellious because her mother hoped she would not take on "the pains of being a writer", Wang once said.

"And she seldom praised my writing."

In the 1980s Wang and her mother attended a creative writing workshop at the International Writing Center in Iowa.

"As I get down to the basics of writing, storytelling, I have realized I get a lot of inspiration from my mother's writing," Wang says.

Apart from reading and writing, she is a professor of creative writing at Fudan University.

She laments that young writers often "don't know what to write about". She also feels pain when a student fails to get excited when reading a beautiful sentence, as she does.

Nevertheless, Wang says, Chinese literature is in good shape.

"We're not that far behind the 1980s, which was a golden age for literature. Writers are still writing as well, as seriously and with as much dedication."

meijia@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 02/28/2014 page29)