Yan Geling - White Snake and Other Stories

[oyceter]

I tend to do fairly poorly with short stories and with literary fiction, so please take my post with a grain of salt, or many!

The main story in this book, "White Snake," is about a ballet dancer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for practicing decadent, Western, and bourgeois art. The others all concern the Cultural Revolution in some way or the other, which may account for another percentage of my reaction. I am rather sick of stories about the Cultural Revolution, thanks to having to watch many movies by Fifth Generation Directors back in high school. They were very good! They were just incredibly depressing, and they were accompanied by horror stories of the Cultural Revolution from my Chinese teachers.

I say this and note that of course, my Chinese teachers were very biased, given that this was in Taiwan, which was where the Nationalists fled to after losing the civil war to the Communists.

I also bounced off the translation. I'm not sure if it's the prose of the translation or the actual Chinese, but I can almost tell how the translation is attempting to stick to the original, and it didn't work for me. It feels like there is a lack of style and stylistic choices. Maybe some day I will attempt to read the original to see how much is the translation and how much is the prose.

All together, it felt too familiar for some reason, and not interesting enough.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've been looking for this! Because of the title story, of course.

[oyceter]

I, uh, stalkerish-ly grabbed it off your wishlist...

I like what the story does with the White Snake story, especially because I did not realize that Green/Blue Snake was originally a man in heaven and gender-transformed, but it never quite caught me. But! YMMV, especially because I tend to bounce off literary fiction and short stories.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Some of the Cultural Revolution stories I heard about Red Guard kids my age were scary, really scary. I remember hearing a bunch of them when I was in San Francisco, visiting the Haight Ashbury (not to get stoned, but looking for book stores) and I came across a Chinese book store. Turned out to be Maoist, and they were giving away copies of Chairman Mao's little red book. But when we went inside, we ended up in the middle of a fairly tense discussion on what propaganda was saying was going on in China (everything was wonderful) and what was really going on, according to relatives still there (everything was really, really horrible).

[oyceter]

Yeah, stories of the Red Guard kids were where most of the horror stories came from. I think part of it is horror at breaking Confucian hierarchy, but a lot is plain and simple fear of knowing that people close to you might turn on you at any second!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes. The thing that struck me was how very similar these stories were to stories I'd heard in Austria about the Hitler Youth--and read about youngsters during the early, Terror years of the French Revolution.

[oyceter]

Huh, interesting! I think I need to read more accounts from non-Taiwan sources some time to come to better conclusions...

[larryhammer]

So Cultural Revolution stories are like Holocaust stories?

---L.

[oyceter]

I... am not sure if it is on the same scale, especially given where I am hearing the stories from.

[sanguinity]

Huh. I'm wondering if this is one of the stories that I read for my Chinese literature class back in college.

...but no, the pub-date is too late. The book I'm thinking of would have had to have been published in English by 1992. But it a ballet dancer under political pressure/investigation by the government, there was a covert love affair with another dancer who may or may not have been working for the government, and the book had lots of gritty, gritty details about sweat.

For that class, we also watched a lot of films by Fifth Generation Directors. And as with your teachers, the professor who taught us that class told us his personal stories about the Cultural Revolution. For what it's worth, we found them horrifying.

[oyceter]

I... yeah. I do not think I can read or watch many more depressing stories about the Cultural Revolution, just because of all the exposure in school and because they make me want to go spork China, even though that is not necessarily fair of me.