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Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and Aids: Yan Lianke's Trilogy of Disease*

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Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and Aids: Yan Lianke's Trilogy of Disease* chapter 6 Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and aids: Yan Lianke’s Trilogy of Disease* Shelley W. Chan 陈颖 Since the establishment of the communist government in 1949, especially with the open-door policy that brings rapid economic growth after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), China has developed tremendously over the past three to four decades. Its recent achievements, including the 2008 Olympic Games, the 2010 Shanghai Expo, China’s overtaking Japan to become the second larg- est economic power, its docking of the nation’s first manned spacecraft with a laboratory module in orbit, and its first moon landing, etc., have caught much attention from the rest of the world. As a result, many Chinese people believe that their country has shaken off its humiliating image as the “Sick Man of East Asia,” which was the collective anxiety of the Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, this anxiety is still troubling some Chinese who see present-day China as an unhealthy and even morbid world. Among them is Yan Lianke 阎连科, an award-winning but con- troversial writer, who is known for using illness to signify reality.1 For instance, The New York Times published his article “On China’s State-Sponsored Amne- sia” on April 1, 2013, which aroused some socio-political debates.2 Examining three novels of disease by Yan, namely, Streams of Light and Time (Riguang liunian 日光流年, 1998), Pleasure (Shouhuo 受活, 2004),3 and Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuang meng 丁庄梦, 2006), which are about cancer sufferers, * [A shorter version of this essay was presented at the joint conference of the Association for Asian Studies & International Convention of Asia Scholars in Mar. 2011. Ed.] 1 Born in 1958, Yan Lianke has published important novels and stories and been the recipient of major awards in China and abroad, including the 2000 Lu Xun Literary Prize, 2004 Lao She Literature Award (3rd place novel category), 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, and 2014 Franz Kafka Prize. 2 See Yan Lianke, “On China’s State-Sponsored Amnesia,” The New York Times, April 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/opinion/on-chinas-state-sponsored-amnesia. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. (assessed June 27, 2014). 3 The title of Shouhuo is translated by Carlos Rojas as Lenin’s Kisses (New York: Grove Press, 2012). I personally believe that “pleasure” is closer to the original meaning of the Chinese expression. Hereafter, I will use Pleasure in my discussion of the novel and Lenin’s Kisses in footnotes when Rojas’ translation is cited. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�9��9_008 Shelley W. Chan - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:47:09AM via free access <UN> 178 Chan physical disabilities, and hiv patients respectively, this essay investigates how Yan sees humans’ hopeless struggle with fate as well as with absurd phenom- ena, including lust, greed and corruption, in the grotesque post-Mao China through writing about illnesses. These stories show how, according to the stern satirist, the nightmare of being a sick man is still haunting the nation. Cancer: The Fate of Failure Streams of Light and Time is about the inhabitants of Three-Surname Village (Sanxingcun 三姓村) who fight a fatal disease, throat block syndrome (houdu zheng 喉堵症) or, according to Chien-hsin Tsai, esophageal cancer that limits their lives to forty years of age.4 The novel is a story about the Sisyphean efforts of four village heads to make their people outlive the age of forty: Du Sang 杜桑, Sima Xiaoxiao 司马笑笑, Lan Baisui 蓝百岁, and Sima Lan 司马蓝, with the last one being the protagonist. These efforts include encouraging birth to make new lives outnumber the dead; eating rape (youcai 油菜); and turning up the topsoil of the whole village, hoping that crops from the new soil will change their fate. Unfortunately, all these efforts prove to be in vain. When it comes to Sima Lan, he firmly believes that it is the water that has caused this lethal disease, and so he decides to dig a canal to lead water from about thirty miles away. Ironically, when the canal is completed, the supposedly life-saving water is seriously polluted and of no use at all. Eventually Sima Lan dies on his fortieth birthday. Exemplifying the author’s inheritance of medical narratives of the major May Fourth writers, such as Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936), Yu Dafu 郁达夫 (1896– 1945), and Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), who aim to bring the readers’ attention to the collective social reality by writing about the individual biological reality, Streams of Light and Time makes itself a metaphor for disease, turning Three- Surname Village into a miniature of the society and revealing the negative side of human beings through displaying the poor health and miserable lives of the villagers. Three-Surname Village, a remote rural community that can hardly be found on a map, is located in the barren Balou 耙耧 Mountains in Henan 河南 prov- ince of central China. Although this forgotten place is untouched by nationwide political turmoil, it is far from a utopia. Nobody from other villages is willing 4 Chien-hsin Tsai, “In Sickness or in Health: Yan Lianke and the Writing of Autoimmunity,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23.1 (Spring 2011): 91. Shelley W. Chan - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:47:09AM via free access <UN> Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and aids 179 to marry anyone from Three-Surname Village for fear of cancer. Gradually it becomes a totally isolated place, and its inhabitants live in extreme poverty. In order to collect money for their fate-changing projects, the poor villagers sell their own bodies, the only properties they own, to buy necessary tools. While men sell their skins to a hospital specializing in healing burn patients, women engage in prostitution in the city. Here are how the men’s legs look like: Scars covered them from the groin to the knees, where thin slices of skins had been cut off and sold, altogether over ten pieces. The big ones were the size of a palm, and the small ones about that of an oak leaf, one piece after another, full of bumps and holes like red tree tumors and watery bruises.5 When the villagers’ legs look like tree trunks and their skins are similar to barks, they cease to be humans; instead, they are turned into things, objecti- fied and degraded. Yet selling their skins is just a routine activity in their lives; at times it is even joyful as they would be a bit “rich” to keep a small amount of money for themselves. As a result, selling of skins becomes a carnival of celebrating pain and suffering, the only effective measures to defer the early appointment with death. They indeed should be celebrated as they can bring hope to people, even though this kind of celebration leads to a pathetically twisted and diseased reality. While male villagers are obligated to make contributions, women make equal sacrifices to the life-prolonging projects, especially the female protago- nist, Lan Sishi 蓝四十, the lover of Sima Lan. Lan Sishi is sacrificed when her father serves as the village head, in accordance with the belief that a virgin should be sent to sleep with a leader from the commune, so he will send man- power to the village to help with turning up the topsoil. Later when Sima Lan needs money to have surgery in a city hospital, Lan Sishi is sacrificed again by being asked to engage in prostitution in the city. Being forced to violate her body again and again, this woman, like the male villagers, is objectified and downgraded to a state of non-human. Eventually, not only does the violation harm her body, but it also destroys her desire to continue her life. When Sima Lan goes to her home one day, he finds her dead in her bed—in fact, she has killed herself: 5 Yan Lianke, Riguang liunian 日光流年 [Streams of Light and Time] (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 240; my translation. Shelley W. Chan - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:47:09AM via free access <UN> 180 Chan …he looked at the lower part of her body, between her legs that used to be powder-like white but now looked a dull green, at the thin and se- ductive light blue panties. Being stabbed five, six or seven times, or even ten or twenty times, with a pair of scissors that gleamed coldly, the front part of the panties had become a red honeycomb; flesh and blood brim- ming over from the honeycomb formed a withered yet blooming peony… he…started taking off her panties, …blood had formed a kind of heavy blackness on the light blue underpants. When the blackish underpants were peeled off from her body, …he looked at her private parts carefully and saw white particulate matter as if there were a pot of flourishing but crumbled white flowers. He stared at the flower and finally understood— She was infected with venereal disease from the business of selling her body.6 This graphic and disturbing scene as well as the description of the scar- covered legs mentioned above demonstrate the damaged bodies of the villag- ers. Paradoxically, when they are trying very hard to prolong their lives, they are actually harming their bodies. The Confucian teaching does not seem to be remembered in this poverty-stricken village: “Our bodies—from a single hair to a bit of skin—are derived from our parents, we must not in the least in- jure or wound them.
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