Sexual Life in Modern China Ian Johnson Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, to bawdy, coarse works. Abroad, al- and Wang Xiaobo grew up with rick- mainly as China’s foremost expert on Chinese writers grappled with the most none of his writing had been ets. He had a slightly bulging skull and sex and interviewed her about Chinese traumas of the Mao period, seeking to translated. He seemed destined to be a barrel chest, as well as bones so soft people’s sexual liberation in the reform make sense of their suffering. As in the little more than one of the many writ- that he would entertain his four siblings era (a typical clichéd idea written up imperial era, most had been servants of ers whose works are reduced to fodder by yanking his legs behind his head and by foreign journalists; how often have the state, loyalists who might criticize for doctoral students researching an pulling himself along the floor on his we read stories about Chinese people’s but never seek to overthrow the system. era’s zeitgeist. stomach like a crab. His one privilege sexual liberation?). And yet they had been persecuted by In the twenty years since Wang’s was sweetened calcium pills, which he It took me awhile to realize that she Mao, forced to labor in the fields or death, however, something remarkable ate by the handful while his siblings was actually a leading chronicler of shovel manure for offering even the has happened. In the West he remains watched enviously. something more profound: the return most timid opinions. virtually unknown; a single volume of Despite the family’s misfortunes, of the private sphere in the lives of or- Many wrote what came to be known his novellas has been translated into Wang grew up intellectually privileged. dinary people. She had researched and as scar literature, recounting the tribu- English. But Chinese readers and His father had a wide collection of for- written about China’s gay and lesbian lations of educated people like them- critics around the world now widely eign literature in translation. In school, movement, and in recent years has selves. A few wrote sex- fueled accounts regard Wang as one of the most im- Wang would stare at the wall and ig- stood up for transgender and bisexual of coming of age in the vast reaches of portant modern Chinese authors. Two nore his teachers, but at home he de- citizens as well, but the bigger picture Inner Mongolia or the imagined was the government’s retreat from romanticism of Tibet. Almost all people’s daily lives. of them were self- pitying and in- This past spring I talked with sipid, produced by people who her about her late husband. She were aggrieved by but not reflec- Leong Mark said that they had had a simi- tive about having served a system lar upbringing. Both came from that killed millions. educated families, and both had Then, in 1992, an unknown secretly read novels like The writer published a strange novella Catcher in the Rye. While in the that told the hilarious and absurd United States in the 1980s, Wang story of two young lovers exiled to had read Michel Foucault and his a remote part of China near the ideas about the human body, but Burmese border during the Cul- she felt he was more influenced tural Revolution. There they have by Bertrand Russell and ideas of an extramarital affair, are caught personal freedom. “The person he by officials and forced to write liked to cite the most was Russell, endless confessions, tour the coun- the most basic and earliest kind of tryside in a minstrel show reenact- liberalism,” she said. “I think he ing their sinful behavior, escape had started reading these books in to the mountains, and return for his childhood.” more punishment, until one day The two met in 1979 and married they are released, unrepentant and the next year. Li was part of a new slightly confused. generation of sociologists trained The novella was immediately after the ban on the discipline had popular for its sex, which is om- been lifted. In the Mao era, sociol- nipresent and farcical. But it isn’t ogy had been seen as superfluous described as something liberating Wang Xiaobo, Beijing, 1996; photograph by Mark Leong because Marxism was supposed during a period of oppression or to be able to explain all social as a force of nature unleashed by living new collections of his works have been voured works by Shakespeare, Ovid, phenomena. Supported by China’s pio- in Chinese borderlands. Instead, sex is published in China. Internet forums Boccaccio, and especially Mark Twain. neering sociologist Fei Xiaotong, Li something the Communist Party wants honor his life and writings. A café has His brother estimated that Xiaobo studied at the University of Pittsburgh to control—the apparatchiks want the opened in his name. He is now included could read one hundred pages an hour, from 1982 to 1988. Wang accompanied couple to write endless self- criticism so in every major anthology of recent Chi- even of difficult works by Marx, Hegel, her for the final four years and studied- they can drool over the purple prose— nese fiction, and his essays are consid- or classical Chinese writers. with the Chinese- American historian but the narrator and his lover still man- ered crucial to understanding China’s When Wang Xiaobo was fourteen, Cho- yun Hsu. age to imbue it with a deeper meaning recent past. Mao launched the Cultural Revolu- Now retired, Hsu told me that he that they understand only later, at the He was also an early user of the In- tion, hoping to purge the Party of his was initially flummoxed by Wang. Al- end of the story. ternet and spoke up online for disad- enemies and return the revolution though not formally a novelist, the After the sex, what was most shock- vantaged groups—then an unusual to a purer state. After that quickly young man wanted to write. And al- ing about the novella was how intellec- position but now common among descended into chaos, Mao ordered though he was living in the United tuals are portrayed. They are almost public figures such as the filmmaker young people to go down to the coun- States he spoke very little English. “I as bad as the party hacks who control Jia Zhangke, the writer Liao Yiwu, tryside to learn from the peasants. realized that I was training not a his- them. The novel’s hero cons his lover and the novelist Yan Lianke. In a less Even though weak, Wang volunteered torian or sociologist but a Chinese into the sack, picks fights with locals, overtly activist way he resembles the to go to Yunnan, spurred by romantic novelist who needed to understand his- dawdles at work, and is as tricky as his recently deceased Nobel Peace Prize fantasies of the border region. He was tory,” he said. “He was writing a form tormentors. The novella’s title added to laureate Liu Xiaobo: an interloper who fifteen when he arrived, and he wrote of trauma literature.” Hsu put Wang on the sense of the absurd. It was called pushed for change outside the state lit- endlessly while there. He would get up a course of independent study, mostly The Golden Age, leaving many to won- erary and intellectual apparatus. in the middle of the night to scribble systematic reading in the Chinese clas- der how this could have been anyone’s with a blue pen on a mirror, cleaning it sics and recent Chinese history, which or any country’s best years. and then writing again. He dreamed of had been lacking in his Communist- era And who was Wang Xiaobo, the au- Wang Xiaobo was born in Beijing in being a writer and rehearsed his stories education. Wang received a master’s thor? He was not part of the state writ- 1952, the fourth of five children; his over and over again. degree in East Asian Studies but spent ers’ association and hadn’t published father, the logician Wang Fangming, When he returned to Beijing in 1972 most of his time writing—for the desk fiction before. But after its publication was a university professor. That year, he kept writing but didn’t publish. He drawer. “He wasn’t ready to publish,” in Taiwan, The Golden Age was soon the elder Wang had been labeled a worked in a factory for six years, and Hsu said. “And I respected that. My published in China and became an im- class enemy and purged from the Com- when universities reopened he got a goal was to help him develop.” mediate success. Wang followed it with munist Party. The newborn’s name, degree and taught in a high school. All After Li received her Ph.D., the a torrent of novellas and essays. He was Xiaobo, or “small wave,” reflected along he stayed silent until one day he couple returned to China and collabo- especially popular with college stu- the family’s hope that their political couldn’t. rated on a groundbreaking study, Their dents, who admired his cynicism, irony, trouble would be minor. It wasn’t, and World: A Study of the Male Homo- humor—and of course the sex. people like Wang Fangming were reha- sexual Community in China. Li even- Just five years later, in 1997, Wang bilitated only after Mao died in 1976. I have met Wang’s widow, Li Yinhe, tually took a position at the Chinese died of a heart attack at the age of In his memoirs, Wang’s elder brother, several times over the past twenty- five Academy of Social Sciences, and Wang forty- four.