Publication day is not a real holiday / The Shaanxi Opera
I suspect a book like Jia Pingwa’s The Shaanxi Opera in English translation has a natural audience, globally, in the range of a couple dozen people. That is how many people I expect will read from the first page to the last.
This is not meant to dissuade anyone from reading it. Nicky Harman and I worked on the book in fits and starts for several years, during which we also took research trips to Shaanxi. Since I first read Ruined City twenty years ago, all I wanted to do was translate a novel by Jia Pingwa. The book is meaningful to me.1 I love it. I hope it is discovered by the couple dozen people that might enjoy it.
Most ambitious works of contemporary literary fiction do not have a large audience. The barriers that exist around this work are slightly taller. I would like to acknowledge that.2
There is no shortage of rural novels from China, but this one is different. It avoids national allegory. Set around the time the novel was written, about twenty years ago, it is concerned with day-to-day village life. This is a novel about the death of a village; this is the story of the end of a way of life. All able-bodied men and women have left Freshwind to seek their fortunes in Xijing (this is the name Jia uses in most of his books to stand in for Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province). The only ones left behind are the elderly, the children, and the disabled. When it comes time to bury the dead, there are scarcely enough men left to carry the coffin to the grave. The local form of opera, which gives the book its title, no longer has enough devotees to sustain touring troupes.
It reads like just the type of legend that a Shaanxi opera librettist might draw from: two powerful families, the Xias and the Bais, the former ascendant (beneficiaries of the political shift after Liberation) and the latter fallen into disrepute (formerly great merchant and landlord family), united by the marriage of Snow Bai, the prettiest girl in town, pure as her name, filial daughter and keeper of village tradition, and the handsome scholar Rain Xia. It wouldn’t make sense to have a love story free of conflict, though, so, our narrator, Spark, is madly in love with Snow Bai. Like a Shaanxi opera, there are plenty of scenes, too, of supernatural spookiness, slapstick comedy, musical interludes, sexual innuendo, and one or two fight scenes.
It is not similar in form to many other novels published in English during the past several decades. This is a reason that Jia Pingwa, despite his stature in his own country, has not had much success going out into the world: while his peers borrowed from the contemporary Western canon, Jia was reluctant. His models are Ming and Qing vernacular fiction, gazetteers, ghost stories, and revolutionary romanticism. If he is influenced by any Western literature, it is the sprawling nineteenth century French realist novel. This means that The Shaanxi Opera at seven hundred pages in English translation has lots of room for detours away from the central plot. The reader is treated to digressions into local political economy, the internal machinations of opera troupes, folklore and language,3 irrigation, and gully reclamation projects.4
It is a book thematically out of step with most of what has been published in English since the turn of the millennium. It is a lament for a lost way of life, but written long after anything can be saved. The village is a place of animalistic coupling, barbaric customs, and violent punishment. All that is good has been corroded by external politics and the power of the market.
The Shaanxi Opera reeks of excrement. Its language is uncompromising. This has turned off the readers algorithmically distributed early copies.5 It’s an ugly book with ugly language. It uses words that are rarely deployed in contemporary literary fiction.6 It climaxes with the birth of a severely disabled child and the autocastration of the protagonist.
The Shaanxi Opera is a book that possesses sublime beauty. It is there in the poetry, especially; some of it is doggerel, but much of it is not. The jewels stand out against the pain and filth of village life.
If that sounds interesting, I hope you can read the book.7
Here, I would like to thank Nicky Harman again. This book was my passion, not hers, I think it’s fair to say. She insisted that I be included on the project, which was offered first to her. Her commitment alone meant that I got to work on The Shaanxi Opera. (I should also mention Nick Stember here, too. I believe he advocated for my inclusion, too. However, I think by that point, even though he had gotten the ball rolling on Jia Pingwa translation, that he didn’t have much say. I still owe him my gratitude! He was the reason that I got my translation of an excerpt of The Shaanxi Opera published in Chinese Literature Today.) (I am personally indebted to both Nicky Harman and Nick Stember for a great many other things, as well.)
This book is not marketed, exactly, as a work of serious literary fiction, I would say, however, partly because it is not coming out through a publisher devoted to those things. It will be algorithmically served to Amazon customers that are unlikely to appreciate a dense rural epic from an author they’ve never heard of. It will not be reviewed by anyone but the comments section. That’s life.
A line I like to repeat: Jia Pingwa is an anthropologist as much as he is a novelist.
Several dozen pages are given over to recreating government documents on the gully reclamation project. I will forgive anyone that chooses to skip over them.
The only comment on the Amazon page is titled: "Vulgar languaage, vulgar thinking.” Other social media book review sites don’t have much more serious comments. I suppose an American reader would crack this book and find it spectacularly vulgar.
This reminds me of an Eileen Chang essay called “Foreigners Watching Opera and Other Things.” She tells the story of a particular opera that involves a man whose spirit is trapped in a chamber pot. Foreign audience members were baffled, she says, at the combination of such a sublime, tragic event with mundane filth. She says that Chinese people have fewer taboos about bodily functions, so it doesn't strike them as peculiar.
This is the language of the villagers. It is raw and crude. It looks much nastier, I realize, in English translation in the current intellectual climate.
I can direct you to the Amazon page for the book. I can’t suggest that you acquire the book by some other means, but I’m sure that you could. I don’t recall whether my contract has me getting points on it, anyways.