Half of Man is Writing

Cover of Zhang Xianliang's first major work in its English edition.

Below I paste in code from a review I wrote over at Goodreads.com, which seems both a nice tool to send off reviews to Twitter and a community of intelligent readers. See the site for a well-written negative review of this book and several other interesting comments.

Once again I feel the need to press some internal "reset" button and strategize once again for a method of work that will give me real results on my dissertation. I feel what I'm lacking now is a firm system for managing time. Time is constraining, but also liberating. There is the bare fact that the entire project is on a deadline, and then there is the problem of how to use a single free day. This is essentially a problem of management, of making action and timing both deliberate.

So. To manage myself, I will say that I must have the first fully-drafted chapter of my diss by June 1. That leaves about 37 days to get the draft done. Plenty of time, I think, as long as I give it a concentrated effort. The draft I will have on June 1st will simply be a crafted summary of what I have read by then. Thus, the key method will be to read and write reciprocally.

This blog will remain a hybrid document that contains small reviews and comments from my research, as well as self-reflective comments on the larger project at hand.

Half of Man Is Woman by Zhang Xianliang


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Zhang, Xianliang. Half of Man Is Woman. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.

Casablanca in the Gulag

Zhang Yonglin is a Chinese Rick -- they probably would have fought on the same side during the Spanish Revolution in 1936, if Zhang had been there. But Zhang wasn't -- he was probably only born around then. By the time he had grown up, this sort of meritocratic freedom fighting was under attack in the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Zhang had been condemned, politically, socially and every other way, and sent to the first labor camps of those days, where he remained till 1966, when our story opens.



The inciting incident of "Half of Man is Woman" is boy sees girl, "Woman needs man/And man must have his mate./ That no one can deny." Zhang Yonglin, a virgin at 39 (picture a virgin Bogart! Sheesh!) is working in the fields one day when he sees -- a naked woman! He's so unbalanced he enters an amazing crisis punched into us via Zhang Xianliang's blockish prose. It is almost a coincidence that the very same year, a new political movement known as the Great Cultural Revolution is beginning. But after all, right, "It's still the same old story/ A fight for love and glory/A case of do or die."

The conceit of the story is that Zhang is working out his ideas about what life is all about in both his relationship with the woman and with his observations on the political events in the following years, 1968-1979. Like Rick, Zhang knows in the end that it's "a case of do or die," and makes the decision that determines his marriage and his very life.

Any reader who understands this work first and foremost as a documentary of life in China is a tremendous fool. First and foremost it is a great work of fiction, a crafted expression of a life, with turning points full of the interior thoughts of a man, including doubts, fears, desires and weaknesses. It probes just what would make a thinking man live through a dark night of turmoil that might last for decades, leaving a deep, national version of Stockholm's syndrome on the psyche. China here is the setting, no more.

Zhang's language throughout the book reminds me that story is about plot and character structure, not language. Zhang Yonglin, his girl, and the supporting cast with a wide range of fascinating subplots is a good story, but it is seldom a well-written. It is crafted, but in a garish, earthy style that is often repugnant. Martha Avery would be sublime translating "Baotown" just after this, but writing in 1986-7 she seems certain of Zhang's importance as a story craftsman but often unable to handle his clunky dialogue, flat jokes, flowery landscape description, all of which feed into an enigmatic (to the English reader) because so darkened, black-humor perspective on life. A debased pessimism pervades the work, and clearly Avery has understood the need to render this in English, but only hints of it were possible. I won't read this whole volume in Chinese, most likely, but you better believe I'm going to turn here when I want to practice my snark.


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