SinoWeird

One day, an itinerant monk from Ceylon arrived in Chang’an. The monk’s name had already reached the emperor’s ears, and he was invited to the palace to preach on Buddhism. The monk sat himself down before the emperor and spoke, not on the Buddhist classics, nor on the life of the Lord Buddha, but of things seen and heard in his travels. He spoke of the phosphorescent wakes of ships traversing tropical seas on moonlit nights. He spoke of crab-eating monkeys on coral reefs, glimpsed from the ship in the first glint of dawn. The monkeys had the faces of dogs, and they reached down from the reefs and scooped up fish in their claws. He described man-eating trees in tropical rainforests. Lotus flowers big as wagon-wheels in warm-water rivers. Southern nights, filled with the scent of flowers, when mermaids surfaced and displayed their charms beneath the moonlight. The emperor possessed all under heaven, but he had never seen such scenes as these. At first he thought he would have the monk’s head for such wanton fabrication, but then changed his mind and let him go.

Before the Ceylonese monk left, he gave the emperor a bracelet made of bone beads, covered in indecipherable Sanskrit script. The emperor couldn’t read Sanskrit, and nothing made of bone had ever been permitted within the palace, but he treasured that bracelet nonetheless. When he held it in his hand, the emperor was able to see all that the Ceylonese monk had described. Though he was wealthy beyond compare, he couldn’t take a single step outside the imperial palace. Being emperor wasn’t necessarily a good thing, he thought. Not a soul besides the emperor himself, and those who had been emperor before him, knew that emperors were susceptible to a malady known as “imperialitis”. This involved allergies to pollen, to hay, and even to fresh air. Merely ascending the tallest tower in the palace and looking out over Chang’an’s greenery would leave him congested for days. And then there were the rashes… Worst of all, he could eat nothing but the food meticulously prepared in the imperial kitchens, served in silver bowls. A single taste of the mutton-offal stew made in vast pots on the streetside would give him loose bowels for three days. He could only make love to the flower-like women of the palace, whose skin was like snow – should the eunuchs bring him a sturdy, powerful girl from the countryside, one whiff of her sweat-scent would be enough to knock him out. Listening to the monk’s tales, the emperor came to feel he was a prisoner within his own palace. And so he ceased frolicking with his concubines, and refused to meet his ministers, and remained locked in his private chamber day in and day out, in the company of his bone-bead bracelet.

[...]

A group of drunks looking for a fight, for instance, will shortly ascertain that a persistent squatting position renders one unable to move with any physical strength. Even if armed with knives, they will find that the sudden motion of attacking meets with painful protest from their numbed, cramping legs, causing them to drop their knife hands reflexively to maintain balance, and nipping neatly in the bud what might have otherwise been a bloody incident.

Imagine a rapist squat-rushing at a woman in short, mincing steps, backing her into a corner, and then – but how would sexual relations occur between two squatting people? Of course, the rapist could throw the woman to the ground and throw himself on top of her, but even ignoring the effects of protracted squatting on the human sex drive and sexual performance, how intimidating could a lowlife be, so close to the ground? Especially when the woman could resist by simply standing up – an option open to her, but not him, under the same legal principle permitting violence in the cause of legitimate self-defence? Even if he dared stand up, patrolmen would descend upon him for violating the regulation before circulation ever returned to his legs, and our would-be rapist would end up worse off than when he had started.

Imagine a group of thieves planning to rob the empty home of a wealthy man. They have done reconnaissance, planned their escape route, prepared a car to transport their takings and a full set of pliers, screwdrivers, crowbars, scissors, and other implements of crime; they have waited for just the right moment, and now – but how are they to get up onto the balcony? How will they squeeze through the window? Their sole option will be to enter the building and attempt to pry the iron anti-theft door off its frame, a time-consuming and difficult proposition. Any ideas of climbing onto a balcony or squeezing through the window are doomed to failure: either of these would require them to stand up straight while outdoors, a move that would instantly mark them as thieves to any law-abiding citizen or police officer within the vicinity. Clearly, evil-doers of all varieties would find their ambitions thwarted, were squatting to be generally enforced.

Finally they arrived at the tower, which was located in a narrow valley running up into the mountains. In the thick woods which filled the valley, a cluster of low huts were built around a public square. In the middle of the square there was a fountain with a pagan goddess sitting on a lotus blossom throne. A mysterious smile of deep compassion and endless sorrow cut across her broad, moon-like face. Some of the men jumped into the fountain, while others fell to the ground and wept like children. Others were frozen in place, neither crying nor laughing.

Not a single hut was lit from the inside, and no smoke issued forth from their chimneys. No one emerged to welcome them, for the entire village was silent, without a soul around. They soon realized that this place was abandoned, and their hopes were dashed like a great soap bubble that had floated up too high in the sky. Sobbing, they spent the night huddled together in a confused mass.

[Originally published on the Goethe Institute website in October, 2014, rescued via Google cache]

Though the connection of his works with China is rarely examined, Franz Kafka has been a great influence on Chinese modern literature, finds Leo Ou-fan Lee.

Since when have Chinese literary scholars been doing research on Franz Kafka?

I’d say since the 1960s, when they – or we, as I was part of the literary group – discovered him in Taiwan through English translation of his short stories. Two – A Country Doctor and The Judgment were featured in the inaugural issue of the journal Modern Literature (现代文学), that my fellow classmates who have later become famous writers themselves in the Foreign Languages and Literature Department founded in 1960. The journal has now become a literary legend. On Mainland China, his discovery was relatively late, in the early 1980s with the literary “thaw” in the post-Mao years, when some of his works were translated in the journals of the Foreign Literature Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences such as World Literature (世界文学) by scholars who also introduced other modernistic works. And a new generation of Chinese avant-garde writers immediately picked him up.

What was it that drove the interest of those scholars?

In the few scholarly introductions I have read, the portrait of Kafka is standard, that is, as an innovative writer of European modernism – not much about his own background. But for the generation of Chinese writers who emerged in the post-Mao era, Kafka’s impact was immense: writers like Yu Hua (余华), for instance, treated Kafka’s fantastic world as real, and his portrait of a huge nameless bureaucracy that persecutes Joseph K. is a vague or not so vague reminder of the government in China during the Cultural Revolution. Yan Lianke (阎连科) follows in their footsteps. By the way, there is now a complete Chinese translation of the works of Franz Kafka translated directly from the German, without the mediation of English translation.

And what fascinates personally you about Kafka’s works?

What interests me most in Kafka, is his succinct writing style and the ways with which he constructs a fictional world that combines fantasy with realism. I am now beginning to learn German at the Goethe-Institut, from the very basic level. It is a distant goal to read Kafka in his original German. Besides that, as we all know, he is a true master, indeed a founding father, of European modernism. He has become part of the world’s “invisible” treasure!

What do Chinese students learn today about Kafka?

I am afraid that my students today are learning very little about Kafka. As far as I know, Kafka is not taught in general education courses or even literary surveys – only in advanced seminars for graduate courses. Recently I taught one on “Modern Classics” in which Kafka is prominently featured together with Cervantes, Poe, Borges, and Lu Xun (鲁迅), among others. But even my seminar is an exception, not the general rule or requirement. What draws younger people – writers and theater people in particular – to Kafka in Hong Kong, from my observation, is the absurdity of situation in which his characters find themselves, something that bears a certain “serendipitous” resemblance to present-day Hong Kong. A performance of the Hong Kong Alice Theatre Group’s Seven Boxes Possessed of Kafka has demonstrated that the family conflict and the congested living quarters become two obvious factors that have united the characters in The Metamorphosis and their Hong Kong impersonators. I was surprised by the full-house turnout. That goes to show that Kafka, contrary to my bleak forecast, has become a big name in Hong Kong literary circles.

Kafka and China: what kind of relationship was that?

As far as I know, except for some scholars, nobody has ever talked about the connection of Kafka and China. Strange as it may seem, Kafka’s famous piece The Great Wall of China does not seem to arise much curiosity among Chinese readers. If there is ever a relationship in academic terms, Kafka is considered part of modern German literature, although he is not as well studied as Brecht. But more broadly I’d say it’s the common fate confronting all humanity that unites Kafka with all nations of the present world, China included. Kafka’s fiction “embodies” the “universal” literary values of alienation, loneliness, absurdity, et cetera. While Kafka himself knew a great deal about China through his readings, the contemporary Chinese readers know him – especially in recent decades – not in the classroom as for instance in Germany but chiefly through chance encounters and the advocacy of Milan Kundera, whose works are very popular in China. Kundera has reclaimed Kafka as a Czech and Middle European writer. That’s why I was first drawn to Czech culture and visited Prague as early as the 1980s – in order to find Kafka in Prague. But that’s another story.

This year the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke receives the Kafka Award. Why do you think the jury chose him?

Also transforming is the wildlife, including the brown bear and the bald eagle, the sequoia and other plants, the fungi and bacteria, and every bit of soil, every drop of water. Sometimes the country displays the layered appearance of a tropical forest, and sometimes it looks like an ice crystal. Murky blood flows in the northeast, and the western deserts glow with a ghostly blue light. Sometimes the whole country is silent, save for the powerful rumbling of the subway system, the strangest sound on the planet. America has become distinct from all other countries in the world.

From China, I can see all these changes clearly, and after shock and astonishment, I’m left with sorrow, my face drenched by tears.