Feng Min: Starting from China's Land

 and Reality

— Reading Liu Jiming's Novel The Human Realm

Source: China Writers Network | Feng Min | December 19, 2016

The Human Realm is Liu Jiming's latest full-length novel, years in the making. Its narrative draws the reader in with an irresistible sense of immersion, carrying me unexpectedly into the world Liu Jiming has created. The novel offers a panoramic, three-dimensional, and "synchronic" portrayal of the sweeping transformations that nearly four decades of reform and opening-up have brought to Chinese society, touching on numerous historical events and social currents. This portrayal is not the fragmented, entertainment-driven treatment so common in much contemporary fiction, but rather a rational reflection on history and reality — one that bears the unmistakable stamp of genuine intellectual inquiry. The Human Realm is a novel with "voices" — a cacophony of voices, like the full score of a symphonic work — and at the same time it presents a "polyphonic" structure: the multiple voices of the external world interweave, entangle, interpenetrate, and contend with one another, while within the writer (or the narrative voice of the work) two inner voices struggle and strain against each other. The novel's first half depicts the "great world" of humanity living alongside the land; the second half turns to the "small world" of the literary and intellectual circle — the two halves forming a relationship of correspondence and dialogue. Reading The Human Realm, I seem to see a dust-laden thinker who, having scaled the summit of reason, turns back with tender longing toward the fertile plains of feeling — a spiritual triumph, no less. It is precisely this quality that gives Liu Jiming his singular voice in expressing Chinese experience and Chinese stories. He carries within him a natural reverence for the harmonious order of the natural world, and a deep, abiding attachment to the small village on the Jianghan Plain called Shenhuangzhou. The people who live and struggle on that land, and the creatures and plants of the natural world — all have passed through the filter of the author's emotion, like patterns raised on a carpet, soft and textured to the touch. Those two charming little hedgehogs, Dalin and Xiaolin [Big Grove and Little Grove], have yet to leave my mind.

The artistic function of a novel is not merely to tell a twisting and moving story — more importantly, it is to create characters one cannot forget. In my view, creating memorable characters is far more demanding than telling a good story. When we think of classic novels about rural China, we think of Liang Shengbao in A History of Entrepreneurship and Xiao Changchun in A Bright Sunny Sky [note: Yanyang Tian, a celebrated socialist realist novel]. These "images of the new socialist man" fashioned through fiction were, in their day, known to nearly every household in China. Ma La, the protagonist of The Human Realm, both inherits this tradition and carries it further. Liang Shengbao and Xiao Changchun came to understand the historic transformation of their class position through the contrast between the old and new social orders, and in the changing economic system discerned the direction of historical development. As leaders of the collective economy, they embodied a selfless spirit of dedication and a sense of responsibility befitting those who are masters of their own fate. Ma La, by contrast, is carried through the turbulence of social transformation — from exhilaration to disillusionment, from setback to reflection, his fortunes rising and falling with the tides. Neither Liang Shengbao nor Xiao Changchun ever had to navigate the vicissitudes of individual fate or the mutations of human nature under a market economy. In this sense, Ma La is a richer and more three-dimensional figure than either of his predecessors, and a more genuinely tragic one. As a schoolboy, Ma La's heroes were his elder brother Ma Ke and the educated youth Murong Qiu. His brother's heroic spirit shaped him; Murong Qiu's books cultivated his love of reading. In acting as messenger between his brother and Murong Qiu, carrying books and letters back and forth, Ma La underwent his first awakening to love. After Ma Ke died a martyr's death — sacrificing himself to save the production brigade's seed grain — his brother became the driving force behind Ma La's lifelong struggle. It is no exaggeration to say that his brother played a decisive role in shaping Ma La's growth and character.

As Marx observed, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. In contemporary China, intellectual elites have often taken part in designing the blueprints for various reforms. Ma La, as an outsider, experiences this rapidly changing world from the margins — which gives him something the elites lack: a visceral, ground-level empathy with ordinary people. His decision to return to his hometown and build something there is the fruit of rational reflection; he throws his entire passion into the remaking of rural China, with Shenhuangzhou as his "experimental base." In Ma La one finds both the moral idealism of a European visionary and the chivalric spirit of the traditional Chinese humanist intellectual — the one who shoulders responsibility for all under heaven. Ma La's practice of establishing the "Tongxin Cooperative" [note: tongxin — "of one heart," or "united in purpose"] in Shenhuangzhou offers a profound lesson: in China, the question of land is historical, contemporary, and future all at once. Whether in revolution, in socialist construction, or in reform, it has always been the land question that lies at the center. China's future, too, cannot escape it. The specialized cooperative, as an emerging new form of economic organization in China's villages, is in the process of reorganizing China's farmers — and this will surely become an unstoppable historical tide. Ma La's tragedy closely resembles that of his mentor Lü Yongjia: both were pioneers. Lü Yongjia was a pioneer of reform and opening-up; Ma La is a pioneer of rural renewal. Pioneers often fail for want of sufficient strength, yet they exercise an immense guiding influence on those who come after. The value of the character Ma La lies precisely in this: he is both a prophetic thinker ahead of his time and a practitioner with his feet planted firmly in the earth.

Another major figure in The Human Realm is Murong Qiu. If Ma La's intellectual mentor was the liberal Lü Yongjia, then the greatest influence on Murong Qiu's worldview was the committed communist Ma Ke. Ma Ke was the Communist Youth League secretary of the production brigade; Murong Qiu was an educated youth sent down from the provincial capital to labor in the countryside. Murong Qiu admired Ma Ke's vigorous, can-do spirit and shared his ideal of shouldering the burdens of the world. Murong Qiu's distinctly intellectual temperament, in turn, deeply attracted Ma Ke, who drew much spiritual nourishment from the fine literary works she recommended. Two kindred spirits, they moved from comradeship to love. Tragically, a fire brought their young romance to an end — Ma Ke perished in the flames while saving collective property. This chance event in life altered Murong Qiu's destiny irrevocably. After the national college entrance examinations were restored, Murong Qiu gained admission to one of the top universities in the provincial capital and remained there as a faculty member, passing through a failed marriage along the way. As Murong Qiu's life unfolds, so too does the second half of The Human Realm, which gradually opens onto the "small world" of humanist intellectuals, drawn forward by the thread of her experience. This intellectual circle is rife with competition for fame and material gain, petty behavior, and at times even squalid conduct. Murong Qiu, who only ever wanted to pursue scholarship and keep clear of academic politics, cannot always keep herself untainted — at times she drifts with the current. Yet after coming into contact with Ma La, she subjects her own life to a searching self-examination. She resolves to change her way of living and her approach to scholarship, to return to Shenhuangzhou, and to explore together with Ma La the new questions and new paths of cooperative rural economics.

In The Human Realm, Lü Yongjia and Ma Ke are not characters who run the length of the narrative — both depart this world far too early. Yet these two figures profoundly shape Ma La and Murong Qiu. The contrast between them is striking: Lü Yongjia — gifted, prescient, a man of many talents — dies in pursuit of self-interest; Ma Ke — simple, steadfast, unwavering in his faith — dies in service to others. Yet Ma La, so deeply influenced by Lü Yongjia, and Murong Qiu, so deeply marked by Ma Ke, arrive at the same destination by different roads, from a new point of intellectual departure — both must bid farewell to their old selves and move toward a new one.

In sum, it is precisely because Liu Jiming fuses the subjective and objective worlds into a single unified vision that The Human Realm achieves a profound harmony of the historical and the aesthetic. The novel closes with an open ending: the fates of many of its characters remain in motion, and like Chinese society in the midst of its ongoing transformation, the work is full of crisis yet pregnant with hope. As Liu Jiming writes in his Afterword: "More than thirty years have passed. Chinese contemporary literary creation, having been buffeted by a dizzying succession of new terms and new trends, seems to have returned to its original point of departure. No amount of flashy and bewildering ornamentation can conceal the pallor and crisis within literature itself. Contemporary Chinese society and its literature seem once again to face a new round of setting out, a new round of release." One can only hope that The Human Realm will prove to be a harbinger of spring — drawing more writers like Liu Jiming, writers with a sense of responsibility and ideals, to set out anew from China's land and its reality, to welcome a new literary and intellectual "sunrise."

(The author is former Deputy Editor of Fiction Selection magazine)