The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong (Overlook Press, 2011. Trans. from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt)

Although I am a strong believer in the power of the imagination, I also believe that good literature can only be born in an environment that gives us the elements necessary to transmute them into something else. A (good) writer doesn’t simply copy reality, but (s)he can’t entirely reinvent it either. What I am trying to get at is this: if, in a society, all the writers are teaching creative writing, the reality they work with is, by force of circumstance, impoverished. True, this impoverishment is due to more than one factor: one could say that the sterile, aseptic lives most of us live in Western societies—spending most of our time in front of a screen—aren't conducive to creating great works of art; of course, one could also say the opposite: that a sterile environment may trigger in us the desire to create a different world than the one we live in. No matter, one need only read literature in translation from non-Western countries to realize that the flesh of the real and the touch of history do play a role in artistic creation.

Having said this, I would rather spend all my life in an office than live in Su Tong’s China where there is no escape from history. The narrative takes place, as far as I could tell (since there are no dates) in the late seventies, in post-Maoist China. The setting: a fishing village where the population is divided into the boat people and those on the shore. The main character is a teenager—and later a young man—nicknamed Kongpi from “kong,” empty, and “pi,” ass (not the most popular boy in town). The boy and his father end up among the boat people when the father, who had been a Party Secretary, falls out of favor with the local nomenklatura. His disgrace is the result of a tragic-comic situation: having been considered until then the son of a local revolutionary-martyr (that is, a young woman who had been killed by the previous regime, and as a consequence, had been transformed into the closest equivalent to a saint—she is the object of a cult and her sculpted likeness is guarded as a precious relic), he is now declared a fraud. This ritual of a fall from grace, all too common in communism, is subjected to a sarcastic scrutiny by Su Tong: the proof of the father’s claim to fame (as the martyr’s son) is the fish-shaped birthmark on his behind. Once he is declared a fraud, no matter how often does the poor man drop his pants down to show the proof, no one believes him any more. Not only that, but, after having been unfaithful for many years, he loses his wife too. And the solution he ultimately finds to his overpowering sexual urges is…to cut off his penis. Young Kongpi himself, who has inherited his father’s urges, struggles for the entire novel with his undisciplined penis, which has a tendency to stand erect at the most inauspicious moments.

This is the background on which appears Huixian, a charming, clever nine-year-old girl, who is adopted by the boat people, and who becomes the object of Kongpi’s most secret desires. The girl turns into a beautiful young woman, who, for some time, seems to have a great future as an actress performing a Communist revolutionary, until she too, falls from grace. Huixian’s character is, actually, very complex, as this woman changes from a powerful diva into a cheap conformist, and from a beautiful woman into the closest equivalent to a redneck (she spends most of her time cracking melon seeds). Kongpi’s adventures too are endless, and one could almost call him a picaresque hero. This is an extremely captivating novel, and the translator, Howard Goldblatt, deserves special credit for an impressive translation.