Five Spice Street by Can Xue

Five Spice Street (Yale UP, 2009) by the contemporary Chinese writer Can Xue is one of the strangest, most original novels I’ve ever read. It also happens to be one of the worst translations. There is a difference between deliberate strangeness—Can Xue is known for her unusual writings—and a strange feeling resulting from a bad translation. Spice Street is strange, I’m afraid, in both ways.

The novel’s deliberate absurdness resides in its way of “telling a story” (the novel is full of ironic quotes, by the way). The “story” revolves around a few questions: Who is Madame X? What is her relationship with Q? Do they even have a relationship? For 329 pages, a series of picturesque characters from Five Spice Street—a widow proud of being both very sexy and virtuous, a coal miner infatuated with Madame X, a female friend jealous of Madame X, several male characters with dubious intentions, Madame X’s sister, who ends up living in a shed surrounded by…shit, and others—give us their points of view on Madame X. These perspectives intersect, complement or contradict each other in a way that is voluntarily absurd. The story takes the shape of a maze or of a diagram that is unrolled and undone before the reader’s eyes. The novel could be described as a “meta-story,” but unlike other such narratives, this one is very funny, and the writer doesn’t escape Can Xue’s ironic eye either. Unlike most classic novels about writers in which the character-writer is almost a copy of the author-writer, here, the writer is not even the same gender as the author (i.e., Can Xue). In fact, writers in general are made fun of as “geniuses” who are “usually sitting on a deserted mountaintop or the roof of a thatched cottage,” having dialogues with the gods.

One could also look at this novel as a sort of upside-down “comedy of manners” in which the author (Can Xue), using the research done by the character-writer and all the other characters on Five Spice Street, gives us a study of the sexual behavior of “our people.” There are many hilarious passages, but the comic is not always obvious, sometimes because of the translation, other times because of the grotesque element in many of the scenes, or because the comic of the language is based on a parody of Communist slogans. Some of the scenes seem in the tradition of the slapstick (or that of traditional Chinese theater): “they reached the granary [where they usually had sex] and he was kicked in the butt and fell. This was a good kick, very educational. He was kicked back to reality, and began to fulfill a male’s responsibilities.”

Since the translation of a novel from the Chinese is no easy feat, I am willing to give the two translators (Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping) some credit for their hard work, but still, I cannot but deplore the result. Here are a few (very few!) examples: “how could that person shout so loud as to scare a person?”; “I’m so confused inside” [rather than “outside”?]; “Everyone knew he was a doll” [in the context it’s clear the author meant “a puppet”]. And yet, in spite of the translation, the novel is worth reading. If someone at Yale UP reads this, please try to edit this novel and reprint it! The author deserves it.