Han Han (born September 23, 1982) is a Chinese professional rally driver, best-selling author, singer, creator of Party, One (App magazine) and China's most popular blogger. He has published five novels to date, and is represented by the Hong Kong based Peony Literary Agency. He is also involved in music production. In May 2010, Han Han was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In September 2010, British magazine New Statesman listed Han Han at 48th place in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In June 2010, Han Han was interviewed by CNN as China's rebel writer who has become the unofficial voice for his generation.
A modern-day Don Quixote set in a nondescript Chinese town, "His Country: A Song Belongs To Us" is a funny, absurd, romping look at the life of Zuo Xiaolong, a twenty-something, kind-hearted punk whose only possession is a motorcycle, and whose only cause is to start a choir in his demesne, a town called Tinglin, with the ultimate goal of having sex with Huangbao, the older, more stylish woman who ultimately rejects him for a rich factory owner in jail for poisoning the town's water supply. The novel is more wacky picaresque than youth romance: Zuo Xiaolong wanders, with almost no sense of reason or purpose, through and around Tinglin town, exposing the reader to an ever-so-slightly hyperbolic rendition of a Chinese town that is wholly Han Han's: early on in the book, Zuo Xiaolong meets Niba, an admiring middle school student who claims Zuo Xiaolong looks like Che Guevara and whose age Zuo Xiaolong doesn't even dare to ask; Zuo Xiaolong's motorcycle breaks down, so he and his new girlfriend simply sleep in the street. Later, Zuo Xiaolong finds a job as a product inspector at a thermometer factory, and in a bit of Han Han's classic satire, Zuo Xiaolong tests the thermometers by sticking them up his ass. "My workload is picking up again," Zuo Xiaolong tells his friend, a blind restaurant owner named Liu Bimang. "I can test sixteen mercury thermometers at a time now. If I were a woman I could probably do twenty." As always with Han Han's work, the bantering, farcical tone half-conceals serious outrage and critique of the enormous problems of life in China today: rampant pollution (halfway through the novel, a paper factory releases a chemical into the river that mutates the town's animal population, turning them many times their ordinary size; the town's residents rejoice at the higher prices their freakishly large livestock now command; but a few months later, everybody who ate the mutated animals goes blind); the hollow pabulum of the ruling political class and their cavalier attitudes (Tinglin Town's Party Secretary, after deciding to appropriate profits from the mutated animals to the state, is killed when a resident goes electrofishing and fries the politician on an evening swim); and the absurd lengths to which local governments go to conceal and distort information (after the mutation, a government propaganda truck's megaphone announces, "[This mutation] is considered an ordinary evolutionary event...It was caused by the planet’s greenhouse effect". Han Han's writing occasionally lapses from clever satire to mere slapstick, and he does not have much to say about the politics of modern China that has not been said before--at least not that wasn't whitewashed by the censors who undoubtedly had a heavy influence on this book. But as always, the story is conveyed with such humor and imagination, and the characters are portrayed with such a balance of trenchant criticism and honest affection, that it is easy to forgive Han Han nearly all of his flaws.
Flat. It wasn't until almost the end that Zuo Xiaolong, the main character, started coming to life for me, and I suspect that's due as much to some variation of Stockholm Syndrome is more to blame for that than Han Han's literary skill. Not a bad slice-of-life glimpse at small town modern China, but not enough for an entire novel. Probably should've been aggressively edited down to short story length, novella at most.
Désappointée... J ai eu envie de l’abandonner 10 fois sans jamais y arriver. Je l ai finalement terminé mais j ne sais quoi en penser. Il y a de beaux passages de littérature ironique ou poétique mais aussi des chapitres qui m’ont paru pauvres et abscons ( surtout au début), je n’ai pas réussi à apprécier le ton humoristique et ironique du roman .