An innovative 1997 novel records its narrator’s experiences—as an urban “Educated Youth” relocated among rural peasants—as entries in a descriptive “dictionary.”
The entries include regurgitated directives preaching the tenets of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, analyses of common words recharged with official meanings (e.g., “brutal” is both a pejorative and a compliment), analyses of the fictional village of Maqiao’s socioeconomic features and history of bloodshed and repression, and indigenous folk beliefs and superstitions as embodied in a rich gallery of precisely sketched characters. The more memorable of the latter: truculent beggar “king” and malcontent Old Master Nine Pockets; Teixang, the recklessly unfaithful wife of an ineffectual Party leader; Ma Wenjie, lord of a feared “bandit army”; and versatile artist Yanwu, whose paintings are declared “reactionary” for failing to create convincing likenesses of Chairman Mao. The result is a subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought—and, more to the point, a stunningly imaginative and absorbing work of fiction.
