Michael Berry

Liang Xiaosheng's fate has paralleled that of his mother country. Born in 1949, the year of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Liang was sent to the desolate Great Northern Wasteland in the northeastern part of the country as an educated youth in 1968, arguably the darkest hour of Mao Zedong's China, only to emerge a decade and a half later as a literary superstar during the era of Deng Xiaoping's reformist policies. Since the mid-1980s, Liang Xiaosheng has consistently been among the most prolific and widely read writers in China. A bona fide literary phenomenon, Liang has not only published a small library of epic novels, short fiction, essays, and social and cultural critique, but also penned screenplays for some of the most popular films and television miniseries in recent years. Best known in China for his portrayals of the plight of educated youths sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Liang Xiaosheng has remained an all but anonymous figure abroad. With the publication of Panic and Deaf, the first volume by the author to appear in the United States, Hanming Chen and James O. Belcher have attempted to redress Liang's relative obscurity on the international literary scene. (An earlier collection of Liang's short stories in English translation, entitled The Black Button, was published in China by Panda Books in 1992.)

Panic and Deaf consists of two satires about aspiring bureaucrats in contemporary urban China. "Panic," the longer of the two novellas, takes readers on an unpredictable and absurd journey as they follow a few days in the life of Yao Chungang, the assistant director of the fledgling China Psychological History Research Institute. Yao wakes up on a Monday morning, his most feared day of the week, to find his life slowly starting to fall apart. While staging a series of feigned illnesses and injuries to get himself out of work, Yao discovers that Fat Zhao, the executive director of his institute, is trying to edge him out in favor of his secretary-mistress; he also learns that his own wife is having an affair with her boss. To make matters worse, Yao finds himself fantasizing about having his own affair with the rabbit-faced woman who frequents Fat Zhao's office. It is through this complex web of unpredictable relationships that Liang Xiaosheng weaves his absurd, brilliant, and highly entertaining comedy of morals. Readers are kept in suspense, never knowing what to expect next on this literary roller-coaster ride through a capitalist bureaucracy haunted by the specters of Marx and Mao. Our only complaint once the car pulls into the station is that, as on most roller coasters, the ride is over too fast.
"Deaf," clocking in at just under fifty pages, is a less substantial work than the more intricately crafted "Panic." The short novella does, however, prove to be both a highly entertaining page-turner and the perfect companion piece for "Panic. "Everything becomes unreal, and that includes your own existence." Thus utters Liang, the protagonist of "Deaf," who wakes up on the morning of his big promotion to director of the research institute where he works to find that he has mysteriously lost his hearing. However, rather than giving in to his newfound handicap, Liang dutifully delivers his inaugural address as director, and implements a series of new policies at the institute-such as mandatory Walkmans for his subordinates, to be worn at all times, and requiring written memos instead of oral reports-so that he can conceal his deafness. In this playful take on The Metamorphosis, characters are indeed unreal-or, rather, surreal-existing in a literary realm that subtly fluctuates between a realistic portrait of urban China and a bizarre, Kafkaesque display of the strange and unexpected.
On the surface, "Panic" and "Deaf" seem to be departures from Liang Xiaosheng's best-known works in terms of both scope and theme and suffer in comparison with Liang's epic novels such as The Growth Ring and his one-thousand-page masterpiece, Snow City. The narrative twists and turns, seething satire, and hilarious absurdity of "Panic" and "Deaf" should, however, not only grab readers' attention and demonstrate why Liang Xiaosheng is so popular in China, but also whet the literary appetites of Western readers for more of Liang's work in translation. Unlike the majority of Liang's works, such as his early award-winning story, "This is a Miraculous Land," the two novellas steer away thematically from his semiautobiographical tales of educated youths in the Great Northern Wasteland. In Panic and Deaf, the "miraculous land" is now one of economic reform, free enterprise, extramarital affairs, urban malaise, and the absurd. Liang Xiaosheng's delightfully entertaining glimpse at the allegorical midlife crises of two petty bureaucrats should not be seen as a move away from his earlier work, but rather, as part of a larger project to link up the political madness of Mao's China with the economic madness of Deng's reformist regime.

Michael Berry is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Chinese literature at Columbia University. He is the translator of Wild Kids: Two Novels about Growing Up by Chang Ta-chun (Columbia University Press, 2000), and the forthcoming novels To Live by Yu Hua and Nanjing 1937: A Love Story by Ye Zhaoyan.