The Explosion Chronicles

Also by Yan Lianke

The Four Books

Lenin’s Kisses

Dream of Ding Village

Serve the People!

Copyright © 2013 by Yan Lianke
English translation copyright © 2016 by Carlos Rojas

Cover photograph © Chen Yu, Untitled, 2011
Series No. 1, 2011/Schoeni Art Gallery,
Hong Kong/schoeniartgallery.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
[email protected]
.

First published as
Zhalie zhi
by Shanghai 99 in 2013

Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2582-8
eISBN: 978-0-8021-9001-7

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2016

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Grove Atlantic edition as follows:

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

As every Chinese schoolchild knows, Sima Qian’s first-century BCE historical classic
Records of the Historian
was—as the Ming dynasty literary critic Jin Shengtan memorably put it a millennium and a half later—the product of a “bellyful of stored-up resentment.” Jin Shengtan’s characterization can be traced back to Sima Qian’s own lamentation, in a letter he wrote near the end of his life, that many rich and powerful figures end up disappearing from the historical record—after which he proceeded to list several famous works authored by figures who, he argued, had found themselves stymied in their quest for worldly success, and consequently withdrew from political life and turned to writing in order to “vent their frustration” (
fafen
).
*
For Sima Qian, writing functions as a sublimated expression of the author’s personal frustrations in response to setbacks in the real world—offering the author the possibility of realizing through his writing the fame and influence he was unable to achieve in real life.

As Sima Qian made clear in this same letter, his discussion of the visceral resentment that may drive literary production had clear autobiographical resonances. He complains bitterly about how, in 99 BCE, he had been accused of offending Emperor Wu of the Han, as a result of which he was sentenced to be castrated. Given that castration was regarded as a fate worse than death, it would have been expected for someone of Sima Qian’s stature to then promptly take his own life—but he instead resolved to live so that he might fulfill the promise he had made on his father’s deathbed twelve years earlier, to complete the monumental historical project his father had begun just a few years earlier. Sima Qian labored for decades over this massive and extraordinarily influential historical chronicle that traces China’s socio-political history from the legendary Yellow Emperor up to what was then the present-day. Like the earlier literary figures to whom Sima Qian tacitly compared himself, he managed to leave an indelible historical mark after his death despite having suffered devastating dishonor and humiliation while still alive.

Sima Qian’s monumental text would go on to not only be an invaluable source of information on early China, but also to provide a structural and literary model for the cycle of dynastic histories that followed. There are twenty-four official dynastic histories in all, beginning with
Records of the Historian
and concluding with the Qing dynasty’s
History of the Ming.
Each of these subsequent dynastic histories was formally commissioned by the imperial court of a new dynasty, and uses a similar approach to chronicle the history of the preceding dynasty. In addition to these official histories,
Records of the Historian
also provided a model for another historical genre known as “local gazetteers.” Numbering in the tens of thousands, these local gazetteers were regional histories compiled by officials and local gentry. Both the dynastic histories and the local gazetteers typically consisted of a combination of narratives, biographies, anecdotes, and other historical materials, and Yan Lianke uses these two interrelated historiographic genres as a loose narrative model for his novel
The Explosion Chronicles.
In particular, Yan’s novel uses a similar compositional structure that brings together individual biographies, clan genealogies, and descriptions of pivotal events in order to trace a broad swath of a community’s history.

In
The Explosion Chronicles,
Yan Lianke relates the history of the community of Explosion, located in the same Balou Mountain region of Henan province in which Yan has set many of his other fictional works. The novel surveys more than a thousand years of Explosion’s history, but devotes by far the most detailed attention to the post-1949 era, and particularly to the post-Mao period. Two years after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, his successor Deng Xiaoping launched the Reform and Opening Up Movement, which generated a long period of economic expansion, and in Yan’s novel the community of Explosion capitalizes on this opportunity as it metastasizes from a modest village into a town, a county, a city, and finally a provincial-level megalopolis.
The Explosion Chronicles
tracks the community’s explosive growth by focusing on the complicated relationship between individuals belonging to three of the community’s major clans, using a set of intersecting biographical narratives to detail the history of the community as a whole. At the same time, even as the novel chronicles the history of Explosion, it simultaneously uses the community to offer an ironic commentary on China’s own hyperbolic growth, as the novel uses Explosion as a metonym for the Chinese nation as a whole.

As the narrative of
The Explosion Chronicles
traces Explosion’s development, it employs a variety of different measuring systems. For instance, the novel initially refers to the months of the year using the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, but by the end of the novel it is clearly using the Western calendar. (In Chinese, this shift is subtle, since under both systems months are referred to simply as “second month,” “third month,” and so forth, though there is always a one- or two-month gap between, say, the second month of the lunar calendar and the second month in the Western calendar). Similarly, for units of length, weight, and so forth, the narrative often uses a combination of metric and traditional Chinese units. In the translation, I have preserved the metric units, but have translated some of the traditional Chinese units into English ones, for units in which there is a close equivalent. For instance, a Chinese
chi
is roughly equal to a foot, and a Chinese
cun
is roughly equal to an inch. On the other hand, for Chinese units that lack a close equivalent in the English system (such as a
mu
, which is equivalent to about 0.16 acres, or a
jin,
which is equivalent to 1.3 pounds), I have simply retained the Chinese unit.

Many of the specific elements in
The Explosion Chronicles
are clearly fantastical. For instance, one character collects shards of moonlight in order to dry out the smudged ink of an old almanac that contains the fates of the other characters. At the same time, however, some putatively fictional elements actually have real-life correlates, such as a reference to a torrential downpour that is described as being the largest Beijing had seen in more than six centuries, and which was directly inspired by record-breaking rainfall that inundated the capital in July of 2012, just as Yan was completing the novel. As a result, the novel’s use of hyperbolic mimicry has not only a defamiliarizing effect, in that it invites readers to view familiar practices in a new way, but also an uncannily familiarizing one, in that it invites readers to consider the relationship between the novel’s fictional content and the “real world.”

This interplay between reality and fiction, meanwhile, is further developed in the paratextual material positioned at the margins of the novel itself. The main text of
The Explosion Chronicles
is framed by a metatextual preface and postface written by (a fictional) Yan Lianke, who is introduced as the author and editor of the chronicles themselves. Modeled loosely on the real-life author, this fictional figure is presented as a prominent novelist who lives in Beijing, where he is a professor at Renmin University. Since this fictional Yan Lianke is originally from Explosion, local municipal leaders have recruited him to write and edit a historical chronicle of their community. He accepts this assignment, but insists that he be given complete autonomy to compose the work as he sees fit, explaining that he does not wish to merely model it on traditional Chinese historical chronicles, but rather to treat it as a creative literary endeavor in its own right. The municipal leaders agree, though the result is perhaps not what they expected.

Moreover, the entire work (including the main text, as well as the preface and postface) is itself embedded within yet another paratextual frame consisting of a pair of notes that offer additional reflections on the novel and its literary context. First, the book opens with a translator’s note by the work’s English-language translator, which situates the novel within a tradition of Chinese dynastic histories and local gazetteers, while also commenting on the structure and contents of the text itself. At the end of the book, an author’s note by (the real-life) Yan Lianke positions the novel in relation to a literary practice that Yan calls mythorealism, which he defines as the use of a nonrealistic narrative style to explore contemporary China’s underlying reality. In this note, Yan describes how his recent novels are motivated by a sense of righteous indignation in response to the horrifying realities of contemporary China (such as the hundreds of dead pigs that suddenly appeared floating down China’s Huangpu River during the Lunar New Year holiday in early 2013, just as Yan was carrying out the final revisions of the novel), and he implies that the
The Explosion Chronicles
itself may be viewed as a product, like Sima Qian’s
Records of the Historian,
of a process of venting frustration—frustration of not only with the situation in which China currently finds itself, but also with the authors’ limited ability to intercede with that same reality.

At the same time, however, the novel suggests that the process of writing about this history and contemporary reality may be productive in its own right. From the text of the old almanac that can only be read after its pages have been dried out by shards of moonlight, to the fictional text of the Chronicles themselves, Yan’s novel suggests that through a careful study of the past and present, it may be possible to gain insight into the future, establish a new legacy, and create a new historical record. Or, as Sima Qian describes his own project, “I have cast a broad net across the old accounts that have been lost or neglected. Examining these in light of past events, I have gathered together all the evidence for cosmic and dynastic cycles, having studied the underlying causes of success and failure, and of rise and decline… . I have tried to probe the boundaries of heaven and man and comprehend the changes of past and present, thereby perfecting a tradition for my family.”
**

—Carlos Rojas