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Wang Anyi (author), Todd Foley (translator), I Love Bill and Other Stories, Foreword by Xudong Zhang, Cornell University Press, 2023. 260 pgs.
Since reading the original in 2001, I have eagerly awaited a translation of I Love Bill ๆ็ฑๆฏๅฐ (1995). Wang Anyi ็ๅฎๅฟ (b.1954) is arguably Chinaโs most important woman writer of the last half-century. Her oeuvre includes fifteen novels, myriad novellas and stories, as well as essays, critical works, and screenplays. These works explore an immense range of individual and collective experience, principally from the Cultural Revolution onward. Many of her trenchant realist depictions starkly confront primal energies, direct in certain works, under the surface in others. Wangโs numerous awards include the 2000 Mao Dun Prize and the 2017 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.
Yet Wang remains sorely underrepresented in English. Well-translated masterpieces include the early collection Lapse of Time (ca. 1982, tr. 1988), and Wangโs groundbreaking โthree lovesโ trilogy: Love in a Small Town (1986, tr. 1988), Love on a Barren Mountain (1986, tr. 1988), and Brocade Valley (1987, tr. 1992). Brothers (1989, tr. 2001) confronts the passion and fragility of womenโs same-sex relations, and Wangโs monumental Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996, tr. 2008) follows an ageing beauty queen through four decades of political upheaval. Yet these and other translations present only a fraction of Wangโs work. The collection under reviewโoffering the first English translations of five worksโis a welcome addition, one that underscores the diversity of Wangโs work.
The title novella, โI Love Billโ ๆ็ฑๆฏๅฐ (1995), chronicles a beautiful art studentโs woes during and after her romance with Bill, an American cultural attachรฉ. Set in the early 1990s, Shanghaiโs rapid transformation and glaring inequities frame Ah Sanโs lonely desolation. Even before Bill leaves for a vacation after which she never sees him again, her angst when alone is acute: โWithout Bill, there was no Ah Sanโshe both existed and achieved happiness because of him.โ Ah San finds meaning as an artist until her next foreign lover disparages her paintings. Thereafter she can no longer paint and spends her days (and nights) pursuing foreign men in hotel lobbies. She ostensibly hopes for โa stable relationshipโ, but she cynically inveigles strangers to buy her dinner and keep her in their room for the night. Her ruse runs aground when she aggressively propositions a young British man, and his friends, alarmed, call the police. Sent to a labour reform camp, her reflections on the way connect back to the novellaโs opening frame and two other foreshadowings. The final quarter of the text recounts Ah Sanโs dehumanisation while incarcerated and exposes the harsh fate of vulnerable citizens under a repressive regime.
Much of the narration is rife with cross-cultural projections. For Ah San, the three Britons โwere all handsome young menโฆ that standard look of the Aryan race. Any of them could be the leading actor in a filmโ. The novella also illustrates white Western privilege, as well as the hazards of generalisations. Different readers may interpret the narrative as unmasking or reinforcing these caricatures, often expressed as dichotomies.
Ah Sanโs drastic changes of fortune share a similar narrative arc with โA Girlsโ Tripโๅงๅฆน่ก (2003) and โThe Rescue Truckโ ๆๅฝ่ฝฆ (2007). Each begins with a foreshadow of trouble to come. In an early set-up, a challenge confronts the protagonist(s); soon it becomes clear that calamity threatens. As the disaster approaches, the turning point is never described. Instead, the narrative skips to recounting the nadir of the trouble, and a reversal of fortune allows the character(s) to escape the worst outcome.
โA Girlsโ Tripโ dramatises the scourge of the abduction and enslavement of women in forced marriages. As two carefree young women travel south, kidnappers sell them as wives to rural peasants. After the protagonist escapes, at home her neighbours shun her as a ruined woman. So she sets off to find her friend. Thanks to a deus ex machina, her courage and dogged determination make the story both a warning and an exhortation for female empowerment. โThe Rescue Truckโ is a gripping, much shorter story with a brief timespan, set in a single neighbourhood. As a Shanghai family weathers their young sonโs dire illness, changes in point of view evoke both chaos and suspense.
โMatch Made in Heavenโ ๅคฉไป้ (1998) turns around the theme of the struggle to own history. After an only child (a son) dies in an accident, peasants conduct a posthumous โghostโ marriage to a young woman soldier who arrived in the village decades earlier, only to die. The locals consider her one of their own until county officials come investigating. Soon the boyfriend of her youth, now a distinguished retired official, produces her photograph. As the outsidersโ history supersedes their own, the villagersโ tears release the martyrโs remains as well as their claim to her memory. The theme could be seen as a metastatement about literature and its power to release or usurp memory.
โThe Troupeโ ๆๅทฅๅข (1997) lovingly portrays a ragtag band of misfits with no future. The novella presents a series of vignettes about a provincial cultural workersโ troupe at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The troupe performs patriotic dramas, but loses government support as films and other forms of entertainment supplant traditional theatre. Unlike the collectionโs other works, action does not drive this novella. Each section is a quiet snapshot, a portrait of a time and place. The order of the sections could be rearranged without altering the novellaโs gentle chronology. No cliffhangers here.
Told from the perspective of a narrator somewhere in between the โold guardโ and newer arrivals, the novella bespeaks both an ambivalent nostalgia and deep sympathy. As the old guard adapt to new circumstances, the narrator honours their shared past: โperhaps even they themselves had forgotten, but forgetting is not the same as not existingโ. One section personifies the melancholy, haggard courtyard in which the troupe lives. โSteeped in sorrowโ, the courtyard awaits the troupeโs return from each tour, and embodies their resigned mediocrity. Another section chronicles the disillusionment of the university graduates: โTheir stage careers became nothing more than a way to make a living, having little to do with ideals or aspirations, and little to do with art.โ
Readers will discover new territory in I Love Bill and Other Stories. As with her earlier fiction, Wang often employs language and tropes very different from the psychological language more familiar to many Western readers. With less such language, the narration conveys feelings and experiences in at times startling ways. This less obviously psychological style forces a reader to rethink her customary expectations and responses. Wangโs works expand a readerโs perspective not only on the times and circumstances depicted but also on broader existential questions.ย
How to cite: Knight, Sabina. โChinaโs Most Important Woman Writer of The Last Half-century: A Review of Wang Anyi’s I Love Bill and Other Stories.โ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/05/wang-anyi.
Sabina Knight ๆก็จ่ฏ is author of Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012, translated into three languages) and The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (2006). She is Professor of Chinese and World Literatures at Smith College. Her current projects consider the politics of translation, non-Han literatures, and media of dissent. Photo of Sabina Knight by Wilson Chao. [All contributions by Sabina Knight.]
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