A Private Life Read online

  A Private Life

  Ran Chen

  From Publishers Weekly

  "Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow student named Yin Nan, but their brief, passionate affair ends abruptly when Yin Nan becomes involved in the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Traumatized by the loss of Yin Nan and the deaths of her mother and Widow Ho, Niuniu retreats into her own mind, becoming Miss Nothing ("I no longer exist… I have disappeared…"). Niuniu's flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study. Even the more conventional scenes are narrated with lyrical intensity, and hallucinatory dream sequences and passages describing Niuniu's alienation range from the revelatory to the overwrought. The result is an uneven but intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space.

  From Booklist

  The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen. As a child, sensitive and gawky Ni Niuniu never quite fit in. Teased by her classmates and neglected by her cold, distant father, she engaged in quiet forms of rebellion (she once stole her father's woolen trousers and cut them off at the knees). While her father scarcely acknowledged her, other adults paid Ni Niuniu too much mind: her middle-school teacher, Ti, and an eccentric widower who lived next door each took sexual advantage of the impressionable young girl. Haunted by the past and despondent over the recent death of her mother and departure of her first love, Ni Niuniu retreats from the realities of politically charged Beijing, writing and drawing and endlessly soaking in her tub. Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world.

  ***

  "Chen Ran's strikingly introspective, subjective, and individualized writing sets her work distinctively apart for the traditional and mainstream realism of the majority of contemporary Chinese writers… In his translation, Howard-Gibbon adeptly conveys the exquisiteness, richness, and slight eccentricity of Chen's prose." – China Daily

  "The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous, coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen… Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world." – Booklist

  "An intriguing exploration of the contemporary consciousness of an alienated, urban Chinese woman for whom current history matters less than the reliable comforts of love, nature, and solitude." – Kirkus Reviews

  "Niuniu's flaws, foibles, and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study… [an] intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space." – Publishers Weekly

  "In the novel A Private Life, Ran Chen immerses us in the troubled life of Ni Niuniu… Chen weaves together these evaluations with Niuniu's manic writings in order to create an ultra postmodern tale of a young woman's psychosocial evolution… an important portrait of a young woman trying to survive in a complicated world." – Bust Magazine

  "A Private Life is not an overtly political book; rather, it has the timeless quality of most dreams. Still, [narrator] Ni Niuniu's refusal to connect with the world outside her door becomes a kind of political statement." – Elizabeth Gold, Washington Post

  "An atmospheric story of sexual awakening and ennui that enlarges our understanding of modern China." – Vancouver Sun

  "Niuniu's hatred of the few powerful males in her life and her sexual confusion and manipulations are clearly depicted." – Sofia A. Tangalos, Library Journal

  "This polished and readable translation of the inaugural novel of Chen Ran stands as an example of the quasi-autobiographical Sino-Japanese shishosetsu" – Choice

  "A riveting tale… a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity." – Translation Review

  "A Private Life shows Chen Ran at her best: weaving together the female bildungsroman and social and political satire, she effortlessly flits from outbursts of rage to ecstasy to rarefied emotions. Her philosophical musings on the difficulty of achieving individual freedom are as critical of the collective pursuit of wealth and sensorial pleasures in China after socialism as of the authoritarianism and ideological conformity during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. The poignant, tragic-comic tale is ultimately about bondage and transcendence." – Tze-Lan D. Sang, author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China

  "The novel daringly depicts a woman's emotional journey towards the maturation of her sexuality. It is a provocative reflection of the new sensibility of a young generation of Chinese women in the post-Deng era. Chen Ran's sensuous style easily breathes through the translator's English rendition of her language." – Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis

  "One of the most acclaimed women writers in contemporary China, Chen Ran in this novel explores the complex emotional territory of the female body, sexuality, homoeroticism, and fantasy. The author’s personal voice triumphs in the novel as a most conscious presence, dissolving the public and collective model of socialist literature. Daringly written and excellently translated, A Private Life not only entertains, but also leaves the reader pondering Chen’s disturbing and deeply personal message." – Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

  Ran Chen

  A Private Life

  Chen Ran (Chinese: 陈染; pinyin: Chén Rǎn)

  Translator’s note

  Chen Ran was born in April 1962 in Beijing. As a child she studied music, but when she was eighteen her interest turned to literature. She graduated from Beijing Normal University at the age of twenty-three with a degree in the humanities and taught there in the Chinese literature department for the next four and a half years, when she moved to the Writers' Publishing House, where she has worked as an editor ever since. She has lectured as an exchange scholar in Chinese literature at Melbourne University in Australia, the University of Berlin in Germany, and London, Oxford, and Edinburgh universities in the UK. She is a member of the Chinese Writers' Association, and currently lives in Beijing.

  Her published works include the short stories "Paper Scrap," "The Sun Between My Lips," "No Place to Say Good-bye," "Yesterday's Wine," "Talking to Myself," Forbidden Vigil," "Secret Story," "Standing Alone in the Draft," the novel A Private Life, and a collection of essays, Bits and Pieces. Some of her fiction has been published and reviewed in England, the United States, Germany, Japan, and Korea, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The film Yesterday s Wine, based on her short story of the same name, was chosen for showing at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995.

  A four-volume Collected Works of Chen Ran was published by the Jiangsu Art and Literature Publishing House in August 1998.

  In 2001 the Writers' Publishing House published its six-volume series The Works of Chen Ran.

  In the 1980s, she won acclaim for her short story "Century Sickness," seen variously as "pure" or "avant-
garde" fiction, and became the newest representative of serious female writers in the country at that time. Through the 1990s and beyond, her work has been leaning more and more toward the psychological and philosophical as she explores loneliness, sexual love, and human life.

  Throughout her writing career, she has been a kind of disturbance on the perimeter of mainstream Chinese literature, a unique and important female voice. She has won a number of prizes, such as the first Contemporary China Female Creative Writer's Award.

  Set against a backdrop of the decades that included the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Square Incident, A Private Life, Chen's only novel to date, is not so much a story about the social change and political turbulence of those times as it is about their effect on the protagonist's inner life as she moves from childhood to early maturity. As a result, it is a genuine and compellingly personal human story, from beneath which unobtrusively emerges a powerful and moving political and feminist statement.

  Breaking from her previous work, in which she laid great emphasis on plot development and philosophical speculation, in this novel Chen Ran layers over the narrative line with a great number of seemingly disconnected interior monologues, fragmentary recollections, and reveries that flit back and forth through time and space.

  The story flickers forth through a complex, sensual, and threatening setting, exploring from its own angle the below-the-surface, deep, and subtle changes that were taking place in Chinese women's consciousness from the 1970s through to the 1990s. It also reflects the complex social life of that time, creating a broad image of feminine conciousness over these decades. Chen Ran's unique and personal postmodern feminist story has created a different and very challenging image of women within Chinese literature of the 1990s.

  The translation is based on the 1996 Writers' Publishing House edition, but includes some changes and additions requested by the author and a few corrections in detail suggested to the author by the translator.

  Publication History of A Private Life

  March 1996, published by Writers' Publishing House

  1998, published by Hong Kong Universal Publishing Co., Ltd.

  October 1998, published by Taiwan Maitian Co., Ltd.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the people who have encouraged and helped me along the way to publication of this translation. First, Yu Wentao, who initially suggested that I undertake the translation, and who also introduced me to Chen Ran. I must also thank Chen Ran herself for her patience and for believing in my capabilities. Then Robin Visser for her praise and encouragement and for putting me in touch with Gregory McNamee, who recommended the translation to Columbia University Press. Finally, I must thank Zhang Tianxin in Beijing, who checked the entire manuscript against the Chinese to ensure there were no errors in translation. His suggestions have improved the accuracy of my work, although final responsibility for the quality of the translation must rest entirely upon my own shoulders.

  These acknowledgments would not be complete without mention of Professor Wang Yitong, who first roused my interest in Chinese literature and culture in 1958 at the University of British Columbia, and of Li Shuo and my many other Chinese friends and colleagues who have, over the years, through their words and actions, led me toward an ever deepening appreciation of their culture, and thus to a deeper understanding of my own – and of what a rare and wonderful blessing it is to be able to stand between the two.

  John Howard-Gibbon

  0 All Time Has Passed Away And Left Me Here Alone…

  To avoid crying out, we sing our griefs softly.

  To escape darkness, we close our eyes.

  As the days and months pass, I am stifled beneath the bits and pieces of time and memory that settle thickly upon my body and penetrate the pulse of my consciousness. As if being devoured by a huge, pitiless rat, time withers away moment by moment and is lost. I can do nothing to stop it. Many have tried armor or flattery to dissuade it; I have built walls and closed windows tightly. I have adopted an attitude of denial. But nothing works. Only death, the tombstone over our graves, can stop it. There is no other way.

  Several years ago, my mother used death to stay time's passage. I remember how she died, unable to breathe. Like a barbed steel needle, her final, cold, fearful cry stabbed cruelly into my ears, where it echoes constantly and forever, never to be withdrawn.

  Not long before this, when he left my mother, my father destroyed almost entirely the deep feeling I had for him, and drove a rift between our minds. This was his way of denying time. He makes me think of the story about the man who planted a seed and then forgot about it. When he chanced upon it later on, it had become a thickly leaved flowering tree about to burst into blossom. But he had no idea what kind of seed it had grown from, what kind of tree it was, or what kind of flowers would emerge from its buds.

  Time is created from the movement of my mind.

  Now I live a life of isolation. This is good. I have no need for chatter anymore. I am weary of the confusing clamor of the city that invades every corner of my consciousness like the constant whine of a swirling cloud of invisible flies. People rant on without cease, as if speech were the only possible route, their only sustenance. They try countless stratagems to utilize it, to keep it as their constant companion. I myself have no such faith in this ceaseless clamor, but an individual is helpless. Since it is impossible for me to swat so many flies, all I can do is keep as far away from them as possible.

  I live quietly in this old city in the apartment my mother left to me. The hallways are long and dark, but the apartment has windows everywhere.

  Living alone has not made me any more uneasy. There was no special warmth when I was living with my parents. Things are fine now. For so many years, time seemed to be rushing by. But it was tired, wanted to slow down. It has stopped in my apartment. It has also stopped in my face. It seems that time is exhausted. It has come to rest in my face and does not move, so that my face looks the same as it did a number of years ago.

  But my mind has already entered old age; everything has slowed down.

  For example, I no longer argue with people, because I now know that ultimately there is no connection between argument and truth. It is nothing more than a matter of who for the moment holds the advantage; and "advantage" and "disadvantage," or who is winning, who losing, no longer holds any significance for me.

  I will never again believe that the earth beneath our feet is a highway. I believe that it is nothing more than a huge, chaotic chessboard, and that the majority of people go where their feet take them. Any who insist on making rational choices should be prepared to accept the loneliness of going against the tide, to stand quiet and uncertain by the roadside looking on, their bodies bent into question marks, like old men who have suffered from rickets.

  I love vegetables, and I'm practically a vegetarian, because I'm totally convinced that only a vegetarian diet can keep the spirit distinct from the flesh, and the eyes clear and beautiful.

  I am fond of the plants on my balcony – a large rubber tree, a tortoiseshell bamboo, and some perennial flowers. I don't have to go to public parks with all their noise and clamor to enjoy fresh foliage and pure air.

  ***

  A few days ago, my doctor friend Qi Luo called. He was very concerned about how I was doing, and suggested that I pay a visit to the hospital. I told him I wasn't interested in seeing anybody, no matter who it might be.

  The words that I encounter around me are as insubstantial as the false radiance of moonlight. Believing in conversation gives us a kind of solace, much like believing that a picture of a loaf of bread can fill our stomachs.

  Just as my spirit has no need for religious faith, my body has no need for pills.

  I told him if I needed him, I would look him up.

  He told me that my "agoraphobia" was incurable.

  I know that the attribution of names to the fantastic variety of people and things is said to be one of the significant eleme
nts of civilization. But a name is nothing more than a name. Take mine, for example – Ni Niuniu. All it is is a string of sounds. I can't see that it makes any difference whether you call me "Ni Niuniu" or "Yi zhi gou" – little Miss Stubborn or little Miss Puppy.

  At this moment, I am stretched across my huge, comfy bed. It is my raft upon the vast ocean, my fortress in the middle of a chaotic world. It is my man and my woman.

  A licking flame of summer morning sunlight, intermingled with the noises of the street, penetrates a crack in the curtain, and its luminous center does its dance of time upon the tired lids of my reluctant eyes.

  I don't like the feel of sunshine. It makes me feel exposed and vulnerable, as if all my organs have been laid bare, and that I must immediately place sentries at every hair follicle to ward off the prying light. But, of course, there are too many suns in this world. The light from every pair of eyes burns more than sunlight, is more dangerous and more aggressive. If this light were to invade my frail being, I would be lost, vanquished, and would die.

  Because I know that a life that is crowned with any kind of light will be full of false appearances and lies.

  I was born on an unremarkable night in the extraordinary year of 1968. Quietly, I left my mother's uneasy womb to enter a world I feared and was not ready for, where I wailed like a frightened lamb. The light in the room where I was born was fluorescent blue. I have disliked bright light ever since.

  The Chinese zodiacal and western astrological texts say that girls born at this time are as firm in their faith as the Spanish nun Theresa Davila.

  Today, almost thirty years later, I see that I clearly haven't gotten beyond or been able to avoid that piercing light. Now, lying on this huge bed, I can feel the sunlight dancing back and forth on my eyelids, time turning her pages as she follows.