The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up - Liao Yiwu

I can’t remember where or why I came across this The Corpse Walker, except that I was in an oral history mood and wanted to read something about China. Still, I was sufficiently unclear that when it first came in and I saw the title without the sub-title on my Holds list, I assumed it was a novel I didn’t recall requesting.

The Corpse Walker is no novel, but some of the stories are strange enough to populate one. A long-time dissident and activist in his native land, Liao Yiwu fills this book with conversations he’s had with a wide range of Chinese citizens, from beggars to counterrevolutionaries and former Red Guards to human traffickers. The sole thread uniting the subjects of his book is their status as outcasts or peripheral figures, individuals who dwell on the lowest rungs of China’s social ladder.

Other themes ripple across stories, as well, commonly injustices enacted by the Communist regime, abject failures of the legal system, and witch hunt hysteria against Rightists that made scapegoats of anyone unlucky enough to stand out even briefly. The book is not a history text, and assumes a certain level of familiarity of the reader, but nonetheless it provided a good primer on some of the mainstays of 20th century Chinese history: the Great Leap Forward, the sixties thaw, the Cultural Revolution, the One Child Policy, the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The tight focus of individual accounts lends an urgency to the telling, allowing some of the finer facets of these brutal events or policies to shine brighter.

Yiwu also allows glimpses of pre-Communist China, which seap through in the practices suprressed by the governtment: professional mourning, Feng Shui, Erhu playing and music generally, Falun Gong (actually a recent phenomenon, but harkening to an earlier age). I finished the book with a better appreciation of life in China beyond the basic stereotypes, and while I’m no expert, Liwu’s accounts gave me a glimpse I wouldn’t otherwise have managed.

The books can be classified as oral history, but Liwu actually handles them more like straight-ahead interviews, including his own prompts and reactions in the text and carrying on conversations with his subjects. Unlike a typical journalist, he makes no effort to hide his feelings, betraying indignation on behalf of injustices, and disgust with those he thinks have behaved poorly. Such subjectivity wouldn’t fly in standard journalism, but it works well here, since everything is coloured with a tinge of uncertainty. Subjects recount superstition as fact, and s omany of the tales are such blatant hard luck stories, it makes you wonder if they are shading events in their favour a bit. What’s more, Liwu didn’t generally have access to a tape recorder, and was unable always even to take notes, so all conversations are only approximations of what really occurred. Still, I believe what is written in broad strokes.

Liwu has won international accolades for his writing, but I don’t feel I can comment, since the book is almost entirely transcripts of conversations, which isn’t a proper venue for judging prose. Still, he is perfomring important work, and is undoubtedly fearless in the face of oppression. I’ll look out for more of his work, where he is able to express himself in his own words.

Death's End - Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem Trilogy reminds me of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Both tell stories massive in scope, where the focus is less on the arc of an dividual character than that of the universe itself. Each tells a continuous story over a long span of time, with a new central character for each installment, while the characters who set the initial story in motion—Ye Wenjie in The Three Body Problem and Hari Seldon in Foundation—loom large in the mythos but are never much more than background characters.

In Death's End, the main character is Cheng Xin, a physicist from the common era who plays a critical role in the shaping of the Human-Trisolarin conflict. The story picks up after Luo Ji's discovery of Dark Forest Deterence, wherein a message identifying the location of the Trisolarin and Human solar systems is used to leverage mutually ensured destruction and stave off war. Cheng Xin is nominated Swordholder to succeed Luo Jito, meaning decision that in the event of a Trisolarin attack she will bear the ultimate decision to initiate the message and doom both worlds. The Trisolarins call her bluff, and her failure to act results in humanity's enslavement.

From there, the book takes a series of odd and fascinating turns. Rather than turning into a rebels versus empire tale of conflict, it explores a vast range of philosophical and scientific principles, carrying Cheng Xin across a sweep of time and space that dwarfs the not inconsiderable scope of the previous two books.

One of the most unusual aspects of Death's End is its tone. The other two books were contemplative in their own right, favoring reflection over action, but increasingly the story becomes in a away a meditation on it’s own smallness. I was struck by its melancholy, an emotion I don’t see reflected very often in literature. Tragedy is used a lot, but tragedy is grand and operatic. Melancholy is small and quiet and sad. In this sense, the latter half of Death’s End reminded me more than naything of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. As in Shute’s novel, the characters in Death’s End face an apocalypse—indeed, one on a much larger scale than the one featured in On the Beach —with more resignation than anguish. There is grief, to be sure, but it’s grief of a muted, elegaic sort. It’s a bold stylistic choice to end a three-part epic, but I think it was the right one. Liu’s work has always felt like classic sci-fi, which dwelt more in the realm of ideas than characters, and the detached way in which it depict’s humanity’s end and potential new beginning seems apt.

The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin

The Dark Forest picks up right where The Three Body Problem left off, with humanity’s research into cutting edge physics hamstrung by sophons, leaving Earth at the mercy of the incoming Trisolarin fleet, set to arrive in a little over 400 years time. However, in other ways the book feels like a departure from the first one, taking the story in a looser, more philosopihcal direction.

Set in various instances occurring over a 200-year period, the book leaves behind most of the characters from the first novel, focusing instead on Luo Ji, a disillusioned physicist who begins the book as a womanizing gadabout. A chance encounter with Ye Wenjie, the woman responsible for alerting Trisolaris of Earth’s location and thus setting off the invasion, leads to Luo Ji learning the fundamental axioms of Cosmis Sociology, a new field Wenjie has theorized.

Some time later, Luo Ji is named one of four Wallfacers, a UN-sanctioned program that imbues four humans with incredible latitude to conduct their own projects in secret, with the end goal of defeating Trisolaris in the upcoming Doomsday Battle. Wallfacers are instructed not to reveal their true intentions to anyone, and to even act in deliberately deceptive ways, as the sophons can read or hear any information conveyed to others through speech or writing. Luo Ji squanders his power by living a life of secluded luxury, before changes in circumstance force him to ponder an actual solution.

Luo Ji’s story is the backbone of the novel, but there are many more characters and plot threads interwoven around him. The Dar kForest is a rich, sprawling book, and while sometimes the dialogue can feel a little stilted—perhaps a result of translation from the Chinese, which I would imagine makes it very toug hto capture cadence precisely—the writing is evocative. The book poses bold ideas with confidenc,e and all of the solutions proposed feel logical and real. I can’t speak to the physics used wit hany authority, but Cixin’s reputation for researc hsuggests a solid underpinning, even in places where the technology presented ventures far beyond what is currently possible.

The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin

Despite a teenage obsession with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, I’ve never been particularly drawn to hard science fiction. As such, I approached the Three-Body Problem without much in the way of expectations.

The story concerns scientists in the People’s Republic of China over the last fifty years, as they grapple with the discovery of alien life. The aliens, dubbed Trisolarans, live a harsh and precarious existence due to their planet’s incomprehensible orbit around three suns (a peculiarity from which their name is derived). They discover Earth thanks to the efforts of Ye Wenjie, a disillusions astrophysicist who sees in alien life a means to curb the excesses of humanity, which she believes cannot be trusted to govern itself. She partners with an idealist billionaire named Mike Evans, with whom she forms the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), a body with the traitorous objective of ensuring Earth falls under Trisolaris’ control.

Much of Trisolaris’ history is explained through a cryptic video game called Three Body, which was designed to recruit new members to the ETO. Through it, we learn biological quirks of the Trisolarans, and gain a crash course on the titular three body problem, which involves efforts to calculate the interplay of three different objects through orbital mechanics.

As a genre, hard science fiction is traditionally more concerned with ideas than characters, and the Three-Body Problem follows this template while providing just enough personality to keep the protagonists engaging enough to follow. The dialogue can come across as clunky, though I hesitate to criticize this since it may be an effort to capture the rhythms of Chinese in translation. There is also a lot of blatant exposition in the dialogue, a common trope of hard sci-fi that I find a little irritating. However, it was neither frequent nor egregious enough to pull me out of the story, and much of the science is handled deftly enough for novices to absorb through the text without descent into clunky footnotes.

In contrast to the sometimes stiff dialogue, the prose is slinky and lyrical, yet understated, its crisp, clear sentences filigreed with illuminating images. Liu peppers the text with similes where other writers would likely employ metaphors, a decision that I wondered might come from the story’s Chinese origins—this is merely speculation, since I speak no Chinese, but the smattering of Asian poetry I’ve encountered in translation is similarly filled with such devices.

The Three Body Problem is book one of a trilogy, and very much feels incomplete on its own. However, it drew me in enough that I will be sure to seek out the sequels in the near future.