The confessional may be a genre stretching back more than 1,600 years, but it was in 1992 that Wang Xiaobo made it his own. Golden Age is the Beijing native’s semi-autobiographical account of the final decades of the 20th century in China — a no-punches-pulled satire in a country where few are written, let alone published — now released in its first full English translation.
When we first meet Wang Er — the shared surname hinting at the blur between character and author — he is a bawdy 21-year-old intellectual in exile, sent down from the capital to a rural commune in Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. There he embarks on an affair with a married woman, but is soon forced to come clean to the authorities. “Chen Qingyang and I had inappropriate relations. The end,” reads the first draft of his confession. But this does not satisfy the local party bosses. They keep pressing for greater detail and he is only too happy to oblige, delving deeper and deeper into his hilarious (and, like any good writing on sex, impossible to quote out of context) recollections of the couple’s so-called crimes. “I came to believe that I would spend the rest of my life confessing,” he writes.
And so he does. In the book’s second section, Wang is 32, a college biology lecturer in Beijing but unhappily married and forever dragging down the school’s reputation. His newfound position of responsibility prompts reflections on childhood misdeeds: an ascent of the school chimney, a failed attempt to poison his teacher, a disastrous bomb-making exercise with his now lab assistant. And in the book’s third and final part we find him in his “doubtless” forties: despite this supposed self-assurance, he is plagued by his decisions. Having been transferred to a teaching post at a mining school, he replays the deaths of two acquaintances in his head. Confessions spill effortlessly onto the page, from stealing pineapples to lusting after his boss’s wife.
Wang the character is an everyman, a reluctant cog in the collective, a Good Soldier Švejk fighting the good fight against corrupt officials and nosy compatriots. But he is also acutely individualistic in a society where — among the lower classes, at least — the concept is not supposed to exist. As a favourite saying of his goes, “Don’t be afraid of thieves, be afraid of thieves who remember you.” Life is a precarious balance between social recognition — successful but exposed — and invisibility, which is safe but boring. Only in the “golden age” of his early sexual encounters does he seem to find these states reconciled; only with these lovers does his existence not seem incongruous.
But then Wang Xiaobo’s protagonist is nothing if not incongruous: he claims variously to be a plumber, a watch repairer, a mechanic, a teacher and a poet; geographically he is subjected to the whims of the state; his narration is unreliable (he admits to changing names and dates) and driven as much by his libido as his intellect. “One could profess with complete sincerity, long live the emperor and the emperor must die, and believe that there was no contradiction between the two,” he writes.
Such dissimulation was no doubt why Wang Xiaobo was able to publish at all: national figures are not mentioned by name, and local ones are largely dragged into sexual, rather than intellectual, politics. Even so, the first draft of the work was started in 1982, but it was not until 1992 that it first appeared in Hong Kong, and 1994 that an editor in the People’s Republic was willing to risk publication, and the book was heavily criticised before it gradually built up its cult following. By 1997, Wang was dead at the age of 44. In hindsight, the Golden Age of the title is as much one of late 20th-century literary innovation before the shadow of censorship was cast as it is a reflection on (happily) misspent youth.
To be imperfect and impetuous and inconsistent though — and to own those qualities — is precisely what allows both novelist and character to maintain critical distance from the regime they scorn, and also what makes Golden Age so enjoyable. Who said a confession had to be perfect anyway?
Golden Age by Wang Xiaobo, translated by Yan Yan, Penguin Classics £18.99, 272 pages
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