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Reviews 575 David Der-wei Wang and Jeanne Tai, editors. Running Wild: New Chinese Writers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 264 pp. Hardcover $49.50. Paperback $15.95. Contrary to what one might have imagined, the violent suppression ofthe protest movement of 1989 and the political persecution that followed have not cast a heavy pall on the Chinese cultural scene. Indeed, disregarding the fact ofdwindling readership, the quantity and quality ofinnovative and interesting writing in Chinese would suggest that it has never been healthier. Less obsessed with the "moral burden" ofChinese particularity (as C. T. Hsia characterizes its antecedents ) and more interested (cynics would argue with a Western market and a Nobel Prize in mind) in integrating with trends in world literature, these writings have a fresh appeal abroad. With the attention China has received in the West since the events of 1989 and, moreover, with the growing multicultural consciousness , publishers have begun to recognize a market, slim as it may still be, for literature translated from the Chinese. Contemporary Chinese fiction has begun to find a place in the Western market because the works themselves are good, by any standard, and the climate for their reception in the West is more hospitable . Running Wild: New Chinese Writers, a collection of short stories by a wide variety ofcontemporary Chinese writers, makes an important contribution to a growing body oftranslations from the Chinese. In reading and rereading the stories in this volume, I found myself trying to exact from them common themes and styles that would offer a tidy ground upon which to construct, for this review, a homogeneous discourse on the state ofcontemporary Chinese fiction. Yet these stories resist such a discourse. They are as heterogeneous and varied as one might find in a collection of recently published fiction in English. This heterogeneity derives in part from the fact—and this has not been the practice in compiling such anthologies in the past—that the stories are products offour different cultural-political contexts, sometimes referred to collectively as Greater China: Taiwan, Hongkong, the People's Republic of China, and a scattered community of overseas Chinese. As editor David Der-wei Wang puts it, the motivation behind the collection is to present a new image of China "defined not by geopolitical boundaries and ideological closures but by overlapping cultures and shared imaginative resources " (p. 238), and a new literary landscape where "dialogues between many© 1995 by University different Chinas become possible, a negotiation that does not establish a republic of awai ? ressQçQimese letters but rather creates a real heterogeneity ofcontemporary Chinese literature" (p. 241). This is a positive strategy in the move toward the formation of a more aesthetically based canon of contemporary Chinese literature, though it 576 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 should be recognized at the same time that the political and historical contingencies of the four areas that Wang seems to want to erase are what account, at least in part, for this very heterogeneity. In Running Wild, the avant-garde mingles with the gofhic, modernist anomie adjoins sentimental melodrama, in a hodgepodge of stylistic diversity that may itselfbe read as a sign of a postmodern loss of faith in ideological, stylistic, and linguistic uniformity. The writers from mainland China (seven ofthe fourteen represented, ifwe include exiles like A Cheng and Yang Lian) in particular are reacting against the homogenization ofliterary styles and language that was the prescribed norm in the PRC cultural world dominated by Mao Zedong's politicized view of art. David Wang makes clear that these stories tend to dispense with the pretense ofrepresentation, drawing attention instead toward their very textuality, the artifice of their construction as narrative. While realism, and its various socialist versions (or perversions), dominated modern Chinese literary theory and practice from its inception in the May Fourth period through the Cultural Revolution, much of recent avant-garde fiction is radically antirealist. Mo Yan's "Divine Debauchery ," which opens this volume, sets the antirepresentational tone. The story is in the form ofa biographical sketch of a certain Master Jifan, an aristocratic aesthete, a "free spirit," who enjoys riding naked on his horse through a forest of...

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