Books On And About China

[the stinking enigma]

At least the tank didn't run the guy over in tiananmen square. So it wasn't all bad. He wouldn't have got away with that in iraq or afghanistan with a bradley or abrams

[dilligaf]

Just being a simple peasant, all I want to know about the Chinese  is how they make the sweet and sour sauce taste SO good at Food Paradise Express 

[Chinahand]

My Xmas read: Hospital by Han Song

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09SYSD8VH/

Oh goodness how to summarise this book? I don't know if I can, let alone recommend it! It's a sort of cross between Kafka's The Castle and Voltaire's Candide, but embedded in a critique of modern Chinese society, both its domination by the CCP and its obsession with American/Western society.

The way it does this is via the lens of medicine, but in a massively exaggerated near future Sci-fi world where the CCP's domination of China's society and rhetoric is replaced by a rhetoric based around industrialised-medicine. 

The story follows Yang Wei, the story's everyman hero (a composers of company songs), as he falls ill on a business trip and is taken to the eponymous Hospital which comes to dominate his life. To say there is a plot is a bit of an exaggeration, the story has huge changes of direction, plot-twists, random interludes; characters appear and disappear at random.

I've studied the CCP for years and how it attempts to control Chinese society, and the narratives within it, and did find it fascinating seeing how Han Song had twisted this into narratives about health and medicine and you do get pulled into the story as Yang Wei's illness and treatments progress and become entwined. Does the Hospital want him to get well, is it over-treating him for profit, to control him with drugs and procedures.

The plot becomes more and more bizarre and, as Yang Wei's illness and treatments progress, the boundaries of reality and sci-fi breakdown. The Hospital is now city-, then country-, then world-, then universe-spanning. As in the Culture Revolution factions vie for control and doctors use quisling patients to evangelise cures as the struggle for health becomes all consuming. Sex, incest, the genetic family as abolished or subverted, microbes are genetically altered until sentience emerges, Utopias are promised and then denied.

Han Song has an incredible imagination and his critique of Chinese society and the Clinical-Academic-Industrial Complex is fascinating. It has resonances with Lu Xun, China's most famous writer of the early modern era, who also critiqued medicine in China (though in this case Chinese Traditional Medicine, not the Industrialised modern medicine) and wrote stories including cannibalism to shock and show up society's decay.

But for all this the book is bizarre, hard to read with the continual wrenching plot changes and, with the boundaries of reality lost as diseases confound and confuse, the unreliable narrator makes the story almost incoherent.

So, can I recommend it? There's a huge amount you can discuss and analyse within the book. It's a perfect study choice for a 3rd year Chinese literature course. It's subversion of communist rhetoric is simply brilliant and it is so left field I was reminded of my drowning within the treacle of Joyce's Ulysses. 

If you are an avid curious reader, fascinated by China, give it a go!

I nearly gave up multiple times but persisted and am glad I did, but suspect many will give up in confusion and annoyance.

4/10

[Chinahand]

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