Digital paintings of a science-fictional surgical procedure room by alan9187, CC0, through Wikimedia Commons.
Hospitals play a giant function in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his mother and father had been each medical doctors, he grew up in and round hospitals as a baby, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later steadily seem in his work as websites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a reputation for himself within the eighties with a collection of darkish, violent, experimental quick tales, however over the course of his profession, his writing grew to become extra standard, incomes him a broad readership and fame within the course of. However what if Yu Hua had gone the opposite route? What if he had gone darker, stranger, extra experimental? If one is on the lookout for somebody to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism at the moment, I might level them to Han Music’s Hospital trilogy, which not solely shares a fascination with the medical setting but in addition presents an unflinching have a look at the violence lurking just below the floor of the on a regular basis. It’s no coincidence then that, throughout a current interview I performed with Han Music when he was talking of his formative influences, he instructed me: “I used to be notably fascinated by Yu Hua at the moment and even imitated him.”
Comprised of three full-length novels, Hospital, Exorcism, and Useless Souls, the trilogy begins in a reasonably standard method. Yang Wei, a forty-year-old authorities employee who moonlights as a songwriter, is struck down with a bout of debilitating abdomen ache after checking right into a lodge in C Metropolis throughout a enterprise journey. The ache is so horrific that Yang Wei passes out, awakening three days later to search out two feminine staff from the lodge taking him to the hospital. From there, Han Music takes us on a Kafkaesque journey the place the protagonist undergoes numerous exams, procedures, and operations. He’s despatched from one wing of the hospital to a different, ready in lengthy strains, vying for the eye of any one of many mysterious medical doctors who inhabit the hospital, and but seemingly unable to get any info, not to mention a prognosis. The longer he stays within the hospital the extra misplaced he turns into, till actuality itself appears to unravel round him and he descends right into a labyrinthine nightmare of the unusual.
Translating the trilogy has absolutely consumed, even haunted me, since 2020. Studying it’s a difficult expertise and definitely not for everybody. The collection accommodates frequent descriptions of ache, rape, homicide, suicide, and cannibalism, however much more disturbing, in a approach, is its unconventional use of language, uncommon construction, and shifting views (Hospital is written in third particular person, Exorcism in first particular person, and Useless Souls in second). It accommodates dense references to medical terminology, scientific historical past, Buddhism, Christianity, Japanese popular culture, and basic literature and philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kafka and Sartre, with loads of veiled references to the political actuality of up to date China alongside the best way. The collection is categorized as “science fiction” by booksellers in China and overseas, however that’s deceptive. For some time, I described it as a mash-up between science fiction, horror, suspense, social realism, and avant-garde literature; assume a hallucinogenic David Cronenberg movie written by Franz Kafka and set throughout a Chinese language politburo assembly. However I’m undecided if even that description does the collection justice. Over the previous three years, as I’ve slowly labored by the interpretation, my understanding of the collection has developed. I’m at all times discovering new layers of that means hidden throughout the guide’s devilishly advanced narrative.
In fact, one purpose for the literary transpositions offered by the collection could be present in China’s present censorship requirements. With a protracted listing of “delicate” subjects that Chinese language writers are compelled to keep away from, the “cultural no-fly zone” for writers and artists in China has grow to be more and more expansive. The truth that a collection like this was revealed in any respect is due largely as a result of brilliance of Han Music, who has contorted his vital imaginative and prescient to the purpose it’s unrecognizable to many readers (and Chinese language censors). But when readers peel away the façade of absurdity, they’ll shortly discover uncanny reflections of and demanding insights into the truth of China at the moment. Calls to “inform the nice hospital story” will definitely remind readers of Xi Jinping’s directions to “inform the nice China story”: the violence and hospital uprisings echo the Cultural Revolution; references to hospital “reform” echo Deng Xiaoping’s Reform Period; and though the phrase China is seldom talked about in the complete trilogy, “the hospital” could be learn as a stand-in for the Chinese language Communist Social gathering or the nation itself. This isn’t dissimilar to what Yu Hua—and different writers like Ma Yuan and Can Xue—did within the eighties with their very own experimental fiction. However Han Music has taken issues a lot additional. The violence is pervasive, the hospital is all-consuming, and its permutations by no means finish. This calls on readers to take an energetic function in decoding the novel to disclose its litany of horrors and flashes of the elegant.
At occasions, I’ve questioned if the entire thing was composed by an AI program gone haywire. Maybe it’s best to explain it with the Chinese language time period qishu, which is alternately translated as a unbelievable, unusual, or wondrous guide. Han Music has spoken in regards to the affect of Studio Ghibli movies on his work and his try to render their marvelous, unbridled imagery in a literary kind. Having lastly accomplished my translation of the ultimate quantity, I more and more consider the trilogy as a dream, or a nightmare, happening on a deep unconscious stage; it’s meant to be skilled greater than intellectualized or analyzed. However for now, Han Music’s hospital continues to hang-out me.
Michael Berry is the writer of Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Marketing campaign and the translator of novels by Yu Hua, Wang Anyi, Fang Fang, and Han Music. His interview with Yu Hua seems in our new Winter concern, no. 246.
