THE LILY THEATRE: A Novel of Modern China
By LULU WANG
Translated from the Dutch by Hester Velmans. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2000. 434 pages, $25

Tony Giffone

Readers of Lulu Wang's novel The Lily Theatre will be forgiven if, upon initially encountering the book, they suspect that they've already read it. Perhaps, they might be tempted to think, they have read the novel under a different title or in a different translation. But, no. It's simply that the book treads similar material as any number of recent books (including Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, Anchee Min's Red Azalea, and Hong Ying's Daughter of the River) and films (such as Zhang Yimou's To Live, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, and Joan Chen's Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl). For want of a better phrase, the entire genre might be called "How I Suffered and Survived during the Cultural Revolution."

The familiarity of the tale is not to minimize the importance of what it chronicles. Set during a three-year period, from l972 to l974, and told from the perspective of an adolescent girl named Lian, the novel is another reminder of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the suffering it wrecked on the lives of ordinary Chinese. Sent to a reeducation camp so she can be with her mother, who is a college history professor, Lian ironically gets a better education at the camp than she ever would have on the outside, as the camp is home to many of the top intellectuals and teachers in the country. The title refers to a pond in the back of the camp that becomes Lian's private space, a refuge from the world of denunciations, confessions, and self-criticisms, where she can speak the unspeakable. In order to survive the system, one must never speak one's mind; however, in order to survive mentally and emotionally, this is precisely what one must do. The lily pond, where Lian holds forth, becomes an imaginary theater that allows her to survive intact.
Though billed as a novel, the book feels more like an autobiography. The short chapters read like diary entries. But in recording the lives and stories of others in the camp, the work assumes the role of journalism. Lulu Wang was born in 1960, and so would have been roughly the same age as Lian in l972; indeed, Lian is more successful as an eyewitness than as a protagonist. Wise, insightful, precocious, and able to see through both adult pretensions and political hypocrisy, Lian seems to be an idealized version of what the author would have liked to have been like.
Though Lian may be an idealized portrait of an adolescent, Lulu Wang is particularly good at delineating the emotional and interior life of female adolescence. In detailing the friendship between Lian and her schoolmate Kim (socially of a much lower class), Wang doesn't shrink from conveying the erotic feelings that are sometimes attached to such adolescent friendships, even in a culture where such desire is taboo. The emotional heart of the novel lies in the way that the Cultural Revolution tears this friendship apart.
What new insights into the Cultural Revolution does Wang provide? While the litany of horrors will be familiar to many, Wang's achievement is in demonstrating that the failure of the Cultural Revolution was not only in its enormous costs in terms of human suffering, but that the revolution failed to meet even its basic goals. When Lian is sent to the countryside to work with and learn from the peasants, she discovers that the peasants find the presence of the intellectuals more of a hindrance than a help. And, far from learning from the peasants, those sent to the countryside often returned stubbornly elitist. Wang suggests that the "caste system" (the phrase is deliberately chosen by Wang) is as entrenched in China as it is in India, and that the Cultural Revolution failed to do anything to abolish it. Lian's own father remains stubbornly elitist in terms of class, preferring that Lian not associate with Kim because Kim's lower class status might jeopardize her own social standing and, hence, her own marriage opportunities.

The importance of the need to chronicle the horrors of the Cultural Revolution does not diminish the fact that most of the narratives that attempt to do so (including The Lily Theatre) are marred by shortcomings and other problematic aspects. While "the personal is political" (as the 1960s slogan insisted), the narrow focus on individual stories and individual suffering leaves little room for larger political and cultural analysis in these works. While this may seem to be asking too much of any individual novel or memoir to do, one only has to read such South American memoirs as Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number or Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North to see how writers have successfully been able to combine a chronicle and litany of personal suffering with a wider perspective and analysis of history and politics.
Furthermore, I wonder about the Western fascination with this particular episode in recent Chinese history. It's not that the events are untruthful or unimportant, but it sometimes seems that writing about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution is the only way for a Chinese writer to get public recognition in the West these days. Lulu Wang now resides in Holland, and her book was written in Dutch; indeed, many of the works chronicling the horrors of the Cultural Revolution (even those written in Chinese) seem to have one eye on the Western market, fitting in so neatly as they do with our current fascination with victimhood of all sorts.
At the same time, the works rarely offer anything that might be considered controversial or taboo within contemporary discourse in the People's Republic of China about the Cultural Revolution. (Joan Chen's film Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl is an exception in this regard. It was banned in China, partially, I suspect, because of its pessimistic ending; refused to indulge in the traditional upbeat ending that is de rigueur for so many of these narratives: that, having survived the Cultural Revolution, life is better now, and the craziness of the past is, well, past.) Everyone I met in China talked freely about how they suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Surely, I'm not the only one awaiting the book or film that details how they inflicted suffering on others. A book written from the perspective of the victimizer not the victim. A book that attempts to make explicable the how and the why, not only the what.

Tony Giffone, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, has taught English at Hebei University and is a consultant to the Chinese American Education Exchange.