Three Brothers by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Grove Press, 2020
One of the most translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yan Lianke, has become quite the celebrity: he is featured in interviews in global media, invited to international literary festivals, and quoted on the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, despite this fame and international image, he remains fiercely loyal to his roots—the Chinese village where backbreaking hardship was the common lot until the 1990s. As he admits in his latest book to be translated into English: “I grew up in a household full of poverty and warmth.”
In this piece of non-fiction called 我与父辈 (first published in China in 2009) and rendered as Three Brothers in English through Carlos Rojas’ faithful and vivid translation, Yan pays tribute to the generation of his father, who survived an era of famine, political upheavals, social discrimination, and self-reliance in the 1960s and ’70s. By remaining faithful to their rock-solid values of decency, sacrifice, and stoic acceptance of life’s unfairness, this generation was able to provide better lives for their children. Yan, who belongs to the bridge generation, still remembers his early life of “吃苦” (chi ku, or literally, “eating bitterness”), whilst he has also directly experienced the benefits of China’s economic and social reforms that started in the 1980s but affected life in villages much later, around the late 1990s.
The book, which is subtitled Memories of My Family, describes the lives of three men: Yan’s father, Yan’s father’s second brother (called Second Uncle), and his cousin (called Fourth Uncle). All of them share similar characteristics: they are illiterate, extremely hard-working, and they all die as a result of the physical abuse that their bodies experienced in order to meet their most important obligations towards their families.
Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty. In this world of harsh masculinity—there are very few mentions of women in the book—life consists of the most important stations in life: giving birth, building houses, feeding and marrying off one’s many children (this was before China’s one-child policy started being implemented in 1979), providing education for the happy few, and ensuring a decent funeral. This is all accomplished through a philosophy that Yan describes as the difference between living in the village and in the city:
“ ‘Living’ suggests a process of enduring day after day, with each day being the same, and implies a kind of monotony, boredom, hopelessness, and idleness. ‘Life,’ on the other hand, conveys a sense of richness, of progress and the future. It has color and vitality and calls to mind the act of walking down a broad road illuminated by bright lights.”
This definition of living—which can be understood as a synonym to surviving—is also the title of another celebrated Chinese author’s novel. Yu Hua’s To Live (but in the original Chinese: 活着, literally “living”), made into an acclaimed movie, also pays tribute to the sacrifices made by virtually all peasants in China during the same period. The movie played a key role in acknowledging and showing the pain of rural life in such a public and open manner.
In the beginning of the book, Yan explains that he is driven by a sense of guilt and the need to repay a debt, having abandoned the village for a better life in the city. But he admits that he has never fully overcome a certain complex:
“Until I graduated from elementary school, the pretty girls from urban families who had been assigned to the countryside remained in my class. Their presence constantly reminded me of my sense of inferiority and of the gap between city and countryside. This gulf was the origin of my perpetual desire to leave the land—but it would also be a chasm that I would never succeed in crossing.”
For Yan, there were only two gates to enter the life in the city: joining the army or writing. The army provided for education and life expenses—the reason why Yan eventually joined. He remembers discovering writing at an early age when he chanced upon one of China’s most beloved classics, Dream of the Red Chamber. When he was given a copy of it, he recalls:
“For some reason, I was overjoyed to see this, but I also trembled with fear. Covered in sweat and with shaking hands, I quickly wrapped up the book and stuffed it back into my book bag. In class that afternoon, I wasn’t able to process anything the teacher was saying. Instead, my mind was on that copy.”
And literature did change his outlook on life, as he admits, because it gave him a sense of purpose and the notion of having a future outside the survival mode of the village:
“Writing became my secret life, and it made me feel that my youth was more substantial and idealistic than that of my classmates or the other villagers. It was as if I now had a brighter future hanging in the distance, and this made me feel that, thanks to literature, my life now had meaning and that my writing thereby had a yesterday, a today, and—perhaps—a bleak and difficult tomorrow.”
He also alerts us to how literature was a fragile plant in the merciless village life. Inspired by Dream of the Red Chamber, he started doing his own writing, with the hope of showing it to publishers one day. But a few years later, while away from home, his mother found his thick manuscript and tore it page by page to feed the stove in order to cook and stay warm in the winter.
While Yan is celebrated and published in China, many of his books are also censored. His military background and international fame do bring him a certain layer of protection, but the honesty of his writing makes him an “unreliable” author by today’s political standards.
In this book, Yan opts for strategic silence. Nowhere in the text is the Party celebrated, or thanked for what it is relentlessly claiming: that it “lifted millions out of poverty,” as the slogan goes. As Three Brothers shows, farmers were left to their own devices for survival, openly and often discriminated. They had to build their lives with their own bare hands. Yan has no illusion about how the Party exploited the countryside, as he elaborates in his description of the educated urban elites sent there in the 1950s and ’60s to allegedly learn from the peasants:
“I am convinced that an even greater catastrophe was the fundamental inability of the educated youths—including those former educated youths who subsequently became authors, poets, and teachers—to truly understand the rural land on which they stayed for years, much less the people who had been living on that land for centuries.”
In perhaps the most direct criticism of the Party, he writes:
“The educated youth committed a rape, and the village girl died. Normally a case involving a death is given highest priority, but in the case of this educated youth, nothing was done. Some government cadres accompanied the youth’s parents from the city to the countryside, where they offered the girl’s family some monetary compensation as well as the world’s most sincere apology. But half a year later, there was this similar incident, in which the perpetrator was a peasant, and although he hadn’t succeeded in raping his victim, he was sentenced to death.”
To this day, Communist ideology praises peasants while censoring the social issues and lack of justice still shaping the lives of millions of farmers. The blood-transfusion scandals that affected and killed farmers who developed HIV, the de facto treatment of peasants as second-class citizens due to their lack of social insurance, and the on-going situation regarding residency permits remain taboo.
But despite his fame, travel abroad, and censorship at home, Yan remains faithful to his duty as a son of the village. I had the honor of accompanying Yan Lianke to Paris in 2015 as a translator, and I remember that during an interview, he reiterated his love for Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. When asked why he loved this book in particular, he said: “Because when I read about Macondo, I recognized my village. The same mud, the same stories of survival and dignity.”
Filip Noubel was born in a Czech-French family and raised in Tashkent and Athens. He later studied Slavonic and East Asian languages in Tokyo, Paris, Prague, and Beijing. He has worked as a journalist and media trainer in Central Asia, Nepal, China, and Taiwan, and is now Managing Editor for Global Voices Online. He is also a literary translator, interviewer, Editor-at-Large for Central Asia for Asymptote, and guest editor for Beijing’s DanDu magazine. His translations from Chinese, Czech, Russian, and Uzbek have appeared in various magazines, and include the works of Yevgeny Abdullayev, Radka Denemarková, Jiří Hájíček, Huang Chong-kai, Hamid Ismailov, Martin Ryšavý, Tsering Woeser, Guzel Yakhina, and David Zábranský amongst others.
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