“A Madman’s Diary” has risen to popularity of late as contemporary global readers find resonance in its message. Although the text was specifically written as a critique of the outmoded, nationalistic feudal system in early twentieth-century China, it also speaks to the idea that regimes or practices can be at their most powerful—and dangerous—when they are institutionalized or considered sacrosanct. Angered by state mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak, societies worldwide are now calling for the dismantling of rigid hegemonic political and moral structures that have failed to protect the people. In these times, many are asking: How can we not only survive, but also actively resist these oppressive practices?
Such questions are raised in the recently published That We May Live, an anthology of new speculative fiction featuring writers from China and Hong Kong. The seven translated stories—selected by editor Sarah Coolidge of Two Lines Press—present alternating and refreshing perspectives on survival in quasi-mythical societies that closely parallel those in mainland China and Hong Kong. Unlike the somewhat distant alien worlds in popular works of classical Chinese science fiction—the faraway planets of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem or Xia Jia’s robots—the stories in That We May Live, like those of Lu Xun a century before, utilize the banal and the familiar to criticize civilization’s collective passivity and learned helplessness against institutional oppression.
So often in narratives of sociopolitical critique there is a moment when a character awakens or suddenly tunes into a previously hidden conflict. In contrast, That We May Live feels like a strangely passive read because most of the characters appear either immobile or subservient, seemingly unaware of their own restrictive conditions and therefore unable to liberate themselves. For example, the protagonist in Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s “Sour Meat,” translated by long-time collaborator Natascha Bruce, sacrifices herself to ensure the survival of women. The story traces her pilgrimage to find her grandmother and a secret, fermented drink that she later learns is produced from the flesh of other females. Upon this discovery, the protagonist understands her fate and without question acquiesces, dissolving into a liquid for other young girls to drink and fortify themselves with. Sichuan-born Yan Ge’s “Flourishing Beasts,” translated by Singaporean playwright and novelist Jeremy Tiang, is another tale of sacrifice for a greater, collective cause. In it, a writer visits a tribe of female-identifying beast-trees, discovering in the process that they are all doomed to one of two outcomes in life: if a beast is pure and free of worms, she can be made into expensive snow-white furniture collected by men; but if she is considered diseased, she must live a monastic life in confinement. In these two fates—fetishized ornamental object or social outcast—the beasts appear to have no agency or control over their future, sacrificing their own desires in exchange for a place, any place, in the world.
Oddly, these violent acts—women being recycled, women being subdued into furniture—are described in a poetic, almost soothing language that one might find in a fairy tale or fable, and the characters in both Yan Ge and Dorothy Tse’s stories appear content, even happy, with their fates. Yan Ge writes in conclusion to her story that “the flourishing beasts remain at peace, for this is not their plight alone but the fate of every living thing.” Similarly, “Sour Meat” ends with the strangely peaceful dissolution of the protagonist: “F saw her own body: it had no teeth anymore, no bones, it was just flesh, and all that was left was a tiny piece, so soft, and because her lips were all gone now, she couldn’t even describe how incomparably wonderful it felt.”
This ambiguity and complexity leave these two stories open to interpretation to some extent, but one naturally thinks of traditional feminist critiques of gender-based prejudices in mainland China—where activist leaders are routinely oppressed as part of an insidious move to stifle smaller feminist movements—and Hong Kong, where women are historically fetishized in international literature and films (as in The World of Suzie Wong) and seen as literal objects bridging East and West. On a more basic level, however, if we think of the fundamental terms of survival—as resisting extinction—the women in Tse and Ge’s stories are successful. But what must they give up in return—and how aware are they of these sacrifices? These unanswered questions echo a quote that precedes Tse’s contribution and that gives the anthology its title: “Thus must we do, that we may live.”
Sometimes forced passivity is inborn, as in the oppression of women; other times it is learned. The struggle for upward mobility in Chen Si’an’s “A Counterfeit Life,” translated by Canaan Morse, mirrors the experiences of thousands of migrant workers who move to cities in hope of a better life. These workers can often only find jobs in menial and underpaid labor, which is what happens to the main character, who realizes that the barrier of classism is insurmountable. In Chan Chi Wa’s story, translated by Audrey Heijns, oppression takes the form of a state-owned elephant in a tightly regimented territory. With the knowledge that totalitarian governments may lose control of their citizens without certain infrastructures—censorship, mass surveillance, informant systems, nationwide distractions—Chan ventures to ask what happens when the elephant, described as a source of mass entertainment, disappears. Here, Chan suggests that what is learned, institutionalized, and conditioned can also be undone.
Most of the stories in the collection are set in a faceless and often nameless cityscape. Within these urban landscapes—a popular trope in the genres of science and speculative fiction—individual histories and identities are often homogenized, blending into one large entity. It is only outside of literal and metaphorical city structures that characters can realize their true paths. For example, in “Sour Meat,” the protagonist begins her journey to discover her ancestral history by taking a train from the city to the country, while the creatures in “Flourishing Beasts” live in a quiet, sequestered temple away from the rush of urban life. And in “A Counterfeit Life,” change only occurs once the main character begins to reconfigure his life outside of typical social expectations.
But what happens when there is no urban landscape? Hong Kong-based Enoch Tam’s two stories on gentrification, both translated by Jeremy Tiang, examine classism through the lens of an organic ecosystem and suggest that such struggles will be present in the roots and soil of the earth as long as humans inhabit it. Gone are the cyberpunk, dystopian aesthetics of sci-fi classics, such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, which mapped their anxieties onto generic urban features of Hong Kong like its neon signs and alluvial skyscraper complexes. We see instead lush hills, elephants, and homes made from a combination of sentient, restless boxes and overgrown mushrooms. In “Auntie Han’s Modern Life” and “The Mushroom Houses Proliferated in District M,” the wealthy live in hollowed-out fungal caves that are rooted to the ground, while the working class are relegated to “squat square boxes” that cannot settle and that are often linked together, which means their inhabitants occasionally wake up to find themselves on an entirely different street. In “Mushroom Houses,” property developers from different districts fight to corner the market on these profitable mushroom-dwellings, growing them in less-than-favourable conditions and in the process forcing the displacement of communities while also creating uninhabitable environments.
Those familiar with Hong Kong and its inhabitants will perceive parallels in the wealth disparities and the ongoing battles between property tycoons, government officials, and the indigenous dwellers of New Territories villages, many of whom are being evicted from their land. Certain areas are also subject to toxic waste and pollution from sludge incinerators, landfills, gas power stations, and factories powering the architecturally complex and technologically advanced image of Hong Kong that Western media is so familiar with. But in these struggles and in similar cases around the world there are unfortunately few victories. The citizens of Tam’s “Mushroom Houses” hopelessly drift from district to district, with some even nonchalantly slicing off their own body parts to fuel their insufficiently powered fungal dwellings.
However, there are small, if not immediately noticeable, glimmers of awakening in the collection, most apparently in “A Counterfeit Life.” “I’m going to be here till I die,” the protagonist states early on. But then something surprising happens: the character becomes incensed by his conditions, immediately abandons his romanticized aspirations to secure a white-collar job, and instead engages in a “counterfeit life”—one in which he spend his days gate-crashing events, meetings, and parties and assimilating different roles, such as real estate agent or a generic office worker. In doing so, he cleverly inserts himself into a society that had previously rejected him, and he even begins to teach others how to live this way. In one memorable passage, he declares to an unconvinced student, “There are too many bugs in the city’s program. The bigger bugs may be so big that people like us can only throw up our hands and cry, but the small ones can be fixed and reinstalled by hand, can’t they? I want to reconfigure this unreasonable world by hand. That’s what I want. It’s a sort of new justice for people like me.”
Although billed as a collection of “speculative Chinese fiction,” That We May Live at its core references global philosophical quandaries and anxieties. It describes not just the conditions that can shackle and fail us, but also the complex choices around those conditions that we can engage in. While there are no clear roadmaps, the stories in That We May Live place interpretation, and therefore agency, into the hands of the reader. As Chen Si’an writes at the conclusion, “This sentence he had read somewhere in a book was only the beginning. It was up to him to write what came after.” Now that we have been awakened, it is up to us to decide how we might survive.
