Ghost Tide Nicholas Jose

A friend called me from Beijing recently to ask advice about her novel. She had played a prominent part in the avantgarde art movement associated with the protests at Tiananmen in 1989 and had achieved notoriety in both art and life. Fifteen years on she wanted to give her own account of events, choosing the form of a roman a clef that would be published first in English. But now the Hong Kong agent helping prepare her text wanted changes made to enhance its appeal to foreign publishers. The agent wanted to tart it up and my friend was unhappy.

Few books from China reach the international market unmediated. The patient curiosity required for writing that does not match existing tastes or confirm prejudices is hard to come by in an English-speaking world that has too much to read already. As a result what passes for Chinese writing outside the country is rather thin, and Chinese authors who deal seriously with their culture are known only to specialists.

Ghost Tide is a welcome exception. In fictional form it gives thoughtful and original consideration to some fundamental questions about China. The author’s focus is on gender, sexuality and power relations in the family and the community, and the consequences for individual lives when these are distorted. The setting is an isolated river town in western China. The protagonists are young people growing up in a world shaped by drought, flood and famine, and by conflict between unchanging traditions and the new communist order. The period is the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) but might equally be a mythic time. The narration mixes blunt realism with fabulism. Life is seen mostly through the eyes of Xiezi, the oldest girl in a family blighted by having no male heir. She has to fight to be herself, learning painfully to go against the herd mentality that surrounds her. She questions, for example, whether it is right to have a portrait of Chairman Mao in the women’s bathhouse: ‘the lifeless male eyes … swamped her mind and sent shudders down her spine.’ But her browbeaten mother tells her she’ll die if she asks things like that.

Meanwhile the boy next door, Dandan, is brought up as a girl by his interfering grandmother. He is the longed-for boy after a string of miscarriages and the old woman hopes to deceive the evil spirits who might snatch him away. She can find no peace until the continuation of the male line is guaranteed, but her obsessiveness gives Dandan nightmares. ‘It’s so sweet,’ she says, taking the child’s penis in her mouth. Dandan is not interested. When, at puberty, the time comes for him to switch to living as a boy, he holds on to his feminine persona in the face of public ridicule. Tomboyish Xiezi sympathises with her friend’s refusal to conform, which to everyone else is perversity. In the end both girl and boy become tragic outcasts as gender expectations prove as cruelly repressive in the new society as footbinding was in the old.

Yo Yo depicts an ancient landscape of poverty, ignorance and claustrophobia where history takes the form of enslaving superstition and modernity is a vehicle for opportunism and revenge. The portrait is recognisable not only because it is based on experience but because it is distilled by the imaginative distance of exile. These rural scenes, brought to life with earthy detail in the clear language of Ben Carrdus’s translation, have a resonance that sounds the depths. Yo Yo and her husband, the poet Yang Lian, left China in 1988 and stayed in Australia after the crackdown on dissent in 1989. They now live in London. In a recent review of a controversial report on the situation in rural China,Yang Lian suggested that China’s economic boom is happening on the backs of the peasants who may be worse off than a generation ago and less able to do anything about it. Ghost Tide show why this might be so. Ignorance, gullibility and conservatism are a toxic combination. The river that flows through the book, giving and taking life, is, in the end, China: ‘Oh, great River, what stories could you tell of the joys and rages, the sorrows and pleasures of this land!’ With robust candour and questioning sympathy, Yo Yo tells us.