The origin of the plague that afflicted all of Europe in the early 14th century as “the black death”, as much now seems virologically certain, can be linked to rodents that copulated with each other seven centuries ago in today’s Chinese provincial capital Wuhan. One of the many poetic paraphrases for Wuhan is: “City of Lakes”, another: “China’s Chicago”. That alone shows a bold range of projections, which, however, do justice to the metropolis that the mighty Yangzi River cuts through. The name of the city has always had a special ring, because Wuhan was the epicenter of many earthquakes. This is where the revolution that put an end to the Chinese Empire began in 1911, and this is where Mao Zedong entered the Yangzi River in 1966 to announce the start of the Cultural Revolution with a symbolic rebirth. And from here, since the end of 2019, the corona virus has finally made its way around the world. Not only in the meteorological sense, Wuhan is regarded as one of China’s “ovens”.
The multi-award-winning novelist Liao Yiwu – in 2012 he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade – has made the city the central setting of his story in his new work and the outbreak of the plague the all-forming factor. The title of the Chinese original “When the Wuhan Virus Comes” is therefore perhaps not unintentionally reminiscent of a black gall film from the sixties directed by Roman Polanski. As is well known, Liao Yiwu’s preferred sympathy belongs to the dark side of everyone, and especially of Chinese society.
The messenger service Wechat shares all information with the Chinese state apparatus
The rough framework of the plot can be retold in a few sentences: There are two male heroes, one works as a courageous investigative journalist in Wuhan and tries to find out the true story of the outbreak of this disease by visiting the P4 secret laboratory. The second hero is spending a year in Berlin on a Chinese scholarship abroad and wants to visit his wife and daughter in his hometown of Wuhan for Chinese New Year. This hero is no dissident, but his last name already gives a hint to the uninitiated. His name is Ai, like a famous artist who worked in Berlin for many years.
The investigative journalist experiences what the foreseeable fate in the People’s Republic under President Xi Jinping has in store for investigative journalists. And Mr. Ai will not celebrate a happy New Year with his family this spring either. So much can be revealed at this point in advance.
The victims remain the victims, just as the rulers remain the rulers: Liao Yiwu 2019.
(Photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP)
The story switches rapidly between Berlin, where Mr. Ai tells a Chinese compatriot about the arduous stages of his journey, and Wuhan, where the family lives – and where the investigative journalist works. For the literary networking of these widely divergent impulses, Liao Yiwu uses a magic wand of contemporary communication: the service provider Wechat.
In Chinese, this service provider is called Wei Xin, which literally translates to “Tiny Embassy.” An almost poetic trivialization of the transmission of messages about everything that is or is not the case for a person. It ranges from classic conversations between people to the transmission of images, ordering and paying for goods and services, horoscopes are drawn up, marriages are initiated, and cars and hospital beds are made available. In short, here digital dreams come true in the lowlands of analogue.
The techniques of communication allow a new, different kind of resistance
In front of witnesses, of course. The Wechat company shares all information, all wishes and hopes conveyed by the service with the responsible organs of the Chinese state apparatus. Or – as in the novel – with an author who, as an inventor, is just as omniscient.
Liao Yiwu, the victim of state tyranny, is cunningly exploiting the big ears and sharp lenses of totalitarian power. And he also shows that he can deal with this information in an artistic, i.e. calculating, playful way. liaos previous artistic work, the reports of relentless persecution and humiliation, of mental and physical suffering in Chinese prison camps, formally bore the stamp of relentless testimony: This is how the agonizing story happened, and that is exactly what the grimace of rulers looks like! Every sentence of mine is chiseled with pain! A dark world, full of exclamation marks.
Liao Yiwu: Wuhan. documentary novel. Translated from the Chinese by Brigitte Hohenrieder and Hans Peter Hoffman. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2021. 352 pages.
In the new novel, the victims remain the victims, just as the rulers remain the rulers. But the techniques of communication allow a new, different kind of resistance. Of course, the government has put up a massive “firewall,” a protective wall that only allows the people those “tiny messages” that are acceptable to them. But even this wall can be overcome. In China in particular, any censorship finds it difficult to compete with the virtuosity of language and writing. For every combination of characters that is officially withdrawn from circulation, a replacement can be found from the rich pool of writing, and even the most powerful algorithms are often of no help against the power of imagination.
In China, the Internet is just as little a haven of language culture as it is here
Liao Yiwu brilliantly uses chats, both personal and official short messages, as a stylistic device. The result is a wildly colorful wallpaper pattern of small and very small stories, here a rumor is spread, there reports of atrocities, interspersed again and again with the announcements from the waffle iron of political language. When reading, this triggers different levels of comfort, the Internet is just as little a haven of language culture in China as it is here. Sometimes, unfortunately, the author as narrator becomes a victim of speed, lets “knees tremble”, “bite granite”, “fear really gets into your bones” and what other careless nimble linguistic imagery still offers. Since the translators, Brigitte Höhenrieder and Hans Peter Hoffmann, consistently gave me the impression that I was looking at the Chinese original while reading, the examples caused unnecessary irritation.
The author has called his new creation a “documentary novel”, thus assigning it to a genre that compares the fictitious nature of literature with the authenticity of verifiable facts, real people or secure processes.
This is necessary because the novel was also written for a country in which literature is read very carefully and primarily from a forensic point of view. And so it can happen that current affairs figures appear in the text under their real names, under their pseudonyms or under a veil created solely for them by the author. This may disturb one or the other reader who does not constantly follow Chinese domestic politics, but if you look closely, Liao Yiwu is also pursuing a completely different goal here: He creates commemorative plaques for everyday heroes, such as the doctor who was the first in Wuhan at the time reported the outbreak of the virus. A totalitarian historiography will soon see to it that these memories are erased.
All Wuhan residents, on the other hand, will remember how the epidemic stigmatized them among their compatriots, how the city’s name became a code for an invisible, fateful threat. It is difficult for outsiders to decide whether Liao Yiwu’s story was determined more by the novel than the documentary in this aspect. It may also be irrelevant because the hint of the possible, namely the danger of a rumored state of emergency with civil war-like events Conditions, sufficient terror spread. On the other hand, the much-noticed effect worked “Diary from a Locked City”, which the writer Fang Fang from Wuhan left us almost two years ago, is rather reassuring. Naturally, this work was also not allowed to be shown to the Chinese public.