Shuang Xuetao's Rouge Street
On falling through an icy lake to find the Cultural Revolution beneath the surface.
So far this blog has been entirely about chess — it’s time to switch gears for a moment and write a little about what I’ve been reading recently.
I discovered Rouge Street thanks to a New York Times profile about the author, Shuang Xuetao. I like mysteries, I like magical realism (truth be told, I like most genres, as long as they’re well written), and as far as I can remember I’ve read only two Chinese authors previously: Liu Cixin, whose Three Body Problem trilogy is hotter than ever, thanks to its Netflix adaptation, and Lu Xun, whose excellent stories describe China during the revolutionary era of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
By the time I got around to reading the three novellas that make up Rouge Street, the only part of The NY Times piece that I remembered was that there were mysteries and murder, so a part of me was expecting something along the lines of Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler. Rouge Street is neither, not the precision of the classical detective tale nor the grit and despair of noir. The Times compares Shuang’s work with that of Hemingway and Murakami, which is definitely closer, but as I read I found that one of the things I really enjoyed about Rouge Street was how different it felt from anything I’d read recently, or perhaps ever.
It’s hard to talk about Rouge Street without talking about the Cultural Revolution; heck, it even made its way into the sub-heading for this article. The Cultural Revolution exists as a kind of backdrop to each novella in a way that feels perfectly natural: Shuang wrote about it as if he was writing about the moon appearing at night or ripples appearing on the surface of a pond. It affected every single character who lived through it in a way that I’m hard pressed to find an analogy for in American history: only the Vietnam War feels like the same kind of event. Both damaged so many people and tore up the belief of people in their own society, leaving rifts and scars that persist in the present. That said, American depictions of the Vietnam War are often focused on judging the the war and our involvement in it (The Things They Carried, Apocalypse Now, etc.). Rouge Street seems at times to be saying "here’s what happened during the Cultural Revolution and here’s what’s happening now. Make of it what you will.” It’s a light touch that I appreciated more and more the further I read.
Shuang’s artistic method is one of juxtaposition. This is apparent in how he treats the Cultural Revolution, as mentioned in the paragraph above: let’s juxtapose the past and the present and let the reader make sense of it for themselves. It’s built into the structure of each novella, which jump from past to present or vantage point to vantage point with an assurance that the attentive reader will be able to put together the connective tissue as they go. Shuang’s art of juxtaposition appears at the paragraph level as well; take this moment from the climax of “Bright Hall,” the second story:
The ice around the hole disintegrated, and the two of them tumbled into the water. They sank rapidly, like chunks of metal, without a sound. Soon they were gone from view. The snow had stopped completely now, and so had the wind. I could hear myself breathing. The moon was visible. I thought about Youngest Aunt, a very strict person who would surely demand her daughter back eventually. I thought about my dad, but all that came to mind was drinking—his real family was booze. I took off my clothes and dove in.
The writing in this scene is lovely, but what caught my attention was the way in which Shuang lets you decide how the narrator’s thoughts are connected. Does he jump in because of the imposing nature of Youngest Aunt? Does he do it because of the loneliness and isolation he feels due to his father’s drinking? A little of each? Or is it something else entirely? All three of Shuang’s novellas operate in this way, and as I think about them, I wonder if this is how you have to write literature in the People’s Republic of China: your ideas must be conveyed through ellipses and omissions to get past the censors. Give the reader a puzzle and let them figure out the meaning.
I suppose that this is the point where it’s time to grapple with that meaning, or in the interest of avoiding too many spoilers, at least with the questions that Shuang wants us to be thinking about as we read and form meaning for ourselves. The fact that it’s three novellas rather than one coherent story makes this a more difficult task, and I as I considered it last evening, I found myself coming back around again to the Cultural Revolution as well as Shuang’s other major contextual backdrop, the collapse of factory cities in China’s northeast. Each of the novellas is intergenerational, and each of the detective-protagonists is from the younger generation; they are all asking, to some extent, “What happened to our parents and those of their generation that made them the people that they are?” Reading each novella is like peeling an onion, and each section reveals more about what has been concealed, with the results on the characters in full view: loneliness, addiction, and madness.
My favorite novella of the three was “Bright Hall” because it handled these themes most adeptly. It has all the tropes of a fairy tale: missing parents, abandoned children, a monstrous evil lurking that becomes ever more palpable as the story progresses. It also makes the most out of its setting, using landmarks to tie the past to the future. Bright Hall was the site of struggle settings during the Cultural Revolution; now it’s housing for workers. The defunct factories have made Shadow Lake so toxic that most people won’t fish in them; below its surface the Cultural Revolution continues. “Bright Hall” leans the farthest towards magical realism of all three stories. It twists and turns like a Murakami tale. Shuang is earthbound and gritty where Murakami is ethereal and dreamlike, but like so many Murakami novels, the end of “Bright Hall” defies simple explanation.
I’ll be picking up The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy next and will be writing about them over the next few weeks. Until then, it’s back to chess and the candidate’s tournament for the time being.