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Overview
"This novel about an urban youth "displaced" to a small village in rural China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is a fictionalized portrait of the author's own experience as a young man. Han Shaogong was one of millions of students relocated from cities and towns to live and work alongside peasant farmers in an effort to create a classless society. Translated into English for the first time. Han's novel is an exciting experiment in form - structured as a dictionary of the Maqiao dialect - through which he seeks to understand and translate the local life and customs of his strange new home." "In Maqiao, Han encounters an upside-down world among the village's denizens: a con man dupes his neighbors into thinking that he has found the fountain of youth by convincing them that his father is in fact his son; to be "scientific" is to be lazy; time and relationships are understood using the language of food and its preparation; and to die young is considered "dear," while the aged reckon their lives to be "cheap."" As entries build one upon another, Han meditates on the ability of a waidi ren (out-sider) to represent the ways of life of another community. In this light, the Communist effort to control the language and history of a people whose words and past are bound together in ineluctably local ways emerges as an often comical, sometimes tragic exercise in miscommunication.Synopsis
One of the most-talked about works of fiction to emerge from China in recent years, this novel about an urban youth "displaced" to a small village in rural China during the Cultural Revolution is a fictionalized portrait of the author's own experience as a young man.
The New York Times
The book, the winner of several prizes in China, stubbornly resists analysis. To enter its pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where ''rude'' means ''pretty,'' homosexuals are ''Red Flower Daddies'' and people don't die, they ''scatter.'' Cross-references abound, and slowly the novel emerges as one grand idiom. This is a meditation on the trapdoors of language and on the microhistories buried within words. — Katherine Wolff
Editorials
Library Journal
A novel in dictionary form illustrates the absurdities of Cultural Revolution double-speak through a series of entries about an insignificant small town. (LJ 6/15/03)The New York Times
The book, the winner of several prizes in China, stubbornly resists analysis. To enter its pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where ''rude'' means ''pretty,'' homosexuals are ''Red Flower Daddies'' and people don't die, they ''scatter.'' Cross-references abound, and slowly the novel emerges as one grand idiom. This is a meditation on the trapdoors of language and on the microhistories buried within words. — Katherine WolffPublishers Weekly
Maqiao, a fictitious rural village lost in the vitals of Mao's Communist empire, is to Han's magical novel what Macondo is to One Hundred Years of Solitude-a place in which the various brutalities and advances of contemporary history are transformed within the "fossil seams" of popular myth. Han adopts the rules of the dictionary to the rules of fiction, distributing mini-sagas of rural bandits, Daoist madmen and mixed up Maoists across the definitions of terms with special meaning in Maqiao. Han, narrator as well as author, is sent to Maqiao as part of a cadre of "Educated Youth" during the Cultural Revolution. A sharp, sophisticated observer, he narrates these folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male "dragon"; of "poisonous" Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits. Flawlessly translated by Lovell, this novel should not be missed by lovers of literature. (Aug.) Forecast: Reviews will be all-important for this university press standout, which is as significant as Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain and more reader-friendly, despite its unusual structure. A few champions-Ian Buruma, who refers to it in his book about Chinese culture, Bad Elements, might be one-could do a lot to bring this to the broad general audience it deserves. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
Named one of the top 100 works of 20th-century Chinese fiction by Asia Weekly and the winner of the Shanghai Literary Prize, this unique offering is based on Han's own experiences. Organized in the form of a dictionary, it lists more than 100 entries, each printed in English then followed by its Chinese equivalent. Following each entry is a fictionalized vignette, which either documents the language or the people of Maqiao, a village located in a remote area of southern China. With the novel's progression, readers are introduced to numerous characters, all of whom carry the surname of Ma, making it difficult to track them. A mix of slang, folklore, and superstition make up the stories themselves. The entry for "Scarlet Woman," for example, describes how locals carry a stick or a piece of bamboo to ward off snakes or shout out "scarlet woman" as a means of confusing a snake to give the individual time to flee from it. The same entry also tells of how a man named Yanzao became more poisonous than the snake that bit him. Sometimes humorous, but crude and grim at other times, the entries all intertwine to give readers a picture of life in this distant region. Because Han's interest in lexicology is evident throughout, this is definitely not for the average fiction reader. However, public libraries with specialized collections in Chinese literature and academic libraries with strong programs in Asian literature and linguistics will want to consider.-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
An innovative 1997 novel records its narrator's experiences-as an urban "Educated Youth" relocated among rural peasants-as entries in a descriptive "dictionary." The entries include regurgitated directives preaching the tenets of Mao's Cultural Revolution, analyses of common words recharged with official meanings (e.g., "brutal" is both a pejorative and a compliment), analyses of the fictional village of Maqiao's socioeconomic features and history of bloodshed and repression, and indigenous folk beliefs and superstitions as embodied in a rich gallery of precisely sketched characters. The more memorable of the latter: truculent beggar "king" and malcontent Old Master Nine Pockets; Teixang, the recklessly unfaithful wife of an ineffectual Party leader; Ma Wenjie, lord of a feared "bandit army"; and versatile artist Yanwu, whose paintings are declared "reactionary" for failing to create convincing likenesses of Chairman Mao. The result is a subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought-and, more to the point, a stunningly imaginative and absorbing work of fiction.San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
The best novel of the year isn't that DeLillo-on-automatic-pilot thing that broke out, along with SARS, this spring; nor the smutty anti-Islamic screed by the super-annuated French juvenile delinquent; nor even Jane Smiley's excellent investigation of the unlikely souls of real estate agents. Rather, it is this 'dictionary' of the dialect of a fictitious village, Maqiao, lost in the squat hills of South China.
The Village Voice
[ A Dictionary of Maqiao] is a magnificent book, epic in its ambitions and sweep without any of the sentimental obfuscation on which that genre so often depends.
Asian Review of Books
[B]oth fascinating and masterful... Han paints a detailed, intriguing and amusing picture of what happens when Marxism collides with entrenched village beliefs, and how traditional China coexists with modernity. The book is filled with peculiar, beguiling, tragic characters and scenery so real you can touch it... This is an intelligent, amusing, clever, fascinating and well-written view of a China most of us never see, or don't recognize when we do.
The New York Times Book Review
To enter [ A Dictionary of Maqiao]'s pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where 'rude' means 'pretty,' and homosexuals are 'Red Flower Daddies' and people don't die, they 'scatter.'
Times Literary Supplement
Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel written as a series of definitions which gains further depth from a good translation... Han Shaogong's novel [is] clever, sympathetic and amused... Julia Lovell's translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book.
Persimmon
Han Shaogong's novel has won wide acclaim, and deservedly so; through his treatment of language, he not only vividly portrays village life in rural China, but also inspires readers to rethink what they are accustomed to taking for granted.
The Boston Globe
The narrator's folkloric stereotypes the provincial simpletons and fools, the cuckolded husbands, the long-suffering wives resolve affectingly into distinct human beings. And the peasant vocabulary vulgar, quaint, superstitious which so perplexesthe earnest young outsider is also revealed to be cunningly subversive, an antidote to the totalitarian imposition of a "reality"irreconcilably at odds with the real thing.— Amanda Heller
Taipei Times
This is a serious, ground-breaking and finally brilliant novel by one of China's leading authors... The translation is everywhere excellent — fluent, colloquial where appropriate, without being excessively so, learned in places, and without any hint anywhere of 'translationese'... surely destined for classic status.— Bradley Winterton
Review of Contemporary Fiction
In its formal inventiveness, its nuanced depiction of Chinese peasant life, and its speculative explorations into the Chinese cultural psyche, this is one of the finest novels of the post-Mao era to so far make its way into English.— Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas
China Economic Review
Worth reading...fascinating and surprisingly accessible.— Anton Graham
World Literature Today
Han is a good storyteller, ingeniously leading the reader into the heart of his stories... A Dictionary of Maqiao is readable and enjoyable.— Fatima Wu
Time Magazines Literary Supplement
Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel written as a series of definitions which gains further depth from a good translation... Han Shaogong's novel [is] clever, sympathetic and amused... Julia Lovell's translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book.The Boston Globe -
The narrator's folkloric stereotypes the provincial simpletons and fools, the cuckolded husbands, the long-suffering wives resolve affectingly into distinct human beings. And the peasant vocabulary vulgar, quaint, superstitious which so perplexesthe earnest young outsider is also revealed to be cunningly subversive, an antidote to the totalitarian imposition of a "reality"irreconcilably at odds with the real thing.
Taipei Times -
This is a serious, ground-breaking and finally brilliant novel by one of China's leading authors... The translation is everywhere excellent -- fluent, colloquial where appropriate, without being excessively so, learned in places, and without any hint anywhere of 'translationese'... surely destined for classic status.
Review of Contemporary Fiction -
In its formal inventiveness, its nuanced depiction of Chinese peasant life, and its speculative explorations into the Chinese cultural psyche, this is one of the finest novels of the post-Mao era to so far make its way into English.
China Economic Review -
Worth reading...fascinating and surprisingly accessible.
World Literature Today -
Han is a good storyteller, ingeniously leading the reader into the heart of his stories... A Dictionary of Maqiao is readable and enjoyable.