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The Ancient Ship
by Zhang Wei
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
I wish I could say that I knew all about Zhang Wei and his 1987 novel The Ancient Ship before this translation from Howard Goldblatt arrived. But even now, I know little more than is given on the jacket, that The Ancient Ship was published in 1987, becoming an award-winning bestseller and that Zhang Wei is a widely-respected novelist.
With such minimal context, one is left evaluating the novel on its merits, which may be just as well. But one is also left wondering whether one can ever understand China without reading its fiction, and remarking on how little of this fiction is available in English and how much we are therefore subject to the vagaries of what gets translated and published by the mainstream English-language publishing industry.
The Ancient Ship is a multi-generational saga, spanning some forty years, following three clans (families, really - the Sui, Zhao and Li) in the fictional northern town of Wali, famous for its glass noodles, the manufacture of which is the main theme running through the book, just as a silted-up river runs through the town.
As is the case of some other Chinese novels of roughly the same era -- Han Shaogong's The Dictionary of Maqiao comes to mind -- The Ancient Ship is rather short on plot. Things happen, of course, and quite a lot of them - people fall in love, leave town, start businesses, die, scheme, fight; disasters occur, an ancient ship emerges from the river: there is a progression of sort, but of a cyclical kind.
Much of the book's depth emerges in the people that populate it, for Zhang Wei, like Han Shaogong, is a master of characterization: the two brothers of the Sui clan, who couldn't be more different from each other, or their eccentric uncle who, uniquely, left Wali to go to sea (or so he says).
Further diminishing the sense of plot is the book's non-linear structure: it continually loops back a decade or a generation, filling in details we missed the previous time around. The effect is rather like those Internet or movie images which become progressively clearer with each pass. Again, not unlike The Dictionary of Maqiao, time does indeed pass, but not linearly. As a technique, the effect is interesting and illuminating, but also disconcerting and it can make comprehension something of a struggle: the large number of characters and the time-slips can make it hard to tell the players apart without a scorecard.
One would think that no Chinese novel covering the first forty years of the People's Republic could avoid any mention of politics, but explicit mentions of politics are few and far between: indeed, the book could seemingly have been set in the inter-War years with perhaps little apparent difference: factories change hands, fortunes rise and fall, shops open and shut, couple marry, children are born, disasters natural and man-made happen with depressing frequency. Communism or the Party are hardly mentioned by any of the characters, as if they hardly impinged on daily life.
And perhaps they didn't: perhaps the change from one political system to another hardly mattered for most people. Rules changed, rulers changed, markets changed, but life went on and new social structures were laid upon and merged with previous structures dating back centuries.
But as the book cycles back and forth, it becomes clear that the Sui family represents the old aristocracy, while the Zhou family are the upstarts elevated by the Revolution, who seek and succeed in turfing the Sui's out of their traditional positions -- that in fact the history and turmoil of the People's Republic are part of the fabric of the book.
A good book? I don't know: it's not as accessible as, say, Yu Hua's To Live, nor as imaginative as The Dictionary of Maqiao. But an interesting and illuminating book? In its humanity, eccentricity and almost passive view of a most turbulent time, it is provides a fascinating alternative view of China yesterday, and through yesterday, today.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
by Zhang Wei
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
I wish I could say that I knew all about Zhang Wei and his 1987 novel The Ancient Ship before this translation from Howard Goldblatt arrived. But even now, I know little more than is given on the jacket, that The Ancient Ship was published in 1987, becoming an award-winning bestseller and that Zhang Wei is a widely-respected novelist.
With such minimal context, one is left evaluating the novel on its merits, which may be just as well. But one is also left wondering whether one can ever understand China without reading its fiction, and remarking on how little of this fiction is available in English and how much we are therefore subject to the vagaries of what gets translated and published by the mainstream English-language publishing industry.
The Ancient Ship is a multi-generational saga, spanning some forty years, following three clans (families, really - the Sui, Zhao and Li) in the fictional northern town of Wali, famous for its glass noodles, the manufacture of which is the main theme running through the book, just as a silted-up river runs through the town.
As is the case of some other Chinese novels of roughly the same era -- Han Shaogong's The Dictionary of Maqiao comes to mind -- The Ancient Ship is rather short on plot. Things happen, of course, and quite a lot of them - people fall in love, leave town, start businesses, die, scheme, fight; disasters occur, an ancient ship emerges from the river: there is a progression of sort, but of a cyclical kind.
Much of the book's depth emerges in the people that populate it, for Zhang Wei, like Han Shaogong, is a master of characterization: the two brothers of the Sui clan, who couldn't be more different from each other, or their eccentric uncle who, uniquely, left Wali to go to sea (or so he says).
Further diminishing the sense of plot is the book's non-linear structure: it continually loops back a decade or a generation, filling in details we missed the previous time around. The effect is rather like those Internet or movie images which become progressively clearer with each pass. Again, not unlike The Dictionary of Maqiao, time does indeed pass, but not linearly. As a technique, the effect is interesting and illuminating, but also disconcerting and it can make comprehension something of a struggle: the large number of characters and the time-slips can make it hard to tell the players apart without a scorecard.
One would think that no Chinese novel covering the first forty years of the People's Republic could avoid any mention of politics, but explicit mentions of politics are few and far between: indeed, the book could seemingly have been set in the inter-War years with perhaps little apparent difference: factories change hands, fortunes rise and fall, shops open and shut, couple marry, children are born, disasters natural and man-made happen with depressing frequency. Communism or the Party are hardly mentioned by any of the characters, as if they hardly impinged on daily life.
And perhaps they didn't: perhaps the change from one political system to another hardly mattered for most people. Rules changed, rulers changed, markets changed, but life went on and new social structures were laid upon and merged with previous structures dating back centuries.
But as the book cycles back and forth, it becomes clear that the Sui family represents the old aristocracy, while the Zhou family are the upstarts elevated by the Revolution, who seek and succeed in turfing the Sui's out of their traditional positions -- that in fact the history and turmoil of the People's Republic are part of the fabric of the book.
A good book? I don't know: it's not as accessible as, say, Yu Hua's To Live, nor as imaginative as The Dictionary of Maqiao. But an interesting and illuminating book? In its humanity, eccentricity and almost passive view of a most turbulent time, it is provides a fascinating alternative view of China yesterday, and through yesterday, today.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
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