Book Around the Corner

His Kingdom by Han Han (2015) French title: Son royaume. Translated from the Chinese by Stéphane Lévêque.

This year our Book Club has decided to expand its horizon and read foreign fiction from countries we rarely read from. The first book meeting these new criteria is His Kingdomn, a contemporary book written in 2015 by Han Han, a famous Chinese blogger/author/rally racer. Yes, he’s all that and he was only born in 1982.

We are in Tinglin, a little fictional town in the South East of China. Zu Xialong works as a groundskeeper and has a lot of free time. What he loves most is to drive around Tinglin at high speed on his Japanese moto. He’s young, single and has yet to lose his virginity because each time he’s close to sealing the deal, his partner has her period. He has a crush on Ying with the sultry voice and bad reputation but he only catches the attention of the young Niba, a highschool student who’s been infatuated with him for a while. This is Xialong in a nutshell.

We follow Xialong in his wanderings around Tinglin, his interactions with Niba and Ying and his various small rebellious acts. His various trips in the city are an opportunity for Han Han to describe and make fun of the Tinglin life. It’s a town probably modeled on existing Chinese small provincial towns.

The officials from the Party who run Tinglin have authorized big corporations to come and set up huge factories. As a consequence, the city attracts lots of workers from other areas of China, suffers from pollution and is overcrowded with infrastructures that are not ready for so many inhabitants. The locals become landlords to the newcomers and the economy of the area goes upside down.

Han Han’s descriptions of wild industrialization are often comical and full of humor. See what happens at the end of the working day:

The pollution resulting from the factories is part of Tinglin, a price to pay to the god of economic development. It becomes a permanent fixture, it’s in the landscape and Han Han points out how the inhabitants are so used to it that they embrace it.

Poetic descriptions of the landscape are just another way to mock the good people of Tinglin. Critical minds are not a blossoming species in this town.

Xialong is a rather pathetic character, full of dreams but riding on an empty tank when it comes to make his dreams come true. He’s still a rebel to the general atmosphere of obeying blindly to the Party, bowing in front of apparatchiks and buying all the official speeches.

Sometimes he seems lazy but he’s ready to work his butt off to earn extra-money and repair his precious bike. He takes a second job in a thermometer factory, at the end of production line. He’s quality control and has to check that all the thermometers ready to be shipped actually show 37°C when used in live conditions.

Basically, Xialong tests the thermometers on himself, a job he can only perform well if he doesn’t run a fever. Han Han explains how Xiaolong improves his productivity by putting as many thermometers as he can in his body at the same time, even wishing to be a woman, you know, for the extra hole. Han Han’s dry wit makes fun of Xialong’s inventiveness to improve his job performance.

Han Han selected the most ridiculous job for Xiaolong, only to enforce the comic effects and still denounce the stupid work cadences.

Han Han also picks on Party officials and their ludicrous policies to promote culture and encourage companies to build factories in their town. I wonder how he’s allowed to write such an abrasive caricature of local politics. He mocks the empty and long speeches that they deliver.

There are hilarious passages about the codes to respect for speeches. Some stylistic devices are a must in every speech. They are expected, weighed, compared and officials observe each other and take notes of fellow speakers’ achievements.

I could go on with other excerpts of Han Han’s caustic writing. I enjoyed my time with Xialong, even if he really sounds like a useless bum. Han Han’s style isn’t extraordinary but who knows how many innuendos and puns are lot in translation.

I liked his caricature of small-town China and his critical vision of high speed economic development. Some elements are dystopian or even fantasy, like in Murakami’s Kakfa On the Shore. I was happy to read a Chinese book that was not a historical novel set during the Empire or another opus about the Cultural Revolution.

It was a good pick for me, I enjoyed his brand of humor.