Tales of the 573: 573路之道 The Revival Of A Chinese Literary Consciousness
‘站立禁区’ (‘zhan li jin qu’) the characters stenciled into the ‘Well’ by the doors of the 573 clearly identify it as a “No Standing Area’, but at peak times, when there can be as many as eight pairs of feet standing on it, the sign all but disappears. Anyone who gets stuck in the ‘Well’ has to resign himself to spending the balance of the journey immobilized by the owners of the seven other bodies who, in defiance or more likely ignorance of the laws of Physics, are all trying to squeeze themselves into the same limited space. From the confines of this human straightjacket, someone standing in the ‘Well’ is effectively cut off from access to phone, tablet, console or any other device that under normal conditions would serve as a way to occupy the time.
Finding myself relegated to the ‘Well’ one day last week, I made the best of the situation by taking it as an opportunity to study my fellow passengers more closely, a diversion that, given the circumstances, was admittedly the only one available. As the 573 made its way along the Jinqiao Road axis following its appointed route, I tried to imagine where these other travelers had come from, where they were going, and, more intriguingly, what secrets they might be hiding. However, as I observed them shedding a few tears over the same soap opera, racking up a few more bonus points on the same online game, or dreaming the same dream as they dozed under the fraying curtains pulled haphazardly across windows, I found very little about them that could stimulate the imagination. In the absence of such a stimulus the diversion quickly lost its appeal and by the time the bus reached the stop at the bottom of the bridge on New Jinqiao Road any residual interest in the occupation I may have had was irrevocably extinguished. I looked on with indifference as the objects of my observation - the soap opera fans, the game enthusiasts and the dreamers - filed past me on their way out, leaving a much less crowded bus in their wake. As the doors swung closed behind the last one, I suddenly caught sight of a young man at the back of the bus reading a book, a rare sight indeed and an object much more worthy of my attention. His owlish-looking face was framed by a pair of glasses outfitted with the type of thick lenses that distinguish someone who spends too much time reading and even more time pondering what he has read.
The book that was open on his lap, by my rough estimate, weighed in at more than 500 pages, and was so enormous it obscured everything but his forehead. As I marveled at the book’s heft and considered how best to describe the way it had drawn the young man into its pages, the Chinese expression ‘‘Mai Tou’ (埋头) came to mind. It’s an expression than in its most literal sense means to bury one’s head. When used metaphorically it describes a state of complete absorption in an engaging activity. The degree of difference that separates these meanings is sufficiently significant that normally the contexts in which they are applied have no relationship to one another. However the young man, who was so engrossed in his book that his head had disappeared from view, was proof that these semantic conventions could be suspended and that, at least within the few inches of space bounded by the rims of his glasses and the top his head, the literal and the metaphoric could coexist.
Curious to find out what it was about the book that could be holding his attention in such a powerful grip, I moved in for a closer look. This is a delicate business because you have to get near enough to your subject to be able to observe meaningful details, but yet not so near as to frighten him off. Luckily, the margin of error for gauging an appropriate distance in China is greater than it might be elsewhere because of the high tolerance Chinese have for close proximity and the low premium they place on personal space.
The book at that moment was open to a page that, from where I sat, looked like one of those Malevich monochromes - a field of pure black relieved by a sharp white square positioned at its center. As I got closer in, the white square revealed itself as the image of what the accompanying caption identified as a bust of the Roman emperor Vespasian. On closer inspection, the black field on which the white square rested resolved itself into phalanxes of densely packed Chinese characters that in their current configuration provided a detailed account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
My curiosity about the nature of the book’s content satisfied, I began to speculate on what could possibly have prompted a Chinese teenager to delve into a 500-page treatise on a subject that was so far outside the standard academic curriculum. In the course of this speculation I temporarily lost track of where I was and it was in that brief moment of inattention (generous margin of error notwithstanding) that I somehow managed to stray into the young man’s personal space. It was a transgression he rewarded by snapping his book shut with a loud ‘thunk’, fixing me with an exasperated look intensified to a frightening degree by the refraction index of his uncommonly thick lenses.
A generation ago, Alan Bloom’s ‘Closing of the American Mind’, decried the devaluation of great books as a source of wisdom and warned of the deleterious effect on American academic institutions this devaluation would inevitably have. Striking a similar tone in her provocative essay, ‘Why Aren’t The Chinese Reading Books Anymore ?’ Atlantic Magazine writer Helen Gao called attention to what she perceived as a closing of the Chinese mind and attendant decline in cultural literacy. To provide readers with a better sense for just how steep the gradient of this decline might be, Gao used average-number-of-books-read as a proxy. By this measure, the 4.89 average number of books consumed by Chinese readers over the course of a year fell well short of the average number logged by their American counterparts and was less than half of the total that their Korean neighbors put on the board.
Confronted with such dire statistics, there are some who counter that ‘quantity of books read’ is an indicator of reading health that is much less relevant than ‘quality of books read’. This is an argument that certainly has merit, yet even when the gauge is recalibrated to measure quality the results are not, quantifiably, that much more encouraging. In their assessment of Chinese reading habits, those who study the evolution of social trends note an overwhelming preference of Chinese consumers for books that promote self-enhancement at the expense of those that offer cultural enrichment. These commentators supplement the conclusions they have arrived at through an analysis of secondary sources with eyewitness testimonials that come directly from the field. Liu Siuli, proprietor of a well-appointed bookstore in Beijing and the source of one such testimonial observes that visitors to his shop are primarily looking for “things that are useful to them”, an observation to which he is quick to append the disclaimer: “Unfortunately, they are not reading”.
Visitors to the bookstores that line Fuzhou Road in Shanghai encounter displays at the entrances that are stacked high with the latest bestsellers of Warren Buffet, Wang Jianlin, and Tony Robbins. In their literary incarnations, these investment titans, real-estate moguls, and self-help gurus stand, like Maneki-Neko, as augurs of commercial success and prosperity who beckon invitingly to potential customers with smiles that beam from the covers of their books. Unlike the social critics who are desperate to prevent the closing of the customer’s mind, bookshop owners are eager to accelerate the opening of his wallet.
As dismayed as we may be by this state of affairs and as ready as we may be to join the ranks of those who chastise Chinese readers for turning their backs on the Chinese literary canon and wring their hands over the descent of Chinese consumers into the abyss of illiteracy, we should first pause for a moment to recall that over the last thirty years China has, in fact, managed to reduce the number of illiterate citizens from more than 230 Million in 1985 to less than 50 Million today.
Latching on to this positive vein and convinced that mining it further could yield new insights, Amazon decided to conduct its own investigation into the habits of Chinese readers. The report that resulted from this investigation concluded that 56% of Chinese adults read an average of 10 books per year. A recent article in Forbes magazine encouragingly titled “The Chinese Online Reading Craze” affirmed a robust and growing electronic book market in China whose value it pegged at $9 Billion. The source of this value - a base of active readers 330 Million strong whose number has increased by 20% year-over-year from 2012. No doubt it was these active readers who accounted for a large part of the 10% increase in attendance at this year’s Shanghai International Book Fair and were well-represented among the hundreds who, undeterred by the stifling Summer heat, stood on line for more than hour to gain entrance to the Shanghai Exhibition Hall where the Book Fair was held.
A bit closer to home, I can see the green shoots of an intellectual renaissance sprouting right in my office. Just a stone’s throw of my desk sit colleagues whose reading lists would warm the heart of even the most cynical social commentator. J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Dusklands’, An Oxford professor’s re-assessment of Roman social history, and a review of Indian weaponry from the 19th Century are just a sampling of the titles that populate their lists.
This development is noteworthy in its own right, but it’s broader implications can only be fully appreciated when considered in a larger context. As they work their way through the entries on these eclectic literary manifests, my colleagues, whether they realize it or not, are step-by-step re-establishing links to the scholars, literati, and eccentrics who, throughout the course of Chinese history have served as the dutiful stewards and tireless promulgators of China’s literary, cultural, and intellectual heritage. And viewed within the scope of this broader context, it is clear that these developments playing themselves out in my office are neither isolated or unique.
Every Monday at noon sharp a group of like-minded colleagues who represent departments from across the company make their way to a large conference room situated in the offices of the Communist Party on the third floor of our building. Typically, one of the attendees reports on a book that he or she has read and at the conclusion of the presentation engages the audience in discussion. The presentations are wide-ranging: “A History of Soviet Realist Art”, “Game Theory”, “An Introduction to Democracy, Constitution, and Human Rights” are examples of some of the most recent topics covered.
Queried about their reading habits through a comprehensive survey conducted last year, members of the group revealed that their primary motivation for reading was to learn more about the world and about themselves. They reported that they read 10 books a year on average (a composite total of books read in traditional and electronic formats) and suggested that the number of books an educated person should aspirationally be reading over the course of a year should be at least 20, if not more.
Taken together, the eclectic reading lists, wide-ranging discussions, and 20 book-a -year aspirations form an ensemble of leading indicators that point to a transformation in the reading habits of ordinary Chinese people that is already well underway. Novel and inventive forms of producing and consuming literature that are proliferating rapidly across the Chinese cultural landscape are the direct manifestations of this transformation and evidence of its long-term viability. Take China Literature, an expansive digital platform especially adapted to the creation of fiction in a mobile environment. China Literature facilitates direct and immediate connection between an ecosystem of more than 6 million authors and their loyal followers and then builds on that connection by making it possible for authors and readers to co-create stories. In this fluid and free-wheeling environment plotlines can be adapted on the fly and in real-time as authors make adjustments in response to comments from their readers. The China Literature platform is just one of a number of models whose developers have taken their cue from the mobile environment. The Amazon report on the evolution of Chinese reading habits, for example, describes the growing popularity of novels whose form has been tailored to accommodate the particular characteristics of mobile devices and whose content has been serialized to accommodate the lifestyle of an audience that is on the go. The report also examines the effect that consuming books in electronic format has on sharing them and presents convincing evidence for the existence of a unique stimulative effect in China and a sharing behavior whose particular characteristics are not observed anywhere else in the world
These developments make it clear that just as China is reclaiming its economic place in the world it is also regaining its cultural one and that as it revitalizes the connections to its cultural past it is concurrently building a bridge to the future. Those who despair at the closing of the Chinese mind would be well-advised to keep their own minds open to the possibilities embodied in new forms and models of literary expression. And instead of wringing their hands over the sorry state of Chinese reading they should be bringing them together to applaud this new generation of Chinese readers for reaching beyond traditional boundaries and in the process redefining what ‘reading’ is and what it means.