CHAPTER 3

Aesthetic of Heterogeneity: Roots in Han

Shaogong’s Theoretical and Literary Writings

The Cultural Revolution is China’s catastrophe. It is a concentrated explo-

sion of the deeply rooted ills of the system, culture, and human nature.
But it is also a flash of lightning that enables people to see through many
things.
—han shaogong1

Literature is forever like a returnee who sails against the current, a reac-
tionary who transforms any era into the same era. Literature eternally
locks our gaze onto some unchanging themes: for instance, conscience,
sympathy, and public exchange of knowledge.
—han shaogong2

In the foreword to the most recent anthology of his major writings,

Contemporary Chinese Writers: Han Shaogong Series (2007), Han Shaogong
reflects on his thirty-year career as a writer and states that if it were not for the
whims of fate cast by the Cultural Revolution, it would have been unlikely for
him to embark on the road of writing. He intimates that writing is a choice-
less response to a certain unshakable grief and secret anguish ( jiyu he yintong)
that lurks in the mind. He expresses that writing gives him an outlet for certain
enduring ideas and a deep wish (changnian he shenyuan) that are difficult for
him to abandon.3
Han’s comments immediately locate the Cultural Revolution as a constitu-
tive base of his thirty-year long journey as a writer—a traumatic base, indeed.
The “accumulated grief and secret anguish” articulated by him time and again

1 See Han Shaogong, “Hu si luan xiang—da bei mei huaqiaoribao ji zhe Xia Yu” 胡思乱
想—答北美日报日报记者夏瑜 (Random Thoughts—in Response to North America
Daily Journalist Xia Yu),” in Da ti xiao zuo 大题小作 (Small Contributions to Great Issues)
(Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 2008), p. 102. All quotations by Han Shaogong
have been translated by the author.
2 Han Shaogong, “Jin bu de hui tui” 进步的回退 (Regression in the Guise of Progress), in Da ti
xiao zuo, p. 5.
3 Liu Yang, “Xu yan” (Foreword), in Da ti xiao zuo, p. 1.

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46 CHAPTER 3

illustrate the correlation between trauma and creative endeavor. For Han,
this has been the Cultural Revolution. His writings can be seen as an artistic
response to trauma from the Cultural Revolution.4 The “enduring ideas” and
“deep wish” mentioned by Han similarly point to a different correlation—that
between trauma and illumination. They are the revelatory insights endowed
by the “flash of lightning” of the Cultural Revolution. By the end of this chapter,
a meditation on both Han’s theoretical and fiction writing, I hope that those
“enduring ideas” and the “deep wish” that haunt the writer and underline his
often vague and opaque writings will be elucidated.
Han Shaogong’s influence on post-Mao literature is vast and profound. His
1985 theoretical essay “Wenxue de gen” (Roots of Literature), sparked a constel-
lation of responses and was seen as a manifesto marking a decisive break from
social realism that had characterized Chinese literature since Mao’s 1942 “Talks
at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature.” The success of “Roots of Literature”
was followed by a series of attention-arresting novellas: Homecoming, Pa Pa
Pa and Woman, Woman, Woman. In short, Han’s work remains a major and
recognized influence on the Root-Seeking movement—“one of the key liberat-
ing developments in post-Mao literature” that reopened “fiction to influences
from Chinese traditional cultures, aesthetics, and language, rebelling against
decades of stifling Communist controls.”5
Born in 1953, Han Shaogong came from an intellectual family and lost his
father during the Cultural Revolution.6 A youth when the political upheavals
swept the country, Han thus belongs to the generation of “educated youth”
(zhiqing) and was sent to villages in northern Hunan province to work along-
side the peasants. The traumatic past bears a relation to his formation as a
writer as it is repetitively configured in the corpus of his writings. Diverse,
complex, obscure, and even seemingly contradictory at times, his writings pro-
voke a cluster of crucial questions pertaining to the aesthetic afterlives of the
Cultural Revolution: Does Han’s appeal to writers to seek their roots represent
purely an interest in excavating traditional aesthetics and cultures? Or is it a

4 The correlation between trauma and creative response is not only theorized by Freud in his
famous case of fort/da game played by his grandson, but has a deep root in Chinese tradition
as well. It is well known that the completion of the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian)
(史記) by Sima Qian (145 or 135 b.c.e.–86 b.c.e.), considered the father of Chinese histo-
riography, is motivated by great suffering—the most humiliating and painful punishment,
castration.
5 Han Shaogong, “Translator’s Preface,” in A Dictionary of Maqiao, trans. Julia Lovell (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), p. vii.
6 His father committed suicide due to political pressure during the Cultural Revolution.