Looking East: Reliable Guides to China and Its History
Publication:
The Wall Street Journal
Date:
08/18/2007
Wang Shuo has claimed his own Chinese fiction genre: "hooligan literature," which revels in vulgarity and the rude contempt for authority shown by disaffected Chinese youth. In the novel "Please Don't Call Me Human" (translated by Howard Goldblatt), he describes an alternative Olympics in which nations compete for medals by humiliating themselves and their athletes. The protagonist is a bicycle-rickshaw driver and martial-arts aficionado who is recruited as a wrestling competitor and then put through an ordeal that culminates in his castration. But the plot is almost beside the point in this surreal tale. It was written long before Beijing won the right to stage the 2008 Games but would be an excellent counterweight to next summer's festivities.
