Hard Lives, Big Dreams

2017-09-05 source：chinadaily

Writer Jia Pingwa attends the launch ceremony of the English-language version of his novel, Happy Dreams. The book tells the story of migrant workers in cities. [Photo provided to China Daily]

An English-language version of Jia Pingwa's work, Happy Dreams, has just been published in both print and electronic formats. It looks at the lives of scrappers against the backdrop of big social changes. Yang Yang reports.

One afternoon in 2004, Chinese writer Jia Pingwa received his primary school classmate Liu Shuzhen at his home in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province. Liu, a farmer from a poor village in Shaanxi, had tried to visit Jia before, but Jia was out then.

This time, Liu told the writer that he came to Xi'an to join his son, who delivered briquettes. But the father left the son and became a scrapper after a fight.

Liu had changed his name from Shuzhen to Gaoxing, which means happy, because he was so delighted to come to Xi'an.

Like tens of thousands of scrappers living in Xi'an at the turn of the century, Liu lived a hard life, sleeping in a shack built with plastic boards.

In summer, it was so hot that he had to pour water on the ground and spread a husk mat on it to be able to fall asleep. However, Jia found Liu was extremely humorous and optimistic when telling him stories about scrappers that day.

Jia, a well-know writer, who has lived in Xi'an for more than 30 years, had seen many scrappers around the city, but he did not know anything about their lives.

These people were in general invisible.

His classmate's stories inspired him to write a novel about this group, who usually come from the countryside, try to make some money and dream of a better life.

It was a generation of migrant workers against the backdrop of big social changes.

"I wanted to record with my novel how this generation of migrant workers like Liu entered the city, how they made a living, how they felt about the city and their destinies. I am happy if readers learn more about them and their lives through my novel," says Jia.

Jia did a lot of interviews with the workers. And from October 2005 to February 2007, Jia rewrote his draft four times until he was satisfied. Happy Dreams had a print run of 300,000 copies when it was published in 2007.

Now an English version, published on Aug 23, is available in 183 countries, in both print and electronic formats.

The novel tells the story of the protagonist, Liu Gaoxing, or Happy Liu, and his friends in the city.

Liu and his friend, Wu Fu, arrive in Xi'an in 2000 from their village and move into a semi-completed building.

Speaking about the book, Nicky Harman, the English translator of the novel, says: "In depicting the life of Happy Liu, Jia Pingwa gives us a fine-drawn character. He is complex and contradictory as all human beings are. And he can be by turn pretentious, engaging, scheming, honest, foul-mouthed, affectionate and unintentionally comic. In many ways, Happy Liu is an unlikely hero, but he wins sympathy, because he is so very human.

"Like what Jia Pingwa says in the postscript... he did a lot of research about migrant workers before writing the novel, but this work is first and foremost a novel, fiction."

During the translation, she says, she came across a lot of big and small challenges. The biggest ones were getting the translation of the dialect and the local color right.

"The story consists of Liu's monologues or conversations with his friends. Chitchat is by nature elusive. So, it's even more difficult to understand what the protagonist was getting at when dialect is added to the mix. In some cases, Jia Pingwa invented his own expressions," she says.

Another difficulty was to find convincing voices for Liu and his friends in English.

"I couldn't let them speak an equivalent English dialect. I couldn't make Happy Liu sound like a Glasgow taxi driver," she says.

When dealing with local food that Jia wrote about in the novel, Harman did a lot of research online. When she sometimes still could not understand things, she would ask Jia for help. The writer would then send her hand-drawn sketches to answer the questions.

She says she enjoyed reading the story of Liu Gaoxing and his friends.

Harman came across the novel in 2008 and immediately empathized with the characters. Then, after several unsuccessful attempts to interest Western publishers, she translated an excerpt for the Guardian in Britain.

But it was not until 2015 that an Amazon China editor, trying to find Chinese literary works for a translation project, spotted the Guardian excerpt and approached Harman to translate the novel.

Happy Dreams is one of the 19 Chinese literary works translated by Amazon into English. Fifteen have been published.

Li Jingze, a Chinese literary critic, says: "They (readers) can now read the story of common Chinese people in Happy Dreams and learn about how they live in a fast-changing society.

"From this point of view, it is the most representative work by Jia Pingwa."

 You said in a previous interview that in principle you are a countryman, a ghost from the countryside that wails in the city. Why?

 I was born in the countryside. Life in the rural areas is still much harder compared with in city. Now things are getting a little better.

However, when young people from the countryside arrive in cities－although from appearance, they look the same as young people growing up in cities－their minds are very different. And only they themselves know it.

 The city is a platform, full of competition, uneven distribution of resources and unfair treatment. It is just like in the wild, pregnant leopards kill other animals' offspring to raise their own babies. It is cruel, but it is nature.

 People all have their merits and demerits. But can these young migrant workers be treated fairly and thus live a better life? As I come from a village, I can sense the emotions involved in the lives of migrant workers.

 You once said that local literature about the rural areas in China will not be the mainstream direction any more. What do you think will be the future mainstream direction for Chinese literature?

 Local literature about the rural areas will not be the mainstream literature in China any more due to China's urbanization. For example, in the two more-developed provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, there used to be rural areas, but now they have turned into towns. And life in towns is different from that in the countryside. But urbanization is a slow process, and China still has a lot of rural areas in the west, northwest, northeast and southwest. So local literature about life in those areas will continue to dominate.

 How do you resolve the plight of migrant workers represented by Liu Gaoxing?

 Migrant workers represented by Liu Gaoxing in Happy Dreams were the first-generation migrant workers. The situation they faced in cities has changed.

 Now there are very few young people in rural areas. Even if they do not work in cities, young people from the countryside will still drift to the cities, doing any kind of work and making some money that they use up very soon. The first-generation migrant workers still have emotional ties with the land, so they want to go back to their hometown, just like Wu Fu in Happy Dreams. However, the second-and the third-generation migrant workers have very few ties to the land but neither can they identify with the cities. So they just drift, which is a worse problem.

 Young people growing up in cities seem to pay more attention to cities. How are young-generation writers different from older generations?

 I arrived in the big city of Xi'an from the countryside. But my kids grew up in Xi'an. Without living a rural life, my daughter cannot pay much attention to the countryside. If she writes, mostly she will write about the urban life she is familiar with. It is impossible to write deep things even after doing a lot of research if you are not familiar with things. Now young people are capable only of writing about cities.

 So will this create a new direction for Chinese literature?

 The direction of Chinese literature will change. However, no matter what young people write, it is all about people. Rural areas or cities, it is just the change of the surroundings, the stage, the backdrop. But the performance stays the same. It's the same with stories of war and peace.