Jia Pingwa’s banned novel returns after 17 years

The 1993 and 2009 editions of Feidu

Jia Pingwa’s controversial novel Feidu (废都, often translated as “Abandoned Capital”), which caused a sensation upon its publication in 1993 and was banned the same year, has returned to print after sixteen years during which it was only available in pirated editions.

The official launch, which is technically for a trilogy that includes both Turbulence (浮躁, 1987) and Qin Qiang (秦腔, 2005), will take place in Xi’an on August 8, but the book slipped quietly into stores last week without any advance notice.

The restraint is understandable given the book’s troubled history. Its initial publication in 1993 by the Beijing Publishing House was accompanied by a media frenzy that sensationalized the book as a modern Jin Ping Mei, the classic Ming Dynasty novel famed for its explicit sexual passages, and hype ranged from the author’s rumored million-yuan advance to a million-copy print run, and from speculation about the nature of the book’s deleted passages to the avalanche of bootleg versions that soon appeared in streetside book stalls. Feidu was banned before the year was out.

In late 2003, a decade after the ban, a new edition was rumored to be in the works. The Southern Metropolis Daily printed a preface to that edition in which Jia wrote of his detached reaction to the news. But the book never made it onto shelves, perhaps because of fears that the media hype engine was gearing up again. A GAPP official told Oriental Outlook magazine in January 2004, “Feidu has not been unbanned. Outside claims that Feidu will be republished in 2004 are pure hype.” And Yin Aiping, head of the book publishing management department at the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press and Publication, which issued the original ban order, went further:

“Feidu is unbanned” is, I think, hype from booksellers….after so many years the storm has died down, so they’re hyping it up to make another bundle. Perhaps they think that they’ll really be able to publish the book.

At the time, critic Xie Youshun hailed the possible republication as a sign that times had changed, that Chinese society no longer saw sexual content as shocking or controversial. But this year’s reissue may be due more to changes that took place in other areas. The Beijing News concluded its article last week with a suggestion that authorities are no longer personally invested in maintaining the ban:

Several years back the media announced that Feidu would be reissued, but it never actually materialized. At the time, Yan Aiping said, “In 1993, we acted on GAPP’s instructions and banned Feidu for ‘vulgarity and sexual content,’ and also punished the publisher.” Today, the power of book approval now belongs to GAPP. People in the industry have changed, the approval authorities have changed, and the censors have changed, providing a fine opportunity for Feidu to be reissued.

Times have indeed changed. Jia, a respectable novelist prior to the Feidu controversy, is now firmly back in the good graces of the literary establishment and was given the Mao Dun Prize last year for Qin Qiang. Oddly, the award is not mentioned in the short bio inside the cover of the new edition, which states only that he has “won numerous national literary prizes, the Pegasus Prize, the Prix Femina, and was made a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters.”*

Taking inspiration from the bowdlerization of classic erotic novels, the novel interrupted risque passages with a series of boxes (□□□□□□) and the annotation The author deleted xx words here, which led readers to imagine the existence of an uncensored “author’s edition” that filled in all of the smutty details (and which motivated unscrupulous bootleggers to provide exactly that).

But that imagined edition does not actually exist, as Jia revealed in a dialogue with Xie Youshun ahead of the aborted 2004 republication:

Xie: Sex was a major reason for the controversy surrounding Feidu. Another reason was the trick you played with boxes and the line “xx words deleted.” I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you to tell us whether those words were actually deleted, or if it was purely a publishing strategy and the words were never written in the first place? Now that it’s been more than ten years, can you finally let the truth out?

Jia: I wrote about sex. Why sex? It was because of the demands of character formation, for one: in order for Zhuang Zhidie to extricate himself, he had to seek out women. And out of a thought for the writing, for another: all four-hundred-plus-thousand characters of the novel were about everyday life. When I wrote about a meal I could write four or five pages, about drinking tea I could write three or four pages. I wrote about all of the headaches of the daytime, so there’s no way I could avoid writing about the things of the night, and that meant that touching on sex was inevitable. When I was writing about sex, I wrote out a little bit, but then I didn’t write any more, because I had to consider the national conditions, you know, so I thought I’d just write a little bit and that would be enough. And then I replaced the portion I didn’t write with boxes. When I handed the manuscript to the publisher later on, they deleted additional sections. So the number of characters listed in parenthesis as having been deleted is actually no longer very accurate. For ten years, lots of people have asked me this question, and now I’ve given a truthful answer.

In the present version, the boxes have all been replaced with ellipses and the notes no longer reveal precisely how many characters the author was supposed to have deleted.* That’s apparently all the editing that has taken place. He Jianming, president of the Writers Publishing House, told The Beijing News, “This is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a normal publication of one of Jia Pingwa’s novels after a round of editing.”

The issue of the boxes also turns up in the first of three forewords to this new edition. Li Jingze, current editor of the journal People’s Literature, bookends a freewheeling discussion of Feidu‘s achievements and inadequacies with the suggestion that the boxes represent a failure of characterization that allows the protagonist, Zhuang Zhidie, to abdicate moral responsibility for his actions. It’s a peculiar essay that ties Feidu to the present moment with tossed-off references to shanzhai culture, “lecture room” scholarship, and Xiao Shenyang.

The other two forewords are more scholarly, complete with footnotes. PKU professor of literature Chen Xiaoming writes about the historical semantics of Jia’s writing, paying particular attention to the three volumes in the “trilogy,” and Xie Youshun contributes a discussion of Jia’s narrative ethics.

The overall intent of the three forewords seems to be an attempt at restoring Feidu‘s status as a work of literature rather than a literary or cultural phenomenon. In an opinion piece in The Beijing News last week, critic You Mianjin argued for just that approach, but feared that media sensationalism was already hard at work:

I was born too late to catch the first round of Feidu fever in 1993. Of course I came across the book later on, packaged like a pirate edition and sold by uneducated plebeians as pornography to be hidden away lest the children find it, or a possibly authentic copy placed on a shelf so as to enjoy the delight of possessing a banned book without actually reading it.

Pirated editions in Jia’s library

Looking back at the publication of this book seventeen years ago, it was an innocent, beautiful exercise in hype. First, the news came out that Jia Pingwa was writing a romance to rival Dream of the Red Chamber, and then there was the rumor about a one-million-yuan manuscript fee, later clarified to be a misunderstanding of 150 yuan per 1,000 characters.* Then there were the pumped-up printing numbers, from an initial printing of 100,000, through additional printings to make a total of 1.2 million a month, and then the ban order was handed down, which halted both printing and distribution, recalled all copies, confiscated the publisher’s profits, and assessed double that in fines….all the techniques that matured through repeated use over the next decade or more, until all we’re really able to say today is, “Ha ha.”

Seventeen years later, we have a much more subdued reissue of a Feidu that claims to be a “revised edition” that’s “unedited,” with the boxes replaced by ellipses. There’s no chance that everyone’s going to buy a copy, so a high cover price was the target: a nicely-bound, slipcased set of Turbulence, Qin Qiang, and Feidu is selling for 116 yuan. On its own, Feidu is also available for the low, low price of 39 yuan. Reportedly, “the book sector is fairly cool at the moment,” so copies aren’t flying off the shelves, and “it’s pretty much impossible for there to be fever over Feidu in this day and age.”

Seventeen years if the masses could draw the curtains and watch a Cat III film from Hong Kong, there was no end to their excitement; seventeen years later, college males can download adult films day or night by computer. Seventeen years ago, if a family had an expurgated Jin Ping Mei, it was kept a secret; seventeen years later, no online romance novel is without big chunks of sex. Regardless of the interpretation and deconstruction the critical world has performed on Feidu, of the 12 million official, semi-official, and bootleg copies that were sold, quite a large percentage is accounted for by misinformed masses seeking erotic material, with few people likely to be interested in the thought processes of a 90s-era intellectual. Dream of the Red Chamber gave birth to Redology, yet lots of people just want to read about Baoyu and Daiyu falling in love.

These days, Feidu‘s biggest gimmick is, in the minds of most people, no longer such a bombshell, so the natural significance of the reissue lies in the possibility for a clear, rational examination of literary value that was previously drowned out. Yet even this feels a little forced: there’s really no reason to bring up how “Ji Xianlin said that Feidu would shine in twenty years.” Ji is not a Tiger Balm to be applied everywhere, and besides, the man just died, so to drag him out for undisguised hype is bad manners beyond what was done seventeen years ago. The best home for Feidu would be for it to quietly enter literary history and await the cleansing wash of time.

The sole regrettable thing is that there’s no more “□□□□ (the author deleted xx characters here),” which would otherwise be of historical interest as a kind of parody of the bowdlerized Jin Ping Mei – when I furtively read Jin Ping Mei when I was young, those boxes always appeared at critical moments. It was truly infuriating, but when I went back to catch up on it as an adult, I discovered they were little more than that, and certainly not as good of a read as the sections about everyday life. Taboos are strangely seductive, but when they’re set free and laid bare, they lose their mysterious garb and become ordinary. This fact is understood by many, and misunderstood by many others. Feidu has lost this ritual aesthetic and feels a little more ordinary. I’m reminded of how a well-known fiction website strips out unwholesome words and replaces them with □□, leading to some very peculiar effects. If this incarnation of Feidu had filled in the deleted sections, and then dug out a few box-shaped holes, it may have made for an interesting text of our times. And if doing it manually would be a hassle, then Green Dam could have been put to the task – too bad that’s all impossible now, and we’re left to sigh at ordinary ellipses.

Notes

1. Jia told the Chinese Business View that when he was notified of the Femina award, he and a few journalist friends debated how best to present the news in the mainland media. They eventually decided to hedge their bets by writing “One of Jia Pingwa’s novels (Feidu) won the Prix Femina in France.” Sure enough, the censors clipped the book’s title but left a readable sentence intact.
2. As it turns out, the edits have not been done consistently. Compare this excerpt from page 311 in my copy of the original (which is a semi-authorized edition at best), which has three sets of boxes totalling 279 deleted characters, with this excerpt from pages 275-276 in the new edition, which has three sets of ellipses but only two notations of deleted material. The third, which in the original represented a 200-character deletion, is unmarked, causing potential confusion with ellipses retained from the original text that do not represent unwritten sex scenes. Elsewhere, boxes have occasionally been deleted without being replaced with ellipses.
3. One report said that Jia had received 1000150 yuan for the novel, which was based on a misreading of 1000字150元, or roughly 60,000 yuan for the 400,000-character novel. At the same time, the publisher was also rumored to have paid 300,000 yuan for the rights to the manuscript. Jia later said he received 40,000 (see the Chinese Business View article below).

Further Reading: Capital, Re-Ruined at Paper Republic; and Jia Pingwa talks about the 2004 reissue on Danwei.