A few years ago, Fortune magazine ran an article entitled “10 Must-Read Books That Explain Modern China,” but only one of them, Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words (2011), captures the effects of go-go state capitalism on the Chinese psyche. Yu distills his country’s character through ten essays on essential traits and concepts such as “revolution,” ”leader” and “grassroots.” His final and most candid essay considers the widespread practice of “bamboozling.” After relating several anecdotes, he says, “When a businessman heads out to negotiate a deal, he’ll say he’s ‘off to bamboozle,’ and when a professor goes to deliver a lecture, he’ll say the same thing. Social interactions and romantic partnerships fall under this heading, too. ‘I bamboozled him into being my friend,’ you might hear someone say.”
Bamboozling in China is the pervasive gesture of characters in Jonathan Tel’s Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao, a collection of 11 linked stories. Here, exploitation and cozening are practiced in and between every stratum of society, though Tel begins with China’s sprawling underclass. In the opener, “The Shoe King of Shanghai,” an unemployed street person sidles into a lavish memorial service for a financier; the deceased, a shrewd banker named Qin, will turn up in most of the stories. The street person’s aim is to steal shoes while the mourners mingle in their silk socks. With his catch in hand, he then proceeds to try to sell the shoes, and the bamboozling continues.
In this story, Tel swiftly unspools the narrative through long bursts of comma-connected sentences and clauses. Since his single-minded, satirical focus on deception is clear to the reader from the outset, Tel generates variety in these stories by shifting from conventional modes to jittery expression. But his satiric mode doesn’t call for complexity or nuance or lyricism. It is as if Tel is channeling Winesburg, Ohio into Beijing grotesques. Pacing, nimble plotting, and telling details make the stories work.
Tel covered some of this ground earlier in The Beijing of Possibilities (2009). In those stories, he widened his lens to portray the variety of hectic activity in a city both motivated and dizzied by the speed of change. Urban scenes morphed into surreal visions. In the new stories, Tel peers at a culture in which robust policing of malfeasance exists in parallel with startling depths of corruption. In “Records of the Grand Historian,” a 30-story skyscraper (financed by the indicted banker Qin) is under construction and its builder narrates the circumstances of his situation:
“Even before you begin, there are the sweeteners to officials and to persons of power, you’ve got to wangle the necessary permits, and public security’s got to be on your side, you don’t get nothing for nothing. Then there’s the land itself; you’ve got to deal with the previous owners, one way or another, buy them off, or pay the politicians to deal with it. And the price of cement is up, and don’t talk to me about steel, and as for the workforce – the era when you could get migrants to slave for next to nothing is long past, believe you me.”
Tel wants us to grasp an underlying, pervasive dynamic – that the allure of the sweeping incoming tide of profit-making creates more than wealth. It generates a condition, an atmosphere and tone that penetrate daily life, including how young people meet and plan their futures. The skyscraper man pleads for our understanding:
“So what would you do in my position? I pass for wealthy, but if I liquidated everything today, I’d be four hundred million yuan in the hole. These are my options. One: Declare bankruptcy. I’ve got enough squirreled away, I’d still have a quality lifestyle. Two: Up the stakes. Borrow more, to keep the ball bouncing. An American connection of mine, George, put me in touch with Russian investors who are looking to launder their money … The problem is, the Chinese government doesn’t permit foreigners to own a stake in my business, so George helped me set up a Variable Interest Entity, which is made up of three separate companies …”
The facts, circumstances and stakes in these stories are spelled out in high profile, leaving the reader little to do but concur with the state of things — and to enjoy the intrigue. Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, Laundromat, offers the same effects and conclusions: everyone is screwed by the global network of exploiters, thieves we recognize as objects of satire and targets of our disdain. But while Soderbergh is free to distribute his movie as far as he can take it, Chinese authors don’t enjoy the same latitude. The seventeen novels of Yan Lianke, China’s most controversial novelist, have “been subject to an unofficial ban” as Jiayang Fan reported in The New Yorker. Only Yan’s global reputation keeps his work marginally available in China. The scarcity of homegrown writers allowed to portray China’s market-driven culture and suffocating state control makes Tel’s stories fundamental at this moment. Yan has written irreverently about the good old days of Mao – and Tel’s title echoes that impulse. In order to know if a yuan is real or counterfeit, one may scratch the image of Mao’s head. A character in a barber shop advises, “On the real bill the hair’s got texture, but on the fakes it’s totally flat.”
Just 35 years ago in China, there were no high-rises, advertising, or expressways. A woman would have been restricted to coupons for 25 pounds of grain per month and two ounces of cooking oil. There were few ready-made clothes in the stores; people received coupons for cotton with which they would buy fabric. In 1972, even while American G.I.’s were supposedly beating back Communism in Vietnam, annual bilateral trade with “Red China” was $100 million and nothing was happening on the investment side. In November 1973, the National Council for US-China Trade made its first visit to Beijing. By 2018, the value of bilateral trade was $737 billion. The American reading Tel’s stories is implicated in the effects of these changes – and perhaps it is to Tel’s credit that he generates our queasiness without calling us out directly. At least he leaves that task for us to do.
In 2016, Tel won the Sunday Times short story prize (£30,000) for “The Human Phonograph.” Included in this collection, it seems a different species from its neighbors. Set on a Chinese nuclear research facility north of the Tibetan border, the story portrays the life of a scientist and his wife; they have been separated for seven years, and it is now 1969. The wife travels to reunite with the husband and work at his base. Unlike the other stories, this one isn’t sardonic, isn’t focused on bamboozling, resonates on several levels, and is clearly the best written piece in the book. To tie it in to the rest, Tel identifies the speaker of the next story as the son of the scientist – not an implausible connection, but obviously a makeshift solution.
In the final story, Mr. Qin has run out of luck. A foreign writer, a Sinophile like Tel, is being vetted perhaps for the assignment of writing Qin’s biography. He is told, “To understand China, you have to be above a certain income level. Rich and powerful people talk to other rich and powerful people. They don’t tell the truth to you. Unless you have a very special connection.” In Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao, Jonathan Tel steps up as our special connection – and purports to be the only presence in these stories who tells the truth.
[Published by Turtle Point Press on January 28, 2020, 224 pages, $17.00 paperback original]