It’s an open secret in Hong Kong that both triads (haak1 se5 wui5 黑社會) and local police worship the same deity, Guan Gong, for upholding brotherhood, loyalty and righteousness. It may be odd for organizations that represent opposite ends of the morality scale to both honor righteousness, but it’s this blurred space between right and wrong that is so fascinating about the triads of Hong Kong.
Sheng Keyi likes metaphors. In the increasingly controlled Chinese state, metaphors have the power to circumvent censorship. But they’re not infallible, and it’s their demise that Sheng explores in her new novel. The Metaphor Detox Centre, published today in Taiwan, imagines a world in which people who use metaphors are sent for re-education.
“Originally written as a nightmare, it is based on events that are happening in reality and have affected me,” Sheng told me. “Metaphor disease is defined as the excessive use of metaphors. The fear of uncontrolled speech and knowledge-dissemination prompted the ruling class to create a new centre for ‘healing patients’, which is actually used for controlling people. Creators of metaphors, and metaphors themselves, are imprisoned.”
I am in Baan Mae village, Sanpatong County, Chiangmai, Thailand. The sun has just gone down and night is drawing in. Darkness seeps across the rice fields, the bamboo forests, the banana palms and rape flowers, and as my friends light the lanterns, I feel a light breeze. I’m thinking of you, Mum, in the bitter cold of a Beijing winter, and thinking too, of our home. Xialiu, the village in Guangdong, where, just like here, smoke from kitchen fires fills the air. When I was a kid, you’d work all day in the field before rushing home to make dinner. We were all so poor back then, we could barely afford rice. Meals were mostly sweet potatoes stewed to a porridge with a little rice. Lately, I’ve been getting nostalgic for that porridge, so sweet, so perfectly thirst-slaking. I miss my life there and as the years go by, my memories grow more and more melancholy. But that is why I decided to bring you to Beijing.
In another existence, Adam Brookes was recruited as a Chinese spy. The initial approach happened on a Sunday afternoon, as he was desultorily checking the newswires for stories at the BBC Beijing bureau where he worked as a correspondent. Knocking at the door was an elderly Chinese man bearing a briefcase. Inside it were classified neibu, or internal documents, which he pressed upon Brookes. “I was a little leery of this,” Brookes said, “So I took a look at them, and handed them back.”
A hundred years ago, Lu Xun published a short story that would forever leave its mark on both Chinese fiction and Chinese history. ‘Diary of a Madman’ (Kuangren Riji), Lu Xun’s first vernacular short story to appear in print, was published in the May 1918 issue of New Youth (Xin Qingnian), a radical journal edited by some of China’s foremost progressive thinkers. Modeled on Nikolai Gogol’s work of the same name, the story follows an unnamed protagonist’s descent into lunacy as he convinces himself that the people around him are harboring a secret desire to “eat men” – that is, that they are complicit in a feudal cannibalistic tradition.
