The Fat Years
3/10. Bad. Because the giant Mao portrait and the subtitle “The book no one in China dares publish” caught my eye.
Koon Chung Chan’s The Fat Years is a political thesis disguised as a near-future speculative fiction novel. Similar to 1984, but with bad writing and questionable politics. The protagonist is a middle-aged man called Lao Chen from Hong Kong who is currently living in Beijing. Surprise, surprise: the Chinese government is up to no good, and it’s up to Chen and his gang to get to the bottom of this mystery. Through the weak narrative, it delivers a hollow argument against Chinese society and the Chinese government, while attempting to educate the reader about modern China. Ten years after its publication, some aspects have aged well while others haven’t. It provides certain insights, but it’s still a mundane read for someone who understands China, and I imagine incomprehensible read for someone who doesn’t.
The Fat Years start off with Chen being approached by Fang Caodi, an old friend and somewhat of a conspiracy theorist about a ‘lost month and general happiness’, as well as a long-time crush, Wei Xihong, whom he calls Little Xi, within an hour of each other. There is a lot of confusion and some missteps, but they kidnap a high-ranking government official and make him spill the beans, and they all go their separate ways, lovebirds Chen and Xi riding into off into the sunset.
Before delving into the politics of this, the writing first needs to be addressed. There are funny parts, like this description of Party goals which manages to sound simultaneously Orwellian and textbook CPC English:
“One party democratic dictatorship; the rule of law with stability as the most important element; a state-controlled market economy; fair competition guaranteed by state-owned enterprises; … a self-centered harmonious foreign policy; a multiethnic republic ruled by one sovereign ethnic group of Han Chinese”
Or the ridiculous heroic lines that Chen spouts every so often, which are also hilarious:
“We want to live, too, and we can only live if you live. We just want you to understand that we are all now in a ‘live together or die together’ situation. Live, and we all live, or die, and we all die, and the choice is up to you”
“I shouldn’t have let Little Xi leave. I should have declared my love sooner. I regret it all now.”
I’m not entirely sure that any of those parts were meant to be comedic, but they shine. The rest is an absolute disaster, a vanity project. Chen, the protagonist, is an obvious stand-in for the author, Chan. Chen is a successful author and journalist who was raised in Hong Kong, but currently lives in Beijing, just like Chan. In the novel, he is a cool and wealthy ladies man chasing his childhood crush while casually making various specific and irrelevant references.
On wine: “Jian would bring out a bottle of red wine-always the finest-vintage. ’82, ’85, or ’89 Bordeaux… I told him I was bringing a Bâtard-Montrachet 1989 and a Romanée-Conti 1999.”
On art: “This gallery had an expensive collection of French Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings, including some small works by famous masters and, more importantly, many works by lesser known figures of that period.//Their collection is really worth looking at, and it suits my increasingly conservative tastes, I pondered… The chandelier hanging in the major salon was not made from Chinese materials-it was a genuine Baccarat-crystal chandelier. //As I was looking at that chandelier and ruminating on how the style and temperament of the Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings were not quite in sync with the Baccarat crystal”
On books: “He had a very long list of unread books that he wanted to read, including Chinese classical studies, such as the twenty-four official histories, and classic European fiction, such as the nineteenth century Russian novels. He regarded these as the high point of Western fiction”
On fashion: “He was reading a beige trench coat of the sort worn by Hong Kong comic actor Ng Man Tat when playing a private detective, or Law Kar-ying in the role of a sexual deviant, a flasher, Obviously, Lao Chen was not at all thinking of himself in this light. In his mind, when he put on his trench coat, he looked more like Hollywood tough guy Humphrey Bogart, or the author Graham Greene.”
The cartoon heroism and encyclopedic cultural references are just one aspect of the dreadful narration. The bigger problem is the prose; everything is delivered matter-of-factly, and the description is in the wrong places. The sentences are jarring and the words seem out of place. It’s like reading Hemingway without any force of substance behind them, if Hemingway wasn’t averse to adverbs. I sincerely hope that the root of these complaints can be chalked up to language and translation, and the original is less horrendous.
Unfortunately, the plot is also a mess. Chen is initially approached by Fang for two reasons: find the ‘missing month’ and the cause of everyone’s euphoria. Then Chen bumps into Xi, who disappears, leaving a trail for him to follow. Minor characters, such as Xi’s fascist son, and Chen’s other ex-flame are introduced and then forgotten about along the way. Xi is found at an underground church, which is totally irrelevant to the main plot, and together they kidnap a high-ranking government official for questioning. The interrogation is the last quarter of the novel and is mostly comprised of a lengthy monologue delivered by the official they capture. In the end, the two questions presented at the beginning of the novel aren’t even answered. The deus ex machina of kidnapping an official happens abruptly and unbelievably, and ends in a shoddy explanation for the happiness (microdoses of MDMA in the water), and no explanation at all for the collective amnesia (they simply forgot). And there’s no character development.
Before delving into the politics, I would like to acknowledge that I do have the luxury of the ten years since the book has been published. It might have been apt and prescient at the time, and even now, there are some aspects that ring true. The censorship. The power of the police. The loyalty to the Party. The truest observations to anyone who has lived in China, were the plot McGuffins, the collective happiness and amnesia. The Chinese are extremely satisfied with the way their country is being run. Rather, the majority of the Han Chinese are reaping the rewards of the government’s policies at the cost of a minority of minorities. From boycotting Canadian/American products, to the box office showing of Wolf Warrior 2 and The Wandering Earth, the Chinese are proud to be Chinese once again. After the century of humiliation and recent kowtowing to western ideals, this is something to applaud. There is nothing wrong with celebrating China’s achievements. But the amnesia is concerning. The collective unwillingness to discuss past atrocities is bad enough, but an unwillingness to notice certain aspects of the current reality is terrifying. It’s one thing to acknowledge that there is a trade-off being made, certain liberties for exponential development, but to not be aware of that is disturbing. And that is happening in China.
For a reader that doesn’t know China, this novel is incomprehensible. The flurry of names is hard enough to follow, not to mention the lengthy discussions into various aspects of Chinese culture. The briefing on police crackdowns and organized religion in China give an impression that China is a police state, ruled by force and fear. By and large, this is true. However, the strength of the narrative was as I had mentioned above: that the Chinese people are happy in this climate. It’s Huxley’s London without the soma. This won’t be evident to the reader without background, and the wayward explanation of molly water muddles the novel enough to turn it to a tale of government suppression as opposed to complicit amnesia.
For the mainland Chinese reader living in China, this novel is also incomprehensible. Koon Chung Chan is an outsider looking into China and sees the blind happiness of the Chinese as something disturbing. Many expats who have lived in China, including myself find that this is the case as well. However, the Chinese don’t actually care. In Western media, there are recent reports of the protests in Hong Kong, and the internment camps in Xinjiang. The large majority of Chinese are willfully ignorant about it. And why wouldn’t they be? They’ve been given development and stability, something that no one living in China today has been able to experience until decades after the Southern Tour. If they were to read the book, there would be no grand reaction. Chan doesn’t write the book in a way that shows the hoi polloi the shortcomings of the CPC. Rather, they’d view Chen’s gang as disturbers of the peace, and think that they should be happy given all that the government has done for them. They have no real grievances against the government.
Ultimately, The Fat Years is too heavy handed, and isn’t a complex allegory, such as 1984, or Brave New World, but is rather a thinly veiled political thesis, comprehensible only to those who understand a little of China, and at the same time, don’t drink the Wang Lao Ji. But even then, it’s a terrible novel. And to everyone else, the thesis cannot be understood, nor applied to other milieu.
A novel must be a novel at the end of the day. It can make the most penetrating observations and prophetic judgements, but there is no use if it isn’t well written. And it’d also be a boring read. Take the works of Ayn Rand, notorious for being philosophically shaky. Yet they’re widely read because they’re pleasant to read. I might add that Galt’s speech was less than a tenth of Atlas Shrugged, whereas the monologue by the kidnapped government official takes up almost a quarter of The Fat Years. Even though I was the target audience for this novel, I found it bad, and would not recommend anyone read it.
