Aqueous Profundity

~ Braised Pork, by An Yu ~

This debut novel by An Yu starts with a bang. Jia Jia walks into the bathroom to ask her husband which scarf he prefers, and finds him dead in the bath. She does not scream or panic. After attempting to pull him up, and pulling the plug so the water could drain:

Crossing her arms on the rim of the bath, Jia Jia observed her husband’s body as if he were a sculpture in the museum. She had never seen such stillness. She was certain that this was the first moment of silence she had spent with him in their four years of marriage: even when they slept, there were always sounds — his snoring, the air conditioning, cars on the street. But she could not hear anything now.

That should give you a taste of An Yu’s style, and that of her main character: detached, observant, thoughtful.

Braised Pork follows Jia Jia through the next year of her life. Her marriage had been loveless, the couple held together out of their desire to have a family, but no child had been born. She is left with financial problems: she has no job, her husband left no money and assets beyond the apartment, too large for them, and unmarketable. She used to paint, but her husband never encouraged her to sell her paintings, so her possible career remained a hobby. She has had no real love life. Where will she go from here?

The novel is set in a matter-of-fact, contemporary Beijing.

It was snowing and rather cold, even for a December night in Beijing. The haze contaminated the snow as it descended in flakes the size of sunflower seeds. [Jia Jia] thought about putting the mask on, changed her mind, and stuffed it back into her pocket.

Class, ethnicity, and cultural specificities are woven into the writing.

He remembered Chen Hang clearly: a clean-shaven man, dark-skinned even in winter, with only occasional hints of southern tones in his Mandarin. Chen Hang was tall for a southerner, with broad shoulders and a strong physique. But every time he stepped out of the bar he lowered his head, lifted his shoulders, and sped up his footsteps ever so slightly. [] He would never stroll the city streets like they were hi sown: a trait that was distinctly ‘Beijingese’, even for its poorest citizens. He had never acquired that particular sense of entitlement.

So far, so good.

Then comes the first thread of magical realism. Jia Jia’s husband has left behind a drawing of a ‘fish-man’ — a fish’s body with a man’s head. She remembers that when in Tibet, during ‘a spiritual escape from all this crap’, he had had a dream: a small fish served to him on a plate started talking, and then he realized it was actually a man. He mentioned this dream just once.

Then Jia Jia has a dream of drowning and seeing a silver fish. (Despite its title, fish are more central to the novel than pork). Some samples from her watery dream:

Time became indistinct and irrelevant.

The darkness rippled like silk.

This is rather nondescript writing, and it’s hard to get a sense of why this matters so much to Jia Jia, or why it should matter at all to the reader. The fish, or fish-man, when it speaks, tends to come up with rather prosaic and meaningless statements like ‘Don’t wait for me for dinner’. Shouldn’t one expect a bit more from a mystical being at the center of a novel?

Regardless, Jia Jia starts painting again. She paints (needless to say) fish-men, but is unable to paint their faces. Her obsession with the fish-man increases until she is impelled to make a visit to Tibet, to see the village where her husband had dreamed his dream. Once she gets to Tibet, the surrealism takes over, and to me the book became entirely meandering, unfocused, and mystifying.

This is the kind of novel where characters are slightly hyperbolic and caricatured, giving the impression that they are meant to be deeper representations of some sort of metaphor. in Lhasa, Jia meets a writer, Ren Qi. He is searching for his missing Tibetan wife, shows a deep interest in the fish-man, walks with a crutch, and it turns out his wife had been born in the same Tibetan village where Jia Jia’s husband had his dream. What do these connections mean? I’ve read the book, but your guess is as good as mine.

Intermittent glimpses of Jia Jia’s past are provided: her father left the family when she was young to live with his new love. Her mother was ‘shattered like antique porcelain’ by this abandonment. Her aunt and grandmother live together in an apartment block, and her aunt’s husband is involved in shady deals. The modern descriptions of life and relationships in Beijing were interesting, and I wish they had been better developed.

Many other threads go nowhere. Jia Jia has a large birthmark on her thigh that repulsed her husband, but her new lover might not mind. Does he or doesn’t he? We never find out, but the birthmark is weightily mentioned at several points.

An Yu is a young Chinese author who lives in Beijing, and writes in English. Thus, my lack of understanding of the overall theme cannot be blamed on layers of translation.

This novel was received quite positively by the critics: ‘crisp and never tedious, with bursts of startling imagery’, ‘enthralling’, ‘startlingly original’, ‘unforgettable’ … it’s sometimes startling how differently readers respond to the same text.

‘It’s like I’ve been walking up the walls of a tower my whole life,’ she explained. [] ‘My body is parallel to the ground, and then, the world turns and I’m standing straight up, and the tower is lying flat on the ground. Everything is now distorted but my head is up again, I’m walking forward. But the truth is, I don’t even know which way is up. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’

No.