'Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather': Melancholy of nostalgia, through a dissident's eyes

By 1985, Gao Xingjian had been writing for more than 25 years but had little to show for it. During the height of the Cultural Revolution his wife denounced him to government officials, leading to a six-year sentence of "re-education." Everything he wrote was destroyed. Gao returned to Beijing in 1975, only to hustle out when a play offended officials. He left for a 15,000-kilometer trek through China, which became the basis for his novel "Soul Mountain." He returned to Beijing again, but by 1987 Gao was tired of harassment from the state and immigrated to France. Despite his Nobel Prize for literature, the first awarded a Chinese citizen, his books are still banned in China today.

Given this itinerary, it is understandable why Gao would be preoccupied with memory and selfhood. For a long time, his oeuvre was a palimpsest, destroyed before it could be discovered. "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Father" is his first collection of stories to emerge from his years of dissidence on Chinese soil. Not surprisingly, the book is suffused with the melancholy of nostalgia. It is as if Gao is saying goodbye to his country before he departs.

"In the Park" features a man and a woman chatting on a bench in twilight. The man has just returned after a long trip and they bat back and forth memories from childhood. Like Xingjian's 1992 play "Dialogue and Rebuttal," about a man and a woman talking — or trying to — after a night together, this couple rarely lands on a subject. "Don't talk like that," the woman says, when they get to the present, "I don't want to listen." Later, the man tries to extricate himself from a visit to her new home. She uses the word happiness. "I don't want to hear that word," he replies angrily.

A susurrant gloom emerges from these stories, as if the country's collective malaise travels on the wind. Sunsets and mountain vistas abound, seascapes give off soft sighs, but it's all depicted through a muted haze. The characters that sit by the sea or climb into the hills are erased by the landscape, rather than inspired. Only one character in this collection gets a name. Everyone else is known by a pronoun.

"The Accident" is reminiscent of Xingjian's 1983 play "Bus Stop," in which a group of people — picked to resemble Chinese society — sit and watch as buses pass without stopping. Here a man pedaling a bicycle is struck by a passing tram and crushed. The story proceeds in a series of ripples; first one person, then another and then another rush over to the scene. Some blame the man, others blame the tram driver. The man's child is pronounced dead, then alive.

Modernity, this and other stories reveal, was a dangerous thing in the China known to the author, and for good reason. Under communist rule, the state became a machine and its denizens were the cogs. The more distant past remains a somewhat happier place. At least many characters seem to think so. Sadly, as they discover, memory fades, leaving them stranded in the present. "I feel as if I'm rummaging through my pockets" says the narrator of the beautiful title story, who returns to his childhood village to find it razed and replaced by concrete-block buildings. "I've taken out everything, but still can't find what I want."

John Freeman is a writer in New York.