26th of June – Summary of Han Shaogong’s ‘Pa Pa Pa’ by Cory Nguyen

This week’s session was lead by Dr Xiaofan Amy Li

The summary of the discussion is written by Cory Nguyen

Image: Xu Bing: Book from the Sky, Blanton Museum Austin TX by sbmeaper1 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/)

This week we discussed Han Shaogong’s Pa Pa Pa. Both terribly grim and terribly comic, Han’s text tells the story of an topographically and temporally isolated village and its inhabitants, and in particular, Young Bing, a boy who never grows and can only utter ‘Papa’ and ‘F___ Mama’. Han writes the story in almost vignette-like flashes of prose, with his narrative fleeting and merely brushing past characters as it moves along. We find the village and its inhabitants to be superstitious and violent, wearing the skin of tradition. Speaking in archaic Mandarin and mixing up kinship pronouns, they seem to exist in a space untouched by time and modern culture. 

It came up that the lack of a cultural framework through which we could read the story induced anxiety, as if the heavy Eurocentrism of our education comes and shames us. But perhaps in our lack of knowledge, we speed up the Barthesian death of the author and forcefully decenter the grounding of the story in the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. To view Young Bing as merely an allegorical representation of China in the wake of the Maoist regime would be overly reductive and frankly uninteresting. Yet, despite this benefit of reading Pa Pa Pa in a cloud of cultural unfamiliarity, the issue of reading in translation came up. The story undoubtedly deals with language, often playing with sounds in different ways. Han’s usage of homophonic puns, for example, in the title and Young Bing’s name is obscured through the process of translation, losing a sense of comedy throughout the narrative. But is this truly the case? Venuti, in his article ‘How to Read a Translation’, for example, reminds us that ‘the fact remains that the translator has chosen every single word in the translation, whether or not a foreign word lies behind it’. It would do a disservice to the text to so adamantly glorify the linguistic play of the original to the point that we ignore the linguistic play of the translation. Cheung retains the onomatopoeic quality of the title in translating ‘ba’ as ‘pa’ rather than keeping it as ‘ba’, and in doing so, she clearly demonstrates a thought about the translation of sound. Cheung’s further use of innuendos builds upon the comic nature of the text. For example, in describing ‘Mount Cock’, she writes that ‘below its peak—Cock’s Head—there was a jagged cliff with multi-coloured veins in the rocks’ (61). While the sounds of the original are muffled in the translation, this is not inherently ‘bad’ in any sense. If anything, the translation reminds us to confront our distance to Chinese culture (though reducing Chinese culture to a single, uniform culture is rather problematic). It is also important to emphasize Han’s exoticization of traditional culture, because when we address his exoticization of traditional Chinese culture towards an audience fluent in Chinese (and presumably Chinese culture as well), we are confronted with the fact of the text’s inherent distance from the reader, one that, though varying, is maintained through the process of translation and is portrayed to the extended audience.

Moving past the issue of translation and cultural difference, the character of Young Bing proved to be interesting, drawing comparisons to works by Günter Grass and Peter Pišťanek. As previously stated, Young Bing only says two expressions: ‘Papa’ and ‘F___ Mama’. Han writes that ‘it didn’t really mean anything and could simply be taken as a sign, a symbol, what you will’ (35). Young Bing is, essentially, an empty space onto which the villagers imbue meaning. At one point, they use him in a sort of semiotic augury, inscribing meaning upon his words and movements. We find this when ‘a heated argument developed’ over whether it is more pertinent that ‘higher’ rhymes with ‘retire’ or that it rhymes with ‘fire’, and also in the normalization of profanity, in Young Bing’s constant repetition of ‘F___ Mama’. We find that the essence of the utterance is empty, it has no power as a vulgar expression. It is in these acts that Han depicts the emptiness of Young Bing; the meaning behind his linguistic incapability is irrelevant as the only manner in which he can gain meaning of any sort is through the wholly external inscription of meaning onto his words and behaviours. Young Bing, then, mirrors the village, reflects it, takes on the means of the village. 

But this led to a discussion of the ethics of writing disability. Though Young Bing seems to absorb whatever the village impresses onto him, the question of whether his passivity can only be indicative of an exoticization of disability. This was, of course, discussed in relation to Foucault and the synthesis of normality. Daoist texts, for example, bring up the possibility of holding those who are disabled in high esteem, as if they are ‘perfect people’ in possession of knowledge superior to that of a ‘normal’ human, but this, of course, only furthers the divide between what is deemed ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’. The ethicality of writing such a text addressing disability, then, must address what is to be considered normal. In Han’s case, this is easily discerned by the monolithic movements of the village as a singular entity, tied together in a clanship united under a common legendary history. But the foundation of ‘legendary history’, while at once defining normality, is shaken in Han’s negative portrayal of traditional superstition. 

This is perhaps best seen in the moment of cannibalism, in which an enemy’s corpse and a pig is thrown in a big pot. A piece of meat is speared out and fed to the villagers who cannot refuse. A literal mixing of human and beast, Han demarcates the villager’s selfhood so definitely that the very concept of humanity is kept for themselves. Eating, here, is not merely the simple incorporation of the Other because what is eaten is a strange mixture between Self and Other. (The eating of the enemy is the eating of the Self because Han is of course aware of the readers’ recognition of both groups of villagers as human and thus Self). But this terrifying ambiguity, the possibility of consuming some sort of Self, ascribes, ironically, a beastliness to the village, as if tradition radically overwrites this Self-ness. There is even an underlying desire for this cannibalism, as if it not only derives itself from tradition, but reaffirms the very fact of tradition. It becomes an act of belonging, a moment of decision, in which one must choose whether one belongs to the in-group or the out-group, the Self or the Other, forced to occupy binary structures just as Young Bing and his linguistic incapability, a satirical bastardization of yin and yang. In this manner, Han subverts the culture of the village, albeit with a rather Conradian line of reasoning.

What do we make of Young Bing’s survival, then? Although Han seems to bring together Young Bing and the village, he also separates him in that he survives, in that he belongs neither to the living nor the dead of the clan. Following a quasi-modernist logic of time, Young Bing seems to be able to break out of the clan’s cyclical history of following ancestral rites, as if his atemporality is able to surpass even death. But does this not set him apart, highlighting his difference? Does this not return to the Daoist notion of the ‘perfection’ of disability, as if Young Bing’s disability provides him with some superiority that allows him to survive? And what to make of Idiot Ren, whose character is tied to modernity and progress? He tempts the villagers out of tradition, but just as indicated with the epithet ‘Idiot’, he does not truly care about the village, nor does he care what will happen to them. He riles them up before ‘[going] home to cook himself some gruel’ (72), living his life as ‘a flawless performance’ (73). While he sees that tradition is flawed, Han seems to also denounce the hypocrisy of modernization. 

It is worth discussing the fact that Han, whenever discussing any of this in Pa Pa Pa, is able to maintain a sense of comedy, his discourse more like poking fun at things more than anything else. He treats the idea of patriarchal lineage, for example, quite comically in the fact that Young Bing’s father is absent despite the amount of weight placed on the role of the father, and in the phallic imagery used when describing the mountain, satirizing phallocentrism with Young Bing’s survival. It is this mixing of comedy and seriousness that was so enjoyable about the text.

Perhaps our reading of Pa Pa Pa, more than anything, emphasized our need to read more outside of the Eurocentric canon, more works that are less known to those of us raised on the Western canon. As students of comparative literature, is it vitally important for us to address the shortcomings in our education and seek to expand our personal libraries, not simply for the sake of cultural education, but for the sake of constant awareness of the inherent limitations of our adherence to canonization.