OCT. 10, 2014
“When I talk with friends, I reminisce about the ’80s, when everything was not so tainted by the pressure of money, when poets didn’t abandon their work.” — SHENG KEYI Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
The Saturday Profile
BEIJING — WHEN her village was still lush with lotus plants, and a crystalline river sparkled in the fields, Sheng Keyi, a very clever and very poor 16-year-old girl, watched television on a tiny black-and-white set at a neighbor’s house.
It was 1989, and the story that the world knows as the Communist Party’s military crackdown in Tiananmen Square was told in reverse on the grainy screen. The official version portrayed the students as violent criminals. The peasants, and the young Ms. Sheng, sitting around the television knew no better.
Now a prominent novelist and a denizen of Beijing literary circles, Ms. Sheng eventually fashioned that turning point in contemporary Chinese history into a stomach-churning, exuberantly written allegory, “Death Fugue,” which recalls Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
In “Death Fugue,” she tells the truth about how the People’s Liberation Army extinguished the student protest. She also creates a society, Swan Valley, that can be read as China today and in the future, where things seem superficially shiny and sleek, rich and productive.
Except in Swan Valley, there is no sexual freedom. Pregnancies deemed likely to produce children with low I.Q.s are terminated immediately, and nursing homes that seem welcoming on the outside are in fact crematories. The citizens are happy enough, though. The place is free of bribery, and a young doctor says he does not have to deal with colleagues from his former life — China, in the late 1980s — who sewed up patients’ anuses if they did not receive the requisite payoff.
“I am truly disappointed with present society,” said Ms. Sheng, 41, a petite woman in skinny jeans, a blue T-shirt and black stiletto heels with a sheath of long black hair around a slender face. Over coffee at an outdoor restaurant near her apartment in Lido, one of the cool neighborhoods in Beijing, a mixture of boutiques and bars, with expensive sports cars out front, she added, “When I talk with friends, I reminisce about the ’80s, when everything was not so tainted by the pressure of money, when poets didn’t abandon their work.”
Publishers in China, including Penguin, which released an earlier novel by Ms. Sheng, “Northern Girls,” about the sexual exploits of young women who migrate to the cities, passed on “Death Fugue.” Chinese editors decided the story line was too controversial. Penguin, she said, failed to give her a response. The novel has appeared in Hong Kong and Taiwan in Chinese, and last month, it made its English-translation debut with a small Australian literary imprint, Giramondo.
For Ms. Sheng, being shunned by her publishers at home was hurtful but not surprising. “When I wrote it I knew it couldn’t be published in China,” she said. “I discussed it with a friend — she writes poetry at the university of Chongqing — and she said, ‘You write it because you want to.’ ”
The resolve to tackle a subject as forbidden as the Tiananmen Square crackdown is in character with her tough childhood, and her insistence that she is a storyteller prepared to break taboos. “A novel must have the power to offend,” she says in an author’s note for “Death Fugue.” When it was suggested that some scenes were almost repulsive, she said, “Then I have succeeded.”
MS. SHENG grew up in the village of Huaihua in Hunan Province, the youngest of four children in a home so needy that vegetables and chickens were the basic form of currency. An oil lantern provided the only light at night.
