Ah Cheng

This book contains three novellas, all focusing on the 'Educated Youth' who were sent down to the countryside for re-education in the second phase of the Cultural Revolution. In "The King Of Trees", a group of Educated Youth decide to teach the local countryfolk to turn away from superstition, by cutting down a great old tree that has been left when the mountainside was cleared for crops. In "The King Of Chess", the "Chess Fool", a sent-down youth whose only passion and ability is chess, tries to enroll in a local chess competition. And in "The King Of Children", the narrator is taken from his work group to teach children at a local school; realising that the textbook is useless, he tries to teach them things which will be useful for their everyday life.

These stories were written in the 1980s, which puts them in the first phase of writing dealing with the Cultural Revolution. Unlike a lot of contemporary Chinese fiction, they work well on their own as stories, with recognisable and understandable human relationships and interactions, at the same time as providing clear criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party's approach to the environment, to spiritual life, to education. The translation (by Bonnie S McDougall) reads very smoothly.

It wasn't that easy to screen a film in the mountains. You needed several men to take turns powering the generator by pedaling. Sometimes the man pedaling tired and the electricity would fluctuate, causing the sound from the loudspeakers to become slurred, distorting the well-known arias. Meanwhile on the screen, an uplifting scene of 'heroic deeds' might have started boldly but would suddenly lapse into hesitation. In the mountains, though, everyone enjoyed watching anyway. Other times the man on the pedals changed the tempo on purpose, creatively improvising, and the old films would send the audience into fits of laughter.… (more)