Seven
Wang Shuo
"Pop Goes the Culture?"

The age of innocence is gone. Some celebrate the demise of the 1980s. Others, mostly the cultural elite, are busy fighting among themselves to name the postapocalyptic new age. Has China entered the "post-new-era"? The inquiry threw theorists and critics into a fray that at least kicked up some dust in the off-season the once-popular literary establishment now has to endure. The emergence of the neologism, houxinshiqi (post-new-era), is a relief to those who are more acutely aware than ever of the imperative to write post-Orientalist histories from native perspectives.

But perhaps China's cultural subjectivity is just an imagined stake in the new naming game. What we are greeting could be nothing more than a scenario in which Chinese cultural theorists have grown tired of the fruitless debate over an ever elusive Chinese postmodernism. (Need we remind ourselves that the life span of a literary and cultural controversy in post-Mao China rarely exceeds a year?) Yet whether I attribute the coining of the lackluster term "post-new-era" to the critics' high-minded postcolonial politics or to their characteristically impulsive pursuit and abandonment of one trend after another, the casting aside of the buzzword "postmodernity" in favor of a term that smacks of indigenous periodization is a cultural event in itself worthy of attention.

Although the promoters of this new scheme of periodization haggle over the specific trademarks of post-new-era literature, very few literary historians would disagree with me in singling Wang Shuo out as the

most conspicuous and articulate epochal marker for the transition of the 1980s into the 1990s. Although some of his best known works were published around 1987 and 1988, the post-topian sensibility that emanated from Wanzhu (The masters of mischief) (1987) and Wande jiushi xintiao (What I am playing with is your heart beat) (1988) is unmistakably not a product of the 1980s—a decade designated as "the new era," reigned over by intellectuals, and marked by unrelieved humanistic sentiment and the will to de-alienate. In defying intellectualism and paying impious homage to alienation, our author has clearly eclipsed his own decade and overtaken the other almost by chance.

Wang Shuo's deviance from the zeitgeist of the 1980s cannot be captured in sheer thematic terms. He is the first specimen of a "marketized" literature that promotes "bestseller consciousness" (changxiao yishi ) above all else.^[1] It is this conscious appeal to the entertainment and commodity value of storytelling that marks Wang Shuo's distinct departure from the experimentalists, who might sound as playful and impious as Wang Shuo himself. The hooligan writer's profitable mockery of what the new era literature stood for—the experimentalists' high-minded cynicism included—makes untenable the proposition that we juxtapose the experimentalists and Wang Shuo as "two sides of a dialogic within Chinese (post)modernism."^[2]

The manifestation of the "Wang Shuo phenomenon" is a street affair. Urbanites usurp the author's favorite catchword wanr (play) and greet each other with a halfhearted theatrical awareness: "What are you playing at lately?"^[3] The street fashion industry cashed in on the trendy phenomenon; in 1992 Beijing witnessed swarms of discontented youths wearing the soon-to-be-banned "cultural T-shirts" on which were scribbled two large characters, mei jingr (depleted)—a pet phrase that Wang Shuo's heroes blurt out at the drop of a hat. Very soon, our author's joint venture into miniseries and film scriptwriting turned "Wang Shuo" into a household word. At the dawning of the 1990s, the "Wang Shuo phenomenon" swept over the nation and evolved into a catchphrase beyond the powers of any intellectual antipathy to rebuff.

A good look at Wang Shuo is therefore more than just another reading of a houxinshiqi celebrity writer. It promises a sketch of the brand-new era that survived the dystopian mood of 1989, an era now caught in a high-profile transition from the pristine 1980s into a caricature that vaunts the new cult of pleasure-seeking and foul play.

The story always begins with a turning point.

Post-New-Era: Epochal Wares

Four years after Tian'anmen Square, the Statue of Liberty has returned to China—as the logo for a popular American brand of ginseng tea.^[4]

Urbanites found themselves singing snatches from the Little Red Book in karaoke bars.

"Consumption Is the Motivating Force for the Development of Production"—reads the headline of an editorial in People's Daily .^[5]

Contrary to what critic Li Qingxi would fain believe, houxinshiqi may not be a misnomer, but a belated testimony to a historical turning point that has already materialized in China. It is likely that the neologism arose, as Li argues, from a strategic need of the enervated elite establishment to reclaim its waning authority in arbitrating China's cultural agenda.^[6] But perhaps the term popped up at the bidding of the new era itself. With or without the blessing of intellectuals, the post-topian era undoubtedly came into being several years prior to the emergence of its formal appellation.^[7]

The 1990s in China seems an age of Attitude. Mockeries reverberate. Verbal spews are street theater. It has become a national knack to satirize a society gone mad with consumerism while quietly going along with the greed. If one wants to understand the mores of the post-new-era, the popular "New Ditty on the Ten Kinds of People" delivers an insight or two.

The first class of citizens are the cadres;
    Young and old alike, they enjoy idle fortune.
    The second class of citizens are the entrepreneurs,
        With their portable telephones tucked in their belts.
The third class of citizens are the compradors,
    Who help the foreigners make big bucks.
The fourth class of citizens are the actors,
    A wiggle of their butts earns them a thousand dollars.
The fifth class of citizens are the lawyers,
    Who gouge both defendants and plaintiffs.
The sixth class of citizens are the surgeons;
        They cut open your belly, then ask for a bribe.
The seventh class of citizens are the peddlars;
    In one night their pockets bulge with coins.
The eighth class of citizens are the propagandists;
    Every three or four days they gorge themselves at banquets.
The ninth class of citizens are the teachers,
    Whose tastebuds never experience any delicacies.
The tenth class of citizens are workers, peasants, and soldiers;
        They bend their backs and bust their asses,
        learning from Lei Feng.^[8]

This ditty contains all the spices required to make an epochal cuisine: wheeling and dealing, cellular phones (dageda ), big bucks, official corruption, a downgrading of "knowledgeable elements," and a caricature of the model People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldier Lei Feng. In short, cadres, entrepreneurs, and burgeoning new classes such as lawyers rose to the occasion of Deng Xiaoping's 1992 southern excursion talks ("Let's be more audacious. Let's make faster strides!") by leaving behind the once-privileged Five Red Elements—workers, peasants, and soldiers. An overheated economic reform pushed the nation of merchants into a single activity—going into business.

The onslaught of this trading fever, the alleged third tide since the economic reform was launched, has enlisted some of China's most unlikely recruits: the PLA, child-care centers, elementary and middle schools, universities, and research institutes.^[9] All of a sudden, the craze to make a second income has become both an obscene spectacle and a parody of the pragmatism of the once ideologically pure. University professors open up bicycle repair shops and take to the streets selling tea-eggs and steamed buns. Elementary school students are cajoled into buying popsicles from teachers who waive their homework assignments in return.^[10] Lu Wenfu, the renowned author of Meishijia (The gourmet) (1983) and the vice-chairman of the Chinese National Association of Writers, took up the post of board director for a business corporation. Zhang Xianliang, the author of Half of a Man Is a Woman , is now managing two big enterprises. Even the PLA has turned itself into an enormous conglomerate with interests in everything from luxury hotels to pharmaceuticals.^[11] This single-minded devotion to "revenue increase" is by no means unprecedented. In the 1960s, the nation rose with the same intense fanaticism to meet Chairman Mao's challenge to maximize the revolutionary inventories of the then Red China. "The most important thing is to participate." This motto has proved its popularity once more in the 1990s, when even intellectuals dip their nets in the salty waters of the sea of avarice. The term xiahai (cruising for profits) in showbiz, literally "going fishing on the sea," is now tied in wedlock to the once lofty name "literati." The post-new-era idiom wenren xiahai (literati angling a stream) has entered the Chinese dictionary of slang, bearing testimony to the elite's salute to the market economy.

Where Have The Good Old Days Gone?

Not all the intellectuals stood holding a reel and rod by the seashore, of course. Some reacted against the national mania for profiteering. Oth-

ers deplored the decline of Geisteswissenschaften and witnessed in pain the disappearance of the individual in the face of media hegemony, and with it, the withering of the "serious arts and literature."^[12] A few level-headed intellectuals neither panicked nor surrendered. Among them were Xu Jilin and Wang Ning, who attributed the vulgarization of culture to the ethos of commercial society—a spectacle to be anticipated rather than be alarmed by. Instead of reacting passively to the aggressive takeover by mass culture, the elite have one other alternative: taking the initiative of coming to terms with the inevitable bifurcation of culture that accompanied modernization by first and foremost readjusting their role in the post-new-era. Citing Zygmunt Bauman as a useful reference for Chinese intellegentsia at bay, one critic called attention to modern Western intellectuals' voluntary transformation from powerful modern cultural "legislators" to the mere "interpreters" of postmodern pluralistic culture.^[13] In the 1990s the market certainly usurped the elite as the new legitimate maker of public opinions. In fact, one of the characteristics of modernization is said to be nothing other than "the erosion of the centered position of intellectuals."^[14]

Strangely enough, the Party appeared concerned about the plight of their historical nemesis. On more than one occasion, CCP's Propaganda Department spoke of relieving the writers' sense of crisis in an almost sincere tone. Party spokespeople delivered their routine gobbledegook, which during the 1980s would have aggravated its recipients. Yet in the post-new-era, the officials' talk about initiating a "macroscopic adjustment and control of [China's] cultural market" to offset the principle of "economic efficacy" (the golden logic of mass consumption) sounded like beguiling music to those desperate literati who now saw potential governmental intervention as the last resort for the revival of elite culture.^[15] Shall we cite this complicitous relationship between Chinese writers and the Party as a rebuttal of the simple Western formula that preaches the absolute antagonism between the two? Or shall we label this phenomenon another instance of the writers' historical amnesia? I say amnesia, for the historically "wounded" modern Chinese writers only need a little cynicism to predict that calls for greater regulation often play into the hands of a habitually censorious Party. It is no small wonder that the Bureau of the Arts and Literature took to heart its task of propagating once more such clichéd lessons as "We have to combine social and economic efficacy," "We have to link the task of building a cultural market with the construction of socialist spiritual civilization," and so on.^[16]

The masterminds truly had a great fall. And despite all the wishful thinking, no task forces nor the Party's men can restore the privileged position of literature and the literati again. The educational and instructive function of the arts and literature has bitten the dust at long last. Forget about social efficacy. The 1990s is the Golden Age of Entertainment.

A quick glance at the wares displayed in street booths and privately owned (getihu ) bookstores will indicate the average citizen's taste. Novels of swordsmen popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong dominated the market between 1985 and 1986; tear-jerking romances written by Taiwan's and Hong Kong's pop female writers Qiong Yao, San Mao, and Yi Shu intoxicated young readers in 1987; translations of foreign novels on sensual love, mystery and crime (D. H. Lawrence, Mishimura Toshiyuki, and Morimura Seiichi) emerged as hot commodities in 1988. The popular appetite for "spiritual opium" and "cultural garbage" grew more voracious in 1989 as soft and hard pornography, novels about violence, and divination handbooks flooded street corners.^[17] Only those who are extremely naive would keep insisting that cultural fast food can never replace pure literature.^[18]

As intellectuals faced the inevitable destiny of a retreat into the academy, a new cultural space opened up.^[19] This is a space populated by rock music, karaoke bars, dance halls, stars and fans, TV soap operas and popular magazines, practitioners of qigong , and on its margin a transformed neorealism that no longer challenges or critiques social mores. Neorealist writers Liu Xihong and Chi Li heralded the literary elite's attempt to move the post-1989 culture of consensus in a new direction toward middlebrow literature. After a decade of expansive mood, the pendulum of Chinese neorealism had finally swung back to the latter term in each of the binary schemata: subversion versus containment, signifier versus signified, desire versus law, and aggression versus stability.^[20]

On the surface, the post-new-era seems to witness the return of a national nostalgia for a traditional discourse characterized by ethical conformism, the search for meaning, and a congenial yearning for harmony.^[21] The early 1990s' TV miniseries Kewang (Aspirations) and Mama zai aiwo yici (Mom, love me one more time) are symptomatic of such epochal sentimentality. Indeed, mass nostalgia did not stop at a retrospective look at prosaic familial culture. The reactivation of popular memories also brought back a fever that was laid to rest only a decade ago. Imagine the shock of Western democrats when a reproduction in 1991 of the famous revolutionary ode to Mao Zedong "The Red Sun" broke the record of a single videotape sale—5,800,000.^[22] Yes, Mao Ze-

dong is back! He is a new deity, or a commodity, or a symbol of nationalism, depending upon who interprets the resurgence of Mao fever.

Nobody who has heard Cui Jian sing "Changzheng lushang de yao-gun" (Rock 'n' roll on the Long March) has the heart to trivialize the post-new-era, which is at least not as tepid and compromising as the neorealists depict it in their works. The 1990s, after all, is a swarm of contradictions: It sells environmentalism alongside conspicuous consumption, it ridicules Lei Feng while returning the icon of Mao Zedong to the altar, it places the subdued vignettes of daily life and common humanity side by side with sensational gossip about the underground industries of prostitution, drugs, and gambling.^[23] As Wang Shuo's heroes will tell you with a sneer, this is not a tame era. Behind the spent utopianism lurks the beast in the jungle.

And yet many critics, Zhang Yiwu among them, argue that if there is such a thing as the aesthetics of the post-new-era, it is constrained within the limp and familial vista of plebeian culture (shimin wenhua ). The literary terrain is, of course, as divided as ever, with veteran elite such as Bei Cun, the last experimentalist, coexisting with writers such as Wang Shuo, whose commercial instinct is as strong as his aesthetic one. And yet the experimentalists are a dying species. And even Wang Shuo, who has the ability to be quirky and subversive, can only upstage the neorealists for a short while. Wang may be good at honing his pop image through the multimedia, but it is the neorealists, after all, who can achieve a mainstream style by speaking to the general reading public. Critics have reached a consensus by attributing the newborn artistic vision of neorealism to macroscopic changes in the cultural paradigm of a society in transition. For many, the post-new-era cultural configuration found its mirror-image in a literature that is no longer obsessed with the impetus for self-renewal, a trademark of the 1980s, but which now defines its mission as laying bare the common folk's inclination to look the same, to approve, and to succumb.^[24]

But is the post-new-era itself as dull, devoid of metaphors, reconciliatory, and predictable as its neorealist literary representation? What happens to the lures, thrills, and liberating sensations that consumer culture delivers to the pop imaginary?

Wang Shuo's charm consists in his penchant for telling this other half of the story—desire and transgression. He reminds us that the raw libido that society's castaways release and put on exhibit, so repellent to the neorealists, has always been part of social reality. This is not Wang Shuo's own fiction. In real life, the recessive adolescent energies of Chinese youth

find outlet in rock star worship, disco dancing, necking in dark corners of parks, and in other more insidious activities. And the common people frequent karaoke bars to indulge in self-expression. The post-new-era may throb with vocal and carnal desires and unspeakable obsessions, but it seems beneath the dignity of the bellelettrists (in their middlebrow disguise) to record the pulse of such a desublimated era. Or is neoralism's inadequacy simply a wish come true: Have literati finally struggled free from the orthodox creed of "art for life's sake" and reinvented realism by giving us an inverse image of what the real is like? In place of the reality of sensual gratification, they feed us imaginary moral asceticism.

Very few have bothered to examine the strange discrepancy between the polite and soft post-new-era literature of the neorealists and the dangerous zeitgeist of the age itself. Is it too embarrassing for the elite to acknowledge their own marginal voice? Or is the gap in question simply irrelevant to a hyperactive age in which hundreds of styles and norms bloom at the same time? Wang Shuo scored again as one of the few who sees through the disingenuity in the semblance of decent culture that some veteran elites staggered to put up. There is something profoundly deceitful about writing and reading a literature that reiterates a puritanical wish for the perfection of the human spirit and moral caliber while living in a time that thrives on hedonism and equates style with soul.^[25] Wang Shuo's street gangs expose this duplicity by showing off the ultimate art of total abandon.

How do we then respond to the elitist formula that characterizes the plebeian mood of the 1990s as ordinary folks' quiet adjustments and their earnest search for equilibrium? To expose the illusory nature of this mental posture of a nation engaged in self-discipline, we need only to evoke the ready image of an unruly crowd wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Wang Shuoesque jeers, bumping and grinding to a rock 'n' roll beat. Not only do they echo deafening sound and fury, but the shifting ground beneath their feet sends mental balance to the winds. Neorealism's return to the real, much applauded by the critics, would appear to be nothing more than a sham. Never before has it departed more noticeably from a popular culture that seeks noisy pleasures and mocks self-restraint.

The Cult Of "Hooliganism"

"My writings are targeted specifically at one particular species—intellectuals. I can't put up with their sense of superiority and aristocratic sentiment. They think that common folks are all hooligans, only

they themselves are the conscience of society. Isn't this aggravating? . . . I particularly want to attack this 'nobody else but me' mannerism."^[26] Indeed, what could be a better dig at intellectuals than our author's favorite quip, "Don't you play the saint!" (bie zhuang ). What could be a better means of contesting such hypocrisy than creating a whole species of hooligans who chuckle to themselves, "I am a hoodlum! I am remarkably genuine!" But these snickering, shady characters are not merely fictional constructs. Like Wang Shuo himself, the hooligans (pizi ), the "last proletarians" in the new society,^[27] are by-products of China's market economy. They make a living by swindling, drinking, gambling, telling tall tales, and seducing women, small crimes that earn them the title of "masters of mischief," but which are never serious enough to turn them into outlaws.

Wang Shuo claims that it is the rise of this new species in the post-new-era that invigorates an atrophied society suffering from an excessive exercise of the intellect. The hooligans live on one instinct—don't ever mention "cause" or "mission"!—dumping everything associated with high culture. Knowledge, justice, morality, and nobility are considered nothing more than the means of oppression that intellectuals invented to subjugate the people. In the process of deconstructing the high-strung discourse of intellectuals, they create a vocal culture of small alley talk and tall tales. Their verbal onslaught leaves the battlefield strewn with mutilated eggheads, who die beneath the relentless whipping of our hooligans' quick tongues and mere malicious gazes.

Wang Shuo's frank confessions about his repulsion from intellectuals has earned him the epithet of the master "spurner of elite culture."^[28] However, it is hard to tell how much of the folk spirit that saturates Wang's writings is truly representative of the "plebeian culture" whose vision he is reported to champion. Perhaps the more important question for us to ponder is, Who buys and reads Wang Shuo?

The answer should come as a shock even to the writer himself: intellectuals. It is indeed no small irony that Wang Shuo fandom was first constructed by none other than those who were his designated enemies. Who but the critics' guild hailed Wang Shuo the new literary genius? Who but the authorities of film criticism designated 1988 the "Wang Shuo year"? It is not surprising that Mu Gong categorized hooligan literature as the aristocratic genre written within the mental configuration of plebeian culture.^[29]

Who are the protagonists, after all, but a pack of riffraff who shoulder none of the burdens of material production? These are not just ordinary roughnecks, but a strange mutation of the low and high—the

dregs of society on the one hand, and the spiritual aristocrats among the populace on the other. Striding at leisure down the streets in boisterous company, they flaunt their fat wallets stuffed with ill-gotten gains with an air of complacency that befits the nouveau riche. Wang Shuo's much publicized exposure of China's enervated intelligentsia has given rise to the canonization of an upper crust of the lay population who turn out to be no common folk. All the critics who joined the "Love Wang Shuo" or "Hate Wang Shuo" campaigns have overlooked the invisible contract that our author made with the class he swore to demolish on paper. Theirs is a deeply dependent bond of reciprocal contempt and mutual sustenance. The public is merely promoting a myth by crowning our hooligan writer the spokesman of the Chinese People with a capital P. Wang Shuo is verbally committed only to intellectuals. The hooligans share his passion for the underclass. Ultimately, though, he is merely promiscuous in his love affair with commoners.

The all-consuming intellectual fervor over the "Wang Shuo phenomenon" has one more side effect. Since the real punch of the hooligans is their gift of turning things inside out, I wonder whether this punch meshes with the commercial success Wang Shuo has been enjoying, thanks to his educated readers, and the trendiness of hooligan style. Consumer society is forever appropriating antimainstream fads into the mainstream itself. Wang Shuo is not immune to this process of fetishization. How genuinely rebellious can his sociopathic personalities appear if their audiences are paying for their very act of subversion? In a society that is good at reproducing images, even the electrifying rebel can be turned into a robot for sale.

In the first few years of the 1990s, however, the danger of Wang Shuo reproducing himself, a fiasco that overtook him around 1993, was not yet a reality. No matter how many critics, both at home and abroad, would like to cite him as another casualty of the postmodern sensibility, his early and mid-career works are more than superficial kitsches that flood the Chinese market. Nor did his lackadaisical hooligans emerge as mere walking corpses who risk turning us into jaded readers. Every so often his heroes may blurt out something like "I am spent!" yet theirs is a restless crowd who would find neorealist Chi Li's story title "Either Hot or Cold Is Fine as Long as I Am Alive" an absolute bore.

The Hooligan Chronicle

Like their fictional counterparts, real-life hooligans had uneventful early careers. They were born at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. Grow-

ing up during the lawless period of the Cultural Revolution, they picked up effortlessly a ruffian's character. Most of the hooligans, like Wang Shuo himself, went into the military in their late teens and retired from the service after a short sojourn. Not equipped with any professional expertise, they reemerged as unemployed youths roaming aimlessly in a swiftly changing urban China. Without money or aspirations, they went underground, drifting in and out of luxurious tourist hotels and restaurants, playing poker and pimping, networking with criminal circles, and talking the night away. The money came and went without a trace. Not even a beautiful and innocent Southern maiden—Northerner Wang Shuo has a predilection for women from the South—can soften their rough edges and bring them salvation.

Wang Shuo may have been exaggerating a bit when he told a reporter for the New York Times Book Review that "all the impetus for openness and reform comes from hooligans" for "they do business, build factories, and open shops."^[30] It may be true that they have engaged in transactions large and small and mostly illegal—thanks to the opportunistic epochal spirit—yet the fortunes they have gathered have been scattered like leaves in the autumn wind without accumulating into real capital that could be recycled into the mechanisms of production. In fact, one can characterize the hooligan's lifestyle as unproductive and totally consumptive.

There is no denying that it was economic reform that opened up an existential space for the hooligans, who joined others fishing in troubled waters. But it was the Cultural Revolution that first apprenticed them to a lawless childhood. Reminiscing about fist fights and scuffles with rowdy elements when he was a teenager, Wang Shuo paid his tribute—which surely scandalized intellectuals—to Mao's revolutionary era, whose virtue, he claimed, consisted in its capacity to liberate children. "Even though the Cultural Revolution was wicked, it broke up the orderliness of everyday life and provided an opportunity for kids to develop their own personalities. It freed them from the bondage of the hackneyed school education. At any rate, we gain our knowledge from society only. In contrast to the real stuff, what we were taught in school is meaningless."^[31] Reemerging into the new consumer age, the hooligans insisted on recreating their childhood playground in everyday life. The pure physical play, wedded to an attitude of lightheartedness, was turned into a narcissistic posture that appeared deceivingly seditious.

In a sense, though, the adult hooligans were not real rebels, for there was no purpose for their rebellion. It was just a lifestyle, decadent and

cool. And don't take their inflated egotism to heart; behind the high-profile existence of those seemingly self-possessed playboys are empty husks.^[32] Hooligans do not live as improvising individuals, only as a collective. A typical hooligan hero like Fang Yan in What I Am Playing with Is Your Heart Beat "always spends his time with a crowd, just like a fish who cannot survive without the water."^[33] Deprived of their species consciousness, they are at a total loss. They eat, drink, act, and sin as a cluster. There is only a collaborative memory, not individual ones. Fang Yan may suffer amnesia and labor to retrieve from his shady past the physical image and identity of the woman whom he once loved, which sounds personal and confidential when he embarks on the quest and deludes us into believing that we trespass upon the private domain of an existential hero. Yet the blank slate of his personal history, upon which individual faces, both male and female, are all fused together in an obscure mass, is chalked with nothing but "a chain of vivid memories of [the gang] eating together."^[34] Private space does not exist; life is never anything but one big woozy group activity from morning till night. Doesn't this sound like an old story—a contemporary variation of traditional Chinese clan-centered existence? Wang Shuo may have underestimated the infiltration of certain traditional values into his fictional world.

Is it any wonder that readers have a hard time distinguishing Wang Shuo's heroes from each other? Can we resist the question whether this kind of lifestyle is as fluid and free as it seems, or whether it is always already subjugated to a group agenda—like plotting a fictional murder for fun—from which, once committed, none of the lone hooligans can withdraw? The pledge of group loyalty is all. Our author's young urban fans who adored the improvisational beat of hooligan affairs may live in the biggest illusion of all. Wang Shuo's fiction may turn out to be a celebration of group bondage, not that of the solitary heretic! Or can one tell which is which in a linguistic game that confuses behavioral boundaries?

It may be a small solace to learn that although real-life individual hoodlums lived in a homogeneous identity, an examination of Wang Shuo's works reveals that the species consciousness of hooliganism itself underwent a slight adjustment in the late 1980s. The racketeers who earlier on dove unscrupulously into various lawbreaking adventures have finally exhausted their interest in making bucks and dough.^[35] Looting no longer excites them. Cash bores them. They even feel nostalgic for the ineffable. "Standing in this yard immersed in the sunshine, I am seized with the strong feeling that I have lost something."^[36] And to the

shock of early converts, shedding tears in existential anguish—which was once a forbidden sin in their early career—even smacks of redemption to the hooligan who is denied access to a locked room that promises the revelation of "something hauntingly familiar."^[37] This is the worst scenario of hooliganism: they are losing their instinct for fun and their grip on the carefree spirit. Worst of all, they are getting sentimental.

What is a hooligan when he no longer wears his heart on his sleeve? The ennui of a meaningless life catches up with him. Readers sense the burden of a weighty soul that pretends to be as flighty as usual. To continue the business of trifling with life, new games have to be invented. What is left for a tease has to be something more vulnerable and dangerous than mere norms and snobs.

The masters of mischief set their sights on caricaturing the notion of authenticity, and the gang in Your Heart Beat deride self-identity. We now enter the uncharted territory of a hooligan land where mindless charades are returned to a conceptual framework that produces the very meaning that it earlier sent into exile. Indeed, whether the hooligans are brainstorming about a murder that never took place or substituting real life with simulacra, they have acquired a persona that is outrageously elitist and interpretive.

The show goes on. The laughter sounds more hollow.

Philosophy À La Hooligan

If one believes in such a thing as the philosophy of late hooliganism, one is getting a step closer to appreciating Wang Shuo's appeal to the youngest generation of Chinese intellectuals. They alone can savor the humor of Wang Shuoesque deconstructionism while taking in the aesthetics of debauchery. As those once little hooligans slowly age in his fictional world, they become more sophisticated in their corruption. The time has arrived for those rascals to philosophize villainy and to deliver their speculations in metaphors.

There is something profoundly contradictory in seeing the masters of monkey business try their hand at cognitive games. If it was a routine practice for them to bedevil highbrows and lead ladies astray in the old days, it is certainly an inverse blasphemy to witness them now mock depth while reproducing it, play with abstractions, and worst of all, disassemble self-identities. All of a sudden, Wang Shuo himself dares take a crack at deconstructing concepts, the intellectuals' stock in trade. And the metaphysical game of decentering the subject—the gist of Your Heart

Beat —almost sounds as flashy and unforgivably privileged as the experimentalists' verbal maze!

It is a befuddling transition. Did the writer mature? Or did he betray his earlier vision? For there is no mistake that despite some familiar traces of playfulness, Wang Shuo's visceral depiction of the hooligan lifestyle in his earlier works is now being replaced by a quiet attention to the construction of philosophic intention in his two best known works, The Master of Mischief and What I Am Playing with Is Your Heart Beat .

Ma Qing, Yu Guan, and Yang Zhong—the three fall guys in The Masters of Mischief —begin to lose their cool as their surreal enterprise, "Three T Company" (troubleshooting, tedium relief, and taking the blame), turns into real labor. Yang Zhong is struck in an unwanted platonic affair with a woman whom he was hired to date as a surrogate lover; Ma Qing, in the guise of a surrogate husband, reluctantly bears the verbal abuse of a frustrated young wife; and Yu Guan, despite his good professional intentions, is appalled by a burly client who demands that Yu do him the service of accepting blows on the ear. As male and female patrons visit them with one ludicrous demand after another, the three "service men" get caught in the rules of their own game.

The cool gesture of selling a substitute reality backfires. Yu Guan, the mastermind behind the "Three T Company," barely pulls through the mock ceremony of a fake book award for a vain customer. For a rare moment, the hooligan, "staring listlessly into the space in front of him" while stumbling through one embarrassing ad-lib after another, is almost done in by the phoniness of the gang's own charlatanism.^[38] What is most mortifying is that it's not even fun! The assignments get accomplished without gusto. The hooligans emerge as ordinary salarymen who toil for a job that they no longer believe in. Mountebanks or clowns?

The lampooning of a disingenuous world unexpectedly defeats the lampooner. In the end, it is not clear whether they are masters of mischief or simply overzealous martyrs of an insane epoch. With an ironic twist, the now aging hooligans acquire the aura of deconstructive philosophers who, by dumping the real into a trash can, are immediately filled with desire for sterling authenticity—an embarrassing call for the return of lost innocence.

Could all this be true? The cerebral redefinition of the hooligan vision is focused on nothing other than what used to repel "those rebels without cause": a vague yearning for genuineness. Deconstruction is given a purpose, an un-Wang Shuoesque configuration. "What is left after [the hooligans] discard nobility, negate faith, mock ideals, and destroy social

order and moral criteria?" asks one critic.^[39] The unexpected answer—a returned longing for the pure and the simple that was deconstructed—saves the hooligans like Yu Guan from a complete bankruptcy of human purpose, but in so doing, throws Wang Shuo back into the quest for meaning he once scorned with such charm.

The novella offers us more than one glimpse of the imagined paradise recaptured, if only for a fleeting instant. This benign vista provides no panoramic view of redemption. It is a simple oasis in the desert, a humble refuge for those constantly on the run. In fact, should it surprise anyone that the hooligans' haven and heaven is found nowhere else but in the surrogate home, a small tamed space furnished by a kind mother and a gentle daughter? Ding Xiaolu and her elderly parent (described as a "well-educated," "tranquil," and "dignified" old lady) provide the restless, wandering gang the simple comfort of dumplings and a nightly shelter now and then. This haven subtly echoes the theme of the surrogate that underlies the entire novella. It is a masterstroke to juxtapose the nominal "Three T Company" and its symbolic foil—a surrogate family piously practicing the same professional ethic of "tender loving care" preached by the company. It is obvious that a surrogate in name cannot hold a candle to the surrogate in substance. What Ding Xiaolu and her mother offer the hooligans is not merely a simulacrum of "home sweet home." The real hearth resides in the heart. This final message of the novella—sentimental to the utmost—should astound most Chinese critics who treat The Masters of Mischief as a typical parody of genuineness.

It is only natural that the few episodes of gallantry and moments of benevolence should unfold within the unpretentious fictional space of the Ding residence. There is a kind of calm generosity emanating from the gentle Ding Xiaolu that never fails to disarm Yu Guan and subdue even the implacable Yang Zhong. At a moment of such tender subjugation, we witness the untamed Yang Zhong turn into a courteous gentleman who "shakes [Xiaolu's] hand shyly."^[40] As if embarrassed, Wang Shuo takes care to ensure that the hooligans' encounter with such tenderness and genuine human concern is almost inaudible.

Did you fall asleep for a little while? Ding Xiaolu whispered.

Yes, I did, Yu Guan whispered back. How come you got up so early?

I have to go work today. Can't always stay away from work. Do you want to eat something? There is milk out there.

Your kitty drank the milk.

Really, that damn greedy cat. Xiaolu smiled. Can I make you something?

Oh no, don't bother. I don't feel like eating. It's fine if I don't eat breakfast. It's not indispensable.

Your life is too irregular. It's not good for your health.

I don't want to live to a hundred anyway. I don't care if it's healthy or not.

Yu Guan, if there is anything . . . Well, I won't say it. I know that you won't ever need my help. I just want to say this, come whenever you want to.

"I know." Yu Guan looked into her eyes and then took his leave. (39)

Such simple friendship and innocent concern can mollify even the rawest spirit. And yet Yu Guan is no ordinary knave to begin with.

Is a cultured hooligan an oxymoron? But there is no mistake that a few of Wang Shuo's middle-aged hooligans have grown into the roles of brainy and melancholy wise men. Thus we find a meditative Yu Guan subverting the pedantry of Professor Zhao—a pundit cast as a despicable hypocrite—in this philosophical dialogue:

"Having a great time"? This halfhearted assertion hardly fools the reader. We know that on more than one occasion, Yu Guan and his gang are not having fun. If all that Professor Zhao can brag about is his emaciated intellect, the hooligans have little to brag about either. The hilarious triumph of the hooligans over intellectuals in the good old days is turned into a Pyrrhic victory in The Masters of Mischief .

Deflated hooliganism leads to an aborted antihumanism—there is no denying that the novella delivers fragmentary instances of humanity. Ding Xiaolu's surrogate family aside, the hooligans themselves have tumbled into an occasional mental and emotional zone that unfolds, for their eyes only, epiphanies of the most worldly kind. The revelation may come as an exhausted Yu Guan witnesses young men and women indulging

themselves in a drinking carnival. In a moment of ecstasy, he declares: "God! Chinese folk are truly the best people on earth. They surely don't have many luxurious demands on their minds" (36). The simple and earthy happiness of the crowd, trivial as it may appear, brings profound relief to a tortuously impious soul.

Or the occasion may arise while the heathen is striking another professional pose as a stand-in. All of a suddne, the gate of heaven opens up. A moment of inexplicable fragility dawns on him: Yu Guan turns the paid job of comforting a jilted woman into a real encounter with compassion.

Those are redeeming moments of truth in The Masters of Mischief . Yet are they simple slips of the pen, or are they signs of an iconoclastic writer seeking reconciliation with the world? Regardless of Wang Shuo's intentions, his dispirited antiheroism can be overtaken by the hooligans' genuine understanding of human happiness and suffering. It is an ephemeral thing, to be sure. But a hooligan literature that reaches such depth of humanity is no mere soapy pop stuff.

There is plenty of room, in fact, to argue that The Masters of Mischief is a miniature specimen of the intellectual game of "spiritual wanderers"—known otherwise as our brash dollar-starved hooligans in their earlier incarnations. Nor is the challenge a visceral one any longer. "I dare to waste myself. Do you dare do it?"^[41] Such daredevilry soon sounds formulaic and insipid to a writer whose mission in life is to outwit his intellectual nemeses in a perpetual duel. Next enters a query à la existentialism (should we be surprised at his attempt at high culture?): "Who am I after all?"—a spiritual pursuit in which Wang Shuo will gain ultimate proficiency in his longer piece (arguably his masterpiece), What I Am Playing with Is Your Heart Beat .

The novel continues the quest that the author began in The Masters of Mischief —an inarticulate authorial intention to retrieve the last remnants of meaning from a complete bankruptcy of human purpose. Your Heart Beat features a gang of hooligans who have exhausted every means of rejuvenating their jaded minds and oversexed bodies. In a licentious mood of absolute boredom, they cook up the fictional plot of a murder. One member volunteers to be the disappeared victim and another is

nominated as the murderer without his own knowledge. The real intended players of the game are, however, neither the "murdered" nor the "murderer," but the rest of the gang who now revel in the prospect of prolonging and proliferating the fun by inventing endless subplots, implicating each other in earnest, camouflaging real targets with lookalikes, setting up blockades to a premature recovery of the "murderer's" memories ten years later, and mystifying a police force that is seriously engaged in the investigation of a case that was supposed to have taken place a decade ago.

Imagine the letdown of the main players when the supporting actor, the framed murderer Fang Yan, the only hooligan who is kept completely in the dark, usurps the place of his hosts. Not only does he take his part seriously, but the lone middle-aged hooligan also reverses his designated role from being an incriminated spectator to the protagonist of the show, actively participating in the unraveling of the mysterious murder. For the first time in his wasted life, Fang Yan feels the urge and challenge to act. Yet his memory fails him. He faces the daunting task of searching for his alibi—a woman with whom he was supposed to be deeply in love ten years ago, but whose face and name he now cannot remember.

This is an upgraded adult version of a Chinese children's game that the adolescent hooligans once played with zest, "Soldiers Catch Highwaymen." The rules of the game change little. The physical chase now evolves into a mental one. Yet the most important prop remains intact—the murder weapon, a sword with a tiny stain of blood on it.

There would be nothing exciting about Your Heart Beat if this were simply a novel about physical violence. But no real blood is spilled. The casualties are neither soldiers nor outlaws, but lost identities and memories. The scene of the crime is not any physical locale but a haunting blind spot in the mind. Wang Shuo is leading us into a completely different landscape of the hooligan underground, where deconstructed identities long to be recovered, and unbelievably, where lost love and innocence are mourned.

The detective story progresses amid the twists and turns of the hero's painstaking search for the woman for whom he once felt all-consuming passion. The texture of the entire novel resembles that of memory itself: hallucinatory, fragmentary, and scintillating. We are led from one mental labyrinth to another. First a house remembers the past and narrates its own history in a delirium—voices talking in the darkness, the mechanical sound of a woman dialing, a telephone ringing at night, the maddening sound of the howling wind, and the missing heroine sleep-

ing behind a locked door.^[42] Then an old photograph of the woman evokes disconnected pieces of a puzzle that can never be put back together—a small back alley, a dimly lit ice skating rink, a peal of tinkling laughter, a golden field of rapeseeds, the flashes of a camera's bulb, a trickle of rain, and the distant murmur of a woman's voice that seems to come from an adjacent window to the bedroom. "It seems . . . it seems," she repeats (218). Four women appear, disappear, and reemerge in and out of Fang Yan's disjunct life. Gradually merging into each other's images, they all turn into the woman whom our fugitive hero is tracking. The mystery may finally be resolved. But the subjunctive mood keeps the readers in suspense during the long mental chase. This is what it means to play with your heart beat: The excitement that comes from being suspended in midair. The thumping of the heart and the surging of blood. Ultimate bliss for those who live for the moment.

But this is not just another story about life on the run, no matter how wickedly fickle the title may sound. On the contrary, what is at stake in Your Heart Beat is everything that the hooligans' nomadic existence ostracized—identity, meaning, and love. The novel eventually has less to say about the venting of raw libido than about the emptiness and barreness of the cool sexual fetish that the hooligans call life. Wang Shuo, of course, is too devilish to preach. In the end, he chickens out of the ontological dilemma that Your Heart Beat so breathtakingly presents to its hero and to all of us who have become his accomplices. When Fang Yan reaches his journey's end, he also gets closer and closer to the danger of recovering his lost memory. And the closer he approaches the truth of his life, the more uneasy his creator must feel. What happens after the reconstruction of his subjectivity is completed? What are the fictional alternatives left open for Wang Shuo at the end of the novel? Make Fang Yan confront the woman whom he once loved? He obviously cannot dump her twice. Nor can he reunite with a love that is passé. A lighthearted encounter won't do after the heavy-handed pursuit. A philosophical engagement with an old flame on the subject of passion is equally uncool. Where is the exit?

Your Heart Beat ends neither with a bang nor a whimper. Caught between his desire to blur the boundaries between surface and depth, philosophy and parody, Wang Shuo has no other alternative but to conclude his novel with the expedient device of "making fiction within fiction." The first-person protagonist merges suddenly into a third-person narrator who claims that he has just finished narrating one-third of a book that he has been reading on a train. Of course, he relinquishes the privilege of

continuing the account for he now has lost the patience to finish reading the tedious volume.

And thus we learn that everything is fluid—the four women's identities and the protagonist's own, fiction and truth, and your heart beat and mine—a poststructuralist truism that Wang Shuo tells with exquisite taste and unrelieved seriousness. All this profundity is an accident at best, made possible by Wang Shuo's last act of cowardice. Not only does he willfully sidestep the author's task of giving us a responsible finale, but he stops short of delivering Fang Yan to his own ultimate reality where a dying Baishan, or Ling Yu, or perhaps both of them in one singular identity, are waiting for him to settle old scores on her deathbed. It is safer to make our hooligan live in everlasting flashbacks so that he may continue to imagine that life is chimerical and that all those women haunting him are but specters of the past. A face-to-face collision with the present is a greater risk than the writer and his hero can take. What if there is such a thing as honest feelings and plain humanity at the end of the tunnel? What is at stake if not hooliganism itself? Wang Shuo has a narrow escape from his most impassioned flirtation with meaning ever.

But braking at the final curve does not bring the hooligan crusade for the signified to a full stop in Your Heart Beat . Traces of philosophical intent are scattered along the meandering path that may lead to the Second Coming. Love is undoubtedly the one miraculous formula that unfailingly brings quick redemption, and with it, a purpose in life. Wang Shuo knows that only too well. The poisonous encounter between an evil vagrant and an innocent woman is a recurrent theme in his early fiction. Seduction may send the maiden to her grave early, but the hooligan pays the debt by living in guilt for the rest of his life.^[43] In this conflict between good and evil, there is no real winner.

Your Heart Beat is subtler in its lament for the lost maidenhood of innocence. First of all, the female presence is more substantial than ever before. Quantitative strength brings about qualitative mutations. She no longer emerges as the weaker sex. Less sentimentally configured, she arises from the pool of tears as a versatile female hooligan who, for the first time, shares with her male counterparts a narrative space heavily inscribed in the code of masculinity. She participates in plotting the murder and prods her men to action at the first sight of their waning willpower. In short, she has outlived her own victim status and remodeled herself into an equal partner of male hooligans. These women—the poised Li Jiangyuan comes to mind—excel in philosophical discourse and outplay male intelligence. It is Li who spells out for Fang Yan the meta-

physical significance of his quest: "This is simply an excuse. Judging from the degree of your concern and enthusiasm about this case, I can tell that you do not simply want to prove your own innocence. More importantly, you crave to be more aware of who you are. You are so panic-stricken because, all of a sudden, you don't understand yourself. It seems that there is one piece missing. You cannot patch up your own image" (201).

This woman's interpretive power over Fang Yan is a metaphor for her fluent command of his life, past and present. Yes, she knew him inside and out for ten years as one of the many forgotten ghosts in his past. In retrospect, one of the ironic moments in Your Heart Beat is her first undramatic (re)appearance as a total stranger to our amnesiac hero. Even long before her identity is exposed, Li Jiangyun emerges from the very beginning of Fang Yan's quest as an uncontested authority on him. She holds the key to the interpretation of Fang Yan's personal history and is one of the four hooligans who give birth to the "heart beat" game—a fact unknown to us until the end of the novel.

So there she is, an old friend of Fang Yan's, but thanks to the lapse of his memory, reappearing convincingly as a new acquaintance whose friendship he is now eager to cultivate. Perhaps it is the sense of déjà vu that draws Fang Yan closer and closer to the mystifying persona she projects. The attraction between a man and a woman, which may lead our hero (and us) astray, soon outgrows its deceptive import as a mere diverting and distracting subplot, for the aura enveloping Li Jiangyun is provocative of ineffable anxieties that transcend mere sexual catalysis. It is reminiscent of the magnetism of existential purport in which are hidden the clues to Fang Yan's circuitous quest.

Your Heart Beat would be a boring account of a male hooligan's identity quest without the timely insertion of Li Jiangyun and Fang Yan's long verbal exchanges that sustain the cognitive rhythm of the novel. Every dialogue they exchange and every appearance of hers stirs up tantalizing memories that the bewildered hero tries to untangle. Under the spell of Li Jiangyun's irresistible power, Fang Yan is drawn a step at a time closer to the core of the mystique. She dominates him in a feminine style—quietly, unobtrusively, suggestively, half consciously and half unconsciously. Bewitching, omniscient, and compassionate all at once, like Fairy Disenchantment in the Dream of the Red Chamber , Li Jiangyun leads Fang Yan through the maze and turns page by page before him the book of his life. She takes him to revisit the House of Memory, which releases familiar images and sounds at night that a confounded Fang Yan fails to decipher. To tease his faltering memory even further, she delivers

Baishan—the woman he is searching for—right to his face. Yet once again she triumphs over Fang Yan, who fails to recognize the woman to whom he promised his heart ten years ago. Rarely has one seen a more manipulative and more omnipotent female character in Wang Shuo's fiction than this physically frail Li Jiangyun.

No relationship is devoid of the sexual politics of power. In the case of Li Jiangyun and Fang Yan, the copulation of the male and female hooligan takes place in the form of intellectual jousts during the day and erotic dreams at night. The formula of "boy seduces girl" is reversed here. She is the one who seduces him with her knowledge of his past. Her sparking mind takes control.

On another occasion when she is restored to her old identity in the name of Liu Yan, the female hooligan sheds her philosopher's skin and dons the costume of a survivor, a rape victim who tells the heartstricken tales of how her teacher, her own father, and endless other scum violated and trashed her. Reduced to tears by such testimonials of innocence and cruelty, our hero Fang Yan is once more subjugated to the female power. Even as the incarnate of unrequited love, the woman triumphs over the mere signs of desire that each of her ruthless men stands for. Your Heart Beat is a work that comes closest to reckoning with a sentimentality that the earlier Wang Shuo repressed more successfully.

More than one critic has pointed out the Achilles heel of Wang Shuo's hooligans as none other than their vulnerability to pure, genuine love.^[44] Whereas the young hooligans in Wang Shuo's earlier works—Kongzhong xiaojie (Air stewardess) and Yiban shi huoyan, yiban shi haishui (Half in flame, half in the sea) come to mind—degrade the redemptive potential of love because they fear losing their cool, Your Heart Beat stares such hypocrisy right in the face. A subtle and ambiguous critique of the emotionally insecure male hooligans can be found between the lines.

Ji Hongzhen once argued that Fang Yan's search for the lost memory of Baishan (or Ling Yu) serves as a metaphor for his nostalgia for a bygone cultural value.^[45] The descriptive modifier "cultural" may be overstating the case. I name this value "genuineness"—an ethical rather than a cultural badge of honor. True love is but one manifestation of this old-fashioned principle that finds no refuge in the hooligan's dissolute world. Love's voluntary extinction is guaranteed. Baishan and Fang Yan's pure puppy love is doomed from the very start simply because there is no room for genuine love in the hooligans' code of behavior. To remain loyal to

them, he has to let go of it. And they help him kiss it goodbye by giving her away as prey for a pack of lustful coyotes.

The hooligans sentence the death of romance in typical lighthearted licentiousness. And Fang Yan's complicity in the execution of his love is one of the bloodiest moments in the novel. The slow recovery of memory reaches a final climactic moment when everything repressed comes back to life in a sudden outburst of rich and palpable details. In one scene after another, the sequence of events is vividly reenacted in front of his (and our) eyes: the passionate involvement of the two lovers, their verbal commitment to each other, the gang drinking, gambling, and cynically debunking Fang Yan's emotional purity, his pained struggle to reassert his hooliganhood, and the vicious game in which he reluctantly participates—swapping partners in bed. Throughout the lackadaisical experiment, Fang Yan plays poker intensely while another hooligan brother tries his hand with Baishan in the next room. Neither Fang Yan nor the readers know for sure if the seduction really succeeds. But imagination itself does the fragile hooligan in. From that moment on, amnesia becomes his lifestyle. Fang Yan bids farewell to Baishan and all the memories associated with her. Ritualistically, he mortgages his soul to hooliganism for life.

Metaphorically, the loss of Fang Yan's memory of his beloved is none other than the loss of genuineness, his once tearful and potent innocence, and with it, the loss of that part of his life that he cannot afford to remember without being brought face-to-face with the hair-raising inhumanity of the very existence of the hooliganism he pledged to. To remember all this is an ordeal in itself—perhaps more fatal than the malady of amnesia itself. Can he ever survive the remembrance of things past? Wang Shuo evades this question in the end. Perhaps this is another reason why the author himself cannot afford to tie up all the loose ends in Your Heart Beat . There are too many tricky questions a seasoned reader cannot resist asking: Why did Fang Yan lose his memory in the first place? What will be at stake if he remembers? What is it that his blocked memory keeps from emerging? And finally, when his memory returns at long last, why does the moment of taking stock—a moment that he and we have been waiting for—never arrive? These are the inquiries that a metaphysical Wang Shuo begs us to raise, but from which he eventually cops out. What is he scared of? Could it be true that the message of the utter meaninglessness of such moral debauchery is too close to home to be comfortable even for an archcynic? Is it possible that an honest reckoning

with all those questions will make us cast a suspicious eye at a lifestyle that he has thus far been preaching successfully?

As a "contemporary cultural fable,"^[46]What I Am Playing with Is Your Heart Beat is in the end an eloquent rebuttal of the conventional argument that what Wang Shuo provides is fast-food literature that gratifies the palate, not the mind. It may be blasphemous at times, but it by no means unambiguously deconstructs the so-called high culture. His better works play with circular logic in Ji Hongzhen's terms: the desire to subvert the self, the desire to return to the subverted self, and the profound sense of loss at an aborted return.^[47] It is time to reposition Wang Shuo where he belongs, between a declining elite and a burgeoning popular culture. Lacking a firm foothold in either culture, the "Wang Shuo phenomenon" that marks the transitional cultural logic at the dawning of the post-new-era will fade fast from the public memory. Future generations will remember him, first and foremost, as a mocker of the elite rather than as an unequivocal cultural populist at heart. Although Wang Shuo never gives up the chance to promote his pop identity—"What I am most interested in . . . is the faddish life style . . . violence and sex"—I suspect that his brazenness may be just a fiction meant to camouflage something that is embarrassingly personal.^[48] As his fiction glides from boisterous humor to implied menace and finally to undisguised contempt for intellectuals, I cannot help asking: Is there any fun at all in stabbing someone who means nothing to you? Could it be, at the risk of insulting an author who seems too cool to have a heart, much less a bruised one, that Wang Shuo is merely trying to come to terms with an inferiority complex that derived from his being denied a college education in his wild late teens?

Whom does Wang Shuo succeed in entertaining but the elite themselves every time he goes slumming? His is a parasitic persona whose rise (and perhaps future downfall) is closely intertwined with the destiny of the intellectuals whose literary taste he commands and at times reproduces. Not even his near-total irreverence toward elitism can hide the fact that there are always ideological limits to the popular disrespect for old structures of intellectual authorities. I suggest, as Andrew Ross concluded in his study of American pop culture, that the history of intellectuals will continue to be written into that of popular culture. In the case of China, the history of the late 1980s and early 1990s is clearly crisscrossed by the "linked material power" of "elitism and anti-intellectualism," "vanguardism and populism," and "paternalism and delinquency."^[49] Perhaps Chinese intellectuals have mourned prematurely the loss of their participatory legitimacy in the making of the post-new-era culture. And

herein lies the true significance of the "Wang Shuo phenomenon": his is a genuine voice of a cultural eclecticism that taps the sources of "indignity" on the one hand and carries on a clandestine affair with hauteur on the other.

We can find no better landmark than Wang Shuo—a shadow and caricature of intellectuals—to draw the 1980s to an end. The decade has come to a full cycle, from the intellectuals' outrage against socialist alienation and their call for return to humanism to the consecration of the fetish of a new kind of antihumanism that Wang Shuo's hooliganism crystallizes.

Whereas in the early 1980s the intellectuals condemned the Party for having alienated the entire country from a liberal humanism, the common folk at the close of the decade resorted to "people power" to denounce high culture as alienating. The irony is too powerful even for Wang Shuo to address and contain. Elite culture, which is the vocation and insignia of the House of Intellects, now emerges for many as the very symbol and vehicle of social, if not socialist, alienation. It is the destiny of Chinese intellectuals to combat alienation twice, first as an ideological malaise, and second as the post-new-epochal reality that follows the deregulation of taste and caste. Indubitably, they won the first battle. Morally, intellectuals rarely suffered any defeat until the battle cries of popular culture beckoned them to surrender.

Like the colleagues associated with the post-1989 literary journal Xueren (Scholars), those who reckoned with the antagonism between elite culture and society have rejected the mob, escaped into the ivory tower, and for better or for worse, retreated into political apathy. For the first time in Chinese intellectual history, a tradition of alienation has taken its root in academic culture. In the decades to come, the ivory tower will stand as both a refuge and fortress for veteran Chinese elites. This scenario is not as humiliating as many may envision. Academia, after all, is where they belong. But the story has just begun. With centuries of the tradition of officialdom deeply ingrained in the intellectual culture, Chinese cultural elite are bound to resist the cozy professionalism that American academics embrace. It is still too early to predict in what participatory form high culture will return to greet the post-new-era. But one can be absolutely certain about one thing: This is a rare opportunity for Chinese intellectuals to practice the dream they have had for decades—to gain total independence from societal and political control.

For the time being, however, there is yet no great danger that Chinese intellectuals will look upon the cult of alienation as "a form of escape for

the free intellectual from the essential facts of defeat and powerlessness" as C. Wright Mills proclaimed.^[50] Powerless they truly are. But Chinese intellectuals endure their alienation from society by posing as wounded heroes. Alienation is hardly a ritual for them but a disgrace to be borne with tenacity. Today in China, the progressive atrophy of the intellectuals' cultural and political muscle has come to dominate the popular footage on the glistening screen of the post-new-era, thanks to Wang Shuo's effort to turn the negative image making of highbrows into a profitable industry. The intellectuals, on the other hand, are not going to unravel their Wang Shuo complex in the near future. Although there are still some who adamantly deny the dissociation of the social (everyday life) from the cultural (high culture) in rapidly changing China and who ponder the twin temptations of "total withdrawal" or "total reintegration," chances are that they are bashing Wang Shuo in public and reading Wang Shuo behind closed doors. All those rituals will only serve to perpetuate the "Wang Shuo phenomenon" for a few years longer.

Deng's China has come a long way since the controversy over socialist alienation in 1983. The intellectuals' dilemma in the 1990s only serves to remind us of the glory of elitism in which the first ten years of the Deng Xiaoping era basked. If this psychological chronicle of the history of the (re)ascension and downfall of China's literary and cultural elite has any final message to deliver to the subject and object of my investigation, the Chinese intellectuals themselves—it is none other than one they kept reiterating at the beginning of the 1980s: Because we are facing a cul-de-sac, we will create a miracle!