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!