Night Train by Xu Zechen is a campus novel with a difference: it’s set in small town China in the present day. Chen Munian is the hapless twenty-six year-old student at the centre of this engaging work. His academic career is stymied because of his all-consuming obsession: to catch a night train that will take him far from the stultifying atmosphere of his home. This has led him to commit a big (and perhaps slightly implausible) mistake. In order to wheedle money from his reluctant father, a poor trishaw driver, he has invented a cock-and-bull story about how he has murdered a man and thrown his body into the local canal.
His father refuses to pay up, and so this attempt to escape fails, but because everyone has heard the story, Munian now needs official certification to allow him to properly complete his degree, and then hopefully enrol for a PH.D in classical Chinese literature. This process drags on over several years, and in the meantime Munian is employed as a janitor and gardener, goes out drinking with a few close friends from university and has a very confusing relationship with Qin Ke, whom he has known all his life, but whose love more often than not leaves him bewildered and unable to respond.
Author Xu Zechen, chosen by the Chinese People’s Literature organisation as one of the twenty best Chinese authors under forty one, is adept at portraying the lives of young men like Chen Munian on the fringes of contemporary Chinese society, as demonstrated in previous novels such as Running Through Beijing and Beijing Spraw.
Life for these young men lacks the certainties and many of the dramas of their parents’ generation (who had to endure Mao’s Cultural Revolution); they have to navigate their own way through a highly bureaucratic society where everything in a person’s life and career is decided by the “higher-ups” and there is widespread endemic corruption in every aspect of twenty-first century China, from policemen who augment their low wages by collecting fines for non-existent traffic offences to boost their meagre wages, to university officials who respect only hierarchies and local officials who embezzle government funds.
Rebel Men
Xu Zechen vividly portrays Chen Munian taking refuge in smoking, getting drunk with his friends, especially his upstairs neighbour Xiaoyi, a painter obsessed with Van Gogh, and repeatedly dreaming of the night train that will take him out of this humdrum existence and finally allow him to see something of the rest of China and the world. Some of the scenes in the novel are full of comic touches, such as the one when his friend Little Japan takes him along to meet a prospective girl-friend, and they try out a place that is for Hipsters, “the ground zero for the town’s art scene”, where among many other topics they discuss whether Westerners really flush their toilets with Coke.
As the novel progresses, everything turns much darker. There’s the death of the old man who befriends Munian when he goes to work as a gardener. His artist friend imitates the life of the Dutch painter, is locked up and meets a similar end to him. The university professor whom Munian worships and is relying on to smooth the way for his further studies turns out to have betrayed him and others. These events build up to the shocking climax of the novel that centres around Qin Ke; following this, Munian has little choice but to take one of his longed-for night trains, this time running for his life.
As in his earlier novels, Xu Zechen succeeds in bringing not just Munian the main character but all the others to life, mixing descriptions of their hopes, anxieties and foibles in a very convincing manner. He is greatly helped by Jeremy Tiang’s sparkling translation that makes the novel entirely convincing, capturing the humour and at the same time despair of many of the characters in street-wise American English.
Reviewed by Nick Caistor for BookBlast
The copyright to all the content of this site is held by the individual authors and creators. All rights reserved. Enquiries: please use the contact form
