Can Xue, Five Spice Street, Trans. By Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Yale Press, 2009)"No one and nothing may be trusted in Five Spice Street, the first of Can Xue’s full-length novels to be translated into English. In the neighborhood where the story is set—a three-mile-long street actually—nothing is certain. There is no one truth. Doubt overshadows everything. In this story, a dissonant chorus of voices argues, interrupts, disrupts, contradicts, and gossips, forcing everything into flux. Static, distortion, and noise rule here. As “the writer” suggests:
The crowds on Five Spice Street always had to think everything through every which way: they never reached a verdict lightly, and would never give up on a riddle just because they were temporarily stumped: they had to give it hard thought; if they couldn’t solve it, they would keep their eyes open. Sometimes, a small matter could trigger their thoughts for a long time, and another small matter could suddenly enlighten them.
Parsing out who said what and why within this cacophonous polyphony is challenging, as Xue’s story is filled with parenthetical intrusions and asides and even the simplest statements are placed in quotes. Rumor and gossip amplified to the nth degree: this is what awaits readers in Five Spice Street. Surrendering to the novel’s style, however, is just the beginning. Beyond lie the fabulist and hyper-erotic elements in the story, the many clues found deep within the narrative, and the novel’s “innumerable nested boxes,” as one character puts it. But once the challenge has been met, you just might burst out into hysterics at the wonderful insanity of it all. You have been forewarned.
Five Spice Street is divided into two sections. The first, “Preliminaries,” is an overview of the major characters, among them Madam X, the Widow, Mr. Q, the lame woman, and the young coal worker. “Preliminaries” depicts their intertwining stories, conflicts, and dilemmas, all of which are obscured by the numerous conflicting accounts. The main character, Madam X, brings to mind John Singer Sargent’s painting of the same name, a portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a Parisian socialite, who, after rejecting numerous proposals to be painted, finally agreed to Sargent’s request after realizing it would serve as an opportunity to advance in Parisian society.
The painting, like Madam X, is a study in contrasts, Gautreau’s ivory white skin and her black satin dress, the light from her skin emanating against the russet background, her voluptuous figure and her angular face, the painting’s play of revelation and concealment, control and abandon. The Madam X in Five Spice Street is also a mysterious bundle of contradictions, and surely Xue, like Sargent, employed the name as a way of expressing both anonymity and mystery, as well as raising her own character to the stature of myth, symbol, and archetype. It certainly helps that her namesake was rumored to have been guilty of numerous infidelities. And I wonder if Madam X is also a pseudonym for Can Xue, already a pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, which means “dirty snow.”
There are at least twenty-eight views on Madam X’s age—at one end of the spectrum she’s as young as twenty-two and about fifty at the other—and at least five opinions on Mr. Q’s looks. But there is much more to Madam X than what meets the eye—for instance, her eye. The first time “Mr. Q looked at X’s whole face, he saw only one immense continuously flickering saffron-colored eyeball.” And through the course of their affair the “light waves in her senseless eyes,” whose “intensity can illuminate everything in the universe,” was all he could see. Other fantastic rumors abound about X: She’s suffering from a disease. She has supernatural powers to manipulate people and events at whim. She can force people to their grave. She makes dynamite with the intention of destroying a public toilet. She raises scorpions. There are accounts of her using countless mirrors as a kind of magical portal toward achieving cosmic transcendence. But of course doubts are raised about all of these reports. As for Mr. Q’s looks, he is either ugly, or not, that is, if one subscribes to the Chinese proverb “There’s no such thing as an ugly man.” The consensus, if one may call it that, is that Q is “a large man, either ugly or handsome, or with nothing remarkable about him, with a broad square face, and an odd expression, a little like a catfish.”
The rivalry between Madam X and the Widow is one of the novel’s primary plot devices as is the “sex research” they both practice. Madam X’s “dispel boredom movement” (her mysterious system where “spare-time recreation,” one of the many comical euphemisms for sex in this book, is used as a transcendental act) leads to a series of bizarre escapades. One afternoon when “the sky was that kind of sentimental color, without a cloud to be seen, and the edge of the sun is filled with sharp triangles,” Madam X, “lying alone on the beach at the riverside... felt the reality of carnal intimacy.” Aroused, she undressed and then “flew in the burning heat, running around wantonly, wildly.” A few women in the town were “inspired” to mirror her. This leads to the entire town “hugging and kissing everyone they saw, touching everyone all over their bodies. One or two even ‘got on with it’ on the spot. It was a noisy, rollicking scene. Everyone was sweating profusely and breathing hot and heavy like oxen.”
Madam X, while largely despised and feared, is often approached for advice, for guidance. Especially in the chapter “Madam X Talks Abstractly of Her Experiences with Men,” we find her in philosophical mode. After laying out her thoughts about the importance of having a mind free of conventional considerations, she says:
Language is also a way of hinting at feelings, because try as hard as you can to communicate your ardor and your dreams to the other, you can’t just show your feelings through action—that isn’t enough. And so you use language. At this time language doesn’t have just the everyday meanings—perhaps it is some simple syllables, some little sounds that have sprouted wings. I can elicit that kind of special language.
The novel’s second section, “The Way Things Are Done,” casts doubt on everything that transpired in section one. The disorientation is extreme, as the first section was itself a shifting kaleidoscope of stories, images, and memories, so disorientating that it’s almost as if a giant reset button had been pressed. The lame woman, in her “official account,” perhaps best reveals the character of Five Spice Street’s second half: “I must tell you again: your imaginary experiences don’t exist. They don’t even have a foreword. All the beginnings you’ve imagined are subjectively trumped up: they’ve resulted from sloppy romantic sentiments spilling over. The real beginning is lost, never to return.”
Can Five Spice Street, with its multiplicity of voices, reportage, affidavits, shifting points of view, be termed a “novel”? Conceiving To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf knew that she wanted to draw directly from her own memories and that the work would not correspond to conventional narrative form. In her diary, she wrote: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ ...But what? Elegy?” So what is Five Spice Street? A remarkable prose object? Mirrorbox? Or simply call it “novel,” understanding it to mean “fresh” and “new” as in: Can Xue’s novel approach to writing fiction in Five Spice Street offers the reader a delightful puzzle whose pieces constantly change shape and shatter into ever smaller fragments.
The book is challenging, and deciphering its conclusion, having something to do with “a beautiful wave of the future,” is a task in itself. But the fainthearted may use something the young coal worker said as a guide to understanding the book, or any other “difficult” work of fiction, for that matter: “Sometimes, we have to change our way of thinking and look with brand-new eyes before we can enter into the essence of something. This seems difficult and troublesome, but with hard struggle you can make it.” - John Madera
"There’s an old Chinese fable that goes like this: A weapons vendor at market touts his unbelievable spear (mao)—it can pierce shield (dun)! Then he turns around and talks up his amazing shield—it can withstand any spear! But then a child asks, “What happens if you use your own spear against your own shield?”
That tale spawned a noun in Mandarin: maodun—whose meaning falls somewhere between irony and paradox, and implies getting pulled in opposite directions. It’s a pretty good word for what’s been going on with Can Xue (pen name for 55-year-old Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua): The more vigorously she protests that her fiction isn’t political commentary, the firmer the consensus grows among Western critics that it’s a massive indictment of her homeland. Can Xue has had four books of surrealistic, sometimes grotesque short stories translated into English, each volume further cementing her reputation as a radical who offers, in the words of a 1991 New York Times review, “nightmare images of life under a punishing regime.” But Can Xue continues to insist she writes only of her inner world. “Real literature faces the soul,” she tells me, when I interview her with the aid of a translator at Manhattan’s Yale Club during her recent visit to the United States.
What’s going on here? Maybe the American view of China has become so politicized that we inevitably find critique where there is none. Or maybe a writer like Can Xue has to downplay her political themes to placate Beijing, which has suppressed her work in the past. But which is it? The new release of Five Spice Street,written in 1988 and her first full-length novel to be translated in English, is unlikely to resolve the issue.
A reader today might be forgiven for seeing the book as a dead-on portrayal of late-’80s anomie in the People’s Republic of China. With its excavation of rampant mistrust, spying, and carnal jealousy in a tight-knit rural community, Five Spice Street seems to peer through a magnifying glass at the disintegration of Mao’s utopian socialist order. The novel revolves around the ethereal Madam X, a transplant to the eponymous street—she and her husband run a fruit stand there, although it’s said they used to be party officials somewhere. (Is this a veiled reference to the decline in the prestige of the Maoist old guard?) Speculations about Madam X consume her neighbors, and her essential qualities change depending on whom you ask: Perhaps she’s a potent sexual sorceress, but perhaps her private life is completely banal. The denizens of Five Spice Street, who both despise and adulate her, can’t even collectively determine whether she’s 22 or 50 years old. She’s a temptress and a tease, driving the men and women alike wild, although they don’t know if she could even deliver the goods if they managed to possess her. Could Madam X represent that elusive Social Ideal, whether communism or democracy?
Way off, if you ask the Can Xue, who claims she’s operating on a different plane entirely. Calling Five Spice Street her “spiritual biography,” she tells me, the characters all represent her own desires and dissatisfactions, and that Madam X embodies the author’s personal idealized life. According to her, the story has nothing to do with the real world: Naturally she borrows details from daily existence, she says, but these are just “materials for her factory,” where she “weighs down everyday feelings to a deep place, and then retrieves them.” This method is responsible, she says, for the “strange feel” of her prose.
It’s certainly true that the novel is far from naturalistic, although it paints a more concrete, less dreamlike realm than her other translated work so far (Dialogues in Paradise, Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas,and The Embroidered Shoes: Stories). But its atmosphere is still an uncanny one of occultism, portents, and metamorphoses. Characters’ eyes in particular are sites of magic—perhaps apt in a neighborhood consumed by voyeurism and rumor. “Flickering waves of light” are said to “radiate from Madam X’s eyes, turning people into grotesque shapes.” Meanwhile Old Woman Jin, a rival of Madam X, looks out of “two fluctuating red orbs, at once bulging out of her eye sockets, and all at once drawing back in.”
With her flair for supernatural-tinged farce, Can Xue is incessantly likened to Franz Kafka. But Five Spice Street even more recalls the output of another Eastern European modernist: the Polish short-story writer Bruno Schulz, whose fabulist tales of rural boyhood are cast in the same lush, earthy tones that resonate in Xue’s novel. Some of her anthropomorphic descriptions— “a puff of fog from a green meteor on the horizon startled the hill” — strike with Schulz’s dark beauty. And both writers’ power lies in their shaman-like ability to animate hyper-local superstitions and fears.
Schulz’s stories also took place against a significant historical backdrop—namely the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And while themes of social decay are ever-present beneath his writing, they never overpower the specificity of his imaginative universe. Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for reading Can Xue—her political context shouldn’t be ignored, but neither should it get in the way of appreciating her work for what it is—world-class art." - Eli Epstein-Deutsch
"Who is Madam X? Madam X sells peanuts at the stand with the red-painted sign. Madam X is an occultist, a collector of mirrors and corrupter of neighborhood children. Madam X is a home wrecker. Madam X is a threat to communal harmony and morality. Madam X is a sexual deviant. Madam X is a virgin. Madam X is fifty years old. Madam X is twenty-two. Madam X is having an affair with Mr. Q. Madam X wishes to be famous. Madam X hopes to be forgotten. Madam X is the elected representative of the people of Five Spice Street. Madam X is the wave of the future.
The question of Madam X's identity is at the center of Can Xue's Five Spice Street, a novel that is by turns confounding, comic, and sharp in its portrayal of communal life on a small street in an unnamed country (but which bears an unmistakable resemblance to China). It is a question that is not so much answered as it is endlessly speculated upon by the street's residents, who observe Madam X's activities (Madam X doesn't say much, so they must watch her vigilantly) and then provide their own explanations. As a result, Madam X at first becomes a repository for the people's biases and prejudices. She is thought to be having an affair with a certain Mr. Q, and despite the fact that other residents engage in similarly shady sexual behavior, Madam X is shunned as a degenerate. But by the novel's end, after the people of Five Spice Street have exhausted their speculations, Madam X is honored as a visionary who "represents a society of the future," and she is elected representative of the street.
A tidy plot summary does not begin to capture the novel's tangled versions of reality. The reader sinks into a cacophony of street voices and their competing narratives like a castaway falling into quicksand. An unnamed writer narrates the story, and he reports diligently on the "facts" of the case, trying to reconcile each variation he hears from the residents of Five Spice Street. The first lines are a clue to what follows: "When it comes to Madam X's age, opinions differ here on Five Spice Street. One person's guess is as good as another's. There are at least twenty-eight points of view. At one extreme, she's about fifty (for now, let's fix it at fifty); at the other, she's twenty-two." Consider yourself warned: it only gets foggier from there.
The spark that sets off this fuse of speculation about Madam X is her alleged affair with Mr. Q. A widow notices Mr. Q's comings-and-goings and soon the whole neighborhood is talking about it. Both have spouses who are "childlike," devoted, and don't seem to care much at all about the rumored affair. Madam X says that she "never laid eyes" on Mr. Q, and one of the neighbors, "a female colleague" of X, explains that "X didn't look at people with her eyes… After she bought the mirrors and microscope from the junk shop, she even announced that her eyes ‘had retired.' That is, except for things in the mirror, she looked at nothing." Euphemisms, such as "spare time recreation" used in place of "sex," are deployed by all residents of Five Spice Street. Everyday conversations are beset with the uneasiness of Orwellian doublespeak.
Mirrors and microscopes, spare time recreation, a main character who can only see reflections in a mirror, and a plot that is riddled with random events and characters who flit in and out of the novel seemingly without purpose (a partial list of such events and characters: the collapse of Madam X's house, Mr. Q's discovery of a bouncing ball, Old Woman Jin's affair with a young mining worker, Old Meng's affairs with various women, a widow's neighbor shitting on her front steps, a lame woman recounting a twenty-three-minute staring contest)—this is dangerous territory. Five Spice Street is a novel about the meanings and sources of identity, about the relationship between the individual and the community, about the gap between public and private selves; it is a critique of narrative storytelling, of relationships of cause and effect, of the idea that anything that springs from the human mind can be called truth. It is a novel that rejects the senses, building its fictional universe by subtracting them. What little the reader can hear, see, touch, smell, or taste on Five Spice Street is ultimately uncertain, ephemeral, subjective. The reader, on this arduous journey with an author who isn't explaining or taking questions, is bewildered.
All of this makes Five Spice Street a challenging, frustrating read, but, as with quicksand, it helps if you don't struggle. The rampant gossip, the maligning of character, the elaborate explanations for mysterious behavior, all bring to mind pre-capitalist-reform China, when even the most innocuous behavior could be taken as subversion and lead to public denunciation by friends, neighbors, or colleagues, followed by a trip to a "reeducation" camp. Although the book is set in an unknown city in an unknown year, it is easy to imagine Madam X's neighbors reporting her to the police or some party apparatus that deals with dissenters and social misfits. But instead of a reeducation camp, Xue devises a hilariously backwards ending. After years of denouncing her, the people of Five Spice Street decide that Madam X is really "ahead of her time," and they elect her the people's representative, a job she does not want. By now her husband has left her and her house is literally falling down, but when she appeals to the government committee in charge of house renovation and construction to have her crumbling house fixed, her applications are taken as a kind of statement on the political system and ignored. Two weeks later the house collapses. The temptation for the reader is to interpret the collapse as symbolic of something—its occurrence is so random, so unaccounted for, it would be hard not to—but it isn't symbolic, it's meaningless. The collapse is the culmination of the trick that Five Spice Street has been playing on the reader all along: on Five Spice Street, nothing means anything." - Brendan Patrick Hughes
Other books by Can Xue:
"Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it." - Steven Shaviro
