MCLC: Champa the Driver review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Champa the Driver review
***********************************************************

Source: http://bruce-humes.com/archives/558

Champa the Driver: Tibetan in an Alien Land (裸命)
By Bruce Humes

==============================================
Original Chinese novel:  《裸命》
English title: The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Unbearable-Dreamworld-Champa-Driver/dp/08575220
78
Author: Chan Koonchung (陈冠中)
<http://www.peonyliteraryagency.com/authors_Chan_Koonchung.html>
Translator: Nicky Harman
Reviewer: Bruce Humes
=============================================

 
 “Dreams are so good. Why do we have to make them a reality?”

What’s a young Tibetan stud to do for a living nowadays in a tourist
hotspot like Lhasa? And what happens when his childhood dream—to hang out
in the capital of a country called China—comes true?

In the just-published Champa the Driver, author Chan Koonchung takes us on
a rocky road from Lhasa to Beijing. Along the way he paints disturbing
vignettes. An apartheid-in-the-making. The eerie death wish of a would-be
self-immolator. The Kafkaesque “black jails” where provincial petitioners
who dare air their grievances to the Beijing Mandarins are brutalized,
then sent home.

If they’re lucky, that is.

I read both the Chinese original and Nicky Harman’s translation, and her
rendition convincingly captures Champa’s conflicted mindset and odd lingo;
after all, like any young PRC citizen he is the product of 21st-century
China’s booming economy and rampant materialism. But he is also not a
native speaker of Chinese, and deep down, he is more Tibetan and Buddhist
than he realizes. Even as Chan evokes the gap between image and reality,
between the tourist’s Lhasa and Tibet under the heel of the dragon, and
Beijing as it is dreamt vs. lived, the novel remains a quick and
compelling read.

At the outset, Champa is sitting pretty. He’s got a cushy job in Lhasa as
a chauffeur for Plum, a savvy Han businesswoman with a robust appetite for
the occasional “spurt of the moment” (as Champa puts it), and before he
knows it, he’s her lover-on-demand. However the simple days of
cock-and-cunt—there’s a hefty dose of raw sex as the novel opens—are soon
overshadowed by the troubling loss of his Tibetan virility. After
an-all-too-short trip to Beijing, he realizes that she doesn’t want to be
seen parading her “Tibetan Mastiff puppy” in the capital.

This is a body blow to his self-image, and impacts their relations back
home in Lhasa. “Plum just didn’t get my tantric juices flowing” any more,
he admits. To do his night gig with the boss now, he has to spend his
daytime headhunting a fresh new sex object—in a whorehouse, online, among
tourists, whatever—that he can visualize while servicing Plum.

Dreams of a “Beijing-fixated” Tibetan

Like many youths throughout the PRC, teenage Champa has a romantic image
of Beijing and yearns to emulate it:

<<I always wanted a girlfriend from Beijing. Every year, lots of
Beijingers came on holiday to Lhasa and I learned plenty of Beijing slang
off them. I used to walk like a Beijinger, talk like a Beijinger and dress
like one too.>>

Older generations of Tibetans don’t get this fascination with things
Chinese. When a relative returns from Switzerland, she lectures Champa on
the glories of Tibet’s past, and how “Beijing was built by the Mongols and
the Manchus, and our high lamas were their emperors’ teachers.”

To which he replied back then—or so recount his neighbors—“That’s fuck-all
to do with me!”

Now an adult and working for a Han who spends much of her time in the
capital, a world where she does not welcome him, the attraction of the
Chinese metropolis is even more intense. “If I could get to Beijing, the
world was my oyster,” he tells himself.

Ironically, it’s indirectly Plum who gives him the impetus to hit the road
and turn his dream into reality. Champa has already realized they can’t
stay together because their sexual relations have become an empty ritual
for him, but doesn’t want to hurt her by admitting he no longer desires
her. Instead, he’ll tell Plum that he has left her for another, something
he believes she can more easily accept. But there’s a twist: the new woman
in his life lives in Beijing . . . and happens to be Plum’s daughter,
Shell.

Tibetan History 101

Champa wraps his aphrodisiac White Tārā Boddisattva figurine in a silk
khata, places it in his (oops—Plum’s) Range Rover, and he’s off to the
capital. On his way Champa picks up a hitchhiker, an enigmatic fellow
Tibetan named Nyima. But unlike our protagonist, he doesn’t work for a
living, which puzzles our driver:

<<‘You don’t do anything? Have you always done nothing?’

‘How shall I put this? OK. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s only been the
last few years that I’ve done nothing, since 2008 to be precise. 2008, you
remember, right? It was after that, I started to do nothing.’>>

This is a reference to the “3 •14 Riots” that began in Lhasa as an annual
observance of Tibetan Uprising Day, and quickly spread to other ethnic
Tibetan areas and monasteries. It later descended into rioting, looting
and killing, most victims being Han or Hui civilians.

Champa is also struck by his guest’s choice of words:

<<I realized that Nyima was very particular about the language he used. He
used the Mongolian name, Kokonor, instead of the Chinese, Qinghai. And he
didn’t talk, like the government did, about the ‘Tibetan ethnic minority’
or, worse still, ‘Tubo barbarians’. He pronounced all the names the
Tibetan way. When it came to places, he said ‘Amdo’ or ‘Kham’ or
‘Dbus-Gtsang’ and he was precise about people: they were from Shigatse, or
from Lhasa or wherever. He talked about King Songtsen Gampo, the great
emperor of the Bodpa dynasty. We were not ‘Tibetans’, the word the Chinese
used, Nyima said. We were Bodpa, the ancient people of Bod.>>

As they proceed northeasterly to the capital, Champa—and the reader—get a
mini history lesson about 20th-century Han-Tibetan relations, but
definitely not the one you’ll find inThe People’s Daily. It’s delivered in
short, conversational format by Nyima as we pass through various regions;
and it’s not just about events like resistance to the collectivization of
Kokonor in 1958, which was enforced by Chinese and Mongolian PLA soldiers
who “massacred so many Tibetans that the population of some areas dropped
by thirty or forty percent.” Nyima also details the horrors of famine that
caused many Han starve to death, and the infighting and horrific tortures
employed among Tibetans competing for power in the 1930s.

Thankfully, Nyima’s occasional commentary doesn’t drag on or descend into
diatribe. It never reads like parts of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, where an
old Mongol dispenses lupine wisdom to a naïve, sent-down Han student in
tiresome monologues dressed up as conversation.

Nyima is not a one-track Tibetan history buff with an anti-Han axe to
grind. When he mentions the cannibalism that occurred during one of the
great famines, Champa comments that he seems really “interested in death.”
Not so, counters Nyima. “I’m not interested in death per se. People lack
imagination when it comes to evil. They never imagine that evil is really
that evil . . .’

“Outlander” in the Capital

Things in Beijing don’t go quite the way Champa had envisioned, however.
Partly because his expectations were sky-high from the word go; partly
because his fling with sexually ambivalent Shell fizzles as she discovers
her father was gay; and partly because being Tibetan in racist Beijing
makes getting a decent job or renting a flat a major hassle.

But his introduction to the city is one of the highpoints of the novel.
Just arrived, he’s busy washing his beloved Range Rover when Shell calls
and convinces him—he does have a useful 4 x 4, after all—to join in her
NGO’s effort to save a truckload of dogs bound for the slaughterhouse. The
truck is prevented from leaving as the police, media and bevies of animal
activists converge, and a deal is struck whereby the driver releases the
dogs in return for a whopping 110,000 yuan.

Chan’s description—quoting the SMS texts and tweets of the participants
one-by-one—makes you feel like you’re right there at the scene of what was
actually one of China’s first high-profile, social-media-driven “mass
incidents”:

<<We drove past and took a look. God, it’s terrible, it’s stuffed full of
dogs!
 We counted, twelve cages stacked four high, 12 times 4 makes 48,
times six is nearly three hundred dogs.
Yang says it’s more than three
hundred. It’s 48 cages times 10.

Yang says we’ve got to cut the lorry off, but I’m scared.

Good god! There are all kinds of dogs . . . big tan farm guard dogs,
golden retrievers, huskies, Labradors, Samoyeds, greyhounds, chows,
Alsatians, hunting hounds, golden mastiffs, Pyrenean mountain dogs.

Oh god! Lots of them have collars on. They must be stolen.
 Of course
they’re stolen.
 Stolen.

They must be taking them for slaughter.
 To be turned into dog meat.>>

Shoveling dog-shit at the Animal Sanctuary isn’t Champa’s idea of life in
Beijing, however, and when he and Shell break-up, she does him a parting
favor by calling on an “uncle” to arrange a job as a “hotel security
guard.”

In what is another of Chan’s more masterful treatments of a very real and
frightening phenomenon in today’s China, we gradually realize that he is
working at a “black jail,” or an extra-legal detention center, in legalese.

Black jails are a particularly Beijing phenomenon, because they are
designed to temporarily “house”—detain without trial, in fact—petitioners
who come from all over China to petition the central government for
redress of grievances unresolved by local governments, a practice with
roots in imperial China. Provincial and local governments pay for security
firms and their “black guards”
<http://english.caixin.com/2013-04-02/100509391.html> to intercept these
petitioners before they can formally present their documents to the
Central Office of Letters and Calls, detain them and send them back where
they came from.

The authorities long denied the existence of such a network of jails, but
investigative pieces by the New York Times and China media such as Caijing
and Caixin have made a mockery of those denials. Ironically, the latter’s
reportage, referred to as an exposé by “a weekly magazine in Guangzhou” in
the novel, actually heats up competition among local security firms for a
piece of the “Domestic Security cake” and annoys Champa’s boss, but hardly
seems to have resulted in shutting down the jails.

Singular Novel, Multiple Taboos

Chan’s Chinese-language original wasn’t published in the PRC, and it’s
hard to imagine the English translation showing up at your favorite family
bookstore in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou any time soon.

One particularly sensitive aspect is the way in which actual events and
fictional vignettes combine seamlessly to convey a picture of China’s
Tibet under lock-down. In an example of the former that occurred in 2012,
we learn that thousands of Tibetans are detained when they return from the
Buddhist Kalachakra Tantra festival in India, and “made to study their
‘errors’,” (presumably because the Dalai Lama presided over the ceremony,
though Champa doesn’t mention this).

As Champa drives back to Lhasa from Beijing and enters Tibet, this passage
recalls the mundane but effective mechanics of South African apartheid:

<<From Yanshiping, the first town in Tibet, to Lhasa, there were six
checkpoints on route 109, everyone of them manned by rookie Tibetan cops
or armed police who went through our documents and bags with a fine-tooth
comb, making damn sure that no Tibetan who wasn’t a resident got into
Lhasa.

Why weren’t Tibetans from outside Lhasa allowed into the city? After all,
they were Tibetans, weren’t they?>>

The carnal relationship between Plum, the Han “master” and her indigenous
pet, Champa the “Tibetan Mastiff puppy,” is also something that would
alarm China’s phallocratic censors, not just because it symbolizes the
exploitation of China’s minorities by the dominant Han, but because this
is a Han woman who is perfectly willing to pay a Tibetan to pleasure her
in a way that men of her own race cannot.

To its credit, The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver artfully
accomplishes two things that informative Tibet-related web sites like High
Peaks, Pure Earth <http://highpeakspureearth.com/> or the Chinese-language
diary of Tibetan activist Woeser (看不见的西藏)
<http://woeser.middle-way.net/>
probably don’t: sensitize the casual reader, i.e., who may have no
previous knowledge of the Tibetan “question,” to how China is
micromanaging and marginalizing Tibetans in their own homeland, and
suggest that the Chinese Police State is no less active—and no less
evil—in Beijing then it is in Lhasa.

Welcome to the Chinese Century.