Li Bihua is one of the most “over-commercialized” writers in the Sinophone world, where most criticism and critique on their works is toward the commercial use of their texts. Admittedly, Li’s novels have been repeatedly re-produced into TV episodes, movies and modernist plays, which has gained them popularity that “serious”literary texts do not get to enjoy nowadays. Anyone who was born in or before the 1980s would not forget the impact brought by Wang Zuxian and Zhang Manyu in the movie Green Snake. Millions of audience in China, both mainlanders and Hong Kongers, fell instantly in love with the “abnormal" representation of the old folklore as it had been made into a world full of flirtation, sexual temptation and confrontations of the most secretly hidden desires. But for anyone who has actually read the novel of Green Snake, it would not be compelling to implant the “commercialness” brought along with the movie’s success on Li’s novel. Unfortunately, Green Snake is not the only book that has been constantly misread and mis-criticized.
Different from Green Snake, the story of The Dumpling is set in the contemporary Hong Kong where metamorphism of love and desires between men and women is ubiquitous. Without the mysticism in traditional legends (such as Green Snake), The Dumpling indulges its narrative in a city progressing towards a pursuit of modernity. Ridding itself of the cliche in an usual romance novel, The Dumpling presents the monstrosity of material prosperity with a dialectical spiritual decay. As one can infer from the title, the novel places the most primitive act of human being, eating, at the center of its plot. Of course, Li is not the only or first writer to utilize “eating” as a symbolic literary motif in modern Chinese literature. In 1918, the father of modern Chinese fiction, Lu Xun, enacted the desperate call for the modern nation to save its descendants from the “backwardness” of Chinese traditional culture. In the very first story written in the vernacular language ( Diary of a Mad Man), Lu Xun noted the cruelty upon and indifference to life deeply rooted in Chinese civilization. The mad man in his fiction observes the ritual of eating human flesh every day. He is so obsessed with the cannibalistic nature of traditional culture and education that he can barely rescue himself from the indulgence. Apart from the mad man’s fear and anxiety, Lu Xun also focused on “how the bloody punishment of beheading could be transformed into public entertainment” (The True Story of Ah Q, 1921), and “how a peasant woman’s report of her misfortune could first induce tears and, after several repetitions, end up inciting laughter, mockery and finally total indifference” (New Year’s Sacrifice, 1924). Ever since this beginning of modern Chinese literature, cannibalism has never been able to be separated from the fate of China and Chinese literary evolution.
If China’s development as a modern state is doomed to rise at the cost of its people, the complication of consuming human flesh in The Dumpling has then been adapted and adopted by a postmodern society.
The Dumpling (Jiao Zi) is a collection of five different short stories connected with one central core: whether it is the preserved goose in Chaozhou Alley, the delicious egg tarts in Mong Kok or the dumpling made of aborted fetus, all foods in Li’s narrative imply an intensive game between men and women. In each story, desires are transformed into a feast on the table, love and hatred are inscribed in their tasty flavors, and the aging and deterioration of a human body is consumed as a powerful viagra. Among them, the most interesting story is surely The Dumpling itself. A former actress, Li Jingjing, seeks for a panacea to maintain her youth and tender flesh and finally ends up in a shabby restaurant run by the mainland immigrant, Aunt Mei. Her disgust in the first place gradually develops into an addiction to the miraculous effects of Aunt Mei’s “secret prescription”. Unfortunately, instead of winning her husband’s heart back, her addiction leads her husband’s penis directly to the warm and comforting virgina of Aunt Mei, a woman who has already been in her sixties but still maintained a face of the thirties. In order to make a bowl of “superb” dumplings for Jingjing, Aunt Mei helps a fifteen year-old girl abort her baby, who afterwards dies from massive bleeding, and Aunt Mei herself has to run away from Hong Kong for Shenzhen. Without her “rescue”, Jingjing has no choice but offer a big cheque for a five months old fetus from one of her husband’s mistresses. She is determined to “help herself" no matter what.
As it is said by Aunt Mei, “as long as there are men and women, as long as there is love entangled with anger, and as long as there is fear, worries and willingness to sacrifice everything just for a miraculous cure, my business will never run out.” Perhaps, the contemporary China has successfully rid itself of the struggle in a brutal consuming of human, but how contemporary China is and how China could establish its “contermporariness” needs to be narrated and re-narrated in the face of self-deconstruction and self-critique. By a close reading of The Dumpling, one would easily find a variety of historical implications. With these implications in the setting, such as “the return of Hong Kong in 1997”, “One Child Policy” and “Serve for the People 1968”, those who still insist that Li Bihua’s writing is merely a commercialization operation would inevitably fall into a self-parody and mockery.
The story of The Dumpling is originated from Lu Xun, developed in the contemporary Hong Kong and distorted in its projection of a modern version of cannibalism. How China is depicted by writers like Li Bihua, how history is imagined by Chinese literature and how humanity is related to a nation’s pursuit of modernity are all enriched into a pale reflection of ourselves. This is why Li Bihua must be regarded as a figure of historical witness, to human, to China and to history in a postmodern era.
