Three Brothers

Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, May 30th 2020

On February 21st, a month into the Wuhan lockdown, Yan Lianke spoke to his students about the importance of individual memory in the face of national and historical revisionism. His key messages were that allowing our personal experiences to be erased in the name of collective mythology removes our ability to ensure authenticity and truth remain in the world, and that it is the role of the artist to stand witness to the horrors of war (real or figurative) even as those around them celebrate victory. It is a responsibility that he takes very seriously in his writing, his dark allegories revealing a bleak and desperate ‘invisible reality’ of China that has seen them banned from the mainland.

Originally published in 2010 and newly translated into English, Three Brothers is a memoir of Lianke and his paternal family that sees him turn this critical gaze inward rather than outward. Growing up in rural Henan during the Cultural Revolution, his childhood was dominated by hunger, boredom and endless work. His family’s limited resources were further stretched by the costs of caring for his elder sister (bedridden with osteonecrosis) and his father’s asthma, the result of years of physical labour and undernourishment. Thanks to the love and support of the adults around him, “virtually the only thing I didn’t lack was a feeling of warmth and protection”,  but the combination of material hardship and a love of literature awakened in the young Lianke an intense desire to escape the countryside for the excitement and opportunity of the city. Although he eventually realised his dreams, his politically charged novels have earned him the dubious honour of being his hometown’s least favourite son. Three Brothers has its genesis in the desire to reconnect with his family and their corner of the world.

Lianke’s memories of childhood privation are balanced by adult reflections on the lessons to be learned from his father’s generation. Thus, his father’s story is transformed into an exploration of his own failures, First Uncle’s becomes a meditation on fate and existence, and Fourth Uncle’s reflects on the meaning of happiness and the difference between life and living. Theirs were lives of almost unimaginable hardship, but Lianke’s depictions invoke an honour and integrity that later generations have lost: “My father was a peasant, and work was his duty. Only be working day and night could he truly feel alive and believe his life had significance”, and First Uncle, although illiterate, lived for the sake of the promises he made, “revealing the nobility and vulgarity of his humble peasant’s life…[and had] no need to elevate life and death to the philosophical level of intellectuals.”

In some parts, the writing adopts the fabulist style of his novels: layers of sensual figurative detail, with whole paragraphs, “If life is a process, then fate is an ending….if life has a measurable depth, then fate is a bottomless pit…if life is soft sobbing, then fate is a process of tearlessly howling at the sky.” In other places, the memoir reads like a work of self-criticism, particularly in relation to his father, whose premature death he blames on his own selfishness and lack of filial concern. And, despite China’s rapidly growing economy having moved thousands out of the grinding poverty experienced by earlier generations, Lianke mourns the loss of a world where the toil of a hand-to-mouth existence was in and of itself the reason for living.  

Disturbing, moving, and surprisingly resonant in light of current circumstances, Three Brothers provides a valuable insight into the writer, his country, and the historical and personal soil from which he and his novels spring.