OCT. 10, 2014
“When I talk with friends, I reminisce about the ’80s, when everything was not so tainted by the pressure of money, when poets didn’t abandon their work.” — SHENG KEYI Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
The Saturday Profile
By JANE PERLEZ
BEIJING — WHEN her village was still lush with lotus plants, and a crystalline river sparkled in the fields, Sheng Keyi, a very clever and very poor 16-year-old girl, watched television on a tiny black-and-white set at a neighbor’s house.
It was 1989, and the story that the world knows as the Communist Party’s military crackdown in Tiananmen Square was told in reverse on the grainy screen. The official version portrayed the students as violent criminals. The peasants, and the young Ms. Sheng, sitting around the television knew no better.
Now a prominent novelist and a denizen of Beijing literary circles, Ms. Sheng eventually fashioned that turning point in contemporary Chinese history into a stomach-churning, exuberantly written allegory, “Death Fugue,” which recalls Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
In “Death Fugue,” she tells the truth about how the People’s Liberation Army extinguished the student protest. She also creates a society, Swan Valley, that can be read as China today and in the future, where things seem superficially shiny and sleek, rich and productive.
Except in Swan Valley, there is no sexual freedom. Pregnancies deemed likely to produce children with low I.Q.s are terminated immediately, and nursing homes that seem welcoming on the outside are in fact crematories. The citizens are happy enough, though. The place is free of bribery, and a young doctor says he does not have to deal with colleagues from his former life — China, in the late 1980s — who sewed up patients’ anuses if they did not receive the requisite payoff.
“I am truly disappointed with present society,” said Ms. Sheng, 41, a petite woman in skinny jeans, a blue T-shirt and black stiletto heels with a sheath of long black hair around a slender face. Over coffee at an outdoor restaurant near her apartment in Lido, one of the cool neighborhoods in Beijing, a mixture of boutiques and bars, with expensive sports cars out front, she added, “When I talk with friends, I reminisce about the ’80s, when everything was not so tainted by the pressure of money, when poets didn’t abandon their work.”
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