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Description
"Returning to his village invigorated by success in the army, Gao Aijun sees the beautiful Xia Hongmei walking barefoot alongside the railway track in the warm afternoon sun, and is instantly smitten. Hiding their relationship from their spouses, the pair hurl themselves into the struggle to bring revolution to their backwater village. They wait to consummate their relationship until Aijun has managed to dig a literal tunnel of love between their homes, where underneath the village their revolutionary and sexual fervor reaches a boiling point. While the unsuspecting villagers sleep, they sing revolutionary songs and shout Maoist slogans to each other before making earth-moving love. But when their relationship is finally uncovered, the couple finds themselves dangerously at odds with the doctrinaire and self-disciplined ideals of party higher-ups. Will their great revolutionary energy save their skins, or will they too fall victim to the revolution? Upturning the ideals of socialist realism, Hard Like Water is an operatic and surprisingly moving human drama about power's corrupting nature and the brute force of love and desire"--… (more)
User reviews
The strength of the novel lies in deftly showing just how much of this young man’s behavior is in reality selfishly motivated. It’s not really about the ideals of collectivism, it’s about an individual trying to attain power. We see him trying to use the rhetoric in Mao’s texts as a weapon against those in power, establishing purity tests and secretly gathering evidence to privately denounce people – not because they’re evil or hold capitalist views, but because they’re in his way. He uses the power of peer pressure to get people on his side, promising personal favors should he gain power. This is the same kind of behavior that played out in the Soviet Union’s experiment with communism, and I found it a searing indictment, in its quiet way. It was a little surprising to me that this wasn’t among his banned books in China. I also appreciated its implicit criticism of the disastrous Cultural Revolution.
One of the weaknesses of the novel is its length, which isn’t justified by the quality of the prose. It’s 413 dense pages, and should have been 100-200 pages shorter. Too often lengthy revolutionary statements are included, I supposed to juxtapose these with the guy’s behavior and make a point, but it got to be too much. I have to say also, that Yan’s writing about sex was weak to say the least. Early on he goes at length about the young woman’s breasts in childish ways (“I knew this was where breast milk came out, something sweet and moist, capable of intoxicating a man”), and almost every time he returned to the topic, it made me cringe a bit. In making the protagonist have occasional erectile issues which are often solved by listening to soaring revolutionary music I think he’s saying that guy in insecure as a man, and needs the revolutionary cause with all its rhetoric to feel larger than himself. He’s the kind of personality that could have adapted itself to any other cause and rhetoric, even if he seems a true believer in this one. I just felt that this was rather clumsily handled and rather overdone.
Overall, worth reading if you’re interested in this period of Chinese history, and/or subversive texts. It won’t be for everyone though.