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Sweet humdrum daysDreamworldConnla StokesRupert Winchester

N O S T A L G I AF I C T I O N

Over the last few years, Chan Koonchung has become a name to conjure with in the West, following in the footsteps of Gao Xingjian

and Mo Yan. All three have brought modern Chinese literature, with its hallucinatory realism and wispy absurdism, to the attention of Western audiences.

Chan originally came to European and US attention with the publication of his dystopian novel The Fat Years in 2011. Lavished with praise from heavyweight literary magazines and journals, and deliberately marketed as “the notorious thriller they banned in China”, it was a somewhat heavy-handed satire on China’s “golden age of ascendancy”, which coincided with the 2008 financial crisis in the West.

While interesting as a document, the novel was let down by a ponderous translation and its seemingly endless pages of social and political theorising, which can work against efficient plotting and character management. The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver represents a large step forward for Chan. He has a new translator, a much more likable main character in Champa and a much more workable structure, and it all makes for an altogether better book.

Champa is Tibetan, and works as a driver for Plum, a wealthy businesswoman from southern China who is based in Lhasa. Champa is, in fact, more than just a driver, and performs rather more intimate services for Plum. In the main, the novel is gleefully and energetically filthy, and Champa is fully part of the picaresque tradition, a genre featuring a roguish protagonist of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society.

Champa then becomes obsessed with a woman called Shell and takes off in Plum’s Range Rover for Beijing, where he becomes involved with Shell and her pals, who are trying to end the trade in dog meat. His relationship with Shell eventually sours, and he ends up working for an offshoot of the Chinese government’s security apparatus, imprisoning dissidents, punching schoolchildren and generally being a goon for hire. Eventually he upsets his superiors and is forced to flee back to Lhasa with nothing other than a Tara statuette as a memento of his adventures.

Told like that, the novel seems disjointed and merely episodic. But Chan Koonchung is far too talented a writer merely to churn out scenes. The Unbearable Dreamworld is, of course, a meditation on the relationship between China and Tibet, with the plucky Champa alternately seduced, empowered and co-opted into doing what Beijing desires. Despite Champa believing he has control over his own destiny, with his fornicating and drinking and stealing, in the end he is less than the tiniest cog in China’s plans, even if he can’t see this himself.

Chan Koonchung is a prodigiously talented writer, who has a number of other professional interests, including screenwriting, magazine publishing and environmental advocacy. He is a board member of Greenpeace and an actor. He lives in Beijing, unmolested by the authorities, despite his astringent and deeply political views.

A couple of years ago, he told the BBC, “In China, until the state intervenes, until the state tries to stop you from giving out dissenting views, you are not considered a dissident”. It may be that The Unbearable Dreamworld pushes the authorities in Beijing to take more notice of him. ☐

Sometimes I revisit the halcyon days of early 21st century Hanoi in my mind. How about you, buddy? No, I’m not talking about the

dizzying highs like when I fell in love twelve times in the space of an afternoon without even getting off my motorbike, or when you won seventeen games of pool in a row in Apocalypse Now (even beating the guy who took it so seriously he had a special glove and came with his own cue), or when Vietnam hosted the 22nd SEA Games (heady, heady times). And I’m sure as hell not talking about the terrifying lows (mostly involving motorbike crashes, prolonged bouts of diarrhoea, and encounters with strange, whisky-addled and/or reptillian men after the hour of three a.m.).

I’m not even talking about the creamy middles — more the humdrum in-between stuff, the insignificant ways that you and I (and others of our ilk) passed the bulk of our time. Like: all the hours we spent sitting in a crappy internet café listening to the sound of an erratic dial up connection, which may or may not eventually offer us access to the world-wide-web (but we didn’t care as we knew no better); sitting in Moka Café (I swear it was the best brunch café in all of Indochina for most of the year 2000) or the Kangaroo Café (no frills egg brekkie, mate) debating with friends whether it was time to scrap Hotmail and sign up for Yahoo; or whether you or I, or someone we knew, should stop renting a (highly dependable) Honda Wave (with a monthly service thrown into the bargain) and purchase a two-stroke motorbike that would break down repeatedly (leaving you or I, or someone we knew, on the side of every road in town and most provincial highways across the breadth of northern Vietnam, wishing, hoping, praying someone will take pity on you or I, or someone we knew, and help). I’m thinking about the days when nobody would even raise an eyebrow when a restaurant advertising an English breakfast served you a canned frankfurter in lieu of a sausage. I’m harking back to a time when one of the most regular post-lunch activities for many of us was to sift through boxes and catalogues of bootlegged CDs in those pokey little shops on Bao Khanh Street and buy every single Tom Waits album ever recorded, or Café Del Mar volumes I to VII, or three Ali “Farka” Touré albums that would never get played, not once. I’m recalling how we’d sit in a bar — pick a bar, any bar, doesn’t matter which bar — drinking Halida/ Tiger/ Carlsberg while listening to Californication/ Pretty Fly for White Guy/ I’m the King of Bongo for the fifth time that night. Or how about those

quiet nights when we decided to stay in (whenever one of us was sick or both of us were sick of being hung-over) and enhance our understanding of Vietnam by watching films (made by overseas Vietnamese directors) like Scent of Green Papaya, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, Cyclo, Three Seasons on a contraption known as a “VCD player” while eating pizza Diavola from Luna D’Autunno? Or do you remember how we could drive home before midnight on a Sunday and not see a single ‘privately-owned’ car and hardly any motorbikes (every time we crashed, we only had ourselves to blame)? Or how we told everyone we didn’t smoke, as we didn’t have to buy packs of cigarettes, as our favourite cafés (Cafe Quynh, Cafe Lam, Cafe Giang…) would sell us a single cigarette, so we’d sit there with nowhere else to be, sipping on our iced coffees, smoking our single Vinataba, or if we were feeling fancy, a ‘ba số’, flirting with, or just staring at the girl who served us the coffee… (or avoiding the stares of the seemingly lovestruck boy who served us). Whenever we got itchy feet, we’d jump on our motorbikes and crisscross the town, over and over, daydreaming as we rode, till hunger for food or a thirst for beer, whichever came first, signalled us to dismount and sit at a plastic table on a Lilliputian-sized chair. Maybe we’d trade very limited repartee with the locals around us (until they ran out of English, or we ran out of Vietnamese); maybe we’d trade barbs with the grumpy materfamilias and her cronies; or maybe we’d just sit there watching the traffic (even that seemed like a worthwhile recreation in those days). Every mouthful of cheap-street-eats and every glug of a two- or three-thousand-dong beer seemed like a tip of the hat to the entire city swirling around us.

Is it any wonder that you didn’t stop grinning for a whole bloody year? Not to me, buddy. We were in love. In love with the whole goddamned city and our humdrum lives. And maybe I’m wrong, but I’d like to think that all those years ago, there was a part of us that knew we would one day look back and say, those were the fucking salad days, my friend — and now we know they were; and even though we were most often doing nothing but killing time and loafing about, those days still deserve their little place in history. But let’s agree to never tell anyone that we never even opened any of the three Ali “Farka” Touré albums we bought but listened to every single bloody volume of Café Del Mar — nobody needs to know about that, do they buddy? Even humdrum personal histories need a little airbrushing. ☐

Oslo Davis

Chan Koonchung, The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver, Doubleday, 2014, 192 pages

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