In Gao Xingjian’s images (1940–) play Bus Stop images (1983), eight characters, stuck in an outer suburb, wait for a bus. Though sound effects announce passing buses, none stops, and the characters gradually despair of ever reaching the city. Gramps cannot get to his chess match; Girl misses her date; and Hothead fears losing his chance to taste yogurt. Mom tries to teach Hothead some manners, consoles the lovelorn girl, and worries about her husband and child, whose laundry awaits her weekend visits. Early on, without explanation, the Silent Person leaves to walk, and when the others realize that ten years have passed, they regret not having followed his example.
在高行健（1940-）的话剧《车站》（1983）里，八位角色困在郊区，等待一趟公共汽车。虽然舞台声响表明不时有公共汽车经过，却没有一辆停下来，大家越来越绝望，感觉永远进不了城。“大爷”没法去见棋友，“姑娘”错过了她的约会，“愣小子”害怕失去尝酸奶的机会。“做母亲的”试图教“愣小子”学会礼貌，安慰害相思病的“姑娘”，一边担心自己的丈夫和孩子，他们的衣服每周末都等着她去洗。在这之前，“沉默的人”一声不吭地离开了，要走着回去，当其他人发现转眼十年已过去时，都后悔当初没学他的样子。
At regular intervals, the audience sees the silhouetted Silent Person walking, accompanied by a signature tune. His movement serves as a foil for the waiting characters, whose predicament recalls that of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). Drawing on both traditional Chinese theater (with its interplay of sound and drama) and French theater of the absurd, Gao’s characters sometimes talk for the sake of talking. But their dialogues also express deep longings and trenchant social criticisms. For Glasses, who misses his final chance to take the College Entrance Exam, the waiting becomes unbearable: “Life has left us behind. The world has forgotten us. A lifespan passes by in vain right before your eyes.” “Waiting’s not so bad,” the master carpenter counters later, when the actors break character to deliver overlapping lines. “People wait because they have hope.”
每隔一段时间，观众都会看见“沉默的人”的剪影，同时听到代表他的音乐。他的行进反衬着其他角色的等待，这些人的困境让人想起塞缪尔·贝克特的《等待戈多》（1953）中的弗拉季米尔和爱斯特拉冈。高行健的角色既有中国传统戏曲（声音和情节互相映衬）的影子，也吸收了法国荒诞派戏剧的特点，他们有时仅仅是为了说话而说话。但是他们的对话也表达了深沉的渴望和对社会的尖锐批评。“戴眼镜的”错过了最后一次高考机会，对他来说这样的等待已经无法忍受：“我们被生活甩了，世界把我们都忘了，生命就从你面前白白流走了。”后来，当演员跳出虚构的角色，同时说着各自的台词时，“扮师傅的演员丙”反驳道，“等不要紧。人等是因为人总有个盼头。”
A political allegory of China’s passage from the countryside to the city, Gao’s play suggests five themes central to the modernization and globalization of Chinese literature.
Though many critics interpret the play as signaling the government’s failure to deliver the means of progress, others hear in it ongoing commitments to national pride, humanism, progress, memory, and pleasure. Although such positive aspirations have often been downplayed by critics of Gao’s 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, their resonance for the Nobel Committee and for his other admirers suggests these themes’ centrality in contemporary world literature.
高行健的剧作是一则寓言，解读了中国从乡村进入城市的变化，隐含着对中国文学的现代化和全球化至为关键的五个主题：对民族自豪感、人文主义、进步、记忆和快乐的追寻。
尽管许多评论家将这部剧解释为政府未能提供进步手段的信号，但其他人则从剧中听到了对民族自豪感、人文主义、进步、记忆和快乐的持续承诺。 尽管高 2000 年诺贝尔文学奖的批评者经常淡化这种积极的愿望，但他们对诺贝尔委员会和他的其他仰慕者的共鸣表明这些主题在当代世界文学中的中心地位。
After Gao’s characters have waited a year, they try to block the road as a bus approaches. It blares its horn, and the characters scatter as the bus, full of foreigners, speeds past. It was a tourist bus for foreigners, Mom explains, which would have required foreign currency certificates. This affront further discourages them, and a little later Glasses despairs that no bus will come: “Let’s walk, as that guy did. In the time we’ve spent foolishly waiting at this bus stop, someone could have not only arrived in the city, but accomplished something there. What are we waiting for?”
高的角色等了一年后，当一辆公共汽车接近时，他们试图封锁道路。 它吹响了喇叭，随着满载外国人的公共汽车疾驰而过，人物四散开来。 妈妈解释说，这是一辆面向外国人的旅游巴士，需要外币证明。 这种侮辱使他们更加气馁，过了一会儿，格拉斯对没有公共汽车来了感到绝望：“我们走吧，就像那个家伙那样。 在我们傻傻地在这个公交车站等车的时间里，可能有人不仅到达了这座城市，而且还在那里完成了一些事情。 我们还在等什么？”
Because the characters decide to set off on foot only at the end of the play, their passivity has also been interpreted as an allegory for China’s belated modernization.
Though many features of modern societies were developing in China by at least the sixteenth century, China was militarily unprepared when European powers forcibly entered China in the nineteenth century. After disputes over Britain’s importation of opium led to the Opium Wars, a series of unequal treaties imposed mercantilism (what would now be called free trade), opened China’s ports, created foreign concessions in key cities, and made Hong Kong a British colony.
由于剧中人物决定徒步出发，他们的被动也被解读为中国迟来的现代化的寓言。
虽然早在16世纪中国就出现了现代社会的许多特征，但在19世纪欧洲列强武力入侵时，中国在军事上却毫无准备。当英国偷运鸦片引发的纠纷演变为一场战争时，一系列不平等条约强迫中国接受了西方的重商主义（现在应该称为自由贸易），开放商埠，在主要城市设立租界，并将香港割让给英国。
Concerned that China would be carved up like a melon, reformers pursued a limited Westernization movement—based on the notion of “Chinese essence, Western means”—until Japan too defeated China in the 1894–95 war over Korea. After Japan imposed its own unequal treaty that, among other humiliations, made the island of Taiwan a Japanese colony, many Chinese saw Japan’s power as the result of the Meiji regime’s embrace of Westernization. As Yan Fu (1853–1921) and others translated works by thinkers such as Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Montesquieu, “survival of the fittest” and other vocabulary from the social sciences increasingly shaped Chinese intellectuals’ understanding of their nation’s dilemmas, and they advocated a more radical modernization program for China.
洋务派担心中国被瓜分，在“中学为体、西学为用”的理念指导下，发起了一场有限西化的运动，直到日本在1894-1895年的争夺朝鲜的战争中击败中国。日本也将自己的不平等条约强加给中国，除其他羞辱性条款外，台湾岛也成了日本殖民地。许多中国人将日本的崛起归因于明治维新的西化路线。严复（1853-1921）等人翻译了托马斯·赫胥黎、赫伯特·斯宾塞、亚当·斯密、约翰·斯图亚特·穆勒、孟德斯鸠等思想家的著作，“适者生存”以及其他来自西方社会科学的语汇越来越深刻地塑造了中国知识分子对民族困局的理解，他们因而主张中国应该更彻底地西化。
This nationalistic project supported Chinese literature’s evolution into a distinct and respected field. Convinced that China’s survival depended on an educated citizenry, reformers published vernacular novels, newspapers, and magazines. From Beijing University’s founding in 1898, newly established universities nurtured academic study of the humanities, including Chinese and foreign literatures, and literary groups formed around key universities. With the abolition of the civil service exams in 1905, intellectuals gained further independence from the government.
在民族救亡思潮的推动下，中国文学发展成为一个独立且受尊崇的领域。改革者们深信，中国若要生存，就必须有受过良好教育的公民，所以他们出版白话小说，创办报刊杂志。从1898年北京大学建校开始，许多新成立的大学都大力发展人文学科的研究，包括中国文学和外国文学，以重要大学为中心涌现了许多文学团体。1905年废除科举后，知识分子更加摆脱了政府的束缚。
Much of the best contemporary writing from the mainland also follows in China’s humanist tradition, including Yu Hua’s (1960–) To Live (1992) and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995).
And whereas Yu’s portrait of a desperate father who nearly dies selling his blood offers a subtle critique of market capitalism, Yan Lianke’s (1958–) Dream of Ding Village (2006) directly indicts the government’s blood-selling profiteers who unleashed an AIDS epidemic in Henan province. As Yan’s characters die “like falling leaves,” his haunting novel may be a twenty-first century version of Camus’s The Plague (1947).
大陆当代最优秀的许多作品也继承了中国的人文主义传统，包括余华（1960-）的《活着》（1992）和《许三观卖血记》（1995）。
余对卖血差点丧命的绝望父亲的描绘对市场资本主义进行了微妙的批判，而阎连科（1958-）的《丁村之梦》（2006）则直接控诉了政府的卖血奸商，他们在河南引发了艾滋病流行。 省。 由于严的角色“像落叶一样”死去，他那令人难以忘怀的小说可能是加缪的《瘟疫》（1947）的 21 世纪版本。
In Bus Stop, Glasses, refusing to waste his time merely waiting for the bus, studies English-language flashcards for his College Entrance Exam. He’s tempted to walk but fears that a bus might come the moment they leave: “Maybe our waiting for a lifetime here, until old age and death, has been determined by fate. Why don’t people create their own future? Why do we have to bitterly suffer as victims of fate?”
在公交车站，格拉斯拒绝浪费时间等待公交车，而是为他的高考学习英语抽认卡。 他很想走路，但担心他们离开时可能会有公共汽车来：“也许我们在这里等待一生，直到老死，已经被命运所决定。 为什么人们不创造自己的未来？ 作为命运的牺牲品，我们为什么要受苦受难？”
Gao’s characters’ plight recalls that of
the sleepers Lu Xun hesitates to rouse in the preface to his first collection of stories, Call to Arms (1923). Likening China to “an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation,” he fears that crying out would only torture those trapped. Yet when a friend insists that those awakened might destroy the iron house, Lu has a change of heart: “True, in spite of my own conviction, I could not blot out hope, for hope lies in the future.”
高的角色的困境让人想起
《呐喊》（1923）自序中曾提到“熟睡者”，鲁迅不知道是否应该唤醒他们。他把中国比作“一间铁屋子，是绝无窗户而万难破毁的，里面有许多熟睡的人们，不久都要闷死了”，担心大喊反而会使醒来的人徒受折磨。然而朋友反驳说，醒来的人或许能够毁坏铁屋子，于是鲁迅的想法改变了：“是的，我虽然自有我的确信，然而说到希望，却是不能抹杀的，因为希望是在于将来。”
Works promoting socialist progress became dutifully optimistic
after Mao launched his “Great Leap Forward” (1958–62), and his vice-minister of culture called for “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism.”
In portraying a young mother’s transformation from passivity to initiative, Ru Zhijuan’s (1925–98) “Warmth of Spring” (1959) exemplifies such ardent works. As an estranged couple bond over their efforts to engineer a crucial tool for the wife’s work unit, the story highlights the overlapping benefits for the characters’ personal and collective futures. The formulaic operas and ballets of “revolutionary model theater” further glorified self-sacrificing workers, soldiers, and peasants, as did collectivization novels such as Hao Ran’s (1932–2008) multivolume Bright Sunny Days (1964–65) and The Golden Road (1972–74). Ignoring famines and environmental devastation, legacies of Mao’s programs, these works presented visions of revolutionary history consistent with party policy and Mao’s rising cult status.
在毛泽东发起“大跃进”（1958-62），他的文化部副部长呼吁“革命现实主义”和“革命浪漫主义”之后，
为社会主义进步呐喊的作品把乐观当作一种义务。茹志鹃（1925-1998）的《春暖时节》描绘了一位年轻母亲静兰从消极到积极的转变，代表了这类激情燃烧的作品。为了给妻子的单位设计一件关键的工具，已生隔膜的夫妇又变得团结起来，这个故事彰显了个人前途和集体前途在利益上的一致性。被称为“革命样板戏”的京剧和芭蕾舞剧更热烈地歌颂了自我牺牲的工人、士兵和农民，浩然（1932-2008）的多卷本小说《艳阳天》（1964-1965）和《金光大道》（1972-1974）等反映集体化的小说也是如此。这些作品忽略了毛泽东纲领的负面遗产，例如饥荒和大炼钢铁对环境的破坏，而突出了革命历史的憧憬，这与党的政策和毛泽东日益上升的偶像地位是一致的。
When Bus Stop opened in Beijing in 1983, critics denounced Gao for abandoning socialist literature’s progressive mandate. Despite the drama’s authenticity in presenting the lives of ordinary people, it was attacked in the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. For when Glasses looks at his watch and announces “We’ve been here talking for a full ten years,” his lament evokes the inescapable memory of China’s devastating Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Designed to re-engineer people’s beliefs by suppressing the “four olds” (traditional customs, culture, habits, and ideas), this crusade left millions dead as packs of young Red Guard zealots denounced their teachers and other professionals (breaking the fingers of artists and musicians), destroyed temples, and burned books and paintings. (Scholars estimate 3 million to 20 million deaths including deaths in labor camps and suicides.) As they paraded “class enemies” wearing humiliating placards and dunce’s caps, insufficient fanaticism was deemed revisionism, so almost everyone colluded with persecutions, as Jung Chang (1952–) later documented in her memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991).
1983 年北京公交站开张时，批评者谴责高智晟放弃了社会主义文学的进步使命。尽管该剧真实地呈现了普通人的生活，但它在 1983 年的反精神污染运动中遭到了攻击。因为当 Glasses 看着他的手表并宣布“我们已经在这里谈了整整十年”时，他的悲叹唤起了对中国毁灭性文化大革命（1966-76 年）的无法回避的记忆。旨在通过压制“四旧”（传统习俗、文化、习惯和思想）来重新设计人们的信仰，这场十字军东征导致数百万人死亡，因为一群年轻的红卫兵狂热分子谴责他们的老师和其他专业人士（打破艺术家的手指和音乐家），摧毁寺庙，烧毁书籍和绘画。 （学者估计有 300 万到 2000 万人死亡，包括劳教所死亡和自杀。）当他们戴着羞辱性的标语牌和笨蛋帽子游行“阶级敌人”时，狂热程度不足被认为是修正主义，因此几乎每个人都勾结迫害，如郑昌（1952） ——）后来在她的回忆录《野天鹅：中国的三个女儿》（1991）中有所记载。
During the political thaw following Mao’s death and the fall of the Gang of Four (1976), brave writers began redressing the wounds of the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957) and the Cultural Revolution. Even before the official relaxation of thought control, Lu Xinhua’s (1954–) “Scar” (1978) and other works of “scar literature” testified to long-suppressed sorrow and compassion. In Zhang Jie’s “Remorse” (1979), a man cowed by his expulsion from the party forbids his son to join a mass memorial service
(an implicit protest of Mao’s regime)
.After the son, his spirit broken, dies of an ordinary infection, the father’s reinstatement in the party offers him little solace: “He had not even done the most basic thing: communicate to his dearest beloved son belief in truth.” Guilt also plagues the protagonist of Dai Houying’s (1938–96) Humanity, Oh Humanity , ! (1980, translated as Stones of the Wall).
In her novel, multiple points of view and vivid flashbacks illustrate the piecemeal nature of memory and historical understanding. But as the classmate betrayed in 1957 consoles the protagonist in the narrative present, reconciling their histories opens the door to forgiveness and renewal.
在毛泽东逝世、“四人帮”倒台（1976）之后的政治解冻期，勇敢的作家开始反思反右运动（1957）和“文革”的创伤。甚至在官方放松思想管制之前，卢新华（1954-）的《伤痕》（1978）和其他“伤痕文学”作品已经见证了长期被压抑的痛苦和悲悯。张洁《忏悔》（1979）中的主人公因为被开除党籍而失去了勇气，不许儿子参加一个群众悼念活动 （其实是对“文革”的隐晦抗议） 。当精神完全崩溃的儿子因病去世，他虽然恢复了党籍，仍没觉得安慰：“他甚至没有做到最起码的这件事：把对真理的信仰、对生活的信念、为事业而献身的精神传播给他那至亲至爱的儿子。”负罪感同样折磨着戴厚英（1938-1996）《人啊, 人！》（1980，英译本标题为“墙石”，Stones of the Wall）里的主人公。
在她的小说中，多重观点和生动的倒叙说明了记忆和历史理解的零碎本质。 但当 1957 年被背叛的同学在叙事中安慰主角时，调和他们的历史打开了宽恕和更新的大门。
10. Decades after his death, Mao Zedong’s image still watches over Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
10. 毛泽东逝世数十年后，北京天安门广场上的毛泽东形象依旧。
On the heels of scar literature, other genres of testimony included “new realism,” (pointedly distinct from “revolutionary realism”), “literature of reflection,” and “prison literature,” literally “big wall literature” , named after Cong Weixi’s (1933–) “Red Magnolias Beneath the Wall” (1979). Despite decades of loyal military service, because of a few lines in his notebook criticizing Mao’s deification, Cong’s protagonist Ge Ling is summarily condemned to a life sentence of forced prison labor. Yet as in many works of prison literature, the protagonist experiences his incarceration as purifying, his ordeals strengthening his faith in the party and in Communism. Though he is shot dead while climbing a ladder to pick magnolias to make a wreath for the beloved premier Zhou Enlai, the novella ends with a “bright tail” when an old comrade escapes to Beijing to deliver the wreath stained red with Ling’s blood. More shocking testimony about the labor camps came with Zhang Xianliang’s (1936–) semi-autobiographical Half of Man Is Woman (1985), in which sexual impotence becomes a telling effect of political repression.
接踵伤痕文学的其他见证文学样式包括“新现实主义”（与“革命现实主义”有显著区别）、“反思文学”和“大墙文学”［因从维熙（1933）的《大墙下的红玉兰》（1979）而得名］。从维熙笔下的主人公葛翎尽管在军队里忠心服役几十年，却因为日记本里有几行批评神化毛泽东的文字，就被草率地判处终身监禁劳改。然而和许多大墙文学作品一样，监狱生活对葛翎来说也是一种净化体验，苦难反而坚定了他对党和共产主义的信仰。虽然他为了给敬爱的周总理编花环，爬上梯子去摘玉兰花，结果被农场政委枪杀，但小说结尾却有一个“亮尾巴”：一位老战友怀揣着染了葛翎鲜血的玉兰去北京告状了。张贤亮（1936-[5] ）的半自传小说《男人的一半是女人》（1985）对劳改营生活的描绘更令人震惊，在这部作品里，阳痿成了政治镇压的标志性征候。
Silenced for nearly four decades by Mao-era literary strictures, modernist works re-emerged and implicitly confronted the nation’s collective historical traumas. Inspired by 1920s poets such as Wen Yiduo, young writers rekindled symbolism with “misty poetry,” while “search-for-roots” fiction probed the sometimes pernicious legacies of culture and tradition. By looking backward and inward as well as forward and outward, these and other avant-garde works challenged the party’s ideology of modernization. Historical determinism weighs heavily in many of these works, but they often portray decadence rather than progress.
在毛泽东时代的文学管制下，现代主义作品销声匿迹了近四十年，此时也重新浮出水面，以隐晦的方式对抗民族的集体历史创伤。受到闻一多等20年代诗人的启发，年轻作家们借助“朦胧诗派”重启了象征主义传统 [6] ，而“寻根”小说则深入探究文化和传统的历史遗产，尽管这些遗产有时造成了灾难。这些作品和其他先锋作品一起，不仅向前看、向外看，也向后看、向内看，借以挑战官方的现代化宣传。在许多这类作品中，历史决定论的色彩很重，但它们描写的经常是堕落，而不是进步。
By depicting historical periods before 1949, writers could exhume traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution with less risk of censorship or reprisals. Influenced by the modernism of Kafka and Faulkner, along with the “magic realism” of Gabriel García Márquez, Mo Yan’s (1955–) Red Sorghum (1987) presents five overlapping (yet occasionally incongruous) accounts as the narrator, writing in 1985, imagines his grandparents’ experiences during the brutal Japanese invasion of their village in 1939. Similar in its intense imagery and graphic violence, Su Tong’s (1963–) My Life as Emperor (1992) is set in an unspecified distant past, but the slicing out of concubines’ tongues might remind readers of Cultural Revolution “struggle sessions” when Mao’s Red Guards severed tongues to silence victims’ loyal cries of “Long Live Chairman Mao!”
在卡夫卡和福克纳的现代主义以及加西亚·马尔克斯的“魔幻现实主义”影响下，莫言（1955-）的《红高粱家族》（1987）讲述了五个彼此交叉（但也时常不一致）的故事。叙述者在这部写于1985年的作品中想象了自己的祖父母在1939年日本人野蛮侵占村子时的经历。和《红高粱》一样，苏童（1963-）的《我的帝王生涯》（1992）也以强烈意象和暴力渲染见长。这个故事发生在未指明的遥远过去，但切掉小妾舌头的行为或许会让读者联想起“文革”的“批斗会”，红卫兵也曾切掉受害者的舌头，不许他们呼喊“毛主席万岁”的口号。
Recalling concerns about the destruction of nature and of ethnic minorities voiced in 1980s search-for-roots fiction, Jiang Rong’s (1946–) best-selling Wolf Totem (2004) provoked new concern over the devastation of Mongolia’s fragile grasslands. Drawing on the author’s experience as one of 12 million educated urban youth sent to learn from rural peasants during the Cultural Revolution, the novel recounts a “sent-down” youth’s growing reverence for nomadic Mongolians and for the ecological balance symbolized by the wolf.
姜戎（1946-）的畅销小说《狼图腾》（2004）呼应了20世纪80年代寻根文学对自然遭受破坏、少数民族濒临消失的忧虑，也促使读者关注内蒙古脆弱草原逐渐毁灭的可能。这部小说取材于作者的亲身经历（“文革”中他曾作为一千二百万城市知青的一员接受农民的再教育），讲述了一个“下放”青年的故事，他对游牧的蒙古民族日益尊重，也越发珍视狼所象征的生态平衡。
A comment on both collective amnesia and the creative yearnings of the soul, Ma Jian’s (1953–) Beijing Coma (originally titled Land of Flesh , 2008) follows the thoughts of its narrator-protagonist Dai Wei as he lies unconscious and paralyzed after a bullet to his head during the 1989 June Fourth Tiananmen Square protests. Formerly a PhD student in biology, Dai Wei lies in his mother’s shabby Beijing apartment, relives the past, and ponders the present. When he awakens at the novel’s end, his mother suffers a nervous breakdown as bulldozers begin to demolish their apartment. (Written after Ma’s 1987 exile, the novel was published abroad before Chinese editions appeared in Hong Kong and Taiwan.)
马建（1953-）的北京昏迷（原名血肉之国，2008）是对集体失忆和灵魂创造性向往的评论，讲述了叙述者兼主人公戴维在被子弹击中后昏迷瘫痪时的思想 在 1989 年的六四天安门广场抗议活动中，他被撞到了头上。 曾是生物学博士的戴伟躺在母亲破旧的北京公寓里，重温过去，思考现在。 当他在小说结尾醒来时，他的母亲精神崩溃，推土机开始拆除他们的公寓。 （写于马云 1987 年流放后，该小说的中国版出现在香港和台湾之前在国外出版。）
The pursuit of memory (along with the powers and dangers of nostalgia) has also been central to fiction on Taiwan, especially in modernist works such as Bai Xianyong’s (1937–) elegant story collection Taipei People (1971). In the privileged world of Taipei’s Shanghainese exiles depicted in Bai’s “Eternal Snow Beauty” (1965), a seemingly enviable façade of genteel comfort soon reveals a forlorn vision of moral decadence. Sensual details of light, color, and fragrance shroud the beautiful hostess in mystery, but fantasies of recapturing the past ultimately doom her lovers and deny her own humanity. Since the lifting of martial law (1987), authors in Taiwan have also faced the ongoing ravages of the island’s political traumas, as in Chen Yingzhen’s Zhao Nandong (1987). In this chilling account of Taiwan’s “white terror,” memories of a condemned political prisoner entrusting her infant son (Nandong) to a fellow prisoner are interwoven with the latter’s search, thirty years later, to understand the now grown son’s estrangement.
追寻记忆（包括探讨怀旧情绪的力量和危险）也是台湾小说的核心主题，尤其是在白先勇（1937-）优雅的短篇小说集《台北人》（1971）等现代主义作品中。在《永远的尹雪艳》（1965）中，白先勇描绘了上海籍外来客构成的上流社会，在看似令人羡慕的体面生活下面，可以瞥见道德堕落的凄凉场景。灯光、色彩、香气等愉悦感官的细节将美丽的女主人笼罩在神秘的氛围里，然而重回过去的幻想最终毁掉了她的恋慕者，也让她变得不近人情。自从解除戒严令（1987）以来，台湾作家也在面对政治创伤的可怕后遗症，陈映真的《赵南栋》（1987）就是一例。它对台湾“白色恐怖”的记述令人不寒而栗，小说里交织着两条线，一条是叶春美回忆一位被判死刑的政治犯把襁褓中的儿子（南栋）托付给她；另一条是三十年后，南栋的父亲试图理解已经成人的儿子为何与自己格格不入。 [7]
In Bus Stop, when Girl laments that she can’t wear a certain trendy dress outside the city, Mom reassuringly strokes her hair. “Wear what you like. Don’t wait until my age. You still count as youthful; some young guy will be attracted to you. You’ll feel close, fall in love, and after you have his child, he’ll become even more devoted.” Surprisingly uncritical given her own dreary marriage, Mom’s romantic idyll voices aspirations for personal happiness that were verboten during the
Mao era’s
fanaticism for collective sacrifice.
Yet both before and since the Mao period,
longings for fulfillment through love, career, and material comforts rose dramatically.
在《车站》里，当“姑娘”抱怨说她不在城里，没法穿一种时髦的裙子时，“做母亲的”抚摸着她的头发安慰她：“想穿什么就穿什么，别等到了我这年纪。你还算年轻，会有小伙子看上你的，你们会相亲相爱，你会给他生孩子，他对你会更加恩爱……”这位“做母亲的”并没因为自己乏味的婚姻而变得愤激，有些令人惊讶，她对爱情的浪漫想象表达了追求个人幸福的憧憬，这在
毛时代
为集体作牺牲的狂热气氛中是被禁止的。然而，
在毛时期以前和以后，
通过爱情、事业和物质享受来获得满足的渴求却是戏剧性地爆发出来的。
While scholars often emphasize its ethics, Chinese literature has also long provided entertainment and pleasure. In contrast to the elite genres of history, philosophy, and poetry, much fiction and drama offered diversion and escapism to larger audiences, markets that soared after the 1875 introduction of less expensive Western printing techniques. As modern written Chinese further promoted literacy, a widening readership led to a proliferation of literary magazines, and Saturday (1914–16, 1921–23), the best-selling periodical of popular fiction, reached a circulation of 50,000. Christened “Saturday fiction,” sentimental romances, martial arts tales, detective stories, social satires, and “black curtain” accounts of scandals all flourished from the 1910s through the 1930s.
虽然学者们经常强调伦理的一面，中国文学其实很久以来也不乏娱乐享受的功用。与“雅”的历史、哲学和诗歌相对照，许多“俗”的小说和戏剧为大众提供了消遣和逃避现实的渠道，在1875年引进西方低成本的印刷技术后，这个市场迅速崛起。现代书面白话让阅读变得更轻松，读者群不断扩大，文学杂志纷纷涌现，最畅销的流行小说杂志《礼拜六》（1914-1916，1921-1923）发行量达到了五万份。感伤爱情小说、武侠小说、侦探小说、社会讽刺小说和所谓的丑闻“黑幕”小说都被统称为“礼拜六小说”，从20世纪10年代到30年代盛极一时。
Such fiction was disparaged for distracting readers from national salvation, but avidly read. Though usually set in contemporary times, popular works generally spared readers the political issues posed by the critical realism of the period. Whereas leftist realist writers underscored economic determinism, many popular works present characters who exercise a self-determination that helps explain their appeal. In Zhang Henshui’s (1895–1967) Fate in Tears and Laughter (1930), the superhuman knight-errant Xiugu wins little mortal reward (she remains unmarried), but she exercises fantastical power in slaying a corrupt general, freeing his brutalized wife, and distributing his extravagant wealth to the poor.
有人指责这些小说让读者忘记了民族救亡的大义，但它们还是很受欢迎。大众文学虽然也以当代为背景，通常却替读者过滤掉了同时代批判现实主义所涉及的话题。当左翼的现实主义作家强调经济决定论的时候，许多流行作品中的人物却能自己决定命运，这或许是它们的魅力所在。在张恨水（1895-1967）的《啼笑因缘》（1930）中，近乎超人的侠女关秀姑没得到什么世俗的报偿（她终生未婚），但她却有不可思议的力量，杀死了腐败的刘将军，解放了被他虐待的妻子，还把他的金银财宝分给穷人。
Nor did all serious fiction follow the leftists’ agenda for critical realism. Writers of the “Creation Society” championed the emotional expression of romanticism, while Shen Congwen (1902–88) wrote lyrical fiction celebrating nature, rustic customs, and other earthly enjoyments. Shen’s pastoral novel Border Town (1934) uses bucolic imagery to recount the mutual love between an elderly ferryman and his granddaughter, whom he tries to protect as she comes of age. Pursuits of pleasure and sensuality also overshadow concerns about social problems in the modernist works of the Shanghai-based “New Sensationists.” These works, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, foreground sexuality and self-consciousness, as in Shi Zhicun’s (1905–2003) story of an office worker’s fantasies about a young woman in “One Evening in the Rainy Season” (1929).
并非所有的严肃文学都遵循左翼批判现实主义的路线。“创造社”的作家推崇浪漫主义情感的表达，而沈从文（1902-1988）的小说也极具抒情性，他喜欢描绘的是自然景色、乡村风俗和其他尘世的快乐。他的田园小说《边城》（1934）借助自然景致讲述了一位老船夫和孙女翠翠相互爱护、相依为命的故事。在上海的“新感觉派小说家”具有现代主义色彩的作品里，对快乐和感官经验的追逐也盖过了对社会问题的关切。这些作品受到了弗洛伊德精神分析理论的影响，突出了性和自我意识，例如施蛰存（1905-2003）的《梅雨之夕》（1929）就描绘了一个职员对一位年轻女子的性幻想。
Obsession with sensual gratification, often linked to struggles for power or wealth, also haunts the desolate characters of Zhang Ailing’s (1920–95) incisive masterpieces, many set during the wartime Japanese occupation of Shanghai and Hong Kong. In her Love in a Fallen City (1943), a young divorcée’s desperation for the financial security of marriage leaves her suitor skeptical of her love, but the couple discovers unexpected contentment as they survive the bombing of Hong Kong. In “Lust, Caution” , (1979) a former student actress sent to seduce a collaborator falls in love and warns him of the plot to assassinate him, for which he executes her and her comrades.
对感官满足的痴迷经常牵涉到对权力和财富的追逐，这些都是张爱玲（1920-1995）笔下那些落寞人物难以割舍的东西。她的众多杰作极具洞察力，大都以日据时期的上海和香港为背景。在她的《倾城之恋》（1943）里，年轻的白流苏在经历一次离婚后，竭力要通过新的婚姻获得经济上的保障，这让她的追求者范柳原怀疑起她的感情来，但在日本轰炸香港后，这对劫后余生的情侣却意外发现，现状已经令人满足。在《色，戒》（1979）里，做过学生的女演员王佳芝被派去勾引汉奸老易，却真的爱上了他，于是将刺杀他的密谋泄露给他，结果老易处死了她和其他参与者。
Often likened to Zhang Ailing, Wang Anyi (1954–) confronts the potentially destructive forces of sexual desire in a trilogy of lyrical novellas. In her Love on a Barren Mountain (1986), a sensitive cellist and his strong-willed mistress pursue an extramarital affair, and its exposure leads to their double suicide. Love in a Small Town (1986) offers a visceral account of the erotic awakening, shame, and sexual aggression of two young dancers, and Love in a Brocade Valley (1987) contrasts an editor’s lackluster marriage with her wistful desire for an inaccessible writer. The fleeting rewards of material pleasures are shown in Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995), Wang’s prizewinning novel about a beauty whose early fame in magazines and near-win in the 1946 Miss Shanghai contest ill prepare her to endure four decades of political tumult.
王安忆（1954-）经常被比作张爱玲，她在抒情中篇三部曲里大胆表现了性欲潜在的破坏力。在《荒山之恋》（1986）中，一位敏感的大提琴手和他倔强的情妇陷入了婚外恋，败露后双双自杀。《小城之恋》（1986）则深入骨髓地记述了一对舞蹈演员的性觉醒和伴随的羞耻感，以及两人充满侵犯意味的肉体之爱。《锦绣谷之恋》（1987）里，黯淡的婚姻让一位编辑对一位作家充满了可望不可即的憧憬。物质的快乐转瞬即逝，这是王安忆获奖小说《长恨歌》（1995）传达的讯息，主人公王琦瑶早年就是杂志上的名人，还差点儿成为1946年的“上海小姐”，这样的记忆让她难以承受后面四十年的政治动荡。
After the government slashed subsidies for publishers in the mid-1980s, many presses turned to popular literature, including gangster fiction by the self-proclaimed “hooligan” Wang Shuo (1958–) and “body writing” by “glamour girl writers” such as Mian Mian (1970-) and Wei Hui (1973–). In the decade between Wang Shuo’s Playing for Thrills (1989) and Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (1999),
novels
banned in China (but published in Taiwan and circulated underground) also
explored
political and
sexual deviance.
Hong Ying’s (1962–) Summer of Betrayal (originally titled The Generation of Naked Dancers , 1992), set in the shadow of the 1989 June Fourth incident, confronts the moral implications of membership in the “Degraded Survivors’ Club” as the protagonist uses her sexuality (e.g., taking multiple partners at a final party) to further her quest for selfhood.
20世纪80年代中期，政府大幅削减了给出版社的拨款，于是许多出版社都转向了大众文学，包括以“流氓”自命的王朔（1958-）的痞子小说和棉棉（1970-）、卫慧（1973-）等“美女作家”的“身体写作”。在王朔的《玩儿的就是心跳》（1989）和卫慧的《上海宝贝》（1999）之间的十年，
一些
在中国被禁（但在台湾出版并在地下传播）的
小说也探讨了
政治和
性方面的反常行为。
洪英（1962-）的背叛之夏（原名《赤裸舞者的一代》，1992）以 1989 年六四事件为背景，直面主人公加入“堕落幸存者俱乐部”的道德含义 她的性取向（例如，在最后一个派对上带多个伴侣）以进一步追求她的自我。
Preoccupation with private pleasures also marks much of the fiction written in Hong Kong, both among émigré writers such as Liu Yichang (1918–) and among Hong Kong natives. Ruled by the British for 156 years (1841–1997), Hong Kong enjoyed considerable press freedoms, but self-censorship fostered apolitical writing focusing on private lives. Liu’s story “Intersection” (1972) alternates between the ruminations of a young woman and a middle-aged émigré whose paths cross in a movie theater. While the émigré reflects on his vanished life in Shanghai and the changes he has witnessed during his twenty years in Hong Kong, the young woman, aroused by an explicit photograph, projects her face onto mannequins, singers, and movie stars. The story ends with the characters’ parallel erotic dreams, her fantasy of a handsome lover conjoining with his memory of his virile youth.
香港的许多小说也表达了对隐秘快乐的迷恋，刘以鬯（1918-）等外来作家和本土作家都是如此。香港被英国统治了156年（1841-1997），享有较大的出版自由，但自我审查的习惯使得作家选择非政治的题材，聚焦于私人生活。在刘以鬯的短篇小说《对倒》（1972）里，年轻女子亚杏和中年外来客淳于白在一个电影院并排而坐，作品就在两人的沉思之间来回切换。淳于白回忆着他过去在上海的生活，回顾着他在香港二十年来目睹的变化；亚杏却被一张猥亵的照片勾起了春心，想象自己成了模特、歌星、影星。故事结尾，两人各自做着春梦，亚杏梦见了英俊的情人，淳于白则拾回了年轻时的雄风。