When you read the last cover of the novel “Lost Time” by the Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo, there is a sentence that says, “This novel cannot be read once,” and you are required to listen to every letter written in it, because you are facing a completely different writer, as described by Dr. Ahmed Al-Saeed, the translator of the novel. This writer As his translator describes him: “The closest person to randomly intruding into the secret paths of the human soul, exposing them gently, then treating them violently, and he lived his life writing to man about man. You see his picture and think he is a tramp, loitering in the alleys of Beijing, then you read what he writes and that picture is erased.”
He is a tramp dripping with wisdom, a wanderer who transforms instinct into eloquence. He writes about love and you think about the meaning of life and its contradictions. He tells stories about his life and you do not know whether he has embodied Marquis in his magical realism, or Bernard Shaw in his biting sarcasm, this young man whose heart suddenly stopped. In the middle of his fourth decade, he is considered – as Ahmed Al-Saeed says – one of the most influential writers in the world. How could he not be an inspiration crowned in China in the hearts of those born in the mid-seventies until the end of the eighties? He is the late writer who competes with those alive today for the best-selling banners in China, and despite More than twenty years have passed since his passing, and not a year is without a new edition of his works.
After this introduction, Al-Saeed moves on to talk about the life of Xiaobo, who was born in Beijing in 1952, the year in which his father, who worked in the Chinese Army Corps all his life, was accused of “anti-socialism.” The family’s circumstances were troubled, but circumstances changed five years later, when he met His father was part of the delegation of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, and the child, Xiaobo, attended primary school, but it was only a year before the “Great Leap Forward” movement took place, which his writings are not without mentioning, until the year 1968, when he was in the first year of secondary school. When the “Great Cultural Revolution” broke out, he was assigned to work in the Chinese Army Corps in a border province.
In 1971, Xiaobo moved to another camp, to work as a literacy teacher in the civil service, and about that period he wrote many stories. With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the opening of university admissions, he – after being away from education for 12 years – took the university entrance examination in 1978, and was accepted at the University of the People. Chinese, at the age of twenty-six, then he studied management until 1984 and moved to the United States of America, obtained a master’s degree, then returned to China to work as a lecturer at the university, then resigned from academic work on his fortieth birthday, and devoted himself to writing.
*Free thinker
But – as Al-Saeed says – it was only five years of full-time devotion, which he wished for, until the eleventh day of April 1997 came and his heart suddenly stopped without any warning, and he died at the height of his giving and the peak of his creative maturity, before his forty-fifth birthday. On the day of his death, his wife – the first Chinese woman to obtain a doctorate in sociology from America – wrote to mourn him, saying: “I mourn to the world the romantic knight, the singing poet, and the free thinker, Xiaobo.”
He is called in China “the Chinese version of Kafka and James Joyce mixed together.” He wrote short novels, essays, and poetry, and his short stories have in common that all of their heroes have one character called “Wang Er,” and he means himself by this constant hero in his works, and the temporal and spatial backgrounds in his works are similar. It takes place in the era from the founding of modern China in the early fifties, until the end of the Cultural Revolution and the change in conditions, all the way to the mid-eighties. As for the places, they are not devoid of precise details of the streets of Beijing in which he spent his life, and the cities of America in which he stayed for years to study.