Kong TotalitarianOrdinariness 2018

Totalitarian Ordinariness The Chinese Epidemic Novel as World Literature
Author(s): Belinda Kong

Source: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 30, No. 1, Special Issue on Chinese
Literature as World Literature (SPRING, 2018), pp. 136-162
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
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Totalitarian Ordinariness: The
Chinese Epidemic Novel as World
Literature
Belinda Kong
World literature studies of the past two decades have been an intensely
discipline-based enterprise, with literary scholars debating conceptions
of “world literature” primarily for and against each other. This essay
engages with this internal discussion, but also outlines a transdisciplinary
dimension of world literature. I argue that the contemporary Chinese
epidemic novel can be strategically categorized as “world literature”
to disrupt new formations of orientalism in discourses of global public
health and biosecurity since the 2003 SARS epidemic. Worldliness, from
this perspective, positions literary texts not against each other but against
extraliterary geopolitics. Because pandemic surveillance operates through
modes of technologized remote reading, the essay further proposes a
countermethod of geopolitical close reading—attending with care to
globally minor texts, mining them for alternative imaginations of the
world against hegemonic world-claiming discourses, and staying alert
to geopolitics without re-aggregating textual details toward totalizing
schemas. As one route for pursuing this method, I theorize the concept of
“totalitarian ordinariness”: reading the totalitarian and the ordinary not
136 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

in isolation but alongside each other, so as to better interrupt orientalist
reproductions of contemporary China.
Pandemic Orientalism and the Chinese Epidemic Novel

On the cover of a May 2015 issue of New Scientist is an image of what looks
to be a giant virus, a kaleidoscopic ball of concentric circles that is ringed
at its outer edge with skulls and crossbones. The artist, Ross Holden, is
known for his socially satirical mandala-style photography, but this image
also evokes the genre of digital microbe art. The cover story’s title brings
home this viral association: in all caps, it announces that with “THE NEW
PLAGUE, we’re one mutation away from the end of the world as we know
it.” As the article goes on to warn, “we are more vulnerable than ever
before. There are now 7 billion of us on Earth—an awful lot of potential
hosts for a pathogen to exploit. And thanks to air travel, diseases can spread
around the world faster than ever. There is certainly no shortage of viruses
waiting in the wings,” so that just one mutation of a flu strain “would be a
colossal threat, capable of killing on a catastrophic scale” (Young 2015: 32).
This New Scientist article typifies the pandemic discourse of our
millennium. Its language of pandemic catastrophe has become all too
familiar: hardly a year goes by without some alarming infectious disease
dominating international news, with apocalyptic headlines linking it to
human extinction. The sentiments expressed in popular media may be
couched histrionically, but they are symptomatic of prevalent anxieties
about the impact of globalization—anxieties that are reinforced rather than
allayed by institutional authorities such as the World Health Organization
(WHO). In fact, it was the former WHO Director-General Lee Jong-wook
(2005) who, during a global health meeting, declared our pandemic future
a certainty: “It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus . . . acquires
the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak
of human pandemic influenza. We don’t know when this will happen. But
we do know that it will happen.” Lee’s resonant phrasing—that “it is only
Mo d e r n C h i n e se L i te ra tu re a n d C u l tu re • 1 3 7
a matter of time”—has itself become a mantra in public health discourse.
More recently, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which
sparked widespread consternation about a potential global epidemic, then-
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (2014) further escalated the rhetoric
around pandemic threat with repeated martial metaphors, of “going to
war with Ebola.” The central message uniting science journalists and public
health experts is that in the age of globalization, potential infection defines
and binds our humanity. The most potent and haunting icon of disease is no
longer the quarantined plague city, à la Michel Foucault (1977: 195–200),
but the porous pandemic planet.
These narratives of planetary contagion, I would suggest, fall squarely
within what Lauren Berlant (2011: 7) terms the “genre of crisis.” What has
been a long-standing and ongoing human reality—the fact that we as a
species live alongside microorganisms and experience epidemics—now gets
narrativized as a new crisis condition of our time. Priscilla Wald (2008: 2)
calls this genre “the outbreak narrative,” whose proliferation she traces to
the emergence in the 1980s of HIV. Genres such as biohorror and biothriller
now pervade American popular culture, and what they manifest, despite
their often campy humor, is a logic of danger—the dangers of contact and
contamination, the lethal breakdown of social barriers between “us” and
“them,” and the infiltration of foreign bodies into domestic spaces (Mayer
2007: 1–2; Wald 2008: 1–3). Indeed, as David Fidler (2004: 45) points out,
the scientific term “emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases” is a
misnomer, because for “many parts of the developing world, infectious
diseases had never disappeared as a source of morbidity and mortality. In
the developing world, infectious diseases had not un-emerged.” The term
“infectious disease” thus carries an inherent geopolitical bias, reflecting
the discursive power of first-world nations rather than a truly global
human experience. Furthermore, as several scholars (King 2002; Cooper
2006; Braun 2007; Wright 2007) have argued, Western discourses of global
public health and policies around emerging infectious diseases are far from

purely scientific or geopolitically neutral. Since the 1990s, these discourses
of pandemics as an unavoidable threat to planetary life have formed part of
an ideological outlook—what Nicholas King (2002: 767) calls the “emerging
diseases worldview”—that seeks to consolidate America’s national security
interests, preemptive use of military force, and global economic dominance.
In the language of global health security and biosecurity, recalcitrant non-
Western states that refuse to comply with international health guidelines
jeopardize not just their own people but human survival on a planetary
scale. In this disease worldview, the potentially cataclysmic impact of
political deviance is exacerbated by primitive third-world cultural practices
that transgress vital boundaries between humans and nonhumans.
In 2003, this pandemic discourse zeroed in on China during the severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic. As the first new virus and truly
global infectious disease of the millennium, SARS incited extraordinary
levels of fear and panic. First reported in Guangdong province, the virus
spread within months to over two dozen countries on six continents,
eventually infecting over 8,000 people and killing nearly 800. At the
epicenter was China, which bore the brunt of the epidemic with 5,327
reported cases of infection and 349 fatalities (WHO 2004). In its early
months of response, WHO issued an unprecedented travel warning for
Guangdong and Hong Kong. The fact that this was the first region-specific
infection-based travel restriction in WHO history became widely publicized
in the international media, not just as an indication of the severity of
the outbreak, but also as a direct response to what were marked as two
distinctly Chinese features, one political, the other cultural: the communist
government’s authoritarian secrecy during the epidemic’s initial phase and
the virus’s mysterious origin in the so-called wet markets of southern China.
Pandemic discourse thus became deeply entangled with long-standing
orientalist tropes of a despotic and exotic China, in a contemporary form
of what can be called “pandemic orientalism.” Nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century orientalism persistently configured Chinese bodies as
pollutants, as sources of filth and disease (R. Lee 1999; Shah 2001), and
international media coverage of SARS in 2003 readily exploited these
motifs. Menacing images of masked Asian faces fueled yellow peril fears
of the inscrutable, contagious oriental hordes. Other images yoked racial
signifiers to specifically Chinese political iconography, such as an April 2003
cover of The Economist featuring Mao Zedong in a respirator mask or a
May 2003 TIME cover showing a red chest x-ray with China’s national flag
superimposed. As Mei Zhan (2005: 37–38) details, scientific speculations
about the animal origins of SARS also frequently deployed orientalist
language that cast Chineseness in terms of its “uncanny affinity with the
nonhuman and the wild,” ultimately blaming the outbreak not on “nature
itself” but on the Chinese people’s exotic, overindulgent, and transgressive
appetites. These accounts at once reproached the Chinese for endangering
global health with their unhygienic culinary habits and essentialized these
habits as an inescapable part of their cultural tradition, albeit updated in
the capitalist era as middle-class (over)consumption. In effect, what the
pandemic discourse around SARS implied was that China’s entry into a
modern capitalist world system brings with it a new type of threat to global
life, as its entrenched cultural and political practices prove fertile breeding
ground for emergent deadly viruses. Post-SARS, pandemic discourse comes
to exceptionalize China as the world’s disease ground zero.
It is in opposition to this pandemic orientalism that I advocate reading
contemporary Chinese literature—particularly the Chinese epidemic novel—
as “world literature.” I do not mean by this that we should campaign for
more Chinese works to be inducted into a world literary canon or for more
Chinese writers to occupy “a place at the table” (Liu 2015; Wang/Ross 2016:
583). Certainly, the desire for inclusion in a “global literary humanity,”
as Jing Tsu (2010) elucidates, can emanate from not just local elitism but
geopolitical vulnerability. Still, this perception of world literature involves
a zero-sum game, often especially for already marginalized nations and
groups: insofar as it relies on a logic of canonicity and superiority, any

inclusion of an underrecognized text would entail the exclusion of others,
any elevation of a peripheral author the demotion of others. This issue
of a representational system that can never be truly equal or equitable
constitutes a core problem for current debates on world literature,
especially as they have been shaped by the work of David Damrosch. By
defining world literature as “all literary works that circulate beyond their
culture of origin,” Damrosch (2003: 4) intends to be egalitarian, shifting the
focus from elite membership in a Eurocentric canon to broader recognition
of non-Western writings. His emphasis on border-crossing as the chief
criterion of worldliness, however, subtly reprivileges those languages and
nations with greater access to international mechanisms of translation,
circulation, and distribution. As Yingjin Zhang (2015: 6) puts it, Damrosch’s
formula that world literature is “writing that gains in translation” should
be modified as “writing that gains in translation when it is done in English
or another major European language,” so as to make visible the power
asymmetries of the global literary field. Precisely because its proponents
tend to downplay enduring geopolitical hierarchies, world literature as
a rubric has become suspect for many, at worst taken to be a bad-faith
attempt to resurrect cultural imperialism (and not even by another name)
(Arac 2002; Spivak 2003; Klein 2015). Aamir Mufti (2016: 19) raises the most
comprehensive critique along these lines by arguing that “a genealogy
of world literature leads to Orientalism.” Not only is the idea of world
literature historically rooted in orientalist philology, which under the guise
of diversity and inclusion provided the original cultural framework for
colonial assimilation, but contemporary discourses of world literature, he
contends, uncritically perpetuate Anglophone hegemony. Other scholars
(Hayot 2012; Cheah 2014), however, rather than abandoning the enterprise
of world literature altogether, have turned to the project of redefining
“world,” reconceptualizing it from a spatial and geographical category to
an aesthetic, temporal, or sociopolitical one. In this regard, I find Pheng
Cheah’s formulation especially fruitful. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s
notion of storytelling as a key human act of intersubjective world-making,
Cheah (2014: 326) reframes world literature as “the locus where different
processes of worlding are played out in a historically specific field of forces
. . . something that can play a fundamental role and be a force in the
ongoing cartography and creation of the world.” Cheah’s model not only
restores critical attention to the ways geopolitics affect the production of
world literature but also, reciprocally, endows literature with the capacity
to rewrite prevailing accounts of the world and even rethink what it means
to be writing a world.
It is with this geopolitical capacity in mind that I propose reading
Chinese literature as world (and not just national or Sinophone) literature—
as tactical interventions into world-claiming orientalist discourses in
arenas such as global public health and biosecurity. We may deem this
the transdisciplinary dimension of world literature. Although post-SARS
pandemic discourse advances one powerful description of the world today
by constructing China as a kind of dystopia, an epidemic site that requires
constant scrutiny for signs of outbreak or deviance, we can turn to Chinese
epidemic novels as fortuitous countertexts, offering alternative narratives
of global infectious disease while destabilizing the universal claims of
pandemic discourse. Moreover, because pandemic orientalism operates
through modes of reading that eerily recall Franco Moretti’s (2013: 48–49)
idea of “distant reading”—where Chinese bodies are synthesized into
patterns of masked faces on magazine covers or else charted and mapped as
data points in global surveillance networks, at once reduced and enlarged
into abstract aggregates of viral symptoms—what can serve as a useful
countermethod, as I elaborate in the final section, is a geopolitically alert
mode of close reading.
To better challenge pandemic orientalism, I propose here an interpretive
framework of “totalitarian ordinariness.” The concept of totalitarianism
has its roots in Cold War ideology and hence remains understandably
contested as a political label for China among China scholars. In the Western

imaginary, it often summons visions of a relentlessly nightmarish regime
with total control over the minds and souls of its masses. Whereas the
Western liberal state prides itself on safeguarding the human potential for
privacy and pure unpoliticized being, totalitarianism is habitually attributed
to the West’s political other as a totalizing condition that allows no pocket
of the private to be untouched by ideology and no residue of ordinary
life to exist outside the repressive state. Yet, precisely because of this
orientalist dimension of the totalitarian concept, Chinese political fiction
offers potent counternarratives. To activate their interventionist potential
as world literature, we can strategically and closely read these texts for
elements of ordinariness—scenes of quiet or unexceptional everyday life,
plotlines driven by small personal dramas rather than national political
crises, and details that may be deeply significant to individuals but whose
significance is not reducible to a macro anti-totalitarian critique. It is in
these textual moments that Chinese writers proffer a nontotalizing vision
of totalitarianism. Ordinariness thus refers not to a humanist category of
universal experience, the neoliberal residue that redeems oriental subjects
from the grip of totalitarian power, but to genres and themes often
relegated to the realms of the trivial, sentimental, or feminine. More than a
partial description of social experience, totalitarian ordinariness is meant to
be mobilized as a reading tactic, one that supplements rather than replaces
our attention to scenes of crisis. It insists on reading the totalitarian and
the ordinary not in isolation but alongside each other, so as to interrupt
orientalist reproductions of China. I submit it as a situated tactic for those
of us who read Chinese literature in Western, white-majoritarian contexts,
without any pretense that what is disruptive here would be so everywhere
else in the world. 1
Throughout, I give citations to both the
2011 English edition of Hu’s novel (STW),
translated by A. E. Clark and based on
Totalitarianism: Censorship and Biopower Hu’s full original manuscript, and the
2006 abridged Beijing edition (RY).
For my analysis, Hu Fayun’s Such Is This World@sars.come (Ruyan@sars.come)
Unless otherwise noted, quotations are
is an ideal text.1 As a sustained account of the SARS outbreak from within taken from Clark’s translation.
China, it is an exemplary epidemic novel that can be read in counterpoint
to global pandemic discourse. Brian Bernards (2011) calls it “the most
important work of contemporary Chinese fiction to address the many
social ramifications of the 2003 SARS outbreak,” and Ian Johnson (2016)
observes that it rejects the ornate magic realism of much contemporary
Chinese fiction dealing with sensitive topics in favor of a more grounded
aesthetic. At once political novel and sentimental romance, Such Is This
World offers a rich representational range of the totalitarian alongside the
ordinary, combining an explicit censure of the communist government’s
history of repression with an equal emphasis on the continuities of daily
life amid an epidemic. As such, it lends itself perfectly to a discussion of
totalitarian ordinariness.
Set in an unnamed provincial capital and unfolding over one year,
the novel intertwines two main story lines. In the first, the eponymous
protagonist, Ru Yan, a fortyish widow and single mother whose only son
has gone to France for graduate study, adjusts to life alone in her city. The
narrative opens with a back story of the two things her son left behind: a
puppy and a computer. The dog, named after her son, serves as a symbolic
filial surrogate. The computer connects her to an online community,
particularly a forum called the Empty Nest, where parents with children
studying abroad gather. Here, Ru Yan rediscovers her love of words and
appreciation for good writing as well as her own stylistic talents. Before
long, her online essays attract a following of admiring readers, including
Liang Jinsheng, a local deputy mayor. Himself recently widowed and
an Empty Nester, Liang is drawn to Ru Yan’s old-fashioned sensibilities
and poetic elegance and begins to court her. This female-centered
domestic plotline—of a woman aging alone, caring for a pet, learning
new technology, and rediscovering romance in middle age—functions as
the text’s opening and closing frames. But more than a framing device,
it constitutes half the narrative focus of the novel, intersecting with yet
also anchoring the more politically charged plotline in the small dramas

of nonexceptional life.
For Hu Fayun, this spotlight on Ru Yan is far from incidental. As he writes
in the afterword to the Beijing edition, Ru Yan is modeled after his late wife,
Li Hong, who was battling stomach cancer during the novel’s composition
and who died less than a year after its completion. Li was, as always, his
manuscript’s first reader and editor, and upon the book’s publication, he
dedicated it to her memory (RY 271–272). This semibiographical dimension
might account for why Hu fixes his attention so sharply on Ru Yan’s domestic
life to the exclusion of her professional one, which he addresses mostly in
terms of office gossip and romantic intrigue, despite her being a botanist at
a research institution. By all appearances, Ru Yan seems competent enough
to have contributed substantive scientific reflections on the epidemic,
but throughout, she writes and thinks about SARS primarily as a mother
and a public citizen, from the perspective of moral sentiment rather than
specialized knowledge. The novel’s construction of ordinariness is thus
highly mediated by a gender-conservative and male-oriented code of
femininity. I pick up on this point later.
The novel’s other story line begins nearly midway through and revolves
around SARS. In late 2002, Ru Yan calls her family in southern China and
hears about the outbreak of a strange disease there. As Ru Yan’s mother
exclaims, “You get it, you die,” but the authorities are restricting all
information so that news circulates only unofficially via private cell phones
(STW 178; RY 106). Before long, Ru Yan learns that her brother-in-law has
been infected. Still finding no official news online, she composes an essay,
which goes viral, about his mysterious illness to warn her fellow Empty
Nesters. Thus begins Ru Yan’s political awakening. As SARS spreads across
the country, including into her province, and the globe, she is increasingly
dismayed and then outraged by the government’s responses—first
censoring information about the virus and covering up the epidemic, then
implementing harsh public health measures that spawn brutality and abuse
among local law enforcement. In the ensuing months, Ru Yan is spurred to
write ever more damningly of these events, and she soon becomes the target
of cyberbullying as well as, unbeknownst to her, government surveillance.
Meanwhile, she cultivates a small circle of friends who foster her Internet
activism and deepen her political consciousness, especially Damo, a well-
known blogger and antiestablishment autodidact, and Teacher Wei, a
respected scholar who has emerged through decades of persecution with
uncompromising moral integrity, courage, and wisdom. Precisely because
of his influential role as the intellectual and spiritual mentor to a group
of independent thinkers, Wei falls prey to secret Party machinations and
dies a horrifying death, falsely quarantined as a SARS patient and then,
having contracted the disease in the isolation ward, is left to waste away
there alone. Through the voices and fates of these two male characters, Hu
conveys the novel’s most direct indictment of totalitarianism—constructed
as a sovereign power over life and death and a virtual panopticon seeking
absolute control over biopolitical information. Resistance is configured as
a matrix of paternalistic moral authority, authentic historical memory from
a mostly male intellectual perspective, and innate personal integrity that
cuts across gender, class, and generational lines.
It is tempting to concentrate an analysis of the novel on this second
plotline, for it provides abundant material for broader sociopolitical
commentary about contemporary China. As Bernards (2011) foregrounds,
Such Is This World is not only an important novel about SARS but also a
“social history of the continually evolving impact of the Internet in China.”
Carlos Rojas (2015: 163–165) further homes in on this aspect of the text
to illuminate the Chinese Internet’s double-edged quality, at once an
instrument of government censorship and a vehicle for public resistance
and grassroots activism. In this “dialectics of dissemination and censorship,”
he notes, the Internet parallels the contradictory effects of viral networks
such as SARS, which can bolster existing power structures or engender
new communal possibilities. As several other critics (Bernards 2011; Clark
2011: i; Derbyshire 2011: 45; Chen 2016: 121–126) also recognize, Hu’s

novel epitomizes a symbiosis between official prohibition and creative
reproduction, what Thomas Chen (2016: 115) calls “alter-production,”
because the novel not only dramatizes this process but has itself undergone
a similar publication trajectory as Ru Yan’s writings. First released online
in 2005, the novel disappeared from public view when its hosting website
was shut down a few months later, only to reappear in multiple versions
over the next few years: a popular Internet novel on Sina.com; an abridged
work in a regional journal; a bowdlerized edition by a Beijing publisher; an
uncensored edition by a Hong Kong publisher; and an English translation
based on the author’s original manuscript. Indeed, the book’s tortuous
publication history is so well publicized that Jonathan Mirsky (2012)
considers it a consummate example of the “anaconda in the chandelier,”
Perry Link’s metaphor for the calculated vagueness of China’s censorship
regime that leaves everyone in its shadow adjusting through subtle self-
censorship. “Hu Fayun,” Mirsky remarks, “must hear the anaconda shift
its weight every day.”
Comparing the expurgated Beijing edition with the unabridged
English one, we can discern a further complexity to this hypothesis about
a generalized Chinese ban. Hu repeatedly expounds in the novel on the
mechanisms and costs of censorship in China, and many of these excoriating
passages, contrary to expectations, are retained in the Beijing edition. For
instance, the very passage Mirsky cites as exemplary of Hu’s “word-crimes”
and that should remind us of “how awful true censorship must be”—a
passage in which Wei describes the permanent state of terror saturating
the Chinese psyche, where “some nameless fear grips every heart” (STW
289; RY 175)—stays intact. That this passage remains uncensored does not
invalidate the censorship, of course; in fact, the very next lines about mass
emigration as an effect of political fear are deleted. It may be, as Rojas
suggests, that acts of censorship are always already caught up in a dialectic
with dissemination, so that even the micro-operations of repression at
the paragraph level end up, inadvertently or not, feeding the germ of
a counterdiscourse. It may even be that censors themselves participate,
however unintentionally, in what Chen (2016: 137) calls the “censored
public” and its heterogeneous modes of “trying and testing of censorship.”
What is noteworthy is the element of unpredictability in what gets cut
and what does not. The process is not completely random or arbitrary (all
2
See Chen (2016: 133–135) for a discus- references to the June 4 massacre, for instance, are predictably erased2),
sion of the excisions of references to
but neither is it perfectly foreseeable. The example of this one passage
the 1989 Tiananmen protests and these
passages’ subsequent restoration online is not unique—it is replicated many times over throughout the Beijing
by the blogger Shi Yan Wu Tian.
edition—so we can frame this uneven operation of censorship within the
terms of totalitarian ordinariness as well. As one technique by which power
exerts itself, censorship is far from a banality, but neither is it a totalizing
procedure whose logic and outcome can be projected purely through
preemptive metaphors or remote readings.
Likewise, chapter 55—arguably the novel’s most graphically violent,
terror-saturated, and pivotal chapter—stands entirely untouched in the
Beijing edition. This chapter opens with haunting scenes of animal slaugh-
ter and ends with news of Wei’s death, with these two sandwiching an
episode of the most vicious cyberattack on Ru Yan yet. Haiyan Lee (2014:
90) highlights exactly this chapter’s scenes of animal violence to illustrate
the “state of exception to which both humans and animals [have been]
consigned.” When SARS spreads into Ru Yan’s city, her housing develop-
ment comes under quarantine and residents are forbidden to keep their
pets, which are now treated as potential viral carriers that must be sur-
rendered to the authorities. Ru Yan manages to hide her dog at home by
cowering it into silence, but she often hears the howls of animals being
beaten to death in the streets and, on one occasion, she even witnesses
a group of security guards tearing a small dog into pieces with hooked
poles. She records the scene and posts pictures online, denouncing this
sanctioned torture and public execution of animals as “a city’s disgrace”
and comparing it to Auschwitz. “The days we are living through,” she
writes, “have laid bare things more dreadful than SARS” (STW 363–364;

RY 219). Lee (2014: 90–91) aptly reads these scenes in biopolitical terms,
as reflecting a state of exception in which human and animal life alike
are reduced to the “degradation of bare life,” which Giorgio Agamben
(1988: 8) defines as life that can be killed with impunity by all. The reso-
nance between human and animal precariousness is further reinforced
by the chapter’s concluding announcement of Wei’s death and Ru Yan’s
heavy-hearted meditation on the “extreme brutality of letting a man die
this way,” utterly alone on a hospital bed, “no better than dying in an
unlit dungeon” (STW 372–373; RY 224–225).
On the novel’s political plotline, then, Hu does not shy away from
characterizing contemporary China through the lens of totalitarianism,
which he constructs not as a 1984-esque state of complete ideological
indoctrination but as a biopolitical state of exception with the capacity
to render both humans and animals into supremely killable bare life. The
SARS epidemic serves as the pretext for a state of emergency to be declared
and sovereign power to be enacted, eerily echoing Foucault’s (1977: 199)
biopolitical dictum that, far from eschewing disease, “rulers dreamt of the
state of plague.” Biopolitics as an analytic framework has the additional
advantage of delinking totalitarianism from orientalism, for its theoretical
origins in both Foucault’s and Agamben’s writings pertain first and foremost
to Western milieus rather than to China. Indeed, for Agamben (1998: 10),
the matrix of sovereign power defined by states of exception cuts across
liberal democracy and totalitarianism and represents “an inner solidarity”
between the two.
Like Hu, contemporary Chinese writers often invoke totalitarianism in
their fiction and insist on its relevance for the supposedly post-totalitarian
present to establish historical continuities between the Maoist era and the
current capitalist one. In this novel, Hu uses the word “totalitarian” just
once, in a passage in which Wei laments the absence of an “untainted
cultural vehicle” in China with which his generation could record their lives
(STW 129; RY 75–76). In the Beijing edition, his reference to “totalitarian
countries like the former Soviet Union” is excised. But what is significant
for our reading is that this invocation of totalitarianism emerges specifically
via Wei, in an exchange with Damo and his largely male cohort of friends.
Totalitarianism is thus staged as predominantly a lexicon among men, men
of two Maoist generations who continue to regard themselves as political
and moral guardians of the nation. This masculine intellectual discourse is
pointedly contrasted with the novel’s other story line and its constellation
of ordinariness: Ru Yan’s domestic and romantic life.
Ordinariness: Domesticity and Romance

Although many elements in the personal plotline of the novel are entangled
with the political one, the former is not reducible to the latter. That is to
say, ordinariness is not constructed trivially—ordinary life is not merely life
that is allowed to live through a temporary suspension of sovereign power
or a mere reprieve from an underlying permanent state of exception. Such
are indeed the escalated terms of Wei’s, and often Damo’s, portrait of the
contemporary situation, but these play off the less dramatic details of Ru
Yan’s domestic life. For instance, despite the prominent scenes of animal
carnage, Ru Yan’s dog survives both SARS and the pet ban. Although it is
somewhat traumatized by that period of house confinement and animal
massacre, it nonetheless emerges from the crisis with its intuitions and
empathy intact. The novel’s final reference to the dog shows it perched on
the edge of Ru Yan’s bed, anxiously waiting for her to wake up after her
breakup with Liang Jinsheng; ultimately, the dog is the more faithful and
caring companion. Similarly, Ru Yan’s brief career as an Internet personality
ends on a note of understated resolution. On the one-year anniversary of
her initiation into the Internet, she revisits the Empty Nest after a long
hiatus and lurks there, browsing messages and even coming across nostalgic
posts about her “lovely prose.” But instead of plunging into another cycle
of online activism and spiteful backlash, she decides to remain a lurker, “to
keep these friendly feelings” and “let the acrimony fade into the past”

(STW 443; RY 268–269).
Above all, Ru Yan weathers the abrupt dissolution of her relationship
with Liang without any profound scarring of spirit or psyche. Nor is this
relationship a minor component of her narrative: nearly half the novel is
dedicated to meticulously tracking its growth and the gradual reawakening
of her sexual desire. A series of episodes centers on Liang’s attentively
orchestrated dates with Ru Yan: in one, he drives her to a man-made beach
in a new quarter of the city so they can better moon-gaze on Mid-Autumn
Festival; in another, after being incommunicado for almost a month while
he attended the Party Congress in Beijing and is then sent to the United
States, he returns with a gift-wrapped box of hot dogs, “fresh out of the
oven” from America (STW 140; RY 82). Even after SARS hits the city and
Liang, as the deputy mayor responsible for public health, is put in charge
of epidemic management, he remembers Valentine’s Day and treats Ru
Yan to a banquet of rare delicacies at a private restaurant owned by a
descendant of imperial chefs. In the culminating scene of their romance, he
leaves the quarantine center to visit her unannounced one night, intending
to simply look up at her window from his car so as to avoid contaminating
her, but she rushes down and drags him upstairs into her apartment. They
have sex for the first (and only) time, passionately and with abandon.
Afterward, with fastidious attention to the intricacies of Ru Yan’s inner life,
the narrative follows her reveries as she contemplates her uncharacteristic
indifference to the disorder in the room and unself-consciousness about
their nudity. Then, in a seemingly gratuitous passage, Liang wakes up in
the middle of the night and says, to Ru Yan’s delight, that he needs to
“pee-pee”—not “to use the bathroom” or “I have to relieve myself,” she
muses lovingly, almost maternally, but “to pee-pee,” “like a drowsy child
talking to his mother.” She stands and watches over him as he urinates,
and the narrative does not neglect to mention that she flushes the toilet
for him (STW 346–347; RY 208). Veering far from the disaster-filled political
plotline, this scene zooms in on those details of bodily life that are not so
easily subsumable under the rubric of national biopower but are instead
saturated with sentiment. Whereas Roland Barthes (1986: 141) names
“reality effect” those “superfluous” or “futile” textual details that have
no significance except to induce a sense of reality, we can call this passage
part of the novel’s ordinariness effect.
To be sure, each of these episodes encapsulates some direct or implied
sociopolitical commentary—on the scarcity of unpolluted lakes in China;
the culture of secrecy around Party proceedings; the continued privilege of
officials to dine, literally like royalty, amid an epidemic and its animal bans;
and the unrestricted mobility of a VIP such as Liang, versus the conspired
imprisonment of an undesirable element such as Wei. Nevertheless, we are
led to view Liang’s courtship of Ru Yan not as the superficial or deceitful
performance of a political villain, much less the prelude to a relationship
fatefully doomed by totalitarian power, but as the mature affection of an
older widower who has learned to value love and companionship after
repeated loss. His devotion to Ru Yan is depicted as sincere, although
ultimately not deeper than his political ambitions. Tellingly, their breakup
occurs as the result of a reluctant but voluntary decision on Liang’s part,
not as the inevitable tragic fallout of a totalizing external force. Having
checked SARS in the city, Liang is poised to be promoted rapidly through
Party ranks, and to preserve and advance his career, he chooses to sever
ties with Ru Yan, who has become suspect for her Internet activism and
friendship with Wei. His is a bureaucrat’s decision of pragmatic self-interest,
an act of personal betrayal that rises to the level of villainy only if we reach
for something akin to Arendt’s (1977) argument about the banality of evil:
the crime of a cog in the political machine whose greatest failure is his
incapacity to think. Even then, Liang is no Eichmann: he does not fail to
consult his own conscience before consenting to carry out the commands
of his superiors, and he sacrifices his relationship with Ru Yan with full self-
awareness, even regret and self-disappointment. His decision transpires,
however, without Ru Yan’s knowledge, and the narrative diligently traces

her private torment as she waits, week after week, for him to get back
in touch. She deals with her heartache not through any grand gestures
but by having a conversation with another woman, in one of the novel’s
rare scenes of genuine female bonding. It is her friend who identifies the
root of the problem: that Ru Yan “seeks the overarching values in life, its
ultimate meaning,” but Liang is “unable to detach . . . from worldly fame
and power” (STW 435; RY 264). By the novel’s end, Ru Yan too makes a
decision, albeit a relatively undramatic one: “to begin life anew and live
one’s days well” (STW 443; RY 268, translation mine). For her, this means
a return to normal routines, the first of which is walking the dog.
Were Hu more invested in rendering a wholesale totalitarian dystopia,
he could easily have maximized the disastrous ramifications of SARS and
its governance effects, perhaps with the death of Ru Yan’s dog, the arrest
of Damo’s group, or the breaking of Ru Yan’s spirit. Instead, the novel
ends modestly, uneventfully. Rather than heroic acts of resistance or bold
declarations of a transformed future, the narrative’s quiet conclusion recasts
the terms of ongoing life in contemporary China from an exceptional
politics of sovereign biopower and bare life, state repression and grassroots
protest, toward an ethos of everyday endurance. Taking a walk, closing
a webpage, even deciding not to respond to an online post become the
daily acts that constitute survival from post-epidemic traumatic stress,
social media assault, romantic disappointment, or political betrayal. These
acts have no large-scale or long-term sociopolitical impact, but neither
do they represent forms of quietism or futility. They instantiate a kind
of experiential self-acknowledgment and life maintenance: to recognize
recent events of calamity without alarm, to regulate personal memory
without denial, and to sustain livable life beyond the emergency, without
escalation and with conscious intent. In a different context, Lauren Berlant
(2011: 95–96, 261–262) would call these acts a “lateral politics”: “valuing
political action as the action of not being worn out by politics,” and valuing
ordinary agency beyond “melodramatic” spectacles of resistance. For
Berlant, Western neoliberalism has produced a “crisis ordinariness” in which
subjects, especially those in marginalized or impoverished communities,
suffer from “slow death.” The critic’s task is not to ignore or trivialize
everyday acts of survival but “to reinvent, from the scene of survival, new
idioms of the political.”
Hu seems engaged in a kindred task of theorizing totalitarian
ordinariness, but with more genuine optimism. Even in the wake of a
global epidemic and in the shadow of a calculated panoptic state power,
Ru Yan is anything but a victim of slow death or debilitating desires. She
remains wholly herself at the narrative’s close, ever the loving mother and
compassionate moral citizen, ever full of dignity, self-respect, and cautious
hope for the future. The last scene sees her throwing out the wrinkled suit
worn by Liang after their night of passion and the new slippers meant for
him, not into the trash bin but out her window, for the scrap collector
passing by below. This minor act converts into nothing spectacular on
the macro stage of history, but for Ru Yan it is at once a step forward
from her failed relationship, a small civic gesture toward the poor, and
3
To highlight the distinctiveness of Hu’s
an ecologically minded act of recycling—no more, no less. It embodies an
aesthetic, we can contrast Such Is This
World with a better-known Chinese epi- instance of everyday ethics along Berlant’s model, not as antihegemonic
demic novel, Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding
opposition or radical rupture, but as a simple act carried out in the space
Village, which dramatizes the plight of
one AIDS-stricken Henan village in the of ordinary home life.3 Rather than a nonbiopolitical act, it exemplifies, I
1990s. Although the latter also contains
would suggest, a nonexceptionalist biopolitics.
a central story line on second-chance
romance, the lovers there die tragically, Interestingly, whereas Western reviewers tend to emphasize Wei’s and
with extravagant acts of self-sacrifice
Damo’s sections of the novel, often by quoting their more grandiose and
and devotion. In the final chapter, the
protagonist returns home to his village critical judgments of China’s history and politics, enthusiastic responses on
after being arrested for murdering his
the Chinese Internet initially focused on Ru Yan’s character. According to
son, only to find a ghost town utterly
decimated by disease and human greed. Link (2011: 54–56), Chinese readers “adored Ru Yan for being ‘what China
The torrential rainstorm that ensues
needs’ and ‘the way a person should be,’” with her “simple virtues” of
conjures at once planetary apocalypse,
the world’s renewal, and Nu Wa’s cre- “modesty, integrity, and common decency.” As the poet Bai Hua (2011)
ation of humans, images that showcase
wrote online, “While I’m skeptical whether there really is a Ru Yan in
Yan’s much more eschatological and
mythic aesthetic. China, I’m hopeful. Perhaps many ordinary people in China are Ru Yans.”

Although Chinese readers also comment abundantly on the politics of Hu’s
book, what they tend to highlight is not the wise, victimized patriarch or
the uncompromising, dissident intellectual, but the sheer ordinary goodness
of the heroine. So, although the novel indeed presents a stark gendered
division between a masculinist political discourse and a patriarchal
construction of feminine domesticity and romance, we can also interpret
the latter as Hu’s attempt to retrieve, from the catastrophic discursive
space of the contemporary Chinese political novel, an alternative affective
realm for more mundane and nonelitist forms of sentimental attachment.
Enacted here as self-care, human–animal companionship, and sexual desire,
these attachments do not ineluctably feed back into the scene of national
politics. Such Is This World leaves Ru Yan and its reader with a feeling of
returning to an ordinary life after living through an extraordinary crisis,
where the post-crisis world does not have to be post-apocalyptic but can
deliver a modest homecoming.
World Literature as Method: Geopolitical Close Reading

As readers, we can learn from Ru Yan. Just as she derives enduring meaning
from the small acts of everyday life, not as post-crisis erasure or denial but
as a style of abiding with integrity, so we can think of close reading as an
analogous ethos: a method of attending with care to individual minor texts,
mining them for sustenance amid and against controlling narratives, but
without the ambition to amass or re-aggregate them toward some schema
of totality. What Hu’s novel, and the Chinese epidemic novel more generally,
stand to offer theories of world literature is a mediation—between globally
hegemonic discourses and alternative discourses of the globe, between
an imagination of disaster that cows us into capitulating to sovereign
power and a heterotopic space that encourages us to reimagine ordinary
agency alongside extraordinary (bio)politics. This geopolitical function is
distinctive to Chinese literature today, not because of anything inherent
in or exceptional to the content of the literature itself, but because of
pandemic discourse’s unique structural positioning of China as the site of
global disease ground zero. Yet, as my analysis of totalitarian ordinariness
indicates, this discursive function is not self-activating but remains inert
without a method.
As noted, the problem of geopolitical inequalities dogs present debates
on world literature. Actually, the most influential proponents of world
literature readily grant this premise. Damrosch (2003: 27–28), for example,
explicitly flags his paradigm as a “local manifestation” of American
cultural criticism, conceding that it would be “hubris” to suppose “we are
the world.” Both Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, too, consciously
employ world-systems and core-periphery models in order to highlight
global asymmetry, with Moretti (2013: 46–47) sardonically calling world
literature “one and unequal.” Where the proponents of world literature
diverge most from their critics is in method. Confronted with the unequal
planetary situation, the former will proceed with their various projects of
encyclopedizing, digitizing, and mapping texts toward ever more massive
knowledge archives, albeit with ever greater representation from what had
been the periphery. By contrast, their critics tend to adopt approaches that
perturb rather than consolidate world-knowledge claims, excavating and
exposing rather than sidestepping global power relations, often through
a vocabulary of multiplicity, location, or historicity. Among China scholars,
for instance, Jing Tsu (2010) advocates localizing and historicizing ideas of
world literature outside the Goethe-European tradition; Lucas Klein (2015:
423) calls for smaller scales of comparison and locating Chinese literature
as one unit “in a neighborhood, in dialogue with the rest of the world”;
and Yingjin Zhang (2015: 8) postulates a pluralist model of “alternative
or parallel worlds” that lie “outside the purview of the official and the
elite.” Supplementing these latter approaches, I have pursued in this essay
a method with a postcolonial lineage: a politicized form of close reading
that keeps geopolitics front and center.
In the wake of Moretti’s polemic on distant reading, it is perhaps

unsurprising that those most stridently critical of the world literature
venture would return to close reading and revitalize it as a key
countermethod. Gayatri Spivak (2003: 104fn2, 108fn1) offers an early
version of this move when she insists on “in-depth language learning and
close reading” as the proper antidotes to “Moretti-style comparativis[m].”
Aamir Mufti (2010: 493) likewise pleads for a “better close reading,”
one that remains “attentive to the worldliness of language and text at
various levels of social reality.” In ethnic studies too, Paula Moya (2016: 10)
recently spotlights close reading as “the social imperative” of contemporary
literary criticism, “an indispensable tool for excavating the ideological
investments promoted by any given text.” With their explicit political
orientations, these scholars support what may be dubbed “activist close
reading,” rehabilitating New Criticism from its purported rightist roots for
contemporary leftist agendas and echoing what Marjorie Levinson (2007:
561) calls “activist new formalism.” Yet these scholars are also reprising an
originally postcolonial method, one that Edward Said (1979: 23–24) already
outlined in his introduction to Orientalism where he referred to “close
textual readings whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual
text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a
contribution.” Geopolitical close reading, then, has its theoretical roots in
postcolonial studies’ first engagement with orientalism.
Finally, although this essay has focused on the orientalist aspects of
pandemic discourse, it should be said that the latter is Janus-faced, its
other side contrarily positioning China as the world’s disease gatekeeper.
As I elaborate elsewhere (Kong 2016), since SARS, the Western pandemic
imagination of China has shifted to leverage millennial fears of emerging
viruses. Although the Chinese government incurred wide disapprobation
at the time for its initial failure at transparency and collaboration, in an
ironic twist, once Party leaders authorized anti-epidemic policies—including
“draconian” measures that would be considered violations of civil rights
in many democratic countries—China was widely praised, including by
the WHO, for its tough-minded disease governance. Precisely through
its unbridled use of exceptional state power, the Chinese government
succeeded in containing the outbreak at home in just over two months.
Henceforth, China comes to embody at once a dangerous viral birthplace
and a paragon of sovereign biopower. In light of these overlapping
discourses, Chinese epidemic novels such as Hu’s have the distinct advantage
of disclosing entanglements of orientalism with biopolitical sovereignty,
amplifying those muted layers in Western techniques of remotely
representing, perceiving, and tracking China. A geopolitical close reading of
Chinese political fiction can push against these logics of sovereign necessity
and totalitarian exceptionalism.

Glossary
Hu Fayun 胡發雲
Li Hong 李虹
Ru Yan 茹嫣
Ruyan@sars.com 如焉@sars.com
Yan Lianke 閻連科
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Totalitarian Ordinariness The Chinese Epidemic Novel as World Literature

Author(s): Belinda Kong

136 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

Pandemic Orientalism and the Chinese Epidemic Novel

138 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

140 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

142 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

144 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

146 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

148 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

Ordinariness: Domesticity and Romance

150 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

152 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

154 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

World Literature as Method: Geopolitical Close Reading

156 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

158 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

Arac, Jonathan. 2002. “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review 16: 35–45.

Arendt, Hannah. 1977. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality

Bai Hua 白樺. 2011. Comment on “<Ruyan> Hu Fayun zhu” (Ruyan by

Bernards, Brian. 2011. “Review of Such Is This World@sars.come, by Hu

Braun, Bruce. 2007. “Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life.” Cultural

Cheah, Pheng. 2014. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception

Clark, A. E. 2011. “Preface.” In Hu Fayun, Such Is This World@sars.come.

Cooper, Melinda. 2006. “Pre-Empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in

Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Fidler, David P. 2004. SARS, Governance and the Globalization of Disease.

Hayot, Eric. 2012. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hu Fayun 胡發雲. 2006. Ruyan@sars.com. Beijing: Guoji guangbo.

———. 2011. Such Is This World@sars.come. Tr. A. E. Clark. Dobbs Ferry,

King, Nicholas B. 2002. “Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of

Klein, Lucas. 2015. “Alors, la Chinoiserie? The Figure of China in

Kong, Belinda. 2016. “The Pandemic Planet: Disease Discourse, Biosecurity

160 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

Lee, Jong-wook. 2005. “Meeting on Avian Influenza and Pandemic Hu-

Lee, Robert G. 1999. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture.

Levinson, Marjorie. 2007. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2:

Liu, Hongtao. 2015. “Chinese Literature’s Route to World Literature.”

Mirsky, Jonathan. 2012. “Banned in China.” New York Review of Books

Moretti, Franco. 2013. “Conjectures on World Literature.” In Franco Moretti,

Mufti, Aamir R. 2010. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.”

———. 2016. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures.

Rojas, Carlos. 2015. Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National

Shah, Nayan. 2001. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York:

Tsu, Jing. 2010. “Getting Ideas about World Literature in China.”

Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak

[WHO] World Health Organization. 2004. “Summary of Probable SARS

Wright, Susan. 2007. “Terrorism and Biological Weapons: Forging the

Zhang, Yingjin. 2015. “Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature.”

162 • Tot a lit ar ia n Or di nar i nes s

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