Speech at the New Book Launch of the Chinese Canadian Writers Association, November 5, 2021

Speech at the New Book Launch of the Chinese Canadian Writers Association, November 5, 2021, by Li Yousheng

Writers write tirelessly year after year; they have something to tell the world. As with novels, besides the story itself, authors usually have a deeper meaning to convey. The deeper meaning of my novel is too vast and fundamental, far beyond the comprehension of most people, and requires further explanation.

The Bible states that God created man in His own image, but regretted creating him because of his sins. It’s easy to deduce from the biblical account that God created man more than 4,600 years ago, roughly the time when humankind began to be created in the Middle East during the five thousand years of civilization. Modern anthropologists believe that modern humans are created through cultural traditions; God created man from clay, and humans created him through language. The history of human civilization is a history of escalating wars and class struggles, enough to make God regret his actions.

Civilization begins with a sudden change. Humanity, spread across six continents, has witnessed such a change in civilization in only six places over thousands of years: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Mexico, Peru, and China. Except for China, the other five original civilizations all occurred in narrow areas not far from the ocean or deserts. Only Chinese civilization arose in an open area farther from the ocean, but closer to the desert.

If narrow locations lead to wars and class struggles over land, and the creation of artificial humans begins, then Chinese civilization would have started as a superpower maintaining peace, only entering the stage of war involving artificial humans during the Warring States period.

The social living environments of natural humans and artificial humans are respectively the natural primordial society and the artificial secondary society. The philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism, beginning with Confucius and Lao Tzu before the Warring States period, both idealized the primordial society. Chinese history after the Qin and Han dynasties was characterized by both extreme social stability and cyclical upheaval. Emperors and peasants joined forces to suppress the newly emerging aristocratic landlord class. By the Song Dynasty, China had entered a more egalitarian society, leaving rural China in the 1950s still in a quasi-primordial stage, living a natural life amidst the fragrance of flowers and the chirping of birds. Here, I will use the lives of women in my hometown to illustrate their natural way of life.

My mother was born in 1914 and passed away in 2007 at the age of 93. The rural women of my mother’s generation had bound feet and could only move around within their own courtyards. Arranged marriages by their parents in neighboring villages meant they knew no one, yet they immediately integrated into their new community, dedicating their lives to providing for their husbands’ families. Divorce was almost nonexistent in the area, and violent crime and mental illness were extremely rare. Even among animals, there were no issues of divorce due to quarrels or war-related mental illness. Women in my hometown typically associated with seven or eight neighboring families, and maintained lifelong relationships with seven or eight families of childhood friends. They shared resources and helped each other, and the women also cared for beggars. They spent their lives watching their families come and go wearing clothes they had mended themselves and enjoying the meals they had prepared, their hearts and minds immersed in the silent joy of Confucian natural benevolence. When I was in elementary school, I learned the word “frequently,” but when I said it to them, they didn’t know it. However, they could distinguish the different accents from the surrounding villages. Under their tutelage, I could distinguish the different accents of four or five surrounding villages, but I lost this ability for life after encountering students from different villages during my later school years. The women in my hometown interacted with fewer than 150 people at a time, accounting for about 30% of their waking hours: these figures come from primate sociology research. Their social interactions were limited to verbal conversations; only the men engaged in self-deprecating recitations of imperial dramas.

If the unmanipulable nature of the Western-dominated modern world led to world wars, Chinese history confined the unmanipulable nature of a two-tiered society to the emperor and government bureaucrats, who were frequently killed.

My novel (The Secret Records of Ah Q, the First Emperor, and Emperor Wu) tells this story. Ah Q, who constantly hummed imperial tales, was determined to be reborn as an emperor in the underworld. With the help of his friends, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, he was reborn in reverse, retaining his original memories and becoming both Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han, much to his dismay. By the time Emperor Wu was in his fifties or sixties, most of those around him had become ghosts, all of whom he had ordered to be killed. After his death, Emperor Wu dared not go to that place, for it was filled with the ghosts of those he had ordered to be killed. Therefore, Emperor Wu sought immortality year after year, hoping to find another place for his soul to hide. Under Emperor Wu’s rule, the population was halved. Finally, Ah Q, unable to bear it any longer, willingly descended to the eighteenth level of hell to atone for his sins.