Jia Pingwa travels to modern China to give us his Happy Dreams. Happy Liu, a migrant worker, lands up in the city of Xi’an along with friend Wufu, who is slightly dim-witted and also, in the end, dead. While transporting Wufu’s body back to their hometown, Happy Liu flashbacks. Happy was originally named Hawa, a name he changed because he wanted to be, well, happy. ‘Me, I wanted to live up to my name and be happy. That’s not to say I wasn’t annoyed, but everyone should have a bird singing inside them as well as a crow cawing.’
Workers who leave their villages in search of a better life fight their own unique battles and come up with their own secret of success. Passports are confiscated by angry employers, law has to be bribed now and then, and bullies evaded. Turf wars among the poor are brutal and their food habits surprisingly lavish. There are noodles in soup, in chilli oil, with meat sauce, noodles as thick as sticks with chicken and hot pepper in a huge bowl. There is also mutton paomo soup thickened with bread and a bottle of shaojiu spirits to spice up things further.
Happy and Wufu collect trash; trash collection can sound ‘as complicated as the realms of Buddhist cosmology’. The rules in this job sector, the hierarchy and saluting—Happy was immersed right in the middle of it all and throughout he wondered if true love exists. He had a pair of high-heel shoes and he was looking for a fine pair of feminine feet to fill them up. Love, of course, is found in the strangest of places, so Happy has to contend with turning his dream upside down as he goes along. Yichun is beautiful but different and he must deal with that.
Happy had sold his kidney once upon a time when he still lived in the countryside and dreamt of finding his other half, the man who now had his kidney. ‘It made me a city man myself. But where was the man with my kidney? Was he my shadow, or was I his shadow? He might be the biggest boss in town, but I was a trash picker. It was like ceramic: Why did one piece go to make the oven range, while another piece ended up as a urinal?’
He was here, his other kidney was here, so he must now be a city-slicker himself; ‘I’m a Xi’an man while I’m alive, and I’m going to be a Xi’an ghost when I’m dead.’ The spirit of migrant workers is exemplified by Happy’s upbeat march to a tune only he hears.
Translated by Nicky Harman, Chinese writer Jia Pingwa gives us the woes of labourers with a dash of homespun wisdom and lots of wit. Workers everywhere aspiring to better things, to a higher station in life, come alive as narrator, as bit characters, as landlords, as rejected suitors, as festive eaters, as just so human. There is a stream of consciousness to the writing so that stray incidents seem to come at the reader with no fixed intention, and here and there the story seems to meander more like a diary and less like one focused on its own ending.