The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 29, 2022

Sun Tzu is so well known that he can quoted by people who have never read him. Lord knows I’ve done it. And Lord knows an endless number of authors have based their self-help books on Sun Tzu’s. Some of those might have even read The Art of War, although I doubt it.

St. Martin’s Press is publishing an “Essential Pocket Classic” edition of The Art of War. It’s in English, so I thought, why not read it? Leaders in business, football, and other occupations who liken themselves to generals fighting wars all swear to have followed Sun Tzu’s fifth century guidance. For those who have been faking it, this is their chance to actually read the book. Lionel Giles’ 1910 translation is clear and elegant, although Sun Tzu might account for some of the elegance.

Not all of Sun Tzu’s advice about war provides a useful analogy to fighting other battles. Using fire as a weapon is probably not a sound strategy in the business world. Even as applied to warfare, Sun Tzu’s advice about defending high ground versus low ground versus intersections and the six other “varieties of ground” are probably better suited to generals whose armies consist of chariots and swordsmen. Still, Putin’s generals might have wanted to read Sun Tzu’s advice about protecting supply lines and not getting bogged down. Maybe there isn’t a Russian translation.

For those who don’t want to spend an hour or two with the book, here is my Shorter Sun Tzu:

Know your enemy and know yourself. Pick your fights. Never fight without a purpose. Plan ahead but seize unexpected opportunities. Strike where the enemy is weak. Fight from a position of strength. Be sneaky. Don’t be fooled by a sneaky enemy. Use spies to gather information. Watch out for enemy spies. Keep your head. Don’t be predictable. Recognize and adapt to changed circumstances. Don’t fear retreat. Don’t go out of your way to piss off the enemy. Leaders should be firm but fair. Leaders should share goals but not strategies with the troops. Get out of bed before your enemy. Don’t fight uphill. Armies are expensive. Be generous with the spoils of your plunder. Such is the art of warfare.

Of course, Sun Tzu says all of this with more eloquence, hence: “At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards, emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.”

I’m not sure that war analogies are all that useful outside of football. Healthy competition doesn’t need to be a war. Cooperation can be more productive than conquest. Sun Tzu also notes that, in the military context, there are good reasons not to fight wars when they can be avoided. I regard that as his best advice.

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A Song Everlasting by Ha Jin

Published by Random House/‎ Pantheon on July 27, 2021

A Song Everlasting tells the story of the tumultuous middle years of a man’s life. Yao Tian is a celebrated singer in China. He performs with the People’s Ensemble, a position that ensures social status and a comfortable lifestyle. Tian is married to Shuna, who also enjoys status as a professor. They hope their daughter will attend an American college because “universities in China merely fed students with platitudes and jargons, manufacturing the sort of minds needed by the governing apparatus.”

When the People’s Ensemble performs in New York, Tian surreptitiously meets with his childhood friend Han Yabin. Yabin lost his residential status in Beijing after he began to keep company with a foreign female teacher. Yabin responded by traveling to New York and not returning to China. Tian is concerned that meeting with Yabin might be a black mark against his record. He’s even more concerned when he’s offered a good bit of money to perform at a Chinese celebration in New York. He rebooks his return flight and accepts the gig, only to find after his arrival in China that his indiscretion has not gone unnoticed by Chinese officials.

Realizing that his passport will soon be confiscated, Tian flees China. He wants the freedom to travel, and more importantly to perform, internationally. He also wants the freedom to choose the songs he will sing, rather than performing propaganda songs that are selected by government bureaucrats. Shua agrees that he should establish residence in the United States so that he can be happy.

The novel follows Tian’s successes and struggles in America for a period of years. He needs to find a way to remain in the country legally. He’s not sure whether it will ever be safe for him to return to China. His initial successes in America stem from his popularity with Chinese audiences. Chinese authorities try to bribe him to return to China, then conspire to undermine him. A brief dalliance with a Chinese woman doesn’t help his relationship with Shua, while being accused of physically abusing her undercuts the popularity that he enjoys with Chinese audiences. Tian faithfully sends money home to support his daughter, but he and his wife seem to be drifting apart. He needs to find other ways to support himself when his singing career seems to be in jeopardy.

The tradeoff between freedom and security is the novel’s strongest theme. If Tian had stayed in China, singing the songs he was told to sing and saying nothing critical of the government, he might have lost self-respect but his prosperity would have been assured. Living in America assures Tian only of an uncertain future, but it also allows him to control that future, if only to the extent that he can choose the songs he wishes to sing. Tian feels no particular desire to express political opinions, but he does feel a desire to grow as an artist, something that he would never be able to accomplish in China.

Ha Jin’s novel is heartfelt, filled with moments of quiet drama while avoiding melodrama. It is realistic in the sense that Tian’s life might not work out as he hopes or expects. That’s true of every life. We can control what we can control, but some circumstances, including health conditions and the actions of others, are beyond our influence. Tian learns to accept that his fate isn’t entirely in his hands, but he also learns the value of not giving up the fight for the life he wants to have. His relationship with his wife might change because of his extended absence, but that change might open up the possibility of a new and unexpected relationship. He might not always be able to perform for large audiences, but he might find other ways to use his talent. A Song Everlasting reminds readers that being resilient, living according to your values, and persevering in the face of hardship can create a satisfying life, even if it isn’t the life we once envisioned.

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Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

Published in China in 2006; published in translation by Melville House on July 13, 2021

Strange Beasts of China was written and published while Yan Ge was living in China, which might explain why the book reads as if she used metaphors drawn from fantasy to avoid censorship. Her criticism of authoritarian rule is indirect but unmistakable. In one chapter, for example, the government operates a fantastic scheme that coerces the loyalty of the middle class, creating “an unquestioning devotion” to their rulers “that would never be overturned.” The scheme comes at a price, as the ruler “wins over his people, but only when they have lost their minds. . . . Is this gaining or losing? No one can say.” An authoritarian mind might accuse Yan of being subversive if she made her criticism any plainer. An American reader might think about how authoritarian rulers in the United States encourage reality denial, a form of lunacy that assures the unquestioning loyalty of their voters. Notwithstanding that theme, the book is not primarily concerned with political governance.

Each chapter in Strange Beasts of China introduces a new beast. Yan makes a point of telling us that each type of beast is very like a human despite their distinguishing characteristics. One type of beast has gills behind the ears. One type has coarse and “mottled black” skin. One is grown like a sapling that eventually takes on human form. One lives underground where bodies are buried. They tend to be male and female but they don’t always reproduce in conventional ways. Some types are violent and other are passive. The beasts are a diverse group, a fact the fictional city of Yong’an should (and sometimes does) celebrate, but the differences that distinguish beasts from humans also cause discomfort among the city’s homogenous human population. The beasts tend to be tribal, sticking to their own, although some types are admired by humans. Some of those are prized as possessions. Others are feared and, thanks to human efforts, are bordering on extinction.

The novel’s narrator is a writer whose stories about beasts (as well as food columns and trashy romance stories) are published in a local newspaper. While each chapter incorporates a different kind of beast into the narrative, the book reads as a novel because of the larger story that runs through the chapters. That story belongs to the narrator. She is a lonely woman, “truly scared. In all the vastness of the city, I don’t have a single blood relative, no family at all.” Her friends die or leave or enter asylums or turn against her. She is depressed. "For many years now," she writes, "I hadn’t felt anything like joy.” As the chapters unfold, she learns truths (or potential truths, as objective truth is never quite clear) about her own identity. Her parents, friends, and former lovers have all deceived her at some point. She is frightened of how easily she believed them, how she imagined she was loved. But maybe she was loved by others, people whose love she failed to recognize.

When she isn’t chasing after strange beasts, the narrator spends much of her time drinking and feeling sorry for herself at the Dolphin Bar. A recurring story line involves the narrator’s complex and evolving relationship with the zoology professor who took a special interest in her for reasons that are initially obscure, and maintained that interest — or perhaps maintained an interest in emotionally abusing her — after she dropped out of college and became a writer. A later story line adds a younger man, also a favored student of the professor, who maintains an ambiguous relationship with the narrator — a relationship that, like all relationships, the narrator finds confusing.

Yan seems to have a dual purpose, illustrating how distant individuals are from each other (“You don’t know my story, and I don’t know yours. We poured our hearts into our own stories, but never shared them with each other.”) while illuminating the close connections between people who seem to have nothing in common. Perhaps the narrator is a strange beast. Perhaps everyone is. When the narrator asks whether love is possible between humans and beast, she is really asking whether love is possible between two humans who can never really know each other.

A wry humor infects the novel, evident (for example) in Yan’s descriptions of the varying preferences of the different types of beasts (Joyous Beasts “enjoy fantasy novels, and hate Maths”; Heartsick Beasts enjoy steamed buns and char siu pork while Impasse Beasts survive on a diet of human despair). Yet the novel’s themes, including depression and loneliness, death (by suicide, by murder, by fate), oppression, prejudice, and the apparent impossibility of understanding ourselves, much less another person, are far from light. Yan achieves a fine balance of comedy and tragedy.

At times, Yan states the obvious, or perhaps the meaningless, as if she is stating something profound. At other times, she expresses deep thoughts that, if not entirely original, are provocative because of the original way in which they are showcased. The last chapter, an attempt to reimagine the entire novel, falls flat. The novel as a whole, however, is creative, surprising, and enjoyable.

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Braised Pork by An Yu

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Press on April 14, 2020

Braised Pork tells the story of a woman who is struggling to cope with the demands of a changing life. Wu Jia Jia’s husband, Chen Hang, killed himself while kneeling over their bathtub, leaving her with an expensive apartment and little money with which to maintain it. She wants to sell the Beijing apartment, but rumors of her husband’s suicide have made buyers view the apartment as a place of misfortune.

Jia Jia thinks about moving in with her father, but is shocked to learn that he remarried while she was grieving her husband’s loss. Her other option, living with her grandmother and aunt, is difficult because they have settled into a way of life that makes her feel like an outsider. Finding a new husband might solve her problems, but the parents of the only man she has dated — the bartender at the tavern where she spends her evenings — believe it would be bad luck for their son to marry a widow.

Jia Jia attended art school and has some talent, but Chen Hang thought it would be inappropriate for her to sell her paintings. Now that he is gone, she contemplates a sketch he made of a fish with a man’s head. She obsessively paints her own version of the fish man but can never visualize the face that belongs on the fish’s body. In the meantime, she has been commissioned to paint a scene with Buddha on the wall of a friend’s home.

All of this is background for the true story, which involves visions or dreams or shared experiences in which Jia Jia and others encounter the fish man in a world made of water — a world that, in their view, represents true reality. Jia Jia feels compelled to take a trip to Tibet, where she finds a crude sculpture of the fish man in a small village and later discovers a connection between an old villager and her own family.

The recurring appearance of the fish man is something that might be found in a fable, but most of Braised Pork is grounded in a more recognizable reality. Exactly what the fish man represents or symbolizes — whether the fish man even exists, or is the product of mental illness — is ambiguous. In at least one case, the belief that we live in a world made of water seems to drive someone mad, perhaps because that person believes the world of water took everything from her. That person’s husband comes to believe that there are “two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them.” Whether the body can be separated from the rest of human experience is one of the philosophical questions that An Yu poses to her readers.

I’m not sure quite what to make of the fish man. Despite its central importance to the story, I was drawn more to the life that Jia Jia is trying to make after the death of her husband — her uncertain relationship with the bartender, her reconnection with her father, her decision to start making art again. Jia Jia has an appealing resilience. Whether she has experienced visions that open a gateway to a different concept of reality or is suffering from a mental illness, her determination to place the best interpretation on her encounter with the water world, and to take something positive from its darkness, offers a ray of light in an otherwise dark story.

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The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke

First published in China in 2015; published in translation by Grove Press on December 11, 2018

Li Niannian does not sleep deeply enough to dreamwalk, but on one eventful night, the kind of night that only happens once in a century, most residents of his village suddenly suffer from somnambulism. They behave differently than normal sleepwalkers, because they act out their dreams for hours and resist attempts to awaken them. Some villagers are walking into the river and committing suicide in their sleep. Others die accidental deaths; still others are murdered. Dreamwalkers confess their sins and commit new sins. Some dreamwalkers beat each other to death or plot the murder of spouses. The mayor dreams that he is an emperor.

Niannian’s family makes funeral wreaths and other decorations for the dead. One of his uncles operates the crematorium. As cremation is required by law, it appears that business will be booming for both family businesses after the night of dreamwalking comes to an end. In flashbacks, we learn of controversies surrounding Niannian’s father (a good man who made questionable decisions) and uncle (a questionable man who might be capable of good decisions). One controversy surrounds the proper use of the corpse oil that bodies expel when they are cremated.

The long night of somnambulism is extended by a sunless, cloudy morning — hence the title. Outsiders who learn that villagers are unable to wake up pour into town, breaking into stores and homes and carrying off their loot. Bedlam ensues, and the prolonged lack of sunlight leaves Niannian wondering whether it will ever end. It is up to Niannian’s father to devise an ingenious plan to save the village.

Yan Liane is a character in the novel. He is portrayed as a famous author who occasionally returns to the village for new story ideas. Niannian makes frequent refences to Yan’s other novels (whether those books are real or imagined, I’m not sure), which he claims recount the entire history of the narrator’s family. Yan’s mother fears he will die inside his story if he writes while dreamwalking. Yet writing stories is very much like dreamwalking and Yan would prefer to die than to stop writing.

This brief overview cannot capture the novel’s texture or the richness of its characterization. The story suggests that dreamwalkers expose their true selves when they are free to do whatever they desire. Greed and jealousy become primary motivators of rich dreamwalkers, while despair governs the action of the poor. The story invites readers to wonder what they might do while dreamwalking.

Yan Liane’s writing attempts to make a virtue of redundancy. He repeats sentences or parts of sentences, sometimes adding a new word or slightly rephrasing his thoughts. Whether he does that for emphasis or to create a rhythm, I don’t know. Maybe the style is more successful in Chinese than in translation. I enjoyed the story more than the prose, although Yan’s writing style is otherwise fine.

The story is entertaining while offering interesting thoughts about Chinese history, philosophies, and culture. The novel says something about fate — its disregard of whether someone has lived a good or bad life — and the random nature of death. It also says something about the ability of survivors to accept that randomness and endure. Freshly dug graves are “covered by a layer of new grass, but apart from the fact that this grass was lighter, thinner, and more tender than the surrounding grass, these new graves were scarcely different from the older ones.” Death is every person’s fate, but life continues, new wheat sprouting where the old has been trampled. People and their sacrifices are easily forgotten. All events will be lost to the depths of time, but new events will replace them.  The Day the Sun Died is both death-affirming and life-affirming, telling a timeless and universal story by focusing on a single night in a small village.

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