The city is an unforgiving, unrelenting place. In Jia Pingwa’s Happy Dreams , when an unnamed migrant worker in China’s Xi’an protests against unpaid wages by threatening to commit suicide, bystanders goad him to jump off the roof of an eight-storey building. He promptly does. The only man who shouts out to him to climb down, a garbage collector called Eight, finally steals the dead man’s jacket, only to justify this act to his disgusted friends. He complains bitterly later: “The city spends a billion on a park, millions on a concert in a stadium, and even more on this or that exhibition. But if they’ve got money to burn, why do they only spend it on the city? The villages get poorer and poorer and we don’t have a cent to rub together!”
But the city is also dynamic and filled with opportunities. When Gem Han moves from Freshwind village to Xi’an, rumours spread among the villagers that he has hit the jackpot in the city. This motivates many of them to pack their bags and leave, including the novel’s protagonist, a quixotic character named Hawa “Happy” Liu and his friend, Wufu.
The dirty work
Pingwa’s heartbreaking, yet optimistic, novel explores the lives of those jostling for space at the bottom rung of the ladder in cities. These are the trash collectors, daily wage earners and cleaners on whom the middle class and the wealthy rely but don’t
respect or even recognise. In the author’s note, Pingwa writes about his inspiration, the real Happy Liu, his childhood friend who migrated to the city to collect trash: “The country folk [are] like sheaves of corn, pressed and wrung to extract the last drop of moisture from them, until only the husks are left.” The story of Happy Liu and Wufu is poignant and will perhaps be relevant for decades to come, as large swathes of people continue to migrate from rural to urban China, dazzled by cities but often finding themselves doing back-breaking, dirty work.
Happy Liu is irrepressibly cheerful and upright. He goes to the city in search of the man to whom he donated his kidney as well as a better life. Happy is proud that he is different from other villagers — he is quick at mathematics, ready to forego food to attend an opera, plays the flute, and believes in being clean even though his job demands that he wade through muck.
He takes with him to Xi’an a pair of high-heeled leather shoes to be worn by whichever woman he marries, and a reluctant Wufu. Happy finds a woman who fits into the shoes, a sex worker called Meng Yichun. But even loving someone has its own set of challenges on the gritty streets of Xi’an.
Unlike Happy, Wufu is content with his wife and children in Freshwind. He does not have lofty dreams but goes along simply because he idolises Happy, who, in his eyes, is the smarter, wittier and more cultured of the two. In the city, they make a new beginning by collecting trash and then supplement their income with other odd jobs. What is one man’s litter becomes another man’s wealth.
A coarse turn
Once the characters are established, Happy Dreams moves at a leisurely pace. Pingwa is determined to immerse the reader in the lives of Happy, Wufu and Eight. The book lacks a solid plot but remains mostly engaging because of the simple and conversational language, which often takes an excessively coarse turn, rendering it unsuitable for those of us with a delicate appetite.
The strength of the book lies in its characters, in the translation (from the Chinese by Nicky Harman), and in its humour. Pingwa has a sociological eye — he covers everything from the food habits, myths and superstitions of the urban poor to their ambitions, faults and failures, with empathy.
The novel is bookended by Wufu’s death. This to me was a mere fact to be noted in the beginning but I shed a tear for the character in the end despite predicting how the novel would wrap up. Happy Liu may be a likeable narcissist, but it is Wufu — unattractive, trusting, rustic and pitiable — who emerges as the more lovable and pragmatic of the two.
Happy Dreams Jia Pingwa Trs Nicky Harman, AmazonCrossing, ₹499
