Chan Koonchung sits in a crowded Starbucks on the ground floor of Beijing’s Pacific Century Place, surrounded by latte-sipping members of a generation of Chinese that he at once marvels at and worries about. They’re young and affluent, wired and blissfully apolitical.
This same Starbucks is the setting for the opening of Chan’s novel, The Fat Years, a book that has become an underground sensation in China. Officially banned from bookstores and ignored by the state-controlled media – but available for download online if you know where to look for it – Chan’s dystopian vision of the near future has become the book that members of China’s chattering classes ask each other if they have read yet.
The Fat Years is set in 2013, a time when the West has fallen into financial ruin and China has taken its place as the dominant power. Its citizens are deliriously happy to be living in the country’s Golden Age of Prosperity. Even Starbucks is Chinese, having been taken over by the conglomerate WantWant China Group and serving Lychee Black Dragon Lattes.
Only a few Chinese notice that an entire month – the bloody crackdown of February, 2011 – is missing from their memories. No one remembers anything about those 28 days, and nothing about the period can be found in libraries, newspapers or on the Internet.
Chan’s plot, in which the Communist Party has added ecstasy to the water supply in order to keep its citizens smiling, is wild enough that several reviewers have referred to The Fat Years as a work of science fiction. But in the Starbucks café – where Internet searches are restricted by China’s censors and users are required to identify themselves via their mobile phone numbers in order to log on – it seems less far-fetched.
“I set [the story] in 2013, so I could use some fictional events to explain my feelings. So some reviewers called it science fiction or a dystopian novel in the line of [George Orwell’s] Nineteen Eighty-Four or [Aldous Huxley’s] Brave New World. But that almost came as a secondary thought. The whole point is to talk about China now,” the stylishly dressed 60-year-old says as he sips a vente cappuccino. “It’s about now, it’s not about the very distant future. That’s why I set it in 2013, instead of, say, 2033 or something.”
Unless they are among the few who know how to navigate around China’s notorious Great Firewall, the real-life Starbucks clientele will find almost no online information about the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, and only Communist Party-approved material on the mass murder and indoctrination of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. But they are materially better off than any previous generation of Chinese, and few seem bothered that someone is filtering what they read.
Chan, who previously was best known for founding a Hong Kong lifestyle magazine and a Taiwanese cable television station, says he did not set out to write a book about Tiananmen Square. Instead, he says The Fat Years is an attempt to warn Chinese and the world that such horrors can repeat themselves in a society that intentionally forgets its recent history.
“For the great majority of young mainland Chinese, the events of the Tiananmen massacre have never entered their consciousness,” Chan writes in the epilogue, connecting his fable to the China he was born in and returned to 12 years ago. “They have not forgotten it, they have never known anything about it. In theory, after a period of time has elapsed, an entire year can indeed disappear from history – because no one says anything about it.”
