Please Don't Call Me Human.

Kinkley, Jeffrey C.

Wang Shuo. Please Don't Call Me Human. Howard Goldblatt, tr. New York. Hyperion East. 2000. vii + 291 pages. $23.95. ISBN 0-7868-6419-2.

THIS ROLLICKING, FAST-PACED work represents Wang Shuo's "bad-boy" image even better than does his mystery, Playing for Thrills (1989). Please Don't Call Me Human trashes every last vestige of Chinese authority, honor, and pride, and generally with humor.

Obligatory back-cover blurbs by American novelists stunned to find that they enjoyed a Chinese novel call this work satire, but farce is more like it. The link to satire is by way of the old episodic Qing novel. In the plot, a hapless but superhuman son of a 1900 Boxer Uprising martial-arts adept experiences one aspect of Chinese social excess after another while being trained to defeat any and all foreign competition in future Olympics. Please Don't Call Me Human is a fast read, and it must have been written fast. (The author would be proud on both counts.) There is little consistency of plot, tone, character, theme, or anything else; the jokes and exaggerations just keep rolling. The novel captures the Beijing idiom of our day (Howard Goldblatt works wonders in conjuring up the next best thing in English), and it captures just as astutely the Chinese consensus on what makes their society look ridiculous.

The hero naturally ends up a media sensation and an embodiment of Chinese ethnic superiority -- though he is Manchu, like the author! In one exhibition, he singlehandedly defeats an army and tips over a tank. That surely refers to the man who stared down a tank shortly before the 1989 Beijing massacre. Other allusions, e.g. to a quest for a sacred book as in kungfu movies, may go over American readers' heads. But not all. The superhero is given a sex-change operation to emphasize the social superiority that China accords women (get it?). Wang's more outrageous burlesques juggle shibboleths from different Chinese eras and venues and may make sense only to young folk as ignorant of recent history as Jay Leno's "Jaywalkers" (the Burbank kids Leno interviews who don't know Karl Marx from Groucho), but contempt for historical knowledge is part of the Attitude; American readers may feel right at home.

By the end, Please has savaged nearly all realms of experience that Wang Shuo knows and loathes: nationalism, intellectuals, officials, books, movies, women's associations, and men in cop uniforms (generally criminals, in his plots). The parodies of Chinese propaganda are funny because communist rhetoric is outrageous to begin with. In a "philosophical moment," a man tells a tiresome and unfortunately homely female official: "We don't need to like each other, but we need to be tolerant. I don't like you, for instance, but you won't hear me saying that your existence is a humiliating insult to women." Despite his success, Wang still doesn't take himself too seriously. It's his saving grace. Women's opinions may differ! Jeffrey C. Kinkley St. John's University, New York