SUSPENDED REALITY

Cai Jun is one of China’s most successful suspense novelists. His 2001 novel Virus is widely considered the first Chinese suspense novel. A prolific writer, the 43-year-old has published more than 30 suspense novels, many of which have been translated into languages including English, French, German, Russian and Japanese. So far, his works have sold over 10 million copies. 　

Published in December 2020, his latest novel One Spring Night marks the writer’s foray into serious literature. Though the story employs the framework of suspense fiction, it is a semi-autobiographical work of social realism that examines the tremendous changes in the fates of Shanghai’s working class over the last few decades along with the societal transition from the planned to the market economy. 　

“I want to explore a particular way of writing for myself – I hope to blend the features, techniques and experiences that I accumulated from my genre fiction writings into literary writing,” Cai told NewsChina. 　

With the deepening of the reform and opening-up policy since 1978, Chinese society experienced tremendous changes as its economy became marketized. 　

In the late 1990s, a wave of industry layoffs swept the country. The factory where Cai’s father worked began losing money and most of its workers were laid off. His father was among the few who remained. 　

Cai’s father had a young apprentice. He and Cai were the same age. Though Cai never met the young man, he heard lots about him from his father and felt a closeness to him. 

　

Many years later, memories of this apprentice resurfaced. “I started to realize that we were like brothers. It was as if he was the other me who didn’t become a writer but instead inherited the skills and the spirit of industry and perseverance from the workers of my father’s generation,” Cai told NewsChina. 　

Based on the apprentice, Cai created Zhang Hai, the protagonist of One Spring Night. The novel revolves around two unsolved cases in the State-owned Chunshen Machinery Factory near the end of the 1990s: the murder of a senior engineer and a new factory manager who disappeared with money raised from the workers to save the factory from bankruptcy. 　

The story is told in the first-person through Cai Jun, a young fan of literature whose father was a senior worker at the machinery plant. In the story, Cai Jun meets his father’s apprentice Zhang Hai and the two become friends. Cai and Zhang work together to solve the murder of the engineer and search for the missing factory manager. The two, along with a group of laid-off workers, start a journey to find the truth that spans more than two decades. 　

“One Spring Night can’t be categorized as suspense fiction, but it contains many elements of the genre. I blended these elements into the story to make it more dramatic and I added many cliffhangers to draw readers in,” the writer told NewsChina. 　

Compared to his past works, most of which feature long passages of formal language and standard Chinese, One Spring Night adopts more colloquial language, slang and the Shanghai dialect. 　

“Since I’ve woven lots of my own experiences into this work, the use of vernacular language enhances the sense of authenticity and reality,” Cai said. 　

From Cai’s perspective, when writing about Shanghai, writers tend to depict it as a modern metropolis for the bourgeois. But the working class constitute a large part of Shanghai’s history.

 

“Ever since the 1990s, with the deepening of the market economy, the establishment of the Pudong New Area and the further openingup to the world, Shanghai came to wear a new face. But more often than not people began to forget about or ignore the city’s appearance before the 1990s,” Cai told NewsChina. He hopes this book can reawaken people’s memories about the city and its citizens in the planned economy era – a forgotten side of Shanghai. 　

At the book launch of One Spring Night in Shanghai on December 27, 2020, Liu Ning, a news anchor on Shanghai Television, said she could feel Cai’s ambition to write about the history of the city. “The novel has the power to rekindle our collective memories about a particular history of Shanghai. The facts and social issues he wrote about in the book are extremely authentic and close to us, and they allow us to reflect on the past and present of industrialization in Shanghai over a century,” Liu said. 　

Twenty years ago, he was a lonely reticent clerk working in a local post office. He seldom chatted with his colleagues as he could not find anything in common with them. He found solace in writing in his free time. 　

“Initially I wrote poems. But later, more stories popped into my mind that couldn’t be fully expressed through poetry. Then I turned to writing fiction,” Cai said. 　

He bought his first computer in 2000 and began publishing his works online when he was 22. He contributed his short story “The Fall of the Tianbao Court” to Under the Banyan Tree, one of China’s earliest literary websites. The short story quickly become one of the site’s most read works. Every week, Cai tried to write a short story and uploaded it to the website. By the end of 2000, he had written more than 30 short stories. 　

Encouraged by an online friend who suggested he write page-turners with intriguing plots, Cai wrote his first full-length novel Virus, which was inspired by the computer virus “Lady Ghost” that spread on the Under the Banyan Tree website at the time. 　

In spring 2001, Cai published this 100,000-word novel on the website, capturing the attention of a large number of readers. 　

Post-1978, influenced by Western fiction like Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), many Chinese writers began writing stories with horror elements. Jia Pingwa’s novella Ghost Town (1982), Wang Anyi’s 1997 short story “Fairy Couple” and Gui Zi’s novella New Year’s Eve (2004) are literary works that contain elements of horror and suspense fiction. However, Cai’s Virus, which he published in print edition in 2002, was dubbed the first Chinese suspense novel. 　

The popularity of Virus inspired Cai to write a series of suspense novels. Deserted Village Apartment (2004) is one of his most famous works. In the story, four college students are so entranced with a serialized novel titled “The Deserted Village” that they begin a journey to find the deserted village themselves. Returning from the village, the students suffer freak accidents. The novel was so popular that it sold over 200,000 copies. 　

When text messaging emerged in 2004, Cai became obsessed with the idea of writing a story that revolved around it. A year later, he published The Nineteenth Layer of Hell, the protagonist of which is Chun Yu, a senior in college and the lone survivor of his previous book Deserted Village Apartment. In the story, Chun receives an anonymous text message asking: “Do you know what the 19th layer of hell is like?” The secret message drags Chun and her classmates into a horrible, life-threatening game. 　

The novel sold over 280,000 copies, breaking the sales record for Chinese suspense fiction. Cai realized that he could live comfortably on his royalties, which now eclipsed his salary many times over. 　

To improve his own writing, Cai turned to the Japanese “social school” of detective novelists, particularly Matsumoto Seicho (1909- 1992). Seicho was one of Japan’s best-known crime writers who created a tradition of Japanese “social school” crime fiction by incorporating social issues in realistic settings into his stories. 　

“Matsumoto Seicho wrote many social realist crime novels that depict Japanese society in his time. Today when we read his works, we find that past Japanese society under his pen has huge similarities to contemporary Chinese society,” Cai told NewsChina. 　

Inspired by Japanese social realist writers, Cai started to focus more on the changes in Chinese society. In 2010, a string of suicides at the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn shocked the nation. In the span of a few months, 14 young migrant workers jumped to their deaths from buildings on the Foxconn campus, allegedly driven to desperation over the stressful working environment. 　

In response, Cai published the short story “Foxconn Murders” on his blog. The story narrates the process of alienation of the worker “G,” who gradually transforms into a machine and forgets his own name and the names of his parents, brothers and lover. In the end, he names himself “Foxconn.” 　

This short story further triggered Cai’s transition to social realism suspense. Since 2010, he has published novels that reflect a wider social reality of China. 　

In 2014, Cai’s short story “One Night in Beijing” won several prestigious awards in China, including the 16th Hundred Flowers Award for Literary Prose. 　

Cai calls himself an “outsider” in the world of serious literature. “My writing is often considered too literary for genre fiction, but I’m deemed more of a genre novelist in literary fiction circles. I’m like a wanderer who wavers at the threshold,” he said.