Novels, Deep-Read · Wang Xiaobo · No.78
Huangjin shidai · Wang Xiaobo · novella · prize-winner 1991, mainland edition 1994
Yunnan, just after the rains. The red dirt track is still soft underfoot. The doctor from Team Fifteen, up on the mountain, walks down the path to Team Fourteen at the bottom and stops in the doorway of a thatched hut.
Inside, a twenty-one-year-old sent-down youth from Beijing is lying on his back with a bad spine, doing nothing.
She hasn't come about his back. She has come to discuss, seriously, a single question: whether or not she is a "worn-out shoe."
On a state farm in Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution, a young doctor branded a slut by everyone around her, with no way of proving otherwise, and a twenty-one-year-old sent-down youth with a head full of crooked logic decide to make the rumor true and become real lovers; they are hauled back, paraded at denunciation meetings and made to write confession after confession — and in a place where even what happens in bed must be reported to the authorities, the one thing she finally hands over, the only crime she will admit to, is that once she truly fell in love with him.
Wang Xiaobo (1952–1997) grew up in Beijing, was sent as a teenager to a production-and-construction corps in Yunnan, later worked in a factory, studied at Renmin University, took a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh, taught for a while back in Beijing, and in 1992 quit to write full time. The novella The Golden Age won the novella prize of Taiwan's United Daily News in 1991 and appeared in Taiwan first; it only came out on the mainland in 1994, as the title piece of a collection. He died of a heart attack in 1997, at forty-four. The "Age" trilogy — The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Bronze Age — was published after his death, and that is when his reputation really exploded.
It occupies an odd square on the literary map. Its material is the material of "scar literature" — sent-down youth, struggle sessions, written confessions — but its voice was something nobody had heard before: no weeping, no indictment, just a narrator calmly discussing logic, sex and jokes. That narrator, "Wang Er," turns up again in nearly everything Wang Xiaobo wrote afterward.
The narrator is Wang Er — the name is about as ordinary as "Wang Number Two" — twenty-one, sent down from Beijing to the countryside in Yunnan and living with Team Fourteen at the foot of the mountain. He has hurt his back and can't do heavy work, and he's in poor standing: the team leader is convinced Wang Er shot out the left eye of his bitch with a slingshot, and since then the dog looks at people with her head cocked sideways, and the team leader has made Wang Er's life a misery. Wang Er says he didn't do it — but he has no way to prove he didn't. Keep that small thing in mind. It turns out to be the same shape as the big thing.
The doctor for Team Fifteen up on the mountain is Chen Qingyang, twenty-six, a medical-school graduate from Beijing, good-looking and married, with a husband in prison. Everyone up and down the mountain says she is a "worn-out shoe" — period slang for a loose woman, one who sleeps around. Seed ①Nobody can name a single man she has slept with. The reasons are all vague: she's too pretty, her husband is away, and she refuses to keep her eyes on the ground. The label has been put on her by everyone at once, and no one is responsible for proving it.
She once treated Wang Er's back and noticed that he didn't talk like other people. So she comes down to ask him to help her prove that she is not a worn-out shoe.
Wang Er, flat on his back, works it through for her. To prove she isn't one, she'd have to prove she has never slept with any man — which can't be done; how do you prove something didn't happen? Conversely, the people calling her a shoe can't produce any evidence either, but they don't need any: everyone says so, therefore she is. If innocence can't be proved and guilt needs no proof, then whether she is a worn-out shoe has nothing to do with what she has or hasn't done. His conclusion: in that case she might as well actually become one — and he is happy to help.
It's an argument that sounds like a con man's and turns out, on reflection, to be airtight. Chen Qingyang is naturally outraged; she tells him off and leaves. But the argument stays with her. The longer she thinks about it, the clearer it becomes that every step is sound — it's the world the argument lives in that's absurd.
Later, she comes down the mountain again.
Wang Er gives their arrangement a solemn name: "great friendship." The phrase comes straight out of the newspapers, where it described unbreakable bonds between socialist nations; in his mouth, "cementing our great friendship" becomes the code for going to bed. Seed ②Chen Qingyang accepts the term, and insists on it, again and again: this is friendship; she does not love him. She sleeps with him because, since they call her a shoe, she might as well be one; because they're friends; because of anything at all — just not love. Wang Er doesn't press. He thinks the arrangement suits him fine.
He tells this stretch brightly, frankly, even a little smugly. Sex in his hands is neither sinful nor romantic — just an ordinary thing everybody wants to do and nobody is allowed to, and two people who have found, in a place where everything is policed, one small patch of ground nobody can reach.
Seed ③On his twenty-first birthday Wang Er has the thought that readers have quoted ever since: that day he wanted everything — to love, to eat, to turn in an instant into a half-lit cloud in the sky; he felt he'd go on being wild forever and nothing could ever hammer him down. He doesn't yet know that life is a slow process of being hammered. The image has a source: on the farm, the old way to geld a bull was with a hammer, and a bull that has taken the hammer stops fighting and just puts its head down and grazes. At twenty-one, Wang Er pictures himself as a bull that will never take the hammer — and that, the title tells us, was his golden age.
Life on the team gets steadily worse. The team leader is watching Wang Er; so is the army representative posted to the farm. His back gets no care and his workload no relief. So he simply walks off alone into the deep mountains.
Some time later, Chen Qingyang climbs up after him. They put up a thatched hut and settle there, like a pair of wild people, or a couple who have eloped. It is the freest stretch of the book: no team leader, no army representative, no one calling anyone a shoe. For once they are standing somewhere the absurd syllogism can't reach.
The mountain paths are steep. Once, on a particularly bad slope, Wang Er carries Chen Qingyang up over his shoulder, and partway up he gives her two smacks on the bottom. Seed ④She goes quiet at once and hangs limp over his shoulder without a word. Wang Er is simply glad it's easier going, and thinks no more about it — on his side, the moment passes like any other bit of horseplay. It's very easy for the reader to let it pass too.
They can't stay in the mountains forever. Eventually they come back down to the farm of their own accord. What's waiting for them is an investigation.
They're questioned separately. What the investigators want is simple: a confession — what you did, when, where, and how, written down in full.
So Wang Er writes. He writes in extraordinary detail, detail that verges on literature. He notices that his investigators are keenly interested in the material — they read it over and over, then ask for more, for additional details. His confessions grow longer and better. Wang Er understands perfectly well that in those men's hands the pages stopped being evidence long ago and became reading matter. A system that forbids a thing turns out to be the most eager audience for hearing it described, again and again.
Meanwhile the two of them are taken round to denunciation meetings at one production team after another — what the book calls going out on "struggle duty," as if it were an errand. Chen Qingyang stands on the stage tied up with rope, facing a sea of excited faces. Wang Er, standing beside her, sees exactly what is going on: the crowd isn't looking at a crime; it's looking at a beautiful woman tied up. The denunciations become the best entertainment on the farm, and the more of them there are, the bigger the audience.
Through all of it Wang Er keeps the same voice: not angry, not protesting, as if it were happening to someone else. But the further you read, the more you feel what that voice is holding down. The calm face is the last stubbornness of a bull that hasn't yet taken the hammer.
Chen Qingyang has to write a confession too. The times, the places, the details — Wang Er's pages have already exhausted all of that. What the investigators want from her is her own admission.
In the end, she gives it. Not which time, or where, she slept with Wang Er — that's long since on record. What she confesses is that moment on the hillside: Wang Er carrying her over his shoulder, the two smacks, and the instant in which everything in her went slack and she fell in love with him.
Payoff ④ ↑The small gesture in Act Three that even Wang Er didn't register is, on her side, the heaviest moment in the book. The same event is told twice: in Wang Er's telling it's a passing joke; in Chen Qingyang's confession it's the turning point of her life. Wang Xiaobo tells it first from the man's side, lightly, so that the reader slides past it exactly as Wang Er did; when it comes back a second time, from the woman's mouth, the reader realizes they didn't see it either.
Payoff ② ↑And it's precisely the thing she kept denying in Act Two. She could sleep with him, be called a shoe, stand on a stage and be denounced, write every detail out for strangers to read — all of that she would own. Love was the one thing she always said wasn't there. "Great friendship," that stiff, borrowed official phrase, was the wall she had put up in front of that one word. When she is finally required to confess everything, the single true thing she hands over is the one she had hidden deepest. That, she says, is her real sin.
Payoff ① ↑And by now the phrase "worn-out shoe" has been turned inside out. In Act One it was a charge the crowd pinned on her, needing no evidence and admitting no defense; her and Wang Er's answer was to make it true, to turn an empty accusation into a fact she had chosen — you say I am one, so I am, and it was my decision. But in the end, the crime she convicts herself of isn't being a shoe at all. That was other people's charge. Falling in love was hers. The word others used to define her has been taken back out of their hands and replaced with a crime only she can pass sentence on.
For the investigators it's probably the most useless page in the whole file: no times, no places, no details worth passing around — just a fact they can neither understand nor consume. For the book, it's the final stress.
The novella has in fact been jumping between two times all along. The "now" of the telling is twenty years on: Wang Er is past forty, Chen Qingyang is middle-aged, and when the two meet again they go over the old events one by one, checking and filling in. Much of what we thought we already knew turns out, in those conversations, to have another version — hers.
Payoff ③ ↑On his twenty-first birthday Wang Er believed nothing could hammer him down. The man telling us this story has taken the hammer. The book never says how he spent the twenty years in between; it simply lets that forty-year-old voice keep talking — calm, funny, entirely unsentimental. And it's exactly that calm that makes you understand: the "golden age" of the title is something seen by a man looking back after the hammer — and the years when he was paraded at denunciation meetings and forced to write confessions turn out to have been the best of his life. That's harsher than any accusation.
If you want to find the fuse for this story, it isn't the elopement or the confessions. The fuse is the unprovable "worn-out shoe" in Act One — a charge that holds without evidence. Because innocence couldn't be proved, Wang Er's crooked logic held; because it held, Chen Qingyang came down the mountain, went up the mountain, and came down again; because the charge belonged to the crowd from the start, the investigators had to make her confess and confess until she handed over something real. Everything after — the great friendship, the hut in the hills, the struggle duty, the ever-longer confessions — is the aftershock of that label landing on her.
| Layer of time | Who is telling it | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Age twenty-one · Yunnan | Wang Er's memory | The shoe debate, the great friendship, the mountains, the denunciations |
| The confessions | Wang Er and Chen Qingyang, each writing for the investigators | The "official version" of the same events, ever more detailed |
| Twenty years on | Their conversations when they meet again | Filling in and cross-checking; Chen Qingyang gives her side |
The novella's three layers of time. The same event is often told twice: once in his memory, once in her words.
The book's first move is to put the most outrageous thing on the table in the most academic way possible: a woman humiliated by the whole community comes down the hill, as if to a seminar, to discuss the proposition "I am a worn-out shoe." And Wang Er answers like a logician.
Why does it work? Because the absurdity is left to expose itself instead of being denounced by the author. Wang Er reasons step by step, each step valid, and arrives at a ridiculous conclusion — and the moment the reader laughs, they've already grasped that the problem isn't the reasoning but its premise: a world in which a charge needs no evidence. The author uses not a single loaded adjective. "Persecution," "injustice" — none of those words appear. Yet the shape of that world is perfectly visible. This is Wang Xiaobo's central move: meet the unserious with total seriousness; meet the illogical with logic.
In Wang Er's narration this takes two or three sentences, so light it nearly floats away. In Chen Qingyang's confession it's the summit of the book.
Why does it work? Because the information is distributed unevenly. Wang Xiaobo gives the whole story to a male first-person narrator who is clever, candid and talkative; the reader trusts him almost at once and sees through his eyes. And those very eyes miss the thing that matters most. When the event comes back from Chen Qingyang's side, the reader suddenly discovers they've been sitting in a blind spot the whole time. This isn't a technical trick. It says that even the most candid man cannot see what is happening inside a woman. At that moment the book's center of gravity quietly shifts from him to her.
Long stretches of the book are, nominally, "confession" — what Wang Er wrote for his investigators. Those details the investigators devour, we are devouring too.
Why does it work? Because it puts the reader in the investigator's chair. We laugh at the men hunched over the confessions, while reading the very same pages and wanting the very same details. Wang Xiaobo doesn't let the reader off: the distance between peeping and policing is shorter than we'd like. And Wang Er's response is: if you insist that I tell it, I'll tell it well — so well that it stops being evidence and becomes a work. Forced narration, in his hands, becomes a kind of freedom.
There's nothing supernatural in this book. Its "device" is a stance of language: the narrator always sounds as though he's working a math problem. He reasons, generalizes and defines, discussing the most forbidden subject (sex) with the utmost rigor, and the most unreasonable one (the denunciations) with the same rigor.
Its rules are roughly these. First, use no moral adjectives; describe only facts and causes. Second, push the logic of power all the way to the end, until it exposes its own absurdity. Third, where you are expected to suffer, stay funny. The approach works because the political language of that era claimed to be the most logical, most reasonable discourse there was — Wang Er simply carries out its logic more seriously than it does. To be honest about it: this is a literary stance, not a universally valid method. It requires distance, and distance is itself a privilege — the man looking back from twenty years later has it; the woman tied up on the stage in the moment may not.
In those years a "confession" was compulsory writing: you had to tell your private life to the authorities, and the more detail you gave, the more sincere your attitude was taken to be. Wang Xiaobo builds a good part of the novella directly on that form.
The chain runs like this: power demands narration → Wang Er supplies a surplus of narration → narration becomes pleasure, and investigation becomes reading → the solemnity of power dissolves in that reading. Chen Qingyang's last confession takes another route: she hands over something true, something the investigators can do nothing with. One dissolves the system with excess; the other punches through it with the truth — two different kinds of resistance.
On the surface the title is ironic: sent-down years, denunciations, confessions — how is that a golden age? One layer down it's sincere: it was when Wang Er was youngest and wildest, when nothing could hammer him, when he loved and was loved. At the deepest layer the two are stacked on top of each other: a man's golden age happened to fall in the most absurd years of his country's history, and afterward he has to admit that it really was golden. The title won't let you choose just one reading.
One · If you can't prove your innocence, should you make the charge true?
Chen Qingyang has done nothing, yet everyone has decided she's a worn-out shoe, and she has no way to prove otherwise. Wang Er's solution: go ahead and do it. When a charge can stick without evidence, is "making it true" a way of seizing your fate back — or a surrender to the slander?
First, the strongest case for making it true. Proving your innocence is a trap: the harder you plead, the more you concede that your accusers have the right to judge you; and in a place where the charge never needed evidence, pleading will never work — it will only use up your life trying to please the judges. When Chen Qingyang decides to be a "shoe," she is saying: your label means nothing to me; my body is mine to decide about. It's the only way to stop letting other people define you. The freedom she and Wang Er find in that relationship is something a lifetime of pleading could never have bought.
The other side is just as hard. Making the charge true proves the slanderers right. The people who called her a shoe now have their evidence; the investigation and the denunciations now have their justification. More to the point, "since you say so, I'll do it" looks like defiance but still lets other people's words decide what you do — you've just obeyed in the opposite direction. Real freedom might be neither pleading nor confirming, just living as you would have anyway, whatever they call you. And the costs of this path aren't shared equally: Wang Er gets to be the one with the clever argument; Chen Qingyang is the one tied up on the stage.
Bring it home: at school, at work, online, someone sticks a label on you that won't come off — "scheming," "difficult," "doesn't fit in." Do you spend your energy proving you're not, or do you simply live the label out? Which of the two is more truly your own choice?
Two · Writing your confession as a novel: is laughter a form of resistance?
Facing investigation, Wang Er doesn't rage or break; he writes his confessions with relish, turning the investigation into reading and the denunciations into a joke. Inside a system that crushes you, is dissolving it with humor and compliance the highest form of freedom — or a refined kind of surrender?
First, the strongest case that it's surrender. Humor needs certain conditions: some slack, some distance, some assurance that you won't be beaten to death. Wang Er can laugh because he did, in the end, survive — and is telling the story twenty years later. Countless people in those years couldn't laugh and never got the chance to tell it later. Writing that era as an absurd comedy risks quietly taking the charge off it — leaving the reader thinking it wasn't really that bad. And Wang Er's confessions did satisfy his investigators: he turned in his pages, they enjoyed them, and the system went on running. The posture of non-cooperation served the substance of cooperation. From the outside, cynicism and freedom can look identical.
The other side: what a system fears most isn't being hated but being laughed at. It needs people to take it seriously — to fear it, loathe it, weep over it — because all of that grants it weight. Wang Er refuses it that weight: you want a confession, here's one, and look closely at what it is you actually wanted. What he preserves isn't his life but an inner self they can't reach. The Wang Er who pushed the shoe syllogism to its end, the Wang Er watching coolly beside the stage, is never reformed, from first page to last. Staying lucid and funny in the most absurd place is itself a refusal of that place.
Bring it home: in a company, school or family you're powerless to change, do you fight it, go silent, or treat it as theater and go through the motions while laughing inside? Is that inner laughter protecting you — or making it comfortable to stay exactly where you are?
Three · Two slaps made her fall in love — how should we read that moment?
Chen Qingyang says she truly fell for Wang Er at the instant he carried her over his shoulder and smacked her twice. She treats it as her only real sin. Is this a woman being honest with herself at the freest moment in the book — or a male writer turning domination into romance?
First, the strongest case that it's a problem. "He hit her, she went soft, she fell in love" is one of the most widespread male fantasies there is: the woman reveals her true heart at the moment she's overpowered. The whole book is narrated by Wang Er; even Chen Qingyang's inner life comes to us through him. What we finally read is a man telling us how a woman fell in love with him under his hand. However beautifully it's done, that structure deserves suspicion: who needs this story to be true? And making love a "sin" — having a woman confess love to her investigators as a crime — is hard to call liberation.
The other side: this is the first moment she stops giving reasons. Until then everything she did came with an explanation: because she'd been called a shoe, because they were friends, because of Wang Er's logic. Only here is there no reason at all — she simply let go; she simply loved. That isn't surrender to Wang Er but surrender to a part of herself she had always denied. She calls it a sin not because she thinks love is shameful, but because it's the one thing no one else can define for her, the one thing only she can admit. In a place where everything must be confessed, she hands over something the investigators can't use at all. By putting it last, Wang Xiaobo gives Chen Qingyang the heaviest line in the book.
Bring it home: think back to the moment you really fell for someone. It usually wasn't when they did something right; it was some instant you can't quite explain. Would you tell anyone about that instant? And if you did, how would you tell it so it wouldn't be heard as something else?
The first thing he kept returning to is the interesting against the dull. For him, what oppresses people is often less brutality than tedium — being forbidden to think, forbidden to enjoy yourself, required to obey with a straight face. Wang Er is always thinking and always joking, and that is his way of resisting. Wang Xiaobo's essay "A Pig Who Went His Own Way" describes a pig he knew during his rural years that refused to sit still and be fattened, roamed wherever it liked, learned to imitate the factory whistle, and finally escaped into the hills — more or less Wang Er in animal form.
The second is sex as the last free territory. In Love in the Time of Revolution, Wang Er, working in a Beijing factory, is assigned to a young Communist Youth League official for "reform through help," and the helping ends with the two of them together — the same structure as The Golden Age: the organization sets out to remake your body, and your body goes free under its nose.
The third is a mind under control. The Silver Age moves to the future, where people write to specification in a "writing company" — the confession in another form; The Bronze Age rewrites Tang-dynasty tales (Hongfu's Night Flight, Temple of Longevity), running back and forth between history and invention. The Golden Age is where the line begins: how a person, in a place that demands they hand over everything, keeps one thing back.
The sex, and the charge of smut. At first the book couldn't be published on the mainland; it won its prize and found its publisher in Taiwan, and when it did appear on the mainland it was dogged by accusations of vulgarity and pornography. Admirers see the sex as a metaphor for freedom; critics feel the explicitness of many passages goes beyond what the story needs. The argument still hasn't quite died down decades later.
The portrayal of women. Chen Qingyang is the most moving character in the book, but everything about her — her beauty, her body, her inner life — reaches us through Wang Er. Many readers treasure the two slaps on the hillside as the book's most beautiful moment; many women readers see it as a male fantasy that dresses submission up as love. That is hard to defend, and it shouldn't be waved away.
Turning suffering into comedy. Some critics argue that writing the Cultural Revolution and the sent-down years with humor, however fresh, risks making real suffering weigh less — Wang Er, after all, is the one who survived and can laugh about it twenty years on. Defenders answer that it's precisely that distance that makes the absurdity so visible.
Posthumous canonization. In his lifetime Wang Xiaobo stood largely outside the literary establishment; after his death he quickly became the idol of a generation of readers, some of whom proudly called themselves his "running dogs." That has fed a persistent question: has his literary achievement been inflated by his early death and by the liberal stance he came to represent? Was he a great novelist, or a brilliant essayist who wrote a few good novels? People are still arguing about it.
In translation. The Golden Age appears in English in Wang in Love and Bondage (2007), a collection of his novellas, and has had far less impact in English than its standing in Chinese would suggest; humor built on the rhythms of the language and on political jargon loses a great deal in translation.
① A woman comes down the mountain to discuss whether she's a slut — and the book's first scene already lays the absurdity of that world on the table.
② Innocence can't be proved and guilt needs no proof: Wang Er's crooked logic holds because the world around it doesn't.
③ "Great friendship" is a phrase lifted from the newspapers to wall off a word she won't say.
④ At twenty-one, Wang Er thought nothing could hammer him; the man telling the story is forty, and has taken the hammer.
⑤ The investigators forbid the act, and love nothing more than hearing it described again and again.
⑥ Wang Er turns his confession into a work: forced narration, in his hands, becomes a kind of freedom.
⑦ Two slaps on a hillside: a passing joke on his side, the turning point of a life on hers.
⑧ She'll admit to everything except love — and when she must confess everything, love is exactly what she hands over.
⑨ "Worn-out shoe" was other people's charge; falling in love was the crime she convicted herself of.
⑩ The golden age is neither pure irony nor pure nostalgia: a man's best years happened to land in his country's most absurd ones.