Hungry For More

jacket and goes off to apply for a job as a security guard at a five-star hotel. There he is mistaken for a journalist and whisked into a press banquet, one of many held in today’s China to launch everything from404 Not Found

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) literacy campaigns to property developments. After a splendid meal — with an envelope of cash “for your troubles” — Dan has a revelation: all he needs to continue this charmed life is a fake business card and a nonexistent website.

Thus begins Dan’s career in journalism — and Geling Yan’s shark-fin-sharp satire on cuisine and corruption in contemporary China. The Banquet Bug, which won enthusiastic reviews in the U.S. this summer, is now being published in Britain with greater fanfare and a more appetizing title, The Uninvited. It is the first book written in English by Yan, a Shanghai-born novelist (The Lost Daughter of Happiness) whose stories inspired director Joan Chen’s 1998 art-house hit Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl. Yan emigrated to the U.S. after the 1989 Beijing crackdown and now lives in San Francisco, where she is a leading figure in China’s post-Tiananmen literary diaspora. Others include best-selling novelists like Ha Jin (Waiting) and Ma Jian (Red Dust), as well as newcomers such as Da Chen (whose Brothers came out in September). Like many of the American writers who decamped to Europe in the last century, these transplants write largely about their homeland. The Internet, satellite television and eased travel restrictions keep them abreast of life in China, but distance can give them a fresh perspective — and freedom to say things unwelcome in Beijing.

The Uninvited will not get Yan invited to many Beijing banquets. Dan Dong and his wife Little Plum have come to the capital from impoverished Gansu province and a childhood diet of “dark gruel made of tree bark and sorghum.” Subsisting now on noodles and expired canned goods, they marvel at the urban paradise around them. Little Plum, writes Yan, “roams the supermarket, admiring stacks of dish detergents, napkins and bath towels as if they were flower beds or pavilions in a park.”

Dan’s yearning for the good life — and his delight with the gustatory perks of his new calling — initially blind him to the swamp of favors and payoffs he has entered. But, in a twist out of the Socialist Realism handbook, he finds himself becoming a real journalist. After he notices that his fellow diners have filed inaccurate, self-censored stories about an event he attends, Dan writes his own account. Soon ordinary people are bringing him heart-breaking tales of injustice and corruption in hopes he can help. When one of his exposés appears in print, Dan learns how perilous journalism can be.

He also discovers, appropriately for modern China, that another reporter has pirated his intellectual property, swiping his name and bogus website to climb onto the gravy train. Then Dan takes one risk too many by sneaking Little Plum into a banquet, just so she can experience delights like sea cucumber and “minced pigeon breasts with mashed tofu molded into tiny snowballs, sprinkled with tiny tender green scallion flakes.” Writes Yan: “He can’t bear to think of her spending her life as their neighbors do, with so many omissions; a life blank as if unlived.” But by now, the police are cracking down on freeloaders like Dan, and he gets his just deserts.

Soon enough, Dan gets lost in the moral mire of this world. Some exploited construction workers enlist him to take on their employer, a shady real estate tycoon who blunts the offensive by offering Dan a free apartment. Dan has an affair with a fresh-from-the-countryside “masseuse” and resolves to right a dreadful wrong she has suffered. But Dan is torn between his thirst for justice and his lust for sex and sea snails. By the time he stirs himself into action, it’s difficult to tell whether Dan is a hero or just another guy whose hunger gets the best of him. Through Dan, The Uninvited deftly describes a country that may be undergoing a similar crisis.