With not much help from Freud

Shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, I found myself in a girls’ dormitory of Beijing university. It was a small drab room of eight wooden bunks. The students wore shapeless Mao jackets over hand-knitted jerseys and their hair in plaits. It was very cold. I had asked about their love life.

The girls looked puzzled. The Cultural Revolution had promoted puritanism between the sexes. What preoccupied them was not love but hot water. Each day they received one thermos. That was their lot. ‘So if we wash our hair, we can’t have tea,’ one explained, gazing wistfully at my clean head.

It is such girls, modest, virginal if a little grubby, that Mr Muo, the hero of Dai Sijie’s latest novel, is in search of. But the China of today is a very different one from that of 25 years ago. Mr Muo spent the intervening period in France studying Freud. He is obsessed with psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. When he hears that his first love is imprisoned in China for selling a newspaper article to the foreign press he returns to save her.

He discovers a country bankrupted by politics. In the offices of the Commission for the Prevention of Clandestine Publications, for example, he passes shelves crammed with documents on ‘the famines during the Sixties, the massacres of intellectuals, the re-education camps, cases of revolutionary cannibalism ….’ It is a society left bereft of ideals or virtue. But it is virtue that Mr Muo must now find; for the judge who has imprisoned Mr Muo’s love is so sated with cash bribes that he demands a virgin instead. Muo’s quest turns into a series of adventures. By the end he has lost his own virginity, found a wife and revealed a great deal about China today.