The Magician of 1919
by Li Er
translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz
Make-Do Publishing
In Li Er's short story Christmas Eve a retired schoolteacher mourns the death of his daughter while simultaneously pimping young girls to an infamous nightclub-cum-brothel.
The story is set on the night before Christmas. But unlike Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a transformative parable in which the greedy and frozen-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge rediscovers his morality after visits from the three Ghosts of Christmas, Christmas Eve delivers no such redemption.
Instead, the tale follows Mr Chin, a teacher-turned-newspaper seller, who lives a lonely life eating, sleeping and relieving himself within the four walls of his newsstand. He supplements pitiful wages by procuring vulnerable girls for the Garden of Eden nightclub across the road. Tacked to the wall, above a Panda brand cassette recorder, is a photograph of his dead daughter - forever frozen at 25 years old.
Within this world Christmas is a hollow holiday which the young and wealthy pick up like a fashionable Western accessory, using the foreign festival as an excuse to booze and whore their way around the city.
Li Er paints a bleak picture of the New China, one in which moral confusion and antipathy lie at the heart of the nation. The publication of the story for the first time in English, alongside another short story, The Magician of 1919 (in a collection titled under the same name, which is part of the publisher's 'Modern Chinese Masters' imprint), comes at a time when China is reassessing its own mores: this month, Netizens led a public outcry over the death of Yueyue, the toddler who was run over twice and then ignored by 18 passersby before being picked up by a rubbish collector.
