Baptism

Baptism is Yang Jiang's only novel. First published in December 1988 by SDX Joint Publishing Company, it was written in the autumn of 1987. The title comes from the alternative name for the intellectual thought-reform movement in the early years of the People's Republic—then called the "Three Antis" and popularly known as "taking off your trousers and cutting off your tail"—that is, what Westerners called "brainwashing." The novel begins in the early days of the liberation of Beiping: the once obscure "Beiping Institute of Chinese Studies" is renamed the "Institute of Literary Research," and all sorts of people flock in—old scholars who stayed on the mainland, students returned from Britain, America, France, and Russia to join the bright new era, writers, literary cadres from the liberated areas, and young people fresh out of school. These intellectuals, each with private concerns, form a group portrait: Xu Yancheng and his wife Du Lilin, the "standard beauty," appear harmonious but have nothing to say to each other; Yao Mi, forced to leave school by family misfortune, works as a librarian, quiet and talented; there are also the scheming Yu Nan, the bossy Shi Nina, the pedantic Zhu Qianli, and the loyal Luo Hou. Xu Yancheng and Yao Mi develop feelings amid borrowing, returning, and cataloguing books—and then the "baptism" movement arrives, and everyone must pass muster in public and dissect themselves. The book consists of three parts—"Gathering Turnips and Radishes," "As If I Had Not Washed My Clothes," and "How Clear the Waters of the Canglang"—plus a preface and an epilogue, with no single protagonist. Taking a political movement as its cross-section, it depicts the circumstances and inner thoughts of intellectuals of every stripe. In her closing words Yang Jiang asks: if a person truly has spirit and conscience, life is nothing but knowing oneself, refining oneself, and transforming oneself willingly—yet how difficult that is. The language is spare and restrained, irony wrapped in warmth, and readers have likened it to a "new Scholars."