Dan K. Woo's Learning How to Love China

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Quattro Books, 2018)

I hadn’t heard of either Dan K. Woo or his first book Learning How to Love China until I picked it off the table at his fall launch. When I opened it, I was immediately impressed by the first page, and I am as impressed by the whole book as I was by those first handful of sentences. Presented as a booklet produced by the Chinese Bureau of Public Affairs, the novella tells the story of a young Chinese woman (she is never named) working in a plant a short train ride from Shanghai (like the protagonist, the city the plant is in is never named). The protagonist yearns for something more than twelve-hour shifts on the assembly line, and fixates on Canada, a far-off and perfect land of “clear blue skies, beautiful lakes, pristine forests, clean friendly cities, and hunky men.” The book follows her through a failed relationship, and stints as a waitress and then as a hostess. All the while, she dreams of that better place that is Canada and the better life that would be possible there. And she does finally, in the closing pages, reach the land of her dreams and aspirations, but as a masseuse/prostitute trapped by the organization who brought her in a life that is far worse than what she left behind in China. The end, when it comes, is more than tragic enough for the narrative to serve the Chinese Bureau of Public Affairs as a jingoistic cautionary tale, but it is also the wrenching conclusion to a deeply human story of hope and disappointment. Learning How to Love China exploits this tension between realistic narrative and propaganda to powerful effect, producing a biting satire of modern China that has a great deal to say about hope, aspiration, and the way both interact with the false utopianism of agitprop.
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The book begins: 

Thank you for purchasing “Learning How to Love China.” Good for you, Comrade!
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This guide will help you become a responsible citizen. It will show how to let go of unpatriotic thinking. Read it with an open mind. It may change your life and start you on your road to inner peace and recovery.

And Woo maintains this conceit through the entire novella. The title of the first chapter, the chapter that these sentences begin, is “Keep Calm, There is Hope,” and each chapter has a similar title. At times, such as with this first chapter or the third chapter, “Be Happy Where You Are,” they are tongue-in-cheek. At other times—such as in with the chapter “Too Much Romance is Unproductive,” in which the protagonist is sexually assaulted by her boyfriend, Q—they are coldly ironic. Whatever their tone, they consistently highlight the gap between the official narrative and the reality of the protagonist’s experience.
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The book also maintains the use of the second person that it introduces in these opening sentences. This is a difficult trick to pull off, and it could easily become contrived, but it works, in part because it is contrived. It highlights the artificiality of the narrative and the coercive intent of propaganda. Rather than being neutral, this is a narrative style that corrects, insists, forces the interpretation. Take, for example, this description of the city while the protagonist and Q are riding the bus to see a movie:

​Toward evening on a good clear day, just at this time, if you look way up at the apex of the sky, you can see the fog or smog or whatever it is clearing at the very top. You can see a patch of faint blue sky the size of your thumb. Look closely, you will see it. If you look down just slightly, anywhere slightly lower than the apex, the blue melds into white haze. This is not a big city, it’s not a dirty city, it’s one of the cleanest and most wellkept cities in the country. 

The second person obviously places the reader in the position of the protagonist, but there is more going on here than that, or, rather, the position the reader is placed in has its own specific complexities. The reader is tasked with disentangling the content of experience from the framing of that experience, a position that replicates the coercive experience of the protagonist. It is the difference between reading propaganda and being addressed by propaganda, and it is a small difference, but one that factors meaningfully into reading the book.

This Is not to say that there is not beautiful writing here. Woo finds room between the agitprop and the irony for more than a few well-wrought phrases. Outside a mall, a remote control plane “makes a sound like a motorboat in the sky, only the sound is more compact.” On the way to visit her parents, the protagonist looks out a bus window: “When you do see water, it does not look like water but like a field that is neither moving nor still.”

These descriptions point to one of the book’s other strengths—its attention to quotidian detail. The settings are rich with specificity. In the early pages of the novella, “workers line up at the Bank of China ATM, eager to check their bank balances no doubt,” and “everything everywhere is plastered with cheap monocoloured ads the size of business cards, but even this litter and defacement of private and public property infuses the dreary scene with a rainbow-like feel akin to musical theatre.” Even the taco the protagonist eats when she first arrives in Canada is described with precision and care. These descriptions ground what could otherwise read as an allegory or a parable in the concrete specificities of reality and help to create the tension between the official story and the protagonist’s lived experience by highlighting the discrepancies between the two. The ads don’t make the scene anything like musical theatre, but they do give us a glimpse into the realities of the lives lived beneath the cheerful surface of the agitprop.

The story itself is both predictable and engrossing. A naïve young factory girl who dreams of more tries to better her lot in life and fails repeatedly, never losing her naivete or her hopefulness until her final tragic failure. It is predictable, and all the more affecting because it is predictable, because any astute reader will see the end coming and be even more moved as a result.
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The most interesting aspect of the protagonist is her hopefulness, not because of its persistence, but because of the way it serves a necessary self-delusion. When she works at the factory, Canada, its handsome Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and the possibilities they represent are what allow her to maintain her sense of self among the countless other workers and the twelve-hour shifts. When she is raped a second time by her now ex-boyfriend, Q, this fantasy helps her survive the experience:

You try to move away, but there’s only the wall. Look at the wall Comrade! Look. What do you see? You see the beautiful, handsome face of ‘Justin Trudeau.’ The powerful image helps you endure what is happening.

And, although it is necessary, essential, in the end, her hopefulness is destructive, making her easy prey for the Chinese-Canadian procurer, Mark.

What is perhaps most interesting is the way the book draws parallels between the at-times necessary, at-times destructive delusions at the centre of the protagonist’s aspirations, at the heart of her desire for something better, and the dissimulations of state-sponsored propaganda. The above passage, for example, recalls the passage quoted earlier in this review in which the protagonist looks out at the sky from the bus. Both employ the imperative to turn the eye towards something less difficult to look at, towards that single patch of blue sky or the distant possibility of someplace better. Both are, in their way, retreats from or distortions of reality. Both are fantasies. Neither offers a real escape. And it is this understanding of the homologies between hope and propaganda that gives the novella its satisfying complexity, that sets it apart from more run-of-the-mill political satire, and that fills it with a melancholy that will stay with the reader long after they put it down.
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This is by no means all the book has to offer. The is a lot more in Learning How to Love China to think about and enjoy. Woo packs a lot into a small package, but I will leave it for you to discover. And you should seek this book out; if you pick it up, you are sure to be impressed by Woo’s accomplished debut.

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Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Maple Tree Literary Supplement.  His first book, Grass-Fed, is available from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.