Around that time, Italian and Japanese TV crews had come to film Yan’s birthplace. The county government became interested in turning the place into a cultural-heritage site that might attract visitors, and informed the farmer that he was obligated to sell. One night, in a vengeful rage, the farmer tore the old house down, and then erected the ugly structure that we were looking at. He’d made it as large as possible, in order to extract more compensation from the government, but he’d miscalculated: the state had no interest in buying something that wasn’t Yan’s birthplace, and the building had been abandoned ever since. The spiralling overvaluation of the site had ended up destroying what little value there was.

We continued our walk around the village, sometimes running into people Yan knew, and his Henanese accent thickened with every exchange of greetings. Signs of restless transformation were everywhere, making the village, in Yan’s words, rattle like “a pot of boiling water”: dilapidated homes with “Demolish” scrawled in white chalk on the walls; new buildings covered with white ceramic tiles; asphalt paths where before there had been only dirt. Around us, paulownia and ginkgoes swayed in the wind. There would be more of them, Yan told me, if the older trees had not been cut down in the nineteen-nineties and sold for kindling. Once one villager started doing it, no one could justify not following suit. Yan shook his head. Nobody had thought to ask, If we cut down the trees, what will protect the harvest from the sandstorms? Without the harvest, how will we live? In Yan’s novels, misfortune arrives as the consequence of an external threat, but more often than not it is abetted by shortsighted avarice, which hastens a community’s downfall.

I asked Yan’s brother if he’d read any of Yan’s books. The older man smiled sheepishly. “I’ve tried, but what’s the point?” he said, kicking at an invisible pebble. “It’s all beyond me.”

Yan patted him lightly on the shoulder in appreciation of his honesty. None of his family members read his books, and what little they know about his criticisms of the government has mostly baffled them. When Yan published “Serve the People!,” the erotic satire of the Cultural Revolution, his brother, looking embarrassed, asked, “Is it true that you have been conscripted to write porn? How hard up are you, brother?”

A few years ago, the neighborhood in Beijing where Yan lived, which had been built only five years earlier, was bulldozed for a road-widening scheme. He led a residents’ campaign to stop it, writing articles in the national and international press. For Yan, the fight wasn’t about money, though the compensation was inadequate, but about interrogating the arbitrariness of bureaucratic decisions. Yan’s siblings told him that he shouldn’t be stirring up trouble. Why couldn’t he be content with his lot? And, even if it wasn’t about the money, surely getting some compensation was better than nothing.

Yan doesn’t know when he was born. It was only when he was joining the Army and had to fill out a registration form that he needed to find out. When he asked his mother, who didn’t know his birthday or her own, she turned to other villagers for help. Maybe it was that summer when the sweet potatoes grew particularly well, someone suggested; good harvests were rare enough to be memorable. That was how they settled on a year: 1958. A local clerk picked a month and a day.

The year 1958 marked the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s catastrophic industrialization campaign, which caused the Great Famine. Some thirty million people died, and Henan was among the provinces hit the hardest. Yan remembers feeling, before he had the words to express it, that his hunger was an appendage, a huge tormenting tail that you couldn’t cut off. His mother taught him to recognize the most edible kinds of bark and clay. When all the trees had been stripped and there was no more clay, he learned that lumps of coal could appease the devil in his stomach, at least for a little while. As we discussed the famine, I happened to call it the Three Years of Natural Disasters, the government-approved term that I had learned growing up. It was the only time that Yan corrected me in our days together. “Language matters,” he admonished.

Early on, language divided the world Yan was born into from the one he wished to inhabit. He told me, “In the villages, nobody calls life the city word for life, shenghuo, but rizi”—ri means “sun”—“so if you were a villager your life was nothing but a handful of sunrises to be endured.” For Yan, whose preternatural gift for metaphor spills out of him unbidden, this made sense. “The country has always been the husk that provides nourishment to that precious seed, the city,” he notes. When he was ten or so, during the Cultural Revolution, educated teen-agers from cities arrived in the village, having been sent to the countryside for reëducation. A few of these “sent-down youth” were billeted at his family’s home, and Yan watched his mother feed them the best of what was available, while her own children went hungry.

When he was fourteen, he got a part-time job hauling cement at a factory in Luoyang. It was the first time he had seen street lights and paved roads and buildings that rose three stories—sights that inspired in him an almost religious awe. Around the same time, an uncle who worked at a nearby factory came to the village sporting a white polyester shirt. No one had seen any fabric except cotton before, and the material attracted open admiration. The uncle sensed Yan’s longing and gave him the garment, which Yan wore six days a week, washing it in the evenings and hanging it to dry overnight. “Wearing that white shirt at fourteen gave me the first inkling of what it might be like to carry the mark of the city on your body,” he told me.

In his teens, Yan discovered reading. His eldest sister suffered from a painful bone disease and spent much of her teens bedridden. The villagers lent books, a scarce commodity, to keep her occupied. As Yan put it, “Her tragedy was one of the greatest pieces of luck in my life.” At sixteen, he got a rare copy of the great eighteenth-century novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” a book that he now describes as “my first lover.”

The book that Yan claims to owe his career to is a largely forgotten novel, “Boundary Line,” by Zhang Kangkang; he read in an afterword that its publication, in 1975, had secured Zhang a transfer from a farm in rural Heilongjiang to the city of Harbin. “I did not begin writing out of principle or passion,” Yan likes to say. “I saw the pen as a means of escape.” (He couldn’t have known then that Zhang was from a family of intellectuals and had been sent to the farm for reëducation.) While working sixteen-hour days at the factory, Yan stayed up nights to write his own novel, a four-hundred-page manuscript about the Cultural Revolution, which his mother later used for kindling.

In 1978, at the age of twenty, Yan enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army. On his first night of training, the canteen served pork buns, and, for the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to eat meat until he was full. To the consternation of his commanding officer, he wolfed down eighteen buns in twenty minutes.

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Yan adapted well to Army life, and, after a year, he joined the Communist Party. His literary talent earned him a place in the propaganda department, and, during the next twenty-five years, he worked his way up to the rank of colonel. The Army transformed his life: he got a degree in political science and, later, one in writing; he was able to arrange for his father, already chronically sick, to be treated at the Army hospital. He has never forgotten the look in his father’s eyes when he arrived at the compound, along with the whole family, after several days of gruelling travel. At the entrance, his father stopped and addressed them solemnly: “All my life, I’ve never been to a proper hospital, and here we are, at the best hospital, an Army hospital. We have no money, so they have no reason to treat us, but we’ve travelled for hundreds of miles to be here. If they refuse to receive us, I want everyone to get on their knees. I will kneel, too. We will put our heads to the floor to beg.” His father spent two weeks in the hospital, hooked up to an oxygen tank, and Yan is sure that they were the happiest of his life.