Chan Koonchung (1952- ) was born in Shanghai and received his education from the University of Hong Kong before completing graduate study at Boston University. Koonchung has worked in several different industries, such as film and television production before becoming a novelist. He currently lives in Beijing.
Koonchung’s The Fat Years, or directly translated as The Age of Prosperity: China 2013 uses the theme of dystopian technology in order to critique present actions or policies of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society. The Fat Years is set in the not-too-distant future , where the entire month of February 2011 is missing from public memory and record. In the year of 2011, the global economy crashed, but China remained unaffected and ascended to become the top global economic power, attaining great domestic prosperity.
The protagonist, Lao Chen, a Taiwanese writer, reconnects with several old friends, who are trying to determine how they partially remember the seemingly missing month. The group also notices everyone is suspiciously content and happy despite not being able to remember an entire month. Throughout the course of the novel, Xi and Caodi, two of Lao Chan’s friends, reveal their memories and travel to nearby regions to in order to understand why no one remembers the month and is unbothered by it. Eventually, the group kidnaps a knowledgeable Politburo member, He Dongsheng, to understand what role government leaders played in the mass amnesia and widespread happiness. He Dongsheng reveals the Chinese government places small amounts of MDMA (ecstasy) in the water and other beverages throughout the country so that everyone is relaxed and happy all the time. He Dongsheng likes this to the United States putting fluoride in its water. Koonchung implies people have chosen to not worry about the “forgotten month” because they are so content with such economic prosperity.
Though it is obvious Koonchung critiques the Chinese Communist Party in The Fat Years, the novel also presents a larger critique of complicity in the face of lost freedom in exchange for excessive material gain within any economic or political system. In Koonchung’s China, citizens gladly traded their individual rights, such as the freedom of expression, for economic prosperity. Koonchung ultimately urges readers from any country to ask themselves what essential qualities of freedom they are willing to surrender in order to achieve wealth, luxury, and prosperity.
FURTHER READING:
Koonchung, Chan. The Fat Years. Translated by Michael S. Duke. New York: Anchor Books, 2013.