Bearing Word opens with a donkey observing life at West Kun Temple through a crack in the stable door. She has been imprisoned here since she was bought two years ago by religious leader Kunmen Virtue.
The bray of a donkey is a primordial language upon which the soul of every living creature is granted ascension to the celestial court; donkeys can see sounds and their brays build a pagoda climbing towards the heavens. Unfortunately, humans are unaware of this need until they become one of the hundreds of unhappy ghosts trapped in the mortal realm, where religious devotees have silenced donkeys, ironically believing their brays to be an interruption to religious devotions.
Ku, a translator and word bearer, is tasked by Kunmen Virtue to “treat this donkey as you would a message” and deliver her to Tianmen Maisheng at Peach Blossom Temple in the Western City of Heile. Unbeknownst to Ku, the devotees have tattooed their scripture on to her skin, now concealed by the regrowth of fur. Ku names the donkey Hsieh, and the pair set out on their journey to the West, fraught with dangers of travel through desert territories where the Eastern Pisha and Western Heile are “enmeshed in a war like lumberjacks sawing back and forth”; a war which has become a conflict in which the religions of Kun and Tian attempt to eradicate each other, but owes its origins to the building of a wall intended to shut out the noise of donkey brays, but was built so high it cast a shadow over the people of Heile.

Although the war should be the main concern for the travel companions, the initial difficulties they face are that every man and his donkey want to mount Hsieh because she is such a fine piece of ass. Kunmen Virtue has instructed Ku that she is a virgin and to be delivered “intact” (even though he also tried to have his way with her in the stable). Early chapters occasionally sound like pornographic Black Beauty, reaching a pinnacle in a paragraph where a group of jacks announce their arousal at the presence of Hsieh with loud braying which creates a “dark donkey phallus ten li long and thrusting into the air”: or in other words a braying cacophony of dick pics. The magic realism and mysticism of the novel is reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, who at times also seems to have a penis obsession. The gratuitous sexual imagery does, however, parallel the treatment of women in an otherwise male-dominated novel as these scenes are contrasted with Ku’s memories of his wife Sha who was given to him as a child slave to raise and then marry when she came of age.
The fantastical framework employed by Liu Liangcheng places Bearing Word in the company of allegories such as Animal Farm in allowing the discussion of religion and politics at a slight distance from the immediate context of contemporary China. Chinese discussion forums are awash with interpretations of the novel which has a consistent meta-narrative running through the text, alongside character and place names which are clearly symbolic; Ku in Chinese means a store or warehouse making him an empty vessel, Hsieh (a name rendered by Jeremy Tiang into the older Wade-Giles romanization rather than pinyin transcription) means variously to thank, to wither, to apologize.
The narrative unfurls through the continuous present tense of a narrator who is witnessing, but detached. Images of war and death pass by in a few sentences just a part of the dust blowing across the desert, as the story plods onwards like Hsieh with the only reference point being the final destination. The narrative shifts focus to other characters such as Tuojue, the hybrid ghost constructed when the head of a Heile soldier was sewn onto the corpse of a Pisha general, uniting them not only in flesh, but also in soul, who becomes their travel companion visible to Hsieh but not Ku. Tuo and Jue each tell their own backstories, but due to the nature of their hybrid state there is no difference in style between the two; clearly this is the correct artistic choice, but it makes progress hard going.
Throughout the novel, the meta-narrative draws attention to the status of translations compared to the original—a timely discussion as #namethetranslator gains ground and translated fiction is increasingly popular—through the absurd debate between Tuojue as to whether they are led by the head which thinks and speaks, or the body which allows them to move. Similarly, the ideas are raised through the characters of General Chokanurkan who is a single body inhabited by the souls of conjoined twins separated at birth by their father and instructed to live as one by day and the other by night.
Tiang’s prose constructs a dream-scape where the narrative flows along on beautiful, sometimes disturbing imagery, jolted by anachronistic vocabulary choices such as “noggins”, “played possum”, and “bivouacked”, which emerge like strange apparitions of the subconscious, before falling back into fluency. Ku tells us in the novel: “All languages from distant places felt like dream talk”; Tiang’s strategy in deploying these strange choices is to play up the meta-narrative displaying the visibility of the translator in the text. The effect is to draw attention to the theme of language and translation in the novel and the idea of, in the words of the title, “bearing word”.
Ku himself acknowledges the transformative power of translation.
The difference between languages is so great, translating between them is like herding out a flock of goats in the morning and finding they’d turned into dogs by afternoon.
Ku’s translation is treated with suspicion as those around him are “uncertain what he is translating their words into.” And their mistrust is not unfounded: Ku’s interpretation mediates in the fortunes of hostages, leading to half their lives being spared. Translators are shown to work according to their own moral position, and language is exposed as serving those who use it.
Opposites are a recurring motif portrayed not only through the characters, but in the linear journey across this mythical ancient Chinese landscape from East to West; the two great religions and the war their followers wage; black and white; night and day; and the combining and dividing of bodies and souls.
The simplistic idea of division and separatism is deceptive though. Ku and Hsieh soon reach the middle grounds of Guma and Fence village where an informant named Mazaghan has created a Goatman to spy on neighboring armies:
I put him in the goat pen to live with the goats … I skinned a yearling and put the pelt over the child, sewing his mouth shut, covering him head to toe so the goat skin would become the boy’s skin.
On the next page, in one of the most horrific scenes in the novel, the soldiers attempt to flay the goatman: “The goat skin has fused with the human one, and hairs from the human body grow through the animal pelt.” The two have grown together and cannot be separated, and “goatman dies of pain.” Similarly, the Kun temple had been built upon ruins of an earlier one, and Ku travels a road he has traversed back and forth many times before, meeting people who are all strangely connected to each other. The nature of the universe in Bearing Word is hybrid and everything is interrelated, just as the translation is intertwined with the original.
The landscape of Bearing Word is populated by ghosts unable to reach their eternal rest until the sound of donkeys is restored to the mortal world. It is through this haunted landscape that Ku and Hsieh make their journey, and the ancient grudge between Heile and Pisha breaks to new mutiny, spawning ever more ghosts. Bearing Word is itself a ghost—an “Afterlife” in Walter Benjamin’s parlance—of the Chinese novel 捎话 (Shao Hua) which brings a message in a new language of the ghosts of the past and how they live on in the fractured present.
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