Writer Lu Xinhua was just 24-years old in 1978 when he published his breakthrough short story, “The Scar.” Written while a freshman at Fudan University, “The Scar” examined the traumatic legacy of the Cultural Revolution and the decisive, imperious rule of the Gang of Four. In the wake of Mao’s death, China found itself at a crossroads. There was the Beijing Spring, the New Enlightenment, and “Scar Literature” was at the vanguard of what came to be known as a second “Hundred Flowers Movement.” The suffering of intellectuals and their families would never be avenged, but literature could go far towards achieving some sort of reconciliation.
In roughly 8,000 words, “The Scar” told the story of Xiaohua, returning home during Chinese New Year 1978. It had been nine years since she’d severed ties with her mother, who had been accused of being a “traitor to the revolution.” The alleged sins of the mother were visited upon the daughter, and Xiaohua was deprived of her Red Guard membership and treated with disdain. While there was obvious love from mother to daughter, for Xiaohua there was “no room for sympathy.”
There’s an innocence to the tragic way “The Scar” unfolds and concludes, a tone that both reflects the writer’s youth and sets the tone for Scar literature in general. It’s certainly about trauma and oppression, but the practitioners are not necessarily virulent anti-Communists. Their belief that the Party will rectify past mistakes and rule a post-Mao China with love and mercy might be both idealistic and naive, but it’s a beautiful way to allow the cold facts of a dark period in 20th century Chinese history to have some grace.
In his 2024 novel Wu Lou, writer Lu Xinhua tells the story of a young woman (Tutu) discovering her fiance (a Khmer Rouge officer) dead beneath a Buddha statue at the temple where she lives. It’s the early 1970s in Cambodia. She is an orphan who was taken in by the temple’s Master Buddhist Monk (Wu Lou), a man she considers her brother. Her fiance, with whom she shared a deeper, physical relationship (resulting in a child) is both a clear representation of carnal desire and a ticket out of her situation. She’s young, not yet 20, and she needs more than Wu Lou is willing to provide.
At its surface, obviously, Wu Lou is set up as a classic love triangle. An innocent young woman is swept up by her allegiance to a monk who would not consummate their relationship. The total consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign was yet to be fully understood before Tutu’s fiance’s death, but the discerning reader understands the full darkness of that history. To fall as part of a love triangle on the eve of his Army’s bloody reign was arguably a preferable ending.
The story then moves from this Cambodian temple in the 1970s to the Commerce Casino in Las Vegas. It’s nearly half a century later and our narrator Terry, who will take us the rest of the way, reflects on his life. He’s a casino dealer now, but in 1968 he was a fifteen year old educated youth sent to the countryside to be re-educated by peasant farmers:
“I felt more exhilarated than peasants…I also felt profoundly secure…Now I could do what I wished on my own land…”
Terry and his wife are the narrators, but the focus of Wu Lou is the mysterious character named Miller. Terry, a writer himself, describes Miller like so:
“His open-hearted laughter was identical to that of the Maitrya Buddha.”
Miller, as fate would have it, turns out to be Wu Lou, who disappeared from the temple in the wake of the Khmer Rouge officer’s death. Xinhua could be accused of laying it on a little thick when he has Terry tell us about Miller “I suddenly remembered seeing a halo over his head once, so I started squinting and opening my eyes wide to search for it. Unfortunately, I did not see it again.” On the other hand, the generous reader who enters this text with an open heart understands it’s a story about refuge and exile. Wu Lou had to escape the Cambodian temple after the man’s death. It follows that any story based on the precepts of Buddhism will allow for a sort of reincarnation in another land after a death at a temple.
It’s not by coincidence that a big setting for much of this novel is a Las Vegas casino. Both Terry and Miller gravitated there as a way to stand in opposition to another Buddhist precept: non-attachment. A casino exists only to encourage attachment to money, dependence on accumulating material possessions. When Terry realized “…the essence of freedom…lies in the ease and detachment of one’s heart,”he bid farewell to the casino but not to the mystery of Miller.
It’s matters of the heart that serve as the driving force of Wu Lou. Tutu, real estate agent for Terry and his wife, hears about Miller and concludes he is in fact Wu Lou. He is the spiritual brother with whom she has been trying to reconnect for years and fate had them together at the same time in Las Vegas, that most un-Buddhist of cities. Tutu is intent on connecting with him again, and though she speaks of the conflicting forces of “good karma, bad karma, sinful karma,” she wants a resolution to their story.
The middle third of this novel takes us back to Cambodia in the 1970s, on the eve and beginning of the Khmer Rouge’s reign, and it’s palpably evocative. The Khmer Rouge officer, named Wu Huaiyu, would meet his death at the feet of the Buddha statue in the temple where he found and befriended Tutu. Wu Lou, despite being in the jungle, learns from temple visitors that the Khmer Rouge eradicated at least a quarter of Cambodia’s 8 million people. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot is referred to as “Brother Number One” and makes an appearance. The mood is dark and getting darker.
In the final third of this novel, we’re back in Las Vegas. Tutu is looking forward to reuniting with Wu Lou, and Terry compares Tutu’s initial reactions in the moments before the reunion to Marina Abramović’s 2010 exhibition “The Artist Is Present,” in which Abramović sat in a chair for a total of 700 hours while museum-goers came to take turns sitting across from her. They imposed their own feelings on Abramović while she sat stone-faced. When a former lover comes to sit across from her, he becomes emotional and she quickly follows suit but no words are shared. The main thoughts are clear: “You don’t have to say anything. I understand.” Terry wonders if all the people of contemporary China will find themselves reuniting with ancient emperors, the Boxers in the late Qing Dynasty, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, Confucius, and more.
For all the characters in Wu Lou, “the world is inherently chaotic.” Tutu and Wu Lou get their reunion, but there’s a tragic ending that hearkens back to the structure of “The Scar.” It’s almost as if writer Lu Xinhua is saying that there is no such thing as a “happy ending.” It isn’t that his characters don’t deserve happiness but rather that true peace or nirvana will always be out of reach. Instead, Terry finds himself reflecting on the essence of Wu Lou beyond his corporeal form:
“…If he were…a geometric shape, he would be a circle…a physical state…an iron begonia…If represented by the marks he left behind, he would be a crane…If portrayed by his demeanor, he would be ever-smiling…”
Wu Lou as a novel takes on various shapes and forms. It’s a traditional love triangle, with a celibate monk, an innocent sixteen year old orphan girl, and the Khmer Rouge officer determined to save her from her purity. It’s a circular reflection on birth, spiritual death, and renewal in another form, and it’s an infinity symbol in which we live to search for reunification only to have it slip away from our grasp at the last moment.
