PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksArguably the most important of Yan’s earlier novels ... Mao Zedong’s poems, lines from model operas, Marxist dictums, and Party songs and slogans abound in this satire, leading various Chinese critics to call the book (not always approvingly) a \'dictionary\' and \'museum\' of revolutionary language ... In Hard Like Water, the formulaic language of the Cultural Revolution insinuates itself into the minds and mouths of the characters ... Such schizophrenic dialogue is rent by the dictates of what Geremie Barmé calls New China Newspeak. How to render in English this stilted, allusive language? Translator Carlos Rojas’s prudent solution is to sometimes italicize the stock phrases, as seen above. As he explains in a postface, it would be impractical to gloss the intertextuality, and the Chinese original did not. Two decades after the initial publication, one wonders if the resonance of Yan’s layered language might thin out even among Chinese readers, new generations of whom would also find the style arcane. In this sense, the novel will indeed serve as a dictionary or museum preserving the Maoist era’s carnival of cant ... But Hard Like Water is realistic primarily in capturing the logorrhea and hypocrisy of the times ... Scar literature’s question of moral responsibility persists in Yan’s novel. He does not absolve Gao in mass hysteria but presents him as a scheming careerist with selfish motives behind a public facade, a little megalomaniac who, far from wishing to topple the existing hierarchy, strives rather to ascend that hierarchy by talking the talk of the megalomaniac-in-chief. In Yan’s imaginative world, each of us bears at least partial burden for our words, even and especially when we are parroting those from on high. ... Crucially, however, Hard Like Water’s hero is an antihero unrepentant to the end.
