Braised Pork by An Yu Review

Set in modern-day Beijing, doting housewife Jia Jia finds her husband floating face down in their tub one morning, dead. Next to him - a bizarre drawing of a fish man (Abe Sapien?!). What does it all mean? She sets out to find answers.

… and finds none. Because An Yu’s debut novel Braised Pork is awful! I’ve wanted to read a contemporary Chinese novel for a while and that intriguing premise sounded right up my street. Well, alls I can say is that I can see why Chinese literature isn’t taking the world by storm (unlike its diseases) if this trash is anything to go by.

The story is a meandering zero. Jia Jia starts a relationship with a bartender called Leo which goes nowhere and means nothing. She goes to Tibet to find out about the Fish Man and meets a man looking for his wife - like she’s kinda looking for her husband through the drawing. She used to be an artist who’s now taken up painting again, her first commission being a painting of the Buddha for a couple whose marriage is over - also like her former loveless marriage.

Uh huh…? I can see Yu trying to seem deep and literary in drawing these parallels, but I don’t get any idea what she’s trying to actually say, if anything, because I suspect there’s nothing substantive being said anyway. We spend our whole time with Jia Jia but I don’t feel like I know her at all. She used to be an artist before her husband made her stop but now he’s gone she’s started again. Yay? I mean, was it her dream to paint Buddhas on people’s walls?

Did she really love her husband? He seemed to be only mean and distant to her so why would she care so much to find out what this enigmatic scribbling meant? And on that, couldn’t it just be some random drawing her husband drew? It’s such a cliched literary conceit that it leads to this quest. Not that that leads anywhere interesting either - just more smoke and mirrors.

Like Jia Jia, Yu’s portrayal of Beijing is bland and unimpressive - I got no sense of place or what it’s like to live there; it could be any major metropolitan city. Other things happen - she’s trying to sell her apartment, she reconnects with her estranged father, her aunt’s husband gets in trouble with the authorities - but none of it matters. It’s just padding to beef up a thin storyline.

I would’ve been more forgiving of the book if the story had been better handled - like if we got an idea of why her husband killed himself and the meaning of the Fish Man - but instead Yu abandons her attempts at telling a semi-coherent narrative in favour of murky impressionism that was deeply unsatisfying to read. A vague, confusing, disappointing and very boring novel, don’t believe any hype you might hear about An Yu’s Braised Pork - it is rancid.