A new review of The Angry Wu Zili (Published in September 2025)

 

The Angry Wu Zili: A Subversive Testament from 1980s China

Introduction

Ouyang Yu's The Angry Wu Zili (《愤怒的吴自立》) occupies a singular, almost paradoxical position in contemporary Chinese literature. Written in 1988 by a young literature student in Shanghai, rejected for publication repeatedly across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, it remained underground until its limited Beijing release in 1999 and Taiwanese edition in 2016. The English self-translation, published in 2025 by Otherland Publishing in a limited run of 100 copies—with an excerpt appearing in the final issue of Meanjin before the journal's closure—finally brings this incendiary work to Western readers. The novel's tortured publication history mirrors the psychic torment of its protagonist: both suppressed, marginalized, and unable to find legitimate channels of expression.

Historical Context: The 1980s Crucible

To understand The Angry Wu Zili, one must grasp the peculiar pressures of 1980s China, particularly for educated youth. The decade following Mao's death in 1976 saw the country lurching between liberalization and repression, between opening to the West and reasserting ideological control. For university students like Ouyang Yu, studying English and American literature at Wuhan University in the early 1980s, this created a psychologically destabilizing environment.

The post-Cultural Revolution generation had been promised that education would restore meaning to Chinese society. Yet what they encountered was a profound value vacuum. Traditional Confucian ethics had been systematically destroyed during the Cultural Revolution; Maoist ideology was increasingly revealed as bankrupt; and Western ideas, flooding in through newly available translations, offered tantalizing but ultimately inaccessible alternatives. Students read Sartre, Camus, Kafka, and Hemingway, but lived in cramped dormitories under constant surveillance, their futures dependent on test scores and political reliability.

The economic reforms beginning in 1978 introduced market competition and material inequality, shattering the egalitarian promises (however hollow) of socialism. Students witnessed the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs and officials enriching themselves while they subsisted on meager stipends. The "iron rice bowl" of guaranteed employment was beginning to crack, replaced by anxiety about scarce opportunities. Sexual repression remained severe—premarital sex could result in expulsion from university—even as Western cultural products introduced new awareness of sexual freedom.

This is the world Wu Zili inhabits: caught between systems, between values, between identities. He cannot believe in communism, cannot embrace capitalism, cannot return to tradition, cannot fully adopt Western individualism. This total ideological homelessness produces his volcanic rage.

The Psychology of Total Negation

What makes The Angry Wu Zili so disturbing—and so authentic—is its refusal of redemption. Wu Zili does not seek reform, improvement, or even understanding. He wants destruction, beginning with himself. His opening declaration sets the tone: "I cannot destroy the whole world, and the world can easily strangle me to death: you only need each person to spit one spit to drown me. Instead of being choked to death by the stinky farts of the masses and drenched in their murky urine, it is better to end my own life as soon as possible, thereby declaring the end of the world with the end of myself."

This is not the alienation of Camus's Meursault, who remains essentially indifferent. Nor is it the metaphysical despair of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, who retains a perverse attachment to consciousness. Wu Zili's nihilism is active, aggressive, inflammatory. He hates beauty because it highlights ugliness; he hates success because it emphasizes failure; he hates love because it makes loneliness unbearable. His only consistent position is opposition.

Crucially, Ouyang Yu refuses to pathologize or romanticize this stance. Wu Zili is neither mentally ill (requiring treatment) nor a misunderstood genius (requiring recognition). He is simply the logical endpoint of a society that has systematically destroyed every basis for meaning while demanding conformity to empty forms. His "madness" is sanity's response to an insane world.

Sexual Frankness and Bodily Reality

Perhaps the most radical aspect of The Angry Wu Zili is its unflinching treatment of sexuality and bodily functions. In 1980s China, where sex education was nonexistent and any discussion of sexuality was taboo, Wu Zili's graphic descriptions of masturbation, sexual fantasies, menstruation, and physiological desire were almost unpublishable.

Consider his relationship with the "ugly girl": "I did have sex with that extremely ugly girl. When it got strong, we would even tear off the menstruation bandages, and do it all bloodied." This is not erotic; it's almost clinical in its matter-of-factness. The ugliness is deliberate—Wu Zili chooses the ugly woman precisely because she represents truth, whereas beautiful women represent the lies of aesthetic idealism.

The novel's treatment of the body—its smells, secretions, needs—stands in stark contrast to both Chinese literary tradition (which largely ignored such matters) and official socialist realism (which presented idealized revolutionary bodies). Wu Zili's body is cold, dirty, sexually frustrated, and mortal. His meticulous descriptions of taking cold showers, picking food from teeth, and applying face cream puncture any pretense of transcendence.

This bodily honesty extends to the novel's treatment of desire. Wu Zili's sexual fantasies are omnipresent but never fulfilled. He masturbates compulsively, imagines violent sexual scenarios, and dreams of impossible women, but his actual sexual experiences are mechanical and unsatisfying. Sex doesn't redeem or liberate—it simply confirms the impossibility of genuine connection.

Western readers encountering this frankness might compare it to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) or Michel Houellebecq's work. But there's a crucial difference: Roth and Houellebecq write from within sexually permissive societies and can therefore treat sexual dysfunction as individual pathology. For Wu Zili, sexual repression is systemic, political, and inescapable. His masturbation is not just personal inadequacy—it's the only sexual outlet available in a society that criminalizes desire while simultaneously bombarding him with sexualized imagery through newly available Western media.

The Performance of Writing as Suicide Preparation

The novel's most formally innovative aspect is its structure as a death-preparation. Wu Zili announces early on: "I have figured it out that if I'm going to die I'm going to die so fucking silent that no one would know." Yet the entire novel is his attempt to leave a record, to "fill in the blanks" before disappearing.

This creates a fascinating paradox: Wu Zili wants to die silently, yet compulsively writes toward that death. The writing itself becomes a form of suicide—not metaphorically, but literally. He sets himself a quota: write 100,000-150,000 words, then die. The novel we're reading is this suicide note, extended to unbearable length.

But the quota proves impossible to meet with original material. Wu Zili resorts to plagiarism—copying his own old writings, transcribing his friend's poems, reproducing a found notebook. This plagiarism-as-padding is both hilarious and heartbreaking. It suggests that even his own death isn't important enough to generate sufficient original thought. He must cobble together his suicide note from scraps.

This meta-fictional aspect—the novel as documentation of its own failed production—anticipates postmodern techniques while remaining rooted in genuine psychological extremity. Wu Zili isn't playing literary games; he's genuinely running out of material, genuinely approaching the moment when writing stops and action (suicide) must begin.

Comparison to Western Contemporaries

Western readers might be tempted to place The Angry Wu Zili alongside other works of extreme alienation: Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890), Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight (1939), or Thomas Bernhard's rants against Austrian culture. But crucial differences emerge.

Hamsun's protagonist starves in a capitalist society where he could, theoretically, succeed. Rhys's Sasha Jensen drinks herself to death after personal failures in love and work. Bernhard's narrators rage against cultural hypocrisy from positions of relative privilege. All three operate within societies where individual failure is possible—where one might have succeeded under different circumstances.

Wu Zili has no such possibility. His society offers no legitimate path for someone of his temperament and talents. He cannot become a writer (everything he submits is rejected). He cannot have a satisfying relationship (all sexual and romantic connection is frustrated). He cannot believe in official ideology (it's self-evidently false). He cannot embrace Western individualism (it's inaccessible in 1980s China). He cannot even achieve a satisfying death (his suicide plans keep being deferred by the need to complete his writing quota).

The closest Western analogue might be Michel Houellebecq's Whatever (1994) and The Elementary Particles (1998), which similarly present protagonists in total negation of liberal-democratic society. But Houellebecq's narrators can at least consume—they have access to prostitutes, pornography, alcohol, travel. Wu Zili can't even reliably get decent food. His material deprivation matches his spiritual desolation.

Perhaps the most apt comparison is to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864). Both feature hyperconsious narrators whose awareness of their own contradictions makes action impossible. Both are structured as confessional monologues. Both use spite and perversity as organizing principles. But the Underground Man still participates in society, however dysfunctionally. Wu Zili has withdrawn almost completely, existing in a liminal space between life and death, writing and silence, presence and absence.

The Question of Publication

The novel's publication history is inseparable from its meaning. Written in 1988 but unpublishable until 1999—and then only in a limited underground edition—the text existed for over a decade in the same liminal state as its protagonist. Like Wu Zili himself, it was alive but socially dead, present but invisible, speaking but unheard.

The repeated rejections from publishers across Greater China weren't simple censorship. Many sexually frank or politically critical works circulated in the 1980s and 1990s. What made The Angry Wu Zili unpublishable was its totality of rejection. It offered no redemption, no critique from a positive standpoint, no suggestion that reform might help. It was pure negation—of Chinese society, Western society, human society in general.

Publishers need to position books within existing frameworks: social critique, psychological case study, political allegory, coming-of-age narrative. The Angry Wu Zili refuses all such frameworks. It's not critique (which implies standards for improvement). It's not psychology (Wu Zili isn't mentally ill). It's not allegory (it's too specific). It's not bildungsroman (there's no development, only accumulation of despair).

The 2025 English edition's limited run of 100 copies and its appearance in the final issue of Meanjin before the journal's closure seem grimly appropriate. The novel remains marginal, appearing just as the venue that published it disappears—a fitting fate for a work about disappearance.

Literary Technique and Voice

Ouyang Yu's prose in The Angry Wu Zili achieves a remarkable tonal consistency: unrelentingly harsh, deliberately crude, yet capable of sudden lyrical passages that make the prevailing ugliness more painful by contrast. Consider this description of evening: "The unbearable silence lasted for a full ten minutes. During that period, someone wondered if they could discuss in small groups..."

The novel employs several formal techniques that enhance its claustrophobic effect:

Stream of consciousness without interiority: Unlike Joyce or Woolf, where stream of consciousness reveals rich inner life, Wu Zili's consciousness is mostly reactive—cataloguing external irritations, copying other texts, filling time until death. His interior is nearly empty.

Recursion and repetition: The novel circles back obsessively to the same grievances, the same memories, the same fantasies. This creates a sense of psychic imprisonment—Wu Zili can't escape his own thought patterns any more than he can escape his social circumstances.

Radical tonal shifts: The text lurches between crude vulgarity ("I want to spray the poisonous juice that had filled my soul on them"), clinical description ("The water was a little cooler than the heat of the road"), and unexpectedly beautiful passages ("The fragrance, like a veil, could be squeezed and touched by hand as it was warm and soft").

Embedded texts: The extensive quotations from Wu Zili's friend's poems, the discovered notebook, and his own earlier writings create a palimpsest effect—layers of failed expression, each inadequate to the task of making meaning.

Gender, Class, and Social Position

Wu Zili's misogyny is explicit and repellent. He despises beautiful women for their inaccessibility and ugly women for their accessibility. He fantasizes about rape and degradation. He reduces women to body parts and sexual functions. This creates a genuine interpretive challenge: How should we read such toxicity?

Several points are crucial. First, Wu Zili's misogyny is clearly presented as pathological, not endorsed. The novel doesn't ask us to sympathize with his hatred—it documents it. Second, his sexual hatred is inseparable from his broader hatred of everything, including himself. Women aren't singled out; they're part of the general catastrophe of human existence.

Third—and most importantly—Wu Zili's sexual ideology perfectly mirrors the dehumanizing logic of the society he inhabits. In 1980s China, women and men were subjected to intrusive state control of their sexuality and reproduction. Marriage required work unit permission. Premarital sex could destroy careers. Contraception and abortion were state-controlled. Women's bodies were sites of political regulation, not personal autonomy.

Wu Zili, unable to form genuine relationships and sexually starved, responds with the same dehumanizing logic the state employs—treating bodies as objects for control and use. His pornographic imagination is the mirror image of state-enforced sexual repression. He reduces women to flesh because the system has reduced everyone to political objects. His misogyny is an internal colonization, reproducing the external violence of the system.

Similarly, his class resentment—his rage at students who have better food, better clothes, better prospects—reflects the particular cruelty of 1980s Chinese inequality. Having been promised equality under socialism, students instead encountered a vicious competition for scarce opportunities, with success depending largely on family connections (guanxi) and political reliability rather than merit. Wu Zili's poverty isn't chosen or romantic—it's degrading and inescapable.

The Question of Authenticity

One might ask whether Wu Zili represents a genuine psychological state or merely literary posturing. The text itself anticipates this question: "I don't quite agree with his point of view. He was so sadly buffeted that he was able to say that. He is an absolute loser."

But the novel's power lies precisely in its refusal to resolve this question. Wu Zili might be performing despair, but the performance has become indistinguishable from the reality. His writing toward suicide might be procrastination, but the procrastination is itself a form of slow death. His copied and plagiarized material might be cheating his writing quota, but this only confirms his essential thesis: that original thought and authentic expression are impossible in his circumstances.

The inclusion of other people's writings—his friend's pretentious poems, the discovered notebook of another despairing student—suggests that Wu Zili's condition is widespread, perhaps universal among his cohort. He's not uniquely damaged; he's normally damaged. His extremity makes visible what others disguise.

Philosophical Implications

At its core, The Angry Wu Zili is a novel about the impossibility of meaning in conditions of total social breakdown. Wu Zili has access to every philosophical tradition—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Marxism, existentialism, nihilism—but none can provide orientation. Each system has been discredited, either by historical failure (traditional Chinese philosophy destroyed in the Cultural Revolution) or inaccessibility (Western philosophy available only as translated fragments).

This leaves Wu Zili in a condition we might call "meta-nihilism": not just the absence of values, but awareness that this absence is itself a historical construction, not an eternal truth. He knows he's the product of specific social forces—failed communism, incomplete capitalism, cultural colonization—but this knowledge doesn't liberate him. He remains trapped in the very situation he can analyze.

The novel thus stages a crisis of intellectual life itself. Wu Zili is educated enough to see through every ideology, but not powerful enough to create alternatives. His consciousness is purely critical, purely negative—a condition Marx described as "all that is solid melts into air" taken to its logical extreme.

Language and Translation

Ouyang Yu's self-translation into English (2025) raises fascinating questions about the novel's linguistic identity. The original Chinese employs vulgar speech, literary quotations, bureaucratic jargon, and lyrical description—a heteroglossia that reflects Wu Zili's education and social position. The English translation necessarily transforms these registers.

Certain effects are lost: the specific vulgarity of Chinese profanity, the weight of classical quotations, the particular rhythms of 1980s mainland speech. But other effects are gained: English-language readers can more immediately recognize the echoes of Western literature that Wu Zili has absorbed, and the novel's dialogue with Western existentialism becomes more apparent.

The translation also makes visible what was implicit in Chinese: that Wu Zili's consciousness is already translated. He thinks through foreign categories, using concepts from Western philosophy and psychology that don't quite fit his experience. This produces a characteristic awkwardness in his self-analysis—he's always slightly misusing the terms he's learned. The English translation, oddly, captures this sense of conceptual estrangement more directly than Chinese could.

Contemporary Relevance

Reading The Angry Wu Zili in 2025, we might be struck by its prescience. Wu Zili's condition—educated but marginalized, sexually frustrated, economically precarious, ideologically homeless—describes increasingly common experiences in contemporary societies worldwide.

The rise of incel culture, the epidemic of young male suicides, the spread of political nihilism, the turn toward destructive anti-social ideologies—all these phenomena share Wu Zili's basic structure: high consciousness meeting low possibility. Men (usually) who have been promised significance through education, work, and romantic success instead encounter systematic exclusion. Their response, like Wu Zili's, combines grandiose fantasy with petty resentment, self-hatred with misogyny, nihilistic philosophy with mundane grievance.

Of course, there are crucial differences. Contemporary incels have internet communities that Wu Zili lacked. They can find validation and reinforcement for their worldview. Wu Zili is almost perfectly isolated—his only "community" is the dead authors he reads. This isolation is both more painful and potentially less dangerous. Wu Zili contemplates only suicide, not mass violence.

But the novel's analysis of how societies produce such consciousness remains urgent. What happens to people when every source of meaning—traditional religion, political ideology, work identity, romantic love—fails simultaneously? What kind of subjectivity emerges from total disenchantment? Wu Zili provides one answer: a consciousness that can only negate, that finds perverse satisfaction in its own misery, that seeks extinction as the only honest response to existence.

Conclusion: The Work That Cannot Be Accommodated

The Angry Wu Zili remains what it was in 1988: a work without a proper place. Too extreme for mainstream publishing, too despairing for political dissidents (who need hope to mobilize opposition), too specific to Chinese circumstances to be universal, too influenced by Western literature to be authentically Chinese. It falls between every critical category.

This categorical homelessness is inseparable from its subject. Wu Zili himself has no proper place—not in Chinese society, not in Western society, not in any conceivable society. His only possible position is negation, rejection, absence. The novel that documents his consciousness must share this fate.

Yet precisely this extreme marginality makes The Angry Wu Zili valuable. It shows us what normally remains invisible: the human wreckage produced by historical transformation, the consciousness that emerges when all meaning-systems collapse, the voice that speaks from the absolute outside of social intelligibility.

The novel offers no solutions, no comfort, no redemption. It simply insists that such experiences exist and deserve documentation, even—especially—when no one wants to hear about them. Wu Zili's voice, crude and despairing as it is, testifies to a reality that polite literature usually excludes: that some people really do experience existence as pure suffering, that some social positions really are intolerable, that some historical moments really do make life unbearable.

Whether such testimony serves any purpose beyond documenting suffering is unclear. Wu Zili certainly doesn't think so—he writes only to fill time before suicide. But his text survives him, circulating marginally, troubling the waters, refusing to disappear completely. Perhaps that's enough: not to offer hope or meaning, but simply to refuse the silence that society demands of its casualties. To keep speaking, however roughly, however hopelessly, until the speaking finally stops.

The appearance of this English translation in 2025—37 years after composition, in a limited edition of 100 copies, in the final issue of a closing journal—seems almost too symbolically perfect. Like Wu Zili himself, the novel appears briefly, marginally, just before disappearing. It asks to be read not as literature (which implies aesthetic pleasure) or as document (which implies historical utility) but as testimony: this happened, this consciousness existed, this cannot be ignored even though everyone wishes it would go away.

In this sense, The Angry Wu Zili is less a novel than a wound—raw, unhealing, refusing to close. Reading it is not pleasurable or enlightening. It's simply necessary, if we want to understand what societies do to people, and what people do to themselves in response. The anger in the title isn't just Wu Zili's—it's the text's, insisting on being heard despite knowing that no one wants to listen.

(by克劳德哎哎）