Move over Kanye, meet Han Han (my new Unclese lover)

I’m in love.

His name is 韩寒, or Han Han. He’s a young, Unclese novelist, blogger and, and, AND, A RACECAR DRIVER. That triple threat just made by brain explode all over the keyboard.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention, he looks like this:

Credit: Sina and Sina.

This all started when, yesterday, I asked the class about young, Unclese artists and writers today. Were their works political? Did they examine themes like class struggle?

The tutor answered that writers today covered a broader range of topics: gender, sexuality, and ethnic minorities (by that she was referring to this nation’s ethnic minorities, of which there are 55. But they’re greatly outnumbered by the 91% of the nation who fall into the Han group – of which I belong to.)

The class brought up two, exciting young writers, of the “post 80s generation” (the generation born after 1980, which is when the Unclese government began to strictly enforce the one-child policy.) Their stories were very “alternative” and highly relevant to the Unclese youth. Neither had gone to university, and one had even dropped out of high school. The tutor commented it was interesting that these writers, poster children of the new gen of Unclese, had always operated “out of the system”.

The next day, and reflecting on these two writers thought to myself, boy they sound sexy! I kicked myself for not having written down their names, so jumped on the internet and emailed my friend from the class about them. She wrote back,

The two youth writers we were talking about are 韩寒 (Han Han) and 郭敬明 (Guo Jingming), both of whom belong to the post-80s generation writers. Han Han is more realistic and thought-provoking (he is also an awsome F1 driver) while Guo Jingming is more dreamy and commercial. You may find them an interesting comparison.

Credit: EastSouthWestNorth

I quickly Googled Han Han. Hot, I knew it! I found him on Wikipedia, and by the end of the page, was, am, desperately in love. (I’m going to pause here before this post descends into a rabble of Twi-fan proportion OMG HE’S SOOOOO HAAAWWWWT WE ARE TOTES MEANT TO BE TOGETHER etc. etc. So let me just say that if you read the Wikipedia entry, it’s like God made an imprint of everything my subconscious had been looking for in a soulmate. - OK that was a bit much.)

I was bursting to tell someone. I grabbed my Unclese friend on gchat and “announced” that I was in love. I asked if she knew of my lover, and of course she did, he’s quite famous here, saying “he’s pretty rebellious and has written many articles critizing the government and stuff.”

But I wondered how out of the system he really was. I found this article from the New York Times that focuses on Guo Jingming, but also mentions Han Han:

Guo is the most successful of a dozen young celebrity authors who make up the “post-’80s” generation, some others of whom have also achieved book sales in the millions. This group includes the high school dropout and professional car racer Han Han, 25, who derides China’s inefficient educational system in his novels and regularly insults older, more established artists on his blog, and Zhang Yueran, 26, whose novel “Daffodils Took Carp and Went Away” features a bulimic girl who falls in love with her stepfather, is mistreated by her mother and is sent off to boarding school.

While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers or forces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the other post-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social ideals of the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t pose any threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”

Without being able to read Unclese, it’s hard for me to comment. In any case, I have something new to motivate me when it comes to my language studies: I want to be able to read Han Han’s blog. I may even say that the next time I get answered the stock standard expat question: “why did you decide to learn Unclese?”

- “So that I’m able to read Han Han’s blog. …DUH.”

More interesting posts, about the interesting Han Han: