ABSTRACT
The Chinese have never been averse to laughter, and the universal tools of satire, absurdity and irony have always been an integral part of Chinese literary history and culture. Absurdity and irony are points on the wide spectrum of humour and play a pivotal role in public and literary discourse. Home-grown Chinese satire covers a spectrum from the gentle stories by Wu Jingzi, who revealed the shortcomings of the civil service in his work The Scholars to the bleakly comic, poignant and sometimes heart-rending stories by Lu Xun. Number expressions are common in Chinese language, and in Yan Lianke's novel, they are used in what could be an obsessive fashion. In traditional Chinese culture, a child is counted as one-year-old at birth, and a year is added each Chinese New Year. Yan Lianke uses the motif of weighty classical literature to parody and satirise modern China.
