A new film and a new novel under the same title, Cell phone (Shouji) have hit the box office and the book market at the same time.

The special marketing seems to have won a lot more public attention than anyone would have managed.

The ploy was the brainchild of Feng Xiaogang, one of China's most popular film directors.

Feng developed the film script with Liu Zhenyun and later asked Liu to expand the script into a novel.

But even without the aid of Feng's movie, whose cast include a galaxy of popular Chinese stars, a new book by Liu is itself enough reason to attract the attention of literary fans.

Liu was regarded as one of the most promising young writers of China with his "new realistic writing" 15 years ago.

Ten years later he awed the literary circle with his professional piety after he secluded himself for eight years to write the four-volume novel, Homeland, Flour, and Flower (Guxiang Mian he Huaduo).

Many believe he is a writer whose works are worth waiting for.

One or the other?

In his newly released autobiography, I Dedicate My Youth to You (Woba Qingchun Xiangeini), Feng recalled the occasion when he and Liu first came up with the idea of making a film about mobile phones.

Last September, when Liu was venting his opinion about the relationship between arts and life in Feng's studio, their friends present were busy answering cell phones that kept ringing. There were obviously things that some of the speakers found hard to reply to. From their words and expressions, both Feng and Liu sensed the kinds of camouflages and pretences from the callers they were eavesdropping on.

They watched with amused interest, when suddenly Feng was struck by the idea: "Why don't we shoot a film just called Cell phone?"

Liu at once grasped the point of the notion.

"Cell phones are meant to bring convenience to people's lives," Liu said. "But to those constantly finding the need to lie and reluctant to state their whereabouts, it brings more inconvenience than convenience."

As a director with an acute sense of what the public finds entertaining, Feng sensed, of course, the comic elements in this irony and its relevance with modern urban life.

As far as comic effect is concerned, the story line of Cell phone devised by Feng and Liu certainly answers that need.

The biggest faculty of the hero of Cell phone, Yan Shouyi (played by Ge You), as his boss in the TV station where he works observes, is his ability to "talk nonsense with an innocent face."

By this talent he becomes a successful host of a popular talk show called Have one thing, say one thing (Youyi Shuoyi).

However, in real life Yan is impeded by complicated affairs with three women.

Throughout his entanglement, his cell phone plays an important role to exacerbate his trouble. Very often he has to reply to wrong calls at the wrong time, and though the cell phone allows him to fabricate things, it will finally betray him. Either he will get caught while making secret phone calls, or the short messages he receives will expose him.

At the end of the movie (but not in the novel), Yan gets cell phone-phobia and cannot stand to have one shown to him.

Writer behind the screen

In recent years, Chinese writers are having a happy honeymoon with film and TV series makers.

Liu is just another one on the long list of well-known Chinese writers who lend their names to advertise the movie and TV business.

Before Cell phone, he worked with Feng to adapt his novella, A Ground of Chicken Feathers (Yidi Jimao), into a 10-episode TV series.

Liu seems to be quite satisfied with the collaboration.

"I know nothing about filmmaking, while Xiaogang knows little about writing. So I reckon we make the perfect partnership," he said jokingly.

With a more serious face he praised Feng as "a director with wisdom."

"There is no denying that Feng is a very commercialized director," Liu said. "But I think that is exactly what's so wonderful about him. When it comes to marketing, he is peerless. And I think that's a quality that deserves high respect."

Before its premiere on December 18, the movie had been promoted with a series of eye-catching events.

Liu, who is reportedly a reserved man and used to shun the media, dutifully showed up at most of those occasions with Feng and the cast of the movie.

"As a writer, I'm used to only taking charge of the part of writing, and leaving the promotional work to others." Liu said. "But now they tell me that I must come out and try to sell my book, and I agree. It's good for me, good for the publishing house, and good for literature.

"Some Chinese writers always have the notion that good works don't sell. That's so wrong, so harmful to the development of literature," he said.

His novel has turned out to be a marketing success. So far the first 200,000 copies have almost sold out.

However, it is also true that the number of books sold isn't the only index to evaluate literary success. For while Feng's audience could be satisfied with one night's entertainment and leave the cinema with little afterthought, some of Liu's readers might expect the book can provide something more than a funny story.

Liu seems very confident about his new work. "The movie is just like a cooked dish, with a nice color, taste and smell, while the novel tells you about how the dish is cooked," he said. "You would feel you have had enough once you try the movie once, but the novel would be read long after the film is outdated."

Unpredictability

A critic once observed that Liu is a serious writer capable of unpredictable turns. That remark seems very pertinent.

Born in the rural area of Central China's Henan Province in 1958, Liu joined the army at the age of 15, and spent the next five years in the Gobi desert in Northwest China.

In 1978 he returned home, and was enrolled in the Chinese Literature Department of Peking University. After graduation he went to work for the Beijing-based Farmers' Daily, where he remains to this day.

His youthful experiences can be summed by three works of fiction he wrote in his 20s: Tapu, The Company of the New Recruits (Xinbing Lian) and A Ground of Chicken Feathers.

Tapu is the seat of a country high school where young people gathered to attend classes, with the slim chance of passing the university entrance exam that had just been restored after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

Like Tapu, cruel competition also takes place in The Company of the New Recruits. The simple-minded country lads use all kinds of pitiful tricks and schemes to get the advantage. This work is an incisive commentary on the psychology of Chinese peasants.

A Ground of Chicken Feathers and a group of other works tell about the ordinary people's urban existence.

Liu is known as one of the most representative writers of the group known as the "new realistic writers."

He hates that classification, or any other, for that matter. But the fact is that the trend of "new realistic writing," popular in Chinese literary circles for the recent decade, originates from the writing style invented by him and a couple of other authors.

The style struck people as very strange when it first appeared. All these works seem to be records of everyday life, with no artistic content.

The first sentence of Liu's A Ground of Chicken Feathers is: "A pound of bean curd in the Xiao Lin's goes bad." The first two pages are dedicated to an elaborate account of Xiao Lin's everyday task of purchasing the bean curd, and the trouble that some rotten bean curd is likely to arouse. Xiao Lin's life is a ceaseless, hopeless war fought for trivial daily things such as bean curd, and Liu, with the same patience as his hero, dutifully records the course, with no personal remarks whatsoever.

A strong impression conveyed by Liu's works of fiction, but not often by those of his followers, is that the writer is very serious.

Steely-eyed as he is, he shows no signs of cynicism, or an intention to display sophistication, when elaborating the life philosophy of ordinary people, and the tricks which they use to survive innumerable problems.

"There is no trivial thing as far as individual people is concerned. Every thing is big to the person concerned," he said.

"New realistic writing" is now recruiting an ever larger group of followers, while attracting an increasingly larger share of negative criticism.

An important reason is that, under the pretext of "presenting real life with objective perspective," it gives writers the convenience of not having to give values, and the liberty to concentrate on telling the superficial, dramatic twists and turns of life, which are apt to attract anecdote-thirsty middle-class readers.

Just as the writer Li Rui said: "It is one thing to conceal one's values with effort and skill in order to achieve a more profound reading effect, it is another thing to have no values at all."

During his late 20s Liu abruptly gave up writing short stories and novellas, and invested all his energy in writing novels. After two modestly successful novels, he used eight years, from the age of 30 to 38, to write the voluminous Homeland, Flour, and Flower.

The publication of the novel became a literary event at that time, but mostly due to the unbelievable efforts on the author's part. Many critics admitted they had not tried to read the novel.

"Liu has overestimated the patience of contemporary readers," the critic Xiao Xialin said.

In the novels he also traded the plain, simple prose for an intricate language style.

He described the style as "an eruption of words."

"I think the changes are mostly due to coming of age," Liu said. "I found that I preferred to speak at a much more rapid speed in my 30s."

(China Daily December 29, 2003)