每日英语：The Deeply Odd Lives of Chinese Bureaucrats

Why make up stories when life is so ridiculous?

bureaucrats：官僚，官僚主义者

As a bureaucrat, author Wang Xiaofang says he came across a rogue’s gallery of real-life characters: a woman who had plastic surgery on her backside so she could sleep her way to the top; a flooded apartment filled with cash owned by a top bureaucrat; another official who consulted a feng shui master to build a bridge, only because he felt he was supposed to have a bridge in his life.

rogue：欺诈，流浪，流氓　　　　

At the start of his writing career, Mr. Wang figured out that you can write about Chinese officialdom as long as you make it fiction. He told a crowd at the Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival on Wednesday that he felt “lost” when he entered official circles and saw corruption and power struggles. He didn’t want to be “spiritually crippled,” he said.

officialdom：官场，官僚作风　　　　cripple：残废的，受创，削弱

Fourteen years ago, Mr. Wang’s former boss was sentenced to death for corruption. Ma Xiangdong, the deputy mayor of the northeast city of Shenyang, was convicted of accumulating 31.5 million yuan, or about $5 million, through bribes and embezzlement. Authorties rejected Mr. Ma’s appeal.

embezzlement：侵占，挪用，盗用

On the day after Mr. Ma’s execution in 2001, Mr. Wang saw a picture of his boss in the newspaper, “holding a cigarette in his hand, looking very desperate and confused.” Saddened, Mr. Wang sat down and wrote 10,000 words, the beginning of what would be his first novel, “The Mayor’s Secretary.”

The rules in China are “don’t follow the wrong person, don’t sleep with the wrong person, and don’t say the wrong words,” Mr. Wang said at the literary festival in Beijing.

“I’m a typical example of following the wrong person,” he said.

It doesn’t seem to have hurt him. Today he is the author of a dozen books─all fiction─and the dean of what some call the literature of officialdom─novels that chronicle the inner workings of bureaucratic China. His first book to be translated into English, “The Civil Servant’s Notebook,” has been described as a how-to-guide for the 1.4 million aspiring bureaucrats who take the civil-service exam each year.

chronicle：编年史，记录　　　　

And Mr. Wang, who still resembles a civil servant with his slicked-back jet-black hair and puffy face, had plenty to say. The genre came about, he said, because of “revulsion from the public” about the nepotism, the corruption and the abuses that have arisen from officialdom in China. Even so, the main talent needed here along with experience and knowledge is “the courage to touch upon those sensitive topics.”

puffy：胀大的，喘气的　　　　revulsion：剧变，厌恶　　　　nepotism：裙带关系　　　　

For example, the stories of Wang Lijun and Bo Xilai, the disgraced former officials in Chongqing, were evidence of “tigers” who escaped from their cages. “We’ll see similar cases in the future,” Mr. Wang said. “Absolute power produces absolute corruption.”

disgraced：失宠的，贬谪，羞辱　　　　

Mr. Wang, by contrast, said he sees himself as an “undercover agent sent by God” to experience life in a bureaucracy. “I think in China now there is evil behind glory,” he said.

The stories based in reality are augmented in “The Civil Servant’s Notebook” by even more outlandish stories. The character Yang Hengda, for instance, drinks urine for five years in order to please his boss, who thinks it provides strength. To Mr. Wang, urine is a “metaphor for this cultural garbage” of rank and power in bureaucracy.

outlandish：古怪的，稀奇的，偏僻的　　　　metaphor：隐喻，暗喻　　　　

Mr. Wang said, “We have lost our traditional Chinese culture,” but the Chinese cannot adopt Western culture, either. “All we can do is to stand at this crossroad being confused. I think what all of my novels are trying to say is that the operators in the official circles in China have lost themselves. They don’t have any faith and they have lost their spiritual home.” The writer’s responsibility, he said is “to record our thoughts in reality and in history. Because I quite doubt of the greatness of the writer if he is ignorant of his surroundings.”

Mr. Wang cancelled a scheduled appearance in front of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China in Beijing on Thursday. Contacted for comment, his publisher said he begged out of the event “for personal reasons.” Mr. Wang himself could not be reached.