Chong Yang

Ryan Bigge
Special to the Star

“Me fail English? That’s unpossible!” – Ralph Wiggum, The Simpsons

Bridezilla. Man-crush. Affluenza. Vajayjay. Frankenfood. Crackberry. There are plenty of vogue words that jockey for position on Wordspy.com, the lexical equivalent of the Billboard Top 50.

Meanwhile, each week in Ideas, the Sunday Star publishes “The week’s best invented words,” releasing a pack of fresh neologisms into the ether.

While most new words have a half-life of weeks, some survive infancy, manage to become part of the lexicon proper, and are eventually recognized by spell-check.

Through overuse, some new words, such as the infamous metrosexual, even earn the ignominy of appearing on Matt Groening’s annual list of Forbidden Words, published in his comic strip Life in Hell. (Past winners include tofurkey, blogosphere, monetize, synergy and phat.)

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the birth and death of fad lingo, a linguistic cycle akin to hula hoops or crocs. But a vogue prefix? Now that’s a little more un-usual.

The un-trend first went mainstream in 2002 with Ikea’s Unböring Manifesto, and the last few years have given us unmortgages, unconsumption, undesign – even unwords. And that’s only the start.

Steven Hall’s 2007 novel, The Raw Shark Texts, includes something called un-space, described as “the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates boarded-up houses” – and on and on, concluding with, “the pockets of no-name-places under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings.”

Meanwhile, unschooling is experiencing a resurgence, along with ungifting and unconferences.

And last July, the Sunday Star published “The Untourist Guide” to Toronto.

I could keep unspooling examples such as these for many more paragraphs, but that would be unwise and undoubtedly uninteresting. I’ll conclude my list of examples with a mention of the ultimate un-titled un-book, UN, Dennis Lee’s 2003 collection of avant-garde poetry.

Why has un- become the prefix of the moment? Perhaps because we live in an undo culture, thanks to computer software that allows us to retrace our steps by hitting CRTL-Z. Our ability to reverse our mistakes with impunity is not only a digital convenience, it’s a metaphor for our ideal relationship with the world at large.

Or perhaps, in our continuing efforts to distinguish ourselves from the herd, we seek out new, fresh experiences that require a radical inversion of traditional approaches and outcomes. We’ve become jaded seen-it-alls, tired of the predictable, always seeking out the opposite, be it undesign or untourism. Thus, the un- prefix has become shorthand for an idiosyncratic, thinking-outside-the-unbox approach.

Socio-cultural guesswork aside, it is clear that un- bends the eye and the ear in an effective manner, thus calling attention to itself. At the very least, its frequency of use justifies this unarticle.

Our obsession with the opposite, at least in an advertising context, can be traced back to 7UP, which, starting in the late 1960s, advertised its effervescent little bottle with the slogan “There’s no cola like The Uncola.”

With television and print ads that played with the prefix (the un and only; un in a million), Uncola was a clever campaign. But for Ben Yagoda, professor of journalism at the University of Delaware and author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, using un- today is, well, a little unoriginal. Reached via email, Yagoda argued that Uncola “was clever at the time, but `the unmortgage’ 30 years later is not.”

They might roll off our tongues somewhat awkwardly, but words such as ungifting (giving donations instead of presents at Christmas) or unconference (a gathering at which participants determine the content of sessions) are grammatically kosher for word-nerd Yagoda.

At their worst, he suggests, such unwords “come off as kind of self-consciously cute” similar to the use of the suffix “age” on TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (e.g. slayage, sparkage, kissage).

Unlike a particular word, there appears to be less danger of wearing out un-, given its promiscuity. Caution, of course, must still be exercised, lest the double negative make its appearance.

In the pilot episode of Pushing Daisies, protagonist Ned admonishes his new business partner, Emerson Cod, for using the words zombie and undead. “Nobody wants to be un-anything,” Ned says, “Why begin a statement with a negative? It’s like saying I don’t disagree. Just say you agree.”

His witty banter would please the late George Orwell, who famously waged war against the double negative in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.”

As Orwell wrote, in a footnote, “One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”

And so, this article has reached its unbeginning.

Now exiled in London, a banned Chinese author who lived though the exhilaration and horror of Tiananmen Square revisits its meaning.

May 25, 2008
Geoff Pevere

The Book:

Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian
translated by Flora Drew
Knopf Canada,
592 pages, $34

On June 4, 1989, Dai Wei, the narrator of Ma Jian’s epic historical novel Beijing Coma, takes a bullet in the head while attempting to flee the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Plunged into a decade-long coma by the wound, the former student activist, a key pro-democracy player in the demonstrations that so riveted real-world attention, is buffeted by memories – of his life, his loves, his political experiences and, most tragically, the terminal wound afflicting his country.

“I am still living, in what Buddhists refer to as the stinking skin-bag of the human body,” Dai Wei ruminates after nearly a decade of semi-oblivion.

As the son of musicians persecuted as “rightists” during the Cultural Revolution – among other atrocities, his long-imprisoned father remembers seeing near-starved political inmates mutilate and eat the bodies of the freshly-executed – Dai Wei represents the latest generational turnover of doomed dissidence. But political activism, like human flesh, has a way of forgetting pain and regenerating itself, especially when stoned on its own sense of invincibility.

This is the book’s most dramatically sustained and audacious metaphor. The trauma inflicted on Dai Wei’s body is inextricable from that imposed on the nation. As the nation powers into the global economy, even Dai Wei’s body becomes a commodity. At first his urine is sold as a kind of magic healing tonic, then his cash-strapped mother arranges for the removal and sale of his kidney.

In the same way that Dai Wei is left to lie in catatonic semi-consciousness as his memories swirl around the drain of cognitive decline, so the events at Tiananmen Square – anywhere from 300 deaths (state figures) to 3,000 (student calculations) – have disappeared into a vortex of revisionist cleansing.

Already notorious for writing novels banned in his homeland due to their criticism of China’s policies on human rights and Tibet, the now London-based Ma Jian here launches his most sustained and intricate indictment of his former country.

Ma Jian was himself present at Tiananmen in the weeks of May leading up to the state’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators – previously in self-exile for two years, he returned to China during the brief “Beijing Spring”. As novelist, he painstakingly recreates the cycle of idealism, arrogance, confusion and despair that characterized the experience of demonstrators on the ground in the square.

Initially mobilized into action by the death of the reformist former Secretary General Hu Yaobang in April 1989, the largely university-based protesters quickly find themselves dissembling into competing factions and squabbling petty ideologues.

Although prone to sometimes numbingly pedantic debates over the most politically correct protocol, Ma Jian’s young would-be revolutionaries are also painfully human. Some are characterized by their body odour and childish resentment, others by their stubborn idealism and romantic allure. (As much as he reflects on the events leading up to the tragedy, Dai Wei fixates on sex, love and the smell of a former lover’s foot.) Arguing over the protocol of press conferences and wording of banners, buffeted by conflicting rumours of state response, the demonstrators leave themselves ripe for slaughter long before the rumble of tanks is heard at the perimeter gates.

As witness to, participant in, and ultimate casualty of the events, the flesh-imprisoned Dai Wei is especially vulnerable to torturous musings over what went wrong:

“A light so bright it’s almost black hovers above my bed,” he observes. “If I’m to die now, I won’t feel many regrets. I’ve been lying here for ten years. I have retrieved every detail of my life. There is nothing left for me to remember. If I’m to die now, I won’t feel many regrets, only grief and guilt about the students who died before me.”

As horrifying as the author’s rendering of the ultimate crackdown is – replete with harrowingly vivid descriptions of bodies crushed by tanks and ripped open by exploding bullets – the infamous slaughter isn’t itself the primary object of critical regard in Beijing Coma. Ma Jian focuses more on the collapse that precedes the crush. If anything, this is what marks the novel as both daring and controversial.

It’s one thing to damn the Chinese government for doing what it had already proven itself only too willing and able to do in the past. It’s quite another to suggest that the demonstrators were nearly as complicit in their own slaughter as those who gave the order to shoot.

Set mostly in 1999, two years after the “handover” of Hong Kong and in the thick of the country’s preparation for an Olympic bid – which leads directly to the demolition of the building where Dai Wei lies – Beijing Coma manages to shine a harsh light of history even through the smudged prism of the present. While occasionally choked by a dizzying overabundance of incident, character and detail, especially of the politically windy variety, the book still yanks atrocity out of the shadows and holds human arrogance and folly to account.

By the end of Beijing Coma, Dai Wei has learned that many of his former Tiananmen comrades have become successful 21st century Chinese capitalists. Like their country, they’re marching forward, not letting history get in the way of progress.

Author and broadcaster Geoff Pevere is The Star’s book columnist. He appears weekly.