BOOKS

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

GETTING USED TO DYING

by Zhang Xianliang

Translated by Martha Avery

HarperCollins; 291 pages; $19.95

Beginnings are delicate times, and a novel can rise or fall on the strength of its first sentence. Zhang Xianliang begins his with these astonishing words: "It is no longer clear to me when I began to want to kill him." Zhang then reveals the narrator's intentions to be suicidal rather than murderous. "I" and "he" are identical, split apart only by having to survive -- for want of a better verb -- the unending political upheavals of communist China.

Though ungrammatical, the better verb could well be, as Zhang's title implies, "to die." Each period of chaos, from the antirightist movement of the '50s to the Great Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, required that the Chinese get used to living as though they were dead. Recalling tenures at labor camps, Zhang's schizophrenic main character says, "Death became second nature to him, but he lacked the strength or tenacity to die. It was at times like this that I had to help him."

That is, help him accept that death without the peace of oblivion is China's lot. The manifestations of that horror are myriad, and Zhang, whose 1985 novel Half of Man Is Woman shocked the People's Republic with its explicit -- by Chinese standards -- discussion of sex, details them with bitter black humor. Lined up for execution, the main character sees his condemned colleagues fall dead in a hail of bullets. Only he and a young girl remain alive, spared by blanks and cynical commissars. Nearly dead from starvation, he is hauled into a makeshift morgue and buried in a pile of corpses.

The nightmares are intensified as they are interlaced with stream-of- consciou sness musings on sex, travels to the U.S. and Europe, a taste of freedom. Despite his forays into the liberal West, returning to China is inevitable for Zhang's semiautobiographical character. Out of China for too long, he says, the Chinese often act insane.

An old Taoist adage tells of a sage who dreamed he was a butterfly and then awoke to find himself wondering who was doing the dreaming. Might he not be the butterfly imagining it was a philosopher? Zhang has reproduced that pretty reverie, combining it with Kafka's Metamorphosis and shading it with The Fly. The question is now threefold: Is the narrator a person dreaming he is a cockroach or a cockroach dreaming it is a contemporary citizen of the People's Republic, or is there no difference between them at all?