Author provocateur

[Photo/China Daily]

In The Man with a Knife, a powerful writer who routinely trades his influence for sexual favors ends up castrating himself. A paraplegic who sleeps with his mother kills her in I Love My Mum. He isn't an author that people might want to read for pleasure alone.

Chen, however, argues that the sexual content in his writings reflects other existential issues faced by his characters. "In my works, sex is not so much in the physical act but it represents the depths of the human psyche."

Harman, who translated his works, adds: "In Chen, the sex is never gratuitous; it's always inextricably linked to the emotions the protagonists are feeling."

In the story Kidney Tonic, for instance, a salesman who peddles re-vitalizing supplements, and who begins spying on his neighbor and his wife－watching them in the act－might be imagining the whole thing.

In obsessing over his neighbors' sex lives, he loses track of his own and gets irrevocably entangled in theirs. In the end his identity is completely suffused with that of the masturbating ailing man next door and he is none the wiser.

Chen's interest is mainly in such complicated aspects of life, viewed through the prism of the primal impulses in human beings. What Chen's characters do in bed is who they are in essence－stripped naked and with zero defense－and the deep truths that emerge as a result are not necessarily pleasant.

"The sex in my works is painful, abnormal and even violent, as indeed human life is," says the writer. "Sex is not about entertaining readers but exposing the shady areas of human life."

Chen's work is in the antipode of Fifty Shades of Grey－the international best-seller which put a halo around the sexual subjugation of women by men, glorifying spanking as if it were a coveted pleasure.

He writes about those deep recesses of the human mind that are irredeemably eclipsed. No reader－certainly not those with a predilection for mummy porn－would want to be in the shoes of his deeply-troubled characters, who keep inflicting pain on each other while destroying themselves in the process.

Some readers are made uneasy by Chen's books because of society's largely moralistic attitude toward sex.