The first thing I read in a book is its title. The second is its table of contents. This book is unusual in both respects, and both are worth discussing before anything else.
Let us begin with the title, A Salty Joke. Liu Zhenyun’s own explanation is that many jokes in this world are destined to run their course through tears. Tears are salty, and so the joke becomes salty too. The jokes he means are not the ones people play on one another, but the ones life plays on every one of us. When one person plays a joke on another, there is intention behind it; when life plays one on us, we are merely its recipients. The first kind can be controlled, the second cannot. One may hurt, but the other cuts far deeper. If someone plays a joke on you, you can fall out with them and refuse to speak to them again. But when life plays a joke on you, you cannot fall out with life. To refuse life is to stop living. Some people in the novel do fall out with life and take their own lives, but that is not the right answer. In the end, the joke must be swallowed and never mentioned again. The tears run through the mouth and are swallowed with it. Tears are salty; mixed with the joke, they make a salty joke.
A Salty Joke has been out for a while, though not for very long. It is Liu Zhenyun’s newest novel. The first of his books I read was One Word Is Worth Ten Thousand Words. Strictly speaking, though, the first book of his I ever encountered was A Ground Covered with Chicken Feathers. I did not encounter it by reading it, but through everyday conversation: in Chinese, “a ground covered with chicken feathers” has become a common way to describe a scene of uncontrollable chaos. Many of Liu Zhenyun’s titles have entered the language as familiar idioms. Perhaps before long, “a salty joke” will do the same.
That is the title. Now for the table of contents. Its structure is fascinating: the book is divided between the “main text” and “digressions.” The main text occupies only a handful of pages, while the digressions make up nearly the entire book. I think Liu Zhenyun means to tell us that the small events and unremarkable people we barely notice are often the ones that exert the greatest influence on our lives. Every person Du Taibai meets and everything that happens to him contributes to the man he becomes—even Archimedes, the little mouse that can do arithmetic.
Before turning to the story itself, I want to say a little about the connections between A Salty Joke and Liu Zhenyun’s earlier work. The phrases “one word is worth ten thousand words” and “a ground covered with chicken feathers” both appear in this novel. So does the question of whether two people can truly talk to one another. The two people Du Taibai can talk to most freely are not members of his own family, but his former daughter-in-law Chunya and Monroe, whom he meets at a massage parlor. That is precisely the theme of One Word Is Worth Ten Thousand Words.
The Jokes Life Plays on Du Taibai
Life’s first joke on Du Taibai is to give him a brutal father. Du grows up under the shadow of violence, shaped in countless ways by everything his father says and does. Life then plays a succession of jokes on him: illness ruins his performance on the college entrance examination; a drunken fight costs him his teaching career; the “groping” incident costs him his work as a master of ceremonies at weddings and funerals…. But in the end, what has Du Taibai actually done wrong? I do not think he has done anything wrong at all. On the contrary, I think he is a deeply kind man. He grows up in the shadow of violence, yet never inflicts violence on his own children—not when his eldest, Paris, rushes into a marriage and just as quickly out of it before running away with a married person much older than himself, nor when his second child, New York, enters a same-sex relationship. Another moment that left a particularly strong impression on me is the wedding Du agrees to host for one of his former students. He does not have time to take the job, but somehow makes time anyway. Then an accident at that very wedding costs him his career as an emcee. This is what people mean when they say the good are easy to bully.
There are more examples of Du Taibai’s goodness than one can count—and just as many examples of life’s cruelty toward him.
Tell me: are honest people simply meant to be bullied?
When life plays a joke on us, how are we supposed to answer?
One choice is to fight life head-on. Life refuses to let you have something, so you insist on having it. One person can fight another, but no one can fight life itself: life has ten thousand ways to put a person in his place. Fight life, and sooner or later you will lose.
Another choice is to go mad in front of life. Life is not some force apart from us; life is made up of people. Rather than say life drives Du Taibai mad, it would be more accurate to say that the ordinary people who collectively make up his life drive him to the brink of madness. Du discovers that even when he is right, life can turn him into the one who is wrong; other people can be wrong, and life will still declare them right. Take Lao Kuai, who turns Du Taibai’s “groping” incident into a song. The incident is a misunderstanding, so Lao Kuai is fabricating the story. But what happens? The song becomes a hit, Du Taibai’s reputation is destroyed, no one wants anything to do with him, and even his girlfriend leaves him for someone else. Lao Kuai, meanwhile, enjoys booming business on the strength of the song. That is life: the more seriously you take it, the more it treats you as a joke. In the end, Du Taibai loses his mind. He tells everyone he meets about all the things that have happened to him. He sits in one place and thinks from morning until night. It is as though life will let you catch your breath only when you make a spectacle of your madness, or show everyone that you are prepared to take them down with you.
A third choice is to play dead in front of life. Chunya once tells Du Taibai that when winter comes, many small animals and plants freeze to death. But ants and insects burrow underground; the seeds of grasses burrow underground too; wheat lies above the earth and plays dead. When spring arrives, the ants and insects emerge, the grasses grow again, and the wheat comes back to life. Chunya has lived through winters of her own. Thinking this way is how she survived them. When winter comes, there is only one thing to do: play dead. Play dead, and you will not die. Every life has many winters, no matter how successful a person may be. In winter, we should play dead like wheat. But what does that mean? How does one do it? The book does not offer much explanation. To me, playing dead means refusing to react to the consequences life has imposed on you. It also means trying to read something bad as something good. Everything has more than one face, and in this world there are no facts, only perspectives. Show a good thing to a pessimist and it becomes bad; show a bad thing to an optimist and it becomes good. Liu Zhenyun is right: give time a little time. Many unhappy experiences from childhood become stories we can laugh off once we are grown. By the same logic, the unhappiness of the present may become something we laugh off when we are older. A laugh that comes many years later is no longer salty. It may even be sweet.
Du Taibai’s fate is revealed by implication in “Main Text II,” the final section of the novel. I am especially satisfied with the ending. Life never treated Du Taibai seriously, but in the end, Du Taibai treated life with the utmost seriousness.
When life plays a joke on us, we should not weep. We should learn to accept it, perhaps even to meet it with a smile—to make responsible choices in an imperfect world.
Du’s seriousness appears in his desire to write an essay about leaving the world before he dies, then read it to two friends from the summit of Mount Tai. He cannot understand why he came into this world, but he has thought seriously about why he might leave it. His seriousness appears again when he finally sees his way through: instead of taking his own life, he moves to a new city and begins a new career. Du Taibai learns to say goodbye to the person he used to be, and that often requires a great deal of courage.
Reflections
Life itself is absurd. If the world were reasonable—if, for instance, good people were always rewarded—then whenever I did something good, I would necessarily receive something good in return. Yet the opposite is often true. Good people are not always rewarded, and bad people are not always punished. But that cannot become an excuse to abandon ourselves or stop striving to be better. Even in an imperfect world, we should live as good people and try to approach the ideal. We should treat others with kindness and understanding. If our goodness cannot uproot evil, we still must not join it. We must hold on to the good within us. The more evil the world becomes, the more worth defending justice becomes.
We live in the information age, and lies are invariably more compelling than the truth and easier to spread. While truth is still putting on its shoes, a lie has already traveled around the world on the internet. When something like this happens to us, we should know how to use the law to protect ourselves. On the internet, saying less is not necessarily a bad thing. Learning to distinguish truth from falsehood—and refusing to take part in spreading lies—is the first duty of every internet user.
Finally, let us return to life itself. Everyone passes through low points. When we reach one, we must learn to play dead: react less and look at the problem from another angle. Low points often make a person, because they teach us so much and give us the chance to be transformed. Moments of glory can sometimes inflate a person’s ego and eventually destroy him. But life is made up neither of low points alone nor of high points alone. It is a succession of good and bad. If we can keep from swelling with pride when things are good and keep from giving up when they are bad—if we can smooth life’s rises and falls as much as possible—we may know a little less pain and a little more peace.
Every person in this world is like a character in the novel, hurrying down a road without knowing where it leads. Most people cheer us forward; few remind us to rest before we set out again. It is not that life refuses us a chance to breathe. We simply do not know how to play dead. When it is time to lie low, lie low. Recover your strength, then begin again. To read A Salty Joke is to stop and catch your breath so that you can go on facing life. No one in this world has it easy. Every one of you has worked hard.
Life plays a joke on me, and I cry at its cruelty. Slowly, I begin to laugh instead—at its powerlessness.
Life is this absurd, and I am still alive and well. If life is not powerless, then who is?
A Final Note
I finished A Salty Joke on the day I set out for Hohhot to see Liu Zhenyun, and I wrote this reflection during the journey. Of course I will be happy if I get to meet him. But if I do not, I suppose that will simply be another joke life has played on me. Will life laugh at my folly, or will I laugh at life’s powerlessness? Zhengyang, tomorrow’s response will decide.
Zhengyang Yao
August 12, 2026, aboard the high-speed train from Beijing to Hohhot