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The Trials of a Chinese Man in China: A New Translation
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 5 2025
Pages: 236
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.59 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Wealth without pleasure. Life without meaning. And a philosopher who takes contracts very literally.
Kin-Fo has everything-a massive fortune, a beautiful fiancée, every luxury 19th-century Shanghai can provide. Yet he feels nothing. No joy, no sorrow, no desire, no fear. Material abundance has produced only profound boredom, an ennui so complete that existence itself seems pointless.
When news arrives (false, it will turn out) that his fortune is lost, Kin-Fo sees opportunity. He has recently taken out a large life insurance policy naming his beloved Lé-ou as beneficiary. If he dies within the policy's terms, she will be provided for. So he contracts with Wang, his philosopher friend, to assassinate him sometime within the next few weeks-reasoning that at least the uncertainty will make him feel alive through fear of death.
Wang agrees. A contract is a contract, and a philosopher honors his commitments.
Then Kin-Fo discovers the bankruptcy was false. His fortune is intact. He has needlessly arranged his own murder. When he desperately seeks Wang to cancel the death sentence, his philosopher friend has vanished into China's vastness.
What follows is a frantic chase across Chinese geography-from Shanghai to Canton, up the Yang-Tze River, through cities and landscapes-as Kin-Fo tries to find Wang before the philosopher fulfills his lethal contract. Complicating matters: Lé-ou insists on joining him, determined to share his danger. Two insurance agents desperately protect him (his death would cost their company a fortune). And various adventures, misunderstandings, and comic complications arise from a situation that began as existential crisis and has transformed into literal fight for survival.
Jules Verne's 1879 comedy explores wealth, happiness, and what gives life meaning through an absurd premise that generates both philosophical insight and narrative momentum. Kin-Fo discovers that he values life only when threatened with losing it, that security eliminates the intensity that makes existence feel meaningful, that material abundance cannot substitute for genuine purpose.
Yet modern readers must navigate the novel's orientalist representation of Chinese culture-Verne never visited China, based his descriptions on secondhand sources and imagination, and portrayed Chinese society through European assumptions about Eastern exoticism and inscrutability. His China serves primarily as exotic backdrop for what is essentially European philosophical comedy, constructed according to Western stereotypes rather than observed reality.
Within these limitations, the novel achieves moments of genuine insight about human psychology, satirizes modern institutions like insurance that transform moral questions into economic calculations, and demonstrates Verne's narrative efficiency and comic touch. It's a lesser work than his science fiction masterpieces, but it reveals his versatility and his interest in exploring ideas about meaning and contentment through adventure narrative.
From the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea-a philosophical comedy about a man who hires his own assassin, then desperately wants to live.
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