imaginative narratives into an adult impetus toward social action on
behalf of our shared and inhabited environment:
Over the past several years most cases involving pollution of our
environment seem to have taken the form of a behind-the-scenes fairy
tale that never reaches a conclusion. It always goes something like this:...
Once upon a time there was a happy place. Then one day an ogre
suddenly appeared and began to ceaselessly torment the people who
lived in the happy place. The people suffered terribly, and tried every
known means to rid themselves of this ogre, but to no avail. Finally they
had to ask the local magistrate to intercede on their behalf. Who could
have guessed that a magistrate would be terrified of such things, not
daring to take any action for fear of provoking the ogre?!...
An ending without ending. The past is precisely a fairy tale of this
kind, leaving so many of these environmental degradation issues
hanging, suspended like the toxic emissions from the Sanhuang pesti-
cide factory these dozen odd years. However, this year witnessed a
turning point when the “Sanhuang” district residents interceded on
their own behalf, and are now trying to rewrite this preposterous fairy
tale. Even if their attempts fail, they plan to expose the facts for
everyone in the country to see....
To put it another way, who has the right to subject local residents to
such prolonged tribulation? This pesticide factory, this ogre, how does
it dare so brazenly flout the law? Where is the institution responsible for
banning such flagrant acts of pollution?....
We don’t ever again want to come across another of these tales
without endings; we’ve already had too many of them, far too many.
(Liu 1992a: 66; 67–68)
This real-life story of grass-roots collective action against a major
industrial polluter, whether immediately successful or not, is shown to
have achieved an overlooked success: the intervention in shared,
collective social narrativesthat we tell about the struggle of individu-
als and local communities against oppressive industrial monsters of
mythical proportions. Even when we fail to concretely reform one cog
in the machine of industrial development, we have nonetheless per-
manently “rewritten” the “preposterous” once-monolithic narrative
that seemed to have consigned all such tales to a stock doomed
dénouement. We need not capitulate to the perceived inevitability of
events, whether allegorically in fairy tales or in public narratives of
social justice. Liu imaginatively forges the link between our childhood
indoctrination into the foregone narrative conclusions of fairy tales
and our adult numbing to equally “preposterous” social injustices,
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 95