THE
BIG
RED
BOOK
OF MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE
WRITINGS FROM THE MAINLAND IN THE
LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY
EDITED BY YUNTE HUANG
Dedicated to my father
who taught me
the power and perils of Chinese literature
Contents
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Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: 1911 – 1949
Introduction to the Republican Era
LU XUN
Preface to Call to Arms
A Madman’s Diary
HU SHIH
The Butterflies
Dream and Poetry
One Smile
To the Tune of Shengzhazi
GUO MORUO
The Streets of Heaven
The Sky Dog
The Nirvana of the Feng and Huang: Prelude
LIU BANNONG
How Can I Not Miss Her
Paper Thin
XU DISHAN
The Peanut
I Think
BING XIN
A Maze of Stars (selections)
Spring Water (selections)
LI JINFA
The Abandoned Woman
The Expression of Time
YU DAFU
Malady of Spring Nights
HE HAIMING
For the Love of Her Feet
ZHU ZIQING
The Moonlit Lotus Pond
XU ZHIMO
Second Farewell to Cambridge
By Chance
WEN YIDUO
The Dead Water
Perhaps (A Dirge)
Confession
DING LING
Miss Sophia’s Diary (excerpt)
MAO DUN
Rainbow (excerpt)
BA JIN
Family (excerpts)
DAI WANGSHU
Rainy Alley
I Think
SHEN CONGWEN
Border Town (excerpts)
ZHOU ZUOREN
Reading in the Lavatory
LIN YUTANG
My Country and My People (excerpt)
LAO SHE
Rickshaw (excerpts)
BIAN ZHILIN
Evening
Dream of the Old Town
Fragment
Loneliness
XIAO HONG
Tales of Hulan River (excerpt)
PART TWO: 1949 – 1976
Introduction to the Revolutionary Era
MAO ZEDONG
Changsha
Mount Liupan
Snow
Quotations from Chairman Mao (excerpts)
AI QING
Wheelbarrow
Dayanhe—My Wet Nurse
On a Chilean Cigarette Package
WANG MENG
The Young Man Who Has Just Arrived at the Organization
Department (excerpts)
ZHAO SHULI
The Unglovable Hands
ANONYMOUS
The Red Lantern: A Revolutionary Peking Opera in Eleven Acts (excerpt)
PART THREE: 1976 – Present
Introduction to the Post-Mao Era
BEI DAO
The Answer
Let’s Go
Notes from the City of the Sun
The Red Sailboat
City Gate Open Up (excerpt)
GU CHENG
A Generation
Nameless Flowers
Farewell, Cemetery
I’m a Willful Child
MO YAN
Red Sorghum (excerpts)
SHU TING
To an Oak
A Roadside Encounter
Assembly Line
Where the Soul Dwells
LIU SUOLA
In Search of the King of Singers (excerpts)
YANG LIAN
Norlang
Burial Ground
The Book of Exile
Masks and Crocodile (selections)
CAN XUE
Hut on the Mountain
WANG ANYI
Love in a Small Town (excerpt)
ZHAI YONGMING
Premonition
Hypnosis
The Language of the ’50s
HAI ZI
Your Hands
Facing the Ocean, Spring Warms Flowers Open
Spring, Ten Hai Zis
MA YUAN
Thirteen Ways to Fold a Paper Hawk
CHE QIANZI
The Night in the End
Sign: Inspired by a Letter
A Chinese Character Comic Strip
An Antique Style Door Screen
YU JIAN
File O
CHI ZIJIAN
Night Comes to Calabash Street
YU HUA
On the Road at Eighteen
SU TONG
Raise the Red Lantern (excerpt)
ZHANG ZAO
A Starry Moment
Into the Mirror
Elegy
XI CHUAN
On the Other Side of the River
Blackout
Far Away
YU XINQIAO
If I Have to Die
Epitaph
The Dead Are Mourning the Living
Self-Introduction
GAO XINGJIAN
Soul Mountain (excerpts)
CUI JIAN
Nothing to My Name
Permissions
Introduction
This book is a search for the soul of modern China.
As such, it is less an anthology, or à la carte sampling, than a story that, carrying the historical weight of a nation in its most tumultuous century, seeks a coherence lying on the page and beyond.
Twentieth century China saw two apocalyptic events that defined its character and destiny. In 1912, the overthrow of Qing Dynasty shattered the shackles of two thousand years of monarchical rule and ushered in a modern nation. In 1949, the founding of the People’s Republic took the country on a long march toward a utopian, Communist future that never materialized, a perilous path some may say it is still treading on today, at least in name if not in reality. Around these two watershed events were other, often bloody, episodes: the Boxer Rebellion, the Republican era’s reign of terror, the Japanese invasion, a civil war, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre. Any soul that has plumbed the depths of these horrors must be at pains to find a voice to speak the unspeakable.
Beginning with Lu Xun’s Call to Arms, Chinese writers have tried, often at the cost of their lives, to come to terms with a world gone awry, a culture in crisis, and a nation on the brink of annihilation. The Opium Wars and clash with Western imperial powers and repeated defeats and internal rebellions since the nineteenth century plunged many Chinese into doubt about the viability of their once-proud civilization. Lu Xun likened the Middle Kingdom to a sepulchral “iron house” in which sound sleepers will never wake up. Wen Yiduo, gunned down by secret agents of the Kuomintang in 1946, compared China to “a ditch of hopelessly dead water,” where “no clear breeze can raise half a ripple” on its sordid surface.
Yet, the Republican era (1911–49) was also a time of radical transformations in literature. The end of monarchy gave the Chinese literati an opportunity to absorb influences from the West and imagine a brave new world. The May Fourth Movement, a student-
led protest that began in Peking in May 1919, calling for democracy and science, had a lasting impact on the Chinese mind. Transitioning from wenyan (the archaic, classical form of Chinese) to baihua (the vernacular of common speech), Chinese literature was reborn. Novels by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Ding Ling, and Shen Congwen, poetry by Dai Wangshu, Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, and Li Jinfa, and essays by Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, and Zhu Ziqing, all combined to create a kaleidoscopic vista of the Chinese literary imagination. The sense of newness ran so deep, and occasionally wild, that some even proposed a face-lift for the ideographic ancient language, replacing it with an alphabetic system as the medium for writing.
This golden age of modern Chinese literature came to an abrupt end when communism took over the country in 1949. Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman and a poet, exerted an ironclad control over literary expression, dictating that literature serve politics. Works produced in this period of totalitarian rule, up to Mao’s death in 1976, may rightly be regarded as propaganda, or at best formulaic potboilers that rarely deviate from party lines. Read through the prisms of the West, which regards individual free expression as the golden rule for artistic production, revolutionary literature may indeed lack aesthetic value. While this is hardly the place to dispute the validity of aesthetic principles, it is worth noting, however, that the belief in literature as an expression of a free individual is as ideologically suspect as the revolutionary mot justes in Mao’s Little Red Book. Communism may have done much damage to literature, but at least it takes art seriously, so seriously that it wants to control all forms of artistic expression, weeding out the “one hundred flowers” that dare to blossom.
Selections from the so-called revolutionary literature in this book, therefore, must be read with an open mind. The works by Ai Qing, Zhao Shuli, Wang Meng, and others, are not relics from a bygone period, but a record of creative souls struggling, negotiating, and coping with a national dream gone bad. They remind me of my father’s red notebook. When I was growing up in the waning days of Mao’s China, my father once showed me a notebook he had kept since he was young. It had a red plastic cover, making it look like Mao’s Little Red Book. Inside he had pasted many clippings, all poems and essays he had published under various pseudonyms in newspapers and magazines. His grandfather (my great-grandfather) was a landlord, from an “exploitive and parasitic class,” a factor which doomed my father’s future. Going to college, a privilege reserved only for working-class children, was a dream beyond his reach, and he became instead a “barefoot doctor,” carrying a medicine kit, roaming the countryside to cure sick peasants. A literary aficionado, he did not stop writing, a secret he had long kept from everyone, including his family. I found the notebook by accident one day when I, a curious kid, was rummaging through his things. Shocked a little, he got me to promise never to tell anyone, and then he let me read a few short poems. From what I can remember, those tofu-sized poems were mostly about the virtues of the proletarian revolution, joys of agricultural harvesting, and other topics common to Communist literature. Despite the formulaic quality of the writing, even my prepubescent eye could see that my father’s love for literature and desire for creativity were as real as the heartbeats pulsing under his bare skin.
The end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the ensuing economic reform led to an era of unprecedented openness. After decades of writing under the threat of the Communist Sword of Damocles, Chinese writers finally enjoyed some freedom of expression. Censorship persisted, but it was no match for the sudden burst of creativity, as if a dam had cracked open. The generation born under the red flag and coming of age during the Cultural Revolution led the way. From Bei Dao’s bold proclamation, “I do not believe,” to Gu Cheng’s ironic lines, “the black night gave me black eyes / still I use them to seek the light,” the Misty School of poetry broke the ice that had long frozen literary imagination. Novels by Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Can Xue, and others explored topics such as sex, love, and bestiality, which had long been taboos. Literature no longer had to function only in the service of politics. The Chinese soul, long tortured and deeply scarred, finally seemed to be able to roam freely. As the peripatetic narrator in Gao Xingjian’s Nobel-Prize-winning novel Soul Mountain puts it, “I would rather drift here and there without leaving traces.”
Freedom, however, was short-lived. The rumbling tanks and roaring gunfire at Tiananmen Square in the wee hours of June 4, 1989, pulled the curtain on a decade of cultural fever and spiritual euphoria. In those dark days after the massacre, Beijing broiled in the stifling heat of a deadly summer. The ancient capital city appeared to be plagued by something unknown, as if a mysterious disease, lying dormant for thousands of years, suddenly came alive and turned viral, attacking the city mercilessly. Spilled innocent blood might have been washed off the streets, but the stink of death lingered on in the air.
I was still a college sophomore. Hai Zi, a young poet and fellow student at Peking University, had just committed suicide earlier that year. He had done so by lying on the railroad tracks near the crown jewel of our national pride, the Great Wall, as if naked flesh could stop the train of what Lu Xun’s madman once called “four thousand years of cannibalistic history.” We held a candlelight vigil for Hai Zi one night, accompanied by poetry readings and watched by an unknown number of undercover cops. After the event, I took a walk by the campus lake. A pale moon hung in the night sky. Reflected in the inky water, the moon looked like a period artificially placed there, failing to anchor a sentence that had no meaning. Someone was singing and playing guitar on the other side of the lake. The words of the popular song “The Orphan of Asia” by Luo Dayou drifted waywardly, like broken radio signals, in the muggy night air: “The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind / Red mud on his yellow face . . .” At that moment, only a few months before the event of Tiananmen Square, I already felt all hope had indeed been lost, the soul of China sinking like the paper-thin moon to the muddy bottom of the lake.
And yet, two decades later, China rises again, as a world superpower flexing its economic, military, and political prowess everywhere. In his monumental search for the zeitgeist of modern China, Jonathan Spence writes, “The swings of its political life, the switches in its cultural moods, the lurches in its economy . . . all combine to keep us in a state of bewilderment as to China’s real nature.” Looking back at the undulations of the Chinese experience in the twentieth century, remembering the red plastic cover of my father’s secret notebook, and thinking about that ominous pale moon I once saw in one dark night in Chinese history, I often wonder: How did the Chinese soul endure these tortures and horrors? How did China rise from that lifeless mirage flickering at the bottom of dead water?
That is the story this book tells.
CHRONOLOGY
1912
Abdication of Emperor Puyi, end of Qing monarchy
1919
May Fourth Movement
1921
Founding of the Chinese Communist Party
1927
Chiang Kai-shek consolidates power, reign of “White Terror”
1931
Japan occupies Manchuria
1934–35
The Long March led by Mao Zedong
1937–45
Sino-Japanese War
1945
Japan surrenders, beginning of the civil war
1949
Founding of the People’s Republic of China
Introduction to the Republican Era
For millennia China had regarded itself as the center of the universe, a vast land of unimaginable wealth and a most advanced civilization. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, when British gunboats arrived in the China seas, the self-labeled “Middle Kingdom” experienced a rude awakening. The ensuing clash with the West led to a dramatic shift in the Chinese mind, a change of self-consciousness aptly described by Joseph R. Levenson as “the contraction of China from a world to a nation in the world.” Not just any nation, but one that was de
feated and humiliated time and again by the Western powers that were carving up the country like a juicy melon through unfair treaties involving territorial concessions. Internal strife—regional and nationwide rebellions—also added to the pressure on the Manchu regime teetering on the verge of collapsing. Barely able to maintain its imperial façade, the Middle Kingdom had by the late nineteenth century acquired a new epithet, the “Sick Man of East Asia.”
Modern Chinese literature was born in this crucible of national crisis. In 1912, Qing Dynasty was toppled, ending monarchism in China. In 1919, the May Fourth Movement began with students marching through the streets of Peking, demanding change. The zeitgeist of this transitional period may best be captured by Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (1923), with its dark metaphor for China (“an iron house”) and the madman’s desperate plea (“Save the children”). Lu Xun’s call was echoed, among others, by Guo Moruo’s Goddesses (1921), in which the poet imagines the rebirth of China like a phoenix out of the ashes. Interestingly, as leaders of the New Culture Movement, both Lu and Guo began as students of medicine and then realized that it was more important to save the soul than the body of the “Sick Man of East Asia.” This perceived centrality of literature to the life of a nation speaks to a dilemma that was faced, though often unacknowledged, by modern Chinese writers: in their bold attempts to dismantle traditional literature and culture, they unwittingly inherited the Confucian belief in the ties between writing and governance, the assumption that literature is essential to morality, social life, and politics. Shelley’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” did not fall on deaf ears when translated for China, where for centuries the ability to write well was considered the prerequisite for, if not simply equivalent to, the ability to govern or legislate. Twentieth century Chinese writers would pay dearly, and occasionally get paid handsomely, for this belief in the power of literature. But we are ahead of our story.
Lu and Guo were also representative in another respect: they both studied abroad, in Japan. The repeated defeats suffered by China at the hands of foreign powers—in two Opium Wars with Britain, the 1894 war with Japan, the siege of Peking by the Eight-Nation Alliance (including the United States) in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, to name just a few—made the Chinese realize that traditional Chinese culture had become a roadblock to progress and that they needed to learn from the powerful nations that had just bullied them. The experience of study abroad, predominantly in Europe, the United States, and Japan, produced a generation of writers who transformed modern Chinese literature: Hu Shih, Liu Bannong, Wen Yiduo, Xu Dishan, Ba Jin, Yu Dafu, Xu Zhimo, Bing Xin, Dai Wangshu, Li Jinfa, Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, Qian Zhongshu, and so on. While direct exposure to foreign cultures helped to train the pioneers of modern Chinese writing, translations from Western literature also created a hotbed for new ideas and literary experiments. The unbridled wildness of Guo Moruo’s work claimed lineage from Shelley, Goethe, and Whitman. It was under the influence of British Romanticism that Xu Zhimo wrote the most beautiful lyrical poems penned since Chinese poetry had broken free from classical verse. Hu Shih’s famous proposal for replacing classical Chinese with vernacular Chinese as the literary language had much to do with his devotion to American pragmatism, a school of philosophy that taught him to question absolute authority, including the tyranny of the Chinese classics. Ba Jin’s indictment against feudal patriarchy in his novels was inspired by the anarchist and utopian ideas he had picked up while living in the Latin Quarter in Paris as well as from translated texts. The list can go on.