2. NOVELISTS AS REFORMERS

Thrillers and purely humorous fiction play an extremely insignificant part in modern Chinese fiction. Novelists regard it as a disgrace to write merely for the sake of popular entertainment. While this may be a serious disadvantage to technique, it shows how conscientious our writers are. In fact, most of our novelists are social reformers at heart. In tracing their motives of writing, the desire to ameliorate a corrupt society is evident. The Japanese may know the value of ancient Chinese porcelain and bronze, but they fatally underestimated the new spirit of self-assertion in all articulate young Chinese and how politically conscious they had become. Merciless self-analysis of national weakness and indomitable assertion of individual rights were the guiding forces of contemporary Chinese writers. Take the widely known Lu Hsün, author of The True Story of Ah Q . Actually he began his career as a medical student. This was because he had suffered much in his childhood from country quacks. He wanted to master the science of curing the ailments of his fellow-beings. One day in Tokio, at the end of a tedious anatomical lecture, the professor showed some non-medical lantern slides to amuse his students. One of these showed a group of Chinese who had acted as spies for the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War. They had been arrested and beheaded before a cheering crowd. Lu Hsün was cut to the quick. For it dawned on him that the disease of his compatriots was mental rather than physical. He gave up his medical career to become a writer. There was nothing rosy about the China he depicted. All his stories are caricatures of apathetic Chinese types, often bitingly effective.

There is no doubt that our finest literary harvest in modern times is that of fiction. And it is here that new writing contrasts most strikingly with the old. The change in the position of fiction in China is as surprising as that from a pauper to a prince. Thirty years ago, Hsiao Shuo (the Chinese for "fiction", meaning "small talk") was regarded as a low and vulgar form of writing. The handful of novels written between the tenth and the nineteenth centuries were mainly by scholars who had been banished from imperial favour, or else had failed in the imperial examinations. Hence, their authorship is often a matter for conjecture. The abolition of imperial examinations in 1904 and the introduction of Western literature completely changed the situation. Fiction has since become a popular form of writing. While novels in the pre-Republican days were mere accidents, they are written with conscious and deliberate craftsmanship to-day.

The writers of new China take great pride in the hardships and vicissitudes of life. They are aware of the value of personal experience to a resourceful novelist. A life springing from the gutter may provide a wealthy store of material. Some of them were born in such humble conditions; some went out of their way to seek them. Whence, realism has become quite natural to modern Chinese writers. They are not only the reformers of a corrupt society: many of them were the victims of it. Miss Ts'ao Ming begins her Confessions thus: "In the first half of my ninth year, my pillow was seldom dry. I was the twenty-third child of a polygamous father, and my mother was his concubine. When I was ten years old, I was so peaky and thin that I looked like a girl of six. Often my mother clasped me tightly, playing with my queue and fondling my bony chin, saying, 'It is hard to be a woman, and when one is so thin...'" Miss Pai Wei in an autobiographical sketch pictured herself kneeling before her Confucian father, sobbing timidly, imploring him, "Father, give me a chance to study. Don't marry me off so soon!" She was to be married to a boy whom she had never seen and who was already lying on his deathbed. Indeed her sufferings were cruel. She was stripped, beaten, and literally tortured by her mother-in-law. Later she ran away, and managed to enter a school, without her parents' knowledge. But soon she was discovered.

In Ai Wu's case, a vagabond life was chosen rather than imposed by circumstances. He trekked all the way from Ssǔchuan to Yünnan, and thence to Burma . En route , he worked as a groom in a wayside inn in the wild mountains on the border. He was even a cook to a monk in Rangoon. Often he was driven out of his lodgings for arrears of rent. But all the time he carried with him a copy of Gogol's Overcoat , a pen, and a bottle of ink swinging from a piece of rope. As he walked on mountainous journeys or swept up the dung of horses and mules, he carefully scrutinized the life around him. At night, by the faint light of an oil lamp, he jotted down the incidents of the day. There is in fact a quaint touch in his works beyond the reach of the more well-to-do.

The study of modern Chinese fiction can be approached from several angles. The regional novel has never been fully developed in China, partly because the tumultuous life never allowed any writer to settle down peacefully in one spot. But many Chinese writers naturally remain attached to the part of the country most intimate to them. In the works of Chou Wen, Sha Ting, and Lo Shu, you see all aspects of Ssǔchuan—villainous country squires, helpless wives of peasants, salt merchants and opium smugglers. Lu Fen has graphically depicted the villages of his native Honan, the people's militia, drunkards, or missionary hospitals. Hsiao Chün, the author of Village in August , and his former wife Hsiao Hung, chose the whole of Manchuria for a background, from Harbin to Dairen . Writing about the guerrilla fighters in that part of the country, Hsiao Chün himself had been one. The setting of Tuan-mu Hung-liang's novels are naturally laid in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia, where he came from. In Wu Tsu-hsiang's stories, one sees the haggard faces of downtrodden tenants and the greed of the country gentry in Anhui. Nearly all the characters in Lu Hsün's works were taken from Wei Chuang, that town wherein the immortal Ah Q was born, lived and suffered. There are writers who sometimes use foreign countries as a background, either because of the exotic colour, as in the case of HsüTi-shan's India, Pa Chin's France, Ai Wu's Burma and the white Russian colony in Harbin as appearing in Chin Yi's works, or because of their lengthy sojourn, as in the case of Kuo Mo-jo's in Japan.

The danger of classifying writers geographically is obvious. To start with, provincialism has been deprecated by modern Chinese writers. Though Lu Hsün and Chou Tso-jen were brothers, their approach to life was totally different. In Chou, one sees the ripples of gentle streams and the waving shadows of bamboo groves. In Lu Hsün, one sees China struggling against the clutches of a decadent tradition. Nevertheless, it remains the garden of nostalgic memories. As an ingredient in the formation of a writer's character, this is also significant. Shen Tsung-wên, for instance, admitted the influence of the River Ch'en in West Hunan on his whole literary career. He wrote:

"The foundation of my work was not built on a bundle of useful books; it was built on water. The tiny raindrops from the eaves, a little brook, or the immense deep—these are all great teachers to me. My ability to use my little brain was wholly due to the influence of water. I owe to it the habit of seeing beneath the surface.

"In childhood, the river was my refuge. From the age of fifteen, for the next five years, my life was spent on the bank of the River Ch'en. Now, each time I recall my past, the happiest of my reminiscences are watery. At least one tenth of my time was squandered on the main currents and the tributary streams of the river. I learnt much about the human world from flowing water. My imagination was given wings by the river.

"After five years, I left that river. I could then wield the brush, and began to write. I often used the riverside as my setting. I wrote about it with love. My characters are also those familiar faces on the river. If there is sadness in my writings, perhaps it was due to the gloomy weather in that corner of China fifteen years ago. If there is anything in my work worth noticing, it was also because people moving on that river spoke a rich and vivid language·

"After five years' sojourn in Peking, I went to live by the sea, the dazzling and boundless sea. I had a greater opportunity to see life from a remote angle. How lonely was the sea! It nourished my feeling of solitude, enlarged my soul and magnified my personality..."

(From Literature and I , 1934, Shanghai.)

In whatever shape, water has always charmed our writers. Miss Ping Hsin, one of the first of our women writers in the vernacular, was profoundly influenced by the sea. Not being a navigating country, we have produced no Joseph Conrad. To a Chinese writer, the sea is oftener a lyrical symbol. To Miss Ping Hsin, it symbolizes mother love. She spent her girlhood in a delightful fishing town on the Chiao Chou Peninsula where she often sailed on the sea. In her Letters to My Young Readers from America, she constantly sings in praise of the sea. "To look at a range of mountains on a hot summer afternoon", she wrote, "is like looking at an enormous ailing ox, with layers of darkness piling in front of our eyes. But the sea is always lively and glimmering with thousands of silvery flowers. She is my mother and the lake is my friend."

In the transitional period of reforming the family system, the relationship between the sexes was bound to arouse acute interest and controversy. Every youth became aware of his innate right to choose his own life companion. But the tradition of marriage by betrothal was still unbroken. Few authors were without matrimonial troubles, and literary confessions of these became a vogue. The more erotic type, like Yü Ta-fu, went so far as to vent his "sexual hunger". Obviously there was an instinctive craving in the hearts of young Chinese, long denied or repressed by social and ethical codes. That craving was most frankly expressed by Yü who had many of the traits of Rousseau and Dostoyevsky. In his "Recollections as a Writer", he said all literary works were autobiographical. It was undoubtedly true in his own case. He packed his notorious Nine Diaries with all the sins he committed. At the end of each sin, he took a turkish bath to wash it off. His outstanding novel was Sinking ("Ch'en Lun"), an analysis of a morbid youth. In one passage he characteristically wrote:

"...O my decayed life at twenty! My dead ashes twenty years! I'd sooner be transformed into a mineral. I shall never blossom in this incarnation. Knowledge I desire not, nor fame. I only yearn for a 'heart' that is tender and understanding—a fervid heart bursting with sympathy, and with love from that very sympathy. What I really crave is love! Were there a beautiful woman who understood my agony, and if she desired my immediate death, I am ready. If there were only a woman, beautiful or ugly, as long as she loved me with a true heart, I would sacrifice my life for her. What I crave is love of the other sex..."

How naive, yet how expressive of the mood of repressed souls!

Yü's influence on the younger generation cannot be called good. But his emotions were genuine. Faithfully and without restraint, he expressed the particular sorrow of the youths of that time. But another novelist who chose nearly the same theme cannot be judged in the same light. Chang Tz-ping must have deeply regretted his opportunism. Perhaps he has been cursing the ingratitude of his readers. Only fifteen years ago, his novels of triangular and quadrangular love a airs were manufactured by the dozens. They were devoured by boys and girls all over the country. Writing must have brought him considerable profit. His plots were as alike as two peas. His characters seemed to have one common virtue, namely, sensuality. The endings were invariably tragic, either suicide as a result of being in love with a married person or a sudden discovery of pregnancy by parents. These stereotyped situations were soon denounced by all critics and disillusioned even his most enthusiastic readers.

But the question of "family oppression" has not been completely solved, and it has never failed to interest Chinese readers. The success of Pa Chin's novels is sound evidence of this. He is an anarchist whose uncompromising spirit has spoken much for the discontent of his generation. He has written scores of novels about miners and revolutionaries. His recent trilogy, Spring, Autumn, Masses , deals with the degeneration of a patriarchal family in Ssŭchuan and the rebellion of the young. Pa Chin is a writer of conviction. While in France, he became a fervent student of the French Revolution. The spirit of J'accuse runs through his works. He writes to protest rather than to entertain. But he never makes any pretence to be an artist. In the Preface to his Electric Chair , he wrote:

"I have no liberty, no joy, because a whip constantly lashes me. I cannot rest. It is the misery of mankind, and my own. When passion burns in me, my heart becomes restless, I must write something. When I write, I exist no longer. Gruesome pictures haunt me. They make my heart and my hand tremble at the same time. What is art after all, if it cannot bring more light to humanity; if it cannot strike a single blow against the demon? The whole city of Pompeii was once buried under ashes. One day, the ivory tower of art will also be consumed. No, I want to make a direct appeal to my readers, make them abhor darkness and love light. My writings need no connoisseur..."

This attack on the art-for-art's-sake group was more emphatically expressed in his Recollections of My Life :

"I am not lying when I say that part of my works are a mixture of tears and blood. I am no artist. My writing is just part of my existence. My life has been a painful struggle, my writing too. I write only about human aspirations. While I suffer, I envisage a rosy dawn for all mankind. Yes, life is short and art is long. But there is yet something longer than art and it is that which guides me."

Since 1927, the Northern Campaign of the Revolutionary Army, Chinese writers became more politically conscious. Personal introspection became less popular and novelists turned their eyes to a bigger canvas. Mao Tun was the first to attempt a monumental novel, portraying the revolution for which much blood had been shed. His Disillusion , Mutation , and Pursuit were a trilogy about that fateful year. Like André Malraux, the author of La Condition Humaine (translated into English as Storm Over Shanghai ), Mao Tun was an active party member in Wuhan, then the seat of the Left-wing government. Being an enthusiastic disciple of naturalism, he drew his material from reality. This was followed by his Twilight, A Romance of China in 1930 , in which he ambitiously presented a panorama of China, both rural and urban. An amazing feature of this novel is the graphic description of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Some of his works tend to be documentary, but he has taught younger writers to explore actual life.

The portrayal of the seamy side of Republican life is a universal theme. Yeh Shao-chün vividly writes about schoolteachers and middle-aged people, Chang T'ien-yi about civil servants and children. His Knight of Yang Ching Pang is one of our best picaresque novels. Miss Ting Ling's works are widely known. Her In Darkness and The Mother won many plaudits. Miss Ling Shu-hua has written a number of delightful stories. Being a painter herself, and the wife of Professor Ch'ên Hsi-ying, a learned but not pedantic critic, her creative talent is further enhanced by scholarship. I do not wish to pay all-round compliments to our women writers, but I really cannot omit Miss Lin Hui-yin, the author of Ninety-nine Degree and other charming stories. Being a versatile artist herself and a lover of experimental writers such as Virginia Woolf, she has made fiction a record of rapid flashes of life instead of static "facts". She has fished beneath the sea of consciousness and thus deepened the effect of her writing.

From 1916 to the formation of the League of Left-wing Writers in 1930, anything written in the vernacular style seemed acceptable. The criterion tended to be more linguistic than artistic. During the period of revolutionary literature, Left-wing critics were mostly concerned with ideology. Wang Shu-ming, one of the leading critics of the time, wrote how he became a literary critic: "I bade farewell to all the aesthetic theories of a capitalist society and made careful studies of socialism." Art was then contemptuously dismissed as "technique". Consequently many stories appeared bare skeletons of revolutionary tales or dramatizations of certain political ideas.

Shen Tsung-wên has often been described as a stylist. It is true that his choice of words is so deliberate that they sparkle. In his stories, the prevalent mood is that of a poet. He admits that all he attempts is to capture momentary sensations and images. They are often impressionistically fresh. For instance, in describing a timid youth, he would say he was as shy as a little apricot tree. But Shen's essential virtue is that he writes of a world entirely of his own—soldiers, civil servants in the interior, peasants of West Hunan and the colourful tribesmen on the border. With his vivid pen he enlivens them all, their rich dialogue, their picturesque lives and their tragedies. He was born and bred among them. As a soldier, then as a tax-collector, he trod every inch of the soil. In his Preface to Green Jade and Green Jade (an English translation by Miss Emily Hahn and Shao Hsün-mei appeared in the T'ien Hsia Monthly , Hong Kong) he explains his creative attitude:

"For peasants and soldiers, I cherish an inexpressible love. This emotion is in all my writings. I never conceal it. I was born in the little town I write about. My grandfather, father, and brothers were all in the army. All died on active service. The living will end their lives in the same manner. This is the side of life I am most familiar with. I write about their loves and hates, their joys and sorrows. Clumsy as my pen is, it cannot distort too much, for these people are honest, straight forward, commonplace but big-hearted. In temperament, sometimes very beautiful, sometimes very petty. In the senseless civil wars lasting nearly twenty years, these peasants were the foremost sufferers. Their souls have been heavily oppressed, which has done much to destroy their original simplicity, industry, frugality, peacefulness and honesty. They have been transformed into quite a different kind of being, lazy and poverty-stricken. I am trying to record this dreadful transformation."

The war has been a blessing in disguise for Chinese literature in general, and for fiction especially. Previously, two lamentable symptoms existed among nearly all story-writers. They either lacked solid experience of national life or their diction was too remote from that of the people. The war has shown many writers the right direction. For the first time they inhaled the aroma of rice fields and saw the gorgeous orange groves, and the manifold marvels of the countryside. But above all, they came in direct contact with the people, the people untouched by European influence, who lived far away from the coastal ports. Beyond all this, they saw the war, its tragedy as well as its heroism. Consequently, we may hope for much from post-war Chinese novelists. nLTqlN6/3eOFzwXX5d0CNjeCnITqyevfGskYm90AC9QRK07KIWUH3FNeK8f8gGK2