Border Town Read online

  Border Town

  A Novel

  Shen Congwen

  Translated by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  An old imperial highway running east from Sichuan into Hunan…

  Chapter Two

  Chadong was built between the river and the mountains. On…

  Chapter Three

  For ten years and more, the local military commander at…

  Chapter Four

  It was two years earlier: at festival time, on the…

  Chapter Five

  Two years passed.

  Chapter Six

  One day the old ferryman got into an argument with…

  Chapter Seven

  It was the day of the festival. Grandpa and Cuicui…

  Chapter Eight

  A fine rain was falling at daybreak on the fifth…

  Chapter Nine

  When Grandpa got home, it was almost time for breakfast.

  Chapter Ten

  While they were eating, someone called for the ferry on…

  Chapter Eleven

  A man arrived at Green Creek Hill bearing gifts. Dockmaster…

  Chapter Twelve

  The next day, Cuicui was in the vegetable garden below…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cuicui sat beneath the white pagoda behind her house as…

  Chapter Fourteen

  Exhausted by his work, the old ferryman slept. Cuicui, tired…

  Chapter Fifteen

  No. 1 took the new oil boat downriver, leaving Nuosong behind…

  Chapter Sixteen

  No. 2 now had his chance to serenade, but he never…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Grandpa seemed angry at someone. He didn’t smile as much…

  Chapter Eighteen

  As another month passed quietly by, the heartaches of all…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cuicui’s flight into the bamboo grove and the old ferryman’s…

  Chapter Twenty

  The night did bring a great storm, accompanied by frightening…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bright and early the next day, friends came from town,…

  Notes to Border Town

  About the Author and the Translator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  Once upon a time, Shen Congwen’s stories of rural China seemed so close to the lives of the country folk and the grand landscapes framing them that a 1947 collection of his works in English was titled The Chinese Earth. That earth was overturned, along with Shen’s literary reputation, in the 1949 Communist revolution. Thirty years later, when radical Maoism expired in turn, Chinese critics rediscovered Shen Congwen. They called him the representative writer, perhaps the founder, of a uniquely Chinese prewar school of “native-soil,” or “rural,” literature. A 1980s revival of Shen’s way of combining earthbound themes with ethereal style was accorded partial credit for China’s post-Mao literary renaissance.

  Those claims created a sensation. Mao’s writers had already asserted exclusive understanding of peasants as a class, but the political morality tales they cranked out appear inauthentic today. The themes of nature, agriculture, and cosmic harmony in China’s ancient classics and poetry have enjoyed far greater staying power. In the 1920s, however, Shen Congwen and his colleagues declared Classical Chinese and the literature composed in it “dead.” They strove to create a New Literature in the modern vernacular, without giving up China’s traditional lyric—and didactic—literary missions. Shen Congwen chose the lyric path; Border Town (Bian cheng), a modern pastoral published in 1934, is his masterpiece. Some call the work implicitly Daoist, but Shen and his generation of writers in principle scorned China’s old philosophies. They wanted to be known as moderns, either realist or romantic. Shen Congwen’s novels defy classification within that dichotomy, though he, perhaps surprisingly, thought it more a compliment to be called a realist. He liked “revolution” in literary technique, but not as armed struggle for social reconstruction.

  These issues explain the fascination with Shen Congwen’s views of rural life, even if most critics agree that his greatest contribution to Chinese literature lies in his imagination, craftsmanship, and creation of one of the greatest Chinese prose styles of all time. In the late 1920s and 1930s, China’s writers and social scientists “discovered” the Chinese peasant. The loudest literary critics and social ideologues, like their political leaders, were moved by conflict-based theories of class struggle and national survival: Marxism and nationalism, left wing and right wing. Shen Congwen announced at the time that Border Town was a tribute to China’s farmers and soldiers written in defiance of the ideologues. The Marxists who controlled China’s intellectual scene in subsequent decades thought Border Town an insult to their ideas of rural class conflict.

  It is intriguing to wonder if Border Town might also be a Chinese rejoinder to The Good Earth. Pearl Buck’s novel was controversial in China because it acquired worldwide authority to speak for China’s peasants, despite its authorship by a foreigner (though Chinese was Buck’s first language). An American bestseller of 1931 and 1932, The Good Earth won a Pulitzer Prize and was translated into Chinese in 1932. At least two Chinese book versions hit the market in 1933, with more to come before the 1937 release of the celebrated film and Buck’s Nobel Prize the next year. The novel’s burgeoning success—a succès de scandale, some Chinese intellectuals thought—might have hurried up the first English translation of Border Town by Emily Hahn and Shao Xunmei in 1936, which inspired Ching Ti and Robert Payne’s 1947 version, titled The Frontier City, in The Chinese Earth anthology. (My translation is indebted to those prior renditions and to a 1981 retranslation by Shen’s friend Gladys Yang.)

  The Good Earth and Border Town depict China’s common folk sympathetically. The characters are straightforward, practical, culturally grounded, and hardworking. Moreover, the humble protagonists of both great novels have inner lives, though of the heroines, that is truer of Shen Congwen’s Cuicui than of Pearl Buck’s stolid O-lan, who suffers far more from gender inequality. The hopes and endeavors of the folk in both novels are “scrutable,” even culturally universal, yet subject to being undone by fate.

  Since Border Town’s resurrection in the 1980s (it was banned in China ca. 1949–1979, and in Taiwan until 1986), many Chinese critics have viewed it as a regional novel. Chadong lies in Shen Congwen’s native West Hunan, along not just a provincial boundary but also an internal cultural frontier, where Han Chinese mix with Miao (Hmong), Tujia, and other formerly tribal mountain peoples who once spoke unrelated languages and whose women still wear exotic clothing. According to this reading, the characters in Shen’s novel are not ordinary Chinese peasants. Indeed, Shen Congwen preferred to write about small-town boatmen, artisans, soldiers, hunters, and young people, not tillers of the soil. The critics’ point, however, is that Shen’s characters might belong to the exotic “national minorities” of Southwest China. Some scholars from Chadong’s You River Valley argue that Cuicui exemplifies local Tujia culture, whereas critics from the border farther south, where Shen Congwen was born, claim her for the Miao. Her dark skin makes her an exotic beauty within Chinese literature, but darkness is not characteristically “tribal” in that part of China.

  Shen Congwen’s ancestors were Han, Tujia, and Miao. The fineness of his ethnographic observations and the dialect in some of his other works easily inspire ethnographic interpretations. His youthful clerking for a locally popular West Hunanese warlord and later status as a famous native son have made him a regional hero. One can construct from his works a Chinese Yoknapatawpha—a full and mapp
able literary landscape like Faulkner’s, complete with oppressed minorities acting as conscience to the Han. Yet, markers of ethnic identity are blurred in Border Town. That is why scholars can debate Cuicui’s ancestry. Minority ethnicity (the Middle Stockade folk would be prime candidates) has been sublimated into a broader, regional, local color. This serves national purposes, for Shen Congwen’s West Hunan exemplifies the diversity and creativity of China as a multiethnic universe—a blended nation more than an ethnic mosaic.

  Shen Congwen spoke of Freudian influences in Border Town, possibly referring to Cuicui’s dreams and daydreams, the flute and white pagoda as phalli, or Tianbao and Nuosong as Ego and Id. Although Shen later wrote erotic and experimental stories in a Euro-American high modernist vein, international critics typically see Border Town as a conservative work full of idyllic and nostalgic visions and devoted to an exquisite painterly style, an element this translation could not duplicate. Shen Congwen labored tirelessly to rework the modern vernacular into a literary language figuratively as rich as Classical Chinese—when it was “living.” The vitality and rawness of youth, balanced by art and nuance, creates tension in much of his writing. In a manifesto of 1936, Shen chided commercialism, faddishness, and politics in contemporary literature, avowing that he only wished “to create a little Greek temple, built of solid stone on a mountain foundation. With economy, vigor, and symmetry as my architectural ideals—in a design perhaps modest, but not fastidious—I would devote this temple to the worship of ‘the human spirit.’”

  Border Town might be thought a “little Greek temple” in its seeming classicism (neither realist nor romantic), its attention to fate, and its aspect as an eternal modern myth more than a story bounded by time. It is economical in language and plot. Did Shen also achieve his ideal of symmetry? Like many Chinese works of the time, Border Town was probably composed a few chapters at a time, just in time for the successive printer’s deadlines of its initial serial publication. He began writing in October 1933, deliriously happy at having finally married Zhang Zhaohe, a dark beauty who years earlier had resisted his attentions; she helped inspire the character of Cuicui. The first chapters were published at the start of 1934, but Shen finished writing the novel only after a winter visit to West Hunan, his first in over ten years, to see his dying mother. The land of his childhood now appeared to him spoiled and despoiled. He left in a hurry. Local officials, aware of his criticisms of the Nationalist government, suspected Shen was a Communist. The consistency of Border Town is the more remarkable for that.

  Shen Congwen was chosen to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, but he died before the October announcement; the prize necessarily went to another. Border Town still occupies a unique place in Chinese and world literature. It inspires one to ponder Shen’s favorite subject: the human spirit.

  Jeffrey C. Kinkley

  CHAPTER ONE

  An old imperial highway running east from Sichuan into Hunan province leads, after reaching the West Hunan border, to a little mountain town called Chadong. By a narrow stream on the way to town was a little white pagoda, below which once lived a solitary family: an old man, a girl, and a yellow dog.

  As the stream meandered on, it wrapped around a low mountain, joining a wide river at Chadong some three li downstream, about a mile. If you crossed the little stream and went up over the heights, you could get to Chadong in one li over dry land. The water path was bent like a bow, with the mountain path the bowstring, so the land distance was a little shorter. The stream was about twenty zhang wide—two hundred feet—over a streambed of boulders. Though the quietly flowing waters were too deep for a boat pole to touch bottom, they were so clear you could count the fish swimming to and fro. This little stream was a major chokepoint for transit between Sichuan and Hunan, but there was never enough money to build a bridge. Instead the locals set up a square-nosed ferryboat that could carry about twenty passengers and their loads. Any more than that, and the boat went back for another trip. Hitched to a little upright bamboo pole in the prow was a movable iron ring that went around a heavily worn cable spanning the stream all the way to the other side. To ferry across, one slowly tugged on that cable, hand over fist, with the iron ring keeping the boat on track. As the vessel neared the opposite shore, the person in charge would call out, “Steady now, take your time!” while suddenly leaping ashore holding the ring behind. The passengers, with all their goods, their horses, and their cows, would go ashore and head up over the heights, disappearing from view. The ferry landing was owned by the whole community, so the crossing was free to all. Some passengers were a little uneasy about this. When someone grabbed a few coins and threw them down on the boat deck, the ferryman always picked them up, one by one, and pressed them back into the hands of the giver, saying, in a stern, almost quarrelsome voice, “I’m paid for my work: three pecks of rice and seven hundred coppers. That’s enough for me. Who needs this charity?”

  But that didn’t always work. One likes to feel one’s done the right thing, and who feels good about letting honest labor go unrewarded? So there were always some who insisted on paying. This, in turn, upset the ferryman, who, to ease his own conscience, sent someone into Chadong with the money to buy tea and tobacco. Tying the best tobacco leaves Chadong had to offer into bundles and hanging them from his money belt, he’d offer them freely and generously to anyone in need. When he surmised from the look of a traveler from afar that he was interested in those tobacco leaves, the ferryman would stuff a few into the man’s load, saying, “Elder Brother, won’t you try these? Fine goods here, truly excellent; these giant leaves don’t look it, but their taste is wonderful—just the thing to give as a gift!” Come June, he’d put his tea leaves into a big earthenware pot to steep in boiling water, for the benefit of any passerby with a thirst to quench.

  The ferryman was the old man who lived below the pagoda. Seventy now, he’d kept to his place near this little stream since he was twenty. In the fifty years since, there was simply no telling how many people he’d ferried across in that boat. He was hale and hearty despite his age; it was time for him to have his rest, but Heaven didn’t agree. He seemed tied to this work for life. He never mulled over what his work meant to him; he just quietly and faithfully kept on with his life here. It was the girl keeping him company who was Heaven’s agent, letting him feel the power of life as the sun rose, and stopping him from thinking of expiring along with the sunlight when it faded at night. His only friends were the ferryboat and the yellow dog; his only family, that little girl.

  The girl’s mother, the ferryman’s only child, had some fifteen years earlier come to know a soldier from Chadong through the customary exchange of amorous verses, sung by each in turn across the mountain valley. And that had led to trysts carried on behind the honest ferryman’s back. When she was with child, the soldier, whose job it was to guard the farmer-soldier colonies upcountry, tried to persuade her to elope and follow him far downstream. But taking flight would mean, for him, going against his military duty, and for her, leaving her father all alone. They thought about it, but the garrison soldier could see she lacked the nerve to travel far away, and he, too, was loath to spoil his military reputation. Though they could not join each other in life, nothing could stop them from coming together in death. He took the poison first. Not steely-hearted enough to ignore the little body growing within her, the girl hesitated. By now her father, the ferryman, knew what was happening, but he said nothing, as if still unaware. He let the days pass as placidly as always. The daughter, feeling shame but also compassion, stayed at her father’s side until the child was born, whereupon she went to the stream and drowned herself in the cold waters. As if by a miracle, the orphan lived and matured. In the batting of an eye, she had grown to be thirteen. Because of the compelling deep, emerald green of bamboo stands covering the mountains on either side by the stream where they lived, the old ferryman, without a second thought, named the girl after what was close at hand: Cuicui, or “Jade Green.”


  Cuicui grew up under the sun and the wind, which turned her skin black as could be. The azure mountains and green brooks that met her eyes turned them clear and bright as crystal. Nature had brought her up and educated her, making her innocent and spirited, in every way like a little wild animal. Yet she was as docile and unspoiled as a mountain fawn, wholly unacquainted with cruelty, never worried, and never angry. When a stranger on the ferry cast a look at her, she would shoot him a glance with those brilliant eyes, as if ready to flee into the hills at any instant; but once she saw that he meant her no harm, she would go back to playing by the waterside as if nothing had happened.

  In rainy weather and fair, the old ferryman kept at his post in the prow of the ferryboat. When someone came to cross the stream, he’d stoop to grasp the bamboo cable and use both hands to pull the boat along to the other shore. When he was tired, he stretched out to sleep on the bluffs by the waterside. If someone on the other side waved and hollered that he wanted to cross, Cuicui would jump into the boat to save her grandpa the trouble and swiftly ferry the person across, pulling on the cable smoothly and expertly without a miss. Sometimes, when she was in the boat with her grandpa and the yellow dog, she’d tug the cable along with the ferryman till the boat got to the other side. As it approached the far shore, while the grandfather hailed the passengers with his “Steady now, take your time,” the yellow dog would be the first to jump on land, with the tie rope in his mouth. He’d pull the boat to shore with that rope clenched between his teeth, just as if it were his job.