“Literature of the People’s Republic of China”
The Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
“C
ultural Revolution” was not a term invented in 1964, or even in 1962. On June 9,1958, the People’s Daily had already proclaimed the beginning of a cultural revolution in China.
By 1962 the perpetual contention between the extremists (Shanghai-based hard-liners) and the moderates (Peking-based soft-liners) within the Party had once again intensified. Chiang Ching, Mao’s wife, with the support of the Shanghai group, had started to purify the theater with her own revolutionary opera (The Red Lanternl, 1963). Mao Tse-tung’s orders regarding literature, as interpreted by Chiang Ching, were indifferently received. Teng T’o and his friends Wu Han and Liao Mo-sha were writing thinly veiled criticism against the arbitrary and sometimes ignorant leadership at the top level. In the country at large, resentment grew against the recently risen elite—old comrades now high up in the government—who, as the new privileged class, monopolized the comforts of the city and even the opportunity to give their children higher education. The cumulative failure to complete the Great Leap Forward and to educate the people as ideal Communists created a desperate situation. All this and more went into the making of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Once Mao Tse-tung unleashed the fury of the Red Guards (high school students and some college students), instructing them to “bombard the headquarters,” their action went beyond pasting large-character posters on Peking walls. By 1964, most of the students were trooping up and down the country; all schools were closed. By 1965, all the magazines were suspended and writers started going to the countryside under orders to learn from the peasants. By the end of 1966, all the Central leaders except Mao (and there was a rumored attack even on him) were denounced, and Chiang Ching and her close supporters reached the zenith of power.
Lao She is a tragic representative of the best-known authors killed by the Cultural Revolution. Since his post-1949 works were hitherto considered totally acceptable, The Teahouse, a three-act play written in 1957 about pre-Liberation life, is selected here to show the irony of his death. T’ien Han’s historical play was accused of openly challenging the Party’s authority. Hsia Yen’s The Lin Family Store, a 1958 play based on Mao Tun’s 1938 novel of the same name, was faulted because it did not pitch the shop clerk against his master. Yang Han-sheng, who based his 1963 screenplay on his experiences in a commune project to fight drought on the northern frontier, was charged with painting a gloomy picture of the new society. Along with Chou Yang, T’ien, Hsia, and Yang, all holding influential positions in the cultural and literary departments of the government, were now attacked as the Four Villains against the Cultural Revolution.
As the Cultural Revolution crested, nearly all the major works selected in this volume were one by one swept aside and buried, leaving only a lone Red Lantern (and six or seven other pieces also organized by Chiang Ching) to shine on the desolate stage of China. However, before all the bookstores boarded up their doors, a few works managed to appear and circulate because their authors were newcomers with neither a political past nor a current literary following to be shot at by the Red Guards. Lu Yang-lieh’s story conveyed a good touch of frontier flavor. Wang Chia-pin, a member of a fishing fleet crew, demonstrated an excellent sense of the drama between man and nature, as well as a strong defense for the principle of writing from a proletarian’s physical experience.
Born to the modest family of a Manchurian soldier in the last imperial army of China, Lao She grew to be one of the most distinguished of the novelists who matured in the era of the May Fourth Movement. He was trained to be a teacher and taught school for some time before he went to England to teach Chinese for several years. It was there that he started writing. Except for the short period when he taught in universities and a yearlong visit to the United States (1949-50), Lao She divided his time between writing and leading writers’ organizations. At the time of his death he was holding the influential and prestigious post of chairman of the Peking Federation of Literary and Art Circles.
The government of the People’s Republic acknowledged in 1978 that Lao She died from the persection of the Red Guards, and public rites were held to restore his memory to a position of honor. Early in 1979, details of his suffering were made public, but it is still unclear whether his death was a suicide or a murder.
Lao She published some thirty books—novels, plays, and collections of short stories. Among them the best remembered include Divorce, Biography of Neu T’ien-szu, Rickshaw Boy, and City of Cats.
Teahouse, written in 1957, is a three-act play centering on the vicissitudes of a teahouse in Peking. The time in the first act is 1898, right after the collapse of the Reformation Movement of the Manchurian Court, which will be followed by the collapse of the court itself. The second act occurs in 1916, after the death of the ambitious Yüan Shih-k’ai, who had briefly declared himself emperor, when the warlords are dividing up China. The third act follows thirty years later, around 1946, when World War II has just ended, and “the secret police of Kuomintang and the American soldiers are devasting Peking.” In this play Lao She captures well the flow of history that has affected representative segments of the Chinese population during the first half of the twentieth century. The characterization is very persuasive, and the dialogues, typical of Lao She, realistic and lively. In February 1979, after thirteen years of suppression, the play was restaged in Peking with considerable fanfare. Here is Act I.
—L. C. and K. H.
ACT I
Characters (in order of appearance):
SUNG EN-TZU, in his twenties; an old-fashioned secret police agent.
WU HSIANG-TZU, in his twenties; a colleague of SUNG EN-TZU’S.
FIFTH MASTER MA, in his thirties; a local bully working for a Christian mission.
WANG LI-FA, in his twenties when he first appears; because his father died untimely, he, though young, has already become the manager of Prosperity Teahouse; a smart man, somewhat selfish, but kind-hearted.
T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER, in his thirties; a professional fortune-teller; an opium addict.
SECOND MASTER SUNG, in his thirties; timid, but talkative.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG, in his thirties; a good friend of SECOND MASTER SUNG’S ; both are regular customers of the teahouse; a conscientious man, physically fairly strong.
LI THE THIRD, in his thirties; waiter of the teahouse, diligent, sincere, and warm.
SECOND TE-TZU, in his twenties; a policeman.
LIU THE POCK-MARKED, in his thirties; a matchmaker, vicious and malevolent.
K’ANG THE SIXTH, forty years old; a poverty-stricken farmer, living in the outskirts of Peking.
FATTY HUANG, in his forties; the big boss of the ruffians.
OLD MAN, eighty-two years old; lonely and helpless.
CH’IN CHUNG-I, in his twenties; he is the landlord who leases the house to MANAGER WANG; from a wealthy family; later, becomes a Reformist-capitalist.
WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE, in her thirties; so poor that she has to sell her daughter.
LITTLE GIRL, ten years old; daughter of the WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE.
EUNUCH P’ANG, forty years old; now that he has amassed a fortune, he decides to take a wife.
LITTLE OX, a teenager; the page of EUNUCH P’ANG.
CUSTOMERS OF THE TEAHOUSE, A, B, C, AND D; all are men.
K’ANG SHUN-TZU, fifteen years old in Act I; daughter of K’ANG THE SIXTH; purchased by EUNUCH P’ANG as his wife.
WAITERS E AND F.
Time:
In the morning of an early autumn day in 1898, when the Reformist
Movement led by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and K’ang Vu-wei had just collapsed.
Place:
Prosperity Teahouse in Peking.
The curtain rises.
This kind of teahouse exists no more today. Decades ago, you could locate at least one of them in every city. The teahouse sold tea as well as simple snacks and meals. For bird lovers, after they had taken their thrush, oriole, etc. for a walk, this was the place where they could have a rest, drink tea, and let their birds demonstrate their singing. People would also come here to discuss business or to work out deals of betrothal. In those days, group fighting* frequently occurred. However, there were always friends acting as mediators between the rival parties. After the mediators talked hurriedly to both parties, these thirty to hfty hghters would all come here to drink tea and eat pork noodles—a special dish of the teahouse, reasonably priced and taking only a few minutes to cook—and then, they would be reconciled amicably. In a word, this was an extremely important place in those days; here you could linger for hours no matter whether you were occupied or not.
Here you would hear the most absurd news, such as how a huge spider at a certain place had transformed itself into a spirit and was struck by a thunderbolt; or the most curious ideas, such as if a great wall was built along the coast, no foreign soldiers would be able to set foot on our land; or hear that a certain Peking opera singer had recently composed a new variation for a tune; or hnd out the best way to process opium. Here you could also take a look at newly discovered treasures such as an excavated pendant made of jade, or a snuff-box glazed in three colors. This place was so crucial that you could regard it as the locale of cultural exchange. Now, let us take a look at such a teahouse. Right by the entrance are the counter and the cooking stoves, or, to keep it simple, we can omit the stoves on the stage. Instead, we can make noisy clanks of dippers at the back of the stage. The room is enormous, with many rectangular and square tables as well as benches and stools, which are seats for the customers. Outside the window is the backyard, where many seats are scattered in the shade of the awnings. There are plenty of spots to hang birdcages inside the room or under the awnings. This poster is pasted everywhere: “Do not discuss affairs of the state.”
Two customers, whose names we do not know, are humming to the beats of clappers; their eyes are narrowed to a slit, and their heads are swinging.
There are two or three more customers whose names we do not know either, absorbed in watching the crickets in an earthen jar. SUNG EN-TZU and WU HSIANG-TZU, wearing long grey gowns, are talking in a low voice. Their manner reminds you of the secret police from the yamen of the Northern Quarter.
Today a new dispute has brought group fighters here. The rumor says they fought over the ownership of a pigeon, and hnally it seemed the strife could only be solved by force. If fighting should break out, bloodshed would be inevitable, for some of the hghters involved are men from the police station as well as from the guards of the Department of Finance, who are all fierce combatants. Fortunately, before both parties had assembled all the committed men, the mediators had already interceded. Thus, no war this time. The rival parties are holding a meeting here right now. Fighters are walking up, in groups of two or three, through the doors into the backyard. They roll their eyes ferociously and are dressed in shirts and pants.
FIFTH MASTER MA drinks tea by himself in an inconspicuous corner.
WANG LI-FA sits on a high stool behind the counter.
T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER enters, dragging his feet slipshodly. He wears a filthy long cotton gown; several small pieces of paper are stuck behind his ear.
WANG LI-FA Mr. T’ang, would you please go for a stroll outside?
T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER (Grins miserably) Dear Manager Wang, be kind to this fortune-teller. Give me a cup of tea free and, in return, I will now read your physiognomy. In addition, I will read your palm for free. (Without waiting for WANG’S reply, he snatches his hand) This is the twentyfourth reign year of Emperor Kuang-hsü, the year of the dog, and your age is . . .
WANG LI-FA (Withdraws his hand) Forget about it! I’ll give you tea free. Stop shooting off all that jargon. What’s the use of telling me my fortune? Since both of us have to brave all sorts of weather to make a living, our lots will be equally tough for sure. (Walks from behind the counter and directs TANG to sit down) Sit down. Listen: if you don’t break off opium, you’ll be stuck with bad luck. This is my physiognomy. I assure you it is more reliable than yours.
(SECOND MASTER SUNG and FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG enter, holding birdcages in their hands. WANG LI-FA greets them. After hanging up the cages, they sit down at a table. The bookish SECOND MASTER SUNG has an oriole in a small cage, while the vigorous, muscular FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG has a thrush in a large cage. WAITER LI THE THIRD comes over to them immediately, fills their bowls with boiling water, and covers them. They have brought their own tea leaves, as is customary. When the tea is ready, SECOND MASTER SUNG and FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG nod to the nearby customers in a courteous gesture, inviting them to drink first before they sip their tea)
SECOND MASTER SUNG AND FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (To each other) Please.
(Then they take a look at the backyard)
SECOND MASTER SUNG I think there is trouble here.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG They won’t fight anyway! If they really meant it, they would all be outside the city. Why on earth should they gather in a teahouse!
(Just then, SECOND TE-TZU, a fighter, enters. He overheard what FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG had said)
SECOND TE-TZU (Comes over to them) About whom are you making those wise remarks?
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (Uncompromisingly) Are you speaking to me? I pay to drink tea here, not to be bossed around by anybody.
SECOND MASTER SUNG (Carefully studies SECOND TE-TZU) Sir, you must be an officer in the police force. Please come, drink tea with us. We also get around and meet people, you know.
SECOND TE-TZU Wherever I work is none of your business.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG If you want to show off your stuff, go beat up the foreigners. Aren’t they ferocious? You, who have been supported by the public, when the Anglo-French troops burned down the Full Bright Imperial Garden, you did not fight like a lion against them, did you?
SECOND TE-TZU Whether or not I fought the foreigners is none of your business. I’ll teach you a lesson first. (About to hit him)
(Other customers have not paid any attention to them. WANG LI-FA runs to them)
WANG LI-FA Gentlemen, we all are brothers of the street. Please don’t fight. Master Te, please come to the back.
(SECOND TE-TZU ignores WANG LI-FA. He sweeps a cup to the floor. It breaks. He stretches his hand to seize the neck of FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG)
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (Dodges the blow) How dare you!
SECOND TE-TZU Well, I don’t dare to touch the foreigners, but I certainly dare to touch you!
FIFTH MASTER MA (Still seated) Second Te-tzu, you are quite a man, aren’t you!
SECOND TE-TZU (Looks around and finds FIFTH MASTER MA) Oh, Fifth Master Ma, it’s you. I am awfully sorry; I didn’t see you. (Goes over to greet him)
FIFTH MASTER MA Can’t you talk things over? Why did you pick a fight just like that?
SECOND TE-TZU Yes, sir. You are right! I am going inside. Li the Third, I’ll take care of the bill here. (Walks to the backyard)
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (Walks toward FIFTH MASTER MA; intends to unburden his mind to him) Sir, you are wise and understanding. I would like to hear your views on this.
FIFTH MASTER MA (Stands up) I am busy. Good-bye. (Leaves)
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (To WANG LI-FA) That’s strange! How oddly he acts!
WANG LI-FA You didn’t know he is Fifth Master Ma! No wonder you have also offended him.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Did I offend him too? I’ve certainly picked the wrong day to come.
WANG LI-FA (Lowers his voice) You just criticized foreigners, and he is precisely one of those who depend on the foreigners. He believes in foreign religion and can speak the foreign tongue. He can go straight to the magistrate of Wan-p’ing County here when he needs to. That’s why even the officials yield to him.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (Walks back to his seat and sneers)I have no respect for the parasites of foreigners.
WANG LI-FA (Points his head toward SUNG EN-TZU and WU HSIANG-TZU and whispers) Please watch your words. (Loudly) Li the Third, another cup of tea here. (Picks up the broken porcelain cup)
SECOND MASTER SUNG Let’s have a man-to-man talk. How much is this cup? I’ll pay for it.
WANG LI-FA No hurry. Let’s work that out later. (Walks away)
(POCK-MARKED LIU, the matchmaker, leads in K’ANG THE SIXTH. LIU greets SECOND MASTER SUNG and FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG)
LIU THE POCK-MARKED How early you have come today! (Takes out a snuffbox and pours some snuff out) Please take a pinch. It has just arrived from Britain. Fine and pure stuff.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG My word! We have to import snuff too! How much silver has flowed into foreign hands!
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Our great Manchurian Empire possesses gold and silver piled up high like mountains. There is no way of spending it all. Please enjoy yourself. I have some errands to run. (Finds a table for himself and K’ANG THE SIXTH)
(LI THE THIRD brings a cup of tea to him)
LIU THE POCK-MARKED How about ten taels of silver? Give me a straight answer. I am too busy to wait on you.
K’ANG THE SIXTH Master Liu, a girl of fifteen is only worth ten taels of silver?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED If we sell her to the brothel, perhaps you can get several more taels, but you have already turned that down.
K’ANG THE SIXTH But she is my daughter! How could I . . .
LIU THE POCK-MARKED You cannot support your daughter. Could this be someone else’s fault?
K’ANG THE SIXTH That’s because we farmers cannot make a living in the countryside any more. If my family had as little as one meal of this porridge a day, and I still sold my daughter, I’d be a bastard.
LIU THE POCK-MOCKED I don’t give a damn for the problems of you farmers. Since you entrust me, I’ve got you a good deal, and have found a place for your daughter where she’ll be well fed. Aren’t I fair enough?
K’ANG THE SIXTH Who is it anyway?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED When I tell you who he is, you’ll give your consent from the bottom of your heart. He is serving in the palace!
K’ANG THE SIXTH Are you kidding? Someone serving in the palace would want a girl from the countryside?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED That’s because your daughter is in luck.
K’ANG THE SIXTH Who is he?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Imperial Steward P’ang. You must have heard of this Imperial Steward. He attends the Express Dowager. He is at the height of his career. Think about it: even the vinegar jar in his home is made of agate.
K’ANG THE SIXTH Master Liu, how could I give my daughter away to a eunuch? I should feel ashamed in front of my daughter.
LIU THE POCK-MARKED You should feel ashamed in front of her anyway, since you are selling her! It doesn’t matter who is buying. What a fool you are! Think about it: after she is married into his house, she will eat delicious, delicate dishes, wear silk and satin dresses. How lucky! Well, tell me, yes or no, give me a straight answer.
K’ANG THE SIXTH In this wide world, I have never heard of such . . . He offers only ten taels of silver?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED I don’t think all the families in your village can put together ten taels of silver. You know very well that now a child can bring only five catties of wheat flour in the countryside.
K’ANG THE SIXTH I . . . (Sighs) I have to talk it over with my girl.
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Listen, “Once you pass beyond the border of this village, you can’t find the same shop any more.” If you let this opportunity slip, don’t blame me. Come back—the sooner the better.
K’ANG THE SIXTH (Sighs) I will be back in a moment.
LIU THE POCK-MARKED I’ll wait for you here. (K’ANG THE SIXTH walks out slowly)
LIU THE POCK-MARKED (Pulls his stool toward SECOND MASTER SUNG and FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG) It’s very difficult to do business with bumpkins. They can never be straightforward!
SECOND MASTER SUNG This sounds like a big deal, right?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Not much in it for me. If it goes through, I’ll earn a piece of silver, that’s about all!
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG What has happened that’s so drastic in the countryside that they have to sell their children?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Who knows what’s going on! No wonder there is a saying: “Even a dog’d like to be born in Peking City.”
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Master Liu, making this sort of match, you must have a heart of stone.
LIU THE POCK-MARKED If I don’t take part in it, very likely they won’t find any customers. (Changes the subject) Second Master Sung (Takes out a small watch), please look at this.
SECOND MASTER SUNG (Takes the watch) What an impressive little watch!
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Please listen to it. Tick-tock, tick-tock!
SECOND MASTER SUNG (Listens to it) How much is this?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED You love it? You can have it. No haggling, five taels of silver will do. When you get tired of it and want it no more, I’ll buy it back from you at the sale price. It is the genuine thing, good enough to hand down as a family heirloom.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Listen, I just realized how many foreign goods there are hanging off us! Liu, look at yourself: foreign snuffbox, foreign watch, gown made of foreign satin, shirt and pants made of foreign cloth. . . .
LIU THE POCK-MARKED But foreign stuff looks really super! If I wear local cloth, I’ll look like a country yokel. Nobody will pay any attention to me.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Nevertheless, I feel our satin and Szechwan silk look much more impressive.
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Second Master Sung, keep this watch. If you wear such a nice foreign watch, you will catch everybody’s eye. What do you say?
SECOND MASTER SUNG (Indeed loves the watch, but considers the price rather steep) I . . .
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Wear it for a couple of days first. I’ll collect the silver later.
(FATTY HUANG enters)
FATTY HUANG (His eyes suffer from serious trachoma. Since he can hardly see clearly, he greets everybody in the room as soon as he enters) Brothers, lend your ears to me! How are you all? We are all kin, please do not spoil our good relations.
WANG LI-FA These are other people. The ones you want are in the backyard.
FATTY HUANG Pardon me, I cannot see clearly. Manager, prepare pork noodles. Since Fatty Huang is here, there will be absolutely no fighting! (Walks inside)
SECOND TE-TZU (Comes out to greet him) Hurry up, please, the rival parties have already met each other.
(SECOND TE-TZU and FATTY HUANG walk inside. The waiters bring tea to the backyard over and over again. An old man enters. He carries small goods such as toothpicks, beard combs, earpicks, etc. Lowering his head, he moves from table to table, but nobody buys his stuff. As he walks toward the backyard, LI THE THIRD blocks his way)
LI THE THIRD Old gentleman, why don’t you take a walk outside? Since they are holding a peace negotiation in the backyard, no one will buy your stuff.
(Meanwhile he hands the old man a bowl of left-over tea)
SECOND MASTER SUNG (Whispers) Li the Third (Points to the backyard), what on earth are they fighting for, with everybody’s sword drawn and stick at the ready?
LI THE THIRD I heard it’s for the sake of a pigeon. The pigeon of Chang’s house flew to Li’s house. The Lis refused to hand it over. (Sighs) We’d better keep out of it. (Asks the old man) Old gentleman, may I ask how old you are?
OLD MAN (Drinks the tea) Thank you. I am eighty-two. No one takes care of me. Nowadays a man means less than a pigeon. (Sighs and walks out slowly)
(CH’IN CHUNG-I enters. His clothing is well tailored and his face beams with vigor and delight)
WANG LI-FA Oh, heavens! Second Master Ch’in, you must be very free lately, or you would not honor this teahouse with a visit! And you come alone, without servants?
CH’IN CHUNG-I I come here to inspect how well you, my young fellow, are doing with your business.
WANG LI-FA Well, I am learning by practicing. I have to make a living from this. There is no other way out, for my dad died young. Fortunately, all the customers are my dad’s old friends. When I fall short of hospitality, they won’t raise their hands and they let me off the hook. To make a living in this tough world, good public relations are most important. I follow my dad’s footsteps, his old tactics: always speak courteously, greet people frequently, and be sweet to everybody; then you will not get into a mess. Please sit down. Let me prepare a cup of fine tea for you.
CH’IN CHUNG-I No, no drink please. Nor am I staying.
WANG LI-FA Please sit down for a while. I feel very honored that you visit our humble shop. Li the Third, make a bowl of the very good. Second Master, how is your family? Is everything going well for you?
CH’IN CHUNG-I Not exactly.
WANG LI-FA Don’t you worry. Your business has such a big turnover, “even your little finger is bigger than my waist.”
T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER (Comes close to them) This gentleman has a wonderful physiognomy. How prominent is your forehead! How full is your chin! Although you may not rise to the position of a prime minister, you will become as wealthy as Fan Li!*
CH’IN CHUNG-I Don’t bother me! Go away!
WANG LI-FA Mister, now that you have drunk tea, please go and exercise yourself outside. (He pushes T’ANG away a little. T’ANG sighs, lowers his head, and leaves)
CH’IN CHUNG-I Li-fa, don’t you think I should increase the rent a little bit? The small amount of rent that your father paid me in the past can’t even pay my bill at the teahouse.
WANG LI-FA Second Master, you are right, absolutely right! But I should not bother you with a trifle like this. Just send your manager here; I’ll talk it over with him. Whatever increase there should be, I will comply for sure. Okay? Yes!
CH’IN CHUNG-I You, young fellow, have become more slippery than your father. Well, just wait, sooner or later, 111 take back the house.
WANG LI-FA Oh, please don’t scare me. I know how much you care for me, how well you have been looking after me. You certainly won’t have me carry a heavy teapot to sell hot tea on the street!
CH’IN CHUNG-I Just wait. We’ll see!
(A woman from the countryside enters with a teenage girl. A straw is stuck in the girl’s hair.* At first, LI THE THIRD intends to drive them out, but a soft spot in his heart checks him. They walk toward the center of the room slowly. The customers suddenly all stop chatting to watch them)
LITTLE GIRL (Stands at the center of the room) Mom, I am hungry! I am hungry!
(The WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE stares at the girl; then suddenly, her legs can no longer support her. She sits on the floor, weeping and covering up her face)
CH’IN CHUNG-I (To WANG LI-FA) Throw them out!
WANG LI-FA Yes, sir. Go outside. You can’t stay here.
WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE Gentlemen, please be charitable! Would someone take this child, two taels of silver only!
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Li the Third, two orders of pork noodles. Take them outside to eat them.
LI THE THIRD Yes, sir! (Walks toward the woman) Get up. Wait at the door. I’ll bring the noodles to you.
WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE (Stands up, wipes her tears, and walks out as if she has forgotten her child. She turns back after walking away for two steps, embraces the little girl, and kisses her) My precious darling! My poor baby!
WANG LI-FA Hurry up! (WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE and the girl leave. After a while, LI THE THIRD carries two bowls of noodles outside)
WANG LI-FA (Comes over) Fourth Master Ch’ang, you are indeed kind and generous, to give them food. But, let me tell you: there are numerous cases like this. Can you take care of all of them? (To CH’IN CHUNG-I) Second Master, what do you think about what I just said?
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG (To SECOND MASTER SUNG) I think the Great Manchurian Empire will be finished!
CH’IN CHUNG-I (An experienced know-it-all) Whether it will be finished or not does not depend on whether someone gives food to the poor. Li-fa, to tell you the truth, I really intend to take back this house.
WANG LI-FA Second Master, please don’t.
CH’IN CHUNG-I I want not only to take back the house but also to sell the country estate as well as sell my business in the city!
WANG LI-FA Why?
CH’IN CHUNG-I To put all my resources together to start factories!
WANG LI-FA Factories?
CH’IN CHUNG-I Yes, gigantic factories! That’s the only way to save the poor, to resist foreign import, to save our country! (Talks to WANG LI-FA, while his eyes stare at FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG) Well, why should I talk to you, you don’t understand it anyhow.
WANG LI-FA Why should you sell all your property for the sake of other people? How about yourself?
CH’IN CHUNG-I You don’t understand. This is the only way for our country to turn strong and wealthy. Well, time for me to go. Now that I see with my own eyes that you have a booming business, don’t you play dumb when I increase the rent.
WANG LI-FA Please wait a minute. Let me get a carriage for you.
CH’IN CHUNG-I No, I prefer to take a walk.
(CH’IN walks toward the entrance. WANG LI-FA sees him off. Supported by LITTLE OX, EUNUCH P’ANG enters. LITTLE Ox carries a tobacco pipe)
EUNUCH P’ANG Hello, Second Master Ch’in!
CH’IN CHUNG-I Master P’ang, you must have felt at ease these two days!
EUNUCH P’ANG Of course I have. Peace is restored in our empire. The Imperial decree said: execution by beheading for T’an Szu-t’ung.* Let me tell you, anyone who dares to alter the old Manchurian ways will be beheaded!
CH’IN CHUNG-I This sounds like nothing new to me. (Suddenly all the customers stop chatting. Holding their breath, they listen to them)
EUNUCH P’ANG Really smart, aren’t you, Second Master Ch’in? No wonder your business is thriving.
CH’IN CHUNG-I My small business is not worth mentioning.
EUNUCH P’ANG How modest you are! Look, everybody in Peking knows your name! You are more influential than high officials. I’ve heard that quite a few rich men support the Reformation?
CH’IN CHUNG-I Not exactly so. My influence reaches nowhere in your presence. (Laughs)
EUNUCH P’ANG Well said, well said! Let each of us put up his own show just like when the Eight Immortals crossed the ocean.† (Laughs)
CHIN CHUNG-I I’ll visit you some other day, good-bye. (Leaves)
EUNUCH P’ANG (Sneers and mutters) Such an insignificant moneybag dares to quibble with me! The way of the world has certainly changed for the worse! (Asks WANG LI-FA) Is Liu the Pock-marked here?
WANG LI-FA Imperial Steward, please come to the back to have a seat.
(LIU THE POCK-MARKED has seen EUNUCH P’ANG already, but he dares not come closer for fear of interrupting the conversation between EUNUCH P’ANG and CH’IN CHUNG-I)
LIU THE POCK-MARKED Hello, my good master, how are you! I have waited for you for a long time. (Escorts EUNUCH P’ANG to a secluded table)
(SUNG EN-TZU and WU HSIANG-TZU come to greet EUNUCH P’ANG. He whispers to them. After a moment of silence, the customers start a heated discussion)
CUSTOMER A Who is T’an Szu-t’ung?
CUSTOMER B It seems I have heard his name somewhere. Anyway, he must have committed a grave crime, or else he would not be beheaded.
CUSTOMER C For these two months, those officers and gentry have been creating such havoc that I don’t know what the devil they are doing!
CUSTOMER D Great! I can keep my rations from the government now. Who cares what has been going on? T’an and K’ang Yu-wei proposed that the government should stop paying the rations of military ranks to all Manchurians,* and that the Manchurians should support themselves. How mean they are!
CUSTOMER C We already had a hard time, because more than half of our rations were pocketed by our superiors.
CUSTOMER D Well, it is better than nothing! To live on reduced rations is at least better than death. If I had to support myself, death would be the only way out.
WANG LI-FA Gentlemen, please—“Do not discuss affairs of the state.” (They quiet down and start to chat about their usual subjects)
EUNUCH P’ANG (Already sits down) What did you say? A girl from the countryside would cost two hundred taels of silver?
LIU THE POCK-MARKED (Stands reverently) Though a country girl, she is extremely pretty! After she moves to the city, teach her how to use makeup and how to behave, I can assure you she’ll look dazzling and act most properly. Whenever I am at your service, I strive for perfection in every minute detail, with even more devotion than when working for my father!
(T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER returns)
WANG LI-FA Why are you back again, Fortune-teller?
T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER I don’t know what’s going on. The troops are rushing all over the streets.
EUNUCH P’ANG Of course, they are searching for the partisans of T’an Szu-t’ung. Don’t worry, Fortune-teller, they aren’t coming for you.
T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER Thank you, Imperial Steward; would you please also give me some opium pellets, for that will set my mind completely at rest. (Several customers leave quietly, as if they sense a forthcoming calamity)
SECOND MASTER SUNG We’d better go home too. It’s getting late.
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Okay. Let’s go.
(Two men dressed in grey—SUNG EN-TZU and WU HSIANG-TZU— come over to them)
SUNG EN-TZU Wait a minute!
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG What for?
SUNG EN-TZU Did you just say: “The Great Manchurian Empire will be finished”?
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG I . . . I love the Great Manchurian Empire, so I fear that she will be finished.
WU HSIANG-TZU (To SECOND MASTER SUNG) Did you hear him? Did he say that?
SECOND MASTER SUNG Gentlemen, we drink tea here every day. Manager Wang can guarantee that we are indeed peaceful citizens.
WU HSIANG-TZU I asked you, did you hear him say that?
SECOND MASTER SUNG Well, let’s talk about it. Please sit down.
SUNG EN-TZU If you don’t answer the question, I’ll arrest you too! Since he said “The Great Manchurian Empire will be finished,” he is a partisan of T’an Szu-t’ung.
SECOND MASTER SUNG I . . . I heard it. He . . . he said . . .
SUNG EN-TZU (To FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG) Come!
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Where are we going? We should clear up the fact first.
SUNG EN-TZU Do you dare to resist arrest? Here is “the imperial law”! (Takes the manacles from his belt)
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Listen, I am a Manchurian myself!
WU HSIANG-TZU It’s a far more serious crime for a Manchurian to turn into a traitor. Handcuff him!
FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG Don’t. I cannot escape anyway.
SUNG EN-TZU I agree, you can’t. (To SECOND MASTER SUNG) You come with me also. If you tell the truth in the court, you will be released. (FATTY HUANG comes in from the backyard with four or five men)
FATTY HUANG How splendid! The sky has cleared up; so have the troubles. I did not run my feet off in vain.
SECOND MASTER SUNG Master Huang, Master Huang!
FATTY HUANG (Rubs his eyes) Who is it?
SECOND MASTER SUNG It’s me, Sung the Second. Please come over here! Please help us.
FATTY HUANG (Recognizes them) Oh, Master Sung, Master Wu. You two gentlemen are investigating a case, aren’t you? Please go on.
SECOND MASTER SUNG Master Huang, please give us your hand. Spare some kind words for us.
FATTY HUANG I take care of the cases when the government does not. But I will keep my hands off when the government does. (Asks everybody) Shouldn’t it be so?
EVERYBODY ON HAND Yes, sir.
(SUNG EN-TZU and WU HSIANG-TZU take FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG and SECOND MASTER SUNG outside)
SECOND MASTER SUNG (To WANG LI-FA) Please look after our birds.
WANG LI-FA Don’t worry, I will deliver them to your homes.
(FOURTH MASTER CH’ANG, SECOND MASTER SUNG, SUNG EN-TZU and WU HSIANG-TZU leave)
(T’ANG THE FORTUNE-TELLER tells FATTY HUANG that EUNUCH PANG is here) FATTY HUANG Oh, my good master is here too? I heard that you are taking a bride. Please accept my congratulations.
EUNUCH P’ANG You just wait for the wedding party.
FATTY HUANG I am grateful for your invitation. (Leaves)
(WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE carries the empty bowls in and places them on the counter. LITTLE GIRL enters also)
LITTLE GIRL Mom, I am still hungry.
WANG LI-FA (Sighs) Go outside!
WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE Let’s go, my darling.
LITTLE GIRL Aren’t you going to sell me again? Mom, are you?
WOMAN FROM COUNTRYSIDE My darling. (Weeping, leaves with LITTLE GIRL)
(K’ANG THE SIXTH enters with K’ANG SHUN-TZU. They stand in front of the counter)
K’ANG THE SIXTH My girl, Shun-tzu, your father is a bastard. A bastard I am. But what can I do? If you don’t find a place to feed yourself, you will starve to death. If I don’t get some taels of silver, I will be beaten to death by my landlord. Shun-tzu, you’d better accept your fate. Help me.
K’ANG SHUN-TZU I . . . I . . . (Too agitated to speak)
LIU THE POCK-MARKED (Rushes to them) Here you are! You give your consent, right? Okay. Come to meet Imperial Steward. Come, kowtow to Imperial Steward.
K’ANG SHUN-TZU I . . . (About to faint)
K’ANG THE SIXTH (Supports his daughter) Shun-tzu, Shun-tzu!
LIU THE POCK-MARKED What’s the matter?
K’ANG THE SIXTH She is so hungry and disturbed that she has passed out! Shun-tzu, Shun-tzu!
EUNUCH P’ANG I want one alive, not a dead one.
(Everybody turns quiet)
CUSTOMER A (Playing chess with CUSTOMER B) Check! You are finished!
(End of ACT I)
Translated by Ling Chung and King Hu
Teng T’o belonged to the younger, more progressive-minded generation of Communist leaders: people who were as committed to revolutionary ideals as their older comrades, but who had benefited from a higher education and showed a broader, more urban-oriented and internationalist outlook. After 1949, their qualifications should have enabled them progressively to take over the Party. With their revolutionary credentials and their intellectual sophistication, they could have considerably eased China’s entry into the modern world. However, through the Cultural Revolution, Mao managed to wipe out nearly all of this small enlightened elite, thus inflicting upon the country a grievous harm whose ultimate consequences are still to be fully assessed.
The son of a successful Mandarin from Fukien Province, Teng T’o taught school for a time before he began his Party activity in the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei guerrilla zone, where he was editor of a newspaper, Resistance News. After 1949 his political and journalistic career rose swiftly. By 1952 he had become editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily. In 1959, however, he had to relinquish his influential position; it was a political setback on the national scene, but it did not prevent his ascent inside the Peking municipality, where, under the protection of P’eng Chen, he became one of the secretaries of the municipal Party committee. As a member of the Academy of Sciences (department of philosophy and social sciences) and regular contributor to various newspapers and journals (Peking Daily, Peking Evening News, Enlightenment Daily, Frontline, Historical Research), he remained very active in the fields of culture, education, and journalism. In the spring of 1966, his influential newspaper column brought disaster upon him and his close associates, Wu Han and Liao Mo-sha. Unable to bear the severe persecution, Teng killed himself in May of that year. Wu Han, an accomplished historian and for many years vice-mayor of Peking, also committed suicide. Thirteen years later, both Teng and Wu were publicly exonerated.
The disastrous column Teng wrote under the title “Evening Talks at Yenshan” was published in the Peking Evening News in 1961-62. It became tremendously popular among intellectuals. Foreign observers were puzzled: why should these modest little articles dealing with various historical literary anecdotes arouse such enthusiastic interest? The answer was provided in 1966, with the first stage of the Cultural Revolution. Violent attacks were launched against Teng T’o as part of a broader offensive aimed at P’eng Chen and the Peking clique, which led to the downfall of Liu Shao-ch’i and most of the Central Party leadership. The attacks included a detailed exegesis of Teng’s writings, identifying the hidden meaning of each of his articles. Actually they had constituted so many parables, transparent to the initiates, which daringly criticized the person, style, and policies of Mao Tse-tung.
When reading Teng T’o, Westerners may feel that his short essays hardly reach beyond the level of commonplace and commonsense observations. However, in a totalitarian system, banality can become the last refuge of sanity and decency; to make commonsense observations requires the greatest of courage, since it challenges directly the ideological dogma. Teng T’o did it with unparalleled daring, wit, and elegance. In affirming that intellectuals owe their first unconditional allegiance not to the Party but to truth, in asserting the primacy of rationality and informed criticism over raw political power, he committed the ultimate sin, the unforgivable crime (like Hu Feng had done before him)—he questioned the absolute authority of the Party.
The following article, first published in the Peking Evening News on August 24,1961, and later collected in his five-volume Evening Talks at Yenshan, bore the brunt of the attack in 1966. Without specifically saying that Teng had identified Wang An-shih, the Sung Dynasty prime minister in the article, with Mao Tse-tung, the Party-directed critics condemned Teng for inciting people to oppose the Party’s General Line and the Great Leap Forward.
—Pierre Ryckmans
Study more and criticize less. This is a correct attitude toward learning, worthy of promotion. We must be humble about anything if we lack specific knowledge about it or about its circumstances. We must apply ourselves seriously to studying it and we must never thoughtlessly criticize it, which would often lead to mistakes, exposing ourselves to ridicule, or even causing irreparable damages. It is a lesson handed down to us by generations of scholars in the past through their experiences of learning and working. Whoever chooses to ignore the lesson is doomed to defeat.
In general, to sit down and actually write a whole book, or to lay hands personally on a certain matter, is rather difficult, but it is always easy to be an uninvolved spectator and to criticize. Those writers in the past often devoted their whole lives to the completion of their books without feeling that they had done everything possible in their work. Along came the fault-finders, just enough to douse the writers with cold water and make them shudder in despair. Liu Yüan-ch’ing of the Ming Dynasty cited an example in his book The Saintly Company to illustrate the problem. He said,
Liu Chuang-yü often picked bones in Ou-yang Hsiu’s [1007-72] History of the Five Dynasties and showed them to Su Tung-p’o [1036-1101]. Su said to him, “When Ou-yang completed his Five Dynasties history, Prime Minister Wang An-shih [1021-86] asked me why I did not take up the history of the Three Kingdoms, something Ou-yang should have done but did not. I bowed and declined the weighty assignment. After all, writing a book of history involves collecting data that cover tens or even hundreds of years; it is impossible not to miss a minor point here and there. I dared not to accept the assignment precisely because I dreaded the gleaners like you who would follow my footsteps to pick and criticize.”
Ch’en Chi-ju [1558-1639], also of the Ming Dynasty, quoted the same anecdote in his A Mirror for Studying, with the comment, “My teachers told me not to make irresponsible criticism against those ahead of us unless we have read all the books in the world. I rather think that if I could finish reading all the books in the world, I would know better not to criticize those ahead of us casually.”
Actually none of us can deny that Ou-yang Hsiu’s New History of the Five Dynasties, only about half as long as Hsüeh Chü-cheng’s [912-81] old History of the Five Dynasties, offers many insights. Just the same, there have been fault-finders throughout the ages whose picking would not have convinced Ou-yang Hsiu at all. Could it be that there are so many people who are born with an addiction to criticizing others but are not necessarily equipped with either the knowledge or the ability even to focus on a real issue?
Many people feel sure about themselves, confident about their knowledge, and look down upon those whom they criticize, forgetting that they themselves are never infallible and their targets may be making progress every day. The result is that the critics blunder all too often. Lu Yu [1125-1210], the poetstatesman of the Sung Dynasty, mentioned in his book Notes Taken in the Studio Where I Study Even When Old the instances when Wang An-shih slipped in his criticism against others because of his own carelessness:
Wang An-shih had always slighted Shen Wen-t’ung, thinking that Shen had not read enough. He sent Shen a poem, “You relax pillowing your head on a pile of books / Until sundown when you go home on horseback / . . . .” And then when Wang wrote Shen’s epitaph, he said, “Though he seldom read any book. . . .” Someone saw it and remarked that perhaps Wang ought to think about that line; after all Shen had won the number one position in the ultimate imperial examination. Whereupon Wang changed the phrase “read any book” to “kept any book in sight.” Once Wang An-shih read Cheng Yi-fu’s poem on dreaming of an immortal, “. . . He gave me a book written on green jade / In unusual archaic script red and serpentine / I looked at it but could not understand a thing / But he had turned and soared up to the purple clouds.” Wang guffawed and said, “This man admits his illiteracy without anybody questioning him about it.” Yi-fu said, “No! I am only using Li Po’s [701-62] line.”
Wang An-shih himself failed to recognize Li Po’s poetry, and yet he turned toridicule others, only succeeding in exposing himself to ridicule. . . .
As a creative statesman of the Sung Dynasty, Wang An-shih had many innovative ideas but not enough practical experience or knowledge. Chang Lei of the Sung Dynasty wrote in his Miscellaneous Comments on Attainment of Wisdom,
Prime Minister Wang An-shih liked to talk about irrigation systems for the country. At that moment he was thinking of draining Lake T’ai [in Chekiang Province] to create thousands of acres of fertile land, which provoked much chuckling among others. Wang spoke of it one day with his visitors. One of them, scholar Liu Kung-fu, said, “That’s easy.” “How,” asked Wang. Liu said, “Just open up another Lake T’ai on the side to drain the water into, that’s all you need.” Everybody laughed.
Anecdotes like this about Wang An-shih’s blunders are legion. All of them point up one fact: Wang was impractical and arrogant—his two failing traits.
We need to derive from past experiences the principle that we must maintain a humble attitude to learn more and criticize less about anything and everything. How much more and how much less is, of course, a relative matter. To us, we should be ready all the time to study more about Marxism-Leninism and humbly learn from the masses through actual practice. Here I am not talking about the resolute struggle against any and all erroneous and reactionary things; that is a separate question.
Let us all honestly own our ignorance when confronted with what we do not know and openly admit our error when one has been committed. Ch’en Chi-ju, who also wrote What I Have Heard and Seen, said,
Hsü Wen-chen was in Chekiang examining candidates. One of them had a line in his composition, “. . . Yen Hui (Confucius’ best student) was troubled by Confucius’ lofty wisdom. . . .” Commissioner Hsü wrote a comment on it, “Where did you invent this one?” Upon reading the comment, the candidate approached the commissioner and said, “The line, sir, came from the book Fa-yen by Yang Hsiung [53 B.C.-18 A.D.].” The commissioner immediately responded from his rostrum, saying, “Too bad this commissioner passed his own examinations too early, thus having lost the chance to do some hard studying.” He then stood up and saluted the young candidate, adding, “Thank you for your enlightenment!” Everybody there was greatly impressed by the commissioner’s attitude.
It’s true that at the end of the very first chapter of Fa-yen there is such a line. The prestigious commissioner that day admitted his error on the spot, which act did not cause him to lose face but, on the contrary, earned him much admiration. Isn’t that a great example for posterity to observe?
Evening Talks at Yenshan, Vol. I, pp. 82-85
Discussing state affairs, the Eastern Foresters followed Master Turtle Hill,*
Their concern covered everything between the earth and the sky.
Do not say, please, the eggheads indulged only in empty talk.
Where their heads braved the sword, fresh bloodstains lie.
Enlightenment Daily, September 7, 1960
Translated by Kai-yu Hsu
It would be difficult to imagine a native playwright who has had as great an impact or has played as central a role in the development of drama in modern China as T’ien Han. T’ien Han was born in 1898 to a declining gentry family in Changsha, Hunan. In 1916 he travelled to Japan to study medicine and there met Kuo Mo-jo. Together with Yü Ta-fu and others, he organized the famous Creation Society. When he returned to China in 1922, T’ien Han and his wife founded the South China Society, one of the earliest companies in China devoted to the study, writing, and performing of modern drama. The South China Society continued, off and on, until it was formally disbanded by the Kuomintang in 1930. It was during this time that T’ien Han wrote such plays as Night Talk in Soochow and The Death of a Famous Actor, which were among the first experiments with romanticism in Chinese spoken drama (hua-chü), and which continued to serve as popular models throughout this early period. After the founding of the League of Left-wing Writers, T’ien Han changed the direction of his plays from their earlier romanticism and experimentation with “Art for Art’s Sake” to a more political commitment. His socialist plays of the 1930s were among the first to incorporate the concept of a “mass” hero. And under the Party’s aegis he continued to rise to a position of considerable power and influence in post-Liberation Chinese theater; in 1958, when Kuan Han-ch’ing was published, he was head of the national Drama Association and the controlling force in the Peking theater world. It was after a long silence that T’ien Han wrote this “historical play.” The “historical play” is a long-established dramatic tradition used by Chinese playwrights to mask an attack on the regime in power under the somewhat safe guise of retelling history. Kuan Han-ch’ing was the forerunner in the revival of the tradition in the crucial period just prior to the Cultural Revolution. Later, in 1961, it was republished together with his Hsieh Yao-huan, another “historical play” using the Chinese opera form, thus presenting a most explosive pair to the Chinese public. Similar works followed on stage, such as Meng Ch’ao’s Li Hui-niang, and of course Wu Han’s now famous Hai Jui Dismissed from Office. During the Cultural Revolution Wu Han fell because of his play. In April 1979 Ts’ao Yü, the celebrated playwright and director of the People’s Art Theater in Peking, revealed that T’ien died in jail in 1968 under persecution by the Gang of Four—mainly because of Kuan Hanch’ing.
The hero of the play, Kuan Han-ch’ing, was a leading playwright during the Yüan dynasty. He was moved by the corrupt conditions prevailing in China to write a historical play, The Injustice to Tou O, which directly attacked the evil officials and ministers. T’ien Han, in his play excerpted here, speaks through Kuan Han-ch’ing’s mouth to encourage his audience to “speak out” against injustice.
I have translated here two scenes from the play, the first and the sixth. The latter scene gives us a partial glimpse of the technique that T’ien Han revived from his earlier successful play, The Death of a Famous Actor. Not only are we the audience for T’ien Han’s play, but also, with the actors backstage, we share in the performance of Kuan’s play, The Injustice to Tou O. The scene also demonstrates the overwhelming power a seasoned playwright such as Kuan Han-ch’ing or T’ien Han has at his command, and why T’ien Han and the others had to be so rigorously condemned during the Cultural Revolution.
—E.J.B.
SCENE 1
Characters:
MRS. LIU, wineshop proprietress.
ERH-NIU, MRS. LIU’S daughter.
KUAN HAN-CH’ING, famous Yüan Dynasty dramatist.
HSIEH HSIAO-SHAN, friend of KUAN HAN-CH’ING’S and fellow Drama Society member.
CHIEN SHUA-CH’IAO, friend of KUAN HAN-CH’ING’S and fellow Drama Society member.
YOUNG GENTLEMAN, Lord Akham’s twenty-fifth son.
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT, or, as MRS. LIU calls him, “FOURTH MASTER TS’UI.”
Cambaluc (today’s Peking) , the capital city in the eighteenth year of the reign of Kublai Khan (1281). On a street corner next to a small wineshop on the edge of the city are gathered a great many people, watching the execution procession. Amidst the long wailing of a trumpet, a Mongolian official in charge of the execution comes rushing in on horseback, followed by runners sounding bamboo clappers and shouting: “Out o’ the way! Out o’ the way!” In a moment the executioner, accompanied by the beating of gongs and drums, appears, a feather perched high on his hat and the official sword in his hand. He is escorting a donkey cart bearing a female prisoner, head bowed, hair askew, and carrying on her back the notice of her impending execution. An old woman trails close behind, shouting at the top of her voice: “Child, child! Oh, Heavens! Save my child! This can’t be!” She is repeatedly abused by the runners, who, like fierce tigers, snarl at her: “Get away, old woman! Get away, or they’ll cut your head off too!” The proprietress of the small wine shop, MRS. LIU, is carrying a bamboo basket, in which is concealed wine, meat, and some sacrificial paper money. Originally it seems she had though t to squeeze through and stop this pitiful procession, but, seeing it is impossible, she withdraws and murmurs softly: “Poor child!” And tears flow like rain. Just then a few household servants in Mongolian dress pass by. Alarmed, she chokes back her cries and wipes dry her tears. She calls to her daughter,
ERH-NIU, in the street. ERH-NIU, though dressed in common everyday clothes, is without doubt a beautiful young lady.
MRS. LIU Erh-niu! What good does it do to keep watching? There are household duties that need your attention!
ERH-NIU I’m coming, Mother. (But she continues watching)
MRS. LIU She says “I’m coming,” but she doesn’t move. Ai, you can see this kind of excitement on the street at least once or twice a month. What’s so interesting about it?
ERH-NIU (Only now forcing herself to turn back, grabs hold of her mother’s hand) Mother, it’s so pitiful! How could such a young woman be a murderess?
MRS. LIU Who said she was a murderess! She’s a good child, just like you. You’ve forgotten about Hsiao-lan who came to visit us in spring the year before last.
ERH-NIU Hsiao-lan? You mean Mrs. Ch’en’s daughter-in-law?
MRS. LIU That’s the one! (Wiping away tears)
ERH-NIU She’s completely changed! Mother, is there some way we can save Hsiao-lan? Is there?
MRS. LIU Silly child. How can we save her! (Indicating the bamboo basket) I prepared some wine and things, thinking to sacrifice them to her spirit, but even this I’m afraid to do. Hsiao-lan has truly had a sad life, and then this . . . (She stops abruptly)
(KUAN HAN-CH’ING—a great playwright—at hrst standing behind the crowd watching, now, hearing MRS. LIU’s and her daughter’s voices, pushes his way through to them)
KUAN (In a low voice) Mrs. Liu, do you know her?
MRS. LIU Aiya! Master Kuan, you too have come to watch the show?
KUAN No. I was going out of town to see a friend. When I was passing by here, the streets had been cleared, and I ran into it.
ERH-NIU Ah, Uncle Kuan is here. Come in and sit awhile, won’t you? (She hurriedly makes tea) Please have some tea.
KUAN Thank you. Erh-niu is growing more and more beautiful. You still remember Uncle Kuan?
MRS. LIU We’re old neighbors. You moved away barely two years ago; how could she have forgotten! Please have a seat.
KUAN All right. (Sitting down) Business still good?
MRS. LIU Not bad. It’s just that I need more help and I can’t afford any. My husband is usually in the countryside at Wan-p’ing. He hardly comes back more than once or twice a month.
KUAN That doesn’t matter. Erh-niu is certainly a great help to you.
MRS. LIU That’s right, but if she were a boy it would be better. For a girl to be seen too much in public, it’s asking for trouble.
KUAN Oh, that’s true. Mrs. Liu, do you know that prisoner who just went by?
MRS. LIU Yes. I’m distantly related to her mother-in-law’s family. Ai, to see with my own eyes that child, totally innocent, come to such an end, and no way to help her—Oh . . . (Dries her tears)
KUAN What happened to her? Still so young, and yet having committed such a serious crime?
MRS. LIU What crime? She’s a good child.
KUAN Then why?
MRS. LIU (Watching the people on the street slowly disperse; in a low voice) Master Kuan. This child’s mother-in-law told me all about it, and she spoke the truth. If you can’t save her life, perhaps in the future you can avenge the dead.
KUAN Oh, tell me about it.
MRS. LIU This unfortunate child is Chu Hsiao-lan. Her family were originally farmers in Hsiang-yang. As you know, that area had seen battles for a good many years. The city destroyed, Lord Alihaiya* staked out ranches for raising his horses. He seized her family’s few mu of land and even conscripted her father to take care of the horses. Her father, in a fit of rage, ran away, leaving behind Hsiao-lan and her mother. Unable to make a living, they came to the city to search for an uncle. Unfortunately, her uncle was away, and so they took lodging with a Mrs. Ch’en, who had come from the same town. Hsiaolan’s mother became ill and was sick for more than half a year. To pay for the doctor and the medicine, they had to borrow ten taels of silver from Mrs. Ch’en. Mrs. Ch’en had a son named Wen-hsiu. He was a good boy, but since childhood had suffered from poor health, and no betrothal had yet been set for him. One day Mrs. Ch’en asked Hsiao-lan’s mother for the ten taels of silver. But where was she to get the money? There was no other way. She gave Hsiao-lan to Mrs. Ch’en to be her daughter-in-law, partly to repay the debt. Hsiao-lan’s mother’s illness continued, off and on, till last fall she passed away.
KUAN Oh. And Hsiao-lan?
MRS. LIU Later, Hsiao-lan and Wen-hsiu were married. The two got along quite well together. Mrs. Ch’en loved her as if she were her own flesh and blood. In their modest way, they managed to be very comfortable. Who could have known trouble would arise right within the household.
ERH-NIU Mother, don’t talk about these things now. What can be done to save Hsiao-lan? I’m going to die from worry! Can’t we ask Uncle Kuan to think of a way? Hurry! Hurry!
MRS. LIU Silly, child. Uncle Kuan is a doctor and can only save people from colds and coughs. How can he save someone from getting her head chopped off? Mother’s talking. Don’t bother us.
(ERH-NIU, seeing there is nothing that can be done here, rushes out)
KUAN Mrs. Liu, tell me how it happened, that trouble right within the household?
MRS. LIU Mrs. Ch’en’s own family was named Li. She had a cousin on her father’s side called Liu-shun. He was quite old and lived in Mrs. Ch’en’s house. Mrs. Ch’en had to run the house herself, so she entrusted him with certain household matters. The year before last, Liu-shun’s son, whom he had not seen in many years, turned up. His son was named Li Yi, but everyone called him Donkey Li. He was a restless scoundrel, who had gotten mixed up with the army for many years. They say he went with Commander Sa to fight down South. When he reached Lin-ant† he got himself a good haul and then came back. When he got back, he saw Hsiao-lan and wanted to marry her. But Hsiao-lan paid no attention to him. Later, after she and Wen-hsiu were married, Donkey Li still would not give up. One day Wenhsiu went out and didn’t return. Only two days later did it come to light that he had been drowned. Some say Donkey Li did it.
KUAN (Striking the table) Imagine such disgusting vermin! He actually got away with chewing up good and meek people! (Turning to Mrs. Liu) Of course he did this in order to get Hsiao-lan, right?
MRS. LIU Right. After Wen-hsiu was buried, Hsiao-lan cried bitterly day and night. Donkey Li shamelessly brought up the matter of marriage again to Hsiao-lan. She said she would not marry and would rather spend her life taking care of her mother-in-law. Mrs. Ch’en, because her son had died, cried till she became ill. One day, she felt like having some lamb tripe soup. Hsiao-lan prepared the soup. Donkey Li found an excuse to send Hsiao-lan out of the room, and put arsenic into the soup. He had decided to poison Mrs. Ch’en and then take Hsiao-lan. Who could have known that Mrs. Ch’en would suddenly lose her appetite for the soup. Li Liu-shun, being a glutton, took the bowl and ate the broth. Immediately he started to throw up blood and he died. Donkey Li intimidated Hsiao-lan, saying if she agreed to marry him, he wouldn’t say a word; if she didn’t, he would seize her and take her to face the magistrate. Hsiao-lan, with a clear conscience, said: “If I’m to face the magistrate, then I’ll face him.” Who could have known this child’s fate was to be so bitter; she had to cross paths with a corrupt official.
KUAN Ai, nowadays uncorrupted officials are all too few. Who was the official she ran up against?
MRS. LIU (In a low voice) The case was brought to Ta-hsing Prefecture. The prefect, Lord Khoshin,* as you know, is money-hungry; but he’s also very concerned with his good name, and is continuously ordering the people to present him with “ten thousand signature” umbrellas.† He’s a Semu,‡ and when he saw Hsiao-lan was a “barbarian’s”** daughter and also had fled her native village, he was prejudiced against her. Donkey Li gave him a letter from Commander Sa, and also some silver, so how could he avoid ruling in his favor? During the trial Hsiao-lan explained what had happened from start to finish, but the prefect didn’t listen to a thing she said and mercilessly used cruel tortures to force her to confess how she poisoned to death Donkey Li’s father. But Hsiao-lan would rather die than plead guilty.
KUAN Right! No matter what, she shouldn’t plead guilty.
MRS. LIU Finally, Lord Khoshin said, “Since she won’t confess, then her mother-in-law must have administered the poison.” He then ordered Mrs. Ch’en to be dragged out and given eighty lashes. Hsiao-lan, seeing that the judge intended to flog her mother-in-law, thought, “Mother-in-law is so old, how can she withstand the beating?” She steeled her heart and submitted a confession.
KUAN That’s awful! Why did she admit what she hadn’t done!
MRS. LIU If she hadn’t done so, wouldn’t that corrupt judge have beaten her mother-in-law to death?
KUAN She should never have pleaded guilty. Once she does, she has to forfeit her life. Didn’t she think of that?
MRS. LIU: How could she not think of that?! But she wanted to save her mother-in-law, so she did it, regardless of the consequences. Hsiao-lan, that child, had just that sort of character.
KUAN She truly is a noble woman. But weren’t there any conscientious judges to hear an appeal?
MRS. LIU Ai! Master Kuan, who was there to give her a fair trial? Nowadays, a donkey’s life is worth more than a Han’s. The day before yesterday, Hsiaolan was given only one hearing, and today wasn’t she sentenced to be executed?
KUAN It’s all these jackals of judges who treat human life as if it were nothing more than weeds!
MRS. LIU (In a low voice) Master Kuan, you had best not say such things.
(The people on the street again rush past. ERH-NIU comes running back)
ERH-NIU (Pulling her mother) Mother, hurry and think of something. (To KUAN HAN-CH’ING) Uncle Kuan, hurry! Don’t you know a lot of people? Hurry! Think of something!
(In the distance the sound of a cannon is heard)
MRS. LIU What is there left to do! She’s already gone. Poor Hsiao-lan! (Sinking into a chair, she hides her face and cries)
(ERH-NIU, at her side, also cries)
KUAN (With immeasurable sorrow) What kind of a world is this! (Getting up) Mrs. Liu, thank you. I’m going. (To himself) Ai, can I do nothing more than save people from colds?
MRS. LIU Good-bye, Master Kuan. Come and visit us when you have time. Going home?
KUAN Uh, no. I’m going out of town to visit a friend.
(With heavy and measured steps, he is about to go on his way out of town, when his friends and fellow Drama Society members HSIEH HSIAO-SHAN and CH’IEN SHUA-CH’IAO emerge from the crowd on the other side of the street. HSIEH HSIAO-SHAN catches sight of HAN-CH’ING and grabs him. KUAN HAN-CH’ING, lost in thought, is startled)
HSIEH Aiya! Old Kuan. I was just looking for you. I went to your house, but you weren’t there. So you were here drinking.
KUAN I wasn’t drinking. I was talking with Mrs. Liu about the prisoner who just went past.
HSIEH I know a little about the case myself. I hear she was falsely accused.
CH’IEN They say someone wanted to marry her, but she was unwilling, so he implicated her.
KUAN Mrs. Liu just told me the whole thing. It made me furious.
HSIEH Ai, what were you getting mad for? Nowadays, nine out of ten cases are misjudged. If you’re going to take them all so seriously and get angry about them, then there’s no way you can go on living. I’ve something I want to discuss with you. Come over to my place and have a drink.
KUAN No. I’m on my way out of town. What is it?
HSIEH A certain man has asked me to teach him to sing your piece “Four Pieces of Jade, in Nan-lü mode.” The first line, I remember, is “When thirsty, drink, when hungry, eat, when drunk, sing.” But Ch’ien Shua-ch’iao insists it’s “When thirsty, drink, ah, when drunk sing,” without the three words “when hungry, eat.” Good. Now we’ll let the “original edition”—you—testify to the truth. Which one of us is wrong?
KUAN You’re both right.
CH’IEN That doesn’t make sense. Which one is right?
KUAN Originally, you are. “When hungry, eat” was added on later, to make it easier to sing. Some say the addition changed the flow of the melody and was not as subtle as the orginal.
HSIEH Yes, that’s true. I think I’ll use the original version. That gentleman is especially fond of those lines of yours that come later: “To till the land in the South, to retire in the mountains in the East, the ways of the world, I have seen plenty. In leisure to consider the things that have gone before, he may be wise and I a fool. What is there to fight about?” He said what you wrote is really beautiful.
KUAN (From the bottom of his heart, he disagrees with that kind of easy, idle life) No! It’s completely wrong! He’s not necessarily wise, and I’m not necessarily a fool. We have to fight. We have to fight to distinguish the wise from the foolish, the right from the wrong. I think, Hsiao-shan, you had best not teach that line.
HSIEH What? You’ve changed your mind? Then, what about the section “Passionate Mode”? Do you still want to learn it or not?
KUAN I do.I’ll come over and see you later. (To CH’IEN SHUA-CH’IAO) Is Fourth Elder Sister Chu* in today?
CH’IEN Probably.
KUAN “Probably”? And Sai Lien-hsiu? Has she recovered?
CH’IEN (Shaking his head) I don’t know.
KUAN You don’t know? Aren’t you and Sai Lien-hsiu rather involved?
HSIEH Their affair has blown away. This fellow got drunk and forgot his lines on stage, and Sai Lien-hsiu bawled him out. He couldn’t take it, so he ran off for quite a few days.
KUAN Ch’ien Shua-ch’iao. No matter how good an actor you are, do you think a performer should forget his lines on stage? Do you?
CH’IEN Of course he shouldn’t.
KUAN Well, then, if a person bawls you out for your own good, tell me why you lost your temper?
CH’IEN Because, because . . .
KUAN Because the person is a woman, right? There is only one truth under Heaven. Is there a male truth and a female truth? I’m going to see Fourth Elder Sister. Come with me and apologize to Sai Lien-hsiu. (To MRS. LIU MRS. LIU) Mrs. Liu, Erh-niu, we’re leaving now.
MRS. LIU Good-bye.
(They go off together)
KUAN (At the corner of the street, taking his leave from HSIEH HSIAO-SHAN)
Hsiao-shan, will you arrange for me to meet with the drummer Old Jen-szu and the flutist Yü Mei? I’m thinking of writing a new play, and I want to talk over with them the scene divisions and the melodies.
HSIEH Fine. (He exits in the direction of town)
(KUAN HAN-CH’ING and CH’IEN SHUA-CH’IAO exit in the opposite direction. Just at this time, the servants in Mongolian dress who passed by a while ago are returning, followed by a richly outfitted young gentleman and a man with his hat on crooked. They enter MRS. LIU’s wine shop)
MRS. LIU Young masters, please sit down.
YOUNG GENTLEMAN No, thank you. (To the man with the crooked hat) You tell her.
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT Mrs. Liu. The matter that I raised with you yesterday—what about it?
MRS. LIU The matter you raised yesterday? Oh, Fourth Master Ts’ui, didn’t I tell you? Our Erh-niu has already been betrothed. Sixth Master Chang was the go-between. The boy’s family are the Chous from Wan-p’ing. Although they are farmers, the boy, Chou Fu-hsing, is employed at the home of Lord Horikhosen. They’re only waiting for this year’s fall harvest, and then they’ll be married. (Motioning for her daughter to go inside) (ERH-NIU runs inside the house)
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT It’s useless to argue. I know all about this, and I’ve told our young lord. He says: “This isn’t important. Who cares if he is employed at the Minister’s residence. Even if he were the Minister’s son himself, he would still have to give in. Give some money to this fellow named Chou to pick another woman for a wife.”
MRS. LIU When a girl has already been betrothed, decency will not allow this.
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT Where do you find that much decency? Our young lord, the twenty-fifth son of Lord Akham, has taken a fancy to your daughter. This is the greatest decency. Others aspire but cannot reach this height. You, on the contrary, have made our young lord pay several personal visits to your house. Don’t spoil it when someone is doing you a great honor. Now, are you agreed or not?
MRS. LIU Fourth Master, please say a few words on my behalf to the young lord. Erh-niu’s betrothal has already been settled. She doesn’t have this measure of good fortune.
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT (To the young gentleman) You see, sir?
YOUNG GENTLEMAN Don’t waste words with her. Get the young woman!
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT (To the servants) Get the young one!
(The servants drag ERH-NIU out of the house)
ERH-NIU (Resisting) Mother! Help! Help!
MRS. LIU Fourth Master, Young Lord, you can’t do this! Her father has gone to Wan-p’ing. I can’t make this decision. Wait for her father to return. Fourth Master, Fourth Master, I’m begging you. (She kneels)
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT It can’t be done, but it shall be done!
(Without another word they drag off ERH-NIU, the MAN WITH CROOKED HAT following last. MRS. LIU leaps up and grabs hold of the corner of his robe and won’t let go)
MRS. LIU How can you kidnap a person’s child in broad daylight! Can you ignore the Emperor’s Law?!
MAN WITH CROOKED HAT Don’t be so obstinate, Mrs. Liu. For twenty years our Lord Akham’s family has done things this way. If you want the Emperor’s Law, go to Ta-hsing Prefecture and tell them about it. You make enquiries. The governor of the Capital Region, who is also the prefect of Ta-hsing Prefecture, Lord Khoshin, is the eldest young lord of our family.
(Pushes MRS. LIU MRS. LIU away and swaggers off)
MRS. LIU Heavens! What am I to do? What am I to do? I must die! (Falling to the ground, she wails)
[In Scenes 2-5, KUAN is persuaded by his close friend, the famous actress CHU LIEN-HSIU, to show his outrage at the unjust execution of CHU HSIAO-LAN by writing a dramatized version of the incident. She herself has volunteered her services for the performance of the controversial play. After long hours of painstaking efforts, and with the kind assistance of his solicitous friends and colleagues, The Injustice to Tou O is completed, a theater is secured, and all is ready for the premier performance.]
SCENE 6
Characters:
KUAN HAN-CH’ING
CHU LIEN-HSIU, famous Yüan Dynasty actress.
WANG HO-CH’ING, old friend of KUAN HAN-CH’ING’s.
DIRECTOR HO, director of the Jade Goddess Theater.
WANG CHU, Yi-tu troop commander.
YEH HO-FU, scoundrel in the theater circles of the time.
HO CHEN, assistant to the Prime Minister.
IMPERIAL BODYGUARD, BACKSTAGE MANAGER, ACTORS, PUPILS OF CHU LIEN-HSIU.
Backstage at the Jade Goddess Theater. KUAN HAN-CH’ING and MA ERH, YEN SHAN-HSIU, and SAI LIEN-SHIU, all of whom have removed their makeup, are positioned behind the doorway curtain of the embroidered backdrop, eagerly watching the action on stage and the audience’s response. From time to time they exchange a few whispered comments. The backstage attendants and the Mongolian guards constantly mill about. Onstage Act 4 of The Injustice to Tou O is approaching the end.
FEMALE GHOST (Sings the Coda) Destroy all these transgressing ministers and officials. Take into your hand the sword of authority which the emperor has bestowed on you, rid the people of this evil.
(The audience cheers. Some shout, “Rid the people of this evil!”)
FEMALE GHOST (Speaks) Father, my mother-in-law is old. There is no one to take care of her.
T’IEN CHANG What a dutiful child!
FEMALE GHOST (Sings) I charge you, Father, to exhume my grandmother’s body and see that it has a more fitting burial, and with kindness take care of my mother-in-law. Take pity on her old age. Finally, reopen my case and reverse the unjust verdict that sent me to death.
(The audience shouts approval)
T’IEN CHANG Dawn has broken. Go and bring to me every official from the Yanchow Prefecture who took part in trying the case of Tou O.
ATTENDANT Yes, sir!
(While the final act is still in progress onstage, CHU LIEN-HSIU, dressed in the part of the Ghost of Tou O, leaves the stage. KUAN HAN-CH’ING, visibly moved by her performance, is helping her as she enters backstage. Her disciples rush to her side. HSIANG-KUEI gives her some tea to drink)
KUAN Rest, Fourth Sister! Your acting was tremendous. Even I never dreamed this play was so powerful.
CHU LIEN-HSIU (Removing the “ghost” trimmings on her costume) There seemed to be people shouting.
KUAN Some were calling: “Rid the people of this evil.”
(WANG HO-CH’ING and Director of the theater Ho, full of exuberance, rush in)
WANG HO-CH’ING Aiya! Lien-hsiu, you acted beautifully. In such a short time to produce such a marvelous performance! (To KUAN HAN-CH’ING) Hanch’ing, you are quite a writer of tragedies. Still, I must say that if it weren’t for this opportunity, there would be no way for this play to be staged.
KUAN I’m truly grateful to you.
WANG HO-CH’ING No need to thank me. Just don’t drive me away next time I visit you. (All burst into laughter)
KUAN Fourth Sister, hurry and remove your makeup. You must be exhausted.
HO Don’t take it off. Change into the costume you wore in the first act, and come with me to Her Ladyship. She was so delighted tonight that she cried through one yellow silk handkerchief after another. She said: “I’ve never seen such a wonderful play! I must have a look at that pitiful little daughter-inlaw. Give her a little something. And mind you, treat her properly.” When Madame Po Yen saw how pleased Her Ladyship was, she too said: “This play isn’t bad.” Well, it looks like I did well this time as a program manager.
(An Imperial Bodyguard dressed in Mongolian attire anxiously rushes in)
BODYGUARD Hurry up. Her Ladyship is anxiously waiting.
HO We’re coming. Put a few more flowers in your hair. Pat on a little more powder. Her Ladyship doesn’t like a young lady without any makeup. (CHU LIEN-HSIU is engulfed by a flurry of her pupils hurriedly applying fresh makeup. A backstage manager enters)
BACKSTAGE MANAGER (To Ho) Director, Commander Wang would like to see Miss Chu and Master Kuan.
HO Is he Wang Chu of Yi-tu, Commander of a Thousand Men?* Please invite him in! (After the BACKSTAGE MANAGER leaves, to KUAN HAN-CH’ING) He’s rather a straightforward and hot-blooded person. A while back someone in the audience shouted, “Rid the people of this evil”—that was him. Why don’t you see him?
KUAN All right.
(WANG, an immensely imposing army officer, accompanied by the MANAGER, enters.)
WANG CHU (To HO.) Director HO, which one is the actress that just acted Tou O?
HO (Pointing to CHU LIEN-HSIU, who is just touching up her makeup) She’s the one.
WANG CHU You acted beautifully. You spoke what is in our hearts. “The officials have no wish to uphold the law. The people want to speak out, but dare not.”
CHU LIEN-HSIU You’re very kind, but the credit is really due to Master Kuan’s excellent writing. (Indicating KUAN HAN-CH’ING)
WANG CHU Nevertheless, it was your singing that carried so much feeling, so much power. Every word struck deep into our hearts.
BODYGUARD (To CHU LIEN-HSIU) Hurry up. Her Ladyship is waiting.
CHU LIEN-HSIU (To WANG CHU) I hope you will honor me with more of your criticism. Please excuse me. I’m going to see Her Ladyship. (Once more straightening her outfit in the mirror, to her pupils) All of you go home. (DIRECTOR HO and BODYGUARDS assisting CHU LIEN-HSIU exit. Her pupils are tidying things up. Some leave)
WANG CHU (To KUAN HAN-CH’ING) Mr. Kuan. I’ve seen many of your plays. But this play moved me more than all the others. It moved quite a few people today. If I may be so bold as to inquire, was this play of yours inspired by Chu Hsiao-lan’s case?
KUAN (With great difficulty) Uh, no. It’s taken from a historical tale.
WANG CHU Oh. You really should write more of these historical plays.
(The BACKSTAGE MANAGER and YEH HO-FU enter, leading the swaggering HO CHEN, assistant to the Prime Minister)
HO CHEN Where is Chu Lien-hsiu?
BACKSTAGE MANAGER Your Excellency. Director Ho just escorted her to see Her Ladyship.
HO CHEN Oh. Which one is Kuan Han-ch’ing?
KUAN . . .
YEH HO-FU (Indicating KUAN HAN-CH’ING) He is.
HO CHEN (Sizing KUAN up) You then are the playwright Kuan Han-ch’ing? Do you recognize me?
KUAN . . .
YEH HO-FU His Excellency, Lord Ho, the Assistant to the Prime Minister.
KUAN Oh. HO . . .
HoCHEN Weren’t you a member of the Imperial Medical Academy? You write plays too?
KUAN Not very well, I’m afraid.
HO CHEN Why so modest? It wasn’t bad. Her Ladyship, among others, was moved by it. Ha, Ha, Ha! Even our Lord Akham watched part of it. I’m afraid we’re going to trouble you again tomorrow. We don’t want Gazing at the River Pavilion; instead, we want The Injustice to Tou O. Understand?
KUAN . . .
HO CHEN The substitution has been made, but I’m afraid we must impose upon you to alter a few things. (To YEH HO-FU) Did you mark down all the places His Lordship indicated?
YEH HO-FU They’re all written down.
HO CHEN The list?
YEH HO-FU Right here.
HO CHEN (Taking it, gives it to KUAN HAN-CH’ING) Kindly have a look at these and correct them all. All right?
KUAN (Accepting the list and hurriedly glancing over it) I’m afraid I can’t do that. If I make all these changes, then it won’t be a play. (WANG HO-CH’ING takes the list and also looks at it)
HO CHEN It wasn’t a play to begin with. You even curse heaven and earth and the demons and gods, to say nothing of us government officials. You call that a play? If it weren’t for fear of offending Her Ladyship, our Lordship would have lost his temper. I was the one who . . .
YEH HO-FU Right. It was His Excellency who made excuses for you. Finally His Lordship ordered: “Tell Kuan Han-ch’ing to change the play and perform it again tomorrow night.”
KUAN NO. It can’t be changed.
HO CHEN “Can’t be changed”? That’s a bold answer. But His Lordship has ordered: “If it isn’t changed, it can’t be performed.”
WANG HO-CH’ING Han-ch’ing, why don’t you make the changes.
KUAN NO. I’d rather see the play banned than change it.
HO CHEN You’re stubborn as a mule. Didn’t your venerable sage Confucius say: “If you have made mistakes do not shrink from correcting them”?
KUAN He was speaking of mistakes.
HO CHEN Do you mean to say you haven’t made any mistakes?
(DIRECTOR HO returns, assisting CHU LIEN-HSIU, who is carrying in her arms quite a few gifts)
HO Aiya! Her Ladyship was certainly happy today. Look at all the presents she gave! There’s never been anything like this before!
HO CHEN (To DIRECTOR HO) HO!
HO (Sensing something amiss) Yes, sir, Your Excellency.
HO CHEN Tomorrow at this same time . . .
HO Yes, sir.
HO CHEN In this same theater . . .
HO Yes, sir.
HO CHEN This same play—Our Lordship troubles you to perform it again. Understand?
HO Yes, sir. I understand.
HO CHEN But the play must be sung in accordance with all the changes. I’ve given the list to Kuan Han-ch’ing.
KUAN (With determination) Lord Ho, please go back to Lord Akham and say I would rather that this play never be performed again. It can’t be changed. If it were changed the way he wants it to be, it would be a completely different thing. It would no longer be the original Injustice to Tou O.
HO CHEN Ha, Ha! Kuan Han-ch’ing, you really are a fool. Do you think Our Lordship wants to see your original Injustice to Tou O? There’s nothing more to be said. The play will be changed and performed accordingly. If it isn’t, your heads will roll!
(HO CHEN, with his bodyguards in attendance, storms off. YEH HO-FU remains behind)
YEH HO-FU Han-ch’ing, didn’t I tell you from the outset there would be trouble with this play? A wise man doesn’t walk into certain disaster. Change it! Just now Lord Khoshin told his father about all the parts in the play where you held him up to ridicule. Some of those remarks of yours were aimed directly at His Lordship himself. How could he not get angry? Those of us in the trade know full well we’re merely “playing a game.” So—make a few changes, cut out a few lines, then the storm will blow over. Good. Han-ch’ing, take the advice of an old friend!
KUAN (Unable to restrain himself) What kind of friend are you! You’re a traitor!
WANG HO-CH’ING (Fearing he’s going too far) Han-ch’ing!
YEH HO-FU See, a person with the best of intentions tries to help you. You and your temper—you haven’t changed.
WANG HO-CH’ING Old Yeh, don’t say any more. Han-ch’ing is in a fit of temper.
YEH HO-FU His Lordship is also in a fit of temper. We’ll just see who gets burned. Good-bye! (His real character hnally reveals itself as he exits)
WANG HO-CH’ING (His eyes following YEH HO-FU out) I really never imagined he was that vile a scoundrel!
(WANG CHU comes out from an inner room and enthusiastically grasps KUAN HAN-CH’ING’s hand)
WANG CHU Mr. Kuan. Today really is a lucky day. Not only have I seen your play, but I’ve also seen what kind of a man you are. The way you respect your play, protect it with your life, it moves us even more profoundly. It makes us love your play even more. Right! Better not to produce it. No matter what, it can’t be changed. But a great play like this must be produced everywhere. If it can’t be put on in Cambaluc, you can take it to some other place. You could go to the South and produce it there. China is a big place. When will you come and perform it in Yi-tu? I’ll host all of you, you can be sure of that. When I was watching your play, I couldn’t stop myself from speaking out. If you go among the people and perform your play, even more people will speak out. Right! We must by all means “rid the people of this evil.” We cannot easily let go of these depraved ministers and corrupt officials. Take care of yourselves. Good-bye! (Shouting good-byes to everyone, he walks off with bold, determined steps)
WANG HO-CH’ING When you compare the two, that is a man. Yeh Ho-fu is nothing more than a mouse.
CHU LIEN-HSIU Han-ch’ing, what are we going to do? When I heard the shouts coming from the audience, I knew there was going to be trouble. Not only that, but Sai Lien-hsiu got carried away today. It seemed to me she added a few lines. My heart was in my mouth.
DIRECTOR HO Mr. Kuan, there’s no other way. Put up with it a little. Make the corrections on the list. Tomorrow morning Lien-hsiu and the others will have to have a rehearsal or two to make sure it will go well in the evening. What Yeh said was right. You needn’t make a whole lot of changes. Just omitting a few lines would suffice. For example, “The ministers and officials have no intention to uphold the law,” etc., can be left out. As for cursing heaven and earth, the way I see it, if the singing will go better with it in, then leave it in. It won’t send anyone to the chopping block. To speak frankly, these men of position, they fear you’re striking out at those in office. They don’t care if you attack heaven and earth. They feel it has nothing to do with them and would as soon let it go.
WANG HO-CH’ING You’re absolutely right.
HO Good. All of you go home! Lien-hsiu, producing such a show in only a few days, you must be exhausted. Go home and have a good rest. You have to conserve a little energy for tomorrow’s performance. Although we had this big blow-up, still, Her Ladyship gave you so many lovely gifts, and was so taken by you, she even spoke of adopting you. That should make you happy. Well, see you tomorrow.
EVERYONE See you tomorrow.
HO (Glancing back) Mr. Kuan, a great man can bend. Make a few changes, all right?
(DIRECTOR HO, followed by attendants, exits. CHU LIEN-HSIU, her makeup removed, KUAN HAN-CH’ING, and WANG HO-CH’ING are left onstage)
CHU LIEN-HSIU Well, Han-ch’ing and Mr. Wang, hurry up and think of something.
WANG HO-CH’ING (After a moment of silence) Today’s was really a moving performance. There were even some among the officials who were moved; Commander Wang, for example. But the more you move people, the harder it is for them to live with their guilty consciences. Akham is the most powerful man at court. Many have fallen under his hands. How could he be willing to let us off easily? Luckily, Han-ch’ing is a famous scholar. They dare not take action lightly. Also, Lord Po Yen’s mother very much liked the play and even received Lien-hsiu. I hate to think what would have happened otherwise. It’s good of Han-ch’ing to stand firm. On the other hand, if the play isn’t changed, it can’t be produced. The theater has already been booked. It has to be produced. Whether we live or die, succeed or fail, all depends upon what we ourselves decide to do now.
KUAN I’ve already decided. I would rather see it banned. It will not be changed under any condition!
WANG HO-FU But we’ve just said it has to be produced.
CHU LIEN-HSIU (Having made up her mind) Then we’ll put it on the way it is, without change.
WANG HO-CH’ING And how will you then satisfy these sly old foxes? Didn’t you hear Ho Chen say “If it’s not changed and staged, your heads will roll!”
CHU LIEN-HSIU (After considering it a moment) We’ll do it this way, Mr. Wang. Please devise a way of getting Han-ch’ing out of the city tonight. (To KUAN HAN-CH’ING) Han-ch’ing, you go. I’ll take care of things here. Don’t worry. I would rather lose my head than see your play lose a single line.
KUAN How can that be right? If you’re going to lose your head, let’s all lose ours, together!
[In the last five scenes of the play, as decided, The Injustice to Tou O is performed again the following night for Lord Akham and the other officials, without change. Outraged, Akham wants the entire company executed on the spot but is persuaded from taking such drastic action against KUAN and CHU. The young impetuous actress, SAI LIEN-HSIU, however, without a patron, has her eyes gouged out by Lord Akham’s men. KUAN and CHU are taken to prison, where they await punishment. Thanks to the repeated petitions of KUAN’S many friends and admirers, he is sentenced to permanent exile rather than execution. On the day of his departure, his friends gather to see him off. And there, at the Marco Polo Bridge, KUAN HAN-CH’ING and CHU LIEN-HSIU bid a tearful farewell.]
Translated by Elizabeth Jeannette Bernard
Hsia Yen grew up in Hangchow. He left school after his primary years to help support his family by working as an apprentice in a dyeing mill. Two years later he found the chance to enter a provincial technical high school, where he performed outstandingly and won a government scholarship to study electrical engineering in Kyushu, Japan.
In addition to engineering, which he dutifully pursued, literature and politics gradually awakened deeper interests in the youthful Hsia Yen. During the intellectual ferment of the May Fourth movement, while he was still in high school in Hangchow, he joined in editing two student magazines that promoted “the new tides in thought.” During his Japan years he began reading Western literature and social science, including Marxism.
In 1927 Hsia Yen returned to China, taught school for a while, and moved increasingly into literature and politics. He joined the Communist Party in Shanghai at a time when doing so involved great risk and participated in the planning of the League of Left-wing Writers. As part of his heavy responsibilities within the league after its founding in 1930, Hsia Yen moved to create an important subsidiary, the League of Left-wing Dramatists. Film held a particular fascination for him, partly because of its potential to reach large masses of people. His chance to extend his influence to filmmaking circles came in 1932, when the Japanese bombing of Shanghai shocked that city’s film industry into a more radical view of China’s historical situation. Hsia Yen became an advisor to the Star Film Company, which began to produce leftist movies almost exclusively. In 1933 he founded a united front group called the Association for Cinematic Culture in China, which contributed film reviews to newspapers and provided scripts and personnel to the main Shanghai studios.
It was not until 1936, when the League of Left-wing Writers disbanded, that Hsia Yen made his own name as a creative writer. In that year he produced a piece of “reportage literature” (pao-kao wen-hsüeh) called “Bonded Labor,” which Communist critics promptly hailed as a masterpiece of the genre. Shortly thereafter he turned to plays. His Story of Ch’iu Chin, Sai Chin Hua, and Under Shanghai Eaves all achieved success both among critics and at the box office. Some performances were closed because they satirized government policies. During the war years Hsia Yen fled Shanghai and moved between Kweilin, Chungking, Hong Kong, and Singapore, working as an editor at various newspapers.
After 1949 he returned to his old home base—Shanghai—and reshouldered heavy responsibilities in the administration of the new regime’s literary and filmmaking enterprises. In 1954 he was appointed Party secretary of the AllChina Federation of Cinematic Workers, a position that certified his preeminence in China’s film industry.
He was also appointed vice-minister of culture in 1954. The minister of culture was Mao Tun, a prolific writer from the 1920s and 1930s and author of the short story “The Lin Family Store” (1932), upon which Hsia Yen’s filmscript was based. The film was produced for the screen in 1958. Released the following year, it was warmly received among critics and movie-goers until, six years later, it became the object of severe criticism, which led to the removal of Hsia and Mao Tun from their official posts.
Early in 1978 Hsia, his health much impaired, was appointed advisor to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. He has resumed some filmmaking activities.
—P.L.
from The Lin Family Store— A
Filmscript and a Controversy
[The story is about a Mr. Lin, the proprietor of a small general store in a town not far from Shanghai in 1931. He has a wife, who is subject to bouts of hiccoughs when under stress, and a teenage daughter named Ming-hsiu. They live modestly in rooms that adjoin the Lin family shop. Mr. Lin’s chief assistant in the shop is a young man named Shou-sheng. There are also two hired shophands, one identified as “No. Four” or “Ah-szu,” and another simply referred to as “the shophand.”
The shop is described as an example of the in-between status of the petty bourgeoisie. On the one hand, it is deeply in debt to banks and wholesalers; on the other, it is a creditor to some smaller shops which themselves are on the brink of insolvency. Hsia Yen introduces the setting as “a society of cannibals . . . [in which] big fish eat little fish and little fish eat shrimp.”
The opening scenes show how Proprietor Lin, as a little fish, finds himself severely pressed after the Japanese bombing raids on Shanghai in late January 1931. His wholesaler in Shanghai, worried that passage to the countryside may be in jeopardy, sends a collector to demand a clearing of accounts from the Lin family shop. Local moneylenders, fearing that Lin will go bankrupt, refuse him credit. To make matters worse, a boycott is developing against Japanese goods, which Mr. Lin stocks. His daughter, Ming-hsiu, has been taunted at school for wearing clothes made in Japan.
The numbers below refer to the scenes of the filmscript.]
20
(Fade in) The evening of the fourth day after New Year’s, in the living quarters adjoining the rear of the Lin family shop.
New Year’s scrolls, as is the custom, still hang on the main wall, and a tablecloth that has been worn to a deep red hangs from the front edge of a table. Tin plates on the table are laden with tangerines, sugar cane, nuts, and so on. The scrolls are all the kind of thing in which “businessmen” take pride. Hanging them is merely an observance of custom; it has nothing to do with “refinement.”
It appears they have just finished the evening meal—the three Lins, the shophands, and Shou-sheng. Ah-szu brings Mr. Lin a thermos bottle and pours him a cup of tea. Mrs. Lin, seeing that they are going to talk business, retires to the back room.
Mr. Lin presses his hands together and faces Shou-sheng: “What to you think we should do? (He pauses a moment) If we stay open, where are we going to get merchandise? If we close up, then the four or five hundred dollars people owe us just ‘dries up,’ right? It says in the paper the fighting in Shanghai is something fierce . . .”
The shophand sits clenching his scalp, unable to utter a word. Ming-hsiu suddenly breaks the stillness: “Papa, Japanese aircraft have bombed Hangchow.”
As the atmosphere grows heavier still, the shophand says: “I hear that Chapei in Shanghai is all burned out, and most of the hundreds of thousands of people are running away, leaving everything. The foreign concessions are crammed with people and rents have skyrocketed . . . an awful lot of people are flocking to the countryside. (He pauses) One bunch got here just yesterday, and they looked like pretty high-class types. Quite a few of them were crowding into the Shrine of Sage Confucius. . . .”
Shou-sheng suddenly has a thought. Putting down his teacup he asks the shophand: “Wait a minute—we still have a lot of those small items—washbasins and towels and stuff—stored in the shop, don’t we?”
“Yeah, quite a few,” the shophand answers, uncomprehending.
Shou-sheng continues proudly: “Mr. Lin, there’s a way out of this.”
Mr. Lin is startled: “And what is that?”
“We can sell every item in that whole batch of merchandise—like the washbasins, the towels, the soap, toothpowder, toothbrushes. . . .”
“Who’d buy it?” Mr. Lin is skeptical.
Standing up, Shou-sheng continues with confidence: “This is a great chance to do business, Mr. Lin. The people fleeing Shanghai must still have a pretty penny on them. But they can hardly have run away carrying washbasins and soap. When they settle in they’re sure to need all the daily necessities. . . . So the market’s in the bag!”
Mr. Lin is still somewhat skeptical, but Ming-hsiu, who is busy eating peanuts and melon seeds at the table in the rear, becomes interested and pulls up a stool to listen.
“Can you be sure of it?” asks Proprietor Lin. “Other shops have washbasins and towels, too, you know.”
Shou-sheng speaks quickly: “Mr. Lin, you’re forgetting that we’re the only ones with any real supply of these items. Yü-ch’ang-hsiang [the competing shop across the street] can’t even come up with ten washbasins, and the ones they have are all odds and ends.” (Proudly) “We’ve got this market in the palms of our hands, Mr. Lin. If we sell the stuff as a ‘one-dollar package’ at a dollar apiece, it’s sure to sell.”
Feeling as if snatched from the jaws of disaster, Mr. Lin smiles and pats Shou-sheng’s shoulder, saying, “Right you are . . . you really are the sharpest man we’ve got. Well then, let’s get things moving. . . . ”
The shophand is happy too, and quickly says, “I’ll go get the stuff out and start checking it over.” Then, calling back over his shoulder to Ah-szu, “Hey, come gimme a hand!”
By the time the shophand and Ah-szu have exited, Shou-sheng has come up with another idea.
“Let’s get right on it, Mr. Lin. The refugees will be either in the Shrine of Sage Confucius or else in that empty building in the silk factory outside the west gate. Let’s make plenty of posters and paste them up right this evening.”
Ming-hsiu feels there is work for her as well, and excitedly joins in: “I’ll help you do the posters, Shou-sheng.” She dashes to get out the inkstone and brushes. Shou-sheng is busy too, procuring a stack of paper from inside the shop. When Ming-hsiu has rubbed up some ink, Shou-sheng takes a brush and begins to write. Mrs. Lin, forgetting about the stomachache she had, pitches in by cutting paper and mixing paste.
Mr. Lin rushes into the shop to assist in checking the merchandise. Ah-szu and the shophand are assembling washbasins, towels, toothbrushes, and toothpowder into matched sets. Mr. Lin helps by matching soap, towels, and glass cups into sets. He calculates the price as he goes, dully mumbling “fifty cents . . . thirty-two cents . . . plus forty-eight cents . . . less twenty percent. . . .”
Sheet by sheet the advertisements are written: “Grand Sale—One Dollar Package,” “Below Wholesale Clearance,” “Slashed Prices Unmatched Anywhere,” and so on and so forth.
The kerosene lamp begins to flicker, and Mr. Lin turns it up a bit. As he counts up the items, suddenly something occurs to him: “Oh, yeah—those things we released to Ch’en the Seventh’s shop on commission basis last year—there was a lot of small merchandise in there, too. (Shou-sheng nods) Okay, let’s go get those things back.” He prepares to leave.
Shou-sheng is hesitant: “But it’s New Year’s. How could we do a thing like that?”
Proprietor Lin puts his scarf around his neck. In an accusing voice, and with a touch of sarcasm, he says: “What a fine conscience you have, caring whether it’s New Year’s or not. Let’s go! If they’ve sold anything, we collect; if not, we take the stuff back!” Beckoning the shophand, he leaves.
21
In the evening, at Ch’en the Seventh’s little general store.
Turning a deaf ear to all protestations, Proprietor Lin is busy removing some small items of merchandise. Ch’en the Seventh is beseeching him to desist, but Proprietor Lin is stony-faced. The shophand is placing washbasins, towels, and the like into the bamboo basket they have brought along.
22
(Fade in) Shou-sheng, Ming-hsiu, and the others are still writing advertisements. The sound of firecrackers can be heard in the distance.
“Ah-szu!” Shou-sheng calls out. And then to Ming-hsiu: “They’re already saluting the god of wealth . . . it’s almost dawn. Why don’t you go and rest?” Ming-hsiu shakes her head, but cannot fight off another yawn. When Ah-szu comes running in, Shou-sheng says to him: “Go start pasting—at the gate of the Shrine of Kuan the Divine, at the Shrine of Sage Confucius, and all around the silk factory. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ah-szu excitedly grabs a stack of paper and a jar of paste and runs out.
A string of firecrackers goes off near by. As Mr. Lin rubs his eyes, the rays of dawn are already seeping under the front door.
23
(Fade in) At the gate of the Shrine of Kuan the Divine, early in the morning. Refugees are clustered here and there, three or four to a group. Some are buying breakfast snacks. They quickly notice the advertisement on the walls:
—Special to our Displaced Countrymen: Items for Daily Use at Unheard-of Low Prices.
—Also the “One-Dollar Package.”
—Supply is Limited, First Come First Served.
A hubbub of discussion ensues.
24
The inner rooms of the Lin residence. Mrs. Lin is implanting three sticks of lit incense before a porcelain image of Kuan Yin. She prostrates herself and kowtows vigorously, mumbling some indistinct phrases.
25
At the morning market. Sure enough, all kinds of refugees are crowding around in front of the Lin family shop. Though obviously travel-weary, they nevertheless are dressed much more stylishly than the “local yokels.”
The shophand and Ah-szu are busy selling one after another of the “onedollar packages.” An unexpected smile appears on Mr. Lin’s face.
These Shanghai people, from the big-time city, make their purchases with little nonsense. They pick something up, glance over it, pull out their cash, and pay. They don’t pick through the merchandise or want to knock a few pennies off the price.
Remarkably enough, people are also buying umbrellas, galoshes, and things like that.
26
At the Yü-ch’ang-hsiang shop [across the street]. The storefront is decked out in splendid fashion, with even a vase on the counter filled with winter sweet blooms and nandina leaves. Yet business is slow.
The proprietor of Yü-ch’ang-hsiang is in an agitated state. He runs out in front of the counter and peers at the Lin family shop. His little clerk is pointing and gesticulating.
There is much bustle at the Lin family shop.
The proprietor’s expression is one of surprise, then suspicion—mixed with an element of swelling jealousy. He ponders a moment, then gives a slight wave of his hand to his accountant. He goes up to the cashier’s counter and the accountant follows.
The two men huddle together, whispering stealthily. The accountant alternately nods and appears to be deep in thought. In a moment the proprietor says, “So that’s what we’ll do. You yourself (With emphasis) make the arrangements.” The accountant nods his head, picks up his felt hat from the counter top, and walks out. (Fade out). . . .
[In scenes 27 and 28 it becomes clear that a nasty rumor has been planted about the Lin family shop. Mr. Lin grows increasingly desperate.]
29
In the home of President Yü of the Merchant’s Guild. Yü and his family are playing “hit the jackpot” with dice. When he sees that Mr. Lin has come, Yü leaves the table and rises to greet Lin, clasping his hands in the New Year’s salute: “Best wishes, Lin my friend, and every prosperity in the New Year! You started this year with a real bang, old boy—your business was fantastic when you opened today!”
Mr. Lin, preoccupied with his own worries, returns the salute, mumbles “thank you,” and extends perfunctory civilities to all present. Then he pulls Yü aside and says, “I must impose upon your kindness again, President . . .”
“No problem, no problem. Have a seat.”
The two sit down and talk privately.
Mrs. Yü and the children go on rolling dice. While continuing to play, Mrs. Yü calls out, “Amah Wang, make some sweet tea! Company’s here.”
Mr. Lin is whispering, and his voice is drowned out by the sounds of the dice and the children’s laughter.
President Yü listens to him and guffaws: “That’s possible, but hardly a foregone conclusion. Take it easy, old boy. Tomorrow I’ll . . . go get in touch with them. Just take it easy.”
Mr. Lin feels relieved and smiles as he replies, “That’s wonderful. Thank you so much.” He rises and prepares to excuse himself when Amah Wang comes in with sweet tea. Yü grabs hold of him: “What’s your hurry? Let’s chat some more—it’s great to have you here.”
Mr. Lin reluctantly sits down again. Yü, bubbling with laughter, gives the impression of one about to reveal a bit of good news. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, only haven’t had the chance. (He pauses, rubbing his chin) Somewhere or another Commissioner Pu [of the local Kuomintang Party branch] has noticed your daughter, who very much suits his fancy. The commissioner is nearly forty and still without a son. His wife has never given birth, but if your daughter were to go over . . .”
At this point Mr. Lin begins to panic. He tries to speak, but Yü cuts him off: “If she can just produce a child or two, she’s a ready-made Madam Commissioner! Ha, ha! When that happens even I can ride on her coattails.”
This bolt from the blue leaves Mr. Lin scared silly. He is totally at a loss for what to say. “President Yü . . . you . . . must be kidding!”
But Yü is still the picture of seriousness. “We’re old friends, so we can be quite frank. When it comes to things like this—from an old-fashioned point of view—one might feel a loss of face or something. But it needn’t be so. It’s the style these days, and there’d be nothing improper if your daughter made this move. . . . What’s more, since Commissioner Pu’s already got this in his head, if you go against him it’ll be hard for you to get along around here. (He pauses to allow the import of this statement to sink in) But if you agree, you’ll have something to look forward to. I’ve looked at all this from your own point of view, believe me, or I never would have brought it up.”
“No, no, President Yü, we are modest folk—we couldn’t be such social climbers! My little daughter is unrefined and . . . ah . . . we really couldn’t. . . .”
“Ha, ha! You’re not climbing—someone else is stooping, that’s all! What fault of yours is it? Let’s leave it this way: you go back and talk it over with the missus, and I’ll just hold off for now. If I see Commissioner Pu, I’ll just say I haven’t had a chance to mention it, okay? But you’ll have to let me know pretty soon.”
“Uh-huh—” Mr. Lin arises with a ghastly expression on his face. His legs are unsteady.
As Yü sees him to the door, a volley of laughter and the rattling of dice are heard from within the room.
30
Mr. Lin’s bedroom in the interior of the Lin residence. It is late at night, and Mrs. Lin obviously has been weeping for some time. She is outraged and, despite efforts to keep her voice down, she indignantly bursts out: “A right and proper family . . . hie!* . . . has a pure and innocent girl be somebody’s concubine! (Mr. Lin gestures that she should lower her voice) Hsiu’s the only one I’ve got—even if it were good people with a proper proposal, I wouldn’t let her go!”
“I feel the same way, but . . .”
“ ‘But’ you say?! But I won’t have it! See if they can steal her from me!”
“Steal they won’t—but they’re sure to hatch some kind of evil scheme. These people are more vicious than thieves.” Mr. Lin is also on the verge of tears.
“If they get her, it’ll be over my dead body!” . . .
A few days later police come to the Lin family shop and arrest Mr. Lin. He is jailed on the strength of rumors that he intends to abscond with borrowed funds. Shou-sheng learns that a bribe of $200 will release Mr. Lin. At the same time the proprietor of the Yü-ch’ang-hsiang shop offers to buy the Lin shop’s marketable merchandise.
37
Five o’clock P.M. The inner quarters are already dark and gloomy. Shou-sheng is standing before Mrs. Lin. Ming-hsiu enters carrying a lit kerosene lantern.
Shou-sheng says: “The way it looks now, things are pretty clear. A moment ago, Guild President Yü told me that to get somebody out you have to spend two hundred dollars or more. Now the accountant from the Yü-ch’ang-hsiang shop comes across the street to gouge some merchandise for a sum of one hundred and fifty or sixty. It looks like they’re all in cahoots. (He becomes somewhat agitated) Just look—the Party branch and the Merchant’s Guild want money, Yü-ch’ang-hsiang wants merchandise, Commissioner Pu wants a certain person. . . .”
Mrs. Lin, who has been weeping continuously, manages a sentence: “It’s . . . it’s like picking the softest of the steamed buns out of a bamboo steamer. Your master was too gentle a person, that’s all—everybody took advantage of him. . . .”
Shou-sheng scratches his head, then says: “Mrs. Lin, I think we’d better let them gouge this batch of stuff. We can take their hundred and fifty or sixty dollars of cash, add in the fifty or sixty in the shop, and get Mr. Lin out before going any further.”
Mrs. Lin is both grieved and upset at the idea of spending so much money. She merely weeps (A noiseless weeping) and says nothing.
Seeing that his suggestion is getting nowhere, Shou-sheng feels obliged to withdraw. But just as he steps through the swinging door to the shop, Minghsiu catches up with him. The color is gone from her face and her voice is trembling. “Oh, Shou-sheng! Mama’s too upset to think! She keeps saying . . . that they’ve already killed Papa. You . . . you must hurry up and settle it with Yü-ch’ang-hsiang, hurry up and get Papa out! You . . . better take charge of things.”
So saying Ming-hsiu suddenly blushes and runs back inside. Shou-sheng’s eyes follow her as she goes. He stares dumbly for a moment, then slowly turns again to leave, mustering his determination.
38
Shou-sheng returns to the shop area and takes a packet of cash out of the teller’s drawer. He speaks to the shophand in a firm voice: “Close the front door, Ah-szu. (Hands a list of inventory to the clerk) Please check these items to see if they are all there. I’m going over to give Yü-ch’ang-hsiang his answer.”
Ah-szu and the shophand are unaware of what is happening. They look startled as they reach to receive the inventory list.
39
(Fade in) The inner quarters. In front of two candles, Mrs. Lin is kowtowing before the bodhisattva Kuan Yin.
Ming-hsiu yawns and stretches, then glances at the old-fashioned clock on the table in front of the bed.
It is 11:40. Mrs. Lin stands up after finishing her obeisances to the bodhisattva.
Ming-hsiu says, “Why don’t you go rest, Ma? I’ll stay up.”
Mrs. Lin shakes her head and sits down. One can hear the distant tolling of the night watch.
A moment later the sound of the outside door opening sends Ming-hsiu dashing out. Mrs. Lin also turns to rise.
Sure enough, it is Shou-sheng bringing Mr. Lin back. Mrs. Lin can hardly believe her eyes. Ming-hsiu’s worried expression rapidly disappears and is replaced by a look of joy. Mrs. Lin examines her husband in every detail, seeking to satisfy herself that he has not been abused. She then hastens back to offer incense before the bodhisattva Kuan Yin.
The dazed Mr. Lin sits down as Ming-hsiu drapes a padded gown over his shoulders and pours him a cup of hot tea.
Shou-sheng digs a paper packet out of his clothing and places it on the table. “This is a bit of left-over money. We still have fifty or sixty.”
Mr. Lin heaves a sigh. His voice is listless as he says, “You might as well have let me die over there. Spending money to get me out means our money is all used up. And the shop is empty. Isn’t this the end of the line?”
Mrs. Lin moves to her husband’s side. Seeing him in this mood she cannot help weeping again. Mr. Lin continues, fighting back sobs. “They’ve gouged all our stuff . . . our debts are piled high . . . what can we do with . . . this shop?”
“Mr. Lin, sir.” The speaker is Shou-sheng, who then dips his finger in his tea and writes a character on the table.
(Close-up on the character “Leave’)
Mr. Lin is startled; then tears gush from his eyes. He glances at Mrs. Lin, glances at Ming-hsiu, and can only sigh.
Shou-sheng lowers his voice: “This is the only way out, Mr. Lin. If we scrape together everything in the shop, it’ll come to a hundred dollars or more. Take it with you—it should get you by for a month or two. Let me handle what happens here.”
His words are overheard by Mrs. Lin, who quickly interjects: “You go, too—you and Hsiu. Leave me here by myself; I’ll fight to the last.”
Mr. Lin waves his hand in an effort to calm her, but, suddenly seeming healthy and vigorous, she dashes into the bedroom. Ming-hsiu cries out “Ma!” and runs after her.
Mr. Lin is dazed. In his indecision he sits tapping his head with his hand.
Shou-sheng lowers his voice again. “You and your daughter leave together, Mr. Lin. Mrs. Lin will never feel comfortable if the young lady stays here, since that guy Pu is sure to try something.
Mr. Lin still cannot make up his mind. Shou-sheng, at a loss, walks aimlessly around the table.
At this point Mrs. Lin enters in a burst of tears. Both Mr. Lin and Shou-sheng jump with surprise. Cupped in the lady’s hands is a little “gift box.” The sight of Mr. Lin’s and Shou-sheng’s startled expressions brings her to a stop. “You two come in here, too,” she says, “and listen to my idea.”
Mr. Lin and Shou-sheng follow her in.
She opens up the little box, removes from it a paper packet, and says, pointing at the packet: “These are my private savings, about two hundred and some dollars. I’m going to give half to you. Hsiu—(With emphasis) I hereby betroth you to Shou-sheng. Early tomorrow morning Hsiu will leave with her father . . . hie! . . . I’m not going. Shou-sheng will stay with me a few days until we see what happens. There’s no telling how many days I have to live . . . hie! . . . (Pointing to Ming-hsiu and Shou-sheng) If you’ll kowtow together in front of me, I can set my mind at ease.”
Mr. Lin is astonished at his wife’s decision but, at the same time, feels it to be a relatively fitting solution. He wants to speak, but Mrs. Lin is busy grabbing Ming-hsiu with one hand and Shou-sheng with the other, requiring them to “do their kowtows.”
The two of them oblige and kowtow before the elder Lins. Ming-hsiu inclines her head, blushing profusely. Shou-sheng steals a glance at her.
At this point Mr. Lin finally has decided what to do.
“All right,” he says, “so be it. (Hepauses) But Shou-sheng—if you stay behind to deal with those people, be extremely careful at every turn.”
Mrs. Lin now has found her confidence: “Go get your things ready, Hsiu!” (Fade out)
40
(Fade in) The Lin family shop has finally closed down. It is early morning, and a sheet of paper pasted on the front door bears the message: “Clearing Accounts—Going Out of Business.”
A group of people gather around and clamorous gossip breaks out.
“There was wind of this a few days back.”
“The boss took off two days ago.”
One woman sighs. “Times are really hard.”
All of a sudden Ch’ien the Monkey [from a local bank] crowds his way in, accompanied by a clerk. Barging to the front, he pastes a poster next to the one that reads “Clearing Accounts—Going Out of Business”:
Public Announcement of the Heng Yüan Money Shop:
“In order to protect the interests of all creditors, any . . .”
Having pasted the notice, Ch’ien the Monkey pounds savagely on the door.
Lu the Monk comes rushing over with the tottering Mrs. Chu [a small creditor]. When she sees what has happened, she nearly faints.
Ch’en the Seventh comes running as well. The crowd outside the door gets bigger and bigger. . . .
[A few final scenes depict outraged creditors and the lonely image of Proprietor Lin fleeing in a small boat.]
The film about the Lin family shop was attacked for “prettifying the bourgeoisie,” meaning that it wrongly allowed a person like Lin to appear honest and pitiable.1 Its detractors objected less to the film’s subject matter than to the viewpoint from which it was presented. In the words of one critic:
If we really want to depict the image of an exploiter like Proprietor Lin, we must pay attention to the relationships between the exploiter and those he exploits. We must reveal how it happens that the blood and sweat of the working people turn into his profit; this means we must reveal the oppressive and exploitative relationships between him and his shophands and must deal with the conflicts and struggles between those two classes. But . . . in the film we see nothing whatever of class conflict, or the clash between labor and capital. What we see is how very kind and concerned the proprietor is toward his shophands, as if they were his own family; what we see is how loyal and true the shophands are toward the proprietor, planning and scheming on his behalf. In the film the proprietor’s interests are made into the common interests of these two types of people. . . .2
Scenes 20 and 39 above include obvious examples of the mutual concern between Shou-sheng and Proprietor Lin that Hsia Yen’s critics found unacceptable. Would a shophand really have thought of the “one-dollar package” to save his boss’s skin? Would the boss really engage his daughter to a shophand?
Mao Tun’s original story in 1932 had been an attempt at “naturalistic” description, a kind of combination of Zola’s concern for scientific detail with a Communist concern to reflect current social theory. The fact that the story was attacked thirty-three years later hardly implies that it was out of step in its time. Consider the following description of the petty bourgeoisie written by Mao Tse-tung in 1926:
The petty bourgeoisie . . . fall into three different sections. . . . The third section consists of those whose standard of living is falling. Many in this section, who originally belonged to better-off families, are undergoing a gradual change from a position of being barely able to manage to one of living in more and more reduced circumstances. When they come to settle accounts at the end of the year, their debts mounting and their life becoming more and more miserable, they “shudder at the thought of the future.” They are in great mental distress because there is such a contrast between their past and their present. Such people are quite important for the revolutionary movement; . . . not only will [the left-wing of the bourgeoisie] join the revolution, but the middle section too may join, and even the right-wingers. . . . [Emphasis added.]3
Given this background, how could Hsia Yen’s critics have held it to be grossly wrong to put the Lin family story on a movie screen in 1959? Had Hsia Yen distorted Mao Tun’s theme? Such distortion was never charged—in fact Hsia Yen’s critics were quite ready to concede that the film was “faithful to the original work.”4
A close comparison of the filmscript with Mao Tun’s text reveals that Hsia Yen, far from adding bourgeois sympathies to the story, actually altered it in a “left” direction. The original story, for example, does not include the episode in which Lin cruelly retrieves his merchandise from the little shop of Ch’en the Seventh (end of scene 20 and scene 21). This and other touches were added by Hsia Yen in order to stress the exploitative side of the petty bourgeoisie. “In one respect,” Hsia Yen wrote, “[Lin] is oppressed, is exploited; but in another he is an exploiter quite capable of oppressing others.”5
Despite his efforts to make Proprietor Lin seem less sympathetic, it was Hsia Yen, and not Mao Tun, who in May 1965 came under direct attack for the bourgeois sympathies that remained in the story. Mao Tun was punished only to the extent of a quiet removal from office in late 1964.
Hsia Yen’s critics, aware of this apparent inconsistency, explained by saying that times had changed. Chang T’ien-i, a fellow writer from the thirties, put it this way: “Regarding any piece of writing from the past (from the thirties, for example), to ask what effect it had in its time is one thing, but what effect it is likely to have when transplanted before the eyes of today’s readers and viewers (especially youth) is quite another matter.”6 Others argued that sympathy with Proprietor Lin was appropriate in the thirties because the correct course at that time was to unite with people like Lin in a joint struggle against the Kuomintang and the Japanese. In the fifties, however, there was no need to sympathize or ally with capitalism in any form.
It is almost certain that there were other, more crucial reasons for the attack on Hsia Yen, reasons related to the struggle for power by those who were later known as the “Gang of Four.” Mao Tun, though formally outranking Hsia Yen in the Ministry of Culture, was not a member of the Communist Party and was, to some degree, only a ceremonial figure.7 But Hsia Yen was a long-standing member of the Party who had wielded a strong influence in the Party’s film circles ever since the early thirties. Thus anyone attempting a turnover of power would naturally need to concentrate on Hsia Yen.
Hsia Yen’s association with the “revisionist” wing of the Party leadership—those who became prominent public enemies during the Cultural Revolution—can be traced back at least as early as 1962. In that year he contributed periodically to a column in the People’s Daily called “Ch’ang-tuan Lu” (“Long and Short Records,” or “Sizing Things Up”), which soon gained a reputation for thinly veiled but astute criticism of national policies. Other contributors to this column included Teng T’o, a prominent journalist, and Wu Han, a historian and Deputy Mayor of Peking. In 1966 Teng and Wu were denounced for anti-Party activities in an attack whose ultimate targets were such leading “revisionists” as P’eng Chen, Mayor of Peking, and Liu Shao-ch’i, Chairman of the People’s Republic. To some degree the criticism of Hsia Yen must be viewed as an opening sally of the larger campaign.
From 1966 until 1977, Hsia Yen and Mao Tun were not heard from publicly. A year after the fall of the “Gang of Four” both reappeared. They participated at a state banquet on September 30, 1977, the eve of the eighteenth anniversary of the People’s Republic. In subsequent months they published some brief reminiscences, mostly denouncing the Gang of Four, and met occasionally with foreign visitors.
Translation and comments by Perry Link
NOTES
1. Literary Gazette, no. 6 (1965): 2-14; Film Criticism (May 20, 1967): 3-4; Current Background, no. 766 (July 15, 1965).
2. Hu K’o, “What Has the Film ‘The Lin Family Shop’ Propagandized?” Literary Gazette, no. 6 (1965): 4.
3. Mao Tse-tung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I, pp. 15-16.
4. Su Nan-yüan, “ ‘Lin’s Shop’ is a Picture for Prettifying the Bourgeoisie,” People’s Daily (May 29,1965); Current Background, no. 766 (July 15, 1965).
5. Quoted in Chang T’ien-i, “A Critique of the Revision of ‘The Lin Family Shop,’ ” Literary Gazette, no. 6 (1965): 7.
6. Ibid., p. 6.
7. Some sources identify Mao Tun as a Communist Party member. For example, see Ting Wang, Critical Introduction to Chinese Writers of the 1930s, p. 15. But Mao Tun has not been behaving like one with weighty Party responsibility. [K.Y.H.]
The Red Lantern is perhaps the best known of eleven model “Modern Revolutionary Peking Operas” written during the Cultural Revolution under the aegis of Chiang Ching. From the moment of its important debut at a drama festival in Peking in 1964, it attracted widespread attention from critics, who praised it for its ideological, literary, and musical qualities.*
The creation of a new form of opera was advanced as a fulfillment of the guidelines set down by Mao Tse-tung in his famous Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art delivered in 1942. The main principle was that art must serve the people—that is, the workers, peasants, and soldiers. In contrast to traditional Peking Opera, which represented ideal worlds of emperors, ministers, scholars, and beauties, Revolutionary Opera turns to the proletariat and the historical theme of liberation through struggle. The events of the War of Resistance and the civil war against the Nationalists form the core of this new mythology. Revolutionary Opera is designed to present positive images of the people as well as to enable the audience to reexperience the revolutionary process through the catharsis of the theater.
One of the key aesthetic problems of the genre is characterization, wherein a tension is perceived between the function of typifying the masses and the fulfillment of the emotional and artistic need for a heroic figure who is somehow extraordinary. This is solved theoretically by the doctrine of “combining revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism” and practically by allowing heroes such as Li Yü-ho to express human emotions in the midst of crises and to suffer mortality.
As a result of Soviet influence in the 1950s, many techniques of Western ballet and socialist realism have been assimilated. The actors themselves, however, conceive of their craft more in terms of attitude. Personal struggle against the temptations of self associated with the Stanislavsky system, and the emphasis on the collective life of the troupe as it identifies with the masses through labor, enable the actors to grasp the essence of their role from an enhanced socialist life offstage.
Musically, Revolutionary Peking Opera is built on the aria forms of traditional Peking Opera. However, a number of new aria types have been created by amalgamating melodies from local operas. The orchestra has been enlarged and often includes Western instruments for more power, while the greater precision of the Western scale has been adopted to enable better tuning. Incidental music plays an expanded role and is often excerpted for concert use. In addition, scenery and realistic props link this genre to Wagner and other Romantic proponents of a “total theater.”
The two principal musical modes involved are hsi-p’i and erh-huang, the former somewhat higher pitched and crisper than the latter. A “standard beat” consists of the regular rhythm of 2-2-3, or 3-3-4, usually set parallel to a trochaic-trochaic-dactylic or dactylic-dactylic-trochaic-trochaic pattern in the text. “Swaying beat” is slower and more lyrical than “fast beat,” and “flowing-water beat” suggests a narrative mood. There is also a more vigorous flowing beat in frequent use. “Scattered beat” gives the singer greater freedom to vary the metrical arrangement of each line. “Two-six” suggests something like a trochaic pattern.
The arias usually have one end-rhyme sustained throughout a passage. As in traditional Peking opera, arias can also function as asides. —K.Y.H. and
Richard Strassberg
A REVOLUTIONARY PEKING OPERA IN ELEVEN ACTS
[The opera presents a page from the Chinese Communist guerrilla war against Japan in the early 1940s in North China.
In Acts I-IV, old Communist revolutionary railroad worker LIYÜ-HO lives withGRANDMA, who has accepted LI as her son, and a young girl,T’IEH-MEI, who calls him her father. All three of them work together to aid the guerrillas. An underground messenger jumps a train to deliver a secret code book to LI, who is to transmit it to a guerrilla unit. A spineless comrade,WANG, when threatened by the Japanese, betrays LI. Still unaware of the crucial turn of events, LI returns home after an unsuccessful attempt to deliver the code book, as the curtain rises on Act V.]
ACT V: Relating the Story of a Revolutionary Family
Evening, at LI’ s house. The audience can see both the living room and the area outside the door to the house. As the curtain rises, GRANDMA LI is in the room waiting for LI YÜ-HO
GRANDMA ( Sings—hsi-p’i swaying beat)
The time grows late
And YÜ -ho has not yet returned.
(T’IEH-MEI comes out of the back room. A siren sounds)
T’IEH-MEI (Sings—vigorous flowing beat)
There’s so much commotion in the streets,
I worry about my father.
(LI YÜ-HO enters holding his lunchbox and a signal lantern. He knocks on the door)
LI (Offstage) T’ieh-mei!
TIEH-MEI Daddy is home.
GRANDMA Hurry up, open the door.
T’IEH-MEI (Opens the door) Daddy!
GRANDMA Yü-ho!
LI Mother!
GRANDMA You’re back. Did you make the connection? (Takes his lunchbox and the lantern)
LI NO. (Takes off his coat)
GRANDMA What happened?
LI Mother! (Sings hsi-p’i flowing beat)
At the porridge stall, as I contacted the knife-sharpener,
Police car sirens sounded, and Japanese swarmed out to search.
But the knife-sharpener covered me by luring away the wolves.
Seizing the chance, I opened the lunchbox and hid the secret code.
I hid it at the bottom of the porridge where it can’t be found ...
T’IEH-MEI Uncle Knife-sharpener was wonderful!
GRANDMA Yü-ho, so where is the secret code?
LI Mother!(Confiding in her, he continues singing) To prevent any slip, I’ve stored it in a safer place.
T’IEH-MEI Daddy, you really are resourceful.
LI T’ieh-mei, now you know all about it. It is more important than our lives.
We would rather have our heads cut off than reveal the secret. You understand?
T’IEH-MEI Of course I understand.
LI SO you do understand. Just look at this good child!
T’IEH-MEI Oh, Daddy ...
LI Ah ...
(It gradually gets dark. GRANDMA LI brings over a kerosene lamp)
GRANDMA Ah ... look at you two.
LI Mother, I have something to do. I have to go out again.
GRANDMA All right. Be careful! Come back quickly.
LI Okay. Don’t worry.
T’IEH-MEI Daddy, put this scarf around you. (She puts a scarf around his neck)
Daddy, be sure you come back early.
Li (Lovingly) Don’t you worry. (He goes out the door, exits)
(T’IEH-MEI closes the door. GRANDMA LI polishes the signal lantern with great care as TIEH-MEI gazes at her intently)
GRANDMA Come, T’ieh-mei. Let me tell you the story about this red lantern.
T’IEH-MEI Ai. (Very happily, she goes over to the table and sits down)
GRANDMA (Seriously) This red lantern has, for many years, lighted the paths upon which we poor people have trod. It has lighted the paths for us workers. In the past, your grandpa held it. Now your father holds it. My child, you already know what happened last night. At crucial junctures, we cannot part with it. You must remember: this red lantern is our family’s treasured heirloom.
T’IEH-MEI Oh, the red lantern is our family’s treasured heirloom?
(GRANDMA LI looks at T’IEH-MEI with confidence and trust, then she walks into the back room. T’IEH-MEI picks up the lantern, examines it carefully, and ponders it.)
T’IEH-MEI (Sings—hsi-p’i scattered beat)
I heard Grandma tell
(Switches to swaying beat) About the red lantern,
Her words were few, but their meaning, profound.
Why don’t my father and uncles
(Switches to standard beat) Fear any danger?
Because they want to save China, save the poor and defeat the Japanese devils.
I think: what they do everyone should try to do;
What they are we all should try to be.
Oh, T’ieh-mei!
(Switches to vigorous flowing beat) You are seventeen, and no longer young.
Why don’t you help father to lighten his worries?
For instance, if father carries a thousand catty load,
You,T ’ieh-mei, should bear eight hundred.
(GRANDMA LI comes out of the back room)
GRANDMA T’ieh-mei,T’ieh-mei!
T’IEH-MEI Grandma!
GRANDMA My child, what are you thinking about?
T’IEH-MEI Nothing.
(A child’s cry is heard from the neighbor’s house)
GRANDMA (Sighs) Ai! They have nothing to eat again. We still have some cornmeal left. Hurry and take it over to them.
T’IEH-MEI Yes, Grandma. (She puts the cornmeal into a container)
(HUI-LIEN enters and knocks at the door)
HUI-LIENU Grandma Li!
T’IEH-MEI Cousin Hui-lien is here.
GRANDMA Hurry up, open the door for her.
T’IEH-MEI Yes, Grandma. (She opens the door. HUI-LIEN enters)
GRANDMA (With concern) Oh, Hui-lien, how is the baby?
HUI-LIENUI-LIEN (Sighs) How can I afford to take the child to a doctor? These days, fewer and fewer people send me clothes for mending or washing. In our house, we’ve been living from meal to meal, but now there’s nothing left, nothing at all.
T’IEH-MEI Cousin Hui-lien, here, take this. (She hands her the cornmeal)
HUI-LIEN (Extremely touched)....
GRANDMA GO ahead, take it. I was just sending T’ieh-mei to bring it over to you.
HUI-LIEN (Accepting the flour) You are so kind to us!
GRANDMA Don’t say that. The wall is the only thing separating us—otherwise we would be one family.
T’IEH-MEI Grandma, we are one family even if we don’t tear the wall down.
GRANDMA T’ieh-mei is right.
(The child cries again)
AUNTIE T’IEN (Calling from offstage) Hui-lien, Hui-lien!
(AUNTIE T’IEN enters enters)
T’IEH-MEI Hi, Auntie.
GRANDMA Auntie, come here and sit down.
AUNTIE T’IEN I can’t. The child is crying again. Hui-lien, go home and look after the child.
(Seeing the flour in HUI-LIEN’S hand, she is very touched)
GRANDMA Make some food for the child first.
AUNTIE T’IEN But you yourselves don’t have enough to eat.
GRANDMA Ai! (Warmly) Between our two families, whatever is ours is also yours. So don’t even think of it.
AUNTIE T’IEN We have to get back.
GRANDMA Don’t hurry. Take care!
(AUNTIE T’IEN and HUI-LIEN exit)
T’IEH-MEI(Closing the door) Grandma, Cousin Hui-lien and her family have suffered too much!
GRANDMA Yes. In the past, her father was a porter working on the railroad. He was crushed to death by a train. The Japanese devils not only didn’t give them any compensation, they even seized her husband to work for them without pay. T’ieh-mei, our two families are working people sharing the same hatred and bitterness. We must take good care of them.
(FAKE LIAISON MAN, an enemy agent in disguise, enters, knocks at the door)
T’IEH-MEI Who is it?
FAKE LIAISON MAN Does Li Yü-ho live here?
T’IEH-MEI Someone looking for daddy.
GRANDMA Open the door.
T’IEH-MEI All right! (She opens the door)
(FAKE LIAISON MAN enters the room and hurriedly closes the door behind him)
GRANDMA You are ...
FAKE LIAISON MAN I sell wooden combs.
GRANDMA DO you have one made of peachwood?
FAKE LIAISON MAN Yes, I do, but I want cash.
T’IEH-MEI All right. Wait.
(FAKE LIAISON MAN puts his pack down and turns around. puts his pack down and turns around. T’IEH-MEI is about to get the signal lantern. GRANDMA LI stops her. Instead, she picks up the kerosene lamp to test the man. stops her. Instead, she picks up the kerosene lamp to test the man. T’IEH-MEI suddenly understands)
FAKE LIAISON MAN (AN (Turns back, sees the lamp) So I finally found you, thank Heavens. It wasn’t easy, believe me!
(T’IEH-MEI’S surprise turns to anger; she is unable to control herself)
GRANDMA (Realizes the plot, very calmly) All right, my man. Come on, show us your wooden combs so we can choose one.
FAKE LIAISON MAN What are you talking about, old lady?I came here to get the secret code.
GRANDMA Child, what is he talking about?
FAKE LIAISON MAN Don’t interrupt, grandma. The secret code is a very important document of the Communist Party. It has a great deal to do with the future of the revolution. Come on, give it to me, hurry up.
T’IEH-MEI (Angrily chasing him out) Don’t talk nonsense here. Get out.
FAKE LIAISON MAN Don’t, don’t ...
T’IEH-MEI Get out!
(T’IEH-MEI’S pushes the man out of the door, throws his pack at him, and slams the door with a bang)
T’IEH-MEI Oh, Grandma!
(GRANDMA quickly stops T’IEH-MEI from talking. FAKE LIAISON MAN calls two plainclothes agents over to watch LI’s house, and then exits)
T’IEH-MEI Grandma,I almost fell into his trap.
GRANDMA My child, there must be someone who has turned traitor and betrayed us.
T’IEH-MEI In that case, what shall we do?
GRANDMA (Whispers) Hurry, tear off the signal.
T’IEH-MEI What signal?
GRANDMA That red butterfly on the window.
T’IEH-MEI (Understands) Oh. (About to tear it off)
GRANDMA T’ieh-mei, open the door and use it to block the light. You tear the signal off, I’ll sweep the ground to cover you. Hurry, hurry!
(T’IEH-MEI’S opens the door, and LI YU-HOU-HO enters in haste. He closes the door. T’IEH-MEI is frightened and GRANDMA LI drops her broom to the ground drops her broom to the ground)
LI(Sensing something wrong) Mother, has something happened?
GRANDMA There are “dogs” outside.
(LI YÜ-HOU shows no fear. He quickly arrives at a conclusion about the enemy situation)
GRANDMA Oh, my son, my son!
LI Mother, it is possible that I’ll be arrested. (Instructs his mother very cautiously) The secret code is hidden under the stone tablet by the old locust tree on the western bank of the river. You must try your best to deliver it to the knife-sharpener. The password remains the same.
GRANDMA The password remains the same.
LI Right! You must be very careful.
GRANDMA Don’t you worry, son.
T’IEH-MEI Daddy ...
(Auxiliary warrant officer Hou of the Japanese military police enters, knocks on the door)
Hou Is Li Shih-fu home?
LI Mother, they’re here.
T’IEH-MEI Daddy, you ...
LI T’ieh-mei, open the door.
T’IEH-MEI Yes, Daddy.
Hou Open the door!
(T’IEH-MEI opens the door, seizing that moment of activity to tear off the red butterfly)
Hou (Entering) Oh, you must be Li Shih-fu.
LI Yes,I am.
Hou Captain Hatoyama invites you to a party. (He hands the “invitation “over)
LI Oh? Captain Hatoyama invites me to a banquet?
Hou Correct.
LI My goodness! What an honor! [Scornfully he throws the invitation on the table)
Hou To make friends. Li Shih-fu, shall we?
LI After you, please. (To his mother, hrmly and solemnly) Mother, take care of yourself! I am going now.
GRANDMA Just a minute. T’ieh-mei, bring some wine here.
T’IEH-MEI Yes, Grandma. (She goes to the back room to get wine)
Hou Hey! Old lady, there’s lots of wine at the banquet, more than enough for him to drink.
GRANDMA Ah ... poor people are used to drinking their own wine, because drop by drop it soaks deep into their hearts. [She takes the wine T’IEH-MEI ’IEH-MEI has brought in and bids LI YÜ-HOU farewell, dignified yet emotional) Now, my son, this bowl of wine ... you, you, you drink it down.
LI (Solemnly receives the wine) Mother, with this wine at the bottom of my heart, I can cope with whatever wine they may offer me. (Drinks it up in a gulp) Mother, thank you, thank you, thank you!
(Heroically sings—hsi-p’i two-six beat)
Upon parting I drink a bowl of Mother’s wine,
Courage fills this whole body of mine.
“To make friends with me?” Hatoyama invites me to dine;
I can handle him now, whatever his line.
Time is awry, storms descend without warning—Mother,
You must always be mindful of the changing weather.
T’IEH-MEI Daddy! (She throws herself onto the bosom of LI YÜ-HOU sobbing)
LI (Continues singing his covert message, with intense affection and feeling)
Little T’ieh-mei, watch the weather when going out to sell.
“Accounts,” coming in and going out, you should remember well.
When tired, watch the door, beware of stray dogs roaming free;
When depressed, wait for the magpies to sing on the tree.
You should take over the family affairs
And share with grandma her concerns and her cares.
T’IEH-MEI Daddy! (Sobs on her father’s bosom)
Hou Li Shih-fu, shall we go?
LI (To T’IEH-MEI) My child, don’t cry. From now on, listen to your grandma.
T’IEH-MEI Yes, Daddy.
GRANDMA T’ieh-mei, open the door. Let your father go to the “banquet!”
LI Mother, I am leaving now.
(LI holds his mother’s hands tightly, and each encourages the other to keep struggling. T’IEH-MEI opens the door. A cold wind blows in. In heroic and majestic stride with head held high, LI goes out against the wind. Hou follows)
(T’IEH-MEI picks up the scarf, chases her father, shouting, “Daddy!” ENEMY AGENTS A, B, and C rush in, stopping T’IEH-MEI.)
AGENT A Stop. Get back!
(He forces T’IEH-MEI back. The agents enter the house)
T’IEH-MEI Oh, Grandma ...
AGENT Search! Don’t move!
(The agents search and mess up the household. One of them finds a copy of an almanac, opens it up and then throws it away)
AGENT Let’s go.
(Exit the AGENTS)
T’IEH-MEI (Closes the door, pulls down the window curtain, looks about) Grandma! (She throws herself into her grandma’s arms and sobs. A little while later) Grandma, my daddy ... will he return?
GRANDMA Your father ...
T’IEH-MEI Oh, Daddy!...
GRANDMA T’ieh-mei, your tears cannot save your father. Don’t cry. Our family ... It is time you should know about our family.
T’IEH-MEI Know what?
GRANDMA Sit down, child. Let Grandma tell you.
(GRANDMA gazes at the scarf, and all the past revolutionary events come back to her. Old hatred and new hatred bubble up in her mind. gazes at the scarf, and all the past revolutionary events come back to her. Old hatred and new hatred bubble up in her mind. T’IEH-MEI moves a tiny stool and sits by her grandmother)
GRANDMA Child, your father ... is he nice?
T’IEH-MEI Daddy is nice.
GRANDMA But your daddy is not your real father!
T’IEH-MEI (Shocked) Ah? What did you say, Grandma?
GRANDMA I am not your real grandmother either!
T’IEH-MEI Ah? Grandma, grandma, you must be crazy.
GRANDMA NO, I am not. My child, we three generations are not from one family. (Stands up) Your family name is Ch’en, mine is Li, and your father’s is Chang. (Sings—erh-huang scattered beat)
These past seventeen years have been stormy times, and I’m afraid to talk about the past.
I fear that you are too young and your will is not strong.
Several times I have tried but I just couldn’t open my mouth.
T’IEH-MEI Grandma, tell me. I won’t cry.
GRANDMA (RANDMA ( Sings—slow three-beat)
It looks as though your dad will never come home again this time.
And I, your grandmother, will be arrested and put in jail.
I see the heavy burden of the revolution soon falling on your shoulders.
(Switches to vigorous flowing beat) I’ve told you the truth. Oh, T’ieh-mei! Don’t you cry, don’t be sad!
You must stand firm, you must be strong!
(Switches to standard beat) Learn from your father, to have a red, loyal heart and a will as strong as steel.
T’IEH-MEI Grandma, please sit down and tell me everything slowly.
(T’IEH-MEI helps her grandmother sit down)
GRANDMA (Sighs) Hai! It is a long, long tale! In those early years, your grandfather worked as a repairman in the locomotive shop on the river banks in Hankow. He had two apprentices. One was your real father, Ch’en Chihhsing.
T’IEH-MEI My real father, Ch’en Chih-hsing?
GRANDMA One was your present father, Chang Yü-ho.
T’IEH-MEI Oh? Chang Yü-ho?
GRANDMA At that time, the warlords fought each other and the whole country was in turmoil. Later (She stands up), Chairman Mao and the Communist Party led the Chinese people to revolt. In February of 1923, the railroad workers organized an all-China union at Chengchow. Wu P’ei-fu, that running dog of foreign devils, would not permit them to form a union. So the union headquarters called a strike; all the workers of that line walked off their jobs. More than 10,000 workers along the river banks marched in dernonstration. That evening, the weather was just as cold and the sky just as dark as today. I worried about your grandfather. I could neither sit still nor sleep. By the lamp light I mended old clothes. Suddenly I heard someone knocking at the door, shouting, “Mother Li, open the door, hurry!” So I quickly opened the door, and a man rushed in.
T’IEH-MEI Who was he?
GRANDMA He was your dad.
T’IEH-MEI My dad?
GRANDMA Your present dad. I saw he was wounded all over, holding this signal lantern in his left hand.
T’IEH-MEI Signal lantern?
GRANDMA He held a child in his right arm. . .
T’IEH-MEI A child ... .
GRANDMA A baby not quite a year old ... .
T’IEH-MEI That child ... .
GRANDMA It was no one else ... .
T’IEH-MEI Who?
GRANDMA It was you!
T’IEH-MEI Me?
GRANDMA Your daddy held you tightly in his arm; with tears in his eyes, he stood in front of me and cried, “Mother Li, Mother Li!” Then he just stared at me, unable to utter any words. I was so upset I urged him to speak up, fast! He ... he ... he said, “My Shih-fu and my brother Ch’en ... they ... they all sacrificed their lives. This child is the only heir of my brother Ch’en ... a second generation of the revolution. I must raise her so that she can continue with the revolution!” Then he repeatedly called out, “Mother Li, Mother Li! From now on, I will be your own son, and this child will be your own granddaughter.” At that moment, I... I... I took you over and held you tightly in my arms!
T’IEH-MEI Oh, Grandma! (She rushes to her grandmother’s bosom)
GRANDMA Now, stand up, and stand straight! Listen to your grandma.
(Sings—erh-huang standard beat)
During a labor strike your parents’ blood the devils’ hands did stain;
Since then Li Yü-ho has worked hard so the Revolution may obtain;
He’s vowed to carry on for those martyrs that the red lantern may shine again;
He wiped the blood off, buried the dead and went back to the fireline.
Now the Japanese bandits have come to loot, kill, and burn;
You’ve watched your father taken to jail, never to return.
Note this “account” of blood and tears, note it down well,
(Switches to vigorous flowing beat) You must set a heroic goal, steel your will, get even with the foe,
For a blood debt can only be with blood redeemed
T’IEH-MEI [Sings—erh-huang standard beat)
Hearing Grandma talk about revolution, oh, how sad yet heroic!
I now realize I’ve grown up in the midst of these storms.
Oh, Grandma, for seventeen years of rearing the debt I owe you is deep as the ocean.
(Switches to vigorous flowing beat) From now on I’ll aim high and keep my eyes clear.
I’ll demand an eye for an eye; I must carry on the task left by the martyrs.
Now I raise the red lantern, let its light brighten all four corners. Daddy!. . .
(Switches to fast beat) My father’s will is, like the tall pine, unbending and strong.
A brave Communist he is, a pillar between the earth and the sky.
Daddy, I shall follow you forward without any hesitation.
Now the red lantern is raised high, its light, bright as day.
For my father to slaughter those beasts, it will light up the way.
Generation after generation, in the battlefield we shall remain
Until all the vicious wolves have been slain.
(T’IEH-MEI and GRANDMA raise the red lantern high, striking a dramatic raise the red lantern high, striking a dramatic stance. The lantern shines bright.
(Stage dims)
(Curtain)
[In Acts VI-XI, LI faces the Japanese captain who has known him before. Tortures follow LI’s refusal to cooperate. Meanwhile, his house is under surveillance, but T’IEH-MEI sneaks out the neighbor’s door. The Japanese arrest GRANDMA and T’IEH-MEI in order to coerce Li. That failing,GRANDMA and LI are executed after much heroic declaration, while T’IEH-MEI is allowed to go home, secretly tailed. Again the neighbor aids T’IEH-MEI escape. She finally succeeds in delivering the code book to the guerrilla leader as the Japanese and the traitors all die in a clash with the guerrilla unit.]
Translated by Richard F. S. Yang
Yang Han-sheng was born in Kao-hsien, Szechwan Province, and graduated in sociology from the University of Shanghai. He joined the Communist Party in 1925 and served under the command of General Yeh T’ing. After participating in the unsuccessful Nanchang Uprising of 1927, which was led by Chou En-lai, Yang went to Shanghai to work with the leftist literary groups. Between 1930 and 1937 he was a key member of the League of Left-wing Writers, serving for a period as the head of the Party branch in that organization. In 1936 he supported Chou Yang’s National Defense Literary Movement in opposition to Lu Hsün, who castigated Yang as one of the Band of Four Ultra-leftists, ironically anticipating his own downfall as one of the “four rightist villains” thirty years later.
While in Shanghai, Yang, using the pen name Hua Han, wrote three stories published in one volume under the title The Underground Spring. These stories deal with the peasant problem in the late 1920s. The leftists greeted the book with enthusiastic acclaim, praising it as a model for progressive literature. Yang also wrote movie scripts for the Star Company, including such romantic and melodramatic pieces as “Life’s Melancholy Tune,” “The Tide of Wrath in the China Sea,” and “Loyalty in Life and Death,” which were very popular.
During the war, Yang held posts in the political-cultural agencies of the Nationalist government, working with Kuo Mo-jo and other leftist writers. He produced a good number of very successful plays, including The Wind and Cloud on the Frontier, The Spring and Autumn of the Taiping Kingdom of Heaven, and The Death of Li Hsiu-ch’eng. After the war, he returned to Shanghai, where he continued to work for the Communist cause and at the same time wrote more screenplays for the K’un Lun Motion Picture Company.
The Communist take-over of 1949 sent Yang Han-sheng to the Cultural and Educational Commission of the State Council as its deputy secretary-general, holding simultaneously the position of chairman of the screenwriters guild, vice-chairman of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and secretary of its Party branch. His writing activity was much reduced. His screenplay The Northland and South of the River, written in 1962 from his fresh experience of participating in the north in the Great Leap Forward, drew wide attention for a time but brought him severe criticism during the Cultural Revolution. The charge pointed out his failure to uphold the Communist Party’s efficient leadership, because the film tends to emphasize the interrelated forces in society at any given moment in history. Of his earlier works, The Death of Li Hsiu-ch’eng (a hero in the Taiping Rebellion) was denounced for its alleged stress on defeat and surrender—a traitor’s attitude.
Yang dropped out of sight in 1965 and did not reappear in public until the very end of 1978. In January 1979, he was reported to have regained an important assignment in the government, handling cultural affairs. —D.D.
from The Northland and South
of the River
[The People’s Republic of China is a very late comer in cinematics; even her best footage exhibited in the United States in August 1978 failed to impress the seasoned reviewers in New York. But the screenwriters in Peking understand the power of the screen in mass education and they are making their cinema serve, quite effectively, their political and revolutionary causes. The Northland and South of the River is no exception.
First, the plot:
Tung Wang, a poor and bankrupt man, is fleeing from a tyrannical landlord. In his flight, Tung asks his brother, Tzu-chang, to care for his son, Hsiao-wang. The brother refuses; luckily Wu Ta-ch’eng, a poor peasant but progressive and generous, offers to care for Hsiao-wang as the pursuers draw near. Tung Wang barely escapes, but Wu Ta-ch’eng is implicated; and after a fierce struggle, he too finds himself a fugitive, fleeing from home.
Years pass. Wu Ta-ch’eng and his family have long since settled in a rural farm community; Wu is the village leader and has raised Hsiao-wang into a strong young man. The days go by peacefully and happily. Hsiaowang and Kuei-fen, the daughter of a local villager, fall in love. Then, in this particular year, the weather has been exceptionally dry; the villagers are worried about their crops. As their leader, Wu makes plans to have wells dug. The work begins and progresses; but gradually, as winter approaches, the work becomes increasingly difficult. To add to the hardship, other disasters occur, the weather turns worse, and Ch’ien San-t’ai, a counterrevolutionary, sabotages their efforts, bringing the work to a halt.
Chang Chung, a man who has appeared on several timely occasions to assist Wu Ta-ch’eng, comes again and brings to Wu’s attention where his problems lie. The sabotage is discovered and soon thereafter the work returns to a normal pace. Again, the community is at peace. But Tung Tzu-chang, Hsiao-wang’s worthless uncle, has been living in the village and constantly acting contrary to the people’s ideals and purposes. In addition to trying to do business for private gain, he finally persuades Hsiaowang to leave the community for the city to seek excitement and a better life-style.
A new conflict is created in Wu Ta-ch’eng’s household as Hsiao-wang, against the advice of everyone, including the girl he loves, decides to leave, having been poisoned by his uncle’s deceit. Fortunately, Tung Tzu-chang, in a moment of drunken stupor, shows his villainy. He is apprehended and forced to make a public confession and apology. The film ends as Chang Chung returns with Wu Ta-ch’eng’s wife, blinded earlier, now completely healed through successful treatment. Once again, happiness is the order of the day.
From the first frame, the film’s unmistakable atmosphere is noticeable, identifying its national origin and tradition. Even in revolutionary times and with such a remarkably scientific medium, the initial setting is reminiscent of scenes from such Chinese classics as The Songs of the South and Water Margin. The mood of desolation, its poetic qualities, indeed the very words used to begin the filmscript are familiar to countless such settings, dramatically highlighted and coupled with a mournful song, resembling the weaving together of poetry with prose, found in centuries of popular drama and fiction.
A cold and desolate embankment.
The skies barely glimmer with light, their colors still hidden; and opaque is the mist riding low on a morning breeze, sweeping across a field. On the fields, once growing pastures show withered and desiccated.
Large patches of agricultural fields appear to have been put to the torch and now lie completely blackened and dead.
September, just when autumn is cold.
From the distance comes the mournful song of shepherds:
Ten years, drought and famine; nine without harvest:
Even fires are cold, and chilling smoke oppresses each home.
The landlords are wolves; the officials are like tigers!
And on countless miles of fields are harbored the sounds of crying.
Endless chains of mountains, and endlessly circling waters—
A life, a generation! Working like beasts.
Ceaseless flow tears, inadequate to speak the suffering,
In times like these, is there never an end?
In times like these, is there never an end?
[The film begins by making direct use of action and suspense to heighten interest and provide the necessary narrative exposition. At the same time, it establishes the contrasting environments needed to give appropriate commentary to life before and after the revolution; we must first witness the social ills that led to necessary change. A destitute father, chased by the gang of a tyrannical landlord, is forcibly separated from his son.]
TUNG WANG SO, let’s go!
HSIAO-WANG Dad,I don’t want to go ...
TUNG WANG (Desperate) Hurry up! Let’s go. Don’t make me mad. .
HSIAO-WANG (Still chewing a potato, stares at his father) I ... I don’t want to go ...
TUNG WANG (Stamps his feet and with tears in his eyes) You don’t want to come with me? Where would you go? You don’t have a mother ! Now, come on!
(HSIAO-WANG, deeply hurt, starts to cry. TUNG WANG drags HSIAO-WANG towards the door)
[The separation of parent from child suggests a melodramatic prototype common in Chinese literature even before the flowering of drama in the Yüan dynasty; its prevalence continues unabated, in the absence of such other forms as tragedy or the more sharply distinguished categories of the comic and the serious. The primary response the above scene hopes to elicit is “What kind of society would allow this to happen?” rather than “What kind of person would do something like this?” since the villain has not been adequately revealed to us. At the same time, this act of melodrama provides an opportunity to depict virtue. Wu Ta-ch’eng, at whose home the above scene takes place, intervenes and persuades Tung Wang to leave the son to his care. The charity is expressed in clichés: “As long as I have food, your son will have food,” and “as long as I have life, he will be taken care of.”
Yang Han-sheng is fully aware of the fact that melodrama depicts welldefined and predictable entities of character and action, while the overall plot structure may often be extremely circuitous and episodic. It is a form that communicates well to the masses and is hence well suited for promulgating for popular consumption ideologic and sociologie points of view. In view of the requirements for the arts at this time, we can expect to find in Yang’s melodrama some expression of the greatest national fears and the greatest national commitments. We note further that pathos, in addition to an association with the matter of social injustice, relates to the “complaint motif,” a device traditional to Chinese poetry since the Shih Ching, the earliest Chinese anthology. To that extent the revolutionary art of the People’s Republic shows important ties to the past.
The virtue thus depicted is, more often than not, a homely virtue and not the awesome acts of Greek tragic heroes. Wu Ta-ch’eng’s charity is revealed in the exchange translated above, but a more glaring and more typical example of heroism is illustrated by the following excerpt, taken from about the middle of the film. The scene is night in the midst of a severe winter storm with temperatures well below zero. The villagers have assembled to discuss the problems of digging the wells, a task that has become frustratingly difficult. Before solutions can be raised, Ch’ien San-t’ai brings word that the dynamite sticks have been used up in a remote mountain area, and someone voices the opinion that the work must now come to a stop. Wu Ta-ch’eng retorts that the suggestion is unacceptable and then asks for volunteers to bring more dynamite to that area on foot, a difficult and dangerous task.]
(There is a moment of silence)
LAO CHENG (Suddenly comes forward) I’ll go! If I can’t get the dynamite back in any other way, I can at least use my own back to carry it. .
TIEN LU You’ve got to be kidding. Look, Associate Director, don’t you understand? If you drop the stuff, it’ll explode! Have you lived too long to care about life any more?
K’UNG Szu (Sarcastically) Heh, Lao Cheng, even if just for the sake of your young wife, I think you ought to live a while longer. .
LAO CHENG YOU spineless mice! What do you know? You think I’m bragging, don’t you? Among us, who besides me has ever handled the transport of dynamite? Have you all forgotten? During the Liberation struggle, it was I who delivered dynamite to the front line! If I don’t do it, who will?
CHENG’S WIFE (Anxious and torn at the same time, scolds him in a low voice) Look at you! You want to go, just like that. Didn’t you think at least to talk to me about it first?
LAO CHENG This is not a matter for discussion with you.
CHENG’S WIFE (Angrily)I won’t let you go!
LAO CHENG (Imploring) Oh, please, let me go.
CHENG’S WIFE (Ignores her husband and suddenly steps forward. She points to LAO CHENG and says in a loud voice) Don’t listen to him. He’s just bragging. ...
LAO CHENG (Changes his attitude, his voice serious) I’m sorry, Er-sao, I’ll listen to you about anything, except this. On this, you’ve got to listen to me. I’m not careless of life. But since this is for the sake of all of us, for the sake of our children and our grandchildren, so that they might see the light of happy days ... How can I not go?
(CHENG’S WIFE is too angry to say anything)
Wu TA-CH’ENG You may go, Lao Cheng, but ...
[In view of the socio-political climate of 1962 in the People’s Republic, we can, without even seeing the film, make reasonably accurate assumptions about the manner of presentation, the nature of the acting, and perhaps even the view the cameraman seeks, all of which render a relatively heroic but rather formal posturing of characters, speeches, ideas, and acts. At no time would it seem necessary, desirable, or possible for the audience to ponder over the righteousness of an ideal, the moral label of each character, or the relative merits of the decisions and actions embraced. Hence, the film’s artistic aims are found in the conviction, the degree of sincerity and poignancy, with which characters and deeds are presented. If the plot outline given earlier suggests a complexity in the narrative development, it is, after all, not unusual for melodrama to rely on a number of twists and turns of story as its main source of complication.
It would appear that the necessary compliance to making statements about the State’s cause would have been adequately, if not nobly, performed by such scenes as the above; Yang Han-sheng, however, did not appear totally insensitive to the one-dimensional nature of such heroic expostulations, and he portrayed convincingly the nagging doubts, the uncertainty, and the weariness present in such singular devotions.
In the final complication of the film, we see Hsiao-wang’s decision to leave the village. Poisoned by his uncle’s deceit, he is torn between his desire to leave for the city and his love for Kuei-fen. What makes his dilemma convincing is both the screenwriter’s art in portraying with restraint Hsiao-wang’s inner struggle and our own ability to relate to this problem; the appeal of the city and its magnetic attraction to the young growing up in small rural areas are universal problems. There are three brief scenes which deal with this situation, all coming near the end of the film.]
(HSIAO-WANG and KUEI-FEN are alone, secluded behind a rock pile. They are quarreling)
HSIAO-WANG (Interrupting her) You must be the one who told them! Let me ask you, did you tell them everything?
KUEI-FEN What are you afraid of? You seem already set on leaving. If you are right, you should talk things over with Brother Ta-ch’eng.
HSIAO-WANG How can I talk with him now? I haven’t even settled the matter with you. What’s there for me to say to him at this point?
KUEI-FEN (Surprised) Me? What are you talking about?
HSIAO-WANG ( Very touchingly) I ... I need you to go with me! Since sooner or later well live together. Why don’t you go quickly and get permission from your father!
(KUEI-FEN, shocked by the suddenness of all this, shakes her head, speechless)
[Shortly after the above scene, Hsiao-Wang is confronted by Ming-hsin, who grew up with him under Wu Ta-ch’eng’s care.]
(In the woods)
MING-HSIN (Annoyed) Don’t give me that! You’re only thinking of getting away! You’re afraid of hardship and you yearn for ease and comfort!
HSIAO-WANG! No It’s not that I’m just thinking of myself! I don’t want to risk my life recklessly. Here, it’s ... A period of wind, a period of snow ... After the planting, drought; after the drought, planting ... more drought, more planting; more planting, more drought ... over and over and over again, without ever an end! We start working before daybreak and end it after dark every day; we shoulder our loads; we push the carts; we work our backs, burden our shoulders! What time do we have for ourselves? The irrigation system needs work; a tree belt is needed as a windbreaker! Here we’re flying kites under the table—you can’t get anything up high no matter how you try! (Upon the last words, a slapping sound interrupts from MING-HSIN’S hand against HSIAO-WANG’S face. Thereupon, the two begin to fight)
[The dilemma Hsiao-wang finds himself in seems convincingly portrayed; and, presumably, it accurately points to existing conditions and problems in his society. We may wish to credit Yang Han-sheng with both honesty and artistic sensitivity, but we should not be surprised to discover that the movie fell under critical attack: Yang’s presentation of the more “negative” aspects of life in the rural communities of the People’s Republic of China was said to undermine the people’s enthusiasm toward laboring in the outlying areas. Yang more thoroughly belabored the problems than he shed light on solutions.
It is also interesting to evaluate Yang’s attitudes toward that age-old dichotomy of town versus country. His interest in the rural setting has been nearly life-long. To a great extent, he embraces the traditional writers’ stance, which portrays the country as the seat of innocence, purity, and honest diligence. The town, on the other hand, has typically been viewed as the locus of deceit, evil, and parasitic sloth. It is true that Yang focuses our attention on the problems of life in the rural community, the unending hardships, the constant struggle against natural elements; and typical to melodrama, which introduces problems and complications seemingly from out of nowhere, this selection of locations most hostile to human survival easily provides a stream of conflicts for the characters to react against. But Yang’s presentation of life’s hardships in the villages is nevertheless given from the perspective of an artist concerned with showing the dynamics of human struggle and courage as well as ultimate triumph. Nowhere is there an unsympathetic condemnation of farm life in favor of the glitters of the city.
The translation that follows is taken from the latter part of the film (Part IV, section 3). It is not a part of the film which advances the plot. Instead, the scene is like a short, independent movement, a segment of life showing yet another facet of the people and their lives in this small community. Yin-hua, Wu Ta-ch’eng’s wife, is blind due to eye disease; courageously she makes herself useful by taking care of the village children on behalf of the working parents. But more important than this characterization of a rustic heroine and her contribution to the community’s cause is the following more developed sequence of Yang’s artistic techniques, his presentation of a touching village scene, showing the basic humanity of a community and its participants, a scene that presumably would be castigated by Yang’s critics for not making his art speak forcefully of social solutions or the more positive aspects of life in this new society.]
(Wu TA-CH’ENG’S home)
(Outside, a heavy, freezing snow storm; the wind cuts like knives. It is bitterly cold)
(Inside, YIN-HUA is speaking to a 12-year-old child)
YIN-HUA Hsiao Li, I’ve already talked it over with your family ... from now on, you’re to come every day and help me take care of these young friends. How do you feel about it?
HSIAO LI (Reluctantly) All right.
YIN-HUA ( Turns and speaks to the other children) Your families are all very busy now, so from now on, you’re to come here and play. I’ll be here to play with you, and to tell you stories. How about it?
CHILDREN Good.
(MRS. CHENG brings T’IEH-SHU in)
MRS. CHENG (to YIN-HUA YIN-HUA) I’ve already mended your sister-in-law’s clothes; I must get them to her right away, but this child simply won’t let go of me. .
YIN-HUA You go on ahead. Leave the child here with me. .
T’IEH-SHU Grandma, I want to go see Mommy with you. I want to go! I want to go!
MRS. CHENG It’s snowing much too hard out. Why don’t you play here with Auntie Wu. Grandma will be back soon, so be good.
(MRS. CHENG takes her winter garment and leaves. YIN-HUA takes T’IEH-SHU by the hand)
YIN-HUA T’ieh-shu, would you like to hear a story? Come children, let’s all sit close together. Hsiao Li, will you please help the children move some chairs? (T’IEH-SHU and several other children sit around YIN-HUA, facing her. But before everyone has settled do wn, two older children stealthily come in from outside. As soon as they enter, they gesture to the children sitting in front of YIN-HUA; they try to get them to go out and play in the snow, build snowmen, and have snowball hghts. HSIAO LI and T’IEH-SHU as well as a few other children nod their heads to show they understand. And the two older children then quietly sneak back out)
YIN-HUA (Smiling) Is everyone seated? All right, then ... Let’s first talk about some of the differences between a wolf and a dog. Then, I would like to tell you a story about a wolf hunting expedition. Would you like that?
CHILDREN Yes!
YIN-HUA Has anyone here ever seen old Mr. Wolf?
T’IEH-SHU I haven’t, but I’ve heard the wolf howl, and it’s very frightening!
YIN-HUA DO you think the wolf looks at all like the dog?
T’IEH-SHU Yes, indeed!
YIN-HUA But you’ve just said that you’ve never seen Mr. Wolf? How would you know that he’s like a dog?
T’IEH-SHU I’ve seen him in a picture.
(YIN-HUA smiling, nods her head)
(The children, one and two at a time, begin to sneak out. The first is HSIAO LI and the last to follow is T’IEH-SHU)
(However, YIN-HUA continues to speak to the children happily)
YIN HUA Now listen carefully. The wolf is actually the early ancestor of the dog. Dogs and wolves do have many points in common; but they also have some important differences. And you should remember what they are. For example, old Mr. Wolf has a tail that always hangs down, while Mr. Dog’s tail is always curled up. The wolf’s neck is extremely long, whereas the dog’s neck is quite short. Mr. Dog makes a sound that goes like “wow!” “wow!” “wow!” The wolf makes a sound that seems like some strange creature crying, “woooo!” “woooo!” When you hear it, it’s very frightening.
(Just as YIN-HUA finishes her imitation, the cry of a real wolf suddenly bursts forth. YIN-HUA hears this and responds with an unavoidable cold shiver)
YIN-HUA Did you hear that? What was that?
(There is no answer. And YIN-HUA immediately realizes that there is not the usual commotion from the children)
(She is suddenly frightened and calls out)
YIN-HUA T’ieh-shu! T’ieh-shu!! Why don’t you answer? Hsiao Li! Hsiao Li!
(The house seems cold and quiet. As she does not hear the children, she is very upset and proceeds to grope about in search for them, until finally it dawns on her that T’IEH-SHU and the other children have gone outside. She feels a quick sensation of cold terror; and in haste she grabs a cane, then proceeds to call out T’IEH-SHU’s name while stumbling about to get to the outside)
(Outside the village in the distant snow-covered wilderness, a lone, hungry wolf cries out for a moment; then it heads straight towards the village)
(Outside the village)
(T’IEH-SHU and the other children are making snowmen and having snowball fights)
(They hear the cry of the wolf and are frightened. Turning about, they run and scream)
CHILDREN The wolf is coming! The wolf is really coming!
(When T’IEH-SHU hears the wolf’s cry, he too runs with the others; but because of his age, he cannot run fast; and in running, and falling, he is left farther and farther behind)
[The wolf is coming towards the village at a fast pace. T’IEH-SHU is running slowly)
(YIN-HUA hears the screams of the children; she heads towards the edge of the village: she is running, and crying out, and asking for T’IEH-SHU ...)
YIN-HUA T’ieh-shu! T’ieh-shu! Hsiao Li! Hsiao Li! Where are you? Children, where is T’ieh-shu? Why did you children leave him behind?! T’ieh-shu! T’ieh-shu! Has anyone seenT ’ieh-shu?!
(One group of children, while running, respond)
CHILDREN T’ieh-shu is still behind us—he can’t run. .
YIN-HUA (Trembling) Oh, heavens!T ’ieh-shu!T ’ieh-shu!
(Up and down she scrambles toward the edge of the village. T’IEH-SHU sees YIN-HUA coming toward him ...)
T’IEH-SHU Auntie Wu!
(T’IEH-SHU rushes toward YIN-HUA. YIN-HUA dashes forward a few more steps and embraces T’IEH-SHU in her arms, crying with tears of relief)
YIN-HUA T’ieh-shu, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid! I’m here; and that nasty wolf won’t come here.
(And indeed, as the hungry wolf rushes near, it turns and runs away upon seeing others)
(MRS. CHENG, WU TA-CH’ENG, HSIAO-WANG have all arrived)
Comments and translation by Donald Dong
Lu Yang-lieh is a soldier-writer in the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army. After he studied at Chekiang College in Hangchow, he joined the army at the age of eighteen and worked in a cultural troupe. In 1953 he joined a semiprofessional group of writers, and wrote several short stories about army life.
The story “Star” is from Lu Yang-lieh’s Slave Girl Chin-chu, a collection of eight stories describing Tibetan life in the old days and after Tibetan Liberation (1951). The title story has a “White-haired Girl” motif in which a slave girl is forced to live in a mountain cave, and years later is released to expose the evildoers.
The setting of “Star” is the Red Army on their historic Long March (1934-35), passing through Sikang Province. Combining intrigue and adventure, the story begins and ends with the same blind bard playing his Sgrian sitar; thus it revives the literary convention of a storyteller who participates in the action of his own narration. The star is the badge awarded to a slave for his heroic exploit in aiding the Red Army. —M.T.
I
The All-deities Festival is a joyous occasion for Tibetans. This auspicious day is also observed as the anniversary of the establishment of the Nima People’s Commune.
At daybreak, the courtyard in front of the Nima Lama Temple is already congested with people. Staunch militiamen in traditional armor on horseback with swords at their waist are getting ready for the annual parade. Long-skirted girls, adorned in dresses of brocade silk, prepare to present their best dances. Peasants and herdsmen, production heroes from various villages, have brought their finest wool sheep, cows that give the sweetest milk, and barley seeds as big as beans.
Suddenly the sound of a samisen* is heard in front of the Great Scripture Hall. Hurray! The minstrel is here! He is immediately surrounded by the crowd. Seeing that he is a blind bard, the crowd quietly sits down and looks at him reverently.
The wandering minstrel sits upright in great dignity. Holding his sgrasnyan, a homemade samisen, he begins to play the familiar “Socialism is Wonderful” as a prelude. Then he sings a saga ...
*A type of three-stringed banjo. [K.Y.H.]
II
Today I am going to tell about neither deities nor sprites. I am going to reveal to you the saga of the Sacred Mountain of Nima [the Sun], on which today you can see woodsmen, drilling machines, an electrical power station, and all the rest. In the past, it was a dark hell!
Black pines covered the whole mountain. Anyone venturing into it would most likely fall astray and be doomed by the vipers or bears, or venomous vapor from the decaying underbrush.
Yet, this black pine forest is a treasure land with an abundance of bears’ gall, musk, fox furs, precious medicinal herbs, and the like, but it is not easy to get them. The Living Buddha of the temple used to force his wa-tzu [bondman, slave] to make an expedition for the treasures in the forest; the wa-tzu seldom came back. The rare survivors returned empty-handed.
Half a century ago, a wa-tzu named Bawu was born in the temple. Everyone said that he must be an incarnated mountain deity, or else he could not travel unharmed within the forest. Amazingly, he always came out with abundant treasures.
One day, on his tall white horse, Bawu returned from the Black Forest. He wore a long sword at his waist and an old English rifle slung across his shoulder, the fork supporting the gun barrel sticking up like two long swords. His iron-like right arm was free from the sleeve of his robe, thus revealing half his bare, bronze chest. Behind his saddle he carried a sack heavily filled with precious ginseng and worm-herb. It was not yet dark, but strangely the lights in the village were already lit. Even more strangely, the streets, which had been cluttered and smelly, were clean and tidy. Riding forward, Bawu could see brightly colored posters on the walls. But since he was illiterate, he did not know the themes of the posters. He was sure, however, that they were not incantations.
On a small open lot by a street intersection, a group of children, hand in hand, had formed a circle and were singing:
Red Army brothers are going on the Long March,
With clapping hands we bid them farewell.
They will defeat the Japanese aggressors,
So the nation can enjoy peace.
Bawu found this very curious. How had these children, who usually gathered only to quarrel and fight, become so civilized? What was the song?
Bawu got off his horse and walked over to watch the gathering. What had happened during his absence from the village for the past five or six days? Suddenly he beheld many Chinese soldiers in blue uniform, equipped with rifles and swords, walking on the village streets. Bawu was surprised and frightened. Two years ago some Chinese soldiers had camped in the village. Bawu hated them because they were the meanest men in the world. When they were happy, they would shoot yaks and sheep as living targets; when they were depressed, they would whip the villagers. They took the villagers’ property any time, any place, as they wished.
Now Chinese soldiers were here again! The only difference was that they had had yellow uniforms two years ago.
“No matter how they dress, they are all alike,” Bawu thought. He decided to avoid the Chinese. He walked his horse quickly past the soldiers.
Down the street, Bawu caught a glimpse of twenty or more villagers surrounding two Chinese soldiers. One of them stood on a rock, talking energetically. There was no indication that the villagers were frightened or disgusted. Instead, they listened attentively.
Bawu could not help but glance at the two Chinese soldiers. Something red caught his eye. Looking more carefully, he saw a red star fixed on the cap of each soldier.
Bawu proceeded to Nima Temple, which stands at the center of the village. As he arrived at the yellow outer wall, a little lama called to him, “Bawu, the Chief Steward wants to see you in the Great Scripture Hall.”
Bawu could guess that the Chief Steward’s summons was not auspicious; he wondered what sort of trouble he would encounter.
Bawu walked down the central approach to the temple. He became more amazed at each step he took. Many butter lamps were lighted. He wondered which Bodhisattva was celebrating a birthday today.
Under the staircase of the well-lit hall stood the big, greasy Chief Steward. As soon as he saw Bawu, he greeted him with a broad smile. Then he embraced Bawu in a solemn salute.
“Bawu, you must have had a wearisome journey.”
This unusual courtesy struck Bawu dumb. He could not believe what he had heard. But the Chief Steward continued, “Bawu, your luck has come! The Living Buddha has sent for you!”
The upper stories of the Great Scripture Hall were the most sacred part of the temple. Even the lamas who were living in the temple, not to mention a wa-tzu, were not allowed to intrude. Today the Living Buddha wanted to see Bawu in his chamber. How could Bawu be at ease? He did not know his fate—he had to wait and see.
Following the Chief Steward, Bawu carefully watched his own feet ascending the steps to the inner sanctum.
The thick, heavy drapes and screens were rolled aside at the entrance. Brilliant lights projected from colorful glass lampshades. The floors, waxed with butter, appeared as clear as mirrors. The demoniac designs and figures lacquered on the wall gaped and stared. Bawu was giddy, not knowing whether he had come to Heaven or Hell.
The drapes were parted at the last doorway, to admit Bawu and the Chief Steward, who walked bending low in reverence. Bawu had to follow the example. The Chief Steward prostrated himself toward the yet unseen Living Buddha; Bawu did likewise, sticking his tongue out once and shaking himself, as the ritual required.
The salute over, Bawu lifted his head. To Bawu’s surprise, the Living Buddha was not at all as he had imagined. He was not handsome and dignified like the Buddhas in the paintings or the scripture illustrations. What was this? The Living Buddha was an ugly old man sitting on a chair lined with tiger-skin. His bald head gleamed in the light. His sagging face was too big to match his short, dumpy stature.
“Living Buddha, Bawu is present by your command,” the Chief Steward said, carefully pronouncing the words.
The Living Buddha opened his droopy eyes slightly and cast a glance upon Bawu. Then he pointed to the floor near his seat, saying, “Come here!”
The Chief Steward gestured to Bawu. Bawu walked on his knees to the place.
Bawu sat on the floor. The Living Buddha reached over and touched Bawu’s forehead, chanting some Buddhist texts. Bawu never dreamed that he would receive such blessing! He was bewildered.
“Bawu,” the Chief Steward said, “you have found favor with the Living Buddha. He is going to give you twenty yaks, fifty goats, a horse, and the rifle which you’ve been carrying on your shoulder. You may choose any one of the women from the village as your wife. Hereafter, you are going to lead a comfortable life, and you won’t be required to serve in the temple.”
Bawu could not believe what he had heard. This day was indeed a strange day full of strange events. Was the Mountain Sprite Nima really revealing His divine power? However, Bawu’s thirty years of life told him that this game of reward without labor was a precursor to some imminent catastrophe.
As he expected, the Chief Steward said to him, “Bawu, since the Living Buddha is so kind to you, how are you going to repay his grace?”
“From my head to my toe, every hair and every inch of this skin of mine belongs to the Living Buddha. I will listen only to what the Living Buddha wills,” Bawu said without any feeling.
The Chief Steward stretched his neck and came closer to him. “Did you see the Chinese soldiers in our village?”
Before Bawu could answer, the Chief Steward gnashed his teeth and added, “These Chinese soldiers are the most wicked among the wicked!”
Bawu could not understand the Chief Steward. Two years ago when the villagers hated the Chinese soldiers in yellow uniforms, the Living Buddha, the Chief Steward, and the Chinese benbu [officials] acted like dear brothers. But now ...
While Bawu was trying to puzzle it out, the Living Buddha screamed, “You must guide them to the Devil’s Cliff!”
The Chief Steward immediately added an explanation: “These Chinese soldiers are going to the North tomorrow. They are bound to go through the Black Forest and climb Nima Peak. They do not know the way, so you must offer to guide them! But,” the Chief Steward grinned, “you have to remember the words of the Living Buddha.”
“Oh, the words bid me to kill,” Bawu realized at once.
When confronting those who deserved death, Bawu’s hand, holding a gun or a sword, never trembled, but the brave never kill without justification. Judging from the reactions of the villagers, the Chinese soldiers he had seen did not appear to be bad men. Why did the Living Buddha want to murder them?
Bawu was thinking to himself when a lama reported from the doorway, “The Chinese benbu has arrived.”
As the Living Buddha and the Chief Steward rose to greet the guest, Bawu withdrew at once. When he passed through the big reception hall, he saw lamas preparing a large banquet. He realized that the Living Buddha wanted to hold a feast for the ranking Chinese official. He suspected that the food might be poisoned.
Bawu was thinking about what he, entrusted with a special mission, should do on the following day. Deep in thought, he descended the steps and collided with someone coming the opposite way, losing his balance. The other man reached down to help him. Bawu lifted his eyes and saw a Chinese soldier, who said apologetically, “Forgive me. Are you hurt?”
A little Chinese soldier who accompanied the other man stepped forward and bent to brush the dirt from Bawu’s clothes. Bawu was embarrassed because the collision was his fault. While he struggled to say something polite to the soldiers, the Chief Steward appeared at the top of the staircase shouting, with an exaggerated smile, “Ah-ha, Mr. Political Commissar, the Living Buddha wishes to receive your honor. Please come in.”
Bawu turned to watch the middle-aged Chinese military man with whom he had collided climb the stairs toward the Chief Steward. He asked himself, “Is he a benbuV
III
With the permission of the Chief Steward, Bawu returned to his own home the following morning. Bawu’s mother, who was old, thin, and weak, lived alone in a small tattered nomad’s tent. Such a tiny tent! The Chief Steward had commented that the Bodhisattvas could not endure looking at it. Therefore, she was kept two miles away from the decent village.
Ordinarily, Bawu had to get special permission from the Chief Steward before he could go home at night, after his long day’s servile work in the temple, to carry some water and grind some barley to feed his mother. Every spring, he had to arrange several nights to work on that small plot of land in front of his mother’s tent, planting barley.
Now the barley was ripe. Bawu decided to harvest it before he set out to guide the Chinese soldiers through the Black Forest to Nima Peak.
Bawu hurried out of the village and down the road. In the fields on both sides of the road, full ears of barley pressed against one another, waving gently in the cool morning breeze, rippling all the way to the horizon.
The villagers had gotten up early today and were at work, harvesting in the fields. As he walked past them, Bawu wondered why people looked so cheerful today.
The sun rose with spreading rays from the eastern valley. Innumerable reflections of shining red flashed in Bawu’s eyes. Standing on tip-toe, he saw red stars shining throughout the fields.
Bawu was hypnotized by the sight; he stood there gazing for a long while before resuming his run toward his mother’s tent. As he approached, he heard the stone mill grinding and his old mother talking and laughing. He also saw a heap of threshed barley beside the mill near the opening of the tent.
“Who helped mother thresh all the barley?” he asked himself. He was about to ask the question aloud when he entered the tent and saw a little Chinese soldier working at the mill. He recognized him as the very man who had brushed the dirt from his clothes the previous evening.
“Bawu, how are you?” The little Chinese soldier called him by name, and greeted him warmly.
His old mother stood up, smiling, and called to her son: “Bawu, these are dear friends of mine. How nice they are! They helped me harvest, carry water, chop wood, and make dung cakes for fuel. They have done everything.” His mother suddenly changed her tone. “But in one thing they are no good. Like this boy, none of them will accept even half a bowl of barley mush as payment for their help.”
Suddenly Bawu heard the sound of hooves approaching. Someone shouted, “Is Bawu at home?”
Bawu left the tent. A wa-tzu on horseback and carrying a rifle pointed to a horse he was leading, and shouted, “The Chief Steward wants you to return to the temple immediately. We are departing!”
Bawu’s mother and the little Chinese soldier followed Bawu out of the tent. The mother looked apprehensive. The little Chinese soldier raised his hand, shouting to Bawu, “Bawu, I am Mengleh. We are going to work together.”
It was high noon. The Chinese troops were about to leave. Holding sheepskins which contained butter and cheese, and brazen pots of milk and tea, the villagers congregated at the roadside to see them off. A singer, shaking his finger bells and beating his small drum, began to sing with feeling:
The eagles fly from afar
On their ten-thousand-mile journey;
I pray the deities in Heaven and on earth,
Provide them with cloudless days ...
Bawu and the political commissar walked ahead of the troops. The villagers saluted Bawu because he represented the whole village in repaying the Chinese soldiers for their help. But Bawu remembered the Chief Steward, who had summoned him and reiterated his assignment that morning. Bawu was worried and rueful. He wished desperately that he could just disappear from the scene.
Suddenly the song came to an end and the crowd grew silent. The Chief Steward, as an envoy of the Living Buddha, had come to say farewell to the troops. Holding a Buddhist scripture, the Chief Steward smiled and said to the political commissar, “May you have a fair journey and a bright future.”
Having said this, he closed his eyes and chanted some benedictory verses. The henchman of the Living Buddha made Bawu feel nauseated, as though he had swallowed a scorpion. He tried to turn away, but he was too late to dodge the Chief Steward’s stare, which shot at Bawu like two daggers. It seemed to be saying, “The Devil’s Cliff! The Devil’s Cliff!”
IV
The sky was clear and the trees swayed in the wind. The soldiers sweated and struggled against the hot sun. Because of the heat they had stripped to a thin underwear, but they were still panting and out of breath. The road on which they marched extended to the edge of the Black Forest, and then turned westward. Near the entrance to the deep forest, Bawu came to a stop and said to the political commissar, “It is cold within the forest. You should tell the men to put on their sheepskins.”
It was irrational that they should put on fur while they were still sweating, but without hesitation, the commissar took his own jacket from his pack and put it on even though he was dizzy from the heat. He told Mengleh to pass the word: “I order all of you to put on your fur jackets immediately.”
To Bawu’s surprise, the troops acted in one accord. It was the first time he had had the experience of his word being so respected and producing such an effect.
As soon as they stepped into the Black Forest, a current of cold air swooped against them. The commissar found he could hardly breathe in the sudden chill. With his broad shoulders and chest, Bawu purposely strode before the commissar to shelter him from the blast of icy air. The men began to sneeze.
The Black Forest was indeed like a dungeon. Ahead of the troops, it was dark as far as one could see. The rotten leaves and decomposed plants threw off a dank, overpowering odor. The severe blast of cold air almost turned the men into pillars of ice. The political commissar felt dizzy and weak. Bawu supported him and helped him walk, saying “No one can stop here.”
The commissar told Mengleh to pass along the order that everyone should march forward without pause. Despite the fact that they were almost breathless and were stumbling, the commissar and the soldiers still forced themselves to accelerate their pace along the forest path.
After they had pushed ahead five or six li, the day grew brighter. Over their heads, the leaves were thinning. Small patches of blue sky appeared among the boughs of the huge trees. Bawu stopped and then guided the commissar to a resting place on a rock. He plucked some wild leaves growing from a crack in the rocks. He chewed a leaf and then handed it to the commissar. Following Bawu’s advice, the commissar sniffed the herb. He immediately felt rested and invigorated as he breathed in the strange soothing fragrance. Bawu told him, “We call this herb Hsüeh-tan-cha, which means longevity. In the forest I eat them when I run out of food. It tastes good if you make tea with them.” Bawu put a small bunch into his mouth. The commissar also chewed a leaf and exclaimed, “Umm, very good. Now we don’t have to worry about starvation!”
The commissar gave a handful of the leaves to Mengleh and told him to distribute some to each battalion so that everyone could collect and fill his pocket with the magic herb. Bawu rose and said with joy, “I’m going to fill my pockets so that I can boil some tea for you later.”
He started calling the big Chinese benbu simply “you.”
The troops continued their march. Another mountain range stood before them. The dense, primeval black pine trees of the forest, growing on both sides of the valley, gave way to the rocky crags of a barren mountain range which blocked the way. When the troops completed their climb to the top of the mountain pass, dark, ominous clouds rolled across the sky, spreading in every direction. The sun was hidden. A gale blew and a thunderstorm crashed down upon the men. It seemed that the strong wind and rain were competing with all their force to hurl the troops off the mountain. The men, not dressed for such weather, were drenched to the skin. When they tried to move on the loose, slippery ground, they felt as though they were walking perilously on a ship deck without railing, being tossed in the surging sea. Fortunately, the storm soon subsided. Once again the sky was blue. The setting sun painted the treetops golden, and a rainbow leaned against the peak of the mountain. Everything was quiet, fresh and clean.
When the sun sank behind the mountain into the deep pine forest below, the men of the Red Army began to make camp. They built fires around their campsite. Burning pine cones and branches crackled in the midst of a milkwhite fog. While the political commissar gathered the soldiers around him to hold a discussion, Bawu and Mengleh sat watching a small pot of the magic herb boiling over the fire. Bawu was adding wood to the flames, and Mengleh was cleaning his rifle. They began to talk softly.
“Mengleh, my friend, where is your home?”
“The Golden Sand River runs for a thousand miles. It flows through the valley of your village and then comes to the forest of my home,” Mengleh chanted his answer like a song.
“You live in Liang-shan?” exclaimed Bawu. “Are you a Yi? You are not a Chinese?”
“No. No.”
Bawu realized how impolite and abrupt he was, but he had to finish what he wanted to say. He touched Mengleh’s rifle. “I meant I was surprised that you were a Yi, and yet they trusted you with this gun.”
Someone’s voice interrupted them, “Who are ‘they’?”
Bawu and Mengleh turned around and saw that the political commissar had come over to them. Bawu felt uneasy. The commissar sat down between them and took out a small pipe into which he stuffed some fresh tobacco.
“I never expected that we could still find tobacco left in the pleats of a regimental commander’s tobacco pouch. He generously gave me half of it,” the commissar said cheerfully as he lighted the pipe. He handed it to Bawu, saying, “Come, have a puff.”
Like all brave Tibetans, Bawu loved to smoke. He, Mengleh, and the commissar took turns smoking the pipe. The tobacco smoke erased the cares and uneasiness from Bawu’s mind. The last shred of tobacco had burned; the commissar put away his pipe. He remarked, “Among the three of us, one is a wa-tzu of Tibet, one is a slave from Liang-shan, and one is a Han worker. Indeed, we are brothers in need.”
“What is a worker?” Bawu asked.
“A worker eats the same food as you do, dresses the same as you do, and lives in a shabby place just as you do. We workers build tall buildings, but never live in them,” said the commissar.
“Do you have a Living Buddha and a Chief Steward where you live, Mengleh?” Bawu asked.
“Of course,” Mengleh said, angrily. “That is why I joined the revolution.”
The Hsüeh-tan-cha herb in the pot began to send out its aroma. The night fog gradually dispersed, leaving the men’s clothes damp. Pine cones still crackled in the fire, and the flames lit the red faces of the men clustered around the blazing warmth. Bawu reflected upon the commissar’s words. The pine forest was so intensely quiet that even the lowered voice of the commissar echoed distinctly throughout the valley.
It was late. Bawu closed his eyes, but inside him a tempest was rising. He had lived for more than thirty years, but not until tonight had he come to the realization that a wa-tzu was not predestined to suffer. There are two kinds of people in the world. Some people are enslaved to work like animals and die like dogs, but another kind of people squeeze and oppress others to fatten themselves. Bawu now understood why people in his village had no milk to drink —butter was used to polish the floor of the temple.
Bawu had been like a yak, carrying goods and eating grass, and then falling asleep, day in and day out. It had never occurred to him that the world was beautiful. Now as he remembered the troops putting on the fur jackets as they entered the Black Forest, the Hsüeh-tan-cha herb, and the pipe which he had smoked, Bawu was restless and lay awake, thinking.
V
Bawu did not know when he fell asleep. When he awoke, he found himself covered by the commissar’s fur coat and squeezed in between the commissar and Mengleh. Day had dawned. He sat up and saw a world of whiteness; it had snowed during the night. The two men beside him were not completely covered because they three had been sharing the one fur coat that belonged to the commissar. Bawu was deeply touched and felt even more uneasy. When he tried to get up and cover the commissar and Mengleh so that they could sleep warmly, the commissar opened his eyes.
“Good morning, Bawu. Will our journey be rough today?”
At that instant, it occurred to Bawu that today they would come upon the first and second of the Devil’s Cliffs. If they were to bypass them, they would have to pass under a waterfall and over a steep precipice. “The journey today is very dangerous,” he said. “Commissar, you will have to be very careful.”
The pine forest had thinned out in this area. The trees were replaced by vast marshes covered with broad-leaved grass that grew to a man’s waist. The rank grass had very sharp edges, like sword blades. Even worse, one could hear snakes hissing everywhere, slithering through the grass.
“Don’t worry,” Bawu shouted reassuringly.
Holding a long stick in his left hand and a knife in the right, Bawu led the way, slashing forward, making the sound “wu-hsü-wu-hsü.”
The soldiers followed him, pushing ahead, their swords clearing a path. The reptiles’ hissing was all around, but the knives and sticks frightened the snakes away. Bawu led the troops directly to the foot of a great waterfall that thundered two hundred feet down a cliff, sounding like exploding ammunition and clashing armies on a battlefield ...
The creek below the waterfall ran no more than a hundred paces and then shot down to another precipice. There was only one way to cross the waterfall: by wading across the rapid creek.
“Commissar, let me try first,” shouted Bawu. He took off his boots and tightened his belt. Tying one end of a rope to a pine tree and holding the other, he slipped down into the torrent of icy-cold water. He was nearly swept away despite his hold on the rope. His face paled and then turned purple in the freezing cold. Bawu clenched his teeth and struggled in the thigh-deep water. The trust and expectations of his fellow villagers came to mind, and steeled him with the awareness of the importance of his mission. He moved slowly, step by step, and finally reached the other side; the rope was pulled taut and now spanned the river. Clinging to the rope, and with great difficulty, all the troops crossed the creek.
After the waterfall, the path came to an end. They faced an overhanging cliff about two hundred feet high; even monkeys would not attempt to climb that! The troops halted under the cliff and built fires for their meal. Meanwhile, the commissar had more than forty leather belts put together. After eating a few bites, Bawu walked up to the cliff. All eyes were riveted on him as he climbed to a tree which protruded from the rocks. He then threw the rope he had brought with him at another tree growing above him; the loop caught the tree and he pulled himself up to it. From tree to tree he ascended. Then he lowered one end of his rope for the chain of leather belts. From the top he waved at those below. The soldiers applauded, then started to follow him.
Again Bawu felt that it was his fellow villagers who were looking at him. He felt like shouting, “Don’t worry, I will never fail you. I, Bawu, am a man to be trusted!”
The adventure, which had lasted for three days and three nights, thus came to an end. The terrifying Black Forest was now far behind them. On the fourth day, when the sky spread its colorful sunrise all over, the magnificent Nima Peak rose before them. Like a dignified old man with disheveled white hair, it stood straight up, greeting the travelers.
Bawu would have joined the Red Army as Mengleh had done if he did not have to care for his old mother at home. He held back his tears and said goodbye to the commissar and his soldiers. The commissar took the red star from his own cap and held it in his left palm. His right hand tightly gripped Bawu’s hand as he gravely said to him, “Bawu, my friend. There is one thing I hope you will remember. It is not that the insurmountable Nima Peak is a sun which never sets. The real sun that never sets is this star. Someday it will rise on top of the summit of Nima, and your village will be radically changed.”
With great excitement Bawu received the red star and carefully put it into the amulet hanging on his chest. He was very touched as he said, “Dear Red Army men, my friends, as long as I live, my tongue will tell my fellow villagers all about you.”
The sun was rising as the Red Army climbed toward the mountain’s summit. Thousands of golden rays were reflected on the glaciers. The commissar and his comrades turned back to wave goodbye to Bawu, who stood at the edge of the Black Forest watching the troops ascending like so many eagles soaring with extended wings. Hot tears flowed down his face. He heard them calling from the far distance: “We shall return!”
Bawu returned to his village, but without saying anything to the villagers, he disappeared. A few days later his old mother mysteriously disappeared also. From that time, no one in the village of Nima ever saw the mother or her son again. Some yak caravans, returning from a temple festival elsewhere, reported that they had seen a minstrel, with eyes gouged out, who resembled Bawu. It was said that the blinded minstrel wandered from village to village with his samisen, singing the story:
A flock of eagles flew in from afar,
Leaving me a red star.
It is a sun which never sets,
Illuminating the heart of a wa-tzu ...
The wham of the huge brass gong in the courtyard of the temple interrupts the song of the blind bard. The festival ceremony is about to start.
The minstrel puts away his sgra-snyan and takes out his amulet, from which he produces a five-pointed red star.
Translated by Meishi Tsai
Very little is known about Wang Chia-pin. In Selected Creative Writings by Young Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers, the collection in which “The Whale Trough” appears, he is referred to simply as “a worker.” He is very likely assigned to a fishing fleet, since his latest short story, which appeared in People’s Literature in May 1977, is on the same subject.
Among the writings of his peers, Wang’s prose stands out with its descriptive power which brings the reader close to the scene of the action. He is a promising young writer who bears watching. —K.Y.H.
The fish run was in full swing. Boats plied the waters of the harbor like shuttles, ceaselessly darting back and forth, and the sounds of whistles, anchor chains, motors, and shouting people blended into the steady humming pulsation of a busy fishing port, a bustling, cheerful arena of collective endeavor.
In the harbor area, huge wooden cases freshly unloaded from returning boats were lined up, forming a great wall of fish and shrimp. The odor threatened to take away the breath of any casual visitor.
Expedition I and Expedition ü were docked against the pier. Having just completed a joint run and unloaded their catch, they were now preparing for their next run.
Szu-ma the Flying Dragon, captain of Expedition I, stood almost six feet tall, big hands, big feet, a broad face matching his square head. He flipped down from the bridge, landed on the deck, and crossed the gangplank in a few nimble strides. The second skipper, a tiny bit of a shriveled, wiry old man named Old Root, called out to Flying Dragon from the bridge: “Hsiao-lung, about our request to run the Whale Trough, you’d better talk to your dad nicely. Don’t get excited if he does. Don’t get angry either when he gets angry at you. I don’t believe his head is so full of dried cement that he can’t turn around, ever .. .”
Behind Old Root stood a line of his crew, all sturdy calves ready to prance at the first word that their captain had secured permission to run the Whale Trough.
“Comrade Crewmen,” the loudspeaker on the dock suddenly blared. “The ‘Learn from Ta-ch’ing and Ta-chai’ special forum now begins.* You are listening to a message from Szu-ma the Flying Dragon, captian of Expedition I.... “ Flying Dragon stopped, moved by his own words over the loudspeaker: “I was raised exclusively by the Party. In the old society, a man like me could not possibly dream of being a captain. Now, we workers are the masters, and we must listen to the Party and to Chairman Mao. The oil workers have developed a Ta-ch’ing; why can’t we develop another Ta-ch’ing, a Ta-ch’ing of the sea ... We request permission to run the Whale Trough, to expand our fishing waters. ..
*From time to time since the early 1960s, campaigns have been conducted to rally all industries to emulate the spirit and practice of Ta-chai, a model commune in southwestern Hopei Province, and Ta-ch’ing, a model oil field in Manchuria. [K.Y.H.]
Flying Dragon’s blood boiled. Whale Trough, a mysterious place haunted by sharks and other huge denizens of the deep, beckoned all the members of the Expedition fleet to uncover its secret. Like their leader Flying Dragon, no longer content with the familiar waters close to shore, they were dying to venture out into the unknown.
Last year Flying Dragon drafted a plan to conquer the Whale Trough, a plan which drew much attention from the leadership. Party Branch Secretary Chi, who also headed up the Deep Sea Bureau of the Marine Products Commission, was called back to commission headquarters to study the project and prepare for it. Months had gone by and no word came from the commission, yet the fish run had just about reached its peak now. Any further delay would see the fish run move northward, and the chance for getting into the Whale Trough would be missed. Flying Dragon quickened his steps, hoping to have another heart-to-heart talk with Fishing Fleet Director Szu-ma the Big Sea.
Szu-ma the Big Sea was Flying Dragon’s father, an old sea dog. Several years before, the leadership thought Big Sea was getting old, and fleet headquarters needed someone to take charge, to sort of keep things on an even keel. Big Sea was transferred from his boat to assume the local directorship. He took his desk job as seriously as he did any assignment he had had, leading his fleet always one step ahead of the others. As his old pal Old Root said of him, the only trouble with Big Sea was that he tended to look only at the immediate returns. On this matter of running the Whale Trough, for example, he would not back down from his disagreement with his son. He opposed the project because he himself had tried it once some nineteen years before. At that time his capitalist boss had forced him to risk it against his better judgment; they brought back not a single fish, lost their net, and almost did not come back at all. No, he was not interested in taking that kind of risk any more; he would rather do the safe thing, by staying in familiar waters to realize a bigger catch for the government. The father and son argued on and on. Finally the father said, “I have no time to exercise my vocal cords with you. If I had time, I’d rather spend it figuring out how to get a bigger catch from spots close to shore....”
Flying Dragon reviewed their arguments in his mind while rushing headlong toward his father’s office. He didn’t see the archway fashioned out of fish cases covered with decorations to boost morale and forecast an “Overflowing Catch” until he bumped into it, nearly knocking it off its base.
“What are you doing? Trying to knock down the dragon gate?”
Flying Dragon turned around and found himself facing Bureau Chief Chi, whom he had wanted to see for all these long months. He walked up to the chief and said, “Hi, Chief, what about our plan to run the Whale Trough?”
“It’s been approved,” Chi said. “The commissioner even commented that this is the direction in which we should all be moving in the future.”
Flying Dragon would have leapt for joy if the thought of his father’s objection had not followed this cheering news. “Ah, I see,” he said, his brow tightly knitted. “But the lower echelon lacked steam!” He stressed the words “lower echelon.” “The lower echelon leadership would not support us. We even quarreled several times, but each time it was me who got criticized!”
“Ah,” said Chi, suppressing a secret chuckle. “Shame on you to talk that way! What’s the use of quarreling? Will that settle anything? If you’ve got a point, let’s bring it out into the open and discuss it fully. If you quarrel, that’s exactly what he wants. He’s your dad, and you’re his son. He’s got a bit of advantage there!”
The humorous way Chi put it drew a smile from Flying Dragon. He pressed his question: “All right, when do we go? The very next trip out?”
“What do you think?” Chi half closed his eyes to study the husky young man in front of him.
“We’re ready to move, even today.”
“You are ready, but what about your dad?” Chi patted the young man’s broad shoulder. “You mustn’t quarrel with your dad. Your dad has been doing a good job overseeing the production. The commission is very pleased with him. You have to be patient with him, help him to see our long-range interest.”
Flying Dragon felt reassured, and his steps became lighter as he walked along with the bureau chief. The chief studied this young captain, who had grown up under his very eyes. The young man bore strong resemblance to his father in the way he frowned and walked, and yet he had something about him not to be found in his father.
The fleet director’s office was a small wood hut overlooking the entire harbor across a row of willow trees.
As the two men approached the hut, they could hear Big Sea’s loud, hoarse voice yelling. “... Hey, Old Root! You listen to me first! You old rascal, your mouth is just like a machine gun, rattling nonstop ... You don’t have to give me that sort of stuff, all empty big talk! We are fishermen, you understand? Not explorers. It’s the best season now in the waters close to shore. Don’t you ever think of that? ...”
Big Sea was heavy and fat. He stooped over the desk, shouting into the phone. Old Root, on the other end, must have said something that annoyed him, for he stamped his foot and yelled, “What? Me, conservative? What sort of nonsense are you spewing? The older you get the crazier you become, eh? ...”
He slammed the phone down, but another phone on the desk started ringing. Angrily he snatched it up. “This is Szu-ma! ... What information? ... What? You are the research institute? This is the fleet director’s office, not the information resource room. Damn it ...”
Flying Dragon pushed the door open and rushed toward the phone. “Dad!” He only had time to grab the receiver from his father’s hand before he excitedly rattled off, “Comrade, I asked for the information!... Oh, thank you, thank you ...” He turned to his father and said, “Dad, you see, the theoretical aspect ... Hello!” He had to turn back to the phone again. “I was talking to someone else here. I wanted to tell you that if you people can take care of the theoretical aspect of the project, we can catch the fish and uncover the Whale Trough’s secret for you—our boat gives you our word of honor!”
“You ask them,” interjected Bureau Chief Chi, “if they have any new information on the present status of the geology of the Whale Trough.”
Big Sea, who had been ignoring the two visitors by gluing his eyes on a wall map, turned around, startled by what he had just heard.
“... That’s it! That’s it!” Flying Dragon relayed Chi’s question. He seemed to be even more excited. “We are with you on that. Comrade, I pledge my head on this thing. We will never let you down!”
Flying Dragon put the phone down. “Chief, now everything is ready,” he said, grinning broadly and rubbing his hands. “All we need is that gust of east wind!” He glanced at his father.
“What did the research institute say?” Chi asked.
“They have checked every source except those of the fifteenth century. Everything they went through said the same thing: the Whale Trough is a basin with no direct current through it. It’s got a mud bottom.” Flying Dragon continued: “They also said there is no record of any wreck or shoals in that area. Lots of sharks. Whales during June and July. These things seem to dovetail well with the fish runs near here. It’s really very promising.”
“That’s enough!” Big Sea interrupted his son. “It’s all a lot of paper work!” His eyes fixed on Bureau Chief Chi, asking the unspoken question: Have we decided to try the Whale Trough?
“Yes, we are going to try it!” Chi guessed Big Sea’s question and answered with a smile. “I’m back this time just to talk it over with you. How about sending Expedition I and II on this exploratory mission?”
“Right in the middle of the fish run here?”
“Yes, right at the height of this best season.”
Big Sea started pacing the floor. Pulling out his best team, the Expedition boats, at this moment would wreck his production plan. To him, this would be worse than being hit by a hurricane.
Flying Dragon stared at his father’s stiff neck, hoping that somehow he would see it bend into a nod of the old man’s head.
“How about it, Old Hai?” said Chi, who knew the temperament of this old sea dog very intimately. “We’ve got to work the waters close to shore, of course, but we’ve got to look further. You are not just a captain of one boat now, you are the leader of an entire fleet. You have to stand higher and see farther ...”
Chi kept talking, about matters from pre-Liberation days to the present, and from the present to the distant future. But Big Sea was troubled. He figured how much fish he would lose if he missed his main strength during the season, which came only once in a year. He couldn’t make up his mind.
Flying Dragon watched his father’s face as it turned lighter, then darker, then lighter again. Since the senior Szu-ma said nothing, his son didn’t know what to do. Finally he hit upon an idea. “Dad,” he said, “recently many comrades out there have been talking about you.”
“What about me?” The father stopped pacing.
“The young fellows out there say, ‘The director had a bad time in the Whale Trough some nineteen years ago; that’s why he doesn’t dare to do this, doesn’t dare to do that—he is plain scared!’ “
Big Sea blushed in anger. He glared at his son for a moment without saying anything. His reddened eyes seemed to be saying, “I know, I know, it’s you, and nobody else, who said I am scared!” Then he turned inquiringly to Bureau Chief Chi.
Flying Dragon left his father’s office without further argument.
The leadership had approved the project, and Bureau Chief Chi continued to work at the preparations. Big Sea relented and agreed to let Expedition I and Expedition II start out in three days. Grudgingly he walked the bureau chief out of his office, saying, “Look, we are so busy this year. All three of my managers have gone out to sea to be where the frontline action is. I’m left alone to man this show. It’s bigger than I can handle.”
“We’re prepared to assign two deputy directors to help you.”
“Two? When will they be here? Are they cadres from commission headquarters?”
“They have been here for a while already, out there aboard a boat somewhere.”
“But who are they?”
“One is Old Root.”
Big Sea was disappointed. He had hoped he would get some reliable help. Of course, Old Root was quite a fisherman, but something had gotten twisted between these two old sea pals; they seemed to quarrel every time they got together.
“Who is the other one?”
Chi laughed. “The other one? Well, we’ll have to watch and see. Look here, Old Hai, we can’t just dig around our own threshold forever; we have to expand into more distant seas. You have to adapt your strategy somewhat ...”
Returning to his office alone, Big Sea stared at the wall map showing the fishing waters in the vicinity. The adventure forced upon him nineteen years before by his capitalist employer once again passed before his eyes.
Nineteen years ago, Big Sea had been second in command on a small, beat-up fishing boat. The captain was a worthless foreigner who knew nothing except bossing people around. He was determined to go treasure-hunting in the remote, mysterious Whale Trough.
It was the same kind of windy season as this year. After leaving the fogbound harbor, the rickety boat coughed and shook, moving three knots forward and two back. It took them three solid days and two full nights to reach the Whale Trough.
From a distance, the water of the Trough looked murky, black, and eerie. The sharks, those huge black shadows of death, shot through the waves. Whale spouts, measuring over thirty feet high, shot up all around. The size and sight of the Trough unnerved the foreign skipper. His courage, fit only for risking a high stake in a gambling joint, fled.
“First Mate,” the foreigner called, “God has led us into this heavenly place! Let’s light the firecrackers.”
The old fishermen followed a superstitious tradition. When they saw a huge marine object, they would beat gongs and drums and light firecrackers to drive away the devil and ensure luck. At that time, Flying Dragon, only thirteen years old, was on board with his father, and the young boy enjoyed enormously the assignment of carrying a string of popping firecrackers as he walked around on the deck.
The boat approached Flying Shark Lane on the edge of the Trough. A swift current caught the feeble boat and held it captive for a time. Somehow no map had shown the tight, rocky spot in the middle of Flying Shark Lane, and when the foreign skipper saw it, he turned pale.
It was a good thing that Old Root, already a famed pilot, was on board. He sweated with Big Sea to steer the boat through the jutting rocks to reach the Trough. In the middle of the Trough they dropped their net, then they fullthrottled the engine. But the boat stood still, as though glued to the bottom of the ocean. Was it some marine monster that held the net in its claws? Strong winds rose. Schools of sharks, like wolf packs, gathered around. At each toss of the wave the boat missed capsizing only by a couple of inches. The fear-crazed foreign captain scurried around, spreading panic among the crew.
“Let go of the net!” the foreign captain kept yelling. A succession of huge waves smashed against the boat, breaking the thick boards kept ready for fencing off the sharks.
The situation was critical. Big Sea seized an axe from the emergency rack, thinking, “If I don’t do it, it will be almost certain death, but if I risk it, there might still be a chance.” He darted to the net platform and chopped away at the cable. The steel cable broke, freeing the boat from the drag net, and they managed to get back to port after a tough struggle. Even now, Big Sea still could not understand why the net got stuck
It was settled now—about running the Whale Trough.
During the three days remaining, Flying Dragon hurried with the preparations. He called a meeting of the crew, and they discussed all the unexpected situations they could think of and mapped the necessary countermeasures. They studied the eyes of the net, which seemed small and would make the net too heavy to drag when too much mud was caught in it. So they changed it, installing a net with larger eyes. What with the net-changing and others jobs, the crew, including the cook, all pitched in to work an extra night in order to start out as scheduled.
Big Sea had his own preparation to do for the fish run in waters close to shore. He ran breathlessly between the customs office, the telegraph bureau, and back to the boat dock, with no time to spare for watching how the Expedition team was getting along. When he heard that the bureau chief had transferred Old Root away from Flying Dragon to take charge of the auxiliary boat, Expedition II, he was stunned. “Don’t forget that Flying Dragon is still just a kid!” he complained to Bureau Chief Chi on the telephone.
“In your eyes he is still a kid, but I see in him a little tiger,” said Chi.
“Chief,” pleaded the senior Szu-ma, “you trust him too much.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be with them. Old Hai, drop over to commission headquarters. Let’s talk about this thing some more. . . .”
“I can’t make it now. There are still five teams of boats yet to go out.”
By dusk, Big Sea finally found time to go to the dock again. Expedition II had already been iced and was now anchored outside the harbor. Expedition I was packing its last load of ice.
Like a gleaming arm, the ice bridge reached out from the cold-storage tower, its rumbling conveyor belt delivering huge boulders of ice into the ice smasher. As each crystal boulder disappeared into the machine, a loud crash resounded and then a flood of crushed ice rushed to the hold of Expedition I by way of the elevated funnel.
Big Sea mounted the net platform of Expedition I; there he saw a huge nylon net caught in golden sunlight. It felt nice and soft. “How many fish would such a net mean if it were used in our familiar sure-fire waters,” Big Sea thought, and he felt unhappy about the prospect of casting the net into the Whale Trough.
Back on the dock, Big Sea saw his son, naked except for a pair of sweat-soaked shorts, running among the crew who were loading the empty fish tubs. Muscles rolled under the young man’s tanned, almost black, skin as he shouted encouragement to his fellow crewmen: “Let’s step it up—we’ve pledged to start out on time!”
“Dad,” Flying Dragon greeted his father, “are you here to inspect our preparations?”
“How many tubs have you loaded?” said the old man.
“A thousand.”
“A thousand?” The old man obviously thought it was too much. “What are you trying to do? Move the whole house? You really don’t have any idea yet what you may run into, and here you are, going big guns already. I don’t think you know what you’re doing. That ice and those tubs have been prepared for the boats working around Tiere.”
The young man pouted. Big Sea looked at his son, who stood half a head taller than himself now; he looked at his broad shoulders, at the wrinkles on his forehead, and at the stubble of beard around his mouth. Ever since the boy had lost his mother when he was thirteen, he had been with his father on a fishing boat. Nineteen years had passed, and only now Big Sea seemed to notice for the first time that the boy had grown up.
And the thought melted the old sea dog’s heart.
“Put your clothes on,” he said.
Obediently, Flying Dragon put on his clothes. With his hand, the father brushed away the few pieces of fish scale stuck on the young man’s back.
“With your Uncle Old Root gone, you’d better be twice as careful about everything,” the father said.
“Yes, dad.”
“Whenever anything happens, send me a message first.”
“I know.”
“If things don’t look right, pull back quickly. Don’t miss the fish run in this area also.”
Big Sea was talking his way back into that old rut about protecting production by sticking closer to home base. The young man had no interest in listening to that again. He smiled and interrupted his father: “Dad, it’s time to go.” Then he shouted to his crew, “Make ready to cast off!”
The crew followed Flying Dragon on board. Turning back to his father, Flying Dragon said, “Dad, don’t worry. We guarantee we’ll open up the Whale
Trough for us!”
The gangplank was removed; each crewman assumed his station. In the red light, Flying Dragon stood on the bridge, looking like a bronze statue. He made sure everyone was in position before he pulled the whistle to signal a start. “Front cable off!” he called. The engine bell rang and Expedition I, with all its lights ablaze, steamed out, followed closely by Expedition II.
As soon as the boat left the harbor area, Flying Dragon urged his men to get some sleep, to rest up for the next day’s battle. Activities on board subsided. Only the engine rumbled on steadily, indefatigably.
From the chart room, Flying Dragon found a set of maps, which he took to the captain’s cabin. He slipped off his shoes, spread the maps on the floor, and crawled from one end of the room to the other, reviewing the underwater topography. The tiny cabin suddenly seemed immense, and he felt he was watching his father, old Big Sea, doing exactly the same thing some years back.
The gossamer-thin lines, the sesame-like dots, each informed Flying Dragon something of this sea and posed for him a complex problem. He pushed the magnifier back and forth until he found Flying Shark Lane, which would present the first test for his boat. If successful, they would be directly approaching the Whale Trough. His eyes followed the Lane until they came to the Trough, which was marked in three large characters, near his left toe. He examined that area with care, and realized that the net he and his father had abandoned nineteen years before must be just about in the center of the Trough.
Something moved under the map. “Who’s that?” Flying Dragon asked.
“Open up here,” answered Hsiao Hsu, who had been transferred from Expedition II to assist Flying Dragon. Hsiao Hsu wanted to come up through the trapdoor which opened to the crew’s cabin. Flying Dragon folded up his maps and let the visitor in. About a dozen crewmen followed Hsiao Hsu.
“Captain Szu-ma,” Hsiao Hsu said, “these comrades are too excited to sleep. They all want to hear from you once again the story of how you were forced to go to the Whale Trough nineteen years ago.”
“Tell us about how the foreign idiot made a fool of himself,” said one crewman.
“Tell us about those huge sharks,” said another.
Flying Dragon scratched his head. “Haiya, all of you know that story already. Why should I tell that again?”
“We’ll never get tired of hearing it. Why don’t you tell us again, exactly the way it happened.”
“Yes, tell us, captain!”
Flying Dragon had to tell the story once again, from the very beginning, and it was not an unwelcome task. He always got carried away with his own story. Toward the end, he was overcome with emotion. “This happened nineteen long years ago,” he said. “It’s an old calendar, worn out and worm-eaten. Comrades, we are a new generation of crewmen raised by Chairman Mao himself. Only we can conquer this ocean and uncover its mystery!”
“This time,” said Hsiao Hsu, “we are going to put a stranglehold on the neck of the Whale Trough and demand that it give up its fish.”
“Ya!” said another crewman. “Let’s convert the Whale Trough into a Ta-ching of the sea.”
Excitement over the anticipated battle filled the tiny cabin. Outside, cold wind had started to blow. It was past midnight. Patches of fluorescent green blinked around the boat on the dark sea’s face, as microscopic marine life glowed like so many fireflies heralding the approach of a storm....
After the departure of Expedition I and II, Big Sea walked back to his office, where a staff member on duty handed him a letter. It was from Bureau Chief Chi.
“Old Hai,” the letter said, “both you and I have been busy these days. We haven’t had much chance to chat. I wonder if you have any further thought about developing the fishing waters of the Whale Trough. The current mission of Expedition I and II will have much to do with our future marine production. Just to make sure things will be all right, I have decided to go with Expedition II, where I will have Old Root’s wise counsel. You don’t have a thing to worry about. But you do have a heavier responsibility at headquarters overseeing the work in near-shore waters. I believe the picture of our production is about to embark on some dramatic changes. All right, you keep direct contact with the commissioner whenever you need any help.”
The letter warmed him. He felt the leadership’s concern over the entire operation; not a single link or a single person was overlooked. He bent over the desk, and before he knew it, he had started to snore....
The rustling leaves of the willow trees and the resounding surf outside awakened him. The sky was pitch-dark. He jumped up and grabbed the phone. “What’s the position of the expedition?” he asked the radioman. “Closing in on Flying Shark Lane,” came the answer. “Oh? What about the weather there?” “High wind expected,” said the radioman, followed by a spell of the transmitter’s ticking sound.
Experience told Big Sea that the approaching storm would be a whopper. He thought of the Whale Trough, and the scene he witnessed nineteen years before returned to haunt him.
Anxiously he awaited the dawn, when he would phone the commissioner to order the expedition back to port. But the phone rang, and from the other end came the commissioner’s voice. “I was at your office,” said the commissioner, “but you were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t want to wake you up ... Old Hai, I’m at the radio station. Can you come over? The devil of a weather is playing tricks on us; I need your help....”
“Yes, yes, right away!” said Big Sea. He had forgotten his request for the return of Expedition I and II.
Expedition I had already reached dark and unfamiliar waters. Black clouds pressed down, hovering just over the tip of the ship’s mast. But the boat kept its energetic course, darting ahead, splitting a threatening ocean. The engine roared as tirelessly as the fluttering red flag above.
Captain Flying Dragon stood unperturbed on the bridge, feeling no need of sleep at all. “Our position?” he asked Assistant Skipper Hsiao Hsu.
“Five knots to Flying Shark Lane.”
A telegram was brought over. It was fröm the commissioner, saying, “Captain of Expedition I, you are doing very well. Keep up the fearless revolutionary spirit. High wind expected. Be extra alert. Hope you will overcome all difficulties and insist on victory. Wish you success in charting a new channel for the marine products industry of our country. . . .”
The wind gained strength at dawn, and the boat gained knots, biting into Flying Shark Lane. A brilliant flash of lightning split the sky, followed by sustained peals of thunder.
Dodging skillfully the visible shoals, Expedition I was rapidly closing in on the critical “throat” of the lane. Suddenly Hsiao Hsu called out, “Whirlpool ahead!”
Flying Dragon squinted. In the distance he spotted a large area of churning water, a funnel-shaped maelstrom with a deep, sunken center. That was the throat of the lane. He felt the boat begin to shake as though it had contracted a case of malaria. The waves breaking against the hull of the boat thudded dully as a windstorm caught up with them.
Flying Dragon asked for full speed ahead. The boat leapt forward. He recalled what Old Root had told him just before their departure: “For the throat, you aim at its center and rush it.” To the right of the whirlpool’s center he saw a straight line—a through current. He headed his boat toward that current.
But, as the old sailors say, it takes only a lamb of wind to bring on a tiger of waves—the pounding wind had stirred the Lane into a deafening chaos. At a moment like this, if a man were anything less than perfectly calm, his knees would have buckled long ago. Flying Dragon thought of the people waiting for the results of what he was doing, waiting and watching him; the thought steeled his nerves and he signaled for reduced speed, to proceed with caution.
“Left, further left, still more ...” he gave orders. Like a hunter spotting his prey, he squinted at the course ahead. Without warning, Expedition II shot up from behind, pulled even with Expedition I, then passed it. During that one moment when it was abreast with the lead boat, Flying Dragon heard Old Root call out to him from the bridge of the second boat, “Be steady now!...” Flying Dragon realized that Old Root had found the throat of the Lane and had aimed straight at it. He followed suit. At fast-forward three, Expedition I wedged forth, caught up with the second boat, and together they sliced the mountainous waves and buffeting wind until they cleared the critical passage.
“Relax,” Flying Dragon said to the pilot, a young crewman with beads of sweat all over his face. “That was only the first dry run, a sort of initial greeting extended by the Whale Trough.”
Leaving Flying Shark Lane behind, Expedition I headed toward where Big Sea had left his net nineteen years before. The boat rocked and yawed, fighting the storm, at times her mast almost touching the peaks of waves. Each wave seemed higher than the last until the plexiglass window of the wheelhouse threatened to give way to the relentless pounding of angry water. Inside the wheelhouse, the pilot’s stool toppled and rolled from one end of the floor to the other.
Flying Dragon secured his foothold on the bridge. His legs, which had weathered years of storms on the sea since he was only thirteen, held him straight as though they were two pillars screwed to the board. Undaunted, he clung to the charted course without deviation.
But a wall of seawater rose directly in front of the bow and crashed on the wheelhouse, causing the windows to break their clasps and slide down the slots. Water rushed in. The pilot was knocked over. For a split second the boat slid helplessly sideways into the gaping trough of the second wave. Flying Dragon leapt to the wheel and, giving it a sharp spin, turned the boat back onto its course. He pushed the windows back into position, wiped the glass top of the compass. Hsiao Hsu, his assistant, ran into the room to take over the wheel. “Captain,” he said, “you keep watch. Let me handle this for you.”
“She wants to show us some color,” Flying Dragon smiled, looking at the churning sea. “Ah, but she doesn’t know us!” He flipped on the sonar screen. Sixty feet below the surface it was all calm; a huge black shadow remained immobile in the center of the screen. It could not be fish, for there was no movement, he thought. Weeds would not look like that either. Flying Dragon was puzzled.
According to his chart, that must be just about where his father had lost the net. The thought stirred him; he had to swallow hard before ordering “Net down!”
The nylon net rolled off the platform. Expedition II closed in to catch the other end of the cable. Together the two boats started dragging.
But there was no drag, much to Flying Dragon’s surprise. The boats proceeded as though nothing were happening. The crew looked at each other, wondering. In their minds, they, too, were reviewing the story of what had happened to the captain’s father years back.
“Captain Hsu,” Flying Dragon said, “you keep the wheel. I’ll go astern to take a look.” He went to the rear of the boat. The cable was taut; the net must have behaved properly underwater. Upon returning to the bridge, Flying Dragon sent a message off: “Expedition I net down. Drag normal.”
An hour passed, with no change in the boat’s speed. What could have happened nineteen years before that had pinned down the boat? None of the crew had anything to say.
“Look! The cat!” the crew yelled suddenly. Flying Dragon turned back. There in the midst of boiling whitecaps flashed the dark shadow of a large shark, followed by a looming black mound, the back of a whale, its tail flopping some distance away. In between, another chunky shark flashed its jaw at the hovering sea gulls above. The crew held on to the heaving rail, transfixed by this show of movement and power.
Before Flying Dragon could reflect on this ominous sight so like the prelude to what happened to his father seconds before the senior seaman had had to abandon his net, Expedition I stopped, just like the other ship nineteen years before! Flying Dragon sucked in some cold air; his heart skipped a beat.
“Aiya! ... The ship is not moving!” someone yelled.
“Don’t yell!” Flying Dragon ordered, as much to stop any panic as to calm himself. “All right,” he thought, “you scared the foreign idiot nineteen years ago, but you’re going to come clean this time ... for a while I thought you weren’t going to show up. All right ...”
“What has caught the net down below?” he reflected. “What has drawn those cats of the sea and the birds above?” He ordered full-speed-forward, as he and Old Root had agreed to do before departure.
“Signal Expedition II, increase-five!” The signalman manipulated his flags nimbly, and Flying Dragon read from the other boat a flag saying the order had been received and complied with. He turned to his talk-tube. “The horse isn’t running,” he spoke into the tube. “Whip her five—hard!”
Still the boat was glued to the same spot.
“Give her five, again!” he called.
Still nothing happened.
“Again ...” But Flying Dragon checked himself as he noticed the spray splashed onto the net platform by the propeller of his own ship. The cable strained dangerously, and the ship yawed like a struggling fish itself, trying to get free. The cable could snap any minute, and that beautiful new net would be lost forever. He bit his lips, his face flushed purple. If the net was lost, how would he face anybody back at the harbor? He fought hard to stay calm.
“Back to normal-forward,” he ordered.
He had an emergency huddle with Assistant Captain Hsu, then returned to the deck himself to direct the battle. The crew on the deck waited for his orders, their black plastic suits glistening in the pale dawn.
“Comrades,” Flying Dragon said, “the Whale Trough is challenging us to a fight now. The situation is tough. She wants to swallow our net. Are we going to let her do that?”
“No!” the crew shouted.
“Right! Let’s bring up our net. The storm is ugly, and we don’t know what’s going on down there. Be extra careful! We’re going to get back our net at all cost!”
Expedition II closed in again to hand back the other end of the cable. The cable wrench squeaked and Expedition I backed up toward that something down below. Prancing sharks thickened around the ship.
A huge wave swooped down on the water tank astern, clawing its way onto the ship. The deck tilted sharply, throwing the crew off-balance. The board on the net platform flew up and landed on the forward deck. Flying Dragon jumped at it, caught it, dragged it back to the platform and latched it down again.
Another wave tried its turn to smash the ship. This time a huge belt of shining sparkles emerged above the crest for a moment and sank down into the murky water again.
“The net is full! ... It’s bubbling up now!” the crew yelled, overjoyed.
Flying Dragon grinned. Wiping the brine off his face, he shouted, “The bastard! Ha, you almost fooled us, didn’t you? Fellows, hurry up with the machine gun.”
A burst of rattling gunfire subdued the sharks somewhat. “Perhaps the net is safe from their sharp jaws now,” Flying Dragon thought. On calmer days the net would “bubble up” to the surface when full of fish, and one could see it from a distance, but today the rough sea had kept the crew guessing until the net had been pulled quite close. The wrench was whirring, pulling ... its speed increased.
Smoke rose from the wrench spool—too much load! The spool began to act funny: turn and stop, turn and stop, as the long dragon of a net neared the ship. Then one end of the net was hauled over the side of the ship. The thing was too full for the two-ton capacity of the crane; they had to use the load divider, a cable noose which could be drawn over the sausage-like net to divide it roughly into two-ton sections so that each section could be pulled up and emptied one after the other.
The divider noose was lowered, and it caught the net-sausage nicely. But then another huge wave tossed the whole thing up, sky-high, and when it dropped down again, Flying Dragon’s heart sank—the rope attached to the divider noose had snapped. What could they do now? The broken rope dangled on the net several yards from the ship; it was caught in a section of rusted old cable that twisted around the net like a rotten, dead sea serpent. And the net, pulled and shoved in the waves, was slipping off the ship.
Flying Dragon leapt to the chain on the deck, tossed it around one end of the net, and twisted it tight on the railing. The net was momentarily secured to the railing. “Give me the hook!” Flying Dragon shouted. He waited for the huge sausage to be tossed close to the side of the ship and then stabbed the net with the hook, hoping to catch the broken rope. The rusted cable tangled around the sausage refused to give. A few more twists and turns, and another high wave knocked the hook into two pieces.
Each wave now clawed at Flying Dragon’s heart as it washed away that much farther his chance of securing that bulging netful of fish. He dropped his section of the broken hook-stick with a curse and wrung his hands. The crew’s eyes all were fixed on his angry face.
The old cook ran out from the kitchen, a meat cleaver in hand. “What’s caught? Where?” he shouted, panting. “Let me get it with this thing!” This comical outburst reminded everybody of something they had not thought of. “Yes, let’s chop it off, yes ...” One young crewman gave voice to everybody’s flash discovery.
“Ya, somebody go and chop it!” said someone.
“Captain, let me go!” another responded.
Flying Dragon’s eyes did not leave the floating sausage for one second as he thought about this last risky suggestion. Suddenly he swiveled around.
“Give me the file and pliers! Hurry!” he ordered one crewman nearby.
In a second he had stripped naked, donned a life jacket, and belted on it the file and pair of pliers. He had one hand on the end of the net, one foot already seeking a foothold on the sausage, when the crew rushed around him, all shouting, “Captain, let me go.” “Let me ...” “Captain, you are the head of the ship, you let me ...”
“Yes, and because I am the head of the ship ... stand back!”
Expedition II pulled closer, its whistle screaming. Flying Dragon saw Old Root shouting something from the bridge, but he could hear nothing for the wind. He saw, too, Bureau Chief Chi on the bridge, waving a safety belt at him. The crew on Expedition I got the message. They hurried to bring out a safety belt and quickly attached it over their captain’s safety jacket. In a moment he was gone, washed under the waves.
From the ship, the floating fish sausage seemed a stable island, at least stable enough for one to walk on it. But the sausage was not solid. It gave under each step. Flying Dragon clung to it like a lizard, holding his breath when it was awash, and struggled forward a few inches at a time between waves.
Some of the crew also put on life jackets, ready to reinforce their captain; others were dropping shark repellent around the sausage to shield their captain from those predatory jaws. Assistant Skipper Hsu whirled the wheel this way and that, trying to keep the ship as steady as possible. Expedition II turned in circles around this arena to help scare the “sea cats” away.
Inch by inch, Flying Dragon got closer to the rotten cable tangled in the net. How many times he was tossed up into the sky and dropped down to the bottom of the sea’s trough he didn’t know and didn’t care. All he wanted was that rotten cable. And when he finally got within reach of it, he was stunned. There, attached to one end of the rotten cable, was a broken piece of pulley which he immediately recognized as having belonged to his father’s boat. Nineteen long years! The net had rotted away, but its skeleton, its ghost, remained, waiting here to give him another bad time! He felt like biting it with his own teeth
. . . . . . .
The senior Szu-ma stayed on land, but he was dying to be in the Whale Trough.
At first the message that Expedition I had entered the Whale Trough and that the drag was normal jarred him only a little. Then word about the net “bubbling up” exploded in his ears. For a long while he couldn’t believe the radio message in his hand.
Then he was thrust back into gnawing anxiety as he pictured in his mind how his son crawled toward the broken rope. He couldn’t help but feel that he, Big Sea, should have been on Expedition I After all, to him Flying Dragon was still a boy!
As Szu-ma wallowed in his own emotional waves, the door of the radio room opened and out stepped the radioman. His mouth trembled, and it was only with difficulty that he managed to mutter the figure, “Two hundred thousand!”
“What?” the senior Szu-ma jumped. “Two hundred thousand?”
“ ‘Trouble removed. Net lift normal. Estimate two hundred thousand catties in net.’ “ The radioman handed the message from Expedition I to the old man.
As though a mirror vividly reviewed a page of old history for him, Big Sea saw in a flash the mystery that had nearly cost his life nineteen years before. His net, then, had also dragged a full load—too full for his rickety boat to handle. That was long ago, he thought, and that was when someone forced him to risk his life. But today, ah, today, what kind of people are we dealing with now, and what kind of ships are we handling now! Big Sea thought of his attitude, and regretted his timidity....
Out in the Whale Trough, Expedition I continued to load the fish, two tons at a time: tighten the noose, haul up, swing over the deck, and drop.... The net bulged, bursting in a few places. The live fish swam away; the stunned and half-dead fish lured even more gulls to swarm around. Two birds struggled together with a huge fish, carried it aloft for a few feet, then slipped and dropped it right on Flying Dragon’s head. “Look, even they want to help,” someone yelled and laughed.
Four big shovels, four pairs of strong arms, kept pouring fish into the gaping mouth of the hold. Still too slow. The fish piled up higher and higher on deck. What would have taken the two boats ten days to net from waters near shore, even at the peak of a run, was here in this one haul. The crew laughed and hopped on the pile of fish. Hopping together with them were the live catch, all sizes, shapes, and colors, their dancing rhythm accentuated by the engine’s roar. Seeing this, who could fail to recognize that it’s better catching fish than eating them?
Evening came. The winds stilled and the sea’s face resumed a joyous calm. The Whale Trough looked even more immense than before. Miles of shining brocade dyed by the sunset was cut only occasionally by the black scissors of sharks’ fins. Further away stood columns of white spout; the whales roamed, ever so casually.
The crew gathered further information about the Trough, proving that it was really an ideal fishing area as they had projected, and the message reaching Flying Dragon from his father the following day applauded their finding. “Congratulations!” the message read. “Now the fleet is organizing teams to plunge right into the Whale Trough for its treasures....”
On the bridge, Flying Dragon took in the scene of infinite beauty around him as the engine of Expedition I hummed a triumphant tune on a smooth homeward journey. The setting sun continued to burn the western sky. He turned to look at Assistant Skipper Hsu, who was equally absorbed in the intoxicating view. “Who knows how far it is to the South Pole?” he said to Hsu. “At least several thousand knots,” someone answered. “Only several thousand? Much farther than that ...” someone else chimed in with a comment.
In Flying Dragon’s ears sounded a song, “... let us open up a new world ...” And he saw himself piloting a boat in all the corners of mystery, over all the immense oceans on earth.
Selected Creative Writings by Young Workers,
Peasants, and Soldiers, pp. 130-155
Translated by Kai-yu Hsu
—On Reading the Diary of Wang Chieh
Write like this,
Write like this —
Our diaries
Should be written like this.
Write like this,
Write like this—
Our history
Should be written like this.
Write of our
Splendid red flag,
Write of our
Great achievements.
With
All our lives,
With
All our warm blood.
Life —
Write it like this,
Death —
Write it like this.
Revolution!
Revolution!—
In every line,
Every page.
The people!
The people!—
In every chapter,
Every stanza.
For a note on Ho Ching-chih, see p. 361.
The world,
In our hearts.
The heroes,
In our ranks.
We are
Comrades at arms of Huang Chi-kuang and Lei Feng,
We are
Thousands and thousands of Wang Chiehs!
Who says Wang Chieh
Already made the sacrifice?
Who says Wang Chieh
Has already bid us good-bye?
See the thousands and thousands of hearts of Wang Chieh
Beating in unison,
See the thousands and thousands of diaries of Wang Chieh
Still being written . . .
O, write,
We shall write!
We shall write this way,
We must write —
Face
The ten-thousand beacon fires,
Respond
To the world of today!
Revolution—
Never retreat!
Struggle—
Never cease!
How can we tolerate
The traitor’s betrayal?
How can we allow
The thief’s rampancy?
Our red flag—
Never shall fall!
Our torch—
Never shall die!
Who is
A “good breed of revolutionary”?
The people
Can tell!
Please look
At the revolutionary troops,
Just this moment
Regrouping ...
We are
Mao Tse-tung’s fighters,
We are
Heroic Wang Chiehs!
Come, see the enemy:
Are they not crazed?
Come, let the storm
Blow more fierce!
We have already
Made preparations,
Ready to meet
All that must come!
We shall sing loudly:
“This is the last struggle ...”
Fight forever
In the very front line!
We shall
Open our diaries
To write down boldly —
The truth of Mao Tse-tung’s thought
Write: the sky
Will never fall!
Write: the earth
Will never be destroyed!
Write: the imperialist bandits,
Must be all buried!
Write: the revisionist traitors,
Must pass the final judgment!
O, write: to peoples of the world,
Final victory!
O, write: on the whole earth,
The season brings blossoms everywhere ...
O, our diaries,
Our history,
Shall be written down: tomorrow
A newer, a more beautiful page!
November 11, 1965
Singing Aloud, pp. 149-154
Translated by Hsin-sheng C. Kao
Return to Well Ridge Mountains
(1965)
To climb once more the Well Ridge Mountains:
Pilgrimage devoutly planned.
Thousand-mile journey, and here the old haunts
All changed in aspect, smiling and bland.
Song of oriole, dance of swallow,
Purling streams on every side,
Trails pierce the clouds where we stand.
Perilous heights over Yellow Vale —
These we leave behind.
With storm and thunder
Banners surging
The people have taken this land.
Passage of thirty-eight years
Drumming fingers, a wave of the hand.
We can pluck the moon from the nine-fold heavens,
Seize the great turtle from five oceans’ depths,
Then back with cheers and a band.
No task on earth too difficult:
We have only to stretch out our hand.
Leviathan-roc spreads his wings,
Rises ten thousand miles
By the whirlwind’s force propelled.
The sky on his back, he surveys below
Walled cities where humans dwell:
Horizons lit by gun-flash,
Shell craters all around
Startle a sparrow from bramble dell.
“Whatever to do?
Oh! I want to fly off as well!”
For a note on Mao Tse-tung, see p. 373.
“And whither, sir, shall you journey?”
Now comes the sparrow’s reply:
“There’s a fairyland, I hear tell,
Where a year or so back, when the moon was bright
Three clans contracted in peace to dwell.
They’ve lots to eat there, too,
Potatoes piping hot,
Plenty of beef to sell.”
“Bullshit, my friend:
Just watch heaven switch with hell.”
MAO TSE-TUNG’S POEMS
Return to Well Ridge Mountains (1965), to the tune “Water Music Prelude.” The Well Ridge Mountains (Ching-kang shan), on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, were the earliest base of Mao’s Communist armies. Now, almost forty years after the fierce battles fought there, Mao celebrates peace and looks forward to ever greater achievements.
Dialogue of the Birds (1965), to the tune Nien-nu chiao, “Charms of Nien-nu.” “Leviathan-roc” is an image borrowed from the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, of a creature of vast powers beyond the comprehension of the blinkered sparrow. Here the roc stands for the Chinese people, or perhaps the Communist Party. The sparrow is the revisionist or capitalist-roader who looks enviously toward the West. There, the lands of beef and potatoes—the United States, Russia, and Great Britain—have entered into a detente to preserve their prosperity. Mao’s roc makes an earthy comment, literally “quit farting”: the prosperity of the West is only temporary, the “heaven” of the future will be China.
Translation and notes by Cyril Birch
PROLETARIAN POETS OF
THE EARLY 1970s
The dust of the Cultural Revolution was barely beginning to settle; poetry journals were still suspended. But in some regions a few small pamphlets of verse had begun to appear. The following selections come from one of these pamphlets, recommended highly by a senior professor of literature at Sun Yat-sen University, Canton, as a worthy sample of proletarian writings in recent years. The professor’s judgement is supported by the fact that the poems had been screened by a contest held in Kwangtung Province in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Mao Tse-tung’s “Yenan Talks.” —K.Y.H.
Night rain, pouring in buckets,
The mountain village locked in by a windstorm.
A bugle sounded,
Men came running from all directions.
Several squads of militia—several walls,
Standing erect on mountain slope, braving wind and rain.
“Count off!” “One, two, three ...”
Ah, why one too many?
A flash of lightning
Lit up Uncle Hung Sung:
Silver eyebrows on bronze face,
And a glistening sword in hand.
“Uncle Hung Sung!” “Here!”
“Fall out!” “Yes!”
“Go home!” “No!”
There was fire in his words:
“Time was when White dogs came at us,
Blood flowed in streams in our village.
The Red Guards counterattacked at night,
I wielded this very sword, and enemy heads rolled.”
“Until the class struggle ends
My sword will keep singing under my pillow,
Its blade eversharp, and its heroic spirit ever high;
Though my hair is frosty, my heart stays red.”
“Fall in!” A new order rang,
Uncle Hung jumped in joy, like a young fellow.
He felt weightless, stepping on air, in wind and rain,
His silvery hair reflected on his gleaming sword.
March 1972, at Tzu-chin
New Poetry from Southern Kwangtung, pp. 151-52
Thick and downy, spring rain
Sprinkles on the plain;
Soft, gentle breeze
Wakes up the sleeping households.
And the doors and windows, one after another
Open to the sky still dark grey before dawn.
The communers
Ready their plows to greet a new day.
Long threads of rain
Hang down from the sky;
A vigorous choral music
Has been struck on these strings;
Lively, vocal raindrops
Nurture our sprouting crops.
From up there
Come rain and wind day by day;
And on earth
Spread the signs of spring everywhere.
Riding on the wind, spring rain arrives,
And the newly terraced fields at La-tzu-k’ou
Stand vertical, a pagoda of a thousand stories.
In sunny March
The freshly turned soil blooms.
Riding on the wind, spring rain arrives.
The plot at Yang Chia-ling which Chairman Mao once tilled
Shines forth,
And the glittering plowshares
Ease the Red seeds into the soil.
Spring rain, falling, falling,
Riding on ceaseless wind.
Waves of green water churn in the rivers and streams,
While on the hills, unrolls a misty screen.
From the Ta-ts’ang range to T’ien-shan,
From the Yangtze River to southern Yunnan,
Every inch of land heralds the arrival of spring,
Every inch of land
Sprouts the young shoots of Ta-chai.
Early March, the rivers thaw,
Mid-March, wild geese return from the south,
Spring rain has soaked through the land now.
At the meeting to discuss spring plowing
The production brigade stays until sunrise.
This year, they declare,
Let’s beat the quota and break the 1000-catty miracle limit,
Let’s mold a world abundant in food and clothes.
Willow catkins fly, peach blossoms glow,
Spring rain brings noisy cheer to earth,
Noisy rumbles of farm machines,
Noisy commands to the draft animals.
This year, we say,
We want to rise several further stories high,
And for that men are racing, everywhere.
Revised in Canton, spring 1972
New Poetry from Southern Kwangtung, pp. 66-68
Greeting the New Year before
the Furnace
The hour is late, the Last Eve approaching,
In the furnaces, flames leap and reel;
Before them we fight, wiping sweat like rain,
Locked in close combat with molten steel.
Say, you want to view flowers on New Year’s Eve,
This is not a bad place, not bad at all;
A rainbow in the sky, a sunrise spreads
Where the steel sparks rise and fall.
Say, you want to watch the old year’s passing
Around a fire, then come right over here;
Most satisfying to face such roaring blazes
And hold battle positions without wavering or fear.
Say, you want to toast the arriving spring,
Let us race with time, hurry and speed up;
Let each crucible be our drinking glass,
Let’s pour bucket after bucket, cup after cup.
Arms of iron wielding rods of steel,
Sketch heroic designs and visions ahead;
As crimson light and heat wave rise to the sky,
We write our unending poetry, fiery and red.
New Poetry from Southern Kwangtung, pp. 38-39
Translated by Kai-yu Hsu
__________________
*Not as well-organized or sinister as gang fighting, though at times it could result in casualties. [K.Y.H.]
*Fan Li was a famous statesman of the Yi.ieh Kingdom in the fifth century B.C. After he retired, because of his talent in business he soon became a millionaire. He spent his last years at T’ao, and called himself T’ao Chu Kung. [L.C. and K.H.]
*A sign to indicate that the bearer is for sale. (L.C. and K.H.]
*One of the leaders of the One Hundred Days Reformation Movement. The Reformists were supported by the Emperor, but the Empress Dowager wiped out the movement in September 1898. Six of them, including T’an Szu-t’ung, were executed. [L.C. and K.H.]
† While the Eight Immortals of popular Taoism ferried across the Eastern Sea to reach the Fairy islands, each displayed his or her magic power. They are Han Chung-li, Chang Kuo-lao, Lü Tung-pin, Ts’ao the Uncle of Empress, Li the Iron Staff, Han Hsiang-tzu, Lan Ts’ai-ho, and Ho the Goddess. [L.C. and K.H.]
*Since the establishment of the Manchurian dynasty in the seventeenth century, all Manchurians had been given military rank and free rations. The Manchurians were the minority ruling class. [L.C. and K.H.]
*Yang Shih (1053-1135), who first established the Eastern Forest Academy at Wusih near Lake T’ai. Revived by loyal scholars toward the end of the Ming dynasty, the academy was the target of bitter political persecution for decades. [K.Y.H]
*A cruel warlord who served under Kublai Khan.
†Lin-an was the capital of the Southern Sung dynasty. [E.J.B.]
*Lord Akham’s eldest son.
†An umbrella with 10,000 signatures given by the people as a tribute to popular officials.
‡Name used to refer to the national minorities in Northwest China then under Mongol Rule.
**The Mongols referred to the Han people as “southern barbarians.” [E.J.B.]
*Kuan is referring in a familiar way to Chu Lien-hsiu. [E.J.B.]
*In the Yüan dynasty commanders were ranked according to the number of men in their command. (E.J.B.]
*Here she makes a sound between hiccoughing and burping because of her chronic stomach trouble. The author himself deleted this in his 1959 revision for the screen. See Treatises on the Motion Picture (Peking 1963), p. 260. [K.Y.H.]
*Forty such essays have been collected in Critical Essays on the Peking Opera ‘The Red Lantern’ (Peking, 1965). A complete text including musical scores, dance patterns, and detailed pictures of costumes, scenery, props, and lighting can be found in The Red Lantern (Peking, 1972).
*A type of three-stringed banjo. [K.Y.H.]
*From time to time since the early 1960s, campaigns have been conducted to rally all industries to emulate the spirit and practice of Ta-chai, a model commune in southwestern Hopei Province, and Ta-ch’ing, a model oil field in Manchuria. [K.Y.H.]
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