II

“AUTUMN IN KULING”

FROM LIFE TO FICTION

“Autumn in Kuling,” an undated short story, was first published in installments in the journal Literature in 1933.¹ In a footnote Mao Tun revealed that the story originally had nine sections, but sections five to eight, “for reasons unknown, disappeared the night after it was written.” He added, “I would have found them if I had wanted to look for them, but I did not feel like looking, nor was I up to rewriting the missing parts.”² What he did instead was make the original section nine the new concluding section five.

As a work of imaginative fiction, “Autumn in Kuling” is not entirely successful, but there are several reasons why it is a useful microcosm of the young Mao Tun’s developing fictional method.

First, it is short—some 20,000 to 25,000 words in its published version. The four middle sections almost certainly disappeared because the work was a thinly veiled report on current history.³ The story’s brevity becomes an advantage when connections between history and Mao Tun’s fiction are sought; there is less concealment to uncover, and fewer links to reconstruct. It offers a rare opportunity to observe closely how Mao Tun used fiction to satisfy his irrespressible urge to write about contemporary history, despite all the practical difficulties of dealing with such sensitive matters under the various levels of censorship.

Second, the story is illuminated by its autobiographical companion, “Remarks on the Past,” also published in 1933.⁴ The parallels between the two provide enough clues to establish the historical subtext in the fictional work as the cluster of events surrounding the retreat of the Chinese Communists from Wuhan in the second half of July 1927 and the famous Nanch’ang Uprising of August 1, which has since been declared the official memorial day to mark the founding of the Chinese Red Army. Certainty about the subject matter of the story greatly facilitates our study of Mao Tun’s fictional technique of using political allegory and symbolism.

Third, it offers a way to begin discussing what Mao Tun himself said in “My Understanding” about the importance of characters in fiction and of the relationships between characters.

Fourth, “Autumn in Kuling” is a prime example of Mao Tun’s way of dealing with women in literature. Unoppressed women were a rare phenomenon in modern Chinese writing of the 1920s, even for the most revolutionary and the most sympathetic of writers. The women in Lu Hsün’s stories are almost without exception victims of institutionalized oppression. And Ting Ling’s Miss Sophia (1928),⁵ a bold image of and a confessional outcry for freedom from traditional bonds—sexual as well as educational—is a feverish, tubercular heroine who exemplifies not so much freedom as the frustrated urge for freedom. Mao Tun’s women characters, by comparison, are by far the most emancipated, free, and healthy; they are the only women in major Chinese fiction of the period who actually move outside family settings and still remain realistically convincing as characters. Their behavior is unfettered by traditional notions of chastity and docile womanly virtues, and they are accountable only to their inner sense of responsibility. Certainly they are frequently excitable creatures, and we also get clues to this in Mao Tun’s non-fiction—such as the scene in the autobiographical “Remarks on the Past” in which a woman, flushed of face, is walking in the rain beside Mao Tun and talking in great excitement about a political meeting. But she, like her fictional counterparts, is never patronized, and Mao Tun is clearly aware of what revolutionary struggle for emancipation of the oppressed meant for women. Traditional Chinese literature is not used to educated women with a degree of freedom; even Mao Tun’s contemporaries did not know quite what to do with them. Mao Tun was to go on in his novels to make his women much more real than in either “Remarks on the Past” or “Autumn in Kuling.” And we shall see in his women characters a degree of concern for their total emancipation that not many activists in those days paid much attention to.

“Autumn in Kuling” also seems from internal evidence to be Mao Tun’s first attempt at totally imaginative fiction. It marks the end of his first politically active period, and it may sensibly be read as his first attempt to recreate imaginatively the four years of revolutionary development that he had experienced. For the first time, too, Kuling, a summer resort town up in the mountains, the beautiful Lushan range in Kiangsi Province, begins to take on the aura of a private symbol for Mao Tun. He used it often in the early part of his career as a writer; it was a touchstone that evoked the Chinese Communist movement during the years of the Great Revolution.

The publication date of the story gives no clue to when it was written. Many of Mao Tun’s stories are dated in footnotes or datelines, but this one is not. Evidence that it was written some time before publication is abundant, however. First, there is the first-person “I” passage in the footnote about the sections that disappeared, which calls attention not only to censorship but also to the timing of publication. Then there is the name of a character in the story, Master Cloud (Yün shao-yeh), which links him quite unambiguously to many other occurrences of the name Cloud—rich in symbolism in Chinese literature—in Mao Tun’s other writings during his three-week stay at Kuling or about events that took place then.

According to his first and highly emotional defense of Eclipse, “From Kuling to Tokyo,” and also to his autobiographical “Remarks on the Past,” and his “Memoirs IX,” Mao Tun went from Wuhan to Kiukiang on July 23, 1927, immediately after the CCP-KMT split, on orders from the Party. He was on a secret assignment to deliver a draft for two thousand dollars to a contact in Kiukiang and possibly also to attend one of the Party’s planning conferences, for which the Lushan area was a favored setting. The next day he made the short journey up to the mountain resort town of Kuling with a few friends. They were told that there was another route down the far side of the mountain that could take them to Nanch’ang. He suddenly fell ill with a severe case of dysentery. His wife, who was pregnant, had already gone back to Shanghai, a safer place than Wuhan at the moment, and his friends now departed also. Mao Tun stayed behind in Kuling till mid-August, recuperating. During that time he heard about the Nanch’ang Uprising and about meetings between generals and politicians of the KMT Left Wing from a woman coworker named Fan Chih-ch’ao, who was also in Kuling after the Wuhan retreat. An active man, Mao Tun was suddenly reduced to inactivity by illness and by the need to conceal his presence in Kuling. He had time on his hands.

Illness is a time when people think a great deal; it is a time to confront death and to think over the past and the future, perhaps feverishly. In his forced state of physical inactivity, Mao Tun was certainly not intellectually idle. Things were happening just over the mountain. The revolution was at a turning point. Many of his comrades were braving death at Nanch’ang; some were trying to carry a share of the action underground via a secret journey back to Shanghai. All were in acute danger. While his body was immobilized, his head was filled with excitement—the known and unknown movements of his friends and comrades; the future of the Party and the revolution; the bad news portended by the meetings there and then in Kuling between such KMT Left Wing leaders as Wang Ching-wei, Yü Yu-jen, and the no longer supportive army generals Chang Fa-k’uei and Huang Ch’i-hsiang (which he learned about from his colleague Fan Chih-ch’ao).⁶ Mao Tun could not but be obsessed by the possible outcome of all this.

In “From Kuling to Tokyo,” as well as “Remarks on the Past” and “Memoirs,” we are told that while he was in bed he was reading a collection of essays by Maurice Maeterlinck, The Buried Temple, and translating a short novel, Their Sons, by the Spanish novelist Eduardo Zamacois.⁷ “From Kuling to Tokyo” offers the clearest account:

We also learn that other thoughts about the immediate affairs around him demanded even more of his attention. His reaction to them was first expressed in several nonfiction “newsletters” he dispatched to the Hankow Republic Daily and later treated allegorically in “From Kuling to Tokyo” in his account of an encounter with a certain Miss Cloud:

This Miss Cloud is certainly not any real person whom Mao Tun actually met in Kuling. If Fan Chih-ch’ao provides a partial model for her, then it is highly conceivable that the account of the Nanch’ang Uprising that Fan gave Mao Tun provides a partial model for Miss Cloud’s experience which struck him as a medieval romance. Mao Tun could not fail to recognize the romantic aspects of the gallant, doomed rebellion. Miss Cloud is of special interest here, however, for the clue to an approximate dating of “Autumn in Kuling” provided by her name. For “Cloud—“Yün”—as a character appears continually in Mao Tun’s writing of the period and does not reappear after this cluster of works which revolve around his thoughts and experiences of the Kuling period.

There are at least five other pieces written by Mao Tun between July 24, 1927, and November 1931 in which the name Cloud appears as a person. The texts of four are available but the content of the other two, which are oddly unavailable, can be inferred from the titles. The two unavailable pieces are both “Newsletters from Kuling,” which, according to “Remarks on the Past,” were the first things Mao Tun wrote “after settling in a hotel there.” One, he says, is about a story he heard from a certain Miss Cloud on the subject of “catching fleas,”⁸ a most incongruous subject under the circumstance. But if Mao Tun was inspired to write about it at that juncture, we may infer that this tiny blood-sucking insect carries some allusion to current events about which he felt scornful enough to joke in a mock-heroic mood. The other newsletter, “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat,” was published in the Hankow Republic Daily’s “Literary Supplement” of July 29, 1927.⁹ Of course, it would be possible to do elaborate speculative exercises on the allegorical meaning of “Cloud” and “Straw Hat,” drawing upon other work by Mao Tun for support. But for the present I will only note that the light, mocking tone suggested by the title is quite consistent with the light, mocking tone we can infer from the flea-catching story of the same period.

The third piece in which Cloud appears as a person is a poem, “Goodbye to Younger Sister Yün,” dated August 12 and published August 19, 1927:

So the mocking tone continues. The poet is grievously disillusioned but nonetheless remains hopeful that he and Sister Cloud will meet again.

Shortly after dispatching the poem, Mao Tun left Kuling to return to Shanghai. It was at this time that he became separated from the Party organization and was no longer on the front line.¹¹ Once in Shanghai, he went into hiding with his mother and wife on the third floor of a small house in Ching-yün Lane—where Lu Hsün was soon to become his neighbor. During the subsequent months—from the end of August 1927 to June 1928—he was active on a different front, writing the trilogy Eclipse. In June 1928, ostensibly for reasons of personal safety, he left for Japan. But no sooner had he arrived in Japan than attacks on Eclipse began. He quickly responded with “From Kuling to Tokyo,” and we can see from the content of the piece that Mao Tun was still deeply concerned with those who had remained on the front line (or had died there). He could not stop reliving those years when he too was at the heart of the Party organization. This continuous inner involvement with events after the events themselves are past accounts for much of the creative energy Mao Tun displayed in his Japan years (1928-1930). Miss Cloud appears again in “From Kuling to Tokyo,” but the allegory has lost its light hearted tone: the benign mocking that informed the Kuling “newsletter” and the goodbye poem a year before is no longer there. The Miss Cloud of July 1928 is critically ill and her mind is no longer playfully dabbling with catching fleas but alternates “between pessimism and excitement.” And this state of alternating pessimism and excitement continues when Cloud next appears as a young man from a land-owning peasant family in the short novel In Company of Three.

The mysteries surrounding Mao Tun’s Cloud character are far from the only mysteries in his early writings. For example, the publication date of the minor novel In Company of Three, whether by coincidence or not, is similarly “clouded.” The official version in “Memoirs XII” is that the novel was written in the second half of 1931. This is consistent with Ch’ü Ch’iu-po’s remarks in an early review that the latter part of the novel was written in the fall of 1931 because in it Mao Tun referred to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931.¹² The time Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and Mao Tun gave for the writing of the book would put the publication date no earlier than December 1931. However, two Shanghai editions of In Company of Three—each called “first edition”—give the publication dates as, respectively, March of the 18th year of the Republic, which is March 1929, and October of the 20th year of the Republic, which is October 1930.¹³ Such confusion about the dating of In Company of Three certainly allows us to reconsider the dating of “Autumn in Kuling.”

Internal evidence—the story itself—is as important as all these elusive Clouds.

The development of tone and style in the works in which Cloud appears as a character—from the light-hearted mocking tone of the “flea” newsletter, “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat,” and “Goodbye to Younger Sister Cloud” to the pessimistic and excited tone of “From Kuling to Tokyo” and In Company of Three—places “Autumn in Kuling,” with its light-hearted, carefree, tourist-minded Master Cloud, in the July-August group. Its spirit is in tune with the first three, and there is a clear division between the feverish gaiety of these four works and the driven quality of the other two. The young man Cloud in In Company of Three, especially, belongs to an altogether different political era, when it is important to assert peasant background and peasant class-consciousness.

Theme and tone argue that “Autumn in Kuling” was written not long after “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat,” probably in the first week of August 1927, after the Nanch’ang Uprising had been put down and the Southern March of retreat had begun. We may safely assume that the story was withheld from publication at the time because of multilevel censorship of the parts, now missing, that logically would have dealt with the uprising. Mao Tun would have acceded to the deletion not only out of Party loyalty but partly because as a beginner at fiction he was not entirely confident of his own skill at portraying such a momentous event. Possibly, too, since he was planning a novel about the Great Revolution, he hoped to incorporate the material in it. Then Eclipse took shape and the story did not fit in after all. But when Mao Tun returned from Japan the political scene had changed, and when he became editor of Literature in 1933, he had a place to publish his work somewhat more freely. No doubt he also felt much more confident of its reception—even though it was based on events six years earlier—now that he had earned a reputation with the trilogy. Whether out of nostalgia or lingering defiance or both,¹⁴ he quickly serialized the safer parts of “Autumn in Kuling” in the September, November, and December issues of his magazine.

The “Cloud” allegory is worth looking into a little further because it is so intimately woven into this unique period in Mao Tun’s life, when he was being transformed from a revolutionary into a creative writer. It crystallizes in one image the widely divergent sources of inspiration—literary, biographical, geographical, political, and ideological—which Mao Tun was to draw on continuously for allegories and symbols in his early fiction.

The making of the Cloud allegory begins with Kuling, a real place high enough in the mountains for real clouds to be very close. The time was July-August 1927, a turning point in the history of the Chinese Communist revolution. Mao Tun, too, was on the verge of a critical change. Out of action for the first time in years, his mind preternaturally alert despite his debilitated body, he listened to all sorts of plans about what was to be done in the aftermath of the disaster at Wuhan. Friends came and then disappeared into the clouds on the mountain above the town. Men and women were all busy talking about goals and action. Physically inactive himself, Mao Tun had just the right perspective for contemplating his friends’ plans. The old ideological framework, the old Party line that had informed everybody’s actions with a sense of reality, had just fallen apart. New slogans for a new line were yet to be formed. The Nanch’ang Uprising, for example, was being planned and was surely to take place soon. But would it really usher in the new, third phase of the Chinese revolution, the “soviet phase,” with identifiable geographical areas transformed into soviets and governed on Communist principles? Or was it merely to be words all over again?

As the clouds floated among the mountain ranges, and people floated busily in and out of them, and words floated around seeking incarnation into concrete history, a literary idea also began to float in Mao Tun’s mind, agitating and pushing to take shape. From his vast knowledge of literature, Mao Tun was trying hard to summon a literary motif, a tradition-rich image, to give fitting expression to this enormous contradiction he saw all around him: the concreteness of people’s actions and the unreality of their goals. This agitated search finally settled on the encompassing figure “cloud.”

There is at least one well-known use of “cloud” in Chinese literature relevant to the case in point. The Chinese use is embedded in the Taoist tradition of “taking off to the clouds” (“yün-yu),” in which a Taoist disciple would from time to time take leave of mundane concerns and, for the benefit of his spirit or his health, journey to some distant place, a high mountain where clouds gather. This Chinese use aptly captures one aspect of Mao Tun’s ironic view of the ever self-rejuvenating revolutionary slogans and activities that indeed took leave of reality when called on to do so for the sake of spiritual—read ideological—truth. However, this use alone is a bit too pretty to carry the full weight of Mao Tun’s condemnation of such behavior. From his studies of English, Mao Tun no doubt understood the dual meaning of the common phrase “head in the clouds,” which implies pure and lofty thoughts along with the inability to see one’s immediate circumstances. In addition, Mao Tun knew at least two specific Western uses of “cloud” that address his concerns very well.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Futurist poet laureate of the October Revolution, whom Mao Tun had studied and written about, in 1915 wrote a long poem, “The Cloud in Trousers,” in which he glorified the coming revolution and the victory of the proletariat. The poem begins:

There were several Chinese translations of this poem, and Mao Tun certainly knew it for he mentioned it in the section on Mayakovsky and Futurism in his Outline of Western Literature,¹⁶ and later on borrowed from it the metaphor for revolution of a crown of roses and thorns to use in his Wild Roses stories. Mayakovsky’s “Cloud” had a specific meaning as a metaphor for “proletarian revolution” and its nebulous ideology. When we juxtapose Mayakovsky’s “Cloud” with the contemporary meaning of “straw hat” in Shanghai journalism, a picture emerges that helps to explain the allegory for both “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat” and “Autumn in Kuling.”

Shanghai, where Western journalism arrived early, had both Western-style newspapers and illustrated journals. The Tien-shih-chai Illustrated News was a famous publication by the Commercial Press that used drawings to comment on the social and antisocial activities of Westerners and the Western military. There were scenes from the 1884–85 Sino-French war over Annam, for instance, and at the other extreme, a long-gowned foreign woman playing the piano in a Western-style drawing room with a poodle jumping by her side. When Mao Tun became editor of the Short Story Monthly, one of his innovations was to include several pages of illustrations accompanying its world news section. He was thus familiar with the cartoons and drawings of Shanghai young men wearing a still Western-style straw hat that advertised their Western pretensions. Mao Tun took over the hat as a symbol of empty pretensions to Western learning in a number of his early works. In Pursuit, for example, he scornfully refers to a Party man’s lofty speeches about education as “big-hat” talk—a lot of empty air under the hat that is too big for the head. This usage provides a clue to the allegory in the title “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat.” A young revolutionary named Cloud (a possible surname in Chinese) decked out in this cheap imitation of fashionable foreign attire, the symbol of an imported ideology. It could well be Mao Tun’s commentary on the Comintern influence incongruously superimposed on the Chinese revolutionary movement.

The second Western use of “Cloud” comes from Aristophanes’ satirical play about Socrates, The Clouds, which Mao Tun summarized in his Outline of Western Literature, giving it his own emphasis. His synopsis shows that: A bankrupt old man goes to seek instruction from Socrates on how to hoodwink his creditors. As they are talking, in comes a women’s chorus, the “Clouds.” The old man takes them to be gods, but Socrates says, “They are clouds in the sky but lazy people still look upon them as goddesses. To us philosophers and theoreticians, we extract from the clouds ideas, language, and philosophy.” Unable to understand Socrates’ philosophical talk, the old man fetches his son to take his place. The son soon becomes an accomplished sophist and confuses all the creditors with his nonsense. He does many outrageous things and finally beats up his father, defending the logic of his actions every step of the way. The old man is so incensed by the consequences of Socrates’ teaching that he burns Socrates’ Academy and his home to the ground. It is easy to see in Socrates’ teaching an analogy to the effect of Soviet Russia’s doctinaire ideology on China, resulting in outrageous behavior for the learner.

The “Cloud” is a complex symbol combining several important elements of Mao Tun’s revolutionary experiences in the years immediately preceding his Kuling stay, where he began his career as a creative writer. Gradually and one by one, aspects of this welter of experience begin to assume human forms and appear as characters, several of them bearing this densely allegorical name Cloud. As the pattern develops, women Clouds generally represent abstract ideals and goals and men Clouds represent implementation of such ideals and goals on the level of action. “Autumn in Kuling,” with one such Cloud among its characters, belongs to this period of Mao Tun’s writing. Cloud does not appear again as a character after In Company of Three. In our analysis of “Autumn in Kuling,” we shall see that Mao Tun’s major themes are already present in it, themes that will be developed and presented more successfully, in greater depth and fuller realization, in the rest of his early fiction.

The story opens with a scene at Pier Six on the Hankow waterfront. The date is July 23, 1927. Three men are seen boarding the Japanese ship Hsiang-yang-wan to go to Kiukiang.¹⁸ In the third-class cabin the three are cursorily introduced to the reader: Old Ming, a journalist, Old Sung, an exiled KMT member from Chekiang who recently came from Shang-hai, and Master Cloud, apparently a young tourist but a friend of Ming and Sung. The three meet a number of acquaintances and exchange ambiguous remarks on the current political situation and military developments. A light blue skirt strung up in the third-class cabin as a makeshift screen calls their attention to the presence of two women acquaintances, Miss Wang and Miss T’ao. They too are going to Kiukiang, to take the train from there to Nanch’ang.

In Kiukiang, the three men spend two very confusing and frustrating days. First they have trouble finding the people they had arranged to meet. Then their plans change repeatedly in less than half a day. Miss Wang and Miss T’ao appear, somewhat unexpectedly, in the same hotel. The train to Nanch’ang has been delayed because of the need to transport soldiers.

In the last section, the former section nine, the scene abruptly shifts to Kuling. A week or so has elapsed. Two of the three men, Ming and Master Cloud, are still on the scene, playing chess in a hotel. “Where do you think Old Sung and the rest of them are now?”¹⁹ asks Ming. “Don’t they say that onece beyond Fuchow, it is all wild mountains? We are in the mountains too, but theirs over there must be more interesting.” Cloud has no answer, and the two men muse silently about their friends and about their own situation for a while. Finally, they decide to go back to Shanghai in two or three days.

The plot of “Autumn in Kuling” thus summarized tells very little about the events presented, much less the significance of the characters. There is much bustle in the story, but none of it has any clear direction. We are not told anyone’s background or what kind of work any of them is doing now. The reason for the trip to Kiukiang is not known, and the encounters with the women seem to be casual and without significance. The final episode in Kuling, instead of answering these questions as endings normally do, introduces yet other mysteries, the business of Old Ming and Master Cloud in Kuling, and of “Old Sung and the rest” in the mountain areas near Fuchow.

“Autumn in Kuling” has never attracted much critical attention; probably because of its apparent pointlessness, any clue to an intelligent reading was lost when the middle sections vanished so mysteriously. But the similar trip described in the nonfiction “Remarks on the Past,” published in the same year, throws considerable light on the story. Mao Tun himself had traveled from Wuhan to Kiukiang on the ship Hsiang-yang-wan, and from “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat” we know that he left Wuhan on July 23, 1927, the same day the Hsiang-yang-wan departed from Hankow in the opening scene of “Autumn in Kuling.”

Such striking coincidence inevitably suggests a connection between the actual and the fictional trips. Other details, down to the color of the woman’s skirt strung up in the cabin, indicate that the two trips are one and the same. (There are two light blue skirts in “Remarks” and only one in “Autumn in Kuling.”) In both cases the skirt belongs to one of the two men that Mao Tun, as well as characters in the story, had known from his Shanghai days. Later in “Remarks,” Mao Tun says he went from Kiukiang to Kuling; two of the three male characters also go from Kiukiang to Kuling. From Kuling, Mao Tun left in less than two weeks’ time to go back to Shanghai; the two men also decide to do this at the end of “Autumn in Kuling.”

Such coincidences cannot be accidental. The author evidently links “Autumn in Kuling” to his autobiographical “Remarks” and relies on these links of detail to reveal the larger common historical context that was his main concern and real subject. Reliance on external information to reveal the deeper subject matter, and use of selected details to pinpoint the larger historical framework, occur repeatedly in Mao Tun’s early fiction, especially in the Wild Roses stories and their prefaces. It is also true of the trilogy Eclipse and Mao Tun’s two articles in defence of it, “From Kuling to Tokyo” and “On Reading Ni Huan-chih.”

“Autumn in Kuling” in fact deals with a small, clearly identifiable cluster of historical events: the retreat of the Chinese Communists from Wuhan in the second half of July 1927 and the famous Nanch’ang Uprising of August 1. A comparison of these events with the time, place, and sequence of events in “Autumn in Kuling” shows that the story is indisputably a fictional representation of current history, and that the literary technique, far from being purely realistic, is broadly allegorical.

“Autumn in Kuling” begins on July 23, 1927, when the retreat was already under way and the plan for the Nanch’ang Uprising had been made final. It ends in Kuling around August 8,²⁰ when the uprising had been defeated and the remnants of the Red Army had reached Fuchow, its final stop on its retreat, the Southern March to Kuangtung.

Hankow, Kiukiang, and Kuling are the settings of the fictional events in the order they occur. Nanch’ang and Shanghai are mentioned as the two separate destinations of the retreating personnel from Wuhan after they gathered in Kiukiang. Mao Tun uses specific place names (Chengchou in section 2, Mahweiling in section 4, and Fuchow in section 5) to anchor the political perspective of the story. These place names identify important military events in the history of the Chinese Communist movement at that juncture. They are emblems of the historical events associated with them. Mahweiling, a strategic military area near Nanch’ang, signifies Chinese Communist troop movements during the Nanch’ang Uprising; it was controlled by Chinese Communist forces under command of Nieh Jung-chih.²¹ Fuchow, in the eastern part of Kiangsi Province, was the first stop of the surviving forces moving south around August 5;²² Chengchou evokes painful memories of T’ang Sheng-chih, the powerful Hunan military governor who from the CCP point of view betrayed the revolutionary cause on May 29, and the Chengchou Conference of June 10-12, when Feng Yü-hsiang, the “Christian General” who controlled the Northwest Army, met with the leaders of the Wuhan government to discuss their common interest against the CCP, a meeting which foreshadowed the expulsion of the CCP from the Wuhan government in July.²³

In “On Reading Ni Huan-chih,” Mao Tun complained that Yeh Shao-chün, the author of the novel, failed to make clear which political party the title character belonged to: “Ni Huan-chih at that time probably had already joined a certain political party. But from chapter 22 on, the activities of Ni Huan-chih do not clearly reflect his group background; as a result, they become the insignificant action of one individual. This greatly affects the basic orientation of the novel.”²⁴ “Autumn in Kuling” presents a concrete example of how Mao Tun suggested the group—or political party—background of his fictional characters by placing their activities in historical times and places and a well-defined political community.

In 1934, in an essay on the writing of fiction, “My Understanding [of Fiction Writing],” Mao Tun discussed the significance of character and human relationships in fiction:

“Autumn in Kuling” highlights both the characters and the relationships among them. As Mao Tun intended, the story’s theme emerges not so much in any one individual’s character and action as in relationships, and once these relationships are shown, the characters’ “group background” and the nature of their activities become clearer.

There are three main characters in “Autumn in Kuling”: Old Ming, Old Sung, and Master Cloud. One can infer from the Chinese custom of addressing someone as “Old” (“Lao”) to show respect that Ming and Sung are older than Master Cloud. They are probably in their late thirties or early forties, whereas “Master” Cloud would be in his early twenties.

Old Ming had worked in a newspaper office in Wuhan (like Mao Tun himself) before he left for Kiukiang. He is said to have inside knowledge of why everybody is going to Kiukiang.

Old Sung recently arrived in Wuhan from Shanghai. He is specifically introduced in the first section as an “exiled KMT member from Chekiang Province, and not an X-tang [CCP member].”²⁶ Old Sung “does not clearly understand” what he was sent to Kiukiang to do. But once there, he is the one most busily engaged in all sorts of ambiguous business. Toward the end of section 4, he is ordered to attend a “meeting” in Nanchang, and in the concluding section he is said to be in the “mountain area near Fuchow.”

Master Cloud is an even more elusive character.²⁷ The symbolism of the name Cloud more or less links the central action (the missing part) to some high revolutionary goal. But as we have him now, aside from his ringing laughter, his sportive air, and his persistent presence throughout the story, nothing very definite can be said about his business or his status. The only clue to what he represents in “Autumn in Kuling” is his preoccupation with Lushan—the meeting place of all kinds of political groups in the last days of July 1927.²⁸

Individually, none of these three characters seems particularly significant. But in examining their activities in the perspective of their “group background” and their relationships with other characters, a different picture emerges.

The reason for their departure from Wuhan is presented in the opening scene at the Hankow waterfront and later in a morose statement made by Old Sung. The juxtaposition of a Japanese gunboat in the river with the Hsiang-yang-wan at Pier Six speaks silently of the tense political situation in Wuhan during the last hours of the CCP presence there. The departing Hsiang-yang-wan signifies the retreat of the Communists, and the presence of the Japanese gunboats is meant to show that the KMT government at Wuhan has already compromised with foreign powers and abandoned the cause of the National Revolution. Sung’s sullen complaint that he should not have come all the way to Wuhan from Shanghai to face this “rotten mess of a situation” represents the prevalent feeling among CCP members and their fellow travelers at that point.

In section 2, there is a clear portrait of the political party to which the acquaintances of the Hsiang-yang-wan passengers belonged. Ostensibly it deals with a number of trifling incidents on the night of July 23 in the third-class cabin. The two casual encounters between Old Ming and his acquaintances and the incidental glimpses of other passengers are Mao Tun’s way of delineating their “group background.” In the first encounter between Old Ming and a leftist youth named Hsü, Hsü’s conversation reveals the most recent political development that led up the Wuhan retreat. His excited, disjointed conversation also reveals something about the business that awaits the Hsiang-yang-wan passengers in Kiukiang. “I sent you a telegram from Chengchou,” he tells Ming,

Hsü is not merely a sketch of an overenthusiastic leftist youth, undoubtedly a common type in the revolutionary ranks at that time. Nor was he created to enliven the realistic cabin scene on board the Hsiang-yang-wan, although he fulfills that function equally well. Over and above such realistic assignments, Hsü also presents the political past and future of the Hsiang-yang-wan voyage. His remarks about the unenlightened people in Honan, the resistance of the local secret societies to Communist propaganda against the landowners and local powers—the “bullies and evil gentry”—and the compromise his “Director Teng” is eventually compelled to make, succinctly summarize the political developments that caused the passengers to board the Hsiang-yang-wan for Kiukiang. Giving them hell in Kiukiang refers to the prospective Nanch’ang Uprising, and for Hsü to mention it off-handedly in public suggests that the other passengers not only know about the plan but are also participants. The offstage “Director Teng” is Teng Yen-ta, a real person who was head of the Political Department of the Fourth Army, which fought most valiantly in the Northern Expedition, and which was infiltrated by the CCP.³⁰

The encounter between Old Ming and his two women acquaintances serves a similar purpose of underlining their common political background. Miss Wang is someone Old Ming knew in his schooldays in Shanghai. Miss T’ao is a member of the Committee for the Women’s Movement in Hupeh. “School” and “Committee for the Women’s Movement” imply CCP organization and policies. Miss Wang and Miss T’ao are going to Kiukiang only to get a train for Nanch’ang: obviously they are intimately involved either in plans for the Nanch’ang Uprising or in plans for the secret retreat back to Shanghai.

Thus section 2 presents an overview of the people who constitute the political community. There were KMT leftists like Hsü and women CCP activists like Miss Wang and Miss T’ao. The other passengers include Old Li and his group, as well as a young man who speaks with a heavy Cantonese accent. The name Old Li strongly suggests Li Li-san, who first conceived the idea of the Nanch’ang Uprising and was on its Front Committee, and the young man with a Cantonese accent easily leads one to think of the Communist troops from the Fourth Army, the main force in the planned uprising gathering near Nanch’ang, which included many Cantonese. The ship’s passengers are bound together in a common destiny by their common past (Shanghai and Wuhan) and they are heading toward a common future (Kiukiang).

Sections 3 and 4 deal primarily with the situation at Kiukiang. Section 3 is set in the early morning of July 24, just after the ship arrives, and section 4 that evening. War clouds, which have long hovered on the horizon, are now descending over the city of Kiukiang. Soldiers are everywhere. They crowd the train station, pack the outgoing trains, march in the streets and shout slogans like “long live X X X [Wang Ching-wei],” “Down with X X X [Chiang Kai-shek].”³¹ These scenes reproduce most realistically the commotion in Kiukiang in the days immediately before the Nanchang Uprising.³² The Front Committee, with Chou En-lai as its chairman, which was to direct the field action of the uprising, had been formed. Its general headquarters was in Nanchang, and military operations had already begun. But the Party leadership in Wuhan had not yet decided whether the uprising was advisable. The Central Committee in Shanghai was also undecided. It was still meeting secretly with Soviet advisers and Comintern representatives, and as late as July 26 the committee sent an envoy (Chang Kuo-t’ao) to halt the military action. This lack of synchronization between political and military arms is portrayed in the confusion and frustration of Old Sung and his two women coworkers in Kiukiang.

In sections 3 and 4, all the important characters have congregated in a hotel in Kiukiang. By bringing them together in one hotel, Mao Tun seems to be modeling the Hua-yang Hotel in the story on the real Grand Kiangsi Hotel in Nanch’ang, which was the headquarters of the Front Committee, and thereby making it the center of the collective activities of his fictional characters.

In the concluding section, what must have been the climax of the story—the Nanchang Uprising—is over. Anything Mao Tun saw in Lushan or learned from his woman acquaintance at the Supervisory Department (in “Remarks on the Past”) has been deleted from the story. There was probably no conceivable way Mao Tun could have treated the uprising and the Southern March honestly and to the satisfaction of either the Party or the KMT. The other details used in the story were mostly forgotten by the time it was published, but even in 1933, the Party, still under Comintern control, could not conceivably have sanctioned an act of such magnitude as the Nanchang Uprising, which flew straight in the face of Comintern authority; and the KMT, whether in 1927 or 1933, was not likely to tolerate the publication of a story about so treasonable an act.

The plan of retreat can, however, be reconstructed from the itineraries of the three main characters in the published story. Old Sung’s itinerary from Shanghai to Wuhan to Kiukiang, Nanchang, and Fuchow traces the assemblage of forces for the Nanch’ang Uprising and the escape route of the Southern March. Old Ming’s and Master Cloud’s itinerary from Wuhan to Kiukiang and then Lushan-Kuling to Shanghai follows the retreat route of the Wuhan Office of the CCP Central Committee from Wuhan to Shanghai.

As a work of literature, “Autumn in Kuling” satisfies in many ways Mao Tun’s own prescription for modern Chinese fiction. Its subject matter is thoughtfully chosen: for a CCP member of the 1930s, what could be more important than the CCP’s unprecedented attempt to break free of Comintern interference, abandon the “suicidal” policy of collaboration with the KMT, and establish its own Red Army? Its theme reflects Mao Tun’s conception of the spirit of a revolutionary epoch and is concerned with the life and destiny of far more than the few individuals portrayed. “Autumn in Kuling,” mutilated though it is, gives convincing early evidence of Mao Tun’s sensitive experimentation with political allegory couched in realistic terms.