As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known cartoonist.
Feng obviously did not think much of education in general
Education is the process of changing raw materials into something else
I’ve been reading Cao Naiqian’s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night.
It’s an odd sort of book, and you can see why an academic press published it rather than commercial press. The stories are quite short, usually only a few pages, and the author is someone who does not really fit the model of the modern western writer, since he still works as a cop in the city of Datong, rather than chucking his job and writing full-time. He also does not write about being a policeman, but rather about life in the Wen Clan Caves. Although it is possible to criticize Mao’s Cultural Revolution for lots of things, sending city youth down to the countryside does seem to have an effect on Cao, giving him a window into how the other 90% lives that he is still looking through all these years later.1 The Wen Family Caves is a fictionalized version of the area he was sent down to, (a Chinese Yoknapatawpha County) and describing the lives of its inhabitants is his main purpose. The Chinese version is apparently written in a heavy Shanxi dialect, but pretty much all that comes through in the English translation is frequent use of the word fuck. This is rather appropriate, since food, work and sex seem to be about all the people in these stories are interested in. Building the revolution, getting ahead in society or even moving to the big city are goals that are so remote as to be non-existent.
I find the stuff about work interesting, just cause I always do, and because one of the things that makes peasants peasants is that their lives revolve around physical labor the way mine doesn’t. The food is mostly pretty gross, a bowl of oatmeal with wild garlic is about a fancy as these representatives of the world’s greatest cuisine get. There is an awful lot of sex, however. In fact, just as people in the book don’t have dreams of attending Beida, or meals consisting of 6 dishes for five people they also don’t have much for “regular” human relationships. Mostly people are struggling to survive (they live in holes in the ground) and only the most stripped down forms of courtship or family formation are going on, (marriage costs money) and lots of violations of propriety. One of the longer stories is Heinu and her Andi. Heinu was an old woman who had been something of the town prostitute (although it’s not clear if she was ever paid).
Poverty was one thing that had been handed down over generations in the village. Some men were so poor they could never take a wife. Heinu thought that chickens and dogs all mated. As a woman she couldn’t bear to see the men as less then chickens and dogs.
This led her to let Zhaozhao have sex with her after seeing him try to mount a ewe, and later having sex with most of the unmarried men. The men take care of her, and she burns spirit money to them after they are dead, since they have no family. When the story opens Heinu is rather old, and she has been given a chick by a traveling salesman who has been unable to sell his “Australian” (a word that means nothing to the villagers) chicks. She raises it (She never had any children) and it grows into an enormous black bird that is the envy of the village. At first it lays eggs and makes her “rich” but after an illness it stops laying eggs and starts mounting all the local hens (hence the name Andi). The roosters are not happy about this and gang up on Andi, but are defeated, leaving Andi with all the females (just as Heinu had been left with all the males years before.) Eventually Andi’s rebellion becomes too much for the villagers (Andi leads all the roosters and all the hens to crow not only at dawn but all day and night) and it ends badly.2 Like most of the stories this one is very sparse in its narration, and presents a human relationship stripped down to its absolute minimum.
Of course another thing that makes the book great is that they sent it to me just because of this blog. Normally all I get is American History textbooks. Other publishers looking to have their books introduced to our tens of readers should take note.
Parade Magazine (September 14, 2008) asked Laura Bush what she’s been reading: “The Imperial Woman, by Pearl S. Buck. I picked up this book after returning from the Olympics in Beijing. The story of the last empress of Manchu China is fascinating; I can hardly put it down.”
Now from my point of view, the novel’s interest is for the history of American ideas about China, but Buck’s take on “Old Buddha” is not to be taken lightly and her appeal to the public should be respected as a “teachable moment,” not merely scoffed at.
Over the years, Buck’s staying power has intrigued me. Since I have a contrarian streak, I’ve challenged myself to respect her accomplishments (considerable) while keeping in sight her shortcomings (ditto) and to distinguish the two. 1
Moyer Bell Publishers has a number of her books in print, including Imperial Woman. They are nicely printed and reasonably priced, including Buck’s translation of Shuihuzhuan (titled All Men Are Brothers), which is listed at $16.95. The translation is heavy going at first, as you have to get used to the labored diction she developed to reflect Chinese style, but hey, the price is right.
They offer other of her novels which are of topical interest: Dragon Seed (1939), for instance, describes the opening of the Second Sino-Japanese War with gruesome details of the 1937 invasion and occupation of the Yangzi valley. It’s not the first thing to read on the subject, but holds its own as an historical novel. Peony (1948) is set in 19th century Kaifeng and interweaves a reasonably accurate history of the Jewish community there.2
One of my neighbors was doing some spring cleaning and brought me this.
Lin was a notable if somewhat minor intellectual figure in China but his real fame came as an interpreter of China to the outside world. In China he was known as a humorous critic of the warlord governments which got him in trouble with both Left and Right, since they felt warlordism was no joke and his emphasis on the continued value of Eastern Wisdom made him sound more like Tagore than anyone Chinese intelectuals of the period were likely to respect. He became an important figure in the West after Pearl Buck convinced him to write My Country, My People (1935) which launched his career as and interpreter of the West.
He is somewhat unique in that his reputation has vanished almost entirely. His books are still in print, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a bookstore (Although I tend not to haunt the ‘don’t worry be happy section’) and he is never assigned in courses. Even during his life he was dismissed as being someone who wrote English very well. (He was a third-generation Fujian Christian) but was not all that knowledgeable about China. You can see how he worked with these two excerpts from the story Curly-Beard
I’ve been reading Wolf Totem and having a lot of fun doing so. The book, based on Jiang Rong’s time as a sent-down youth in Inner Mongolia. was a huge best-seller in China. Why is this book a Thing Chinese People Like? Nicole Barnes says that the book is nostalgic drivel aimed at Chinese who long for a world with fewer skyscrapers and more manliness and seek it in Mongolia. A lot of the novel is also nostalgia for the past. If you want to recapture the ancient knowledge of the East, Mongolia is apparently the place to do it. Our Chinese heroes spend a lot of time trying to keep wolves from eating the sheep, and learning about the symbiotic relationship between the Mongols, the steppe, and the wolves, and thus the foundations of Asian society.
Chen felt himself to be standing at the mouth of a tunnel to five thousand years of Chinese history. Every day and every night, he thought, men have fought wolves on the Mongolian plateau, a minor skirmish here, a pitched battle there. The frequency of these clashes has even surpassed the frequency of battles among all the nomadic peoples of the West outside of wolf and man, plus the cruel, protracted wars between nomadic tribes, conflicts between nationalities, and wars of aggression; it is that frequency that has strengthened and advanced the mastery of the combatants in these battles. The grassland people are better and more knowledgeable fighters than any farming race of people or nomadic tribe in the world. In the history of China—from the Zhou dynasty, through the Warring States, and on to the Qin, Han, Tang, and Song dynasties—all those great agrarian societies, with their large populations and superior strength, were often crushed in combat with minor nomadic tribes, suffering catastrophic and humiliating defeat. At the end of the Song dynasty, the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan invaded the Central Plains and remained in power for nearly a century. China’s last feudal dynasty, the Qing, was itself founded by nomads. The Han race, with its ties to the land, has gone without the superior military teachings of a wolf drillmaster and has been deprived of constant rigorous training exercises. The ancient Chinese had their Sun-tzu and his military treatise, but that was on paper. Besides, even they were based in part on the lupine arts of war.
Millions of Chinese died at the hands of invasions by peoples of the North over thousands of years, and Chen felt as if he’d found the source of that sad history. Relationships among the creatures on earth have dictated the course of history and of fate, he thought. The military talents of a people in protecting their homes and their nation are essential to their founding and their survival. If there had been no wolves on the Mongolian grassland, would China and the world be different than they are today?
Jiang Rong p.99
Wolf Totem actually fits pretty well with the other book I am reading for fun at the moment, Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Rose’s book was very well-received,which is not surprising as it is a very good look as what ordinary British folk read and what they got out of it in the couple of centuries before 1945. One book that was quite popular for a very long time was Robinson Crusoe. Like Wolf Totem it is a ripping yarn with extended didactic passages. Like Wolf Totem it is a story of civilized men outside the city. Rose suggests that Crusoe was popular in part because appealed to both members of the new middle class who were no longer able to provide what they needed with their own hands and to those who were still working with their hands and liked reading a book that represented what they did as important.
Wolf Totem has a lot of that as well. As a keyboard jockey I like books about places where everyone is doing something and it is clear exactly what benefit each thing provides. The is particularly clear in Wolf Totem, since Jiang goes through the workpoint value of each job a person can do and shows how each is perfectly calibrated to the exertion the work requires and its value to the group.1 Would you be willing to go without electricity to live in a world where every day you did things of real value and this was accepted by everyone around you, and sucking up and bullshit were totally impossible? Apparently some people in China would too.
More later (mabye) on ethnic politics in the book.
The New York Times has published three reviews of new Chinese works in translation: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (pen name for Lu Jiamin) and Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. What binds these works together, in particular, is that all three are — at least in part — about the experience of the Cultural Revolution.
Ang Lee’s (李安) new movie Lust, Caution (色，戒) is apparently being released later this week in the United States. The movie won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (where it was labeled as coming from “USA/China/Taiwan, China“), received a full mix of reviews (1,2,3,4,RT), and may ultimately get an unusually limited showing due to its NC-17 rating. The version which eventually cleared censors in China supposedly had to cut some thirty minutes.
The movie is based on a novella by Eileen Chang (張愛玲）which in turn is inspired by an historical event: the attempted assassination of Ding Mocun (丁默邨 1903-1947) on December 21st, 1939 by the 22 year old half-Japanese spy Zheng Pingru (鄭苹如 1918-1940).
Ding Mocun was a leading figure in Chinese intelligence in the 1930s until his execution in 1947. He was a former Communist Party member who recanted and rose quickly to power in the Nationalist party with the support of the CC Clique and especially Chen Lifu (陳立夫). When he was squeezed out of power in a 1938 reorganization of the Nationalist intelligence services into the Zhongtong1 and Juntong2 and accused of corruption, he left unoccupied China and together with Li Shiqun (李士群 1905-1943) worked for the creation of a spy agency supporting Wang Jingwei’s (汪精衛/汪兆銘 1883-1944) peace movement in Japanese occupied areas.3 The headquarters of the resulting organization, founded in April, 1939, was located on 76 Jessfield Road, Shanghai, and became a site of infamous torture and death often simply referred to in Chinese accounts as “#76″ (七十六號). In its twenty or so holding cells Ding and Li’s operatives, along with Japanese officers, extracted what information they could from suspected Communists and supporters of the Nationalist government in Chongqing before dispatching them.
Ding is now usually listed among the dozen or so most famous Chinese traitors (hanjian 漢奸) for his collaboration with Wang’s government and the Japanese. He was arrested in September, 1945, convicted of treason in February 1947, and executed on July 5th.4 Like many of the leading collaborators put on trial after the war, however, Ding pleaded that he secretly cooperated with the Nationalist spymaster
Roland Soong, who runs the world’s best weblog covering the Chinese media, ESWN, recently posted a translation of an article by the famous writer and critic Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) discussing the new movie and the historical figure Ding Mocun: Lung Ying-tai on Lust, Caution
You can find the original Chinese version of her article here: 贪看湖上清风──侧写《色，戒》
In her essay Lung responds to criticism that Eileen Chang did not portray the character of Mr. Yi (who is inspired by Ding Mocun) as a sufficiently evil person. I certainly commend her for this, as I really don’t think Chang’s fictional character Yi needs to be everything that Ding Mocun was. However, many writers who try to counter efforts to portray the wartime collaborators as one-dimensional evil-dooers and malicious traitors, in my view, take the completely wrong approach: the reversal. Instead of restoring nuance, or at least moving beyond simple nationalist critiques to evaluate the legacy of these figures in terms of their acts while in positions of power (under whatever regime), Lung embraces a strategy I find frustrating, to say the least: the evil-dooer wasn’t evil at all, he was, in fact, a patriot.
小说和电影之外，民国史里头的“易先生”，其实也不见得是个多“坏”的“坏人”“the novella and the film aside, the Mr. Yi in the history of the Republic of China was really not a very “bad” person.”5
Lung writes that she read through the archival materials related to Ding’s various positions in the regimes of occupied China and his trial records along with the memoirs of Chen Lifu.6 Lung argues that we should reevaluate the historical figure Ding because beginning in 1941 he 1) began to secretly work with Chiang Kai-shek’s government, 2) helped rescue some secret agents, 3) continued to serve the Nationalist government to repress bandits (read Communists) in the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the war and his work was highly valued both by Dai Li and Chen Lifu.
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