This book is a search for the soul of modern China.
As such, it is less an anthology, or à la carte sampling, than a story that, carrying the historical weight of a nation in its most tumultuous century, seeks a coherence lying on the page and beyond.
Twentieth century China saw two apocalyptic events that defined its character and destiny. In 1912, the overthrow of Qing Dynasty shattered the shackles of two thousand years of monarchical rule and ushered in a modern nation. In 1949, the founding of the People’s Republic took the country on a long march toward a utopian, Communist future that never materialized, a perilous path some may say it is still treading on today, at least in name if not in reality. Around these two watershed events were other, often bloody, episodes: the Boxer Rebellion, the Republican era’s reign of terror, the Japanese invasion, a civil war, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre. Any soul that has plumbed the depths of these horrors must be at pains to find a voice to speak the unspeakable.
Beginning with Lu Xun’s Call to Arms, Chinese writers have tried, often at the cost of their lives, to come to terms with a world gone awry, a culture in crisis, and a nation on the brink of annihilation. The Opium Wars and clash with Western imperial powers and repeated defeats and internal rebellions since the nineteenth century plunged many Chinese into doubt about the viability of their once-proud civilization. Lu Xun likened the Middle Kingdom to a sepulchral “iron house” in which sound sleepers will never wake up. Wen Yiduo, gunned down by secret agents of the Kuomintang in 1946, compared China to “a ditch of hopelessly dead water,” where “no clear breeze can raise half a ripple” on its sordid surface.
Yet, the Republican era (1911–49) was also a time of radical transformations in literature. The end of monarchy gave the Chinese literati an opportunity to absorb influences from the West and imagine a brave new world. The May Fourth Movement, a student-led protest that began in Peking in May 1919, calling for democracy and science, had a lasting impact on the Chinese mind. Transitioning from wenyan (the archaic, classical form of Chinese) to baihua (the vernacular of common speech), Chinese literature was reborn. Novels by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Ding Ling, and Shen Congwen, poetry by Dai Wangshu, Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, and Li Jinfa, and essays by Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, and Zhu Ziqing, all combined to create a kaleidoscopic vista of the Chinese literary imagination. The sense of newness ran so deep, and occasionally wild, that some even proposed a face-lift for the ideographic ancient language, replacing it with an alphabetic system as the medium for writing.
This golden age of modern Chinese literature came to an abrupt end when communism took over the country in 1949. Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman and a poet, exerted an ironclad control over literary expression, dictating that literature serve politics. Works produced in this period of totalitarian rule, up to Mao’s death in 1976, may rightly be regarded as propaganda, or at best formulaic potboilers that rarely deviate from party lines. Read through the prisms of the West, which regards individual free expression as the golden rule for artistic production, revolutionary literature may indeed lack aesthetic value. While this is hardly the place to dispute the validity of aesthetic principles, it is worth noting, however, that the belief in literature as an expression of a free individual is as ideologically suspect as the revolutionary mot justes in Mao’s Little Red Book. Communism may have done much damage to literature, but at least it takes art seriously, so seriously that it wants to control all forms of artistic expression, weeding out the “one hundred flowers” that dare to blossom.
Selections from the so-called revolutionary literature in this book, therefore, must be read with an open mind. The works by Ai Qing, Zhao Shuli, Wang Meng, and others, are not relics from a bygone period, but a record of creative souls struggling, negotiating, and coping with a national dream gone bad. They remind me of my father’s red notebook. When I was growing up in the waning days of Mao’s China, my father once showed me a notebook he had kept since he was young. It had a red plastic cover, making it look like Mao’s Little Red Book. Inside he had pasted many clippings, all poems and essays he had published under various pseudonyms in newspapers and magazines. His grandfather (my great-grandfather) was a landlord, from an “exploitive and parasitic class,” a factor which doomed my father’s future. Going to college, a privilege reserved only for working-class children, was a dream beyond his reach, and he became instead a “barefoot doctor,” carrying a medicine kit, roaming the countryside to cure sick peasants. A literary aficionado, he did not stop writing, a secret he had long kept from everyone, including his family. I found the notebook by accident one day when I, a curious kid, was rummaging through his things. Shocked a little, he got me to promise never to tell anyone, and then he let me read a few short poems. From what I can remember, those tofu-sized poems were mostly about the virtues of the proletarian revolution, joys of agricultural harvesting, and other topics common to Communist literature. Despite the formulaic quality of the writing, even my prepubescent eye could see that my father’s love for literature and desire for creativity were as real as the heartbeats pulsing under his bare skin.
The end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the ensuing economic reform led to an era of unprecedented openness. After decades of writing under the threat of the Communist Sword of Damocles, Chinese writers finally enjoyed some freedom of expression. Censorship persisted, but it was no match for the sudden burst of creativity, as if a dam had cracked open. The generation born under the red flag and coming of age during the Cultural Revolution led the way. From Bei Dao’s bold proclamation, “I do not believe,” to Gu Cheng’s ironic lines, “the black night gave me black eyes / still I use them to seek the light,” the Misty School of poetry broke the ice that had long frozen literary imagination. Novels by Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Can Xue, and others explored topics such as sex, love, and bestiality, which had long been taboos. Literature no longer had to function only in the service of politics. The Chinese soul, long tortured and deeply scarred, finally seemed to be able to roam freely. As the peripatetic narrator in Gao Xingjian’s Nobel-Prize-winning novel Soul Mountain puts it, “I would rather drift here and there without leaving traces.”
Freedom, however, was short-lived. The rumbling tanks and roaring gunfire at Tiananmen Square in the wee hours of June 4, 1989, pulled the curtain on a decade of cultural fever and spiritual euphoria. In those dark days after the massacre, Beijing broiled in the stifling heat of a deadly summer. The ancient capital city appeared to be plagued by something unknown, as if a mysterious disease, lying dormant for thousands of years, suddenly came alive and turned viral, attacking the city mercilessly. Spilled innocent blood might have been washed off the streets, but the stink of death lingered on in the air.
I was still a college sophomore. Hai Zi, a young poet and fellow student at Peking University, had just committed suicide earlier that year. He had done so by lying on the railroad tracks near the crown jewel of our national pride, the Great Wall, as if naked flesh could stop the train of what Lu Xun’s madman once called “four thousand years of cannibalistic history.” We held a candlelight vigil for Hai Zi one night, accompanied by poetry readings and watched by an unknown number of undercover cops. After the event, I took a walk by the campus lake. A pale moon hung in the night sky. Reflected in the inky water, the moon looked like a period artificially placed there, failing to anchor a sentence that had no meaning. Someone was singing and playing guitar on the other side of the lake. The words of the popular song “The Orphan of Asia” by Luo Dayou drifted waywardly, like broken radio signals, in the muggy night air: “The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind / Red mud on his yellow face . . .” At that moment, only a few months before the event of Tiananmen Square, I already felt all hope had indeed been lost, the soul of China sinking like the paper-thin moon to the muddy bottom of the lake.
And yet, two decades later, China rises again, as a world superpower flexing its economic, military, and political prowess everywhere. In his monumental search for the zeitgeist of modern China, Jonathan Spence writes, “The swings of its political life, the switches in its cultural moods, the lurches in its economy . . . all combine to keep us in a state of bewilderment as to China’s real nature.” Looking back at the undulations of the Chinese experience in the twentieth century, remembering the red plastic cover of my father’s secret notebook, and thinking about that ominous pale moon I once saw in one dark night in Chinese history, I often wonder: How did the Chinese soul endure these tortures and horrors? How did China rise from that lifeless mirage flickering at the bottom of dead water?
That is the story this book tells.