(1933)
MAO DUN (1896–1981)
Mao Dun was the pen name of Shen Dehong, one of the major novelists of modern China; later he also served as the first minister of culture of the People’s Republic, from 1949 to 1965. Disgraced, like so many of his generation, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), he was subsequently rehabilitated. The pen name he chose for himself was originally composed of the characters for “spear” and “shield,” used together to mean “contradiction,” an expression of the turbulent decades in which he grew up. It is said that the novelist Ye Shengtao (1894–1988), a close colleague in the 1930s, worried that “contradiction” was too political and possibly dangerous; so he changed the first character by adding the radical for “grass,” so that it came to mean “straw” or “thatch”—a “straw shield” being a very different image.
Born into a well-educated family in northern Zhejiang province, the young Mao Dun studied classical works such as the sixth-century CE Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan; included in it are the Nineteen Old Poems [Gu shi shijiu shou]); but in 1913 he went to Peking University where he studied Chinese and foreign literature. Due to family poverty (his father had died in 1906) he was unable to finish his studies and moved to Shanghai, where he found a job as editor and translator in the English section of the Commercial Press, a major publishing company. He worked on the magazine Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), creating translations of works by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Shaw, Byron, and Keats.
Inspired by the radicalism of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Mao Dun joined the Communist Party. In Shanghai he continued to write and edit journals with friends (one of whom was Ye Shengtao), and he published a series of novels, including Midnight (Ziye). He also became a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers.
A long and complex novel, Midnight is set mainly in Shanghai and is considered by many to represent the best picture of the city during the 1920s and 1930s. It has been compared to Zola’s Germinal, although Mao Dun himself said he was influenced by Tolstoy’s depictions of individual characters caught up in historical periods of turmoil. In a lecture in Xinjiang in 1939, Mao Dun described Midnight as being set at a time when Shanghai was beginning to feel the repercussions of world economic depression. He described three groups, or influences—Chinese industrialists, “feudal forces,” and “comprador-capitalists”—in the novel: Chinese industrialists, “groaning under foreign economic repression,” were hindered by “feudal forces” (meaning traditionalists) and threatened by the control of the money market by “compradorcapitalists” (glossed as “foreign imperialists”; “comprador” was originally the name given to Chinese agents employed by foreign companies doing business in China). The Chinese industrialists’ response was to increase brutality and intensify “their exploitation of the working class.” The response of the working class to increased brutality and deteriorating working conditions was to “put up a fierce resistance,” an aspect of the story that Mao Dun said he could not explore and expose to his satisfaction because of contemporary censorship by the Guomindang. “Comprador-capitalists” represented a threat to the survival of Chinese industrialists (meaning the “national capitalists”) in their manipulation of loans and capital and the stock markets.
A historic example is the silk industry in Shanghai in the 1930s, which was certainly under various types of pressure as the traditional methods of production were threatened by the Japanese, who set up superefficient modern filatures (silk-reeling facilities) in China, and world prices for silk dropped. Conditions in such filatures were horrific. Writing in 1939, Christopher Isherwood described “. . . silk-winding mills so full of steam that the fingers of the mill girls are white with fungus growths. If the children slacken in their work, the overseers often plunge their elbows into the boiling water as punishment . . .”*
A further hazard to workers’ lives and the development of industry was the increasing unrest around Shanghai as the Japanese, having seized Manchuria in 1931, intensified attacks in China proper—which was already harrowed by combative warlords controlling different parts of the country, a Communist Soviet established in Jiangxi, and the failure of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and forces to take overall control.
Midnight begins with the arrival of old Mr. Wu in Shanghai, brought by his son, Wu Sunfu, a wealthy industrialist who owns several factories and a big mansion. Mr. Wu is moved from the ancestral family home in the unstable countryside (which is “stirred up by Reds”) to the comparative safety of the city. A true representative of traditional China, Mr. Wu comes to Shanghai accompanied by a fleet of slick black Citroëns while clutching the Book of Rewards and Punishments (Ganying pian), a popular traditional Daoist text that emphasizes filial piety. Old Mr. Wu’s faith in filial piety is shattered by the sight of his elder daughter, “half naked with bare legs and arms,” and in a room “filled with countless swelling bosoms and bloodred mouths” he collapses and dies.
Mourners gather in Wu Sunfu’s mansion. As they wait for the coffin, the funeral refreshments of lemonade, ice cream, and cream layer cakes arrive; a girl dances on the billiard table with all the men looking up her skirt as she twirls; and Colonel Lei, a staff officer in the Guomindang army, remarks that the fall in government bonds is “even more alarming than the news from the front.” There is a nice little twist to Colonel Lei’s presence. Wu Sunfu’s wife has been dreaming of a student rebel who flashed through her life like a comet but suddenly disappeared, leaving her heartbroken. Colonel Lei presents her with a copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, with a rose squashed between the pages—it was him! They kiss. “My dear!” squawks the parrot in the room.
Wu Sunfu needs money to pay the workers in his filature but his first priority is to pay for materials. He is sufficiently desperate to consider destroying his daughter’s reputation. The women workers are “conspiring” and he needs to “squeeze” the factories to compensate for losses on the stock exchange. When his women workers strike, he appeals to them. “It’s a hard life being a factory owner”—but they are soon joined by the workers of his match factory, and Wu complains that the Swedish Match Trust takes advantage of light import duties and bribes. He determines to “get to work on the factories tomorrow. If we get rid of three hundred to five hundred workers from five factories, abandon overtime on Sundays, extend the working day by an hour . . . and cut wages by nine percent . . . And if the workers riot? We’ll close the factories for a fortnight and then see!”
Throughout the novel the complexities of stock-market dealing and the uncertainty of money supply beset Wu Sunfu and his major competitor, Zhao Boli, who plays the stock market and represents the “comprador-capitalist” class. But all suffer: “It was midnight. Most of Shanghai’s workers and financiers were groaning with terrifying nightmares of cut-throat competition, though the nightclubs still echoed with the sounds of knives and forks and popping corks . . .”
A major aspect of the book is its portrait of Shanghai, parts of which are still familiar, beginning with the opening passages: “The sun had just sunk below the horizon. A slight breeze blew gently on people’s faces. The muddy water of Suzhou Creek was transformed to a golden green as it flowed quietly west. The evening tide of the Huangpu had risen imperceptibly and the assorted boats that lined the banks of the Suzhou Creek floated high on the water, decks half a foot above the level of the landing stage. The wind carried the sound of music from the park on the Bund with the popcorn-like patter of drums.
“The towering steel frame of Garden Bridge was covered by evening mist. As trams passed over the bridge, the overhead cable shot out bright green sparks. Looking east from the bridge, you could see the foreign warehouses on Pudong, crouched like monsters with lights twinkling like hundreds and thousands of tiny eyes. Looking west, suspended high on the roof of a foreign-style building was a huge neon sign flashing flaming-red and phosphorescent-green: LIGHT HEAT POWER!”