(1947)
QIAN ZHONGSHU (1910–1998)
Qian Zhongshu was one of the foremost literary scholars of the twentieth century. Not only did he produce magisterial texts on traditional Chinese literature but his D.Litt. thesis from the University of Oxford, examining references to China in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is an immensely scholarly survey.*
Born into a scholarly family in Wuxi (in Jiangsu province), Qian Zhongshu’s father, a professor and Confucian scholar, changed one of the boy’s given names to Mocun (“Silence”) because he talked so much. He was educated at missionary schools in Wuxi and Suzhou before entering the prestigious Qinghua University in Beijing (another missionary foundation). It is said that his math skills were deplorable but his knowledge of English and classical Chinese was such that he was accepted. At Qinghua he met his wife, Yang Jiang (1911–2016), who translated the novels Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Blas, and, most notably, Don Quixote into Chinese; she later also wrote several autobiographical pieces including Six Chapters from a Cadre School Life (Ganxiao liu ji). When Qian Zhongshu won a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship in 1935 (funded by the reparation paid by the Chinese government after the destruction of Western life and property during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900), they both traveled to the University of Oxford, where Qian Zhongshu prepared his D.Litt. thesis and Yang Jiang gave birth to their only child, a daughter. He claimed to spend much time reading detective stories and Proust but finished his thesis in 1937, and then moved to the University of Paris with his wife and daughter. Returning to China in 1938, after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Qian Zhongshu taught in a series of universities (in Kunming, Hunan, and Shanghai), reflecting the unsettled nature of life at the time. In 1949, the year of the Communist victory, the family moved to Beijing and he became a professor at Qinghua University, though he subsequently transferred to the Chinese Literature Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and later to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Before 1949, Qian Zhongshu published some short stories and essays, but Fortress Besieged (Wei cheng), published in 1947, is his only surviving novel. After 1949 he restricted himself to literary scholarship, working on Tang poetry and, most notably, Song poetry. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), his son-in-law committed suicide, and he and Yang Jiang did menial work in so-called cadre schools (set up for the political “reeducation” of officials and intellectuals).
Fortress Besieged is set in China during the late 1930s and early 1940s, during the time of the full-scale Japanese invasion of China (which began in 1937). The title of the novel is taken from a French proverb, “Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiegée, tous ceux qui se trouvent dehors veulent y entrer, tandis que ceux qui sont à l’intérieur veulent en sortir.” (“Marriage is like a besieged fortress: those who are outside want to get inside, while those who are inside want to get out.”) Marriage is, indeed, a major theme of the novel as we follow the somewhat passive main character, Fang Hongjian,† on his picaresque trip from Europe to Shanghai and then to a dubious appointment at a newly established (or half-established) university in the interior of China, located as far away from the Japanese armies as possible.
The problem of marriage is confused by the question of education, another of the major themes in the book. While still at school in China, Fang Hongjian had been engaged to the daughter of a rich man (originally from Fang’s hometown of Wuxi), but she had died before he even met her. Her parents gave Fang the money set aside for a lavish wedding to enable him to study abroad. The novel begins in 1937, on the French ship Vicomte de Bragelonne, bringing Fang and many other Chinese students back from their studies overseas. This linking of traditional practice (an arranged marriage and continuing family ties even after death) and contemporary innovation (from the end of the nineteenth century, many young Chinese went abroad to study “modern” subjects) is very characteristic of the novel and its setting in time. It is also, perhaps, important to note that Qian Zhongshu’s broad erudition appears throughout the novel, extending even to the name of the ship: The Vicomte de Bragelonne is the title of a novel by Alexandre Dumas, in which the vicomte falls hopelessly in love with Louise de la Vallière.
For Fang Hongjian the series of women, or marriage prospects, begins with his dead fiancée and continues with a couple of women on the ship: the straightforwardly seductive Miss Pao, who appears in shorts and whose display of naked flesh is compared by her fellow travelers to a French charcuterie, and the coquettish Miss Su, who has a real French Ph.D. degree—unlike Fang, who purchased a fake diploma from one Patrick Mahoney and had himself photographed in the robes of a Ph.D. holder from the University of Hamburg. Miss Su pursues Fang, sewing his buttons and washing his handkerchiefs, and later (in Shanghai) introduces him to her friend Miss Tang, with whom he fancies he is in love. After a series of misunderstandings, some due to Zhao Xinmei (who is a newspaper editor), and Japanese bombings of Shanghai and Wuxi, Fang and Zhao escape Shanghai, having been invited to join the staff of a new university, San Lu, in the interior. Among their traveling companions is Miss Sun, a shy recent graduate on her way to her first post, in the Foreign Languages Department of San Lu University.
The long trip to San Lu involves bug-ridden hotels, a severe shortage of money, and a series of buses, one of which shudders and shakes as though suffering from malaria and another which stops dead, prompting the driver to kick it and, in a common Chinese curse, declare himself intent on sexual intercourse with the bus and its mother.
San Lu University itself is little better. The ill-assorted staff fight among themselves, and Director Gao offers little leadership but has plenty of ideas. He tries to introduce a tutorial system based on that of Oxford and Cambridge but with contemporary Chinese aspects. In accord with Chiang Kai-shek’s puritanical “New Life Movement” (a moral code of life proposed in 1934 stressing healthy pursuits, cold water bathing, and saluting the flag), tutors are forbidden from smoking in front of their students (as Oxbridge dons did habitually), and—in defiance of the numbers of students, tables, and chairs—they are ordered to eat with their students. “Why not just share beds with the students?” asks Fang. Also at San Lu, a Mrs. Wang attempts to provide Zhao and Fang with wives, one being the bespectacled Miss Fan, who has personally inscribed her collection of plays with fake “dedications” from their authors, and the other the plump and silent Miss Liu. In the end, with no offer of a contract from Director Gao, Fang leaves for Hong Kong with Miss Sun and finds himself unhappily married to her.
While Fang Hongjian’s entanglements with women and his eventual marriage recall the sense of helplessness of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), Qian Zhongshu’s satire extends beyond the problem of marriage. The educational system, the attempt to preserve a semblance of authority in the turmoil of a country being invaded and bombarded, and the growing contradictions between traditional ideology and modern (Western) ideas are all major subjects in his novel, which accurately depicts a country in chaos. It is told with considerable wit, satirizing the “new poetry” (with titles like “Adulterous Smorgasbord”) and the passion for foreign ideas while also including a rich variety of reference to traditional Chinese beliefs and stories.