From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan

Completed on July 7, 1944, and first published in 1945 in Jiazhutao (Oleander), Beijing: Ma Dezeng. This translation incorporates corrections made by hand by the author on his copy of the first edition, and selectively includes other revisions shown in Complete Works II (reprinted in New Complete Works 3:315–371).

When the season of lilac blossom arrived it was the habit of Mrs. Shao—the wife of the sub-landlord—to bring out her fish basin and all kinds of flowerpots from the corners of her bedroom, even from under the bed, and set them out in the courtyard. She brushed away the cobwebs and thick, thick layers of dust covering them, mounted the fish basin on a high pile of bricks, and then surrounded it with the various potted flowers: pomegranate, oleander, dwarf lilyturf, hydrangea, crab apple, jasmine, Indian azalea, and so on. It was a pity that she only rarely kept goldfish in her fish basin, which was usually stocked with a glossy green profusion of sweet flag instead. Although the mood sometimes took her to buy one or two goldfish from a passing peddler, generally before the day was out, or within only four or five days at most, her daughter or some other naughty child in the compound would have scooped them out. By the time she discovered them, the poor creatures would either be caught in the flag fronds, high above the water, or else they’d be lying on the ground by the basin where they had been flung, their lovely golden bellies bathing in the sun.

“Impossible children!” she’d say, as she looked pityingly at the desiccated fish.

Summer had arrived. People were removing their lined gowns and changing into unlined cotton ones. The foliage in Mrs. Shao’s pots was already abundantly green, and the oleanders were beginning to put out their pretty little red or white flowers.

This was also the time when the sub-landlord, Shao Chengquan, would get the canopy company to erect a simple canopy in the rear courtyard as shelter from the burning sun.

However, there was another regrettable thing, namely, Mrs. Shao’s one and only Peking pomegranate, which looked half-dead with its sparse leaves of what could only be called gray-green and its two or three small flowers. Seemingly finding it unpresentable, Mrs. Shao shoved it in a corner, while her pots of luxuriant oleander replaced it in the position of honor. So there was nothing for it but to revise the three great ideals of the Peking courtyard to “Canopy, sweet flag, oleander.” Luckily, as far as the reality was concerned, there was no great conflict here. Firstly: as long as there was a fish basin, there was no real need to be overly persnickety as to what was kept in it, goldfish or sweet flag. Secondly: oleander was not necessarily any less beautiful than pomegranate. Moreover, the Pekingese are a smooth, slick race of people, vastly experienced and resourceful—they would never allow pedantry to get in the way of the true meaning of things. Although there were certain other matters, such as the fact that the new phrase didn’t trip off the tongue with as much resonance as the old, nobody bothered about them all that much.

It is human nature to assume that any place where flowers are in bloom must also possess the brightness of spring, healthy lives, human dignity, and human warmth. But goodness knows what this compound possessed! It was overflowing with all the evil and misery of human society that can be expressed in the vocabulary of ugliness and sorrow.

The first thing that must be mentioned is that, as with other Peking courtyard dwellings, very few people knew—or, more precisely, very few people could be sure—how many rooms there really were in this compound. According to the local way of counting, anything that had a covering—these coverings were many and varied: tiles, plaster, mud, reeds, sheet iron, even a sack of straw or a rush mat, and one could extend the list; anything that had something to hold it up—the “something” may be divided into three categories: three and a half posts, two and a half walls, or a few bricks—then no matter whether it were a garbage dump, a kennel, or a toilet, and no matter whether it were inhabited by those lords of creation—human beings—or by some other kind of animal, then each was counted as a room…. Thus, according to the sub-landlord’s report there were altogether sixteen rooms in the compound. But … the devil knows. Luckily all the occupants were members of the world’s most superior race, blessed above all others in possessing all possible human virtues: they were forbearing, satisfied with their lot, reticent. Like wild pigs they had the ability to live in their dark, filthy, damp nests, comfortably and contentedly. And so they felt very pleased with their situation. They even had a nice way of putting things: they had “the tenacious vitality of animals! the yielding but tough adaptability of wild grass!” Outsiders, however, would open their wide eyes in amazement, shake their heads, and exclaim: Good gracious! What a people! What an extraordinary people!

The compound was composed of three courtyards: front, middle, and back. The middle courtyard was small and narrow and was nicknamed “the passage”; at either end there was a wooden door, but these doors were never closed.

All kinds of people lived here. At the top there was Zeng Simian, a civil servant who lived with his family in the three-room apartment—the only rooms worthy of the name—on the north side of the middle courtyard. At the bottom was the family—heaven knows what they did for a living—who had the two rooms on the south side of the back courtyard.

Rather than say they “lived,” one might just as well say they “crouched like bats in caves,” muddling along, muddling through, muddling aimlessly through. And yet on the surface they lived very amiably, they got along very well together, and they even occasionally showed one another consideration (although most of the time no one paid anyone else any attention). They were like people who had come together by chance, like strangers on a stricken vessel. Since they could not fight the destiny that they bore, there was no other way for them to get through their storm of the century, the journey of their lives. As Mrs. Shao said: behind the compound door they were all one big family!

And now, summer was here again.

The oleander was growing vigorously, putting out its first flower; the sweet flag in the basin was also sprouting lovely thick stems and leaves. The sun canopy had been put up in the back courtyard, so that most of the cramped, stifling hot yard was now covered with refreshing, pleasant shade.

On such roasting summer days, the shade of the canopy became a natural meeting place. As a lush green pasture lures a herd of deer, the cool shade drew these neighbors under the canopy. After the midday meal and in the evenings they would gather here to enjoy the cool and indulge in conversation.

One early afternoon, looking over at the deserted south apartment, Mrs. Shao reported to the two ladies enjoying the cool alongside her, Mrs. Zhuang, who lived in the east wing, and Mrs. Zeng: “The day before yesterday I saw Old Mrs. Yan’s daughter. She told me the old lady will be moving back in in a couple of days.”

“Is she better?” asked Mrs. Zeng.

“They say she’s better, but she’s not really herself. Miss Yan says she can’t put up with her any longer, so she has no choice but to send her back here and let her brother’s family look after her.”

“Why didn’t she just go and live with them then?” said Mrs. Zhuang.

“Them? Hasn’t Laosan’s wife got enough mouths to feed? And now he’s unemployed, he might be needing to go out and beg before long! Miss Yan says that in order to persuade her sister-in-law to come and look after the old lady she had to give her a pair of trousers, for she’d none to wear!”

The three women fell silent, turning in tacit agreement to look at the south apartment, which had been empty for half a year. Longlegged spiders hung from the eaves and the windows were long since sealed with dust.

This rectangular compound, its street-side roof all covered in jet-black sludge, its wall corners and plinths speckled with moss—probably nobody knew how many alternating times of prosperity and decline it had seen, what great changes in the world it had witnessed. Its decrepit, gray, and faded exterior not only made it clear that it was approaching its last years of decline and decay, but also shed light on the undulating worldly road it had traveled. Yes! It was already as weary and haggard as the tenants who roosted in its cramped and dirty quarters, more like pigeonholes than so-called human dwellings.

A dozen or more years ago the proprietor of a barbershop had bought the compound as a gift for old Mrs. Yan, the elderly woman Mrs. Shao had been talking about to Mrs. Zhuang and Mrs. Zeng. He had wanted to take her only daughter as a concubine, and the gift was a token of his sincerity. However, within two years the old lady’s sons began secret discussions about selling the property and splitting the proceeds. When he learned about this the barbershop boss bought the compound back again. This time, however, he put his own name on the title deeds instead of his mother-in-law’s, and he still remained the owner. Thus the old woman fell abruptly from the position of landlady to that of a resident cloistered in the two south rooms of the back courtyard. Mind you, she didn’t pay rent.

Among the oldest residents of this compound, after the old lady the next in line were Shao Chengquan and his family, who had lived here for over eight years. Mr. Shao had moved in after getting a job in a large hotel. He was an amiable man, approaching forty years of age, short in stature. He always smiled broadly at you, appearing kind and friendly—although at any hour of day or night one might see him, face and neck flushed, eyes popping out of his head, and a voice like thunder, shouting at his wife or his six-year-old daughter. The cause of these outbursts was usually that his wife had used sesame oil making pancakes, or his daughter had bought twenty cents’ worth of roast sweet potatoes between meals, that kind of thing. So apart from this minor blemish—and it has to be said that not giving proper consideration to the hour of the day when scolding one’s wife in a voice that is audible several lanes away is an extreme lapse in good taste—this sub-landlord of ours was really a fine, good-hearted man.

He had worked in that large hotel for eight years now, and the precision of his timekeeping was like that of an American-made clock. Every week he worked one night shift, and unless something absolutely prevented it, he went to work every day, rain, hail, or snow. So Lu Qizhong, for example, who lived in the south apartment of the middle courtyard, would ask his wife: “What time is it?” Clever Mrs. Lu wouldn’t need to turn and look at the desk clock they’d had for at least ten years, and tell him: “Half past eight!” Instead she would answer: “Mr. Shao just got back from work!” The time Shao Chengquan got home from a night shift happened to be precisely the time Lu Qizhong had to leave for work.

Toward the tenants of the compound he, Shao Chengquan, could be said, to a certain extent, to be very polite, and even affectionate. Although his home was rent-free (because he spread his rent over that of all the other tenants) he still would often wear worry and distress all over his face, and his voice would be full of sighs and lamentation as he said: “Ai! What’s to be done. I’m so poor, the paltry amounts I get for my labors at the hotel aren’t even enough to keep my wife and daughter in gruel, so how can I keep subsidizing others every month! On one hand there’s the landlord: if he says the rent’s to go up then the rent must go up; but on the other hand, aren’t we all good neighbors? You’ve all been very good to me, so how can I ask you for more? Isn’t that right, Mr. Zeng? Ai, what can I do?”

At times like these everybody in the yard knew perfectly well what he was up to: instinctively they knew that the sub-landlord was about to raise the rent again. And so they were extremely unhappy, and couldn’t help grumbling about the landlord’s insatiable greed. But after grumbling for a while they would end up dutifully acceding to the demand.

Almost invariably, every few months the sub-landlord would repeat his performance of sighs and lamentation, and afterward, sure enough, within at most a month Mrs. Shao would go from household to household telling them that from next month the rent would increase by three yuan per room. They would be most aggrieved at this, unable to understand why the rent should keep endlessly rising.

Mrs. Zhuang in particular, the sub-landlord’s next-door neighbor in the back courtyard, who often chatted and had a laugh with Mrs. Shao and seemed to get on with her very well, acted as if nothing less than a lump of her flesh were being carved out, and would be deeply wounded for months on end. At the start of every month she’d be grumbling even as she handed the rent money over.

Mrs. Zhuang was short and fat while her husband Zhuang Jingfu was tall and thin, so that they looked just like the comedy film star Tang Jie and his wife. Mr. Zhuang was a traveling agent for a warehouseinn, so he was rarely at home during the day, and not often at night either. But strange to say, Mrs. Zhuang’s fecundity was in no way inferior to that of a sow: her children came one a year, hot on each other’s heels. Although she was still in her early thirties, her children were already like a swarming brood of ducklings.

Whether for good or for bad I don’t know, but the fact is that China has more women like Mrs. Zhuang than any other kind. They are everywhere. Miserly, selfish, abject, petty, nosy, interfering, quarrelsome, sharp-tongued … and so on and so forth: these are the stamps of their character. Schadenfreude—sniffing around to see if some family or other is harboring a juicy calamity—is one of their biggest daily concerns. As for their children, these women resemble machines: all they know is how to manufacture them. Moreover, they’re congenitally blessed with mouths that they can open like a bellowing ox, awe-inspiring in sound and power, capable of frightening their produce into behaving as meekly as lambs.

“You dare?!” they roar. And with one swift lunge they’re upon the child, lashing out with hand or foot to its head, its back, its stomach, bang bang bang … as if beating a big drum. That’ll learn ’em! In this way they mold children who will sit nice and obediently on the stone section beneath the house plinth, staring vacantly at the sky like lumps of wood. This is what makes these mothers happy and content.

Above all, miserliness and pettiness are the special secret heirlooms of these women. Just take a look at the scene as they buy vegetables at the street door, for example. I guarantee you’ll be shocked and amazed, and gasp at their ingenuity and the agility of their handiwork. Somehow they can manage to spirit four or five sticks of celery or a handful of beans from the vendor’s barrow into their baskets, without anyone seeing how they do it, as if by magic!

The front courtyard was shared by two one-room households. In the south wing was the Western-style tailor Lin Dashun; the north apartment was inhabited by a widow with thickly swollen eyelids.

The story went that because the Lins had once stolen a few briquettes of the widow’s coal—or perhaps it was the widow who stole the Lins’—the accusations had never stopped flying since, and each side blamed the other. Anyway, on one side were thieves and on the other were victims, or it might actually have been that both were thieves and both victims. Even the parties involved didn’t seem sure, so naturally no outsider was in a position to pass judgment. To this day the two households were irreconcilable in their indignation.

The widow had one son and one daughter. The son had no reputable employment. He slept during the day, and his bluish complexion was to be seen only at night, as he flitted in and out like a ghost. The daughter was a waitress at Restaurant X at Dongdan. She was twenty years old, but at first sight you’d mistake her for a child of eleven or twelve. Her complexion was a pallid yellow, she had her mother’s thick eyelids, and her face was covered with acne. Her brownish hair was permed to three times the height of her head in curls. She looked more demon than human. Before a shift she would spend more than an hour on dressing and making herself up. Most of that time was spent on artificial means of compensating for the deficiencies of her underdeveloped body, such as trying somehow or other to attach two balls of cotton wool to her chest in order for that part of her to achieve its proper charm.

At such times you can be sure that Lin Dashun’s wife from the south wing opposite would once more be venting the old enmity, her ten-year-old stepdaughter becoming the false target of the scorn and loathing written all over her face: “Can’t you ever stay put, you little tart? Some stray dog of a man waiting for you again, is there?”

And thus the two women, if not contenting themselves with filthy looks, would set about pulling hair and trading slaps in the middle of the tiny yard they shared, like two insane hens.

Put simply, such were the living conditions of the people in this courtyard dwelling. These weeds grew up from seeds that fell on this barren patch of stony, shady ground. They had been deprived of nurturing sunlight and thirst-quenching rain and dew. In order to maintain their half-dead existence they were always waiting for any fated opportunity to put all they had on a single throw of the dice—and to hell with everything else.

All this was very perplexing to Li Jirong, the rather sentimental and susceptible philosophy student who was Zeng Simian’s neighbor in the middle courtyard. Basing his observations on the laws of biology, and taking into account other requirements of human life, he found it very hard to understand how his neighbors were able to go on living as well as they did.

Take Lu Qizhong, who worked as a driver for the Y Company. His standard of living was relatively high for this compound, but his monthly salary was a mere thirty-three yuan, out of which fully twenty yuan went on rent. Was the little that was left sufficient for their monthly living expenses? No matter how Li Jirong scratched his head, he couldn’t understand. Surely they couldn’t be like cicadas, which can fill themselves up on dew alone? Seeing how perfectly smug and satisfied they looked, he couldn’t help feeling mystified.

However, our poor humanitarian, like so many other people, had forgotten an utterly commonplace but extremely important law of the universe. When it comes to the necessities of human life, whatever is necessary to A will also be necessary to B, and such necessity can lend A or B enormous strength to attempt certain efforts to obtain these necessities of life. How laughable it is to apply morality and law to these people, whose very existence cannot be assured. On this point it would seem that those wretched beggars on the streets, who cry out for pity in hopes of getting a little handout from their fellow humans and who might need to run half a mile behind a rickshaw to get it, actually understand the situation better than our young Mr. Li.

One day toward evening Lu Qizhong arrived home with yet another can of what looked like gasoline. Zeng Simian, standing at his doorway, eyeballed the steel can. Without pausing for thought, but with a knowing smile lighting up his face, Zeng said: “Ah, gasoline?”

Lu forced an awkward smile in return, and explained: “Mm, yes. A friend asked me to buy some for him.”

That night Zeng Simian and Li Jirong had another debate—they often had such disputations on one thing or another.

“How about it, Mr. Li?” said Zeng Simian sarcastically. “Do you still find it impossible for anyone to understand how they survive? Don’t mistake yourself, sir: there really isn’t any amazing mystery to it! You would only need to go hungry for three days to learn, quite naturally and ingeniously, how to find the two nest buns¹ that you need. It’s quite simple; there are lots of things your stomach can teach you.”

Zeng Simian felt a great deal of sympathy for the people of the compound, but also disgust. At the same time, these feelings of disgust also caused him much vexation. Sometimes he was even assailed by serious doubts about himself and his relationship with his neighbors. He often had misgivings about whether they truly were all descended from the people of the Wei river basin²—whether the same blood could really be running in their veins as in his own. Were he and they really members of the same race, with the same customs, cultural traditions, history, and destiny?

Since his discovery that they had radically different ways of thinking and concepts of living from his, that they had basically lost all power of moral judgment and all human sense of beauty and brightness, his former beliefs suddenly changed. Now he loathed and detested them.

First of all, what did he see? He saw an accumulation of all the evils in the universe, a group of human beings scrabbling around at a level of animal subsistence.

They were like pigs huddled together in a pestilent sty: short of a miracle, the only possible outcome for them was extinction of their kind from this world.

Let us try opening one of the books on philosophy bequeathed to us by our ancient sages as sacred manuals for social conduct. There we will find a line that is a marvelous remedy uniquely inherited from our ancestors: “Sweep clean the snow from your own doorstep; mind not the frost on anyone else’s roof.” This maxim appears to embody selfishness, lack of public spirit, absence of neighborly love, fear of getting into trouble, and much besides.

Thus, if the house of our neighbor to the east should catch fire this morning, what our sagacious ancestors tell us to do is not to go immediately to help extinguish the blaze and save lives. No! They tell us to stand at a good distance—the further, the better—and, as leisurely and elegantly as if we were admiring the goldfish in Central Park,³ to watch the distant flames as they shoot up into the heavens (at this point, the flames had better be “shooting up into the heavens,” otherwise they’re not really much in the way of flames, and the spectators will not be well satisfied) and cry out loudly: “What a great blaze!”

At a time like this, if there’s a fly in the ointment it’s hearing a neighbor say that in the confusion he picked up an Yixing teapot that was still more-or-less intact. At this you experience the uncomfortable feeling that that teapot should by rights have been yours, but somebody else got hold of it just because you didn’t go to the scene. Ai! What a pity!

In the same way, the person in a public park who sees someone willfully breaking off branches and picking flowers and goes to prevent it and to lecture the perpetrator on public morality…. Well, he is quite the silliest of fellows, and I guarantee he will get himself nothing but grief. The other person is sure to look him up and down for five minutes before asking contemptuously: “What’s it to you? Huh!”

Yes! What is it to him? Greatly dejected and put out, the fellow will go home and think about what happened for fully three days and nights. The more he thinks, the more he’ll regret his actions and the more he’ll reproach himself for interfering. Eventually he slaps his own face fifty times as hard as he can. When the slapping’s finished he strokes his stinging cheeks and begins to feel happy again in his mind. He feels he has learned something, grown cleverer and wiser. In future if he sees someone picking flowers he’ll go up to the person and say generously: “Would you like me to help you? These ones are very good, much nicer than you’ll see at the flower market!”

Zeng Simian saw how such attitudes were absorbed, whole and unresolved, and then dissolved in his neighbors’ physical tissue and in their outlook on life. Heaven only knew how much sympathy or assistance might be expected of them if some disaster were to occur.

When Zeng Simian first came to Peking from his home in the south and moved into this compound, the first things he sensed about the emotional life of his new neighbors were their dejection and apathy. Each household formed a unit, and none of them paid any of the others any heed, existing in loneliness and isolation. They did not socialize; each door closed on its own. Several times Zeng had seen the attitude and demeanor of others when one or other of the families had a brush with the law or suffered illness or bereavement. It was not only that they did not come forward to offer sympathy or assistance; instead, if passing by the door of the afflicted family they would actually avert their eyes and hurry gingerly past, afraid that the misfortune might fall from that house onto theirs. Fear and revulsion would be written all over their faces, and they might even curse those neighbors for disturbing the peace.

Zeng Simian, who was passionate about society and who had, moreover, been born and brought up in the environment of simple kindliness and affection among neighbors that is typical in the south, found it very difficult to get used to such attitudes. It pained him and caused him no end of vexation. Even now such things still upset him.

However, it seemed that, as Mrs. Shao said, nothing in this world was as it should be. Take the following instance (to this day when it is mentioned Mrs. Shao curses the wickedness of it), which caused quite some displeasure in the compound, lasting several days.

For some reason that nobody knew, the old man whose job it was to carry away the night soil didn’t come for over a week (this was quite a frequent occurrence), and so there was nothing for it but for the neighbors to steal out at night and empty their buckets in the lane. However, they didn’t empty the stuff by the entrance to their own compound but by the doorway next door. They didn’t bother about whether or not it was right to do this. After all, even the police officer in charge of this beat didn’t bother about it. Mrs. Lu had once asked him: “Well, where are we supposed to dump the night soil?” He just came right out and said he didn’t care. He told her to ask at City Hall. And so they just had to go on dumping the stuff in the lane; not by their own doorway, however (according to Mrs. Shao, “surely that would be too unhygienic!”) but next door. Anyhow … the hell with you, just dump the stuff!

But next day they kept smelling waft after waft of acrid, smelly stench coming right in through the main door. When they opened it to take a look, they found a puddle by the entrance that turned out to be the source of the stink.

“It’s piss, goddammit! What a liberty!” exclaimed Mrs. Shao in horror.

Next we come to a very clear trait: their contentment with their lot. They neither blamed Heaven nor accused their fellow man, but just kept working away diligently like oxen, indefatigable. Like their ignorance, dirtiness, and poverty, this almost praiseworthy spiritual state was capable of flabbergasting any foreign traveler or sociologist who might witness it.

Lin Dashun in the front courtyard was an example. Often he sat on a low stool under the eaves, staring at the gray-black wall, with no expression whatsoever on his face, not moving a muscle for almost half the day, as if he were a shadow. Although one might equally say that the reason for this was his loss of capacity for thought, it probably wouldn’t be too far wide of the mark to class Lin among those contented with their lot.

And then there was Lu Qizhong of the middle courtyard, an even clearer manifestation of the type. When he came home from work he’d put his little son—one year old and just learning to talk—in the baby cart, and go off for a wander somewhere without too much traffic, perhaps to the Imperial Ancestral Temple or somewhere like that. Whenever he met anyone he’d say: “The weather’s good today, it’ll be lovely in Beihai Park, you should go.” And he’d say to his son: “Little Fatty: say ‘Hello, Mister!’” … Then at night, as soon as his head hit the pillow, Lu would sleep as sound as a pig until dawn.

Only on one occasion did Zeng Simian witness what he took to be an indication of dissatisfaction with reality, one that affected him in a very special way. The person concerned was Shao Chengquan, and at first it wasn’t clear whether he was expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

“Whaddaya think, Mr. Zeng: eight years!” The sub-landlord spoke with great feeling, thrusting his right hand up to Zeng’s face, thumb and index finger spread in the sign for “eight.” “I’ve worked in that hotel for eight years now! Whaddaya reckon—fed up, or what? Eight years? But what can I do? What else could I do, Mr. Zeng?”

At the time, Zeng Simian sighed to himself on Shao’s behalf, but when he thought it over later it seemed there was actually more to it. Afterward, each time Shao waved the “eight” sign in his face again and started to complain, it was already clear to Zeng that this was really just another way of expressing satisfaction.

As for indolence, vanity, pride, the tendency to make a great hue and cry over nothing … many such phenomena were everywhere you looked, in every street and alleyway, as common as anything. They were like the beggars of Peking: our human society was bursting at the seams with them.

If other examples are needed, no problem: just go to any wedding or funeral—of any family that still has something worth forty or fifty cents at the pawnshop—and you will see vanity, that source of unfounded human satisfaction. And from that sub-landlord of ours you may learn the emptiness of face: at the same time as he is putting up the rent, he tries to give and keep face with the neighbors. Or come and spend a couple of minutes or so in our compound and you may have your eyes opened by the gratuitous quarrelling and commotion among the women.

Laziness is another thing that was rife in this compound. Lin Dashun’s father was like a chain around his son’s neck. The widow’s son did nothing but eat, sleep, and shit, except when he got hold of some money—then he wouldn’t come home at night while his mother, demented, looked everywhere for him; and when he did come back the only difference would be that the money was all gone and the boy’s face was greener than ever. When Lu Qizhong got home at midday for lunch he’d find his wife still asleep; in the morning before going to work he had got a good fire going in the stove, but now it was just as if he’d never lit it…. These are just a few examples.

But the old lady was a different person compared to a few months before. She had lost normal consciousness and now resembled an old crazy woman. Her skin was dry and shriveled, cracked like the bark of an old cypress tree and purplish in color. Her senses were dulled and her faculty of thought greatly slowed. Her powers of sight and hearing were especially weakened. Wearing the purple satin, short, lined jacket with the longevity pattern that hadn’t been off her back for ten years, leaning on a wooden walking stick and looking like a person with rickets, she hobbled all through the compound, in and out of the courtyards. She would chase after anyone she happened to meet, crying and complaining like a child: “Why are you ignoring me? Aren’t we all the best of neighbors?”

Everyone in the compound would dodge or hide or shut themselves in as soon as they saw her, as if she were a terrifying god of plague.

Several months earlier—that’s to say, on a day in late winter when the morning was already getting old—Mrs. Shao had noticed that there was no sign of movement from the old lady in the south apartment opposite hers. Wondering if there might be something the matter, she went over to see if she could see anything. The moment she opened the door she was assailed by a stench fit to make you spew, so that she was forced to cover her nostrils and rush back out again. When the smell had subsided somewhat she advanced once more, fearing an unhappy discovery. And what should she see but old Mrs. Yan sitting on the bed clutching wildly in the air, like a person drowning. She could not talk but was making a rasping sound in her throat like a duck being held by the neck. Seeing someone come in, like a frightened child whose instinct is to fly to its mother’s bosom, she made a grab for Mrs. Shao. The latter, frightened out of her wits, ran straight off to find the old lady’s daughter.

Half an hour later the daughter came and took her away.

When Mrs. Shao was locking up the south apartment she found a briquette-burning stove in a corner. The stove was cold. She wiped down the tightly sealed windows, and locked the door as she came out. She said to the neighbors: “Well, she’s lucky she didn’t kill herself with the fumes!”

Now, several months later, although she had escaped with her life, nothing could restore the old lady’s mental state to what it had been before.

Not only was she weak-minded and unable to exercise moral judgment, but there was another special phenomenon: she suffered continually from a form of anxiety.

“Sister-in-law,” she would call to Mrs. Shao. “Tell me, please, what time is it now?”

“Three o’clock!” Mrs. Shao would reply impatiently.

So the old woman would walk another two paces and say to Mrs. Zhuang: “Sister, can you tell me what time it is now, sister?”

As usual Mrs. Zhuang ignored her. Bang! She closed the door in her face. So the old woman went to the middle courtyard, then the front courtyard, asking the same thing over and over.

And so, whether they paid her any attention or not, she’d often find a way of butting in. This wasn’t simply out of loneliness and depression, it was her anxiety that wouldn’t give her any rest, and compelled her toward groups of people.

As a rule, however, people like this are lacking in self-criticism, in contrast to their very strong sense of self. Old Mrs. Yan was unable to appreciate other people’s feelings, and at the same time she had lost the concept of social decorum that required her to take care of her appearance. When she was speaking to someone, her failing powers of sight and hearing meant that she had to go right up to the person, eyeball to eyeball. This was extremely unpleasant and odious to her interlocutors, because of her bad breath and filthy body. Grease, grime, dust, fleas—things that should only be found on animals—covered her clothes and her hair.

Starting from the time when Mrs. Shao had seen a shower of fleas fall to the ground from the old woman’s clothes, everyone would run a mile as soon as they saw her. That day Mrs. Shao, seeing the old woman chasing people round the yard yet again, tried to tell her for her own good: “You’ve got fleas. They’re afraid of you!”

“I haven’t!” the old woman replied indignantly. And to prove it, she brushed herself down all over with her hands. Wherever her hands touched, clouds of dust rose up and fleas fell to the ground like rain, crawling and leaping around.

“You haven’t, huh? Just look!” cried Mrs. Shao in righteous vindication.

Meanwhile, everyone else had already fled.

However, it was not her dirtiness alone that made the old lady so unpopular. As far as the possessions of people in the compound were concerned, she seemed no longer to recognize the distinction between “yours” and “mine." If she needed something, no matter what, she’d just go right ahead and take it, without a word to anyone. If there was something she couldn’t get hold of, so that she needed to ask the owner, from her tone of voice you’d think she was talking to one of her own sons, brazenly and without any restraint. Firewood, coal, salt, pickles—these were the things she needed.

“How can you go taking my coal!” they protested.

“I am not!” she said, and carried right on taking it.

“I suppose you’re going to say somebody owed you that coal!” they said, angry now.

“I’ll tell Laoliu to buy you some more later, alright?” she retorted calmly. “I wouldn’t just take what’s yours without paying it back!”

And so they began shutting all their things indoors, as if afraid of burglars. If it was Mrs. Zhuang, she’d be quickly hiding things away with one hand while her other hand would be pointing the old woman in the direction of the Zengs’ apartment, meaning that she should go there looking for what she needed. But the half-blind old lady wouldn’t take the hint; she just kept on and on: “Don’t worry, I’ll tell Laoliu to buy you some more later; I wouldn’t just take what’s yours.”

By now Mrs. Zhuang would be hopping mad, shrieking: “I don’t want your son to return it to me. It’s mine and you’re not having any!” And so saying, she’d reach out and seize back anything and everything the old lady was clutching in her arms.

“As if I would!” she whined. “They’re all ignoring me, every one of them.” She turned and went off to look for her daughter, leaning on her grandson’s shoulder.

Her grandson, the son of her third son, Yan Laosan, had come with her when she moved back in and stayed as her helper. He was twelve or thirteen, with dull, vacant eyes. He wore an unlined long gown, probably his father’s, that was too big for him in every dimension, so that he was forced to tie it round his middle with a hempen rope, making him look like a little Buddhist monk.

The old lady’s “they” referred not only to her neighbors in the compound; when she was hungry it also often included her daughter and sons. And “ignoring me” referred specifically to the fact that she hadn’t seen any of her children for several days.

You see, the old lady’s daily food and other expenses were provided by her only daughter (the landlord’s concubine) and her sixth son, Yan Laoliu. The latter worked as a waiter in a pancake eatery at Tianqiao. Every three to five days one of them would bring over some money or nest buns for her.

But she hadn’t seen them for several days now. Since early morning the old woman had been so hungry that she kept walking in and out of the courtyard, wondering what had happened to her children.

And so it was that she went off to look for her daughter, leaning on her grandson’s shoulder.

“As if I would!” she whined. “They’re all ignoring me, every one of them.”

Only a few days later, Yan Laosan’s wife and their four-year-old daughter came to stay. From one point of view, they had come to look after the old lady; from another, she was actually nothing short of their savior, a rare prospect. Because this way the daughter-in-law no longer needed to live the monotonous life of a sidewalk seamstress, but could sit comfortably at home every day and never go short of nest buns.

Moreover, although this woman brought only her daughter, somehow her husband, Laosan (a bald guy with a purple face and a pot belly who had a smarmy smile for everyone he met) now also took to coming round. Whenever the clatter of bowls and chopsticks began to sound—that’s to say, whenever meals were being got ready—this third son of the old lady would appear as if by invitation. When he’d finished eating he would wipe his face with the backs of his hands, like a contented cat, then take a tattered rush mat to any convenient shady spot under the eaves and lie down with a great display of satisfaction. Five minutes later the thunderous sound of his comfortable snores would strike up.

When he’d had a sufficiently long siesta, he’d get up, give a lazy stretch, and leave. Come the evening, just before meal time, he would appear again, neither a moment too soon nor a moment too late.

Once he started coming round, Laosan put considerable terror in the hearts of the people of the compound. First among them was Mrs. Shao, who was beside herself with fear as she hid everything of any value at all away in her cupboards, not saying a word to anyone. When Zhuang Jingfu came home at night, he gave special instructions to Mrs. Zhuang to keep an eye on the windows and doors at all times.

But the most worried of all were Laosan’s own brother and sister, because he added enormously to their burden. Finally the day came when this state of affairs brought about conflict among them.

That evening there were hardly any nest buns. As soon as they were out of the steamer, Laosan, like the wind whisking away fallen leaves, swept away enough of them to eat his own fill. Old Mrs. Yan was sitting woodenly by the bed, but though she waited for ages, still no one brought her any nest buns.

“What about my buns?” she started to wail, like a child.

“What buns? The last of the nest buns were finished at midday!” replied her daughter-in-law, bringing her a bowl of spinach soup. “Quiet now, drink this!”

Coming back into the outer room, she lowered her voice and urged her sons: “Come on, quick, eat up.”

The little monk and his brother, who was an apprentice, were munching away at their nest buns.

“That can’t be right.” In the inner room the old lady raised her voice again. “I remember there were some nest buns left! How could they be finished so quickly?”

“If we had nest buns, wouldn’t I give you yours?” said her daughter-in-law.

Next day, when her sixth son came, the old lady complained: “Laoliu, I’m hungry. They won’t give me any nest buns!”

These words were the spark that ignited a quarrel between the brothers. Laoliu’s opinion was that the nest buns bought with his wages were for Mother to eat, not for Laosan and his family. After all, his means were not so great that he could feed such a crowd of people. Laosan’s response was that he could take his family back home straightaway and Laoliu could find someone else to come and look after the old lady.

“We can go right away!” he said, sticking out his belly, steam rising from his bald pate. “I’m telling you, we’ll just leave Ma to her own devices! Come on, let’s go!” He turned to hurry up his wife. “Let’s go! Get your things together, we’re leaving!”

And in order to emphasize the strength of his resolve he berated his younger son, who was just standing there gawking: “Can’t you bear to leave? Is this your home?” And he slapped him across the head for good measure.

Laosan was a clever one. He knew there was no need to “get your things together,” because apart from the dirt and fleas they had brought with them and would take away with them, there was nothing else whatsoever. There was a reason for this pretense: he believed that it would surely put the wind up Laoliu. So they put on a show, went inside, tramped around a bit, and then waited a little before coming back out. Laoliu, however, behaved unusually: he merely looked coldly on, which made his brother feel very awkward, and rather panicky. Observing Laoliu’s resolute air from the corner of his eye, Laosan didn’t know what to do. Naturally he had no wish to take his family back to their own home, where nothing but hunger awaited them. So, should they stay? Um, er …

He stood dumbly in the middle of the courtyard, utterly at a loss.

Just then, his sister arrived. This Miss Yan, as Mrs. Shao called her, was a shrewd woman. The moment she entered the courtyard she saw this incident for what it really was. Without saying a word, she came and stood between her brothers and, completely ignoring them, said to the old lady: “Get yourself ready, I’ve got all the paperwork in order with the old people’s home, they’ll be sending someone later on to take you there. I’ve made up my mind it’s for the best, the neatest arrangement. It’ll save everybody getting so upset and give us all some peace. Come on, get ready, let’s get it over with!”

The old lady stamped her feet and wailed and begged: “I won’t go! You’re my only daughter, I won’t go … !”

“You can’t just say you won’t go,” replied Miss Yan, all seriousness. “It’s all arranged. This will save a lot of strife!”

“I’m not making trouble, dear! They’re the ones making trouble,” whimpered the old lady. “They’re the ones who ate all my nest buns and wouldn’t give me any!”

The brothers were speechless in the face of this sudden turn of events. Not knowing what to do, they just stood where they were in a daze.

Just then, everyone’s eyes were drawn toward the entrance by the sound of heavy, jumbled footsteps approaching. A moment later three or four men in uniform charged inside. Everyone thought this must be the men sent by the old people’s home; they couldn’t help feeling worried about the old lady. Only the daughter was thrown into confusion; instinctively she felt that this squad of men must be harbingers of some ill fortune.

Seeing these men in uniform arrive, the old lady was so frightened that she began howling at her daughter: “Darling! I won’t go …” And begging: “I won’t go! Darling! Tell them I won’t make trouble anymore …” At the same time she was entreating the uniformed men themselves, almost going down on her knees: “Don’t take me away, I beg of you, sir, I won’t go!”

The men spared only an uncomprehending glance at this peculiar behavior.

“They’re not here to take you away,” Miss Yan explained to her mother. “Stop making such a scene. Stop it now!”

The man who seemed to be the squad leader put a question to the people in the courtyard:

“Is Yan Yongtai here?”

Everybody’s gaze focused on the elder brother. His bald pate shone out amid the crowd.

“That’s me!” replied Laosan in great alarm, turning slightly pale. “Sir! And you are …?”

Two minutes later, Yan Laosan was taken away by the men in uniform and the crowd dispersed, everyone talking at once. However, feeling as if everyone in the compound was somehow implicated, the neighbors were plunged into disquiet, and for a long time no one dared speak loudly.

That night, when the moon was rising slowly above the sun canopy, Mrs. Shao spoke quietly, as if mentioning something that was taboo: “You know why they took Laosan away? He stole money from a shop!”

“So, will he get out again?” asked Mrs. Zeng.

“Who knows?” replied Mrs. Shao.

As if wishing to take their time savoring this juicy incident, the women fell silent. No one spoke for a while.

Then Mrs. Lu, her eyes on the oleander swaying dreamily in the breeze, said with a sigh: “What a lively place we live in!”

“There’s liveliness yet to come!” said Mrs. Shao. “Just wait till Laoliu brings his new wife here to live. Hah! Then you’ll see ‘lively.’”

“Laoliu got married?” said Mrs. Zhuang. “How come we never heard?”

“Well, he didn’t send you an invitation to the wedding, did he? So how would you know? He picked up this bride down Tianqiao, you know!”

“Picked her up?” asked Mrs. Lu, making a big deal of it.

“You find that strange? It’s the commonest thing in the world! These days you can pick up anything you want. If you like, you can even pick up a very fine fellow for yourself!” Mrs. Shao lowered her voice again and put on her most serious expression. “But you’ll never guess,” she went on. “This woman slept with three men at a time in the brothel. Three men!” And now she spoke loudly again: “What do you think of a piece like that! So there you go, he picked her up down Tianqiao, didn’t I say?”

Imagining the kind of things that might be about to happen, Mrs. Zeng murmured to herself: “Really, who knows what kind of things our compound may be in for!”

“Come on!” he called to his new wife, beaming and grinning all over his face. “Come on! This is Mother, come and meet Mother!”

The woman went over and greeted her mother-in-law respectfully and submissively, just like a country girl.

“And this lady is Mrs. Shao!” Laoliu introduced her to them all one by one. “This is Mrs. Zeng…. From now on we’re all like one big family. If there’s anything you’re unsure of, don’t be shy, just ask Mrs. Shao, Mrs. Zeng, Mrs. Lu, or one of the other ladies whatever you like. They’re all such good neighbors, always willing to help.” Laoliu was playing the parts of good husband (earnestly instructing his wife) and good neighbor (deferentially addressing everyone else): “From now on, please don’t be hard on her, she’s newly come from the country and there’s a lot she has to learn.”

That night the newlyweds slept with the old lady on her six-foot-square brick bed platform.⁴

For his first week of married life Laoliu’s boss had granted him leave to come home to sleep, but after that he could only sleep at home once every three or four nights. Occasionally he managed to find the time to pop home during the day.

A few days after the marriage, when Laoliu wanted to go and register it, he discovered that his bride had no residence permit.

“So where is it then?” he asked her.

“At home in the village. I forgot to bring it with me.”

“How could you forget something like that?” he pressed her. But he immediately resumed a milder tone. “Never mind, we’ll get you a residence permit when we go to the police station for the marriage certificate.”

She remained silent, fiddling with her clothes. She didn’t seem all that willing.

“We can’t not register, you know!” Laoliu explained.

“Can’t you at least get me a pair of leather shoes and some material to make some clothes?” She spoke like a spoiled child. “I haven’t got a thing to wear, how can I even go out in public?”

Next day Laoliu left work early and on the way home he bought two pairs of woven stockings, drip-dry material for two blue shirts, and two pairs of black woolen trousers. These purchases used up two-thirds of the five hundred–odd yuan he’d saved since he began his apprenticeship at the age of eleven. Parting with the money was really very painful for him. But soon his pain began to turn to joy. As he walked he inwardly imagined his wife’s happiness. How lovely that would be!

However, he had completely miscalculated. His wife still wouldn’t agree to go and register. She hummed and hawed and made him agree to drop the subject until her clothes had been made up.

“What’s the hurry?” she grumbled, flirtatiously. “I’m yours now anyway, who cares if the registration’s a little late?”

Laoliu listened happily. Sure, what did it matter? And wasn’t she so womanly and sincere, so much like a housewife?

He was completely content.

After that Laoliu could only come home once every few days, and every time he asked her about the registration she put him off one way or another and humored him this way or that, until he himself began to forget about it. Meanwhile, just as Laoliu had imagined, his wife was extremely pleasant and solicitous, tending to his mother with great tenderness and obedience. Sometimes, it’s true, he saw an expression of annoyance come over her face, but she exerted herself to repress it, never allowing her inner feelings of disgust to reveal themselves in her actions.

“Dear!” said the old lady, addressing her as her own daughter. “Help me outside for a bit of a walk. I feel so suffocated.”

“Go for a walk?” her daughter-in-law said, frowning impatiently. “On one of the hottest days of the year?”

But she acceded to the old lady’s wishes and took her outside. With contempt etched deep in her face, looking anywhere but at her mother-in-law, avoiding her smelly breath, she looked for all the world like a coolie roughly tugging a poor, clumsy old beast of burden along by the nose. Meanwhile, the neighbors could hear the old lady’s plaintive cries: “Don’t pull me so fast … !”

Soundlessly but ceaselessly the days rolled by, and now it was the season where summer and autumn overlapped.

One day, when Yan Laoliu returned home at dusk, Mrs. Shao called him into her house and said: “You’d better check your wife’s stuff, and see if anything of yours has gone missing. Today at noon when I saw her go out she seemed to be wearing far too many layers of clothing, and she looked suspicious. I wouldn’t be surprised if that piece turns out to be a con-woman who’s been out to rob you all along! Go home and take a careful look!”

Laoliu went home, and sure enough, the things he’d bought her recently had disappeared.

It was very late when she finally got home.

“What’ve you done with all that gear I bought you?” Laoliu began the interrogation the moment she came through the door. At first she seemed flustered, but she composed herself and then, appearing almost on the verge of tears, she began to complain in a most piteous tone.

“I pawned it!” she said. “You don’t come home for days on end, leaving me not a single penny. Ma goes about asking here and there for pickles and kindling, but I’m too embarrassed to do that!”

“Where’s the pawn ticket, then?” asked Laoliu.

“I’ve put it away,” she said, darting a nervous eye at him. “Surely you don’t think I’m lying?”

“That’s not what I mean,” said her husband. “I want to go and redeem those things tomorrow. I bought them for you to wear, how could you go and pawn them?”

“Well, it doesn’t make any difference if I hold on to the ticket then, does it?” she replied. “Just bring me the money and I’ll go redeem them right away.”

Next day as Laoliu was going out, Mrs. Shao again stealthily called him aside. “You’d better come back and stay at home again tonight,” she told him. “I reckon that piece of yours is going to run out on you. And I wouldn’t put it past her to make off with some of your stuff while you’re out; after all, the old lady’s eyesight isn’t up to much!”

Laoliu thought about this, then went back into his house and told his wife: “It’s very busy in the shop recently, I’m afraid I won’t be able to come home for two or three days, so you take extra care of Ma!”

That day his wife went out very early and didn’t come back until after nightfall. When she came in and saw Laoliu sitting there large as life, having said he wouldn’t be back for two or three days, she turned pale and began to scowl. The three of them passed the night without talking.

Next day Laoliu didn’t come home for the night. At dusk, his wife went out empty-handed, reluctantly and resentfully.

First thing next morning the old lady set up a cry, sounding like a dog that was being beaten: “She’s taken the quilt! She’s taken the quilt!”

At almost the same time (actually a little earlier) a quarrel started up in the front courtyard.

“That fine son of yours stealing people’s quilts, and you still deny it? A shameless thing like you was bound to raise a shameless thing like him …”

This was the metallic shrieking of Lin Dashun’s woman.

“Did you see him? Did you see him? Did you see him …?”

This was the voice of her opponent, the widow.

“I saw him steal it with my own eyes. With my own eyes I saw him bring it through that door in the middle of the night! You still dare to deny it, but tell me this: what was your son doing going out at that hour, huh?”

“Where he goes is none of your business; what he does is none of your business either, none of your business!”

Before long the people who crowded into the front courtyard to watch the fun were nearly bursting down the walls. With gratified expressions on their faces these ladies and gentlemen of the audience pointed out the finer points to one another: which of the performers’ voices was the more sonorous, which voice was crisper; which of the antagonists had the greater mastery of the art of cursing; whose curses hit home just where it hurt the other most. The only thing they felt far from satisfied about was that the two women traded only abuse; no blows were exchanged. Otherwise it would have been a really fine civil-military variety performance, and admission was free!

But they were not disappointed after all, because the very next instant the two women started leading with their fists and feet, producing a truly spectacular performance.

Seeing Mrs. Shao and the old lady arrive, Lin Dashun’s wife went toward them, saying: “Old Mrs. Yan, I can tell you, your quilt was taken by …”

Before she could finish her sentence she suddenly felt a vicious blow to her face which almost sent her flying. The pain made her see stars, but as she turned, out of the corner of her eye she saw the widow launching her whole self at her again. Dodging, the Lin woman then pounced in her turn and grabbed the widow by the hair. But in the same instant she felt her own hair grabbed hold of.

The two women scratched and mauled and rolled together this way and that, like a pair of lionesses. Only after Mrs. Shao, Mrs. Lu, and Mrs. Zeng had tried for some time to separate them were they finally pried apart.

“Inside that door we’re all one big family!” said Mrs. Shao. “Why are you causing such a commotion at this hour of the morning? You’re neither of you youngsters anymore; aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”

The two combatants retreated through the crowd, rubbing the places where blood flowed through the scratches and cuts on their faces. But from inside their houses each continued to shout abuse at the other: “Mark my words, next time it’ll be your old smelly cunt that’s bleeding, or I’m a mongrel bastard! You dirty shameless bitch!”

Lin Dashun was from Tongxian, the county to the east of Peking, where his family were farmers. However, no matter how hard they worked and no matter how much hardship they were prepared to endure, their mere half-acre of land could hardly support a family of ten. Moreover, Lin’s first wife had died in 1936, leaving one son and a daughter. At the time, he had already been considering leaving home to seek a livelihood elsewhere. After full-scale war broke out and the Japanese invaded the following year, life in the countryside became even harder, and Lin decided to strike out for another place. Luckily he had trained as a tailor, which meant he shouldn’t go hungry unless his luck was bad. So he bade farewell to his parents, elder brother, and sister-in-law, and one bitter cold winter’s day he came with his children to Peking. As to whether city life turned out as he expected, he alone knows.

During his third year away from home he remarried, and from that year, whether because of Fate or because his economic burden was too great (actually he had never had much to spare), life got more and more difficult. Eventually he was like a man with a heavy load on his back climbing a precipitous mountain path, gasping for every breath. What’s more, in 1938 his elder brother went missing and the family sold their little bit of land; when his father had come to live with him two years ago life grew even harder. Under this excessive burden Lin’s back became bent and a vacant expression fixed itself on his pale, slightly greenish face, which resembled a puny weed forever hidden from the sun. At work he sat silently at his table in a dark basement room where electric light burned day and night; at home he either sat on the edge of the bed and daydreamed or sat outside on the edge of the plinth and stared at the gray wall thinking heaven only knew what. He took no interest whatsoever in his own family, seeming like a sponger in his own home. Toward his wife he was as tame and meek as a family pet.

Seeing him just endlessly sitting there dumbly, like a piece of wood, his acutely anemic wife would often become hysterical: “That’s right, you just sit there daydreaming!” she’d cry with a contemptuous snort. “You think the god of wealth’s gonna bring you a present of silver dollars if you sit there long enough, do you? Damn my rotten luck to marry a useless deadbeat like you!”

Terrified, Lin would shift further over toward the corner of the wall or the bed, keeping a fearful eye on his wife’s expression.

This woman was another of the leading lights of the compound. Whenever she looked at her own two children and saw how weak they were, and then looked at the two left behind by Lin’s first wife, she got angry and upset in a way that seemed both natural and inexplicable. Try as she might she just could not understand how those two little so-and-sos managed to thrive. Whenever she thought of her failure to get rid of them quickly and efficiently she got angry with herself and would blame it on being too good-hearted. And then she would suddenly leap up and start screaming accusations at her stepson, an eight-year-old with a complaint against hunger perpetually in his timid eyes: “Don’t we give you enough to eat? Or is that damn dog-belly of yours bottomless? Let me tell you, your pa isn’t so rich that he can keep throwing money into that bottomless hole of yours!”

She did all she could think of to overwork and ill-treat these two thorns in her side. She made them go two or three hundred yards to fetch water from an old well in another lane. She made them go all over the place scavenging for the family’s daily fuel: scraps of coal, branches, and twigs. She made the boy work the stove bellows, and sent the eleven-year-old girl in the middle of the night to stand in line at the nearby grain shop for the next morning’s ration of mixed-grain flour.

The Lins lived in a small one-room apartment in the south wing of the front courtyard. At night they all slept together on the six-foot-square platform bed. The room was cramped and dark; in summer it was like a steamer, and in winter like an icehouse. The walls were spattered all over with sad, comet-shaped, dark red stains—these were the remains of bedbugs, which is to say that this was their own poor, thin blood spattered on the walls. Separately, out on the plinth under the eaves, they had put up a crude shelter using two thin bamboo poles and two tattered reed mats, with a few thin wooden planks on the ground. This was where the old man slept.

Filling the room and overflowing into the courtyard were all kinds of worn, bent, and broken furniture, chipped and cracked pots and vats, bits of wood that the children had scavenged, piles of straw, scraps of wood, and so on. It always looked as filthy as a cattle pen, as if it had never been clean for a single day. At the corner of the outside wall there was a rough stove; at midday and in the evening the first wife’s boy would be crouched there working hard at the bellows, his skeletal little body almost buried in the straw. Thick smoke billowed up from the stove, roiled around the plinth and into the room, and floated into every corner of the courtyard. The smoke permeated every cooking vessel and item of clothing and left an acrid smell permanently hanging in the room; it irritated the nose and eyes of the boy at the bellows, making him sneeze and weep and feel suffocated.

And so they lived—amid smoke and dust, filth and anemia, scarcity and bedbugs, poor light and forbearance. No matter how hard they worked, no matter how small and how low—unhealthily low—their hopes for security and material comfort, their lives never improved. On the contrary, life’s menace and cruelty toward them only grew. They were like a man at the end of a rope: the more he struggles, the tighter the noose grows.

When Lin Dashun’s father came from the village to live with them his daughter-in-law was far from happy. It aggravated her hysteria and intensified her cruelty toward her unfortunate stepchildren. Again and again, like a summer thunderstorm, she would burst into bouts of fierce cursing against the family she had married into. These would be accompanied by ill-treatment of the stepchildren, scolding of her “useless” husband, and the throwing around of objects. When the storm died down she would start wailing like a pig being slaughtered, and a wave of uncontrollable anger with herself would sweep over her. She would noisily grind her teeth, and even lose consciousness, falling to the floor foaming at the mouth.

Later, she began to notice that some things in the house, including recently bought sorghum, millet, and maize flour, were going unaccountably missing, in part or in whole. This discovery—that somehow or other her father-in-law had fallen into that dreadful habit—sent her almost completely mad, unleashing one of her worst outbursts.

When this latest storm finally subsided it was already late at night. Soon the whole compound was sunk deep in sleep, but the Lin woman alone was still tossing and turning. Her mind kept dwelling on things, bringing her bitter regret, depression, and despair. After the evening’s bout of burning fury, her body felt extremely tired and limp; wave after wave of restlessness flowed through her, a most uncomfortable feeling.

Just at this point she heard the sound of the widow’s door across the yard. Abruptly alert, she immediately recalled that the widow’s waitress daughter had often been seen stealthily welcoming or seeing off young men in the middle of the night.

She quickly moved over to the window, in time to dimly see a tall, thin figure squeezing through a crack in the door before going toward the inner courtyards. The figure was male right enough, but she recognized it as the widow’s son. Disappointed, she went back to bed. She didn’t know how much time had passed before she heard footsteps coming out from the inner courtyards. It seemed to her that the footsteps did not go to the widow’s apartment but were heading for the main door of the compound. Sure enough, the next thing she heard was the sound of the main door’s bolt being very quietly shot. In her surprise she went to the window again: she saw the same tall, thin figure as before, but this time there was something very large under its arm. Looking more carefully, she made the object out as a quilt. Then in a flash the figure, walking on tiptoe but moving very quickly, disappeared through the street door.

Staring at the big lonely door, now closed but not bolted, the Lin woman was delighted.

“This time I’ve got you right where I want you!” she thought.

The day before, the two elder Lin children had gone scavenging for coal along the railway tracks outside Peace Gate.⁵ The boy, Xiaofu, was feeling unwell and also hungry; cold sweat was pouring from his brow and he kept stretching and yawning, as if just out of bed. He strained himself to keep going until each of them had collected almost half a basketful. At last the children turned for home. As they were passing a shop Xiaofu saw two or three bits of coal on the ground and unthinkingly picked them up. Only when he looked up did he see the pile of coal in front of him, no doubt just recently unloaded there.

Suddenly a middle-aged man came roaring out of the shop. Without waiting for any explanation, he took aim and walloped Xiaofu across the face, seized his basket, and poured its entire contents onto the coal pile. Xiaofu, stunned and dizzy from the blow, reeled and almost fell. He staggered some way before his head cleared enough to realize that his sister had been helping him along as they fled. Coming to the end of a very long lane, Xiaofu could walk no further. He felt waves of nausea surging up from his stomach, sparks were swimming before his eyes, and his legs seemed unable to bend, like two pieces of wood.

“Sis!” he said weakly. “I can’t walk any further.”

Coming to a patch of shade under a tree by the road they sat down for a rest. Xiaofu lay down on the ground, his breath dry and bitter. He felt faint and soon fell asleep. He didn’t know how long he slept, but when he awoke the sun was almost setting. Somehow or other his empty basket was half-full again, not with coal this time but with little bits of wood. Beside him, his sister was calling: “Xiaofu, quick, get up. It’ll be dark soon. Ma will be angry again when we get home.”

It was very late by the time they finally got home. No sooner had they entered the compound than their grim-faced stepmother began bellowing at them: “Oh, that’s just fine! Seems like you’ve been having a really lovely time. Why don’t you just not bother coming home? Off you go and play some more! Just come back whenever you’ve finished your little games; free nest buns will be waiting for you!”

Though their tummies were rumbling they didn’t dare say they were hungry. They shrank shivering into themselves and didn’t dare move a muscle, like little demons facing the king of hell. Their father cast a melancholy look in their direction, but said not a word.

That night the Lin girl went with another girl from a neighboring compound to the nearby grain store to wait for the next day’s rations.

The next day was the day their stepmother quarreled with the widow from across the yard.

The whole of that day the Lin woman was in a bad mood, her face tripping her. The fury in her heart needed only to light on a suitable target for it to burst out as fiercely as gunpowder.

Turning, she saw the girl working the bellows and snapped: “Has your brother died or something? What are you doing working the bellows?”

“He … Xiaofu isn’t feeling very well today,” the girl stammered.

Looking up, the woman saw Xiaofu sitting on the ground by the street door, his face flushed with fever. She flew into a rage.

“Not very well? Oh that’s great, it’s all very well for some, this is a fine time to go and be ill! Just you keep on lying there, and I can tell you, that’s real comfort for you!”

Like an old nag startled by the crack of the whip, the boy fearfully rose to his feet, moving quickly but as if sapped of all his strength, and walked over to his bellows. The smoke billowed out from the top of the stove, which had no flue, casting a veil over most of the wall behind it. From within the thick acrid smoke the child’s helpless, irritated coughing was heard over and over.

That evening, feeling very tired and unwell, Xiaofu went to bed and fell asleep before the evening meal. When he awoke it was already late night. At some point autumn rain had begun falling outside, pitter-patter, pitter-patter. All around was bleak and lonely. The sound of the rest of the family in deep sleep filled the room, closing in all around him. On the inner part of the platform bed, his father, stepmother, half-brother, and half-sister were breathing evenly and deeply through their noses, not moving at all.

Xiaofu’s whole body felt as hot as charcoal that was ready to explode; the heat caused unbearable pain, which made him groan. It was very difficult to breathe and his throat made a dry rasping sound like the bellows he worked. His eyes were dry and irritated, and it felt as though someone were pushing down hard on his eyelids. With difficulty he forced open his eyes, but what was there to see apart from the low, pitch-black ceiling and the dark night that crowded into the room?

Hardest to bear were the thirst in his mouth and the hunger in his belly. Oh, how he longed to eat or drink something. Since the day before yesterday, when he began to feel unwell, it was over forty-eight hours since he’d had a proper meal.

He gave his sister sleeping beside him a couple of pushes and whispered her name. Having spent all the previous night squatting sleepless in a queue for grain, she didn’t wake up. Sitting up on the bed, all the boy saw in the dark was the indistinct outline of one body-shaped hump after another where all the others were sleeping soundly. Raising his head he looked out the window and was startled to see a human shape moving about out there. His heart began beating fast and would not stop. The shape was cowering right up against the window. It seemed to be sitting with both arms around its knees and rocking, now to the left, now to the right, as if trying to dodge something. Xiaofu had to think for a while before it came to him that this was his grandfather. But why would his grandfather not be asleep at this time of night?

Empty-headedly, he watched his grandfather’s silhouette and listened to the melancholy sound of the rain. Just then his sister, still asleep, turned over to face him. As she did so she spoke in her dreams: “Xiaofu, Xiaofu, nest buns!”

In return, Xiaofu whispered again: “Sis! Sis!”

But she did not speak again, and the room returned to silence.

As before, there was no answer. Moments later the boy himself was carried away by a wave of exhaustion to a hazy country ruled by fever, moaning, and delirium.

When he awoke it was already late in the morning of the following day. Who should he see but his grandmother at the side of the bed with concern and kindness in her eyes. When had she come up from the countryside? And there too was his sister standing beside the old woman. Otherwise, the room was quiet, no one else seemed to be around. He wondered where his stepmother, half-brother, and half-sister had gone.

“Feeling a little better, Xiaofu?” asked his grandmother anxiously.

“Granny!” This one word cost him such an effort.

“Where is it sore, where are you uncomfortable?” she asked.

He looked at her with lifeless eyes; and wearily closed them without answering her. His face was as red as an iron in the smith’s fire, his little nostrils flared feebly, and his breath was hurried and burning hot. By the time his grandmother asked him again he had already fallen back into an unhealthy sleep.

Glancing round the empty, quiet room, the old woman asked her granddaughter: “Where has your ma gone?”

“Home to her ma!”

“And your grandpa?”

“I don’t know. I saw him just a moment ago!”

The old woman had come to Peking only that morning (she came to the city about once a month or two to see them, and to get a little money from her son while she was there) and had found the place still as the grave. There was no sign of her daughter-in-law and her children, nor of her husband—her son, she knew, would be at work.

When she pushed open the door she saw only her older granddaughter sitting alone by the bed looking anxiously at the boy who lay there, her older grandson. Suddenly seeing her grandmother, the girl acted as if a savior had come in her hour of need, and launched herself into the dear old lady’s arms. Stroking the girl’s hair, the old woman felt as if something had caught in her throat, and at first she said nothing.

An hour later the old man came back. Seeing his wife, he seemed startled at first, but a moment later he crawled like a ghost into his little hovel.

“Look how ill Xiaofu is, and not a soul at home!” It wasn’t clear whether the old woman was complaining to her husband, or just muttering to herself.

“How was I to know he was ill?” retorted the old man coolly. “He was right as rain yesterday, wasn’t he?”

As he spoke he looked nervously all around him, then ever so carefully removed one third of the tobacco from the end of a cigarette, got out a little bag from his pocket and put some white stuff from it into the cigarette, and finally replaced the tobacco he had taken out. Then he lit up and began to smoke slowly.

Inside, the boy woke up again, opened his eyes a crack, and said weakly: “I’m hungry, Granny!”

“Didn’t anyone make breakfast this morning?” the old woman asked her granddaughter.

The old woman searched all round the room but found nothing.

“Don’t you know where it’s kept, the maize flour or whatever?” she asked her husband.

“How should I know where it’s kept?”

The old woman looked round again carefully, but there was nothing at all that could be eaten.

“That woman surely has a poisonous heart,” grumbled the old woman. “To leave nothing at all—what were they to eat?”

“Are you telling me you eat nothing at all?” she turned again to her husband.

But there was no reply from the old man. When she went out to look, she found him snoring soundly—he’d had a sleepless night with the rain coming into his lean-to, and just now he had smoked a good fix. Angry, his wife stared at him for a while, but there was nothing she could do.

Supporting her grandson and leading her granddaughter by the hand, she walked into the middle courtyard, put on a smiling face, and implored Mrs. Zeng: “How do you do, Mrs. Zeng? I’m sorry, Mrs. Zeng, can you give a nest bun or two to these children? The boy’s taken real bad, but his stepmother has gone off to her mother’s, not leaving so much as half a bun for them to eat. The poor children haven’t had a thing to eat for two days now!”

“Ah, how do you do, Mrs. Lin?” said Mrs. Zeng. “Please come in and sit down. We have freshly steamed mantou!”⁶

The old woman sat Xiaofu down in a chair. His eyelids were drooping, and he was too tired to try to keep them open.

Mrs. Zeng bustled around, selecting a few hot mantou from the steamer and putting them on plates in front of the two children. Hearing the word mantou, Xiaofu smartly opened his eyes and grew lively again. Like a ravenous eagle, he grabbed a mantou in clawlike fingers and began greedily eating. But after only one bite, his brows creased into a frown and a pained look came across his face. Bringing the mantou close to his eyes, he looked again and again at it, as if trying to see if what he was eating was really a mantou and not a stone.

He looked, nibbled a bit more, looked again, and then, after forcing himself to eat a few more mouthfuls, he shook his head and put the mantou down and ate no more.

“I can’t get it down, Granny!” he said, and dejectedly closed his lifeless eyes once more.

That night neither the children’s stepmother nor their father returned home. They knew that their father would have gone to his mother-in-law’s straight from work, as he had done before.

Xiaofu went on sleeping all evening, dead to the world. Next day he awoke only a couple of times, and even then his eyes stayed firmly shut and he did not respond when spoken to. Sitting on the edge of the bed, his grandmother thought he looked close to death. She wrung her hands and her eyes filled up with tears.

The boy’s father and stepmother came home together toward evening.

The grandmother complained to her son: “See how sick the boy is, how could you just go off without a care? If you had to go, how could you not leave so much as a single nest bun? Anyone would think you wanted the boy to die!”

Lin Dashun stayed silent, not replying, but his wife began to roar: “Heaven is my witness, if I didn’t leave some maize flour for them let it strike me and my children barren and let me die a bad death!”

“What good are such oaths in this day and age?” the old woman spat back, not letting her off so easily. “Why would I falsely accuse you! Just go and ask Mrs. Zeng. If there had been any maize flour would I have asked Mrs. Zeng to give them some mantou?”

“That’s nothing to do with me. All I know is I left maize flour for them. Some swine, some mongrel bastard must have sold it.” By now she was shouting loudly. “It was some swine, some mongrel bastard son of a whore that sold it!”

She knew who it was who had taken the flour. From outside, the children’s grandfather could be heard muttering: “I don’t know anything about any maize flour!”

Like people who have lost all human sense of goodness, like wild beasts, they snarled and fought around a little boy’s deathbed, shouting fit to raise the roof, implacable and unstoppable. And thus it was amid such venomous sounds of cursing and accusation that an unfortunate boy slipped unnoticed from an unhappy world.

“Aiya!—oh my God—and they say I deliberately caused his death!—as heaven is my witness—oh my God!”

Even while the wailing and weeping was going on, Li Jirong and Zeng Simian began debating the problem.

“What a vicious woman that is!” Once again our young humanitarian took up the cudgels on behalf of humanity. “To treat a living, breathing child like that; why, she as good as tortured him to death!”

Listening to Li’s long and profound sighs, Zeng Simian looked coolly at him but said nothing. The corners of his unspeaking mouth held a cold smile that was akin to fury.

“Oh my God … !” Another shrill cry came from the front courtyard.

Listening to this shrieking of a woman who had lost all sense of human goodness, Li Jirong frowned, depression and dejection showing in his face. “The stepmothers of China!” he muttered, as though talking in his sleep. “The stepmothers of China!” he repeated. “I just don’t understand why tragedies like this seem to be inevitable in human society, especially in China!”

At his side, Zeng Simian couldn’t help wanting to laugh at the sight of his sorrowful expression, like that of an actor in a Western-style play.

“It seems your humanitarianism and your grumbling have been provoked yet again—this time by that woman in the front courtyard!” Zeng sneered. “But you’d better put away that humanitarianism of yours, it’s not worth a dime! Let me tell you: that stuff can’t be applied to China, it’s just too far from the reality!”

“Here we go again! I only have to open my mouth for you to accuse me of humanitarianism,” said Li Jirong, crossly. “So I suppose in your view that child deserved to die!”

“How should I know? Look at you, you look as if you want to take a bite out of me! Hey, hey, Jirong, don’t get me wrong, I’m not out to pick a quarrel with you!”

Zeng very nearly laughed out loud at the childish manner of Li’s outburst. After a little pause, he continued what he had been saying, but in a more serious tone.

“However, there is a very obvious truth to be observed here, which is worthy of our careful consideration: there’s a two-thirds probability that that child was destined to die anyway. It’s mere chance that the agency of his dying fell into his stepmother’s hands.”

“Mere chance or not, there’s no getting away from the fact of that woman’s responsibility for the boy’s death!” Li made his point forcefully.

“From what you say,” said Zeng, deliberately provoking his young friend, “if you were a judge that woman would certainly receive a heavy punishment. And if you handed down such a punishment, then I would call you a truly excellent judge. But looking at it from another angle, you would be a truly dreadful so-and-so, a machine for the implementation of the law. If you … Well, how about we broaden the question out a bit?” Zeng dropped his mocking tone. “Because in this way you will immediately see how negative your methods are, and how unsuitable they are to China….”

“Words of wisdom, words of wisdom!” Li Jirong was quickly learning a mocking tone from Zeng; far from backing down, he now went on the counterattack. “Summing up everything you’ve said, we can conclude that China has no use for morality, isn’t that right? In other words the Chinese are neither more nor less than savages. Well, in that case you are very welcome to go and live abroad!”

“Oh no!” said Zeng Simian gravely. “I think you misunderstood me! I was only saying that morality is something to be studied and put into practice by a nation of people where there is health and freedom in life, and where normal faculties of thought and judgment are maintained. But the problem these people here face is how to stay alive, and how to overcome all the obstacles that threaten their lives. They are toiling to escape with their lives from a dead-end street. They are constantly faced with hunger and death! They are puppets in the hands of Fate….”

“Puppets in the hands of Fate?” echoed Li. It was unclear whether he sought clarification or was just mocking Zeng.

“Yes, puppets in the hands of Fate!” Zeng Simian repeated himself impatiently. Then he resumed his cold, mocking tone: “It’s the stage of Fate that they tread, but they don’t even know it: they’re fumbling in the darkness. Sometimes, whether consciously or unconsciously reacting to something, they do try to flee the stage. Indeed, their efforts to escape began a very long time ago. There are records of this from ancient times. More recently, we’ve seen the National Revolution of 1911, the May Fourth Movement, literacy movements, concern for the woman question, rural emancipation, labor security, reforms to the family system … and so on and so forth. But long ages of history have made China’s stage of Fate as invulnerable as a prison. The way things are today shows us just how puny the effects and achievements of all their struggles have been. And the clearest evidence of all is that they are still hungry.

“This is the heavy historical burden they bear. They’re like fish swimming around at the bottom of a net. Here they live and die, laugh or weep: stepmothers mistreat stepchildren; they pour their sewage out at their neighbors’ doors; mothers and children, brothers and sisters fall out over a couple of nest buns; theft, drunkenness, drugs, crime, idleness…. Both abusers and abused (in other words, those who live and those who die) are puppets of Fate. And what is Fate? When you come down to it, it is poverty, ignorance, conformism, illness, disorder, homelessness, poor hygiene, lack of safe and reliable medical facilities, substandard education, official and commercial corruption, opium and gambling addiction, suspicion toward new systems and new things…. All of these, the iron hooves that trample them day after day, are the heritage of their ancestors!”

With a look Zeng signaled to his wife—who had just come in from the yard to say something to them—not to interrupt. After a pause he continued.

“You know very well how the families of this tenement are getting poorer and poorer, one step at a time, don’t you? And you know how they go from poverty to annihilation? If ever they fall just once into the grip of poverty, it’s so hard to break out again. Poverty is a calamity in life; it brings about a vicious cycle, which is to say it induces every adverse circumstance, and soon there is no telling where lies cause and where effect. A deep abyss of death is created, in which poverty’s captives thrash about, trying to keep their heads above water, with no hope of escape.

“Their wages are too low: what the father earns in a day is usually enough only to maintain his own animal needs, and the material needs of his family have to be found by each individual member. For this reason, not only the father but even their little ones’ opportunities for betterment and advancement are all mercilessly cut out. And so their children—their posterity, and China’s second and third generations—have no choice but to accept the same status and the same conditions as their fathers, and struggle on like them. This is just their fate, their present situation.”

“Oh, I see,” said Li Jirong disdainfully. “There I was, thinking you had some fresh new idea, but you go on and on and it turns out that all you have is a snare for your own neck. You’re the one who’s the real humanitarian. Well then, according to you, what should they do for the best?”

“Do for the best?” Zeng echoed scornfully. “How should I know what they should do for the best?”

“Well, that’s strange. You prattle on and on with your grand discourse, and in the end all you have is ‘How should I know?’ What a lot of words for so little substance!”

“No substance? Fine! I admit there’s no substance. My aim was merely to set out the facts. As to the question of what they should do for the best, we can only leave that up to them. Luckily they are a clever race, it seems to me that what they lack is actually not the means but the willpower. That’s right, it’s probably something like willpower that they lack—or, to put it another way, they lack practicality!”

With this Zeng fell silent. Judging by how extremely fed up he looked, one would say that he must be thoroughly sick of discussing such pointless and nauseating affairs.

“So there you go again, talking and talking and then … suddenly you break off without rhyme or reason! Utterly lacking in rhetorical organization, and just silly!” It was not clear whether Li Jirong’s dissatisfied grumbles were addressed to himself or to Mrs. Zeng.

“The widow’s son just came back,” reported Mrs. Zeng, after a pause in which she judged that the two men had finished talking, “but the old lady’s quilt is gone and the money is all spent. Yan Laoliu wouldn’t let it rest; he said he’d get the police. The widow took fright at that and gave him twenty yuan to put an end to it.”

Mrs. Zeng stopped talking when she saw that the two men seemed to be neither listening nor not listening. They remained silent.

By now the hysterical shrieking in the front yard had stopped and only the sound of desolate weeping continued to reverberate through the hushed compound.

At dusk the next day a small coffin was silently carried out through Hatamen Gate.⁷

Toward evening, when Li Jirong saw the lonely figure of the dead boy’s sister secretly shedding tears while working the bellows her brother had worked before her, he remembered what Zeng Simian had said the night before. Here he was now getting a clear glimpse of how it was the fate of a nation of people to get poorer and poorer, one step at a time, and to go from poverty to annihilation, one step at a time.

Mrs. Shao was beginning once again to move her flowerpots indoors. Standing by one of the pots, she looked at the mess of yellow leaves on the ground and the half-naked branches shivering in the cool wind, and said with real feeling: “How quickly the time passes. Before we know it winter will be upon us again!”

As she spoke she pruned the branches of one withering plant after another.

“This summer when I brought the plants out, Old Mrs. Yan was still living across the yard. Who’d have thought that only a couple of months later she would have moved away. Her family scattered, Yan Laosan dead, how our compound has changed! Who knows what other changes there may be by this time next year!”

“Yes!” chimed in Mrs. Zhuang. “Only a few months ago my husband was saying we should find somewhere else and move, but now the compound’s already much less unruly, so I told him there’s no need!”

Yes, just as Mrs. Shao said, this compound had changed. And top of the list of changes was the change in ownership.

During the summer the authorities had discovered drugs, including opium and heroin, at the owner’s barbershop. The shop was closed and sealed and its employees took to their heels. Sentence came down one month later: three years in prison. Two months later, according to the wishes of the owner’s first wife, the compound was sold to a member of that new class that is so adaptable to prevailing conditions and so adept at taking advantage of opportunities, that class which is most capable of bringing its strengths into full play precisely when social conditions are at their most unstable.

Among the changes rippling out from this sudden disturbance of the previous calm were, naturally, changes affecting the inhabitants of the compound. First of all, old Mrs. Yan’s security of tenure suffered a shock. Secondly, at the suggestion of the new landlord, the two families in the front courtyard had to find somewhere else and move.

This affable middle-aged man had taken one look at the battered furniture, piles of coal, kindling, and so on stuffed into every available space of the front courtyard, wrinkled his brows in a frown, and said: “Filthy! Just filthy!”

And so, two months previously, one by one the old lady, the Lins, and the widow and her children had moved out.

“Will the old lady be going back to live with her daughter?” Mrs. Zeng asked Mrs. Shao one day.

“Her daughter? Huh!” Mrs. Shao snorted dismissively. “Who knows where the daughter herself is even going to find a place to live now! Think about it: a concubine, and one who hasn’t even produced any children; now she doesn’t have her husband with her anymore, do you think she’ll be able to challenge the legal wife? I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t even have a place to stay herself, so how do you think she’s going to take the old lady in?”

“Well then, surely the old lady can’t go back to live with Laosan’s family?”

“Where else can she go? Laoliu doesn’t have a home of his own, he eats and sleeps at the shop, so where would he put the old lady if she went to him?”

“But Laosan’s dead, isn’t he?”

Sure enough, the old lady had gone back to live with Laosan’s family. Unfortunately it was just then that Laosan died in the outbreak of bubonic plague that was terrorizing Peking, so who was going to look after his mother and the rest of his family?

As for Laoliu, since the debacle of his marriage he had been very depressed and full of regret. In particular, he could not get out of his head the heartbreaking thought that the five hundred yuan he had struggled so hard to save for over twenty years was now spent. So he resolved to put aside all other things and concentrate single-mindedly on doing his job in the pancake bar to try to put together a bit of money again.

“With a bit of money I can get a new wife!” was what he thought.

And finally, it seems just a few more words are required regarding the recent circumstances of this courtyard dwelling. Shao Chengquan had now sunk to the status of an ordinary resident, and whenever it was time to pay the rent—he too now had to pay rent—he would feel an inner discomfort that might last up to half of the following month. Mrs. Zhuang’s children had by now been educated by her into the most well-behaved and obedient of children, while her husband had enjoyed great good fortune in his finances. He had earned quite a bit of money this spring, and Mrs. Zhuang, in turn, had very quickly learned how to cherish her own possessions. For example, when Mrs. Lu would ask to borrow a stovepipe for a while she would turn her down absolutely flat. Mrs. Lu herself meanwhile was very busy plaguing her husband because he wouldn’t hire a maid for her. That warm-hearted humanitarian of ours had for some unknown reason changed overnight into a melancholy, gloomy person. The people who had moved into the front courtyard were altogether two persons more numerous than the two previous families … and various other similar minor circumstances…. That’s all.

After about one more month, winter gradually descended on the ancient city of Peking. On the day that the last yellow leaf was blown down from the treetops, while he was out walking on West Chang’an Street, Zeng Simian saw a youth with a hempen rope tied round his middle, making him look like a little Buddhist monk, on whose arm an old woman was stumbling along, finding it very hard to walk. Zeng recognized these beggars as the old lady who had been his neighbor in the compound until a few months ago and her grandson, the son of the deceased Yan Laosan. The youth stared coldly at Zeng, then without any expression on his face, as if toward a stranger, held out his right hand. At the same time the old lady, who now seemed almost totally blind, began pleading in the most piteous of tones: “Kind sir, please do a good deed today, oh please take pity on us who have nothing to eat. May heaven reward your kindness, sir….”

Zeng Simian looked at them with deep sorrow in his heart, took out a little money, and stuffed it in the boy’s hand just as he would for any beggar. Then he walked on without looking back. As he did so, his feelings were akin to loathing and contempt.

4. Brick bed platform (kang 炕): in traditional houses in north China sleeping quarters (often also living quarters) are usually equipped with a built-in hollow brick platform about two foot high, for sitting and sleeping. Heated by an integral stove, the kang usually stretches the entire length of one of the walls and often occupies more than half the total area of the room. In “Oleander” every “bed” mentioned is a kang, except for Mrs. Shao’s movable one (chuang 床) in the second paragraph.