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

The movie China: My Native Land (1980) was a biopic of my father, Zhong Lihe. Without an iron will, nobody could have persevered in his ideals from start to finish, against poverty and illness, as thoroughly as he did, as seen in the movie. My father was a writer who stuck to his principles and never ceased to plow the literary field. His final, fatal, attack of tuberculosis came while he was in the act of revising his newest literary work, so that he has been dubbed “a writer who died, pen in hand, in a pool of his own blood.” The volume of short fiction, Oleander, printed in Peking in 1945, was the only book Zhong Lihe saw published in his lifetime; his only completed full-length novel, Songs of Bamboo Hat Hill, won Taiwan’s top prize for long fiction in 1956; his other works include the four-part novella Homeland. The year 2009 saw the publication of the eight-volume New Complete Works of Zhong Lihe.

A literary vocation is an extremely hard career. For Zhong Lihe it was all the more so because his golden age as a writer coincided with the period in postwar Taiwan when anti-communist imperatives held sway. The true-to-life descriptions of the land, the people, everyday life, and various intricate social phenomena that dominated Zhong Lihe’s works were pigeonholed as “nativist literature.” Naturally, most of his work never saw the light of day; even more naturally, there was no question of his being able to live by his pen. However, Zhong Lihe always believed that true worth would out; good literature could not be allowed to languish in obscurity. And so it has proved! Half a century has gone by, and at last my father’s high place in literary history has been confirmed. Here in Meinong, where Zhong Lihe lived and wrote and fell in love, the Zhong Lihe Memorial Institute, Taiwan’s first such institution to be funded in the community, was built in 1983; and before long, Taiwan’s first “Zhong Lihe” literary eco-park will also start to take shape here at the foot of “Bamboo Hat Hill.”

It may be said that Zhong Lihe gave his life for his literature, but it has also been said that “it was Zhong Pingmei (Taimei) who brought out the literature in him,” and “without Zhong Pingmei there would have been no literature.” Zhong Lihe’s wife, my mother Zhong Taimei, was the epitome of the virtuous woman: she adored her family, loved her husband, and was devoted to us children. She was friendly, meek, and warm toward others. During her husband’s long, recurrent illnesses she steadfastly bore the brunt of family duties and family economics on her own slender shoulders. She could do the work of any man—even the arduous and dangerous job of illegal logging.¹ “Pingmei” (the name my father usually used for fictional portrayals of her) never questioned her fate and was surely a heroine among Hakka women. And now, it is extremely fitting that the bridge that links the Zhong Lihe Memorial Institute to the rest of the world has been rebuilt and renamed as “Pingmei Bridge,” because in life and death Zhong Lihe and Zhong Taimei could never be separated by the swiftest of torrents or the widest of rivers.

On August 4, 1960, Zhong Lihe was in the act of carrying out revisions to his newly completed novella “Rain” when tuberculosis struck again. Coughing up blood, he collapsed onto his manuscript and died at the age of forty-four. To have lived such a short time on earth, yet to achieve such a lofty posthumous reputation must be due not only to the author’s own noble and steadfast character, but even more to the truth, goodness, and beauty of human nature that his literature expresses, and to the honesty, detail, and warmth of his writing. When we read his work we sense an elegant melancholy, but no plaintiveness; it conveys a profoundly tolerant attitude to Heaven, to Fate, and to the harshness of Time. Throughout his writings we find rationalism coupled with ardor and a fervent love of life. Even though Zhong’s typical subjects were the most ordinary and humble of rural people living the harshest, most basic of lives, he shows how tenaciously they struggle with themselves, with poverty. In their unrelenting struggle readers may clearly sense the nobility and dignity of human nature. Opportunists and waverers carry no weight in his literature: he felt a mixture of sadness, pity, and disgust for characters such as Li Xinchang in “Swimming and Sinking.” Zhong believed that human beings should live their lives with dignity, should fight for life. He revered those who lived courageously and conscientiously, and part of his reason for writing was to eulogize them. As society grows ever more utilitarian, Zhong Lihe’s works appear all the more pure and moving.

The faithfulness with which Zhong Lihe’s works record the social conditions of his times offers us many historical glimpses. For example, “My Grandma from the Mountains,” “First Love,” and “From the Old Country”—three stories of childhood and coming of age set in Gaoshu—depict Taiwan aboriginals, Hakkas, and Mainlanders, showing their differing special characteristics and customs. From his period in Mainland China, Zhong’s stories “In the Willow Shade,” “Oleander,” and “The Fourth Day” emphasize the contrasting outlook and behavior of Koreans, Japanese, North Chinese, and people from Taiwan (or “the South”) like himself. Then again, when Zhong Lihe returned to Kaohsiung in 1946, he revisited the homeland he had been missing for so many years. Both his father and his “grandma from the mountains” had died in 1943, and his brothers had gone their separate ways amid the family’s failing fortunes. The result was that Zhong’s four Homeland stories—“Zugteuzong,” “Forest Fire,” “Uncle A-Huang,” and “My ‘Out-Law’ and the Hill Songs”—chronicle the heartbreaking poverty and dereliction of postwar Meinong, in particular the economic and ecological devastation of the drought years of the time.

The next phase of my father’s life, his last ten years, was spent in unemployment, poverty, failing health, and an oppressive environment; any one of these things was enough to threaten to destroy him and his family. During these years he wrote “My Study,” “The Grassy Bank,” “The Plow and the Sky,” “The Little Ridge,” “Rain,” and other works that record his observation of life and work in the homeland, together with his own experiences and emotional reactions.

For a book of Zhong Lihe’s works to be appearing in English translation, we have Dr. Tommy McClellan and my eldest brother, Zhong Tiemin, to thank. In spite of Dr. McClellan’s proficiency in Chinese, he needed help with many aspects of Hakka language and culture that appear in my father’s works. In preparing to do the translation, he visited Taiwan several times, took part three times in the Bamboo Hat Hill Literary Seminar in order to delve deeply into Zhong Lihe’s literary world (in 2006 contributing a lecture of his own to the seminar), and even spent ten weeks of the summer of 2010 living and working in the Zhong Lihe Memorial Institute itself. Through several years he met many times with Zhong Tiemin to ask linguistic, cultural, and geographical questions on the texts, and to thoroughly discuss literary aspects of my father’s work. Only after these preparations did Dr. McClellan begin work on the translation. Through McClellan’s meticulous, sensitive work, Zhong Lihe’s writing may at last find a place in world literature.

Zhong Lihe was a lonely intellectual, an isolated writer. Most of his life was lived among family and neighbors in remote rural Taiwan who did not share his passion for literature and the realm of ideas. Even his eight years in Mainland China were largely spent among philistines, and his beloved wife and soul mate, my mother Zhong Taimei, was actually illiterate. Only in the last three and a half years of his life did Zhong finally find a group of intellectual friends and equals to belong to. After his novel Songs of Bamboo Hat Hill won Taiwan’s top prize for long fiction in 1956 he was invited by Zhong Zhaozheng (no relation) to participate in launching a literature circular entitled Literary Friends Bulletin. Although he never met most of the “Literary Friends” in person, not even Zhong Zhaozheng himself, the Bulletin and the extensive letter correspondence it generated were enormously important to Zhong. Finally he felt connected to a group of brother writers who validated his long, lonely years of literary struggle.

Zhong Lihe was physically isolated from his Bulletin friends, who were almost all resident in urban North Taiwan, but their appreciation and acceptance of him and his work gave him an enormous boost. Now Tommy McClellan, although separated from Zhong Lihe by very large distances in space and time and language, is another kind of “literary friend,” of whom I feel my father would have been very glad.

1. See Zhong Lihe’s story “Pin-jian fuqi” 貧賤夫妻 (1957–1959), translated as “Together Through Thick and Thin” by Shiao-ling Yu, in Joseph S. M. Lau, ed., The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction Since 1926 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 57–67. If we read the story as recorded fact, as people generally do with Zhong Lihe’s autobiographical fiction, it seems that Zhong Taimei, in despair at her family’s poverty, on one occasion joined a gang of local people to fell and steal timber from the state-owned forests around the Zhong home. Unluckily, Forest Patrol officers discovered the gang’s activities that day. Taimei avoided capture, but dropped her log and sustained cuts and bruises in the chase. She never went logging again.