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

Zhong Lihe (1915–1960) lived the first thirty years of his life as a citizen of the expanding Japanese Empire: mostly in his native South Taiwan, but also, for nearly eight years, in Manchukuo and Peking.¹ Zhong was the third of seven sons (by two concurrent wives) of a prominent local landowner and entrepreneur and grew up in comfort in a small village in his native Gaoshu township (Pingtung county), where he received a good Sino-Japanese education up to the age of sixteen. From 1932 he worked on his father’s latest venture, a coffee and fruit estate at Jianshan 尖山,² Meinong district, Kaohsiung, where he fell in love with one of the day laborers, Zhong Taimei 鍾台妹. The ancient Chinese taboo against same-surname marriage was already much less prevalent elsewhere, but remained very strong in rural Hakka Taiwan, so that the couple’s families, especially Zhong Lihe’s father, vehemently opposed their wish to marry. Eventually they were obliged to elope to Manchukuo in 1940, Zhong Lihe having first gone there alone in 1938 to establish a livelihood. In 1941 they moved to Peking.

By the time the Zhongs returned to Taiwan in spring 1946, after years of struggle with poverty and the bare beginnings of Zhong’s career as a writer, they had a five-year-old son, Tiemin 鐵民, born in Shenyang,³ whose congenital good health seemed to vindicate Zhong Lihe’s modern romantic and scientific principles. Although they had also had an infant death in Peking, they went on to have four more healthy children between 1946 and 1958. However, Zhong Lihe contracted pulmonary tuberculosis soon before or after returning to Taiwan, where they had received a one-seventh portion of the family’s greatly diminished property.⁴ Zhong spent three years in a Taipei sanatorium, returning home to Meinong in October 1950 after radical, life-threatening surgery as well as treatment with the new antibiotics. Earlier the same year nine-year-old Tiemin had contracted tuberculosis of the spine, which left him permanently disabled. The difficulties and sadnesses of the Zhongs’ devoted marriage reached a tragic climax in 1954 with the death of their seven-year-old second son, Limin 立民, of a sudden, acute bronchitis, which had been denied effective and timely treatment by the family’s unrelenting poverty and the inaccessibility of their home at Jianshan.

Zhong Lihe made great sacrifices to establish the basis for marriage to Taimei, and was the family breadwinner for a time in Mukden and Peking, working as a commercial driver and as a civil service interpreter. The latter job was even shorter-lived than the former, however, and from then (about 1941–1942) until his death Zhong increasingly depended on Taimei to support the family, while he devoted himself to literature. His few months as a temporary Mandarin teacher at a community middle school in Pingtung in 1946, cut short by the onset of TB, was the only time that he appeared to have prospects of forging a career in the intellectual field. During the fourteen years and four months of his life after returning to Taiwan, Zhong’s only regular contributions to family monetary income were provided by that brief stint as a teacher plus two or three months of clerking at Meinong Town Hall in 1952 and another clerical job in a paralegal firm, which he managed to hold down from February 1957 to December 1958. He was forced to resign from both clerical jobs because of ill health. It appears almost needless to say that in his whole life he earned next to nothing from his literary work.

Zhong had begun writing fiction and other prose in earnest in 1938 and had financed the publication of a volume of fiction in Peking in 1945.⁵ Apart from the contents of that book, before 1950 Zhong had completed only one further novella, four more short stories, and two essays, of which only two short stories and one essay had made it into print. After falling ill and being forced to quit the teaching job in Pingtung, Zhong wrote almost nothing, apart from a substantial diary, during the three whole years 1947–1949. However, during his last months in the Songshan Sanatorium, May to October 1950, he at last began to create some of his most important literary works.

Up to 1950, then, Zhong Lihe’s literary output and record of publication had been very meager. Reasons for this may include the difficult conditions imposed by exile, poverty, and ill health. Another important factor was Zhong’s linguistic background as a Hakka Chinese in Japanese Taiwan. His native Hakka has no standard written form of its own, and Zhong was formally educated to read and write Japanese and less formally taught to read a dead language: classical Chinese.

The Chinese of Taiwan (that is, the 95 percent and more of the population who were of Han Chinese extraction, including the Hakka) were largely excluded from the New Literature being created in mainland China from the mid to late 1910s in modernized baihua 白話 (vernacular Chinese based on Mandarin). Taiwan’s own New Culture Movement of the 1920s emulated the developments on the Mainland, but was discouraged by the Japanese authorities, and there were few native examples for Zhong Lihe to learn from. He began teaching himself to read and write the older form of baihua from Chinese novels that predated the May Fourth Movement until he had the opportunity to encounter the latter in the 1930s:

Inevitably, Zhong Lihe’s self-education in modern written Chinese, as well as in literary technique and style, was slow. His early work was painfully created, and it was not until 1950 that his literary voice appears to have fully matured. He finally became prolific in the last decade of his life, a decade he might not have seen without surgery at Songshan, and began to produce work of the highest quality. However, for most of the 1950s Zhong still had only rare success in submitting his work for publication, and only the last two or three years of his life saw a relatively large number of his short stories and essays published, including eighteen in Lianhe bao fukan 《聯合報》副刊 (United Daily News literary supplement), then one of the world’s leading fora for literature in Chinese, in 1959 and 1960 (including one story that was being serialized at the time of his death). Zhong’s only completed full-length novel, Lishan nongchang 笠山農場 (Bamboo hat hill farm), won the top Republic of China (Taiwan) prize for long fiction in 1956, but remained unpublished at his death. On August 4, 1960, Zhong Lihe was at home in Meinong working on revisions to a new novella, “Yu” 雨 (Rain), when he coughed up blood and died in its pool on the manuscript.

From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan is intended not only to present a selection of the best of Zhong Lihe’s literary work but also to represent his life and times. The circumstances and events Zhong witnessed in his native Taiwan, in Manchuria, and in North China during and after Japanese rule invest his fiction with considerable documentary interest to anyone seeking insights into the turbulent and complex history of East Asia in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Therefore the selections have been arranged in chronological order according to their content’s relevance to the author’s life.⁷

Part I below begins with the story of early childhood “My Grandma from the Mountains” which, like “First Love” and “From the Old Country,” is set in Zhong Lihe’s native Pingtung. Unlike the second and third selections, however, “My Grandma” goes beyond the village and its immediate environs into the hills above it to the east. The importance of this landscape to Zhong Lihe may be seen in the record of his participation, at the age of twenty-one, in an expedition to the summit of North Mount Dawu (3,092 m.), the last 3,000-meter-plus peak at the southern end of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range. This travelogue begins:

The importance of physical environment is quite evident in Zhong Lihe’s literature, as we shall see, but in “My Grandma” the human element turns out to be even more important than the topographical. The story is about “A-He” ’s personal relationship with his step-grandmother, and also about her special status as a member of the Paiwan “mountain people.” The I-narrator A-He’s childish perspective—Zhong Lihe’s representation of his own innocence as a very young child⁹—shows the ignorance of Han Chinese toward aboriginal ways, lending them a mystic and slightly frightening quality. In particular, it is Grandma’s singing of unfamiliar songs in her own language that spooks A-He. She sings apparently in celebration of the mountains of her people, as she and A-He walk further and further into them. When he bursts out crying at the strangeness of everything, she appears hurt and uncomprehending. In the end Grandma is just Grandma, and the bond of love between her and her little grandson is touchingly evoked, but there is also a sense that Grandma is obliged to deny her own culture in order to keep peace in her husband’s family. “My Grandma from the Mountains” was one of the first of Zhong Lihe’s works to appear in Taiwan school textbooks after 2000. No doubt it was selected not only for the central theme of grandparental love, but also as an expression of the multiculturalism that gained currency in Taiwan from the start of the first non-Kuomintang administration in that year.

On account of its frank, though innocent, description of the female form as seen by teenage boys, “First Love” would be less likely to feature in a schoolbook. Latent eroticism from the start of the story turns to more direct eroticism after A-He’s “avowal,” which amounts to no more than his saying “Chunmei’s quite good-looking, I suppose?” to his friends. The I-narrator appears utterly innocent of any smutty thought about the young woman he admires. His mild obsession with her begins with her appearance among the many human subjects for his sketches, and it is only a friend’s teasing that alerts him to the possibility that her breasts may be somewhat out of the ordinary. Observing her again at the next opportunity, he is relieved to find that his favorite model is buxom, yes, but still proportioned within his acceptable aesthetic standards.

The action of this story mainly takes place in the author-narrator’s native village, but like “My Grandma” it is made more vivid by a passage set amid distinctive scenery (just) outside the village: “the river flats, where maidengrass grew among the boulders.” Like many rivers in Taiwan, the one that flows past Zhong Lihe’s native village in Pingtung takes the form, outside of the rainy season, of a very wide, sandy, and stony flood channel with the river stream in the middle. In Zhong Lihe’s stories young people come to the river flats to hang out together—swimming, paddling, catching frogs or crickets, or just lazing around on the boulders. It is a perfect arena for the teenage boys in “First Love” to gather and express their newfound sexuality in music, banter, and bragging.

It is no coincidence that singing features in the first two stories of this collection. Music plays a significant role in five of the sixteen pieces collected here, and a less significant role in a further two. Zhong Lihe was very interested in folk song: he collected the lyrics of two hundred and twenty-two of the local shan’ge 山歌 (hill songs), which appear in volume eight of New Complete Works along with a few tunes in his own notation. Zhong left no indication as to whether he simply recorded those two hundred and twenty-two songs, or whether he adapted any or all of them in any way. The songs that appear in “First Love” and elsewhere in his literature are not included in those two hundred and twenty-two and are assumed to be his own compositions, presented as extempore expressions of the singers’ emotions.

Zhong appears to have adopted the shan’ge as a natural and genuine artform of the people. The narrator of “First Love” considers these “rustic folk songs” not to be “fine” or “remarkable.” A character in another story is much more assertive of the cultural value of folk song: “[Park] believed that in any country the best and most direct reflection of life—especially the moral life of the two sexes—was the folk song” (see “In the Willow Shade”). Perhaps the local flavor of the shan’ge particularly appealed to Zhong as suiting his literary project, because although shan’ge of various forms are widespread throughout rural China and Taiwan, Zhong’s Hakka people, particularly in Meinong, consider their local form of shan’ge¹⁰ to be among the most distinctive and attractive features of their culture, alongside lanshan 藍衫 dresses (see “Zugteuzong” and “Rain”), oilpaper umbrellas, and water buffalo.

“First Love” approaches its subject with lighthearted sexually suggestive humor and straightforward realism; the use of shan’ge allows Zhong to express with greatest pathos the emotional pain and yearning of the boys. At the same time, the everyday setting of the river flats, the homemade huqin fiddle, and the smutty talk prevent the story becoming sentimental.

The third and last story under the heading “Formative Years” begins with the I-narrator in early childhood, as in “My Grandma.” By the end he is already a young adult, setting off to explore Mainland China. This I-narrator of “From the Old Country” appears to be the same autobiographical character as in the first two stories, although the name A-He does not appear here. In fact “Old Country” is even more strongly autobiographical than those two stories. Zhong Lihe blamed this for the story’s failure with several journals to which he submitted it. “It can’t be considered fiction,” he wrote to fellow writer and friend Liao Qingxiu on October 2, 1959. “At most it’s fictionalized autobiography, which is precisely why [The United Daily News] rejected it.”

“From the Old Country” never did make it into print during the author’s lifetime, but it has eventually become perhaps his most famous work of all. Oddly, it seems to owe that fame to certain manipulations and oversimplifications of what it actually contains.

The first part of “From the Old Country” (sections 1–2) is told from the perspective of the narrator in early childhood. The child’s naïve questions and puzzlement at the answers are humorous, but also make the adult reader feel that no wonder the child is confused. Starting with “Who are Old Country people?” and “Where is the Old Country? Is it very far?”, and touching on such burning issues as whether his family ever ate dog meat like “all Old Country people,” in simple terms the child’s central question is “Where do we come from?” But there seems to be nothing simple about the answers.

Moving from later childhood into adolescence, the narrator encounters first the hostile, contemptuous views of his Japanese teachers toward “Shina,” second his father and other villagers’ mixture of pride, shame, and disillusionment regarding “the Old Country,” and third his favorite (half-)brother’s ardent passion for “the Mainland, the fatherland.”

With regard to autobiography, it is the characterization of the narrator’s brother’s attitude to China that is of the greatest interest here. In real life Zhong Heming 和鳴, who is clearly meant here, was indeed the most active Chinese patriot among the seven Zhong brothers. “Old Country”’s account of his leaving for the Mainland refers to Heming’s risky 1940 adventure—he and his new bride, together with a cousin and another couple, took a route forbidden to them as Japanese citizens in order to join the anti-Japanese resistance in Canton province. On arrival the five young Taiwan Hakka intellectuals were suspected by the Kuomintang guerrillas of being Japanese spies and narrowly avoided execution. After months under arrest they were exonerated and then recruited, and spent the rest of the war doing paramedical, educational, propaganda, and other support work. Heming, who assumed the nom de guerre Haodong 浩東 while in China, became secretly associated with left-wing groups within the Resistance. After the war he was appointed headmaster of Keelung High School, and after the 228 Incident¹¹ he joined the (illegal) Chinese Communist Party and turned the school into one of the most important centers of Red organization in Taiwan. In October 1950, at the height of Taiwan’s White Terror, Zhong Haodong/Heming was executed after more than a year in prison.¹²

Although Heming/Haodong appears in the Chinese original of “From the Old Country” only as “Third Elder Brother,”¹³ it was courageous of Zhong Lihe to give him such a prominent role in the story, one based closely on the facts, during that period of suppression of communists. When “Third Elder Brother” returns from his first trip to the Mainland, the narrator’s response is not a political or patriotic one, but a cultural reaction to the gramophone recordings and postcards Heming brings home with him: “these arias, together with those enchanting views of famous places, stimulated my imagination enormously and deepened my longing for the land across the Strait.” Later, describing a political meeting apparently organized by Heming, the narrator lists a number of terms or slogans mentioned at the meeting, and comments: “I’d never been interested in these terms, and so I understood little of what I heard.”

Zhong Lihe and Zhong Heming, half-brothers almost identical in age, were the firmest of friends. The fictional characterization of the latter in “From the Old Country” suggests a protective elder brother, although Lihe was in fact slightly older than Heming, and in his autobiographical writings Zhong Lihe mentions Heming as an important influence on his early development as a writer. Having succeeded where Lihe failed in advancing beyond (upper) elementary education, Heming encouraged his early efforts and sent him literature from high school in Kaohsiung city and from university in Japan during the mid-1930s. However, “From the Old Country” reveals fundamental differences between the brothers in their attitude to China: Heming’s main concerns were political, while Lihe’s were cultural. Both brothers went to the Mainland, in 1938 (Lihe, for the first time) and 1940 (Heming, for his only lengthy visit). Heming went to seek out Chinese forces engaging the Japanese in guerrilla warfare. Lihe went to Manchukuo and later Peking, far behind Japanese lines, seeking elements of Chinese culture that survived beneath the international conflict. In part 2 of this book we may see something of what he found.

We should not, however, expect some variation on Patriot’s Progress, because “From the Old Country” has revealed great depths of ambiguity in Zhong Lihe’s attitude to China. Through a child’s eyes Zhong has exposed some of the absurdity for many Taiwan people of seeking identification with “the Old Country,” but equally the impossibility of clearly distinguishing a Taiwan ethnicity from that (or those) of the Mainland; he also shows the conflicted attitudes of his father’s generation—a mixture of reverence and disdain toward the land of their ancestors; and he even distances himself from his own dearly beloved brother’s Chinese nationalist politics. He appears to remain a cultural patriot of sorts, and his longing for personal understanding of his Chinese roots remains alive at the end of the story, which announces his departure for the Mainland. Here, the words “I am not a patriot” may be a case of protesting too much, but they must not be ignored because those that follow appear to confirm a certain reluctance: “I am not a patriot, but Old Country blood must flow back to the Old Country before it can stop seething! So it was with my brother, and nor could¹⁴ I be any exception.” In context and quoted in full, these last two sentences of “From the Old Country” express cynicism about China and about patriotism, but they also acknowledge that because Zhong’s Chinese blood still seethed with desire for knowledge of what China meant to him, he could not but go and see for himself, somehow reluctantly, and even though he was not a political nationalist like his brother.

Part 2 of this book is the “CJK” chapter of our selection from Zhong Lihe’s fiction, each of its stories in turn dealing with life’s difficulties for groups of Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese, respectively. The three stories, written between 1938 and 1945, are among Zhong’s earliest works; that is to say, their earliest versions predate all the other selections in this volume. These translations, however, follow the author’s revised versions, done at various known, unknown, or imprecisely known times between 1945 and 1959.¹⁵

“In the Willow Shade” is a simple story told by an I-narrator who does not have much involvement in the main plot and whose name (Zhong) and place of origin (Taiwan) are mentioned very much in passing. The story itself concerns two of “Zhong”’s Korean friends, classmates in the Manchuria Automobile School in Shenyang where all three are learning driving and motor maintenance in hope of finding lucrative employment in that rapidly developing industrial city. At the time of writing the first version of this story Zhong Lihe was enrolled in a driving school in Shenyang, and his ambition to find a livelihood as a driver was intimately connected with his plan to marry or elope with Zhong Taimei and start a new life with her on the Mainland. Remarkably, he keeps the anxiety and emotion that he must have been feeling almost completely out of this story, by telling instead two separate tales of trouble in love, marriage, and career. Park says of Kim: “He’s a sacrificial victim of the [Korean] system of early marriage and arranged marriage.” In reality this is true of both Park and Lim, but in different ways. Park is from a “comfortably-off family” and is a closer friend to Zhong because they share a similar educational background and interests, especially literature. But Zhong finds it difficult to understand why Park is so passive regarding his unhappy separation from his childhood sweetheart. When Park finally does act, quite suddenly, he puts his livelihood in jeopardy and the outcome appears very uncertain, because although he has graduated from driving school, he leaves without waiting for the issue of his license. The narrator appears on the one hand to approve of Park following his heart, but on the other to be very worried about his friend’s prospects in a world where money is everything.

“Willow Shade” has a very strong theme, common to much of Zhong Lihe’s work, of the ultimate importance of economic factors on individual and family life, which is most tellingly shown in the story of the other Korean. Kim is from a poorer background than Park, and is further burdened by an arranged marriage that made him a father by the age of fifteen. He is forced to quit driving school because he and his wife and daughter are almost starving to pay the fees. Ever optimistic and resourceful, he embarks on a new livelihood selling ice popsicles, but as autumn turns to winter he is unable to find new work and eventually leaves Shenyang, apparently to return to Korea. When he goes he has to give some bedding in lieu of the final rent to his Japanese landlady, a kindly old soul who has a very high opinion of Kim but whose own hand-to-mouth existence does not allow her to waive the rent.

Japanese people feature rarely in Zhong Lihe’s work, in spite of so much of it being set within the broader Japanese Empire. The little cameo of the Japanese landlady at the very end of “Willow Shade” reinforces the story’s theme of the extremely precarious economic situation of all sorts of ordinary people, be they from Taiwan, Korea, or even Japan herself. The result is that the compassion the story embodies toward people facing difficulties in their romantic and economic lives is extended universally, regardless of race or nationality.

No Japanese (or Koreans) appear in the novella “Oleander,” even though the action is explicitly identified as taking place during the Sino-Japanese conflict, approximately between 1942 and 1944; all the characters are Chinese, and apart from the Zeng family, which is from South China, all are from Peking and its environs. Not only does “Oleander” confine itself to Chinese characters in the setting of the once and future Chinese capital, but the narrative actually focuses quite explicitly on problems of the Chinese race. Words like “race,” “nation,” and “people” occur several times in the novella, always in a negative or sarcastic sense. These negative utterances are usually put in the mouth of the southerner, Zeng Simian, and may be an expression of Zhong Lihe’s own disillusionment at what he found when he came to live in what he had imagined as his own cultural heartland—“the Old Country.” Perhaps what he found was not so different from the crude racist propaganda of his Japanese teachers, for it turns out that the “Shina jin” (Chinamen) of “Oleander” are indeed “opium addicts and a shameless, filthy race,” among other unpleasant things. Then again, this novella dwells at great length on the crushing poverty that afflicts most of the families who inhabit the three courtyards of their typical Peking tenement dwelling. The moral shortcomings of these families are described mercilessly, but their almost impossible economic situation still invites compassion.

“The Fourth Day,” written in late 1945, is very unusual in Zhong Lihe’s opus. Not only is it not in the least autobiographical, but its single-viewpoint character is Japanese, as are all but one of the other characters. In the rest of Zhong Lihe’s entire literary output none of the main characters are Japanese. Told from the perspective of Komatsu, a junior functionary, this longish story imagines the experiences of Japanese residents of North China immediately after the surrender of August 15, 1945. In spite of concerning itself almost exclusively with Japanese people, this work does share some of the representative themes and concerns of Zhong Lihe’s literature. “The Fourth Day” deconstructs Japan’s nationalist-militarist myth, demonizing it in the figure and actions of one central negative character. For the rest of the large group of Japanese characters, on the fourth day after their emperor’s surrender, “war” and “nation” have suddenly become irrelevant. This is a huge relief to them, but also a source of great confusion and insecurity about the recent past and the immediate future:

The positive characters, chiefly the central character, Komatsu, and his friends, are just ordinary folk, much like their Chinese and Taiwan counterparts in Zhong Lihe’s other stories. Suzuki, for instance, is a big, strapping soldier whose army cap has been so constantly on his head that the forehead beneath is snowy white compared to his sunburned face. Surprisingly, it turns out he had been a violinist in a dance band before the war, but he announces near the end of the story that he has decided not to go back to that, but instead to seek factory work more suitable to his big hands. Suzuki embodies most of the Japanese whom Komatsu observes: drilled for years to think and talk of nothing but war and nation, and stunned by the abrupt reversion to the sole concern of “personal affairs.”

Variations on phrases like shanliang de renmen 善良的人們, which I translate here as “good and honest folk,” appear frequently enough in Zhong Lihe’s works to suggest that a concept of “simple goodness” was important to the author’s ideal of humanity. Although this conception is most closely associated with the Hakka peasantry of Zhong’s native South Taiwan, “The Fourth Day” is another story that shows that this notion was applicable to other classes and even other nations, even though no such similar phrase actually appears in this story.

“The Fourth Day” also shows considerable compassion toward the Japanese in defeat. One might have expected a person from Taiwan to be more concerned with China’s victory and the retrocession of Taiwan to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime. Yet perhaps it is not so surprising that Zhong Lihe empathized with Komatsu and his friends. In some nonfiction writings of 1945–1946 he expresses indignation at the fact that Taiwan residents of the Mainland were treated in the same way as Japanese and Koreans by the victorious Chinese government: their assets to be confiscated, their persons to be repatriated. It is not at all certain that Zhong Lihe planned, in 1945, to return to Taiwan, as he still felt that he and his wife would not be accepted at home, for the same reason that they left in the first place.

Treated by his own fellow “Old Country people” as if he were part of the defeated occupying forces, Zhong Lihe decided, or was forced, to join the repatriation to Taiwan in March–April 1946. The family did not at first go back to Meinong, but stayed with one of Zhong’s younger brothers, Zhong Lizhi 里志, not far away in Taiwan’s second city, Kaohsiung. Then came the job as a Mandarin teacher, cut short within a few months by the onset of Zhong’s tuberculosis. His unfitness for work forced him to settle his family (now with a new baby boy, Limin) at Jianshan, and then to go to Taipei for extended treatment, from October 1947. Turbulent events (Zhong was undergoing assessment in Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, in February–March 1947 and so witnessed part of the carnage of the 228 Incident), illness, and a gruelling treatment regime resulted in Zhong writing almost nothing in the years 1947–1949. When he began again in earnest in 1950 it was to work on a set of four short stories—Homeland (Guxiang 故鄉)—that arguably present the quintessential Zhong Lihe.

Three of the stories of Homeland were written in 1950, the first at Songshan while Zhong was being prepared for the surgical removal of six ribs and part of a lung. The success of the two operations, for which his doctors gave him only a fifty–fifty chance of survival, may have given Zhong an extra ten years of life. After five years of near-stagnation in his literary career, Homeland was a hugely significant relaunch. Although the four stories failed to find a publisher during the author’s lifetime, this probably shows that they are among the most undeserved victims of Taiwan’s postwar obsession with “conflict literature,” that is, anti-Japanese and anti-Communist writing.¹⁶ Their literary quality and importance is now widely acknowledged.

“Zugteuzong,” the first of the Homeland stories, is strongly reminiscent of “Guxiang” 故鄉 (“My Old Home,” 1921) by Lu Xun, whose strong influence on Zhong Lihe is clear in many of his works and explicit in some of his diaries and letters. The equally autobiographical narrators of the two stories are both returning to their native places after many years, and the pivotal idea in each story is the fond recollection of a friend in earlier life, followed by sadness at the discovery of his present benighted state and the gulf between him and the narrator in the present. Each story contains more than this common thread, but Lu Xun’s professed custom of adding optimistic “innuendoes” (qubi 曲筆)¹⁷—in “My Old Home” the innocence of the younger generation represented by the narrator’s nephew and his childhood friend Runtu’s son—is absent in “Zugteuzong.” In the latter the superstitious fatalism of the locals on the train is not brightened by any ray of hope. On the contrary, the devastation of drought is even surpassed in melancholy by the physical and spiritual decline of the narrator’s friend Bingwen, a former “literary youth.”

The fictional action of Homeland is supposed to take place over a short period after the autobiographical narrator A-He’s return to Meinong in spring 1946. The main focus throughout is on various aspects of economic difficulty being suffered by the district and the individuals who inhabit it. Much of this economic difficulty is specific to time and place: Bingwen’s unemployment is symptomatic of the changing times; the local people’s complaints are based in the real-life successive floods and droughts in Taiwan in 1945–1946; poverty is everywhere, represented by the dietary reliance on sweet potatoes, and many families are actually starving.

A more general and ancient trend, superstition, compounds the problems, as people prefer to spend money, even in these hard times, on rededicating the Taoist temples prohibited under Japanese rule, and on extravagant worship. Worse than that, ignorance and superstition cause “these apparently simple, good, and honest folk … [to set] their own hills on fire.” Paradoxically, in “Forest Fire,” the narrator’s elder brother, representing a local gentry that is better educated and more modernized than the general peasantry, rages against the latter’s ignorance and superstition one day, but takes pride in the lavishness of his temple sacrifice the next.

“Uncle A-Huang” and “My ‘Out-Law’ and the Hill Songs” also take perennial and general problems as their focus. The failure of the middle-aged A-Huang, once one of the most respected, hard-working young farmhands in the district, to provide for his family, or even to maintain a scrap of human dignity, suggests a fundamental problem in the economy: “If it is just as A-Huang said—‘the more we work the poorer we get’—then what is to become of our world?”

Homeland’s catalogue of deterioration and stultification is leavened with affectionate portrayals of “good and honest folk” and descriptions of rural beauty. These dominate in “My ‘Out-Law’ and the Hill Songs,” the mildly melancholic conclusion of which is that even a rural idyll such as Meinong cannot escape change, but hope is still to be found in youth, friendship, family, and local culture. Approaching middle age, A-He, his wife, and their old friend Yuxiang realize that almost nothing remains of the youth they shared. Their old friends, especially the women, are physically changed out of all recognition by poverty, procreation, and domestic violence. Yet A-He and Yuxiang’s own families appear relatively lucky in spite of their heterodox origins. The story does not refer to the same-surname marriage taboo, but here, plainly, are Zhong Lihe and Zhong Taimei in fictionalized form, apparently happy together and with a healthy five-year-old son. Yuxiang’s family began with an affair with a widowed mother of one, who conceived a second child while Yuxiang was away with the Japanese army in the Philippines. From these unpromising beginnings Yuxiang seems to have established a stable family life. He has by now fathered two children of his own, but his greatest joy or comfort is his stepchild, a fine, sturdy boy already able to help him in his work as a carter.

The nostalgic mood of “Out-Law” is encapsulated in its eponymous hill songs: “Amid all the change and upheaval, perhaps this was the only unchanging thing I could find.” But there is more than nostalgia here: in the story the songs are explicitly associated with the young people who sing them, young women in particular, and although the songs are old-fashioned and unchanging—representing hope for the preservation of local culture—they also suggest that youth, love, and sex must endure as forces for the future.

As its title suggests, part 4 of this collection presents four lyrical evocations of Zhong Lihe’s life at Jianshan in the 1950s. As such, these sketches largely speak for themselves. “My Study” is at once a lighthearted complaint about the author’s impoverished situation and a rhapsody on the glories of nature and the mythic beauty of rural life that surrounded him. “The Grassy Bank,” which appears in one of the short-fiction volumes of New Complete Works,¹⁸ describes the death of a hen and its effect on her offspring as an allegory for the mother love of Zhong Taimei and her family’s dependence on her. “The Plow and the Sky” is the most purely lyrical-pastoral of the four sketches. Its simplicity is deceptive, as its detailed reference to agricultural activity and repeated references to hill songs show how it is linked to Zhong Lihe’s fiction’s foregrounding of local economy and local culture.

Finally in this part, “The Little Ridge” is the most personal of the four pieces. After their elopement Zhong Lihe and Zhong Taimei endured unremitting poverty, an infant death, Zhong’s life-threatening and debilitating illness, the crippling illness of their eldest son, and Zhong’s long failure to gain recognition for his writing. But surely the biggest sadness in their life was the sudden death of their second son, Limin, at the age of seven in February 1954. The short story “Fuhuo” 復活 (“Restored to Life,” 1960 [translated elsewhere]) dramatizes Limin’s death so as to put the blame on his father’s excessively strict discipline. According to Limin’s elder brother, Tiemin, who died in 2011 at the age of seventy, this part of the story is entirely fictional.¹⁹ Zhong Lihe was in reality a kind, perhaps even overindulgent father. It seems likely that he wrote “Restored to Life” in that way as a distillation of the guilt he felt at condemning his family to poverty and to an existence in the remoteness of Jianshan, both of which were true factors in the failure to get medical treatment in time to save Limin. Another sketch, “Ye mangmang” 野茫茫 (Wilderness, 1954), apparently written sooner after Limin’s death, is a long, agonized lament, but it seems that by the time he wrote “Little Ridge,” Zhong was calmer, and its quiet, straightforward tone, using the charming innocence of two-year-old Ying’er’s (in)comprehension of her elder brother’s absence to offset the terrible, literally unspeakable grief of her parents, makes for a subtler treatment of this most difficult of subject matter.

Economic realities are never far from most of Zhong Lihe’s works. Mostly these concern the intimate day-to-day scraping by of ordinary folk. In “Swimming and Sinking,” as in Homeland, Zhong Lihe attempts something more ambitious and more widely relevant. This story is a dryly observed yet bitterly impassioned social commentary on Taiwan in the first fourteen years of the Pax Sinica, 1945–1959. Here the autobiographical I-narrator, Old Zhong, presents in flashback the increasingly desperate and often disreputable efforts and failures of an old friend, Li Xinchang, to get rich in the unstable economy of postwar Taiwan. Meanwhile, Old Zhong himself declines into a kind of Bingwen figure, albeit not as spiritually degraded. By the end of the story, presumably 1959, Old Zhong’s erstwhile friend Li Xinchang has become a real big shot at last and does not even recognize Old Zhong.

In Zhong Lihe’s swansong (and arguably his masterpiece), “Rain,” Huang Jinde is one of the most memorable characters in Zhong Lihe’s entire opus. As an ordinary tenant farmer in Meinong, as a family man, stern moralist, hard drinker, and gambler, as a returned war coolie, and most of all as a man with an obsessive concern with the rights and wrongs of land ownership and tenancy rights, Huang’s words and actions throughout are invested with a strident, confident machismo. However, it is the ambivalences in his personal makeup that present the reader with the most engrossing and tragic cruces of the plot.

The chief motive for Huang’s pursuit of justice against the power of local landlord Luo Dingrui lies in his sense of duty to his fallen comrade and blood brother Xu Longxiang. Thus he acts out of a traditional Chinese ethic of fraternal love. What is perhaps most significant, however, is that Huang’s duty to Xu is a guilty one. Having had his own life saved by Xu while fighting for the Imperial Army of Japan, Huang failed to save Xu’s and was forced to leave him to die during their attempt to flee from advancing American forces. Secondly, Huang, for all his machismo, is a compromised family head, having married-in to his shrewish wife’s better-off family, a fact she never lets him forget.

Thus denied a confident sense of patriarchal superiority, Huang exerts himself all the more in his righteous pursuit of justice in the case of the rented land that he signed over to Xu’s widow on his return from the war. He is disgusted at the latter’s decision, condoned by her elder son, to sell the plot to the notorious and unscrupulous land grabber (and wartime collaborator) Luo Dingrui. The horror that occurs in the climax of “Rain” is partially due to Huang Jinde’s all-consuming obsession with questions of land rights and ownership and to his loyalty to his fallen comrade and best friend. He is so taken up in these affairs that he fails to prevent heartbreaking calamity in his own family.

As so often in his fiction, Zhong Lihe shows that the people closest to his heart, the “good and honest farming folk” of Hakka South Taiwan, are bound to the soil and their homeland not by sentiment but by pressing economic necessity. Huang Jinde is a noble social figure in this context, but his obsession with land makes him a tragic failure as a father and as an individual. “Rain” is rare in Zhong Lihe’s fiction in excluding any sentimental, nostalgic tone. No one, least of all Huang Jinde, appears likely to burst into a hill song at any point. In this story of rural economics, the only thing that sings is a hulling machine. We may speculate therefore that at the moment of his death Zhong Lihe may, with “Rain,” have been moving toward a harder realism in his literature.

1. Strictly speaking, only Taiwan was an integral part of the Japanese Empire (1895–1945). Manchukuo (the region commonly known in English as Manchuria, but usually referred to by the Chinese simply as “the Northeast”) was a Japanese puppet state, 1932–1945; North China was occupied by Japan 1937–1945, with a puppet Chinese administration in Peking (Beijing).

2. Jianshan, 7 km northeast of the small town of Meinong, consists of a hamlet and a scattering of farms and cottages and is the hilliest, most remote townland in Meinong district. “Jianshan,” meaning “pointed hill,” refers to the small, almost perfectly conical hill that rises immediately to the north of Zhong Lihe’s family home (from the early 1930s to his death in 1960; his surviving family still live on the site) and the Zhong Lihe Memorial Institute (Zhong Lihe Jinianguan 鍾理和紀念館), founded 1983. This little hill is now also—increasingly, it seems—known as Lishan 笠山 (Bamboo Hat Hill), the fictional name Zhong Lihe gave it in his novel Bamboo Hat Hill Farm (see below).

7. The selection is inevitably subjective to some degree, and difficult decisions have had to be made to exclude some novellas, stories, and essays from “the best.” Two easier decisions were to exclude Zhong Lihe’s only full-length novel and five short stories previously translated by other hands. (See “Sources, Translations, and Acknowledgments” in this volume.) The two aims “to present a selection of the best” and “to represent his life and times” came into conflict in one case. One of the pieces included in this volume (I will not say which!) was chosen because of its very great value to the second aim. If I had had only the first aim in mind there would have been several other works from “the best of Zhong Lihe’s literary work” that I would have chosen ahead of it.

10. Zhong Lihe provides a quite specific definition of the Meinong hill song in Bamboo Hat Hill Farm: “This was a very special kind of hill song. Just like the cotton headscarves that trailed from the women’s bamboo hats, it flourished only among the mountain villages on the north side of the upper reaches of the Xiadanshui River. The people called it the Meinong hill song, as opposed to the Pingtung hill song that could be heard on the other side of the river. Hakka people loved hill songs” (New Complete Works 4:50).

11. Kuomintang rule in Taiwan after 1945 was corrupt and viciously discriminatory against members of the native population, who were routinely treated as Japanese collaborators. A trivial incidence of police brutality in Taipei on Feb. 28 (= 2/28), 1947, provoked a backlash of mass protest and violence against Mainlanders, which in turn provoked a very bloody military suppression. For many natives of Taiwan, 2/28 was the final straw, the end of any warmth toward the Kuomintang as compatriots and liberators.

12. Xingzheng Yuan Wenhua Jianshe Weiyuanhui 行政院文化建設委員會 (Council for Cultural Affairs, RoC [Taiwan]), Taiwan lishi cidian 臺灣歷史辭典 (Dictionary of Taiwan history), http://nrch.cca.gov.tw/ccahome/website/site20/contents/017/cca220003-li-wpkbhisdict004463-1306-u.xml (accessed June 20, 2011).
A very fine, very moving feature film based largely (but with postmodern elements) on Zhong Haodong’s life, imprisonment, and death (1940–1950), entitled Hao nan hao nü 好男好女 (Good men, good women), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, was released in 1995.

13. Heming was their father’s third natural son, the eldest natural son of the principal wife. The latter had adopted a son who was eldest of all the brothers, so that Heming was the fourth son overall. Zhong Lihe, the second natural son, born to his father’s secondary wife and older than half-brother Heming by about three to four weeks, was for some reason in the habit of addressing Heming in real life as “Second Elder Brother.” In the two extant, undated manuscript versions of “From the Old Country,” the one believed to be earlier refers to the brother as “Second Elder Brother”; in the later one (the basis for the version in New Complete Works used here) this has become “Third Elder Brother.”

18. In a few cases it is difficult to decide for certain whether some of Zhong Lihe’s works are short stories or essays. Homeland was classified as a group of four essays in Complete Works (II) and “Record of an Expedition to the Summit of Mount Dawu” remains—erroneously, I would say—in one of the short-fiction volumes of New Complete Works. Overall, these ambiguities reflect the tendency of Zhong Lihe’s autobiographical fiction to cling very closely to fact, and to have plots which are rather low on action.