Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts Read online

  HUMANS, BEASTS, AND GHOSTS

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

  LITERATURE

  David Der-wei Wang, Editor

  Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)

  Oda Makato, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003)

  Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003)

  Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004)

  Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004)

  Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)

  Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)

  Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)

  Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt (2006)

  Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)

  Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)

  Kim Sowŏl, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007)

  Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry with Susan Chan Egan (2008)

  Ch’oe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2008)

  Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009)

  Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou, translated by Patrick Hanan (2009)

  Cao Naiqian, There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, translated by John Balcom (2009)

  Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? An Autobiographical Novel, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (2009)

  Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, translated by Janet Poole (2009)

  Hwang Sunwŏn, Lost Souls: Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2009)

  Kim Sŏk-pŏm, The Curious Tale of Mandoji’s Ghost, translated by Cindy Textor (2010)

  Xiaomei Chen, editor, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (2010)

  HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE

  Carol Gluck, Editor

  Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Richard F. Calichman (2005)

  Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2005)

  Overcoming Modernity, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2008)

  Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited and translated by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (2009)

  HUMANS, BEASTS,

  AND GHOSTS

  STORIES AND ESSAYS

  Qian Zhongshu

  EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY

  Christopher G. Rea

  With translations by

  DENNIS T. HU

  NATHAN K. MAO

  YIRAN MAO

  CHRISTOPHER G. REA

  PHILIP F. WILLIAMS

  Columbia University Press

  NEW YORK

  This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead

  Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-52654-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Qian, Zhongshu, 1910–

  [Selections. English. 2010]

  Humans, beasts, and ghosts : stories and essays / Qian Zhongshu ; edited with an

  introduction by Christopher G. Rea ; with translations by Dennis T. Hu . . . [et al.].

  p. cm. — (Weatherhead books on Asia)

  This book brings together the essay collection “Written in the margins of life (Xie zai ren sheng bian shang)” and the short story collection “Human, beast, ghost (Ren shou gui).”

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-231-15274-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-15275-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-52654-8 (e-book)

  1. Qian, Zhongshu, 1910–—Translations into English. 2. Chinese essays—Translations into English. 3. Short stories, Chinese—Translations into English. I. Rea, Christopher G.

  II. Hu, Dennis T. III. Qian, Zhongshu, 1910–Xie zai ren sheng bian shang. English IV. Qian,

  Zhongshu, 1910–Ren shou gui. English V. Title. VI. Title: Written in the margins of life.

  VII. Title: Human, beast, ghost. VIII. Series.

  PL2749.C8A2 2010

  895.1′452—dc22

  2010018856

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the editor nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Introduction

  Written in the Margins of Life and Human, Beast, Ghost

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE 1983 EDITIONS OF

  Written in the Margins of Life and Human, Beast, Ghost

  Written in the Margins of Life

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu

  Windows

  On Happiness

  On Laughter

  Eating

  Reading Aesop’s Fables

  On Moral Instruction

  A Prejudice

  Explaining Literary Blindness

  On Writers

  NOTES

  Human, Beast, Ghost

  FIRST PREFACE TO THE 1946 KAIMING EDITION

  SECOND PREFACE TO THE 1946 KAIMING EDITION

  God’s Dream

  Cat

  Inspiration

  Souvenir

  NOTES

  EDITIONS

  FURTHER READING IN ENGLISH

  TRANSLATORS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This volume has been several years in the making, and I would like to thank the many individuals and institutions who have helped it reach completion. I began translating Written in the Margins of Life in Taipei in 2004 as a recreational adjunct to my doctoral dissertation research on comedic cultures of modern China. When publication became a possibility, I decided to make the essays more accessible by including notes to explain their numerous allusions and occasional instances of untranslatable wordplay. My thanks to Shang Wei and Liao Ping-hui, who early on illuminated several obscure terms and passages. I am also grateful to Philip F. Williams for his generous advice as this project was getting off the ground, and for contributing his masterful translation of “On Writers” to the volume.

  I decided to combine Margins and Human, Beast, Ghost into a joint volume in order to offer readers a more comprehensive picture of Qian’s early works. Three of the four stories in Human (all except “God’s Dream”) have been published previously in Engli
sh translation, and I offer my sincere thanks to Dennis T. Hu, Yiran Mao, and Nathan K. Mao for sharing their translations. These translations have been revised both to match the 1983 Fujian renmin chubanshe edition and for overall stylistic consistency. Qian made many changes to both Margins and Human over the years, and I have preserved his more substantial alterations in the endnotes. My thanks to Michelle Cheng and Shannie Hsu at the University of British Columbia for their assistance in comparing editions, and to Bruce Fulton for his feedback on a portion of the manuscript.

  At various stages of this project, I have relied on financial assistance from the graduate schools of arts and sciences of Columbia University and Harvard University, the Fulbright Foundation in Taiwan, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the Whiting Foundation, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. To each my enduring thanks.

  I am grateful to Jennifer Crewe, Mike Ashby, and two anonymous reviewers at Columbia University Press for their endorsement of this project and invaluable feedback on the manuscript. Any errors that remain are either mine or Qian Zhongshu’s (you decide).

  David Der-wei Wang has been a transformative figure in my life and an unparalleled mentor through graduate school and beyond.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Pei-yi Wu, a teacher and friend to generations of Columbia graduate students.

  My love, as always, to Mom, Dad, Sandy, Julie, and Peregrin.

  Christopher Rea

  INTRODUCTION

  Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998) was one of twentieth-century China’s most brilliant writers. Born into a learned family, educated at one of the nation’s best universities and later at Oxford and the Sorbonne, Qian came into his own as a creative writer during a period of chaos, producing most of his works between the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Communist takeover in 1949.1 Although he continued to write poems and essays intermittently throughout the remainder of his life, his career as a creative writer, like that of many of his contemporaries, was cut short by the outcome of the Chinese civil war. Over the course of that decade, however, Qian made several striking contributions to literary modernism that have yet to be fully appreciated, both within and beyond China.

  Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts presents this startlingly original literary voice in the making. Written in the Margins of Life (Xie zai rensheng bianshang , 1941) and Human, Beast, Ghost (Ren shou gui , 1946), the two collections of essays and stories comprising this volume, together constitute the bulk of Qian’s early creative prose.2 Written primarily during wartime, after Qian had returned from three years of study in Europe, they offer iconoclastic commentary on one of the most tumultuous periods in modern Chinese history. As many of his contemporaries were rushing to answer the call for a “literature for national salvation,” Qian instead published a collection of essays that appeared to be concerned more with literary squabbles than with military battles. Later in the war, he wrote four stories that eschewed the epic mode for psychological domestic drama or satirical fantasy. Yet in each essay, we find concerns more substantive than might be suggested by their sundry topics—the significance of windows versus doors or the failings of impressionist literary critics, for instance. His stories, too, transcend the topicality of current events. In Qian’s essays and short fiction alike we find a sustained testing of the possibilities and limitations of language by a critically minded writer with an unparalleled linguistic repertoire and a spirit of fierce intellectual independence.

  Fortunately, Qian has expressed his literary vision not through ponderous philosophizing or anguished moralizing but through a comedic prose style that yields maximum pleasure per paragraph. Indeed, the encyclopedic mode of satire that runs through these stories and essays, which I discuss later, is one of the interrupted trajectories of modern Chinese literature. While teaching at various universities before 1949, Qian had the freedom to display his wit through fiction, essays, poems, and reviews. The dogmatic politics of the Mao years (1949–1976), however, prevented the republication of these earlier works and redirected Qian’s creative energies toward academic research. During that age of literary utilitarianism, satire became untenable (despite Mao’s endorsement of the mode in a 1942 speech), and Qian worked in obscurity as a literary researcher and translator in government-sponsored academic research organizations. In the post-Mao period he was “rediscovered” in China thanks to the publication of his seminal work of literary criticism, Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters (Guan zhui bian , 1979–1980), and, in the early 1980s, the republication of much of his early fiction, prose, and criticism. China had unearthed a massive talent—one who joked at the time that his literary remains would have best remained buried. “Qian Studies” subsequently developed into a subfield in Chinese academia, and Qian Zhongshu became a household name in 1990 when his landmark novel Fortress Besieged (Weicheng , 1946–1947) was adapted into a television serial.

  Famous though he is in China, Qian remains a relatively unknown writer in the English-speaking world, even though his acclaimed novel Fortress Besieged has been available in translation for thirty years. This neglect is due in part to the inaccessibility of the rest of Qian’s creative oeuvre, only fragments of which have been published. Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts is thus intended to afford readers a more comprehensive portrait of this remarkable writer by bringing together translations of his early works. Since detailed overviews of Qian’s life and works are already available in English, and since his early works have received little critical attention compared with Fortress Besieged and Limited Views, in this introduction I focus on the literary significance of the works contained in this volume.3

  CIRCUMSTANCES OF AUTHORSHIP

  In September 1938, Qian Zhongshu boarded the French steamer Athos II bound for China with his wife and daughter after three years of literary studies in Oxford and Paris. The Second Sino-Japanese War, now in its second year, had forcibly displaced many of China’s schools of higher education, particularly those north of the Yangtze River. Three of China’s top universities—Beijing, Qinghua, and Nankai—joined to form a new institution, Southwestern United University, and established a campus in Changsha, Hunan province. War pressures soon forced the school to relocate to Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan. Qian, a Qinghua graduate, had been recruited that summer to teach in Southwestern United’s Department of Foreign Languages, which he did from shortly after he landed in Hong Kong in October through the summer of 1939. During this time, he published a series of four essays in the Kunming literary journal Criticism Today (Jinri pinglun ) under the heading “Cold Room Jottings” (Lengwu suibi ). That summer, he rejoined his wife, Yang Jiang (b. 1911), who, with their daughter, had continued on the boat to Shanghai. A few months later, he departed again for the interior, this time to Lantian National Teacher’s College, in the remote town of Baoqing, Hunan province, at the behest of his ailing father, who was on the faculty. During their separation, Yang collected ten of Qian’s recent short works—one short story and nine essays—into a book she entitled Written in the Margins of Life. Qian wrote a preface to the collection, dated February 1939, which suggests that he had completed all ten pieces by then, but the volume was not published (by Shanghai’s Kaiming shudian) until December 1941.4 By that time, Qian had returned to Shanghai, now under complete Japanese occupation, where he stayed with Yang and their daughter through the end of the war.

  Poshek Fu has characterized the moral environment in occupied Shanghai as presenting intellectuals like Qian and Yang a choice between passivity, resistance, and collaboration.5 Qian Zhongshu’s wartime activities would seem to place him within the first of these categories, as he largely eschewed wartime politics and focused on his own scholarly and creative works. This time of financial hardship and political peril turned out to be an extremely productive one for Qian. While teaching at the French Catholic Aurora Women’s College in the French Concession, he continued work on a
book of literary criticism that he had begun while teaching in the interior, Discourses on Art (Tan yi lu , 1948). He also wrote four pieces of short fiction, which were published after the war as Human, Beast, Ghost.6 (I translate the title of the story collection in the singular, for reasons explained later.) Yang Jiang’s success in Shanghai as a commercial playwright in 1943 is said to have inspired Qian to undertake his most ambitious creative project, Fortress Besieged, subsequently recognized as one of modern China’s greatest novels.7 Fortress, which took Qian two years to complete, was serialized for one year in the Shanghai literary magazine Literary Renaissance (Wenyi fuxing ), beginning in February 1946, and published as a single volume in May 1947. In 1948, as the tide of the civil war was shifting in the Communists’ favor, Qian reportedly turned down job offers from Oxford, Taiwan University, and the University of Hong Kong to remain in China.8 A partially completed second novel, The Heart of the Artichoke (Le Coeur d’artichaut [Baihe xin ]), begun after the war, was lost in transit when Qian moved to Beijing to take up a position in Qinghua University’s Department of Foreign Languages in 1949. He was thirty-nine.

  EARLY PROSE WRITINGS

  The authorial persona that emerges from Qian’s small body of pre-Fortress works is that of an intellectual aristocrat—an inheritor of a traditional Chinese scholarly legacy who has masterfully conjoined it with the vast territory of Western letters. These early writings are larded with an astonishing range of literary allusions and cultural references and—with the exception of the story “Souvenir” (Jinian )—written in an aloof, satirical style that reserves particular contempt for fellow intellectuals. Edward Gunn has characterized Qian’s cutting satire, pessimistic remarks about humanity, and antihero protagonists as typifying an “antiromantic” trend in the literature of wartime Shanghai, which eschewed themes of self-realization for “individual failures caused by self-deception.”9 At the same time, Qian’s early works seem less concerned with probing the individual psyche than with using individuals or “types” as focal points for linguistic play. Written in the Margins of Life and Human, Beast, Ghost offer a number of insights into Qian Zhongshu’s worldview and literary style. I highlight three here.