Border Town (FOREWORD) 边城 (译者前言)

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FOREWORD
Once upon a time, Shen Congwen's stories of rural China seemed so close to the lives of the country folk and the grand landscapes framing them that a 1947 collection of his works in English was titled The Chinese Earth. That earth was overturned, along with Shen's literary reputation, in the 1949 Communist revolution. Thirty years later, when radical Maoism expired in turn, Chinese critics rediscovered Shen Congwen.
They called him the representative writer, perhaps the founder, of a uniquely Chinese prewar school of "native-soil," or "rural," literature. A 1980s revival of Shen's way of combining earthbound themes with ethereal style was accorded partial credit for China's post-Mao literary renaissance.
Those claims created a sensation. Mao's writers had already asserted exclusive understanding of peasants as a class, but the political morality tales they cranked out appear inauthentic today. The themes of nature, agriculture, and cosmic harmony in China's ancient classics and poetry have enjoyed far greater staying power. In the 1920s, however, Shen Congwen and his colleagues declared Classical Chinese and the literature composed in it "dead." They strove to create a New Literature in the modern vernacular, without giving up China's traditional lyric—and didactic—literary missions. Shen Congwen chose the lyric path; Border Town (Bian cheng), a modern pastoral published in 1934, is his masterpiece. Some call the work implicitly Daoist, but Shen and his generation of writers in principle scorned China's old philosophies. They wanted to be known as moderns, either realist or romantic. Shen Congwen's novels defy classification within that dichotomy, though he, perhaps surprisingly, thought it more a compliment to be called a realist. He liked "revolution" in literary technique, but not as armed struggle for social reconstruction.
These issues explain the fascination with Shen Congwen's views of rural life, even if most critics agree that his greatest contribution to Chinese literature lies in his imagination, craftsmanship, and creation of one of the greatest Chinese prose styles of all time. In the late 1920s and 1930s, China's writers and social scientists "discovered" the Chinese peasant.
The loudest literary critics and social ideologues, like their political leaders, were moved by conflict-based theories of class struggle and national survival: Marxism and nationalism, left wing and right wing. Shen Congwen announced at the time that Border Town was a tribute to China's farmers and soldiers written in defiance of the ideologues. The Marxists who controlled China's intellectual scene in subsequent decades thought Border Town an insult to their ideas of rural class conflict.
It is intriguing to wonder if Border Town might also be a Chinese rejoinder to The Good Earth. Pearl Buck's novel was controversial in China because it acquired worldwide authority to speak for China's peasants, despite its authorship by a foreigner (though Chinese was Buck's first language). An American bestseller of 1931 and 1932, The Good Earth won a Pulitzer Prize and was translated into Chinese in 1932. At least two Chinese book versions hit the market in 1933, with more to come before the 1937 release of the celebrated film and Buck's Nobel Prize the next year. The novel's burgeoning success—a succès de scandale, some Chinese intellectuals thought—might have hurried up the first English translation of Border Town by Emily Hahn and Shao Xunmei in 1936, which inspired Ching Ti and Robert Payne's 1947 version, titled The Frontier City, in The Chinese Earth anthology. (My translation is indebted to those prior renditions and to a 1981 retranslation by Shen's friend Gladys Yang.)
The Good Earth and Border Town depict China's common folk sympathetically. The characters are straightforward, practical, culturally grounded, and hardworking. Moreover, the humble protagonists of both great novels have inner lives, though of the heroines, that is truer of Shen Congwen's Cuicui than of Pearl Buck's stolid O-lan, who suffers far more from gender inequality. The hopes and endeavors of the folk in both novels are "scrutable," even culturally universal, yet subject to being undone by fate.
Since Border Town's resurrection in the 1980s (it was banned in China ca. 1949–1979, and in Taiwan until 1986), many Chinese critics have viewed it as a regional novel. Chadong lies in Shen Congwen's native West Hunan, along not just a provincial boundary but also an internal cultural frontier, where Han Chinese mix with Miao (Hmong), Tujia, and other formerly tribal mountain peoples who once spoke unrelated languages and whose women still wear exotic clothing.
According to this reading, the characters in Shen's novel are not ordinary Chinese peasants. Indeed, Shen Congwen preferred to write about small-town boatmen, artisans, soldiers, hunters, and young people, not tillers of the soil. The critics' point, however, is that Shen's characters might belong to the exotic "national minorities" of Southwest China. Some scholars from Chadong's You River Valley argue that Cuicui exemplifies local Tujia culture, whereas critics from the border farther south, where Shen Congwen was born, claim her for the Miao. Her dark skin makes her an exotic beauty within Chinese literature, but darkness is not characteristically "tribal" in that part of China.
Shen Congwen's ancestors were Han, Tujia, and Miao. The fineness of his ethnographic observations and the dialect in some of his other works easily inspire ethnographic interpretations. His youthful clerking for a locally popular West Hunanese warlord and later status as a famous native son have made him a regional hero. One can construct from his works a Chinese Yoknapatawpha—a full and mappable literary landscape like Faulkner's, complete with oppressed minorities acting as conscience to the Han. Yet, markers of ethnic identity are blurred in Border Town. That is why scholars can debate Cuicui's ancestry. Minority ethnicity (the Middle Stockade folk would be prime candidates) has been sublimated into a broader, regional, local color. This serves national purposes, for Shen Congwen's West Hunan exemplifies the diversity and creativity of China as a multiethnic universe—a blended nation more than an ethnic mosaic.
Shen Congwen spoke of Freudian influences in Border Town, possibly referring to Cuicui's dreams and daydreams, the flute and white pagoda as phalli, or Tianbao and Nuosong as Ego and Id. Although Shen later wrote erotic and experimental stories in a Euro-American high modernist vein, international critics typically see Border Town as a conservative work full of idyllic and nostalgic visions and devoted to an exquisite painterly style, an element this translation could not duplicate.
Shen Congwen labored tirelessly to rework the modern vernacular into a literary language figuratively as rich as Classical Chinese—when it was "living." The vitality and rawness of youth, balanced by art and nuance, creates tension in much of his writing. In a manifesto of 1936, Shen chided commercialism, faddishness, and politics in contemporary literature, avowing that he only wished "to create a little Greek temple, built of solid stone on a mountain foundation. With economy, vigor, and symmetry as my architectural ideals—in a design perhaps modest, but not fastidious—I would devote this temple to the worship of 'the human spirit.'"
Border Town might be thought a "little Greek temple" in its seeming classicism (neither realist nor romantic), its attention to fate, and its aspect as an eternal modern myth more than a story bounded by time. It is economical in language and plot.
Did Shen also achieve his ideal of symmetry? Like many Chinese works of the time, Border Town was probably composed a few chapters at a time, just in time for the successive printer's deadlines of its initial serial publication. He began writing in October 1933, deliriously happy at having finally married Zhang Zhaohe, a dark beauty who years earlier had resisted his attentions; she helped inspire the character of Cuicui. The first chapters were published at the start of 1934, but Shen finished writing the novel only after a winter visit to West Hunan, his first in over ten years, to see his dying mother. The land of his childhood now appeared to him spoiled and despoiled. He left in a hurry. Local officials, aware of his criticisms of the Nationalist government, suspected Shen was a Communist. The consistency of Border Town is the more remarkable for that.
Shen Congwen was chosen to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, but he died before the October announcement; the prize necessarily went to another. Border Town still occupies a unique place in Chinese and world literature. It inspires one to ponder Shen's favorite subject: the human spirit.
Jeffrey C. Kinkley