MCLC: literary guide to China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: literary guide to China
***********************************************************

Source: The Telegraph (7/10/13):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10162707/Literary-guide-to-China.h
tml

Literary guide to China
By Rana Mitter 

When people think of modernity, they think of Shanghai -- and that was
equally true 100 years ago. Even today, the Bund remains one of Asia’s
most impressive waterfronts, its British colonial buildings pompous but
strangely familiar to the disoriented Westerner (the Customs House still
sports a mini-Big Ben known as “Big Ching”). Yet the city has always
disconcerted more than it comforts. One of the most famous opening scenes
in modern Chinese literature comes in Mao Dun’s Midnight, subtitled “A
Romance of China in 1930”. A family patriarch from the countryside is so
dazzled by the city’s sights and sounds that he has a stroke. The Leftist
Mao Dun meant the story as a cautionary tale about capitalism, but there’s
no mistaking the sense of enchantment with the city’s temptations in his
writing, too.
Those temptations are concentrated in more comic fashion in Shanghai
Express by Zhang Henshui, one of pre-war China’s bestselling popular
novelists. The novel deftly sketches archetypes still recognisable today:
an impoverished scholar takes the train from Beijing to Shanghai and finds
himself in a world of seductive “new women”, pompous bureaucrats, and a
society trying on flashy modernity for size. As a reminder that some
things don’t change even after eight decades, it’s a perfect read on board
the present-day equivalent – the high-speed trains that zip around the
Yangtze delta at speeds that Thirties passengers could only dream of.

A walk around Old Shanghai today also reminds you that it was one of the
great cities of the British Empire, and this lost world is called up in
Robert Bickers’s Empire Made Me, the reconstruction of the life of a
British policeman who lived and died in the “noisy, stinking streets” of
the pre-war city.

The modern behemoth of Shanghai is a universe away from the small-town
reality of a more traditional China. Shaoxing, in coastal Zhejiang
province, is prosperous and full of visitors trying the famous (and
frankly vile) local wine. Yet a lightly disguised, accusatory portrait of
the town a century ago came from one of its greatest sons, the author Lu
Xun, a sardonic figure somewhere between Gogol and Saki. His story Kong
Yiji sums up the devastation left by the collapse of the old Chinese world
when the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in 1912.

A grittier vision of rural China emerges in Red Sorghum by 2012 Nobel
Prize-winner Mo Yan. “Bastardly ” is how the narrator describes the town
of Gaomi in the north-central province of Shandong, and a central
character is the township’s harsh earth that nurtures the sorghum grain
underpinning the town’s economy, whose high stalks hide guerrilla fighters
resisting the Japanese in wartime, and which provides food and wine during
the Communist revolution. A much warmer portrait of a small town is Peter
Hessler’s 2001 memoir River Town, about the remote Sichuan town of Fuling,
where the mist is “thick on the Yangtze like dirty grey silk”. Through
sensitive portrayals of a generation of Chinese coming to terms with the
upheavals of economic and social reform, Hessler’s is one of the most
moving portraits of contemporary China to come from a Westerner.

Some of China’s most modern and elegant cities hide a legacy of wartime
trauma, reconstructed by novelists and historians alike. Nanjing today is
a university town with Ming-era tombs and tree-lined avenues designed in
the Thirties when the city was Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. But by the
mid-Thirties, the atmosphere in China soured as the threat of war with
Japan came closer. Ye Zhaoyan’s Nanjing 1937 tells the story of Chinese
lovers whose quarrels are overshadowed by the threat of war, bringing to
mind an earlier classic, Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged (1947), which
evokes with great brilliance the febrile atmosphere of the middle class on
the eve of war, sensing that life was about to be turned upside down but
unable to do anything about it.

Tokyo’s menacing presence also sits in the background of Paul French’s
Midnight in Peking (2012), which reconstructs the ritual murder of a young
British woman in January 1937. It foreshadows the horrors of just a few
months later, when Nanjing would witness thousands of murders at the hands
of Japanese soldiers. Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang’s The Woman Who Lost China,
published this year, vividly portrays Nanjing’s civil war of 1949,
depicting the fate of a Chinese family split as the city falls to the
Communists. Reading about Nanjing’s traumas in a city now marked by
universities and technology is a reminder that under the surface of the
authoritarian China of today is an extremely violent past still sitting
within living memory.

Rana Mitter is the author of China’s War with Japan 1937-1945: the
Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane).