The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction

Home , Shen Congwen, The True Story of Ah Q

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33.2 September 2007: 9-34

Haiyan Lee University of Hong Kong and University of Colorado at Boulder

Abstract Etienne Balibar has argued that no nation possesses a natural ethnic basis. And yet the “people” tends to be the most taken-for-granted entity in nationalist thought and literature. I argue in this paper that the “people” is a fictive category invented in the contested field of literary production in the early 20th century. In particular, I examine the concept of the “folk” in the works of such native soil writers as Yang Zhensheng (楊振聲), Fei Ming (廢名), and Shen Congwen (沈從文). By contrasting the image of the folk in native soil fiction with the more familiar image of the peasants in realist fiction, I call attention to the paradoxical status of the people in the nationalist imagination. If the peasants were ignorant, unfeeling, and parochial under the pen of Lu Xun (魯迅), the folk were revealed to have preserved a deep reservoir of emotions and humanity beneath the stultifying trappings of Confucianism in native soil fiction. I aim to show that representations of the folk and the native soil were intimately bound up with the production of the modern individual as an affective moral agent and of the nation as a community of sympathy.

Keywords folk, emotion, nationalism, native soil fiction Yang Zhensheng, Fei Ming, Shen Congwen

10 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

When Mao proclaimed in 1949 that the Chinese people had stood up, there seemed little doubt as to who the “Chinese people” were. One easily conjures up images of urban residents lining the streets to greet the People’s Liberation Army marching into cities, and of peasant masses being swept up by land reforms and rural collectivization. However one might judge the communist regime, the People’s Republic has a degree of legitimacy as the sovereign state of the “Chinese nation,” or at least the majority of the “Chinese people.” But Etienne Balibar has forcefully argued in his article “Racism and Nationalism” that no nation possesses a natural ethnic basis and that nationalism has to invent a fictive ethnicity by nationalizing a heterogeneous society. Immanuel Wallerstein in “The Construction of Peoplehood” similarly maintains that “peoplehood” is not a primordial social reality, but rather a construct with constantly shifting boundaries. In his classic study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes the crucial role played by Asian and African “bilingual intelligentsias” in the last wave of the spread of nationalist ideologies and the rise of anti-colonial nationalism. “Poised precariously over diverse monoglot populations” (Anderson 114), the bilingual intelligentsias were the first to be exposed to modern European culture and to have access to “models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state” (Anderson 116). Intellectual agency, therefore, was largely defined in nationalist terms vis-à-vis a population that needed to be nationalized, that is, made into a “people” in order to serve as the basis of the nation in the making. The nationalist invocations of the people (renmin, minjian, minsu, xiangcun, xiangtu [人民、民間、民俗、鄉村、鄉土]) came closest to the German term Volk, an essentialized, primordialist notion that must be distinguished from the Marxist notion of the masses (minzhong, qunzhong, dazhong, laodong renmin [民眾、群眾、大眾、勞動人民]). As the foundation of the modern nation, the people as folk were both pre-modern and the historical (but not historicized) subject that shall march into modernity. Their primordiality was therefore in perennial tension with the need for them to become modern, that is, to possess the requisite characteristics of the modern universal subject.1 The mediator of this tension was the bilingual intelligentsia who, often without self-conscious acknowledgement of their role, mobilized the trope of awakening to launch the nationalization project. At most, they saw themselves as the “already-awakened” (先覺xianjue) whose mission was

1 The folk does not have a fixed or unchanging relationship to the nation. Rather, different conceptions of the nation are necessarily associated with different constructions of peoplehood. Hence the socialist nation is premised not primarily on an essentialized folk or ethnos but on a class-differentiated notion of the people as laboring masses. Lee 11 The Other Chinese

to arouse the slumbering people to come face to face with their true national self and in touch with their true national essence. This meant, among other things, compelling the people to speak the language-of-the-state and to see themselves as members of a universal and yet bounded community by partaking of the new universal institutions of education, conscription, taxation, and consumption. Insofar as the intellectuals were the principal agents of the nationalizing/ modernizing drives, they should be regarded and critiqued, in Tani Barlow’s view, as colonial intellectuals.2 Speaking the language of imported truths, intellectuals constructed themselves as heroic, polyglot, and universalized modern subjects and the agents of civilization and enlightenment. Their agency and power was predicated on the co-figuration of the people as benighted, ignorant, and parochial, languishing under the tyranny of a “traditional” culture that robbed them of their vitality and humanity. But the people were also the very foundation of their legitimacy. The intellectuals were, after all, no longer the tutors of the people on behalf of the cosmic way and its temporal embodiment the emperor. Rather, their raison d’être was to remake the people in the name of the nation and its destiny. Their relationship to the people, therefore, was even more fraught with ambiguities and contradictions than that of European colonizers to the alternately derogated and romanticized “native” colonial populations. For the nationalist intellectuals, the people’s defects and deficiencies—when measured by the yardstick of universal criteria—were a painful reminder of the intellectuals’ own location as colonial subjects straddling two worlds. The people might be exasperatingly inscrutable or unresponsive, but they could not be dismissed as strangers, as radical Other. The people were no subject of idle colonial curiosity; they were rather the abiding obsession of the bilingual intelligentsia. If the “noble savage” held the hope of civilizational regeneration for European romanticists, then it was “the folk” that was the internal Other who nonetheless condensed the essential qualities of universal humanity and provided the critical trope of intellectual self-empowerment. The invention of the folk went hand in hand with the essentializing critique of Chinese national character. A recurring theme in the critique was the idea that the Chinese people were incapable of love and sympathy. This was considered a fatal flaw because the nation was thought to be first and foremost an affective community, sustained, and renewed by the strength of individual patriotic sentiments. The members of a modern nation must be able to love one another as co-nationals and properly enact that love, which meant, at the most basic level, to

2 See her article “Zhishifenzi (Chinese intellectuals) and Power.” 12 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

allow young men and women to love and marry without parochial considerations of social status or genealogy, and at a higher level, to be pained by the sufferings of one’s compatriots and to strive for their emancipation. May Fourth intellectuals were profoundly troubled by the Chinese populace’s apparent nonvaluation of emotion and indifference to the dire strait of the nation. As they cast their anxious gaze on rural towns and villages, they found that the disregard for young people’s feelings in matrimonial affairs went hand in hand with the lack of national sympathy.3 But if the Chinese heart was indeed so arid, what hope was there for the people to coalesce into a community of sympathy and attain modern nationhood? Under the influence of Romantic thought introduced from Europe and Japan, intellectuals began to formulate a concept of the folk in an effort to recuperate a deep reservoir of emotions beneath the stultifying trappings of Confucianism. The May Fourth folklore movement invented a new image of the Chinese folk that was timeless and fully endowed with the requisite emotions of modern life.4 Fiction writers, too, mined their childhood memories and began to paint rural society in a pastoral light. These writers came to form the “native soil school” (鄉土派 xiangtu pai). In this paper, I read closely the writings of three native soil authors: Yang Zhensheng, Fei Ming, and Shen Congwen. I aim to show how the representations of the folk and the native soil are intimately bound up with the production of the modern individual as an affective moral agent and of the nation as a community of sympathy.

Nora Goes to the People

Almost every prominent writer of the May Fourth era seems to have written homecoming narratives, whether or not he/she is known as a native soil writer. It should surprise no one that the common genealogy of native soil literature locates its fountainhead in Lu Xun (1881-1936), who dealt with the “different facets of his hometown complex” (Wang 249) in at least three stories: “My Old Home” (故鄉 Guxiang), “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (祝福 Zhufu), and “In the Tavern” (在酒樓上 Zai juilou shang). He was also one of the earliest critics to “attempt to circumscribe the themes and structures of native soil literature” (Wang 249). Lu’s narrative of homecoming tends to dwell on the journey itself or the moment of

3 For an extended discussion of the connection between nationalism and the cult of emotion, see Lee, Revolution of the Heart. 4 For details, see Lee, “Tears That Crumbled the Great Wall.” Lee 13 The Other Chinese

encounter so that it is as much about the narrator’s crisis of identity or conscience as about home or homeland per se. More often than not, home turns out to be a disconcerting, if not outright oppressive, place and the native son ends up leaving once again—this time likely for good. Other than a nostalgic piece recalling the adventurous thrills of childhood (“Village Opera” [社戲 Shexi], 1922), Lu Xun was unable to bring himself to compose pastoral idylls without becoming self-conscious about the mediating role of the intellectual. He was thus extremely distrustful of those who presumed to write about the countryside but only from a safe distance. “Storm in a Teacup” (風波 Fengbo, 1920), for example, begins with a parody about such authors before it proceeds to the story proper of a village family plagued by ignorance, superstition, and mutual malice. After a mock description of the picturesque country landscape and cozy communal life on a riverbank, Lu Xun writes: “Some scholars, who were passing in a pleasure boat, waxed lyrical at the sight. ‘So free from care!’ they exclaimed. ‘Here’s real idyllic happiness’” (Selected Stories 45).5 The underlying message is that idylls are only fabricated by authors who are out of touch with reality. Reality, by implication, has a great deal of grim truths in store for those willing to get down to the ground, as he shows in some of his best-known stories. Once one is close enough to reality, one will cease dreaming about one’s father’s garden, “a garden which does not exist any more” (Lu Xun, "Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi" [中國新文學大系] 28). The remark about the phantom garden comes from Lu Xun’s critique of native soil literature as a genre of “imaginary nostalgia” in David Wang’s term. Thanks to his towering presence in the literary scene, the vast majority of May Fourth writers who wrote on rural topics cleaved to the mode of critical realism dominated by such themes as poverty, women’s oppression, feudal morality, superstition, and clan feuding. Together, they painted a bleak picture of grass-roots society hopelessly unyielding in its divisions and casual in its cruelty.

5 In a narrative essay possibly modeled on Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Yu Dafu (郁達夫) is quite guilty of the kind of romanticization Lu Xun satirizes even though Yu seems to have gotten closer to the scene. On an impulsive trip to Lake Tai (太湖)—to flee from “the multitudes locked in the pursuit of fortune and fame”—Yu fantasizes about leading an idyllic life in the country, which translates into chanting English poems while climbing the mountain. Lost, he inquires his way at the house of a peasant family whose life appears to him enviably tranquil and contented. The country folks show incredible warmth and take him all the way to the main road. “Two large, grateful teardrops rolled out of the corners of my eyes” (Yu Dafu 2: 576- 94). 14 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

In 1925, however, Yang Zhensheng (1890-1956), a writer who would be much maligned by Lu Xun a few years later, published a homecoming story that departed widely from the realist imperative. Here a couple of May Fourth youths return to the hometown, settle down among warm-hearted country folks, and find not only pastoral beauty in their environs, but also a populace who are naturally loving and highly amenable to their modernist message of equality, love, and sympathy. Yang Zhensheng’s novella “Yujun” (玉君) was written just a few years after the heyday of May Fourth romantic fiction—from 1919 to 1921, a period in which love stories, in Mao Dun’s estimation, comprised 98% of the total fictional output (Zhang Hua 618). As one of the earliest novellas to come out of the May Fourth camp, which had so far produced mostly short stories, poetry, and prose essays, it created quite a sensation upon publication and was reprinted twice within a year and many times in subsequent years. Chen Yuan (陳源), a member of the Modern Criticism School (現代評論派 xiandai pinglun pai), put it on a par with Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” (沉淪 Chenlun) Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (吶喊 Nahan), Guo Moruo’s (郭沫若) The Goddess (女神 Nüshen) and others as one of the ten most influential works since the onset of the New Culture movement (Zhang Hua 619). Superficially, “Yujun” carries on the May Fourth tradition of totalistic repudiation of the Confucian order through the tried and true formula of free love versus arranged marriage. However, whereas earlier May Fourth fiction tends to depict the Confucian order as uniformly dark and oppressive and the “new youth” as always innocent and enlightened, Yang’s story complicates this polarized vision by introducing a primordial realm outside the reach of Confucian orthodoxy as well as a young man who betrays the romantic cause (hence creating the condition for a triangle affair—the staple theme of post-May Fourth love stories). It also differs from earlier May Fourth fiction in that it explores the aftermath of self-awakening and escape, or, to echo the title of a famous essay by Lu Xun, “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home” (娜拉走後怎樣 Nala zouhou zenyang) Here, the pristine countryside is presented as a realm of salvation for rebellious youths cut loose from oppressive social institutions. Zhou Yujun (周玉君), the titular heroine, like many May Fourth heroines, defies parental authority and flees from her gentry-class family to avoid an arranged marriage. The central drama of the story takes place in a small coastal town, where the principal characters return after receiving a modern education in the city. There is no meditative homecoming journey, nor uneasy encounter with the old. The story opens when Yujun’s college sweetheart, Du Pingfu (杜平夫), is about to leave for France after his marriage proposal has been rejected by Yujun’s father on account of Lee 15 The Other Chinese

some past enmity between the two families. The “I” narrator named Lin Yicun (林一存), who has himself studied abroad for many years and is now idling at home and reveling in old memories, is asked by Du to relay letters for him and Yujun while he is in France. Unbeknownst to Du, Lin has been in love with Yujun since their childhood days but he represses this feeling to honor his friendship with Du. During Du’s absence, the son of a warlord comes to seek Yujun’s hand. Unable to withstand her father’s relentless pressure, she attempts suicide by jumping into the sea. She is miraculously rescued by some fishermen and brought to Lin’s secluded hillside pied-a-terre. With Lin as her admiring protector and companion, Yujun begins an idyllic life of reading, gardening, observing archaic folk rituals, and calling on fishermen’s homes on offshore islets. The honesty and sympathy of the villagers move her so profoundly that she decides to set up a girls’ school on one of the islets and settle down there permanently. To help her realize this dream, Lin sells a piece of his land, as he is conveniently a man of considerable means (his landowning parents having both passed away). Meanwhile, Du returns abruptly and accuses them of infidelity and betrayal. Yujun tells him off for being easily swayed by rumor and jealousy and thus unworthy of her affection. Soon afterwards, a band of marauding soldiers ravage the islet and Lin is forced to send Yujun abroad with the money he has just raised for the school. Yujun’s escape from home is stereotypically cast as breaking free from the shackles of patriarchy that enslave women. The story condemns the Chinese family and society as “old” ( 舊家庭 jiu jiating) and “evil” ( 惡社會 e shehui) for perpetuating two doctrines: the imperative of patrilineal descent and the illegitimacy of desire. The first doctrine sanctions early marriage and concubinage and mandates universal marriage, sparing not even “idiots and cripples.” The result is a nation full of sick and deranged people. The second doctrine strips men of their vitality to the degree that they can neither neither maintain their families nor defend their nation against “tartar” invasions. It also obstructs natural passions from being expressed in music, art, and literature. “Even Confucius himself would have been flabbergasted to learn of this doctrine.” As a result, the neo-Confucian moral code (English in original) has metamorphosed into “fetters of death and masks of cannibalism” (Yang Zhensheng 570-571). Since Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), cannibalism was the standard May Fourth indictment against the traditional order (see Yue). Yang Zhensheng’s leadership role in the May Fourth demonstrations (for which he was jailed for a week) and his training in educational psychology at Columbia and Harvard well account for his generally anti-traditional, humanist outlook (with a eugenic bent). 16 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

However, in “Yujun,” Lin’s diatribe against neo-Confucianism is encased in passages of jovial bantering between Lin and Yujun’s younger sister, Lingjun, arguably one of the most memorable child characters in modern Chinese literature. In making the diatribe appear so out of place, the text seems to suggest that such a weighty analysis of the old/evil order does not apply to the rustic villagers, whose plenitude of feeling renders them immune to the baneful effect of Confucianism. Among the villagers in this story, there is no antagonism between parents and children, or conflict between moral code and spontaneous emotion. For instance, Lin Yicun’s old servant couple graciously pardons their teenage daughter for premarital sex as soon as the boy in question (Xinger [興兒]) comes forth to ask for her hand. But for their momentary anxiety over the girl’s marital prospect, they are remarkably easy-going and indulgent. They do not seem to have any use for the “good offices” of a go-between, let alone trying to barter their daughter for a fortune or an upward move on the social ladder. The fishermen who rescued Yujun, too, readily agree to keep the secret of her whereabouts because they are all moved to “sympathy” (同情 tongqing) by her plight of having to flee from an authoritarian father and an arranged marriage, as if they understood perfectly well the sanctity of individual liberty and the value of free love. But the villagers’ emotional life, however full it already is, apparently still needs to be enriched with modern science and modern values. Lin Yicun begins his modest rural reconstruction experiment with the stuttering Xinger by lecturing him on the importance of birth control—the fewer children, the greater the chance of their all receiving an education. Xinger readily accepts the imperative of education and, with a little prompting from Lin, even promises to assist other people’s children to go to school should he have none of his own (instead of, say, exhausting his resources in procuring concubines in order to perpetuate his own patriline). Similarly, the islanders have no difficulty in appreciating Yujun’s desire to educate their daughters; they even take the initiative to convert their Sea Goddess temple into a schoolroom because they are too impatient to wait for a new building to be constructed.6 The falling through of the school project, and by extension, Lin and Yujun’s utopian experiment, is no fault of anyone directly involved. The appearance of the marauding soldiers may be a reminder of the fragility of pastoral utopianism, but it also serves as a convenient alibi for an improbable experiment.

6 It is interesting to contrast this fantasy scenario with the level of resistance that modernizing reformers actually encountered in trying to expropriate temple properties for bureaucratic, educational, or military purposes (see Duara, Rescuing History, especially chapter 3). Lee 17 The Other Chinese

The novel’s idealism and light-hearted approach to what in other May Fourth texts are life-and-death issues provoked a vituperative attack in 1935 from Lu Xun ("Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi" 20-21), in no less a significant place than his preface to the canon-making Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi (中國新文學大系 Compendium of modern Chinese literature). Admittedly, the attack was to some extent motivated by partisan politics, for Yang Zhensheng was associated with the Modern Criticism School with which Lu Xun had sparred during the factional strife of the New Culture movement. But as Zhang Hua points out, Lu Xun finds most irritating Yang’s open declaration in the Preface to “Yujun” that he is “faithful only to the subjective” (忠實於主觀 zhongshi yu zhuguan) and has no qualms about exercising artistic license in embellishing reality (Zhang Hua 620). For Lu Xun, the commitment to the subjective is merely an excuse for wallowing in nostalgia or maintaining “a cold detachment” accompanied by a “worrying laughter” (Duara, Sovereignty 218). But for the nativist writer, nostalgia is a way to celebrate the universalism of sentiment and to reconnect with one’s emotional (therefore human) roots. After her suicide attempt, Yujun vows that never again will she choose to kill herself to appease her father. Instead, she will choose to live for love—because “the joy of life springs wholly from the affection others feel for you" (Yang Zhensheng 557). Lin Yicun delights in chitchatting with Xinger and imparting to him the supremacy of feeling: “The meaning of life is encapsulated in laughter and tears. With laughter and tears one genuinely lives life; without them one is merely lived by life.” Again, “we speak because we need sympathy. With words I touch my heart with yours and share my joy and sorrow with you. My joy is redoubled and my sorrow is halved if you share them with me” (Yang Zhensheng 559-60). The text is deliberately ambiguous as to whether Xinger efficiently absorbs Lin’s message or whether he is already naturally and richly endowed with feeling, an ambiguity necessitated by the paradoxical status of the “folk” as a modern nationalist construct. Nonetheless, the sympathetic communion between the intellectuals (Lin and Yujun) and the people is a long way from the sense of debilitating alienation that imbues Lu Xun’s short stories of homecoming. In “My Old Home” (故鄉 Guxiang, 1921), for example, the childhood friendship between the narrator (of gentry-class background) and Runtu (閏土) (son of a peasant) is permanently lost to the insurmountable barrier (隔膜 gemo) between them as grown-ups, now fully socialized into divided and incommensurate worlds. The catalyst of this change resides not with Runtu, who is still very much an organic part of his environment, though wizened and stupefied by life’s toil and moil. Rather, the loss issues from the narrator himself whose modern education and 18 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

acquisition of universal subjecthood have inexorably alienated him from his roots. When Runtu asks to be given the incense burner and candlesticks, the narrator laughs up his sleeve at the futility of idol worship. In Lu Xun, Runtu stands for the purblind and meekly submissive quality of the Chinese peasantry, arousing more authorial pity than Ah Q (阿 Q) does but remaining equally hopeless. In native soil literature, however, writers rediscover Runtu-like characters in all their primordial fullness of being. Thus vindicated, the native soil scarcely has any more use for either the satire of “The True Story of Ah Q” (阿 Q 正傳 Ah Q zhengzhuan, 1921) or the trailblazing intellectuals and their dream of rural reconstruction.

The Age of Innocence

The transition from the agonistic homecoming narrative to that of rustic tranquility in May Fourth fiction is in part marked by the disappearance of the “I” narrator. The work of Fei Ming (penname of Feng Wenbing [馮文炳 1901-1967]) is among the earliest to depict the countryside in a language that is free of intellectual self-references and remarkable for its lyricism and colloquialism. A protégé of Zhou Zuoren (周作人), Fei Ming attracted much attention with his refreshing rural portraits and use of regional speech, serving as an inspiration for Shen Congwen, the acclaimed master of the native soil school. Edward Gunn points out that Fei Ming’s reputation as a regionalist has as much to do with his linguistic creativity as with his talent for rendering dialogues in Hubei (湖北) regional speech: “Feng initiated the most adventurous attempt to break down categories of style, genre, influences, and unexamined assumptions about the resources and purposes of literature, including the place of realism” (128). The stylistic innovations in Fei Ming’s fiction are in part necessitated by the pursuit of timelessness and the need to resist narrative temporality. Holding together all the digressions, asides, and free associations characteristic of his prose is a quiet faith in the essential harmony and integrity of rural life, a faith that underscores the most distinguishing aspect of his writing, to wit, his “short stories” are more properly speaking “sketches” in which narration and character development are subordinated to static descriptions and lyrical reveries. There are no twists or turns of the plot; temporal change is quietly absorbed into the thick description and does not fundamentally alter the rhythm of life nor upset the spiritual equilibrium of the characters.

Lee 19 The Other Chinese

Shu-mei Shih calls our attention to the painterly quality of Fei Ming’s fiction where nature and human characters share the space as in a traditional Chinese landscape painting: “The nonintrusive and quiet actions of the characters rather seem to become fragments of the landscapes with which they harmoniously merge” (197). Amongst the human characters, love, cooperation, and mutual care prevail. The familiar May Fourth theme of family conflict disappears without a trace here. In “The Tale of a Bamboo Grove” (竹林的故事 Zhulin de gushi, 1924), for example, a nuclear family—father, mother, and small daughter—thrives near a cozy bamboo grove on fishing, gardening, and animal husbandry. The narrative centers on the angelic daughter, affectionately known as San Guniang (三姑娘), who basks in the tender affection of her parents and the nurturing radiance of her idyllic surroundings. She assists in the various chores of the farm, but everything she does seems more like play than toil. Even her father’s untimely (and unexplained) death does not dampen her vivacity or interrupt her insouciant frolicking:

Mother and daughter are so hard working that the household grows very prosperous. In this little patch of the universe, the bamboo and the vegetables sprout in the spring breeze and assume a lovely shade of green. Memories of the death of Old Cheng [the father], on the contrary, grow dimmer and dimmer. When the hawk circles the house, mother would summon daughter, “Go check on the chicks in the coop.” The daughter goes to the bamboo grove and remembers that this is where father sleeps. Eventually, though, when grass levels everything that there once was a father is all but forgotten. (Fei Ming 46)

Between mother and daughter, the only cause for quarrel is the latter’s fastidiousness and insistence on remaining by the former’s side. But the feeling evoked here can scarcely be equated with “filial piety.” There are no grand gestures of self-sacrifice, only spontaneous affection, intimate companionship, and total mutual devotion. The daughter does not care for the pleasure of going to town with girlfriends to see the lantern festival (and to exhibit her beauty); the mother insists that the daughter should decorate her hair with a flower while tenderly “scolding” the latter for keeping the house spotlessly clean. In this mini-story there is an “I” narrator of sorts in the persona of a schoolboy, but he merely functions as an admiring observer and the narration is not entirely restricted to his point of view. His coming and going entail no change in the lives of 20 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

the observed; and when he returns to the village years later, he recognizes San Guniang instantly even though she is now a mature woman (婦人 furen) who is as demure and hardworking as ever. But few other stories by Fei Ming are able to sustain the faith in the everlasting as well as “The Tale of a Bamboo Grove.” Many of his stories deal with the theme of paradise lost with a touch of melancholy nostalgia. In “A Riverbank Willow” (河上柳 He shang liu, 1925), Old Man Chen is a puppet master who has lived a serene, if old-fashioned, bachelor’s life and whose doorframe couplets have remained unchanged (only the paper is replaced yearly) for as long as he can remember. But at the start of the story, he is feeling dumpish because the government (衙門 yamen) has banned puppet playing—a sideline he has plied in town to earn money for a few drinks (presumably his main source of livelihood is the land). Now he is deprived of the few modest pleasures in life and is being pestered for arrears at the tavern. After a flood washes away his wooden puppets and his mud hut, he is forced to live in an ancestral hall and cut down his beloved willow tree in exchange for a little cash. As Yang Yi points out, Fei Ming exhibits profound empathy for antiquarian characters (古風人物 gufeng renwu) such as Old Man Chen, but he also recognizes the slow disintegration of the patriarchal society and the inevitable dead end that awaits such characters (Yang Yi 454). Between the man-made and the natural agents that destroy Old Man Chen’s way of life, Fei Ming makes no special distinction, referring to the former with the defunct term of yamen, the headquarters of a civil official in imperial China. The intrusive state that seeks to eliminate a popular art form is described in a resigned tone as if it were an unfortunate but irreversible force of nature like the flood. There is only a slight hint of surprise or indignation, as when the text explains the source of Old Man Chen’s melancholy— “even the puppet show is included in the list of things outlawed by government order” (Fei Ming 51). One has every reason to see these bans as part of the late Qing (清) and early Republican campaigns against religion—aggressive programs launched by the modernizing state that often had devastating effects on local autonomy and cultural diversity. But for Fei Ming, Old Man Chen’s loss is more an occasion for nostalgia than for social critique. If Old Man Chen is a symbol of the old way of life that is being undermined by impersonal forces (the government being as faceless as the flood), then Mother Li in “The Laundress” (浣衣母 Huan yi mu, 1923) stands for expansive humanity smothered by the tawdry whims of Confucian morality. Abandoned by her husband, the 50-year-old Mother Li lives with her hunchbacked daughter outside the city wall in a straw hut bordering a stretch of sandy river beach, eking out a living as Lee 21 The Other Chinese

laundresses. However, vague knowledge of her former status (of her having once lived in “a tall mansion with tile roof”) and her feminine grace (“tottering on a pair of feet like a paper toy”) make her customers all treat her with cordiality and sometimes even hospitality (Fei Ming 18-19). Here as in “The Tale of a Bamboo Grove,” mother and daughter quarrel only because the latter is too eager to please the former and to be useful. Together, they turn their humble hut, the adjacent slope, and the beach nearby into a “carefree world” (自由世界 ziyou shijie)—first as a nature playground for neighborhood kids and then as a resting stop for peddlers, farmers, beggars, even the much-dreaded soldiers. There is no one with whom other mothers can trust their toddlers better than Mother Li, whose pockets are always full of goodies and whose hunchbacked daughter is totally devoted to these little “angels.” Soon teenage girls form the habit of taking a rest at Mother Li’s place—with their mothers’ trusting permission—after they finish their laundry in the evening. Mother Li treats them as if they were her own children just returning home from a day’s hard work, fanning the sweat beads off their “apple-like foreheads.” Mother Li’s daughter serves tea while keeping an eye on their “beautiful and handy” laundry baskets. Farmers who peddle their produce in the city also stop by to enjoy a bowl of cool tea and cake, while leaving behind a handful of peas or taro harvested from their own fields. Old men come here to sunbathe; beggars come here to search their bodies for lice. Mother Li is the “mother of all” (公共的母親 gonggong de muqin) (Fei Ming 12) whose boundless love excludes no one. The power of Mother’s Li’s maternal love is most fetchingly portrayed in her interaction with a group of soldiers. Before the literature of defense’s glorification of the war against Japan and the Communist apotheosis of the People’s Liberation Army, a soldier in the popular imagination is a villain who condenses all the dreaded attributes of banditry—lawlessness, cruelty, and total disregard for everyday values and sentiments—and who is without the countervailing glamour of knight-errantry. By introducing soldier characters into his story, Fei Ming already has to break the idyllic spell of his fictional world. But he manages to turn them into sentimental props rather than agents of fear and destruction (such as the soldiers in “Yujun”). The appearance of the soldiers (stationed inside the city wall as guards) are preceded by a short paragraph commenting on the ironic blessings of poverty— at a time when bandits and soldiers routinely prey on large and prosperous households, Mother Li and her daughter are left in peace. Moreover, Mother Li’s name is on the lips of every soldier in the garrison. Two boyish soldiers even take to calling her “mom.” They pilfer meat and vegetables, take them to Mother Li’s place, 22 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

and cook up a feast to treat her; they take their laundry here and beg her coyly to patch up the torn places; when her firewood is in low supply, they half seize and half purchase a few dan (担) and take these to her house and then run away when she discovers it to avoid her questions. In this nearly seamless world, death is not a tragedy but an occasion for the community to celebrate its identity and ritually cement its social bonds. As the daughter of the town’s “mother of all” and to some extent a public figure herself, the hunchback’s (unexplained) death is turned into a festive occasion: “The small death [小小的死 xiao xiao de si] is mourned by the entire town,” grandfathers, children, housewives, and other laundresses all offering condolences in their own style (Fei Ming 23). It may seem inconceivable that the death of a crippled, unmarried young woman would warrant spontaneous festivity on such a scale, without the active promotion of the state or the local elite. After all, the daughter is never recognized as a filial exemplar, chaste maiden, or woman warrior—the only grounds on which unmarried women become hallowed figures in traditional China. But it is precisely Fei Ming’s point that true motherly/feminine love can cathect universally and allow a community to overcome its divisions and strife and become “a community of sentiment as much as one of purpose” (Duara, Sovereignty 220). Yet the community of sentiment brought together by Mother Li’s selfless love reveals its hidden fissures when she tests the limits of its unwritten rule of conduct concerning male-female relations. A 30-something bachelor stranger shows up at Mother Li’s door and, with her consent, sets up a tea stand in front of her house to take advantage of its ideal location. At first she merely looks on, but gradually she begins to lend a hand, being unable to restrain her natural inclination to be of use. Business begins to prosper and the enterprising bachelor implores her to give up the laundry business. But rumor soon flits across the whole town and the bachelor is obliged to decamp. Now young women no longer come to rest in Mother Li’s house after doing laundry in the river; mothers scare their toddlers with talk of “a tiger outside the city gate”; and the copper coins in Mother’s Li’s pockets are no longer exchanged for candies. Thus after years of enjoying Mother Li’s munificence, the community cruelly turns its back on her on the slightest suspicion of moral infraction. In her role of “mother of all,” she is not allowed a private self with her own desires and needs. In this tale of intolerance, Fei Ming touches on the seedier side of rural life— its small-mindedness and its unjust treatment of women. But Fei Ming seems less interested in denouncing the moral code that brings about Mother Li’s downfall than in mourning the loss of community, of the possibility of humanity coalescing Lee 23 The Other Chinese

in the blissful harmony of a great family presided over by a matronly figure. Once again, lyrical nostalgia takes over: the loss is ingested by the author in a gesture of melancholia and then transformed into an exquisite aesthetic experience. Through the act of writing, he affirms his unique affinity to a lost object of love and a lost world of authenticity. Precisely because of its loss, it is always already a timeless entity on which identity may be fashioned and in which the nation may be rooted.

The Eternal Folk

Towards the late 1920s, Shen Congwen (1902-1988), whose name is almost synonymous with native soil fiction, took its imaginary nostalgia to new heights. David Wang comments that Shen’s stories tend to begin with the spatial indicator “there is” without a corresponding time frame, an indicator that points to a mythic locale that is enclosed, timeless, and self-sufficient, and in which one contemplates the “serene mountains and rivers, good-natured country folk, legendary romances, and ancient festive rituals” (265). As in Fei Ming’s stories, both Lu Xun’s reflexive narrator and Yang Zhensheng’s didactic narrator disappear altogether from view. No one is here to contemplate the gulf between incommensurate worlds (Lu Xun), or to lecture about gender equality, women’s economic independence, and public care of children (Yang Zhensheng). The villagers have little use for modernity and its aspirations and anxieties. Though seemingly “primitive” or “feudal,” their lives are ultimately humane. With the nearly simultaneous introduction of European Romanticism and Freudianism, the May Fourth generation defined humanity in a mixed idiom of affect and desire. While romantic love is a largely modern urban phenomenon (see Illouz), sexual desire seems to be the immutable common denominator of humanity. The need to paint a humane picture of the native soil explains the peculiar presence in Shen’s pastoral tales of frank sexuality, so frank and resilient that it borders on the bizarre and the pathological. In the same way that folklorists “discover” romantic love in folksongs and legends,7 Shen finds the essence of folk culture in sexual love, which instead of being crushed by moral strictures, ultimately triumphs over them. We have now come full circle from the May Fourth lamentation of the Chinese failure of love. Shen Congwen writes in the preface to his famous novella The Border Town ( 邊城Biancheng, 1934) that the purpose of literature is to

7 See Lee, “Tears That Crumbled the Great Wall.”

24 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

“represent a form of life that is graceful, healthy, spontaneous, and in tune with humanity” and that his portraiture of small town people caught up in “a common human problem” serves only to illustrate “the ideal of love of human beings” (qtd. in Wang 266). The common human problem in “Three Men and a Woman” (三個男人和一個女人 Sange nanren he yige nuren, 1930) is familiar enough: male rivalry over the heart of a woman (Shen 1981). The narrator, a small-time militia officer, tells of the intense longing that the winsome daughter of a gentry family unwittingly arouses in himself, his buddy the bugler, and a bean curd shop owner. The two militiamen like to frequent the bean curd shop for its location across the street from the girl’s residence. Just as it appears that the daily ritual of gazing at and sighing over the fleeting sight of the girl would go on for an eternity, the girl dies suddenly, having allegedly killed herself to protest an arranged marriage. As the narrator lies in bed tormented by the news of her death, the bugler returns to report that the girl’s tomb has been robbed, that the bean curd shop owner has mysteriously disappeared, and that the girl’s body has been found in a mountain cave without any clothes on and strewn with wild flowers. Critics have duly taken cues from the story to conclude that the bean curd shop owner has stolen the girl’s body and fulfilled his necrophilic desire in the cave. The story is then read, along Freudian lines, as an indictment against a tradition that deforms human sexuality. Lydia Liu expands on this reading by highlighting the class tension in the story: the girl belongs to the gentry class while the three men are of lowly social origins and can never hope legitimately to ask for the girl’s hand. In the psychoanalytic lingo, the men are symbolically castrated by their under- privileged social status. In a compelling way, Liu calls our attention to the way in which the men befriend the girl’s pet dogs, in effect likening themselves to animals. In “eroticiz[ing] the tension between the upper and lower classes” (Liu 156), the story drives home the message that humanity, here crystallized in sexual desire, can triumph over artificial social boundaries. While class hierarchy may prevent any of the men from marrying the girl and forging a socially sanctioned relationship with her, it is powerless to stop them (at least one of them) from following the imperious command of their desire to a shocking end. The necrophilic act, rather than being an instance of sexual pathology, is precisely the moment when humanity shines through—in however limited and reprehensible a fashion. The text suggests that the two militiamen may both have contemplated taking possession of the dead girl, and yet in the end only the taciturn bean curd shop owner has the courage to carry out the ultimate romantic, even if Lee 25 The Other Chinese

outrageous, act. It would be missing the point to dismiss the shop owner as a man afflicted with abnormal sexual desires. Shen Congwen is decidedly not writing a native soil version of “Sinking” (by Yu Dafu); there is very little interest here in confession as a mode of self-fashioning and equally little interest in partaking of the regime of sexuality by pathologizing transgressive desires. Even “necrophilia” is quite inappropriate in its evocation of the taxonomy of the sexual sciences. The unusual ending serves, instead, to show that the shop owner’s love for the girl is so powerful that it transcends not only the class hierarchy, but also the great divide between life and death. In other words, the congress with her dead body is only the culminating expression, not distortion, of his great passion.8 In his book-length study of Shen Congwen’s life and work, Jeffrey Kinkley maintains that Shen’s West Hunan narratives seek “to render lower-class people as ordinary, hence understandably human to his urban readers, yet also as humanly individual, as well as different—aesthetically colorful and culturally apart from city people” (147). The sexual union in the cave is, I submit, meant to accentuate this aesthetic and cultural colorfulness, especially in view of the wild blue chrysanthemums that cover the girl’s body. What makes the shop owner so human is also what most distinguishes him from the militia that captures and beheads him for committing what is to them a horrid crime. At his execution, the shop owner remains in a trance, smiling meditatively and murmuring to himself: “She was so beautiful, so beautiful—" (Shen Ts'ung-wen 135). Clearly, he is still intoxicated by the experience in the cave, and death by beheading pales before the splendor of desire. There is, to be sure, a critical aspect to the story, but the critique is as much targeted at the institution of arranged marriage (which drives the girl to her death) as at the reality of class division. Class, I argue, merely serves as a barrier which desire/humanity must overcome in order to demonstrate its strength. It carries none of the Marxist connotation of structurally determined irreconcilability or life-or- death struggle. The muscular shop owner emerges as the doer instead of mere talker or dreamer because, of the three men, he is closest to the native soil and is therefore most richly endowed with unspoiled humanity. His taciturnity, rather than a sign of his “castration from normal social intercourse” (Liu 159), is a mark of his close,

8 The trope of love transcending the boundary of life and death is a familiar one in traditional Chinese literature. Tang Xianzu’s (湯顯祖) celebrated play The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) comes readily to mind. No critic, as far as I am aware, has attempted a Freudian reading of the play or called Liu Mengmei (柳夢梅), the male protagonist, a “necrophiliac.” Instead, the erotic dream and the union in the netherworld are duly recognized as literary tropes, employed by the playwright to apotheosize the power of qing. 26 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

unalienated rapport with nature, where silence betokens vitality and authenticity. By contrast, the narrator and his buddy, having tramped around the war-torn country and involuntarily witnessed many a violent spectacle, are compromised by this experience and are therefore no longer fully or authentically human. Their “castration” is the result of their initiation into the modern regime of power, greed, mercenary soldiery, and gratuitous violence—a defilement they cannot shake off even if they rise to the rank of battalion commander (which would render them compatible to the girl’s social status). They have lost the courage to follow the object of their desire to death, as it were, and can only marvel at the shop owner’s otherworldly enactment of primitive passion. In this light, it is understandable why the death of the shop owner in the hands of their fellow militiamen would leave an indelible scar in the psyches of the narrator and the bugler so that long afterward they are still “perpetually weighed down by melancholy” (Shen Ts'ung-wen 136). In grieving over the young man’s death, they also grieve for the loss of innocence, of authenticity, and of the human spirit that they have once felt faintly in their own breasts and glimpsed burning brilliantly in the young man’s death-defying love for the girl. The point I wish to emphasize here is that Shen Congwen’s writings are far more preoccupied with celebrating local color and common humanity than with critiquing Confucianism or class oppression. As Kinkley also notes, Shen’s characters are free-spirited and they organize their family and social life on “love and mutual caring” and seldom on authority (179). The evil customs that May Fourth radicals have vehemently attacked such as arranged marriage and child marriage are rendered quaint and harmless by his characters’ expansive humanity. In spite of, or even because of, these customs, the villagers manage to live a graceful, healthy, and spontaneous life. Take Shen’s 1930 short story “Xiaoxiao” (蕭蕭) for example. The story is set in a region where families with infant sons take in teenage daughters-in-law from indigent circumstances to help bring up their “little husbands.” In high May Fourth realism, the arranged marriage is such a vile institution that distressed and frightened brides put up a desperate protest, weeping, fainting, or even taking their own lives.9 Folklore genres, too, often depict marriage from the bride’s point of view, for whom marriage amounts to leaving one’s natal

9 Consider, for example, the true incident of Zhao Shuzhen’s (趙淑貞) suicide (1919) which triggered one of the earliest discussions of the woman question in the May Fourth period. The young Mao Zedong (毛澤東) contributed three articles to local newspapers on the subject of her death. Nüjiezhong (女界鍾, 1919) put out a special commemorative issue, hailing her as “the martyred vanguard of women’s liberation” (Yang Yi 1: 210). Lee 27 The Other Chinese

home and venturing alone into the company of strangers, an experience so traumatic that few women can face it with equanimity. 10 In short, one rarely encounters portrayals of traditional marriage as a “happy affair” (喜事 xishi) for women. In “Xiaoxiao,” Shen Congwen duly reminds his reader of the time-honored tradition of wailing or sobbing in the bridal sedan, and then coolly announces that the 11-year-old Xiaoxiao, the heroine of the story, does not cry on her wedding day. In fact, “all she could do was to laugh about it, with no sense of shame or fear” (Lau et al. 227). This sets the basic tone of the whole story: the folk take in stride what enlightenment intellectuals find abominable; they go on with their lives in dignity and are fully capable of reconciling personal and collective happiness. As David Wang puts it, Xiaoxiao and her fellow villagers live in a world where the laws of society still obtain, but they observe and interpret them with “an infantile imaginativeness” that can even give a fairytale ending to a sexual transgression. Wang likens the villagers to a group of children “who are reluctant to face up to the moral consequences of ‘adult’ institutions” (Wang 243). Romanticization, after all, is a small step away from infantilization. The marriage between Xiaoxiao and her “pint-sized” toddler husband is given such an endearing representation that one may wonder why one should object to a custom that is capable of generating so much tender affection and attachment. The family and the village community at large are portrayed as a realm of primordial solidarity, mutual care, and jolly company, where Grandfather cracks ribald jokes with Xiaoxiao while her in-laws, hired farmhands, and bystanders egg him on to mine Xiaoxiao’s embarrassment for a good laugh. Having been orphaned and then married off to be worked like a chattel slave, Xiaoxiao “wasn’t any the worse for the wear; one look at her figure was proof enough of that. She was like an unnoticed sapling at a corner of the garden, sprouting forth big leaves and branches after days of wind and rain” (Lau et al. 228) and flourishing “in the clean country air, undaunted by any trial or ordeal” (Lau et al. 232). At the age of fourteen, Xiaoxiao, bursting with animalistic vigor, is seduced by a farmhand named Motley Mutt. Their union takes place in the springwoods, amidst burgeoning flora and without a glimmer of guilt or shame. Xiaoxiao’s tears only come forth when the problem of her pregnancy can no longer be ignored. In a typical May Fourth narrative, this would be the turning point of the

10 Please see Fred Blake’s “Death and Abuse in Marriage Laments” and “The Feelings of Chinese Daughters towards Their Mothers as Revealed in Marriage Laments.” As Blake shows, even the system recognizes the bride’s “persephonian dread of married life” and allows for a temporary venting of grief: “For three nights and days prior to her departure, the bride laments her fate in marriage which she likens to death in Hell! These laments include morbid wailing and rancorous cursing” ("Death" 13). 28 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

plot—when sexual transgression undercuts an individual’s communal membership, and when the lovers take drastic measures to avert the prospect of punishment/ ostracism through either elopement or double suicide. Xiaoxiao and Motley first contemplate elopement:

“Brother Motley, why don’t we go where we can be free in the city and find work there. What do you say?” “That won’t do. There’s nothing for us there.” . . . “It’s no use running to ‘freedom’ in the city. Only strangers there. There are rules even for begging your bread; you can’t go about it as you please.” (Lau et al. 233)

The city, which has symbolized liberation for so many May Fourth rebels, is in the eyes of this pair of rustic lovers an inhospitable place; the last thing it offers newcomers is “freedom.” Here, the story purports to offer a rural perspective on the city and all that the city stands for. The young lovers’ inarticulate longing for and fear of the city is owed in large part to the garrulous Grandfather’s counter- discourse on the city. In his accounts, urban “co-eds” enjoy liberties and luxuries at the price of moral decay. Thus, even given the terrible scrape they are in, the lovers still find the native soil more comforting and accommodating. And sure enough the native soil turns out to be just that way—humanely caring and accommodating beneath its menacing rhetoric. Upon discovering the affair, the in-law family is shaken up and peace and tranquility is for the moment disrupted. They call in Xiaoxiao’s uncle—her only surviving kin—to decide on her punishment. “By rights, she should have been drowned, but only the heads of families who have read their Confucius would do such a stupid thing to save the family honor. This uncle, however, hadn’t read Confucius; he couldn’t bear to sacrifice Xiaoxiao, and so he chose the alternative of marrying her off to someone else” (Lau et al. 235). In this passage, Shen Congwen does not so much challenge head-on the May Fourth maxim of Confucian “cannibalism” as suggest that it is a grossly exaggerated evil. Without the meddling of Confucian moralists, the country folk simply follow their instincts on which basis they have forged a humane existence. They may pay lip service to orthodox morality, but in practice they value individual life (even that of a transgressive female) above all sanctimonious doctrines. “Once the matter had been settled, no one, as a rule, made any more fuss about it. There was nothing to do but wait, and everyone was totally at ease on the matter. At first, Little Husband was not allowed Lee 29 The Other Chinese

in Xiaoxiao’s company, but after a while they saw each other as before, laughing and playing like brother and sister” (Lau et al. 235). Since no one comes to claim her hand, Xiaoxiao gets to stay and soon gives birth to a cherubic baby boy to whom everyone instantly takes a fancy. The family, putting behind Xiaoxiao’s adultery and the infant’s illegitimacy, takes good care of both mother and son: “the customary steamed chicken and rice wine were served to the new mother to build up her strength, and ritual paper money was burned to propitiate the gods” (Lau et al. 235). What else can account for the villagers’ magnanimity but their essential humanity, unspoiled by Confucian teachings and untutored by enlightenment intellectuals? When Xiaoxiao and her little husband finally consummate their marriage, her ten-year-old son, the Herdboy, can already “do half a man’s work [and] look after the cows and cut the grass.” Promising to be a superb farmhand, Herdboy earns his membership in the community despite his suspect origin. A year later, his rightful place in the family and village is firmly established when he is given a girl bride. At the wedding ceremony, “the grandfather and the great-grandfather were both beside themselves” and Xiaoxiao looks on singing a lullaby to her second baby (Lau et al. 235-36). The story thus ends with an affirmation of the folk’s tenacious will to life and the “mythic human cycle” (Wang 265) that sustain the eternal vitality of the native soil.

Conclusion

In the annals of Chinese literary history, Xiaoxiao is a minor character rarely mentioned in the same breath with such illustrious anti-heroes as Ah Q. Few literary historians would contemplate their comparison. Indeed, although both Xiaoxiao and Ah Q are orphans, their fictional life courses cannot be further apart from each other. Ah Q is the ultimate tramp, drifting from one place to another and suffering abuses at the hands of rich men and paupers alike. Even so, he receives neither authorial nor readerly sympathy because he is obnoxious in his manners and thoroughly devoid of the sincerity of feeling or honesty of character. He is both deceitful and self-deceiving; he is scorned by and therefore scorns everyone; he belongs to no cohesive social group or class. He yearns to join the revolution only because it seems to promise a topsy-turvy world in which he may lord over his fellow villagers. He is, in short, the polar opposite of the true folk, who are at peace with their social existence. Xiaoxiao, as mentioned before, accepts her fate with extraordinary aplomb— she neither wails nor curses at the prospect of being wedded to a child husband. She 30 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

is too much a product of the native soil to feel misplaced in her social station or alienated from her adopted community. Her extramarital liaison, though breaking communal rules, only reinforces her status as a hearty daughter of nature. The fact that the liaison results in the birth of a man-child—greatly prized in rural society— makes the redemption and reintegration of the mother a matter of course. The reconciliation between Xiaoxiao and the villagers is an extremely significant departure from the enlightenment episteme: Here the assertion of the self (through the act of sexual transgression) does not turn the self against the community— Xiaoxiao does not flee the village to become another anonymous and deracinated loner in some teeming metropolis. The village, in turn, does not violently eject Xiaoxiao in order to preserve the purity of communal identity. It accommodates the individual so long as the individual chooses to belong to it and so long as she locates her identity in her social role rather than in her sexuality/individuality. The contrast between native soil literature and realist literature a la Lu Xun can also be gleaned from a comparison between Fei Ming’s laundress Mother Li and Xianglin’s Wife in Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924; the two stories were published only a few months apart). Both characters begin as honest, upright, and hardworking rural women well respected in their communities, but because of some unfortunate twists of fate they become the victims of communal intolerance. Nonetheless, the two stories articulate fundamentally different visions of local society. While Mother Li’s descent from the “mother of all” to “a tiger outside the city gate” is saddening, there is little sense of a persecuting crowd on her heels. She is allowed to remain in virtual widowhood and resume her livelihood as a laundress. The community, in other words, though prejudiced, is capacious enough to permit the individual some margins of error. It has no need of periodically enacting ritual sacrifice to cast out “wayward” or “impure” individuals in order to consolidate communal identity. This is precisely what the people of Luzhen in “The New Year’s Sacrifice” do to Xianglin’s Wife. Her symbolically charged death on the New Year’s Eve is a powerful indictment against a social order erected on the sacrificial corpses of the wretched of the earth. For Lu Xun, local society was not a lost past “to be restored or preserved,” but a real present “to be reformed and transformed” (Duara, Sovereignty 219). For all his “demand for grim realism,” however, Lu Xun could not entirely escape the logic that informed much of the native soil fiction. As Duara notes, “even when Lu Xun . . . sought to employ native place writing for reformist goals, [he] could not avoid a nativist cathexis, a poetics of identity” (Sovereignty 235). Precisely because the need for identity—for the people to be the foundation of the new nation—was Lee 31 The Other Chinese

so keen and profound, one finds a greater sense of loss in Lu Xun’s native place writings than in texts that merely “wallow in nostalgia” (Sovereignty 219). But the nostalgic writers faced the same quandary as did all who deployed the concept of the “people” as an authorizing agency—that the people (as folk) must embody the abiding essence of the nation, while their lived experience was inherently heterogeneous, contradictory, and irreducible. The native soil writers influenced by the folklore movement tried to circumvent this quandary by diminishing or eliminating the pedagogic intellectual and by presenting the people/folk in their primordial immediacy and authenticity. But the specters of nationalism and enlightenment still haunt these stories insofar as the “state of nature” is very much a projection of intellectual fantasies. The folk often turn out to be enlightened modern individuals transposed to an idyllic setting. As I have tried to show, the disarmingly simple villagers are always made to embody the highest ideals of enlightenment humanism, not least in their emotional fullness of being. If the modern nation must be a community of sentiment and if its legitimacy must be grounded in the “people,” then the people must be shown to be capable of love, feeling, and sympathy. This was what the native soil writers sought to demonstrate. Their writings were bound up with the nationalist imperative of remaking the people and it was in this capacity that native soil literature took on its utopian qualities. The charge of “romanticism” from the realist camp is usually understood to indict the native soil writers’ reluctance to admit inequality, injustice, social conflict, and class struggle into their idylls. The realists also held in suspicion native soil portraitures of rural society as a community of sympathy wherein the individual’s inner feelings are perfectly reconciled to external moral codes. At the same time, the regionalist urge to accentuate local color served to guarantee a degree of verisimilitude, with the result that native soil characters, with few exceptions, are on the one hand uncannily modern in their endowment of emotions and in their organization of social relationships on affective principles, and, on the other hand, remarkably traditional in their reluctance to accord emotion a foundational status and in their subordination of personal desires to social institutions. They are capable of carrying out outrageous acts of passion, and yet we are seldom made privy to their inner feelings. We can only gauge the intensity of their inner life by their deeds. Native soil literature as represented by Shen Congwen acquired considerable notoriety as a genre of idealism, nostalgia, and lyricism. One of its most recognizable themes is the revelation that seemingly barbaric customs are no more than a superficial veneer beneath which thrives robust humanity. Already in 32 Concentric 33.2 September 2007

“Yujun”, there is an embryo of the Xiaoxiao story when the elderly servant couple choose to turn a blind eye to their daughter’s amorous play. In the same year (1934) that Shen published The Border Town, a novella widely regarded as the epitome of native soil literature, Yang Zhensheng wrote a short story, “Baofu” (Revenge), which mirrors Shen’s work. In both, two men vie for a woman’s affection, and their essential humanity ultimately triumphs over the conflict of individual desires. In the end, the nativist obsession with portraying the “common human problem,” in the terms of Shen Congwen, against the variegated background of “local color” bespeaks a desire to shed social artifice in order to reveal the irreducible human core—people’s natural ability to form authentic communities on the basis of natural sentiment. On these “other” Chinese, therefore, was pinned the intellectuals’ hope of realizing modern nationhood.

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About the Author Haiyan Lee is Assistant Professor of modern Chinese studies at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2007), and guest editor of “Taking It to Heart: Emotion, Modernity, Asia,” a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming). Her scholarly articles have appeared in Public Culture, Positions, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, and CLEAR, among others.

[Received 19 January 2007; accepted 12 July 2007; revised 18 September 2007]