by Li Rui
TREES WITHOUT WIND
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 Mandogi’s Ghost, translated by Cindy Textor (2010)
Xiaomei Chen, editor, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (2011)
Qian Zhongshu, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, edited by Christopher G. Rea, translated by Dennis T. Hu, Nathan K. Mao, Yiran Mao, Christopher G. Rea, and Philip F. Williams (2011)
Dung Kai-cheung, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, translated by Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall (2012)
O Chŏnghŭi, River of Fire and Other Stories, translated by Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton (2012)
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)
Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition, edited by Seiji M. Lippit (2012)
LI RUI
TREES WITHOUT WIND
A NOVEL
TRANSLATED BY JOHN BALCOM
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
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Copyright © 2013 Li Rui and John Balcom
COVER IMAGE: ©FRANK LUKASSEK / CORBIS
COVER DESIGN: CHANG JAE LEE
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53104-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Li, Rui, 1950-
[Wu feng zhi shu. English]
Trees without wind : a novel / Li Rui ; translated by John Balcom.
p. cm.—(Weatherhead Books on Asia)
ISBN 978-0-231-16274-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-16275-3 (pbk.)—
ISBN 978-0-231-53104-7 (electronic)
I. Balcom, John. II. Title.
PL2877.R85W7813 2012
895.1'352—dc23
2012014231
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 author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Trees Without Wind: Anatomy of a Revolution
LI RUI’S MASTERFUL NOVEL Trees Without Wind is set against the backdrop of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), or Mao’s last revolution, as it is termed by some today. For ten years China was thrown into utter chaos as Mao unleashed the Red Guard to once again consolidate his political power and to implement a reign of perpetual revolution. A younger generation of extreme idealists sought to carry forward Chairman Mao’s plans while aiming to overthrow the status quo. Mao possessed near divine status and was venerated in a cult of personality that would have disastrous consequences for the country. Li Rui sees the decade as the most important, if not the defining period in modern Chinese history.
Li Rui is an important member of that generation of fine writers who lived through the Cultural Revolution and came to prominence in the 1980s. He was born in Beijing in 1950 and grew up there. In 1969, after finishing secondary school, he was sent to the Shanxi countryside, where he worked as a peasant for six years, followed by another three years as a steel-mill worker. His parents died during this time, and his siblings were scattered around China. Li Rui’s experience in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution was formative to his development as a writer. Much of his fictional output has been concerned with rural Shanxi in that tumultuous period.
The novel grew out of the author’s short story “A Funeral,” which is included in his 1989 short-story collection The Earth. Four years later, Li Rui revisited this piece and decided it needed further development. Over the next three years, he worked at surpassing his earlier efforts as a writer to produce something totally new in terms of form and narrative style. He sought to bring the Cultural Revolution, which had served as an ill-defined backdrop to his work, into sharper focus, feeling that the period was key to understanding China and had an importance to the Chinese similar to that of the two world wars for Europeans. Published in 1996, Trees Without Wind offers a view of the Cultural Revolution from the hindsight of twenty years.
In China, Li Rui’s fiction is often lumped with the “root-seeking” school of modern Chinese writing, which was largely concerned with an examination of rural life and values. This categorization is due in large part to his early collections of short stories, which are set in the countryside. In Trees Without Wind, the setting is a remote village in the Luliang Mountains of Shanxi Province, a particularly poor and backward region. In the tradition of Zhao Shuli, the great proletarian novelist from Shanxi, who is remembered for his use of dialect to create a new written language to represent peasant speech, Li Rui u
tilizes the regional speech of Shanxi to further heighten the verisimilitude of his characters. Because Li Rui has chosen to write about a poor province, using the local language, his writing has sometimes been dismissed by Chinese critics as a throwback to an earlier time—an oversimplification, to be sure.
Depicted in the novel are the political movements and in-fighting of the period, replete with the obligatory quotations from Chairman Mao. Yesterday’s discourse of power now seems a relic. Alongside the official language of power, Li Rui juxtaposes Shanxi peasant speech. Yet both this bygone language of power and the rural dialect are contained within extreme formal innovations that include multiple perspectives, stream-of-consciousness-narrative, and flashbacks. With consummate artistry, Li Rui dissects and deconstructs the Cultural Revolution, exposing it for what it was: a cultural, social, and economic disaster. The novel also upends the genre of revolutionary fiction in terms of content and form. The linear plots, the black-and-white purity of values, and the absence of complex or middle characters that typify such writing are all undermined here. Life becomes ambiguous, human motives are hypocritical and self-serving, values are impure, and the good guys don’t always win.
The character Zhang Weiguo best embodies the metanarrative of the Cultural Revolution. Zhang’s own idealism and desire to be a writer have been inspired and shaped by proletarian fiction and movies of the revolution. He seeks to imitate one proletarian writer in particular, not just in going to the countryside to change the world but also in his very appearance, by adopting the same black-rimmed glasses worn by his model. Since arriving in Stunted Flats, Zhang has kept a diary, which is actually a work of revolutionary fiction based on his experiences. Throughout the novel, there is a frequent blurring of fiction and reality in Zhang Weiguo’s references to his fictional alter ego, Zhang Yingjie. While the fictional protagonist struggles to realize his ideals, Zhang Weiguo is far more complex. Even as he interprets his own motives through the metanarrative of the party idealism of the Cultural Revolution, his actual behavior is, ironically, much more ambiguous. He compromises his ideals to make deals with the locals to undermine the authority of an older cadre.
The complex social and political relationships in the village and the various levels of irony are inseparable from the novel’s form. The novel is narrated from the perspectives of a dozen characters, one of whom is a donkey who thinks in terms of color association—therefore, in her monologues, the “green one” refers to her caretaker, Uncle Gimpy, who feeds her, and so on. Much of the irony arises from the multiple perspectives, as events are interpreted in different ways by different characters, and in the gap between self-perception and perception by others. Irony is also a product of intertextuality, of reading the novel within the tradition of modern Chinese fiction, especially in its later revolutionary manifestation, in which plots and characters were often flattened as writers sought to portray workers, peasants, and soldiers as heroes. For example, the struggle session against the sole class enemy in the village takes on a particularly ironic twist when read against, say, other struggle sessions depicted in a classic of proletarian fiction such as Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines on the Sanggang River. The revolution has become a caricature of itself.
This artistic synthesis achieved by Li Rui is symptomatic of the milieu in which he wrote. China, having rejected the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, had embarked upon economic reforms on a massive scale and had opened to the West, in the wake of which came great social and cultural change and demands for greater political liberalization. During the 1980s and 1990s China was exposed to twentieth-century literary trends and schools from around the world, through both translations and academic studies. Modernist writing, previously considered decadent and available only to a select few of the Party elite during the Cultural Revolution, was suddenly widely available and came as a shock, providing inspiration and a fertilizing influence. For example, Li Wenjun’s translations of Faulkner’s fiction in the 1980s were an important source of inspiration for Li Rui. Faulkner, especially the author of As I Lay Dying, is an abiding presence behind the novel. The result is a masterful blend of regional content and high modernist style.
The title of Trees Without Wind refers to a Chinese expression: “the tree may prefer calm, but the wind will not subside.” As Director Liu, one of the characters in the novel, explains its significance within the revolutionary context: “It means the tree wants to stop and rest, but the wind blows and blows, and even if the tree wants to stop, it can’t; even if it wants to stand still, it can’t. That’s the way class struggle is, no one has a choice—you might not want to struggle, but you have to!” Class struggle and revolution are proclaimed as independent of human will, though they are depicted as something far different in the novel. The villagers of Stunted Flats all yearn to be free of the buffeting winds of revolution. Ironically, they generally think that life was better without all the upheavals caused by the self-interested officials and ideologues and their games. (The juxtaposition of life in the village during the Cultural Revolution with the brutality under the Japanese during the 1930s and ’40s would also seem to underscore the assumption that politics has done nothing but make life worse for the villagers.)
The remote mountain village setting is also significant. It is called Stunted Flats because the poverty-stricken inhabitants all suffer from Kashin-Beck disease, a degenerative bone disease that leaves them stunted, deformed, and crippled. On a symbolic level, of course, the political movement as it unfolds in the village represents the Cultural Revolution in microcosm and the residents represent China’s masses, crippled and deformed by nature and the political system. The villagers live in poverty, struggling for freedom from the realm of necessity. The pursuit of food and sex occupies most of their time. They are largely ineffectual and powerless in dealing with political issues. By contrast, the two representatives of the Communist Party are much freer and not subject to such harsh constraints.
Political control over the village has been exercised by an old-guard revolutionary, Liu Changsheng, also referred to as Director or Commune Head Liu. Over the years since the victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he has grown complacent. Now comfortable in his position, he enjoys food and drink, as well as the favors of one of the village women, and has no interest in overturning the status quo. He is not a severe master, and basically desires to live and let live.
However, Zhang Weiguo, one of the educated youth who went down to the countryside to transform China, has been living in the village for six years. Known as Kugen’r, or “root of suffering,” he is the orphan son of a Party martyr and has chosen to steel and temper himself in the remote country. Vain, conceited, and ambitious to advance himself as a revolutionary, he has not made much headway. His vanity is subtly depicted when he goes to the eye doctor to be fitted for glasses he does not need, because he likes the cosmetic effect. His journal, which is also a fictionalized account of his life and work at the village, portrays himself as a revolutionary hero. Kugen’r, while paying lip service to the goals of the revolution, is in it to advance himself. He has little stomach for Director Liu’s way of life and slack principles, and would like nothing better than to put him in his place.
Uncle Gimpy, like most of the villagers, works hard for the basics of life. Despite being called a rich peasant, he has actually spent much of his life caring for the village donkeys. He is well liked by the villagers, but must be trotted out as a class enemy every time the Party orders a political movement to be undertaken. He is subject to not only the laws of the realm of necessity but also the rather arbitrary laws of politics. His decision to end his own life is the only gesture at freedom he can make within a crushing system, and his death is the catalyst that finally precipitates the denouement of the political struggle between Liu and Kugen’r. Just before hanging himself, Uncle Gimpy, in particularly self-ironic form, wonders what the Communists will do after he is gone, since there are no other class enemie
s in the village.
Nuanyu, the main female character, is not actually from Stunted Flats, and is therefore also healthy and sound in body. In a sense, she represents the healthy and fructifying aspects of nature not subject to deformation by political power. She and her family arrived in Stunted Flats fleeing the famine that resulted from the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Her younger brother dies there, and Nuanyu is married off to one of the village men, or so she thinks. She in fact “weds” the entire village, because the village has provided the goods for the “bride price.” After the deaths of her husband and her infant daughter, she enters into a polyandrous relationship with the remaining village males. Cherishing her, the village looks after her; she does light jobs for high work points. It can be argued that Nuanyu and the village men are practicing a form of communism. However, their “primitive” communism is not the ideologically pure variety that the puritanical Kugen’r has strived to inculcate in the villagers for six years. In the poorest parts of Shanxi, such relationships were practiced, though not generally utilized as a topic for literature, until the 1980s and ’90s.
Li Rui’s revolutionary novel, therefore, stands as an indictment of the period and a critique of the ideological literature of previous decades. The revolution as depicted here has nothing to do with the idealism of proletarian or revolutionary fiction; rather, it is a nexus of conflicts of self-interest conducted under the guise of political and social change. The new society and the revolution are gamed by the self-serving—the complacent and the conceited—for their own ends, which are basically sensual and vain. The revolution is not about uplifting the masses, transforming China or the world, but rather about promoting one political or ideological faction at the expense of all else. On the levels of form and content—the high modernist style and polyandrous relationships in rural Shanxi—the novel stands as a critique of the one-dimensional proletarian fiction that embodied the idealistic metanarrative of the Cultural Revolution and shaped the minds of a generation. Trees Without Wind is one of the author’s finest novels, and arguably one of the best ever written about China’s Cultural Revolution.