Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts

by Zhongshu Qian

  19. The 1946 edition reads: “Luckily he hadn’t made man beautiful, otherwise he wouldn’t have had to bring a gift either! He then ordered man to explain his request.”

  20. Parallel prose and regulated verse are two Chinese poetic forms governed by strict rules about symmetry, parallelism, and tonal balance.

  21. The 1983 edition reads: “Once again, he couldn’t help admiring the exquisiteness of his art. As a result, God felt at peace.”

  22. The Chinese idiom “Humans beseech Heaven when in dire straits” (ren qiong ze hutian ) captures the tendency of humans to seek divine intervention when compelled by circumstance.

  23. This Buddhist-sounding line is an excellent example of Qian’s fondness for mixing allusions, one ancient and one modern in this case, as a way of obliquely making fun of his contemporaries. The phrase parodies a famous line attributed to Cao Cao (155–220), a military leader and chancellor of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220). In the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi ), which is largely responsible for Cao Cao’s subsequent reputation as an archvillain, Cao justifies his backstabbing of a sworn brother by remarking that “I would rather wrong the world than have the world wrong me” (Ningke wo fu tianxia ren, buke tianxia ren fu wo ). The reference to eating grass likely alludes to Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) self-mocking remark that “I’m like a cow, eating grass and squeezing out milk and blood” (Wo haoxiang yizhi niu, chide shi cao, jichulaide shi niunai, xue ). Lu Xun also likens himself to a humble beast of burden elsewhere in his works, most notably in the poem “Self-Mockery” (Zichao ), which contains the famous line “Brow arched, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers / Head bowed, I serve as the children’s willing ox” (Hengmei lengdui qian fuzhi, fushou ganwei ruzi niu ). The “milk and blood” comment appears in his common-law wife Xu Guangping’s (1898–1968) dedication to her book Xinwei de jinian (A Memento of Consolation) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953).

  24. Tripitaka is the Buddhist monk protagonist in the famous Ming dynasty vernacular novel Journey to the West. Accompanied by three anthropomorphic beasts with magical powers (Monkey, Piggy, and Sandy), Tripitaka travels to India to obtain Buddhist sutras and along the way experiences a series of adventures, including encounters with carnivorous monsters.

  25. This expression refers to a situation in which one not only fails to gain any benefit but ends up inconveniencing oneself to boot. The proverb appears in slightly different form in chap. 12 of the Qing vernacular novel The Scholars (Rulin waishi ): “be unable to taste lamb meat and end up reeking of mutton for nothing” (yangrou bu ceng chi, kong re yishen shan ).

  26. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “His protruding stomach made him look like a patient suffering from goiter or a country suffering from inflation. But the goat’s horns . . .”

  27. “Offering to a Crocodile” (Ji e’yu wen ) is a celebrated parodic essay by the Tang dynasty (618–907) essayist, poet, and courtier Han Changli (768–824), better known as Han Yu . In the piece, addressed to a crocodile that has been terrorizing a nearby village, Han, the newly arrived district magistrate, threatens the crocodile with death if he does not cease eating humans and accept banishment to the ocean. An English translation of this work is in David Pollard, trans. and ed., The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 33.

  28. In Chinese folklore, dragons are serpent shaped, and black dragons carry a pearl under their chins. The terms “black dragon pearls” (lizhu ) and “pearls from below the chin” (lingxia zhi zhu ) came to refer generally to anything precious, or to the essence of something, such as a piece of writing. An early parable about black dragon pearls occurs in the “Lie Yukou” section of the Daoist philosophical text Zhuangzi .

  29. A prevalent belief in traditional Chinese medicine is that consuming the “essence” of a wild beast endows the consumer with that animal’s qualities, such as fierceness or virility.

  30. This cliché appears in traditional Chinese literary romances, as well as a vow of brotherhood made by the bandits in the vernacular novel The Water Margin.

  CAT

  Translation revised from Yiran Mao, Cat, by Qian Zhongshu: A Translation and Critical Introduction (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2001).

  1. The Forbidden City is located in the center of Beijing, opposite what is now Tiananmen Square. First constructed in the period 1406 to 1420, the complex served as the seat of imperial rule from the mid-Ming through the Qing dynasty.

  2. Les Pléiades (The Pleiades) refers to a number of “star” poets of the sixteenth-century French Renaissance. While the exact makeup of this canon varies by source, its core members include Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560), “prince of poets” Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), and Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–1589).

  3. Shakespeare, Sonnets 127–52. In the 1946 edition, this and the following sentence read: “This cat is beautiful and dark, so we might as well follow Shakespeare and call her ‘Dark Lady.’”

  4. Daji was the favored concubine of the reputedly tyrannical King Zhou of the Shang dynasty (sixteenth–eleventh centuries B.C.E.). She was the daughter of Yousushi , the chief of an ancient tribe. When King Zhou defeated Yousushi, Yousushi presented Zhou with his daughter, who is said to have aided Zhou in his tyrannical rule. Ever since, Daji has been a classic Chinese symbol of beauty and viciousness.

  5. Posthumous names and honorary titles were conferred on deceased emperors, aristocrats, and distinguished ministers to immortalize their deeds.

  6. The League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, was formed to preserve peace and foster international cooperation through pledges by member states to eschew aggression and take united action in applying economic and military sanctions. In 1937, however, the league condemned Japan’s Manchurian policy but failed to take forceful action against its aggression in China.

  7. Tang Ruoshi (Tang Xianzu [1550–1617]) was a playwright born in Zhangle, Jiangxi. For his most famous work, see Tang Ruoshi, The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting, trans. Cyril Birch, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Xie Zaihang (Xie Zhaozhe [1567–1624]) was a Ming dynasty writer born in Linchuan, Fujian.

  8. Yuan (1271–1368); Ming (1368–1644); Qing (1644–1911).

  9. Beijing (Northern Capital) was renamed Beiping (Northern Peace) in 1928, when the Nationalist government moved the capital to Nanjing (Southern Capital, or Nanking). The name reverted to Beijing in 1949 when the Communists took over and declared Beijing the capital of the People’s Republic of China.

  10. Over forty specimens of Homo erectus, who lived approximately 500,000 years ago, were unearthed at Zhoukoudian (thirty miles southwest of Beijing) in the 1920s and 1930s and came to be known as Peking (Beijing) man. In addition to fossil remains, many stone tools were found, along with evidence that Homo erectus pekinensis had mastered the art of fire making.

  11. The 1930s saw ongoing disputes between writers and critics associated with the Beijing school (Capital school) and the Shanghai school. Lu Xun ridiculed the bickering between these schools in his essay “The Beijing School and the Shanghai School” (Jingpai yu haipai ).

  12. With the abduction of the last emperor of the Qing dynasty on February 12, 1912, the feudal system that had prevailed in China for more than two thousand years ended. In this story, the two old men are branded as old-fashioned remnants of a bygone age.

  13. The Chinese democratic revolution led by Dr. Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen [1866–1925]) overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China.

  14. During the latter years of the Qing dynasty, certain official titles could be purchased. Unscrupulous purchasers exploited their newly acquired prestige for graft and other forms of self-aggrandizement, a practice chronicled in highly popular exposé novels such as Wu Jianren’s (1866–1910) Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (serialized 1903–1910) and Li Boyuan’s (1867–1906) Guanchang xianxing ji (1903), both available in partial English translation as Wu Wo-yao, Vignet
tes from the Late Ch’ing: Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two Decades, trans. Shih Shun-Liu (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1975), and Officialdom Unmasked, trans. T. L. Yang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001), respectively.

  15. Wuchang, the capital of Hubei province, was the site of a military uprising launched on October 10, 1911, by anti-Qing soldiers of the New Army, aided by members of the Tongmeng hui , a group founded by Sun Yat-sen that later evolved into the Nationalist Party. This uprising was followed by the new military government’s declaration of independence from the Qing dynasty.

  16. The Westernization Movement was initiated and promoted by bureaucrats such as Yi Xin, Zen Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang, and Zhang Zhidong in the latter half of the nineteenth century to introduce Western military and industrial technology in order to preserve the rule of the Qing government. See Bai Shouyi, Zhongguo tongshi gangyao (Essentials of General Chinese History) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1980).

  17. In the 1946 edition, this sentence ends: “. . . which looked like rose petals floating in milk.”

  18. In both Chinese and Japanese, “Japan” means “origin of the sun.” Japan’s national flag is called the “sun flag.” The allusion likely refers to Japan’s imperialist expansion across Asia, during which Japan substituted its own authorities in place of local governments.

  19. “Demon seductress” (yaojing ), an evil spirit or witch, is a derogatory term for an attractive woman.

  20. “The three hundred and sixty trades” is a Chinese expression used to refer collectively to all professions.

  21. In Chinese, zhangfu (husband), daifu (doctor), and tiaofu (porter) all contain the character fu , which can refer to (among other things) “laborer” or “intellectual,” depending on context. Qian purposefully juxtaposes fu representing different social classes. The 1946 edition has chefu (chauffeur) instead of tiaofu.

  22. The Chinese term that Qian uses is literally “sitting bottom” (zuotun ). In the 1946 edition, the German reads: “Sitzfleisch haben.” Haben is cut from the 1983 and later editions.

  23. French lawyer, politician, and epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) was the author of La Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste, 1825).

  24. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . modern man, unlike those court tasters of the past who held official title.”

  25. In the 1946 edition, the second title is Scattered Notes on My Journey to the West (Xiyou sanji ).

  26. Qian humorously transliterates the titles of these two popular travel guides as “a must see” (bi deguo ) and “never visited” (mei lai ).

  27. Grandview Garden is a garden of the Rongguo Mansion. Lin Daiyu is the niece of the master of the Rongguo Mansion and comes from a less-prominent, less-wealthy family, whereas Grandma Liu is from the countryside. Her entrance into the garden is considered the quintessential comedic “country bumpkin” scene in premodern Chinese fiction.

  28. In the old days, female characters in Beijing opera were played by males, who tended to be larger than women. This likely alludes to Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), Beijing opera’s most famous female impersonator, who, by the 1940s, when Qian wrote “Cat,” was in his forties and had put on weight.

  29. In the 1946 edition, the second title is Scattered Notes on the Return of a Native (Huanxiang sanji ).

  30. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . just as when a car is pulling out of a garage the nose is the last to emerge.”

  31. Tianqiao was a market area in southeastern Beijing that, by the end of the Qing dynasty, had become a gathering place for folk performances, including traditional operas, ballad singing, storytelling, comic dialogues, clapper ballads, acrobatics, puppet shows, and martial arts.

  32. The 1946 edition reads: “French symbolist poets.”

  33. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . and encouragement, which served the same purpose as a grown-up’s ruffling a child’s hair or patting his shoulder to tell him not to be afraid. As such, it was a pity that Yigu still . . .”

  34. This passage alludes to the Tang poet Li Bai’s (701–762) poem “A Banquet Held in Xie Tiao’s Tower in Xuanzhou, to Bid Farewell to Archivist Shu Yun” (Xuancheng Xie Tiao lou jianbie jiaoshu Shu Yun ). The opening lines are “Ah, my betrayer! / Yesterday’s day that never will return. / Ah, my dismayer! / This day today that makes me this day mourn” .

  35. The Boxer Rebellion was a quasi-religious, antiforeign, and anti-Christian armed struggle waged by Chinese peasants in 1900, with the eventual support of the Qing government. It started out in the provinces of Shandong and Hebei. Churches were sacked and missionaries as well as their Chinese converts were killed. Foreign legations in Beijing were besieged before a relief force of foreign powers attacked the Forbidden City and defeated the Qing troops.

  36. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “Thanks to clever advertising, these essays were said to be like the eight-legged essays Kuang Chaoren wrote in The Scholars: everyone was reading them in the Western world.” In chap. 19 of The Scholars (Rulin waishi ), Kuang Chaoren takes a civil service examination on behalf of an imbecile candidate, so Qian seems to be suggesting that Yuan Youchun (a stand-in for Lin Yutang) was pulling a similar sleight of hand as a cultural interpreter.

  37. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “Otherwise, we’d have to say that the black circles under his eyes were marks of libertinism or insomnia, and that his red nose was a sign of hard drinking or constipation. Malicious speculation of this sort would be dishonest, however, and would furthermore contain too many hypotheses to accord with the scientific method.”

  38. In Chinese, the abbreviation for “Japan” also means “sun.”

  39. Cixi (1835–1908) was the dowager empress of the late Qing dynasty.

  40. Bonsai is the creation of miniaturized landscapes in containers by carefully controlling the growth of trees over a period of years. Haiku is a concise form of Japanese poetry consisting of seventeen syllables divided into units of five, seven, and five syllables. The creation of bonsai, the writing of haiku verse, and the practice of the elaborate tea ceremony are distinctive Japanese traditional arts.

  41. This is a satiric reference to Japan’s grandiose plan for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Da dongya gongrong quan ), a scheme by which Japan would dominate Asia economically, culturally, and militarily.

  42. This term was promoted by the German scholar of Shakespeare and Goethe, Friedrich Gundolf (1880–1931), a close associate of the scholar-poet Stefan George.

  43. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “His discussion of ‘crystallization’ was akin to Stendhal’s philosophy of love, and his discourse on ‘selective affinity’ was at one with Goethe’s famous novel [The Sorrows of Young Werther].”

  44. This term is associated with the self-deceptive behavior of Lu Xun’s fictional protagonist, Ah Q, from his famous novella The True Story of Ah Q (1922).

  45. The Qingyun Song was a classical song said to have been composed by Shun , a legendary monarch of antiquity, which was used as the national anthem by the Northern Warlord government. On noise and thinkers, see “A Prejudice.”

  46. The 1946 edition reads: “Since too many of the dishes were steamed in clear soup, the colors were not well distributed.” Expanded in the 1983 edition.

  47. The 1946 edition reads: “. . . young men accustomed to living at home or at school would shake their heads and say, ‘It really doesn’t seem like him.’” Compare the Devil’s comments on autobiography in “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu.”

  48. The 1946 edition reads: “His mind-set of fearing others and wanting to make others afraid of him must be likened to a cat when it sees a dog.”

  49. The 1946 edition has an additional sentence here: “He encouraged and guided them, subliminally shaping their outlooks on life and receiving their gifts of flowers.”

  50. Qian Ruoshui (960–1003), a high official of the Song dynasty, is sai
d to have visited Mount Hua when he was young to get his fortune told by Chen Tuan (d. 989), a monk clad in a hempen robe. Later, when people wrote books on physiognomy, they often used “hempen robe physiognomy” in the title.

  51. The 1946 edition has additional sentences here: “A man with such defining eyes was best suited for one of two paths: either become an optometrist and cure his own ocular malady by pledging to rid the world of all eye diseases, or to pair a bewitching smile with his contemptuous glances and get into ambush courtship by darting glances at girls on street corners. But Fu Juqing was a critic after all.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

  52. He Yimen (He Zhuo [1661–1722]) was a textual critic of the Qing dynasty born in Changzhuo, Jiangsu.

  53. Jin Shengtan (1608–1661) was a literary critic who annotated editions of several Chinese classics, including Li sao, Zhuangzi, Book of Songs, Poetry of Du Fu, The West Wing, and The Water Margin.

  54. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was, for a time, Alexander Pope’s most important mentor. But in “Atticus,” Pope portrays Addison as one who could “Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer” (quoted in Robert M. Otten, Joseph Addison [Boston: Twayne, 1982], 13).

  55. This phrase appears in English in the original text. Qian’s Chinese rendering, piyan is a homophone for piyan (asshole), though it is not clear that a vulgar pun is intended. In the 1946 edition, the remainder of this sentence reads simply: “he was delighted.”

  56. The 1946 edition has an additional passage here: “When he had just returned to China, his eyes accidentally lost this special property. A nouveau riche Shanghai businessman felt that, from the car to the pug, his home possessed every foreign product out there except for a sufficiently Westernized person, so he made it his hobby to raise a foreign student and intended to marry Juqing to his only daughter. The daughter forced Juqing to see a doctor about getting a pair of glasses to fix his eyes. Juqing acquiesced, thinking to himself that getting a wife and a fortune wouldn’t be a bad way to recoup his foreign study expenses. After two or three days of wearing glasses, however, he couldn’t help but protest. He claimed that his habit of leering and sneering had already determined his life’s course and ideals, and that if he got rid of them now, over a decade of effort would go to waste, leaving him hesitating at the crossroads of life, seeking a different calling. Fixing his eyes would be no big deal in itself, but it would force him to completely reinvent his entire persona, and this wasn’t worth it. He’d prefer not to marry. This incident only elevated Juqing’s reputation.” Cut in the 1983 edition.