by Lao She
THE END
NOTES
bean curd parlour: A vendor of fresh-made bean curd. Similar to commercial bread making, bean curd preparation begins early in the morning, and consists of the grinding and boiling of soybeans.
slips of paper money: As part of Chinese funerary customs, paper money is burnt as an offering to the deceased for their use in the afterlife.
ancient Chinese sages proscribing physical contact between members of the opposite sex: As set down in classical Chinese texts such as the Book of Rites, one of the Five Classics traditionally believed to have been authored or edited by Confucius.
freedom: The word for ‘freedom’ in Felinese is not at all like the one we use in Chinese. By ‘freedom’ the Cat People mean ‘taking advantage of others; noncooperation; creating disturbances’. (Narrator’s note to the original text.)
the argument for the innate goodness of man won’t hold water: The Chinese philosopher Mencius argued that human nature is good and when it operates spontaneously or ‘unconsciously’, it tends towards acts of benevolence.
He quoted the Cat Country Classics at me: Refers to the Five Classics of Confucian philosophy and the Classic of Poetry, one of the Five Classics, and the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry dating from the tenth to the seventh centuries BCE.
We Foreigners had Better Stick Together: Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, most foreigners in China lived in foreign enclaves where they were insulated from the Chinese populace and beyond the jurisdiction of Chinese law.
Light Country: A play on the Chinese names for America (Beauty Country) and Britain (Brave Country).
frost-covered winter melon: A vine-grown vegetable gourd native to China that is covered in a fuzzy white coating when young.
Madam Ambassador’s Story: Under the traditional marriage system, widows were not permitted to remarry. There would often be intense rivalry between the usually elder head wife and the younger secondary wives or concubines.
Reverie leaves make excellent medicine: Similarly, opium was often used in China to treat diseases or even minor indispositions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
But nobody binds a girl’s feet anymore: Towards the end of the nineteenth century, various interest groups such as Christian missionaries, educated women and the feminist movement began to advocate for an end to foot-binding and by the early twentieth century the imperial Qing court and Republican government that came after, made attempts to prohibit the practice.
ten thousand: Historically, ten thousand is the largest discrete numerical unit. ‘Ten thousand years’ was a form of address reserved exclusively for the emperor and translates as ‘long live’.
woman radical: Each Chinese character is a logogram made up of individual components called ‘radicals’, and the Chinese character for ‘woman’ is both a radical and a character. The ‘woman’ radical appears in many Chinese characters and is one of the more frequently occurring radicals. Meanwhile, the ‘woman’ character is a plural noun, able to represent both ‘woman’ and ‘women’ in meaning.
hwala-fuszji: In the original Chinese, these foreign phrases resemble the transliteration of the Russian language in Chinese.
Ruler of the Ten Thousand Brawls: In ancient times, the Chinese emperor was known as ‘Ruler of the Ten Thousand Chariots’, such as that set down in the foundational Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching.
Uncle Karl: Suggestive of the influential German philosopher Karl Marx, who co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels.
Red Cord Corps: Alludes to the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party, the Red Army, as it was known during the civil war with the Kuomintang Party, following the break-up of the Kuomintang-Communist alliance in 1927.
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Australia)
707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada)
90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland
25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ)
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd
Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa
Penguin (Beijing) Ltd
7F, Tower B, Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China.
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Chinese as Maochengji by Les Contemporains, Shanghai 1932
This translation first published by Ohio State University Press, 1970
This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia) in association with Penguin (Beijing) Ltd, 2013
Copyright © The Estate of Lao She, 1932
Translated from the original Chinese edition by William A. Lyell, Ph.D.
This edition published by arrangement with Ruth G. Lyell, Ph.D.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Design by Steffan Leyshon-Jones © Penguin Group (Australia)
Front cover image © Gao Rongsheng
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-0-85797-565-2