The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature

by Yunte Huang

  From that day on, he was no longer satisfied just looking at her footsteps. Several times he was able to escape the notice of the others and, boldly yet carefully, stole glimpses of the woman with the beautiful feet. He put together the various profile angles to form a mental portrait, which he kept locked in the inner recesses of his heart. She was lovely beyond compare. Fortunately, the girl liked to visit the park day after day. Thus, he had regular opportunities to catch sight of those feet, which drove out all of his other desires, including his interest in looking at anything else around them. Each day, his eyes waited hungrily for this particular pair of feet. Seeing them time and again, he developed an inexplicable obsession: He had to look at them constantly. On any given day when the feet came around later than usual, his heart would be at his throat in his longing for them. Whenever they suddenly arrived as he was thinking about them, a wild feeling of joy would come over him and a smile would instantly appear on his face. Sometimes, as the feet left the park to return home, he would hardly be able to bear seeing them go. He would then suppress the urge to bid them good night and promise to see them again on the morrow. When the feet would stay away for an entire day, his disappointment would know no bounds. He would go about with a heavy heart, worried that the girl could have perhaps fallen ill. In sum, each time he saw her yielded a feeling of gladness, each time he did not, a feeling of woe. His moods swung between the extremes of joy and sorrow. Caught in this emotional turmoil, he had no idea what to do. He began by falling in love with a pair of feet and ended up falling in love with the whole person. His opportunities varied by the day, however. Mostly, he saw the feet, far less often the person. Chances for seeing the feet came easily, those for seeing the person came rarely. In the abstract sense, he did indeed become enamored of those feet. But in terms of actual feelings, how could he have helped extending this love to include the one to whom the feet belonged?

  After pondering the matter for an extended time, he came to realize that he had fallen hard for this girl. How wonderful it would be if he could exchange names with her, or escort her to the amusement park. And, thinking ahead another step, if they were to get married, that would be better still. He would then be able to watch over her feet all his life. At this thought, his face felt a little feverish, and he was embarrassed enough to chide himself. “Aren’t you going too far?” he muttered. “She looks like a person of means, the daughter of a wealthy family, while you, with your ragged clothes, are no more than a pauper of a cobbler. How on earth could you match up with her? Ai. . . . What is it that has made you so poor ever since you were born?” (The same thought sequence has turned the determined into successes, the crafty into criminals, and the cowardly into suicide victims.) Then another thought occurred to him. “Not so. She and I are the same sort of people. Our ages are similar. So why can’t we be married? I may be relatively poor right now, but who’s to say I won’t become rich in the future? There are many in the world who overcame a destitute childhood to end up tycoons. Everything is the result of what one does. It doesn’t seem to be all that impossible for me to become wealthy. So, fine! From now on I resolve to be an earnest, hardworking young man, to advance my position so that I can marry this girl in the future and have a fulfilling family life with her. Otherwise, it’s useless to go on fantasizing as I have day in and day out.”

  Making up his mind at that moment, he indeed strove to succeed with extraordinary determination. He showed an exceptional eagerness for learning, rushing to handle every task. He mastered all the required skills to near perfection. On his time off from his job, he regularly attended night classes to advance his academic knowledge. Through it all, he was happy to be able to see those feet outside the window every day. Looking at them each time, he would resolve once again to strive harder. It was as if they were actively encouraging him. Eventually, thanks to the strenuous effort he expended for their sake, he attained his goals.

  For a businessman, time never passes so easily. For a storyteller, however, a decade can go by with a mere stroke of the pen. The Ah Fa after that time was no longer the earlier Ah Fa. From the young apprentice he had been, he became one of the successful people in the world of industry. At first, the manager in the store noticed his excellent work and sent him to another town to be foreman at a branch. Then, when the manager’s position opened up there, he was promoted to fill it. Business boomed during the next several years, allowing him to save some money. He then quickly became a stockholder in the enterprise. Toward the end of the period, the business was greatly expanded and was reorganized into a limited corporation issuing stock. In this way, he became an important founding member of the firm. At the elections to fill the firm’s various posts during its establishment, he was voted by the stockholders into the position of vice president in charge of managing the main store. In this way he returned to his original location.

  What we must settle at this point is whether, through all this, he had forgotten the person whose feet he had been so infatuated with as a youth. Even as he was being transferred out of the main store, he could not help having lingering regrets about the move: he would miss those feet. But business came first (those words constituting a fundamental principle for his major accomplishments), and he could not very well have remained in the basement just for those feet outside the window. To go out and take care of proper business, moreover, was clearly one very good way to eventually possess those feet. So he had determinedly gone on his way, not daring to tarry. There was more and more work at his post each day, and he was getting older and older each year. Eventually, as we might expect, the infatuation he first felt as a lad gradually faded. There were times, however, when the memories did come sneaking back, memories he had some trouble brushing off. But other than laughing at himself, there was nothing he could do about them. How ludicrous, to lavish such fantasies on nothing more than a pair of feet!

  Now that he had returned and was successful, he lived with several shareholders in a large hotel. Venturing out in daylight, he felt a flutter in his heart when he saw the feet of so many women. That first night, he could not get to sleep, as various thoughts came back to him. The image of those feet from the past, long embedded in his brain, seemed to reappear with stark clarity before his eyes, like a movie film placed in the light of a projector. All he had to do was shut his eyelids and they would be there. Evidently, the first love of one’s youth cannot ever be forgotten. In pondering the past, his thoughts went as follows: “Why are those feet still in my head? Why do I still love them? Could I still be as naive as I was as a young man? Since I’m not able to free myself from them, I ought to exhaust all means, to plunge myself into the mass of humanity in order to seek them out. And yet, realistically speaking, that would be an impossible task. Too bad I was such a dope then, wallowing in my own infatuation without bothering to find out her background or address. If I were to look for her now, where would I begin?”

  Then one evening, having finished his work, he rested alone in his hotel room, stretched out comfortably on a sofa. The image of the feet was again welling up in his mind. It happened that he had left his door open. Since the sofa was directly opposite it, his line of vision was unconsciously directed outside the room. Even though a swinging door was still in the way, he could see out the unobstructed area beneath it. The feet of various hotel guests went past from the corridor outside, reminding him of what he saw out the basement window years before. Yes, uncanny coincidences do indeed happen. For, in a flash, he again caught sight of those feet.

  Having looked at them so many times, he had long known by instinct their exact width and length, how they were pointed at the toes and rounded at the heels, as well as the way they moved either in a hurry or at a leisurely pace. Should you ask him to explain this knowledge in detail, he wouldn’t of course be able to do so. But encountering them again suddenly was like rereading an old book: Instantly he was certain of what he saw. One thing about them had not changed, moreover: even now, those feet had on shiny b
lack shoes. For a former cobbler, the ability to determine the size and style of leather footwear was of course unerring. In addition, there was one other feature that made the feet easily identifiable. The bone at the second joint of each big toe jutted out at a sharp angle. Here was a truly remarkable encounter, and he wasn’t about to let this rarest of opportunities pass. So he rushed out after her.

  It was all right. She had not gone far, only to the table at the corner of the corridor. What’s more, she was standing right there, turning her head to ask a bellhop where room 107 was, and learning that it was upstairs to the west. As she nodded her thanks, her face became distinctly visible from a distance. Surely she had to be the one. Her attire was even more gaudy than before, even though it had been ten years and she was now a woman of twenty-five or twenty-six. Could she still be single? Why wasn’t she wearing a skirt? Why was she dressed like the teenager she’d not been in years? Looking again, he saw a girl by her side, someone much younger but made up with so much powder and rouge that she appeared to be a prostitute. What were they doing together? Who were they looking for in the hotel?

  Befuddled for the moment, he called the bellhop over after the two went off, and asked who they were. “They’re both call girls,” the young man replied with a smirk. “The younger one is Hibiscus Blossom; the other is Old Number Five. She tells people she’s the older sister. But she’s really the well-known courtesan Spring Hibiscus Number Five.” How had she come to this? He wanted badly to find out everything from her. So he went back to his room and filled out an order for the bellhop to bring her there.

  In short order she arrived, Hibiscus Blossom in tow. He invited her to sit down, then greeted her by announcing, “We haven’t seen each other for a very long time.”

  She searched her memory for a time without coming up with anything. “We’ve met before . . . somewhere,” she responded vaguely.

  “It’s something that happened quite some time ago,” he said with a smile. “It was I, though, who was acquainted with you, not at all the other way around. As to what I recognize in you, I’m afraid it’s just those feet of yours—not you as a total person.”

  She thought this exceedingly strange. “How is it that you recognize my feet?” she immediately asked. “Perhaps you’re playing with me. . . .”

  “It’s all true,” he said. “You’ll understand after I explain.”

  He then recounted all that had happened years ago, as if he were telling her a story. At the end, he let out a sigh. “I had no idea I would see you here today, not to mention finding you in such straits,” he said. “Just talking about everything grieves me deeply. (We shed tears on reading these words.) Now that I’ve told you all about me, can you tell me about yourself?”

  She and Hibiscus Blossom were both dumbfounded at the story, and she, especially, was deeply moved. “How in the world,” she thought, “could there be such a single-minded fool? He fell in love with my feet, then extended that love to all of me. At least he appears to care a lot for me. So why not bare my soul to him?”

  Thereupon she laid out in detail for him all that had happened to her over the past ten years. Her father, it turned out, died when she was little, leaving her to grow up with only her mother. Until she was fifteen or so, she had attended school. But she had always been fond of going to the amusement park, even at the cost of neglecting her studies. Then she was charmed by a slick young man, to whom she lost her virginity. Her mother became so upset she took ill and died. Thereafter, she descended into the world of prostitution. After becoming a veteran in the trade, she began to get into the business side of it as well. At present she was an assistant in the organization. In retrospect she could see that everything was the consequence of her early attraction to the amusement park. (Those who are similarly addicted today ought to take note of this.) And yet, had she not gone there so often during those years, she would never have left her footprints so deeply in his mind. The whole thing was a kind of karma, something ordained by fate.

  Hearing all this, he could only let out sigh after sigh. Then he took on a very serious air. “Our meeting today is the result of your feet acting as our go-between,” he said to her. “From what you tell me now, your decade of misfortune also came about because of your fun-loving feet. For my part, though, what success I enjoy today has been given to me by those same feet of yours. If not for them, I would not have accomplished what I have. So I should give great thanks to them in appreciation for the good they have provided me for ten years, for motivating me to get better and better. After all, your feet are nothing but an appendage of your whole self, and I can’t think of any appropriate gift to offer them. To get them a few pairs of shoes, for example, would hardly be sufficient. So I have no choice but to go from feet to person, to express my heartfelt gratitude. What are you in need of right now? Please tell me without hesitation. As long as it lies within my powers, I am willing to provide you whatever you ask for.”

  Old Number Five pondered for a while. “I would never guess that these feet of mine would lead to any good; they have only taken me to dissipation and ruin,” she frankly admitted. “Now, after meeting a caring person such as yourself, I’m overwhelmingly ashamed of what I’ve done. To think someone would strive so hard for the love of my feet. Even though I have my own heartaches, I could never seek to profit from you the way I’ve always sought to profit from my ordinary customers. For the sake of what you have felt for my feet, I beg you to allow all of me to become your dependent. Since you have loved them so, you won’t be able to bear seeing them wander about in the world forever, without ever having a place to call home. So please take me in. You can make me your concubine or maidservant. . . .” (These were not words of gratitude, but words of love.) Tears were running all over her face by the time she concluded. (How could she not shed them?) She looked up at him, waiting for a reply.

  He could not help being moved by this unexpected request, which he quickly agreed to grant. “These last few years, I have been so occupied with my work I have not even taken a wife,” he told her. “In my heart, I have of course wished for a day like this. You may have betrayed your own feet, but they have not betrayed me. They have made me a success in my profession, and you will be marrying me only because of them. So, in the end, your feet are a boon to you. From now on, may you keep them under control for my sake, so that I can be close to them each and every day. Then may I redouble my efforts and renew my resolve to strive for even greater success in my work. Your feet have now taken you through the gate of good fortune to a peaceful and happy existence. You have no reason to grieve anymore.”

  As they were thus agreeing to marry, Miss Hibiscus Blossom prudently slipped away to return alone to the brothel. “Fifth Sister is going to get married,” she proclaimed to everyone there. “I heard the groom is Zhao Fa, the vice president and manager of China Leather Goods.” Another decade after that, another news item was spread around. “Zhao Fa has become a tycoon. In consultation with his wife, he has bought out the large amusement park, turning it into a department store for Chinese products. Footwear produced by the China Leather Goods Company is on display in the basement. Most remarkably, Manager Zhao’s office has been located there all along. He said that a person should never forget where he comes from.” (He achieved his current success only because he was always mindful. All of you who work for a living should take Zhao Fa as a model.)

  1923

  (Translated by Timothy C. Wong)

  ZHU ZIQING

  (1898–1948)

  A virtuoso belle-lettrist, Zhu Ziqing was also a pioneer of the new verse and a renowned scholar of classical Chinese literature. Born in Jiangsu, he entered Peking University in 1916 and upon graduation taught at high schools in many cities. In 1921 he joined the Literary Research Society, and the next year started Poetry Monthly, the first poetry journal founded after the May Fourth Movement. In 1925 he was offered a professorship at Tsinghua University, whose beautiful campus would become the locale for his u
niversally admired essay “The Moonlit Lotus Pond.” The year 1928 saw the publication of his first collection of essays, A Silhouette. A patriot and peace activist, he opposed Chiang Kai-shek, who started the civil war in 1946. He died of hunger in 1948 because he refused to accept food aid from Chiang’s backer, the United States.

  The Moonlit Lotus Pond

  These past few days I have been exceedingly restless. This evening, as I sat in my courtyard enjoying the cool night air, I suddenly thought of the lotus pond along which I was used to taking daily walks, and I imagined that it must look quite different under the light of this full moon. Slowly the moon climbed in the sky, and beyond the wall the laughter of children playing on the road could no longer be heard. My wife was inside patting Run’er* as she hummed a faint lullaby. I gently threw a wrap over my shoulders and walked out, closing the gate behind me.

  Bordering the pond is a meandering little cinder path. It is a secluded path; during the day few people use it, and at night it is even lonelier. There are great numbers of trees growing on all sides of the lotus pond, lush and fertile. On one side of the path there are some willow trees and several varieties of trees whose names I do not know. On moonless nights this path is dark and forbidden, giving one an eerie feeling. But this evening it was quite nice, even though the rays of the moon were pale. Finding myself alone on the path, I folded my hands behind me and strolled along. The stretch of land and sky that spread out before me seemed to belong to me, and I could transcend my own existence and enter another world. I love noise, but I also love quiet; I love crowds, but I also love seclusion. On a night like tonight, all alone under this vast expanse of moonlight, I can think whatever I wish, or think of nothing if I wish. I feel myself to be a truly free man. The things I must do and the words I must say during the daytime I need not concern myself with now: this is an exquisite secluded spot, a place where I can enjoy the limitless fragrance of the lotuses and the light of the moon.