by Yunte Huang
There was another blast of wind; when it had passed by, the shop signs, the mats, and the pedestrians all seemed to have been rolled up and carried off by the gust. All that was left were the willow branches following the wind in a mad dance.
The clouds had not yet covered the entire sky but it was already dark on the ground; the too hot, too bright, too clear noontime had abruptly been transformed into something that resembled a dark night. The wind brought the rain as it dashed wildly from east and west as if searching for something on the ground. Far off on the northern horizon there was a red flash as if the clouds had been split open and their blood gushed out. The wind diminished but it made a loud whistling noise that made people shiver. A blast of this kind passed by and nobody seemed to know what to do next. Even the willows were waiting for something apprehensively.
There was yet another flash, white and clear and right overhead. The fast-falling raindrops came with it and forced the dust to leap upward, giving the ground a rainish look of its own. Many huge raindrops pelted Hsiang Tzu on the back and he shivered twice.
The rain paused. Now the black clouds covered the entire sky. Still another blast of wind came, much stronger than the ones before, and the willow branches stretched out horizontally, the dust flew in all directions, and the rain fell in sheets. Wind, earth, and rain were all mixed up together; that gray, cold, roaring wind wrapped everything up inside itself and you couldn’t tell what was a tree, what was ground, or what was cloud. It was a chaos of noise and confusion. The wind passed by, leaving behind only the driving rain to tear the sky, rend the earth, and fall everywhere. You couldn’t see rain. There was only a sheet of water, a blast of wetness, and then innumerable arrowheads that spurted up from the ground and hundreds of torrents that fell from the roofs. In a few minutes the earth was indistinguishable from the sky as the rivers in the air flowed down and the rivers on the ground flowed across them to make a grayish dark turbid yellow, sometimes white, world of water.
Hsiang Tzu’s clothes had been soaked beforehand. There wasn’t a dry spot on him and his hair was wet under his straw hat. The water on the ground covered his feet. It was already hard to walk. The rain above pelted his head and back, swept across his face, and wrapped around his loins. He couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t move forward. He was forced to stand in the middle of all that water without knowing where the road was or what front, back, left, and right were. All he was conscious of was the water that chilled him to the bone and sloshed over him. He was aware of nothing except a great vague hotness in his heart and the sound of rain in his ears. He wanted to put the rickshaw down but didn’t know where to put it. He thought about running but the water held his feet. He could only keep moving, pulling the rickshaw with his head down one step at a time and more dead than alive. The passenger seemed to have died right there in the rickshaw. He let the rickshaw man risk his life in the rain without saying a word.
The rain let up some. Hsiang Tzu straightened up slightly and puffed once. “Sir, let’s take shelter somewhere and then go on!”
“Make it snappy! What do you think you’re doing just leaving me somewhere!” He stamped his feet and yelled.
For a moment Hsiang Tzu actually thought about leaving the rickshaw and going to find someplace out of the rain. But when he looked at how dripping wet he was, he knew he’d only get the shivers if he stopped. He ground his teeth and, paying no attention to whether the water was deep or shallow, began to run. He hadn’t been running long when another flash came close behind another darkening of the sky and rain blurred his vision again.
When they finally arrived his passenger didn’t give him a penny extra. Hsiang Tzu said nothing. He didn’t care if he lived or not.
The heavy rain stopped and then resumed but fell much lighter than before. Hsiang Tzu ran straight home. He hugged the stove to get warm and shivered like the leaves on a tree in the wind and rain. Hu Niu steeped him a bowl of ginger and sugar water and he drank it all down in one draught like an idiot. When he finished he burrowed under his quilt and knew nothing more. His condition was like being asleep and yet not really sleeping. In his ears was the swishing sound of rain.
The black clouds began to look tired a little after four o’clock. Softly and weakly, they let loose paler flashes of lightning. In a while the clouds in the west broke up. The tops of the black clouds were edged with gold and a little whiteness came rushing underneath them. The lightning all went south, dragging the not so terribly loud thunderclaps along with it. After another interval, rays of sunlight came out through the spaces between the clouds in the west, making gold and green reflections on the water-covered leaves. In the east hung a pair of rainbows, their legs in the dark clouds, the tops of their bows in the blue sky. Soon the rainbows faded and there were no more black clouds in the sky.
The blue sky, as well as everything else that had been newly washed, looked like part of a charming world just risen from darkness. Even the “pond” in the mixed courtyard had a few dragonflies hovering over it.
But, except for the barefooted children who chased those dragonflies, no one in the place cared about taking pleasure in the clear sky that followed the rain.
A piece fell out of a corner in the rear wall in Hsiao Fu Tzu’s room and she and her brothers hurriedly tore the matting off the k’ang and blocked up the hole. The courtyard wall had collapsed in several places but no one had time to do anything about it because they were all too busy taking care of their own rooms. Some had front steps that were too low and let the water in. They all had to race around with old bowls and dustpans bailing out the water. Some were on the roof looking for ways to patch it. Some had roofs that leaked like sprinkling cans and got everything inside soaking wet. They were busy moving things outside next to the cookstove to dry or hanging them on windowsills in the sun. They had huddled in their rooms while the rain was falling; rooms that might, when the moment came, collapse and bury them alive. They left their fate to Heaven. After the rain they tried to figure out how to repair their losses.
Although a heavy rain might lower the price of a pound of rice by half a cent, still, their losses were so great that such a trifling drop in price could not make up for them. They paid their rent but no one ever came to repair the place unless the dilapidation was so bad that no one could possibly live there. In that case, two masons would come along and fix up the wall haphazardly with mortar and broken bricks, preparing it for its next collapse. If the rent wasn’t paid the whole family would be thrown out and have its goods confiscated. The walls were cracking, the roof might fall in and kill someone, and no one cared. A place like this was all their tiny income could afford. It was tumbledown, dangerous, and they deserved it!
The greatest loss of all resulted from the sickness brought on by the rainwater. All of them, young and old, were out in the streets looking for a deal all day and the furious rain of summer could pelt down on their heads at any time. They all sold their strength to make a living and were always covered with sweat. The fierce rain of the north was very hard and very cold. Sometimes there were hailstones as big as walnuts in it. If it did nothing else, the ice-cold rain striking at their open pores made them lie on the k’ang with a fever for a day or two.
The children got sick and there was no money for medicine. A spell of rain urged the corn and the kaoliang upward in the fields but it also sprinkled death onto many of the poor children in the city.
The adults got sick, and that was even worse. Poets chant about the lotus “pearls” and double rainbows that come after rain, but poor people suffer from hunger when the wage earners are sick. A spell of rain might well create a few more singsong girls and sneak thieves and put a few more people in jail. When adults get sick it’s much better for boys and girls to become thieves and singsong girls than to starve! “The rain falls on the rich and on the poor, falls on the just and on the unjust.” But the truth is that the rain is not evenhanded at all because it falls
on an inequitable world.
Hsiang Tzu was sick and he certainly was not the only sick person in the place.
(Translated by Jean M. James)
BIAN ZHILIN
(1910–2000)
Born in Jiangsu, Bian Zhilin bought a copy of Bing Xin’s A Maze of Stars when he was fourteen, a chance encounter that kindled his passion for new poetry. In 1929 he entered Peking University and studied under Xu Zhimo, who quickly recognized Bian’s poetic talent and helped him get published. Closely associated with the Crescent poets, who emphasized metrics and prosody, Bian was most productive in the 1930s, when he wrote some of his best poems, including “Fragment” and “Dream of the Old Town,” which combine techniques of Western modernism with the Chinese poetic tradition. In the tumultuous decades in Mao’s China, Bian worked quietly as a professor and translator of Shakespeare.
Evening
Evening sun leaning on West Hill,
temple wall just standing, about to fall;
facing each other, what do they want to say?
Why don’t they say it, eh?
Haggard donkey, old man on its back,
hurries home, clackety-clack,
hooves rapping on clay and stone—
a dry and ragged tune!
A croak in midair—
treetop, a crow there
soars up, but makes no sound,
then lights and settles down.
—1930
Dream of the Old Town
There are two kinds of sound in the small town,
equally desolate:
the fortune-teller’s gong by day,
the watchman’s clapper at night.
Unable to shatter dreams with his gong,
as if in a dream
the blind man walks the streets,
step by step.
He knows which slab of stone is low,
which slab of stone is high,
and the age of the daughter in each household.
His claps sending people deep into dreams,
as if in a dream
the watchman walks the streets,
step by step.
He knows which slab of stone is low,
which slab of stone is high,
and the door of which house is most tightly shut.
“Third watch already, listen,
Ah Mao’s dad.
The baby makes such a row we can’t sleep a wink,
always crying in his dreams.
Let’s have his fortune told tomorrow.”
It’s deep in the night;
it’s the quiet afternoon:
the watchman with his clapper crosses the bridge,
the fortune-teller with his gong crosses the bridge.
Ceaseless is the sound of water flowing under the bridge.
—August 11, 1933
Fragment
You stand on the bridge looking at the view—
the viewer on the balcony is viewing you.
The moon adorns your window—
you adorn someone else’s dream.
—October 1935
Loneliness
Fearing loneliness the country boy
kept a cricket beside his pillow.
Toiling in the city after he grew up,
he bought a luminous watch.
As a child he used to envy the cricket
for having weeds on the tomb as its garden.
Now he has been dead for three hours,
yet the watch keeps on ticking.
—October 26, 1935
(Translated by Mary Fung and David Lunde)
XIAO HONG
(1911–1942)
Born to a wealthy landlord family in what she called “the easternmost and northernmost part of China,” Xiao Hong (real name Zhang Naiying) lost her mother at the age of nine, became alienated from her father, and fled from home while still a teenager. Attending middle school in Harbin, she cohabited with a local teacher, became pregnant, and then was abandoned by the man. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria forced her to flee to Qingdao, where at the age of twenty-three she wrote her first novel, The Field of Life and Death (1935). Her fiery and strained romance with Xiao Jun, a noted left-wing writer, remains the stuff of legend in Chinese literature. Living a bohemian life beset by male cruelty, unwanted pregnancies, and ill health, she died at the age of thirty in Hong Kong, where she had completed Tales of Hulan River, a semi-autobiographical novel of poetic nostalgia and acute sensibility about her birthplace, Hulan.
Tales of Hulan River (excerpt)
Hulan River
1
After the harsh winter has sealed up the land, the earth’s crust begins to crack and split. From south to north, from east to west; from a few feet to several yards in length; anywhere, anytime, the cracks run in every direction. As soon as harsh winter is upon the land, the earth’s crust opens up.
The severe winter weather splits the frozen earth.
Old men use whisk brooms to brush the ice off their beards the moment they enter their homes. “Oh, it’s cold out today!” they say. “The frozen ground has split open.”
A carter twirls his long whip as he drives his cart sixty or seventy li under the stars, then at the crack of dawn he strides into an inn, and the first thing he says to the innkeeper is: “What terrible weather. The cold is like a dagger.”
After he has gone into his room at the inn, removed his dogskin cap with earflaps, and smoked a pipeful of tobacco, he reaches out for a steamed bun; the back of his hand is a mass of cracked, chapped skin.
The skin on people’s hands is split open by the freezing cold. The man who sells cakes of bean curd is up at dawn to go out among the people’s homes and sell his product. If he carelessly sets down his square wooden tray full of bean curd it sticks to the ground, and he is unable to free it. It will have quickly frozen to the spot.
The old steamed-bun peddler lifts his wooden box filled with the steaming buns up onto his back, and at the first light of day he is out hawking on the street. After emerging from his house he walks along at a brisk pace shouting at the top of his voice. But before too long, layers of ice have formed on the bottoms of his shoes, and he walks as though he were treading on rolling and shifting eggs. The snow and ice have encrusted the soles of his shoes. He walks with an unsure step, and if he is not altogether careful he will slip and fall. In fact, he slips and falls despite all his caution. Falling down is the worst thing that can happen to him, for his wooden box crashes to the ground, and the buns come rolling out of the box, one on top of the other. A witness to the incident takes advantage of the old man’s inability to pick himself up and scoops up several of the buns, which he eats as he leaves the scene. By the time the old man has struggled to his feet, gathered up his steamed buns—ice, snow, and all—and put them back in the box, he counts them and discovers that some are missing. He understands at once and shouts to the man who is eating the buns but has still not left the scene: “Hey, the weather’s icy cold, the frozen ground’s all cracked, and my buns are all gone!”
Passersby laugh when they hear him say this. He then lifts the box up onto his back and walks off again, but the layers of ice on the soles of his shoes seem to have grown even thicker, and he finds the going more difficult than before. Drops of sweat begin to form on his back, his eyes become clouded with the frost, ice gathers in even greater quantity on his beard, and the earflaps and front of his tattered cap are frosting up with the vapor from his breath. The old man walks more and more slowly, his worries and fears causing him to tremble in alarm; he resembles someone on ice skates for the first time who has just been pushed out onto the rink by a friend.
A puppy is so freezing cold it yelps and cries night after night, whimpering as though its claws were being singed by flames.
The days grow even colder:
Water vats freeze and crack;
Wells are frozen solid;
Night snowstorms seal the people’s homes; they lie down at n
ight to sleep, and when they get up in the morning they find they cannot open their doors.
Once the harsh winter season comes to the land everything undergoes a change: the skies turn ashen gray, as though a strong wind has blown through, leaving in its aftermath a turbid climate accompanied by a constant flurry of snowflakes whirling in the air. People on the road walk at a brisk pace as their breath turns to vapor in the wintry cold. Big carts pulled by teams of seven horses form a caravan in the open country, one following closely upon the other, lanterns flying, whips circling in the air under the starry night. After running two li the horses begin to sweat. They run a bit farther, and in the midst of all that snow and ice the men and horses are hot and lathered. The horses stop sweating only after the sun emerges and they are finally turned into their stalls. But the moment they stop sweating a layer of frost forms on their coats.
After the men and horses have eaten their fill they are off and running again. Here in the frigid zones there are few people; unlike the southern regions, where you need not travel far from one village to another, and where each township is near the next, here there is nothing but a blanket of snow as far as the eye can see. There is no neighboring village within the range of sight, and only by relying on the memories of those familiar with the roads can one know the direction to travel. The big carts with their seven-horse teams transport their loads of foodstuffs to one of the neighboring towns. Some have brought in soybeans to sell, others have brought sorghum. Then when they set out on their return trip they carry back with them oil, salt, and dry goods.
Hulan River is one of these small towns, not a very prosperous place at all. It has only two major streets, one running north and south and one running east and west, but the best-known place in town is the Crossroads, for it is the heart of the whole town. At the Crossroads there is a jewelry store, a yardage shop, an oil store, a salt store, a tea shop, a pharmacy, and the office of a foreign dentist. Above this dentist’s door there hangs a large shingle about the size of a rice-measuring basket, on which is painted a row of oversized teeth. The advertisement is hopelessly out of place in this small town, and the people who look at it cannot figure out just what it’s supposed to represent. That is because neither the oil store, the yardage shop, nor the salt store displays any kind of advertisement; above the door of the salt store, for example, only the word “salt” is written, and hanging above the door of the yardage shop are two curtains which are as old as the hills. The remainder of the signs are like the one at the pharmacy, which gives nothing more than the name of the bespectacled physician whose job it is to feel women’s pulses as they drape their arms across a small pillow. To illustrate: the physician’s name is Li Yung-ch’un, and the name of his pharmacy is simply “Li Yung-ch’un.” People rely on their memories, and even if Li Yung-ch’un were to take down his sign, the people would still know that he was there. Not only the townsfolk, but even the people from the countryside are more or less familiar with the streets of the town and what can be found there. No advertisement, no publicity is necessary. If people are in need of something, like cooking oil, some salt, or a piece of fabric, then they go inside and buy it. If they don’t need anything, then no matter how large a sign is hung outside, they won’t buy anything.