Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu

by Xu Xu

  During his exile in Hong Kong, Xu Xu continued to follow as closely as was possible from across the border the cultural and political developments in mainland China. He witnessed with anguish how writers he had known before the war were victimized for having failed to meet the ever more elusive expectations of the new regime toward its writers and artists, or “art workers” 文藝工作者, as they were now called. He frequently commented on those developments in his many essays and newspaper columns written in Hong Kong, some of which will be discussed in the critical essay at the end of this volume. While Xu Xu never participated in the production of what has become known as Greenback Culture 綠背文化—anti-Communist literature commissioned and sponsored by the United States Information Service (USIS) in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia—he did write a number of works of fiction in the early 1960s that explored the consequences of regime change in China on the lives of select individuals.

  In “Going to the Country” 下鄉, an enthusiastic journalist returns to his natal village for a reportage about the success of collectivization. Through the journalist’s encounters with the villagers, the reader learns about arbitrary executions in the wake of the land reform and the sobering reality of the Great Leap Forward. These perfunctory revelations, however, stand in stark contrast to the journalist’s ultimate report, which is a glowing eulogy to the new society. In “Escape” 逃亡, an equally enthusiastic protagonist, this time an engineer, eventually grows disillusioned and decides to flee the system, an act that he pays for with his life. Xu Xu’s most ambitious work about life and politics in the People’s Republic, however, was his novel A Tragic Era 悲慘的世紀, which was first serialized in Hong Kong in 1969. A dystopian love story set in a Communist state that contends with a revisionist and a capitalist state for control over their planet located in a distant solar system, A Tragic Era shared elements of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 and explored the incompatibility of complete devotion to the Communist system with individual fulfillment and personal integrity. With its depiction of power struggles between competing political factions, nationally televised struggle sessions, and the eventual love suicide of the two protagonists, readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan would have unmistakingly understood A Tragic Era as a commentary on the politicization of life in the early decades of the People’s Republic and in particular the excesses of the Cultural Revolution that had begun in 1966 and only came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976.

  ***

  By the early 1970s, Xu Xu’s fiction increasingly failed to resonate with a younger generation of Hong Kong and Taiwanese readers, especially those who were too young to recall life in prewar China or who were born after the war. Only a few of Xu Xu’s works of fiction were actually set in Hong Kong, and many of those that were, like his novel Time and Brightness 時與光 from 1966, depicted restless narrators in search of love and beauty who considered Hong Kong as nothing more than a temporary home and who nostalgically gazed at life in prewar China. Some of the cinematic adaptations of Xu Xu’s work resolved this disconnect with a younger audience by changing the setting of the narrative from prewar China in the novel to present-day Hong Kong, as happened in Blind Love and Rear Entrance. In the meantime, a younger generation of writers who had come of age in Hong Kong began to write fiction and poetry through which they asserted their Hong Kong roots and extolled the mundane beauty that could be found amidst Hong Kong’s mushrooming tenement blocks.

  In one of Xu Xu’s last works of fiction, the short story “Inside the Garden” 園內 (also known as “Phantom” 魅影) published in 1968, the quest for love, the restless wandering, and the solace found in metaphysical encounters that characterized so much of his postwar fiction all coalesce. When a young man on his way to study in England gets stranded in Hong Kong, he becomes obsessed with a woman whom he frequently observes strolling inside a walled garden opposite the house of a friend where he is staying. His attempts at becoming acquainted with her, however, remain unanswered, and it is only in his dreams that the two meet. The young man finally departs for England, yet he cannot rid himself of the memory of the woman in the garden and eventually returns to Hong Kong. He resumes observing her during her walks in the garden and eventually musters the courage to ask his friend to act as go-between. Only then does his friend inform him that the young lady who used to live in the house opposite had died of heart disease six months earlier.

  While none of Xu Xu’s fiction of either the prewar or postwar period was available in China throughout the first three decades of the People’s Republic, it remained popular among readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as in Chinese communities throughout Asia and America, especially among readers who had left the mainland after 1949. In addition to fiction, Xu Xu also continued to write poetry that regularly appeared in literary supplements of Hong Kong or Taiwanese newspapers. Some of it was even set to popular music. Xu Xu further continued to shape the Chinese literary field in Hong Kong as an editor of a number of literary journals. In 1953, he established the journal Humor 幽默. In the same year, he set up a publishing house with Cao Juren 曹聚仁 and began publishing the semi-monthly Hot Blast 熱風. In 1957, Lin Yutang’s former journal The Analects was revived in Hong Kong, and Xu Xu became the editor. In 1968, Xu Xu started the semimonthly Style 筆端 and in 1975 the monthly The Seven Arts 七藝. While some of these journals only enjoyed short printruns and had a limited circulation, they provided an important platform for the burgeoning community of writers in Hong Kong. At the same time, they often featured translations of Western or Japanese literature or essays on foreign cultural trends. Postwar Hong Kong in effect was at that time the only place in the Chinese-speaking world that enjoyed a free press and only limited censorship, and Xu Xu, with his cosmopolitan outlook and broad interests in the arts, greatly facilitated the influx of new ideas.

  Xu Xu also remained active as a cultural and literary critic. He regularly contributed essays on various topics ranging from Chinese politics to American literature to newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He also published several collections of essays that focused broadly on freedom and individualism and the function and role of art in society. Toward the end of his life, he began work on a history of modern Chinese literature, parts of which were posthumously published under the title Taking a Glance at Modern Chinese Literature 現代中國文學過眼錄. Equally important was his role as a teacher of a whole generation of writers and critics. Xu Xu taught Chinese literature at the Zhuhai College 珠海書院 and New Asia College 新亞書院 in Hong Kong and had teaching stints in Singapore and India before becoming professor and chair of the Chinese Department at Hong Kong Baptist University 香港浸會大學 in 1968. He remained there until his death from lung cancer in 1980, having assumed the position of Dean of the School of Literature in 1977.

  Not long after Xu Xu’s passing, his works, along with those of Lin Yutang and many other previously banned writers, became available again to readers in mainland China for the first time in more than three decades. During the 1980s, China embarked on a path to economic liberalization and experienced a decade-long cultural blossoming. Usually referred to as Culture Fever 文化熱, this period was characterized by openness to Western cultural imports and the rehabilitation and rediscovery of artists and critics who had been purged from the literary canon of the People’s Republic. Xu Xu’s cosmopolitanism, his liberal political stance, his individualism, and his critical interest in East-West cultural encounters as well as the exoticism of his prewar works all greatly appealed to readers and scholars who had experienced decades of political extremism and antagonism toward the West.

  The Chinese scholar Yan Jiayan 嚴家炎 was the first to assign a certain romantic tendency to Xu Xu’s work in the preface to his 1986 Anthology of Modern Chinese Schools of Fiction 中國現代各流派小説選. In his History of Modern Chinese Schools of Fiction 中國現代小説流派史 that followed in 1989, Yan paired Xu Xu’s works with those of Wumingshi 無�
�氏 (1917–2002), another wartime writer whose aesthetics were characterized by cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and romance.7 These writers’ aesthetics, it appeared, had defied the mainstream narrative of nationalism and revolutionary radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s and now offered inspiration to mainland intellectuals who, after years of enforced ideological conformity, saw the chance for a cultural reawakening. Unfortunately, some of these hopes were dashed by the Tiananmen Massacre of June 4, 1989, in whose wake the CCP tightened control over cultural production and consumption.

  Xu Xu’s literary legacy, however, has continued to generate interest in China. Since the 1990s, a number of Chinese publishers have released books of his fiction, essays, plays, and poetry. In 1995, the filmmaker Chen Yifei 陳逸飛 produced a remake of “Ghost Love” entitled Evening Liaison 人約黃昏. In 2008, in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Xu Xu’s birth, his complete works in sixteen volumes were published in Shanghai.8 More recently, two different theatrical productions based on “Ghost Love” were staged in Shanghai and Hong Kong respectively, and the Shanghai author Wang Anyi 王安憶 wrote a play based on The Rustling Wind. Several studies of Xu Xu’s works have appeared in China and Hong Kong over the past two decades, and a comprehensive biography was published by the scholars Wu Yiqin 吳義勤 and Wang Suxia 王素霞 in 2008.9 My PhD dissertation on Xu Xu from 2009 is still the only comprehensive author study of Xu Xu in English,10 but in 2019 a study by Christopher Rosenmeier that discusses some of Xu Xu and Wumingshi’s prewar and wartime works in English was published in the UK.11

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  I hope that these five short stories as well as my critical essay at the end of this volume will provide a glimpse of this fascinating artist’s career that spanned a large part of China’s turbulent twentieth century. I would be humbled if my translations of “Bird Talk” and the other stories in this collection spoke to the reader in the way they have spoken to me, and delighted if they inspired others to seek out more of Xu Xu’s literary works.

  Endnotes

  1. Xu Xu 徐訏. Xu Xu quanji 徐訏全集 [The complete works of Xu Xu]. Volumes 1–15. Taipei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1966.

  2. Xu Xu 徐訏. Xu Xu wenji 徐訏文集 [The collected works of Xu Xu], edited by Qian Zhenhua 錢震華. Volumes 1–16. Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2008, 5:219. For a discussion of Xu Xu’s early essays and fiction, see: Frederik H. Green. “The Making of a Chinese Romantic: Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Lyrical Exoticism in Xu Xu’s Early Travel Writings.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), volume 23.2, Fall 2011 (pp. 64–99).

  3. According to Asabuki, Xu Xu asked her to replace his real name with the homophone yu 兪 in The Other Side of Love when they met in Tokyo after the war. Only in her later autobiography My Paris Tales from 1989 published after Xu Xu’s death did she reveal his real name. See: Asabuki Tomiko. Ai no mukō gawa 愛のむこう側 [The other side of love]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1977, 53–76. And: Watakushi no Pari monogatari 私の巴里物語 [My Paris tales]. Tokyo: Bunka shuppankyoku, 1989, 28–32.

  4. For a summary and analysis of Brothers and other wartime works, see: Frederik H. Green. “Rescuing Love from the Nation: Love, Nation, and Self in Xu Xu’s Alternative Wartime Fiction and Drama.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, volume 8.1, Spring 2014 (pp. 126–53).

  5. Shi Huaichi 石懷池. “Bangxian de mengyi ‘Guilian’—Xu Xu de shu zhi yi” 幫閑的夢囈《鬼戀》—徐訏的書之一 [The trashy rigmarole “Ghost love”: One of Xu Xu’s books]. In Shi Huaichi wenxue lunwenji 石懷池文 學論文集 [Collection of essays on literature by Shi Huaichi], edited by Jin Yi 靳以. Shanghai: Gengyun chubanshe, 1945, 151–54.

  6. Xu Xu 徐訏. Xu Xu wenji 徐訏文集, 5:72.

  7. Yan Jiayan 嚴家炎. Zhongguo xiandai geliupai xiaoshuo xuan 中國現代各流派小説選 [Anthology of works from the various modern Chinese literary groups]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1986. See also his Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo liupaishi 中國現代小説流派史 [History of modern Chinese literary groups]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989.

  8. Xu Xu 徐訏. Xu Xu wenji 徐訏文集.

  9. Wu Yiqin 吳義勤 and Wang Suxia 王素霞. Wo xin panghuang: Xu Xu zhuan 我心彷徨—徐訏傳 [My mind is restless: A biography of Xu Xu]. Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 2008.

  10. Green, Frederik Hermann. A Chinese Romantic‘s Journey through Time and Space: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Nostalgia in the Work of Xu Xu (1908–1980). PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2009.

  11. Christopher Rosenmeier. On the Margins of Modernism: Xu Xu, Wumingshi, and Popular Chinese Literature in the 1940s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

  Note on the Translation

  I have tried to stick as closely to the original Chinese text as possible. On a handful of occasions I have inserted an explanatory clause where there was none in the original. Words and phrases that are explained in the short prologue preceding each story are marked with an asterisk in the prologue and the translation.

  Throughout the translation, I have maintained the Chinese convention of presenting the family name first and the given name last. All personal and place names are rendered in Hanyu Pinyin romanization, except for those names for which a standardized romanization other than Pinyin exists in English, as it does for some of the Taiwanese place names in “The All-Souls Tree.” The one notable exception is in “When Ah Heung came to Gousing Road”; since the story takes place in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is predominantly spoken, all personal names are given in Cantonese romanization while all place names are reproduced according to the way they are customarily referred to in English in Hong Hong.

  While many people have given me a helping hand with this translation, all mistakes are, of course, my responsibility.

  鬼戀

  Ghost Love

  The serialization of “Ghost Love” in January 1937 in the popular Shanghai bimonthly literary and current affairs journal Celestial Winds 宇宙風 made Xu Xu a literary celebrity in China. Xu Xu later considerably revised the original and published it as a book that, by 1949, had gone through nineteen printruns. “Ghost Love” evidently struck a nerve with the reading public of Republican-period China (1912–49). The translation presented here is based on the original from 1937.

  The novel opens around the year 1930 when the first-person male narrator late one night meets a mysterious woman in front of a tobacco store on *Nanjing Road. Nanjing Road was the main shopping street in the International Settlement of Shanghai, the largely self-governed Anglo-American concessions area that had sprung up in Shanghai following the first Opium War of 1839–42 (see the map on pages 120–21). To the south, it bordered the French Concession, whose main thoroughfare was *Avenue Joffre, famous for its elegant shops, bars, restaurants, and theaters. Despite being a constant reminder of Western imperialism in China, the foreign concessions area emanated a cosmopolitan flair and came to symbolize urban modernity. Both the male narrator and the mysterious woman are thoroughly modern urbanites. She smokes *Pin Heads, a popular British cigarette brand, wears a *qipao, the tight-fitting dress that was popularized by Chinese socialites in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, and speaks several foreign languages fluently. He wears an Omega watch, drinks brandy, and refuses to believe in ghosts, especially of the kind found in *Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 聊齋志異, a famous eighteenth-century collection of ghost stories.

  The geography of Shanghai plays an important role in “Ghost Love,” as it did in much of the fiction about Shanghai of the Republican period, in the same way the geography of Tokyo played an important role in modern Japanese fiction or that of New York, Paris, or Berlin in Western modernist fiction. The reader literally can follow the two protagonists on their nightly walk from the tobacconist on Nanjing Road to *Xietu Road 斜土路 on what would then have been the southern outskirts of Shanghai. On their nightly walk, they pass through *Xujiahui 徐家匯 (spelled Zikawei on old European maps), to the southwest of the Fren
ch Concession. A Jesuit mission had existed there since the seventeenth century, on land that had been donated to the Catholic Church by the family of Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633), a prominent Jesuit convert. To this day, Xujiahui remains the site of St. Ignatius Cathedral. Completed in 1910, it was once the largest cathedral in East Asia (though it is now dwarfed by adjacent high rises). In its vicinity there were also Jesuit monasteries, schools, libraries, and an observatory.

  Even further south and far beyond Xietu Road lies *Longhua 龍華, a district known to this day for its elaborate Buddhist temple and pagoda. In 1937, when the story was published, readers in addition would have associated Longhua with the location of a dreaded KMT prison. On April 12, 1927, Chiang Kai-shek betrayed his former Communist allies and ordered the violent purge of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations in Shanghai. In the ensuing decade, until the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese in November 1937, thousands of political prisoners were held at Longhua Prison, many of whom were executed. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the original site was turned into a martyr’s shrine. The mysterious woman in the story appears to allude to the events of 1927 and, by claiming to work on behalf of the *masses, to the socialist cause that enjoyed broad support among progressive intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s.