by Shen CongWen
Three days later, the fleetmaster came to propose that Cuicui come live in his house, but Cuicui, who wished to tend her grandpa’s grave, wasn’t ready to move. Instead she wanted the fleetmaster to speak to the government offices, to ask that Horseman Yang be allowed to live with her for the time being. Fleetmaster Shunshun agreed and went on his way.
Well past fifty now, Horseman Yang was an even better storyteller than Cuicui’s grandpa. He was neat and diligent in his work and conscientious about everything; he made Cuicui feel that in losing a grandfather, she had gained an uncle. When the ferry passengers inquired about her poor grandpa, or when she got to thinking about him at nightfall, she felt miserable and dejected. But as the days passed, her misery weakened a little. As the horseman sat with the girl on the high bluffs by the stream every evening in the dusk and in the darkness, telling her stories about the poor old man lying in the wet soil, many of which she had never heard before, Cuicui’s heart was put at ease. And he told Cuicui about her father, the soldier who valued both romantic love and honor, and how he had turned the local girls’ heads in that smart uniform of his, the outfit of a brave in the Army of the Green Standard. He also told Cuicui about her mother—what a wonderful singer she was, and how the melodies and lyrics she made up were repeated far and wide.
But times had changed, and with them, all the local customs. If the emperor no longer ruled over the hills and valleys, how tumultuous had it been for ordinary folk! Horseman Yang recalled that when he was a young man and just a groom, he had led his horse to Green Creek Hill and sung to Cuicui’s mother, but she paid him no attention. And now he was this young orphan’s sole support and intimate. He couldn’t suppress a knowing smile.
Because the two talked every evening at dusk, of Grandpa and everything about the family, and finally all that had happened before the old ferryman’s death, Cuicui came to understand many things that Grandpa hadn’t dared to mention while he was alive. No. 2’s singing on the bluffs; the death of No. 1; the subsequent aloofness of Shunshun and his son toward Grandpa; the grain mill offered by the Middle Stockade captain as a dowry to entice Nuosong; how No. 2, remembering the death of his elder brother and feeling ignored by Cuicui, was pressed by his family to take the mill yet still preferred the ferryboat, until he fled downstream in anger; and how her grandpa’s death had something to do with Cuicui…all that Cuicui hadn’t been able to understand, now became clear. Once Cuicui understood, she cried the whole night long.
When the fourth week of mourning had passed, Fleetmaster Shunshun sent a man to ask the horseman back to town. He proposed that Cuicui come into his home, as the future wife of No. 2. But since No. 2 was in Chenzhou, they could not announce it; they would first have to ask No. 2 how he felt. The horseman thought that they should ask Cuicui first. When Horseman Yang got back and told Cuicui of Shunshun’s proposal, he advised her not to move to a stranger’s house while her fate was so unsettled; best to stay at Green Creek Hill until No. 2 sailed home, to hear his opinion.
That settled, and the old horseman thinking that No. 2 would soon return, he entrusted his horses to someone else at camp and stayed at Green Creek Hill to keep Cuicui company. The days passed.
The white pagoda at Green Creek Hill was important to the feng shui of Chadong. It was, of course, imperative that a new pagoda be built there. The military camp, the revenue bureau, and all the shops and ordinary citizens contributed money. All the big stockades brought in money, too. The pagoda was meant to confer blessings and advantages not just on particular people; everyone should be able to accumulate merit by contributing, so everyone was given the opportunity. Therefore a big bamboo tube with knots at each end and a slot sawed into its middle was put on board the ferryboat, to let passengers contribute money as they pleased. When the tube was full, the horseman brought it with him when he went to town to see his superiors—and carried a new one on his way back. Passengers, taking note that the ferryman was absent and that Cuicui had tied up her pigtails with white mourning ribbons, realized that the old man had completed his work in this life and was lying at peace in a mound of earth to feed the worms. They’d look sympathetically at Cuicui as they scrounged up a few coins for the bamboo tube. “May Heaven protect you. The deceased has gone to the Western Paradise. Eternal peace to the living.” Grasping the compassion and sympathy in their words, but sick at heart, Cuicui was quick to turn away and tug the boat.
Come winter, the white pagoda that had collapsed was good as new. The young man who had sung under the moonlight, softly lifting up Cuicui’s soul from her dreams, had not yet returned to Chadong.
He may never come back; or perhaps he will be back tomorrow!
Notes to Border Town
This translation is based on the most critically acclaimed 1936 edition of Shen Congwen’s 1933–34 novel, with a few corrections from his final revision in the 1983 edition of his collected works, which revised the characters’ ages and so forth. The translator is grateful for help from Susan Corliss, Tim Duggan, Howard Goldblatt, Mi Hualing, and Shen Congwen’s granddaughter Shen Hong.
[Border Town] was banned in China ca. 1949–1979, and in Taiwan until 1986. After political pressure induced him to attempt suicide in 1949, Shen Congwen prudently took up a new career in art history at the National Historical Museum in Beijing. Printing plates for his old literary works were destroyed, but his stories were not generally dangerous to possess until the Cultural Revolution, as they were at times in Taiwan, where the Nationalist government held that Shen was a Communist because he stayed on the mainland. Taiwan publishers challenged this censorship with at least one small printing of the relatively apolitical Border Town. A surprising recent revelation from the mainland is that the Shanghai Cultural Film Studio had a short-lived plan to film Border Town as late as 1950, reviving a 1947 project with a new screenplay by Shi Tuo. Radicalization of the revolution stopped that. The first film version of Border Town, titled Cuicui (1953), came from Hong Kong. For more about Shen Congwen in English, see the translator’s biography, The Odyssey of Shen Congwen; A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, by C. T. Hsia; Shen Ts’ung-wen, by Hua-ling Nieh; and Fictional Realism in 20th Century China, by David Der-wei Wang. See the anthology Imperfect Paradise for a selection of Shen Congwen’s short stories.
Chadong. In real life, there is a town called Chadong (“Tea Cave”) at this location. Shen Congwen writes the name’s second syllable with a similar but rarer and more picturesque Chinese character containing the ideogram for “mountain” and pronounced tong or dong. With the dong reading, the town name likewise literally means “Tea Cave.”
she had grown to be thirteen. The Chinese says fourteen sui. In the old way of counting, a person was one sui at birth (acknowledging the time in-utero) and gained one more sui (“year old”) every New Year. Hence ages in sui were a year or more older than years elapsed since birth.
Chenzhou. The city today called Yuanling.
“Dragon Head” lodge master. A designation later attached to the character Shunshun that likely indicates his status in the Gelaohui, or Elder Brothers Society, a “secret society.” Later in the novel, he is addressed as Fleetmaster (chuanzong), a term Shen Congwen explains as wharf-side argot for the actual, working boss of the river—an unofficial position. Shunshun is also described as Dockmaster, a more official role that Shen says was often a sinecure.
Forty-ninth army regiment. A New Army regiment of Hunanese in the late Qing that joined the 1911 revolution to overthrow the monarchy. Following the revolution, most of China was beset by warlord depredations, large-scale banditry, and civil war.
wine mixed with realgar. Realgar (arsenic sulfide), an ancient Chinese medicine thought to ward off evil, was sometimes taken internally, the wine diluting the poison. The approach of summer was associated with the spread of disease, from which children especially needed protection.
Liang Hongyu, Niu Gao, Yang Yao. Several popular novels tell of the historical figure Liang Hongyu giving naval drum sign
als to help her husband, a Song dynasty general, trap enemy Jin forces as they fled up the Laoguan River. Histories also tell of Niu Gao, another Song dynasty general, under Yue Fei, who fought the Jin and captured the rebel Yang Yao in 1135 after he jumped into a river to commit suicide.
“Dragon Boat tide.” High waters said to arrive on the second or third day of the fifth lunar month.
“And your dog barked at him, having no idea who he was!” Literally, “Your dog didn’t know he was barking at Lü Dongbin,” one of China’s legendary Eight Immortals. The worker may have been thinking of another anecdote, about Lü Dongbin and a friend whose name was homophonous with “dog biting.”
zongzi. Dumplings made of sticky rice, often filled with meat, eggs, and vegetables, shaped like a pyramid and wrapped in palm leaves. They commemorate food that, according to legend, was thrown into the river in memory of Qu Yuan, the ancient virtuous and wronged minister who drowned himself in a river in Hunan and whose legend is honored on Duanwu, the fifth day of the fifth month, the Dragon Boat Festival.
Zhen’gan town. The old, pre–1911 name for Fenghuang, Shen Congwen’s beloved hometown.
Song Family Stockade. “Stockade,” zhai, is the local term for a village up in the Miao pale. These mountain settlements used to be fortified.
“She’s a real Guan Yin.” Guan Yin was the goddess of mercy, a beauty in Buddhist iconography.
Lord Guan. Guan Yu is a heroic general in the popular novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The same novel made famous the Red-haired Steed, which was the mount of General Lü Bu.
General Weichi Gong. A Tang dynasty general who became one of China’s two Door Gods. He brandishes an iron whip, but so does a famous character in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Huang Gai.
Old Man Zhang Guo, Iron Crutch Li. Immortals in the Daoist pantheon.
Hong Xiuquan, Li Hongzhang. Taiping rebel Hong Xiuquan and Qing official Li Hongzhang are actual nineteenth-century historical figures. This mixing of “apples and oranges”—of sacred and profane, of history, myth, fiction, and misremembering—is presented in a tone of affectionate amusement regarding folk conceptions of history and culture.
Captain Zhang Heng. A robber of boats in the popular novel Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh, who ended up a naval leader of the heroic band of outlaws in the novel.
Mount Liang. The mountain redoubt of the 108 bandit heroes in Water Margin.
nanmu tree. An evergreen strongly resistant to decay, used to make furniture and boats.
Lu Ban. A fifth-century B.C.E. carpenter, philosopher, statesman, legendary inventor, and legendary builder of the Zhaozhou Bridge—but not, even in legend, the Luoyang Bridge, which was built after 1000 C.E.
for “three years and six months,” i.e., “at length.” Here the ferryman alludes to a West Hunanese mountain song Shen Congwen cited in his “Songs of the Zhen’gan Folk” (1926), translated in Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., Imperfect Paradise (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), pp. 485–519.
You don’t know as many songs as I do,
I know as many as there are hairs on three oxen!
If I sang for three years and six months,
I’d just make it through three ears’ worth!
“people eat what they like, even beef with chives.” This local expression alludes to a folk belief that the combination is harmful to digestion, if not toxic.
Horseman Yang. Mountainous West Hunan had no cavalry to speak of, but horses were ridden by commanders and used for transport. The Chinese word indicates that Yang’s title was that of a full-fledged soldier.
he’d battle his own maternal uncle. Relations with one’s mother’s brother(s) were particularly close in local society.
an unspoiled maiden, made unafraid by her innocence. The Chinese phrase is “a newborn calf,” which is said to be unafraid of anything, even tigers.
warbler. Technically, a rufous-rumped grassbird.
After that, Grandpa fell silent. He did not add, “The songs gave us you, and then they took away your father and mother.” These words, found in pre–1949 editions of the work, were deleted from the final 1983 revision.
“tigers’ ears”: saxifrage. Saxifrage “splits rocks” it grows in cracks. Now prized as decorative potted plants, most Chinese species that are called “tigers’ ear plants” (huercao) have fanlike leaves the shape of cats’ ears, with soft down and a pink underside.
“had a chance for success in this.” The Chinese expression for success in this phrase, set off in the original in quotation marks, uses the word border, as in Border Town.
In his penultimate revision of the novel for the Jiangxi People’s Press in 1981, Shen replaced the final lines of chapter 20, beginning with “The old Daoist priest,” with the expanded passage below. He deleted the addition from the final, 1983 version.
The old Daoist priest, a literatus of tongsheng status who had changed his trade only after the 1911 revolution, mumbled to himself in bed, incoherently: “The emperor values literary renown; admonishes you people to get it for your own; other pursuits are all beneath us; only book learning commands us to bow down…Is it daylight? Time to rise and shine!”
Under the old monarchy, a tongsheng was merely qualified to sit for examinations that might lead to the xiucai, the minimal degree that conferred lower or sub-gentry status. What the old Daoist recites while waking was written in earnest by Wang Zhu (Northern Song dynasty) at the opening of his “Shen tong shi” (“Poem of the Boy Genius”), but, having been excerpted in elementary primers of the Ming and Qing dynasties, it had by the twentieth century become a stale homily memorized by Chinese children on the path to literacy. Admonishments to study Confucian classics sounded clichéd, pompous, and hypocritical to Shen Congwen’s generation.
About the Author and the Translator
SHEN CONGWEN (1902–1988) is one of the most influential writers in China’s modern history. His novel Border Town was banned under Mao’s regime, only to become an inspiration to a new generation of Chinese writers in the late twentieth century.
Translator JEFFREY C. KINKLEY is the author of The Odyssey of Shen Congwen and editor of Imperfect Paradise, a collection of Shen’s stories. He holds a Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages from Harvard and is a professor of Chinese history at St. John’s University in New York.
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Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by Hans Neleman/Getty Images
Copyright
BORDER TOWN. Translation copyright © 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195923-3
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