Rickshaw Boy: A Novel Read online

  Rickshaw Boy

  A Novel

  Lao She

  Translated by Howard Goldblatt

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  I’d like you to meet a fellow named Xiangzi, not…

  Chapter Two

  Xiangzi’s happiness buoyed him; with a new rickshaw, he ran…

  Chapter Three

  Xiangzi had run twenty or thirty steps when he stopped.

  Chapter Four

  Xiangzi was laid up for three days in a little…

  Chapter Five

  As promised, Old Man Liu told no one of Xiangzi’s…

  Chapter Six

  An early autumn night, with breezes rustling leaves that cast…

  Chapter Seven

  Xiangzi moved into the Cao home.

  Chapter Eight

  Mr. Cao had the rickshaw repaired and deducted nothing from Xiangzi’s…

  Chapter Nine

  Xiangzi was barely able to step across the threshold. In…

  Chapter Ten

  Xiangzi was not smart enough to deal with his problems…

  Chapter Eleven

  After the encounter with the old man and his grandson,…

  Chapter Twelve

  Xiangzi was looking for a place to sit down and…

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sky seemed to lighten a bit earlier, thanks to…

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Liu birthday celebration was a roaring success, and Fourth…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Since Xiangzi was not capable of hitting an old man…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Xiangzi’s period of idleness lasted till the fifteenth day of…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Little by little, Xiangzi pieced together what had happened at…

  Chapter Eighteen

  By June the compound was silent during the day. The…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Xiangzi lay in a daze for two days and nights.

  Chapter Twenty

  Xiangzi sold his rickshaw.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  When chrysanthemums came on the market, Mrs. Xia bought four pots,…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Xiangzi had forgotten where he was headed as he strode…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Xiangzi walked down the street, shaken to the core, when…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Another season for pilgrims to burn incense at mountain temples…

  About the Author and the Translator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Lao She (Shu Qingchun, 1899–1966) remains one of the most widely read Chinese novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, and probably its most beloved. Born into an impoverished Manchu family—his father, a lowly palace guard for the Qing emperor, was killed during the 1900 Boxer Rebel-lion—he was particularly sensitive to his link to the hated Manchu Dynasty, which ruled China from the mid-seventeenth century until it was overthrown in 1911. The view of one of his biographers is difficult to dispute: “The poverty of his childhood and the fact that these were also the years when the dynasty was collapsing and the Manchus were becoming a target of increasingly bitter attacks left a deep shadow on Lao She’s impressionable mind and later kept him from personal participation in political activities. But his alienation strengthened his sense of patriotism and made his need to identify with China even more acute.”*

  After graduating from Beiping Normal School, Lao She spent half a dozen years as a schoolteacher, primary school principal, and school administrator. Then, in 1924, after joining a Christian society and studying English, he accompanied a British missionary, Clemont Egerton, to London, where he taught Chinese at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies. Among his lesser-discussed activities there was the acknowledged assistance to Egerton in his translation of the “indecent” classical novel The Golden Lotus, in which the racy parts were rendered in Latin. During his time away from the classroom, Lao She read voraciously. He has written of his fascination with British novels, in particular the work of Charles Dickens, whose devotion to the urban downtrodden and use of ironic humor Lao She found particularly affecting; they would inform much of his own work, particularly the early novels and stories.

  Lao She’s literary career began during his five-year stay in England, where he wrote three novels: The Philosophy of Lao Zhang (1926), a mostly comical look at middle-class Beiping residents and modeled, in the author’s own words, after Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers; Zhao Ziyue (1927), a generally unsympathetic exposé of the activities of a group of college students; and The Two Mas (1929), the tale of a Chinese father and son living, and loving, in London. All three were serialized in China’s most prestigious literary magazine of the day, Short Story Magazine, before Lao She returned to China, in 1929, after a six-month stop in Singapore, where he taught Chinese in a middle school; there he wrote most of a short novel, The Birthday of Little Po (1931), the only one of his novels that focuses entirely on a child, a Cantonese boy living in Singapore.

  Upon Lao She’s return to China, he landed a teaching job at a Shandong university, where he continued to write and publish. His first novel written there, Lake Daming (1931), was set to be published in 1932, but the author’s only manuscript was lost when a Japanese bomb destroyed the publishing house. Later in 1931 a dystopian satire set on Mars entitled Cat Country (1932) appeared, followed closely by Divorce (1933),* a tale of domestic strife. Taken together, the two novels give witness to Lao She’s increasing dejection over deteriorating social and political conditions in China and the rise of nationalistic, even revolutionary, tendencies throughout the country in the wake of the Japanese occupation of Northeast China (Manchuria) in 1931, with the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, followed by a Japanese attack on Shanghai the same year.

  While Cat Country and Divorce broaden the author’s critique of the weakness of the Chinese character, castigating it as a malaise that affects the whole nation, not just pockets of middle-class urbanites, Lao She continued to see the salvation of Chinese society in the Confucian ideal of individual moral integrity, the vaunted junzi, a man of virtue. This begins to change with the slight novel The Biography of Niu Tianci (1936),† in which the author entertains doubts that “individual heroism could be of any use in a generally corrupt society.”‡ Lao She’s political ambivalence had begun to give way to more active political engagement. The bankruptcy of individualism in the face of a corrupting and dehumanizing social system is both the political and moral message of his next novel, Rickshaw Boy, which was first serialized in a magazine edited by Lin Yutang, Cosmic Wind (1936–1937), and published as a book in 1939; it has been republished many times in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and in Chinese communities in the West.

  Not only had Lao She matured as a writer when he wrote Rickshaw Boy, but he also had finally been able to quit teaching, a job he admitted he did not like, and devote all his time and energies to his craft. The polished structure, language, and descriptions of this complex novel made for a fitting debut as a full-time writer. After producing a series of novels that dealt with middle-class urbanites, minor officials, college students, and the like, in Rickshaw Boy, Lao She chose an illiterate, countrified common laborer as the vehicle for his ongoing social critique. Though a case can be made for viewing the novel as an “allegory of Republican China” in which “the Chinese people were bullied by imperialist powers, misled by the false promise of capitalist modernization, and betrayed by corrupt government, miscarried revolution, and their own disunity,”*at its core it “port
rays the physical and moral decline of an individual in an unjust society”† and, for the first time, hints at a way out: a move away from individualism and toward collective action. Lao She himself wrote of the novel in 1954, “I expressed my sympathy for the laboring people and my admiration of their sterling qualities, but I gave them no future, no way out. They lived miserably and died wronged.”‡ For a twenty-first-century reader who knows how things have turned out in China, the novel can be read as commentary on the sorts of struggles the underprivileged of the world face daily and the powers that keep them that way. It is also a stark but edifying picture of the early-twentieth-century city in which Lao She was born and died.

  During the war years (1937–1945), Lao She spent most of his time in the interior, where he devoted his energies and lent his patriotic zeal to the publication of anti-Japanese magazines and to the chairmanship of the All-China Association of Resistance Writers and Artists. There he began a novel set in one of Beijing’s traditional quadrangular compounds, Four Generations Under One Roof, which he would not finish until several years later. He did start and finish a novel—Cremation—which he considered to be an utter failure, owing primarily to a lack of understanding of life in areas under Japanese occupation: “If a work like Cremation had been written before the war,” he wrote, “I would have thrown it into the wastepaper basket. But now I do not have that type of courage.”* For a variety of reasons, not least of which were the demands upon writers to serve the war effort, Lao She’s major achievements during this period were in patriotic plays, most of which were forgotten after the war. It is important to keep in mind that during these troubled times, when the Japanese invasion was further complicated by the irreconcilable strife between Communist and Nationalist forces, and the continued presence of warlords, particularly in the north, Lao She was the only cultural figure who commanded enough respect by all sides to serve in a leadership role of patriotic literary and art associations.

  The war with Japan ended in 1945, only to morph immediately into four years of civil war between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Lao She was absent from China during most of those years. Owing largely to the surprising popularity of an English translation of Rickshaw Boy—it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection—Lao She was invited by the U.S. Department of State to visit America in early 1946; though the initial invitation was for a year, he did not return home until the establishment of the People’s Republic, reportedly at the request of Zhou Enlai. Soon after he arrived in the U.S., at a gathering in his honor, he made a point of informing his American audience, which knew little about Chinese literature, other than a bit of classical poetry and the translations of Arthur Waley and others of premodern novels, that new literary trends had taken hold back home. “The younger school of Chinese to which [I belong],” a New York Times story on May 19, 1946, quoted Lao She, “is only about thirty years old and it is distinguished from the older by its break with the classical vernacular and by its subject matter, which has less to do with flowers than with social themes.”

  While in the United States, Lao She wrote a novel he called Drum Singers; it was published in an English translation (1989) long before the Chinese version appeared. He also completed his long novel dealing with the lives of several generations of families living in a traditional Beijing compound, Four Generations Under One Roof, and worked with an old China hand, Ida Pruitt, on an abridged translation into English she called The Yellow Storm (1951); the Chinese original appeared in three volumes, published in 1946, 1948, and 1951.

  A celebrated cultural figure in the People’s Republic for the first seventeen years of its existence, Lao She held a variety of important or symbolic offices after his return in 1949, and while he appears never to have been completely comfortable with the system or ideology under which he lived and worked, he wrote prolifically, devoting his creative talents almost exclusively to the production of dramas, some of which continue to be read and performed. Teahouse (1958), which treats the Chinese revolution in three periods, from the late Qing reform movement through the early postwar era, was made into a successful film, starring Ying Ruochen. It remains Lao She’s most impressive work from the period and is also the first of his creations to feature Manchu characters, one of whom declares, “I am a Manchu, and the Manchus are also Chinese.”* Thus spake Lao She!

  Lao She’s final novel, Beneath the Red Banner, was begun in the early 1960s but never finished; the partial manuscript, which was not published until 1979,† following the lead of Teahouse, features a number of Manchu characters.

  In 1966, shortly after Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, Lao She was interviewed by a foreign couple who subsequently published the exchange. His remarks regarding himself and his generation of writers are telling: “I can understand why Mao Zedong wishes to destroy the old bourgeois concepts of life, but I cannot write of this struggle because I am not a Marxist, and, therefore, I cannot feel and think as a Peking student in May 1966 who sees the situation in a Marxist way…. We old ones can’t apologize for what we are. We can only explain why we are and wave the young ones on their way to the future.”‡ Not long after that, Lao She was visited at the offices of the Chinese Writers Association by Red Guards, who dragged him outside, where they interrogated, humiliated, and probably beat him. He was ordered to return the next day, but, according to reports, when he saw his “courtyard strewn with all his possessions, his house looted, his painting and sculpture wrecked, and his manuscripts, the work of a lifetime, in shreds…he did not enter his house but instead turned and walked to [a nearby lake], and there he drowned himself.”

  Lao She has been unevenly translated into English. Some of his novels, particularly the early ones, remain untranslated, while others, and many of his excellent short stories, have been translated more than once, in China and in the West. Luotuo Xiangzi (sometimes translated as Camel Xiangzi), his signature novel, besides remaining popular in Chinese communities throughout the world, is available in translation in many countries. While it has previously appeared in three English translations, it has not fared particularly well. In 1945, Reynal & Hitchcock of New York published a translation entitled Rickshaw Boy (the author’s name is given as Lau Shaw), by a translator using the pseudonym Evan King, reputedly a prisoner of the Japanese in Northern China when the work was done. Beautifully illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge, it was a bestseller, thanks in part to the popularity of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Unfortunately, King’s translation reflects little of the style or intent of the original. Larding his rendering with grand flourishes that are found nowhere in the Chinese, the translator took it upon himself to rewrite portions of the novel, delete others, and move sections around in ways that, quite frankly, make little sense. Then, in one of the most egregious betrayals of an author’s autonomy of purpose, Evan King changed the ending, completely distorting the author’s intent.

  After a shelf life of more than three decades, King’s translation was superseded by one that takes none of those liberties. Nor, unhappily, does it do justice to the artistry of the original or appeal as a representative of good English writing, however laudable the impetus to end King’s reign may have been. Frequent misreadings and non-idiomatic English, plus an outdated spelling system for Chinese, seriously mar the work. Published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 1979, Jean James’s Rickshaw is a valiant if ultimately unsatisfactory attempt to bring the novel faithfully across to a new generation of readers, for which the editorial staff at the press must share responsibility.

  In an afterword to a revised Chinese edition of the novel in 1954, Lao She wrote: “The Chinese edition of this book has already been reprinted several times. In this present edition, I have taken out some of the coarser language and some unnecessary descriptions.” Whether this was an altogether voluntary undertaking remains a mystery, although there is evidence that it was not, and whether the result is a better novel is a matter of taste. One must not, however, be fooled by the understated confes
sion into believing that the changes were, in fact, minimal. Several passages considered by some to be delicate or unsuitable in a Communist milieu have been excised, disrupting the logic of the narrative where they occur. And as for coarse language, it’s still there; but the author had to say something, I suppose.

  In 1981, China’s Foreign Languages Press and Indiana University jointly published a translation of the novel under the title Camel Xiangzi, which includes a preface by Lao She’s widow, artist Hu Jieqing, and a translation of the author’s essay “How I Came to Write the Novel ‘Camel Xiangzi,’” from a delightful little book of Lao She’s essays on his writing, An Old Ox and a Beat-up Cart (1935). The translator, Shi Xiaojing, has based her readable, if uneven, rendering on the 1954 revised edition—minus, shockingly, the last chapter and a half! Echoes of Evan King. In 2005, the translation, with the ending restored, was republished in a bilingual edition in Hong Kong, with an extended introduction by the literary scholar Kwok-kan Tam. For obvious reasons, anyone interested in this translation should choose this edition.*