Fortress Besieged Read online

  Qian Zhongshu with his wife Yang Jiang in Beijing

  Photo courtesy of Dominique Bourgois

  CONTENTS

  A Note from the Publisher

  Foreword by Jonathan Spence

  Author’s Preface

  Translators’ Preface

  FORTRESS BESIEGED

  Afterword

  Notes

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER ON THIS EDITION

  The translators of Fortress Besieged, Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, used the Wade-Giles romanization system for Chinese characters in their translation, which they first published in 1979. According to this romanization scheme, the author’s name is spelled Ch’ien Chung-shu. Since the year 2000, all libraries and bibliographic services in the United States have joined the international community in using Pinyin, rather than Wade-Giles, as the standard romanization style for Chinese characters. In this edition, New Directions provides the Pinyin spelling of the author’s name, Qian Zhongshu, as a cataloguing reference but, in order to keep this edition affordable, throughout the text the publisher has kept the translators’ original Wade-Giles transliteration of Chinese names and places intact.

  Foreword by Jonathan Spence

  1937 was a hellish year for China. After years of threats and corrosive expansion into Chinese territory, the Japanese finally moved to all out war, first in the Peking region, and soon after in Shanghai. In the north, Japanese armies moved swiftly to consolidate the region under a collaborationist government and the following year—despite a Chinese effort to slow them down by blowing up the dikes on the Yellow River—pressed southwest to the strategic rail and river junction of Wuhan. In the Shanghai region, Chinese resistance was far fiercer, and casualties on both sides were enormous. But by the late fall of 1937, the Chinese troops had crumbled, and the Japanese advanced triumphantly through the largely abandoned defensive lines to the Nationalist capital of Nanking. There, in December 1937, the infamous “Rape of Nanking” brought death or agonizing humiliation to hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children. In 1938, the Japanese established a collaborationist regime in Nanking, echoing the one already set up in the north. Having lost Wuhan to the Japanese, the Chinese Nationalist armies retreated still deeper upriver through the Yangtse gorges, establishing a new national capital at Chungking in Szechwan province.

  It is into this bleak setting that Qian Zhongshu unceremoniously tosses his hapless hero Fang Hung-chien. Fang has been somewhat aimlessly studying literature and philosophy in Europe for a year or so, living comfortably off cash gifts from relatives, but never assembling a valid number of course credits. Pressured to get his degree, he finally creates his own diploma by adapting a phony one from a fraudulent correspondence college. In 1937, he returns to China on a French boat via Singapore and Hong Kong with neither goals nor prospects, having learned a little about this and that but nothing about life itself. His family, meanwhile, has sought shelter from the widening war by moving from the countryside to the area of Shanghai known as the “Foreign Concessions,” controlled by French and British interests, which the Japanese had bypassed, restricting their assaults to the Chinese-controlled areas of the huge city. But weighted by his fake degree, and with no real skills or source of income, in mid-1938 Fang leaves Shanghai for a teaching job at “San Lü,” a small university he has never heard of, deep inland in Hunan province. There he gets engaged to be married, but also loses his job. Disconsolately, he returns again to Shanghai, after a hurried wedding in Hong Kong, only to watch bemusedly as his marriage collapses.

  Fortress Besieged is an intricately crafted comic picaresque novel that—like any major work of art—operates on a whole series of levels at once. One level is clearly autobiographical. Qian Zhongshu, like his fictional protagonist Fang, was also from a scholarly family in central China, and went abroad to study in Oxford and Paris in the mid-1930s, returning to China in early 1938. Unlike Fang, Qian was an accomplished scholar of both Chinese and English literature, and had obtained his B. Lit. degree at Oxford with a thesis on the depictions of China in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. But like Fang, Qian Zhongshu taught for a time early in the war in the interior, joining a group of refugee scholars from Shanghai and Peking who had set up a university-in-exile in the southwestern city of Kunming. After a stint there, and another at a college in Hunan, Qian returned to Shanghai (in 1941) where he taught and wrote until the end of the war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the Japanese took over the former foreign concession areas, and interned the foreigners. Qian thus lived and wrote in an area controlled by the collaborationist Nanking regime, but he seems to have avoided—like the fictional Fang—becoming either a member of the resistance or a collaborator. Instead he kept his profile low and wrote and studied in the privacy of his home—together with his wife, the distinguished playwright and translator Yang Jiang—and consorted with a small group of highly educated Chinese scholars and artists. (In 1949 he and his wife decided to stay in China, and spent the rest of their lives under communist rule.)

  Another level at which the novel operates is historical. Though Qian keeps the war offstage throughout most of his book, and there are no battle scenes, and no dramatic confrontations with guerrilla forces, collaborationists, or the Japanese themselves, the war remains everywhere. The effects of war are most subtly conveyed in the magnificent chapters that recount the journey made by Fang and four companions, as they travel by bus, boat, on foot, and by sedan chair, for several weeks in their quest to find the presumed haven of San Lü. Though Qian does not emphasize the topics, the alert reader will observe numerous examples of civilian profiteering, military graft, the ripple-effect of the needless destruction of Changsha, and the constant threat of being arrested and interrogated that Fang and his companions face. Elsewhere in the novel, one can also find references to the dreaded interrogation center run by the Japanese and their collaborators in the suburbs of Shanghai, and note the pressures on journalists and writers to conform to the collaborationist party line. Underlying these themes, at least for many Chinese readers, would have been the fact that the phrase “Fortress Besieged” (Chinese: “Wei Cheng”) had been most prominently used by a Chinese poet back in 1842 to describe the city of Nanking when it was besieged by the British after their defeat of China in the first of the so-called “opium wars.” Thus shame and national humiliation would have been very much in people’s thoughts.

  At a third level, the book is about Chinese intellectuals, and about the baleful effects of the excessive adaptation of Western literary and aesthetic theories that Qian felt had corroded the integrity of the Chinese, compounding the disarray of their culture which was already reeling under the collapse of the Confucian value-system. Fang himself is innocent in the sense that he always claims he knows too little to give informed opinions on cultural matters, but such inhibitions are not felt by any of his friends and colleagues. Fang is surrounded by puffed-up pedants and phony scholars, whose self-important diction and mindless comments drive several of the funniest sections of the novel. Many of the people whom Fang encounters on his travels can be readily recognized as real figures from the Chinese literary and academic world of the time, but in his own preface to the novel Qian counsels the reader not to see Fortress Besieged as a roman à clef.

  At yet another level, this is a book about the relationships between men and women, and about sex and marriage. Fang’s agonized and disastrous romances, crammed as they are with misunderstandings and absurd expectations, are brilliantly rendered and often heart-breaking despite their satirical coloration. The last fifty or so pages of the novel are surely one of the finest descriptions of the disintegration of a marriage ever penned in any language. One critic has o
bserved that Qian was led into his particular mode of anti-romantic pessimism by his broad reading of British novels during his time at Oxford, especially the works of Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, and there is surely some truth to that. It may also be pertinent that while Qian was working away at Fortress Besieged one of his closest friends in Shanghai, an expert on Flaubert, was completing his translations of both Madame Bovary and L’education sentimentale. At the same time, we must acknowledge that the details of the botched relationships, and the weight of a variety of family pressures on the indecisive Fang, remain recognizably and strictly Chinese in flavor.

  Lastly, and perhaps most off-puttingly, Fortress Besieged is awash, almost from the first page, with images of bile, vomit and phlegm. Human bodies—and not just Fang’s—are continually revealing their fallibility through their mouths and their nostrils. There is seasickness, airsickness, carsickness, drunken vomiting, babies’ spittle and drool, and snot, and there is nothing the reader can do but wince and move on. One might argue that there are some deliberate echoes of Jonathan Swift here, and that may be true, since Qian was indubitably an expert in British eighteenth century literature as well as modern. But often there is more than satire in these moments. Qian seems determined to remind us of the impossibilities of human purity, and of the fact that our ecstasies are forever doomed to conjure up their opposites.

  When Fortress Besieged was published in 1947, although the Japanese had been defeated, China was once more enmeshed in a vicious civil war that ultimately brought the communists to victory. It was a time of cruelty and chaos, as the late thirties had been. But Qian had completed his task. He had created a novel of originality and spirit, of wit and integrity, one that clearly has earned its place amongst the masterworks of twentieth-century Chinese literature, and can be read on its own merits within the most demanding of global contexts. It has been long out of print in English, and New Directions has rendered a true service in making it available once again to fresh circles of readers. Fortress Besieged may not be able to tell us where China is heading now, but it can certainly tell us what China went through on the way.

  Jonathan Spence

  Yale University

  September 6, 2003

  Author’s Preface

  In this book I intended to write about a certain segment of society and a certain kind of people in modern China. In writing about these people, I did not forget they are human beings, still human beings with the basic nature of hairless, two-legged animals. The characters are of course fictitious, so those with a fondness for history need not trouble themselves trying to trace them out.

  The writing of this book took two years altogether. It was a time of great grief and disruption, during which I thought several times of giving up. Thanks to Madame Yang Chiang, who continuously urged me on while holding other matters at bay, I was able through the accumulation of many small moments to find the time to finish it. This book should be dedicated to her. But lately it seems to me that dedicating a book is like the fine rhetoric about offering one’s life to one’s country, or handing the reins of the government back to the people. This is but the vain and empty juggling of language. Despite all the talk about handing it over, the book remains like the flying knife of the magician—released without ever leaving the hand. And when he dedicates his work in whatever manner he chooses, the work is still the author’s own. Since my book is a mere trifle, it does not call for such ingenious disingenuousness. I therefore have not bothered myself about the dedication.

  December 15, 1946 CH’IEN CHUNG-SHU

  Translators’ Preface

  Ch’ien Chung-shu ranks among the foremost twentieth-century Chinese novelists, and his novel Wei-ch’eng (Fortress Besieged) is one of the greatest twentieth-century Chinese novels. After receiving extensive treatment of his works in C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction in 1961, Ch’ien was largely neglected until recently. The present translation of Wei-ch’eng reflects that renewed interest, and it is hoped that it will generate even greater interest in Ch’ien Chung-shu and his works.

  This translation is the cooperative effort of Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. Whereas Jeanne Kelly did the first draft of the translation, Nathan K. Mao revised it; in addition, Mao wrote the introduction, refined the footnotes, and prepared the manuscript for publication. Despite our divided tasks, this book is our joint responsibility.

  We wish to thank Professor Joseph S. M. Lau of the University of Wisconsin and Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee of Indiana University for their expert editing assistance, patience, and encouragement; Chang Hsu-peng for help in the first draft of the translation; James C. T. Shu of the University of Wisconsin and Professor Mark A. Givler of Shippensburg State College for reading the entire manuscript and offering their advice; Mr. George Kao of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for permission to reprint chapter one, published in Renditions (No. 2, Spring 1974); and lastly Professor C. T. Hsia of Columbia University for supplying us with biographical and bibliographical information on Ch’ien Chung-shu.

  We also wish to express our gratitude to Mr. Ch’ien Chung-shu himself for reading the biographical part of the Translators’ Introduction as well as the Author’s Preface during his visit to the United States in April-May of 1979. He clarified several items of biographical detail and made some corrections. We are deeply honored that this translation has the author’s full endorsement and support.

  Chevy Chase, Maryland JK

  Chambersburg, Pennsylvania NKM

  Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiégée;

  ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer, et

  ceux qui sont dedans veulent en sortir.

  Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those

  who are outside want to get in, and those

  who are inside want to get out.

  —French proverb

  1

  THE RED SEA had long since been crossed, and the ship was now on its way over the Indian Ocean; but as always the sun mercilessly rose early and set late, encroaching upon the better part of the night. The night, like paper soaked in oil, had become translucent. Locked in the embrace of the sun, the night’s own form was indiscernible. Perhaps it had become intoxicated by the sun, which would explain why the night sky remained flushed long after the gradual fading of the rosy sunset. By the time the ruddiness dissipated and the night itself awoke from its stupor, the passengers in their cabins had awakened, glistening with sweat; after bathing, they hurried out on deck to catch the ocean breeze. Another day had begun.

  It was toward the end of July, equivalent to the “san-fu” period of the lunar calendar—the hottest days of the year. In China the heat was even more oppressive than usual. Later everyone agreed the unusual heat was a portent of troops and arms, for it was the twenty-sixth year of the Republic (1937).

  The French liner, the Vicomte de Bragelonne, was on its way to China. Some time after eight in the morning, the third-class deck, still damp from swabbing, was already filled with passengers standing and sitting about—the French, Jewish refugees from Germany, the Indians, the Vietnamese, and needless to say, the Chinese. The ocean breeze carried with it an arid heat; the scorching wind blew dry the bodies of fat people and covered them with a frosty layer of salt congealed with sweat, as though fresh from a bath in the Dead Sea in Palestine. Still, it was early morning, and people’s high spirits had not yet withered or turned limp under the glare of the sun. They talked and bustled about with great zest. The Frenchmen, newly commissioned to serve as policemen in Vietnam or in the French Concession in China,1 had gathered around and were flirting with a coquettish young Jewish woman. Bismarck once remarked that what distinguished French ambassadors and ministers was that they couldn’t speak a word of any foreign language, but these policemen, although they did not understand any German, managed to get their meaning across well enough to provoke giggles from the Jewish woman, thus proving themselves far superior to their diplomats. The woman’s handsome husband, who was standi
ng nearby, watched with pleasure, since for the last few days he had been enjoying the large quantities of cigarettes, beer, and lemonade that had been coming his way.

  Once the Red Sea was passed, no longer was there fear of the intense heat igniting a fire, so, besides the usual fruit peelings, scraps of paper, bottle caps, and cigarette butts were everywhere. The French are famous for the clarity of their thought and the lucidness of their prose, yet in whatever they do, they never fail to bring chaos, filth, and hubbub, as witness the mess on board the ship. Relying on man’s ingenuity and entrusted with his hopes, but loaded with his clutter, the ship sailed along amidst the noise and bustle; each minute it returned one small stretch of water, polluted with the smell of man, back to the indifferent, boundless, and never-ending ocean.

  Each summer as usual a batch of Chinese students were returning home after completing their studies abroad, and about a dozen of them were aboard. Most were young people who had not as yet found employment; they were hastening back to China at the start of the summer vacation to have more time to look for jobs. Those who had no worries about jobs would wait until the cool autumn before sailing leisurely toward home. Although some of those on board had been students in France, the others, who had been studying in England, Germany, and Belgium, had gone to Paris to gain more experience of night life before taking a French ship home. Meeting at a far corner of the earth, they became good friends at once, discussing the foreign threats and internal turmoil of their motherland, wishing they could return immediately to serve her. The ship moved ever so slowly, while homesickness welled up in everyone’s heart and yearned for release. Then suddenly from heaven knows where appeared two sets of mahjong, the Chinese national pastime, said to be popular in America as well. Thus, playing mahjong not only had a down-home flavor to it but was also in tune with world trends. As luck would have it, there were more than enough people to set up two tables of mahjong.2 So, except for eating and sleeping, they spent their entire time gambling. Breakfast was no sooner over than down in the dining room the first round of mahjong was to begin.