Sinica Leidensia, v.125. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015. x, 263 pp. US$142.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-29996-2.
Qian Zhongshu, fiction writer, literary critic, and antiquarian, and his wife Yang Jiang, playwright, translator, memoirist and fiction writer, were the power couple of late republican Chinese intelligentsia. Both were born in the last months of the empire; they married in their early twenties after meeting as students at Qinghua University in Beijing. They were grounded in Chinese scholarly traditions before leaving for Europe, studying in Oxford and Paris, and they became literary celebrities after their return to China in 1938, Yang first as a dramatist writing comedies in wartime Shanghai, and Qian with the success of his novel Weicheng (Fortress Besieged) in 1947. Declining opportunities to teach overseas, they remained in China following communist victory in 1949, suffering the strictures common to the established intellectuals in the Mao era, working in relative obscurity as translators, while Qian conducted his research on Chinese literature and philosophy. They returned to something like their former prominence after the Cultural Revolution, with Yang publishing a celebrated memoir of their “cadre school” incarceration in 1981 and her only novel, Xizao (Taking a Bath), in 1988. Following Qian Zhongshu’s death in 1998, Yang Jiang wrote extensively about their lives together and with their daughter, continuing her creative work well into her eleventh decade.
This collection of essays by a distinguished group of scholars has its origins in a 2010 symposium hosted by Christopher Rea to celebrate the lives of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. The book presents Qin and Yang as Chinese cosmopolitans, who wrote in China on Chinese subjects with a perspective informed by their sensitivity to the culture of Western Europe, particularly, as Judith Amory observes, that of the eighteenth-century novel. They were, like all intellectuals in the Mao-era People’s Republic, employed by the state, Qian working on the English version of Mao’s Selected Works and Yang translating European picaresque novels from English, French, and Spanish, but they managed to keep their distance from the turmoil of their times. Wendy Larson suggests that Yang Jiang’s later writings “present the ideal of a detached, cosmopolitan, and universal creative intellectual who imagines himself or herself not so much part of political society as floating in … the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic sphere.’” (135) References to the moment in their Mao-era works are private and oblique: Yugen Wang, in his chapter on Qian Zhongshu’s poetry, written in classical Chinese, quotes a poem written in 1957, on the eve of the Anti-rightist campaign and the Great Leap, which ends with elegantly haunting lines anticipating the trouble to come: “From distant skies comes the muffled roll of thunder./ Falling leaves tumble about in the air; the winds gusting every which way;/ Cooing mountain doves suddenly fall silent; the storm approaches” (47). Through much of the Cultural Revolution, Qian was as aloof as could be managed from the upheaval around him, writing critical essays on premodern Chinese literature and philosophy, the Guanshi bian (literally “Tube and Awl Collection,” also translated as “Limited Views”), analyzed here by Ronald Egan.
Their determined detachment from politics, even while they were undergoing (entirely unsuccessful) socialist re-education in their cadre-school, is recorded by Yang Jiang in her celebrated 1981 work Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liu ji). The memoir is modelled on the Qing dynasty memoir Six Chapters of a Floating Life, whose author Shen Fu recorded his love for his wife in vignettes of their time together. Like Shen Fu’s, Yang’s memoir takes delight in small things—clandestine meetings with her husband, a relationship with a dog—and its restraint is remarkable, given that it was written at a time when other memoirists from the intellectual class, also returning from a decade and more of ostracism, were bitterly cataloguing the abuses they had suffered at the hands of red guards and opportunistic colleagues.
For all the variety of their literary output, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang will likely be remembered most fondly for their single novels, Qian’s Fortress Besieged and Yang’s Taking a Bath, written forty years apart. Qian’s novel is set in the chaos of late republican China and Yang’s in the decade that followed it, the early years of the People’s Republic. Both concern the misadventures of intellectual classes in their natural habitats, the college and the research institute. In Qian’s novel, a returned student with a fraudulent degree finds a position in a dubious college in the interior, and in Yang’s, colleagues at a research institute connive and betray to maintain their status and employment. The influence of the European novel of manners is noted here, though surprisingly not that of the eighteenth-century Chinese comic masterwork Rulin waishsi (Unofficial history of the scholars), which covers much of the same terrain for the late imperial period. In his chapter on Qian Zhongshu, T.D. Huters finds possible inspiration for Fortress Besieged closer to hand, for its author at least, in the satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh, popular while Qian and Yang were at Oxford; Huters further notes a similarity to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, written a decade after Fortress Besieged, and similarly set amongst the lecturing fraternity. Qian and Yang’s novels share the territory of the contemporary Anglo-American university novel, of which Lucky Jim is an early example and the novels of David Lodge the best-known examples from the late twentieth century: Chinese and Western authors alike offer tales of inadequacy and pretention, shabby romance and petty jealousy, in a genre that veers from farce to black humour and always has time to expose the vaingloriousness of scholars.
Fortress Besieged and Taking a Bath are available in English; those wishing to read more of Yang Jiang in translation can refer to a special edition of Renditions (no. 76, 2011) released to coincide with the author’s hundredth birthday.
There is more to appreciate in this collection, including chapters on Yang Jiang’s plays and translations, and another on her family memoir We Three (Women sa). China’s Literary Cosmopolitans offers both a valuable introduction to two outstanding cultural figures, and innovative scholarship on aspects of their work which have previously received less scholarly attention.
Richard King
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
pp. 131-133