Beneath the Red Banner [Paperback]

She Lao (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Borgo Press (December 31, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 0809545039
• ISBN-13: 978-0809545032
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,204,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bequest of a doomed rare bird, August 30, 2005

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beneath the Red Banner (Paperback)

The ivory billed woodpecker is a rare bird indeed. Just imagine that you looked for it over decades, then located it, only to see it fly headlong into a large plate-glass window and die. I feel rather the same way about Lao She. In the century of China's turmoil between 1850 and 1950, only a few topnotch writers could emerge, people like Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Shen Congwen. Lao She was one of this small group. He grew to be a rare bird in the forest of literature, but was captured and killed. Eventually politics cornered him. His humanistic, humorous style did not please party bosses. He doomed himself by being born a Manchu in pre-revolutionary times, by writing of life as he saw it before the Revolution, rather than life as Socialist Realism decreed it to be. And he served the Communist Party, he believed in the changes that convulsed China. They hounded him to death during the Cultural Revolution: I believe he drowned himself. What a loss!

Lao She couldn't write a bad story. On the other hand, he could. These two contradictory statements are illustrated perfectly in the unfinished BENEATH THE RED BANNER, which at 212 pages, is only a fraction of the novel he planned to write. The first part, which deals with a character's first month on this ball of dirt, takes up 121 pages, a fantastically interesting description of life among the impoverished Manchu bannermen in Beijing in the last years of the 19th century. It oozes humor, color, reality, and earthy dialogue. OK, maybe it isn't deep philosophy, maybe there are no psychologically-revealing characterizations, but you can't get enough. This is what Lao She excelled at. His stories are genuine monuments to a certain period in Chinese history, that long-vanished Beijing life---poverty, corruption, polished bourgeois manners, stewed pork, orchid scented tobacco, esoteric hobbies and secret societies---still lives on his pages. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the mood and tone change. The author begins to write `politically correct' descriptions and to idealize propaganda-poster characters without any criticism, certainly without a humorous glint in his eye. Bad, greedy foreigners, sleazy Chinese running dogs, heroic bare-chested rebels---I felt sorry for Lao She, who obviously had to toe the line. It didn't help him in the end: his past caught up with him. Although you can buy this book as a single book, it really is two books. One is vintage Lao She, the other is Lao She Lite. I wonder what the book would have been if he could really have written as he wanted. We will never know.