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Snake's Pillow: And Other Stories (Fiction from Modern China)

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About the time Zhu (sometimes, Chu) Lin began writing in 1979, some naive lefties I knew were wearing T-shirts with a Maoist slogan, "Woman holds up half the sky," as a sign of their support for the Equal Rights Amendment. Zhu Lin, who had just returned from years of rustication in a poor part of east-central China, could have told them that the sentiments had no connection with reality.

The "Snake's Pillow" collection comprises five searing, angry, brutal stories about life in Jiangnan, a sort of Chinese version of Bucks County for Chinese literati; and one story set in Shanghai. All are excellent, and although there are threads that link them together, they vary in style and structure. Since being translated 20 years ago, nothing else of Zhu Lin's large output has been put into English, which is a considerable failure for the sponsor, the Fiction from Modern China project.

There is nothing wrong with these stories, except that they are unpleasant to read.

Most of what we hear from China today is about the alleged economic miracle (which I consider to be similar to the reports we got out of Germany in the mid-'30s about Hitler's economic miracle: wildly overblown and delusional, but that's another story). Still, two out of three Chinese people have been little affected by foreign investment. Not for them the heady chance to work in sweatshops for $2 an hour and pay $1 an hour for a hot bunk. Rural poverty is still the norm.

And just how poor that is comes through like a thunderclap in these stories. Zhu Lin was a daughter of the intelligentsia, which got her sent to the countryside, so she knows about peasants. Her peasants seem very real, once you understand her ground rules:

Men are cruel and powerful; the only decent men are imbeciles; socialization turns them into rapists and murderers. Women are victims.

Most of Zhu Lin's heroines are so poor they don't even have names. If a girl is born into a loving family and is given a name, she will be sure to lose it.

This stylistic trick attains dizzying complexity in the long story "Night Songs." (Not long enough, it should have been expanded into a novel.)

Although Zhu Lin is a feminist writer, she is evenhanded in choosing her likes and dislikes, heroes and heroines. "Night Songs" is as feminist a piece as any of the others, for all that its protagonist, Pots, is a man literally blinded for love. (The man, like the women victims, has no name, just an epithet.)

I have not found stories as richly gruesome and implacable since the Greeks quit composing their plays. "Night Songs" begins with the abandonment of a baby girl. Rescue, it later appears, was the worst thing that could have happened to her. Pots, the lover, pays a terrible penalty for her.

A line from "Night Songs" could be slotted into any of the other Jiangnan stories: The local bigwig says, "She's a woman, so she's a cheap life, and she can do as she's told."

"Night Songs" begins just before the '49 revolution, and it encompasses most of the subsequent disasters, the Cultural Revolution, famine etc. It ends up with a complete change of characters, emblematic, perhaps, of the persistence of sorrow in Jiangnan, despite the appearance and disappearance of individuals.

Along the way, Zhu Lin manages to take swipes at most of China's sorrows. Evenhanded here as elsewhere, she is as likely to find corruption among the landlords as among the Communist cadres as among the newly prospering Red capitalists.

It isn't a peasant Orestiad, but sometimes it comes close.

"Snake's Pillow" is the most lyrical of the pieces. Throughout, the misery of the humans is balanced in Zhu Lin's stories by the burgeoning renaissance of nature, most lyrically in this story.

"Snake's Pillow" also undergoes a complete change of characters, as the downtrodden girl and the imbecile boy suddenly are replaced with a nature naming story, again, Greek in feeling.

According to translator Richard King, Zhu Lin read widely as a girl, including the French novelists. I find something of Balzac here, and more of Stendahl, but even more of Euripides.

Many years ago, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, I visited China as part of a delegation from Australia. We saw the official sights and heard the official views, didn't believe a lot of it, but came away impressed with the abilities and intelligence of Chinese people. One of the official events we attended was a performance of "On the Docks", a rare, approved Chinese opera with a modern theme and modern choreography. Even though it was awful in many ways, I still felt attracted to the colors, the movements, and the presentation of mawkishly earnest sentiments (which few might have believed in their hearts). At that very time, millions of Chinese were undergoing "re-education" in the countryside, learning the political lessons to be gained by shoveling manure, eating bad food, and being resented by the actual peasants. The author of this book, Zhu Lin, was one of them.

All the more strange (to my American eyes), then, that when she wrote, she employed a style close to "On the Docks"---bright primary colors, characters without depth, good guys and bad guys. I did not find much psychological finesse here, more melodrama or bathos. To top that off, she wrote of topics that could not have been welcome even in her more liberal times. She criticized Communist party officials bitterly, she criticized the old and the new mercilessly, and then the re-emergence of vendors, salesmen, and all sorts of petty businessmen, creaming profits off pilfered state property. So, though she writes bitter stories of the exploitation of women, injustices everywhere, and officials taking advantage of the simple people they are supposed to serve, she couches these stories in a style that I would have thought now long-abandoned. A puzzling performance. The last story, "Street Sketch", about a Shanghai street con-man is the best, but it ends very strangely, almost as if two disparate themes were welded crudely together. I appreciated these stories as a glimpse of a Chinese writer unknown in the West, but I doubt if they would appeal to many readers. The propaganda poster, the one-dimensional character still reverberate here.