Modern Chinese writers self-portrayals: Gu Hua

T h e   S l o w   M a t u r a t i o n   o f   M y   C r a f t

Tea in Cold Water Steeps Slowly
-------------------------------

Gu Hua

1982

     At the urging of the editors, I have written this piece about
     "Literature and Me."  The title, "Tea Steeped in Cold Water
     Grows Stronger Slowly," is a metaphor for how slowly I
     progressed as a writer.  There truly is a bit of "Ah Q" in it.


1.  The Planting of the Seeds

   I was born in a small mountain village in the northern foothills of
the Wuling Mountains of Hunan.  The village, which had only forty or
fifty families, was divided into northern and southern sections by a
long, narrow cultivated gully.  Said to resemble two elephants standing
shoulder-to-shoulder, it was called "Two Elephants Village."  On the
western end of the "two elephants" were planted luxuriant cypress trees
several rows deep, which formed a verdent protective screen.

   Emerging from this screen of cypresses, a winding cobblestone road
ran north and south.  Flowing east to west was a small stream, ennobled
as "Bigger than a Ditch."  Each year in summer and autumn, it became
the "River of Happiness" for us children.  Once we'd all stripped
naked, we learned how to jump in, dog paddle, dive, and splash each
other, besides picking up conch shells, seizing fish and crayfish in
our bare hands, catching crabs, and scooping up eels.  Our tiny hands,
fearlessly reaching deep into rock crevices, sometimes dragged out a
slippery bream.  The stream, continually pounded into jaded green,
flowed on until it was yellow and turbid.  Yet, beginning from this
tiny creek, some of my childhood friends ultimately became illustrious
naval officers sailing the South Seas and the Pacific.  And who would
have ever imagined that one of these bare-bottomed children would later
come to write short stories?

   Behind the small mountain village was a great stand of ancient
trees, abundant and flourishing.  Naturally, in bright daylight the old
trees provided an even better playground for us.  We searched for
brushwood and grasses, raked up pine needles, plucked mushrooms, pulled
up bamboo shoots, retrieved birds' nests, and learned to climb thes
trees like squirrels.  When evening came, the old forest was full of
fear and mystery for us.  The sound of the wind, the rain, the
billowing pine trees, bird calls, and wild animals noises scared me so
that I buried myself in my quilt, head and all, where I dreamed of
falling down the stairs, off the rooftop, out of trees, or from clouds
in the daylight sky.  Startled awake, I heard grown-ups say I must be a
in a growing spurt.

   While climbing trees, I scraped my hands and feet, tore my clothes,
and more than a few times got a hard spanking for it.  Yet those lofty
treetops, sweeping the blue sky and white clouds high enough to reach
the stars and the moon, held a tremendous power of attraction for me.

   In those days, remote mountain villages at the border were wholly
backward in culture.  A few times a year, itinerant performers from
Henan and Anhui came with their monkeys to show off their tricks.
Naturally, we couldn't enjoy the radio broadcasts, movies, and
talk-plays that are now almost universally available in farm villages.
Yet the ancient mountain villages retained some of the ancient culture.
My hometown was praised as a center of Hunan folk songs.  Popular among
the women were traditional songs and dances to "Accompany the Bride."
When a village girl was to be married, all her paternal aunts,
brothers' wives, and sisters would gather indoors and sing on her
behalf for three days and nights.  What did they sing?  Songs about the
girls' reluctance to leave her old home, her hopes for married life,
the sorrows of her family at the parting, and, even more important, her
resentment of feudal ethics and the arranged marriage system.  (After
Liberation, musicologists who came to our area to collect folk songs
recorded over six or seven hundred original lyrics.)

   Another event in the small mountain villages that could be called a
cultural movement was "Recounting of the Past" by elders.  "Recounting
of the Past," or simply telling stories, was a pastime for the older
generation, and an unconscious means of transmitting cultural and
historical knowledge to the younger generation.  During that peaceful
era, the village was mostly at rest during the night.  It was relaxed
and peaceful, without any small-group meetings or mass rallies.  There
were only birds chirping and dogs barking, or sometimes a disturbance
raised by cattle thieves from outside the village.

   Perhaps it was that creek that ran through my village, the stand of
old trees out back, the sound of the songs to accompany the bride, the
elders' recounting of the past, that unwittingly sowed the seeds of
literature in my young heart and thick, impervious soul.

   These seeds of course were most fragile and thin, and they seemed to
have fallen into barren cracks in the earth.  Without spring winds and
rain, they never could have sprouted.


2.  The Nutrients

   I'm embarrassed to say so, but I first came into contact with
literature through martial arts fiction.  In the early years after
Liberation, when I was eleven or twelve years old, books that had lost
their covers and even some of their beginning and ending pages used to
circulate in the countryside, like Three Knights-Errant and Five
Gallants, Most Incredible Marvels among the Swordsmen, tales of court
cases, and the like.  I was obsessed and enraptured by the knights-
errant who leapt up on roofs and vaulted over walls and courtyards to
extirpate eveil and help the poor, and also by the limitless magical
powers of the sorceresses and Daoist adepts who mounted the clouds and
rode the mist, or changed stone into gold.  It's a good thing I wasn't
led astray, for those books all have the same formula.  One way of
another, the knight-errant gets into a terrible spot, and when no other
resolution is possible, the Goddess of Mercy or the Venerable Mother of
Pear Mountain inevitably appears to save the situation.  I think such
writnig is one of the historical roots of our [current] literary
practice of writing everything according to the same formula.

   My reading interests were broad.  I read a little of everything,
from Tang dynasty stories of the strange and marvelous and Ming-Qing
romances, to the New Literature of the May Fourth period and works of
critical realism from eighteenth-century Europe.  I was particularly
fond of The Dream of the Red Chamber;  I read it five or six times all
told, sometimes as a textbook on how to write, yet even now I haven't
grasped all of its subtleties.  Truly it is a vast and profound
literary treasure.


3.  The Soil

   As peasants manage their land, writers manage their own lives.  Life
is the soil of literature.  From the time I was small, I lived in a
farm village in Hunan.  When I was eleven or twelve, the poverty of my
family got me prematurely caught up in the contradiction between
seeking knowledge and seeking sustenance.  For the sake of eating, the
spirit naturally had to give way to material needs.  I learned to make
straw shoes to sell, chop bamboo, tote charcoal on a shoulder pole,
even take people's cows out to pasture.  The area around my hometown
was very poor, so a lot of people bore charcoal on shoulder poles to
sell in neighboring counties.  In the blistering heat, the flagstones
of the road were hot enough to keep you jumping as you went.  Your
sweat turned into a mist.  In the rain and snow, you wound twine around
your shoes to prevent slips and falls.  On frosty days, you hands and
feet were so frozen they split open like broken bricks, bleeding and
exposing the flesh.  Yet among charcoal sellers, the poor helped the
poor and neighbor helped neighbor.  Stopping along the way to rest
their feet and wipe away the sweat, they never left a companion behind
to fend for himself.  If one day the charcoal or bamboo sold for a good
price, a three-ounce cut of fatty meat would be brought back, stewed in
an earthenware pot with black beans until it was fragrant and tender,
then shared equally, so that all could beam with joy as they broke
their fast together.  This life allowed me to understand how precious
it is to be able to support oneself.  It let me empathize with the
hardships of manual laborers, and feels for myself the laboring
people's pure and precious willingness to share their good fortune
along with their hardships.

   Three years later I was able to go on to middle school, though I
returned to the countryside each winter and summer vacation.  During
the Great Leap Forward, my studies were interrupted for a year.  I
taught in a local citizen-run primary school, where I participated in
the making of charcoal and steel, launched all kinds of high-yield
satellites [1], and ate in the communcal mess hall of a people's
commune.  The following year, I passed the entrance examination to a
prefectural agricultural school.  Then came the so-called "days of
hardship."  The collective was sent down to a poor district in the
countryside, to undertake large-scale agricultural work.

   In the winter of 1961, the school was ordered to disband and I was
sent to a prefectural agricultural station as a farm worker.  I lived
next to a small town for the next fourteen years.  During that time, we
experienced the "Four Clean-ups" campaign and the "Historically
Unprecendented Great Cultural Revolution."  I planted vegetables,
managed orchards and nurseries, planted rice in flooded fields,
repaired farm tools, oversaw granaries, and so forth.  I basically
learned all about agricultural life.  In those fourteen years, I never
suffered from hunger or cold, but I was tired to my very bones.  It
allowed me to immerse myself in life at the grass roots, experience the
illusory vicissitudes and storms of the times, and become intimately
familiar with local conditions and the customs of the common people in
rural Hunan.  Moreover, all this provided the local color of my later
fiction.  One can sum it up with a little joke:  Though Heaven
entrusted no great task to me, it "exhausted my fame, made me suffer
starvation and hardship, and tested my resolution." [2]  I am thankful
to life for tempering me.

   I feel that if life is the soil of literature, there is a
dialectical relationship between its breadth and depth, and between
specific locales as opposed to the whole terrain.  If an author, having
written works of a certain quantity and quality, still limits his life
to a certain village or stays at a certain level for a long time, that
will surely influence his outlook on life and artistic viewpoint.  His
writing is bound to evidence a certain unimaginativeness, like an
overly "self-conscious country cousin."  He'll be unable to bring into
play, unearth, or refine many of the precious elements of life.  The
problems we writers who hail from the grass roots confront,
particularly those of us known as "xiangtu (rural) writers," are
totally different from those of writers who rarely come down to the
basic levels and rely on collecting materials and interviewing for
their creative work.  The latter kind of comrade ought to get involved
at the grass roots (as our literary and artistic leaders have long
stressed), and the former ought to create the conditions and
opportunities for broadening themselves.  They ought to go visit the
great rivers and mountains of our motherland, and our famous ruins.
They ought to participate in some literary gatherings, or read a few
noted works by foreign and domestic writers.  I have my own experience
to speak of.  Right after the smashing of the "Gang of Four," the
Chinese Writers' Association and related unites offered me the chance
to visit the Southwest, East China, the North, Manchuria,a and other
places, where I could see our famous mountains and great rivers to my
heart's content.  Moreover, they arranged for me to leave my job for a
time and study at the Chinese Writers' Association Literature
Institute.  We read some famous literary pieces and heard a lot of old
writers and scholars speak.  It expanded my living and artistic horizons.
I think that the new breakthroughs in my own writing these past few
years are very much related to these travel experiences.


4.  The Seedlings

   I wrote Hibiscus Town in July 1980, in a peaceful and secluded
forestry project in the Wuling Mountains.  As is my habit when I write
a comparatively long piece, I followed normal working hours during the
day and in the evenings simply found people to talk with, listened to
the news, flipped through books and newspapers, thenwent to sleep at
the usual time.  One evening a friend from the school for the
foresters' children came to chat.  He mentioned that the head of a
commune in his county, having clashed with a brigade cadre, had sent
select militiamen to surround the latter's village.  The villagers all
signed a petition of complaint, which was forwarded to and approved by
higher and higher levels, until it was like a document on a holiday
trip.  The matter was resolved only when the document got to a
responsible person in a ministry of the central government who had
relatives in the village.  This affair reminded me of a discouraging
but widespread phenomenon in our lives a few years earlier:  although
lots of people were in communication with higher organs at various
levels to file a complaint, an appeal, or a request for a hearing, it
would go unresolved for a long time.  Because of overlapping agencies,
overstaffing, and low efficiency, the buck wouild be passed up the
echelons and then down again.  How could government in a country
governed by the people and under the leadership of the party allow
these phenomena to exist so long?

   Then I thought of yet another affair.  In 1977, when I was in a
different county collecting materials, I heard that the head of a
production team was going against his commune's orders to institute
uniformly "double cropping of rice."  He had planted twenty acres of
midseason rice without authority.  When the commune head discovered it,
he brought a group of people to pull the seedlings out of the ground
and transplant early rice there.  Commune members under the offending
team leader were opposed to that, and they got into a fight with the
people doing the transplanting, right there in the rice fields.

   Afterward, the team leader was sent to prison for the crime of
"assaulting cadres of the revolution."

   I kneaded these two incidents from different counties together into
a story about an old farmer who cried out against the injustice done to
his son in prison.  He filed complaints to higher and higher levels,
but not until a leading cadre in a ministry personally looked into the
matter was there any hope for a resolution.  I used this story to extol
the correct line of the party central and the flesh-and-blood closeness
of the old cadre to the common people, and also to chastise the work
style of certain bureaus that did not work on behalf of the people.

   Transforming, polishing, and filling out a real-life story into my
1981 novel Hibiscus Town was a large task.  It all began with the case
of a falsely accused "rich-peasant widow" that I heard about in 1979
when I went to a large county in the mountains to gather information.
The original story is chilling and sorrowful.  It is said that an
industrious young woman earned some money selling rice-beancurd during
the "days of hardship" after the Great Leap Forward, enough that she
built a house for herself on the eve of the "Four Clean-ups" movement.
During the campaign, she was tagged as a "new rich-peasant element."
Her husband, a pork butcher, was so cowardly and intimidated that he
hanged himself.  His young wife, her head full of feudalistic
superstition, thought her fate was formidable that it overpowered those
around her, and that she was fatal jinx to any husband she might take.
Hence she often cried at his grave in the night.  Later on, a
prospecting team came to the village and she was ordered to put them up
in her house.  ONe member of the team was unmarried technician in his
thirties.  Simply because some young workers in the team joked that
they were willing to act as matchmaker between the young widow and the
technician, misfortune came again.

   In 1969, during the campaign to Cleanse the Class Ranks, they were
repeatedly dragged up on stage together for criticism and struggle.
The technician couldn't rid himself of the shame, so he also commited
suicide.  Thereupon the rich-peasant widow felt even more strongly that
her fate was overpowering, and that her jinx had put to death yet
another innocent male.  Now she secretly went to two gravestones to cry
in the night.

   Only in early 1979, after the Third Plenum of the party's Eleventh
Central Committee, when misjudged verdicts were overturned nationwide,
was the new rich-peasant widwo acquitted and rehabilitated.  So her
fate wasn't so formidable after all.

   This story continually preoccupied me.  If I had written the story
as it was originally, it would have been easy to fall into the old
cliches, for through the ages there have been so many, many stories
about woman's fate.  I thought about writing it several times in 1979,
but in the end I never started.  Finally, in 1980, when I was studying
at the Chinese Writers' Association Literature Institute, this story
came together with my long-standing plan to write a long novel.
Thereupon, I seemed to see a light through the clouds, and I began to
come alive;  I finally hit on the following idea:  I would write about
life in a small mountain town.  Characters from four different
generations would act out their own lives, reflecting the social
customs and ethos of small-town life in the mountain regions of the
South.

   I would use a small community to reflect the larger society in a
time of turbulence and flux.  That would of course be difficult, and if
I didn't take care I would surely fail.  It called on me to bring into
play nearly all of my thirty years' experience living in the
countryside.  It was another big test of my ability to use language and
delineate character.

   Several of the main characters in Hibiscus Town are based on real
people, but changed for the story:  Sister Hibiscus Hu Yuyin;  the
Solder from the North Gu Yanshan;  the brigade secretary Li Mangeng;
the cynic Qin Shutian;  the "Campaign Cadre" Li Guoxiang;  the owner of
the stilt-house Wang Qiushe;  and others.  Some are based on several
different life models.  I lived and worked with these people for a long
time, observing their ups and downs and their joys and sorrows, so
parts of them reflect my own experience, too.

   An old comrade in a Peking publishing house once asked me:  You
aren't very old, and haven't experiencd any great rises or falls in
your own life, so how did you come by the moving feelings of Sister
Hibiscus, a woman full of hidden anguish [over her thwarted love life]?
I answered:  Sister Hibiscus's feelings come from me.  For a long time
I have been a weal person, and I've been bullied.  The strong look at
the weak as pitiful wretches, while the weak, who commiserate with each
other and stay together, naturally can appreciate feelings that are
lost to the strong.  The weak have to deal with them, or even rely on
them.

   Thinking back on the creative path I have taken these last twenty
years, I really feel guilty and afraid.  Yet most writers do not like
to expose themselves before their readers.  This essay may be
considered a work of self-consolation and self-encouragement;  of
self-mockery and self-analysis.


--
"Lengshui paocha manman nong" (Tea steeped in cold water grows stronger
slolwly), in Wenxue zhi lu (The path of literature) (Changsha, 1983),
pp. 118-29.

				-- Translated by Linda Greenhouse Wang

--
Footnotes:

[1]  After the USSR launched the world's first space satellite in 1957,
     China tried to contribute to the socialist camp's victory by
     "launching" experimental fields ("satellites") in agriculture.

[2]  Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, 1970), book VI, part B,
     verse 15.  This quotation is ironic, for these are the tests by
     which Heavne actually makes great kings and public figures.

--
Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals, edited by Helmut Martin and
Jeffrey Kinkley, published by M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992.

--
This book is available at Central Library, PL2277 Mod