GU HUA A SMALL TOWN CALLED HIBISCUS ============================ Postscript ---------- I was born in 1942 in the northern foothills of the Wuling Mountains in south Hunan. That small village had no more than fifty households who lived north and south of some narrow fields, like two elephants standing side by side, and so the place was called Two Elephants Village. The west end was screened by a fine stand of cypresses, deep green the whole year round. A winding flagstone road ran from north to south, while from east to west flowed a brook called "Bigger than a Ditch". For us kids, in summer and autumn that brook was our "Happy River". Stark naked we learned to dive and swim dog-paddle. We had water fights and caught snails, fish, shrimps, crabs and eels, our small hands reaching boldly into the cracks of the rocks, from which occasionally we might pull out a slippery bream. We stirred up the green water till it was muddy. But it was starting with that little brook that some boys of my age later joined our glorious navy and sailed the high seas. And, even more unpredictably, one of those bare- bottomed boys took to writing stories. Behind that little village was a big primeval forest, lush and green. In the daytime of course that was our favourite playground where we gathered firewood, pine needles, mushrooms and bamboo shoots and learned to shin up trees like squirrels to raid birds' nests. After dark we found it a scary, spooky place. The sound of wind and rain, the soughing of pines and the cries of birds and beasts frightened us into tucking our heads inside our quilts and gave us nightmares. When I woke with a start from dreams of falling out of a window, off a roof, off the top of a tree or down from the sky, the grown-ups said I was outgrowing my strength. Climbing trees I grazed my hands and feet and tore my clothes, for which I often had my bottom spanked, my head rapped with a bamboo. Those tall tree tops which brushed the clouds and seemed to soar to the moon and stars had a great attraction for me. But actually I never once climbed to the top. The grown-ups had warned me that coiled in the crows' nests up there lay speckled snakes. The thought of that made me look down. But it's no good looking down when you're climbing a tree. It made me so dizzy, my hands and feet so limp that I quickly slithered down, ignoring the squirrels mocking me from the boughs.... Later, when I started writing, I often remembered those climbs of mine as a boy, the attraction they had for me and the spice of danger. It was really difficult to climb to the top. In those days that small village near the border was culturally very backward. Only a few times a year did travelling showmen come from Henan or Anhui with their performing monkeys, and of course there were none of the broadcasts, films or modern plays that villages have today. But that mountain village had its own old culture. My home was known in Hunan for its folk-songs, and the women sang and danced whenever there was a wedding. Each time a village girl married, all the other girls and young wives came to sing in her home for three days to give her a send-off. They sang about her reluctance to leave her childhood home, her hopes for her marriage, her parents' grief at this parting. An even more common theme was aversion to feudal conventions and arranged marriages. (After Liberation musicians came to our parts to study the local customs, and they recorded six to seven hundred of these traditional songs.) Every autumn, when the grain was in the barns and the sickles hung on the walls, was the season for weddings at which such songs were sung. We kids were always able to tuck in by reaching out a row of small hands for titbits. We were able to feast our eyes on the decorated bridal sedan chair as it was borne into the village, and the bride in her red silk veil as she and the bridegroom bowed together to Heaven and Earth then went into the bridal chamber. We could also give our ears treat by standing quietly behind the singers while they sang: A bride of eighteen, a groom of three Who wet the bed each night, Less than a pillow in length, Not up to a broom in height. At night he woke, for milk he cried. "I'm not your mum - I'm your bride!" Another cultural activity in that small mountain village was listening to stories. Old folk told stories to pass the time and in this way taught the youngsters some culture and history. In those days, in times of peace, there was practically nothing to do in the country at night. People could relax and be quiet - there were no meetings. The only sounds were cocks crowing or dogs barking, or a sudden commotion if a thief was caught trying to steal a water-buffalo. Of course we kids had to work in exchange for listening to stories. In summer we sat on the threshing-ground in the moonlight waving rush fans to cool the old story-teller and drive away mosquitoes; in winter by the brazier we pummelled his back muscles which ached after the day's labours. As time went by my little brain became crammed with The Canonization of the Gods, The Pilgrimage to the West, Outlaws of the Marsh and other old stories. Perhaps, without my knowing it, the seeds of literature were sown in my childish mind by the brook beside the village, the forest behind it, the wedding songs I heard and the stories the old folk told. Those seeds certainly fell on very poor rocky soil, and could hardly have germinated without the spring wind and rain. I confess to my shame that the first books I read were stories about swordsmen. Soon after Liberation, when I was eleven or twelve, some dog- eared books with the first and last pages missing circulated through the countryside, most of them the adventures of swordsmen or accounts of involved court cases. I was spell-bound by the exploits of those swordsmen who flew on to eaves, climbed high walls and broke into houses to kill scoundrels and save the poor, as well as by all the magic of those immortals and alchemists who rode on clouds and mist and turned stone into gold. Luckily these books did not lead me astray, because most of them were written to the same formula, and by the time the swordsmen reached a dead end the situation could only be saved by the intervention of Guanyin or some other deity. My tastes were fairly catholic. I read a little of everything: Tang romances, Ming and Qing stories, the new literature of the May 4th period, and the critical realist works of the 18th and 19th-century Europe. My favourite novel was A Dream of Red Mansions, which I read five or six times, sometimes reading it as a literary textbook, but never understanding it completely. It is truly a great treasury of art. Each time I read some classic it transported me into a colourful world with a whole gallery of characters, so that I felt as if drinking from a crystal fountain. Needless to say my study of great works whether Chinese or foreign was somewhat superficial. Without fully understanding them I tried to adopt their good points in the hope of producing something new myself. Later I also read histories, works on philosophy, war reminiscences, biographies of famous men and records of important world events. I tried to broaden my vision. No one poorly read and ignorant can be a good writer. I thought, since I came from the countryside, if I took no interest in and knew nothing about major current events, simply giving lively factual accounts of a few villagers, it would be hard to avoid mediocrity in my writing. Literary writing requires nourishment which comes partly from life, partly from reading. If you are widely read in the best works ancient modern, Chinese and foreign, you are imperceptibly influenced by them. Silently, like rain and dew, they enriched and transform your mind. While trying my hand at writing I often felt that I lacked nourishment. We middle-aged and young writers today have read much less than the older generation of writers. Just as peasants cultivate their fields, writers cultivate their lives. For life is the soil of literature. Brought up in a poor family in a south Hunan village, when I was only twelve I was faced with the contradiction between getting an education and making a living. Naturally food form my belly had precedence over mental sustenance. First I made straw sandals and sold them, then felled bamboo, carried charcoal to the market and hired myself out as a water-buffalo boy. Our village was so poor that many families took loads of charcoal to other counties to sell. In the sweltering summer the flagstones scorched the soles of your feet, and the sweat pouring off you steamed. On wet days I wrapped straw ropes round my sandals to keep from slipping. In winter the frost chapped my hands and feet so that blood dripped from the raw flesh. But it's the poor who help the poor, and we charcoal pedlars had plenty of homes to stop at to rest and wipe off our sweat - no one would be stranded half-way. If your charcoal or bamboo happened to fetch a good price, you'd buy a few pounds of meat and make a savoury stew with black soya beans, then give your mates a treat.... That life taught me how fine it was to earn your own living, taught me how hard this was. It enabled me to appreciate the sterling qualities of the labouring people who share their griefs and joys and help each other out. Three years later I passed the entrance examination to junior middle school, but still went home in the winter and summer holidays. Towards the end of the fifties I interrupted my studies for a year to teach in a village school. The next year I was admitted into our district's agricultural school, from which we all went down to a poor county to go in for agriculture in a big way. In the winter of 1961 that school closed down and I was transferred to the agricultural college as a farm worker. I lived near a small town for fourteen years, which covered the Four Clean- ups Movement and the "unprecedented great cultural revolution". I grew vegetables, tended orchards and raised saplings, grew paddy, mended farm tools and minded the store room. I learned basically all kinds of farm work. In those fourteen tumultuous years at the grassroots level I also familiarized myself with the village customs of south Hunan. The ancient flagstone street in this small mountain town, the new grey tiled, red brick houses, the old camphor tree with fine foliage, and the crooked stilt-house all fascinated me and made me feel very close to the past. The vicissitudes, griefs and joys, the funerals and weddings of the local people and even their poultry and dogs made a lasting impression on me. I discovered that though the small town made very slow progress materially in those years, human relations changed incredibly fast. I am glad to have gone through the mill there. Most authors take up writing mid-way in life, or began writing in their spare time. When I published my first work in 1962, I was up against the problem of how to handle the relationship between my main job and my spare-time activities. Unless handled correctly it would lead to trouble and hold up my progress in writing. A writer must love life and his own job, otherwise he will feel isolated, unable to integrate with those around him or adjust to his surroundings and create a good environment for his work, study and writing. Because the raw material for a story is the people around you. Then, if you have any profound ideas or original views, these should be expressed in your work. A showy display of brilliance is hard for readers to accept. And overstatements and effusiveness prevent you from thinking deeply about life. I believe that in life, the soil of literature, there is a dialectical relationship between depth and range, a focal point and the whole spectrum. If a writer produces a certain number of works of a fair standard but confines himself for years to living in one village or grassroots unit, it is bound to restrict his view of life and his artistic vision, bound to reduce his works to mediocre matter-of-fact accounts, as he is unable to draw upon, refine and exploit many valuable materials from life. Thus writers like us who come from grassroots units - especially if we come from villages - are confronted by complete different problems from those writers who seldom go down to the grassroots or only make trips there to collect material. They should settle down there for longer periods, whereas we should try to see more of our country, take part in more cultural conferences, or read more Chinese and foreign masterpieces. I am keenly aware of this from my own experience. After the downfall of the "gang of four" the Writers' Association and other organizations arranged for me to travel widely in China to many famous mountains and great rivers, as well as to attend a course on literature. I was able to read more widely and listen to talks by well-known authors and scholars, to broaden my outlook on life and literature. This travel and study undoubtedly invigorated my writing. Summing up my experience not long ago I wrote: "In the past few years I have stopped inventing stories and piecing together imaginary episodes, but instead have used the experiences of characters in real life, transforming and refining these to make them typical. This saves trouble. Drawn from life these works have the simplicity and truthfulness of life, not being as contrived as my earlier writing." Works of literature are the saplings, or sometimes the great trees, a writer raises from the soil of life. Stories like A Small Town Called Hibiscus and The Log Cabin Overgrown with Creepers were drawn from life then altered and refined. To say "this saves trouble" is not entirely true, for this process of transmutation and refinement is actually more difficult than inventing one's own plot. My novel A Small Town Called Hibiscus appeared in Modern Times (Dangdai) No. 1, 1981, and later that year was published by the People's Literature Publishing House. It is based on life but I took pains to alter, amplify and polish it. I first thought of writing this novel in 1979 when I learned about the unjust treatment of a "rich peasant woman" when staying in a county town in the mountains. Here was a tragic story. A young, hardworking woman during the "hard years", she made enough money selling beancurd to build a storeyed house just before the Four Clean-ups Movement. During that movement she was classified as a new rich peasant and her husband, a timid butcher, hanged himself. Being very superstitious, she thought she had been fated to be the death of her husband, so at night she often went to weep at his grave. Then a prospecting team came to the village and was billeted in her house. One of its technicians wa a bachelor in is thirties, and some younger members of the team offered jokingly to arrange for him to marry this young widow. Both were denounced and struggled against, and unable to stand the disgrace he committed suicide too. Convinced that she was ill-fated and had caused the death of another innocent man, the widow went secretly after dark to weep at the two graves. Not until after the Third Plenary Session of the Party early in 1979 were wrongs righted throughout the country, and this widow was cleared. She realized then that her misfortunes had not been doe to her fate. This story haunted my mind. But if I wrote it as a true-life story it could easily be stereotyped, for there have been so many accounts since ancient times of the sad fate of women. Several times that year I thought of writing it but refrained. In 1980, I decided to incorporate it in a novel I had long been planning. Then I gave free rein to my fancy and made up a plot about a group of people in a small mountain town in four different periods. By reflecting the local customs and feelings of that small community in south China, I hoped to portray that whole turbulent age, now past. Of course I had set myself a difficult task and might very easily botch it. I had to draw on virtually all my experience of village life in the last thirty years, and I feared my command of language and characterization might prove inadequate. The main characters in A Small Town Called Hibiscus are adaptations of people in real life. Some are based on several different individuals with whom I lived and worked for a long time, witnessing all their ups and downs, their griefs and joys. I also drew on my own experience. A veteran publisher in Beijing once asked me: You are relatively young and haven't gone through great vicissitudes, so how could you enter into the poignant frustration of a woman like Sister Hibiscus? I told him: I experienced it myself. The strong characters in life despise weaklings, and the weaklings sympathize with and feel close to each other, so they can understand feelings which are a closed book to the strong. It is also easy for them to understand the feelings of the strong, because they have so many dealings with them and may be dependent on them. As for another major character Gu Yanshan, a grassroots Party cadre, while portraying his fine qualities I stressed that he was an "ordinary individual", a stabilizing influence in the small mountain town, looked up to by the townsfolk as their leader; but I did not cover up his weaknesses or the way he vented his feelings. In recent years I have tried to avoid writing in a stereotyped, generalized way, but hitherto I have made very little headway in this respect, and I need to redouble my efforts. Literature is the product of life. Life is its soil. And the richness or poverty of the soil determines whether a work of literature is vigorous or feeble. A great tree will not grow from barren land; only rich soil and clear water will enable it to flourish. Looking back at what I have written over the last twenty years I feel ashamed and dismayed. But most writers seem to like to brazen things out with their readers, and so I have written this article to comfort, encourage, mock and explain myself.