I mentioned my aspirations for this page at some point during the four weeks in which I was a blogger. I took it’s name from a phrase I’ve seen a handful of times: 辞林, the forest of words, which refers to the world of literature in the same way 儒林, the forest of scholars, refers to the whole community of Confucians. I always liked this usage of forest, so I’ve tried anglicizing it, taking “letters” from the phrases “belles-lettres” — admittedly a French phrase, but one I always found quite mysterious, showing up in the kinds of 19th century novels I read as a teenager.
I would like, essentially, to understand what vernacular Chinese literature actually is — primarily the literature of the 20th century. I of course must prepare myself for the possibility that it’s not anything at all. From novels like A Flower in a Sinful Sea at the end of the Qing dynasty, to the married couples in Shi Zhecun’s stories, harboring a latent darkness between them that rivals that found in Eyes Wide Shut, to mid-century Taiwanese novelists like Pai Hsien-yung and post Cultural Revolution mainland authors (who will probably form the bulk of what I write about) — it’s all too much for me to think about. But I feel compelled to try my best to read as much as I can and write a few words about what I learn. I’m not quite sure how to do that, as I lamented in the blog post mentioned above. So I figured I’d just get right to it without thinking too much. I can engage in revisionary antics later on, if I ever figure something out.
So without further ado, we begin our walk through the forest of letters with Sun Ganlu’s most famous story, and thus far the only one I’ve read by him, 我是少年酒坛子, whose English title Chinese Literature in Translation lists as “I Am a Young Drunkard.” (I should mention at this point that I will only discuss works I’ve read in Chinese and will not read any English translations even when they’re readily available, which means half the time I’ll only have a vague idea of what it is I’d just read.)
Here’s the picture of Sun Ganlu that’s at the front of the collection I bought, made appropriately pixelly:
A lot of the difficulties I have writing about Chinese literature in general find themselves manifested quite acutely in this little short story. To put it simply, I have no idea what this story is about. Despite that, I’ll try summarizing it. The best place to start seems to be this paragraph from the second page, which sets the scene. I’ll present it in somewhat abbreviated translation:
One scorching summer evening (which, to be precise, occurred at some point in the past century) I found myself meeting a guest from the north with a melancholic expression and an excess of energy — a self-titled poet with a penchant for writing resentful stories. It was at Ostrich Qianzhuang (which once hung a sign advertising alcohol) that this “habitual memory,” (as the blind Argentinean might call it) was made complete.
I asked Xiaoxi, without any context “Can you tell me what on earth a qianzhuang (钱庄) is?” She immediately replied “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. China’s always had these places called qianzhuang, yet I have no idea what they are.” As for the blind Argentinean, that’s certainly Borges, but I’m not sure what “habitual memory” might refer to.
The protagonist sits at a table with his poet friend. The way everyone talks to the narrator, I imagine he’s still a kid, maybe 19 at most — someone who learned the art of inebriation at an early age. I’m not sure how this young alcoholic and this emaciated northern poet became friends, but here they are.
There’s a part towards the beginning of the story that I rather like where the narrator and the poet are silently listening to the conversation of the men sitting next to them while they drink. The men notice this though and violently scream at the poet and narrator, telling them not steal other people’s drinking conversation. So they try their best to make their own conversation:
“What did you do before you came to the south?”
The poet lifted his nose till it touched the back of his chair, looking quite elegant, and said loudly “I hid myself away at home. You must know, the north is a ‘hidden dragon, crouching tiger’ sort of place.” Having finished speaking, he quite mysteriously swept his gaze across everyone in the qianzhuang.
The ostrich calmly straightened his neck.
“In the south, everyone spends all their time on the streets,” I said with a hiccup.
He quickly pointed his yellowed index at me, homing in on my weakness. “Just because you’re on the streets doesn’t mean everyone else is.”
“Has anyone ever gone searching for you or trying to call upon you?” I quickly said, trying to change the topic.
“As soon as someone visits,” he kindly explained, “We leave the nest. When they’re gone, we go back to hiding ourselves.”
“Are you all hidden together, or spread in every direction?”
The conversation goes on like this, for several pages. The poet keeps saying things that the other guests at the qianzhuang, represented by some card players, find idiotic, yet the narrator seems to hold an odd admiration towards him, closely listening to everything he says. The poet mentions that as a child he had always wanted to be buried in a garden so that his corpse could become food for plants. The card players next to them get really excited about this and menacingly suggest that they have a garden right outside for him. The narrator intercedes by suggesting that he and the poet need to pee. The ostrich man tells the narrator and his poet friend that since the building’s on top of a hill, they can just go outside and pee wherever they’d like, as gravity will carry the urine away.
The poet then becomes mesmerized by an antique copper coin they find, which immediately rolls down the hill. The poet chases after it, and the narrator soon follows. He bumps into a man who sells aphrodisiacs, and when he asks him if he’d seen the poet, he says he had — that the poet had run into a group of monks and joined them in their ascetic life. And so the narrator never saw the poet again.
In my youth, exploring the infinite world of Newgrounds, I found myself playing “The Legend of Zelda and the Lampshade of No Real Significance” over and over. There’s a bunch of characters that, at first were a complete mystery to, but which I gradually realized after months of revisiting the game must be based on other Newgrounds personalities. They all have two or three lines of dialogue and some passing significance in a trading quest. I never really felt much desire to engage with the work of the people they were based on — it’s easier to be friends with video game NPCs that say the same thing over and over — a tiny cartoon face in a slightly larger house in this bite sized, clearly delimited world. This story kind of feels like that. I’m not really sure why the path through the story is the way it is, yet I find myself mentally retracing my way through it over and over.
There’s a part of the story, which I haven’t yet spoken about, mostly because I don’t understand it. Before the story proper begins, there’s a section that feels unrelated about some people who traverse a mountain in the year 1959. That part initially put me off, because its narration style reminded me of the pseudo-Biblical tone of Yan Lianke’s Four Books, a novel I didn’t enjoy at all. The story itself, with its long strings of 成语 and massive jumps in diction between the poet and all the other characters’ dialogue, is mysterious to me in the sort of way that produces endless imaginations. It makes me want to go to the top of a hill and pee. Yet I find it attached to this five paragraph introduction that makes my eyes start to wither whenever I try rereading it. Why does everything have to come in pairs like this? Everyone is carrying some part of them that I have dread having to plunge into, yet it’s precisely that part of them that carries their darkest secrets.
We continue our forest walk now to Shi Zhecun, whose story 莼羹 I read last Wednesday while having breakfast at McDonalds. This was my first time being at McDonalds in the morning in China since 2018, when I had found myself in what I now retrospectively realize was a classically Murakamian situation, engaged in conversation with two strange women who’d been awake all night singing karaoke and had found me sitting beneath a bridge, drawing sketches for some 3D block pushing puzzle game idea I had had at the time. Since I had to pee, we’d all gone to McDonalds together. One of the women seemed to be very curious about me and kept asking to look through my sketchbook. When I refused, she asked if I’d least let her open it up to a blank page. I didn’t really have a reason to refuse this. She then asked for my pencil and proceeded to draw me a little sketch of a tree. I remember feeling like I’d defrauded her, as her tree sketch was “A delightful example of light and shade,” to steal a phrase from The Magic Christian, (a movie I went to great lengths to see as a teenager because because I liked the Badfinger theme song), while everything else in my sketchbook I’d drawn myself looked like the scribblings of a child. The other woman didn’t trust me at all, so as soon as I finished using the bathroom, she kept suggesting that I should be on my way. So I awkwardly bid the two of them adieu and walked out into the early morning Beijing cityscape.
Back to last Wednesday. The reason I was at McDonald’s was that our landlady’s husband had showed up that morning at the apartment with a guy to inspect our pipes. I’d been in the shower when they arrived, so they’d all been awkwardly standing outside the bathroom waiting for me to finish. Xiaoxi had still been asleep when they came knocking on the door, and therefore was in such a rush to get dressed before she let them in that the she hadn’t realized the t-shirt she grabbed quite visibly exposed the protrusions of her two nipples. As I stepped out of the bathroom, my mind halfway registered this, but not enough to form any coherent thoughts about it. Instead, I immediately left without having breakfast, since I felt weird about eating in the presence of the landlord’s husband. At first I thought I might loiter in the alleyways outside our apartment for a while, but I was worried the landlady’s husband might see me when he left, so there’s was nothing for me to do but bike to the office. Once I arrived, I still had plenty of time before work started. That’s when I was struck with the delightful idea of going to McDonald’s. I ordered a cup of coffee, a youtiao and one of those potato hashbrown patty things I remembered having at McDonald’s locations back in the United States — thereby fulfilling by sworn duty to always be at the intersection point between East and West. Here’s photographic evidence:
I remembered I had Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous Women, a collection of stories by Shi Zhecun, in my bag. I pulled it out and turned to where I’d left off last time: 莼羹. After having disparaged his wife’s cooking the week before, a man finds himself committed to cooking her wife 莼菜 soup the following Sunday (according to Google, 莼菜 is “Watershield” in English, but as is usual with names of plants I’ve only encountered in Chinese books, I have no idea whether or not this is true). “I criticized her the same way I criticize my good friend Dai Wangshu’s poetry, despite being no poet myself. I simply wanted to help her improve. Yet my wife was unable to see that.” She’d challenged him try cooking himself if he was such a gourmand, and too proud to back down, he accepted the challenge. When Sunday actually came around though, he woke up late and was desperate to use his one day off for something productive. He figured he had enough time to translate six quatrains by Richard Aldington that he quite liked, but after finishing only one, his friend Mr. Zhu arrived unannounced. His wife boasted to Mr. Zhu about how he’d come just in time to have a taste of her husband’s masterful cooking, but the protagonist was so frazzled that he reneged on his promise, and instead rushed Mr. Zhu out the door to eat at a restaurant together. When he finally came home later that afternoon, he found his wife face down in bed crying, having been denied the chance to taste his delicious 莼菜 soup.
This is very relatable to me, since my own weekends are spent deliberating over how I could use them productively, lamenting over how little time I have, finally coming up with a plan that seems doable, starting it, taking far longer than I had predicted, and then getting interrupted before I’m even a quarter way done. Before I know it, it’s 3AM. I was like this even back when I didn’t have a job — except it wasn’t limited to just the weekends. So I suppose I should thank the patron god of salarymen and corporate drones for saving me from that daily despair I was once so familiar with.
I’m supposed to hate my boring office job, but I still find life in the office to be a fantasy. I don’t necessarily like it — but I’d spent so many years imagining what it would be like to work in a Chinese office building, and now that I’ve been granted the opportunity to do so five days a week, I can’t help but cherish it. The narrator of Xu Xing’s Variations Without a Theme says that he always feels so uneasy on his days off from the restaurant he works at. That’s how I feel too, even if working in an office and at a restaurant are a bit different.
And yet I always feel so tired when I come home. There is a certain kind of sorrow that I’m still learning to deal with resulting from being separated from Xiaoxi whenever the sun’s still hanging in the sky. Usually she’s just waking up when I head off to the office. I remember in the second or third chapter of Fortress Besieged, the protagonist would write little letters while working at the bank (or was it a newspaper?) everyday to the teenage girl he was infatuated with. I wish I could do that to various people I’m infatuated with, Xiaoxi foremost among them. Instead I can only send messages on Wechat. As we all know, this is just not the same as putting pen to paper, sealing it an envelope, and dropping it in the mailbox just before the second mail shift, knowing that it will be delivered before the end of the day.
This relates to one of the aspects of Shi Zhecun’s stories that I like. They are, for the most part, about married couples. A handful are about infidelities, but the majority of these couples could all be considered to be in “happy” marriages. Usually long-form novels about marriage turn into tragedies at one point or another. Fortress Besieged is the perfect example. It begins with the epigram “Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.” The typical novel needs drama and conflict that can be kept for hundreds of pages, so I suppose this a natural result of the form. Yet I’d sometimes find myself wondering if there were any novels about “happy” marriages. It never occurred to me that perhaps the short story works much better for such themes. In a few pages, one has just enough space to linger on a single moment of tension, and watch it ripple through the psychology of a husband and wife, in the process revealing the whole world the two of them have made for themselves.
It makes me want to read more short stories. What other themes have I been ignoring simply because they’re not suitable for multi-hundred page novels?
Since I last updated this page, I dipped my toes into the works of several authors that seemed worth "strolling through", e.g., Chu Tʻien-wen, Fei Ming, and Wang Zengqi, but none of them really stuck with me. Maybe if I revisit them in a different mindset I'll find more to say about them, but at the time I read their stories my only real reaction was "ok." It was only in January that I found what might be the perfect author for where I am in life right now: Xu Xu. To put my feelings for him in a sentence that won't be particularly useful to anyone, he is delightful. He is so delightful that I don't know how to write about him. I've gotten too emotionally invested in his books, and the ground I'd have to cover far exceeds what a simple "stroll" can contain. We'll have to wait for a later date before we can depart on something more than a stroll through his world.
For now, I'll just say that it was bad timing getting into him in January. It would have been better to have known about him when I was in Hong Kong during New Year's. I could have looked for old editions of his books at used-bookstores there, where I imagine he exists more plentifully than here in Shanghai, despite Shanghai being the subject of so much of his work. He was very well known during the wartime years, but after leaving for Hong Kong in 1949, his works obviously weren't preserved in the mainland the way leftist authors like Mao Dun were. He also hasn't experienced the same sort of revival that someone like Eileen Chang/Zhang Ailing has. So when I've tried tracking down his works, my options have been between a handful of recently published selections of his novellas and essays (which only scratch the surface of what he's written), yellowed editions of his books published in Hong Kong in the 50s or 60s (often not cheap and liable to crumble to pieces at the slightest touch), or the 17-volume Complete Works of Xu Xu, which I wouldn't have space for in my apartment and would be one of the expensive single purchases I've made in the past five years.
Anyway, after four months of struggling to get into any author but Xu Xu, I picked up The Drunkard by Liu Yichang earlier this month, which was quite refreshing in its own way. [Editor's note: We're only three entries in, and this is already the second piece with "Drunkard" in the title.] I'd known about Liu Yichang for a long time primarily as one of Wong Kar-wai's literary influences, though now that I've finished the book, I realize that's a terrible way to think about him. 2046 was apparently inspired by the setting of The Drunkard, but the movie makes the hack-writer protagonist feel far more cynical and empty than he is in the book. The plots are also completely different, but that doesn't really matter much, since both the movie and the book are structured in a way where plot more-or-less melts away from memory as soon as you exit their worlds.
However, what had most resonated with me about 2046 when I first saw it years and years ago, namely characters with distant mainland origins who had all ended up in Hong Kong (or Singapore), is explored in full force in The Drunkard. The narrator, an alcoholic writer of Wuxia novels serialized in newspapers, had grown up immersed in the literary scene of Shanghai in the 30s and 40s and has frequent flashbacks to the city. He bumps into people he knew back in the mainland and hadn't seen in decades. He sends letters to old Shanghai friends who have ended up in the UK, writing articles in English about footbinding and queues (the Manchu hairstyle), since that's all British readers care about China. Despite Liu Yichang's Wikipedia article calling him the founder of Hong Kong's modern literature, the overwhelming "identity" described is Chinese and Shanghainese émigré. Whenever the narrator talks about Hong Kong in particular, it's as a society that's gone wrong, having given itself over to capitalistic greed — a dystopia that he's found himself lost in, and which can only be escaped through alcohol (though there are the occasional moments when he deludes himself into thinking literature will save him.)
His mind is filled with Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Faulkner. He evokes them like muses or old friends, begging for their help in his darkest moments, or fantasizing about them coming to Hong Kong and enduring the same degrading hyper-capitalist publishing world that he has to navigate. Many chapters are devoted to the narrator giving his opinions about things, usually framed as conversations with his young writer friend while drunk: he declares Dream of the Red Chamber (or Story of the Stone, as he typically refers to it) the supreme avant-garde novel, anticipating all experimental literature of the 19th and 20th century; he goes through the major Chinese short-story writers of the 1930s, evaluating their legacy one-by-one; he explains why Hong Kong cinema can't rise to the level of Japanese or Western cinema (only after a movie executive friend cheated him, though). The fact that he's drunk when he writes these things is what makes them work — this isn't necessarily the author inserting his own polemic into the novel. The way this overly-educated highly-literary narrator forced to write trashy serials out of economic necessity delivers his overflowing and sometimes contradictory perspectives about the world — perspectives that in another life he might have crafted into carefully crafted articles in literary journals — pulls you deeper into his mind. This is a person for whom simple existence is inseparable from memories and fantasies of literature and the authors he's read and reread.
One of the things that's interesting reading this book in 2026 is the snapshot it provides of the publishing in Hong Kong at the time — an industry that's been transformed several times over in the past 60 years. The novel of course depicts the commercial publishing world at length, e.g., the kinds of interactions the narrator has with newspaper editors, people pounding on his door demanding he hand over today's installment of his novel, or worries about pirate reprints across the South-East Asian market; but a major plot point is the narrator's young writer friend's attempt to start a literary journal of his own, and how the project ends up a waste in the eye of the narrator due to his friend's bad taste and the lack of contributions — not due to a poverty of talent in Hong Kong, but because the world has corrupted all the good writers. In the narrator's view, the only surefire way to keep up the quality of their literary journal is to focus on translations of Western authors, because "Western authors have the freedom to create great works, outside of the oppressive system we have in Hong Kong." (I'm paraphrasing the narrator's thought process — he doesn't literally say this.)
While there is a recognizable plot, as I said above, the plot really isn't how I think about the novel — that's why I haven't attempted a summary thus far. Instead, the more conspicuous "organizing structure" to the novel is the different rooms he rents, and the landlords/landladies that come to dominate his thoughts in different ways. I imagine this focus on living arrangements is one of the influences 2046 took away from the book, despite the movie being set in a very different sort of domicile (one of those hotels where people take out long-term rentals) from the extremely intimate let-out rooms in the homes of lower-middle class families that The Drunkard revolves through. (Shanghai also still has a lot of these kinds of old buildings with rooms designed for letting out. Frequently mentioned friend-of-the-Saddle Xie Wang lives in one.)
He rents three different rooms over the course of the book. He has to leave his first room because the landlord’s precocious daughter tries to seduce him, while at the same time telling her dad that it was him who made advances against her. So he finds a landlady whose “husband” is a sailor who apparently has a wife and child in every port his ship docks in. The husband sends her money — more than enough to live on — and she goes to the harbor to see him twice a year. The only reason she’s letting out a room is that she "needs a man around the house." She gradually falls in love with the narrator and starts enabling his alcoholism. Ultimately things come to a head and he moves in with a "normal family." This is where he lives for the second half of the book, and initially it seems like whatever drama regarding his living situation is more or less resolved. His landlord and landlady are hardly present, and their children are all boys without much interest in him. The only member of the family who interacts with him much is the grandmother, who in her old age mistakes him for her son, who had died in the war. (This makes me recall the grandmother in Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, of all things.) She becomes a major character by the end of the book.
I wonder if I'll ever meet a senile old lady who thinks I'm her son. It seems much less likely to happen to me, since I'm fairly limited in terms of the old people I come in close contact with, and I'm probably not going to live in a room in another person's home anytime soon. When I read the narrators of mid-century novels talk about their landladies (Xu Xu has many stories about this, and Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf's another obvious example), I become jealous. I've only seen my landlady three times. I have no idea where she lives, and I'd have to look at my WeChat contacts to remember her full name. A country gets rich, and all of a sudden all the respectable families don't want strangers living with them anymore! Life becomes more comfortable, killing off certain classes of human relationship in the process and denying them the possibility of ever again being the subject of literary exploration. (I'm exaggerating, of course. People still let out rooms — it just doesn't have the same omnipresence as in the 20th century. Someone in the relative economic position of my girlfriend and I in 1930s Shanghai would almost certainly be living in someone's home, whereas now, private apartments are so readily available to us that renting one isn't a question. I've lived with roommates, but that's not really the same thing. It's a different sort of relationship from what I find described in these novels.)
Why is it such a pleasure to spend a few moments each day entering another person's hell? That's all The Drunkard is — a voice describing the hell he's found himself in in Hong Kong in some year in the early 1960s. He stews and he stews. He keeps dragging himself down into even more desperate situations. Yet when I'm with him, I feel so warm.
Now that I've finished the book, I'm not sure what I'll read next. I picked up a collection of Maupassant stories (in English), because he's featured in both Xu Xu's work and The Drunkard. But where will our stroll through Chinese literature take us next? Is it time for me to finally dive deep into the likes of Eileen Chang or Mu Shiying? Or should I read one of the new novels friend-of-the-Saddle Fish has recommended me? There's so much I want to read, but what I actually do end up reading feels completely out of my control. We'll just have to wait and see.