This book is an innovative attempt to convey something of how it
has felt since the early nineteenth century to be Chinese. It is
based on the assumption that people live their lives in stories, or
as if they themselves were in stories--stories that are largely a
social inheritance but are also in some measure self-created or at
least continually adapted, edited, or extended.
The author describes and interprets some of the most important
stories through which the Chinese have lived their lives in the
last two hundred years and their understanding of them. He shows
how largely forgotten works of popular literature, novels and poems
in particular, can admit the reader to a number of different
emotional worlds. Together they suggest that there is no such thing
as "the" Chinese story, let alone mind, but rather a historical
palimpsest of extraordinary and often internally contradictory
complexity.
The book begins with an examination of Li Ruzhen's "Destinies of
the Flowers in the Mirror, " which reveals a microcosm of the
educated Chinese world predating major Western influences.
Balancing this emphasis on the elite are the poems collected by
Zhang Yingchang in "Our Dynasty's Bell of Poesy, " which portray
the universe of peasants, women, artisans, soldiers, and prisoners.
A bestseller of the 1930's, "Tides in the Human Sea, " shows the
'crisis of absurdity' that arises when feelings no longer coincide
with inherited patterns of behavior as modernization begins to take
hold. Hao Ran's "Children of the Western Sands, " a popular
Communist work of the early 1970's, allows us to be drawn into at
least a momentary empathy with the idealism of the Maoist faithful.
Almost as different as can be imagined is "The Bastard, " by Sima
Zhongyuan, one of Taiwan's most widely read writers. Its characters
interpret the Communist revolution in terms derived from
traditional Chinese religion, as a deserved punishment inflicted on
the Chinese for the filthy impropriety of their sexual conduct.
The final work considered is a book of essays, "A Commonplace
Fellow, " by Yuan Ze'nan, a Chinese-American writer who has reached
the point where his Chineseness has all but vanished, and who is
consciously exploring its disappearance.
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