Cat Country

CONTENTS

About the Author

Introduction by Ian Johnson

Translator’s Note

THE CRASH

CHINA WAS NEVER LIKE THIS – OR WAS IT?

HOW DO YOU GET OUT OF HERE?

WHAT STRANGE MEN THESE CAT-MEN BE

WHEN IN ROME . . .

FELINESE AND OTHER THINGS

A LAND OF PEEPING TOMS

THE PROFIT MOTIVE

A RELUCTANT SERVANT OF THE GREAT SPIRIT

BEING A FOREIGNER DOES HAVE ITS ADVANTAGES

THE CAPITAL OF CAT COUNTRY

WE FOREIGNERS HAD BETTER STICK TOGETHER

THREE GENERATIONS

A RAINSTORM

MADAM AMBASSADOR’S STORY

FREE LOVE AND OTHER THINGS

SCHOOL DAYS

YOUNG SCORPION AS HISTORIAN

OF SCHOLARS OLD AND NEW

BOOKS AND RELICS BY THE POUND

ANYONE FOR A BRAWL?

SOME GENERALS PREFER BOUDOIRS TO BATTLEFIELDS

HAWK

A WALK WITH REVERY

EVERYTHING IS BEGINNING TO COLLAPSE

THE LAST GASP OF A DYING STATE

FAREWELL TO MARS

Notes

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

About the Author

Lao She was born Shu Qingchun in 1899 to a poor Manchu family in Beijing. His father was a Bannerman, an imperial guard of the Qing court, who died fighting in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

Lao She left China in his mid-twenties to teach Chinese at the University of London where he would remain for the next five years. His first book,
The Philosophy of Lao Chang
, appeared in
Fiction Monthly
in 1926 and
Mr Ma and Son
, his third and final novel written during his London years, was serialised in 1929.

He continued to teach and write upon his return to China and had, by then, become an established author known for his humorist style. In 1932, he ventured into the realm of satire and science fiction with
Cat Country
and three years later he published
Rickshaw Boy
, the story of a local Beijing rickshaw puller, widely regarded as his most accomplished novel.

Throughout the fifties, he continued to write, producing novels, non-fiction works and the notable play,
Teahouse
. In the sixties, he was labelled an anti-Maoist and a counter-revolutionary by militant Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. In August 1966, Lao She committed suicide in Beijing.

William A. Lyell, Ph.D., studied Chinese at Yale University and served in the Korean War as an interpreter and soldier. He was a professor of Chinese at Stanford University for over thirty years where much of his research focused on modern Chinese literature. His previously translated works include
Blades of Grass: The Stories of Lao She
by Lao She,
The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
by Lu Xun,
Shanghai Express
:
A Thirties Novel
by Zhang Henshui, and he is the author of
Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality
.

Ian Johnson is a journalist, author and literary critic based in Beijing and Berlin. He served as a correspondent in China for Baltimore’s
The Sun
,
The Wall Street Journal
and
The New York Times
. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of China and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of
Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China
and
A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West
. He is a regular contributor to
The New York Review of Books
.

INTRODUCTION

I
N THE
northwest corner of Beijing’s old city is a subway and bus workshop. It was built in the early seventies on the site of the Lake of Great Peace, which was filled in as part of a plan to extend the city’s subway system. In the bigger picture of the destruction of old Beijing, the Lake of Great Peace was just another loss – one of the countless cuts that have destroyed the old city and remade it in the borrowed image of socialism: modern, efficient and rootless. But its demise is especially poignant because it was here in 1966 that the greatest chronicler of Beijing’s urban life, Lao She, committed suicide after being tortured and brutalised by Mao Zedong’s Red Guards.

Lao She’s best-known works are the novel
Rickshaw Boy
and the play
Teahouse
, both of which describe the challenges faced by ordinary people in China’s turbulent twentieth century. A champion of vernacular Chinese, he was one of the first to fully capture how people really spoke, especially the dialect of his beloved Beijing. But it’s in
Cat Country
that Lao She stretches himself the furthest, producing one of the most remarkable, perplexing and prophetic novels of modern China. On one level it is a work of science fiction – a visit to a country of cat-like people on Mars – that lampoons 1930s China. On a deeper level, the work also predicts the terror and violence of the early Communist era and the chaos and brutality that led to Lao She’s death at the Lake of Great Peace.
Cat Country
is often called a dystopian novel, but when Lao She took his own life, it was an uncannily accurate portrait of the reality around him.

The novel hasn’t always been seen in such terms. After it was serialised in 1932, it was roundly criticised as too pessimistic. Although it was a popular book, Chinese and foreign critics had a hard time placing it in Lao She’s oeuvre. Some have seen its value mainly as a way of understanding his views on China. But
Cat Country
’s stature has grown over time, after the detritus of a turbulent era has settled, the shrill polemics have faded, and the book is seen not only in the context of Chinese history but as a reaction to a time when many societies, both Eastern and Western, were degenerating into a violent, animalistic state.

Lao She himself was ambivalent about
Cat Country
, and saw it as a detour from his roots as a humorist in the Beijing storytelling tradition. He was born there in 1899 as Shu Qingchun, or Sumuru, in his native Manchu tongue. His people were the one-time nomads who had conquered China in the mid-seventeenth century and had been ruling it since then under the Sinicised name of the Qing dynasty. His father was a soldier who died defending the Forbidden City in 1900 against Western troops in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers had vowed to expel foreigners from China, and the Manchu court had made the ill-fated error of backing them – one of the final blows that caused the Qing to fall in 1912 and be replaced by a weak republic.

Lao She grew up impoverished: his mother had a tiny widow’s pension and the boy often lacked overcoats in the winter. But he was tough and one of his friends, the linguist Luo Changpei, wrote in an essay that ‘even when he was beaten with the rattan pointer until tears filled his eyes, he wouldn’t shed a drop or ask to be spared.’Academically gifted, he went to a teaching school and was immediately given a job in the educational bureaucracy. But he resigned in disgust at the corruption and lack of reforms – themes he would take up with gusto in
Cat Country
.

He went to London in 1924 to teach Chinese at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies (the precursor of today’s School of Oriental and African Studies), and he read English novels in earnest. Homesick for Beijing, he began to write, partly imitating Dickens. His first novel,
The Philosophy of Lao Chang
, was well received because he had brought to the fore something that modern Chinese literature had previously neglected: humour. Two more novels followed and then he moved back to China, stopping first for half a year to teach in Singapore, where he wrote a children’s novel.

Assigned to teach in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan, Lao She wrote a novel that looked at how a Japanese attack on the city in 1928 played out against a family’s life. But that work was lost when he sent it to be published in Shanghai and the publisher’s offices were destroyed during a Japanese attack in 1932.

Cat Country
was his response to these events, and a part of Lao She’s growing politicisation. He felt that he had to help China by writing more critically but it also betrayed his unease and distance from the country itself, perhaps a reflection of his position as a Manchu. Many of his kinsmen had been killed in pogroms after the fall of the Qing, and had been widely blamed for China’s troubles.

The novel tells the story of a Chinese man who crash-lands on Mars. His two companions are killed and he is soon captured by a group of Cat People who run one of the planet’s many countries. He frees himself from their clutches after realising that they lack rudimentary military technology, allowing him to use his pistol to scare them off. He is befriended by one of Cat Country’s richest and most powerful men, Scorpion, who has a plantation of ‘reverie’ trees, which produce addictive leaves that the Cat People eat.

Scorpion takes the narrator under his wing, protecting him from further attacks, but also using him as a mercenary to guard his valuable crop. Eventually, the two go to Cat City, where the narrator learns about Cat Country’s plight. As he puts it upon entering the city, ‘As soon as I set eyes on Cat City, for some reason or other, a sentence took form in my mind: this civilisation will soon perish!’