Cat Country (2 page)

What follows is a detailed exploration of Cat Country, which can be seen as a direct commentary on 1930s China and indeed this may have been how Lao She intended it to be read. ‘Mr Earth’, as our narrator is called, views the Cat People with a mixture of pity and disgust. The locals are dirty and chaotic, the local food poisonous and unsafe, while modern education and foreign travel have only led to superficial knowledge and alienation from traditions.

The narrator’s informant is Scorpion’s son, Young Scorpion, who shows the disorderly state of museums and libraries, which have been pillaged by corrupt officials. Worse are the schools, where nothing is taught and everyone immediately handed a university diploma. In one particularly chilling scene, students dissect their teachers alive.

Unlike his great contemporary, Lu Xun, Lao She doesn’t put much hope in young people, believing them to be more hopeless than the older generation. As Young Scorpion tells our hero, ‘In Cat Country we don’t have any young people! We only have different age groupings . . . Some of the “young” people among us are even more antique in their thinking than my grandfather.’

But his criticism of China goes beyond the early twentieth century and many points ring true today. Our narrator is angered by the custom of pulling strings to get ahead – akin to the debilitating practice of
guanxi
that continues to hobble Chinese society. ‘If you had an influential friend at court, then you could rocket to the top immediately, no matter what you had studied in college,’ Young Scorpion tells him.

At the heart of these problems is another issue that echoes in contemporary China: a lack of moral guideposts. Lao She’s era was defined by the destruction of the imperial order, as well as unrelenting attacks on traditional culture and religion. In some ways, Lao She himself participated in this; he eschewed classical Chinese for the vernacular and his writings indicate he was a strong advocate of reforming education and politics. But he also sensed the danger in these radical changes; and indeed if the country of cats is anything, it’s one morally unmoored. This rootlessness, as Young Scorpion says, ‘prods our people into taking a backward leap of tens of thousands of years, back to the cannibalism of antiquity.’

Lao She struggled with these issues in his personal life. In 1922, he converted to Christianity at Beijing’s West City New Church (Gangwashi), still one of the city’s most important places of worship. He took the English name Colin C. Shu and taught classes in moral cultivation and music. But he seemed to have stopped practising after he grew frustrated with the lack of indigenous Christian leadership and the resulting sense that it was yet another imported ideology.

Unlike many writers and artists of his era, Lao She didn’t turn to leftist ideology as an ersatz belief system. Some of his sharpest scenes pillory young Cat People who go abroad to study and come back speaking gibberish – a sort of mock Russian that they can’t understand. The ruling ideology is ‘Everybody Shareskyism’, whose leader killed the cat-emperor and installed himself at the top. One of its deities is an Uncle Karl and students in one scene cry out, ‘Long live Uncle Karlskyism! Long live
Everybody Shareskyism!
Long live
Pinsky-pansky Pospos
!’

When
Cat Country
came out, it was roundly criticised as less successful than Lao She’s previous three novels. Some of the criticism seems to reflect a lack of familiarity with satire and its inherent limitations – some wrote that the characters weren’t developed enough or that the plot was somewhat flat. Perhaps more importantly, it was at variance with the critical realism that would eventually come to smother Chinese literature. A few years earlier in 1930, the League of Left-Wing Writers was formed, a hugely influential group that put pressure on authors to be political. But
Cat Country
was different. It was a blast of anger and revulsion at all sectors of society, not just the government or landlords, but also students and revolutionaries.

A few years later, Lao She published a collection of essays that reflected on his first few novels. In it, he declared
Cat Country
a flop, saying it was ‘like a bird fallen onto the ground with broken wings.’ Its key failure, he said, was that it had too much satire and too little humour. Perhaps as a result, Lao She later tried his hand at works of critical realism, which the People’s Republic declared to be his masterpieces. Yet
Cat Country
was popular when it appeared and went through numerous printings until the founding of the Republic in 1949.

Lao She tried hard to fit into the new society. He had been living in the United States, but returned home to participate in the creation of the new society. He wrote plays about the bad old days of pre-Communist rule, and in 1951 was honoured with the title of ‘People’s Artist’. But almost none of Lao She’s works lauded the new era of Communist rule. He candidly said that he didn’t understand the new society that Mao was building. In an interview shortly before his death, he told two foreign visitors ‘I am not a Marxist and, therefore, I cannot feel and think as a Beijing student in May 1966 who sees the situation in a Marxist way.’

That was an understatement. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded that spring and summer, Lao She’s sort of non-conformity became dangerous. Already 67, he was ill with bronchitis and had been hospitalised earlier. China’s canny premier, Zhou Enlai, reportedly advised him to stay put to avoid the turmoil outside, but Lao She was curious and on 23 August had himself discharged.

It was incredibly unlucky timing. That same day, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the
People’s Daily
, issued an infamous editorial applauding the Red Guards’ ‘revolutionary spirit’ and thus spurring new violence. Lao She was called out of his office at the Beijing Writers’ Union and immediately set upon by the fanatical mob. He was taken to the Confucian temple where religious relics were being burned in a bonfire. He and twenty-eight others were forced to kneel down in front of it for three hours – dubbed a ‘baptism by fire’. Their heads were shaved, black ink was poured on them and they were beaten. Lao She was singled out for abuse and accused of being an American agent. Accounts say he was beaten with a copper-studded leather belt until he fainted.

But like the stubborn boy of his youth, Lao She refused to bend. He rejected the accusations and wouldn’t wear a placard around his neck admitting his guilt. Incensed, the Red Guards took him to the local police station and declared him to be an ‘active counter-revolutionary’. He was released that evening and told to report to work the next day wearing the placard. When he got home, he found that his house had been ransacked, manuscripts burned and his prized collection of art strewn across the courtyard. The next day, instead of going to work, he walked to the Lake of Great Peace and sat on its shore for the day, as witnesses say. The next day his body was found floating in the waters, several of Mao’s poems scattered about.

Lao She’s death came during ‘Red August’, a particularly bloody period during the Cultural Revolution. That month in Beijing, 1772 people were killed or committed suicide, calling to mind some of the chilling lines from
Cat Country.

‘You see, adherents of
Everybody Shareskyism
will kill a man without thinking twice about it’; ‘And thus now it is a very common occurrence to see students butchering teachers, professors, chancellors, and principals.’

Another link between his fate and
Cat Country
came when this translation by William A. Lyell was initially published in 1970. Soon after, the Beijing magazine
Chinese Literature
published a screed attacking the translation indirectly, writing that ‘not long ago, the social-imperialists evoked the ghost of this shameless rogue and published a full translation.’ The article hinted at why this book in particular, angered the Maoists so much, ‘From start to finish the novel is a vicious attack on the guiding ideology of the party – Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.’

After the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, Lao She was rehabilitated. It was during this era that
Cat Country
was finally republished in mainland China. The author’s death is still a sensitive topic – a memorial on the site was never permitted to be erected – but a play based on
Cat Country
was performed to enthusiastic audiences in several Chinese cities in 2013.

The novel also occupies an uncomfortable place in modern Chinese literature. It can be seen in the Chinese tradition of fantastical encounters with strange peoples, but its Martian setting also makes it an early work of Chinese science fiction. The Communist Party, however, has long viewed this genre with suspicion. An early wave of science fiction died in the twenties when leftist-inspired critical realism took hold. Another was killed in the early eighties when it was deemed to be ‘spiritual pollution’ and most science fiction magazines closed.

And yet appreciating
Cat Country
means shedding some of these labels and didactic explanations. When Lao She describes how the emperor is replaced by the head of Everybody Shareskyism, multiple interpretations are possible – not just the role that Chiang Kai-shek was assuming for himself in the 1930s, but the fate of many revolutions, from the French to the Chinese.

Likewise, the novel’s reverie leaves do immediately bring to mind opium, but equally fascinating is that in 1932, the same year
Cat Country
was serialised, Aldous Huxley published
Brave New World
and imagined a product he called ‘soma’ that numbed his dystopian inhabitants into accepting their fate. In this sense, Cat Country is part of a broad trend in world literature, reacting to efforts to dumb down and control people.

All of this makes Cat Country an anomaly in Chinese fiction, one that grew out of Lao She’s unique biography. Unlike his great contemporaries, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, Lao She had directly experienced western culture. He was deeply rooted in China, but as a Manchu he was enough of an outsider to go for the jugular when looking at his native land and to eschew the naïve belief, for example, of Lu Xun, that all would be well if China just trusted its youth. Lao She had a clearer view of what could beset a country when the old markers are gone, and in
Cat Country
he gives us a brutal look at a China that resonates today.

— IAN JOHNSON

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE

T
HE PRESENT
translation was done from the edition of Lao She’s
Maochengji
that was issued as number fourteen of the
Chen Guang Encyclopedia of Literature
by the Chen Guang Publishing Company, Shanghai, 1949.

Chapter titles have been added for the convenience of those readers who, having finished the novel, might like to locate a specific passage quickly.

I should like to express my gratitude to my wife, Ruth, for her encouragement and help in this project. Thanks are also due to Don Marion for his close proofreading of the first draft. I am indebted to my colleagues in the Ohio State University East Asian Division for the help and advice they gave me while I was preparing this translation.

— WILLIAM A. LYELL, PH.D.

1970

THE CRASH

T
HE SPACECRAFT
was a total loss. And as for my friend, a man who had been my childhood schoolmate and who had just piloted me through space for the better part of a month, there wasn’t a single bone of him left in one piece.

And what about me? Well, I still seemed to be alive, but God only knows how it happened that I too hadn’t died in the crash. At any rate, things were what they were and there was no point in crying over spilt milk.

Our goal had been Mars. According to my late friend’s calculations, we were already in the Martian atmospheric envelope before the accident occurred; if he was right, then I must indeed have landed on the planet Mars. The soul of my dead friend ought to be at rest, for to be the first Chinese on Mars was really something worth dying for! But how could I be sure that I was really on Mars? I ended up deciding that, barring evidence to the contrary, I’d have to assume that I was on Mars, even if I wasn’t; I had no way of proving it one way or the other. Of course, it ought to have been possible to determine my location from the stars, but unfortunately my knowledge of astronomy was as developed as my knowledge of hieroglyphics. My friend could have determined our location without the slightest hesitation, but my friend . . . my friend, my poor childhood friend!

Since the spacecraft was a total loss, how would I get back to Earth? I’d better not think about it. All I had to my name was the clothing on my back (so ripped and torn that it looked like shredded confetti) and whatever food happened to be left in my stomach. I didn’t even know how I was to survive here, much less how I was to get back to Earth! Ignorant of the geography, and what life forms might occupy this strange planet, I began to wonder if there were any creatures here similar to human beings. I had many questions, but there was no point thinking about them. A castaway on the planet Mars – wasn’t there some comfort to be derived from a title like that? There was certainly no point in letting worry eat away at whatever courage I had left.

All of this, of course, is a distant recollection of my situation as it was then. At that time I was in a state of shock, and it may well be that my traumatised brain produced a good many other disconnected thoughts. However, I can’t remember what they were now. All I can remember is that I was concerned with how to get back to Earth and how to survive; these two thoughts, like the remains of a shipwreck washed up on a beach, are the only two that remained with me after the experience.

After I had come to my senses, the first thing I thought of doing was devising some way of burying the pile of bone and flesh that had been my friend. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the spacecraft, for, in its own way, it too had been a good friend: it had brought us both here, faithful machine. My two friends were both dead and I was the only one left alive. I began to feel that their misfortune was all my fault. The two skilled members of our expedition had both died and I, the unskilled third, was the only survivor; the luck of an idiot – what painful comfort! I knew that I could bury my schoolmate single-handedly, but I wouldn’t be able to cover up the spacecraft; therefore, I didn’t have the heart to look at it.