Cat Country (32 page)

Towards the end, I actually saw a few Cat People try to resist, but even then they could only manage to band together in groups of three or five at the most. On the very brink of death, they still didn’t understand the need for cooperation. Later, on a small mountain, I ran into ten or so Cat People who had escaped. It was the only spot that had not yet been occupied by the enemy soldiers. But before three days were out, even this group of refugees had begun fighting each other so that over half of them were already dead. Before the enemy troops arrived in the area, the group was down to two; they must have been the last two survivors in all of Cat Country. By the time the enemy arrived, these two were locked in mortal combat. Rather than killing them, the enemy soldiers locked them in a large wooden cage where they continued their struggle until they had bitten each other to death. In this way, the Cat People themselves completed their own destruction.

*

After living on Mars for another half year, I encountered a French exploration craft and thus was able to return alive to my own great, glorious and free China.

THE END

NOTES

bean curd parlour
: A vendor of fresh-made bean curd. Similar to commercial bread making, bean curd preparation begins early in the morning, and consists of the grinding and boiling of soybeans.

slips of paper money
: As part of Chinese funerary customs, paper money is burnt as an offering to the deceased for their use in the afterlife.

ancient Chinese sages proscribing physical contact between members of the opposite sex
: As set down in classical Chinese texts such as the
Book of Rites
, one of the Five Classics traditionally believed to have been authored or edited by Confucius.

freedom:
The word for ‘freedom’ in Felinese is not at all like the one we use in Chinese. By ‘freedom’ the Cat People mean ‘taking advantage of others; noncooperation; creating disturbances’. (Narrator’s note to the original text.)

the argument for the innate goodness of man won’t hold water
: The Chinese philosopher Mencius argued that human nature is good and when it operates spontaneously or ‘unconsciously’, it tends towards acts of benevolence.

He quoted the Cat Country Classics at me
: Refers to the Five Classics of Confucian philosophy and the
Classic of Poetry
, one of the Five Classics, and the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry dating from the tenth to the seventh centuries
BCE
.

We Foreigners had Better Stick Together
: Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, most foreigners in China lived in foreign enclaves where they were insulated from the Chinese populace and beyond the jurisdiction of Chinese law.

Light Country
: A play on the Chinese names for America (Beauty Country) and Britain (Brave Country).

frost-covered winter melon
: A vine-grown vegetable gourd native to China that is covered in a fuzzy white coating when young.

Madam Ambassador’s Story
: Under the traditional marriage system, widows were not permitted to remarry. There would often be intense rivalry between the usually elder head wife and the younger secondary wives or concubines.

Reverie leaves make excellent medicine
: Similarly, opium was often used in China to treat diseases or even minor indispositions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

But nobody binds a girl’s feet anymore
: Towards the end of the nineteenth century, various interest groups such as Christian missionaries, educated women and the feminist movement began to advocate for an end to foot-binding and by the early twentieth century the imperial Qing court and Republican government that came after, made attempts to prohibit the practice.

ten thousand
: Historically, ten thousand is the largest discrete numerical unit. ‘Ten thousand years’ was a form of address reserved exclusively for the emperor and translates as ‘long live’.

woman radical
: Each Chinese character is a logogram made up of individual components called ‘radicals’, and the Chinese character for ‘woman’ is both a radical and a character. The ‘woman’ radical appears in many Chinese characters and is one of the more frequently occurring radicals. Meanwhile, the ‘woman’ character is a plural noun, able to represent both ‘woman’ and ‘women’ in meaning.

hwala-fuszji
: In the original Chinese, these foreign phrases resemble the transliteration of the Russian language in Chinese.

Ruler of the Ten Thousand Brawls
: In ancient times, the Chinese emperor was known as ‘Ruler of the Ten Thousand Chariots’, such as that set down in the foundational Taoist text, the
Tao Te Ching
.

Uncle Karl
: Suggestive of the influential German philosopher Karl Marx, who co-authored
The Communist Manifesto
with Friedrich Engels.

Red Cord Corps
: Alludes to the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party, the Red Army, as it was known during the civil war with the Kuomintang Party, following the break-up of the Kuomintang-Communist alliance in 1927.

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First published in Chinese as
Maochengji
by
Les Contemporains
, Shanghai 1932

This translation first published by Ohio State University Press, 1970

This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia) in association with Penguin (Beijing) Ltd, 2013

Copyright © The Estate of Lao She, 1932

Translated from the original Chinese edition by William A. Lyell, Ph.D.

This edition published by arrangement with Ruth G. Lyell, Ph.D.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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ISBN: 978-0-85797-565-2