Rickshaw Boy: A Novel (2 page)
The war with Japan ended in 1945, only to morph immediately into four years of civil war between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Lao She was absent from China during most of those years. Owing largely to the surprising popularity of an English translation of
Rickshaw Boy
—it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection—Lao She was invited by the U.S. Department of State to visit America in early 1946; though the initial invitation was for a year, he did not return home until the establishment of the People’s Republic, reportedly at the request of Zhou Enlai. Soon after he arrived in the U.S., at a gathering in his honor, he made a point of informing his American audience, which knew little about Chinese literature, other than a bit of classical poetry and the translations of Arthur Waley and others of premodern novels, that new literary trends had taken hold back home. “The younger school of Chinese to which [I belong],” a
New York Times
story on May 19, 1946, quoted Lao She, “is only about thirty years old and it is distinguished from the older by its break with the classical vernacular and by its subject matter, which has less to do with flowers than with social themes.”
While in the United States, Lao She wrote a novel he called
Drum Singers
; it was published in an English translation (1989) long before the Chinese version appeared. He also completed his long novel dealing with the lives of several generations of families living in a traditional Beijing compound,
Four Generations Under One Roof
, and worked with an old China hand, Ida Pruitt, on an abridged translation into English she called
The Yellow Storm
(1951); the Chinese original appeared in three volumes, published in 1946, 1948, and 1951.
A celebrated cultural figure in the People’s Republic for the first seventeen years of its existence, Lao She held a variety of important or symbolic offices after his return in 1949, and while he appears never to have been completely comfortable with the system or ideology under which he lived and worked, he wrote prolifically, devoting his creative talents almost exclusively to the production of dramas, some of which continue to be read and performed.
Teahouse
(1958), which treats the Chinese revolution in three periods, from the late Qing reform movement through the early postwar era, was made into a successful film, starring Ying Ruochen. It remains Lao She’s most impressive work from the period and is also the first of his creations to feature Manchu characters, one of whom declares, “I am a Manchu, and the Manchus are also Chinese.”
*
Thus spake Lao She!
Lao She’s final novel,
Beneath the Red Banner
, was begun in the early 1960s but never finished; the partial manuscript, which was not published until 1979,
†
following the lead of
Teahouse
, features a number of Manchu characters.
In 1966, shortly after Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, Lao She was interviewed by a foreign couple who subsequently published the exchange. His remarks regarding himself and his generation of writers are telling: “I can understand why Mao Zedong wishes to destroy the old bourgeois concepts of life, but I cannot write of this struggle because I am not a Marxist, and, therefore, I cannot feel and think as a Peking student in May 1966 who sees the situation in a Marxist way…. We old ones can’t apologize for what we are. We can only explain why we are and wave the young ones on their way to the future.”
‡
Not long after that, Lao She was visited at the offices of the Chinese Writers Association by Red Guards, who dragged him outside, where they interrogated, humiliated, and probably beat him. He was ordered to return the next day, but, according to reports, when he saw his “courtyard strewn with all his possessions, his house looted, his painting and sculpture wrecked, and his manuscripts, the work of a lifetime, in shreds…he did not enter his house but instead turned and walked to [a nearby lake], and there he drowned himself.”
Lao She has been unevenly translated into English. Some of his novels, particularly the early ones, remain untranslated, while others, and many of his excellent short stories, have been translated more than once, in China and in the West.
Luotuo Xiangzi
(sometimes translated as
Camel Xiangzi
), his signature novel, besides remaining popular in Chinese communities throughout the world, is available in translation in many countries. While it has previously appeared in three English translations, it has not fared particularly well. In 1945, Reynal & Hitchcock of New York published a translation entitled
Rickshaw Boy
(the author’s name is given as Lau Shaw), by a translator using the pseudonym Evan King, reputedly a prisoner of the Japanese in Northern China when the work was done. Beautifully illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge, it was a bestseller, thanks in part to the popularity of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Unfortunately, King’s translation reflects little of the style or intent of the original. Larding his rendering with grand flourishes that are found nowhere in the Chinese, the translator took it upon himself to rewrite portions of the novel, delete others, and move sections around in ways that, quite frankly, make little sense. Then, in one of the most egregious betrayals of an author’s autonomy of purpose, Evan King changed the ending, completely distorting the author’s intent.
After a shelf life of more than three decades, King’s translation was superseded by one that takes none of those liberties. Nor, unhappily, does it do justice to the artistry of the original or appeal as a representative of good English writing, however laudable the impetus to end King’s reign may have been. Frequent misreadings and non-idiomatic English, plus an outdated spelling system for Chinese, seriously mar the work. Published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 1979, Jean James’s
Rickshaw
is a valiant if ultimately unsatisfactory attempt to bring the novel faithfully across to a new generation of readers, for which the editorial staff at the press must share responsibility.
In an afterword to a revised Chinese edition of the novel in 1954, Lao She wrote: “The Chinese edition of this book has already been reprinted several times. In this present edition, I have taken out some of the coarser language and some unnecessary descriptions.” Whether this was an altogether voluntary undertaking remains a mystery, although there is evidence that it was not, and whether the result is a better novel is a matter of taste. One must not, however, be fooled by the understated confession into believing that the changes were, in fact, minimal. Several passages considered by some to be delicate or unsuitable in a Communist milieu have been excised, disrupting the logic of the narrative where they occur. And as for coarse language, it’s still there; but the author had to say something, I suppose.
In 1981, China’s Foreign Languages Press and Indiana University jointly published a translation of the novel under the title
Camel Xiangzi
, which includes a preface by Lao She’s widow, artist Hu Jieqing, and a translation of the author’s essay “How I Came to Write the Novel ‘Camel Xiangzi,’” from a delightful little book of Lao She’s essays on his writing,
An Old Ox and a Beat-up Cart
(1935). The translator, Shi Xiaojing, has based her readable, if uneven, rendering on the 1954 revised edition—minus, shockingly, the last chapter and a half! Echoes of Evan King. In 2005, the translation, with the ending restored, was republished in a bilingual edition in Hong Kong, with an extended introduction by the literary scholar Kwok-kan Tam. For obvious reasons, anyone interested in this translation should choose this edition.
*
Having enjoyed, if not necessarily accepted, the counsel of my earlier translators, I have undertaken this project, a goal I set for myself two decades ago, in hopes of making available a complete, faithful, and readable English version of one of China’s modern classics. In doing so, I have worked from a facsimile of the original (1939) Renjian shuwu edition, but have consulted the 1941 Wenhua shenghua chubanshe edition, in which minor errors in the earlier edition have been corrected.
For a novel that is more than seventy years old, anachronisms are unavoidable. For the most part, I have opted for contemporary relevance over period prose; since this is a translation, the illusion of absolute authenticity is already compromised, so I see no reason to be quaint. There are two major exceptions. First, the title. The Chinese title,
Luotuo Xiangzi
, is the protagonist’s name, the literal meaning of which is “fortunate son,” preceded by the word for camel (
luotuo
). Xiangzi is, of course, a young man, not a boy, and while only a few of the characters associated with rickshaws are, in fact, boys, at the time of writing, pullers were known among foreigners as rickshaw “boys” (waiters, servants, and other menial laborers all suffered the indignity of being called boys, irrespective of their age). However distasteful it seems now, “rickshaw boy” fits the period and the tone, and so I follow Evan King in his choice of English title. As for the city in which most of the narrative takes place, China’s current capital has had a number of names over the years. In the Republican era (1912–1945) it was officially called Beiping (“northern peace”); it reverted back to the earlier Beijing with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Lao She used Beiping; so have I, along with two of my predecessors.
If I have failed in my goal of giving Lao She’s masterpiece the translated version it deserves, it is not because I had no help along the way. The editors at HarperCollins, my agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and my wife, Sylvia Lin, supplied encouragement and assistance whenever I needed it. Finally, a tip of the hat to a couple of killer Chinese Web sites that made sense of the many elusive and highly colorful Beijing-isms no longer in common use.
—Howard Goldblatt
I
’d like you to meet a fellow named Xiangzi, not Camel, because, you see, Camel is only a nickname. After I’ve told you about Xiangzi, we’ll deal with his relationship with camels, and be done with it.
The city of Beiping has several classes of rickshaw men: first are those who are young, energetic, and fleet-footed; they rent handsome rickshaws, put in a whole day, and are free to come and go as they please. They stake out a spot at a rickshaw stand or by a manor gate and wait for people who are looking for speed. If luck is with them, they can land a fare right off, earning as much as a silver dollar or two. But if luck passes them by, and they don’t make enough to pay for that day’s rental, well, so what? This group of running brothers has two ambitions: one is to land a job as a private hire; the other is to buy one’s own rickshaw, to own one outright. Then it makes no difference if they get paid by the month or pick up odd fares, since the rickshaws are theirs.
The second class includes men who are slightly older and who, for health reasons, cannot run as fast, or whose family situation will not allow them to go all day without a fare. For the most part, their rickshaws are in good shape, if not particularly new. Since they manage to keep up appearances, they can still demand a respectable fee for their services. Some of these brothers work a full day, others only half a day. The half-day workers generally choose the night shift, even in the summers and winters, since they have the energy to handle it. Working at night requires special care and skill, so there’s more money to be made.
Men over forty or younger than twenty have little chance of falling into either of these classes. They rent beat-up rickshaws and don’t dare work at night, which means they must set out early in the morning and work till three or four in the afternoon in hopes of earning enough to pay for that day’s rent and food. Given the poor condition of their rickshaws, speed is out of the question, so they wind up earning less for running more. Most of their fares come from hauling melons, fruit, and produce to market; the pay is low, but at least they can run at their own pace.
Some of the under-twenty men start out at the age of eleven or twelve, and few become top runners after the age of twenty, as they’ll have suffered too many injuries to maintain decent health. They can pull a rickshaw all their lives and still not make the grade. Those over forty will have been at it for at least a decade, which takes its toll; settling for mediocrity, they gradually become resigned to the knowledge that one day they will collapse and die in the street. Their style of running, their shrewd bargaining abilities, and the deft use of shortcuts or circuitous routes help them relive the glories of their past, which is why they turn up their noses at younger men. But past glory has no effect on their current dismal prospects. And so they sigh as they wipe the sweat from their brows. But the suffering of these veterans pales in comparison with another group of pullers, men who never imagined they would one day have to scrape out a living by pulling a rickshaw. Not until the line between life and death has blurred for them do they finally pick up the shafts of a rickshaw. Laid-off policemen and school janitors, peddlers who have squandered their capital, and out-of-work laborers who have nothing more to sell and no prospects for work grit their teeth, swallow their tears, and set out on this road to oblivion. Having mortgaged their youth, they are reduced to spilling the blood and sweat derived from coarse corn cakes on the city streets. They have little strength, scant experience, and no friends; even their laboring brothers avoid them. They pull run-down rickshaws whose tires go flat several times a day, and must beg forgiveness from passengers who, if they’re lucky, will give them fifteen cents for a ride.
Yet another class of rickshaw men owes its distinction to the peculiarities of environment and intelligence. Those native to Xiyuan and Haidian naturally ply their trade in the Western Hills or around the universities at Yanjing and Tsinghua; those from Anding Gate stick to the Qinghe and Beiyuan districts; while those outside of Yongding Gate work in the area of Nanyuan. Interested only in long hauls, these men disdain the short, penny-ante business. But even they are no match for their long-distance brethren in the Legacy Quarter, who take passengers from the diplomatic sector all the way to the Jade Fountain, the Summer Palace, and the Western Hills. Stamina is only one reason why most pullers will not compete for this business, for this group of men can deal with their foreign passengers in their own languages: when a British or French soldier says he wants to go to the Summer Palace or the Yonghe Monastery or the Eight Alleys red-light district, they understand. And they will not pass this skill on to their rivals. Their style of running is also unique: at a pace that is neither particularly fast nor too slow, they run with their heads down, not deigning to look left or right as they keep to the sides of the roads, aloof and self-assured. Since they serve foreigners, they do not wear the numbered jackets required of other rickshaw men. Instead, they dress in long-sleeved white shirts, black or white loose-fitting trousers tied at the ankles with thin bands, and black cloth-soled “double-faced” shoes—clean, neat, smart-looking. One sight of this attire keeps other pullers from competing for fares or trying to race them. They might as well be engaged in a trade all their own.
