Rickshaw Boy: A Novel (36 page)
Weddings and funerals, however, retained most of the traditional rites and practices. These joyful and mournful events still seemed noteworthy enough to warrant a degree of grandeur. The paraphernalia, musicians, bridal sedans, and coffin shrouds were not available in every city. Longevity cranes and lion dogs that led funeral processions replete with paper figurines of people, chariots, and horses, or the dignitaries and twenty-four musical instruments in weddings still evoked an aura of power and prestige, reminiscent of the prosperity and spirit of more peaceful times.
Xiangzi relied on the remnants of such rites and customs to get through the days. In wedding processions he held up ceremonial parasols; for funeral corteges he carried wreaths and scrolled elegies. He neither took pleasure in nor cried over his role in such processions, for which he received ten cents or more. He dressed in green robes supplied by funeral homes or blue ones from bridal shops and wore ill-fitting caps, all of which hid the rags he wore underneath and gave him a bit of respectability. When a rich and influential family arranged the event, everyone in the procession had to shave their heads and wear boots, giving Xiangzi a rare opportunity to walk with a clean head and feet, though his unspeakable sickness slowed him down. He would shamble along by the side of the road holding up a banner or a pair of scrolled elegies.
Even at such trivial tasks, Xiangzi was not particularly good. His best years were behind him. A rickshaw had not provided him with a family or a lasting trade, and everything he did, along with all his hopes, had turned into: “So what!” He put his large body only in the service of carrying a flying-tiger pendant or a pair of short scrolls. He refused to hoist the heavy red parasols or solemn tablets. Competing with old men, children, even women was not beneath him, just so long as he did not get the worst of any situation.
He shuffled along slowly, laboriously, carrying his light burden, head hung low, bent at the waist, a cigarette butt he’d picked up off the ground dangling from his lips. When everyone else stopped, he kept walking, and when they were off again, he stopped where he was for a while. He seemed not to hear the signaling gongs and never paid any attention to the distance between him and those in front or back or whether he was aligned in his row. He just plodded along, head bowed, as if in a dream or pondering some arcane truth. Rustic curses from the mouths of the red-clad gong beater or the procession steward, who carried a silk streamer, all seemed directed at him: “You son of a bitch, I’m talking to you, Camel! Stay in line, damn it!” They fell on deaf ears. The gong beater came up and hit him with the gong hammer, but he merely rolled his eyes and looked around through a veil of haze. Ignoring the man’s curses, he kept his eyes glued to the ground to see if there were any butts worth picking up.
Respectable, ambitious, idealistic, self-serving, individualistic, robust, and mighty Xiangzi took part in untold numbers of burial processions but could not predict when he would bury himself, when he would lay this degenerate, selfish, hapless product of a sick society, this miserable ghost of individualism, to rest.
About the Author and the Translator
LAO SHE
(1898–1966) is one of the most acclaimed Chinese writers of the twentieth century. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, and plays.
HOWARD GOLDBLATT
is a research professor at the University of Notre Dame and the foremost translator of modern Chinese literature in the West. He is the recipient of the Man Asian Prize, the Newman Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Cover photograph © Bettmann/Corbis
RICKSHAW BOY. Translation copyright © 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Title page image © Kuznetsov Alexey and is used under license from Shutterstock.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
EPub Edition © August 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201064-3
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*
Ranbir Vohra,
Lao She and the Chinese Revolution
(Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, 1974), 2.
*
An English translation entitled
The Quest for Love of Lao Lee
was published in 1948.
†
An English translation entitled
Heavensent
was published in 1986.
‡
C. T. Hsia,
A History of Modern Chinese Fiction
, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 180.
*
Thomas Moran, “The Reluctant Nihilism of Lao She’s
Camel Xiangzi
,” in Joshua Mostow, ed.,
The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 453.
†
Bonnie S. M. McDougall and Kam Louie,
The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 118.
‡
Lao She, “Afterword,”
Camel Xiangzi
, tr. Shi Xiaojing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 230.
*
Vohra,
Lao She and the Chinese Revolution
, 129.
*
Vohra,
Lao She and the Chinese Revolution
, 163.
†
An English translation was published in 1987.
‡
Vohra, 164.
*
Hong Kong, the Chinese University Press, 2005.
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