Of all the great modern Chinese writers, Lao She is one of the first to have fully utilized all the resources finally offered by the use of spoken language in literature. Better than many of his contemporaries, who sometimes confused “clear language” (baihua) with the Westernization of syntax and vocabulary. No, it’s really the Pekingese language that the novelist uses, with innate skill !
As it is written, the text is unfortunately only a very incomplete reflection of it, where the sounds, the accents, the tones, the intonations, the interjections and also many suffixes, are missing and where the characters themselves are sometimes faulty, and the punctuation, quite often, defective.
But the important thing is that anyone who has read or had Lao She read aloud remembers it as original music. From the first note, as if he were at the opera, the reader can no longer be mistaken: he is in Beijing, in the midst of Pekingese. In the descriptions, it even sometimes happens that it is the city itself that seems to be talking about itself, the beauty of its sky or its imperial monuments. Like Marco Polo or Victor Segalen, both dazzled, centuries apart, by the splendor of the old capital, Lao She cannot resist the magical charm that emanates from the city. Both from its narrowest streets, like the one where it was born at the turn of the century, and from the large gates at the end of the wide avenues that criss-cross the urban space.
Big town promoted capital, Beijing, when Lao She writes, that is to say in the thirties, is no more than “Peace of the North” (Peiping). After the fall of the Empire, the old Manchurian families could not serve the new Republic, nor could they derogate either: moreover, the soldiers of the famous “banners” no longer knew how to handle arms or ride horses. They survive by selling one after another their noble residences with all the treasures they contained.
Disappearance of a world
Orphaned a year after his birth, Lao She will soon have “neither father nor prince” (wu fu wu jun). He will live for years in the memory of what he himself knew and saw gradually disappear. Hence the gaze of an archaeologist, or rather an ethnologist, who successfully attempts to restore a world on the verge of sinking into oblivion. Hence also a thought constantly dominated, like that of any great writer, by the obsession with time.
Times, because if mores change quickly, in particular under foreign influence, each of the men whom the author gives us to see and hear has his own time, his own way of living it and sometimes losing it, like this failed actor who believed until the end that one day he would succeed.
Disappearance of a world, decline of the individual are the themes of his work. The short stories and accounts of Lao She which have been chosen for this collection are also of great interest insofar as they directly highlight what one might call the limits, so uncertain, of « Civilization” ( wenming), as opposed to “savagery” or barbarism” (ye or yeman). In this one-of-a-kind universe, in this society where the old traditions” or the “principles” (guiju) last, the prostitute is an honest girl ; the cop a poor guy whose wife cheats on him ; the “modern” professor and his their good education, they think they are more advanced, but they too end up getting irritated when the neighbors’ children come and trample the flowers and then steal the fruits from their garden.
Apparently, the cry launched by the writer is desperate: Peking will never again be the capital that it was.
This cry joins that, just as poignant, of the old master of martial arts, at the very end of « The spear of death » story : “No, I will not transmit anything! But the kindness of men, their fundamental humanity and their humor are values that political events can endanger: they will not destroy them anytime soon ». And if there is a message or a lesson to be drawn from this work which, unlike the theater composed later, is not a thesis, it is that the Beijing man, in his diversity and his particularity, will survive all revolutions. And this, even if the writer himself, one of the very first victims of the Cultural Revolution, could not personally escape his young executioners!
Obviously, we hardly see it today. But as Lao She himself said, only those who are just passing through his native town can pass final judgments on her, on her people. The others are silent, or are forced to contradict themselves. But isn’t life precisely that: an endless mixture of laughter and tears, short hopes and long despairs; for many, an illusion that destroys itself as it builds itself; for others, happier, a marvelous and crazy dream that ends in light.
