| / | / ---|--- /| |/ _|_ | /__| | | ---|--- |___| | --|---|-- --|---|-- /_ __/__ ___|___ |---\---/ / /__ | _- -_ --- |___| ____|____ _- -_ | |___| / \ _-_____-_ -+- | | / \ | | | ------- _/ \_ |_____| |/ / \ GU HUA A SMALL TOWN CALLED HIBISCUS ============================ Translator's Preface -------------------- Hunan, this hinterland province larger than France, is essentially a region of hills and mountains apart from the plain around the Dongting Lake. It has a very ancient civilization. During the Warring States Period (403-221 B.C.) the kingdoms of Yue and Chu had their distinctive cultures here, and in subsequent centuries the central authorities found it hard to control its independence-loving people, owing to the difficulties of communication. Hunan has produced a great many talented writers. Outstanding among its twentieth-century authors are veteran woman novelist Ding Ling, Shen Congwen, and Zhou Libo who won fame after Liberation. Since the 80's a group of talented younger writers has emerged. One of them is Gu Hua, whose style is somewhat influenced by Shen Congwen. In the thirties and forties Shen Congwen wrote brilliant idyllic stories and essays about west Hunan, conjuring up its countryside, folk customs and old way of life, to dispel the illusion that this was a "bandit area" shrouded in mystery. Now Gu Hua is doing the same for south Hunan, a good example being his long story~&A log Cabin Overgrown with Creepers. However, his work has an added significance, as readers will see from ~&A small Town Called Hibiscus. Gu Hua, whose real name is Luo Hongyu, was born in 1942 in a village of about a hundred households at the foot of the Wuling Mountains in south Hunan. His father, a small KMT functionary and accountant, died when Gu Hua was five, leaving his elder brother to support his mother and four younger children. Like other village boys, Gu Hua went barefoot, minded water-buffaloes, gathered firewood and carried charcoal to market. At the same time he attended the primary school in the little town of Jiahe. Jiahe, so cut off in the past from the outside world that the local dialect is incomprehensible to people from elsewhere, was known as a centre of folk-songs, notably the cycle of songs to "accompany the bride" sung before a girl left home to get married. And Jiahe had an excellent middle school at which Gu Hua studied. Because he showed a flair for writing and won prizes for composition, he was put in charge of the blackboard bulletin; and if classmates failed to hand in contributions he would improvise poems to fill up the space. He read all the literature that he could lay his hands on, and longed to see something of the outside world. As his brother could only allow him one yuan a month as pocket-money, he failed to realize his dream of saving up fifteen yuan to hike to Chenzhou, the administrative centre 130 kilometres away. After finishing junior middle school Gu Hua taught for a year in the Jiahe primary school. He then entered a technical school to study agriculture, after which he spent fourteen years, from 1962 to '75, in the Agricultural Research Institute in Qiaokou, formerly a waste land, where he learned to grow rice, vegetables and fruit and repair farm implements. There he married Yujuan, a lively, pretty fellow worker. And there in the early sixties he wrote his first short story. In those days it was not easy for unknown writers to get into print. Editors would first investigate their political record and class origin. However, after some of the Party cadres in Chenzhou vouched for Gu Hua, his first story~&Sister Apricot~*was published in 1962. At Qiaokou, Gu Hua took part in the various political movements of that period, including the Four Clean-ups Movement and the unprecedented "great cultural revolution". He recalls, "Ingenuous and stupid, I followed along blindly. I was criticized from time to time, but never got into big trouble. However, I saw my contemporaries, colleagues and friends playing different parts as they were tossed up or down by tempestuous movements, and that distressed and revolted me. A few years ago I even felt that life was a kind of Vanity Fair...." The heads of the Agricultural Research Institute encouraged Gu Hua's literary leanings and gave him time off to indulge them. In 1970 he went for the first time to a forestry station in the mountains to write. In 1975 he was transferred to the Chenzhou Song and Dance Ensemble to give him more time for writing. After the fall of the "gang of four" his dream of travelling to broaden his horizons and see more of life came true. In 1980 he became a member of the Chinese Writers' Association, attended a writers' conference in Beijing, went to lectures on literature and met many well-known authors. In his spare time he wrote his prize-winning~&A log Cabin Overgrown with Creepers,~*published in 1981, as well as other short stories. He resolved to write a novel about characters he knew in a small community which could mirror the turbulent age. Although he feared he was hardly up to this, he received encouragement from the editors of the Hunan People's Publishing House. And when the young writers taking the literary course were given a month off to do some writing, he went back to the forest in the Wuling Mountains and wrote a first draft of over 100,000 characters, which he tentatively entitled ~&A remote Mountain Town.~* In August he went back to Beijing to continue his studies, and in September handed in his incomplete manuscript. He expected it to be put on the shelf. Instead he was very soon told by the editors that they approved of it. They kept him in Beijing to revise and complete the novel. He was most impressed by the concern of these editors and older writers who encouraged him and made constructive suggestions. It was Qin Chaoyang, an eminent literary critic, who changed the novel's title to~&A Small Town Called Hibiscus.~* And it was published in the monthly Modern Times (Dangdai) 1981, No. 1. It created a furore, for readers all over the country instantly related to it. To a great extent this was because it made a breakthrough in tackling a new theme. It is a devastating denunciation of the ultra-Left political line which prevailed in China from the late nineteen-fifties till the fall of the "gang of four". By presenting the ups and downs of seven or eight major characters in a small town in Hunan during this period, it shows us a microcosm of all China in those twenty stormy years. Gu Hua pulls no punches but writes forcefully with profound understanding based on first-hand experience. He exposes horrors, travesties of justice and the ultra-Leftists' denial of human kindness as well as other traditional Chinese virtues. At the same time he writes not with bitterness but with wry humour, which is how most Chinese who went through those terrible years tend to describe their experiences today. So this heart-rending novel also has many laughter- evoking scenes. As early as '66, the first year of the "cultural revolution", Gu Hua in his remote agricultural research institute sensed "something rotten in the state of Denmark". Increasingly he grew more and more aware of the dangers of the ultra-Left line and the cult of the individual. To have voiced this at the time, of course, would have landed him in gaol. Then in 1979 the Third Plenary Session of the party made a preliminary summing up of the Party's mistakes. The first genuine criticism of Leftism made by the Chinese Party, it marked a major historical turning-point, the start of a nationwide righting of wrongs and of condemning the cult of the individual. This reinforced Gu Hua's convictions and provided them with a theoretical framework. It also gave editors the courage to publish Hibiscus. This novel has its detractors. A few local cadres complain that Gu Hua has treated them shabbily. Yet the record shows that grassroots cadres who resisted the lunacies of the ultra-Left line very quickly lost power and landed themselves - and their families - in serious trouble. Other object: Why make a positive character like Gu Yanshan, "the soldier from the north", an impotent drunkard? And would it not be more edifying, more effective in pointing out the dangers of ultra-Leftism, if the cadres who followed this line were portrayed as impeccably moral instead of leading loose lives like Li Guoxiang and Autumn Snake Wang? I think such critics are still influenced by the idea of a clear-cut distinction between "goodies" and "baddies", black and white, which for so long was the bane of Chinese writing. In this country too many stories, plays and film-scripts have been written to formula, describing stereotyped characters in stereotyped situations. How refreshing it is, then, when Gu Hua shows us real flesh-and-blood human beings with weaknesses as well as fine qualities. His characters are brilliantly drawn and convincing. In 1982, ~&Hibiscus~*was one of six novels to received the first Mao Dun Literary Prize. When Gu Hua heard that Panda Books intended to publish~&A Small Town Called Hibiscus,~* he induced the Cultural Bureau of Chenzhou to invite my husband Yang Xianyi and me, as well as one of our editors, to visit south Hunan for a week to absorb something of the local atmosphere. It was a fascinating experience. We visited a primeval forest in the mountains and the forestry station below it where Gu Hua wrote most of Hibiscus and where he gathered the material for~&A log Cabin Overgrown with Creepers.~* We discovered that the little town Hibiscus is a composite of three places. Its natural setting is Qiaokou, where a jade-green river, East River, flows gently past the orchard where Gu Hua sowed, grafted and pruned tangerine trees at the foot of the Wuling Mountains majestic in the distance beyond green foothills. The flagstone street is based on Old Street in Jiahe, where Gu Hua went to school and his family still lives. And the size of Hibiscus at the start of the novel is approximately that of his childhood village. As with the setting, so with the characters. Gu Hua does not write about real people in real life, as a number of Chinese writers tend to do, but invents characters on the basis of his observation of many individuals in different periods of recent Chinese history. Gu Hua's output is impressive. By the end of 1981 he had to his credit two novels, four novellas, and over thirty short stories and essays, as well as songs. He is not a fast writer, however. He revises all his work four or five times, paying careful attention to technique and style. A word now about his translation. An English translation is almost always longer than the Chinese original. As Gu Hua's narrative moves at a brisk pace, to convey this in English I have, with the author's permission, made certain abridgements, telescoped some passages, cut down on mixed metaphors which the Chinese delight in, or shortened lists of names or events such as the Three Anti or Five Anti Movements which would require footnotes or need to be paraphrased to make them intelligible to foreign readers. For instance, Gu Yanshan tells the children of Hibiscus stories about famous drunkards of old, listing six heroes and their exploits in their cups. I have retained one only, Wu Song who killed a tiger, who appears in the novel~&Outlaws of the Marsh. Owing to the limitations of my English, now out of date after over forty years in China, I have failed to convey the raciness and earthiness of Gu Hua's language, which draws heavily on Chenzhou colloquialisms. I hope some younger sinologists will before long make new translations to do justice to his graphic, pungent style. Gu Hua says: What times we have lived through! There cannot be many countries whose writers have such a wealth of material at their disposal. He is planning to write another full-length novel about the years of turmoil. Gladys Yang 1982