What do you think?
Rate this book
The Mountain Village
Book by Yeh, Chun-Chan
- GenresHistorical FictionChina
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1947
4 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Read
March 20, 2018From Independent People I learnt that the cow is the emotional centre of a book about rural poverty. If your cow lacks the character to sustain the whole book the result is The Mountain Village which instead has a strange flatness with a distinct flavour of the situation comedy with the knock on the door of a stranger, or an old friend, propelling the action.
I assume that the story is set in Jiangxi /Chiang-hsi province or somewhere very similar in the early part of the 1930s, I assume only because the ignorance of the villagers and the young boy who is the narrator is ever present. The story was written in English and published in 1947. The author was living and working in Britain in the mid 1940s. Eventually he returned to his theme in the late 1980s and wrote a further two sequels.
The background is Chinese rural poverty, with most of the village land owned by a rapacious landlord and worked by an ignorant peasantry. They know that the Manchu dynasty has ended, but as far as they are concerned it has been replaced by the new Republic dynasty and the chief difference seems to be that the wearing of pigtails is no longer mandatory. Some of the villagers, including the narrator's father and elder brother have gone off to the generic big city to try and earn money - none of which seems to manage to make the journey back to the village. To say more about the background would be to spoil the story, but if you are aware in general outlines of what was going on in China at the time you can pretty well guess some of the events that may well intrude upon the Mountain Village in the course of the narrative.
A constant theme is the relative passivity of the villagers. Change comes from outside. The drivers are all external, even when the agents of transformation are much like them - poor peasants from remote regions. There's a near total lack of an ability to conceptualise the problems that they face beyond bad things being the mandate of Heaven on account of the villagers' inability to give suitable presents to their household god.
I felt that the author never succeeded in finding a successful idiom. Perhaps this was because of his limited feel for English, maybe because of the models available to him had an adverse effect on his style, which overall reminded me very strongly of one of the pastiches in If one a Winters Night a Traveller (specifically the one set during revolutionary turmoil in a European country distant from Italy). This was fatal because I was never sure if for example when within a paragraph a character was described as having groundless fears followed by what he was frightened of happening if this was an example of irony or just bad writing. On the whole in the context of the complete reading experience I lean to the latter, particularly with the abrupt shifting between a limited first person narrator and an omniscient narrator from one sentence to the next.
Worst I read this book in the shadow of Independent People. There are strong similarities, not between Iceland and China, but in the drama of characters constrained by their ignorance and trapped by their prejudices. Its not just the character of the cow, but even the watchdog in this story doesn't have worms. In other words this is not as visceral a reading experience, but perhaps because of that it was better suited to the tastes of the 1940s?
On the other hand I am not as sure about the ideological intentions of this author as I was with Laxness, maybe the authorities in China were not so sure either as the author later fell foul of Chinese Communist authorities.
Still, a quick read that won't spoil your appetite between novels.
I assume that the story is set in Jiangxi /Chiang-hsi province or somewhere very similar in the early part of the 1930s, I assume only because the ignorance of the villagers and the young boy who is the narrator is ever present. The story was written in English and published in 1947. The author was living and working in Britain in the mid 1940s. Eventually he returned to his theme in the late 1980s and wrote a further two sequels.
The background is Chinese rural poverty, with most of the village land owned by a rapacious landlord and worked by an ignorant peasantry. They know that the Manchu dynasty has ended, but as far as they are concerned it has been replaced by the new Republic dynasty and the chief difference seems to be that the wearing of pigtails is no longer mandatory. Some of the villagers, including the narrator's father and elder brother have gone off to the generic big city to try and earn money - none of which seems to manage to make the journey back to the village. To say more about the background would be to spoil the story, but if you are aware in general outlines of what was going on in China at the time you can pretty well guess some of the events that may well intrude upon the Mountain Village in the course of the narrative.
A constant theme is the relative passivity of the villagers. Change comes from outside. The drivers are all external, even when the agents of transformation are much like them - poor peasants from remote regions. There's a near total lack of an ability to conceptualise the problems that they face beyond bad things being the mandate of Heaven on account of the villagers' inability to give suitable presents to their household god.
I felt that the author never succeeded in finding a successful idiom. Perhaps this was because of his limited feel for English, maybe because of the models available to him had an adverse effect on his style, which overall reminded me very strongly of one of the pastiches in If one a Winters Night a Traveller (specifically the one set during revolutionary turmoil in a European country distant from Italy). This was fatal because I was never sure if for example when within a paragraph a character was described as having groundless fears followed by what he was frightened of happening if this was an example of irony or just bad writing. On the whole in the context of the complete reading experience I lean to the latter, particularly with the abrupt shifting between a limited first person narrator and an omniscient narrator from one sentence to the next.
Worst I read this book in the shadow of Independent People. There are strong similarities, not between Iceland and China, but in the drama of characters constrained by their ignorance and trapped by their prejudices. Its not just the character of the cow, but even the watchdog in this story doesn't have worms. In other words this is not as visceral a reading experience, but perhaps because of that it was better suited to the tastes of the 1940s?
On the other hand I am not as sure about the ideological intentions of this author as I was with Laxness, maybe the authorities in China were not so sure either as the author later fell foul of Chinese Communist authorities.
Still, a quick read that won't spoil your appetite between novels.
October 24, 2018
A great story by an author I had never heard off and when one takes a look at the authors history, that is not all surprising. A fervent Chinese Communist before the communist victory in the Chinese civil war, Chun-Chan Yeh's the mountain village has to be read with both this in mind, as well as the author later branding as a feudal reactionary in the Cultural revolution.
The story takes place in a nameless mountain village in 1927 (the name and the refusal to name neither province, district or nearby town and district capital implying that the author presents this village as a model for all thousands of similar villages). The village has many inhabitants and we get to know quite a few of them; the main focus is on one household that consists of a young boy (who is the main protagonist) his mother, old uncle pan, an absent father and older brother who are in the big city trying to earn more money for the family and Ouran an orphan adopted by the family. There are several more important characters such as aunt Chrysant whose husband has been gone for years but for whom she still patiently wait, the old Taoist priest Benjii; the village storyteller Liao Liu, uncle Peifu who is a teacher in a nearby town, Maomao a poor farmer devoted to his wife, the local landlord Chumin and his cronies and several communists.
This is a story on how a rather tranquil and quite place in China, as there were many thousands was swept up by the colossal events of the early 20th century; the fall of the imperial system, warlords and off course communist agitation and revolutionary fervor. It has superficially all the hallmarks of a stereotypical and cliché communist propaganda piece; the inherit inequality of feudal/ pre modern rural society; the lack of education among farmers, the priest and his self proclaimed expertise in ghostbusting is the laughing stock of the village and they are at the mercy of nature and abusive soldiers while local imperial officials care little for them while their most important entertainment is the village story teller recounting folktales. When the communist agitators come they shake up the society and try to right wrong as to liberate the farming community. The emphasis is on try to. For the mountain village and the inhabitants understand little of the heavy rhetoric used by often young communist representatives nor do they fully grasp the implications of this new way of politics and rule.
the book is far from a trumpet hailing celebration of communism and comes across more like an honest attempt at recreating the often trial and error approach of communists when contacting rural China. Made more so because the point of view is not of the agents but the villagers they try to convince; as a reader you get to know the villagers their ills as well as their hopes, hopes that did not necessary correlate with those of the communists resulting in incidents that are mostly the result of a failure to communicate. In the end the village and all those involved have their lives completely turned upside down and for most it is not an improvement (even if for a large part due to the landlord and his cronies fighting back).
This honesty combined with a seemingly genuine appreciation of the rhythm and flow of rural China (but acknowledging its many injustices based in tradition) makes it understandable why the author got in trouble during the cultural revolution. I pick out two lines that must have really hit a nerve; uncle pan saying "We will all remain the same on the inside, us simple farmers never change as we love our land and cows while earning a livin by tiling the soil". and later on uncle Pan says to the story teller who became a propaganda maker for the communists; " have you been reading the Confucian classics? Everything you say sounds like a quote by an ancient philosopher". The problem with these and a few more is the suggestion that a communist ruled China and its people are a continuation of Chinese history (which it is in my opinion) instead of radical break and new age of new ideas unshackled to an awful past to remold society in the new ultimate shape as was the dogma during the Cultural revolution.
So yes the Mountain village is a communist propaganda piece but one unlike I have ever read before; one that I feel is a genuine attempt to recreate a turbulent time in which the communist victory was far from assured.
The story takes place in a nameless mountain village in 1927 (the name and the refusal to name neither province, district or nearby town and district capital implying that the author presents this village as a model for all thousands of similar villages). The village has many inhabitants and we get to know quite a few of them; the main focus is on one household that consists of a young boy (who is the main protagonist) his mother, old uncle pan, an absent father and older brother who are in the big city trying to earn more money for the family and Ouran an orphan adopted by the family. There are several more important characters such as aunt Chrysant whose husband has been gone for years but for whom she still patiently wait, the old Taoist priest Benjii; the village storyteller Liao Liu, uncle Peifu who is a teacher in a nearby town, Maomao a poor farmer devoted to his wife, the local landlord Chumin and his cronies and several communists.
This is a story on how a rather tranquil and quite place in China, as there were many thousands was swept up by the colossal events of the early 20th century; the fall of the imperial system, warlords and off course communist agitation and revolutionary fervor. It has superficially all the hallmarks of a stereotypical and cliché communist propaganda piece; the inherit inequality of feudal/ pre modern rural society; the lack of education among farmers, the priest and his self proclaimed expertise in ghostbusting is the laughing stock of the village and they are at the mercy of nature and abusive soldiers while local imperial officials care little for them while their most important entertainment is the village story teller recounting folktales. When the communist agitators come they shake up the society and try to right wrong as to liberate the farming community. The emphasis is on try to. For the mountain village and the inhabitants understand little of the heavy rhetoric used by often young communist representatives nor do they fully grasp the implications of this new way of politics and rule.
the book is far from a trumpet hailing celebration of communism and comes across more like an honest attempt at recreating the often trial and error approach of communists when contacting rural China. Made more so because the point of view is not of the agents but the villagers they try to convince; as a reader you get to know the villagers their ills as well as their hopes, hopes that did not necessary correlate with those of the communists resulting in incidents that are mostly the result of a failure to communicate. In the end the village and all those involved have their lives completely turned upside down and for most it is not an improvement (even if for a large part due to the landlord and his cronies fighting back).
This honesty combined with a seemingly genuine appreciation of the rhythm and flow of rural China (but acknowledging its many injustices based in tradition) makes it understandable why the author got in trouble during the cultural revolution. I pick out two lines that must have really hit a nerve; uncle pan saying "We will all remain the same on the inside, us simple farmers never change as we love our land and cows while earning a livin by tiling the soil". and later on uncle Pan says to the story teller who became a propaganda maker for the communists; " have you been reading the Confucian classics? Everything you say sounds like a quote by an ancient philosopher". The problem with these and a few more is the suggestion that a communist ruled China and its people are a continuation of Chinese history (which it is in my opinion) instead of radical break and new age of new ideas unshackled to an awful past to remold society in the new ultimate shape as was the dogma during the Cultural revolution.
So yes the Mountain village is a communist propaganda piece but one unlike I have ever read before; one that I feel is a genuine attempt to recreate a turbulent time in which the communist victory was far from assured.
February 19, 2018
Interesa rakonto dum la cxina revolucio en montara vilagxo.
March 8, 2014
Ļoti labi uzrakstīts stāsts par ciema dzīvi pirmsrevolucionārajā Ķīnā ar daudziem paralēliem naratīviem un labi ievītu virsstāstu. Daži tēli mazliet plakātiski, bet tas iederas grāmatas kopējā noskaņā. Labprāt izlasītu triloģijas pārējās daļas, ja sanāks atrast...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews