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The Vixen
Except for “Recollections of Hainan”, written in 1963, all the pieces in this collection of stories and essays by the celebrated Chinese novelist Mao Dun were written before the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.
In 1932 Mao Dun returned to his home town from Japan, where he had lived since 1928, and witnessed on the way the poverty and want of the countryside under the rule of the KMT government. He depicted what he saw in four of his best short stories, of which “Spring Silkworms” and “The Shop of the Lin Family are printed here.
The essays give voice to his indignation against the decadent regime, while his hope and confidence in the common Chinese people are fully expressed in the essay “In Praise of the White Poplar”.
In 1932 Mao Dun returned to his home town from Japan, where he had lived since 1928, and witnessed on the way the poverty and want of the countryside under the rule of the KMT government. He depicted what he saw in four of his best short stories, of which “Spring Silkworms” and “The Shop of the Lin Family are printed here.
The essays give voice to his indignation against the decadent regime, while his hope and confidence in the common Chinese people are fully expressed in the essay “In Praise of the White Poplar”.
- GenresChinese Literature
266 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 23, 2018
One of the most feted Chinese writers of the 20th century, Mao Dun was an early member of the Communist Party, but suffered in the Cultural Revolution 'like any other honest writer', as this edition's afterword by Fan Jun puts it. I'm acutely aware of the huge disadvantage I am under not being able to read this collection of his stories in the original Chinese, and I suspect some of them are better translated than others. But even in translation you realise this is a writer of considerable power, subtlety and scope.
Most of the longer stories - The Shop of the Lin Family, Spring Silkworms and The Vixen - paint a picture of the chaos that engulfed China in the 1920s and 1930s. They can be read as critiques of capitalism, suggesting that unsupervised markets combined with human vice create conditions of abject misery - not just for those on the bottom, but many of those in the middle too. But of course, this was also a time of political upheaval and weak, corrupt leadership, which the writer also amply illustrates. To read these stories is to understand a little of the ordinary lifestyles of people at the time - an ingenious but failing shopkeeper (what we'd now call an entrepreneur), a community of silkworm farmers and a kept woman. They make sobering reading but are enlivened by the writer's sharpness and faithfulness to detail. My favourite of this group is probably A Ballad of Green Algae (strange title, I know, and I'm guessing the strangeness was intentional on Mao Dun's part.) This is as dark as the other social-realist stories but has an unexpectedly uplifting ending that is also satisfyingly ambiguous.
Other stories - Creation and Second Generation - hint at the intellectual aspects of the political upheaval, how people's minds were changing. Creation is by far the more sophisticated story of the two, a painfully detailed dissection of a marriage with psychological insights that seem shockingly modern for a story written in China nearly a century ago. Reading it, you understand that when Chairman Mao said that women 'hold up half the sky', he was responding to what must have been two or three decades of dizzyingly fast social change prior to the Communists' consolidation of power in 1949 - from bound feet to a new generation of women who were, like the character in Mao Dun's story, leaving men in their dust.
Frustration is an intriguing story. Centred on a dinner party for two well-to-do couples who have been forced out of their homes by the civil war, it expresses a hope that a new political order will bring faster industrialisation, less bureaucracy and a more rational use of resources. Sadly, China was going to have to wait rather longer for such improvements to be sustained. And in the story, Mao Dun plants a tiny seed of doubt about whether the Communists' vision could ever come to fruition. Yet as with all the stories, it's the human characters and their human concerns, whether petty or important, that drive and dominate Mao Dun's writing, rather than any political message. This story is also quite a revealing social portrait of a marriage seen mostly from the wife's point of view, with her frustration over a lost trunk of dresses looming large.
Finally, there are some shorter sketches of landscapes, characters and dreams, some of which I suspected of having symbolic meanings I wasn't aware of. You can feel the power of Mao Dun's lyrical writing even in translation.
Most of the longer stories - The Shop of the Lin Family, Spring Silkworms and The Vixen - paint a picture of the chaos that engulfed China in the 1920s and 1930s. They can be read as critiques of capitalism, suggesting that unsupervised markets combined with human vice create conditions of abject misery - not just for those on the bottom, but many of those in the middle too. But of course, this was also a time of political upheaval and weak, corrupt leadership, which the writer also amply illustrates. To read these stories is to understand a little of the ordinary lifestyles of people at the time - an ingenious but failing shopkeeper (what we'd now call an entrepreneur), a community of silkworm farmers and a kept woman. They make sobering reading but are enlivened by the writer's sharpness and faithfulness to detail. My favourite of this group is probably A Ballad of Green Algae (strange title, I know, and I'm guessing the strangeness was intentional on Mao Dun's part.) This is as dark as the other social-realist stories but has an unexpectedly uplifting ending that is also satisfyingly ambiguous.
Other stories - Creation and Second Generation - hint at the intellectual aspects of the political upheaval, how people's minds were changing. Creation is by far the more sophisticated story of the two, a painfully detailed dissection of a marriage with psychological insights that seem shockingly modern for a story written in China nearly a century ago. Reading it, you understand that when Chairman Mao said that women 'hold up half the sky', he was responding to what must have been two or three decades of dizzyingly fast social change prior to the Communists' consolidation of power in 1949 - from bound feet to a new generation of women who were, like the character in Mao Dun's story, leaving men in their dust.
Frustration is an intriguing story. Centred on a dinner party for two well-to-do couples who have been forced out of their homes by the civil war, it expresses a hope that a new political order will bring faster industrialisation, less bureaucracy and a more rational use of resources. Sadly, China was going to have to wait rather longer for such improvements to be sustained. And in the story, Mao Dun plants a tiny seed of doubt about whether the Communists' vision could ever come to fruition. Yet as with all the stories, it's the human characters and their human concerns, whether petty or important, that drive and dominate Mao Dun's writing, rather than any political message. This story is also quite a revealing social portrait of a marriage seen mostly from the wife's point of view, with her frustration over a lost trunk of dresses looming large.
Finally, there are some shorter sketches of landscapes, characters and dreams, some of which I suspected of having symbolic meanings I wasn't aware of. You can feel the power of Mao Dun's lyrical writing even in translation.
April 12, 2026
[letto Creation] performative male final boss ma è Junshi
October 13, 2016
Most people of orient heritage would find the chilling lines of this essay quite relatable.
It talks of a bygone time - perhaps that of our grandmothers' or great-grandmothers', and the oppressive aggression of patriarchal households.
A time of "divine tragedies", and hapless cries of female domestic despair.
"She says you sinned against the Sun Buddha too, and after he died, the old man called you before the king of the underworld to testify."
It talks of a bygone time - perhaps that of our grandmothers' or great-grandmothers', and the oppressive aggression of patriarchal households.
A time of "divine tragedies", and hapless cries of female domestic despair.
"She says you sinned against the Sun Buddha too, and after he died, the old man called you before the king of the underworld to testify."
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews