Let's read Cao Zhenglu and lament the demise of the social novel
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We will get there
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A few thousand words of my translation of a Cao Zhenglu novel will follow. But I think context is important.
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The social novel after revolutionary romanticism and marketized individualism
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I believe this may seem paradoxical, and, without sufficient context,1 it may be difficult to understand, but I am convinced: Chinese literature after 1978 was caught up in a cultural program as thorough as that carried out by the Gang of Four.2 There was a counterrevolution. The Americans taught this in East Asia: the best anticommunist literature does not mention ideological choices at all, and leftist horrors are best expressed in dull terms; the individual must be glorified in the text and in the celebration of particular authors as unique geniuses.3 The key was to dissuade social connection. The individual floated free. These lessons were picked up by culture industry bureaucrats under Deng Xiaoping.
So, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, when the idea of revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism was de-emphasized, and the particular theories of Jiang Qing repudiated,4 the slate was hastily scrubbed. This was incomplete. Certain literary styles, even if they did not survive in name, survived in practice. There were two generations of writers trained in these styles and a literary bureaucracy that preserved the rank of these writers. The socialist realist novel became the capitalist realist novel.5 Those writers, disconnected to some extent from earlier tradition and also modernist and postmodernist innovation, could not change their style, and they had no incentive to do so. The literary bureaucracy was too dear to overturn completely. But a generation of younger writers were celebrated for taking up the banner of individualism.
The social novel, despite its long history in China, being incompatible with either revolutionary realism or the celebration of individualism, would not be revived.
I have stated a strict conclusion, but I think it’s still worthwhile to consider attempts to fight against these trends.
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Cao Zhenglu and new left literature
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Cao Zhenglu 曹征路 started his writing career in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. He was not one of the young radicals sent down to the countryside to compose poetry, but a straitlaced hack.6 He worked his way up to a post in the cultural bureaucracy, heading a municipal branch of the Writers' Association in Anhui. I have not read much of his writing from this time. But it seems that a stint at the Lu Xun Literary Institute and his elevation to a more central Writers’ Association post changed the course of his career. Like many other writers in the 1990s, he began to write more overtly commercial work, intended to be funneled into other branches of the cultural industries, where the audiences expected less staid work.
In the early 2000s, he was dispatched to an academic post in Shenzhen, and he fell in with a loose community of writers that formed around Left Bank Culture Net 左岸文化网. Left Bank was one of many online left spaces, like like Huayue Forum 华岳论坛, Maoflag 毛泽东旗帜, and Utopia 乌有之乡. Left Bank hosted explicitly political work. Much of it was nakedly leftist polemics and field reports, with only a thin veneer of literary fiction.7
Cao Zhenglu borrowed this style—it was still reporting from the lower reaches of society, while attempting to advance theoretical statements on the prevailing social order—but he rose above the leftist milieu to produce challenging, original, and entertaining work.
In 2004,8 he published in Dangdai 当代 a groundbreaking novella titled There 那儿,9 a closely-observed portrait of laid-off workers in a northern factory town. The tragic ending, with the suicide of a union head that has tried unsuccessfully to save the state-owned plant, is executed with just the right amount of sentimental comedy. The political statement is clear, but it never becomes heavy. It's a unique take on the social novel for postsocialist China. Although it was celebrated at the time, twenty years have passed, and it is mostly forgotten outside of leftist circles. Like all of his work, it remains untranslated.
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Asking the Boundless
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Asking the Boundless 问苍茫,10 a Cao Zhenglu novel published in 2009, has met the same fate: in the fifteen years since it was published, it has faded from view, and it has not been translated into any language.
This is a novel about Shenzhen and labor activism. There is narration by workers at the Taiwanese-owned factory, as well as, among others, supervisors, managers, a Party secretary, and a consultant. This is a work of reportage, a work of literary fiction, and a political statement. This is a social novel.
It’s not as immediate and affecting as There. It shows some of Cao Zhenglu’s deficiencies as a writer. But it is impressive for its scope.
I am inviting you to read some of it now, in my translation. I wanted to give you some context first.
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Begin excerpt11
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I.
Yaya was lucky. Her station faced the window. She could glance outside every now and then. Each time that the supervisor didn't catch her, it meant another chance to see the world.
What was out there? She couldn’t see much. But there was the sky, and sometimes clouds. The clouds were different from back home. They were faint and wispy, as thin as cotton batting. Sometimes she could see planes. They were close enough that she could see the rows of windows and the blinking lights on their tails. It was a reminder that she lived in a big city. The modern world surrounded her. One time, everyone was talking about what they wanted to do more than anything in the world. Some people said they dreamed of a bowl of noodles from their favorite hometown shop. Some people said they wanted to sleep for two days. Without thinking, she said she wished she could ride on a plane. There was laughter. But it didn't seem so far-fetched to her. The planes were always floating by, seeming just out of reach... It felt to her that she could hop right on. But everyone is different. Everyone has different dreams.
The window had given her a chance to see the typhoon coming. Before, she had thought typhoons came from Taiwan. A Taiwanese wind. A really strong Taiwanese wind. The name of the storm and the name of the place had no connection, though, it turned out.
She realized that typhoons had a particular color. They started out blazing yellow, then turned a muddy red. Whatever color they were, they always had a terrible brightness. Eventually, that faded, and they turned black. The darkness was the most frightening thing. It was so dark at midday that she could not see the buildings across the street. The rain followed close behind. It swept sideways, hitting her cheeks. At first, a bit of warmth had come with it. She could smell it. It was like rotten eggs. The wind whirled, blasting first from the east, then coming from the west, carrying the rain in its wake. The rain and the wind were not that hard, at first, but that changed fast. Rain started blasting through the window in waves. There were screams from the production floor. Water began to pool around the machines. She shut the window and watched the rain pounding against it.
The typhoon had taken a long time to come. Everyone followed along with the weather reports. In the days before its arrival, the air was sticky with humidity. Everyone was sweating, so the entire production floor smelled like warm and sour. Everyone was looking forward to the typhoon. They said that once it passed, the humidity would abate. The halls of the dormitory were full of hangers and lines draped with clothes that never seemed to dry. The walls were covered in droplets of condensation. Everyone wore wet clothes in to work. They soaked up even more sweat. The smell got worse.
When Little Mao got her period, she ripped up an old undershirt to use instead of a pad. That was what she always did. People told her she was going to get sick, that it wasn’t good to use a shirt that hadn’t dried out. She just laughed at them. When the typhoon came, though she breathed a sigh of relief.
The typhoon was more than a storm. It arrived as a suggestion, or an order. It was the reason that someone shouted out: “Drop everything!” Nobody had discussed a plan. People seemed to have been waiting for that moment as they had waited for the wind and rain. Everyone stopped working.
What was meant by “drop everything” was clear to the workers on the floor. It was time to strike. It was a signal to the bosses and the supervisors. It was time to rebel against their authority. Everyone had heard stories about strikes in other factories. They had heard how a strike at such-and-such a company had worked because of a particular tactic, and a strike at such-and-such a company had failed. It had seemed to be merely a case of workers sharing stories. Nothing more. No decisions were made. When the call to “drop everything” came, it didn’t feel particularly momentous. For a moment, nobody moved. Eventually, someone tossed a big wrench up into the air and it came down on the conveyor belt with a clang. Some people started laughing. It was that simple.
One of the supervisors started racing around, demanding to know who had shouted the order. Everyone ignored him. He went to find the line heads. He told them to keep working, but they couldn’t keep going by themselves. They had to shut down all sixty production lines. The conveyor belt kept creaking. Like dead leaves on a slow creek, the circuit boards started to pile up. Two of the men discussed smashing the time card machine. It never kept the right time. “It’s not worth the trouble,” one of them concluded. “The time is wrong on purpose.” After that, everyone drifted to the windows to watch the typhoon.
The bulk of the storm had appeared, tumbling and roaring above. It was impossible to tell where the sky met the ground below. It was impossible to tell what was ocean and what was rain. The traffic on the street outside had frozen. Cardboard boxes and wastepaper flew through the sky. A massive billboard across the street was blasted from its moorings and flew soundlessly away. Some of the windows on buildings nearby had not been shut, and the wind caught them, ripped them off their mounts, and flung them to the ground. The sound of shattering glass followed the thunder.
This scene stirred something in the workers. It made them glad, somehow. It seemed to satisfy a desire they didn’t know they had.
Although the supervisors and most of the workers had no idea, the idea for a strike had been planted a few days earlier. A rumor had circulated that a new batch of two hundred workers was being hired out of Guangxi.12 The news had been overheard by some of the guys from Hunan, who were part of the previous batch of recruits. That group had already there for three months when Yaya arrived. She knew they must be getting close to the end of their probation. That meant that the company was going to fire them all and bring in new workers. The Hunan group had already seen how the operation worked, and they weren't ready to leave. It hadn't been easy to get through probation.
The way that these assembly line jobs worked, not much training was required. After a day or two, a new recruit could take their own station. There were more than sixty production lines, with two thousand employees, and most of them had not been there very long. Workers in the probationary period received a monthly stipend of two hundred yuan to cover living expenses, and regular workers got seven hundred yuan in wages. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which workers the company preferred. On top of that, the factory was always running short-staffed. The workload of ten people was arranged between seven. If the work wasn't done on time, it was better to have more probationary workers, since they didn't have to be paid overtime. While they were still on probation, it was no problem to fire them. If somebody wasn’t cutting it, it was no big deal to give them the boot and bring in somebody new.
The rumor that the Hunanese group would be fired came at the same time as another rumor, that the company had gotten a huge order with a two month deadline. It turned out to be more than a rumor. The overtime hours were proof enough. Instead of staying on the line until eight, they weren’t getting out of there until ten. There was grumbling. The probationary workers only got five yuan extra, paid in cash.
Miss Mao didn’t mind, though. She saved up every five yuan payment. “If you didn’t want to work hard,” she said, “you should've stayed home. You should be happy with the money.” But Yaya wasn't happy. Her legs were swollen and her feet were sore.
As the Hunanese workers told it, when previous batches of workers had been fired, some of them had started crying. A few people caused trouble. But it wasn't any use. The contract was crystal clear. The probationary period was six months. There were no stipulations about letting them go before that time was up. Most workers, even if they carried on for a while, eventually made the decision to leave. The worst anyone ever did, the Hunanese said, was hanging around at the front gates for a couple days. The guards out front didn't let anyone inside, though. They weren't interested in listening to people complain, either. So, everyone eventually left.
The Hunanese didn’t want the same thing to happen to them. They were more unified than previous batches of workers. They heard the rumors early and knew that they had to seize on the opportunity, before the next group could arrive, when the company was trying to get out a big order. The typhoon seemed to be on their side, too.
Yaya watched the human resources manager Mr. Ma coming through the rain and wind toward the factory. He popped open an umbrella but it immediately disintegrated, like a dandelion going to seed, leaving behind a withered branch. He stormed through the doors. Yaya moved to the stairs above the production floor to watch him. He glanced around as if looking for a place to put his umbrella, then seemed to come to his senses, and tossed the twisted metal aside. It was only about twenty or thirty yards between the office and the factory, but even traversing that short distance, Mr. Ma was soaked. He cursed out the one guard that had always kept a subservient tone with him. The guard maintained a stiff, obsequious smile through the tirade, even as he walked backwards to shut the front door again. Mr. Ma strode onto the production floor, cursing in Cantonese: “Diu! Diu!”
Mr. Ma talked things over with a few of the supervisors, then turned to the workers: “Alright, whoever shouted to drop everything, we're going to let that slide. Let's just say that the typhoon got you upset. Maybe you've never been down south before. You got scared. We should be doling out fines for this stoppage, but the company is going to cover this. I don't want a repeat of this incident. If it happens again, you will compensate the company for any losses. If I told you how much money this company loses every minute those machines aren't running, it would scare the hell out of you.”
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.
“What's going on here? Is there anything you’re still not clear on?”
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.
Mr. Ma gathered the line heads and demanded they get their people back to work. The crowd of workers shifted. But the only ones moving were from Yaya's batch of new workers. Little Mao went to round up a few people, too. With just a few workers sitting forlornly at their stations, there was no way to start up the lines again. The atmosphere grew tense. It seemed as if things were on the verge of boiling over. Yaya had felt a moment of freedom when the typhoon hit, but the oppressive air swept in around her again. She shivered.
Mr. Ma became even more agitated. "I know what you're thinking," he said, "but you’re wasting your time. The company has rules. You signed a contract. We got your signatures, didn't we? This is government policy! Open up the circulation of talented workers. Eliminate workers that don’t meet targets. Right? If you don't like it, you can take it up with the government. I’ve got to follow the same rules, too. I'm just like you guys. I'm a working man. If I'm not doing my job, I'm out the door, too. Isn't that right? For now, the company is willing to keep you on—if you're working. And if you're working, you're earning money. Anyone here have anything against money? Do you? What about you? Just don't make things tough on me, okay?"
"Bullshit," someone at the back of the crowd said. It went off like a wet fart. Everyone started laughing, and they kept going until their sides hurt.
Mr. Ma roared for the security guards to get their captain, but his words were swallowed up in the noise of the crowd. They were surging toward the door. Mr. Ma found himself pressed against a wall. A few fluorescent lights got smashed. Someone jammed a circuit board into the treacherous time card machine.
The heavens were strangely cooperative. The sky outside had been dark and stormy moments before, but, by the time they got outside, it looked like a spring day. The gurgling storm drains were the only sign that a typhoon had passed overhead. People shouted gleefully and raced around. It was as if they had just given themselves a vacation. But deep down, everyone understood the situation. Even if the sky was clear, the rain could come again. They knew that whatever happened, they were still working for a living. They knew they might have to drag their red-white-blue bags further down the line.
"Big deal," one of the Hunanese spat, "they can fire me, if they want. You think I’m scared?" But Yaya was not as confident. It was the first time in three months that work had ended early. And this time, it wasn't the supervisors calling an early stoppage, but the workers themselves. She usually looked forward to days off, and going for a walk in the city, but something about this unexpected break unnerved her. She glanced around the crowd, hoping to find someone she knew. Everyone around her seemed suddenly to be a stranger. It seemed like everyone had forgotten who each other was. Everyone in the crowd seemed to be looking around, trying to find a familiar face. At the same time, they kept pressing forward.
Suddenly, the wind picked up again. Rain came crashing down. The crowd rushed forward. Without thinking, Yaya rushed along with them.
II.
Tana was the peculiar moniker given to the tropical cyclone that had spun up in the tropics and careened through the Indian Ocean. The name was said to be taken from some indigenous goddess. When she crossed Indonesia, Tana was still willowy and tender, but that changed as she traversed Hainan and approached the Pearl River Delta. When Hong Kong TV flashed a wind warning, people in Shenzhen were starting to get anxious.
It wasn't fear that the typhoon would hit! They were concerned that it wouldn’t turn north to pay them a visit. They wanted Tana to liberate them from the oppressive humidity of late summer. They figured it might break up the monotony of the season. And water was a concern, too. A good rain would fill up the reservoirs. Years earlier, the villages around the city had been green, but the landscape had been covered in concrete. All along the river, there were corrugated tin shacks. The hairwashing girls stood in the dried out bottom, calling for customers. The headwaters were diverted down plastic pipes. Tana's arrival could be the beginning of a beautiful legend, about how a goddess restored the land. Everyone welcomed her with open arms. Nobody worried that the pleasant smile of the goddess might hide malevolent power. A few people even went down to the beach to greet her as she came ashore. They ended up being swept away.
In the city, the scaffolding began to shift. The billboards were torn to pieces, hanging pretty faces and voluptuous two-dimensional bodies from streetlights, or dumping them to the street to be trampled. The Shenzhen River was flooded, pushing all the accumulated trash of however many years toward Hong Kong, and spreading stinking water across the city. In luxurious Luohu, a gang of boys floated tables and charged young women for rides home. "Ten each!" they yelled. "Our prices are the best in town!"
All that aside, did you ever think a typhoon could cause a strike? Treasure Isle Electronics, Ltd. was not a huge company,13 but it meant something in a place like Xingfu Village, where it was celebrated as a foreign-funded enterprise. So, when Wen Nianzu heard there was trouble there, he rushed back as fast as he could. It didn't take a genius to figure out what might happen after a strike at Treasure Isle. There were hundreds of companies in Xingfu Village, and all the workers were in touch with each other. A chain reaction would be unmanageable. "All you need to do now is maintain stability," his boss in the municipal government told him. "As long as there are no incidents, you're set. You're going to be rolling in it." He was not informed what would happen if there was an incident. He knew it was inappropriate to say. As for what constituted an "incident" and what didn't, that didn't need to be explained either.
This incident seemed to be a bit out of the ordinary. It didn't fit the pattern. In the past, he wouldn't have paid much attention to it, since strikes were not unexpected. But there was something else going on here... He wondered if the commentator on TV had been on to something when he speculated that Tana was up to some wicked tricks in Shenzhen. In general, strikes followed a pattern. There was a season to strikes. Recruitment took place in spring, then some workers would jump ship for other jobs in the summer, and strikes usually came in the fall or winter, usually after the New Year. But the Treasure Isle strike was coming in July, just after the Dragon Boat Festival.
To himself, he asked: "What the hell is going on here?" He wasn't sure how to answer. "Who the fuck have I got running things over there?" he asked. "Fuck it," he swore. But Wen Nianzu was a local official in a government overseeing hundreds of thousands of people, and chair and vice-president of the Xingfu Village Development Corporation. He wore a suit to work! He couldn't afford to say "fuck it."
He couldn't afford to scold people. He had to endure. Once, he had gone to a fortuneteller in Hong Kong, who told him that he had a talent for making money, but he had to contain his temper. He analyzed the shape of his face and advised him that he would find success with a smile. When he got upset, he had to remind himself of this.
Unlike northerners, so given to violent tempers, most Hakka people had a mild temper. The name "Hakka" meant "guests," so that's how they behaved. They approached every issue with caution and restraint. All Hakka people learned these lessons, including Wen Nianzu. He believed his greatest strength was his patience. He could fight, too, though, if he needed to. That was how he had gone so far in life.
When the car pulled up in front of his office, he raced inside. By the time his jacket dried out, he had already dictated three letters.
The first letter was to notify all enterprises in Xingfu Village to add overtime shifts. If there was no extra work, then they had to bring their workers together for a meal. If they didn't have money, the Xingfu Village government would pay. The most important thing was to make sure the workers didn't leave. Unless someone was getting fired, workers weren't to leave the factory. Contradictions among the people can be solved with money, right?14 Whatever you need, just ask.
The second letter was to ask Mr. Zhao to contact his former student and see what was necessary to ensure that the Labor Bureau didn't get involved. As long as the Labor Bureau could be kept out of things, the incident might be contained. He also asked how to deal with any journalists. Whatever you need, just ask.
The third letter was to Treasure Isle. He wanted to know where Mrs. Chen was. Whether she was in New York or Tokyo, he wanted to be informed.
Those with sufficient context are free to argue with the sweeping judgements I am about to offer. I stand by them. We might have a nice conversation on this topic. But I am writing for an audience that I believe has limited context, who I think might benefit from some hotter discourse. Let’s make contemporary Chinese literature sound dangerous.
It was less destructive, of course. Nobody got hurt. And it was more productive. I am not evaluating those things, though. It’s not that they deserve to be ignored, but I am limiting myself.
I am thinking in particular of what Chien-Chung Chen 陈建忠 calls "U.S. aid literary institution" 美援文艺体制 in Taiwan. While the "national arts and culture institution" 国家文艺体制 of the Taiwanese state pushed hardcore anticommunism, the Americans promoted a literature that broke the author's connection to society, turning literature into pure esthetics. (Apart from Chen, Wang Mei-hsiang 王梅香 covers this most extensively.) (This is not just in Taiwan. Not all programs were run the same way. But I am talking broadly about “cultural Cold War” efforts.)
It’s not quite correct to credit Jiang Qing with theories like the Three Prominences, Red, Bright, Clear, and Tall, Mighty, Complete, but it’s easy shorthand. Her theorists came up with these ideas. This is covered briefly in an earlier entry: “Thoughts after watching a contemporary production of Shajiabang. Political esthetics. If nothing else, a chance to talk about Jiang Qing's photography.”
I need you to forget the more popular use of “capitalist realism.” I mean the style of writing that resembled socialist realism but was turned to praise of marketization. I wrote about this in a review of Jiang Zilong’s Empires of Dust, translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne: “Socialist Literature for the Capitalist Era.”
This is not intended to disparage him. The best writers started out this way. I love Jia Pingwa, who also got his start in the 1970s with the type of stories that made it into magazines in the middle of the Cultural Revolution.
A lot of this work was labeled “new left literature” 新左派文学. This can be taken to mean “literature of the New Left,” “a new leftist literature,” or a combination of the two: it was sympathetic to the analysis of the New Left (critical of the excesses of the revolutionary period but supportive of some of its goals; critical of the marketization and financialization of the economy under Reform and Opening but supportive of some of its goals), as well as representing a new iteration of socialist literature (breaking with revolutionary literature, presenting a critique of a new social order).
I recommend looking up Jie Lu’s chapter on new left literature in China and New Left Visions. Let me include some of it, down here in the notes:
He Yanhong, one of the leading advocates for New Left literature, believes that it already constitutes the Chinese literary mainstream of the twenty-first century, that it embodies New Left spirit and thinking. According to He, this spirit is a "fighting spirit" that Chinese intellectuals conjure to confront reality and their times. Most critics, including He Yanhong, find that New Left literature has returned to the realistic tradition of social engagement and social criticism. Others find a more radical tendency and link these writings with proletarian revolutionary literature. According to Liu Jiming, this tradition includes "left literature," "socialist literature," and "people’s literature" and focuses on social equality, as well as fighting against class exploitation and oppression. In linking New Left and proletarian revolutionary literature, such critics strategically place the New Left in binary opposition to other "nonrevolutionary" literary and intellectual trends. Thus New Left literature is critical not only of social ills but also of previous Chinese intellectual and literary developments.
Zhu Dongli asserts, "Our generation has been under the shadow of previous generations throughout the 1980s: criticizing Chinese history, rejecting modern Chinese revolution including the leftist tradition of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism, questioning state, nation, collective identity, aspiring to western politics, economic mode, science, language, culture and academic thinking. The intellectual paradigm, values and aesthetics of the 1980s, to be frank, are, to quite some extent, shamelessly anti-people and colonized by the west." In commenting on Mo Yan’s, Yu Hua’s, and Yan Geling’s recent works ... Liu Jiming criticizes them as following the patterns of "scar literature" and defining the Chinese socialist practices achieved by several generations as "preposterously good-and-evil sentimental tragedy." These authors hope to demonstrate the surprising intellectual and imaginative poverty of Chinese writers and lack of independence of Chinese intellectuals. Kuang Xinnian sees a "philosophy of ignoble existence" promoted by the neorealist fiction of the 1990s as represented by Yu Hua, Liu Zhengyun, Chi Li, and Liu Heng. In their militant discourse, their total denial of all previous literary achievements, and their lack of dialogic thinking, they fail to contextualize past literary trends and to see important continuities and discontinuities between New Left literature and revolutionary literature of socialist and critical realisms, neorealism, and modernism.
I’ve moved from 1972 to 2004 without much detail. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know that much about Cao Zhenglu’s career before the 2000s. I have read next to nothing. I only care about the work he did in the last twenty years of his life.
The title is difficult to translate. It is, literally, “there”—nàr 那儿—but it comes from the narrator’s grandmother singing incorrectly a transliteration of “Internationale”:
We never did end up bringing my grandmother home with us that day. She refused to leave her bed. She said: "The bed is good. Big Head told me, the bed is good." Big Head was what everyone had called my uncle as a kid. What Big Head said went. She would only listen to Big Head. My mother wore her tongue down to the root trying to convince her to go home with her. Her eyes were spraying water by the end of it. But it was all for nothing.
My grandmother said: "Good, good." She wouldn't leave her bed. When he tried to drag her out, she started wailing. She sounded like a hog being butchered.
My grandmother had dementia but it wasn't that serious. When you talked to her, she could follow what you were saying, but all she'd say back to you was: "Good, good." If you told her it was raining, she'd said: "Rain is good." If you told her it was time for dinner, she'd say: "Dinner's good." If you told her that your buddy was dead, she'd say, "Dead is good." Always the optimist. Sometimes she had moments of lucidity and she'd start singing: "In—ter—natio—no—le will be the..."
We tried correcting her. "It's na, not no."
She said: "No, it's good."
When she heard her son had disappeared, she said: "Good, good." When we asked her where he went, she said: "Where, it's good. Where he went, it's good."
My mother started crying. "Don't talk like that, ma. It's bad luck."
"Bad luck is good."
Another note on title translations… This comes from a Mao Zedong poem. The key line is: Chàng liáokuò, wèn cāngmángdàdì, shéi zhǔ chénfú? 怅寥廓,问苍茫大地,谁主沉浮?
One translation has it as: “Brooding over this immensity, / I ask, on this boundless land / Who rules over man's destiny?” Is this the translation by Hualing Nieh Engle and Paul Engle? I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s my favorite. Elsewhere, Willis Barnstone has it as: “In this immensity / I ask the greenblue earth, / who is master of nature?” Nancy T. Lin renders it as: “Ah, boundless space / Great earth in twilight's gray, / Who, I ask, is the lord of destinies?”
I always give the same warning: No editor is involved here, and I am translating according to my own prejudices, with my own limitations. I will do my best.
Cao Zhenglu’s writing is didactic, and he is writing for an audience that is not necessarily aware of how factories operate. On this point, though, about point of origin for workers, I feel like it’s worth explaining a bit. I admit that I don’t know much about this. I will tell you what I have heard. Local affiliation is important. Workers are often hired as a group from particular locations. A recruiter goes down to a township and take out a group. It’s an easy way to secure a work force. As well, factories might also hire specifically for people from a certain province. They may be looking to keep a uniform work force of, say, people from Hunan, or they might want to add in a group from, say, Jiangxi, to avoid a situation like the one we are about to see in this story. But that is only my own understanding.
The Chinese name of the company is Bǎodǎo 宝岛. This makes it clear that it’s Taiwanese.
This phrase is tastier in Chinese, with the perversion of Maoist language, as well as the parallel rénmín 人民: contradictions among the people is rénmín nèibù máodùn 人民内部矛盾 and the currency of the country is the rénmínbì 人民币. Rénmín nèibù máodùn rénmínbì jiějué 人民内部矛盾人民币解决.