【當代中國小說：蘇童與余華】Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua

Contemporary Chinese Fiction
by Su Tong and Yu Hua

Sinica Leidensia
Edited by
Barend J. ter Haar
Maghiel van Crevel
VOLUME 102
Contemporary Chinese Fiction
by Su Tong and Yu Hua
Coming of Age in Troubled Times
By
Hua LI
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Li, Hua, 1969–

Contemporary Chinese fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua : coming of age in
troubled times / by Hua Li.
p. cm. — (Sinica Leidensia, ISSN 0169-9563 ; v. 102)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-20226-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Chinese fiction—20th century—History and criticism 2. Bildungsromans—
History and criticism. 3. Su, Tong, 1963– Qi qie cheng qun. 4. Yu, Hua, 1960–
Hu han yu xi yu. 5. Comparative literature—Chinese and English. 6. Comparative
literature—English and Chinese. 7. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 8. Group
identity in literature. 9. Youth in literature. I. Title.
PL2443.L4325 2011
895.1’3099283’0904—dc22
2010053916
ISSN 0169-9563
ISBN 978-90-04-20226-9
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Fees are subject to change.
In Memory of Grandfather Fengxiang and Aunt Guoxiang
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments .............................................................................. ix
Introduction ........................................................................................ 1
Chapter One Bildungsroman/Chengzhang Xiaoshuo as a

Literary Genre ................................................................................ 13
Chapter Two The Changing Patterns of the Bildungsroman

in Modern Chinese Literature ..................................................... 33
Antecedents of the Bildungsroman: Zhuan in Pre-modern
Chinese Literature ..................................................................... 34
Bildungsroman in Modern Chinese Literature ......................... 39
Chapter Three Fallen Youth: A Solitary Outcast ...................... 75

Coming of Age in the Toon Street Series ................................. 94
Role Models and Peer Community ............................................ 102
A Failed Catcher in the Rye ........................................................ 110
Sexuality, Violence and Death .................................................... 114
A Solitary Hero on the Street ...................................................... 120
The Boat to Redemption ............................................................... 122
Chapter Four Fallen Youth: A Trembling Loner ...................... 131

A Degenerating and Helpless Parental Milieu ......................... 158
Guanglin’s Self-sufficient Peer Community ............................. 168
Sexuality .......................................................................................... 173
Time and Death—the End of Adolescence .............................. 175
After Cries in the Drizzle ............................................................. 180
Chapter Five Tragic and Parodistic Bildungsroman ................. 187

Farewell to Revolution .................................................................. 188
Unfulfilled Bildung ........................................................................ 195
Glossary ............................................................................................... 207

Bibliography ........................................................................................ 215
Index .................................................................................................... 225
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have received valuable assistance and unstinting encouragement

from my former mentors at the University of British Columbia in the
development and completion of this research project. I am enormously
grateful to Michael S. Duke for his unfailing support and guidance
during my studies at the University of British Columbia; to Timothy
Cheek for being a constant source of inspiration and encouragement;
and to Jerry D. Schmidt for broadening my understanding of classical
Chinese literature. I would also like to express my thanks to Bruce
Fulton, John X. Cooper, Catherine Swatek, Alexander Woodside, and
Alison Bailey for their advice and support. I also thank the Faculty of
Graduate Studies at UBC and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for
their generous support through fellowships.
Special thanks are due to Su Tong and Yu Hua for granting my
request for interviews with them. I would also like to thank Allan H.
Barr for his generosity in allowing me to refer to his English transla-
tion in manuscript form, and for his critical insights and comments at
an early stage of this project. I am also obliged to Philip F. Williams
for his longstanding help and encouragement during the revision of
the manuscript. I would also like to express my appreciation to Ma
Shanshuang for the calligraphy on the front cover. In addition, I wish
to express my gratitude to Katelyn Chin and the other editors at Brill
for their expert editorial assistance, as well as to the two anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments and advice. Finally, I would like
to thank my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and
Literatures at Montana State University for their support and encour-
agement during the later stages of this project.
This book is fondly dedicated to the memory of my grandfather Bai
Fengxiang and my aunt Li Guoxiang.
INTRODUCTION
They experienced a unique coming of age. Exactly

how the Cultural Revolution affected this genera-
tion is still unclear.
—J. W. Esherick, P. G. Pickowicz, and A. G. Walder,
The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History
The focus of this study is coming of age in troubled times as portrayed
in contemporary Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo/Bildungsroman fiction.
Selected works of two major Chinese writers—Su Tong (b. 1963) and
Yu Hua (b. 1960)—are treated as cultural metaphors reflecting on the
growth and future of Chinese youth in the abnormal era of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (hereafter the Cultural Revolution).
This study discusses how this fiction’s images of youth deviate from
the one promoted by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), in which Chinese
youths are compared to “the sun at eight or nine in the morning” and
the socialist new man.1 It will be argued here that the particular nar-
ratives by Su Tong and Yu Hua that I have selected for analysis form
a body of tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman against both the earlier
modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, especially those written during
the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter
PRC) as well as the traditional European Bildungsroman genre.
The overall thesis and ensuing discussions about the tragic and par-
odistic nature of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo will
be illustrated from two comparative perspectives: the terrain of mod-
ern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo written from the May Fourth era
to contemporary times, and the theoretical framework of traditional
European Bildungsroman. By anchoring the two authors’ chengzhang
xiaoshuo in the terrain of modern Chinese coming-of-age stories,
I argue that the coming-of-age narratives written from the May Fourth
1
Mao Zedong, “Talk at a Meeting with Chinese Students and Trainees in Moscow”
(November 17, 1957), in English Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking:
Foreign Language Press, 1976), 288. The full quotation is, “The world is yours, as well
as ours, but in the final analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vital-
ity, are in the bloom of life like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is
placed in you . . . The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.”
2 introduction
era to 1966 betray a tendency toward a gradual victory of the collec-

tive spirit over individualistic self-cultivation, and of national salvation
over enlightenment humanism. The young protagonists in these nar-
ratives fulfill their Bildung by merging their individuality with a mass
movement, and find the meaning of their lives by devoting themselves
to revolutionary and communist careers. In contrast, the coming-of-
age narratives written by Su Tong and Yu Hua in the late 1980s, early
1990s, and the twenty-first century demonstrate a reverse tendency.
By highlighting their young protagonists’ autonomy, subjectivity, and
individuality during the Cultural Revolution, Su Tong and Yu Hua
define themselves as being naturally opposed to the collectivism by
which the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) seeks to imple-
ment its authoritarian social and political policies at the expense of
human individuality. Close readings of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s cheng-
zhang xiaoshuo reveal how the old Maoist utopian vision has given
way to an essentially pessimistic view of the future of Chinese young
people coming of age in the late 1960s and 1970s. This dark perspec-
tive casts its shadow upon the optimistic image of the successors to
the cause of proletarian revolution governed by the CCP. In both Su
Tong’s North Side Story (Chengbei didai, 1994) and Yu Hua’s Cries in
the Drizzle (Zai xiyu zhong huhan, 1991), with the Cultural Revolu-
tion as their historical background, teenagers—representing the hope
of society—grow up in a morally degenerate and politically suppressed
society. They are dissatisfied, restless and unable to find meaning in
their lives. Despite being confronted with trials and ordeals that in
another setting would have probably led them to maturity, their goals
remain unclear and their lives mostly meaningless. They wait in vain
for their future to arrive.
Using Su Tong’s North Side Story and Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle
as a departure, I will also discuss and analyze the Bildungsroman ele-
ments in some of the two authors’ novellas, short stories, and better-
known full-length novels, such as Rice (Mi, 1991), My Life as Emperor
(Wo de diwang shengya, 1992), Binu and the Great Wall (Binu, 2006),
The Boat to Redemption (He’an, 2009), To Live (Huozhe, 1993), Chron-
icle of a Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan maixue ji, 1996), and Brothers
(Xiongdi, 2005–2006). Many of these works are not necessarily Bil-
dungsroman in the strict sense of that term. However, they mostly do
engage at some level with the coming-of-age structure. By discuss-
ing these works in the framework of Bildungsroman, I will attempt
to show how the coming-of-age structure has expanded and changed
introduction 3
in the two writers’ fictional oeuvre over their career, and reveal the
connection between their fiction and their real-life coming-of-age
experiences.
By placing Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction in the
theoretical framework of traditional Bildungsroman as a literary genre,
I argue that these coming-of-age narratives share a common quality
as parodistic Bildungsroman with Western novels, such as Thomas
Mann’s (1875–1955) The Magic Mountain. Bildungsroman is a Ger-
man term that means “novel of formation,” “novel of initiation,” or
“novel of education.”2 This type of narrative appears in nearly all major
literary traditions. Scholars and critics such as Hegel, Dilthey, Lukacs
and Bakhtin have all investigated this literary genre in their treatises.
The traditional Bildungsroman follows its hero’s path from childhood
to maturity, usually moving from an initial stage of youthful egoism
and irresponsibility to a final harmonious integration with society. Yet
with Su Tong and Yu Hua, the tradition is turned on its head, because
the young protagonists in their stories never recognize their “identity
and role in the world” or achieve maturity after experiencing various
kinds of ordeal and spiritual crisis.3
In the present book, the term “parodistic Bildungsroman” and the
connotation of parody resonate with those concepts as applied by
both Martin Swales and W. H. Bruford in their analyses of Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In his book The German Bildungsro-
man from Wieland to Hesse, Swales registers the tragic and parodistic
resonance of The Magic Mountain by questioning the process and end-
ing of the protagonist Hans Castorp’s Bildung. Swales maintains that
“Hans Castorp is and remains ‘mittelmässig,’ mediocre, or perhaps
more accurately, undistinguished by any dominant characteristic, pro-
pensity, or quality” after his seven-year sojourn in an alpine sanato-
rium.4 Castorp’s development deviates from “the traditional sense [of
Bildungsroman] in which . . . a novel hero’s development . . . is learning
consistently and cumulatively from his experience to the point where
he can then enact the values he has acquired.”5 In addition, Swales
2
For a brief introduction about the Bildungsroman as a literary genre, see M. H.
Abrams, A Glossary of Literature Terms, 7th ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace College
Publisher, 1999), 193.
3
Ibid.
4
Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978), 119.
5
Ibid., 118.
4 introduction
questions both the cloistered social world in which Castorp constructs

his Bildung and the external or workaday world he finally enters at the
end of his Bildung. He argues that “the ‘hermetic’ and sick world of the
sanatorium” where Castorp has received his education in philosophy
and other higher things in life “bears no relationship to the common
realm of ordinary human encounters and interaction”—the educative
environment in traditional Bildungsroman.6 Furthermore, the battle-
field that Hans Castorp enters at the end of the novel is “a chaotic and
violent confusion” that would not allow him to fulfill his “relationship
with human society.”7 Castorp’s transformation into cannon fodder
for the World War is truly tragic and parodistic compared to the tradi-
tional Bildungsroman, in which the young hero nearly always ends up
in fine spirits and well prepared for whatever challenges the real social
world might foist upon him. In his article “ ‘Bildung’ in The Magic
Mountain,” W. H. Bruford emphasizes the parodistic implication of
the novel by linking Castorp’s aestheticism to a sort of agreeable sick-
ness and death. Bruford argues that The Magic Mountain parodies the
traditional Bildungsroman “in that the hero comes to terms, in the
course of it, not so much with life as with death, or at least with death
as the ever-present shadow of life.”8 These tragic and parodistic ele-
ments, which Swales and Bruford identify in The Magic Mountain,
are also prominent in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction.
Therefore, I use the terms “parody” and “parodistic” in the same vein
as Swales and Bruford do.
In addition, chengzhang xiaoshuo is used as the Chinese counterpart
to the German term Bildungsroman. In order to avoid repetition, the
term “coming-of-age narrative” is also used to refer to Bildungsroman.
In the European literary tradition, Bildungsroman normally refers to
the full-length novel, but in the present context the terms chengzhang
xiaoshuo and “coming-of-age narrative” are not confined to the full-
length novel, but also include the novella and the short story. To avoid
confusion and in order to differentiate the lengths of the works chosen
to be analyzed, when the full-length novel is discussed, the term Bil-
dungsroman is used. Shorter fictional works in the Bildungsroman mode
6
Ibid., 124–125.
7
Ibid., 124.
8
W. H. Bruford, “ ‘Bildung’ in The Magic Mountain,” in Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain, ed. Harold Bloom (New Havern: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 83.
introduction 5
are referred to as “coming-of-age novellas,” “coming-of-age stories,”

or “coming-of-age short stories.”
The methodology of the present work involves a combination of
close readings of original Chinese literary texts and literary analysis
informed by scholarship on the Bildungsroman genre, recent Western-
language and Chinese-language scholarly works on Su Tong and Yu
Hua, as well as drawing from psychological and sociological theories
of adolescence. An important aspect of the present work is an exami-
nation of the historical and cultural contexts of both modern and con-
temporary China and Chinese literature. In addition, I draw Su Tong’s
and Yu Hua’s biographical information from the two authors’ auto-
biographical essays, interviews published in academic journals, and
various scholars’ research articles. Those different sources cross-refer
to each other, and jointly provide a reliable picture of each author’s
real-life experience.
The chief scholarly significance of studying Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s
coming-of-age fiction is threefold. First, this study expands the bound-
aries of scholarship relating to the literary genre of Bildungsroman.
To be sure, the Bildungsroman is a Western literary concept. While
Chinese writers such as Su Tong and Yu Hua may not necessarily have
been deeply influenced by the European tradition, their coming-of-
age fiction bears many affinities with this literary genre. By referring
these two Chinese authors’ fiction to the theoretical corpus of the Bil-
dungsroman, I explore the interaction between the literary genre and
individual Chinese literary works, and demonstrate how these Chi-
nese narratives enrich the Bildungsroman literary genre by providing a
body of tragic and parodistic chengzhang xiaoshuo. With their cultural
and historical particularities, they enrich the Bildungsroman as a lit-
erary genre in particular and world literature in general. Second, the
present study contributes to our understanding of the social history
of the Cultural Revolution. The thematic content of the two authors’
coming-of-age fiction is analyzed, and the authors’ perceived views
about the effects of the Cultural Revolution upon Chinese youth are
evaluated. Readers of these narratives should focus not only on their
young protagonists, but also on the world in which these young people
have lived and found themselves alienated. These narratives provide a
fresh perspective on human suffering in general, and in particular, on
the suffering of the Chinese people through the man-made disaster
of the Cultural Revolution. Third, this study provides a new perspec-
tive from which to read Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s fiction. Through the
6 introduction
lens of Bildungsroman, I will reveal how the two authors have engaged
with the coming-of-age structure or Bildungsroman elements in their
stories at various career stages.
Many insightful research papers and articles have been published
on the writings of Su Tong and Yu Hua. However, most of them
focus either on the authors’ so-called “avant-garde” stories written in
the 1980s, or on Su Tong’s new historical novels such as My Life as
Emperor and Empress Dowager Wu Zetian (Wu Zetian, 1993), his fam-
ily sagas such as the Maple-Poplar Village Series (Fengyangshu cun
xilie) and Rice, or the “women” series such as “Blush” (Hong fen, 1992)
and “Embroidery” (Cixiu, 1993), along with Yu Hua’s more realistic
full-length novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.9 While
these articles make various helpful and interesting assertions about
the works of these two major Chinese writers, unfortunately, there
remains no systematic and comprehensive analysis of Su Tong’s and
Yu Hua’s coming-of-age stories.
9
In her article “On Su Tong,” Wang Haiyan examines how Su Tong’s fiction
uncovers dichotomies of narration versus lyricism, urban versus rural, fatalism versus
defiance, and individual accounts versus group-based histories. See Wang Haiyan,
“Su Tong lun” [On Su Tong], Anqing shifan xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:80–85. In
“A Review at the End of the Century,” Zhang Yingzhong discusses Su Tong’s fiction
of the Toon Street Series, Maple-Poplar Village Series, and his historical series, and
argues that Su Tong is obsessed with “reflecting upon the past.” See Zhang Ying-
zhong, “Shiji mo de huimou” [A Review at the end of the century], Xiandai wenxue
zazhi, 1994, no. 5:30–33. For a discussion of various themes in Su Yong’s stories, see
Zhao Hongqin, “Wu ke taobi: Su Tong yu nanfang” [Nowhere to escape: Su Tong
and the South], Zhejiang shida xuebao, 1994, no. 3:40–44; Huang Jinfu, “Chuzou yu
fanhui: Su Tong xiaoshuo jianlun” [Leaving and returning: a brief discussion of Su
Tong’s stories], Zhejiang shida xuebao, 1994, no. 3:45–47; and Wu Yiqin, “Su Tong
xiaoshuo zhong de shengming yishi” [Implications of life in Su Tong’s stories], Jiangsu
shehui kexue, 1995, no. 1:116–121. Literary criticism of Yu Hua’s full-length novels
has mainly been undertaken by Chinese scholars and critics such as Chen Sihe, Wu
Yiqin and others. Chen Sihe indicates that Yu Hua refashions or revives accounts of
Chinese folk society in these novels. See Chen Sihe, “Yu Hua: you xianfeng xiezuo
zhuanxiang minjian zhihou” [Yu Hua: after transition from avant-garde writing to
narrative on folk society], Wenyi zhengming, 2000, no. 1:68–70; For his part, Wu Yiqin
attempts a comparison of the writing style between Yu Hua’s early stories and his
novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, stressing that the latter work marks Yu Hua’s
farewell to “hypocritical works.” See Wu Yiqin, “Gaobie xuwei de xingshi” [Farewell
to hypocritical form], Wenyi zhengming, 2000, no. 1:71–77. In their writings, the crit-
ics Yu Xian and Zhang Hong discuss one of the most prominent techniques in Yu
Hua’s novels—namely repetition: Yu Xian, “Chongfu de shixue” [Poetic repetition],
Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 1996, no. 4:12–15; Zhang Hong, “‘Xu Sanguan maixue ji’ de
xushi wenti” [Questions on the narrative of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant], Dangdai
zuojia pinglun, 1997, no. 2:19–23.
introduction 7
Despite the neglect of literary critics, both Su Tong and Yu Hua

think highly of their coming-of-age fiction and the influence of their
childhood experiences on their writings. Though the two writers
have drawn upon diverse writing styles and plot arrangements, their
coming-of-age fiction all deals with the theme of an individual’s self-
realization and socialization. As both Su Tong and Yu Hua remarked
in my interviews with them, their writings have been deeply influ-
enced by their childhood experiences during the Cultural Revolution,
and are replete with projections of sufferings they either witnessed or
encountered.10
In an article titled “Drawing upon Childhood,” Su Tong states:
I recall my occluded and lonely childhood with love-hate senti-
ments . . . Whether carried out of love or out of hatred, of all the baggage
carried throughout my life as a writer, the memories of childhood have
perhaps been the heaviest burden in one’s entire suite of luggage. No
matter if these memories are grey or bright, we must carry them along
and treasure them. We have no alternative . . . We are bound to employ
childhood to record some of our most mature thoughts.11
In the preface to the Italian version of Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua
emphasized that this is a book of resurrected memories:
My experience is that writing can constantly evoke memory, and I believe
these memories belong not merely to myself. They are possibly an image
of an era, or a brand left by the world on a person’s spirit . . . Experience is
always more stark and powerful than memory . . . Memory cannot restore
the past. It only reminds us once in a while of what we had before.12
The dearth of scholarship on Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age
fiction is the motive force behind the writing of this book. I hope that
this book’s analysis of the two writers’ fiction with the coming-of-age
theme will fill this void. More importantly, I hope to establish that
Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s constant aim in their writings is to examine
the existence of human beings whom history has tended to margin-
alize. While not necessarily aiming at overt political criticism, their
10
My interview with Yu Hua took place on 6 July 2010 in Beijing; my interview
with Su Tong took place on 12 July 2010 in Shanghai.
11
Su Tong, “Tongnian shenghuo de liyong” [Drawing upon childhood], Shijie
4:163.
12
Yu Hua, “Wo yongyou liangge rensheng” [I have two lives], in Wo nengfou
xiangxin ziji? [Can I believe in myself?] (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1998),
148.
8 introduction
works seek to identify how individuals, especially the young, survived

or failed to survive in the 1970s China.
This book is structured in five chapters corresponding to the dual
comparative frameworks of tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman. The
first two chapters introduce the European Bildungsroman as a literary
genre and review the history of modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo
respectively. These lay a comparative foundation for Chapters Three
and Four, which deal solely with Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-
of-age narratives. The concluding chapter discusses the two authors’
fictional works from two comparative perspectives. The detailed layout
of each chapter is elucidated in the following paragraphs.
Chapter One introduces the Bildungsroman/chengzhang xiaoshuo as
a literary genre. I make an analytical review of various Western criti-
cal perspectives on the nature of Bildungsroman as a literary genre,
and emphasize its crucial tension between outwardness and inward-
ness. This is followed by a further discussion of the differences and
overlap between autobiography, memoir, autobiographical fiction,
and the Bildungsroman. Specifically, I have chosen to base my dis-
cussion on the definitions and theories employed in M. M. Bakhtin’s
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Franco Moretti’s The Way of the
World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Jerome Buckley’s Sea-
son of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, and Mar-
tin Swales’s The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Then
I flesh out the term chengzhang xiaoshuo—the Chinese counterpart
of Bildungsroman—and outline its importance in modern and con-
temporary Chinese literature. More importantly, I formulate my own
definition of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo and my criteria of selecting
works for discussion in this book.
In Chapter Two, I begin with an examination of the Chinese lit-
erary tradition of autobiographical and biographical writings in pre-
modern Chinese literature. I argue that classical Chinese biographies
and autobiographies prepared the soil for the rise and efflorescence of
the Bildungsroman form during the twentieth century. Next, I discuss
the literary context of modern Chinese fiction from the May Fourth
Movement in 1919 to the 1990s, exploring the changing patterns of
the chengzhang xiaoshuo within different social discourses in mod-
ern China. In the process of reviewing the history of modern Chi-
nese chengzhang xiaoshuo, I argue that the fictional representation of
youth from the May Fourth era to 1966 reveals a gradual withdrawal
of individualistic subjectivity and a surfacing of a collectivist spirit.
introduction 9
In contrast, chengzhang xiaoshuo written during the 1980s and 1990s

herald a reversion to a more individualistic and less collectivistic spirit,
returning to a greater emphasis on subjectivity overall.
Chapter Three focuses on Su Tong. I unfold a thematic analysis of
Su Tong’s chengzhang xiaoshuo embodied in his Toon Street Series
(Xiangchunshu jie xilie) and his latest full-length novel The Boat to
Redemption. The thematic analyses of these narratives are interwoven
with relevant biographical material and literary viewpoints associated
with Su Tong. The Toon Street Series includes the full-length novel
North Side Story, and such short stories as “Memories of Mulberry
Garden” (Sangyuan liunian, 1984), “Roller Skating Away” (Cheng hua-
lunche yuanqu, 1991), “The Sad Dance” (Shangxin de wudao, 1991),
and “An Afternoon Incident” (Wuhou gushi, 1991). Toon Street is
not only a geographical setting for Su Tong’s stories, but also signi-
fies a specific temporal space—1966–1976, the period of the Cultural
Revolution. As Su Tong writes in one of his stories, “Toon Street is
a hallmark of southern China; it is also a symbol of degeneration.”13
It represents the epitome of a spirit of hopelessness in early-to-mid
1970s China. The teenagers growing up in this street unreflectively
demonstrate their autonomy, individuality and subjectivity amidst
social and political chaos. None of the trials the young heroes experi-
ence can be used to develop their fortitude or move them upward in
a trajectory of ascent. Instead, these experiences lead only to reversals,
and even sometimes destruction. In addition, this chapter contains
some discussion of Su Tong’s better-known works, such as Rice, My
Life as Emperor, and Binu and the Great Wall, along with highlighting
some Bildungsroman elements in these narratives. These sections help
flesh out how the coming-of-age structure developed, expanded and
changed in Su Tong’s other fictional works over his career.
Chapter Four deals with Yu Hua’s full-length novels, Cries in the
Drizzle and Brothers, and four short stories entitled “On the Road at
Eighteen” (Shibasui chumen yuanxing, 1986), “The April Third Inci-
dent” (Siyue sanri shijian, 1986), “Timid as a Mouse” (Wo danxiao
ru shu, 1994), and “I Have No Name of My Own” (Wo meiyou ziji de
mingzi, 1994). I argue that in these narratives Yu Hua focuses more
on the psychological development of the teenage characters; overall,
13
Su Tong, Nanfang de duoluo [The degeneration of the South] (Taibei: Yuanliu
chuban gongsi, 1992), 118.
10 introduction
these works constitute a haunting history of fear, restlessness, and day-

dreaming. Yu Hua presents a philosophical reflection on youth and
their maturity in a time of trouble. Maturity is no longer perceived
as an acquisition, but as a loss. I also interlard biographical material
and literary viewpoints of Yu Hua into my analysis of his fiction. This
helps demonstrate the connection between Yu Hua’s real-life coming-
of-age experiences and his fiction. This chapter also contains some
brief discussion of Yu Hua’s more famous novels such as To Live and
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, indicating how these novels resonate
with the structure of his coming-of-age narratives.
In the final and concluding Chapter Five, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s
fictional works are discussed from two comparative perspectives. I draw
connections and reveal contrasts between these two Chinese writers’
works and earlier modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, as well as the
European Bildungsroman tradition, and explain exactly how Su Tong’s
and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo are tragic and parodistic.
The negative outcomes of the youthful adventures presented in Su
Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo provide an alternative per-
spective to flesh out the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution on
the Chinese people, especially the young. Over the past three decades,
numerous books have been written to recount the Chinese people’s
sufferings during the Cultural Revolution in such formats as the mem-
oir, oral history, and fiction. These works include Feng Jicai’s Voices
from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolu-
tion, Rae Yang’s Spider Eaters: A Memoir, and Zhang Xianliang’s Half
of Man Is Woman (Nanren de yiban shi nüren, 1985). In academia,
some Chinese historians have asserted that “the Cultural Revolution
has had a riveting impact on the fledgling field of contemporary Chi-
nese studies.”14 For example, Anita Chan completed a substantial trea-
tise on the Red Guards in Children of Mao: Personality Development
and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation as early as 1985.15
More recent studies such as Roderick MacFarquhar’s and Michael
Schoenhals’ Mao’s Last Revolution and Joseph W. Esherick’s, Paul G.
14
Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz and Andrew G. Walder, The Chinese Cul-
tural Revolution as History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), I. The
essays in this volume reflect a new era of research by scholars who have immersed
themselves in the flood of new source materials from the Cultural Revolution.
15
Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in
the Red Guard Generation (London: Macmillan, 1985).
introduction 11
Pickowicz’s and Andrew G. Walder’s The Chinese Cultural Revolution

as History have undertaken more systematic and comprehensive exam-
inations of this historical event.16 As keen social observers and creative
writers, Su Tong and Yu Hua have chosen a specific literary genre—
the Bildungsroman—to visualize the tragic coming-of-age experiences
of Chinese adolescents in a time of tremendous social upheaval. Their
coming-of-age stories compel us to consider the cultural, educational
and psychological consequences of the Cultural Revolution upon the
writers’ own peers as well as upon later generations.
16
Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
CHAPTER ONE
BILDUNGSROMAN/CHENGZHANG XIAOSHUO
AS A LITERARY GENRE
When discussing post-Mao fiction, especially the experimental writ-

ings by Yu Hua and Su Tong from the late 1980s, critics in both China
and US have noticed the “youth consciousness” or “youth mentality”
embodied in these writers’ narratives.1 This “youth mentality” is
understood as a response to a spirit of “pervasive restlessness” in con-
temporary China, whereby “the entire society slips out of paternalistic
protection and unity, the sense of family is disappearing, and people
are obliged to secure a position of their own.”2 This restlessness is
intensified by the marketized economy and a related growth of insen-
sitivity toward cultural values within society. Yu Hua’s first nationally
renowned short story, “On the Road at Eighteen,” reflects this youth
mentality and has been cogently interpreted as a “miniature of the
Bildungsroman.”3 In similar fashion, all of Su Tong’s narratives in the
Toon Street Series deal with various coming-of-age experiences within
his generation. This youth mentality and the re-emergence of Chinese
fiction dealing with a young hero’s coming-of-age experience in the
1980s highlight a literary genre that will be the focus of this book—the
Bildungsroman or chengzhang xiaoshuo.
In this study, I will draw upon Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s full-length
novels North Side Story and Cries in the Drizzle and some of their
coming-of-age short narratives as a point of departure for systemati-
cally exploring how the two authors have exploited the conventional
1
Chinese critics Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua are probably the first to discuss the
“youth mentality” or “youth consciousness.” Their analyses and arguments have been
frequently cited by other critics and scholars. For detailed discussions, see Wang Zheng
and Xiao Hua, “Hubu de qingnian yishi: Yu Su Tong youguan de huo wuguan de”
[The complementary youth consciousness: Things relevant or irrelevant to Su Tong],
Dushu [Reading] (July/August 1989): 102–107; Xiaobing Tang, “Residual Modernism:
Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 7,
no. 1 (Spring 1993): 12–13; Rong Cai, “The Lonely Traveler Revisited in Yu Hua’s
Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 10, no.1/2 (Spring/Fall 1998): 178.
2
Wang and Xiao, “Hubu de qingnian yishi: Yu Su Tong youguan de huo wuguan
de,” 103–104.
3
Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese
Fiction,” 12.
14 chapter one
genre of Bildungsroman to visualize and conceptualize their personal

real-life coming-of-age experiences from the Cultural Revolution.
I will also explore how the generic structure of the Bildungsroman has
been developed and transformed during the two authors’ careers by
discussing and analyzing their other narratives. Analysis of Su Tong’s
and Yu Hua’s works within the context of the theoretical corpus of
the Bildungsroman/chengzhang xiaoshuo is necessary not only because
the Bildungsroman framework is indispensable to an understanding of
Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s work, but also because the “ ‘Chineseness’ of
these texts is historicized and becomes relational to the outside world”
when they are placed in comparative perspective.4
The interaction between a literary genre and an individual literary
work that fits within the genre is one of the major concerns in this
study. When Martin Swales discusses the German Bildungsroman, he
points out that an understanding of the concept of genre is requisite
to “any understanding of literary texts,” and that the vitality of any
genre lies in the interaction between general “expectation” and specific
practice, between theory and its “individuated realization in an actual
work.”5 The genre provides a certain “expectation” for the individual
novels, and in turn, these novels “vivify” that “expectation” by means
of their “creative engagement with it.”6 No matter how much or to
what degree the actual work has fulfilled a reader’s expectations of
it, the specific literary work will help to illuminate the genre’s fea-
tures. The genre serves as a “structuring principle within the palpable
stuff of an individual literary creation.”7 However, when we study an
individual work through the lens of one specific literary genre, the
first question we confront is the applicability of this genre to the work
under discussion, especially when the individual work is in a differ-
ent socio-historical setting from where the genre originally emerged.
These are the questions need to be answered before this study can
proceed forward: Can we apply the generic framework of the Bil-
dungsroman, which emerged in European middle-class culture in the
nineteenth-century, to the fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua written in
4
Yingjin Zhang, “Introduction: Engaging Chinese Comparative Literature and
Cultural Studies,” in China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative
Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7.
5
Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978), 10–12.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
bildungsroman as a literary genre 15
the PRC during the 1980s and 1990s? How can we justify the retroac-
tive applicability of the term chengzhang xiaoshuo, which had not been
extensively used by critics until the 1990s, to Chinese literary works
from the early twentieth century? In addition, how relevant are the
respective authors’ personal coming-of-age experiences to their fic-
tion? These questions will be addressed and clarified as this chapter
traces the history of Bildungsroman and its Chinese counterpart cheng-
zhang xiaoshuo. I will first explore the origin and development of the
Bildungsroman as a literary genre, review its principal thematic con-
cerns, and respond to some crucial questions that have been raised in
the writings of such scholars as M. M. Bakhtin, Martin Swale, Franco
Moretti, Jerome Buckley, Jeffrey Sammons, and Fritz Martini. Next, I
will flesh out the term chengzhang xiaoshuo and outline its importance
in modern and contemporary Chinese literature.
Before looking into the emergence of the genre Bildungsroman in
nineteenth-century Europe, it is necessary to understand the dialecti-
cal relation between literary genre and social reality. P. N. Medvedev
and M. M. Bakhtin have argued that “genre appraises reality and real-
ity clarifies genre.”8 A literary genre is the conceptualization or visu-
alization of some aspects of reality, and the creation of new genres
is more of a response to “social changes in real social life” than the
mere “result of purely mechanical processes or the revival of neglected
devices.”9 Social changes bring about new views of experience, and
result in a broadening array of genres in literature as well as oral dis-
course. Once a new literary genre arises, it can provide the reader with
a new lens with which to observe some aspects of reality, and can
“become common in spheres remote from [its] origin.”10 An under-
standing of this dialectical relation between literary genre and social
reality helps explain the emergence of both European Bildungsroman
novels in the nineteenth-century and Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo in
the twentieth-century.
The emergence of Bildungsroman novels was a response to moder-
nity in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century. In his study of this
8
P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship:
A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 136.
9
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 277.
10
Ibid.
16 chapter one
literary genre, Franco Moretti calls Bildungsroman the “symbolic form”

of modernity.11 In traditional society, a youth was usually considered
merely biologically distinct from the adult; generational differences
in patterns of cognition were generally ignored. Young people were
expected simply to imitate their parents’ lifestyles and career path. This
is a “pre-scribed” approach to the life stage of youth in which there
is no culture or subculture to distinguish and emphasize the worth of
being young.12 However, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Europe’s
industrial revolution brought major social changes to traditional Euro-
pean society, the countryside was increasingly being abandoned for
the city, and the world of work was changing at an incredible and
incessant pace. Modern young people were thus facing an uncertain
exploration of societal space and a seemingly unlimited potentiality for
self-transformation through apprenticeship, travel, or adventure. This
was in sharp contrast with the “colorless and uneventful socialization
of the old youth” prior to the great changes wrought by the industrial
revolution. Under the new social and economic circumstances, the life
stage of youth became “a specific image of modernity” because of its
attributes of mobility and inner restlessness. The great narrative of the
Bildungsroman thus came into being to correspond to the “symbolic
centrality” of the life stage of youth in modernity. Among the charac-
teristics of the modern life stage of youth, the Bildungsroman abstracts
a symbolic life stage of youth that is epitomized by the attributes of
mobility and interiority.13 We will see in my later discussion, a narra-
tive in the Bildungsroman genre always develops around the tension
between mobility (outwardness) and interiority (inwardness), between
socialization and individuality.
Youth is a period of life that is full of contradictory developments—
“individuality and socialization, autonomy and normality, interiority
and objectification.”14 In his introduction to Season of Youth: The Bil-
dungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Jerome Buckley calls the sea-
son of youth “the space between.”15 This notion was inspired by John
Keats’ words: “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
11
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture
(London: Verso, 1987), 5.
12
Ibid., 4.
13
Ibid., 4–5.
14
Ibid., 16.
15
Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to
Golding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), vii.
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in

which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life
uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.”16 The space between childhood
and adulthood is far from happy; young people are easily “bruised and
wounded” when they encounter reality. “The happy season of youth,”
argues Buckley, is merely “an illusion of those who have lost it.”17
Bildungsroman novels first appeared in Germany in the last third
of the eighteenth century. They were “principally concerned with the
spiritual and psychological development of the young protagonist.”18
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was pivotal in the develop-
ment of this genre in Germany. Dozens of monographs and hundreds
of articles deal with the development and meaning of the type of novel
that uses Goethe’s work as its model.
Even though Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was written
as early as 1795, the term Bildungsroman was not coined until the 1810s
by a then obscure professor of rhetoric in Dorpat, Germany: Karl von
Morgenstern.19 Morgenstern’s invention of the term Bildungsroman
was a theoretical response to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice-
ship. Morgenstern was the first scholar to define the Bildungsroman
as a genre, and explains what the term means in this comment on
Goethe’s work:
It will justly bear the name Bildungsroman firstly and primarily on
account of its thematic material, because it portrays the Bildung [forma-
tion/education/ acculturation] of the hero in its beginning and growth to
a certain stage of completeness; and also secondly because it is by virtue
of this portrayal that it furthers the reader’s Bildung to a much greater
extent than any other kind of novel.20
Morgenstern thus linked the word Bildung to both the hero and the
reader. Martini further points out that Morgenstern’s creation of the
term resulted from his defense of “the novel as a moral means of
16
John Keats, The Poem of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 102–103.
17
Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, vii.
18
James Hardin, “An Introduction,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungs-
roman, ed. James Hardin (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), ix.
19
Fritz Martini, “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory,” in Reflection and Action:
Essays on the Bildungsroman, 1–25.
20
Lothar Kohn, Entwicklungs—und Bildungsroman (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), 5.
18 chapter one
education, as opposed to the conception of the novel as mere enter-

tainment, pleasure, fantasy, and as an escape from reality.”21
Though Morgenstern was the first scholar to introduce the term
Bildungsroman in a formal and systematic manner, this kind of novel
had already been analyzed by the critic Friedrich von Blanckenburg in
his “Essay on the Novel” as early as 1774. The source of this advance
in theoretical understanding of the novel theory lay in Blanckenburg’s
appreciation of Christoph Martin Wieland’s Agathon (1767), and “the
way in which it overtly (and thematically) transforms the traditional
novel genre by investing it with a new psychological and intellectual
seriousness.”22 For Blanckenburg, Wieland’s principal achievement
resided in his ability to get inside a character to portray the complexity
of human potential. Through interaction with the outside world, this
complexity of human potential yields the tangible process of human
growth and change. Although Blanckenburg did not use the term
Bildungsroman, he revealed a clear understanding of such a novel’s
fundamental features when he developed his theory of the novel of
inwardness. Blanckenburg argued that a novel should be evaluated “on
the basis of the extent to which it portrays the inner soul, the inner
history of the person portrayed.”23
However, it was above all Wilhelm Dilthey who brought the term
Bildungsroman into general usage in 1870. Dilthey derived his defi-
nition of the Bildungsroman from his analysis of Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship:
A regulated development within the life of the individual is observed;
each of its stages has its own intrinsic value, and is at the same time the
basis for a higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as
the necessary growth points through which the individual must pass on
his way to maturity and harmony.24
In Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience/1906),
Dilthey identifies the theme of the Bildungsroman as the history of a
young man
21
Martini, “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory,” 24.
22
Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 13.
23
Martini, “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory,” 21.
24
Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Höl-
derlin (Leipzig & Bern: Teubner, 1913), 394. English translation is quoted from Swales,
The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 3.
Who enters into life in a blissful state of ignorance, seeks related souls,
experiences friendship and love, struggles with the hard realities of the
world and thus armed with a variety of experiences, matures, finds him-
self and his mission in the world.25
There are some limitations in Dilthey’s definition of this genre.
For example, it is questionable whether the “fulfillment and har-
mony” to which Dilthey refers should be the “necessary goal of the
Bildungsroman.”26 Despite the narrowness of Dilthey’s gloss for the
Bildungsroman, it remains the most frequently cited definition of this
genre. In the wake of Dilthey’s contribution, the term Bildungsroman
has been applied ever more widely in literary scholarship.
In Germany, the early Bildungsroman soon generated several
noticeable subtypes. For instance, the Entwicklungsroman or “novel
of development” chronicles a young person’s overall socialization and
maturation in the gradual transformation into an adult; the Erziehun-
gsroman or “pedagogical novel” depicts a youth’s training and formal
education; and the Kunstlerroman or “artist novel” recounts the early
formative years of an artist.27
Some scholars who have been cautious in applying the term Bil-
dungsroman have attempted to distinguish it from these designa-
tions of subtypes or subcategories. For instance, Melitta Gerhard has
attempted to make Bildungsroman more precise by categorizing it
as a subgenre of the Entwicklungsroman. According to Gerhard, the
Entwicklungsroman is the more general term, embracing those novels
that treat the protagonist’s maturation through his confrontation with
the world. Gerhard suggests that the Bildungsroman is a specific sort
of Entwicklungsroman that flourished during the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.28
On the other hand, Martin Swales prefers Bildungsroman over
Erziehungsroman and Entwicklungsroman because of the Bildungsro-
man’s cultural and philosophical features. The Erziehungsroman deals
with the educational process in a specific and limited way—“a certain
set of values to be acquired, of lessons to be learned.”29 However, in a
remarkable fusion of theory and practice, the Bildungsroman reveals
25
Hardin, “An Introduction,” xiv.
26
Swales, “Introduction,” in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 3.
27
Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 13.
28
Hardin, “An Introduction,” xvi.
29
20 chapter one
the growth of the young protagonist by focusing on the character’s

inner life and psychological development. The word Bildung connotes
the cultural “values by which a man lives.”30 Compared with Bildung-
sroman, the term Entwicklungsroman is fairly neutral and bears less
“emotional and intellectual” flavor than does Bildungsroman.31
In recent decades, many literary critics and scholars have doubted
not only whether a given individual novel is a Bildungsroman, but
also whether or not the genre itself is as “important and prevalent” as
many earlier critics had assumed. In his article entitled “The Appren-
ticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe,’ ”
Dennis F. Mahoney enumerates several scholars’ arguments. For
example, upon examining various nineteenth century German nov-
els, Jeffrey Sammons concludes that the Bildungsroman is a “phan-
tom genre.” Harmut Steinecke points out that “German novelists and
theoreticians tried to find compromises between Wilhelm Meister and
the Western European novel of society” before Dilthey brought the
term Bildungsroman into general usage in 1870. Only after 1870 did
novels of the Wilhelm Meister tradition become viewed as “typically
German.” Furthermore, scholars such as Hans Vaget have proposed
the term “novel of socialization” to delineate “the contents and objec-
tives of the novels in question and [link] them to developments within
other European literature.”32
In spite of the lack of consensus between scholars on the connota-
tions of the term Bildungsroman, there is nonetheless one area of agree-
ment, namely that the interaction of outward experience and inward
reflection is the main concern of the Bildungsroman as a novelistic
genre. With this consensus in mind, I shall thus turn to a brief discus-
sion of such aspects of outwardness (plot) and inwardness (theme) as
humanism, discursiveness, and educational value.
Jerome Buckley summarizes the principal elements of the plot of
the Bildungsroman as follows: “Childhood, the conflict of generations,
provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by
love, the search for a vocation and a philosophy of life.”33 The child
responds to these “experiences that might alter the entire direction of
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Dennis F. Mahoney, “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of
the ‘Age of Goethe,’ ” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 100.
33
his growing mind and eventually influence for better or for worse his
whole maturity.”34 Among the narrative elements, we need to pay spe-
cial attention to the absence of fatherhood, setting out on a journey,
the tension between potentiality and actuality, and the accommoda-
tion between the young protagonist and the social world.
The role that fatherhood plays in the Bildungsroman is noteworthy.
The growing child in many nineteenth-century English novels is often
orphaned, fatherless, or at least alienated from his father.35 “The loss of
the father, either by death or alienation, usually symbolizes or parallels
a loss of faith in the hero’s home and family and leads inevitably to
the search for a substitute parent or creed.”36 Therefore, “the defection
of the father becomes accordingly the principal motive force in the
assertion of the youth’s independence.”37
Setting out on a journey is another key element in the plot of the
Bildungsroman. According to Buckley, “The journey from home is in
some degree the flight from provinciality” to a larger society, as well
as the flight from the bonds imposed by the parental generation, with
whom the protagonist has usually been in conflict.”38 This sort of pro-
vincial protagonist often initially enters the city in a spirit of bewil-
derment and credulity. Buckley accentuates the double role that the
city plays in the young man’s life: “It is both the agent of liberation
and a source of corruption . . . The city, which seems to promise infi-
nite variety and newness, all too often brings a disenchantment more
alarming and decisive than any dissatisfaction with the narrowness of
provincial life.”39
Besides the narrative elements of fatherhood and setting out on the
journey, the tension between “potentiality and actuality” is also cen-
tral to the growth of an individual hero in a Bildungsroman novel. On
the one hand, the Bildungsroman explores “the sheer complexity of
individual potentiality”; on the other hand, it recognizes that “practi-
cal reality—marriage, family, career—is a necessary dimension of the
hero’s self-realization.”40 This tension becomes part of the ordeal with
which the youth has to grapple in order to achieve maturity. At the
34
Ibid., 19.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid., 20.
39
Ibid.
40
22 chapter one
end of most Bildungsroman narratives, the young protagonist achieves

a reasonable accommodation between the competing priorities of the
individual and society. This is especially common in the English novel
of adolescence, in which there is always “a certain practical accommo-
dation between the hero and the social world around him.”41
“Accommodation” does not mean resolving the tension between
the individual and society, but rather “learn[ing] to live with it, and
even transform[ing] it into a tool for survival.”42 In other words, the
protagonist “realizes his deepest interiority in the outside world,” and
recognizes “the discrepancy between the interiority and the world.”43
In the end, the protagonist finally makes peace with his reality. In
his article, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists,” Jeffrey Sammons
emphasizes the “evolutionary change within the self ”:
Bildung is not merely the accumulation of experience, not merely matu-
ration in the form of fictional biography. There must be a sense of evo-
lutionary change within the self, a teleology of individuality, even if the
novel, as many do, comes to doubt or deny the possibility of achieving
a gratifying result.44
The concern of the Bildungsroman is the growth process itself, not
any particular goal that adulthood may make possible. “It does not
matter whether the process of Bildung succeeds or fails, whether the
protagonist achieves an accommodation with life and society or not.”45
In this sense, it allows the novel to preclude any simple sense of final-
ity, of “over and done with.”46 Not surprisingly, many Bildungsroman
narratives remain open-ended.
The Bildungsroman is a noticeably subjective genre focusing on
the protagonist’s inner life and psychological development. The term
Bildung “involves a belief in inwardness as the source of human
distinction.”47 In 1923, Thomas Mann commented on the German
reverence for Bildung:
41
Ibid., 34.
42
Morreti, The Way of the World, 10.
43
George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the
Forms of Great Epic Literature (Bambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), 136.
44
Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a
Clarification,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 41.
45
Ibid.
46
47
Ibid., 151.
The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best-known and also
the most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness. It is no accident
that it was the Germans who gave to the world the intellectually stimu-
lating and very humane literary form which we call the Bildungsroman.
Western Europe has its novel of social criticism, to which the Germans
regard this other type as their own special counterpart: it is at the same
time an autobiography, a confession. The inwardness, the “Bildung” of a
German implies introspectiveness; an individualistic cultural conscience;
consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and per-
fecting of one’s own personality or, in religious terms, for the salvation
and justification of one’s own life.48
Bildungsroman novels demonstrate “an intense and sustained concern
for the growth of an individual in all his experiential complexity and
potentiality.”49 And “it is precisely this interest in the inner life and
processes of the individual that confers poetic seriousness.”50
The Bildungsroman was born of the humanistic ideal of late eight-
eenth-century Germany. According to Sammons, “the concept of Bil-
dung is intensely bourgeois; it carries with it many assumptions about
the autonomy and relative integrity of the self, its potential self-creative
energies, its relative range of opinions within material, social, even
psychological determinants.”51 Therefore, the Bildungsroman is closely
related to “the early bourgeois, humanistic concept of the shaping of
the individual self from its innate potentialities through acculturation
and social experience to the threshold of maturity.”52 It is a novel form
with “a concern for the whole man unfolding organically in all his
complexity and richness.”53
Closely related to the inwardness of the Bildungsroman is its intel-
lectual flavor. Novels such as Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield
not only present the growth of a young protagonist, but also explore
the “nature and the limitation of human consciousness.”54 They reveal
“the protagonist’s capacity for self-reflection . . . [which] is part of the
whole living process in which he is embedded.”55 This self-reflective
48
Quoted by Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 159.
49
50
Ibid.
51
Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarifica-
tion,” 42.
52
Ibid, 41.
53
54
Ibid., 35.
55
Ibid., 36.
24 chapter one
discursiveness, preoccupied with the development of mind and soul,

in turn, has an educational impact upon the reader. Says Lukacs:
This form has been called the “novel of education”—rightly, because its
action has to be a conscious, controlled process aimed at a certain goal:
the development of qualities in men which would never blossom without
the active intervention of other men and circumstances; whilst the goal
thus attained is in itself formative and encouraging to others—is itself a
means of education.56
It is not only essential for the protagonist of the Bildungsroman to
reflect throughout his ordeals and trials, but also crucial for the reader
to reflect.
Even though novels written in the tradition of Wilhelm Meister
were numerous and important in nineteenth-century Germany, the
Bildungsroman was by no means the only kind of novel to come out
of the country in that period of time. Nor should it be regarded as a
narrowly German literary practice. We find this style of novel in Eng-
lish, French, and other European literature from the late eighteenth
to the early twentieth century, in such works as Stendhal’s The Red
and the Black, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on
the Floss, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and David Copperfield,
Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and Thomas Mann’s The
Magic Mountain.
One could also explore the influence of the Bildungsroman on the
genres of biography, autobiography, memoir, and the biographical or
autobiographical novel. M. H. Abrams has tried to distinguish these
literary genres by emphasizing the nuances of the contents in his Glos-
sary of Literary Terms:
Late in the seventeenth century, John Dryden defined biography neatly
as “the history of particular men’s lives.” The term now connotes a rela-
tively full account of a particular person’s life, involving the attempt to
set forth character, temperament, and milieu, as well as the subject’s
activities and experiences . . . Autobiography is a biography written by the
subject about himself or herself. It is to be distinguished from the mem-
oir, in which the emphasis is not on the author’s developing self but on
the people and events that the author has known or witnessed, and also
from the private diary or journal, which is a day-to-day record of the
56
Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of
Great Epic Literature, 135.
events in one’s life, generally written for personal use and satisfaction,
with little or no thought of publication.57
It is sometimes difficult to draw a sharp line between autobiography
and the autobiographical novel. Buckley has tried to distinguish one
from the other by means of the differing approaches to narration
adopted in the autobiography versus the autobiographical novel. He
argues that the autobiographer is typically “the older man, indulging
in fond retrospect, often more than a little sentimental in his view
of his youth, recalling what it pleases him to remember.”58 The auto-
biographer is pretty much limited by his own point of view of his
own experience, and has to be very self-conscious “through modesty,
through fear of unwanted self-exposure,” and owing to fear of being
criticized as “egotistical.”59
Compared with the autobiographer, the autobiographical novelist
has a distinct advantage in being able to freely “conceal or reveal what
he will of his past by assigning to his hero some of his own acts and
feelings and inventing as many others as he chooses to complete a dra-
matic characterization.”60 In contrast to the relatively senior autobiog-
rapher recalling his memorable past, the “autobiographical novelist is
usually a younger man, nearer in time to his initiation, self-protectively
more ironic, still mindful of the growing pains of adolescence, repro-
ducing as accurately as possible the turbulence of the space between
childhood and early manhood.”61 Meanwhile, he must keep the fiction
independent of himself as an author.62
From this review, we can see that biography, autobiography, mem-
oir, diary, and biographical or autobiographical novels share common
thematic concerns with the Bildungsroman. One could even label them
as Bildungsroman when they are profoundly engaged in the explora-
tion of values, ideas, and the hero’s growth process, inwardness, sub-
jectivity, and philosophical traits.
However, in Bakhtin’s article, “The Bildungsroman and its Signif-
icance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of
the Novel),” the Russian critic identifies the fundamental differences
57
Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 22.
58
Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 25–26.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid., 26.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
26 chapter one
between the Bildungsroman and other related genres, particularly the

biographical novel, the travel novel, and the novel of ordeal. The dif-
ferences revolve around the “dynamic unity” versus the “static unity”
of the hero’s image.63 The biographical novel focuses either on “deeds,
feats, merits, and creative accomplishments” or “on the structure
of the hero’s destiny,” while “the hero himself remains essentially
unchanged.”64 As for the travel novel, Bakhtin indicates that it empha-
sizes “a purely spatial and static conception of the world’s diversity”
with the “absence of historical time.” The hero is just “a point moving
in space” and “has no essential distinguishing characteristics.”65 Simi-
larly, in the novel of ordeal, the hero remains “complete and unchang-
ing” throughout the novel, and his relatively static qualities are merely
being “tested and verified,” instead of being developed or shaped. In
sum, Bakhtin registers the static and constant nature of the hero—
“ready-made and unchanging”—in the biographical novel, the travel
novel, and the novel of ordeal. In sharp contrast, Bakhtin accentuates
the dynamic and changing nature of the hero in the Bildungsroman.
Here, “the changes in the hero himself ” and his personal evolution
over genuine national-historical time acquire significance in the plot.
The Bildungsroman reveals “the assimilation of real historical time and
the assimilation of historical man that takes place in that time.”66 In
other words, it is the interaction between ourwardness and inwardness
that defines the genre.
The Bildungsroman has also attracted the attention of feminist writ-
ers and critics in the twentieth century. The genre has been called “the
most salient form for literature influenced by neo-feminism”67 and
“the most popular form of feminist fiction.”68 Feminist critics have
explored a number of novels that deal with a woman’s search for self-
identity and values. In these narratives, during the heroine’s quest for
“self-knowledge and self-realization,” not only does she encounter
63
M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59.
64
Ibid., 17.
65
Ibid., 10–11.
66
Ibid., 19.
67
Ellen Morgan, “Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel,”
in Image of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon
(Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 183–85.
68
Barbara A. White, Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 195.
outward difficulties such as “an uncomprehending husband [or] eco-

nomic dependence”; she also struggles with “the elusiveness of the
total self ” and “human cognition.”69 The critics analyze these narra-
tives in the light of both Bildungsroman criticism and feminist theo-
ries. For example, in The Voyage In, a collection of essays on “fiction
of female development” complied in 1983, Dilthey’s definition of the
Bildungsroman is accused of being sexist because women have often
not been afforded the same opportunities as men, such as leaving the
countryside for the city, severing family ties, or playing an active role
in society. Citing a number of English and American novels of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the authors of The Voyage In set
forth a definition of “the fiction of female development . . . tak[ing]
into consideration specifically female psychological and sociological
theories.”70 James Hardin concludes that “in effect, a form of female
Bildungsroman is constructed that roughly parallels the general the-
matic and structure of the ‘male’ variety.”71
This outline of the development of the Bildungsroman genre reveals
both the formal characteristics and thematic concerns of the genre.
More importantly, it indicates that the emergence of the narratives of
Bildungsroman genre is a response to the historical condition of moder-
nity in nineteenth-century European society. This revelation will help
us understand the emergence of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo in early
twentieth-century China.72 As in Europe, the appearance of Chinese
Bildungsroman narratives in the early twentieth century is the Chinese
writers’ response to the rise of a new identity of youth as a key stage
of life as well as Chinese intellectuals’ vision of rejuvenating an old
Chinese civilization so as to build a newly modernizing nation-state.
The “youth mentality” or “youth consciousness” detected by critics
in the narratives of Su Tong, Yu Hua and their contemporary writers
has long been manifested in the stories written by authors such as Ding
Ling (1904–1986) and Yu Dafu (1896–1945) as early as in the 1920s.
69
70
Hardin, “An Introduction,” xvii.
71
Ibid.
72
Some research articles have discussed the youthful images in the narratives writ-
ten in early twentieth century, especially the lonely young travelers. See Rong Cai,
“The Lonely Traveler Revisited in Yu Hua’s Fiction.” Also see Leo Ou-fan Lee, “The
Solitary Traveler: Images of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature,” in Expressions of
Self in Chinese Literature, eds. Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985), 282–307.
28 chapter one
The emergence of the Chinese Bildungsroman paralleled the emer-

gence of the May Fourth generation. The term youth was endowed
with strong historical and political implications when Liang Qichao
(1873–1929) eulogized the young and christened China “a young
nation-state” in his essay “Ode to Young China,” (Shaonian Zhongguo
shuo, 1900), thereby attempting to insert China into a “global image
of a modern world.”73
Chinese youth discourse was instrumental to the implementation of
all kinds of new “political projects to modernize China,” particularly
in the wake of the May Fourth movement of 1919.74 Youth discourse
finds its embodiment in young people with identities as “modern stu-
dent,” “new youth,” and “revolutionary youth” in different historical
periods.75 Celebrated cultural figures such as Lu Xun (1881–1936), Hu
Shi (1891–1962) and Guo Moruo (1892–1978) all belonged to this new
generation of youth-oriented Chinese. With the launch of the journal
Qingnian zazhi (Youth Magazine) by Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) in Sep-
tember 1915 (renamed Xin qingnian [New Youth] the following year),
the typical identity of Chinese youths changed from one of “modern
student” in the Western-style new schools to that of enlightened “new
youth.” This journal became a base for theoretical developments in
new youth discourse. While retaining its political symbolism, the term
youth took on additional and diverse cultural and intellectual dimen-
sions: “independence, dynamism, and even aggressiveness, and urg-
ing a radical revolt against various aspects of the Chinese tradition.”76
Under these socio-historical circumstances, Chinese writers of the May
Fourth generation conceptualized and visualized youth-oriented social
change in their creative writing. They produced a corpus of fiction that
fits smoothly into the genre of Bildungsroman. A detailed discussion
of various characteristics and patterns of development in Chinese Bil-
73
Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the National Discourse of Modernity: the His-
torical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996),
37. “Shaonian zhongguo shuo” was originally published on Feb. 10, 1900 in Qingyi
bao (The China discussion). For more about Liang Qichao’s thoughts, see Joseph R.
Levenson’s Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1959).
74
For detailed discussion of the formation of the youth discourse in the early
twentieth-century, see Mingwei Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and
the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005), 10.
75
Ibid., 26–54.
76
Lin Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in
the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 65.
dungsroman from the May Fourth era down to contemporary times

will be presented in Chapter Two.
As a literary genre, the term Bildungsroman was introduced to Chi-
nese readers a few years later than the Bildungsroman novel, a roman-
tic version of this genre—Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther, was
first translated into Chinese by Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in 1922.
The genre was formally introduced in the summer of 1943, when the
poet and scholar Feng Zhi’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship appeared. In his preface to the translation, Feng Zhi
rendered the terms Bildungsroman and Entwicklungsroman as xiuyang
xiaoshuo (novel of cultivation) and fazhan xiaoshuo (novel of devel-
opment) respectively, offering Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as an
example.77 Similarly, in December 1979, Liu Banjiu translated the term
Bildungsroman as jiaoyu xiaoshuo (novel of education) in his preface
to his translation of Green Henry.78
There is no reliable record indicating who first used the term cheng-
zhang xiaoshuo to refer to the Bildungsroman. The word chengzhang
literally means “to form and grow,” which closely matches the con-
notations of the German term Bildung. The literature and film critic
Dai Jinhua and the fiction writer Cao Wenxuan were said to be the
first to use chengzhang xiaoshuo publicly in a seminar on Cao’s story,
“Red Tile” (Hongwa), sometime between 1997 and 1999.79 However, as
early as 1993, the literary critic Li Yang had already used the term to
describe the Mao-era novel The Song of Youth in his book Struggling
Against Predestination.80 Since the late 1990s, this term has been used
extensively by Chinese literary critics. For example, in A Textbook for
Contemporary Chinese Literary History (Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi
77
This preface was written in the summer of 1943, and revised in 1984. Johann
Wolfgang Von Goethe, Weilian Maisite de xuexi shidai [Wilhelm Meister’s Appren-
ticeship], trans. Feng Zhi and Yao Kekun (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988).
78
Gottfried Keller, Lü yi hengli [Green Henry], trans. Liu Banjiu (Bejing: Renmin
chubanshe, 1980).
79
In the preface to Sang Di’s Kanshangqu hen chou [It seems ugly] (Beijing: Dazhong
wenyi chubanshe, 1999), Cao Wenxuan pointed out that it was time for literary crit-
ics to use the term chengzhang xiaoshuo as a literary genre. Also see Xu Meixia, “Lun
dangdai chengzhang xiaoshuo de neihan yu ge’an” [The connotation and case study
of contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman] (Master’s thesis, Xiamen University, 2003).
The author wrote that in an interview, Sang Di told the author that Cao Wenxuan and
Dai Jinhua were the first people to use the term chengzhang xiaoshuo.
80
Li Yang, Kangzheng suming zhi lu [Struggling against predestination] (Changc-
hun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1993).
30 chapter one
jiaocheng), Chen Sihe refers to Wang Meng’s “Newcomer in the Orga-

nization Department” (Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqingren) as a chengzhang
xiaoshuo.81 In this treatise, the term chengzhang xiaoshuo is used to
refer to Chinese Bildungsroman in order to remain consistent with
current Chinese academic usage of the term.
Although the term chengzhang xiaoshuo has been widely utilized
in China only since the 1990s, the tardiness of this term’s acceptance
in China does not prevent us from using it retroactively in reference
to Chinese fiction written in the early twentieth century. After all, the
term chengzhang xiaoshuo represents a theoretical response to coming-
of-age narratives by several generations of Chinese writers through-
out the twentieth-century. There is bound to be a time lag between
the emergence of a specific type of fiction and the development of
a generic term to characterize this type of fiction. This is evident in
the creation of the term of Bildungsroman in Europe. As my previ-
ous discussion shows, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was
written as early as 1795, but, as a theoretical response to this novel,
the term Bildungsroman was not coined until the 1810s by Karl von
Morgenstern, and it was only brought into general usage in the West
by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1870.
As a specific literary genre, the chengzhang xiaoshuo has been recog-
nized and studied by Chinese writers and literary critics only since the
1990s. A few master’s theses and PhD dissertations have been written
to explore the development of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo and to
attempt to fill the theoretical void within this genre for modern Chi-
nese literature. For example, in Mingwei Song’s 2005 PhD dissertation
“Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsro-
man, 1900–1958,” he conducts an historical study of “the evolution
of the youth discourse together with its political, ethical, and cultural
effects” by “look[ing] into the figural formation of youth as represented
in the Bildungsroman” from 1900 to 1958.82 Similarly, Fan Guobin
“elaborates the narrative forms of [Chinese] Bildungsroman from 1949
to 1976” in his PhD dissertation “The Formation of the Subject: A
Study of the Contemporary Bildungsroman,” which was published in
81
Chen Sihe, Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng [A textbook for contempo-
rary Chinese literary history] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2001).
82
Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman,
1900–1958.” 5.
book form in 2003.83 That same year, Sun Jing’s master’s thesis posits
that the development of the modern Chinese Bildungsroman amounts
to “historic proof of the nation’s modernization . . . [and] the abstract
symbol of national development.”84 In another master’s thesis in 2002,
Tian Guangwen argues that puzzlement is the main theme of com-
ing-of-age narratives written in the 1990s.85 In these scholarly works,
each author develops his own definition of the chengzhang xiaoshuo.
These definitions tend to focus mostly on the formal elements of the
genre while neglecting the most significant concern of most writers
of actual Bildungsroman: complex inwardness. In this study, I define
chengzhang xiaoshuo as the Chinese counterpart of the European Bil-
dungsroman. It is a specific author’s visualization of his own or his
contemporaries’ coming-of-age experience in its local socio-historical
setting in order to provide some complex internal reflections on social
reality. Chengzhang xiaoshuo is an organic unity of form and theme,
and a dynamic interaction between its aspects of outward experience
and inward reflection. Its aspect of outward experience is revealed by
means of principal elements of the plot: childhood, inter-generational
conflict, setting out on a journey (in either symbolic or physical form),
ordeal by love, and the search for a vocation and a philosophy of life.
Its aspect of inward reflection deals mostly with individual subjectivity
along with emotional and cognitive maturation. The genre’s thematic
tension is largely between individuality and socialization: on the one
hand, the chengzhang xiaoshuo explores the complexity of individual
potentiality; on the other hand, it recognizes practical realities such as
marriage, family, and career as a necessary dimension of the young
hero’s self-realization. In essence, chengzhang xiaoshuo principally
concerns itself with the spiritual and psychological development of the
83
Fan Guobin, “Zhuti zhi shengcheng—dangdai chengzhang xiaoshuo zhuti yan-
jiu” [The formation of the subject: a study of contemporary Bildungsroman] (PhD
diss., Nanjing University, 2002). It was published in book form with a slightly different
title in 2003, see Fan Guobin, Zhutide shengzhang: 50 nian chengzhang xiaoshuo yan-
jiu [The formation of the subject: a study of the 50 years of Bildungsroman] (Beijing:
Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003).
84
Sun Jing, “Zhongguo xiandai chengzhang xiaoshuo de xushixue yanjiu” [The
study of narratology of contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman] (Master’s thesis,
Qingdao University, 2002).
85
Tian Guangwen, “Kunhuo de zhangwang: xinchao chengzhang xiaoshuo lun”
[The puzzled look: on the new wave of Bildungsroman] (Master’s thesis, Shangdong
Normal University, 2002).
32 chapter one
young protagonist, and discloses the dynamic and malleable nature of

the young hero.
The major author-based foci of this book are the chengzhang
xiaoshuo written by Su Tong and Yu Hua. However, before analyzing
the two authors’ coming-of-age narratives, I will examine the history
of modern and contemporary Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo and detect
the changing pattern of Chinese Bildungsroman in different historical
periods.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CHANGING PATTERNS OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN

IN MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE
Though the Bildungsroman is a literary genre that originated in the

West, some crucial attributes of this genre can be observed in pre-
modern Chinese biography—especially the genre’s tendencies for self-
expression, self-reflection, and self-consciousness. The genre’s emphasis
upon individuality and subjectivity are also explored in the writings
of various May Fourth literati during the first half of the twentieth
century. Since then, the tension between a young protagonist’s indi-
viduality and his socialization has become one of the recurrent themes
in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. This chapter begins
with an examination of biographical and autobiographical writing in
pre-modern Chinese literature, and continues with an investigation
of the changing patterns of chengzhang xiaoshuo during two periods:
from the May Fourth era to 1966, and from the 1980s to the early years
of the twenty-first century. My analysis will demonstrate that changing
narrative patterns in modern Chinese coming-of-age narratives reflect
the way the maturation of Chinese youth is entangled with their con-
temporary history, as well as the psychological impact of the tension
between their assertion of an autonomous self and their participation
in the collective and revolutionary cause. I argue that the trajectory of
the Chinese Bildungsroman from the May Fourth era to 1966 reveals
the process by which individuality and subjectivity gradually become
subordinate to the discourse of revolution and collectivity. During
this period, the social integration of Chinese youth is designed to
meet the needs of the particular historical period, and Chinese youth
go through phases as modern students, subsequently as progressive
new youth, and finally as tamed revolutionary youth.1 However, the
coming-of-age fiction written after the 1980s (the post-Mao era) see
1
Mingwei Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bil-
dungsroman, 1900–1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005). In his study, Min-
gwei Song detects Chinese youth of that time grow from “modern student,” to “new
youth,” and finally to “revolutionary youth.”
34 chapter two
a gradual revival of individuality and subjectivity, and a marginaliza-

tion of revolution and collectivity. Youth are no longer viewed as a
force that will necessarily rejuvenate and modernize China. Instead,
youth become associated with marginality and dysfunction. The image
of fallen youth is especially prominent in the coming-of-age fiction
written by Su Tong and Yu Hua, and will be examined in detail in
Chapter Three and Four. The present chapter will provide a historical
background for the ensuing discussions of Bildungsroman fiction by
Su Tong and Yu Hua, as well as a backdrop against which the two
authors’ works are shown to be both tragic and parodistic.
Antecedents of the Bildungsroman: Zhuan in Pre-modern

Chinese Literature
When we look back through China’s literary tradition, we cannot find

a truly novelistic form of Bildungsroman until early in the twentieth
century. However, certain traits of Bildungsroman such as introspec-
tion and self-consciousness (including self-reflection and didactic
self-examination) are prominent in many traditional Chinese liter-
ary genres, such as poetry, prose, personal correspondence, and the
novel. Poetry (shi), the dominant literary genre in pre-modern China,
is one source of this introspective quality, which is especially notice-
able in many Tang (618–907) Buddhist poems. Later, Northern Song
(960–1127) poetry introduced more intellectualized and philosophi-
cal qualities. Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and
other early Northern Song poets incorporated an increasing amount
of narrative material in order to foreground philosophical issues more
effectively. Later, Su Shi (1037–1101) and Huang Tingjian (1045–1105)
made introspective intellectualism one of the dominant features in
their writing.
In pre-modern China, the literary forms closest to the Bildungsro-
man were biography and autobiography. What we would recognize
today as biography went under a variety of different generic terms,
including zhuan (biographies), xu (prefaces), muzhiming (tomb
inscriptions), ji (records), zhi (notices), lei (dirges), and nianpu (annal-
istic biographies).2
2
Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional
China (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990). This is a pathbreaking
changing patterns of the chinese bildungsroman 35
Among these genres, the zhuan most resembles that of biography.

Zhuan was a category first used by Sima Qian (145–86 BC) for record-
ing the biographies in the Shiji (Records of the Historian), the first
comprehensive history of China from the ancient past of the mythi-
cal Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) up to the Western Han dynasty (202
BCE–8 ACE).3 The zhuan form was adopted by subsequent histori-
ans to compile dynastic histories. From the very beginning, the zhuan
was closely associated with historiography. It was the “main vehicle
of historiography” with the “didactic function of the world.”4 Zhuan
historiographers usually shunned personal observation and first-hand
knowledge. Despite writing about subjects with which they were
familiar, for the most part they relied heavily on archival materials
and second-hand accounts. Any information based on their personal
observation and knowledge would be included as an appendix to the
zhuan and introduced by remarks such as “historians generally say”
or “in appraisal we say.” Biographers in pre-modern China tended to
maintain the “convention of the impartial, invisible, and unobtrusive
narrator.”5
The zhuan was considered a branch of history instead of literature
or belles-lettres. Before the Song dynasty (960–1279), this genre was
not included among the writings of literary critics and belles-lettres
anthologists. For instance, Lu Ji (261–303) made no reference to the
zhuan in his pioneer treatise, Wen fu (Rhyme prose on literature); nor
did Xiao Tong (501–531) include the zhuan among the thirty-seven
genres he listed in Wenxuan (Anthology of literature)—the earliest
extant multi-genre anthology of Chinese literature.6 The zhuan typi-
cally focuses upon the historical aspects of a man’s life and the docu-
mented features of his career rather than on the inner and reflective
self. In so doing, the zhuan does not attempt to trace the ongoing
intellectual and spiritual development of its biographical subject.
study of autobiographical writings in traditional China. In the book, Pei-yi Wu exam-

ines the ecology of biography and autobiography in pre-modern China.
3
Sima Qian (145–86 BC), Records of the Grand Historian of China (translated from
the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien), trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1961).
4
Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional
China, 4.
5
Ibid., 5.
6
Ibid.
36 chapter two
Attention to the differences between autobiography and biogra-

phy in pre-modern Chinese literature has long been neglected. The
major subgenres of Chinese autobiography for the most part imitate
biography by adding zi (self ) to a title of the biographical subgenre.
Pei-Yi Wu identifies Tao Qian’s (362–427) “Biography of Master Five
Willows” as China’s first “self-written biography,” or autobiography.7
Before the end of thirteenth century, autobiographical authors strictly
followed the zhuan biographical convention of the “impartial, invisible
and unobtrusive narrator” and “recorded the external events, usually
public and official, but seldom tried to probe inner stirrings or dis-
close complex motives.”8 The early Chinese autobiography’s subser-
vience to history provided the author with no adequate vehicle for
self-expression.
Since the end of the thirteenth century, however, the biographi-
cal constraints on Chinese autobiography loosened. Breakthroughs
occurred in such areas as introspective and confessional accounts.
Zen Buddhist accounts of enlightenment constitute the beginning of
full-blown Chinese autobiographical expression, adding new spiritual
fervor to self-written narratives of the long and arduous search for
fundamental personal transformation. The next three centuries, from
the entirety of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) up through the early
decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), witnessed the emergence
of many Neo-Confucian autobiographical writings, in which authors
reflected at length upon the nature of their lives and the cultivation
of their learning. Some of these writings were in the form of travel
journals, in which authors not only depicted the external landscapes
through which they wandered, but also explored their own nature.
Here, travel was a metaphor for self-reflection—a journey inward and
a peregrination of the soul.
One critic posits the influence of the Wang Yangming School of
Neo-Confucianism as the main cause of the rise of interest in self-
reflection, self-examination, and most importantly, humanity. Certain
Neo-Confucians “examined their consciences and confessed their mis-
deeds with a depth of anguish and remorse unthinkable in classical
Confucianism”;9 hence, the autobiographical writings in this period
7
Ibid., 15.
8
Ibid., xi.
9
Ibid., xii.
can be called “spiritual autobiography.”10 Examples can be found in the

writings of some Neo-Confucian and Buddhist thinkers. Deng Huoqu’s
“The Record of a Quest in the South” (Nanxun lu) describes his frantic
and ultimately fruitless wanderings in search of enlightenment;11 Hu
Zhi’s “A Record of Learning through Difficulties” (Kunxue ji) relates
his gradual awakening to the full significance of the concept of the
innate knowledge of good (liangzhi).12 De Qing, one of the prominent
Buddhist thinkers in the late Ming dynasty, draws upon the nianpu
(annalistic biography) form to recount his childhood and later path
to enlightenment.13
However, the influence of the Wang Yangming School cannot fully
explain the general intellectual climate of self-consciousness, which
was revealed not only in autobiographical writings, but also in fiction,
drama, and other literary genres. The economic and social conditions
of the late Ming dynasty had a powerful impact on the new perception
of self. The historian Cynthia Brokaw points out:
The commercial boom of the late sixteenth century created new eco-
nomic opportunities and encouraged social mobility, providing a natural
context for a reevaluation of the powers of the individual and his or her
role within society. The increased participation of peasants in handicraft
industries, the rise of merchants to positions of social prestige and politi-
cal influence, the opening of new educational opportunities through the
publication of popular educational literature—these changes might well
have led thoughtful observers to reflect on both the greater effectiveness
and the heavier responsibility now attached to individual effort. Great
opportunities for advancement increased the individual’s sense of con-
trol over destiny, but also intensified personal pressures to succeed in a
context where of course not everyone could succeed.14
So we can propose that the proliferation of autobiography in the late
Ming dynasty might also be seen in part as a response to the new
10
Ibid., 127.
11
Deng Huoqu (1498–1570), Nanxun lu [The record of a quest in the south], Ca,
1599.
12
Hu Zhi (1517–1585), “Kunxue ji” [A record of learning through difficulties],
in Mingru xue’an [Philosophical records of Ming Confucians] (Taibei: Shijie shuju,
1965), 221–224.
13
De Qing (1546–1623), Zuben Hanshan dashi nianpu shuzhu [Unabridged and
annotated annalistic biography of Master Hanshan], ed. Fu Zheng (Suzhou: Honghua
she, 1934).
14
Cynthia Brokaw, review of The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in
Traditional China, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53, no.1 (June 1993): 182–183.
38 chapter two
economic, social, and intellectual demands placed on individuals to

demonstrate their worth in a time of intense change.15
During the seventeenth century, further progress was made in auto-
biographical writing. A few autobiographers focused on an imaginative
portrayal of the individual by borrowing literary techniques and even
lifting entire episodes from fiction. This kind of autobiographical writ-
ing has been described by Pei-yi Wu as “self-invented.”16 For example,
the autobiographical writings of Wang Jie and Mao Qiling no lon-
ger imitated earlier historiographical models, but were instead heavily
influenced by popular fiction of the Ming.17 After 1680, some three
and a half decades after the Ming-Qing transition, experimentation
with forms of autobiography largely ceased as autobiographical writ-
ings reverted to their earlier historiographical conventions. Some crit-
ics attribute this retreat to the fading of the Wang Yangming School,
but surely there are other reasons. By the early Qing dynasty, writers
already had more literary genres at their disposal for self-expression
and psychological exploration—especially popular literary forms such
as vernacular fiction and drama; they were not limited to autobiogra-
phy. For example, literary critics have praised A Dream of Red Man-
sions as a “supreme work of psychological realism,” emphasizing the
novel’s skill at entering directly into a character’s consciousness.18 In
this sense, A Dream of Red Mansions can be read as a Bildungsroman
novel in pre-modern Chinese literature with its in-depth exploration
of young men’s and women’s psychological and spiritual develop-
ment, their increasingly acute recognition of themselves and the out-
side world, and their social integration within a declining elite family.
Yet it was not until the early twentieth century that Chinese readers
encountered autobiography and Bildungsroman of a different type—a
variety that had been influenced by Western models.
15
Ibid., 183.
16
Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China, xii.
17
Wang Jie (1603?–1682?), “Sanrong zhuiren guang zixu” [Expanded self-account
of the useless man Sannong], in Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao [A historical survey of
Chinese autobiography], ed. Guo Dengfeng (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1965),
1:32–67. Mao Qiling (1623–1716), “Ziwei muzhiming” [Self-written tomb notice and
inscription], in Mao Xihe xiansheng quanji [Complete works of Master Mao Xihe],
35: II: Ia–20b. 1761.
18
C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1968), 246; Kirk A. Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern
Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 33.
From the above review of autobiographical writings in pre-modern

China, we can see that the form of autobiography shifted over time
from historiography to self-expression. By the early Qing dynasty,
autobiography had already acquired some of the features found in the
modern Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman specifically deals with the
protagonist’s transitional period from childhood to adulthood, while
biography and autobiography in general purport to be factual accounts
of a person’s complete life story. However, the “spiritual” autobio-
graphical writings in the Ming dynasty, as in the Bildungsroman, only
record the protagonist’s path to enlightenment, though not necessarily
during the period of youth. Such autobiographies as the travel jour-
nals of the Neo-Confucians and the nianpu of the Buddhist thinkers
provide full narratives both of events and of inner spiritual develop-
ment. The inwardness and intellectual flavor of these autobiographical
writings form the foundation for the study of self-expression in early
twentieth-century China.
Bildungsroman in Modern Chinese Literature
As we saw in Chapter One, the emergence of Bildungsroman novels was

a literary response to modernity in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth
century. Europe’s industrial revolution brought major social changes
to traditional European society, and young people were thus facing
an uncertain exploration of societal space and a seemingly unlim-
ited potentiality. The life stage of youth was not considered merely
biologically distinct from adulthood, but became a specific image of
modernity because of its attributes of mobility and inner restlessness.
Youth itself became infused with qualities of dynamism upon which a
modernizing society was increasingly dependent. Similarly, the emer-
gence of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo in the early twentieth century
was also the outcome of great social changes and the formation of
a youth-centered discourse. Moreover, literary influences from Euro-
pean Romanticism and the Japanese I-novel—along with the vernacu-
lar (baihua) language movement—also contributed to the emergence
of narratives of the Bildungsroman variety in early twentieth-century
China. I will now turn to an analysis of the aforementioned four fac-
tors: the formation of a youth-centered discourse; literary influences
from European Romanticism and the Japanese I-novel; the promo-
tion of vernacular language in place of the traditional classical literary
40 chapter two
idiom; and the tremendous cultural and socio-political changes that

took place during this period.
The formation of a youth-centered discourse is a crucial factor in the
emergence of Bildungsroman novels. As early as the Self-strengthen-
ing Movement during the 1870s, the Chinese government dispatched
over a hundred youtong (schoolboys) to the United States for formal
study, in the understanding that they would eventually take up posts
at the Qing court after their graduation and return to China. Such
overseas study projects in the late nineteenth century served as an
initial attempt to provide Chinese youth with an up-to-date educa-
tion of high international standard, as well as a prelude to the forma-
tion of a Chinese youth discourse.19 Meanwhile, the very term “youth”
itself became infused with weighty historical and political implications
upon the publication of Liang Qichao’s (1873–1929) essay “Ode to
Young China” (Shaonian Zhongguo shuo, 1900). In this essay, Liang
challenged the pessimistic image of China as a fading and backward-
looking civilization, instead eulogizing Chinese youth and anointing
China “a young nation-state” that fit neatly within the “global image of
a modern world.”20 Ever since that time, a youth-centered discourse has
been instrumental in various kinds of political and cultural endeavors
to modernize China, helping to foster such up-to-date identities as the
“modern student,” “new youth,” and “revolutionary youth” at various
junctures during the first half of the twentieth century.21
Young people in China often gained a new identity as modern
students through the spread of the country’s new Western-style
schools, as well as in tandem with the steep upsurge in study-abroad
programs beginning in the late Qing and extending into the Repub-
19
1900–1958,” 9–14. Song identifies the English autobiography of Yung Wing (1828–
1912), the one who first proposed the overseas study program, as the first narrative to
record the psychological development of a modern Chinese youth. Yung’s My Life in
China and America (1909) traces his development from an ignorant peasant boy to
an educated and westernized social reformer.
20
Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the National Discourse of Modernity: the His-
torical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996),
37. “Shaonian zhongguo shuo” was originally published on Feb. 10, 1900 in Qingyi
bao (The China discussion). For more about Liang Qichao’s thoughts, see Joseph R.
Levenson’s Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1959).
21
1900–1958,” 26–54.
lican Era (1912–1949). This new identity of Chinese youth echoes

Liang Qichao’s call for a type of xinmin (new citizen) to help build
up the Young China of his forward-looking vision. Such renowned
cultural reformers as Lu Xun (1881–1936), Hu Shi (1891–1962), and
Guo Moruo (1892–1978) hailed from this new generation of youth-
oriented Chinese intellectuals. Meanwhile, new students were also
being mobilized by relatively radical social reformers to serve as a driv-
ing force of “revolutionary action,” as exemplified by the martyrdom
of Zou Rong (1885–1905). Zou’s impassioned advocacy of revolution
in his manifesto Revolutionary Army, followed by his untimely death
in a Qing prison, turned him into an influential symbol of youthful
revolutionary fervor.22 Other modern students went on to participate
in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and support the Republic that sup-
planted the old dynastic regime. Subsequently disillusioned by the
many setbacks encountered by the Republic in its early decades, many
Chinese youth would eventually gravitate to more radical and insur-
rectionist movements such as communism.
With the launch of the journal Qingnian zazhi (Youth Magazine) by
Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) in September 1915 (renamed Xin qingnian
[New Youth] the following year), the typical identity of Chinese youth
changed from that of the “modern student” to “enlightened new youth.”
This journal became a sort of headquarters for the development of a
new-youth discourse. While retaining its political symbolism, the term
“youth” took on additional socio-cultural dimensions: “independence,
dynamism, and even aggressiveness, along with a radical revolt against
various aspects of the Chinese tradition.”23 Such terms as “science,”
“democracy,” and “enlightenment” frequently appeared in the jour-
nal’s articles.
The journal New Youth and the New Culture Movement led by the
journal’s editors Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were indispensable to the
development of the Chinese Bildungsroman. Not only did the young
Chinese men and women edified by this movement become the writ-
ers, readers, and protagonists of the chengzhang xiaoshuo narratives;
Hu Shi’s and Chen Duxiu’s advocacy of “new literature” also set forth
22
Ibid., 33–34.
23
Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May
Fourth Era, 65.
42 chapter two
the linguistic and stylistic parameters for the emergence of Chinese

chengzhang xiaoshuo.
When we examine twentieth-century Chinese literature, we first
encounter its most prominent linguistic feature—the use of baihua
(vernacular language) in writing. Even though it is well known that
baihua was not widely used in writing until 1917—the year when
Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu launched the New Culture Movement—the
vernacular had already starting making inroads on the classical liter-
ary idiom several decades previously. “The written form of northern
baihua, called baihuawen, had become a well-established and sophis-
ticated language by the middle of the [nineteenth] century, princi-
pally because it was used in novels, drama, and storytellers’ written
narratives . . . challenging the previous ‘monopoly’ of wenyan [classical
Chinese].”24 Written forms of baihua were adopted in journalism after
the 1870s and were later applied in the revolutionary press and in
journals for women.25 However, it was Hu Shi who was instrumental
in leading a serious and concerted effort in 1917 to promote the use
of writing in the vernacular among intellectuals. Hu Shi believed that
the use of the vernacular was instrumental in disseminating new ideas
to ordinary people, as opposed to continuing to focus upon the tiny
elite of Chinese intellectuals who were able to read and write classi-
cal Chinese. The use of vernacular language in creative writing thus
became one of the most prominent linguistic features in modern Chi-
nese literature, thereby paving way for the rise of Chinese chengzhang
xiaoshuo.
As we have seen, the early part of the twentieth century was a
transitional period in China. Politically, the imperial dynastic regime
perished and the Republic of China was established in its place. Cul-
turally, under the influence of the journal New Youth, many Chinese
intellectuals embraced a new spirit of rethinking traditional Chinese
values and customs in light of modern Western ideas. Psychologi-
cally, Chinese intellectuals tended to place more emphasis on their
role as independent thinkers and the conscience of society than was
24
Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, “The Origin of Modern Chinese Literature,” in
Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1977), 19–20.
25
For detail see Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova’s article “The Origin of Modern
Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 17–35. In
this article, Dolezelova-Velingerova traces the development of the use of vernacular
in Chinese literature from the late Qing to May Fourth era.
the case among their forbears. With the launching of the May Fourth
Movement in 1919, such currents in modern thought as individual-
ism, anti-traditionalism, and nationalism further captured the imagi-
nations of young Chinese men and women. Broad cross-sections of
Chinese youth tried to slough off the heavy burden of the Confucian
tradition and absorb Western culture in its stead, though their anti-
traditionalism was not necessarily thoroughgoing or consistent.26
The May Fourth era was a time of the awakening of the individual.
The self-image of May Fourth youth was marked by an intense aware-
ness of the individual’s role in society and sense of social responsi-
bility in society. During this period, Western influence upon China
should not be underestimated. May Fourth intellectuals were enthu-
siastic about learning from the West, including Westernized powers
in Asia such as Japan and Russia. Numerous Western philosophical
and literary works were translated from Japanese or rendered directly
from English and other European languages. These translations ranged
from fiction in the tradition of European Realism, Romanticism, and
Expressionism to non-fiction such as Freudian and Jungian psycho-
analysis, Marxism, and Nietzschean philosophy.
The tendency of a focus on subjective sentiment in modern Chinese
literature is partially of Chinese origin; however, the inspiration for its
modern quality is derived from the West. The fictional representation
of self and subjectivity are seen as an integral part of Chinese liter-
ary modernity. The sentimental, humane, subjective, and confessional
tone of most early May Fourth writing is often associated with Euro-
pean Romanticism, Expressionism, Japanese Naturalism and I-novels.
Michael Duke has remarked on the subjective and confessional tone
so common in May Fourth literature:
The concept of literature as spontaneous self-expression—consonant as
it seemed with the venerable Chinese concept of shi yan zhi—led to an
outpouring of autobiographical and confessional literature notable for
its stress on spontaneity, intensity, subjectivity of personal emotions, and
celebration of the individual. Both the individual psyche and the world
of nature were explored as aspects of a passionate search for Truth,
Goodness, and Beauty which were believed to culminate in the spiri-
tual ecstasy of romantic love extolled as the height of joy and suffering,
26
Yu-sheng Lin repeatedly points out in The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radi-
cal Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era that although Chinese intellectuals often
rebelled against their Confucian heritage, they were also part of it.
44 chapter two
honesty and sincerity, defiance of philistine conventions, emancipation

and self-consciousness.27
In his study of Chinese Romanticism in the first half of the twentieth
century, Leo Ou-fan Lee points out that many aspects of European
Romanticism were transformed in China. According to Lee, the Chi-
nese literary scene harbored two dominant modes of writing that had
been influenced by the Western romantic legacy: Wertherian (pas-
sive-sentimental) and Promethean (dynamic-heroic).28 This dynamic,
dual legacy of nineteenth-century European Romanticism helps to
“distinguish the [May Fourth era] romantic tendency inspired by the
West from the sentimental strains in traditional Chinese literature.”
The romantic trend in early twentieth-century China “enveloped the
youth of the entire country” in spite of the fact that there was “not a
conscious Romantic Movement” during that period.29
Aside from this relatively direct influence from the West, Chinese
literature also looked to Japan in modern times. Japan contributed a
great deal to modern Chinese literature by serving as a major chan-
nel both for Western influences as well as for hybrid forms such as
Japanese naturalist fiction. Because of its humiliating defeat in the
Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), China was forced to accept the fact
that Japan was no longer its faithful cultural disciple; it had become
an advanced industrializing country soon after the Meiji Restoration
of 1868. Especially after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905), many Chinese were genuinely impressed with Japan’s
remarkable modernization. Beginning in 1896, the Qing government
dispatched many Chinese students to study in Japan in the hope that
China could modernize itself by following Japan’s path.
Many May Fourth writers were deeply influenced by Japanese natu-
ralism, “the most important pivot in the history of modern Japanese
27
Michael S. Duke, Blooming and Contending (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985), 183.
28
Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 280. Lee argues that the Wertherian man
is full of tender emotions: “gentle and tearful love, nostalgia, and a pervasive mel-
ancholy.” He attains his strength from his inner life—“the nuances of his emotion,
the mysteries of his unconscious self, or the subjective world of imaginary passion.”
Therefore he is also called a passive romanticist. In contrast, the Promethean man is
enthusiastic, passionate, and dominant. He actively embraces life instead of escaping
from it. He attains his strength from outside of life and society, not from his inner life.
However, it doesn’t necessarily mean he is less emotional and less sensitive.
29
Ibid., 294.
fiction”; this Asian variety of naturalism had been present in “the con-
clusion to Meiji (1868–1912) literature,” and “served as the foundation
of Japanese literature since the Taisho era [1912–1926].”30 However,
Japanese naturalism had been directly influenced by French naturalism.
Around 1900, Zola’s voluminous novels were being widely circulated
among young Japanese literary aspirants. However, in assimilating
French naturalism, Japanese writers altered the meaning of the word
nature. For them, it became “the principle of inward reflection and
the subjective expression of human nature in isolation from objective
realities. Included in this subjective vision of reality were the Japanese
romantic traits of self-confession and lyrical expression. What resulted
was a unique form of Japanese naturalism.”31
The most famous type of Japanese naturalism was watakushi-shōsetsu
(shishōsetsu) or the I-novel, which is characterized by “a Rousseau-
esque morality of unrestrained self-revelation, intensive lyricism, and
occasional self-pity, and by a sentimental search for the so-called kin-
dai jiga (modern self ).”32 The I-novel appeared with the publication
of Shimazaki Tōson’s (1872–1943) Hakai (Broken commandment)
in 1906 and prevailed through the next two decades, precisely when
the influx of Chinese students studying in Japan peaked. The literary
trend exerted noticeable influence upon Chinese writers then in Japan
and soon was manifested in the publication of Yu Dafu’s (1896–1945)
semi-autobiographical story “Sinking” (Chenlun, 1921). Many Chinese
intellectuals and writers started to translate Japanese novels and natu-
ralistic writings, introducing them to Chinese readers. These writers
include Liang Qichao, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), and Lu Xun, who
later became members of such literary societies as the Literary Research
Association and the Creation Society. For example, Lu Xun translated
a study of Japanese naturalism by Katayama Koson (1878–1933).33
His younger brother Zhou Zuoren played “a vital role in introduc-
ing major trends and figures in contemporary Japanese literature to
Chinese writers and intellectuals throughout the May Fourth period.”34
30
Nakamura Mitsuo, Meiji bungakushi [History of Meiji literature] (Tokyo: Chi-
kuma Shobo, 1963), 184.
31
Ching-mao Cheng, “The Impact of Japanese Literary Trends on Modern Chinese
Writers,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 78.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 79.
34
Christopher T. Keaveney, The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The
Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2004), 3.
46 chapter two
The efforts of Zhou and his contemporary intellectuals familiarized

Chinese readers “with the achievements of the contemporary Japanese
literary world,” helping lay the groundwork for Chinese readers’ sub-
sequent acceptance of indigenous “Creation Society experimentation
with self-referential fiction.”35 Though Chinese self-referential fiction
from the Creation Society had been inspired by Japanese shishōsetsu,
there was a fundamental difference between this Japanese literary
genre and its Chinese variation. As one critic observes, the protago-
nists in Japanese shishōsetsu are “effectively cut off from larger social
concerns,” but “Yu Dafu and other Creation Society writers emphasize
the connection of the protagonist to his peers, his family, and ulti-
mately to his homeland.”36 In other words, the Chinese counterpart of
shishōsetsu is developed around the tension between individual expe-
rience and issues in the broader society. This mode of self-expression
spread beyond the Creation Society to the entire May Fourth genera-
tion writers, and even “proved to be a touchstone for self-referential
writing by Chinese writers in the post-Mao era.”37
Bildungsroman is a literary genre that portrays the maturation of a

young person with a particular focus on psychological and intellec-
tual development. Youth and subjectivity are thus two indispensable
elements in Bildungsroman. When we study the Chinese chengzhang
xiaoshuo, we must begin with these two elements. From my previous
discussion we can see that both youth and subjectivity were closely
related to the history of the era. From the beginning of the forma-
tion of Chinese youth discourse, it was entangled with the country’s
larger fate. The development of youth discourse was considered to be
the main trope of Chinese modernity, and the assertion of selfhood
and subjectivity were entangled in the larger discourse of modernity.38
Meanwhile, European Romanticism and the Japanese I-novel provided
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., 27.
37
Ibid., 1.
38
In his study of the Chinese Bildungsroman from 1900 and 1958, Mingwei Song
argues that “youth” is a “representative agency in the historical complex of Chinese
modernization” to “rejuvenate and modernize China.” See Song, “Long Live Youth:
National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958,” 2–7; Kirk Den-
ton, in his study of Hu Feng’s literary theory and Lu Ling’s fictional practice, contends
that the tension between “an autonomous individual” and “participating in historical
transformation” has been a “general epistemological problem that haunted modern
Chinese intellectuals” since the formative stage of Chinese modernization in the late
the May Fourth generation an autonomous model of self, but the “val-
ues [of individualism and subjectivism] were appropriated primarily
for iconoclastic purposes.”39 Therefore, various forms of literary writing
in the vernacular (baihua) proliferated, attending to the “internal self ”
(neixin) and exhibiting a flavor of iconoclasm and nationalism. In this
socio-political environment, the chengzhang xiaoshuo/Bildungsroman
was a symbolic form of modernity; was mainly written in the form
of diary and autobiography; and was largely focused on the awaken-
ing of self-consciousness combined with cultural anti-traditionalism
and political nationalism. The Bildungsroman novel maintains a bal-
ance between inwardness and outwardness—the individuality and
social integration. For Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, this tension is
expressed between the individual and history, “ego autonomy and self-
transcendence.”40 The following investigation of the changing patterns
of the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo will reveal how coming-of-age
narratives in different historical periods of the twentieth century—
the May Fourth era, the 1930s and 1940s, the seventeen years after
the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and the 1980s and
1990s—offer fictional representations of young intellectuals’ partici-
pation in China’s historical transformation, their vacillation between
“assert[ing] the psychic reality of individuals and join[ing] selflessly
with the inexorable movement of Nation and History.”41 My review
of the changing patterns of modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo is
succinct and does not pretend to be exhaustive in portraying the char-
acteristics of the Chinese coming-of-age narratives in the twentieth
century.
The emergence of stories by Ding Ling, Yu Dafu, Lu Yin (1898–
1934), and Bing Xin (1900–1999) can be regarded as the beginning
of the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo. These works can also be catego-
rized as “self-referential” fiction that “came about in an intellectual
Qing and the May Fourth era. See Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese
Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 18.
39
Kirk A. Denton, “General Introduction” to Modern Chinese Literary Thought:
Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 44.
40
Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu
Ling, 22.
41
Ibid., 23.
48 chapter two
environment which valued individuality and subjectivity.”42 Merle

Goldman characterizes the literature written in this period as follows:
Many works are stories of youth trapped in and rebelling against tradi-
tional society. Some of them may have been autobiographical, but they
are also biographies of their generation. The frustrations and dreams
are also the frustrations and dreams of an entire generation’s search for
meaning and purpose in a China these writers described as prostrate,
morally bankrupt, politically disjointed, oppressed by warlords and
bureaucrats, and humiliated by foreign powers . . . They are filled with
their excitement and enthusiasm for revolution and subsequent disil-
lusionment when it was not realized, their vacillation in time of vio-
lent struggle, their desperate pursuit of personal happiness, and their
emotional and mental agitation as they broke from Confucian morality.
Theirs was a mixed and contradictory picture, but a true picture of their
times and of the circles in which they lived.43
Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophie’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi de riji, 1928) and Yu
Dafu’s “Sinking” are works with characteristics described by Goldman,
and both are novellas written in the Bildungsroman mode. Bildungs-
roman as a literary genre conventionally involves full-length novels.
Therefore, the term coming-of-age novella is applied to distinguish
them from full-length Chinese Bildungsroman, such as Schoolmaster
Ni Huan-chih and Children of the Rich. An analysis of Ding Ling’s and
Yu Dafu’s novellas indicate that the chengzhang xiaoshuo in the May
Fourth era is marked by the exploration of selfhood, self-confessional
and decadent sentiments, an iconoclastic and nationalistic spirit, and
self-narrative form. Both Ding Ling and Yu Dafu reveal the sensibilities
of their generation, and both are obsessed with the uncertainties and
search for self-definition that characterize youth’s first encounters with
the world. In this process, they must first face their own identities.
A semi-autobiographical story in third-person narrative, “Sinking”
was first published in 1921. The protagonist—a poor, lonely and frus-
trated Chinese student in Japan—is caught between nightly masturba-
tion and daily self-loathing, and between patriotism and self-pity. He
finally drowns himself in the sea. “Miss Sophie’s Diary” was first pub-
lished in 1928 in the prominent journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short Sto-
ries Monthly). The narrator-protagonist is a sick, bed-ridden female
42
Keaveney, The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Soci-
ety’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu, 5.
43
Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 4.
student who has left her South China hometown and sojourns in Bei-
jing to search for love and self-identity. Both stories received enthusi-
astic reviews upon publication and have since become two of the most
frequently analyzed and anthologized works of May Fourth fiction.
Both Yu Dafu and Ding Ling can be linked to what Leo Ou-fan
Lee has called the “romantic generation of modern Chinese writers.”44
Their stories contain obvious semi-autobiographical allusions focused
on love and sex. The protagonists are all alienated and sensitive young
men and women—modern students. In some important ways, Yu Dafu
and Ding Ling stand apart from other writers. Their characters’ tough
moral self-questioning, their search for self-identity, and their sense of
being caught in contradictory situations qualify their stories as cheng-
zhang xiaoshuo and resonate with their counterparts in European lit-
erature that had been written more than a hundred years earlier. These
young Chinese intellectuals’ anti-traditionalism and nationalism thus
bring a fresh flavor to the traditional Bildungsroman.
Both “Sinking” and “Miss Sophie’s Diary” contain narrative and
plot elements that are frequently encountered in conventional Bil-
dungsroman. The protagonists in both stories leave their homes for
unfamiliar metropolitan areas. Sophie in “Miss Sophie’s Diary” leaves
her countryside hometown for school in Beijing. The young man in
“Sinking” departs China and heads to Japan as a study-abroad student.
The conflicts with the older generation in conventional Bildungsroman
are replaced with few and attenuated family connections between the
protagonists and their parents in the two stories. Both protagonists
experience ordeals of love, sexuality, and other complications. Their
individuality and subjectivity are developed during the process of
these ordeals, in which they undergo intense introspection and a quest
for personal identity and fulfillment. More importantly, their personal
growth is closely connected with the social turmoil of the time.
The young man in “Sinking” is mired in poverty and excessive guilt
about his sexuality, and feels insecure and isolated.45 The protagonist’s
44
Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 81–110.
45
Some critics emphasize the irony revealed in Yu Dafu’s story. For example,
Michael Egan argues that the objective and distanced tone of the narrator serves “as
an irony” to “undercut the hero’s sentimental view of himself,” and emphasize “the
basic absurdity of his self-image.” See Michael Egan, “Yu Dafu and the Transition to
Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era,
312. Kirk Denton argues from a contrasting standpoint that we should put our feet in
the shoes of Yu Dafu’s contemporary readers, who were not likely to detect the ironic
50 chapter two
sexual hang-ups can be partially explained in the framework of the

Confucian ethics that had conditioned the author’s upbringing.46 This
feeling is intensified by the fact that he is in a foreign country where
many people regard him as a member of an inferior nationality. Yu
Dafu himself explains:
“Sinking” describes the psychology of a sick youth. It can be called an
anatomy of hypochondria. It also describes as a broad theme the suf-
fering of modern man—that is, sexual need and the clash between soul
and flesh . . . In several places I have also mentioned the discrimination
of Japanese nationalism against our Chinese students there. But for fear
of it being regarded as propaganda, when writing I did not dare to exert
my efforts and merely put in a few sketchy touches.47
Hence, this self-destructive young student’s repeated confessions and
painful self-scrutiny are colored by nationalistic indignation.
If the young man’s ordeals and introspection in “Sinking” are brought
on by excessive guilt about sexuality and ethno-nationalistic humilia-
tion, then Sophie’s sufferings and self-questioning derive mainly from
her struggles with tuberculosis and her feelings of romantic attraction
to the opposite sex. The technique of diary narration facilitates the rev-
elation of the protagonist’s self-questioning.48 Just as tuberculosis plays
a crucial role in Hans Castorp’s Bildung in Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain—elevating him to a higher spiritual and intellectual level,
the disease similarly alters Sophie’s path. It prevents her from living a
normal life, dislocates the practical routines of her life, and isolates her
from others, even though a few friends continue to visit her regularly.
In this sense, Sophie can be regarded as the representative of the “new
woman” of the May Fourth Era who breaks away from “the traditional
social structure and conventional codes of behavior, away from the
tone of the narrator and thus separated the narrator from the author—even though Yu
Dafu’s real life was quite different from the vision of himself projected in his stories.
See Kirk A. Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’” Chinese
Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 14 (December 1992): 117.
46
C. T. Hsia tries to explain the protagonist’s excessive guilt about sexuality in
the framework of the Confucian ethics that had conditioned the author’s upbringing.
“Even when engaged in casual amorous pursuits, Yu Dafu or his fictional alter ego
always suffers from the acute awareness of his truancy as son, husband, and father.”
See C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1961), 109.
47
Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 111.
48
Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern
Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 45.
institutionalized restrictions of marriage, a regular job, or school.”49

This isolation forces thoughtfulness upon Sophie. Meanwhile, Sophie
feels herself to be caught in constant contradictions that leave her in
a state of enduring unease. This restless turmoil is intensified by the
contradiction of being in love with a man whom she simultaneously
despises at another level. If isolation from the outside world and fam-
ily provide her with time and space, and if the uncertainty caused by
contradictory experiences provide her an impetus for introspection,
then her experience of love and her ambivalence toward sexuality pro-
vide concrete material for her ruminations.50 She indulges in the daily
struggle of not knowing whether to love or not to love.
From the above analyses we can see that a faraway urban environ-
ment plays a double role for both Sophie and the young male pro-
tagonist in “Sinking.” The unfamiliar city is both an agent of liberation
and a source of corruption in these two stories, whose protagonists go
through stages of attraction and repulsion in their reactions to their
new environment for schooling. Early twentieth-century China was
experiencing fundamental social, cultural, and political changes, and
the protagonists, like other Chinese intellectuals of their day, were
caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, traditional Chinese ethical
codes conditioned their maturation into adulthood; on the other hand,
Western knowledge, thought, and value systems also affected their life
and thinking. The big city brings disillusionment, making it more
alarming than any dissatisfaction they might have had with the nar-
rowness of life in the country. Eventually, neither protagonist achieves
reconciliation with life and society—the social integration prominent
in conventional Bildungsroman. Instead, self-scrutiny leads both to
despair, and even self-annihilation in the case of the male student in
Japan. Prospects for social integration for either the young man or
the young woman dwindle to near zero on account of the social and
psychological turmoil that swirls around the troubled protagonists. In
this sense, both stories are tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman.
In the 1920s and 1930s, political conflicts between the Guomindang

(hereafter GMD) and the CCP galvanized numerous literati of the May
49
Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 28.
50
Feuerwerker further points out that Sophie’s “love experience is not so much an
excuse for subjective effusions as an occasion for tough moral self-questioning.” See
Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 19.
52 chapter two
Fourth generation to approach their writing from a more politicized

angle. Chiang Kai-shek’s (1887–1975) bloody suppression of the CCP
in Shanghai in 1927 forced the CCP underground and split the GMD
into the left wing in Wuhan and the right wing in Shanghai. In addi-
tion, the GMD’s relatively passive response to Japanese intrusions in
Northeast China in the early 1930s disappointed many May Fourth
writers. Many of them became CCP members or CCP sympathiz-
ers under their acknowledged leader Lu Xun, who nonetheless never
joined the CCP and feuded bitterly with Party heavyweight Zhou Yang
(1908–1989) during the last years of his life. If the May Fourth era was
a time of pursuing individual liberation, then the decade following
the split of the GMD and the CCP became an era of pursuing social
liberation. The concerns of Chinese intellectuals mostly switched an
emphasis on the value of the individual to the exploration of the whole
society’s future. In this political and social situation, the writing of
many May Fourth literati took a left turn, and sought the point of
intersection between the individual and society. This turn is often
characterized by literary historians as a shift from Literary Revolution
to Revolutionary Literature.51 The focus of their writings was no lon-
ger “their own personal experience and individual vision”; they were
more concerned with “ideological and programmatic themes.”52 The
narratives of individuals and individual consciousness prominent in
the May Fourth era were replaced by “panoramic treatments of class
consciousness and great social and economic forces.”53
Under this generally leftist literary climate, the chengzhang xiaoshuo
also witnessed a shift in a leftist direction. The changes are reflected in
subject matter, thematic concerns, narrative patterns and styles. The
chengzhang xiaoshuo by leftist writers during the decade following
1928 usually focus on the way young protagonists find meaningful
paths for their future and devote themselves to the revolution, pursu-
ing a moral transformation from selfish ignorance to revolutionary
enlightenment. Before 1928, May Fourth writers usually portrayed
frustrated young characters who broke the bonds of traditional cul-
51
Leo Ou-fan Lee explains the change in the framework of romanticism. He con-
cludes that the “shift from Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature is epito-
mized by the dynamizing view of Byron—a progression from sentiment to force, from
love to revolution, from Werther to Prometheus.” See Lee, The Romantic Generation
of Modern Chinese Writers, 292.
52
Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 2–3.
53
Ibid.
ture in the May Fourth era, whereas afterwards their characters turned
to social reform or out-and-out revolution. The intense awareness of
the significance of the self in the early May Fourth era increasingly
gave way to class-consciousness and a sense of collectivity. This shift
is identified by critics as the starting point of “a gradual victory of the
discourse of collectivism over the self.”54
In addition to the formulaic thematic framework in these narratives,
the sprouting of an anti-“bourgeois” or pro-“proletarian” identity
could also be perceived among characters. In her study of the theme of
coming-of-age in 1930’s left-wing urban stories, Li Mei points out that
such stories emphasize the transformation and fusion of intellectual
and proletarian identities. There were two patterns of transformation.
On the one hand, as in the character of Jin Xiaomei in “Dawn” (Shu,
1933), the subject of the transformation is the worker who gradually
masters revolutionary knowledge under the consciousness-raising
guidance of progressive intellectuals. On the other hand, as illustrated
by Meilin in “Shanghai in the Spring of 1930” (Yijiu sanling nian chun
shanghai, 1930), the subject of the transformation is the intellectual
who undergoes a metamorphosis into a proletarian by means of guid-
ance from a politically astute “worker mentor.” These two patterns
bring to light the requirement that youth must experience a transfor-
mation of identity in their awakening along the path of growth they
have followed. In this way, young intellectuals wind up proletarian-
ized, while workers and farmers become intellectualized.55
In fictional portrayals of identity shifts, Chinese young people ceased
being enlightened new youth and became progressive and revolution-
ary youth. Protagonists sprang up to embody these new ambitions,
as exemplified in Ye Shengtao’s (1894–1988) Schoolmaster Ni Huan-
chih (Ni Huanzhi, 1928), Mao Dun’s (1896–1981) Rainbow (Hong,
1930), Ding Ling’s Weihu (Weihu, 1930) and “Shanghai in the Spring
of 1930,” Ba Jin’s (1904–2005) Family ( Jia, 1931) and Wang Xiyan’s
(1914–1999) “Dawn.”
These narratives unfold a variety of thematic foci, often including ele-
ments of societal inequities, political injustice, and labor-management
conflict. Nevertheless, most of the works are mediocre with respect to
54
Ling, 5.
55
Li Mei, “Lun sanshi niandai zuoyi dushi xiaoshuo zhong de chengzhang zhuti”
[On the theme of growth in the 1930s’ left-wing urban stories], Yancheng shifan
xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:47–49.
54 chapter two
literary merit, falling into the well-worn “revolution plus love” formula
in which the characters’ personal well-being is now subservient to the
responsibility of saving society as a whole.56 As one critic observed,
“The actual representation of characters’ minds in leftist literature was
for the most part formulaic and superficial. It is not so much that left-
ist writers denied their characters a psychic life, but that the minds
portrayed were flat, unambiguous, and transparently clear.”57 The flat-
ness and simplicity of characterization are also evident in the leftist
chengzhang xiaoshuo narratives. In spite of their artistic weakness, it is
still worth discussing their thematic significance through a brief review
of Ye Shengtao’s Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih.
Ye Shengtao’s (Ye Shaojun) Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih was com-
pleted and serialized in the Education Magazine, vol. 20, issues 1–12,
in 1928. It was then published by Shanghai Commercial Press in book
form in August 1929 and reprinted in thirteen editions by Kaiming
Bookstore from 1930 to 1949.58 The book narrates the path of a young
Chinese educator, Ni Huanzhi, from 1916 to 1927. In Schoolmaster Ni
Huan-chih, various contradictions within the individual as portrayed
in “Miss Sophie’s Diary” and “Sinking” are mainly replaced by portray-
als of contradictions within society through three aspects—the peda-
gogical, the romantic, and the political. These contradictions lead to
frustration and disillusion. The novel not only incorporates the author
Ye Shengtao’s educational philosophy; it also reveals how historical
events of the time shaped the lives and careers of May Fourth youth.
Ni Huanzhi represents a typical middle-class intellectual who attends
a new Western-style school, becomes awakened to the May Fourth
spirit, is later disillusioned by the gap between societal reality and his
ideals, and on his deathbed finds renewed hope in revolution and the
youth of days to come. Ni Huanzhi is a transitional figure, bridging the
gap between May Fourth new youth and revolutionary youth.
56
Jianmei Liu has done a thoughtful and thorough study on modern Chinese
stories written within the thematic framework of revolution plus love in her book
Revolution Plus Love (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). She examines the
changing patterns of these formulaic writings in different historical periods in modern
China, from the 1930s to the contemporary.
57
Ling, 13–14.
58
He Xifan, “Ye Shengtao de jiaoyu qingjie yu Ni Huanzhi de xinling bianqian”
[Ye Shengtao’s educational concern and Ni Huanzhi’s spiritual journey], Xihua shifan
daxue xuebao, 2005, no. 2:65.
Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih was one of the earliest full-length novels

dealing with the Bildung of young Chinese intellectuals. It contains
the typical narrative elements of the conventional Bildungsroman, and
maintains a good balance between the young protagonist’s individual-
ity and socialization. More importantly, the development of the pro-
tagonist Ni Huanzhi’s personality and his recognition of himself and
society intersect with societal developments throughout the story. In
other words, his individuality and subjectivity are developed through
his social integration, specifically his participation in educational
reform and political movements.
Setting out on a journey is one of the important plot elements in
a Bildungsroman novel. In this narrative, the protagonist sets on two
journeys. Covered in the first eighteen chapter of the novel, the first
journey is from his home village to another rural village to realize his
educational ideals in an experimental school. The second journey in
the remaining twelve chapters is to metropolitan Shanghai to fulfill
his political aspirations. The protagonist Ni Huanzhi has two goals: to
establish a school in his hometown to enhance the local people’s qual-
ity of life, and to have an ideal family in which his wife is both his lover
at home and a comrade in the world of politics. Unfortunately, harsh
reality shatters both of his ideals. Feeling depressed and dispirited, he
hurries from his hometown to Shanghai, where various revolutionary
movements are in full swing. Swept up in the mighty torrent of revo-
lution, Ni Huanzhi vacillates between his disillusion with the status
quo and the determination to meld his personal ideals to collective
goals. Inspired and enlightened by the martyrdom of his revolutionary
friend Wang Leshan, he finally recognizes that only through revolu-
tion can an individual ideal be realized. He dies from an illness soon
thereafter.
Ni Huanzhi’s life journey is a collision between his own individu-
ality and his society’s historical dynamism—a frustrating encounter
between his youthful idealism and the harsh status quo. A series of
historical and political events—the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth
Movement in 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925, and Chiang
Kai-shek’s purge of Communists after the split between the GMD
and CCP in 1927—form the backdrop of Ni Huanzhi’s Bildung. The
termination of the imperial examination system gives Ni Huanzhi a
chance to enter a new Western-style school. The Xinhai Revolution
initially brings him new feelings about the surrounding world as if a
new and violent strength has been poured into him, but he is soon
56 chapter two
disappointed, finding that no significant changes have taken place in

his hometown. His early choice of a career as a schoolteacher is a
pragmatic solution for earning a living rather than some sort of ideal
vocation. However, deep within he harbors ample idealism and drive
to achieve an unusual change to the status quo. His friend Jin Shubo
subsequently invites him to teach in an experimental school, the prin-
cipal of which shares his educational vision. Thereupon, Ni Huanzhi
immediately throws himself headlong into pedagogy, applying new
methods in his teaching and engaging in small farm initiatives and
other experimental projects. For Ni Huanzhi, education is not only a
tool to transmit practical knowledge and prepare students for a future
vocation, but is also a means to build student character and help them
develop themselves as well-rounded individuals.
Intellectually, Ni Huanzhi is nurtured by the new ideas promulgated
in Chen Duxiu’s and Hu Shi’s New Youth. This journal is a major
motif in the novel, and also the window through which Ni Huanzhi
and his colleagues see the outside world and assimilate new knowledge
and progressive thought. Although they are not direct participants in
the May Fourth Movement in Beijing, Ni Huanzhi and his colleagues
in the countryside are inspired to strive to do something to echo the
movement in their own town. Ni Huanzhi’s enthusiasm for education
is further fueled by his romance with Jin Peizhang, an independent-
minded and intelligent Normal School co-ed. Yet at the same time, Ni
Huanzhi agonizes constantly over the bleak and difficult reality around
him, and is plagued by his own youthful sentimentalism.
After marrying Peizhang, Ni Huanzhi’s disappointment and disillu-
sion are aggravated by his wife’s regression from her previous standing
as a progressive and idealistic teacher to her present state as a narrow-
minded and self-absorbed housewife. At this low ebb in his morale,
Ni Huanzhi goes to Shanghai to teach at a women’s school with the
support of a recommendation from his close friend, the revolution-
ary Wang Leshan. It is in Shanghai where Ni Huanzhi most fervently
throws himself into organized political activities and witnesses peaks
in the brutality of historical reality. He is present at the May Thirti-
eth Movement, a significant anti-imperialist movement mobilized and
organized by the CCP with factory workers as the main participants.
By engaging in such political activism, he gradually develops a genu-
ine sympathy for factory workers. Two years later, Chiang Kai-shek’s
violent purge of Communists on strike in Shanghai stuns him and
fills him with disillusionment, yet at the same time he is encouraged
by Wang Leshan’s sacrifice of his life in the struggle, as well as the

latter’s revolutionary Communist ideology. Ni Huanzhi sees the hope
of China in that country’s youth, even though he is disillusioned and
distressed by harsh realities and his own failure to reform society. This
hope is evident during a bout of introspection on his deathbed:
Not yet thirty-five, nothing successfully accomplished, how can I just
die like this? Oh, let me die, let me die! Feeble energies, a vacillating
mind, ineffectual, completely ineffectual! Every single thing I’ve hoped
for has come within my grasp, and every time I have let the opportunity
be lost; if I lived for another thirty years it would still be just the same!
No, people like me are useless, every single one of us! Success is not a
prize that we deserve to get; one day there will be people who are quite
different from us—let them get it!59
This monologue reveals Ni Huanzhi’s disillusionment with him-
self and his compatriots, but meanwhile he entrusts his hope to the
revolutionary youth of the future—youngsters who would eventually
follow in the footsteps of Wang Leshan. Ye Shengtao reinforces the
reasonability of Ni Huanzhi’s hopes for China’s future by depicting
his widow Peizhang’s belated return to enlightened social engagement.
Near the end of the novel, Peizhang reflects on the period of regressive
retreat from social activism she had gone through: “I shut myself up
at home as soon as I had a child. But there’s no point in brooding on
past mistakes . . . Years ago Huan-chih said he wanted to go out into
the world and stretch his wings, and now I am burning with the same
desire that he had!” With “the courage that comes to a soldier about
to depart on a long campaign,” she determines to work not only for
herself and her family, but also for society as a whole.60 Though Pei-
zhang’s change of heart seems too sudden to be wholly credible and
the reader is hardly prepared to accept it at face value, it nevertheless
reveals the author’s effort to confirm the soundness of Ni Huanzhi’s
hope for a better future and to allow his social activism to continue
through his widow’s renewed efforts. Ni Huanzhi’s journey from the
countryside to the city and from activism within his school out to
the broader society parallels his intellectual journey from idealism to
disillusionment and finally on to revolution—even though he has no
chance to achieve his revolutionary goals.
59
Ye Shengtao, Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, 2nd ed. trans. A. C. Barnes (Beijing:
Foreign Language Press, 1978), 327.
60
Ibid., 333.
58 chapter two
Aside from Ni Huanzhi, there are other fictional characters whose

life story showcases the various outcomes encountered by activists in
the May Fourth generation. In his article “On Reading Ni Huanzhi,”
Mao Dun (1896–1981) enumerates the outcomes of these May Fourth
participants ten years after the heyday of the movement:
The “heroes” who rose with the great May Fourth tide have passed
through numerous metamorphoses. One need not dwell on the many
who rose and ebbed with the tide of the May Fourth; even the outcomes
of the prominent “pillars” of that time give one much food for thought.
Some died from an illness, while others sacrificed their lives for the
cause; some retired, while others degenerated; some turned reactionary,
while others stagnated. Each in his respective manner revealed his true
colors before Mr. History.61
These “heroes” can find their fictional counterparts in Schoolmaster Ni
Huan-chih: Ni Huanzhi dies from an illness. Jin Shubo degenerates;
he begins by embracing his ideal as enthusiastically as Ni Huanzhi,
but ends up living an idle, gentrified life in the countryside, mocking
Huanzhi’s idealism and naïvety with snobbish condescension. Jiang
Bingru stagnates; as a returned student from Japan, this strong sup-
porter and comrade of Ni Huanzhi ardently take up a career in educa-
tional reform in his hometown, but later compromises with the status
quo, becoming part of the local elite. In contrast, Wang Leshan sac-
rifices his life for the revolutionary cause. Wang Leshan is one of the
earliest Chinese fictional representations of a revolutionary intellectual
who becomes a “martyr” for the Communist revolution.
In spite of their disparate paths after the May Fourth Movement,
we can see one common tendency among these four friends: a grad-
ual withering of individualism and a steady increase of a collectivist
orientation. As observed by one critic, in Ni Huanzhi’s alter ego the
concern for selfhood and subjectivity decreases, and the concern for
national “salvation” and regime change increases.62 Ni Huanzhi’s life
and intellectual journey involve a frustrating process of subordinating
61
Mao Dun, “On Reading Ni Huanzhi” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought:
Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 289–290.
62
Wolfgang Kubin, “German Melancholy and Chinese Restlessness: Ye Shengtao’s
Novel Ni Huanzhi,” Journal of Tsinghua University (Philosophy and Social Science) 17
(February 2002): 77.
his personal convictions and ideals to the regimented political activi-

ties of a revolutionist.
In the 1930s, Chinese leftist writers’ chengzhang xiaoshuo were usually

concerned with the tension between what they viewed as “Historical
Inevitability”—the Revolution’s immanent destruction of capitalism
and “feudalism” once and for all—versus an ever-suspect individual-
ism. Meanwhile, a group of politically unaffiliated writers were writ-
ing coming-of-age narratives on a variety of themes related to young
middle-class urbanites’ experiences or the rhythms of life in tradi-
tional Chinese village society. These diversified themes are evident
in the works of the neo-perceptionists and the nativists (or native-
soil writers). Influenced by various Western modernists and Japanese
Neo-perceptionists School, leading Chinese neo-perceptionists such
as Shi Zhecun (1905–2003), Liu Na’ou (1905–1940), and Mu Shiying
(1912–1940) brought unusual descriptive imagery and elaborate psy-
chological analysis into their fiction. Their works set out to explore
urban experiences and “modern city culture—the erotic female
body, urban exoticism, and the bourgeois lifestyle.”63 Though neo-
perceptionist fiction also touched upon the motif of revolution at times,
it was usually portrayed as more chaotically dramatic than genuinely
meaningful, “as just another scene of urban exoticism,” or else it was
“used to reflect modernity and Shanghai urban culture” to “satisfy the
modern reader.”64
In contrast with these writers’ enthusiasm for urban life, another
group of writers was more concerned with the gradual disappearance
of conventional Chinese rural society and traditional Chinese values,
and hence wrote stories about their native land. Some literary crit-
ics have dubbed them the nativists. Shen Congwen (1902–1988), who
often referred to himself as a villager or ruralite, was the most eminent
representative of this school. In his relatively lyrical narrative style, he
often emphasized, the “elegant, healthy, and natural” aspects of rural
life in the upland border region of west Hunan,” in contrast with what
he saw as the decay of values across the political spectrum in urban
China.65 Congwen’s Autobiography (Congwen zizhuan) and the short
63
Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 151.
64
Ibid., 151–152.
65
Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 207.
60 chapter two
story “Xiaoxiao” (Xiaoxiao) can also be read as chengzhang xiaoshuo,

even though they differ markedly from those written by the left-wing
writers of his day.66
The Lugouqiao Emergency (also called July Seventh Incident and the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident) on 7 July 1937 triggered the eight-year
Sino-Japanese War and turned a new page in modern Chinese history.
In the wake of the unconditional surrender of the Japanese army on
15 August 1945, the civil war between the GMD and the CCP eventu-
ally broke out in 1946 and lasted until 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek
withdrew his GMD government and military to the island of Taiwan.
During these wars, literature was often assumed to shoulder part of
the responsibility for “saving” the country. The aesthetic concerns of
the country’s writers commonly yielded to the perceived need for regi-
mentation in line with the revolutionary or anti-imperialist struggle
at hand. According to one commentator, “During the Sino-Japanese
War, romanticism died a natural death in the occupied area and was
replaced by the resurgence of more traditionally influenced drama,
essays, and anti-romantic narrative literature.”67 With Mao Zedong’s
“Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (1942) as a water-
shed, the May Fourth era’s legacy of enlightenment humanism and
romantic individualism completely eroded, giving way to a more com-
bative era’s insistence upon national salvation and revolutionary collec-
tivism. Under such socio-historical circumstances, fiction dealing with
the intellectual development and emotional growth of young people
became scarce. Still, Bildungsroman fiction of excellent quality were
occasionally still written, such as Lu Ling’s (1923–1994) full-length
novel, Children of the Rich (Caizhu de ernümen). In terms of artistic
value and intellectual depth, the second volume of this two-volume
novel still stands as one of the finest Bildungsroman narratives ever
written by a Chinese left-wing writer. With its complex and ponderous
syntax, the novel deviates from traditional Chinese vernacular mod-
66
Consistent with his loyalty to traditional Chinese values and appreciation of life
in traditional agricultural society, Shen Congwen’s ultimate goal was to manifest the
“power of innocence and spontaneity,” and in so doing, to demonstrate that “the
moral codes of a community should not be predicated on pre-established grounds but
should evolve as a result of the harmonious association of things in their phenomenal
state.” Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957, 201; Lee, The Romantic
Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 244.
67
Duke, Blooming and Contending: Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era, 184.
els, having taken its stylistic cues instead from Chinese translations of
such Western writers as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Lu Ling’s adoption
of a Western narrative style helped this novel to present what a critic
has termed the “problematic self.”68
Written between 1945 and 1948, Children of the Rich recounts the
decline of a wealthy elite family in Suzhou, with particular attention
to the fate of younger family members from the early 1930s to the mid
1940s. The subject matter of this novel was inspired by Lu Ling’s per-
sonal observations of the ups and downs of his maternal uncle’s fam-
ily, along with memories of his own youth.69 Hence, Lu Ling’s work
represents not only certain intellectual currents of the time, but also
significant historical and social changes. Unlike other contemporary
left-wing writers who generally emphasized the dramatic transforma-
tion of the protagonist from a “bourgeois” intellectual to a revolution-
ary, Lu Ling turned inward to disclose the rich inner life of dejected
young intellectuals in a chaotic society. The novel has sometimes been
criticized as excessively intellectual, and has often been read by critics
as a work “about consciousness”—and as a fictional elaboration of Hu
Feng’s ideas about subjectivism.70 In Volume Two of the novel, the
young protagonist Jiang Chunzu continues to experience the kind of
spiritual crisis of Chinese intellectuals that Ni Huanzhi experienced
in Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih. Jiang Chunzu is infused with the May
Fourth spirit of enlightenment humanism and has been nurtured by
ideas in the progressive journal New Youth, but the harsh status quo
makes him gradually awaken to the apparent powerlessness of enlight-
enment humanist values in this social context. Neither Ni Huanzhi nor
Chunzu can envision a way of bringing about social change through
the spirit of enlightenment humanism.
Volume 1 of Lu Ling’s novel is a panoramic presentation of the
gradual decline of a wealthy family with a particular focus on the
family’s two older sons, Jiang Weizu and Jiang Shaozu. This volume
depicts a particularly wrenching transition in family fortunes that res-
onates with Lu Ling’s own family background. He captures the decline
of not merely a lone family, but of an entire complex social ethos.
Volume 2, strongly influenced by Romain Rolland’s (1866–1944)
68
Ibid., 160.
69
Ling, 122–123.
70
Ibid., 185.
62 chapter two
Jean Christophe, focuses solely on the quest for understanding and ful-
fillment of the youngest son Jiang Chunzu, and is written in the narrative
pattern of Bildungsroman, exploring the protagonist’s complex inner
life and his interactions with the outside world. The following discus-
sion will focus on Volume 2, which is marked by a plethora of psycho-
logical description and internal monologue, and animated by a concern
for the whole man unfolding organically in all his complexity and
richness.71
In Children of the Rich, Volume 2, the protagonist Chunzu follows
an opposite path from that of the young protagonist in Schoolmaster
Ni Huan-chih. Ni Huanzhi’s Bildung is accomplished through his jour-
neys from a small world to a big world—first from his home village to
another village to attempt to achieve his educational ideals, then from
the countryside to the city, where he dies after some participation in
leftist political movements. On the other hand, Chunzu leaves his
hometown for larger cities, then withdraws to the countryside to engage
in educational reform, and finally returns to his home to die. Both of
Ni Huanzhi’s and Chunzu’s journeys are accompanied by frustrations
and disillusionment. The young Chunzu is forced to leave home alone
and sets out on an uncertain journey as a war refugee. On this lonely
expedition, he sees the world outside of his family and witnesses the
sort of large-scale human suffering characteristic of wartime. Through
his acquaintance with people from all walks of life, he witnesses bloody
slaughters and brutal persecution in addition to experiencing warm
friendships. With these bitter but valuable experiences, he returns to
his home. So far, the story fits the traditional pattern of Bildungsroman
very well. A young man sets out on a lonely journey; he experiences
the outside world, acquiring a certain set of values, learning lessons,
evolving and growing; finally, he returns home, completing a full cycle
of activity in an individual’s life.
However, Lu Ling does not stop there. He goes much further with
the tension between the development of Chunzu’s individuality and
socialization. After Chunzu returns to his hometown at the rear of the
war-zone, he draws upon his musical talent to contribute to the pro-
duction of anti-Japanese leafletting. However, clique struggles and the
failure of a love affair, push him again into a mire of disillusion and
depression. Chunzu withdraws further to the countryside, searching
for salvation. He accepts a teaching position at his friend’s school. Yet
71
Ibid., 167.
the simple life in the countryside does not help to relieve his depres-
sion. The suffocating atmosphere in the school and bitterness from his
failed love affair impel him to flee back to Chongqing to join his family
there. The painful struggle of his soul induces severe health problems,
and eventually leads to his untimely death.
One critic sees Chunzu’s intellectual self as problematic and “split in
two directions: inward to the mind and outward to the world.”72 How-
ever, I do not see it as problematic. On the contrary, the revelation
of the protagonist Chunzu’s inwardness and outwardness reveals two
important aspects of the protagonist’s Bildung—development of his
individuality and socialization, the combination of which help make
the novel a successful Bildungsroman narrative. In his preface to Chil-
dren of the Rich, Hu Feng extols Lu Ling’s concern for the inwardness
of the protagonist by pointing out that Lu Ling does not simply record
historical events, but reveals the disturbance of the individual soul
under certain historical circumstances.73 Chunzu experiences many
of the hardships that a typical Bildungsroman protagonist undergoes:
generational conflict, provinciality, the struggle to find one’s place in
society, alienation, ordeal by love, and the search for a vocation. Influ-
enced by various personalities and forces, Chunzu gradually and pain-
fully comes to understand himself and his role in the revolution and
the anti-Japanese war, and works out his own salvation by melting
himself into a collective career. Yet in the face of a family and soci-
ety torn apart by the gunpowder of war, his experiences undermine
the development of a mature character. He cannot attain strength and
integrity through this self-examination, and eventually fails to recon-
cile himself with society.
72
Ling, 185, 189, 23. By “inward to the mind,” Denton refers to Chunzu’s desperate
effort to form a “subject apart from the oppressive forces of society,” or in Leo Ou-fan
Lee’s romanticism framework, Chunzu’s “Faustian-Promethean” tendency to “opti-
mistically [wage] a solitary battle against society.” By “outward to the world,” Denton
highlights Chunzu’s action of “join[ing] with the people” as a token of “participat[ing]
creatively in the movement of History,” after this “introverted Wertherian” hero is
overwhelmed by his pessimism and “desires to terminate his isolation by fusing with
a larger whole.” Denton argues that Chunzu’s psychic dilemma and problematic self
are still unsolved today, and they may explain the post-Mao literature’s obsession with
self and subjectivity.
73
Hu Feng, preface to Lu Ling’s Caizhu de ernümen [Children of the rich] (Beijing:
Renmin wenxue chuban she, 1985).
64 chapter two
From the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the

eruption of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese literature in mainland
China was highly politicized. Upon the canonization of Mao Zedong’s
1942 “Yan’an talks” as holy writ in the PRC, Mao-era PRC literature
was shaped to meet the CCP’s political demands for conformity. Polit-
icized writings on revolution and collectivism won a complete victory
over the May Fourth legacy of enlightenment humanism and romantic
subjectivism. Borrowed from Soviet Russia, the prescribed PRC writ-
ing style was so-called “socialist realism,” which later developed into
a combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanti-
cism (with the latter being in fact by far the dominant mode). The
central figure of a literary work—the new hero—was expected to be
a model Maoist figure in a typical circumstance. The dominant con-
flicts were between social classes as defined by Marxist-Leninism and
Mao Zedong Thought; the key contradictions were between public
and individual benefits.74 Workers, peasants, and soldiers became the
nominal masters of history and the protagonists of most narratives,
while intellectual topics were marginalized. The quantity and quality
of chengzhang xiaoshuo declined.
Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhige, 1958) can be counted
as representative of the chengzhang xiaoshuo during this period.75 Even
though this novel adopted the somewhat dated theme of the forma-
tion of a female Party intellectual who hailed from a rural landlord
family, it has continued to be published, reprinted, and highly rated
because the author skillfully fuses the individual growth and maturity
of her protagonist into the collective struggle.76 The novel betrays the
author’s conscious effort to conform to the political and ideological
“correctness” of China under Maoism. Another reason for its popu-
larity at publication was that the theme of the story complied with
contemporary literary criteria: revolutionary realism, revolutionary
romance, and the protagonist’s ultimate goal of becoming a deter-
mined revolutionist. Yang Mo thus echoed leftist writers preceding
her—writers who “belittle the decadent experiences of the bourgeois
74
For detail, see Hong Zicheng, Dangdai zhongguo wenxue gaiguan [General
review of contemporary Chinese literature] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1998);
Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, trans. Michael M. Day
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009).
75
Yang Mo, Qingchun zhi ge [The song of youth] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe,
1958).
76
Sun Jing, “Zhongguo xiandai chengzhang xiaoshuo de xushixue yanjiu,” 23–24.
individual and . . . emphasize the happy ending of the revolution led

by the proletarian collective.”77 Through the protagonist Lin Daojing’s
transformation in The Song of Youth, readers see how the Chinese
intellectual’s autonomy is gradually undermined, and how the May
Fourth new youth is completely transformed into a determined rev-
olutionary youth. It is also apparent how the May Fourth legacy of
enlightenment humanism and romantic subjectivism is finally sub-
jected to revolution and collectivism. Through Lin Daojing, The Song
of Youth presents the image of a typical female revolutionary intellec-
tual in the 1930s. The plot contains all the main elements of a typical
Bildungsroman—conflict with one’s parents’ generation, alienation,
flight from provinciality, entrance into society, education, the ordeal
of love, and finally, the finding of one’s place within society. In many
Western Bildungsroman fiction, the father is absent; in this story, the
relationship between Daojing and her father is problematic. She has
double class identities, since half of her genes are from the exploiting
class of her father, a rural landlord, and half are from the exploited
class of her mother, a maid under the employ of the landlord. Being
the daughter of the working-class mother and living in the exploitative
landlord family are the source of her suffering, and finally lead her to
flee her rural family. Originally an innocent and helpless young girl,
Daojing thus takes the first step towards maturity by herself. To some
degree, her journey from home is a flight from provinciality. Now she
faces a broader world in which she will experience all kinds of ordeals
and finally achieve her salvation, her self-realization.
Swales has repeatedly emphasized that “when portraying the hero,
the Bildungsroman operates with a tension between a concern for the
sheer complexity of individual potentiality on the one hand and a
recognition on the other that practical reality—marriage, family, and
career—is a necessary dimension of the hero’s self-realization.”78 In
The Song of Youth, the development of Daojing’s individual potential-
ity is accompanied by the realization of her practical quests for love,
family, and career. More importantly, her love interests and family life
are oriented toward her career, whose ultimate goal is national salva-
tion. Furthermore, as the critic Li Yang observes, every single evo-
lutionary change in Daojing’s life takes place with the help of men:
77
78
66 chapter two
first, the May Fourth intellectual Yu Yongze, then the revolutionaries

Lu Jiachuan and Jiang Hua.79 Therefore, it is men who incarnate the
forces of history within this novel. Lin Daojing’s relationships with the
three symbolize the tension between the individual and history.
Yu Yongze, a typical May Fourth young intellectual nurtured by
both traditional Chinese and Western literature and thought, opens
a window for Daojing to the outside world. His erudition quenches
Daojing’s thirst for knowledge. His advocacy of individualist values,
freedom, and happiness awakens Daojing as an independent human
being. His romantic love transforms Daojing from a girl into a woman.
These influences symbolize the first stage of Daojing’s self-realization
as an individual: her severance from her rural landlord family to pur-
sue her individual freedom and happiness. Yu Yongze takes her to
Beijing, the center of new culture and thought that will arouse her
yearning for social change. At this point, Yu Yongze has fulfilled his
mission. Another man will take over the duty to guide Daojing fur-
ther toward the goal of mental maturity: commitment to Communist
ideology.
The city seems to promise infinite variety and newness. For Daojing,
Beijing brings her into a new world where she becomes acquainted
with revolutionaries, including Communist Party member Lu Jiach-
uan. Under Lu Jiachuan’s guidance, Daojing reads progressive books,
mainly on Marxist theory, and becomes actively involved in the urban
student movement. She gradually discovers what revolution is and why
it is necessary to change society. Each of Daojing’s growing stages sees
a negation of the previous stage by “overcoming” her earlier “wrong”
and “problematic consciousness.”80 After becoming acquainted with Lu
Jiachuan, Daojing begins to despise the middle-class sentiments and
habits of her first savior, Yu Yongze, who indulges in family happiness,
appreciates traditional Chinese culture, and stands aloof from political
activities. From Daojing’s new perspective, Yu Yongze is out of date
and has become a barrier on her progressive path. Her love for Yu
Yongze gradually and secretly shifts to Lu Jiachuan, a real revolution-
ary. If Yu Yongze helped Daojing achieve self-realization as an individ-
ual human being, then Lu Jiachuan now encourages her to transcend
79
Li Yang, Kangzheng suming zhilu [Struggling against predestination] (Chang-
chun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1993).
80
1900–1958,” 272.
individualism to merge with collectivity. He nurtures such political

awareness by explaining Marxist theory to her. Lu Jiachuan’s mission
is thus successfully fulfilled. Conveniently for the novel’s plot, Lu Jia-
chuan is soon arrested by the GMD and subsequently executed.
A third man, Jiang Hua, enters Daojing’s life and takes over Lu
Jiachuan’s mission to guide Daojing further toward being a full-
fledged revolutionary. His guidance leads Daojing to find a perfect
accommodation with both life and society. In the end, her individual
potentiality is fully developed. She has become a self-confident, inde-
pendent, and mature woman. In home and family life, Daojing finds
her haven in Jiang Hua’s love, and the two become a revolutionary
couple. In terms of career, Daojing is now a determined revolutionary
and a leader in the student movement. It might be true, as Jianmei
Liu argues, that “[Daojing] tries to leave room to preserve residues of
sexual love, personal happiness, and the individual desire under the
cloak of sublimation,” but it is also obvious that at the final stage of her
growth, Daojing has fused her individuality into the revolutionary col-
lectivity.81 Individualist romanticism overtly withdraws from her life.
With her sexuality, individuality and self-determination submitting to
revolution, collectivity and collective commitment, the salvation and
justification of her own life are achieved. Lin Daojing thus completes
her Bildung—transformation from a sentimental female student, to a
progressive youth, to a revolutionary youth, and finally to a tamed
communist youth. This reflects a typical trajectory of many Chinese
youth in the first half of the twentieth century.
The chaos of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 left an almost
empty page in the history of Chinese literature. After Mao Zedong’s
death in 1976, China suddenly found itself able to wake up from the
protracted nightmare, and PRC intellectuals started to reflect on this
disastrous and traumatizing history by writing memoirs and fiction. In
their writings, they recalled their catastrophic and devastating experi-
ences during the Cultural Revolution. These works were labeled “Scar
Literature” and “Reflective Literature.” Examples include Lu Xinhua’s
“The Wounded” (Shanghen, 1978), Dai Houying’s Man, oh, Man (Ren
a ren, 1980), Zhang Xianliang’s Body and Soul (Ling yu rou, 1981),
and Yu Luojin’s A Chinese Winter’s Tale (Yige dongtian de tonghua,
1980). The most noteworthy trait of these narratives is the revival of
81
68 chapter two
the theme of love, which “for those writers represents the banner of
humanism, a way to save society, and a tentative vision of the lost
‘self.’”82 Even though these narratives touch upon the growth and for-
mation of youth, their main concern is to present the disastrous effects
of the Cultural Revolution upon Chinese people, and to reflect intel-
lectually on those failures. In this study, these narratives will thus not
be treated as typical coming-of-age narratives or Bildungsroman.
Since the mid-1980s, alongside a general resurgence of interest in self
and subjectivity, some young Chinese writers started to write narra-
tives that explored seriously the theme of young people’s individuality
and socialization, either during the Cultural Revolution or in the con-
temporary reform period that followed. Examples included Yu Hua’s
novel Cries in the Drizzle and his short stories (for example, “Timid as
a Mouse,” and “The April Third Incident”); Su Tong’s North Side Story
and the Toon Street Series; and Liu Sola’s “You Have No Choice” (Ni
biewu xuanze, 1985). Critics of the 1980s labeled these three writers
“avant-garde,” and many of their early works applied innovative dic-
tion and literary techniques by way of influence from foreign writers
such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
Yet even so, the works cited above could still be read as chengzhang
xiaoshuo. The significance of these narratives lay in the fact that these
writers reflected on the growth and future of Chinese youth in ways that
deviated from the utopian vision perpetuated by Mao Zedong’s ver-
sion of the “new socialist man.” In terms of narrative, they completely
rejected the formula of revolutionary-realism-plus-revolutionary-
romance, which had been popularized among left-wing writers since
the early 1930s and had reached its peak in the Mao era.
In the 1990s, more coming-of-age narratives emerged, and writers
revealed profound intellectual concerns as they explored the growth
and maturation of the individual. However, these narratives were writ-
ten mainly by women, and included Lin Bai’s One Person’s War (Yige
ren de zhanzheng, 1993) and Chen Ran’s Private Life (Siren shenghuo,
1996). Unlike May Fourth era women writers whose female protago-
nists struggled against patriarchal suppression, women writers in the
1990s were more interested in revealing their personal feelings as
women. In their narratives, men such as fathers, brothers, husbands or
lovers were often either absent or else insignificant.
82
Ibid., 24.
In One Person’s War, Lin Bai emphasizes the loneliness and isola-
tion of a girl as an individual. The growth of Duomi, the protagonist,
is a process of searching for her identity. Duomi is a sensitive girl with
literary talent. Her father is absent. Her connection with her mother
is tenuous. She is destined to be an orphan and lives on her own. Her
room is full of mirrors through which she confirms her existence.
As a small girl, Duomi still has some attachment to her mother.
However, after her first experience of sexual self-gratification at the
age of eight, she becomes aware of her identity as a woman and starts
to explore the outside world. She cuts loose from her mother. In her
own words, she starts to “randomly pick up scenes (suiyi tiaoxuan
fengjing).”83 Thanks to the literary talent she subsequently cultivates,
she has an opportunity to flee her hometown and move to the city. As
she seeks a vocation, her world grows larger and larger. She becomes
a poet, an editor, and a screenwriter. She also experiences an ordeal
of love, a necessary part of her growth. After all these experiences,
Duomi chooses to withdraw into her own private world. It seems her
journey of youth—her search for love and vocation—legitimizes her
solitude. However, in this process she affirms her value as an indepen-
dent entity. Duomi calls herself an “escapist.” Her philosophy of life
is to “run off ” when facing a problem. This escape is presented posi-
tively, showing her confidence in her own existence and her don’t-care
attitude about the outside world. At the end of the story, she obtains
inner peace by living on her own; this is Duomi’s way of accommodat-
ing to life and society.
In the late 1990s, some women writers born in the 1970s began
to publish narratives about the lives of contemporary young people.
Many of these narratives were modeled on their own experiences and
became best-sellers. They included such works as Wei Hui’s Shang-
hai Baby (Shanghai baobei, 1999), Mianmian’s Candy (Tang, 2000),
and Flower on the Other Side (Bi’an hua, 2003) by the so-called inter-
net writer Anny Baby. Yet even though these narratives are closely
related to contemporary urban young people’s lives, my study does
not include them in the category of the Bildungsroman. The writers are
more interested in disclosing the state of their lives than in exploring
the process of growing up; they “neither identify with heavily loaded
83
Lin Bai, Yige ren de zhanzheng [One person’s war] (Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi
chubanshe, 2004), 53.
70 chapter two
sense of nationalism nor care to pursue the autonomy of literature.”84

As literary critics have repeatedly pointed out, “Bildung is not merely
the accumulation of experience, not merely maturation in the form
of fictional biography.” It does not matter whether the process of Bil-
dung succeeds or fails, whether or not the protagonist achieves recon-
ciliation with life and society; what matters is that “there must be a
sense of evolutionary change within the self.”85 In these narratives by
young women writers, readers can hardly detect any intellectual con-
cern for the process of change in the self. Therefore, this study prefers
to treat these works as social and cultural phenomena rather than as
Bildungsroman.
From this review of the changing patterns of the chengzhang xiaoshuo
in twentieth-century Chinese literature, we can see that the different
concerns of Bildungsroman narratives in different historical periods
reveal Chinese intellectuals’ response to and reflection on China’s
social and political vicissitudes. In the modern Chinese chengzhang
xiaoshuo written before 1966, the term youth was full of cultural and
political connotations, and young people have often been the chosen
agents to rejuvenate and modernize China, at least theoretically. These
narratives also display a tendency for individuality and subjectivity to
yield gradually to collectivity and revolution. By contrast, the narra-
tives written in the post-Mao era see a resurgence of selfhood, indi-
viduality, subjectivity, and a withdrawal of the concern for national
salvation and collectivity. As Li Zehou points out, the tension between
enlightenment humanism and national salvation has haunted Chinese
modernity since the May Fourth era,86 but “in literary theory and fic-
tional practice, these two discourses were never so at odds…[as] in
the post-Mao period, when intellectuals were searching for alternatives
to Maoist collectivism.”87 In the post-Mao Chinese Bildungsroman,
“youth” is no longer the hero who will save and modernize China.
Among modern and contemporary Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo,
my study will give special attention to coming-of-age narratives of
Su Tong and Yu Hua, and will analyze their works in the next two
84
85
Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarifica-
tion,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 41.
86
Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun [Essays on the history of modern
Chinese thought] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987).
87
Ling, 5.
chapters. There are two major reasons for choosing these two authors
in particular. First, as indicated in the Introduction, coming-of-age
narratives are prominent in the oeuvre of each of these two writers,
yet they have not been systematically and comprehensively studied by
literary critics. My study intends to fill the void in scholarly studies of
this topic, not only among Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s works, but also
with respect to the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo as a literary genre.
Second, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age narratives that are set
in the period from 1966 to 1976 make a substantial contribution to the
study of the cultural history of the Maoist Cultural Revolution.
Unprecedented upheavals in modern Chinese history began in June
1966 with the sudden advent of the Red Guard Movement, known
for the extremist actions of students in the destruction of the Four
Olds, and for armed factional struggles. The radical movement lasted
about two years and was followed by “harsh military repression and
campaigns of political persecution.”88 This was the first and most dra-
matic phase of the Cultural Revolution. The period from the formation
of revolutionary committees in 1968 to the death of Lin Biao (1907–
1971) was the middle phase of the Cultural Revolution; this involved
more mass violence and fierce factional struggles among the CCP’s
high ranking officials.89 Finally, during the period after Lin Biao’s mys-
terious plane crash and before Mao Zedong’s death in the autumn of
1976, Mao established his absolute authority over the CCP and relied
on his “Gang of Four” to further consolidate his power.90
While scholars have paid great attention to the Red Guard Move-
ment and the political struggles of the Cultural Revolution, not much
has been written about the kinds of social issues that are reflected in
fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua. “Scar Literature” and “Sent-down
Urban Youth Literature” written in the 1980s and 1990s focus “on
the most visible protagonist: student red guards, [sent-down urban
youth], worker rebels, and mass organizations engaged in factional
88
Esherick, Pickowicz, and Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as His-
tory, 1.
89
Ibid., 21. See detail of mass killing in Yang Su, “Mass Killing in the Cultural
Revolution: A Study of Three Provinces,” and Jiangsui He, “The Death of a Landlord:
Moral Predicament in Rural China, 1968–1969,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution
as History, 96–152.
90
For the detail, see MacFarquhar, and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution. In the
book, the authors chronicle China’s Cultural Revolution.
72 chapter two
struggles.”91 However, the characters in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narra-

tives do not become noticeably involved in the Red Guard Movement
and in drastic political struggles, either because of their tender age or
their low and marginalized social status. By downplaying drastic polit-
ical theatrics in favor of the characters’ private lives, Su Tong and Yu
Hua effectively reveal the suffering of marginalized people or people
from the bottom rungs of society, especially one of the most vulnera-
ble groups—teenagers in a time of trouble. In the process, they explore
more specific and deep rooted social issues caused by social and politi-
cal chaos, such as dysfunctionality in many schools, the abnormal
psychological development of many adolescents, troubled relations
between numerous parents and children, juvenile delinquency, and
other problems related to youth culture in China in the 1970s.
The selection of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s works for discussion of the
Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo is based on the criterion of the traditional
Bildungsroman as a literary genre established in Chapter One: the plot
revolves around the tensions between “individuality and socialization,
autonomy and normality, interiority and objectification,” and the
development of the narrative leads to the formation and development
of the Chinese young man or woman with a focus on the exploration
of his or her spiritual and psychological turbulence.92
Each of these two authors has consciously experimented with a
variety of established genres at various stages of his writing career.
In their discussions of Yu Hua’s early experimental short stories and
novellas from 1986 to 1989, critics have used terms related to genre
in describing Yu Hua’s appropriation of conventional genres, such as
“parodic subversion,” “generic parody,”93 “revisions of stories drawn
from the traditional vernacular tradition,”94 and “a conscious exploi-
tation of generic elements of the fantastic and tropes of the zhiguai.”95
Yu Hua’s “Mistakes by the Riverside” (Hebian de cuowu, 1988) can be
read as a parody of the detective story; “A Classical Romance” (Gudian
91
Esherick, Pickowicz, and Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as His-
tory, 3.
92
Morreti, The Way of the World, 16.
93
Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” World Literature Today 65,
no. 3 (Summer 1991): 415–420.
94
Andrew F. Jones, “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun,”
Positions 2, no. 3 (1994): 579.
95
Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and
the Supernatural,” International Fiction Review 32 (2005): 25.
aiqing, 1988) is an inversion of the talent-meets-beauty narrative; and

“Blood and Plum Blossoms” (Xianxue meihua, 1989) parodies martial
arts fiction. For Su Tong, it is evident that he has adapted the genres
of the historical novel and the family saga in such narratives as My
Life as Emperor, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, Maple-Poplar Village
Series, and Rice.
When Su Tong and Yu Hua wrote about the coming-of-age of Chi-
nese youth during the Cultural Revolution, they adapted the genre of
Bildungsroman/chengzhang xiaoshuo to visualize a given part of their
reality—their childhood and adolescent experiences. Moreover, they
have consistently exploited elements and tropes of the Bildungsroman
genre throughout their careers in order to explore the inner world
of young Chinese people in a time of political and social turmoil. In
doing this, they have embarked upon a specific kind of creative activity
that embodies a specific sense of experience and vision, while serving
as a bridge between each author’s personal coming-of-age experience
and his fictional world.
CHAPTER THREE
FALLEN YOUTH: A SOLITARY OUTCAST
Figure 1. Su Tong in Shanghai, July 2010 (Courtesy of the author)
While J. D. Salinger lived a reclusive life in his New Hampshire home

in the 1980s, a poor young Chinese man who was living in obscurity
and yet thirsty for literary fame and success was painstakingly writing
a series of short stories in a cramped apartment in Nanjing. Influenced
by Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Nine Stories (1953), this
young man would later become one of the most prolific and renowned
writers in contemporary China. His name was Su Tong.
Enchanted and inspired by Salinger’s teenage colloquial speech and
sentimental adolescent perspective, Su Tong wrote his Toon Street
76 chapter three
Series fiction. This includes ten coming-of-age short stories, (“Memories

of Mulberry Garden,” “An Afternoon Incident,” “The Sad Dance,”
“Roller Skating Away,” and others) and the Bildungsroman novel
North Side Story. Written between 1984 and 1994, the series set out to
explore a group of street teens’ coming-of-age experiences during the
Cultural Revolution.1 In these stories, Su Tong captures the cultural
and geographical ambience of Suzhou, a city he knew intimately, by
setting the narratives on the fictional Toon Street in an unnamed
southern city. Toon Street was modeled after the street on which
Su Tong himself grew up. Most importantly, he relates how a group
of teenaged school drop-outs struggle blindly and in vain to assert
their individuality and find meaning in a society where revolutionary
collectivism has overwhelmed people’s lives while leaving no space for
individualist idealism, and where effective adult mentors are absent.
After writing a series of works in such genres as the family saga, neo-
historical stories, and stories about women and urbanites, in 2009
Su Tong returned to the coming-of-age subject again and published
another Bildungsroman novel The Boat to Redemption with a lot of
motifs evident in his previous “Tong Street Series.”2
In earlier Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, the young protagonists
demonstrate a trajectory from rebellious modern students, to progres-
sive new youth, to radical revolutionary youth, and finally to tamed
socialist youth. This trajectory more or less conforms to the historical
course of twentieth-century China. However, the teenagers in Su Tong’s
narratives are doomed fallen youth in a country that often appears
to be on the verge of falling off of an historical cliff. In this chapter,
Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives will be examined in great detail
in order to illustrate how he presents the psychological and spiritual
course of youth during the chaotic era of the Cultural Revolution—
particularly the autonomy and subjectivity that the dissatisfied and
rebellious youth often assert, along with the failure of youth to achieve
maturity while coming of age in an anti-individualistic society that lacks
good role models. These elements turn Su Tong’s coming-of-age nar-
ratives into a sly parody of both earlier Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo
1
Su Tong, “Xunzhao dengsheng” [Groping for the lamp switch], in Zhishang meinü
[Beauty on paper] (Taibei: Maitian chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 2000), 140.
2
Su Tong, He’an [The Boat to Redemption] rev. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chu-
banshe, 2010). For the English edition see Su Tong, The Boat to Redemption, trans.
Howard Goldblatt (London: Doubleday, 2010).
a solitary outcast 77
in which the young protagonist’s individuality and subjectivity finally

come to terms with a collectivist and revolutionary career, as well as
the classical European Bildungsroman, which concludes with the young
protagonist developing into a mature member of society, with his or
her own perspective and greater self-knowledge.
I will start with Su Tong’s first coming-of-age short story “Memo-
ries of Mulberry Garden,” which the author regards as his first truly
literary work of fiction. As indicated earlier, Su Tong admits that he
was greatly inspired by the works of the American writer J. D. Salinger
and hence wrote the Toon Street Series. Su Tong says that what really
touched him were Salinger’s use of teenagers’ colloquial language and
Salinger’s concerns about the particular problems faced by the teen-
agers. Su Tong said that the coming-of-age narratives he had read before
were such translated Russian stories as The Story of Zoya and Shura
and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s (1904–1936) How the Steel Was Tempered.
In these stories, revolutionary discourse overshadows the young
heroes’ personal problems, and their individuality and subjectivity are
developed only to the extent of meeting the all-important needs of the
sacrosanct revolution. In contrast, Salinger’s stories provide a fresh
revelation to Su Tong of a world full of helpless and lost teenagers
who gropingly explore the outside world and assert their individu-
ality and subjectivity when positive adult role models and guidance
are absent. At the outset of his creative writing career, Su Tong had
been consciously searching for an appropriate tone and language style
for his stories. After reading Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and
Nine Stories, he almost instinctively came to write in a style close to
Salinger’s, though he tried to avoid producing a mechanical imitation.3
One fall afternoon in 1984, Su Tong wrote a short story, “Memories
of Mulberry Garden,” which was not published in the journal Beijing
Literature until 1987. Su Tong sees this story as a sort of milestone,
not because it was a success, but because it was a significant step on
his path of creative writing. J. D. Salinger’s influence on this story
can be traced from the story’s casual tone, first-person adolescent
narrator, extensive utilization of slang, and loosely organized plot. In
addition, this story carried within it the motifs that would be found
in his later short narratives, such as a narrow old street in southern
3
Lin Zhou, “Yongyuan de xunzhao: Su Tong tanfang lu” [Everlasting pursuit: an
interview of Su Tong], Huacheng, 1996, no. 1:105.
78 chapter three
China (Su Tong later named it Toon Street); a crowd of restless south-
ern adolescents; agitated sentiments; premonitions of bloody odors on
a dark street; young lives conceived and festering in damp air and on
slab stone roads. Beginning with “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” Su
Tong captured the narratives of his childhood acquaintances and their
vacillating state of mind.4 More importantly, the story contains some
thematic concerns that appear in his later coming-of-age narratives,
such as the autonomy and subjectivity asserted by rebellious youth;
precocious love; troubled and violent sexuality; death of the young
hero at the threshold of adulthood; and the image of the adult “catcher
in the rye.”
“Memories of Mulberry Garden” is a fifteen-year-old boy’s record
of a few fragmentary observations and experiences during a summer.
There are five characters in the story: the first-person narrator, two
other boys named Xiaodi (Brother Xiao) and Maotou (Hairy Head)
and two girls named Danyu (Crimson Jade) and Xinxin (Pungent).
The story starts with a scene in which the narrator runs into Brother
Xiao and Hairy Head on his way to a public bathhouse. Afraid of
being bullied by Brother Xiao, the narrator agrees to help him deliver
romantic messages to Crimson Jade and then to stand guard while
the couple engages in a series of trysts. Over time, Brother Xiao forces
Crimson Jade to have three abortions. Finally, however, the narrator
takes revenge for his humiliation by vanquishing Brother Xiao in a
fistfight, causing Crimson Jade to leave him. The narrator does not
see her again until she is found dead together with Hairy Head in a
bamboo grove. No one knows how or why they died, but their friends
memorialize them by carving their names on a stone bridge. In this
story, Su Tong does not make the events in the plot add up to a clear
pattern for the reader. Perhaps from the perspective of a fifteen-year-
old boy, this world is too full of mystery to be portrayed as readily
comprehensible.
Most of the story is about the affair between Crimson Jade and
Brother Xiao, and does not mention anything about the love between
Crimson Jade and Hairy Head. However, there are still some clues. For
example, when Brother Xiao praises Crimson Jade’s apparent fearless-
ness in enduring three abortions, he says: “That girl is really some-
4
Su Tong, “Shaonian xue zixu” [Author’s preface to Young Blood], in Zhishang
meinü, 144.
thing. I eavesdropped outside of the door [of the operating room],

but didn’t hear her cry at all.” Hairy Head responded, “Crimson Jade
is finished. She will have trouble giving birth in the future.”5 Another
clue is that Hairy Head says that if he likes a woman, he will nip at
her face and leave bite marks. He does precisely that when leaving
bite marks on Crimson Jade’s face. Su Tong sets up Hairy Head as a
foil to Brother Xiao. Brother Xiao is crude and impetuous, and essen-
tially selfish and cowardly. Hairy Head is kind-hearted, sensible, and
sensitive. When Brother Xiao uses his strength to bully the narrator
to deliver a message to Crimson Jade, Hairy Head kindly helps the
narrator. When Brother Xiao alleges that the narrator must be Crimson
Jade’s younger brother because he has her eyes, Hairy Head defends
Crimson Jade, saying that she is the only child in the family. When
Brother Xiao brags about making Crimson Jade pregnant three times,
Hairy Head is worried about her wellbeing. Finally, after Crimson Jade
leaves Brother Xiao, she and Hairy Head perish together.
The image of Crimson Jade is mysterious and full of contradic-
tions. Su Tong deliberately depicts her as the type of independent-
minded and sexually active girl whom the public usually blames for
sexual excesses in society. She is shy, quiet, and very feminine, but
also seductive, bold, and courageous. She never shouts or cries, but
she uses her black eyes with dark semi-circles beneath them to express
her disagreement and anger when wronged. During the day, she shuts
herself away in a mysterious mulberry garden filled with elm and
osmanthus trees and gloomy houses, but secretly meets Brother Xiao
at night in her boudoir. She is so shy that she always walks close to the
wall, but when dancing, she rubs her long legs against the boys’ “sensi-
tive part.” She stays with Brother Xiao even though he forces her into
three abortions, but immediately leaves him after the narrator defeats
him in a fight. The similar image of young woman will be found in
Su Tong’s later Bildungsroman novels North Side Story and The Boat
to Redemption.
Su Tong’s poetic treatment of death of the young couple is in sharp
contrast to the cruel, ghastly, and sometimes decadent image of death
in his other narratives such as Rice, “An Opium Family,” and “The
Nineteen Thirty-four Escape.” At the end of “Memories of Mulberry
5
Su Tong, “Sangyuan liunian,” in Shaonian xue [Young blood] (Nanjing: Jiangsu
wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 274.
80 chapter three
Garden,” death seems to be a quiet, warm, and lyrical closing cer-

emony of the young couple’s lives. In the deep and serene bamboo
grove, the exquisite and composed girl, Crimson Jade, with a clear
circle of tooth-marks on her face, dies in Hairy Head’s arms. Neither
before nor after presenting this scene does Su Tong tell the reader
anything about when, why, or how this young couple has died. He
simply presents this tableau to the reader, then casually says: “I didn’t
expect them to die in this way. I felt there must have been a ‘mistake’
around this incident. Why did they want to die? They shouldn’t have
been afraid of anyone, because there was no need to be afraid. Maybe
they were just afraid of this ‘mistake.’”6 In saying this, Su Tong is not
pretentiously mystifying the reader. The young couple could have died
for any number of reasons; maybe it was just an accident, or possibly
a foolish double love suicide, or perhaps even a double homicide. Su
Tong’s interest is not in disclosing the details relating to the deaths,
but to evoke a poetic tableau of the couple’s death.
In traditional Chinese culture, bamboo groves are nearly always
associated with lofty, cultivated, and reclusive literati, as with the
famous “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.”7 In this story, however,
Su Tong uses the bamboo grove as the backdrop for the death of two
teenagers in order to highlight their innocence and transcendence.
After their deaths, friends carve the names of Crimson Jade and Hairy
Head on the stone bridge. The bridge thus becomes a monument to
their love. The scene also reminds the reader of the ending of Shen
Congwen’s bizarre story, “One Woman and Three Men,” in which the
proprietor of a tofu shop embraces the dead body of his lover in a cave
surrounded by flowers.
In addition, Su Tong’s poetic treatment of the young lovers’ death
is also a sign of his approval of their “premature love,” thereby break-
ing the age-old code of female chastity. This, in turn, contradicts the
CCP’s discourse of orthodox revolutionary love. The sociologist Bόrge
Bakken interprets the teenagers’ “premature love” as “a sign of egoism
in which they distance themselves from society and reject collective
6
Ibid., 276.
7
“Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” (zhulin qi xian) refers to seven famous literati—
Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Xian, Xiang Xiu, and Wang Rong—in the
Jin dynasty (265–420).
and exemplary norms.”8 In this vein, the image of Crimson Jade and
the autonomy she exerts in choosing a boyfriend demonstrates that
youthful subjectivity cannot be fully suppressed even in such a highly
coercive era as the Cultural Revolution, in which “the repression
of personal feeling and sexuality corresponds to the myth of Mao’s
nation building.”9
Some critics have tried to relate the teenage protagonists in Su
Tong’s narratives to the image of “the catcher in the rye” in Salinger’s
story, because these critics are inspired by Holden Caulfield’s vision:
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of
rye and all. Thousands of little kids and nobody’s around—nobody big,
I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.
What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the
cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going.
I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all
day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.10
Su Tong does create images of “catchers” in his narratives, but they
are not teenagers. The catchers in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives
are all marginalized adults.
In “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” the image of the catcher seems
not yet fully developed. However, if the reader examines the story
carefully, he may notice Xinxin’s grandfather, who appears to be a
prototype for the catcher in Su Tong’s later narratives:
At that time, I thought I had won Xinxin. However, it seemed that she
forgot everything after one night. She didn’t go to the stone stairs any-
more. I had no way to contact her. Her grandpa was very good at mar-
tial arts. Somehow he got wind of this affair, and started to protect his
granddaughter.11
Here, Grandpa is guarding only his own granddaughter, and he is a
catcher for his own house only. In Su Tong’s later narratives, the image
of the catcher becomes clearer and clearer, as it is developed in sev-
eral prominent characters in “An Afternoon Incident,” “Roller Skating
Away,” “The Sad Dance,” and North Side Story.
8
Bόrge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and
the Dangers of Modernity in China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 363.
9
10
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951),
224.
11
Su, “Sangyuan liunian,” 273.
82 chapter three
Though Su Tong regards “Memories of Mulberry Garden” as his first

truly literary story, he had written and published a few short stories
before the writing of “Memories of Mulberry Garden.” Many of his
stories were written when he was a college student at Beijing Normal
University. 1980 witnessed a turning point in Su Tong’s life. Then sev-
enteen years of age, he traveled north to Beijing to begin his university
studies. Prior to that time, the furthest place he had ever ventured was
Nanjing, merely a short train ride from Suzhou. Su Tong has stated
on several occasions that his four years (1980–1984) at Beijing Normal
University were significant to his later writing because they exposed
him to a wider world.12
Many years later in his memoirs, Su Tong describes himself in his
twenties as a crooked piece of wood; he could not tell what kind of
tree he would grow into because he was so easily caught up in pur-
suits such as romance, politics, and culture. The frustrated young man
was eager to present himself as a loner. He roamed the campus or
the Beitaipingzhuang area in the vicinity of the university, trying to
come up with abstract and sophisticated questions to ponder. He even
secretly admired fellow students who evinced suicidal tendencies.
When looking back on those days, Su Tong admits that he was not
really a sophisticated person; his loner image did not last long, and he
took up a simple physical activity instead—playing basketball.
Su Tong says that he benefited greatly from the university’s strict
curriculum. He spent most of his spare time reading fiction and liter-
ary magazines, and sometimes tried his hand at creative writing. By the
time of his graduation in 1984, he had published five stories in some
obscure literary journals. His debut work was a short story entitled,
“The Eighth Is a Bronze Statue” (Dibage shi tongxiang), which he says
“followed the formulaic writing of the time: ‘reform plus romance.’ ”13
The story describes how a young man returning home from his re-
education in the countryside strives to reform the factory where he
works, ultimately saving it from going bankrupt. Even though Su Tong
feels ashamed to include any of his five earliest stories in any of his
12
In an interview on the TV program “Dongfang shikong” [Oriental time] of
CCTV, Su Tong reminisced about his university years in Beijing. This interview was
recorded by Wang Haiyan in “Su Tong Lun” [On Su Tong], Anqing shifan xueyuan
xuebao, 1994, no. 4:80–85.
13
Su Tong, “Nian fu yi nian” [One year after another], in Shi yi ji [Eleven beats]
(Taibei: Maitian chuban youxian gongsi, 1994), 179.
collections, he still cherishes them. These early publications gave him

the confidence and courage he needed to continue moving forward
with his writing career.
At the age of twenty-two, the young writer left Beijing for Nan-
jing with a Bachelor of Arts in hand. He was assigned to work as a
counselor in an art academy where most of the students were older
than he was. He soon grew bored with his daily routine of distributing
stipends to students and coordinating the periodic cleaning of the
school by its students. The only business trip he made was to help the
school investigate a certain female student’s indiscreet private life.
In contrast with his tedious routine at the office, his life after work
was exhilarating. He made new friends among amateur writers and
editors. He was excited about these connections with literary circles.
He told himself: “Oh, they will appreciate me soon . . . They have started
to talk about my works.”14
He devoted most of his spare time to writing stories while smok-
ing inferior tobacco in his dorm. He wrote several stories and sent
them to different editors in hopes of being appreciated. “Memories of
Mulberry Garden” was written during this period of time, but was not
published until 1987. He referred to himself as a tougao jiqi (manu-
script submission machine) that ran without stop. He also compared
himself to Martin Eden, the protagonist in the autobiographical fiction
of Jack London (the pen name of John Griffith, 1876–1916), and said
he was even keener than Eden to become a recognized writer.
In 1985, Su Tong left the art academy and began work as an editor
for the influential literary journal Zhongshan. He describes his work
and life there as full of sunshine. The people he met every day were
all involved in literary pursuits. However, the stories he wrote were
still “like domesticated pigeons that always flew back to his desk.”15
This string of rejections of his manuscripts depressed the young writer.
Finally, in the second half of 1986, one of his short stories was pub-
lished by October, one of China’s most prestigious literary journals. Two
months later, another of his stories was published by the prominent
literary journal Harvest. He became more ambitious and felt that he
was at last succeeding as a writer of fiction.16
14
Ibid., 182.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 183.
84 chapter three
February 1987 was a lucky month for Su Tong. Three literary jour-
nals, Shanghai Literature, Beijing Literature, and PLA Literature and
Art simultaneously published his stories in their February issues. From
then on, the previous stories rejected by the publishers all found their
destinations in different literary journals. In Su Tong’s words, God
started to bless him, “this miserable boy tortured by literature.”17 In
the same year, his first novella, “The Nineteen Thirty-four Escape”
was published in Harvest. Since then, this journal has devoted many
pages to Su Tong’s stories. Exactly like the fictional character Martin
Eden, whose old, unappreciated works were published after he became
famous, many of Su Tong’s stories were printed in 1988, though most
of them were written before 1986. Literary critics started to pay atten-
tion. Su Tong describes his complex feelings when reading critics’
comments and reviews: “I secretly read these pieces of literary criticism
with bated breath, but I tell my friends that I never read critics’ articles.
I have my own business, and they have theirs.”18
Since 1988, Su Tong’s writing and publishing have enjoyed regular
success. He is hardworking and prolific, and has always consciously
explored diverse themes and styles. Su Tong does not think it is good
for a writer to stick to one particular writing style because it will cause
a crisis in his writing. Finding himself trapped in a particular style or
formula, he will become preoccupied with ways to get out of this trap
in order to develop and enrich his writing. Su Tong suggests that a
writer should have the courage to constantly say goodbye to his old
works and surpass his old styles. A writer should have the courage
to enter every door and explore every dark place in the labyrinth of
fiction.19 He hopes that his next story will always be different from his
previous stories.
Su Tong says that his obsession with fiction is neither innate nor cul-
tivated, but a grace given from above that will let an ignorant person
like him have at least some sort of “outstanding” feature.20 “Fiction,”
he says, “is like a huge labyrinth in which my fellow writers and I
grope. It seems all our effort is devoted towards finding a lamp switch
17
Ibid., 184.
18
Ibid.
19
Su, “Xunzhao dengsheng,” 142.
20
Su, “Nian fu yi nian,” 174.
and hope for the splendid brightness to instantaneously lighten up our

fiction and our whole life.”21
In his autobiographical piece, “One Year after Another” (Nian fu yi
nian), Su Tong describes himself as a reserved, withdrawn, timid, and
incompetent person who has always indulged in some “worldly and
paltry” hobbies, such as playing majiang, reading popular magazines,
and looking for trendy clothing. He says he cannot live without these
“secular” things because he fears that anything more sophisticated
would drain away the energy and mental clarity he has reserved for
writing fiction.22 This may be Su Tong’s way of differentiating himself
from the stereotypical image of the serious Chinese writer as built up
and sanctioned by the CCP.
Su Tong emphasizes that the novel should have a soul. It should
attain a certain state of austerity and emptiness, of bizarre abstruse-
ness, or of philosophy or humanity. It is pointless to distinguish which
state or realm is morally low or high; all such realms contribute to the
soul of the novel. Unfortunately, he says, many stories do not achieve
this kind of state; instead, since the author’s soul is not involved in
writing, the resulting writings are little more than a false shell. Su Tong
describes this soullessness as a tragedy.23 He says:
Fiction is a reflection of a writer’s soul. You inject part of your soul into
your writing; hence, the writing contains part of your life. You imprint
special marks on your work by arranging every single detail and sentence
in your own way. Then you build the house of fiction based on your own
aesthetic standard. All this requires the loner’s courage and wisdom. You
sit in this newly finished house with loneliness and pride, while readers
visit it with curiosity. I think this should be the effect of fiction.24
For Su Tong, a writer does not need to take any responsibility for
enlightening, saving, or educating readers. A reader’s drive to satisfy
his or her curiosity is much closer to Su Tong’s sense of what litera-
ture aims at, much more so than the reader’s thirst for education or
enlightenment. Furthermore, Su Tong believes that loneliness is some-
thing that everyone has to live with and struggle against throughout
his or her whole life.
21
Su, “Xunzhao dengsheng,” 141.
22
23
Su Tong, “Xiangdao shenme shuo shenme” [Say whatever I can think of], in
Zhishang meinü, 133.
24
Su Tong, “Xiaoshuojia yan” [Writer’s words], Renmin wenxue, 1989, no. 3:100.
86 chapter three
By 2010, Su Tong had published seven full-length novels: Rice, My

Life as Emperor, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, North Side Story, Why
Would the Snake Fly? (She weishenme hui fei?, 2002), Binu and the
Great Wall and The Boat to Redemption, as well as several dozen col-
lections of novellas and short stories. These were published not only
in mainland China, but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Su Tong’s
narrative works can be grouped into four categories: neo-historical
stories, stories examining the lives of women, coming-of-age stories,
and stories about modern Chinese urbanites.25
The neo-historical stories include full-length novels—My Life as
Emperor, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, and Binu and the Great Wall,
the Maple-Poplar Village Series of novellas and some short stories. Su
Tong has compared My Life as Emperor and Empress Dowager Wu
Zetian to two palaces, representing two kinds of history. My Life as
Emperor is a palace built as the architect pleases, a historical story
“blended with his own recipe.”26 The time of the story is not clear, and
the characters are visionary. An unlikely boy protagonist becomes an
emperor, and subsequently a vaudeville street performer. Su Tong is
obsessed with the tortuous fate of his character, reflecting his continual
shock at the impermanence of life and the mercilessness of history. In
contrast, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian is a conventional historical story
in which Su Tong narrates the real life of Empress Dowager Wu Zetian
without exaggerating her desires and ambitions both as a woman and
as a power holder. According to Su Tong, this story does not go beyond
the reader’s expectations or overstep existing historical records.27
Su Tong regards Binu and the Great Wall as an extension and elabo-
ration of his neo-historical fiction rather than a new departure from
his previous works. He compares Binu and the Great Wall with My
Life as Emperor.28 He indicates that both works are full of imagination
25
Chinese critics have discussed these categories in their writings. The critics include:
Wang Haiyan, “Su Tong Lun,” Anqing shifan xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:80–85;
Zhang Yingzhong, “Shiji mo de huimou” [A Review at the end of the century], Xiandai
wenxue zazhi, 1994, no. 5:30–33; Huang Jinfu, “Chuzou yu fanhui: Su Tong xiaoshuo
jianlun” [Leaving and returning: a brief discussion of Su Tong’s stories], Zhejiang shida
xuebao, 1994, no. 3:45–47.
26
Su Tong, “Zixu qizhong” [Seven of my author’s prefaces], in Zhishang meinü,
149–150.
27
Ibid., 150.
28
Su Tong, Binu [Binu and the Great Wall] (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe,
2006). For the English edition, see Binu and the Great Wall, trans. Howard Goldblatt
(New York, NY: Cannongate, 2008).
and fantasy, but Binu and the Great Wall is better developed in terms
of characterization. When he wrote My Life as Emperor, he admitted
that he was so keen on the legendary implication of the story—the
emperor is destined to become a street performer—that the main
characters somehow come across as over-conceptualized. Compared
with the protagonist Duanbai in My Life as Emperor, the female pro-
tagonist Binu is much more tangible and substantial.29 Binu and the
Great Wall is a rewriting of the story of legendary Mengjiangnü, a
woman renamed as Binu. She has gone through all kinds of hardships
to look for her husband who was conscripted to build the Great Wall.
Su Tong incorporates a lot of mythical characteristics in his rewriting
and uses the Great Wall and tears as metaphors to engage his political
and social criticism of contemporary China. It mirrors various social
and political problems in contemporary China, and transmits a cau-
tionary message: the seemingly softest and weakest thing can beat the
mightiest tyranny, just as one widow’s tears can bring about the col-
lapse of a section of the Great Wall.
The stories in the Maple-Poplar Village Series can also be regarded
as historical fiction. Su Tong invented the village of Maple-Poplar
Village to represent his hometown and to describe his great grand-
parents’ life in the Republican era. This same village appears in stories
such as “The Nineteen Thirty-four Escape,” “Flying over Maple-Poplar
Village” (Feiyue wo de fengyangshu guxiang), “Opium Family” (Yingsu
zhijia) and Rice. Literary critics often regard the series as a sign of
Su Tong’s spiritual nostalgia for his hometown. The author himself
agrees. In the Maple-Poplar Village Series, Su Tong tries to capture the
shadows of his ancestors and assemble the fragments of their stories.
He says that he enjoys the process of “taking the pulse of his ancestors
and hometown,” by which he has seen where he comes from and where
he will henceforth go. He agrees that these stories are his “spiritual
return home.”30 He also admits that by using the same fictional Maple-
Poplar Village as the setting for a number of different stories, he is
29
Su Tong, “Su Tong tibi xie mengjiang” (Su Tong takes up his pen to write
about Mengjiang,” http://www.amazon.cn/static3/lll_060817_bk_bn.asp/168-9185238-
0337869?uri=lll_060817_bk_bn&uid=168-9185238-0337869 (Accessed June 12, 2010).
30
Su, “Zixu qizhong,” 145.
88 chapter three
borrowing an insight from William Faulkner’s (1897–1962) treatment

of Yoknapatawpha as a symbolic hometown.31
In his stories about Chinese women, Su Tong creates diverse images
of women, such as the wives and concubines of a wealthy polygamous
household in “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines” (Qiqie chengqun),
spinsters in “Embroidery,” and prostitutes in “Blush.” The critic Miao
Lü has identified the loneliness and the pain of unrequited love revealed
in these stories as an influence Su Tong received from the American
female writer Carson McCullers (1917–1967), especially in her novella
The Ballad of the Sad Café.32
“A Bevy of Wives and Concubines” is a significant work, which
brought Su Tong national fame after the talented Chinese film director
Zhang Yimou adapted it into a movie entitled “Raise the Red Lantern.”
Su Tong’s initial motivation to write this story was to try something
new. He wanted to write a more conventional, classical, Chinese-
flavored story in order to test his writing ability. He chose a clichéd topic
in classical Chinese stories: the often pitiful fate of wives and concu-
bines in a wealthy traditional Chinese family. He never denies that his
success derives from the influence of such classic novels as A Dream
of Red Mansions (Honglou meng), The Golden Lotus (Jin ping mei), and
modern novels such as Family (Jia), Spring (Chun) and Autumn (Qiu).
Su Tong calls “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines” pure fiction because
he has never known anyone like the story’s protagonists, Songlian
and Chen Zuoqian. What he has is an unusual passion for the past.33
After “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines,” he wrote other stories about
women, such as “Embroidery” and “Blush.”
The third category is Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, in which
he reproduces childhood adventures—his own and that of his teenage
friends—against the backdrop of the fictional Toon Street. The series
includes a full-length novel, North Side Story, and more than ten short
stories in a collection titled Young Blood (Shaonian xue). His latest
novel The Boat to Redemption is also a coming-of-age novel, which
won him The Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010.
31
Ibid.
32
Miao Lü, “Xiang Sailinge zhijing: Sailinge yu Su Tong shaonian xiaoshuo bijiao”
[Salute to Salinger: the comparison between Salinger’s and Su Tong’s coming-of-age
stories], Baicheng shifan xueyuan xuebao 20, no. 2 (February 2006): 64.
33
Su, “zixu qizhong,” 147.
In the fourth category of his works, Su Tong sometimes attempts

a more realistic style to portray the ordinary lives of contemporary
urban Chinese. These stories include Why Would the Snake Fly?, “A
Guide to Divorce” (Lihun zhinan), “The People’s Fish” (Renmin de yu),
and “White Snow and a Pig’s Head” (Baixue zhutou). In the postscript
to Why Would the Snake Fly?, Su Tong quotes Lu Xun’s lament that
he “was directly facing a bleak and dismal life.”34 This aptly describes
the struggle of those who lived near the railway station—a symbol of
the bottom of the social ladder—on the eve of New Millennium.35 The
adult characters in this novel were those teenagers who grew up in
Tong Street.
This categorization of Su Tong’s narratives is not intended to sum-
marize or exhaust the limits of his writing, but it helps illuminate Su
Tong’s diverse content and style, and demonstrate his constant effort
to surpass his own abilities. His critics and his literary contemporaries
unanimously concur that Su Tong is an accomplished storyteller.
Wang Anyi, a writer from Shanghai, even worries that Su Tong may
be so obsessed with telling a dramatic story that he could “degenerate”
into a popular story writer.36 Wang’s concern reveals her somewhat
narrow understanding of the nature of literature and her prejudice
against popular literature, yet it also indicates a recognition among
some of Su Tong’s fellow writers of his story-telling talents. Wang’s
worry is unnecessary because Su Tong’s dramatic narratives still use
lyrical language and employ diverse literary techniques.
This study focuses on the third category of Su Tong’s writing—
coming-of-age narratives. Coming-of-age has been a constant theme
in Su Tong’s narratives during different periods of his career. Even in
the works other than the Toon Street Series and The Boat to Redemp-
tion, we can also detect the thematic concern of young people’s expe-
riences while growing up. For example, My Life as an Emperor is in
essence about a young man’s search for identity and vocation from
an emperor to a street performer. It reveals the development of the
protagonist Duanbai’s self-recognition and autonomy, and his social
34
Lu Xun, “Jinian Liu Hezhen jun” [In memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen], Yusi 74 (April
2, 1926).
35
Su Tong, postscript to She weishenme hui fei? [Why would the snake fly?] (Taibei:
Yifang chuban youxian gongsi, 2002).
36
Wang Anyi, “Women zai zuo shenme?” [What are we doing?], Wenxue ziyoutan,
1993, no.4:27–32.
90 chapter three
integration. Binu and the Great Wall, an allegorical story with ubiq-
uitously implicit political and social criticism, can also be read as a
record of a young woman’s growing-up experiences through the jour-
ney of her search for her husband. Binu undergoes a transformation
from a young woman with the modest initial intention of present-
ing her husband with some warm winter clothing to a heroine who
rebels against social injustice by using her tears to bring about the
collapse of a section of the Great Wall. Her individuality, self-identity
and autonomy are gradually formed during the process of witnessing
various social problems and experiencing various types of mistreat-
ment along the journey.
In addition, the subject matter in some of Su Tong’s urban stories
also focus on youth—particularly their conflict with the outside world
and their constant reconstructions of self-identity in metropolitan
space.37 Su Tong’s preoccupation with youth is partly a projection of
the author’s own childhood and adolescent experiences, as well as a
reflection of his vision of coming-of-age of Chinese youth in the 1970s.
Almost every story in the Toon Street Series bears the shadow of his
childhood. Observing the course that the young Su Tong followed will
help us understand the social space in which he wrote and thus equip
us to analyze the teenage characters through whom he projects him-
self. It will also help us understand the generative formula underlying
his Toon Street series.
Su Tong was born into a family of very modest means in the city of
Suzhou on January 23, 1963. His father, a clerk in a government office,
and his mother, a worker in a cement factory, named their son Tong
Zhonggui, which means “golden mean” and “honor”—the wishes of
traditional Chinese parents for their child’s life. The pen name Su Tong,
according to the author himself, simply means a child from Suzhou.
In his essay “Casual Talks on the Past” (Guoqu suitan), Su Tong
writes that whenever he thinks of the past, the first thing that comes to
his mind is the hundred year-old street in the northern part of Suzhou
where he lived. The long and narrow stone slab street was a light rusty-
red in the scorching heat of July and ash grey in the freezing January
winters. It took him about ten minutes to walk from the south end to
37
Examples of Su Tong’s urban stories about youth that are “Nihao, yang feng ren”
(“Hello, my beekeeper”), and “Jing zhong nanhai” (“The boy in the well”). For detailed
discussion of the story “Hello, My Beekeeper,” see Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narrative
of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 23.
the north end of the street. There was an elevated bridge on each end
of the street, and an overhead railway spanned the middle. The shabby
houses, shops, schools, and factories of the neighborhood were mostly
very crowded, so the local people spent much of their time outdoors
in the areas between the bridges.38
Su Tong’s family lived across from a chemical factory. By his own
account, he always stood in front of his house and watched the factory
employees going to and from work because he had nothing else to do.39
Later, this chemical factory, its obnoxious and odorous emissions, and
its tall chimneys became part of Su Tong’s nostalgia for the past and
repeatedly appeared in his coming-of-age narratives.
Su Tong describes his childhood as “a little bit lonely, and laden
with anxiety.”40 He cannot recall such things as fairy tales, candies,
games, or loving attention from his parents. Instead, what he remem-
bers is poverty and hardship. His parents had almost nothing to their
name except four children. Each workday, his father rode a dilapi-
dated bicycle to work. His mother walked to the nearby cement factory
carrying a basket that contained a lunch of leftovers from the previ-
ous night or just plain rice, and unfinished cotton shoes that she was
sewing for her children. Her household obligations were so onerous
that she had to use her tea break at work to make shoes and sew for
her family. Her beautiful face was always strained from exhaustion
and illness. Su Tong and his family lived on a total of eighty yuan per
month. They would sit around the dinner table with a pot of cabbage
and pork soup as their main dish. A dim bulb shone over the damp
brick floor and moldy furniture. Su Tong recalls one time his mother
lost five yuan on her way to buy groceries, and desperately burst into
tears after fruitless searching. At the age of seven or eight, the sensible
son comforted his mother by telling her, “Don’t cry. I will make one
hundred yuan for you when I grow up.”41
As a precocious but introverted boy, Su Tong seldom participated
in his friends’ games. Frequently at dusk he stood under the eaves
and gawked at the busy street and hasty pedestrians. Usually, at such
moments, his parents would be arguing in the house while his sisters
38
Su Tong, “Guoqu suitan” [Casual talk on the past], in Zhishang meinü, 42.
39
Su Tong, “Tongnian de yixie shi” [Some anecdotes of my childhood], in Zhishang
meinü, 37.
40
Su, “Guoqu suitan,” 43.
41
Ibid.
92 chapter three
wept behind the door. His heart was full of bitterness. He could not
figure out why his parents quarreled so much, for his neighbors seemed
to be at peace.
The notorious Cultural Revolution darkened Su Tong’s childhood.
He describes his impression of the movement thus:
My impression of wudou [factional fighting] is of a barrage of
gunfire . . . At night, people fired their guns from the tops of kilns,
and bullets pierced through our back door . . . At midnight, my mom
wrapped me in a cotton quilt and brought me to my grandma’s
room, where it was safer.42
Su Tong writes that he obtained his preschool education on the street.
There he learned his first complete written sentences. The walls were
full of posters and slogans that every child could recite. Even the most
dimwitted child could write wansui (long live) and dadao (down
with).43 The ink on these posters lasted for years. Ironically, a number
of cadres who had been overthrown became prestigious officials again
several years later. Su Tong recalls:
[During the Cultural Revolution,] a skinny middle-aged woman often
walked around with a paperboard hanging from her neck. Now when I
visit my hometown, I still encounter her once in a while, and the heavy
word of “history” immediately flashes through my mind.44
At the age of six, Su Tong enrolled at an elementary school that occu-
pied the grounds of a former Christian church. Its chapel had been
converted to the school auditorium, where all kinds of political denun-
ciation sessions and rallies were held. The European-style building
with its colorfully decorated arched windows was still the most beau-
tiful edifice on the street. Su Tong’s first teacher was a gentle lady with
grey hair who taught him for three years. Su Tong said she was the
most admirable teacher because she always wore a kind smile, which
was a rarity during that chaotic era.45
In the second grade, Su Tong became critically ill with nephritis
and a blood disease. He recalls that during his illness his mother often
cried, and his father regularly conveyed him on his bicycle to see a
traditional Chinese medical doctor. For about half a year, he spent
42
43
44
45
most of his time lying on a bamboo bed and boiling herbal medicine
for himself. The neighbors all praised him as a well-behaved child, but
according to Su Tong, this obedience was the result of a threat of death.
He was too young to realize it, but the sickness that reduced him nearly
to the point of death turned out to be an elevating spiritual experience,
lifting his whole being to a higher plane. During that period, his only
diversion was reading stories that his sister borrowed from a library.
Su Tong counts these stories as his earliest literary awakening.46
The above-mentioned illness and temporary withdrawal from school
made the boy feel lost. He dreamed of his school, classroom, sports
field, as well as his classmates, all of whom lived on the same street.
Everyone knew each other’s family and life stories. Su Tong never
concealed the fact that the southern teenagers in his coming-of-age
narratives were all modeled on these childhood friends and classmates.47
With the Cultural Revolution as the historical background, and with
the fictional Toon Street in the northern part of Suzhou city as the
geographical setting, Su Tong tries to demonstrate that in an abnor-
mal era, adolescents can never properly achieve maturity and enter
adulthood. The mood of these narratives is casual and adolescent. Su
Tong points out that his coming-of-age narratives are exceptionally
significant to him even though very few critics have paid attention to
them. “The reminiscences of my childhood are remote but clear,” he
writes. “Retrieving my memories from where they have fallen gives me
an illusion of coming back.”48
Writing these coming-of-age narratives has been different from writ-
ing his other stories. Su Tong uses two words to describe his feeling
of writing the Toon Street Series: dear and trustful. Writing about his
childhood and teenage experience is like “smelling his own socks,” re-
experiencing his unique aura from the past.49 The whole writing pro-
cess is closely related to his memories about the past. Su Tong was in
his twenties and early thirties when writing the Toon Street Series. He
confirms that these narratives helped him to develop a clearer recogni-
tion of his own coming-of-age, and hence helped him become more
mature. He entrusts all his past memories to the young protagonists in
46
47
48
Ibid., 44.
49
Su Tong made these statements during Hua Li’s interview with Su Tong in Shang-
hai on July 12, 2010.
94 chapter three
his narratives. Through recalling and fictionalizing his friends’ and his
own childhood and teenage realities, he analyzes the sensitivity, vul-
nerability and the wildest fantasies that he and his friends had expe-
rienced and refused to admit at that time. Su Tong said a successful
coming-of-age story should provide the author with a lens to observe
his own growth. Behind his coming-of-age narratives, there is always
a pair of peeping eyes. These are the eyes of Su Tong as an adult. This
adult perspective keeps adjusting his memories about childhood and
the teenaged world. Su Tong emphasizes that it felt very natural to
use hyperbole, exaggeration, and other techniques to transform these
memories into his fiction because he trusts his memories. Su Tong
confirms that this trustful feeling motivates him to write the Toon
Street Series and other coming-of-age narratives. During these years,
the Bildungsroman structure with tragic and parodistic elements has
become a recurrent pattern in his narratives. Therefore, it is indispens-
able to study Su Tong’s coming-of-age short stories and Bildungsroman
novels in detail in order to have a better understanding of the author’s
works.
Coming of Age in the Toon Street Series
After completing “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” Su Tong wrote a

series of other short stories based on his experiences of childhood and
adolescence. These stories were compiled in the collection of Young
Blood. In the following paragraphs, I will discuss three of Su Tong’s
coming-of-age short stories from this collection. As is the case with
“Memories of Mulberry Garden,” these short stories gradually build up
some motifs and thematic concerns that will become fully developed
in his Bildungsroman novels North Side Story and The Boat to Redemp-
tion. Through my analyses of Su Tong’s short coming-of-age stories and
Bildungsroman novels, I will delineate the social structure in which
collectivity and individuality are portrayed as two poles along a con-
tinuum, while a non-exemplary adult community parallels an autono-
mous adolescent community.
In “An Afternoon Incident,” the first-person narrator—a high school
boy—records a murder that he has witnessed. Huozi (Harelip), the
narrator’s classmate, is regarded as a hero because of his harelip, his
giant physique, and his bravery. The narrator is obsessed with Harelip’s
new hairstyle, a crew cut, and asks Harelip one afternoon to give him
the same hairdo. The narrator plays truant that afternoon, but does not
see Harelip. As he roams the street, a barber named Zhang stops him
and promises to give him the style of hair cut he wants. Sitting in the
barber’s chair, the narrator notices a young man standing on the stone
bridge and waiting for someone. From the man’s appearance, the nar-
rator figures out that it might be Qiuqi, a hooligan living in the south-
ern part of the city. Qiuqi had been severely beaten by Harelip and his
friends the summer before. As the narrator watches, his assumption is
borne out as Harelip appears and is stabbed to death by Qiuqi. Later,
on his way home, the narrator sees his younger sister, who points out
that Zhang has not given him a crew cut like Harelip’s, but instead
has merely shaved off all his hair. Shocked and saddened by Harelip’s
death, the narrator takes his frustrations out on his sister. At the end of
the story, the narrator says, “I will never forget that afternoon because
it was the ugliest time in my entire life. I hope no one looks at me.
May nobody in the world see my ugly appearance.”50
“An Afternoon Incident” is about juvenile delinquency, but also
about the protective role of an adult “catcher.” In this story, the catcher
is the barber Zhang, who forces the narrator to sit on a chair for his
haircut even as the narrator witnesses a bloody murder on the bridge.
Zhang will not let him intervene. The location of old Zhang’s shop is
critical; it is by the ramp of the stone bridge, where Zhang can easily
see what is happening on the bridge. The bridge is exactly where the
teenagers on Toon Street regularly hang out. When there is no busi-
ness, Zhang appears to doze off in his barber’s chair. In effect, though,
he is sitting at the edge of Holden Caulfield’s “crazy cliff” and watching
the teenagers.
Zhang has known all these youths since they were born. When the
narrator skips school and roams the street that afternoon, it is Zhang
who stops him and promises to give him the same type of haircut as
Harelip’s. He knows the potential danger for a teen roaming the street
on a school day, especially when the teen is associating with someone
like Harelip. Even though Zhang seems to be taking a nap when the
narrator passes, he immediately opens his eyes and shouts: “Have a
haircut, come on.”51 Even as the narrator hesitates, Zhang steers the
narrator into his barber’s chair and says: “Just sit still. I can give you
50
Su Tong, “Wuhou gushi” [An afternoon incident], in Shaonian xue, 322.
51
Ibid., 315.
96 chapter three
whatever hairdo you want.”52 Barber Zhang deliberately cuts the boy’s
hair slowly because he knows what is probably going to occur on the
bridge. He has observed a fellow standing on the bridge for two days,
knowing he is not a local and that he is waiting to avenge himself.
He probably knows that he cannot prevent what is going to happen,
but he can save the young narrator by holding the boy down in his
barber’s chair.
Right after the murder happens, the boy wants to rush over to the
bridge to take a close look. He shouts at Zhang, “Take your hands off
me. Let me go and take a look.” Zhang yells: “You aren’t yet finished
with your haircut; you can’t go.”53 Like eagle talons, Zhang’s hands
grasp the boy’s head more and more tightly. Finally, after everyone
has left the bridge, Zhang releases the narrator’s head from his grip,
announcing that the haircut is finished and the boy can now go. At
the end of story, the narrator discovers that Zhang has shaved his
head clean instead of giving him the same type of haircut as Harelip’s.
Another way that Zhang keeps the narrator away from the hooligans
on the street is thus to differentiate the boy’s hair style from theirs.
Among Su Tong’s narratives discussed in this book, “Roller Skating
Away” deals directly with the theme of sexuality. “Roller Skating Away”
records a day in the life of a Toon Street teenager. It reads like an
account of a nightmare. The protagonist is a high school student. On
the first day of the new semester, his younger brother breaks his roller
skates. The narrator goes to look for his friend Cat Head to repair
the roller skates, but aborts the repair plan after catching a glimpse
of Cat Head masturbating in broad daylight. Shocked by what he has
just seen, he is late for school. In class, he is required to recite a poem
by Mao Zedong and is interrupted by the crying of his classmate Li
Dongying, a plain-looking girl who is experiencing her first menstrual
period. On the same day, he is expelled from the classroom and by
chance observes the Party secretary and the school’s music teacher
engaged in a furtive sexual encounter. Later, he witnesses a bloody
scuffle at school and hurries back home. There, however, he encoun-
ters still more appalling incidents. The neighbor Xiao Meng’s beautiful
but insane wife has tried to drown herself again, and this time, fed up
with his wife’s demented behavior, Xiao Meng does not save her. At
52
Ibid., 316.
53
Ibid., 319.
last, the protagonist hears the most devastating news of the day: While
skating recklessly on the street, Cat Head has died under the wheels
of a truck.
The outline of this story suggests that its plot is not at all new: a
teenager is shocked by what he witnesses while out and about in the
adult world, and to a considerable extent he loses his youthful inno-
cence. What the protagonist observes on this chaotic day are symbolic
of three important facets of life: sex, violence, and death.
Cat Head’s masturbation and Li Dongying’s first menstrual period
reveal these teenagers’ sexual awakening, while the scene of clandes-
tine adultery in the school warehouse reveals the licentious desire of
adults. Su Tong portrays each of these episodes as full of sinfulness
and embarrassment. The death of Cat Head may be related to his guilt,
or his fear that his self-gratification would be discovered by others. The
author does not make it clear in the story, but the final sentence can be
a clue: “What puzzled me is that Cat Head’s skating skill is incompa-
rable; how could he have been hit by a truck?”54 Cat Head’s seemingly
frenzied behavior can also be regarded as a desperate flight away from
the confines of the world.
As to Li Dongying’s first menstruation, this normal sign of female
maturity is turned into a symbol of anguish; Su Tong portrays Li
Dongying as a plain-looking, stupid girl who broadcasts the onset of
her period by crying out loud in public. Finally, the scene of adul-
tery takes place in a filthy and chaotic place—suggesting again how
sexuality has become corrupted in the adult world. The guilt and fear
associated with sexuality derive from the era of Maoist asceticism—
the 1970s—the decade when Su Tong grew up. In the eyes of the young-
sters in Su Tong’s narratives, the maturation of their bodies is regarded
as the source of all kinds of disasters. Maturity terminates what seemed
to be a pure and innocent childhood.
“The Sad Dance” is a warm and sad story in which a twelve-year-old
boy, the narrator, first experiences jealousy, disappointment, and sad-
ness. One day, the dance teacher, a gentle and kind lady in her fifties,
selects him for the dance team she is organizing. Later, the narrator
discovers that for the lead role he must compete against another boy,
Li Xiaoguo (Small Fruit Li), whose father is a Party official. According
to the narrator, however, this story is actually about another child,
54
Su Tong, “Cheng hualunche yuanqu” [Roller skating away], in Shaonian xue, 303.
98 chapter three
a beautiful fair-skinned girl named Zhao Wenyan (Elegant Swallow

Zhao). She suffers from urinary incontinence; whenever she is onstage,
she cannot prevent herself from squatting to urinate from time to
time. In spite of this disadvantage, the dance teacher keeps the girl on
the team and takes great pity on her. The teacher knows that Elegant
Swallow’s sickness is the result of stress, since she is on constant alert
to prevent her mother from committing suicide.
While leading the children in rehearsal one day, the dance teacher
suddenly collapses and dies from a cerebral hemorrhage. With her
abrupt passing, the stunned narrator’s short dance career comes to an
end. His competitor, Small Fruit, takes over his onstage role as a dancer.
From this incident, the narrator tastes jealousy, sadness, and disap-
pointment. At the end of story, the narrator writes a few lines about
the future of the other two young dancers. Elegant Swallow becomes a
dancer, but her mother finally kills herself one day after her daughter
leaves home for dance school. Small Fruit suffers paralysis after falling
off of some scaffolding. In the narrator’s words, “This is the tragedy of
fate, which means you might have merely danced once, but that would
be enough for your legs to get broken.”55 This is perhaps also Su Tong’s
comment about the Cultural Revolution. People who experienced the
Cultural Revolution are likely to have been permanently traumatized,
and may never “dance” again.
In “The Sad Dance,” the most prominent character is the dance
teacher, Duan Hong, who serves as a “catcher” to protect the children”
from harm that they cannot perceive. This image may derive from Su
Tong’s memory of his first school teacher, who always wore a kind and
gentle smile on her face. Duan Hong is a spinster in her fifties who
often wears white tennis shoes. “Her waist is more pliable than that of
an eight year-old girl, and her movements are more graceful than wil-
lows in the wind. She has danced since she was young, while neglecting
marriage and child-bearing. Duan Hong is an old maid.”56 She likes to
whisper encouraging words into the ears of her young students, all of
whom enjoy holding hands with her. The first-person narrator repeat-
edly compares Duan Hong to an old hen leading around a flock of
chicks. Like a nurturing mother hen, she protects the fair-skinned girl
55
Su Tong, “Shangxin de wudao” [The sad dance], in Shaonian xue, 312.
56
Ibid., 308.
and the narrator described earlier. Her warm and reassuring gestures
greatly encourage the often helpless young students.
From these sketches and analyses of Su Tong’s some coming-of-age
short stories, we can observe some commonalities among the young
protagonists. First, they are neither the sort of progressive yet frus-
trated new youth who are typically depicted in pre-1949 Chinese cheng-
zhang xiaoshuo, nor are they the model students and promising “new
socialist men” that are often lionized in socialist juvenile literature.
Instead, they are teenaged street people who perform poorly in their
academic subjects, engage in offensive behavior at school, or else drop
out of school altogether. This image fits Bórge Bakken’s observation
of modern and contemporary Chinese society where “paradoxically,
the young are regarded both as China’s hope for a modernized future,
and as a marginal group with a strong tendency to transgress moral
and ideological boundaries.”57 Su Tong’s young protagonists belong
to this “marginal group,” with their stance of disillusioned social
aloofness and rebellious autonomy. During the Cultural Revolution,
given the CCP’s condemnation of individualism and its stress on col-
lective order, the mindsets of young people tended to become polar-
ized. Active membership in the Red Guards and active involvement
in a given school’s factional struggles was considered an exemplary
path for most students to follow. However, Su Tong turns his gaze on
those young people who were born into poor urban families. For vari-
ous reasons, they usually became failing students or dropped out of
school entirely, and thus were excluded from privileged group activi-
ties in school. This alienation from school, a symbolic site of collectiv-
ism, ironically provides them a chance to develop their individuality
and subjectivity. They become a group of alienated youths who were
neglected by the revolution and marginalized by collective revolution-
ary history.
The second commonality among these young protagonists is that
their daily lives were full of physical violence. Their small world is
an epitome of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution, which
exhibited extreme levels of violence. In a disordered society such as
this, the development of individualist ideals and personal potential
among these young people will not lead them to maturity, but only to
57
Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the
Dangers of Modernity in China, 354.
100 chapter three
disillusionment and destruction. According to Bakken’s sociological

research findings, “Most estimates for youth delinquency during the
Cultural Revolution period stand at 40–50 percent of the total crime
rate. Local surveys indicate that the crime rate for 14- to 25-year-olds
peaked around 1973.”58 Unsurprisingly, many of Su Tong’s young pro-
tagonists are fictional representations of juvenile delinquents.
In addition, the young protagonists in all these stories discover
through a series of disillusioning experiences that the adult world is
irreclaimably corrupt. The absence of parental guidance is obvious in
these short stories. In these stories, the only positive adult image is that
of the catcher, such as the barber Zhang and the dance teacher Duan
Hong. The parents seem to provide no protection from a threatening
society and government, and are vehicles of spiritual blindness and
social decay rather than wisdom or positive role modeling.
The above-mentioned commonalities become three prominent nar-
rative motifs in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives: the absence of a
secure political and social structure, the focus on a marginalized group
of young people, and the history of the recent past. These motifs con-
stitute an effective form of political subversion. These thematic con-
cerns are also regarded by some critics as a mode of decadence that
characterizes many of Su Tong’s narratives.59 Su Tong sets the fate
of his teenaged characters against the background of the recent past,
especially the Cultural Revolution. In this way, he unfolds a collec-
tive history of societal trauma. Lurking behind his narrator, Su Tong
becomes a formidable analyst of these teenagers’ relationships in the
context of China during the Cultural Revolution—from the nega-
tive role that parental culture plays, to the teenage peer community,
to the possible solutions that desperate teens pursue. These issues
and thematic concerns were examined more extensively in Su Tong’s
Bildungsroman novel North Side Story.
North Side Story tells of four boys who live on Toon Street: Dasheng
(Growth), Xude (Virtue), Hongqi (Red Flag) and Xiaoguai (Young
Cripple). This is a sad and bloody story in which the four boys all
58
Ibid., 384.
59
Deirdre Sabina Knight, “Decadence, Revolution and Self-Determination in Su
Tong’s Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 10 no. 1/2 (1998): 91–112. Knight argues
that one prominent theme of Su Tong’s stories is decadence which can be identified
in two modes—“a decadence of resignation stemming from fatalism,” and “a creative
decadence amounting to a gesture of defiance or freedom.” (91)
end up in different predicaments, with no one being better off than

the others. The novel begins with the accidental death of Dasheng’s
father. A truck hits him on his way to work, partly because Dasheng
has made off with his well-functioning bicycle, causing him to needing
to borrow a broken-down bike from one of his neighbors. After his
father’s death, Dasheng is repeatedly reminded by his mother of the
responsibility he bore for his father’s death. Obsessed with a heroic
vision, Dasheng looks forward to a bloody rumble to demonstrate that
the kids on Toon Street are not lanshi (puppy shit), a term of abuse
hurled at them by some teens from other parts of the city. Dasheng
eventually validates himself as a true hero by stirring up a scuffle and
single-handedly taking on ten boys in a street fight. However, he pays
the ultimate price for his impetuosity when he gets killed in the fight.
Dasheng’s friend, Hongqi, a quiet boy with beautiful eyes, is sen-
tenced to nine years in prison for having raped a fourteen-year-old
neighborhood girl, Meiqi (Fine Jade). Meiqi eventually drowns herself
because of the humiliation and the ensuing gossip. Her ghost roams
Toon Street day and night.
Another of Dasheng’s friends, Xude, seems to find a relatively normal
path in life, taking a job in a bottle-washing factory staffed by former
prostitutes. The CCP intends to remold them into “good” women who
will follow a respectable trade. Yet Xude is seduced at the factory by a
lascivious married woman, Jinlan (Golden Orchid), who at the same
time is also having an affair with Xude’s father. This love triangle com-
pletely ruins Xude’s family. In the end, Xude elopes with Jinlan and
moves with their newborn baby to northern China.
Dasheng’s third friend, Young Cripple, is a kleptomaniac who is
often an embarrassment to his family. After his mother died giving
birth to him, Young Cripple was cared for by his two sisters and was
violently disciplined by his hot-tempered father. Ironically, however,
Young Cripple finds himself giving lectures as a model youth after
he accidentally discovers a hidden ammunition depot and a “class
enemy.” In this way, for the first time in his life Little Cripple brings
glory to himself and his family.
In addition, North Side Story is a vertically structured story in
which certain characters move back and forth between a mysterious
supernatural plane to a human plane, and from the nether world to
the everyday world. Some objects, such as a snake or a paper heart,
become the medium that connects the two worlds, and they become
highly symbolic in the narratives.
102 chapter three
Role Models and Peer Community
In his book by the same name, the sociologist Bórge Bakken uses the
term “exemplary society” to describe the somewhat peculiar character
of “Chinese society in the midst of reform and modernization.” In
such a context, “‘human quality’ based on the exemplary norm and
its exemplary behavior is regarded as a force for realizing a modern
society of perfect order,” and “a combination of the disciplinary and
the educational constitutes the exemplary society.”60 Bakken traces the
modern tradition of education from modern times back to pre-modern
China, arguing that “rule by morality was more widespread in tradi-
tional China than rule by law.”61 More importantly, he sees the emphasis
on exemplarity as “cultural memory,” which unlike individual memory,
will not perish with the death of the individual. According to Bakken,
“Cultural memories can be understood as symbols, values, norms,
practical strategies, thought patterns, ‘ways of doing things,’ or ‘traces’
that have materialized in a culture and function as legitimizing fac-
tors for acting in society and organizing society.”62 Parents from each
generation pass on these cultural memories to the next generation.
Ordinarily the parental society, composed of parents, teachers, and
elders, provides positive role models for young people to imitate until
the appropriate behaviors become habitual. Parents and teachers are
the most significant adults in the lives of adolescents. Aside from
providing moral guidance to their offspring and pupils, they help the
young to gain a significant capacity for introspection as well as a sense
of history,63 and teach “human decency, altruism, moral values, and a
60
Ibid., 1, 8.
61
Ibid., 8.
62
Ibid., 10.
63
The US writer Robert Bly raises the concept of sibling society in contrast to
parental society in his book The Sibling Society (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub.,
1996). He has identified contemporary American society as a sibling society in which
adults and adolescents are less differentiated. Since the 1950s, the fast development of
commercialism, technology, single-parenting, divorce, and the media-driven emphasis
on the youth culture have all made adults less mature and responsible than their par-
ents’ generation. On the other hand, when they grow up in working-class, single-
family homes, adolescents take on more adult responsibilities. The sibling society is
thus one in which “parents regress to become more like children, and the children,
through abandonment, are forced to become adults too soon.”(132) This problem is
further complicated as people remain adolescents long past the normal adolescent
period. Bly argues that in the parental society of the first half of the twentieth century,
there were numerous representatives of the adult community: teachers and elders to
social conscience by exhibiting these virtues themselves.”64 This theory

of social learning coincides with the traditional Confucian emphasis on
role models provided by parents and teachers. As expressed in two lines
of the Three-Character Classic: “To feed without teaching is a fault of the
father. To teach without severity reflects the laziness of a teacher.”65
During the Cultural Revolution, however, with the total rejection of
Confucianism and other traditional Chinese values, fathers and teach-
ers lost their function of providing guidance to youth. The Cultural
Revolution can be seen as “an attempt to cut society off by its roots”
through shattering the traditional mold in a quest “to establish a uto-
pian dream unencumbered by memories from the past.”66 The esca-
lation of anti-intellectualism and anti-traditionalism during that era
led to moral degeneration, a lack of introspective ability, and a loss
of cultural rootedness in Confucian “benevolence (ren) and altruism
(shu)—the humanism of China’s ancient propriety ( guli).”67 Mean-
while, education was no longer what it should have been because it
was in collusion with a valueless, chaotic society; it did not consider
the lessons of the past as valid. Consequently, adults—both parents
and teachers—could not provide a moral compass for youth and
failed to pass on the traditional values of Chinese culture. From many
young people’s perspective, this absence of proper parental authority
figures and positive role models forced them to turn to their peers
for guidance and support. Unfortunately, the peer community could
not provide the necessary amount of nurturing for emotional growth.
whom the young were drawn. These elders served as positive role models for young
people to imitate until the appropriate behaviors became habitual. Among the elders,
parents and teachers were the most significant adults in the lives of adolescents. In
sibling society, however, due to the lack of maturity among adults, adolescents have
to make do with peer guidance from sibling society.
64
F. Philip Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 2nd ed.
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1978), 73.
65
Wang Yinglin (1223–1296), San zi jing. Bai jia xing. Zeng guang, [Expanded
edition of Three-Character Classic and the hundred surnames], ed. Yuan Ting-
dong (Chengdu: Ba shu shu she, 1988), 4. The San zi Jing, usually translated as the
Three-Character Classic, has been a required text for all Chinese children in traditional
Chinese society.
66
Bakken, The Exemplary Society, 17.
67
Michael Duke, “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chi-
nese Fiction,” Issues and Studies 25 (August 1989): 34. Wang Zengqi, a modern Chinese
writer, says this about his understanding of the roots of Chinese culture: “Confucian
and Confucius’s thought is the leading element [in my thought]—benevolence (ren)
and altruism (shu)—the humanism of China’s ancient propriety (guli).”
104 chapter three
Teenagers during the Cultural Revolution were therefore caught in

the transition between childhood and adulthood, struggling amidst
an uncertainty about core values that seemed as prolonged as adoles-
cence itself. In other words, their emotional maturation was frozen at
the threshold of adulthood. The effects of this lack of adequate adult
models and of the negative guidance of the peer community are best
illustrated in North Side Story.
In North Side Story, all the boys and girls of school age on Toon
Street enroll at Dongfeng Middle School. This school has been taken
over by the Workers’ Propaganda Team (WPT). The head of the WPT
receives a promotion to become the principal of the school. As one
of this school’s most rebellious students, Dasheng feels this change in
the school’s leadership is absurd. School is no longer a place where
children can learn how to develop positive social virtues. It has for-
feited some of the key functions of education, namely “to propagate
doctrines of the ancient sages, to transmit learning, and to dispel con-
fusion.” Instead, the school becomes little more than another site for
reaffirming social control.68 However, the results of this development
are far from effective. The school has become such a hotbed for unfet-
tered murder and arson that whenever its students are challenged by
teenagers from other areas, a simple announcement of the name of
their school is intimidating enough to frighten away any potential
rivals. Confronted with this harsh reality, the teachers tend to shirk
their responsibilities rather than examining their failed role as educa-
tors. They trace back the history of the school and find out that its site
was the location of a prison in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Su Tong
deliberately arranges for a history teacher to reveal this fact. The history
teacher’s discovery legitimizes the teachers’ failure in “propagating doc-
trines of the ancient sages, transmitting learning, and dispelling confu-
sion.” The teachers feel relieved because the school turns out to have
a notorious and longstanding history as a place of murder and arson.
They even think they should be allowed to carry guns to school in order
to protect themselves from possible armed attacks by students.
Supposedly part of the intelligentsia, the teachers of North Side Story
have long lost the capacity for self-retrospection, and have regressed
to roughly the same moral level as their students. They are no longer
68
Han Yu (768-824), “Shishuo” [On teachers], in Han Yu wen xuan [Selected
works of Han Yu], ed. Tong Dide (N.p., 1980), 52.
role models, and have lost the respect of their students. They use vul-
gar language and violence against their students and other adults. The
school’s students and teachers curse and hit each other. It seems that
the only disciplinary measure the school has left is expulsion. Su Tong
writes: “The white posters announcing expulsions are posted on walls
next to the school gate. The names of expelled students are constantly
updated and spring up like bamboo shoots after rain.”69 Dasheng and
his teenage friends Young Cripple, Hongqi, and Xude are banished
from school one by one.
The other would-be role models in Dasheng’s life are his father and
mother. Formerly a foundry worker, Dasheng’s father has been absent
from Dasheng’s life since the boy was thirteen years old due to the
aforementioned fatal traffic accident. The things we know about the
father come mostly from the recollections of Dasheng and his mother.
The memories Dasheng has of his father are of his hot temper, coarse
language, and violent behavior. When he looks at his deceased father’s
picture on the wall, he can still sense a glint of anger in the man’s eyes.
It seems that the only way this sturdy man knew of disciplining his
son was to beat him up. His last words before his untimely death were
a curse upon his son: “I should have beaten you to death!”70 Under-
standably, Dasheng is not genuinely saddened by his father’s death.
He actually benefits from it, since he is now at least free of his father’s
physical abuse.
In North Side Story, there are two other significant paternal figures.
One is Young Cripple’s father, Wang Deji, and the other is Xude’s
father. Even though they are physically present and live with their sons,
they bring nothing other than humiliation and disaster to their chil-
dren. A widower as well as a habitual drunkard, Wang Deji is unable
to suppress his sexual drive, which surfaces in twisted ways. When he
stares at women, his eyes are “like a pair of scissors ready to cut open
a woman’s clothes.”71 To indulge his desire both to peep at and pun-
ish others who are having sex, he throws himself into the Neighbor-
hood Committee’s periodic nighttime raids on public parks to capture
the perpetrators of illicit sexual activity.72 Moreover, he hypocritically
69
Su, Chengbei didai, 10.
70
Ibid., 7.
71
Ibid., 218.
72
The Neighborhood Committee, or jumin weiyuanhui, is a nationally instituted yet
locally operated organization in each urban residential area in the PRC. The director,
106 chapter three
prohibits his own daughters from dating. When his eldest daughter
secretly goes out to date a man, he locks her out of the house at mid-
night, a punishment that leads to her murder at the hands of night-
roving hooligans.
From this description we can see that the image of the father in
North Side Story is harsh and punitive. As psychologist F. Philip Rice
observes:
Parents who rely on harsh, punitive methods are defeating the true
purpose of discipline: to develop a sensitive conscience, socialization,
and cooperation. Cruel punishment, especially when accompanied by
parental rejection, develops an intensive, uncaring, hostile, rebellious,
cruel person. Instead of teaching children to care about others, it deadens
their sensitivities, so that they learn to fear and hate others, but no longer
care about them or want to please them. They may obey, but when the
threat of external punishment is removed, they are antisocial people.
Many criminal types fit this description.73
This is exactly the effect that harsh punishment from the fathers of
Dasheng and Young Cripple have on their sons. Instead of becoming
obedient, both Dasheng and Young Cripple come to fear and hate
their fathers, and simply want to be away from them. They become
more violent and destructive.
Another father figure in the story is Xude’s father. Even though
he is not as punitive or violent as the fathers of Dasheng and Young
Cripple, he brings to his family something even more destructive. He
allows himself to be seduced by the same woman who has been having
an affair with his son. Drunk and driven by guilt, he makes a confes-
sion of this affair to his wife and son. His admission leads to his son’s
hatred of him and the latter’s decision to run away from home, as well
as to his wife’s contempt for him.
Dasheng’s mother, Teng Feng, is also far from a positive parental
role model. Without doubt, she possesses genuine human goodness:
self-sacrifice, loyalty, compassion, and diligence, but she is a far cry
deputy director, and committee members are elected by the residents. Even though
the committee is not a formal administrative organ of the government, it is under the
administration and supervision of the Public Security Bureau, the nationwide police
authority. Its main functions are in accordance with the PRC’s 1982 National Law
Code 111, and resemble the functions of surveillance and social control that are char-
acteristic of urban neighborhood committees in other single-party Leninist regimes
such as Cuba and North Korea.
73
Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 526.
from the woman who has grown up with wholesome nurturing from
her parents. As the daughter of a snake-charmer, she was sexually
harassed by her own father prior to her marriage. Her father eventu-
ally sold her into marriage for two hundred yuan to Dasheng’s father.
“Father treated Teng Feng like a snake. After he finished playing with
her, he just dumped her in this strange city.”74 “Father and the chilly
nighttime wind were like two knives that stabbed at her in her memo-
ries. They left Teng Feng with permanent injuries.”75 After the wedding,
she constantly suffers from her husband’s physical and sexual abuse.
All these experiences make her hate both her father and her husband.
Afraid of her husband, she secretly wishes for his death. However,
after her husband does in fact die in a traffic accident, she constantly
blames her son for having caused the accident. “Her cowardly char-
acter has changed beyond recognition. Sometimes during gloomy and
depressing days, this poor woman chases and beats her son with a
broom handle and tearfully complains of her sufferings.”76
The response she receives from her son, however, is: “You are out of
your mind.”77 When her old snake-charmer of a father finally comes
back to her to request a reconciliation between father and daughter,
she turns him down and shows him the door. The impoverished old
man finally freezes to death under a bridge on Lunar New Year’s eve.
However, in this father-and-daughter relationship, the snake is a motif
that becomes a medium connecting the human and the nether worlds.
Before the snake-charmer goes in search of his daughter, he delivers a
message to her through a dead snake. After the snake-charmer dies, he
is transformed into a snake that haunts his daughter’s house in order
to avenge his death. For Dasheng, his mother sets a negative example
in terms of filial devotion. When his grandfather is chased out of their
home, the old man tells Dasheng: “Someday you should treat your
mother the same way she treated me today.”78 Feeling guilty about her
father’s death and her failure to play her proper role as a filial daugh-
ter, she tries to hide the truth from her son by denying that the old
snake-charmer was her father after all.
74
75
Ibid., 144.
76
Ibid., 8.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid., 141.
108 chapter three
In spite of the destructive relationship between Dasheng and his

parents, readers can still notice Dasheng’s affection for his father and
mother. The bicycle and the alarm clock are two motifs in the por-
trayal of the parent-and-child relationship. North Side Story both starts
and ends with a death somehow related to a clock or a watch, and to
a bicycle. At the beginning of the novel, Dasheng takes his father’s
bicycle to practice riding, but because of the malfunction of his friend
Xude’s watch, he is late in returning the bicycle to his father, who
urgently needs it to get to work. This mistake indirectly causes his
father’s tragic accident. The bicycle becomes the only tangible connec-
tion between him and his father.
Later, on his way home from the town of Double Pagoda, Dash-
eng’s bicycle gets a flat tire and his friend tells him just to ride it like
that. Dasheng, however, strokes the bicycle, which he inherited from
his deceased father, and in the darkness, shakes his head. He tells his
friend, “No. The bicycle would fall apart if I rode it. I would rather
walk back home with the bicycle.”79 This scene is a sign of Dasheng’s
lingering attachment to his father.
At the end of the story, in order to arrive at the gang fight in time,
Dasheng takes the alarm clock his mother uses to awaken in time to
get to work. Right before he dies, he entrusts Pig Head to take the
clock back home for him because his mother needs the alarm clock
for work. His death then leads to his mother’s madness. The unhinged
woman roams the street in the rain like a ghost and asks every person
she meets: “Did you see my alarm clock?”80 Besides being a token of
Dasheng’s concern for and affection to his mother, the clock also has a
metaphorical significance. As an instrument of time, it is closely asso-
ciated with death. The Chinese pronunciation of “clock” (zhong) is the
same as that of the character zhong, which means “the end” or “death.”
By using the prop of a clock at the end of the story, Su Tong may be
implying that this is not only the end of the story, but also the end of
Dasheng’s ill-fated life or, in a broader sense, the end of a meaningful
existence for Chinese youth in the Cultural Revolution.
Throughout the novel, Dasheng’s alienation and his awareness of
his own lack of maturity cause him to seek out an older person to
79
Ibid., 22.
80
Ibid., 269.
provide him with guidance, for he has lost the role models of teacher,
father, and mother. Dasheng’s quest is seen in his search for a martial
arts instructor. With his friend Xude, he first travels to the nearby
town of Double Pagoda, hoping to find a master named Monk. It turns
out he has received false information. There is no such person in this
small town. The only significant outcome of their trip is an ascent to
the top of the wooden tower to gaze at their houses from afar. Next,
Dasheng’s friend tells him that there is a master named Yan the Third
whose kung fu is the best in the area, but Dasheng soon learns that he
does not take disciples anymore. Dasheng does not give up, however.
He finally enters the room of the legendary master, only to discover
that the master has become too old and weak to teach him any-
thing. Moreover, Yan the Third is disillusioned and refuses to teach
youngsters kung fu because he believes those who want to learn it are
all mere hooligans. He abruptly pushes Dasheng out of his room.
Dasheng’s dream of apprenticing himself to a master is completely
shattered. Constantly searching for good in the adult world, or at least
something to mitigate his despair, Dasheng is continually confronted
with an absence of good fortune.
As discussed earlier, school should have been a place where children
learn from their teachers and peers. In Dasheng’s case, school has lost
its function of educating young people. In fact, Dasheng is banished
from school because of his misconduct. Now he has to turn to his peers
on the street. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, in a world
devoid of older male role models and full of a soul-destroying chaos,
Dasheng’s survival is possible only through withdrawal into his peer
community, the Toon Street clan. But these peers fail him as well.
Xude seems to be Dasheng’s best friend. They hang around with
each other most of the time before Xude goes to work in the bottle-
washing factory. Xude is smart, but often acts by instinct and without
taking careful thought of possible consequences of his actions. Through
a series of incidents, Dasheng finds his friend to be unfair, cowardly,
and frustrated by lust. The night they make their way home from their
quest to find a kung fu master in Double Pagoda, both of them are
worried about being scolded by their mothers. Unfortunately, Dash-
eng’s bicycle has a flat tire, and he can no longer ride it. Xude chooses
to ride his bicycle home and leaves Dasheng walking alone through
the dark suburb. Even though Dasheng does not object to his friend’s
decision, he is very disappointed. He knows that he would have stayed
110 chapter three
with Xude if Xude’s bicycle had developed a flat tire. He concludes

that Xude is not a loyal and fair-minded friend after all.81
What frustrate Dasheng even more are Xude’s mockery, his con-
temptuous tone, and his habit of pulling off pranks. When Dasheng,
Xude, and Young Cripple go to the Grass Basket Prison to visit their
jailed friend Hongqi, Xude urges Dasheng to climb a tree and peer into
the prison. When Dasheng reaches the top of the tree, Xude frightens
him by imitating the sound of shooting, causing Dasheng to fall to the
ground and break his leg. Afterwards, however, Xude never seems to
pay attention to Dasheng’s injury, even though he himself had caused
it. When Xude sees Dasheng has left his bed and is trying to walk by
himself, Dasheng assumes Xude will be surprised to see him walking
and will ask about his leg. Xude says nothing, however. Dasheng then
concludes that Xude does not really care about him.82
Dasheng’s other friend, Young Cripple, habitually steals and lies.
His habit of pilfering, ironically, finally brings him honor and fame.
When he tries to steal from Old Kang’s house, he accidentally finds
a hidden ammunition depot and hence exposes Old Kang as a con-
cealed counterrevolutionary. Because of this incident, the government
hails Young Cripple as a hero and a model youth. Young Cripple gives
speeches throughout the city. He is also guaranteed a job. Even though
it sounds like a farce, it is the first time that Young Cripple makes his
father proud of him. It is also the first time that father and son can
have an affectionate and equal conversation. On their way home, the
father advises Young Cripple to behave well, strive to join the CCP,
and cut himself off from his bad friends Dasheng and Xude. This inci-
dent gives the family hope to improve their social status as neighbors
begin to admire them. By including this episode, Su Tong intends to
demonstrate that in an abnormal time, this seemingly harmonious
father-son relationship is actually based on false pretenses.
A Failed Catcher in the Rye
In North Side Story, the image of the catcher is Old Kang, the for-
mer owner of a Chinese medicine shop and now a street cleaner. Su
Tong endows this image with more cultural and historical significance,
81
Ibid., 22.
82
Ibid., 70.
painting him as a guardian of traditional Chinese culture and moral

codes. Given the absence of adult and peer guidance in Dasheng’s
world, Old Kang is the only possible positive role model Dasheng can
look up to. However, Old Kang is marginalized and labeled a miscre-
ant of the Five Black Categories during the Cultural Revolution.83 Even
though he understands perfectly what an adult role model ought to
be, therefore, he is unable to demonstrate it. He tries to speak up, but
no one listens. Even though Dasheng is keenly aware of his need for a
mentor and eager to have someone to guide him, he would never think
of Old Kang. He is too young to recognize a wise man in disguise.
Old Kang retains the fundamental values inherent in Confucian
humanism and the Chinese intellectual tradition. This may call to mind
Ah Cheng’s emphasis on the importance of education and people’s
spiritual needs in “The King of Chess” (Qiwang, 1984) and “The King of
Children” (Haizi wang, 1984). In Su Tong’s depiction of the character
Old Kang in North Side Story, Su Tong also lays “stress on education
in civilization, which represents both a much-needed reaffirmation of
the spiritual values of the ‘Old Society’ and a call for serious reevalua-
tion of Chinese tradition.”84
Old Kang witnesses history and is the bearer of historical memory.
He constantly refers back to what used to happen in the Old Society.
The two places where Old Kang appears are at the pharmacy and at
school (even though he is not allowed to enter the latter, but must
observe from outside). The pharmacy is a place to maintain physical
well-being, while school promotes mental well-being. The year 1949
is a watershed in Old Kang’s life. Before 1949, he owned a Chinese
medicine shop named Longevity and Health Hall—a symbol of tradi-
tional Chinese culture. However, after 1949, his shop was confiscated
by the government and he became “an object of remolding” (gaizao de
duixiang). Since the 1960s he has been picking up scraps of paper on
the streets of the northern part of the city. Hence, he is called “Scrap-
picker Old Kang.” Since paper is a key material used in the recording
of history, Su Tong thus portrays Old Kang as a history-picker.
83
The Five Black Categories (hei wulei) refers to five types of people singled out
as targets of dictatorship during the Mao Era: rural landlords (dizhu), rich farmers
(funong), rightists (youpai), counterrevolutionaries (fan’geming), and bad elements
(huai fenzi).
84
Duke, “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chinese
Fiction,” 40.
112 chapter three
Following the confiscation of Longevity and Health Hall, the name

of the medicine shop was changed to Healthy People’s Pharmacy.
Over the last twenty years, the store has sold Chinese medicine, West-
ern medicine, agricultural chemicals, and pesticides, and it has offered
free contraceptives. The Chinese medicinal chest of padauk wood has
become covered with dust due to neglect. Meanwhile, during these
years the people on Toon Street have become accustomed to the sight
of Old Kang with hunched back and his wicker basket, picking up
scraps. Despite being deprived of the ownership of the medicine shop,
regardless of the season Old Kang is nearly always observed sitting on
the steps of the shop to sort out the scraps in his basket.
Old Kang’s scraps include various kinds of posters, such as slogans,
propaganda about public hygiene, court bulletins, school posters pub-
licizing the names of expelled students, and old newspapers. He plucks
out the old newspapers, because they fetch the highest price. As he
collects them, however, he reads over the headlines, including: “Kim II
Sung has just left,” “Sihanouk has arrived,” and “American devils are
expanding their military force.”85 Old Kang thus helps people recall his-
tory. Sometimes his memory seems confined to the years before 1949.
What he sees in the present propels his thoughts to the old days. He
constantly reminds people of how things were in the past, and repeat-
edly tells people that what is happening now is sinful and criminal.
The teachers complain about the chaotic state of the school and
the evils of the students, saying: “While teaching here, we should get
permission from the Public Security Bureau to carry firearms and
ammunition for self-protection… Dongfeng School might just as well
be transformed into a jail for juveniles.”86 Old Kang is very surprised
to hear such words from the mouths of teachers. He refutes them:
“Without an education, children will never learn to be responsible citi-
zens. Now that the school no longer teaches even the Three-Character
Classic, the children don’t know how to distinguish good from evil.
How can they ever learn to be good?”87 Unfortunately, the teachers do
not understand Old Kang; they conclude that he is advocating Confu-
cian thought, which is supposed to have been struck down long ago.
85
86
Ibid., 112.
87
Ibid.
Old Kang’s remarks only invite mockery and physical violence from
the teachers.
Old Kang cannot help but sigh about the fact that teachers in his
day no longer behave like teachers. He recalls his distant childhood,
when the children in the northern part of the city all attended a school
in the very narrow Peach Flower Alley. Whenever a teacher passed
by, the students would automatically give way and let the teacher pass
unimpeded. In addition, the teacher always carried a ruler in order to
discipline misbehaving boys. However, a teacher was permitted to slap
only the children’s hands and buttocks, nowhere else. By contrast, as
he observes the brutality and disrespect of contemporary schools, he
can only conclude: “It is a crime, it really is a crime!”88
Old Kang is in a muddle because there are so many things he cannot
understand. He cannot understand why Red Guards smash precious
china in his old medicine shop; why the “political study session” is
more important than people’s lives when the pharmacy is closed for
political study; why the young girl, Meiqi, tried to buy sleeping pills to
kill herself; why the snake-charmer’s own daughter left him to freeze
to death on a chilly winter night. When he tries to point out to people
that all these recent happenings are crimes, no one understands him.
Even though Old Kang realizes that fewer and fewer people under-
stand him and has been deprived of the right to speak, he does not
lose his conscience or integrity. Old Kang lives by his own moral code,
which he still observes even if he is handling such minor chores as
picking up scraps of paper waste. For instance, if a poster has been up
for fewer than three days, he will not touch it. Even though there is a
good opportunity for Old Kang to atone for his crimes as a member of
Black Five Categories, he still turns down the request of the Neighbor-
hood Committee to observe and report on young lovers’ trysts in the
park at night because he believes that Heaven would not spare him if
he did such a sneaky thing.
Like other catchers in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, Old
Kang cannot save the aforementioned children in spite of all their
good intensions. They are standing near the edge of the proverbial
crazy cliff. But at most, they can catch only one or two of the boys.
They know the danger, and they know the children are running up to
edge of the “crazy cliff,” but they cannot help because their power is
88
Ibid., 113.
114 chapter three
overwhelmed by the evil of the times—an apt image, in fact, for the
whole of China, which had in many ways run off the cliff during the
Cultural Revolution. These characters are thus destined to wind up as
failed catchers.
Sexuality, Violence and Death
In sexual maturation during the teen years, an adolescent’s emotional

reactions to these changes are as important as the physical changes
themselves. According to the psychologist F. Philip Rice, “Until the
endocrine system completes its changes and gets into balance, the
adolescent may exhibit emotional instability, fluctuations of mood,
extreme emotional sensitivity, temper tantrums, periods of anger or
moodiness, crying spells, or periods of excessive elation.”89 Therefore,
adolescents desperately need social and familial guidance and support
in order to get them through this highly self-conscious and hypersen-
sitive period.
However, Jianmei Liu points out that under Mao Zedong’s regime,
“personal love as well as subjectivity were repressed or channeled into
the sublimated collective energy.” Since the Yan’an era, asceticism was
one of the tools used to control his people.90 This was aggravated by the
highly political suppression of people during the Cultural Revolution.
Most adolescents were brought up to believe that sex was wrong and
dirty. Some developed a pathological, irrational fear of sex, nurtured by
years of repressive and negative teaching. Bakken attributes the CCP’s
“exaggerated concern with sexual disorder (luan xing)” and its empha-
sis on “purity and chastity” to the CCP’s “fear of social disorder.”91
He applies the anthropologists’ hypothesis that “ideologies of purity
serve as symbolic expressions of social change and cultural tension, in
which the physical body is used to symbolize the social order.”92 In the
Chinese social context, “‘disorderly’ sexuality has become a symbol of
the threat to the collective identity,” and threatens “the aim of anding
tuanjie (social stability and unity), which is the very essence of the
89
90
91
Bakken, The Exemplary Society, 354.
92
Ibid.
official post-Mao CCP political line.”93 Therefore, asceticism becomes

a means to prevent the transgression of social boundaries. The prohi-
bition of teenagers’ zaolian (premature love) and the powerful sexual
myth of female chastity, says Bakken, are therefore means to curb the
mobility of young people.94
During the Cultural Revolution, these teenagers’ suppressed sexual
desires were likely to be channeled into violence. Violence was also
closely related to the people’s silence. In an era of extreme political
suppression, people often choose silence. Almost any argument would
remain mute. Violence tended to become the only means of expres-
sion. Su Tong said that violence and death were ubiquitous and had
been part of his childhood and adolescent life. He recalls that he and
his friends had often walked a long distance to view an unclaimed
corpse. The person could have died for any reason: an execution,
a road accident, a drowning, a murder, or a suicide. Su Tong said
this sort of activity stemmed from the natural curiosity of children,
along with their thirst for something unusual. The atypical frequency
of this activity could only have happened in an era with more than
its share of violence and death. In addition, party-state propaganda
and ordinary people’s daily language were both full of violent turns of
phrase. For example, the big-character posters on streets were mostly
full of accounts of this group of people struggling against that group
of people. People in that era typically showed little if any respect for
one another, and generally were lacking in pity and compassion. Chil-
dren who witnessed the violence of the adult world almost inevitably
become violent themselves.95
In Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, sexuality is nearly always
accompanied by violence or its extreme form—death. Su Tong’s link-
ing of death with sexuality is a narrative strategy to dismantle the
vision of revolutionary love fabricated by the Party. In a society where
revolutionary morality is used to judge sex, these young protagonists’
primal instincts and libidinal energy are doomed to meet a tragic
end. In North Side Story, Dasheng’s and Hongqi’s sexual anxieties
are both associated with a young girl, Meiqi, who turns into a ghost
93
Ibid.
94
Ibid.
95
These statements were made by Su Tong in an interview with Hua Li on July 12,
2010 in Shanghai.
116 chapter three
after committing suicide. The incident forces people on Toon Street to

question their own morality and conscience.
One of the most important considerations in any discussion of
adolescent sexuality is the concept of masculinity and femininity. In
this novel, thirteen-year-old Meiqi (Beautiful Jade) is considered the
prettiest girl on Toon Street. Her femininity catches the attention
of the teenage boys in the neighborhood, especially Hongqi. In fact,
the attraction between her and Hongqi is mutual. Su Tong describes
them thus:
He liked to talk to this neighbor girl. Her shy smile and black eyes
seemed to be the only enjoyable thing in the summer. He didn’t know
when he started to flirt with her, and she would always be half shy and
half upset . . . He liked to see this girl’s equivocal eyes and blushing face,
but he didn’t know why.96
They seem destined to become a happy couple. Every thing changes,
however, one summer afternoon. Hongqi feels cold-shouldered by his
two friends, Dasheng and Xude, when they do not take him along
to the town of Double Pagoda to look for the kung fu master. In his
opinion, they have thereby broken the unwritten rules of friendship.
Feeling abandoned, Hongqi decides to go swimming by himself. His
loneliness, his disappointment with his friends, the stimulation from
hearing the clamor of a bloody scuffle, and his attraction to Meiqi
all work together to create a strong lust within him that completely
overcomes his self-control. He thereupon rapes Meiqi. He recognizes
his sin in Meiqi’s painful and panic-stricken eyes and on her blood-
stained skirt. His deed ruins both of them; eventually he will be sen-
tenced to nine years in prison and Meiqi will commit suicide.
When Meiqi returns to school in the fall, she finds out that she has
become the loneliest girl in Dongfeng Middle School. The girls who
used to associate with her now avoid her. They all know what hap-
pened to her the previous summer. Meiqi feels they are all staring at
her as if she had become a beggar. She feels mortified and sick at heart.
She hopes the class will never be over; or else she wishes she could fly
home after the class so that she would not have to face the terrible
looks of her classmates. Meiqi often discusses various methods of sui-
cide with Qiuhong (Autumn Crimson), the only girl who still talks
to her. She knows she needs to swallow a mere thirty sleeping pills in
96
order to kill herself. She tells her mother that she does not want to go
to school anymore; she would rather die, she says, than be forced by
her mother to go.
Meanwhile, Meiqi’s mother thinks of moving away from the dirty
and brutal community to escape the rumors and gossip about Meiqi.
She tells her daughter to keep on muddling through for a couple more
days; they will move out as soon as they sell the house. Meiqi cannot
wait any longer, however. She can no longer endure the harsh words
and scornful stares from her neighbors, and classmates, as well as from
Hongqi’s family. She finally drowns herself in the river, taking many
red paper hearts with her.
The unusual thing about this particular suicide is that Meiqi’s body
is never found. She disappears as soon as she jumps into the river.
The third day after her suicide, a red paper heart appears on the door
of Hongqi’s house. Meiqi takes her revenge by becoming a beautiful
ghost roaming Toon Street with these red paper hearts in her hands
and a “supper flower” garland on her head.
The supper flower, also known as the Mirabilis Jalapa flower or the
“common four o’clock,” is another motif in the novel. Planted casually
along the walls of courtyards and needing little attention, this hardy
plant is the most frequently seen flower on Toon Street. It grows only
in the summer, blossoms in the evening (hence the name “supper
flower”), and withers with the coming of autumn. Su Tong says that
these flowers suit the reality of Toon Street. They are just like the chil-
dren of the street, who can be seen only at supper time. Most of the
day, their mothers can never find them. The life of this flower is short-
lived, as are the lives of many of the young people on Toon Street.
The image relates directly to girls such as Meiqi and Jinhong (Red
Brocade), who both die as a result of either rape or attempted rape.
After Meiqi is raped, her mother finds that the supper flowers in front
of their house no longer blossom. The blossomless plants are ugly. She
cannot figure out if her daughter’s bad luck has anything to do with
these wilted plants. After relating the death of Jinhong, Su Tong writes,
“Some people’s lives suddenly withered, just like the supper flower on
the street in the autumn.” 97
It is noteworthy that Meiqi takes the red paper hearts with her when
she drowns herself. Afterwards, whenever she returns from the nether
97
Ibid., 210.
118 chapter three
world, she leaves red hearts on the doors or windows of houses belong-
ing to people whose malicious gossip helped pressure Meiqi into com-
mitting suicide. The red heart symbolizes her clear conscience. Like
the primary school teacher Zhou, who asked people to examine their
conscience when they saw that her son was in danger but did not lift
a finger to save him, this vulnerable girl returns from death to arouse
the ordinary person’s conscience. In Chinese culture, the most direct
expression of ethical self-reflection is to examine one’s own clear con-
science. Su Tong’s writing shows that during an abnormal era, a per-
son’s conscience is easily numbed, but certain incidents may cause
people to scrutinize their own conduct, even though only for a very
short moment and in a superficial way.
Later in North Side Story, a swarm of bugs hovers over Toon Street.
The old men say the bees have come from the nether world to portend
a disaster—either a conflagration or a flood. Young people, however,
believe this is just a superstition. It is Meiqi’s ghost who finally kills
all the bugs. People say they hear the sound of Meiqi stomping on the
bugs in the night—and sure enough, in the morning they find dead
bugs and red paper hearts on the ground. In effect, Meiqi is warning
the people that a disaster is coming if they continue to conduct their
lives as they have of late.
However, this is a community that has done away with supersti-
tions. No one believes the old people’s warnings about ill omens and
disasters.
Toon Street is full of “optimistic” people. They quickly clean the ground
and pour the dead bugs into the garbage and go to work as usual . . . The
revolutionary masses on Toon Street are not afraid of either heaven or
hell. Will they be frightened by some bugs and a ghost?98
The masses in the Toon Street neighborhood want to banish distress
and detestation from their hearts. They have no confidence or ability
to reflect deeply on what has been happening during the Cultural Rev-
olution. The scene of the clean-up of bees reminds readers of the simi-
lar scene from Yu Hua’s short story “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six.”
After a history teacher kills himself on the street as he demonstrates
ancient punishments, his body is quickly collected and the street is
cleared. His wife, daughter and the masses immediately feel relaxed and
98
Ibid., 233.
jubilant, and blithely walk in the direction of the sunlight. They thus
consign the history teacher, who remembers and deliberates upon the
past, into darkness and loneliness. This aloof indifference toward the
teacher is the same attitude they—and by extension the population—
have taken toward spiritual life in general.99
If Hongqi’s sexual misconduct is driven by libido, then Dasheng’s
case is more subtle and complicated. Dasheng has a fatal secret—his
significantly undersized penis. He becomes self-conscious, hostile, and
defensive whenever the subject of sex comes up. The most humiliat-
ing experience in Dasheng’s life was when his pants were taken off by
some policemen in a police substation. His secret bodily shortcoming
was revealed to all the policemen present, and he was mocked for it.
Dasheng swears that he will get revenge. Before he dies, the one action
Dasheng asks Pig Head to perform for him is to punish Young Ma,
the policeman who disrobed Dasheng in the police substation. Follow-
ing Dasheng’s death, Young Ma thereupon repeatedly discovers that
someone has punctured his bicycle tires while his bike was parked. He
cannot figure out why some people in the Toon Street neighborhood
hate him so much. Even little girls who probably know little or nothing
about the male anatomy sometimes puncture Young Ma’s bike tires.
There is a strange relationship between Dasheng and Meiqi. In fact,
it is Meiqi who actually awakens Dasheng’s sexual desire in spite of
the delayed onset of his sexual maturation. When Dasheng and his
friends first see Meiqi after she is raped, Dasheng keeps silent even as
his friends were all commenting on this matter:
The silent Dasheng saw a sudden gust of wind. The wind blew from the
city moat, raising Meiqi’s white skirt higher. Her skirt looked like a bird
trying to fly first to the right and then to the left, but that was unable
to fly straight upwards. Dasheng watched Meiqi use her hands to hold
down her skirt and walk across the bridge as if she were proceeding
with a dead bird in her hands. The shadow of this girl suddenly became
mournful and graceful. Dasheng felt his heart lightly struck by some-
thing . . . then another light blow . . . what sort of thing was it, so gentle
and so weak? Dasheng shook his head; he didn’t know. Even many years
later, he still could not explain what happened to his heartbeat on that
summer night on the northern bridge.100
99
Hua Li, “Chinese Avant-Gardism: A Representative Study of Yu Hua’s ‘1986’,”
BC Asian Review 13 (2002): 36–48.
100
120 chapter three
After Meiqi’s suicide, she frequently visits Dasheng in his dreams.

Meiqi is Dasheng’s fantasy even though he does not want to admit
it. In one dream in particular, Dasheng’s mind is clear. He shouts to
Meiqi: “I am not Hongqi, I am Dasheng.”101 In the dream, however,
Meiqi’s lithe and soaking wet body is close to him, and her beautiful
and sad eyes silently stare at him. Water keeps dripping from her black
hair, green skirt, and fingers onto Dasheng’s youthful body. These
drops catalyze Dasheng’s wet dream, and make him feel tired upon
waking during the following morning. Dasheng is not afraid of Meiqi’s
ghost; still, when he discovers his nocturnal emission and notices the
sketch of a red heart left by Meiqi’s ghost on his window, he becomes
frustrated and angry. His concern is that these dreams are diminishing
his strength and jeopardizing his goal of becoming a hero in the north-
ern part of the city. Dasheng finally takes his revenge by killing a cat
that he imagines to be Meiqi’s incarnation or else otherwise controlled
by Meiqi’s soul. However, Meiqi’s ghost does not stop visiting him.
Her subsequent visitation is in the company of the selfsame cat. Meiqi
continues to reappear as Dasheng’s fantasy of sexuality and femininity,
even though she is only a ghost.
A Solitary Hero on the Street
From this analysis, we see that Dasheng’s alienation is almost com-

plete—he is alienated from his parents, from his friends, from society
in general (as represented by the school), and from his own sexual
frustration. What makes Dasheng’s experience particularly difficult is
that he is keenly aware of being isolated. His own profound recogni-
tion of alienation and his strong sense of the inadequacy of his life
occur when he suddenly realizes that his close friends—Hongqi, Xude,
and Young Cripple—have drifted apart by the end of summer.
Seemingly, there is no one to whom he can turn for true guidance;
those few to whom he does turn do not offer effective help. He has to
move forward on his own, making his own decisions as to what kind
of person he should become. One sociologist has pointed out:
If emotional and social needs of adolescents are not met in the inter-
personal relationship in the family, they turn to the gang to fulfill status
101
Ibid., 234.
needs that would otherwise go unmet . . . Street gangs hold nearly abso-
lute control over the behavior of individuals.”102
This is exactly what Dasheng does. He aimlessly roams the streets in
the hope of encountering something meaningful. When one of his
friends laughs at him for killing a cat instead of a man, he swears he
will soon let people know that he is a “true man” (haohan). Forming
a gang in Toon Street and becoming the “No. 1 man” or “a real man”
in the northern part of the city become Dasheng’s ultimate goals.
When Pig Head’s gang calls Dasheng and all the teenagers on Toon
Street “puppy shit,” Dasheng is deeply irritated and insulted. He chal-
lenges Pig Head’s gang by proposing a fight. Unfortunately, no one on
Toon Street wants to follow him. He therefore decides to go unaccom-
panied to the street rumble. He quietly muses: “The most sensational
news will be produced at eight o’clock this evening.”103 He finally dem-
onstrates that he is a true man, but winds up sacrificing his life by having
single-handedly taken on ten young toughs in a street rumble.
It is evident that part of Dasheng’s difficulty arises not so much from
his being inherently bad as from his lack of positive role models. Sus-
pended between the world of school and the impoverished and vulgar
life of Toon Street, and in limbo between childhood and adulthood,
Dasheng is adrift amidst a sea of peers that is every bit as adrift as he
is. Without positive role models, these teenagers usually follow their
instinctual impulses. In essence, Dasheng’s dilemma depicts the typi-
cal teenage peer community of the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s.
Dasheng and his young friends’ coming-of-age experiences are part of
the workings of fate.
Fatalism has been one term that critics often use to describe one of
the general themes of Su Tong’s narratives. The writer Ah Cheng notes
that many of Su Tong’s works involve a theme that is uncommon in
contemporary Chinese literature: predestination or fatalism, which in
Su Tong’s narratives, intervenes with the development of one’s per-
sonality.104 The theme of predestination of fatalism is a continuation
to some extent of this motif in A Dream of Red Mansions. Contem-
porary Chinese ideology has rejected the concept of fatalism, since it
conflicts with the notion that art is merely an instrument for achieving
102
103
104
Ah Cheng, Weinisi riji [Diary in Venice] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1998), 62.
122 chapter three
the Chinese Communist Party’s political goals. Consequently, motifs

related to predestination have been practically absent from Chinese
literature for many decades. Under Communism, tragedy in literature
has no longer been truly tragic, but rather a combination of misery,
grief, and a drummed-up stoutness. The results of this amalgamation
range from dullness to absurdity. In contrast, the most touching point
in Su Tong’s narratives is that readers can sense the destinies of indi-
viduals through the disguise of a social system. The young protagonists
in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, represented by Dasheng in
North Side Story, are on a journey to find the self. If Dasheng’s socio-
cultural environment had belonged to a more stable society or era,
as is typical in conventional European Bildungsroman narratives, he
might have been able to achieve an accommodation with society and
life in general by story’s end. However, like Holden Caulfield, Dasheng
finds himself upset with the society in which he lives. Due to his lack
of positive role models from the parental world as well as the absence
of support and understanding from siblings and peers, Dasheng has
to find his own way to make peace with his reality—and does so by
becoming a solitary hero. However, his autonomy and individualist
heroism lead him no further than to his own self-destruction. Dasheng
and his friends are destined to be frozen between childhood and adult-
hood in China, which in the 1970s amounted to rushing headlong over
the edge of the “crazy cliff.”
The Boat to Redemption
Su Tong has said that he had long been thinking of writing a narrative
work about a river. He grew up by a river in Suzhou, and now lives
next to another river in Nanjing. He believes that rivers have con-
cealed a great many secrets, but it is hard for people to decipher these
secrets.105 So he wrote The Boat to Redemption, allowing the young
protagonist Ku Dongliang to take on the mission of telling the reader
the river’s secrets. This lyrical and sentimental statement informs us of
the author’s general motivation for writing the novel. It reveals many
of Su Tong’s complex musings about his childhood, his hometown,
and his teenage friends who grew up by the riverbank.
105
Su Tong, “Heliu de mimi” [The secrets of river], in Heliu de mimi [The secrets
of river] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2009), 13–18.
Fifteen years passed between the writing of North Side Story and The
Boat to Redemption. The latter novel is a blend of the Bildungsroman
and the neo-historical novel. On the one hand, the story further devel-
ops a number of themes that have been evident in Su Tong’s Tong
Street Series, such as the rebelliousness of school dropouts, problem-
atic father-son relationships, unrequited love, socio-political chaos
and repression, and the ambience of a small southern town. On the
other hand, the story is a political allegory that subverts widespread
Cultural Revolution era beliefs in revolutionary bloodlines and Maoist
class divisions.
The story takes place in a small riverside town named Milltown
during the Cultural Revolution. The young protagonist Ku Dongliang
lives with his father on a barge belonging to the Sunnyside Fleet that
plies the waters of the Golden Sparrow River all year round. The boy’s
father, Ku Wenxuan, was once the Party secretary in Milltown and the
whole family had lived a privileged life onshore owing to the father’s
special identity as the son of the female martyr Deng Shaoxiang. Ku
Wenxuan had been identified as the legitimate offspring of Deng
Shaoxiang because of a fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks. This
glorified revolutionary bloodline brought him political honor, offi-
cial position, affluent material life, and numerous extramarital affairs.
However, his revolutionary heredity was questioned and later officially
denied by the government. He was even suspected of having instead
been a bastard son of the notorious river pirate Feng Four. His politi-
cal and social status thereupon declined precipitously, and his wife left
him. He was banished to the Sunny Fleet and became one of the “boat
people.” For various reasons, these boat people have all been deprived
of the right to live on shore. Ku Wenxuan’s fifteen-year-old son Ku
Dongliang chose to live with him on the barge after Ku Wenxuan and
his wife got divorced. The story is a recollection of Ku Dongliang as a
first-person narrator of the father’s and son’s thirteen years of river-
bound existence.
Ku Dongliang differs from the young protagonists in Su Tong’s
earlier coming-of-age narratives in that Dongliang has a particularly
heavy political burden to shoulder during his adolescent years. He is
a direct victim of revolutionary bloodline theories and Maoist class
division. Whereas the Toon Street teenagers are expelled from school
and involve themselves in gang fights on the street, Ku Dongliang is
forced to stop schooling and live on the river as the son of a “class
alien” element. The day after the investigative team disqualifies his
124 chapter three
father from his former status as a revolutionary martyr’s son, Dongli-

ang’s identity changes from a member of a martyr’s family to a kongpi
(empty ass)—a Milltown slang term that means “emptier than empty
and stinkier than an ass.”106
Dongliang’s Bildung is achieved through his alternative lives on the
river and on dry land. Su Tong emphasizes that he has no intention of
presenting the polarity of the river versus dry land on its banks, even
though the metaphorical contrast between the river and adjacent dry
land is evident in the story.107 People living on the river and people
living on dry land are basically situated in two different worlds. The
eleven families in the Sunnyside Fleet all have a shady and murky his-
torical background. Dongliang regards his and his father’s move to
the barge more as a “reclassification” than as exile or banishment.108
Though he chooses to live with his father on the barge, he longs for life
on dry land as all the other boat people do. Each time he has a clash
with his father, he runs ashore, only to escape to the barge for protec-
tion when he is rejected by the residents on dry land. So the river and
the dry land on its banks have each functioned both as places he wants
to escape from and as havens he seeks.
Dongliang’s alienation and loneliness are more profound than the
distress felt by Dasheng and other teenagers in the Toon Street Series.
He has no peer community to join. He makes no friends either on the
barge or on shore. He says, “My days on the river were unrelievedly
lonely, and that loneliness comprised the last thread of my self-respect.
There were lots of boys in the fleet, but they were either too old and
stupid or too young and disgusting, so I had no friends.”109 When he
goes onshore, he is discriminated against by his old acquaintances, and
is kept under surveillance by the Pier Security Group. In addition, his
alienation and loneliness are aggravated by his problematic relationship
with his father and his unrequited love for Jiang Huixian.
The Boat to Redemption continues the theme of tense father-son
relationships that featured prominently in Su Tong’s Toon Street
Series. In North Side Story, young people such as Dasheng, Xude, and
Hongqi all have strained and even violent relationships with their
106
Su, The Boat to Redemption, 22.
107
The statement was made by Su Tong in an interview with Hua Li on July 12,
2010 in Shanghai.
108
Su, The Boat to Redemption, 44–45.
109
Ibid., 47.
fathers, and reconciliation between them is never achieved. The Boat

to Redemption further explores such tensions between father and son.
According to Su Tong, maternal love has more physical dimensions
(giving birth, breastfeeding, and child care), while paternal love is more
spiritual. Traditional Chinese society is a strict patriarchal society in
which paternal love is usually expressed through enforcing discipline
upon the son in order to make him a better person. However, in Boat
to Redemption, the father Ku Wenxuan’s surveillance and discipline
are brutal and sinful, thereby subverting traditional patriarchal dis-
course. Many of Dongliang’s humiliations and sufferings are inflicted
on him by his father. Ku Wenxuan’s sanctions against Dongliang’s
sexual fantasy, his prohibition against Dongliang seeing Huixian and
his self-castration are tokens of redemption for one of his own sins.
Ku Wenxuan had slept around with women and caused the death of
one woman’s husband when he was the Party secretary of Milltown.
This not only embarrasses Dongliang, but also leads to discrimina-
tion against Dongliang by various people onshore. More importantly,
Dongliang’s political and social identity is closely related to his father’s.
As Dongliang puts it, “It was all up to fate. My father’s fate was tied
up with a martyr named Deng Shaoxiang, and mine was tied up with
him.”110 Ku Wenxuan’s fall from power changes Dongliang from a
happy and proud young boy on shore to a kongpi exiled on the river.
The dependence-and-repulsion complex and the love-hate sentiments
between father and son run like a thread throughout the narrative. In
the end, Ku Wenxuan drowns himself in the river with the memorial
stone of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang in his arms. His suicide is a relief
to both himself and his son.
The life of Ku Wenxuan is a course of wrongdoing and redemption.
His life on the river is a redemption for the wrongdoings he has com-
mitted onshore, and is also a struggle to reclaim his political identity
and reputation. During his thirteen years on the river barge, he has
regularly sent appeals to leading Party bureaus regarding his identity
as the son of a revolutionary martyr, demanding an official certificate
that recognizes his martyr-family status.
The fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks is the origin of his tragic
life. It brings him both glory and stigma. However, by the end of the
novel, the fish-shaped birthmark had mysteriously disappeared from
110
Ibid., 42.
126 chapter three
his body. Similarly, the martyr’s memorial stone is the materialization

of his bloodline and identity. There is a bas relief on the back of the
stone: the martyr Deng Shaoxiang has a basket on her back, and a
child’s head pokes up over the edge of the basket. Ku Wenxuan has
identified himself with the child in the basket. It is the material proof
of his existence as the son of the revolutionary martyr. At the end of
the story, when the memorial stone is about to be moved elsewhere,
Dongliang steals it and transfers it to their barge. “I was going to
return Deng Shaoxiang’s martyr spirit to my father,” he says.111 How-
ever, when examining the memorial stone, Ku Wenxuan finds that
the infant’s head is mysteriously missing from the top of the basket.
He regards it as a rejection of him by Deng Shaoxiang. He comments,
“Thirteen years of trying to remold myself have all been wasted. I’ve
failed to earn your grandmother’s forgiveness. She doesn’t want me.”112
Thereupon, when the Pier Security Group and Milltown police depart-
ment go to the barge to claim the memorial stone, Ku Wenxuan ties
himself to the stone and throws himself into the river to drown. Later,
Dongliang finds that his father has metamorphosed into a fish. Upon
his father’s death, Dongliang is emancipated from surveillance, stric-
tures, and the old man’s political stigma. Only with the father’s death
can Dongliang enjoy some improvement in his life and fortune.
Aside from the father-son relationship, Dongliang’s relationship
with the orphaned girl Jiang Huixian is another major narrative thread
in the story. If we were to argue that the father has brought Dongliang
little more than humiliation and embarrassment, then Jiang Huixian’s
appearance in his life brings him hope and joy. He entrusts all his
tenderness and desire to her. He keeps a secret diary recording every
aspect of Huixian’s life on the river barge and later on shore. In a
certain sense, both of them are orphaned. Huixian has been physically
abandoned by her parents. Ku Dongliang has been abandoned by his
mother and lives on the boat with his father. Even though his father
constantly keeps a lookout over him, he is spiritually alienated from
his father. After his father drowns himself in the river, Dongliang also
becomes an orphan.
Jiang Huixian bears many similarities to the female protagonist
Crimson Jade in “Memories of Mulberry Garden”—she is beautiful,
111
Ibid., 338.
112
Ibid., 352.
seductive, and defiant. However, Huixian is endowed with more polit-

ical implications. At the age of seven, she is taken in the boat people’s
care after both of her parents go mysteriously missing. Jiang Huix-
ian provides the boat people with a channel to express their love and
humanity in a way that has not been effaced by revolutionary ideology.
This is in sharp contrast with the people onshore who refuse to take
care of her following her parents’ disappearance. However, Su Tong
does not intend to overstate this love. What he is more interested in
are the things that happen to Huixian after she goes ashore. At the age
of fourteen, Huixian is picked by the district’s propaganda troupe to
play the part of Li Tiemei, the heroine of the revolutionary opera Red
Lantern, and to ride in a National Day parade. Her fate changes as she
moves ashore. From then on, her identity is closely related to that of Li
Tiemei. She wears Li Tiemei’s costume and adopts her hairstyle. The
red lantern becomes the physical expression of her identity, much like
the memorial stone was for Ku Wenxuan.
Su Tong presents Huixian as a treasure trove of beauty and sexual
allure that any man in Milltown would have liked to possess. She is
nicknamed Little Tiemei and becomes a celebrity in Milltown. She is
protected by the new Party secretary Zhao Chuntang and attends ban-
quets to accompany senior officials visiting Milltown from the district.
Zhao Chuntang regards Huixian as his trump card, envisioning that
Huixian will be transferred to a higher cultural unit in the district
or favored by a high official someday in the future, to the benefit of
his own career. However, once he realizes that Huixian has lost her
potential political value, he rejects her immediately. He says to Huix-
ian “When you are not Li Tiemei, you are nothing.”113 Thereupon,
Huixian is transferred to the People’s Barbershop as a hairdresser.
In the barbershop, Huixian is also surrounded by men’s greedy eyes.
Dongliang observes, “Men were always entering and leaving the bar-
bershop, and I could easily spot those who had something other than a
haircut in mind.”114 Actually, Dongliang himself is one of her admirers.
Each time when the fleet stops at Milltown, Dongliang tries different
method of approaching Huixian or even just catching a glimpse of
Huixian, long the object of his desire.
113
Ibid., 230.
114
Ibid., 244.
128 chapter three
The relationship between Dongliang and Huixian remains ambigu-

ous, uncertain, and intermittent throughout the narrative. This rela-
tionship seems to be a one-man show, since the reader can only follow
Ku Dongliang’s perspective. The reader feels his affection for Huixian
as a little girl, and also senses his frustration, joy, passion, timidity,
restlessness and despair after she grows up and goes ashore. How-
ever, like Dongliang, the reader never knows how Huixian thinks
about Dongliang and his obsession with her. This ambiguity is caused
both by the limited narrative angle and by Dongliang’s alternative life
between the boat and the bank. Su Tong has remarked that he could
have switched the narrative angle to that of an omniscient narrator,
but he preferred to confine the narrative to Dongliang’s perspective.
In addition, this relationship is shaped by Dongliang’s intermittent
life on shore. He can only see Huixian when the fleet stops at Mill-
town. He has to manage his time, escape from the surveillance of the
Pier Security Group, and overcome his own timidity. He never knows
when he will next see her. As a result, the relationship is never devel-
oped. Dongliang does not even have a chance to confess his feelings to
Huixian. Only at the end of the story does the reader witness Huixian’s
kindness to Dongliang. When Dongliang is beaten up by some local
hooligans in the barbershop, Huixian rescues him. Later, before she
marries a man on shore, she gives her treasured red lantern to Dongliang
as a replacement for his diary, which had been lost during the brawl.
The gift of the red lantern reveals Huixian’s appreciation of Dongliang’s
affection. It is also a way that Huixian says farewell both to Dongliang
and to her childhood on the river barge. At this point, Dongliang has
lost the two people in the world who were closest to him—his father
and Huixian.
Like the young protagonist in a conventional Bildungsroman novel,
Dongliang has experienced the ordeal of love and conflict with the
older generation, and develops his individuality and subjectivity dur-
ing his various adventures on the river and on the dry land of the
riverbank. However, like Dasheng in North Side Story, Dongliang is
unable to achieve social integration at the end of his prolonged ado-
lescent years. After his father dies, it seems he is relieved and free
to return ashore. However, at the end of the novel, he sees a notice
board on the river bank that announces, “Beginning from today, Ku
Dongliang of the Sunnyside Fleet is banned from coming ashore.”115
115
Ibid., 362.
This notice board is carried by Bianjin, a retarded boy, who also has
a fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks and is now deemed to be
the genuine descendant of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang. Su Tong uses
the idiot Bianjin to signify the irrational and absurd world onshore.
With Bianjin as the real son of Deng Shaoxiang, Su Tong discounts
the significance of revolutionary martyrdom and the supposed honor
attached to all members of such a martyr’s family. This is also an
ironic rejoinder to Ku Wenxuan’s lifelong struggle to wrap himself
in the identity of a son of a revolutionary martyr. For Dongliang, the
biggest irony is that his social integration is rendered impossible by an
idiot. He will never be able to return ashore. In this sense, The Boat to
Redemption is another example of the parodistic Bildungsroman.
Su Tong used the polarities of “wild” and “tame” to contrast chil-
dren living during the Cultural Revolution with children living in the
post-Mao era. He emphasized that the word “wild” does not mean
that the children of the 1960s and 1970s—such as Dasheng, Hongqi,
or even himself—observed no discipline. It means simply that they
“responded to the whole world by their instinct and intuition.”116 The
Cultural Revolution is an era full of heroes endorsed by the Party, but
the teenagers in these novels by Su Tong cannot find any positive role
models or guidance in the adult world. They have to look horizontally to
their peers instead. In effect, they grow up on the streets amidst others
roughly their own age. Even though in school they were forced to read
and recite Mao’s boring sayings and homilies, the children always found
interesting things to do after school, and looked for their role models
on the streets. Su Tong affirmed that in a certain sense, they enjoyed
an “absolute freedom” ( juedui de ziyou) because they followed their
own inner nature. He concluded that “no matter how cruel the sys-
tem is, it won’t be able to subdue human nature.”117 Many years later,
after writing The Boat to Redemption, Su Tong emphasizes that when
he recalls his memory of his childhood and adolescence experience
during the Cultural Revolution, sufferings were always blunted some-
what by the atmosphere of a “revolutionary carnival.” The sadness was
always something that he felt later on when reflecting upon his experi-
ences more rationally.118
116
Su Tong and Huang Zhaohui, “Dianfu bing bu yiweizhe jinbu” [Subversion does
not mean progress], Nandu zhoukan, March 5, 2006.
117
Ibid.
118
Su Tong, “Guanyu He’an de xiezuo,” Dangdai zuojia pinglun no. 1 (2010): 49.
130 chapter three
As an adult, Su Tong also reflected on the tragic side of this free-

dom. He refers to Wang Shuo’s story, “The Fierce Animals” (Dongwu
xiongmeng, 1991), which was made into the movie In the Heat of the
Sun (1994) by Jiang Wen. The story presents a series of seemingly
happy and carefree adolescent experiences during the Cultural Revolu-
tion. The youthful characters feel happy at the time because they can
do whatever they wish, following their instincts. Children can easily
play truant, get involved in bloody gang fights or love affairs, and get
up to all sorts of antics, as do Dasheng and his friends in North Side
Story. They feel that this is simply the way the world is; as far as they
know, everyone lives like this. There is no other point of reference.
They do not know that children in other parts of the world live dif-
ferently.119 As children, they do not recognize the danger of behavior
motivated only by instinct and intuition. They do not know the danger
of growing up without positive role models from the parental world.
They did not realize that this untrammeled freedom will likely lead
them to destruction.
Meanwhile, the seemingly unrestricted behavior of many children
during that time reveals their helplessness in coping with the realities
around them and with their longing for a different world. Only after
they grow up and live in a relatively normal society do they begin to
realize the tragedy of their childhood. The passage of time also compels
them to consider the cultural consequences of the Cultural Revolution,
both for themselves and for their generation as a whole. That is why
Su Tong as an adult novelist focused upon writing narratives about
children growing up in the time of his own childhood. As an adult,
he had a more sober attitude toward the life of young people in China
during the 1960s and 1970s. He has a profoundly tragic sense of the
frenetic, and chaotic aspects of life that many youth were leading in a
time of trouble nationwide.
119
Su and Huang, “Dianfu bing bu yiweizhe jinbu.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FALLEN YOUTH: A TREMBLING LONER
Figure 2. Yu Hua in Beijing, July 2010 (Courtesy of the author)
In Chapter Three we saw how Su Tong’s Toon Street Series depicts

the restless and tragic lives of a group of urban teenagers during the
chaotic Cultural Revolution. To complete the picture of Chinese youth,
Su Tong’s contemporary Yu Hua provides a rural and small town
version of teenage coming-of-age experiences through some of his
short stories and his full-length novel Cries in the Drizzle.1 Yu Hua
1
Yu Hua, Xiyu yu huhan [Cries and drizzle] (Taiwan: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1992).
This novel was first published in Harvest in 1991 with the title Xiyu yu huhan. Yu
132 chapter four
seeks to express the disorder and distress so widespread among

Chinese rural adolescents during the 1970s. Like their counterparts
in the city, these youth demonstrate stunning subjectivity when their
parental world fails to provide adequate models, support, and guid-
ance. They withdraw to their peer community, retreat into fantasy,
and sometimes even descend into psychosis. All are fallen youth; none
becomes the socialist “new man” anticipated and promised by the
CCP. Disillusion, destruction, violence, and death are what they have
experienced on the way to adulthood. Therefore, the balance between
the development of the young hero’s individuality and his gradual
socialization is not achieved. Though the young heroes have to assert
their autonomy and develop their individuality along their journey
towards adulthood, they never achieve the sort of social integration
that is normally expected in conventional Bildungsroman. In this way,
Yu Hua’s coming-of-age narratives resemble Su Tong’s works in this
genre in turning both the traditional European Bildungsroman and the
modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo upside down.
Yu Hua’s first full-length novel, Cries in the Drizzle written in 1991,
has since been eclipsed by both his early experimental stories and his
later works of critical realism, such as To Live, Chronicle of a Blood
Merchant, and the later best-seller Brothers. Soon after its publication,
Cries in the Drizzle encountered many reactions of disappointment
from both readers and critics, who wrote overly negative reviews of the
novel. For example, the avant-garde critic Chen Xiaoming dismisses
the novel as a failure: “Because Yu Hua places too much emphasis on
unique, personal experience and private psychology, the novel appears
to suffer a narrative foreclosure that narrows the representation of life
and historical reality.”2 Kang Liu argues that the effectiveness of Cries in
the Drizzle is dampened by the author’s limited skills in managing the
much “larger narrative scale of the novel”; this is because at this early
stage in Yu Hua’s writing career, he had merely mastered “narrative
skills in presenting experiences and events with intensity in the short
Hua changed the title to Zai xiyu zhong huhan when it was printed in book form by
Huacheng chubanshe in 1993. However, the novel printed by Yuanliu chuban gongsi
in Taiwan in 1992 still uses the old title Xiyu yu huhan.
2
Chen Xiaoming, “Zuihou de yishi” [The last ritual], Wenxue pinglun 5 (1991):
30–61. The English translation is cited from Kang Liu’s article “Short-Lived Avant-
Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” in Globalization and Cultural
Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 123.
a trembling loner 133
story and the novella.”3 Liu regards such stylistic characteristics of the
novel as “illusory and allegorical narration of dreams, hallucinations,
mysterious metaphors and symbols, and minute and objective details
and descriptions of conversations” as nothing more than a minor
extension of Yu Hua’s earlier formal experimentation.4 I disagree with
Chen and Liu because they both fail to interpret the novel within the
generic structure of the Bildungsroman or chengzhang xiaoshuo. More-
over, both critics view the thematic concerns of this novel in isolation
from both Yu Hua’s earlier and later works. As a transitional work
between Yu Hua’s avant-gardism and critical realism, Cries in the
Drizzle remains the most psychologically complex novel the author
has written thus far. It is precisely by means of Yu Hua’s utilization of
“unique personal experience and private psychology”—highlighted by
Chen Xiaoming as supposedly a key weakness of the novel—that the
narrative reveals the inner individuality and potential development of
the young protagonist—a salient feature of the Bildungsroman genre.
However, Cries in the Drizzle is not the first work of fiction for
which Yu Hua adopted the Bildungsroman structure. In his early
experimental stories such as “On the Road at Eighteen” and “The April
Third Incident,” Yu Hua exploited some of the formal elements of
the Bildungsroman genre that later achieved a fuller development in
Cries in the Drizzle. Yu Hua’s first major publication, “On the Road
at Eighteen,” offers a convenient point of departure for analyzing how
Yu Hua applied the Bildungsroman genre to visualize the tragic coming-
of-age experience of Chinese youth during troubled times, and for
exploring this story’s parody of the thematic concern of the conven-
tional Bildungsroman story. Describing a boy’s experiences as he leaves
home, this notable short story achieves its symbolic effects through a
series of reversals. The first-person narrator, a young boy, is walking
alone on a remote highway, trying to find an inn or to hitch a ride
from someone. Eventually he gets a lift from a truck driver who is
transporting apples. Unfortunately, the truck breaks down along the
way, and local village bystanders take advantage of the situation to
steal both the apples as well as the tires from the immobilized truck.
The boy receives a severe beating from the mob after trying to block
3
Kang Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,”
122–123.
4
Ibid.
134 chapter four
them from pillaging the truck. However, the driver remains indiffer-
ent in the face of this brigandage, and winds up stealing the boy’s
red backpack and departing with the thieving villagers. The boy stays
behind in the abandoned truck, which serves as the inn for which
he has been searching. Notwithstanding various modernist and post-
modernist readings of the story by literary critics who ignore the
Bildungsroman genre, “On the Road at Eighteen” is essentially a narrative
of a young man’s “initiation and reconciliation” with the world.5 The story
contains many formal elements of the conventional Bildungsroman—
a youthful protagonist who has left home, an absence of paternal
guidance, the experiencing of an ordeal, and a new recognition of the
world. Moreover, this story embodies the thematic concerns of the
Bildungsroman with individuality and socialization. Through a series
of symbolic and absurd encounters with the outside world along the
journey, the narrative discloses the dynamic and changing nature of
the young hero, along with the rise of his individual subjectivity and
autonomy, as well as a more sober recognition of himself and the
world. When the young hero first sets out on his journey away from
home, he harbors a very idealistic and innocent vision of the world
that is marked by an awareness that seldom extends beyond the narrow
range of what he has grown familiar with during his childhood.6 This is
evident in his high spirits and lightheartedness at the beginning of the
story. He comments on nearby mountains and clouds to his friends
and relatives, whom he hails in high-spirited shouts. However, from
the moment that he first hitches a ride on a truck, the world starts
to reveal its darker face to him. The boy’s ensuing conversation with
the truck driver, the truck’s breakdown on the road, the village mob
and its violent brigandage, and his betrayal by the feckless driver
shatter the cozy and readily fathomable world that he envisioned at the
beginning of the journey. The outside world now presents itself as a
puzzling, violent, and chaotic realm. Each of the reversals that occur on
the road exemplifies a lack of reasonable behavior and an abundance
of disorder in the real world. More importantly, these encounters
force him to develop his individual subjectivity. It is through the pro-
cess of defending the truck and its freight from the mob that the boy
5
Fiction,” 10.
6
Cai, “The Lonely Traveler Revisited in Yu Hua’s Fiction,” 183.
has to assert himself and develop his individual subjectivity. At the end
of the story, he obtains a new recognition of both the outside world
and his own fledgling self, and finds comfort in the abandoned truck.
The absence of a father figure or other adult guidance that could
provide a positive role model is evident in the story. At the beginning
of the story, the young hero has “encountered quite a few people along
the road, but none of them knew where the road leads, or whether
there’s an inn there.”7 Obviously, he is seeking guidance from the
adults he encounters along the way, but none of them has a clear
answer for him, merely saying, “Keep on walking. You’ll see when
you get there.”8 When he finally meets some adults—the truck driver
and the local village bystanders—what he discovers in their behavior is
irrationality, betrayal, absurdity, indifference, and brutality. As Xiaob-
ing Tang has observed, the father figure is not “so much imaginary as
it is undermined and de-realized.”9 The boy’s father is not even men-
tioned until the end of story, when the boy at rest inside the demol-
ished truck recalls how he had been dispatched on this journey by his
father. During the boy’s journey, the only link between him and his
father is the latter’s gift of the red backpack, which was later stolen
by the truck driver. Xiaobing Tang has interpreted the father figure
as the purveyor of a “deceptive promise, a beautiful lie that has to be
exposed,” pronouncing the red backpack to be “a strong symbol of
revolutionary heritage, or the idealism of the father.”10 With the loss
of the red backpack, the idealistic revolutionary heritage has departed,
never to return. The young hero is completely cut off from his father,
and left alone in a disordered, incomprehensible world.
In spite of the formal elements of the Bildungsroman genre that
“On the Road at Eighteen” contains, the story parodies the conven-
tional Bildungsroman by concluding with an incomplete journey,
thereby implying the absence of the young hero’s successful socializa-
tion. The conventional Bildungsroman maintains a fairly even balance
between the development of individual subjectivity and gradual social
integration. In a conventional Bildungsroman, the young protagonist
7
Yu Hua, “On the Road at Eighteen,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern
Chinese Literature, 2nd ed. eds. Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007), 439.
8
Ibid.
9
Fiction,” 13.
10
Ibid., 14.
136 chapter four
gradually forms a mature personality along the road and achieves a

high degree of socialization at the end of his journey, either by finding
a vocation or entering into a happy marriage. However, in “On the
Road at Eighteen,” the young hero’s adventure is full of reversals, and
eventually cut short by violent brigandage.
At the beginning of the story, we know that the young hero just
left home and is looking for an inn, which signifies a goal in his life.
After failing to find an inn, he starts to think about hitchhiking. Yet
when he eventually hitches a ride in a truck, the truck is heading in the
opposite direction from where the boy had intended to travel. Dur-
ing this process, we can see the compromises that the protagonist has
felt compelled to make. “I don’t really care if the truck’s going in the
opposite direction. I need to find an inn, and if there’s no inn, I need
a truck. And the truck’s right in front of me.”11 All these compromises
“displace all notions of destination and necessity,”12 and are at odds
with the thematic tenor of the conventional Bildungsroman. At the
end of the story, the young hero has reclined in the middle of the
truck, where he feels comfortable and warm. This warmth and com-
fort result from the “sympathetic identification” the young hero finds
between himself and the truck—both of them had been roughed up
by violent attacks.13 This helps him to awaken to his own vulnerability,
as well as to the potential brutality of the outside world. On the one
hand, the protagonist defines the severely vandalized truck as his own
“inn.” On the other hand, the immobilized truck shorn of its tires on
a remote highway serves as a reminder of the young hero’s failure to
achieve integration with society. With its tires removed by the brigands,
the truck has lost its function of conveyance, thereby depriving the
footloose young hero of mobility.
The publication of “On the Road at Eighteen” helped establish Yu
Hua’s reputation as an innovative writer. The story’s style and theme
represented a fresh approach in contemporary Chinese fiction. Li Tuo
opined that “Yu Hua’s fiction completely shatters our age-old conven-
tional understanding of the relationship between literature and reality,
11
Yu Hua, “On the Road at Eighteen,” 440.
12
Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narrative of the Self in Contemporary Chinese
Fiction,” 14.
13
Ibid., 16.
and between language and the objective world.”14 He especially appre-

ciates Yu Hua’s use of language, and hails that it signaled another
“emancipation of language.”15 This “emancipation of language” emerging
from Yu Hua’s story is an implementation of the author’s unique view
about the politics of language.
In the 1980s, Yu Hua advocated a kind of “indeterminate language”
(bu queding de yuyan) that was the very opposite of the popular lan-
guage of the masses (dazhonghua de yuyan).16 He felt that the ordinary
day-to-day language of the popular masses possesses no individuality;
one sentence may evoke merely one meaning. Popular language depicts
an overly predictable reality and restricts one’s understanding of this
world. Indeterminate language, by contrast, breaks through the con-
fines of popular language, searching instead for a more truthful and
reliable mode of expression that reveals a world open to limitless vari-
ations and interpretations. In order to reveal the true nature of the
world, language must violate common sense, seeking to offer multiple
possibilities and many levels of understanding. In doing so, it must
also be prepared to break the bonds of normal grammar, applying
grammatical juxtaposition, displacement, and transposition. Yu Hua
has observed that many ordinary words such as pain, fear, and joy do
not reflect an individual’s true inner feelings, but are merely broad
generalizations and subjective judgments.17 Only indeterminate lan-
guage can express these emotional or psychological states—language
that is more objective and authentic than popular language. In addi-
tion, at the level of language, Yu Hua has been more concerned with
revealing desire than with merely portraying the character of the pro-
tagonist. Within the context of a literary work, Yu Hua believes that
people, trees, houses, and rivers all have their own unique desires. A
river demonstrates its desire by flowing. A house discloses its desire by
silence. The combination of all these desires forms the symbolism of a
14
Tuo Li, “Xu: Xuebeng hechu?” [Preface: Where will the avalanche go?], in Yu Hua’s
Shibasui chumen yuanxing [On the road at eighteen] (Taibei: Yuanliu chubanshe,
1990), 9.
15
Ibid., 10–12.
16
Yu Hua, “Xuwei de zuopin” [Contrived works], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji [Can
I believe in myself?] (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1998), 161. In June 1989,
Yu Hua published this famous manifesto to illustrate his writing attitude, causing an
intense response in the Chinese literary scene.
17
Ibid., 167–168.
138 chapter four
literary work.18 Yu Hua has not found much artistic value in describ-
ing individual characteristics through abstract words such as optimis-
tic, cunning, honest, or melancholy; by themselves, such words do not
truly reflect an individual’s inner heart. Words such as these can even
hamper the writer’s extended exploration of a protagonist’s sophisti-
cated psychology.
Critics also link the absurdity and the disturbing simplicity of “On
the Road at Eighteen” with Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) stories. Yu
Hua admits that he has been deeply influenced by foreign literature,
especially the works of Kafka and Kawabata in the 1980s when he
started to write. Yu Hua did not grow up surrounded by literature. He
finished primary school in 1973, the same year in which his small town
of Haiyan opened a library. His father applied for two library cards
for Yu Hua and his brother. Yu Hua started reading fiction, especially
novels. He read almost all of the major PRC novels of the Mao era
from cover to cover, including such well-known works as Bright Sunny
Skies (Yan yang tian, 1964), Golden Road (Jinguang dadao, 1972, 1974),
Shining Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing, 1972), and Wind and Cloud in
the Mine (Kuangshan fengyun, 1972). The latter two were his favorites
from this period.19
However, Yu Hua found most of the Mao-era fiction boring, par-
ticularly compared with the more fascinating big-character posters on
the street during the Cultural Revolution. On his way back home from
school each day, he would spend an hour in front of them, observing
how people he knew hurled invectives and spread slanderous rumors
against each other with the most malicious turns of phrase. On the
posters, people’s imaginations were brought into full play, employ-
ing literary techniques such as fabrication, exaggeration, analogy, and
irony. As Yu Hua remembered, “This is the earliest genuine literature
I read. On the street, in front of big-character posters, I began to like
literature.”20 It may seem ironic, even humorous, that invective-laden
posters would spark Yu Hua’s interest in literature. The posters, however,
were far more interesting than the made-to-order “command literature”
18
Ibid.
19
For more information about Yu Hua’s early reading experience see Yu Hua,
“Wo zuichu de xianshi” [My earliest reality], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 205–212;
Michael Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua” (interviewed August 30, 2003, University
of Iowa International Writing Program), MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2004 at
http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/yuhua.htm (accessed June 2010).
20
Yu, “Wo zuichu de xianshi,” 211.
(zunming wenxue) of the Mao era. Yu Hua frequently employs such

posters in his writings, giving detailed descriptions of their contents, as
in the novels Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and To Live, as well as in his
story “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six” (Yijiu baliu nian, 1987).
After Yu Hua finished middle school, he received some basic medi-
cal training, later becoming a dentist in a Haiyan health clinic. How-
ever, Yu Hua felt that this job was too dull and boring. He found it
unbearable to work eight hours a day, punching the time clock when-
ever arriving and departing for the workday. He preferred a more
flexible and creative vocation. His primary motive for writing, he once
averred, was to avoid working as a dentist any longer. His greatest
ambition was to work in the town’s cultural center, because people
there were not confined within an office eight hours a day, but could
wander around town instead. After getting some short stories pub-
lished in various literary magazines, Yu Hua thereupon began working
as a writer at the cultural center.21 Henceforth, as he eventually moved
to Jiaxing and later Beijing, all of the changes in his life had something
to do with writing.
When he finally began to try his luck at writing, China was fortu-
nately experiencing a certain degree of liberation from Maoist totali-
tarianism. Literature soon resumed its pre-Maoist role as a significant
part of most well-educated people’s lives. Many classical Chinese
books and translations of foreign novels were reprinted, and many
people lined up in front of PRC bookstores to buy these books, reveal-
ing the pent-up literary thirst in the wake of the Mao Era. Yu Hua was
swept up in this PRC wave of a renewed interest in literature. At the
outset, Yu Hua was confused in the face of such a vast array of previ-
ously inaccessible literature, whether foreign or Chinese, classical or
contemporary. As though drifting on an ocean, he lost his direction.
When he was finally able to make a decision, he chose translations of
foreign literature as his preferred reading material, stating:
My choice is a writer’s choice, or a choice made with writing in
mind, rather than a choice of attitude toward life and experience.
Only from foreign literature can I really understand what writing
techniques are and realize the richness of literary expressions through
the practice of my own writing.22
21
Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua.”
22
Yu Hua, “Wo weihe xiezuo?” [Why do I write?], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 193.
140 chapter four
The Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was the first

foreign author to deeply influence Yu Hua.23 In 1980, Yu Hua read
Kawabata’s short story, “The Izu Dancer,” and was stunned by Kawa-
bata’s writing. The early 1980s were the golden era of Scar Literature
(shanghen wenxue) in mainland China, but from “The Izu Dancer”
Yu Hua discovered there was another way to express trauma that was
much more powerful and touching than that found in Scar Literature.
For the next five or six years, he was infatuated with Kawabata, a sensi-
tive and exquisite writer.
It may have been limiting or even harmful for Yu Hua to have
been so preoccupied with one writer for years on end. Fortunately, he
encountered the writing of Franz Kafka in the spring of 1986. Kafka’s
stories such as “The Metamorphosis” and “The Country Doctor” intro-
duced Yu Hua to a new freedom of form and expression. Milan Kun-
dera describes Kafka’s novels as “the seamless fusion of dream and
reality; a supremely lucid gaze set on the modern world, along with
the most unfettered imagination.”24 This sort of unleashed imagina-
tion attracted Yu Hua, disentangling him from his previous obsession
with Kawabata. Yu Hua regarded Kafka’s writing as being free as the
wind, and wanted his own writing to be similarly relaxed. At the end
of 1986, he published his first celebrated short story, “On the Road
at Eighteen.” Other stories, such as “The Past and the Punishments”
(Wangshi yu xingfa, 1989) and “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” also show
the influence of Kafka.25
In literature, the influence of other writers encourages a writer to
constantly discover new ways to make his or her own writing more
independent. “The legacies of Kawabata and Kafka” Yu Hua asserts,
“are two museums that tell us what has once happened in the history
of literature; they are not banks, and do not support any successors.”26
23
Yu Hua, “Chuanduan kangcheng yu kafuka” [Kawabata and Kafka], in Wo nengfou
xiangxin ziji?, 90–94.
24
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press,
1986), 81.
25
Some critics have made detailed comparisons between Yu Hua’s “The Year Nine-
teen Eighty-six” and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and between “On the Road at
Eighteen” and “The Country Doctor.” See Li Xiaona, “Ziyou de xiezuo: qiantan Kafuka
dui Yu Hua de yingxiang” [Free writing: brief talk on Kafka’s influence upon Yu Hua],
Yichun daxue xuebao shekeban 25, no. 5 (Oct. 2003): 81–82. Sun Caixia, “Xingfa de
yiwei” [The implication of penalty], Xiandai wenxue zazhi, 2003, no. 3:49–51.
26
Yu, “Chuanduan kangcheng yu kafuka,” 94.
While Kawabata taught Yu Hua the basic skills of literary imagination,

Kafka revealed insights into the liberation of thought.
Though some critics have praised Yu Hua for “seeming to have had
almost no apprentice period,”27 this does not mean that Yu Hua did
not consciously explore writing techniques, methods, and the relation
between literature and truth (zhenshi). Not only had Yu Hua been
influenced by such writers as Kawabata and Kafka in the early stage of
his writing—he also developed some creative ideas of how to present
the truth of the world through language.
For Yu Hua, “On the Road at Eighteen” reflected a new attitude in
his writing: the quest for truth, that goal of philosophers and mystics
through the ages. In this regard, Yu Hua is similar to Marcel Proust
(1871–1922), for whom the search for truth took the form of “a depic-
tion of error.”28 Proust applied “the depiction of error” to distinguish
his understanding of truth from “useless duplication of days gone
by.”29 Yu Hua has also indicated that all of his efforts at writing have
been attempts to approach truth, a term with specific connotations
for him.
At the beginning of his career, Yu Hua’s mode of thinking was
tightly restricted by common sense and a rather literalistic perception
of reality. In 1986, however, he suddenly broke free to explore the
concept of truth on a more abstract level.30 He reasoned that life itself
is not real; only people’s spiritual existence is real. Only when people
enter into their spiritual world can they truly feel the boundlessness
of it. In the spiritual world, all of the values propounded by common
sense are shattered. Yu Hua has insisted that people’s experiences in
daily life tend to rob them of imagination. These experiences are only
pertinent to a superficial level of understanding that is estranged from
the essence of spirit. As a result, truth is inevitably distorted through
its manifestation in everyday life.
Yu Hua has felt that an individual’s shallowness stems from limita-
tions in personal experience.31 For instance, if a writer describes one
27
Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” World Literature Today 65, no. 3
(Summer 1991): 415.
28
Vincent Descombes, Proust’s Philosophy of the Novel, trans. Catherine Chance
Macksey (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), 4.
29
Marcel Proust and Jacques Riviere, Correspondence: 1914–1922, ed. Philip Kolb
(Paris: Plon, 1955), 3.
30
Yu, “Xuwei de zuopin,” 161.
31
Ibid., 158.
142 chapter four
thing just as it stands, no matter how vivid and honest his description
may be, he can never entirely capture the true nature of that thing.
Instead, he reveals a merely superficial level of truth. Such a concrete
approach to writing must necessarily suffocate the talents of a writer,
rendering our world full of merely concrete things such as houses,
streets, and rivers—without revealing the essence of the world.
When Yu Hua concluded that such limited forms of writing could
deal merely in superficial truth, he started to look for a new manner
of expression. Instead of faithfully describing the pattern of a thing, he
employed what he called a “contrived” (xuwei de) manner of expres-
sion similar to Proust’s “depiction of errors.”32 The reason that Yu
Hua specifically chose the term “contrived” is that in comparison with
people’s everyday experience and common sense, his manner of
expression deviates from the order and logic of the material world,
allowing him more freedom in approaching what he sees as the inner
essence of the world.
Yu Hua identifies “On the Road at Eighteen” as one example of this
manner of expression.33 He chooses the Bildungsroman genre to project
his vision of the predicament of the self amidst a chaotic reality and to
reveal the truth as he sees it in the world. The Bildungsroman structure
with parodistic elements, the intervention of violence, and the series
of reversals manifest in “On the Road at Eighteen” soon become pre-
occupying motifs in the author’s many other stories. For example,
“Blood and Plum Blossoms” is about a vendetta-driven journey of a
young man named Ruan Haikuo. This story is in part a parody of both
the martial arts genre and the Bildungsroman genre. In her discus-
sion of the image of the lonely traveler in Yu Hua’s “Blood and Plum
Blossoms,” Rong Cai argues that this story can be read as a parodistic
Bildungsroman because the author denies the young hero Ruan Haikuo
any moral maturation while depriving the reader of the satisfaction
of witnessing the protagonist avenge a wrong. Ruan’s journey is thus
“wasted effort.”34 Another typical coming-of-age story among Yu
Hua’s early works is “The April Third Incident,” of which I will give a
detailed analysis in the following paragraphs.
32
Ibid., 158–172.
33
Ibid., 158.
34
Cai, “The Lonely Traveler in Yu Hua’s Fiction,” 180.
In many articles, Yu Hua has expressed his appreciation of Lu Xun’s

writing, especially Lu Xun’s treatment of detail. To be sure, at the early
stages of his writing career, Yu Hua was chiefly influenced by foreign
writers such as Kawabata and Kafka. However, with the passage of
time, Yu Hua found himself attracted to a greater range of writing
styles, thereby permitting more and more writers to enter his field
of vision. Yu Hua has regretted that a true understanding of Lu Xun
came so late in his career. Though he read Lu Xun’s short stories at an
early age, he did not recognize Lu Xun’s literary value until he became
a mature writer. In the mid-1990s, he reread Lu Xun and was deeply
attracted by the concise narrative style and profound meaning of Lu
Xun’s short stories. He concluded:
I think it is too bad I did not read Lu Xun earlier . . . . However, he will also
have an effect on my future life, reading and writing. I feel he will support
me emotionally and ideologically at every moment.35
Some critics have compared Yu Hua’s early stories with Lu Xun’s,
pointing out that Yu Hua is one of the best successors of Lu Xun in
the critique of the national character and the portrayal of personal
enlightenment. These qualities are illustrated in such stories as “The
Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” and “One Kind of Reality.”36 Yu Hua recalls
being “flabbergasted” by Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren
riji).37 In the same year that published “On the Road at Eighteen,” Yu
Hua wrote “The April Third Incident,” in which the fusion of dream,
illusion, and reality is reminiscent of Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.”
The story reveals the unexpected discovery and exploration of the
absurdity of reality by an adolescent who is suddenly brought face-to-
face with the adult world.
Like “A Madman’s Diary,” “The April Third Incident” focuses
on the demented psychological state of a young man who has just
celebrated his eighteenth birthday. He is haunted by the illusion that
people around him, including his parents, neighbors, former class-
mates, and even strangers, have all joined a conspiracy to kill him
on April 3rd. The time span of the story is only two or three days.
35
Yu Hua, “Wo zhiyao xiezuo, jiushi huijia,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 254.
36
Ye Liwen, “Dianfu lishi lixing: Yu Hua xiaoshuo de qimeng xushu” [Subversion
of the history and rationality: the enlightenment narrative in Yu Hua’s stories],
Xiaoshuo pinglun, 2004, no. 4:40–45; Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,”
415–416.
37
Yu, “Wo zhiyao xiezuo, jiushi huijia,” 254.
144 chapter four
Much of the action, however, occurs in the protagonist’s dreams and

imagination. The story, written in 1986 when Yu Hua was still fond of
experimental writing, is not easy to read; in fact, it seems that Yu Hua
has deliberately made the narrative line difficult to follow by breaking
the chronological sequence apart and then rearranging the episodes.
The story requires more than one reading to understand the plot and
its implications, as well as to distinguish scenes of fantasy from those
of matter-of-fact occurrences. Some paragraphs starting or ending with
ellipses can be read as the protagonist’s fantasies about the supposed
dangers and threats he faces. The story contains twenty-two sections
and uses numbers as subtitles. There are thematic links among even-
numbered sections and among odd-numbered sections; for example,
the reader’s understanding of the plot can be enhanced by reading sec-
tions eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen consecutively
and then turning to sections eleven, thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen.
The actual chronological sequence of sections three, four, and five is
in fact three, five, and four. The author’s distortion of chronological
sequences helps to reinforce the protagonist’s confusion between fantasy,
dream and reality.
The Chinese critic Ye Liwen has read this story as Yu Hua’s extension
of Lu Xun’s madman, who constantly senses the real or imagined
hostility of the outside world toward him. The only characters the
madman can read in Chinese history books are the two representing
“cannibalism” (chi ren).38 Lu Xun’s portrait of the madman is “afflicted
with an increasingly sharpened perception of reality.”39 “Thus it is pre-
cisely the madman’s growing insanity that provides the basis for an
unusual process of cognition which leads to his final realization of the
true nature of his society and culture.”40
What does Yu Hua want to pass on to his readers in portraying an
afflicted young man? Leo Ou-fan Lee points out that the “recurring
image of the moon gives rise symbolically to a double meaning of both
lunacy (in its Western connotation) and enlightenment (in its Chi-
nese etymological implication)” in “A Madman’s Diary.”41 Similarly,
the hallucination suffered by Yu Hua’s young protagonist also helps
38
Ye, “Dianfu lishi lixing: Yu Hua xiaoshuo de qimeng xushu,” 40–45.
39
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voice from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 55.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
him gain a fuller and renewed sense of reality. Lu Xun’s and Yu Hua’s
treatment of insanity as an instrument for enlightenment finds parallel
in Thomas Mann’s employment of sickness in The Magic Mountain.
As the critic Joseph P. Lawrence points out, The Magic Mountain is
a book about “sickness” in which Mann sees that “sickness humbles
the spirit, opening up access to forces more vital than those it itself
commands.”42 Mann uses sickness to distance the protagonist Hans
Castorp from his family and secular life in the “flatlands,” thereby
disentangling Castorp from his “ ‘exterior ties’ in order to clear the way
for [his] searching interior inquiries to come.”43 In the same vein, for
both Lu Xun and Yu Hua, madness grows out of a hyperactive psyche,
alienates the protagonist from the outside world, and yet leads him
toward a more profound sensibility and consciousness.
Lu Xun’s madman lives in a transitional era in Chinese history, is
trained as a traditional Chinese literatus, and sees the dark side of
traditional Chinese values and culture. The young protagonist in “The
April Third Incident” grows up in a contemporary authoritarian society
and does not share the Republican-era madman’s vision of Chinese
history. His hypersensitivity to hostility from the outside world is more
a reflection of the turbulent psychological experience of adolescence. It
seems, however, that Yu Hua wants to emphasize that the age of eighteen
can be a watershed in a young man’s life. The protagonist starts to
distance himself from his childhood; he sees the outside world differ-
ently; he relies heavily on his own intuition, feeling and judgment; he
flees from his home; and he sets out on a strange journey.
Yu Hua’s choice of “The April Third Incident” as a title is not ran-
dom; that date is the author’s birthday, suggesting that the author is
projecting personal feelings into this story. The story starts on the
morning of the protagonist’s eighteenth birthday. The protagonist is
the only character in the story who is not given a name, suggesting
that Yu Hua intended to emphasize the typical psychological turbu-
lence experienced by a boy growing up. In the story, his parents have
forgotten his birthday, and there is no celebration for him at all. The
only feeling he has is a lack of support.
42
Joseph P. Lawrence, “Transfiguration in Silence: Hans Castorp’s Uncanny Awaken-
ing,” in A Companion to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” ed. Stephen Dowden
(Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999), 4.
43
Edward Engelberg, “Ambiguous Solitude: Hans Castorp’s Sturm und Drang nach
Osten,” in A Companion to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” 102.
146 chapter four
The age of eighteen is a turning point in the protagonist’s life. He

has a premonition that things will be different after this day. Twice in
the story, the image of a harmonica is associated with the age of eigh-
teen. At the beginning, the narrator “walks into the station of the age of
eighteen, and this station is permeated with the sound of a harmonica.”44
At the end of the story, the young man is on the freight train recall-
ing a neighbor who played a harmonica at his window every day but
died of hepatitis at the age of eighteen—“hence, the sound of the har-
monica also dies.”45 The harmonica symbolizes the joy and innocence
of childhood. When the boy next door dies on his eighteenth birthday,
the beautiful sound of the harmonica dies, as does the happiness and
innocence of childhood and the beauty of the outside world.
The protagonist imagines that a big conspiracy against him is set
to go into action on April third. His parents, neighbors, friends, class-
mates, and various strangers are all collaborators in this imagined con-
spiracy. Recalling “A Madman’s Diary,” whose cognition begins with
“sensory perception—the snarling glances from a dog and a neighbor,
gossip and comments from the people on the streets”—the protagonist of
Yu Hua’s story eavesdrops on his parents’ conversation on the bal-
cony and their exchanges with neighbors.46 He catches fragments of
conversations: “Are you almost ready?” and “April the third.” He sees
the suspicious grins of his former classmates and hears their chitchat.47
He captures a vague intimation of impending disaster from the girl
Snow White, on whom he has a crush. He notices that some strang-
ers on the street appear to be spying on him, and believes that a truck
driver attempted to knock him down. To his big surprise, he discovers
that “even the children are properly trained” to spy on him, aim at him
with a toy gun, and lie to him.48 This image of threatening children is
similar to that in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.” Also noteworthy in
Yu Hua’s story is the image of father as overseer and persecutor. In the
frame of Bildungsroman, this is a deformation of the absence of father-
hood. Surrounded by what seems to him to be so much persecution,
44
Yu Hua, “Siyue sanri shijian” [The April third incident], in Wo danxiao ru shu [Timid
as a mouse, and other stories] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 113.
45
Ibid, 165.
46
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voice from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun, 55.
47
Yu Hua, “Siyue sanri shijian” [The April third incident], in Wo danxiao ru shu
[Timid as a mouse, and other stories] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 124.
48
Ibid., 142.
the young protagonist finally decides to flee from home. He climbs on

a coal freight train the night before the April third.
The combination of dream, imagination, and reality makes readers
uncertain or even suspicious about the certainty of the coming con-
spiracy against the protagonist. The more readers read of the story, the
more they suspect that the conspiracy is just the young protagonist’s
conjecture or hallucination. Regardless of whether the reader believes
in the conspiracy or not, it is the truthfulness of a subjective state pro-
jected in the young protagonist’s mind that matters. In the eyes of this
young man, the world is full of hidden crises, uncertainty, conspiracy,
untrustworthiness, and absurdity. It is the same world in which he
used to live, but since his eighteenth birthday, he judges this world
from his own perspective. His fantasy is, in fact, a self-conception and
a sober recognition of reality in disguise. Yiheng Zhao has observed
that “reality in Yu Hua’s works appears so flighty that it is more insub-
stantial than fantasy, and the reality in fantasy is more verisimilar than
the actual reality . . . the unreal results from an interpretive effort of
meanings and is frustratingly subjective.”49 The subjective interiority—
one significant aspect of Bildungsroman genre—is revealed during this
process of recognizing reality and developing a concept of the self.
More importantly, the young hero realizes the relationship between
him and the world is unsettling and ruptured. At the end of the story,
the young hero has to assert himself by jumping on a coal freight train
and embarking upon a new journey. Here again, as in “On the Road at
Eighteen,” there is an uneven relationship between the development of
individuality and gradual socialization within society. The more indi-
vidual subjectivity and autonomy he develops, the more alienated he
becomes from society. The social integration that occurs in conven-
tional Bildungsroman is never achieved. Jumping on the freight train is
more a sign of escaping from society than of entering it. The mobility
the train brings is a means of escaping society and reality. This ending
turns the story into a parodistic Bildungsroman.
In both “On the Road at Eighteen” and “The April Third Incident,”
violence is a motif to interrupt the youthful journey, and chaos is one
of the signatures of the outside world. Yu Hua’s friends and readers
have sometimes asked him, “Why do you write so much about death
and violence?” Yu Hua answered this question with another question,
49
Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 416.
148 chapter four
“Why is there so much violence and death in life?”50 In the years 1986
and 1987, Yu Hua also wrote “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” “Mis-
takes by the Riverside,” and “One Kind of Reality” (Xianshi yizhong).
The common subject matter of these stories is cruelty and violence.
Yu Hua’s skepticism about common sense directly resulted in his
extreme ideas about chaos and violence. Since he no longer trusted
daily life experiences, common sense and language conventions—as
stated in “Contrived Works”—he started to pay attention to violence
and catastrophe, through which he discloses a multi–dimensional and
contradictory reality. As Xiaobing Tang summarizes, “thus violence
and catastrophe have their thematic value because they expose a cha-
otic reality that is the suppressed truth of our seemingly well-ordered
existence.”51 Yu Hua admitted that in the 1980s, he was an angry and
grim writer, depicting this negative side of reality. 52
The above-mentioned three short stories all reveal this alterative
view of the world—a world of violence, blood, and death—phenomena
that Yu Hua drew upon to express his dark meditations on human
existence and human relationships. “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,”
for example, describes a history teacher’s self-mutilation, an action
intended to remind people of the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, along with other phases of the violent past. “Mistakes by the Riv-
erside” is a parody of the detective story in which the causal chain of
motifs carefully preserved in a conventional detective story turns out
to be totally irrelevant to the murder. Insanity is the only explanation
for a series of murders on the banks of a river. Therefore, “innocence
and guilt are confused in the process of fantasy-reality mutation.”53
“One Kind of Reality,” for its part, is a subversion of the Chinese myth
of family amity through the cruel killings of two brothers by way of
a feud within a large family.54 During the period in which he wrote
these stories, Yu Hua thought violence stemmed from an individual’s
50
Yu Hua, “Preface to the Italian Version of One kind of reality,” in Wo nengfou
xiangxin ziji, 151–53.
51
Fiction,” 18.
52
Yu Hua, “Huozhe zhongwen ban zixu” [Author’s preface to the Chinese version
of To Live], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji?, 144.
53
54
For more analyses of Yu Hua’s “One Kind of Reality,” see Yiheng Zhao, “Yu
Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 415–420; Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “One Kind of
Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 18
(1996): 129–145.
innermost desires, and that violence was full of passion. In the face
of violence and chaos, civilization had degenerated into a slogan, and
order into an ornament. This obsession with violence and chaos in Yu
Hua’s early writing not only reflects the author’s intellectual concern
of revealing a multidimensional and contradictory reality, but is also
related to the author’s real-life coming-of-age experience. The vision
of life reflected in a writer’s works is often closely connected with his
or her personal life. Dickens’ childhood, for instance, throws light on
certain recurring characters in his novels, particularly orphans and
rejected children. Understanding Kafka’s and Zhang Ailing’s problems
with their fathers likewise helps readers better interpret “The Meta-
morphosis” and “The Golden Cangue.” In order for readers to obtain
a better understanding of Yu Hua’s obsession with violence and death
in his stories, therefore, it would be helpful to review his early life.
Yu Hua was born on 3 April 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province,
the second son in a doctor’s family. When he was still a toddler, the
family moved to Haiyan in pursuit of his father’s dream of becoming a
surgeon. As Yu Hua himself said in an interview, “[his] childhood was
spent roaming in the hospital.”55 He remained calm when facing death
and blood. Young Yu Hua often sat beside the door of the operating
room to wait for his father. Every time his father came out, his white
gown, hat, and gloves were stained with blood. Sometimes a nurse
followed his father out of the operating room carrying a bucketful of
blood and pieces of flesh.
Later, the family moved into the hospital compound. The window of
Yu Hua’s bedroom was directly opposite the mortuary. Masked by sev-
eral trees and seemingly without a door, the mortuary looked lonely,
even mysterious; Yu Hua would often stare at it. At noon one summer
day, young Yu Hua entered this room, finding nothing but a concrete
slab inside. He stood beside the slab and touched it cautiously. “It felt
incomparably cool and refreshing. On that scorching afternoon, for me
it was not death, but life.”56 Afterwards, when the summer days were
at their most sweltering, Yu Hua would often come into this room,
lie down on the cool concrete slab, and take a nap. He was afraid of
neither death nor blood. Yu Hua later admitted that those hidden and
55
Helen Finken, “Interview with Yu Hua, Author of To Live (Huozhe),” Education
about Asia 8 no. 3 (Winter 2003), 20.
56
150 chapter four
fragmentary impressions of his life as a small boy certainly played a

major role in determining his future literary direction. For example,
the small mortuary and the concrete slab appear three times in Yu
Hua’s novel To Live.57 The protagonist Fugui experiences the death of
his son, daughter, and son-in-law in the same hospital, and their bodies
are each laid out in turn on the same concrete slab. In Chronicle of a
Blood Merchant, the hospital is also an important setting, where the
protagonist Xu Sanguan goes to sell his blood twelve times.58 More
importantly, death, blood and violence became convenient motifs in
his early stories aiming at “explor[ing] the multitude of possibilities
that the literary voice could offer.”59
In spite of his efforts to constantly explore multiple aspects of reality,
Yu Hua has recognized that he can never fully understand the nature
of the world in its entirety. His understanding at different periods
of his life was always of a limited portion of that world. However,
this kind of understanding was actually a simultaneous recognition
of the world’s structure as a whole. From “On the Road at Eighteen”
to “One Kind of Reality,” the narrative structures of his earlier stories
imitated the structures of reality, with the plots and paragraphs of the
stories progressing chronologically. By the time he wrote “A World
like Mist,” however, he had abandoned such imitation. He adopted a
structural mode of juxtaposition and transposition so as to present the
diversity of the world in all its complexity. At this time, he felt a deep
concern about the uncertainty of fate. He reconsidered the various
kinds of relationships in this world: for example, between one person
and another, between people and reality, between houses and streets,
and between trees and rivers. All of these things appear to have their
own destinies endowed by the world, and within them are hidden the
inherent laws of the universe.60
Yu Hua constructed “World like Mist” on the basis of this recogni-
tion. In this story, the connections between one person and another,
people and things, one things and another, one plot and another, and
one detail and another—all seem blurred by the “mutation between real-
57
Yu Hua, To Live, trans. Michael Berry (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).
58
Yu Hua, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, trans. Andrew F. Jones (New York:
Pantheon Books, 2003).
59
Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua” (interviewed August 30, 2003, University of
Iowa International Writing Program).
60
ity and imagination.”61 Yu Hua felt this way of writing fully expresses
the strength of fate—the inherent law of the workings of the world.
Yu Hua also had a specific understanding about time. The writing of
“This Story Is for Willow” (Xian’gei shaonü Yangliu) was an implemen-
tation of Yu Hua’s conception of time, as explained in his statement:
“When I utilized time to construct the story “This Story Is for Willow,”
I felt excited about rushing into a new world. After I tried to employ
a split, overlapping, and displacement of chronological time, the hap-
piness that I gained exceeded my expectations.”62 Yu Hua insisted that
time is the framework of the events that occur in the past, whereby
chronological sequences can be broken during the progression of a
narrative.63 When the facts of the past are rearranged in a different
chronological order, different meanings occur. Obviously, this kind
of arrangement or rearrangement is achieved in memory, an arrange-
ment that Yu Hua has called the “logic of memory” (jiyi de luoji).
Memory can reconstruct the past world in any sequence of events.
In Yu Hua’s view, after each reconstruction of the past through memory,
a new meaning can be bestowed upon the past world.64 Later, this rec-
ognition of the relation between time and memory would be further
embodied in the narrative structure of Cries in the Drizzle.
In his preface to the Italian translation of Cries in the Drizzle, Yu
Hua describes it as a book of memories:
My experience is that writing can constantly evoke memory, and I
believe these memories belong not merely to myself. They are possibly
an image of one era, or a mark left by the world on the inner mind of
one person . . . Memory cannot restore the past. It only reminds us once
in a while of what we had before!65
In particular, Cries in the Drizzle reminds us of what we once had in
our childhood. The novel’s structure is based on Yu Hua’s understand-
ing of time in memory. Memory can reconstruct the past world at any
time. With each new reconstruction, new meaning is bestowed on the
past world. Within the narrative of this novel, time is transformed
into fragments of memories. Some critics view this earlier novel as
61
62
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
65
Yu Hua, “Wo yongyou liangge rensheng” [I have two lives], in Wo nengfou xiangxin
ziji, 148.
152 chapter four
the conclusion and summit of Yu Hua’s experimental writing, with

one going so far as to characterize it as Yu Hua’s “first and last avant-
garde novel.”66
However, I consider Cries in the Drizzle not an avant-garde novel,
but rather a transitional work that is situated in between Yu Hua’s
earlier experimental writing and his later critical realist writing. In
many aspects, this novel retains the narrative techniques evident in Yu
Hua’s earlier avant-garde stories, such as the illusory and allegorical
narration of dreams, hallucinations, metaphors, symbols, and absurdi-
ties accompanied by violence. Meanwhile, it contains such narrative
techniques as “mimetic or figural dialogues,” “the character’s reported
speech,” and melodramatic “rawness and exaggeration”67 that later
developed further to help achieve Yu Hua’s plain realism in To Live,
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and Brothers.
Yu Hua explains his change of writing style from avant-gardism to
critical realism as the result of his change of attitude toward his char-
acters. He admits that when he wrote in the 1980s, he still believed
that a writer was above his fictional characters, that “the writer is a
god and can create everything,” while “characters were more abstract,
like signs.”68 Yet later in the 1990s when writing To Live and Chronicle
of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua claimed that he “started to hear the
voice of his characters,” and discovered that “characters could lead
themselves,” and “the story would lead itself.”69 This statement reveals
Yu Hua’s strategic change in guiding the reader’s understanding of
the story: instead of using fictional characters as mechanized props
in the plot, the writer would follow along with the natural flow of the
plot—the characters could lead themselves and speak for themselves.
In other words, Yu Hua began to dissolve into his writing, and in a
sense to become the characters in his works.
Placing Yu Hua’s change of narrative style in sociopolitical context,
this is his natural response to changing social realities. As Bakhtin
has pointed out, the choice of a specific genre or narrative style is
66
Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 113;
also see Wu Yiqin, “Gaobie xuwei de xingshi” [Farewell to hypocritical form], Wenyi
zhengming, 2000, no. 1:71.
67
Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 124.
68
Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua” (interviewed August 30, 2003, University of
Iowa International Writing Program).
69
Ibid.
the author’s response to some aspect of reality. Through the genre

or narrative style, the author conceptualizes or visualizes his experi-
ence and reflects his discursive concern or view of a specific aspect of
reality. Both the early avant-gardism and later critical realism are Yu
Hua’s conscious choices. His experimental writing from 1986 to 1989
is a response to China’s transformation from a “revolutionary society
to a post-socialist state, bore the imprint of ‘global’ (Western) cul-
tural fashions and trends from high modernism to postmodernism.”70
Yu Hua and his contemporaries such as Su Tong, Mo Yan, Can Xue,
and Ge Fei were at that time searching for alternative modes of writ-
ing to challenge established literary conventions, mainly the Mao Era’s
formulaic ideological writing and the early post-Mao Thaw Era’s Scar
Literature.71 Yu Hua himself makes his motivation very clear in the
following statement:
When I started to write, China had just gone through the Cultural
Revolution. Literature was virtually nonexistent. Novels were all written
in the same kind of narrative style. It was a deplorable situation. The evo-
lution of different styles of narrative is what allows literature to survive.
I believe that it is with my effort and the effort of a few of my contempo-
raries that Chinese literature now enjoys such diversity and abundance
in narrative style.72
Their innovations have been mainly at the level of language and form.
They have avoided the sensitive and sensational political topics that
were characteristic of Thaw Era Scar Literature. Their aesthetic experi-
ments have been more accessible to literary critics than to ordinary
readers. The 1989 June Fourth is a crucial sociopolitical reason for Yu
Hua and his fellow experimental writers to have changed their nar-
rative styles. After the Crackdown, the relatively relaxed political and
cultural atmosphere that had been pervasive during most of the 1980s
was not available any more. With the deepening of the Party-state’s
economic reforms and commercialization of society in the 1990s,
these avant-garde authors’ aesthetic experiments became unrelated
70
Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 103.
71
Some critics argue that emergence of Chinese avant-garde writers and critics was
a “self-conscious and self-reflexive” response to the postmodern critical and theoretical
discourses primarily introduced to Chinese intellectual circle by Fredric Jameson
through his lecture at Beijing University in 1987.
72
154 chapter four
to the general social and political atmosphere, and attracted fewer

and fewer readers. They started to explore alternative writing styles
and techniques in order to adapt to the new social reality and attract
readers. Therefore, these writers’ deviation from avant-gardism and
their search for alternative modes of writing were a conscious effort to
bridge the gap between their aesthetic expression and ever-changing
social realities.
For Yu Hua, his change of narrative style also reflects his increas-
ingly nuanced understanding of society and the world. When he
started to write in the 1980s, his works had originated in the tension
between an imaginative world and reality. He vented this tension by
frequently writing of violence and death, and for a time became an
“angry and grim” writer. In the early 1990s, having accumulated a
broader range of experience in life, Yu Hua gradually altered his view
of the world, and turned his attention to Chinese popular culture and
society. He said:
I formerly approached reality with a hostile attitude. With the passage
of time, however, the anger in my inner heart gradually calmed down.
I started to realize that a real writer is looking for a kind of truth that
involves no moral judgment. The mission of a writer is neither to vent his
grievances, nor to accuse and expose; instead, he should reveal loftiness
to people. The loftiness mentioned here is not a simple goodness, but
a kind of transcendence after extending a spirit of understanding to all
things, treating good and evil without discrimination, and looking out
upon the world with sympathetic eyes.73
“Looking out upon the world with sympathetic eyes” has in fact become
one of the thematic concerns in Yu Hua’s later novels. His honest
concern of life has been explicitly revealed in To Live and Chronicle of
a Blood Merchant. Both novels were written in unadorned narrative
embellished with sensitive irony and humor, deal with ordinary per-
sonages and their fate in the midst of wrenching societal change, and
strongly affirm the strength and perseverance of human dignity and the
will to muddle through and go on living under even great adversity.
Yu Hua’s search for an alternative mode of writing and a sympa-
thetic view of the world begins with Cries in the Drizzle, and he finds
an appropriate genre—Bildungsroman—to tell the story. Though Cries
in the Drizzle retains certain experimental features of avant-gardism
73
Yu Hua, “Huozhe zhongwen ban zixu,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 143–146.
and at the same time manifests some characteristics of critical real-

ism, it distinguishes itself from both narrative styles with its unique
psychological portraits of youth. In this story, Yu Hua attempts to
give a full play of the main character’s psychological complexity. This
psychological complexity is absent in his later novels, To Live, Chronicle
of a Blood Merchant and Brothers, in which Yu Hua conveys psycho-
logical insights mainly by means of characters’ outward actions and
dialogue instead of through internal psychological descriptions.
Yu Hua’s explanation of the title can help readers understand the
story. Cries symbolize human protest against a repressive social system
that is as murky and suffocating as a drizzle of rain.74 Drizzle is also
an apt image of the formative years of Yu Hua’s main character.
The author invites us to consider his novel as a portrait of youth psy-
chology during the Cultural Revolution. However, this is not to say
that his characters are mere symbols. In the intellectual context of Yu
Hua’s narrative, these characters are endowed with a rich literary pres-
ence in their own right.
Cries in the Drizzle is a first-person reminiscence of the young hero
Sun Guanglin’s boyhood in Zhejiang, from age six to eighteen. Those
years, 1966 to 1978, are divided between his five years as an adopted
son of an ill-matched couple in the market town of Littlemarsh, and
his seven years of living with his biological family in the village of
Southgate. This period coincides with the Cultural Revolution, which
serves as a painful backdrop for the novel. Yu Hua gives the reader
a child’s perspective on family, friendship, sex, marriage, fate, death,
and birth—all interspersed with Sun Guanglin’s comments and philo-
sophical reflections as adult. The story also describes the solitude and
helplessness of Sun Guanglin’s young friends: Su Yu, Guoqing, and
Lulu. The experiences of these rural teenagers lend themselves to rich
artistic portrayals of abandonment, intense loneliness, inescapable fear,
feelings of alienation from family members, yearnings for friendship,
and the psychological trauma that accompanies the disappearance of
hope and fantasy.
Although the protagonist’s life experience reflects that of the author,
Yu Hua does not say that this work contains more autobiographical
74
In response to questions posed by American reporter William Marx about Cries
in the Drizzle, Yu Hua talked about the meaning of the novel’s title. For the full inter-
view see “Growing Up During the Cultural Revolution,” PRI’s The World, http://www
.theworld.org/?q=node/14438 (accessed December 4, 2007).
156 chapter four
elements than do his other full-length novels. He simply comments,

“The autobiographical element in my other two novels To Live and
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant is just as important as in these two books
[—Cries in the Drizzle and Brothers].”75 Cries in the Drizzle can be iden-
tified as a coming-of-age story, but it is much more. It is not confined
to the life of a single generation; instead, it is a family saga spanning
four generations from the 1930s to the late 1970s. This broader tempo-
ral background reflects how an ordinary Chinese family has navigated
a tortuous course through modern Chinese history. This journey is
also reflected in Yu Hua’s subsequent works: To Live, Chronicle of a
Blood Merchant and Brothers.
Personal growth is the main theme in Cries in the Drizzle. The story
involves three generations: grandparents, parents, and youth. The birth
of Guanglin and the death of his grandfather represent the two poles
of the life cycle; the different life stories of the characters comprise
the complete process of growth. It is around the growth of Guanglin’s
generation, however, that the main plot of the story develops, with
special emphasis on three particular qualities of growth—abandonment,
anxiety and fear.
As we saw in Chapter Three, parents in Su Tong’s narratives tend to
be negative role models for their children. In Yu Hua’s narratives, the
situation is even worse. The young characters in Cries in the Drizzle are
all abandoned by their families in various ways, with paternal figures
being particularly undependable. They must turn to their friends for
support and guidance. In contrast with Su Tong’s unitary treatment of
the cold, chaotic, and violent peer community, Yu Hua distinguishes
between friends who are warm and supportive, and peers in general,
who are often callous and malicious. On the one hand, the peer com-
munity as a whole seems to reflect the worst characteristics of adult
society. Biological brothers, such as Guanglin and Guangping, or Su
Yu and Su Hang, are remote or even hostile to each other. Guang-
ping is betrayed by his classmates. He is also tormented by other boys
when Su Yu is arrested. Other schoolchildren inform on Guoqing, and
Lulu’s schoolmates ridicule him. On the other hand, the small peer
community of Guanglin and his friends plays the role of a family; they
are connected emotionally and provide genuine support to each other.
This supportive circle of friends, to whom I will refer to as the “peer
75
Ibid.
community,” is in sharp contrast with the relatively perilous adult-

dominated society during the Cultural Revolution.
In Cries in the Drizzle, this parental world disappoints the protago-
nist and his fellow teenagers in three ways: it abandons its children,
it provides negative role models, and it brings about disillusionment
with the more beautiful things in life. By default, the peer community
must now take up the role normally played by the parental world—
providing support, comfort, warmth, understanding, and even guid-
ance. The result of this contrast is that many youth fear growing up
and entering the adult world—eventually, many young people fail to
integrate themselves into the larger society.
Before examining these two contradictory worlds in detail, I would
like to briefly discuss the structure and historical background of the
story. In traditional narrative form, the chapters of a novel are typi-
cally arranged in chronological order. In Cries in the Drizzle, however,
Yu Hua writes four parallel chapters that juxtapose different aspects of
childhood life within the same time period. The first chapter, the main
part of the story, concentrates on the protagonist’s family life, offering
a panorama of his entire childhood. It also serves as an information
reservoir for the whole book by presenting outlines, highlighting key
points, creating suspense, and foreshadowing the scenes in other chap-
ters. Each of the subsequent three chapters could stand alone, but as
a group they also enlarge upon certain episodes in the first chapter.
Because the novel amounts to a series of reminiscences composed of
different narratives about the protagonist and a number of his friends
and acquaintances, the application of this juxtaposed structure rounds
out each story.
Although the novel involves many characters, their relationships are
clear to the reader because Yu Hua narrates each story through the
threads of family structures.76 The key role of the family has been the
most consistent theme in Yu Hua’s works. In different stages of his
writing, family values have been evaluated and represented differently.
Yu Hua’s early avant-garde stories mostly question or even subvert tra-
ditional family values or Confucian ethical codes by means of violence,
cruelty, and the subversion of conventional literary genres.77 However,
76
Wu Yiqin, “Qiesui le de shengming gushi” [The broken life stories], in Xiaoshuo
pinglun, 1994, no. 1:62.
77
Examples of such early avant-garde stories that debunk family values are “One
Kind of Reality,” “The World Is like Mist,” “The April Third Incident,” and “The Noon
when the Northwest Wind is Whistling.”
158 chapter four
in accordance with the subsequent change of his narrative style from

avant-gardism to critical realism, family values start to be presented
differently. For example, in To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant,
Yu Hua highlights the importance of the family as the primary unit
of meaning for every single individual. In Brothers, a story about the
intertwined fate of two brothers during the Cultural Revolution and
Reform era, Yu Hua continues to emphasize the supportive aspects of
the family. Especially in Part I of the novel, Yu Hua depicts an almost
idealized mode of family life during the Cultural Revolution. The two
brothers to whom the title refers, Li Guangtou and Song Gang, come
from two different families, and start to live under the same roof after
Li’s mother, Li Lan, marries Song’s father, Song Fanping. The newly
formed family is full of love, respect, caring, and warmth, and becomes
a haven for family members buffeted by the chaotic outside world.78
In Cries in the Drizzle, the narrative is developed through the
interactions between the families and their children: the protagonist
Guanglin, and his friends Su Yu, Guoqing and Lulu. When one char-
acter’s story is narrated, the stories of his family members are simul-
taneously unveiled. The life and fate of each character are revealed by
that character’s family relationships. The use of family relationships
for the basic structure of the novel endows the work with a profound
atmosphere of culture and humanity. Traditional Confucian values
center on family relationships. Consequently, when Yu Hua attaches
individual characters to the larger family unit, their conflicts take on
deep cultural freight, leading readers to ponder the decay of traditional
Chinese cultural and moral values during an abnormal era.
A Degenerating and Helpless Parental Milieu
In a certain sense, the story of these adolescents is a history of their

abandonment by their families, with paternal figures being particularly
problematical. This abandonment of youth is a revelation of human
alienation, along with the absence or eradication of parental guidance.
Readers are hard pressed to find a single intact and happy family
among the five that Yu Hua presents in this novel. For example, the
protagonist Guanglin is abandoned by both his biological family and
his foster family. At the age of six, he is adopted by the PLA officer
78
Yu Hua, Xiongdi [Brothers] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2005–2006).
Wang Liqiang and his bed-ridden wife, Li Xiuying. The novel opens
with Wang taking Guanglin away from his rural hometown of South-
gate to Wang’s home in Littlemarsh, where he lives for five years.
Life with Wang Liqiang’s family seems to be the only normal time in
Guanglin’s childhood memory.
However, this family is troubled by the tension between the hus-
band’s unflagging sexual desire and the wife’s frailty and poor physical
condition. In her study of the “revolution plus love” stories written
during the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China,
Jianmei Liu concludes that in those stories, “personal sexual love was
not only channeled and sublimated into political goals, it also existed
in harmony with them, demonstrating the real happiness in people’s
life.”79 In sharp contrast, contemporary writers such as Yu Hua usu-
ally portray sexual life during the Cultural Revolution as grotesque
and fatally damaging. Wang Liqiang, a strong, enthusiastic man in
the army, suffers an unpleasant and unsatisfying sex life with his wife,
a pale and chronic invalid lying on her sickbed the entire day. Wang
Liqiang carries on a two-year affair with another young woman until
his privacy is boldly invaded by an aggressive female CCP cadre. In the
end, Wang Liqiang unintentionally kills the cadre’s two sons when he
seeks his revenge on her. Later on, when Wang is surrounded by the
army, he blows himself up with a grenade. On a chilly morning soon
afterwards, his widow Li Xiuying departs from Littlemarsh.
This episode reflects not only the darkness and meanness of the
human heart, but also the abnormal psychology of people suppressed
by the CCP system. Wang Liqiang’s austere family life reflects not only
the asceticism required of army life, but also the sexual repression of
the Mao era. As Yu Hua explains, “this asceticism stems from that era
and echoes with political grimness. Sexual repression is just the physi-
ological response to political repression.”80 Wang Liqiang’s repressed
sexuality thus takes on a political dimension. His tragedy illustrates
Jianmei Liu’s argument that “the erotic fantasies of the oppressed
that may be unleashed by revolution are hidden within every psyche;
this generates a crisis of masculine sexuality that threatens political
morality.”81 Wang Liqiang’s revenge upon the female CCP cadre is a
desperate demonstration that contradicts the CCP-sponsored discourse
79
80
Yu Hua, “Sheshi de cesuo” [Luxurious washroom], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 131.
81
160 chapter four
about how socialist love is supposed to be nurtured by the New Society.

Wang’s suicidal revenge destroys his own family and leaves Guanglin
an orphan.
Guanglin now returns to his hometown, Southgate, to live with his
biological family. He is not welcome there, however. He is denounced
by his father as an “unlucky star” because on his first day back home,
the family home catches fire, seemingly for no apparent reason. Rather
than feeling reunited with his family, Guanglin feels as though he is
beginning another life as an adopted son. The situation in this family
is even worse than that of Wang Liqiang’s home. Guanglin’s father,
Sun Kwangtsai, is an unscrupulous and hot-tempered farmer—a stark
contrast with Fugui and Xu Sanguan, the kindly fathers in Yu Hua’s
later novels, To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Those char-
acters, Richard King observes, “become decent men, loving husbands,
and sensitive fathers, earning redemption and a kind of happiness.”
Sun Kwangtsai, however, never “arrive[s] at a state of grace in spite of
[his] poverty, the callousness of [his] political masters, and the capri-
ciousness of fate.”82 Instead, he remains an utter rogue who treats his
own father and his sons as nothing more than stumbling blocks in
his life; he is ready to kick them out of his home at any moment. He
commits adultery with the widow next door and steals from his own
family in order to shower her with his largesse. After the death of his
wife, he degenerates further by becoming a drunkard who often weeps
at his wife’s tomb in the middle of the night. At last—appropriately,
it seems—he drowns in a manure pit. It seems that one of the focuses
of Yu Hua’s narrative is to turn the positive image of the traditional
father completely upside down by portraying Sun Kwangtsai as entirely
bereft of decency, a sense of morality, and a sense of responsibility. In
his interview with the journalist William Marx, Yu Hua points out that
the brutality and coarseness of this character reflect the psychological
defects imposed by a repressive social system.83
Guanglin’s mother, for her part, is a hardworking, kindhearted
woman who endures all her hardships and humiliation in silence.
There is only one occasion on which she vents her anger at her hus-
band’s adulterous behavior: on her deathbed, she shouts a demand that
82
These quotations are from the book review by Richard King on To Live and
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, MCLC Resource Centre, http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/
reviews/king.htm (accessed March 2004).
83
William Marx and Yu Hua, “Growing Up During the Cultural Revolution.”
he refrain from giving her household effects to the widow. In this story,
Yu Hua presents a polarized array of images of women: some of these
women are insulted and persecuted by men, while other women put
men under their thumbs, often in an unscrupulous manner. Most of
the mothers in this story such as Guanglin’s biological mother, his
foster mother, Su Yu’s mother, and Lulu’s mother, belong to the first
type of women who are betrayed, rejected, or victimized by their hus-
bands or lovers, and who bear their humiliation and misery in silence.
Against this meek maternal image, the shrews or domineering female
types present abhorrent and intimidating characteristics, even though
they show every sign of enjoying a relatively advantaged and happy
life. These women include the lascivious widow; the poet’s fierce-
tempered wife; the aggressive CCP female cadre who regards herself as
a “staunch guardian of the morals of the age” and heartlessly exposes
Wang Liqiang’s love affair;84 and the Tofu Belle who cleans out her
husband’s money pouch immediately after every payday. The brutality
and coarseness found in these shrews are paired with the same qualities
found in Sun Kwangtsai, the butcher, and various other adult men in
the story. In his later works, such as To Live, The Chronicle of A Blood
Merchant, and Brothers, the mother or wife images are relatively posi-
tive and not as polarized as those in Cries in the Drizzle. For example,
in To Live, and Brothers, Yu Hua presents two almost picture-perfect
images of a proverbial “virtuous wife and kind mother” with Jiazhen
and Li Lan. In To Live, Fugui’s wife Jiazhen is portrayed as a hard-
working, enduring, and forgiving woman who always remains loyal to
Fugui through thick and thin. In Brothers, the mother Li Lan and her
second husband Song Fanping provide their two sons with a happy
and loving home life amidst the political upheavals of the Cultural
Revolution. She and her husband serve as a symbol of integrity and
human decency in a troubled time.
Another adult member of Guanglin’s family is his grandfather, a
former stonemason. In Yu Hua’s narrative, Sun Youyuan takes up
the same profession as his father, leading groups of fellow stonema-
sons in bridge construction projects throughout southern China. His
splendid career does not last long, since his predecessors have built so
many sturdy stone bridges throughout the region that there is little
84
Yu Hua, Cries in the Drizzle, trans. Allan H. Barr (New York: Anchor Books,
2007), 292.
162 chapter four
need to build new ones. He belongs to the final generation of tradi-

tional stonemasons, whose occupation began to decline in the 1940s.
Finally, the chaos of war forces him to abandon his profession and
return to his hometown, where he encounters the tragic death of his
parents. Fleeing from this calamity, he marries a distressed young
woman of noble birth who has emerged from a short-lived marriage
with the scion of a gentry family. In the face of a new wife with a
relatively exalted pedigree, Sun Youyuan becomes self-abasing, humble,
and docile in his married life. After the death of his wife, he continues
to dwell on his memories of the past. Unemployed because of a back
injury, he becomes a great burden to his sons, at whose residences he
lives on a rotating basis. His remaining years in life wind up being
a miserable struggle for survival as he endures constant humiliation
from his son Sun Kwangtsai. When Guanglin recalls his grandfather
many years later, he comments: “Given my tender age before I left
home, I could not possibly feel the extent of the humiliation Granddad
suffered.”85 However, Guanglin feels that his grandfather always tried
to make himself invisible to the family, especially to his own sons, who
regarded him with contempt as nothing more than a burden to bear.
The grandfather and Guanglin thus become the two most unwelcome
people in the family. The constant mistreatment that the grandfather
received from his son Sun Kwangtsai not only reveals a violation of the
Confucian moral imperative of filial devotion, but also raises a ques-
tion: how can Confucian ethical codes be practiced during an era of
harsh material circumstances? The political oppression and extremely
meager material circumstances of life during the Cultural Revolution
compel some people such as Sun Kwangtsai to reject traditional ethical
codes as well.
Given these circumstances, Guanglin is alienated from both his
family and the local villagers as a whole. He attempts to rid himself
of his family in the wake of his father’s degradation and his own life
of aimlessness. He spends most of his time at the village pond, which
provides Guanglin with sensations and recollections of warmth. He
recalls, “If there is anything about Southgate that merits some nos-
talgic sensations, it must be the village pond.”86 Appearing repeatedly
85
Ibid., 172.
86
Ibid., 21–22.
throughout the story, this pond bears witness to his lonely childhood.
Recognizing the misery of his situation in the village, he reflects:
During the funeral I kept my distance. Isolation and neglect had practi-
cally nullified my existence, as far as the village was concerned . . . I real-
ized with relief that I had been utterly forgotten. I had been assigned to
a position where I was recognized and at the same time repudiated by
everyone in the village.87
Therefore, Guanglin is completely alienated from his family. The pond,
like the sanatorium of Mann’s Hans Castorp, isolates Guanglin from
the secular outside world and offers him a retreat for introspection
and contemplation. Guanglin’s immediate attempt to distance him-
self from his family can be regarded as a conscious and autonomous
effort to break with exterior ties and pave the way for developing his
interior self.
Guanglin’s friend Su Yu undergoes a similar experience of alien-
ation from his family. Su Yu’s parents are both doctors. Su Yu and his
younger brother Su Hang have always been envied by other children
because they live in a family that seems to be happy and affluent.
However, under this facade are the hostility and resentment that the
parents inflict upon each other, as well as the indifference and neglect
with which they treat their children. Love and warmth have long since
disappeared from the family ever since the father’s one-time affair with
the same seductive widow who sleeps with Sun Kwangtsai during a
two-year stay in Southgate. The mother frequently uses this affair as
a weapon against the father, and even accuses Su Yu of following his
father’s footsteps. Su Yu is ashamed of his family on account of this
affair and his parents’ estrangement.
Doctor Su’s family bears a lot of similarities with that of Yu Hua.
During Yu Hua’s childhood, his parents were seldom home. Some-
times, he and his brother were locked up in the house without parental
supervision for the entire night. The only recourse the two brothers
seemed to have during these times was to rearrange the furniture
and create an arena where they could fight with one other. On each
occasion, Yu Hua would be defeated, and cry out in the hope that
his parents would soon return and punish his brother for bullying
him. However, for the most part his parents did not return until his
voice grew hoarse and he fell asleep. Yu Hua’s mother, in particular,
87
Ibid., 40–41.
164 chapter four
was often assigned to night duty. She would often buy food from the
hospital cafeteria and take it home to her sons as their supper. After
the meal was concluded, she would hurriedly return to work at the
hospital. Meanwhile, Yu Hua’s father spent most of his time in the
operating room, often returning home after Yu Hua and his brother
were asleep and leaving again for work before they woke up. In his
childhood dreams, Yu Hua often heard someone shouting outside his
window: “Doctor Hua! Doctor Hua! Emergency!”88
After 1949, the CCP gradually wormed away much of the tender-
ness and warmth typically felt by individuals towards one another,
even within the family unit. Family life was far lower priority than a
successful career under the Communist Party. Yu Hua reflects his own
family model in Cries in the Drizzle. In the story, Doctor Su and his
wife work in a hospital while their two sons are left uncared at home.
However, Doctor Su’s family is even more apathetic about the well-
being of family members than Yu Hua’s own family had been.
Both Guanglin and Su Yu have a physical family to turn to, even
though they have been emotionally abandoned by their parents. How-
ever, Guanglin’s two friends Guoqing and Lulu have been physically
abandoned by their fathers and eventually become orphans. Guang-
lin has enjoyed his friendship with Guoqing during his stay with the
Wang family in Littlemarsh; Guoqing’s mother has passed away, and
he was abandoned by his father after the latter’s marriage to another
woman. Guoqing thus has become an orphan at the age of nine, and
by the age of thirteen has no recourse but to make a living as a coal
peddler. Yu Hua vividly describes the change in Guoqing’s fate:
One morning when he was nine, Guoqing woke up to find that he held
his destiny in his own hands. Though far from being an adult, and still
under the sway of paternal authority, all of a sudden he was indepen-
dent. Premature freedom made him carry his fate on his shoulder the
way he might carry a heavy suitcase, staggering along a busy street, not
sure which way to go.89
After his father deserts him, Guoqing befriends an old lady who
dwells on memories of her dead relatives. She brings great comfort
to Guoqing when she helps him appear to communicate with his late
mother in the nether world. As this experience awakens memories of
88
89
Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 227.
his mother, Guoqing’s nine-year-old imagination takes him back in

time rather than forward into the future. His conversations are full of
the word “past.” Yu Hua’s intent in conjuring forth this odd friend-
ship is to demonstrate the destructive effects of parental abandonment.
This abandonment immediately brings an end to the relatively carefree
childhood of Guoqing, who is pushed abruptly into premature adult-
hood, if not even old age:
Guoqing, deserted by the living, began to develop close relations with
the old lady downstairs who had been deserted by the dead . . . He spent
more and more time with the lonely old lady. Sometimes I would see
them walking hand in hand down the street, and Guoqing’s features,
normally so animated, seemed a little glum next to her black arm. She
was depleting Guoqing of his energy.90
Guanglin’s other friend, seven-year-old Lulu, has also been physically
deserted by his family and eventually becomes a homeless urchin.
Guanglin comes to know him soon after the death of Su Yu. There-
fore, their friendship echoes Guanglin’s previous friendship with Su
Yu. Lulu is the only son of Feng Yuqing, who had been abandoned
by a young man back when she was a beautiful young girl. Later, she
had eloped with a peddler, but he has exited the scene by the time she
has returned to her hometown with Lulu in tow. In order to make a
living, she has now turned to prostitution. From the very beginning,
this family has rarely known the presence of a father figure, and Lulu
has grown extremely attached to his mother as a result. Unfortunately,
Lulu eventually loses the care and protection of Feng Yuqing after she
is arrested for prostitution and imprisoned. Lulu is subsequently sent
to a shelter.
From the foregoing analysis we see that the parental world in Cries
in the Drizzle offers youth mostly negative role models, along with
the abandonment and dissolution of wholesome values. The most
immediate consequence is loneliness. In fact, the atmosphere of lone-
liness pervades the entire story. Almost everyone in the story lives an
alienated life—not only the children, but also the adults, including the
fathers. For instance, in the adult world, the loneliness of Guanglin’s
grandfather originates from his disillusionment about the career he
pursued during his youth; the subsequent alienation of Guanglin’s
father is caused by his own moral degeneration; and Wang Liqiang’s
90
Ibid., 240.
166 chapter four
isolation stems primarily from the lack of mutuality and harmony in

his sexual relations with his wife.
Guanglin witnesses his father’s betrayal of his mother, his brutality
towards the children, his disregard of filial obligations towards his own
father, and his irresponsibility towards the entire family. Earlier, in his
foster family, Guanglin observes the desperation of the adults caught
in predicaments of their own making, along with the weakness, frus-
tration, and malice of the human heart. Self-destruction seems to be
the only response. Su Yu, for his part, finds his parental world to be
full of the narrowness and coldness of the human heart. For Guoqing,
his father’s selfishness and irresponsibility force him to face the brutal
reality of life much earlier than he ought to. Meanwhile, the miserable
life of Lulu and his mother shows how a vulnerable woman is sub-
jected to indignities by men.
As we saw in Chapter Three, the protagonists Dasheng and his
friends in North Side Story are all expelled from school—in a sense,
they are forced to continue their education on the street. The school
has lost its function—“to propagate doctrines of the ancient sages, to
transmit learning, and to dispel confusion”—and has become a breed-
ing ground for murder and arson. In turn, many teachers have lost
the respect of their students for having failed to provide them with
proper education and guidance. In Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua’s por-
trayal of education is relatively positive, even though schools in this
novel are in no way idealized. It is at school that Guanglin meets his
bosom friends, Su Yu, Lulu, and Guoqing; and it is there that he finds
warmth and emotional and physical support from them, in spite of
the callousness and malice of the other classmates. Everywhere in this
novel, school becomes the haven of these hapless teenagers. In addi-
tion, in contrast with Su Tong’s simplistic treatment of teachers in
North Side Story, Yu Hua presents relatively sophisticated and humane
images of teachers, and reveals that they are also often victims of the
era. He also discloses their desires, weaknesses, and predicaments as
ordinary flesh-and-blood human beings. Yu Hua specifically depicts
two teachers: the unnamed music instructor in Southgate whose rare
finesse has long been Guanglin’s ideal of adulthood, and Littlemarsh’s
Zhang Qinghai, who serves as Guoqing’s guardian for a short period
after Guoqing’s farther deserts him.
In the story, Guanglin sees his music instructor as “the least snob-
bish of teachers, favoring all his pupils with the same smile.” He is
captivated by the teacher’s standard Mandarin accent, sonorous voice,
and cultivated demeanor. In an era when the arts were supposed to be

exclusively at the disposal of the Party’s latest whim, the music instruc-
tor actually has the courage to tell his students that music transcends
verbal communication: “Music begins where language disappears.”91
No matter how much Guanglin admires his music teacher’s elegant
manner, however, the teacher is weak and helpless in the face of the
brutality of the chaotic students in a time when virtue and learning
are trampled underfoot. During one incident in the middle of class,
for example, a student takes off his shoes, hoists them up onto the
windowsill, and insolently props his bare feet up on a desk. When
the music teacher reminds him to behave himself, he responds with
impudent taunts. In the end, he goes so far as to throw the teacher’s
music book out of the window. “Somehow,” Guanglin recounts, “I
felt a sense of loss, having just witnessed how my role model was so
easily humiliated.”92 Later, because of an affair with a female student,
the teacher was put into prison, and was later released to teach in a
remote village school. Witnessing these wrenching changes in the life
of the music teacher, Guanglin gains an insight into the vulnerability
and transience of the finer aspects of life in the adult world. Hav-
ing lost his respect for the music teacher, Guanglin rejects him as an
authority figure, and his hope for a role model in the adult world is
thus shattered. This episode is only one more step in his long journey
of disenchantment.
Zhang Qinghai, another teacher in the novel, is somewhat similar
to the catcher image in Su Tong’s North Side Story, even though at
one point he maliciously forces Guanglin to admit to a crime he has
never committed. Moreover, Zhang sometimes uses threats to control
and discipline his students. Although Zhang Qinghai is a henpecked
husband at home, at school he is an authority figure among his
students and fills the role of their protector when necessary. Upon
learning that Guoqing’s father has abandoned him, Zhang Qinghai
takes Guoqing to see his father, commends Guoqing for his achieve-
ments, and emphasizes that Guoqing is one of the favorite pupils of
every teacher here who has had him in class. After listening the father’s
heartless and sarcastic response, Zhang comes back with a humorous
rejoinder: “Actually, I was thinking of adopting him as my grandson.”93
91
Ibid., 82.
92
Ibid., 84.
93
Ibid., 260.
168 chapter four
Later, having noticed Guoqing squandering his limited living allow-

ance, Zhang Qinghai takes personal responsibility for managing
Guoqing’s money. Zhang Qinghai’s kindness towards Guoqing may be
rooted in his natural compassion; however, given the regressive state
of education during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang’s behavior is rare
and precious.
Guanglin’s Self-sufficient Peer Community
In the world of children, the feeling of loneliness is the impetus for

Guanglin’s longing for tenderness and warmth. This longing is espe-
cially relevant to the historical era that Yu Hua is seeking to portray.
With the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Commu-
nist Party advocated collectivism, gradually substituting this “ism”
for tender and warm relationships between individuals—relationships
that were further destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.94 With tender-
ness and warmth withdrawn from people’s lives, loneliness became
an immediate reality. With the pure heart of a young boy, Guanglin
yearns for these lost values in the midst of the cruelty of reality in
Cries in the Drizzle. Luckily, the small peer community comprised of
Guanglin and his friends does not disappoint him.
It is noteworthy that sibling relations play no role in this supportive
peer community. Guanglin has two brothers, Guangping and Guang-
ming. The three brothers’ lives only overlap for a short period; each
then goes his own separate way. Elder brother Guangping dreams of
living in the city, an illusion that vanishes when he finishes high school
and returns to the countryside to start his mediocre and difficult life
in Southgate. Guanglin and Guangping have had a strained relation-
ship throughout the story. The younger brother Guangming drowns
in the river one beautiful summer noon while attempting to save
another boy’s life. The fragility of fraternal bonds also comes across
clearly in Su Yu’s estrangement from his younger brother Su Hang,
in Lulu’s yearning for an older brother, and in Liu Xiaoqing’s loss
of his older brother. This cold, distant, and sometimes even hostile
94
Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, Mark Selden, and Kay Ann Johnson, Chinese
Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). In this book, the
authors illustrate how the CCP’s dictatorship affected Chinese popular culture and
rural society and how ordinary people resisted these changes.
attitude between brothers is a reflection of Yu Hua’s feelings about

fraternal relationships as he experienced and observed them during
the late Mao era.
In Yu Hua’s autobiographical essays and interviews, he rarely men-
tions his elder brother except in recollection of various childhood
events. Yu Hua recalls that he was a quiet and docile boy when he
was little. In kindergarten, he would sit there alone while his young
friends played nearby. His mother remembered that every afternoon
when she picked him up at the kindergarten, she would find him sit-
ting in exactly the same place where she had left him in the morning.
When Yu Hua was four years old, his then six-year-old brother began
escorting him home from kindergarten. However, his brother would
occasionally forget his duties and wander off elsewhere to play, leav-
ing Yu Hua behind with nobody to look after him. When Yu Hua
grew older, his parents often locked up both brothers upstairs at home
instead of sending them off to kindergarten. The young brothers would
often lean out over the window sill to enjoy the scenery of the coun-
tryside, where farmers were working in the fields. Yu Hua remembers
that the most exciting moment of the day was when these farmers
finished their day’s labor; one villager would stand on the ridge of the
field and shout, “It’s time to knock off.”95 People would gradually walk
over to the edge of the field, while some women would chant “knock
off ” again and again. Against the background of these cries, the two
brothers watched other farmers walking along the ridges between crop
fields with hoes propped on their shoulders. Mothers were shouting
the names of their children, while children were running around with
baskets in their hands. Several children were rushing about so fast that
they occasionally fell down. This scene must have impressed Yu Hua
deeply, because more than two decades later he included the same
images in his novel Cries in the Drizzle, though replacing the image
of the brother with that of a friend. In the novel, the young protago-
nist leans out of the upstairs window with his friends instead of the
brother, gazing at the vast crop fields outdoors.
Yu Hua’s less than positive vision of the fraternal relationship is not
only revealed in Cries in the Drizzle, but is also evident in both his early
experimental stories and later realist works. The most extreme example
is presented in “One Kind of Reality,” a story of “scathing satire on the
95
170 chapter four
Chinese myth of family.”96 In this story, the large multi-generational

family placed in an “emotional void” and “bound together by nothing
but shared meals and indifference—an indifference whose other side
turns out to be eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth aggression” between
two brothers Shangang and Shanfeng, who kill each other without
showing the slightest bit of remorse.97 This antagonistic relationship
between brothers is also presented in Yu Hua’s latest bestseller Brothers,
especially in Part II, which I will discuss later in this chapter.
As the sociologist F. Philip Rice notes, relationships between older
brothers who act as role models and younger siblings who imitate
them can be “vitally important” in the development of an adolescent’s
personality traits and overall behavior. The older siblings often serve
“as surrogate parents, acting as caretakers, teachers, playmates and
confidants.”98 However, in Guanglin’s case, it is among his classmates
and other males, both younger and older, where he finds the support
and guidance he needs. This peer community demonstrates the power
of humanity; at the same time, it highlights the autonomy and subjec-
tivity these teenagers exercise when they are abandoned by the paren-
tal world. These children recall Holden’s fantasy in The Catcher in the
Rye—a vision of children standing in front of a cliff and serving as a
“catcher” for each other—protecting each other from falling into the
corruption of the adult world.
When Guanglin lives with the Wang family in Littlemarsh, his
friendship with Guoqing rekindles his sweetest childhood memories.
As they go to the riverside to wait for waves or climb onto the roof
of Guoqing’s house to look at a distant open field, they learn to share
with each other and provide mutual support. After Guoqing is rejected
by his father, Guanglin and another boy steal food from their homes to
feed Guoqing. In return, Guoqing shares out among friends part of the
pocket money his uncles and aunts have given to him. After Guang-
lin loses his foster parents, it is his friends who generously buy him
a ferry ticket to return to his hometown and see him off at the dock.
The author deliberately keeps adults out of these scenes in order to
demonstrate the self-sufficiency of the peer world. When in difficulty,
the children receive warmth, support, and care from their peers.
96
97
Wedell-Wedellsborg, “One Kind of Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua,” 131–141.
98
After Guanglin returns to his hometown, he encounters the broth-

ers Su Yu and Su Hang. Because they both feel lonely and alienated,
Guanglin and Su Yu establish a deep friendship. Su Yu, a sensitive and
frail soul, is associated with distinction, refinement, and spirituality. A
couple of years older than Guanglin, Su Yu acts as Guanglin’s older
brother and confidant. Together they experience the anxiety of their
sexual awakening and the bitter feeling of being neglected by their
families. However, Su Yu’s untimely death puts an abrupt end to this
memorable friendship.
For a short period after Su Yu’s death, Guanglin befriends a seven-
year-old boy, Lulu, the only son of Feng Yuqing. This friendship paral-
lels his former friendship with Su Yu. However, in this friendship he
plays the role of Su Yu and acts as Lulu’s older brother and protector.
This friendship allows him to better understand the friend he lost in
Su Yu.
Our friendship quickly blossomed. Two years earlier, I had experienced
the warmth of friendship thanks to Su Yu, my senior in years, and now
when I was with little Lulu, I often felt as though I were Su Yu, gazing
at me as I once was.99
Lulu’s loneliness and stubborn expression also remind Guanglin of
his own childhood: “Watching his boyish gait, a warm feeling coursed
through my veins. It was as though I was seeing my own childhood
unrolling before me.”100 In conversation, Lulu looks at Guanglin with
happiness and admiration, and Guanglin feels Lulu’s complete and
unconditional trust. By presenting these two successive friendships,
Yu Hua reveals the continuity of brotherhood in the peer community.
When the older surrogate sibling finishes his mission of guiding a
younger boy, that boy in turn becomes the “caretaker, teacher, playmate
and confidant” of his own younger surrogate sibling.101
Yu Hua takes this self-sufficient peer community a step further: he
lets these children take on some of the duties and responsibilities of
the parental world. The novel is full of instances where the sons take
responsibility for their fathers and mothers. For instance, Guoqing
always keeps a first-aid kit with him. Whenever his father becomes ill,
he asks him about his symptoms and provides the proper medication
99
100
Ibid., 125.
101
172 chapter four
as if he were a doctor. For Guoqing, the first-aid kit establishes a

bond between his father and him, and serves as a token of his sense
of responsibility for his father. Even after Guoqing’s father abandons
him, he still believes that when his father is sick, he will come back
to Guoqing for treatment. However, his innocent belief is finally shat-
tered when he sees his father go to the hospital; he realizes that he
has been completely rejected by his father. With tears running down
his cheeks, he tells his friends, “I saw him go into the hospital. If he
doesn’t come to see me when he’s ill, then he’ll never come at all.”102
It is after this that he initiates his friendship with the old woman who
will seemingly link him with his late mother.
After his mother is arrested for prostitution, seven-year-old Lulu
goes to the Public Security Bureau station and unsuccessfully attempts
to bring his mother back home. Later, after his mother is taken away
by the police and incarcerated in a labor camp, Lulu manages to escape
from the shelter and takes a long-distance bus to look for his mother.
When he finally finds her, he tells her that he plans to live together
with her in the labor camp. After his request is turned down by the
police, he camps right outside the labor camp so that he can watch
his mother working in the fields every day. Lulu’s insistence on stay-
ing with his mother reveals both his emotional attachment to his
mother and his intention of being her protector—the guardian of his
mother’s bedroom.103
Guangping, Guanglin’s older brother, takes on the responsibility of
supporting his family, sacrificing his own ambitions in life. When his
father rejects his wife and children, Guangping looks after not only his
own small family and his mother but also his paralyzed father-in-law.
He works like a machine and runs like a rabbit from the fields to his
home and his father-in-law’s home. In spite of the family’s poverty,
when his mother is seriously ill, he insists on carrying her to the hos-
pital. The mother refuses to go, saying, “I am going to die anyway. The
money’s not worth spending.” When he carries his mother on his back,
however, “a girlish, bashful look began to appear on her face.”104 The
mother is proud of such a demonstration of her son’s filial devotion.
102
103
Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture. Rice describes
how, in families led by a single mother, the son tries to play the role of the guardian
of the mother’s bedroom.
104
This inversion of the traditional son-parent relationship extends

throughout the novel. The children are mature enough to be kind to
their conspicuously vulnerable parents and protect the parents’ feelings.
This human warmth radiating from the children’s world demonstrates
the persistence of goodness and humanity, and stands in sharp con-
trast with the Party’s harsh regimentation and control.
Sexuality
As in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, the sexuality experienced

by Yu Hua’s young characters is closely related to disillusion, violence,
and destruction. By exploring teenage sexual anxiety and teenagers’
disillusionment with their experiments in love, Yu Hua intends to
demonstrate another aspect of his young characters’ subjectivity and
individuality. Before experiencing love, Guanglin experiences profound
disillusionment with regard to female beauty and purity when he wit-
nesses the changes in two young women, Cao Li and Feng Yuqing.
Like most of the boys in his class, Guanglin has a crush on Cao Li, his
classmate in high school and the girl of his sexual fantasies. She is so
pure and holy in Guanglin’s eyes that he blushes nervously every time
he encounters her. To him, she symbolizes innocent romantic love.
The illusion of her purity is shattered irrevocably when he happens
to overhear some girls chatting about how enchanted Cao Li is by the
hairy legs of a boy who is the worst student of the entire class. Yu Hua
describes the unraveling of Guanglin’s infatuation for Cao Li:
I walked all the way to the pond next to the school and stood there for
a long time watching the sunlight and the foliage that floated on the
water’s surface, and my deep disappointment with Cao Li slowly evolved
into self-pity. For the first time in my life a beautiful dream had been
shattered.105
Guanglin is concerned not only about the possible loss of Cao Li’s
innocence to the hairy and masculine classmate, but also about the
loss of his dream of her.
Guanglin’s disillusionment with female beauty and purity is rein-
forced by the changes he notices in the adult woman Feng Yuqing.
Feng Yuqing was once an innocent and beautiful girl, the symbol of
105
Ibid., 101.
174 chapter four
feminine beauty in the eyes of the village boys. Guanglin recalls: “In
those days when I sat beside the pond, Feng Yuqing inspired endless
yearnings when she walked by, exuding youth and buxom beauty.”106
Unfortunately, this innocent country girl is seduced and later aban-
doned by a young man who lives in her neighborhood. Feeling
insulted and desperate, Yuqing runs off with an old peddler. Years
later, when Guanglin meets her and her only son Lulu, he is shocked
by the changes she has suffered:
In that moment I had a clear view of her face, now ravaged by time,
its wrinkles all too apparent. When her glance skimmed over me, it so
lacked animation it was like a cloud of soot floating in my direction.
Then she turned back towards the well, exposing her sagging buttocks
and thickening waistline. At that point I slipped away, saddened not by
Feng Yuqing’s having forgotten me, but by my first glimpse of beauty’s
pitiless decline. The Feng Yuqing who stood combing her hair in the
sunlight outside her home would, after this, always be blanketed with a
layer of dust.107
The disappointment and disillusion over the two young women topple
Guanglin’s belief in the possibility of pure and enduring love in the
world. In spite of this, Guanglin and his friend Su Yu experience the
anxiety of their sexual awakening. Their sexual curiosity and trepida-
tion are disclosed most poignantly in the second chapter of the novel,
when Su Yu’s brother steals a medical book from his father’s library and
shows his classmates a picture of female genitalia. However, Guanglin
misses this chance to see the picture because he has to do sentry duty
at the doorway. His sexual awakening has its origins in even more
secret behavior—nighttime masturbation—through which he obtains
a virtually mystical feeling. His life is divided into two parts—day and
night. At night, he indulges in this mystical experience, whereas during
the day, he feels guilty and impure. He is so tortured by this inner con-
flict that he begins avoiding Su Yu. However, after listening to Guang-
lin’s concerns about masturbation, Su Yu tells Guanglin that this is a
quite normal phase for boys to go through, and shows Guanglin the
picture of female genitalia that he had previously missed. Guanglin is
thereby completely relieved of his feelings of guilt. He remarks, “I will
106
Ibid., 22–23.
107
Ibid., 133.
never forget that morning beside the pond with Su Yu. In the wake of
his acknowledgment, daytime recovered its beauty.”108
In spite of the solace that Su Yu brought to Guanglin, Su Yu himself
struggles with his sexual frustrations, leading him one day to suddenly
follow through on an impulse to embrace a young woman on the
street. As punishment for this misconduct, he is incarcerated for one
year. However, this incident has a positive outcome in that it enables
Su Yu to understand and forgive his father’s short-lived affair with
the widow.
We were bewildered by that smile of his, and it was not until later that I
understood what lay behind it. Despite Su Yu’s seemingly terrible plight,
he himself felt that pressure had been lifted from his shoulders. After-
wards he was to tell me, “I understood how it was my father came to do
what he did.”109
Careful readers may find that Yu Hua subtly presents a hint of homo-
sexual love between Su Yu and Guanglin. In Guanglin’s eyes, Su Yu is
sort of a “crystal boy”: quiet, elegant, innocent, and peaceful. Guanglin
feels jealous about Su Yu’s friendship with Zheng Liang, a very tall
and stout teenage boy. Guanglin becomes even more jealous of Zheng
Liang when Su Yu describes his feeling of embracing the young woman
as similar to his sensation of grabbing Zheng Liang’s arms. However,
Su Yu finally confesses to Guanglin that he actually felt he was grab-
bing Guanglin’s shoulder instead of Zheng Liang’s. After hearing what
Su Yu had to say, Guanglin recalled how “his smile and his bashful
voice warmed me and sustained me that evening when the moonlight
came and went.”110
Time and Death—the End of Adolescence
Coming of age in the context of an adult world full of spiritual blind-

ness and physical corruption, Guanglin, his brothers, and his friends
have an ambiguous attitude towards growing up and making their way
into society. On the one hand, their feelings of loneliness and isolation
make them eager to grow up, wanting to join the company of the adult
world. On the other hand, the largely miserable experiences of their
108
Ibid., 94.
109
Ibid., 111.
110
Ibid., 118.
176 chapter four
parents in that world frighten them and make them lose sight of any
meaningful goals. This ambiguity is aggravated by the lack of a practi-
cal goal in their lives; they have no clear idea about their future career
paths and possible vocations. They are without parental love and guid-
ance; and at school they are vaguely aware that even their teachers lack
firm convictions about a proper set of goals of life. The adult world is
full of a hollow silence on matters of purpose and meaning.
In the setting of the Cultural Revolution, the only approved career
path for rural teenagers is laboring in the farm fields. The overwhelm-
ing likelihood of such a gloomy future makes them fear growing up,
a fear confirmed by the adult life of Guangping, the protagonist’s
older brother. Guangping is a courageous boy who dreams of living
a decent life in the city. However, this dream is shattered when uni-
versity entrance examinations are cancelled throughout the Cultural
Revolution; for over a decade, students were deprived of the right even
to compete for possible admission to a university. Students from the
countryside are forced to return to their villages, with no near-term
prospects for choosing options for their own lives: “By the time Sun
Guangping graduated from high school and returned home to work
the land, his self-confidence had sunk to a new low.”111 Without any
specific long-term goal remaining in his life, he starts climbing into
a widow’s bed at night in a manner resembling his father’s previous
misadventures. In the daytime, he would gaze at old men with wrinkles
on their faces and dust on their bodies who were walking back from
the crop fields. His eyes reveal his complete emptiness and sadness.
“This grim sight had struck a chord in him, making him wonder about
the latter stages of his own life.”112 Giving tacit consent to the status
quo, he embarks upon a boring and destitute life in rural Southgate.
Without a doubt, such will also be the future of his brothers and other
boys in the countryside. It is little wonder that they fear the inevitable
journey to adulthood.
In response to this gloomy future, Yu Hua points to death as a
common terminus of the journey by rural youth. Three young men
die before reaching adulthood: two of Guanglin’s friends and his
younger brother Guangming. The young characters’ tragic fates are
foreshadowed at the outset of the story with the sounds of a woman
111
Ibid., 56.
112
Ibid.
weeping on a rainy night, accompanied by expressions of fear from

the six-year-old boy Guanglin. This fear of the young Guanglin is the
secret fear of young Yu Hua himself. In an autobiographical essay, Yu
Hua recalls that during his childhood in the hospital compound, even
though he felt he could face death and blood with an undaunted spirit,
young Yu Hua harbored a secret fear:
At that time, my only fear was seeing treetops shining in the moonlight
at night. The sharp treetops glistened, extending into the sky. Every time
this scene made me tremble with fear. I did not know the reason, but I
was scared as soon as I saw this.113
Accompanied Yu Hua’s fear are the nighttime mourning wails of the
relatives of the deceased: “The wailing of their relatives resounded
through the endless night and rose a notch, like the sun at dawn.”114 He
would awaken from dreams hearing the echoes of those sad sounds,
which were so enduring and touching that he felt as though they were
not mere wailing, but instead one of the most moving ballads imagin-
able. Meanwhile, he discerned a pattern in which people were more
likely to die in the middle of the night than at other times throughout
the day. Yu Hua said, “I sensed in the wailing a familiarity, a painful
familiarity. For a long time I thought this was the most moving song
in the world.”115 Years later, Yu Hua transplanted his childhood fears
and the women’s wails into his Cries in the Drizzle, and describes how
“from far away there came the sound of a woman’s anguished wails.
When those hoarse wails erupted so suddenly in the still of the night,
the boy that I still was would shiver and quake.”116 Rain, itself a meta-
phor for weeping, forms the backdrop for the wailing. For his part, boy
is fearful about the general lack of response to the woman’s wailing:
Anxiously, I expected to hear another voice, a voice that would respond
to her wails, that could assuage her grief, but it never materialized . . .
Surely there is nothing more chilling than the sound of inconsolable
wailing on such a desolate night.117
113
114
For the quotation and information in this paragraph see Yu, “Preface to Italian
Version of One Kind of Reality,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 152.
115
Finken, “Interview with Yu Hua, Author of To Live (Huozhe),” 20.
116
Ibid., 3.
117
Ibid.
178 chapter four
The boy later hears a sound that responds to the woman’s wails—the
rustling of the clothes of a man dressed in black who is walking through
the fields. In the end, however, the man is found dead in a dilapidated
temple, completing the set of images: crying, drizzle, and death.
Yu Hua’s philosophical understanding of death and time deeply
infuses this story. The novel explores the circular nature of time, sub-
jective versus objective time, and the polar relation between time and
eternity in the embodiment of death, thus rendering time an active
force. Life is limited by the framework of time. However, death tran-
scends time. Practically every time Yu Hua describes death, he applies
the phrase yi lao yong yi, which means “a solution holding good for
all time.” In recalling the death of his younger brother Guangming,
Guanglin feels that his brother freed himself from the constraints of
time. The death of his brother is a permanent departure:
When my vision traverses the long passage of memory and sees Sun
Guangming once more, what he was leaving then was not the house:
what he exited so carelessly was time itself. As soon as he lost his con-
nection with time, he became fixed, permanent, whereas we continue to
be carried forward by its momentum. What Sun Guangming sees is time
bearing away the people and the scenery around him. And what I see is
another kind of truth: after the living bury the dead, the latter forever lie
stationary, while the former continue their restless motion. In the still-
ness of the dead, we who still roam can see a message sent by time.118
If death means only that a person is derailed from the path of time,
then death should never be considered an abhorrent conclusion.
Yu Hua describes Guanglin’s feeling when he first sees the dead man
in the dilapidated temple: “It was the first time I had seen a dead man,
and it looked to me as though he were sleeping. That must have been
the extent of my reaction then: that dying was like falling asleep.”119 To
die, therefore, is to enter an eternal quietude.
Aside from the accidental death of Guanglin’s younger brother,
two of Guanglin’s friends die of sickness at the threshold of turning
eighteen: Su Yu and Liu Xiaoqing’s older brother, who always wears
a peaked cap and can play beautiful melodies on a long flute. The
image of this youth first appears in Yu Hua’s short story, “The April
118
Ibid., 34.
119
Ibid., 5.
Third Incident,” in which a young man plays the harmonica and dies
of hepatitis.
Yu Hua’s melancholic preoccupation with death is best manifested
in his description of the death of Su Yu, a sensitive and thoughtful
soul and one of the most memorable characters in the story. When Su
Yu falls into a coma as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage, neither his
parents nor his brother realize that he is seriously ill. They all assume
that he is just sleeping in, and even complain that he is failing to do his
usual chore of getting the hot water ready for the family. His brother
seems to be his last hope for help, but his brother also fails him. “Su Yu
sent out to his brother a mental cry for help, but all that happened was
that he closed the door behind him.”120 Yu Hua uses three pages to
recount Su Yu’s silent begging for help from his mother, father, and
younger brother. He describes Su Yu sinking into a deep coma, but
each time Su Yu hears the voice of one of his family members, it seems
as though a beam of light is preventing him from subsiding into dark-
ness. However, his family’s neglect of these silent pleas finally pushes
him into darkness:
Su Yu’s body finally found itself in an unstoppable fall that accelerated
and turned into a tailspin. A stifling sensation held him in its grip for
what seemed like an eternity, and then all of a sudden he attained the
tranquility of utter nothingness. It was as though a refreshing breeze was
blowing him gently into tiny pieces, as though he was melting into count-
less drops of water that disappeared crisply, sweetly, into thin air.121
The mysterious attraction that has bonded Su Yu with the protagonist
Guanglin since middle school is now associated in Guanglin’s mind
with his reverence for death. Su Yu’s youth is forever sealed in the
form of death—a permanent and silent slumber. Su Yu’s death, as well
as the other premature deaths that Guanglin has witnessed, trigger the
latter’s awareness of not only the power of death, but also of human
weakness and fragility. In the course of his coming-of-age, Guanglin
comes to terms with death and develops an understanding of death as
an alternative solution—and sometimes the most satisfying outcome—
for some of life’s struggles.
120
Ibid., 120.
121
Ibid., 121.
180 chapter four
Among his friends, only Guanglin will go on, strengthened and

resolute. His growing familiarity with death, his continuing emotional
attachment to his school friends, and his dissatisfaction with ordinary
life may well complete his self-transformation from a lonely and aimless
rural boy to a social critic and artist who could write novels like To
Live, Cries in the Drizzle, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers.
After Cries in the Drizzle
After Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua continued to explore the inner world
of young men coming of age amidst an emotional background of fear
and restlessness.122 As is the case with “On the Road at Eighteen” and
“The April Third Incident,” the short stories “Timid as a Mouse” and
“I Have No Name of My Own,” can be read as miniature Bildungsroman
with tragic and parodistic leanings. None of the protagonists in these
stories is “normal”; each is either unreasonably timorous or else exists
in a state of restless subjection to his own illusions. By narrating the
journeys of these disadvantaged teenagers, Yu Hua presents an alter-
native to the usual Bildung of Chinese youth.
In “Timid as a Mouse,” Yu Hua depicts a boy who is so timid as
to fear even a goose. At school, the protagonist Yang Gao is derided
by both his teacher and his classmates. Even girls bully him. He never
dares to fight them or swear at them. When he leaves school to work
in a factory, he willingly and happily does the most humble work—
cleaning the workshop. His fellow workers enjoy the clean environ-
ment he creates, but they also laugh at his stupidity. He never has a
chance to enjoy the beneficial aspects of working in the factory because
he does not fight for his share of them.
Without making moral or value judgments, Yu Hua sets up a con-
trast between Yang Gao and his friend Lü Qianjin, who has attended
the same school as Yang Gao; both young men later work together at
the same factory. Lü Qianjin is a ruffian, but it seems he is much better
off than Yang Gao. It is no accident that in Chinese, Yang Gao’s name
is homonymic of lamb. The lamb is a symbol of sacrifice, innocence,
kindness, and frailty. In this story, the lamb is neglected, insulted and
hurt. People take advantage of Yang Gao’s innocence, kindness, hon-
122
Yu Hua, “Zixu” [Author’s preface], in Zhanli [Tremble] (Beijing: Xinshijie chu-
banshe, 1999), 2.
esty, and weakness. In the end, when he tries to defend his dignity by
threatening to kill Lü Qianjin, his kindness restrains him from any
such violent action, and he incurs further humiliation. Yu Hua thus
uses Yang Gao to mirror the brutality, numbness, utilitarianism, and
ugliness so often encountered in the adult world.
This story is an extension of “I Have No Name of My Own,” in which
a mentally handicapped orphan named Laifa is constantly insulted by
people around him. Laifa can also be vaguely identified as Guoqing’s
co-worker in Cries in the Drizzle. Instead of using his name, people
address him as “Sneeze,” “Bum Wipe,” “Old Dog,” “Skinny Pig,” or
simply say “Over Here,” “Clear Off,” or “Hey.”123 In depriving him of
his real name, people undercut his sense of dignity and treat him as if
he were as insignificant as dust. Expelled from the human world by the
masses, Laifa at least manages to make friends with a stray dog. He does
not lose his desire, however, to be recognized as a human being.
When some people finally hail him by his real name, his heart starts
pounding. However, the price of this recognition is the death of his
only friend, the dog. This is because some of the locals hoodwinked
him into helping them catch his dog, which they later butchered and
cooked. This incident triggers an inner change in Laifa. He shuts the
door on this human world. He voluntarily gives up his name and
chooses the state of namelessness. He vows, “If anyone ever calls me
Laifa again, I’m not going to answer.”124 This is his way of fighting
against an inhumane society. In spite of the calm and apathetic narra-
tive, Yu Hua invites the reader to identify with Laifa by making him
the first-person narrator. At the same time, Yu Hua directly targets
the population as a whole, from the young to the old, who obtain their
happiness by mercilessly attacking others, just as the masses in the
story mercilessly trample on Laifa’s dignity. It is they who truly lose
their name—human being.125 They lack an interior self and a respect
for life, and are little better than mere animals living by base instincts.
123
Yu Hua, “Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi” [I have no name of my own], in Huanghun
li de nanhai [Boy in the twilight, and other stories] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi
chubanshe, 2004), 68–69. In the present work, I am using Allan H. Barr’s English
translation of this story from “Boy in the Twilight, and Other Stories,” manuscript
form (Asian Studies Program, Pomona College, 2006), 4.
124
Ibid., 22.
125
Jiang Fei, “Yu Hua jiushi niandai xiaoshuo de jiedu” [Interpretation of Yu Hua’s
stories written in the 1990s], Shenyang shifan xueyuan xuebao 25, no. 2 (March 2001):
12–17.
182 chapter four
They are much like the masses in Lu Xun’s stories—curious and

insensible people who can numbly gaze at the decapitation of another
Chinese person without feeling a trace of compassion for the victim or
indignation at the authorities.
Even though “Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own”
were written in the 1990s, they are both set in the 1970s. As in “The
Year Nineteen Eighty-six” and many other stories, Yu Hua reminds
his readers of the devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution on
the Chinese people, who became even worse than the numb coun-
trymen in Lu Xun’s time. If Lu Xun’s countrymen were “senseless
bystanders,”126 then in Yu Hua’s stories these masses have degenerated
into brutal persecutors.
“Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own” can also
be read as Yu Hua’s version of “Gimpel, the Fool,” by Isaac Bashe-
vis Singer (1902–1991), winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Gimpel, the Fool” is one of the ten stories that Yu Hua identified as
having most influenced his own writing, and published them in his
collection, The Warm Journey (Wennuan de lücheng). Commenting
on this story, Yu Hua says that Singer describes “a soul purer than a
blank paper. Because his name [Gimpel] is closely connected with the
fool, his fate becomes a history of the deceived and the oppressed.”127
The apparent weakness that the kind and honest Gimpel manifests
when he faces those who bully and humiliate him is actually power-
ful enough to defeat the mighty. This is also what Yu Hua wants to
express in “Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own.”
Even though the protagonists of both stories are mercilessly tram-
pled by the seemingly strong masses, their innocence, kindness, and
honesty are more powerful; they represent the hope of recovering a
rational, ethical, and humane Chinese folk society.
Bildungsroman solely deals with transitional period of a man’s
life—from adolescence to the threshold of adulthood, and reveals the
development of the young hero’s individuality and socialization. One
of the limitations of this literary genre is that it deals with only a lim-
ited phase in a person’s life. When Yu Hua started to explore broader
themes of human existence, this genre was not a favorable choice any
126
Lu Xun, “Zixu” [Author’s preface], in Nahan [Call to arms] (Beijing: Renmin
chubanshe, 1979), III.
127
Yu Hua, ed., “Preface” to Wennuan de lücheng [The warm journey] (Beijing: Xin
shiji chubanshe, 1999), 8.
more. Since his subsequent two full-length novels To Live and Chron-
icle of a Blood Merchant cover decades-long spans in the protagonist’s
life, the Bildungsroman structure was no longer applicable. However,
in Yu Hua’s more recent bestseller Brothers, a tale of the fate of the two
brothers Li Guangtou and Song Gang during the Cultural Revolution
and the Reform era, coming-of-age became one of the major patterns
of his fiction again.
Yu Hua has repeatedly mentioned his motivation of writing Broth-
ers is to reflect the huge social changes China has experienced over the
past four decades. In an interview carried out in 2003 when he was
still writing this novel, Yu Hua noted “The first twenty years of my
life, I was living in a time of poverty and oppression; the next twenty
years were spent in a time of increasing wealth and freedom. The two
periods are radically different. The gap between the two is like the gap
between Europe in the Middle Ages and Europe nowadays.”128 Through
depicting the separate paths of two brothers in the Reform era, Yu
Hua presents his “disrespectful and subjective comment on the official
version of recent history, or even a parody of government-sponsored
portrayals of economic reform and its social consequence.”129
Brothers is divided into Part I and Part II. Part I was published in
2005 and deals with Cultural Revolution period. Part II was published
in 2006 and covers the Reform period. The novel’s publication gener-
ated a good number of vehement discussions and controversies among
readers and critics.130
Part I is about the two brothers’ childhood and adolescent lives dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. It reveals the close and warm fraternal
relationship they developed under the influence of their loving parents
Li Lan and Song Fanping. The father Song Fanping sets up a very
positive role model for his sons with his love, optimism, integrity, and
loyalty to the family in spite of the madness, absurdity and cruelty
of the outside world. This ideal paternal image is in sharp contrast
128
129
Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “Multiple Temporalities in the Literary Identity
Space of Post-Socialist China: A Discussion of Yu Hua’s Novel Brothers and Its Recep-
tion,” Berliner China-Hefte 34 (2008): 68.
130
Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg regards the vehement controversies Brothers has gen-
erated as an illustration of multiple temporalities in contemporary Chinese literary
identity space. For detailed discussion, see her article “Multiple Temporalities in the
Literary Identity Space of Post-Socialist China.”
184 chapter four
with another paternal image in the story: Li Guangtou’s biological

father who died by drowning in a cesspool when attempting to peep at
women in a public toilet. Part I ends with the death of Li Lan, who has
never recovered from grief since her second husband Song Fanping
was beaten to death by Red Guards seven years ago. The death of both
parents signifies the withdrawal of parental guidance and positive role
models. Therefore, the two brothers are abandoned by their parents
before they even enter the adult world.
Part II deals with the problematic relationship of the two adult
brothers during the Reform era, especially the triangular relation-
ship between the two brothers and a woman named Lin Hong. Lin
Hong first marries Song Gang, but after Song Gang loses his job and
goes away to the south to engage in business projects, Lin Hong falls
into Li Guangtou’s arms. Yu Hua portrays a black-and-white contrast
between the two brothers Li Guangtou and Song Gang, who are differ-
ent in almost every way imaginable. Song Gang is tall, lean, feminine,
honest, kind, loyal to his wife, and protective toward his brother. In
contrast, Li Guangtou is short, sturdy, masculine, coarse, crude, cun-
ning, and immoral. The differences between the two brothers embody
a series of contrasting values: “sex and love, masculine vs. feminine,
active vs. passive, loyalty vs. betrayal, spiritual vs. material.”131 The two
brothers’ harmonious fraternal relationship nurtured by their loving
family during the Cultural Revolution is mercilessly corroded by social
and material forces in the Reform era. Song Gang becomes a victim
of the marketized economy; betrayed by both his brother and wife, he
eventually commits suicide. In contrast, Li Guangtou’s business talents
and unscrupulousness lead to his success in a money-oriented society.
Sex and money have been his weapons to defeat his brother Song Gang.
However, after the death of Song Gang, Li Guangtou becomes impo-
tent, and eventually gives up business as a career. Hence, as Wedell-
Wedellsborg has observed, “the absence [of brotherhood] ultimately
invalidates the powers of sex and money.”132 Through portraying the
dichotomized fates of two brothers and dismantling common assump-
tions about brotherly loyalty and amity, Yu Hua makes a powerful
social criticism of China’s rapid economic development, and reveals
131
Ibid., 68.
132
Ibid.
one of its most destructive consequences for Chinese society—the loss

or dysfunction of traditional family values.
In terms of narrative style, Brothers is a combination of family saga,
the Bildungsroman, popular stories of business success. The story
also has a strong oral quality with such attributes as one-dimensional
minor characters, the omniscient narrator, the straight story line, the
extensive use of slang and popular stock phrases, and the succession
of events, dialogues and actions.133 Strictly speaking, Brothers is not a
Bildungsroman novel, but it incorporates some narrative elements of
Bildungsroman, and resonates with Cries in the Drizzle in its tragic
and parodist connotations. Brothers is about two brothers’ individual
development, and reveals the dynamic transformation of each brother
in the context of powerful social and economic pressures. However,
in contrast with the typical Bildungsroman novel, the narrative is not
confined to the two brothers’ coming-of-age experiences, but focuses
more on their life as mature adults during the Reform era. In addition,
the Bildungsroman genre emphasizes mobility and interiority, or else
social integration and the development of the young hero’s individual-
ity. But in this story, Yu Hua has no intention of revealing the devel-
opment of the young heroes’ internal worlds. Instead, he focuses solely
on the brothers’ overt behavior. As one critic has observed, “all of the
characters in this novel—even the two brothers at the center of it-
are “rather flat characters; there is no attempt at internal psychologi-
cal description.”134 This lack of psychological exploration of the young
heroes makes Brothers a parody or subversion of the genre of Bildung-
sroman. This subversion of the genre is in fact a subversion of the
values that the genre usually upholds, because “the codes for guided
interpretation are mainly ethical codes.”135 By omitting mention of the
psychological complexities of the central protagonists while drawing
solely upon dramatic incidents to propel the narrative forward, Yu
Hua discloses one of his deepest intellectual concerns about contem-
porary China. Namely, that many people seldom ponder or reflect
on matters beyond their immediate ken or areas of personal concern,
133
For more detailed discussion of the story’s oral quality, see Wedell-Wedellsborg,
“Multiple Temporalities in the Literary Identity Space of Post-Socialist China: A Dis-
cussion of Yu Hua’s Novel Brothers and Its Reception.”
134
Ibid., 68.
135
186 chapter four
thereby leading to a vacuum in an area of cognitive life that would

ordinarily be devoted to moral reflection or intellectual growth. At the
end of the novel, neither of the brothers has sired any children, so the
family line stops with them. Therefore, Brothers is not only a parody
of the Bildungsroman, but also a subversion of the family saga.
CHAPTER FIVE
TRAGIC AND PARODISTIC BILDUNGSROMAN
In the previous two chapters, I have presented thematic analyses of

the coming-of-age fiction of Su Tong and Yu Hua respectively. In
this chapter, I will place these narratives in comparative perspective
by relating them to earlier Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo written from
the May Fourth era up to 1966, as well as to the European Bildungs-
roman tradition. In so doing, I will demonstrate that the coming-of-
age fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua are not only tragic, but also paro-
distic, both within the context of earlier modern Chinese chengzhang
xiaoshuo (especially those written between 1949 and 1966) and with
respect to the traditional European Bildungsroman.
I will illustrate the tragic and parodistic implications of Su Tong’s
and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction from two angles. I will first dem-
onstrate how Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives differentiate them-
selves from the coming-of-age fiction written by earlier Chinese writers
by reviving the autonomy, subjectivity, and individuality of the pro-
tagonist. The coming-of-age fiction written from the May Fourth era
up to 1966 had been influenced by the gradual victory of collectivity
and revolution over individuality and subjectivity; in fiction, youth
had been portrayed as the era’s chosen agents for the rejuvenation
and modernization of China. The interaction between inwardness and
outwardness is the tension between individualist autonomy and col-
lective history. In this perspective, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives
are parodistic. While the Cultural Revolution represented the summit
of collectivism, their narratives portray the emergence of autonomy
and individuality among their young protagonists. In addition, unlike
earlier protagonists whose assertion of individuality and subjectivity
conform to the direction of history, the school drop-outs and alien-
ated schoolboys in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives strive to act in
defiance of collectivism; they assert their individualist autonomy in an
unreflective way, and in disregard of the fact that they are bound to
fail. They do not find the meaning of their lives in a May Fourth-style
advocacy of “national salvation,” nor do they grow up as socialist new
men as the Party expects. Instead, they die prematurely, end up in jail
188 chapter five
or otherwise face a troubled and uncertain future. Su Tong’s and Yu

Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo are thus imbued with tragic overtones.
Secondly, I will refer the two authors’ fiction to the theoretical corpus
of the Bildungsroman by examining their similarities and differences
with traditional Bildungsroman fiction. In so doing, I will explore the
interaction between the literary genre and individual Chinese literary
work, demonstrating how Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives enrich
the Bildungsroman literary genre by providing a body of tragic and
parodistic Bildungsroman. I will argue that in their tragic and parodis-
tic character, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives deviate from main-
stream traditional European Bildungsroman fiction. That is, they do
not allow the young protagonists to achieve an accommodation with
society, nor to make peace with their reality after having experienced
all kinds of trials. In this way, they deprive the reader of the traditional
educational function of Bildungsroman.
Farewell to Revolution
After Mao’s famous “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art”
in 1942, Chinese literature in mainland China increasingly became an
instrument for legitimizing and strengthening the reign of the Chinese
Communist Party. The Party’s view of literature mostly gave prior-
ity to ideological correctness over artistic merit. In terms of thematic
concern, individualism and subjectivity gave way to collectivism and
revolutionary ideology; as one critic argues, “Mao gave individualism
and subjectivity negative connotations because the individual’s private
feelings and space may pose a threat to the stable and pure form of
revolutionary ideology.”1 The basic task of writers was to create heroic
models of workers, soldiers, and farmers. The dominant conflicts of the
narratives were based upon class struggle and an adversarial conflict
between the Party’s collectivist imperatives and residual individualist
motivations within society. Overt political messages were the hallmark
of the literary works written in the Mao era.
As we saw in Chapter Two, the chengzhang xiaoshuo written in this
period of time—such as Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth, Wang Meng’s
Long Live Youth, and Hao Ran’s Bright Sunny Skies—follow the
1
tragic and parodistic bildungsroman 189
formulaic writing promoted by Mao Zedong; they portray Chinese

young people as the “morning sun at eight or nine o’clock” who grow
up into rosy-cheeked socialist new men and women under the guid-
ance and support of the infallible CCP.2 In the typical novel or short
story of this era, there is an evolutionary change in the young pro-
tagonist’s character and socialization. No matter which class back-
ground the protagonist comes from—whether working class or middle
class— the period of youth itself is legitimized as helping to propel
the protagonist into highly coveted CCP membership and an ensuing
career in constructing a socialist new China. The protagonist happily
embraces an inevitably bright future in Mao’s China. Represented by
either a school teacher or a Party official, the Party plays a uniformly
positive and central role in the psychological and mental development
and maturity of the protagonist. Thus in Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth,
the female protagonist Lin Daojing passionately exclaims to the under-
cover CCP member Lu Jiachuan, “I am looking forward to seeing you—
the Party—save me, a person on the verge of drowning.”3
However, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age narratives are
drastically different from those of Yang Mo, the early Wang Meng,
and other writers of the Mao era in terms of characterization, plot, and
language. First, their major characters are not typically active, progres-
sive, and pro-Party young men, even though they all come from the
working classes apotheosized by Mao—families of the urban poor or
village laborers. Furthermore, these protagonists are not diligent or
high-performing students in school. The major young characters in
Su Tong’s narratives all get expelled from school, and thereby have
no alternative but to receive an education of sorts on the streets. The
young protagonists in Yu Hua’s narratives are not banished from
school, but they are not necessarily better off than the characters in
Su Tong’s fiction; they are similarly marginalized or alienated. In
addition, the narratives of Yu Hua and Su Tong subvert the glorified
and stereotypical images of the Party secretary, school teacher, and
revolutionary cadre who personalize the CCP and serve as spiritual
mentors to young people in the officially-sanctioned coming-of-age
fiction in the Mao era. In contrast, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives
2
For more about the literature written during the Cultural Revolution see Richard
King, “A Shattered Mirror: The Literature of the Cultural Revolution” (PhD diss.,
University of British Columbia, 1984).
3
Yang, Qingchun zhi ge, 207.
190 chapter five
generally portray CCP officials as negative role models for youth. For
example, in Su Tong’s short story, “Roller Skating Away,” the pro-
tagonist is expelled from the classroom and accidentally discovers an
adulterous affair between a local Party secretary and a music teacher
at the school. In North Side Story, the schoolteachers have regressed
to the same moral level as their students by using vulgar language and
behaving violently in encounters with their students and other adults.
In the same novel, CCP-led mass organizations such as the Workers’
Propaganda Team and the Neighborhood Committee do nothing but
damage the educational system by taking over schools and monitoring
the perpetrators of illicit sexual acts, rather than providing moral and
educational guidance to young people. In Yu Hua’s Cries in the Driz-
zle, the role of the Party among young people is even more vague and
destructive. Guanglin’s foster father, Wang Liqiang, is not the heroic
and politically progressive PLA military officer one invariably finds
in Mao’s formulaic stories; instead, he becomes a victim of the CCP’s
asceticism and provides a tragic and negative role model for his foster
son. The withdrawal of the CCP’s guiding and mentoring role from Su
Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives thus negates the myth of the Party’s
glorious influence on Chinese youth and parodies the coming-of-age
narratives written by leftist Chinese writers in the 1930s and 1940s, as
well as by writers in the Mao era.
In addition, the young protagonists’ dropping out of school or their
marginalization at school symbolizes their withdrawal from collective
and political activities and mass movements. In this way, the narra-
tives of Su Tong and Yu Hua depict an alienation of the self from
social transformation. Through the drama of the characters’ individual
experiences, both authors attempt to articulate the importance of indi-
vidualism, subjectivism, and humanity. Even when the education that
some of the protagonists in Yu Hua’s and Su Tong’s fiction receive
seems to result in partial or total failure, at least these protagonists
stand up on their own two feet; they take some responsibility for their
actions rather than abjectly throwing themselves on the mercy of the
collective or passively blaming society for all of their individual prob-
lems. Likewise, some of the premature love vignettes punctuating the
narratives indicate that the young protagonists are exerting their sub-
jectivity and egoism against the CCP’s asceticism and its discourse of
revolutionary love. In so doing, Su Tong and Yu Hua stand up for
human personality and the inner self in opposition for the leveling
influence of the Cultural Revolution’s political zeal. By emphasizing
the young protagonists’ soul-searching, Su Tong and Yu Hua turn their

narratives from mass movement (the Cultural Revolution) to individ-
ual heroism, from the collectivistic mentality to private identity, and
from political enlightenment to personal spiritual exploration.
The tendency of turning back towards a more individualistic and
less collectivistic spirit in the fiction of Yu Hua and Su Tong also reso-
nates with the advocacy of the “farewell to revolution” explored by
Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu in their book Farewell to Revolution (Gaobie
geming, 1999). In reviewing history of the twentieth century China, Li
Zehou and Liu Zaifu point out that the revolutionary mode of think-
ing and acting has dominated both Chinese intellectual life and the
daily life of the Chinese people for about a hundred years, and they
call for it to end.4 Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s attempt to alienate their
young protagonists from this revolutionary movement can be read as
a gesture to bid farewell to revolution in literary representation.
In spite of their autonomy and subjectivity, the young protagonists
in fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua eventually fail to achieve maturity
and thereby take their place as the most recent link in the revolution-
ary succession of socialist China. This failure is another element that
marks their narratives with parody. All of the young characters in their
narratives end up on a more or less self-destructive path: Dasheng
lies dead on the coal mountain after single-handedly fighting ten peo-
ple; Hongqi is sentenced to waste the rest of his youth behind prison
walls; Xude runs away from home to face an unpredictable future;
Su Yu dies from an illness; Guanglin’s younger brother drowns; and
Guanglin’s older brother faces a life of struggle in the countryside.
Except for Young Cripple in North Side Story and to a lesser extent
the younger brother Guangming in Cries in the Drizzle, none of these
young people becomes a Communist Party member, a model youth,
or some other type of heroic Maoist figure. Even Young Cripple’s
emergence as a model youth reads more like a parody than a run-of-
the-mill Maoist eulogy. When trying to steal something valuable, he
happens to uncover a hidden ammunition depot and thereby expose a
“class enemy.” Ironically, he soon finds himself in demand as a “model
youth” pep-talk speaker; for the first time in his life, he brings glory to
4
Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming: Ershi shiji zhongguo duitan lu [Farewell
to revolution: a critical dialogue on 20th-century China], ed. David D.W. Wang (Tai-
bei: Maitian chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 1999).
192 chapter five
himself and his family. This transformation of Young Cripple into a

model youth under false pretenses is Su Tong’s way of parodying the
notion of model youth in Mao era formulaic fiction.
In Cries in the Drizzle, Guangming drowns while trying to save the
life of an eight-year-old boy. Even though this admirable act of “sacri-
ficing oneself to save others” (sheji jiuren) was repeatedly apotheosized
during the Mao-era as a reflection of the lofty virtue acquired by the
socialist new man, Yu Hua treats Guangming’s heroic sacrifice more
as a personal tragedy for himself and his family: “Sun Guangming
drowned while trying to save him [the young boy]. It would be going
too far, of course, to present this as an act of heroic self-sacrifice. My
little brother had not reached a level of such lofty virtue as to be will-
ing to exchange his own life for someone else’s.”5 Guangming’s death
provides his father and brother with a temporary illusion of Guang-
ming as a widely respected hero. They imagine the government will
visit the hero’s family, glorifying them by means of public accolades
and thus upgrading their political status. Unfortunately, nothing of the
sort ever happens. Therefore, this entire narrative sequence amounts
to a satire in which Yu Hua reveals the emptiness of much CCP rheto-
ric about the Party’s reverence for heroes and martyrs.
Not only do Su Tong and Yu Hua disapprove of their young pro-
tagonists becoming progressive model youth under the Party’s guid-
ance and cultivation—they also draw upon some episodes to satirize
the Party’s heavy-handed political control over the PRC citizenry. For
example, in Cries in the Drizzle, Guanglin’s primary school teacher
suspects Guanglin of having written a slogan of denunciation against
him. Guanglin’s two best friends are sent to pressure him to admit
this to the teacher. Facing his friends’ betrayal and the teacher’s inter-
rogation, the young boy is forced to admit to a crime he never com-
mitted. Guanglin’s forced confession in school is a powerful and vivid
example of the inhumane practices of Party indoctrination and ritu-
alistic confession at the local level, which became deeply rooted in
the Yan’an Rectification Movement in 1942 and continued all the way
through the Cultural Revolution, and in some contexts continue up to
the present day. Accordingly, in the coming-of-age fiction written in
the Mao-era, this kind of moralistic manipulation is always described
in a eulogistic manner: the young student recognizes and owns up
5
Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 35–36.
to having made ideological mistakes, thanks to help from teachers or

peers of sound ideological standing or class pedigree.
In addition to these parodies reflected in the characterization and
plotting, Su Tong and Yu Hua subvert Mao-era rhetoric by using
popular ideological jargon and political slogans for the benefit of the
protagonists. In the literary works of the Mao era, political and ideo-
logical jargon is usually applied in a eulogistic manner to transmit
uplifting political messages. An example of the subversion of this sac-
charine idealism occurs in Cries in the Drizzle when an urban-based
Party official named Zheng Yuda asks Sun Kwangtsai’s opinion of the
People’s Commune. Kwangtsai confirms that the People’s Commune
is a good thing because “meals are free.”6 In spite of the extensive
Party-state propaganda about the benefits of the People’s Commune—
promoting steel production, undertaking water projects, and improv-
ing agricultural productivity, local farmers merely notice the more
practical aspects of the People’s Commune: everything is shared, and
home-cooked meals are replaced by communal dining-hall meals. Sun
Kwangtsai’s down-to-earth response to Mao’s radical collective unit
exposes the gap between high-flown official Party rhetoric and a prac-
tical grass-roots perspective.
In the same story, Mao’s ideological statements are often appropri-
ated for the characters’ personal advantage. For example, a shrewish
wife conveniently and passionately combines fashionable political jar-
gon with classical poetry and pop lyrics to reprimand her husband,
a gifted but henpecked poet. The husband’s letters of repentance, his
pledges to reform, and his confessional statements of self-criticism,
similar to those written by CCP members to show their loyalty to the
Party, become proof of his obedience to his harsh wife. In another
scene, the CCP’s practice of “recalling yesteryear’s bitterness in order
to reflect on today’s sweetness” is exploited by both Guangping and
his father Kwangtsai for different purposes. The father asks his wife
and sons to wear ragged clothes in order to impress government rep-
resentatives. “When we think of the miseries of the Old Society,” he
says, “we are all the more aware of how wonderful life is in the New
Society.” However, when Guangping is ridiculed by his classmates in
school for wearing ragged clothing, he “comes up with a compelling
6
Ibid., 70.
194 chapter five
justification for his abandonment of this costume,”7 telling his father

that their ragged clothing is an insult to the brave new Communist
society.
Similarly, it is common to see in Su Tong’s North Side Story that
the children and women conveniently quote or ape Chairman Mao’s
words and political slogans in order to legitimize questionable behav-
ior that has nothing to do with politics. For example, before Sumei
takes revenge on Jinlan, a debauched woman who has seduced both
Sumei’s husband and her son, Sumei encourages herself and justifies
her violence against Jinlan by citing Chairman Mao’s famous sixteen-
character guideline for the use of force: “We will never attack unless we
are attacked; and if we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack.”8
In another scene, when Old Zhu tries to mediate the tense rela-
tionship between his mother and his wife Jinlan, he juxtaposes the
tense relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law with
the longstanding rivalry between the USSR and the USA: “Even the
Soviet revisionists and the American imperialists have initiated peace-
ful negotiations—how come the two of you can’t practice peaceful
coexistence?”9 The extensive use of ideological statements and politi-
cal jargon in fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua thus not only reflect
the impact of political tag phrases on Chinese society in the Mao-era,
but also present a mockery of that same rhetoric; the sharp contrast
between the overtly political implications of Party leaders’ statements
and slogans and their down-to-earth utilization by the rank-and-file
citizenry amounts to a parody of the Mao-era literary mainstream.
From the foregoing analysis, we can see that fiction by Su Tong
and Yu Hua is oppositional and parodistic in relation to earlier Chi-
nese coming-of-age narratives, especially those written in the Mao-era.
They achieve this through their subversion of the CCP’s glorified role
in the tutelage of Chinese youth, their reassertion of the autonomy
and subjectivity of young people, their denial of the possibility of Chi-
nese youth growing up into new socialist men and women, and their
exploitation and debasement of Maoist official jargon and the Party’s
7
Ibid., 44.
8
This famous tenet was laid down by Mao Zedong in 1939 in his article “On Pol-
icy,” and since then has become the CCP’s chief guideline for the use of force.
9
political rhetoric. In the process, the narratives achieve a profound

reflection upon the political ethos of the Cultural Revolution.
In living through the Cultural Revolution, the characters in fiction
by Su Tong and Yu Hua are destined to endure a troubled and even
tragic existence. Both authors embrace an essentially pessimistic view
of the future of the generation of young Chinese who came of age
in the 1970s. In both authors’ childhood during the Cultural Revolu-
tion, Su Tong and Yu Hua experienced one of the most violent and
chaotic eras in human history. As a result, they both have remained
writers with a strong sense of history. They have felt indignant about
the hardships that they and other Chinese people experienced during
the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Their narratives challenge the
reader to reflect deeply on the origins of the Cultural Revolution and
ponder what an individual citizen can do about the waste of human
lives and talent that resulted from such Maoist debacles. This is genu-
ine literature, not mere infotainment for the ruling elite. For Su Tong
and Yu Hua, writing coming-of-age narratives is thus not only a lyrical
manner of exploring the disastrous effects of historical events upon
Chinese people in general and young people in particular, but also
their reminder to the world that the cataclysms of history cannot be
forgotten.
Unfulfilled Bildung
When Su Tong and Yu Hua wrote their coming-of-age fiction, it was

close to two centuries since the term for the literary genre known as
the Bildungsroman had been coined in Europe in the 1810s. The socio-
historical background of the two authors’ oeuvres differs substantially
from the era of humanistic idealism of late eighteenth-century Ger-
many, from which Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship emerged, and yet
their fiction resonates with the European Bildungsroman tradition in
terms of its plot and characterization, introspection, humanistic con-
cerns, and psychological and intellectual seriousness. However, in spite
of these commonalities, the fiction of Su Tong and Yu Hua differenti-
ates itself from traditional European Bildungsroman fiction by largely
excluding any romantic or love interest from its youthful protagonists’
journeys toward adulthood, as well as by preventing these protagonists
from achieving an accommodation with society. In this regard, the
anti-Bildungsroman or tragic version of Bildungsroman in Su Tong
196 chapter five
and Yu Hua is close to the “parodistic Bildungsroman,” a term that

literary critics such as Martin Swales have applied to describe Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain.10 The following discussion will explore
both the commonalities that our two authors’ chengzhang xiaoshuo
share with the traditional Bildungsroman as well as the differences
between them.
The Bildungsroman “depicts the formation of the hero up until a
certain level of completion”11 with “a balance between activity and
contemplation.”12 Here, activity is understood to be the accumulation
of experience, or what might be considered the ordeal of life. Contem-
plation refers to the introspection and self-reflection that leads to the
psychological and intellectual development of the young protagonist.
Such novels by Su Tong and Yu Hua as North Side Story and Cries in
the Drizzle exemplify major elements of the plot in a Bildungsroman:
“Childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, larger society,
self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and
a philosophy [of life].”13 Both Chinese writers’ narratives maintain a
balance between “reflection” and “action.”14
Su Tong’s North Side Story tells of the protagonist Dasheng’s experi-
ences from the time he is twelve until his death at nineteen. Yu Hua’s
Cries in the Drizzle is an adult’s reminiscences of his boyhood from
age six to his departure for university studies at eighteen. In both nov-
els, the “conflict of generations” is reflected in the negative role models
of the parental world in general, and specifically in the relationships
between fathers and sons. A common picture emerges in Su Tong’s
and Yu Hua’s description of the adult world. The deep-rooted anti-
Confucianism and anti-intellectualism of the Cultural Revolution have
led to the emptying of “the humanism of China’s ancient propriety”15
across the whole of Chinese society and to the loss of the function
10
11
Mahoney quotes Dilthey’s later definition of Bildungsroman in his article “The
Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe,’” in Reflec-
tion and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 101.
12
George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.:
The M.I.T. Press, 1971), 135.
13
14
Hardin emphasizes the balance between reflection and action of the Bildungs-
roman novel in the introduction to Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungs-
roman.
15
Michael Duke, “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chi-
nese Fiction,” Issues and Studies 25 (August 1989): 34.
of education, namely “to propagate doctrines of the ancient sages, to

transmit learning, and to dispel confusion.”16 In this new social and
historical context, adult society, represented by the father and teacher,
cannot provide proper moral and cultural guidance to children. The
Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo thus resemble their European counter-
parts in the way their gradually maturing youthful protagonists such
as Dasheng in Su Tong’s North Side Story and Guanglin and Guoqing
in Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle are either fatherless or else alienated
from their fathers. After having grown alienated from the biological
father or having lost him altogether, the teenagers in these two novels
search for a surrogate parent or a substitute bonding within the peer
community.
Su Tong’s young protagonists generally find themselves more alien-
ated and helpless than those of Yu Hua. In North Side Story, for exam-
ple, Dasheng’s peer community is as helpless and cruel as the parental
society, and finally leads him to self-destruction. In Yu Hua’s story,
Guanglin’s peer community is supportive, caring, and guiding, in
sharp contrast with adult circles in society. Therefore, Su Tong comes
across as more pessimistic than Yu Hua, illustrating even more poign-
antly the contrast between the two authors’ works on the one hand,
and the more optimistic classic Bildungsroman on the other.
In North Side Story, Dasheng is suspended between the world of
school and the vulgar Toon Street lifestyle. He is able to fully recog-
nize his alienation, which is caused by the death of his father, bitter
relations with his mother, expulsion from school, and disappointment
with his friends. His peer community, represented by his friends—
Hongqi, who ends up in jail; Xude, who elopes with a married woman;
and Young Cripple, who misguidedly becomes a model for youth—
offers Dasheng very little generosity or support. He finds that he can-
not “invest his trust in anyone who is not an image of innocence.”17
Seemingly, there is no one to whom he can turn for guidance, either
his parents or his peer community. Dasheng must move forward by
himself, keeping his own counsel. He sets off on his lonely journey and
becomes a solitary hero.
16
Han Yu (768-824), “Shishuo” [On teacher], in Han Yu wen xuan [Selected works
of Han Yu], ed. Tong Dide (n.p., 1980), 52.
17
Bly, Sibling Society, 19.
198 chapter five
Setting out on a journey, symbolically and often literally, is a key

element in the traditional European Bildungsroman. The journey
enmeshes the young man within a broader social milieu and serves as
both an “agent of liberation and a source of corruption.”18 Throughout
this journey, the young protagonist experiences all kinds of difficul-
ties and finally achieves maturity. For example, in Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, Wilhelm’s symbolic journey is his involvement with
theatrical circles. During that period of time, Wilhelm experiences
friendship, love, responsibility, and the harshness of societal realities.
In Dasheng’s case, his larger society is the street gang. His goal is to
organize his own gang on Toon Street and gain recognition as a true
man by defeating the other gangs in town. Dasheng finally fulfills his
wish at the price of his young life.
The youth subculture in Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle is much more
positive. It plays the role that should have been played by the parental
world: providing support, comfort, warmth, understanding, and even
guidance to frustrated adolescents. The friendships of the protagonist
Guanglin with various friends throughout his childhood provide him
with necessary emotional and physical support and guidance. Despite
this, Guanglin cannot escape the fate of alienation. Guanglin’s alien-
ation derives from his being abandoned by both his biological and his
foster families. His friends Guoqing and Su Yu suffer similar aban-
donment, one ending up an orphan, the other dead. Because of the
complete alienation from their families, the young men in Yu Hua’s
narratives are forced to assert their independence much earlier than
they should.
In Cries in the Drizzle, the protagonist has two journeys: first away
from the countryside where his biological family lives to the town
where his foster family resides, and then from the town back to the
countryside. His first journey starts at the tender age of seven, when
he is adopted by the Wang family. This change of life brings him to a
much larger world than that of the countryside. To some degree, the
journey from home amounts to a flight from provinciality. Guang-
lin experiences much more than his brothers, who are left behind in
the countryside. While residing in town, Guanglin attends primary
school, enjoying the friendship of his classmates and a relatively afflu-
ent material life. At the same time, he witnesses the brutal reality of the
18
adult world: a husband’s betrayal of his wife, a desperate man’s bloody

revenge and suicide, and a father’s ruthless abandonment of his son.
Five years later, Guanglin sets out on his second journey, returning
from the town to the countryside. This second journey occurs in ado-
lescence and further alienates him from the adult world, which is rep-
resented by his biological family. His father regards his return as an
unlucky sign because their house catches fire without apparent reason
on the very day he arrives home. What he witnesses at this home is
simply the extended rural version of the family life he previously expe-
rienced in his foster home in town: the harshness and narrowness of
provincial village life, the father’s betrayal of the mother, the father’s
mistreatment of the grandfather, the mother’s helplessness, and the
parents’ neglect of their children. In this period, he enters into a deep
friendship with Su Yu, who plays the role of the older brother, “care-
taker, teacher, playmate, and confidant.”19 The two journeys between
countryside and town show Guanglin both sides of the same coin:
despite different economic and geographical settings, the degenerate,
desperate, and helpless adult worlds are the same.
The ordeal of love is a common element in Bildungsroman narra-
tives, such as David Copperfield’s innocent love for Dora in David
Copperfield, or Wilhelm Meister’s love for Natalie in Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship. In Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives, the ordeal of
love is reflected merely in the anxiety of young men’s sexual awak-
ening, not in a love interest or romance per se. Due to the highly
political, repressive, and ascetic nature of the Cultural Revolution, this
anxiety is aggravated by the lack of proper sexual education and guid-
ance from the parental world. Accordingly, the teenagers that Su Tong
and Yu Hua portray develop a pathological, irrational fear of sex. They
are caught between their natural sexual desire, misconceptions of sex-
uality, and the generally repressive atmosphere of the whole society,
and are prone to violence as a means of venting their pent-up desire
for sex and love.
In Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, sexuality is always accom-
panied by violence or its extreme form, death. For example, in “Roller
Skating Away,” Cat Head’s masturbation and subsequent intense shame
leads to his fatal road accident. In “Memories of Mulberry Garden,”
two young shamefaced lovers, Crimson Jade and Hairy Head, die in a
19
200 chapter five
bamboo grove with the boy’s bite marks imprinted on the girl’s face.
In North Side Story, Hongqi, a quiet boy with beautiful eyes, rapes
his beloved girlfriend Meiqi with disastrous results: he is sentenced
to prison for nine years, while Meiqi in turn commits suicide. In the
same story, the sexual experience of the young protagonist Dasheng
is even more disturbing: the ghost of Meiqi awakens Dasheng’s sexual
desire. Overwhelmed by shame over his wet dreams, he kills a cat that
he believes is the incarnation of Meiqi.
In Cries in the Drizzle, teenage sexual awakenings are portrayed in
a manner less marked by violence and suffering, but the overall senti-
ments are similarly disturbing and tragic. The protagonist Guanglin’s
sexual awakening begins with his secret masturbation at night and
leads to his strong sense of guilt and impurity and his alienation from
his close friend Su Yu. Meanwhile, Su Yu’s own frustration leads him
one day to suddenly embrace a young female stranger on the street,
resulting in his incarceration for a year.
In a normal society, an adolescent’s sexual awakening is often
accompanied by romance or love interest that largely satisfies both his
sexual and emotional needs. In both Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narra-
tives, this sort of satisfying love interest or romance is either absent or
else doomed to destruction. Even when there are occasional glimmers
of genuine love between boy and girl, they are all short-lived. Instead
of leading to a normal romance and marriage, the mutual attraction
between Hongqi and Meiqi in North Side Story leads to the destruction
of two young lives. In Cries in the Drizzle, the genuine love between
Guoqing and his sweetheart incurs nothing but mockery and strong
opposition from the girl’s parents. Eventually, he embarks upon a
hopeless campaign of retaliation against the girl’s parents. In the same
story, the admiration of Guanglin’s elder brother for his female class-
mate brings him only insult and alienation due to her family’s higher
social and political status. Giving tacit consent to the status quo, the
elder brother withdraws to the countryside and climbs into a widow’s
bed, just as his father had done at a previous juncture.
Removing romance and love from the experience of adolescent
sexual awakening, Su Tong and Yu Hua thus show how in 1970s
China adolescent sexual maturity is not ordinarily accompanied by
love, but instead by guilt, shame, violence, and even death. In this
way, their works contrast sharply with the traditional Bildungsroman.
Another key difference is in the way the novels end. Even though crit-
ics repeatedly emphasize that the Bildungsroman is about the journey
of youth itself and that achieving a gratifying result is not the point,
most traditional European Bildungsroman novels have a positive end-
ing marked by the protagonist’s reintegration with society. The tension
between “potentiality and actuality,” which is central to the growth of
the young hero, is thereby released. For example, Wilhelm Meister
finally leaves the theatre, accepts the guidance of the Society of the
Tower, and marries the beautiful Amazon. The Society of the Tower
is the means to foster Wilhelm’s intellectual and cultural ideals—and
ultimately point the way to a new society.20
In contrast, no young man from the narratives of Su Tong and Yu
Hua experiences happiness or reintegration at the end of his journey.
Guanglin seems to be the only one with a promising future, since he
will leave home for university. Yet rather than taking this as an opti-
mistic ending, I see the narrator Guanglin as a witness and medium of
history. He has witnessed the suffering of his peers and the degenerate,
desperate lives of his parents’ generation. He carries the responsibility
of remembering this period of history and passing its lessons on to
later generations.
In essence, Bildungsroman novels are developed around the tension
between the young protagonist’s potential and reality. This tension is
the ordeal the youth has to cope with in order to achieve maturity. At
the end of most Bildungsroman fiction, the young protagonist finds
an “accommodation” between the individual and the society. In other
words, the two ends meet, and the circle of life is sealed. In the fic-
tion of Su Tong and Yu Hua, the complexity of individual potentiality
is revealed in the young protagonist’s assertion of independence and
autonomy; his dissatisfaction with the status quo; his ambition; his
anxiety, loneliness, fear, and alienation; and his longing for warmth,
tenderness, and support. The reality he has to face is a chaotic soci-
ety full of political suppression, a failure of the educational system,
the loss of humanity and cultural tradition, the lack of positive role
models and guidance from his parental generation, and the drifting
and helplessness of his peers. Under such circumstances, his sense of
self-realization can never come to terms with his reality. His youthful
aspirations remain unfulfilled.
None of the protagonist’s childhood experiences—his education, his
conflicts with his parents’ generation, his journeys, his entries into a
20
Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 57–73.
202 chapter five
larger world, and his ordeal of love—help him to learn lessons, achieve
maturity, make peace with reality, or find an accommodation with
society. Instead, these bitter experiences lead him only to destruction.
In this way, the two Chinese authors demonstrate that in an abnormal
era such as the Cultural Revolution, for the most part young people
cannot successfully step over the threshold from youth to adulthood.
They are frozen between childhood and adulthood. Death is the cer-
emony of their adulthood.
The Bildungsroman demands a balance between activity and con-
templation. Martin Swales has emphasized that “the great texts sus-
tain the dialectic of practical social reality on the one hand, and the
complex inwardness of the individual on the other.”21 The process of
a young protagonist achieving practical accommodation within soci-
ety parallels his psychological and intellectual development. The young
protagonist’s self-reflection and his exploration of his potential is a
significant concern of the Bildungsroman. In the fiction of Su Tong
and Yu Hua, the complex inwardness of the young protagonists is
explored as the plot of a given narrative progresses, but in ways that
are distinct from their European counterparts.
In North Side Story, the way the novel explores the underlying ten-
sion of Dasheng’s persona is particularly noteworthy. Dasheng is not
an unthinking person; however, his self-examinations and his analysis
of his situation are too simple, and too often he relies on convenient
labels. At any given point in Dasheng’s life, there are more aspects to
his personality than he is able to recognize in any pursuit or course of
action. For example, in his bizarre relationship with Meiqi both before
and after her death, he never realizes that Meiqi, for him, is a cipher
for feminine beauty and fragility, womanhood, physical vitality, and
spontaneous sensuality. Instead, each time after his wet dream, he only
experiences feelings of anger, frustration, and hatred. This is because
like everyone else living on Toon Street he regards the midnight visits
of Meiqi’s ghost as her way of taking revenge for the wrongful death
she had suffered. He cannot recognize his inner thirst for tenderness
and affection, his deep sympathy for a fragile beauty, and the even
more profound insight that his joy coexists with darkness and death.
Similarly, he sees his father’s death merely as relief from further
physical and verbal abuse on the old man’s part; he cannot fathom his
21
Ibid., 6.
own loss of faith in the values of home and family. When he searches
for a martial arts master to teach him kung fu, he doesn’t recognize
his deep longing for a role model who could provide him with proper
guidance. He complains of his friends’ betrayal, cowardliness, degen-
eration, and drifting apart, but he does not realize that his friends are
struggling with their own dilemmas. He grows alienated from his peers
and yet longs to be brought back into the fold with them.
Through his narrator, Su Tong tries to highlight what his hero fails
to recognize: Dasheng’s quest for a fulfilling life is limited by the his-
torical and political conditions of his time. Therefore, Su Tong provides
another character, Old Kang, to help Dasheng reflect upon reality. As
the bearer and guardian of the fundamental values inherent in Con-
fucian humanism and the Chinese intellectual tradition, Old Kang is
endowed with cultural and historical significance. Having lived in two
different societies, the “old society” before 1949 and the “new society”
after 1949, he has witnessed the social and political changes in China,
and clearly realizes the crises of the time—the failure of the educational
system, the loss of traditional values, and the rejection of Confucian
moral codes without the provision of any satisfactory replacement. He
knows well the problems society in general is facing, as well as the par-
ticular problems with which Dasheng and his teenaged friends must
cope. In a normal society, Old Kang would have been able to offer
Dasheng and his friends the guidance and help they need. Unfortu-
nately, after 1949, Old Kang has dropped to the bottom of the social
ladder and has been deprived of the right to speak. Even though he
is aware of the current social atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and
anti-humanism, he still tries to educate others. Unfortunately, no one
listens to him; he is destined to be a failed “catcher.” Dasheng, lim-
ited by his education, experience, and intellectual complexity, cannot
recognize the support and guidance offered by Old Kang. Old Kang’s
random comments about the status quo, such as “It is a crime, it is
really a crime!” also reflect the author’s opinion of that era.
Dasheng is alienated from family and society throughout his adoles-
cent years. The loss of his father at an early age, his distant relationship
with his mother, and his disappointment with his friends bring an
immense emptiness to his emotional life. In turn, this emotional void
drives him to strive for something to brighten his life. Unfortunately,
he wanders through his experiences with a false sense of where he
is going and what he is achieving in the process. He believes that
the street gang promises a fuller exploration and extension of his
204 chapter five
personality than anything vouchsafed by Toon Street. For him, the

essence of the street gang is the physical, palpable enactment of becom-
ing a real man. However, the practical reality of Toon Street and Dash-
eng’s aspirations of organizing a powerful street gang are insufficient
to sustain Dasheng’s existence. He is simply unable to convert any of
his inner feelings into a practical outward expression of emotion. An
untimely death is the price Dasheng pays for continuously divorcing
his imaginative life from social reality.
In North Side Story, Su Tong emphasizes Dasheng’s strong will and
his endeavor to achieve self-realization both in action and reflection.
In Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle, the author focuses more on the philo-
sophical exploration of the manifold themes of existence—loneliness,
fear of growth, human nature, death, and fate. Cries in the Drizzle
is a discursive narrative, an adult’s reconstruction of his childhood.
The recollecting self celebrates precisely that modest human wholeness
that is the interaction of world and self.
Yu Hua chooses the first-person narrator as a convenient device to
unfold the train of reminiscences. The choice of a first-person narra-
tor, both as a child and as an adult, makes the narrative more flexible.
As the primary narrator, the child is employed to recount the relatively
concrete, surface-level stories and scenes that can be observed through
a child’s eyes. The voice of the adult narrator provides the vehicle by
which the implied author (or the second self ) can draw upon deeper
levels of meaning to express his relatively abstract outlook or ideas.
In his reminiscences of childhood, the adult narrator often inserts his
seasoned opinions and feelings as well as his philosophical under-
standing of birth, death, love, friendship, time, and the like. In addi-
tion, the adult narrator’s reflections highlight the limitations of the
child’s introspection and self-reflection. His function is similar to that
of the character Old Kang in Su Tong’s North Side Story.
Cries in the Drizzle is not a description of the successful forma-
tion of the hero’s personality. Unlike Dasheng in North Side Story,
who sets himself the goal of becoming the head of a powerful street
gang, Guanglin seems unclear about what he wants to do or become as
an adult. The two important periods of his life—living with his foster
family and subsequently with his biological family—are both beyond
his control. This does not mean that he lacks any autonomy, however.
He is a child with an imaginative and lonely disposition. He seeks
release from brutal realities of the day by withdrawing to his inner
world to construct a fantasy that includes the wholeness of being,
destiny, and death. After witnessing the death of so many people

around him, and much like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, he
“arrives at an understanding of humanity that does not simply ignore
death or scorn the dark, mysterious side of life.” He accepts death,
“but without letting it gain control of his mind.”22 He expresses his
humanity by reacting to the deaths of his friends with sympathy and
condolences. Guanglin’s character is formed gradually through the
confluence of his inner aptitudes and talents and through the influence
of external events. There is no final end to Guanglin’s course other
than a casual reference to his departure for university.
From the above analysis, we can see the links between North Side
Story and Cries in the Drizzle on the one hand, and the Bildungsroman
tradition on the other. First, each story is about a young hero search-
ing for a much fuller realization of the self than what can be ordinarily
achieved in the world in which he grows up—even though the grim
reality of China in the 1970s prevents him from achieving any accom-
modation to that society. Second, the balance between practical living
and the individual’s creative inwardness is explored. The hero’s course
is shaped not simply by his all-important contacts with the social world
of adults and peers, but also by his individual psychology, his fondness
for self-reflection, and his complex inner world.
In spite of commonalities with the Bildungsroman tradition, these
Chinese narratives are distinct as specifically Chinese Bildungsroman
of the post-socialist period. The tragic and parodistic sense of these
Chinese narratives stands out prominently. First, although these nar-
ratives contain the main elements of the traditional Bildungsroman
novel—“childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger
society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a voca-
tion and a philosophy [of life]”—these experiences do not help the
protagonists to achieve maturity, as in the traditional Bildungsroman.
Instead, they generally lead the young heroes to destruction. Second,
the everyday social world that would ordinarily guide the protagonists
and eventually help them accommodate themselves to society instead
proves to be chaotic and violent. This world does not allow them to
find a path leading to a fulfilling relationship with society. Third, the
educative environment of the youthful protagonists is not the world
of parents, teachers, and adult mentors, but rather the barely literate
22
Ibid., 106.
206 chapter five
and merely “street-smart” peer community. Therefore, the “education”

implied in the German bildung does not really occur.23 At best, for
the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution, it is a
negative and often destructive form of education.
Within the modern Chinese literary tradition, there are certain peri-
ods of time when the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo closely follows the
traditional European Bildungsroman genre. Some prominent examples
include: Yu Dafu’s and Ding Ling’s novellas written in the 1920s about
May Fourth students’ frustration and growth; the novels written by Ye
Shaojun and Lu Ling in the 1930s and 1940s about the fate of various
young Chinese intellectuals; and the socialist coming-of-age narratives
written by Yang Mo and Wang Meng in the 1950s. However, in the
post-Mao era, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the coming-
of-age narratives written by Su Tong, Yu Hua, and others who grew
up during the Cultural Revolution deviate from the classic Bildungs-
roman in their tragic, oppositional, and parodistic characteristics. In
the current era of economic reform, widespread commercialization,
and globalization, interest in Chinese Bildungsroman continues among
both readers and writers of Chinese literature. The newest generation
of writers, including Guo Jingming and Han Han, born in the rela-
tively affluent and less chaotic period of the 1980s, has produced a
corpus of youth narratives drastically different from those of Su Tong’s
and Yu Hua’s generation, in terms of thematic concerns, plotting, and
diction. However, these new contemporary narratives continue to be
somewhat parodistic in form: their fictional adolescents, too, are in a
painstaking struggle with feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and loss.
They, too, drift in a society experiencing transition—although now it
is a transition from socialism to state capitalism, and from an ideo-
logical orientation to a preoccupation with financial success. And like
the protagonists of Su Tong and Yu Hua, many of them also fail to
achieve maturity.
23
For a discussion of conceptual history, or Begriffsgeschichte, see Reinhart Koselleck,
“On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” trans. Todd Presner, in
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 170–207.
GLOSSARY
Ah Cheng 阿城
anding tuanjie 安定团结
Ba Jin 巴金
baihua 白话
baihua wen 白话文
“Baixue zhutou” 白雪猪头
Bi’an hua 彼岸花
Bianjin 扁金
Bing Xin 冰心
Binu 碧奴
bu queding de yuyan 不确定的语言
Caizhu de ernümen 财主底儿女们

Cao Wenxuan 曹文轩
Chen Duxiu 陈独秀
Chen Ran 陈染
Chen Sihe 陈思和
“Chenlun” 沉沦
“Cheng hualunche yuanqu” 乘滑轮车远去
Chengbei didai 城北地带
chengzhang xiaoshuo 成长小说
Chen Xiaoming 陈晓明
chi ren 吃人
Chun 春
“Cixiu” 刺绣
Congwen zizhuan 从文自传
dadao 打倒
Dai Houying 戴厚英
Dai Jinhua 戴锦华
Dangdai zhongguo wenxue gaiguan 当代中国文学概观
Dasheng 达生
dazhonghua de yuyan大化的语言
De Qing 德清
208 glossary
Deng Huoqu 邓豁渠

Deng Shaoxing 邓少香
dizhu 地主
“Dibage shi tongxiang” 第八个是铜像
Ding Ling 丁玲
Dongtian li de tonghua 冬天里的童话
Du Heng 杜衡
Fan Guobin 樊国宾

fangeming 反革命
fazhan xiaoshuo 发展小说
“Feiyue wo de fengyangshu guxiang” 飞越我的枫杨树故乡
Feng Jicai 冯冀才
Feng Zhi 冯至
Fengyangshu cun xilie 枫杨树村系列
Fugui 福贵
funong 富农
Fu Zheng 福徵
gaizao de duixiang 改造的对象

“Gudian aiqing” 古典爱情
guli 古礼
Guo Moruo 郭沫若
Guo Dengfeng 郭登峯
Guoqing 国庆
“Guoqu suitan” 过去随谈
Haiyan 海盐
haohan 好汉
He’an 河岸
He Xifan 何希凡
“Hebian de cuowu” 河边的错误
hei wu lei 黑五类
Hong 虹
Hong Zicheng 洪子诚
“Hongfen” 红粉
Honglou meng 红楼梦
Hongqi 红旗
Hongqi pu 红旗谱
glossary 209
Hongwa 红瓦
Hu Feng 胡风
Hu Shi 胡适
Hu Zhi 胡直
huaifenzi 坏份子
Huang Jinfu 黄金夫
Huang Tingjian 黄庭坚
Huangdi 黄帝
Huhan yu xiyu 呼喊与细雨
Huozhe 活着
ji 记
Jia 家
Jiang Huixian 江慧仙
jiaoyu xiaoshuo 教育小说
Jiaxing 嘉兴
Jinguang dadao 金光大道
Jin ping mei 金瓶梅
jiyi de luoji 记忆的逻辑
juedui de ziyou 绝对的自由
Kang Youwei 康有为

Kangzheng suming zhi lu 抗争宿命之路
Kongpi 空屁
Kuangshan fengyun 矿山风云
“Kunxue ji” 困学记
Ku Dongliang 库东亮
Ku Wenxuan 库文轩
lanshi 烂屎
lei 类
Li Mei 李枚
Li Tuo 李陀
Li Yang 李扬
Li Zehou 李泽厚
Liang Bin 梁斌
Liang Qichao 梁启超
liangjia funü 良家妇女
liangzhi 良知
210 glossary
Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao 历代自叙传文钞

“Lihun zhinan” 离婚指南
Li Guangtou 李光头
Lin Bai 林白
Lin Biao 林彪
“Lingyizhong funü shenghuo” 另一种妇女生活
Li Tiemei 李铁梅
Liu Banjiu 刘半九
Liu Na’ou 刘呐鸥
Liu Zaifu 刘再复
Lu Ling 路翎
Lu Qiao 鹿桥
Lu Xinhua 卢新华
Lu Yin 庐隐
Lu Ji 陆机
luan xing 乱性
“Lun sanshi niandai zuoyi dushi xiaoshuo zhong de chengzhang zhuti”
论三十年代左翼都市小说中的成长主题
Mao Dun 茅盾
Mao Qiling 毛奇龄
Mao Xihe xiansheng quanji 毛西河先生全集
Mi 米
Mianmian 棉棉
Mingru xue’an 明儒学案
Mu Shiying 穆时英
muzhiming 墓志铭
Nanren de yiban shi nüren 男人的一半是女人

Nanxun lu 南询录
neixin 内心
“Ni biewu xuanze” 你别无选择
Ni Huanzhi 倪焕之
“Nian fu yi nian” 年复一年
nianpu 年谱
Ouyang Shan 欧阳山

Ouyang Xiu 欧阳修
glossary 211
Qingchun wansui 青春万岁

Qingchun zhige 青春之歌
Qingnian zazhi 青年杂志
“Qiqie chengqun” 妻妾成群
Qiu 秋
ren 仁
Ren a ren 人, 啊, 人
“Renmin de yu” 人民的鱼
San jia xiang 三家巷

“Sanrong zhuiren guang zixu” 三农赘人广自序
“Sangyuan liunian” 桑园留念
“Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日记
Shanghai Baobei 上海宝贝
shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学
“Shangxin de wudao” 伤心的舞蹈
Shanshan de hongxing 闪闪的红星
Shaonian xue 少年血
“Shaonian zhongguo shuo” 少年中国说
sheji jiuren 舍己救人
Shen Congwen 沈从文
shi 诗
shi yan zhi 诗言志
Shi Zhecun 施蛰存
“Shibasui chumen yuanxing” 十八岁出门远行
Shiji 史记
“Shishi ruyan” 世事如烟
“Shu” 曙
shu 恕
Sima Qian 司马迁
Siren shenghuo 私人生活
“Siyue sanri shijian” 四月三日事件
Song Fanping 宋凡平
Song Gang 宋钢
Su Shi 苏轼
Su Tong 苏童
Sun Guanglin 孙光林
212 glossary
Sun Guangming 孙光明

Sun Guangping 孙光平
Sun Jing 孙婧
Sun Kwangtsai 孙广才
Su Yu 苏宇
Tang 糖
Tao Qian 陶潜
Tong Zhonggui 童中贵
tougao jiqi 投稿机器
Wang Anshi 王安石

Wang Haiyan 王海燕
Wang Jie 汪价
Wang Meng 王蒙
Wang Yangming 王阳明
Wang Yinglin 王应麟
Wang Yunxia 汪云霞
“Wangshi yu xingfa” 往事与刑罚
wansui 万岁
Wei Hui 卫慧
“Weihu” 韦护
Weiyang ge 未央歌
Wenfu 文赋
Wennuan de lücheng 温暖的旅程
Wenxuan 文选
wenyan 文言
“Wo danxiao ru shu” 我胆小如鼠
Wo de diwang shengya 我的帝王生涯
“Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi” 我没有自己的名字
Wu Xiangzhi 翔之
Wu Yiqin 义勤
Wu Zetian 武则天
wudou 武斗
“Wuhou gushi” 午后故事
“Xiangei shaonü Yangliu” 献给少女杨柳

Xiangchunshu jie xilie 香椿树街系列
“Xianshi yizhong” 现实一种
glossary 213
“Xianxue meihua” 鲜血梅花

Xiaoguai 小拐
Xiao Tong 萧统
“Xiaoxiao” 萧萧
Xiaoshuo yuebao 小说月报
“Xibeifeng huxiao de zhongwu” 西北风呼啸的中午
Xin qingnian 新青年
xinmin 新民
Xiongdi 兄弟
xiuyang xiaoshuo 修养小说
xu 序
Xu Meixia 许美霞
Xu Sanguan 许三观
Xu Sanguan maixue ji 许三观卖血记
Yang Mo 杨沫
Ye Liwen 叶立文
Ye Shaojun 叶绍钧
Ye Shengtao 叶圣陶
“Ye Shengtao de jiaoyu qingjie yu Ni Huanzhi de xinling bianqian”
叶圣陶的教育情结与倪焕之的心灵变迁
yi lao yong yi 一劳永逸
Yige ren de zhanzheng 一个人的战争
“Yijiu baliu nian” 一九八六年
“Yijiu sanling nian chun shanghai” 一九三0年春上海
“Yijiu sansi nian de taowang” 一九三四年的逃亡
“Yingsu zhijia” 罂粟之家
Youfang zhen 油坊镇
youtong 幼童
youpai 右派
Yu Dafu 郁达夫
Yu Hua 余华
Yu Luojin 遇罗锦
Yu Xian 余弦
Yuan Tingdong 袁庭栋
Zai xiyu zhong huhan 在细雨中呼喊

zaolian 早恋
Zhang Hong 张闳
214 glossary
Zhang Xianliang 张贤亮

Zhang Xuexin 张学昕
Zhang Yingzhong 张应中
Zhao Chuntang 赵春堂
Zhao Hongqin 赵洪琴
zhi 志
zhong 钟
zhong 终
Zhongshan 钟山
Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng 中国当代文学史教程
Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun 中国现代思想史论
“Zhongguo xiandai chengzhang xiaoshuo de xushixue yanjiu” 中国现
代成长小说的叙事学研究
zhuan 传
zhulin qi xian 竹林七贤
zi 自
“Ziwei muzhiming” 自为墓志铭
Zou Rong 邹容
Zuben Hanshan dashi nianpu shuzhu 足本憨山大师年谱疏注
zunming wenxue 遵命文学
“Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqingren” 组织部新来的年轻人
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——. “Gaobie xuwei de xingshi” 告别虚伪的形式 [Farewell to hypocritical form].
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INDEX
Abrams, M. H., 24 Pickowicz, Paul G., 1, 10

Ah Cheng, 111, 121 Walder, Andrew G., 1, 11
anding tuanjie, 114 chi ren, 144
autobiographical fiction/novel/story/ coming-of-age narrative, 1, 3–5, 7, 8, 9.
writing(s), 8, 24–25, 33, 36–39, 45, 83 See also chengzhang xiaoshuo
autobiography, 8, 24–25. See also zhuan Cultural Revolution, 1, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11,
67, 71–72, 76, 92–93, 99–100, 103,
Ba Jin, 63 114–115, 129–131
baihua, 39, 42, 47
Bakhtin, M. M., 3, 8, 25–26, 152–153 Dai Houying, 67
Bakken, Bórge, 80–81, 99–100, 102, Dai Jinhua, 29
114–115 Ding Ling, 27, 47–51
Beijing, 17, 56, 66, 83, 139 “Miss Sophie’s Diary”/“Shafei nüshi
Beijing Literature, 77, 84 de riji,” 48–51, 54
Beijing Normal University, 82 Dream of Red Mansions, A, 38, 88, 121
Bi’an hua, 69 Duke, Michael S., 43–44
Bildung, 3–4, 17, 20, 22, 29, 50, 195–206
Bildungsroman, 1, 3–4, 5, 8, 10, 13–32, fazhan xiaoshuo, 29
187–188. See also chengzhang Feng Zhi, 29
xiaoshuo & Bildung Five Black Categories, 111
inwardness, 8, 16, 20, 23, 47 formulaic (writing/stories/fiction),
outwardness, 8, 16, 20, 47 53–54, 82, 153, 189–190, 192
phantom genre, 20
plot of Bildungsroman, 20–22 genre, 14–15
symbolic form of modernity, 16, 47 dialectical relation between literary
youth, 16–17, 39, 70 genre and social reality, 15
Bing Xin, 47 Goethe, J. W. Von, 17–18, 20, 29–30
biographical novel, 24–25 Sorrow of Young Werther, The, 29
biography, 8, 24–25. See also zhuan Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,
Bruford, W. H., 3–4 17–18, 29, 198–199
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, 16, 21 Goldman, Merle, 48
Guo Moruo, 28, 41
Cao Wenxuan, 29
Chen Duxiu, 28, 41–42, 56 history of Bildungsroman, 15–27
Chen Ran, 68 Blanckenburg, Friedrich von, 18
Private Life/Siren shenghuo, 68 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 3, 18–19, 27
Chen Sihe, 30 Entwicklungsroman, 19–20, 29
chengzhang xiaoshuo, 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, Erziehungsroman, 19
27–31, 187–195 Hardin, James, 27
Green Henry, 29 Martini, Fritz, 15, 17–18
Romanticism, 39, 44 Morgenstern, Karl Von, 17
youth consciousness/mentality, 13, Honglou meng. See Dream of Red
27–28 Mansions, A
youth discourse, 28–29, 39–40, 46 Hu Feng, 61, 63
Chiang Kai-shek, 52, 55–56, 60 Hu Shi, 28, 41–42
Chinese Cultural Revolution as History,
The, 1, 11 Japanese I-novel, 39, 44–46
Esherick, Joseph W., 1, 10 jiaoyu xiaoshuo, 29
226 index
Kafka, Franz, 138, 140 post-Mao(-era), 13, 33, 46, 70, 115, 153,
Kawabata Yasunari, 138, 140 206
Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 44, 49. See also Rice, Philip F., 106, 114, 170
Romanticism
Li Mei, 53 Salinger, J. D., 75, 77
Li Yang, 29, 65–66 Catcher in the Rye, The, 75, 77–78, 81,
Li Zehou, 70, 191 109–110
Liang Qichao, 28, 40–41, 45 Nine Stories, 77, 79
Lin Bai, 68 Sammons, Jeffrey, 20, 22
One Person’s War/Yige ren de Scar Literature, 67
zhanzheng, 68–69 Lu Xinhua, 67
Liu Banjiu, 29 Schoenhals, Michael, 10
Liu Jianmei, 114, 159 self-referential fiction, 46–47
Liu Na’ou, 59 Self-strengthening Movement, 40
Liu Zaifu, 191 Shanghai, 52–56, 59, 89
Lu Ling, 60–63 Shanghai Literature, 89
Children of the Rich/Caizhu de Shen Congwen, 59
ernümen, 60–63 Shi Zhecun, 59
Lu Xun, 28, 41, 45, 52, 143–146 Su Tong, 1, 4–9, 34, 70–73, 75–130,
“Madman’s Diary, A,” 143–146 187–206
Lu Yin, 47 “An Afternoon Incident”/“Wuhou
gushi,” 9, 76, 85, 94–96
MacFarquhar, Roderick, 10, 71 Binu and the Great Wall/Binu, 2, 9,
Mann, Thomas, 3, 22–24, 50, 145, 196 86–87
Magic Mountain, The, 3–4, 50, 145, “Blush”/“Hongfen,” 6, 88
196, 205 Boat to Redemption, The/He’an, 2, 9,
Mao Dun, 53, 58 122–129
Mao Zedong, 1, 60, 64, 67–68, 71, 96, Bianjin, 129
114, 189 “Casual Talks on the Past”/“Guoqu
“Talks at the Yan’an Forum on suntan,” 90–93
Literature and Art,” 60, 64, 188 “catcher,” 78, 81, 95–96, 98–99,
Mao-era, 29, 64, 68, 129, 138–139, 153, 110–114, 167, 203
159, 169, 188–190, 192–194 Dasheng, 100–122, 188–206
May Fourth, the, 1, 8, 28, 33, 43–47, 50, “Drawing upon Childhood,” 7
58, 187 “Embroidery”/“Cixiu,” 6, 88
memoir, 8, 16, 24–25 Empress Dowager Wu Zetian/Wu
Mianmian, 69 Zetian, 6, 73, 86
miniature of the Bildungsroman, 13 “Guide to Divorce”/“Lihun zhinan,”
Moretti, Franco, 8, 15–16 89
Way of the World, The, 8 Ku Dongliang, 122–129
Mu Shiying, 59 Maple-Poplar Village Series/
Fengyangshu cun xilie, 6, 86–87
nativist, 59 “Memories of Mulberry
neo-perceptionalist, 59 Garden”/“Sangyuan liunian,” 9,
New Youth, 28, 41–42, 56, 61 77–81, 199
novel of development. See My Life as Emperor/Wo de diwang
Entwicklungsroman shengya, 2, 6, 9, 86–87, 89
Nanjing, 75, 82, 122
parodistic Bildungsroman, 1, 3–5, 8, 10, North Side Story/Chengbei didai, 2, 9,
187–206 100–122, 190–192, 194, 196–197,
parody, 4, 76. See also parodistic 200, 202, 204–205
Bildungsroman “Opium Family” “Yingsu zhijia,” 87
pedagogical novel. See Erziehungsroman Rice/Mi, 2, 6, 9, 73, 79, 86–87
index 227
“Roller Skating Away”/“Cheng Haiyan, 138, 139, 149

hualunche yuanqu,” 9, 96–97, 190, Hangzhou, 149
199 “I Have No Name of My Own”/
“Sad Dance, The”/“Shangxin de “Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi,” 9,
wudao,” 9, 97–99 180–182
Suzhou, 76, 82, 90, 93, 122 “indeterminate language”/bu queding
Tong Zhonggui, 90 de yuyan, 137–138
Toon Street Series/Xiangchunshu jie Jiaxing, 139
xilie, 9, 94–122 “logic of memory”/jiyi de luoji, 151
“White Snow and a Pig’s “Mistakes by the Riverside”/“Hebian
Head”/“Baixue zhutou,” 89 de cuowu,” 40, 148
Young Blood/Shaonian xue, 8 “On the Road at Eighteen”/“Shibasui
Swales, Marin, 3, 4, 8, 14, 19, 202 chumen yuanxing,” 9, 13, 16,
German Bildungsroman from Wieland 133–136, 138, 140–142, 147
to Hesse, The, 3, 8 “One Kind of Realty”/“Xianshi
yizhong,” 148, 169
Voyage In, The, 27 “popular language of the masses”/
dazhonghua de yuyan, 137
Xin Qingnian. See New Youth Sun Guanglin, 155–180
Xinhai Revolution, 41, 55 “This Story Is for Willow”/“Xiangei
xiuyang xiaoshuo, 29 shaonü Yangliu,” 151
“Timid as a Mouse”/“Wo danxiao ru
Yang Mo, 64, 188–189 shu,” 9, 180–182
Song of Youth, The/Qingchuan zhige, To Live/Huozhe, 2, 6, 10, 150, 152,
64–67, 188–189 156, 158, 160
Ye Shengtao, 54–58 “Year Nineteen Eighty-Six,
Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, 54–58 The”/“Yijiu baliu nian,” 139, 140,
Yu Dafu, 27, 45, 48–51 143, 148, 182
“Sinking”/“Chenlun,” 45, 48–51
Yu Hua, 1, 4–8, 34, 70–73, 131–186, Zhou Zuoren, 45
187–206 Zhuan, 34–39
“April Third Incident, The”/“Siyue Deng Huoqu, 37
sanri shijian,” 9, 68, 133, 142–147, historiography, 35
178–180 Hu Zhi, 37
“Blood and Plum Blossoms”/“Xianxue Huang Tingjian, 34
meihua,” 73, 142 Lu Ji, 35
Brothers/Xiongdi, 2, 9, 183–186 Ouyang Xiu, 34
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant/Xu Shiji, 35
Sanguan maixue ji, 2, 6, 10, 150, Sima Qian, 35
152, 156, 158, 160 Su Shi, 34
“Classical Romance, A”/“Gudian Wang Anshi, 34
aiqing,” 72 Wang Yangming, 36–37
Cries in the Drizzle/Zai xiyu zhong Wu Pei-yi, 36–38
huhan, 2, 7, 9, 131–133, 152, Xiao Tong, 35
154–180, 190–194, 196–199, 200, Zen Buddhist accounts, 36
203, 205 Zou Rong, 41
“Contrived Works”/“Xuwei de
zuopin,” 137, 148

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Contemporary Chinese Fiction

by Su Tong and Yu Hua

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Li, Hua, 1969–

Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by

Chapter One Bildungsroman/Chengzhang Xiaoshuo as a

Chapter Two The Changing Patterns of the Bildungsroman

Chapter Three Fallen Youth: A Solitary Outcast ...................... 75

Chapter Four Fallen Youth: A Trembling Loner ...................... 131

Chapter Five Tragic and Parodistic Bildungsroman ................. 187

Glossary ............................................................................................... 207

I have received valuable assistance and unstinting encouragement

They experienced a unique coming of age. Exactly

era to 1966 betray a tendency toward a gradual victory of the collec-

questions both the cloistered social world in which Castorp constructs

are referred to as “coming-of-age novellas,” “coming-of-age stories,”

Despite the neglect of literary critics, both Su Tong and Yu Hua

works seek to identify how individuals, especially the young, survived

In contrast, chengzhang xiaoshuo written during the 1980s and 1990s

these works constitute a haunting history of fear, restlessness, and day-

Pickowicz’s and Andrew G. Walder’s The Chinese Cultural Revolution

When discussing post-Mao fiction, especially the experimental writ-

genre of Bildungsroman to visualize and conceptualize their personal

literary genre, Franco Moretti calls Bildungsroman the “symbolic form”

imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in

education, as opposed to the conception of the novel as mere enter-

the growth of the young protagonist by focusing on the character’s

end of most Bildungsroman narratives, the young protagonist achieves

discursiveness, preoccupied with the development of mind and soul,

between the Bildungsroman and other related genres, particularly the

outward difficulties such as “an uncomprehending husband [or] eco-

The emergence of the Chinese Bildungsroman paralleled the emer-

dungsroman from the May Fourth era down to contemporary times

jiaocheng), Chen Sihe refers to Wang Meng’s “Newcomer in the Orga-

young protagonist, and discloses the dynamic and malleable nature of

THE CHANGING PATTERNS OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN

Though the Bildungsroman is a literary genre that originated in the

a gradual revival of individuality and subjectivity, and a marginaliza-

Antecedents of the Bildungsroman: Zhuan in Pre-modern

When we look back through China’s literary tradition, we cannot find

Among these genres, the zhuan most resembles that of biography.

study of autobiographical writings in traditional China. In the book, Pei-yi Wu exam-

Attention to the differences between autobiography and biogra-

can be called “spiritual autobiography.”10 Examples can be found in the

economic, social, and intellectual demands placed on individuals to

From the above review of autobiographical writings in pre-modern

Bildungsroman in Modern Chinese Literature

As we saw in Chapter One, the emergence of Bildungsroman novels was

idiom; and the tremendous cultural and socio-political changes that

lican Era (1912–1949). This new identity of Chinese youth echoes

the linguistic and stylistic parameters for the emergence of Chinese

honesty and sincerity, defiance of philistine conventions, emancipation

The efforts of Zhou and his contemporary intellectuals familiarized

Bildungsroman is a literary genre that portrays the maturation of a

environment which valued individuality and subjectivity.”42 Merle

sexual hang-ups can be partially explained in the framework of the

institutionalized restrictions of marriage, a regular job, or school.”49

In the 1920s and 1930s, political conflicts between the Guomindang

Fourth generation to approach their writing from a more politicized

Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih was one of the earliest full-length novels

disappointed, finding that no significant changes have taken place in

by Wang Leshan’s sacrifice of his life in the struggle, as well as the