Jottings from the Granite Studio

Today is the birthday of the celebrated novelist, playwright, and also YJ’s favorite author, Lao She, born Shu Qingchun in Beijng, 1899. His family was Manchu, members of the Red Banner, and Lao She’s father was killed defending the city against the Allied Expeditionary Force sent to quell the Boxer Uprising. After her husband’s death, his mother took to working as a laundry woman to support herself and her son. Remembering those years, Lao She would later write:

“During my childhood, I didn’t need to hear stories about evil ogres eating children and so forth; the foreign devils my mother told me about were more barbaric and cruel than any fairy tale ogre with a huge mouth and great fangs. And fairy tales are only fairy tales, whereas my mother’s stories were 100 percent factual, and they directly affected our whole family.”

As a young man, he worked as a teacher and school administrator in Beijing and Tianjin, before leaving for England, where he took a position as a lecturer in Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. It was there in 1926 that Lao She wrote his first novel, The Philosophy of Old Zhang.

Lao She would go on to write some of the most brilliant works in modern Chinese literature, including the science fiction satire Cat Country (1932), the novel Rickshaw Boy (1936), and the play Teahouse (1957).

Sadly, he was also one of the many literary notables destroyed by the frenzied anti-intellectual thuggery of the Cultural Revolution. According to one story, on August 23, 1966, members of the Red Guard rounded up Lao She and about two dozen other authors and dragged them to the grounds of the Confucian Temple and Imperial Academy in Beijing. There he was beaten and forced to his knees for hours while wearing a placard around his neck denouncing him as a “counter-revolutionary.”

As Lao She knelt on the ground in his pain and humiliation, the Red Guards continued to hit and torment the elderly writer until late into the night, when the battered and bruised author was finally handed over to his family and taken home. The next day, Lao She went to the shores of the reedy slough known as Taiping Lake (near present day Jishuitan) and there drowned himself in the turgid water.*

This is a passage from Lao She’s first published novel, The Philosophy of Old Zhang.

What sort of fellow was Chao Four?

Things everyone else liked, he didn’t; things no one else liked, he did. Plans everyone else made for their own benefit, he wouldn’t make; plans no one else made–for the benefit of others–he was full of them.

Unfortunately, his money ran out before his taste for fun. He looked for no return of the money he was always giving away, and so there was no return; what was more, the people who had favors from him were now even readier to ignore him than those who had not. Many a time, he would go up to someone, “Excuse me…,” but their necks would twist and he would be facing the back of their head. Whereupon Chao Four would go outside the city, collect a pile of brickbats and chalk a circle on the city wall. Then he would try out his wrist and his eye against the day he would be aiming at heads.

To Chao Four’s way of thinking it was all just a game: when there’s money I treat you to dumplings, when there isn’t I treat you to brickbats, in reality it’s the same thing. The strange part was that so soft were the people’s heads, they could enjoy the dumplings but they couldn’t take the bricks. And once he really did split a head wide open and out gurgled the red rich blood that properly belongs there. And so Chao Four was hauled off to jail by the policeman and did his three months’ hard.

The ordinary sort of man contemptuously hangs a label marked ‘bandit’ on anyone who has been in prison. The bandit himself, on the other hand, dignifies the jailbird with the title of ‘bravo.’ Which of them is right, I’d rather not say.”

———

*Other accounts suggest that he didn’t commit suicide, but was in fact beaten to death at the hands of the Red Guards, who then simply dumped his body in the lake.

Source and translation:
Cyril Birch. “Lao She: The Humourist in His Humour, “The China Quarterly, No. 8. (Oct. - Dec., 1961), pp. 45-62.

Other sources and references:
An Intellectual History of Modern China, Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)
Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China. (W.W. Norton, 1990)
老舍纪念网 An online memorial to Lao She (zh)