ASIAN HIGHLANDS PERSPECTIVES Volume 20: Ballad of the Huang River and Other Stories

242 Pages·2012·13.639 MB·English

by  Jing Shi (Keith Dede and Susan Su, translators)

Citation: Jing Shi. Translated by Keith Dede and Susan Su. 2012.
Ballad of The Huang River and Other Stories. Asian Highlands
Perspectives. Volume 20.

Front Cover: Huangyuan countryside and Sun Moon Mountains
in Summer. June 2012. Photograph by Zhao Zimo.

Back Cover: Left to right: Jing Shi, his grand-nephew, and
younger brother, in Nalong Village, Huangyuan County. June
2011. Photograph by Keith Dede.

e-mail: [email protected]
hard copy: www.lulu.com/asianhp

online: www.plateauculture.org/asian-highlands-perspectives

ISSN (print): 1835-7741
ISSN (electronic): 1925-6329
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008944256

Call number: DS1. A4739
Subjects: Uplands-Asia-Periodicals
Tibet, Plateau of-Periodicals

© 2012 Keith Dede and Susan Su. This publication may not be
reproduced, translated, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without express prior written permission
from the publisher, unless its source is duly noted and it is not for
commercial purposes. Contact the email above with questions.
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION <5>

THE BALLAD OF THE HUANG RIVER <15>
OLD MAN ZHANG PANS FOR GOLD <87>
THE FANTASTIC TALE OF THE GOLDEN PHOENIX EGG
<167>

INTERVIEW <225>
NON-ENGLISH TERMS <239>

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INTRODUCTION

A round face, framed by longish, slightly unruly bangs and chubby
cheeks, is pulled wide by a somewhat cock-eyed grin that forces
into prominence a pair of protruding front teeth. His eyes are
drawn into narrow slits from the strength of that smile. The
roundness of his head and face extends to his chest and belly,
which are covered in a brightly colored polo shirt that may hang a
bit long, but fits tightly elsewhere. He is laughing, or singing, or
relating an amusing anecdote. He flirts, pleads, plays for laughs,
listens, corrects, explains, argues a bit, but mostly he is trying to
entertain while also enlighten.
Whether seeing him on a television broadcast or sitting
across from him at a banquet table, this is most people's first
impression of Jing Shi. He was born Sun Shengnian (his four-year-
old granddaughter told me in June 2011 that when he is in front of
the computer he is 'Jing Shi,' but otherwise he is 'Grandpa Sun') in
September 1953, at his family's home in the village of Nalong, a
few miles west of the county seat of Huangyuan County in
northeastern Qinghai Province. Educated through primary school
in the village, he left home to attend junior middle school in the
county town. After middle school he enrolled in the Qinghai
Academy of Public Health, from which he graduated in 1973.
Because this period of early education was during the 'Maoist
years', he admittedly didn't get much out of it. The way he puts it,
the leaders had decided that the old textbooks were not sufficiently
revolutionary, so they were discarded, but the leaders never
bothered to find new materials, so there wasn't much to do in
school. Instead, he enjoyed reading stories on his own time, mostly
traditional Chinese stories, such as Journey to the West and
Outlaws of the Marsh. He fondly recounts how as a child, before
he could really read, his mother would have his older brother read
aloud a chapter from one of those stories at night while she did her
sewing. When his brother went away to school, she made Jing Shi
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read the chapter aloud. Even though he couldn't read every word,
he knew enough of the characters on the page for the story to make
sense, and then he would make up the rest.
While at the Qinghai Academy of Public Health, he was
selected to join an elite group of students who were trained to
detect radiation poisoning and, when he graduated, he was
assigned to a work station in western Qinghai. His job was to test
plants, soil, and livestock (mostly sheep) for traces of radioactive
iodine after atmospheric nuclear tests were carried out in Xinjiang.
As he relates it, China was poor back then, so there weren't tests
very often, meaning he had a lot of free time to do whatever he
wanted. Free time meant he had time to visit local herding
families, chat, listen to stories, and drink. But mostly it was free
time for reading.
While still working as a nuclear fallout data-gatherer, he
began editorial work for a local literary journal, Desert Tide (Han
hai chao). The first issue in 1979 included his very first short story,
'The Unfinished Lab Report' (Meiyou xiewan de shiyanjilu).
When China announced that it would end atmospheric
nuclear testing in 1980, he basically lost his day job. Rather than
follow the rest of his work unit into the job of testing radioactive
levels among health workers (radiologists and such), he dropped
his scientific career to pursue life as a writer. His editorial duties
exposed him to a wider range of Chinese writers, and as China
opened up to the outside world in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
he began to read the works of foreign authors.
And yet, as much as this broad taste in reading influenced
his writing, it was always the stories he heard in his home village
that inspired him. Though he left the village at a relatively young
age, the village never left him, and its hold on his imagination was
rejuvenated through frequent visits home to see his family, to visit
relatives, and to listen to the stories of village elders. One story,
about how folks from the village traveled to western Qinghai to dig
for gold and discovered a piece of gold shaped like a bottle-gourd,
forms the basis of the second novella in this collection, 'Old Man
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Zhang Pans for Gold' (Zhang baye taojinji). Similarly, most of Jing
Shi's fiction, from his early short stories to his last novel, The Gold
Dream Disaster (Jin meng jie),1 involve the lives, loves, joys, and
tragedies of the peasants that reside in rural Qinghai Province.
The first story in this collection, 'The Ballad of the Huang
River' (Huangshui yao), is also based on rural life, specifically that
of a woman, widowed at a young age, struggling with the strictures
of traditional beliefs and practices. Elements of the story's
structure, however, were inspired by Mario Vargas Llosa's La
Casa Verde (The Green House),2 and it is by far the most
experimental form Jing Shi has tried. It shifts frames and
perspectives, narrating multiple events from different historical
eras with few overt signals to mark the shifts. This structure
radically challenges the reader to make sense of the entirety of the
heroine's experience before the experience is fully related, while
reinforcing the story's theme of the force of history and tradition in
the present lives and consciousness of villagers. This experimental
form only appears in this one story, however, because as Jing Shi
said, "It's just too difficult," by which I think he meant it was
difficult to write.
His other stories, such as 'Old Man Zhang', included here,
are relatively straightforward narratives. The popularity of his
work is explained in part by the fact that most of his fiction doesn't
require the reader to do mental gymnastics. He is a practiced,
professional storyteller, formally giving the readers more or less
what they expect. The real appeal of his stories, at least for readers
familiar with the stories' settings, lies in his characterization and
language.
Jing Shi's characters are well-wrought, three-dimensional
portraits of rural people his readers can identify with. Whether it's
that uncle from the village behind the mountain, or the busybody
who lives around the corner, his readers identify with them

1 2001. Xining: Qinghai renmin chubanshe [Qinghai People's
Press].
2 1966. Barcelona: Seix Barral.
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because they resemble people his readers know. The image of Old
Man Zhang, wearing a tall, round hat with ear-flaps, a man who
explodes in curses when he is angry, is based on Jing Shi's
recollections of his own father, who was known around the village
as Old Man Sun. The portrayal of Old Man Zhang's wife, Old
Lady Zhang, is based on one of Jing Shi's neighbors who wore an
old yellow headscarf whenever she came outside the house. These
details of portraiture, derived from intimate familiarity with the
people of rural Qinghai, enhance the realism of Jing Shi's
narratives and his readers' identification with them.
The language Jing Shi's characters speak, the Chinese
dialect of northeast Qinghai Province, is the most immediately
recognizable detail identifying them as rural Qinghai folk. Jing
Shi's manipulation of this language within his stories has evolved
over time. In his earlier stories, such as 'The Ballad of the Huang
River', it is mostly used in dialogue, while the narration is
primarily in Standard Chinese. In 'Old Man Zhang', Qinghai dialect
infiltrates the narrator's voice in a limited way. In such later stories
as 'The Fantastic Tale of the Golden Phoenix Egg' (Jinfengdan
chuanqi), included here, the infiltration has proceeded to the point
where it dominates the narrative. While use of dialect for dialogue
adds to the descriptive fullness of a character's portraiture, its use
in the narrator's voice allows the writer to signal when the narrator
is slipping into the perspective of the character, a technique
commonly referred to as free indirect discourse. The narrator's
ability to shift from an omniscient, outside perspective to an
interior, biased one draws the reader more intimately into the story
and into the emotional state of the main characters.
For local readers, the language is relatively easy to
understand and strikes a note of intimacy and comfort, again
adding to their ability to identify with the characters. For readers of
Standard Chinese who do not speak Qinghai Chinese, there are
terms, adages, and idioms that might not be completely
comprehensible, but which nonetheless serve the purpose of
providing colorful, rural depth to the stories' realism. In English
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translation, of course, much of this color and intimacy is lost,
though we have made some attempt to capture the language's rustic
flavor and occasional coarseness.
Readers familiar with Chinese fiction will recognize
common features of xiangtu literature in these characteristics of
Jing Shi's fiction: rural characters, rural settings, and description of
local cultural practices. Like other examples of the genre, Jing
Shi's stories are a complex mix of emotional reactions to village
life, rather than simple, nostalgic paeans to a bucolic ideal. While
the stories reflect a certain longing for a perceived honest
simplicity and natural beauty, that nostalgia is coupled with a
critical representation of the setting's inherent challenges, and the
binds that traditional culture can wrap around rural inhabitants.
The heroine of 'The Ballad of the Huang River', He Zhenlian, is
clearly caught in a struggle between a basic human desire to be
able to choose a new life partner after the death of her husband,
and the restrictions paternalistic village society puts on her
behavior. Old Man Zhang, on the other hand, is squeezed by
cultural requirements to provide his son with a wife and his
inability to navigate the new value system unleashed by the
monetization of village life and human relationships. Jing
Fengshan, the hero of 'The Fantastic Tale', struggles with the twin
binds of poverty and an unusual family structure as he tries to
fulfill his life-long dream. Jing Shi doesn't pass judgment on these
characters, but his provocatively straightforward description
reflects his depth of understanding of the charms and challenges of
the countryside.
The stories also include references to features of
northeastern Qinghai culture, particularly the culture of the Han
Chinese. For example, hua'er – a type of local folk song
traditionally sung as part of young lovers' courtship – plays an
important role in the first two stories. The songs sometimes
expressed naked sexual desire, and thus were forbidden within the
village and in the presence of elders. Nowadays, the songs are
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much tamer and primarily serve as a powerful signifier of local
identity.
There are numerous allusions to Han literary culture
reaching beyond Qinghai. Sun Wukong, the simian hero of the
traditional Chinese novel Journey to the West, is perhaps best
known to English readers through Arthur Waley's abridged
translation, Monkey. 3 Sun Wukong is famous for his
impetuousness and superhuman powers, which include the ability
to change appearance and size in an instant, and so he is compared
to the changeable weather of the Huang River Valley. Qu Yuan
(339 BCE-278 BCE) is one of China's most famous poets. Legend
holds that he was so distraught over politics that he killed himself
by jumping into a river. The local fishermen, who greatly admired
him, raced into the river on their boats to try to save him. This
legend is what underlies the famous dragon boat races on the
Double Fifth Festival, which plays a central role in 'The Ballad of
the Huang River', although the local practices of that holiday are
highlighted in the story. These literary characters are so well
known that even the uneducated among Jing Shi's readers would
understand the allusion.
References to the upheavals of the first decades of
Communist Party rule in China occur in all the stories in this
collection. For example, members of the 'four bad elements'
sileifenzi, are assigned tasks in 'The Ballad of the Huang River'.
The term is a catchall for landlords, rich peasants, counter-
revolutionaries, and troublemakers who became the marginalized
members of the people's communes, established in the
collectivization campaigns of 1956. The 'communal canteens'
mentioned in 'The Fantastic Tale' were established during the Great
Leap Forward in 1957, when the country set out on a foolhardy
experiment in economic expansion. These ideological extremes
serve as a backdrop to the stage on which these stories are set,
reminding readers of the absurdities they suffered through.

3 1943. New York: Grove Press.
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