Book of the Month, April 2009, 巴金's 家

[rob07]

Thanks Meng Lelan. In the immediate future, I don't think I'll have time for anything more than short stories, so it would be great if you could recommend some. I love 祝福 - it is possibly 鲁迅's best. I haven't read 早安北京 - who wrote that?

[gato]

祝福 is beautiful. In a way, it touches on some of the same themes as 家.

[Meng Lelan]

Thanks Roddy I will do that very soon. I do want to comment about 家, though, I read that about ten years ago and it is very well written. I also read 春， 秋 because altogether those three books come together as a set. I actually liked 秋 better than 家， maybe because it was gratifying to see characters from 家 continue their lives and see what they did post 家, so to speak.

[renzhe]

Anyway, how are we doing with "家"?

I'm about half-way through it now and I really like it. It did seem a bit sappy in the first few chapters that set up the characters, but it's coming along very nicely now that the family structure and relationships become clear. Ba Jin obviously identifies with 觉慧 the most, but he still manages to take a step back and poke a joke at this idealism (my favourite sentence: ”梅表姐，我劝你有空多看看新书，好在琴姐家里有，“ 觉慧说，他以为新书可以解决一切的问题。)

I'm very impressed with the characters, so many of them are complex and layered, probably because some of them were based on Ba Jin's own family. My favourite scene was when 梅 meets 瑞珏 for the first time. An event that was feared and avoided by all ends up being so simple and touchingly human, despite the emotional burden.

I think that this makes a great book of the month. Not only is the language accessible, but it also has great description of the Chinese families of the time, the traditions, and the human relations, both the good and the bad.

[gato]

I am almost done with 家. For me, the book makes a better study of its times than a novel. I think it gives a lot of insights about upper-class young Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s. As a novel, it doesn't work as well for me, but maybe I'll say more about that after others are done.

[gato]

These articles by Hu Shi, a leading intellectual in the May 4th movement, provide some background to the intellectual environment of 1920s China.

http://csua.berkeley.edu/~mrl/HuShih/

The Chinese Renaissance

Hu Shih (Hu Shi, 胡适）(1891-1962), Chinese philosopher and essayist, leading liberal intellectual in the May Fourth Movement (1917-23).

This article below by Chen Duxiu on the New Culture Movement might also be of interest. Chen was an editor of "New Youth", mentioned frequently in “家”. He was also a founder of the Chinese Communist Party.

http://www.chenduxiu.net/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=232

新文化运动是什么？

出处：1920年4月1日出版的《新青年》第七卷第五号 作者：陈独秀

[roddy]

Split the discussion about short story readings to here.

[Lu]

I'm barely four chapters in, but I'll definitely finish this one.

I love how very modern 琴 is, she wants to go to the same school as her cousins, not just because they have more interesting subjects and famous teachers, but also because she wants to blaze a trail for her 姐妹. She's so dedicated to modernity that she makes an extra effort to learn to write baihua (she didn't learn that in school!) (And then she uses 低 where Ba Jin uses 的, so either one of them is doing it wrong, or they changed the system between the time when she wrote her letter and when he wrote the book.)

[renzhe]

A small explanation from wikipedia, regarding 琴 and 梅:

Nicknames (小名) :Milk name and «Caricatural name»

Nicknames are usually an alteration of the given name. There are two kinds of nicknames; one given by biological parents to a baby, and one given by the family or a child's friends to another child (綽號/绸号 chuòhào). The first is a nickname to call a baby or child, often made simply by doubling one character of the official name (i.e. official name 德明 -> 明明 mingming), or even their first word. The second one is a caricatural name based on the person's physical attributes, speaking style (小胖 xǐaopang « small big », 小豬 xǐaozhu « small pig »， 蒼蠅 cangying « fly » ). A nickname may consist of the prefix ā (阿) or the diminutive prefix xiǎo (小), followed by part of the given name (usually the last character or occasionally the surname -- but see Forms of address, below). The prefix ā (阿) is more commonly found in the southern regions of China than in the north where the prefix xiăo (小) is more common. Nicknames are rarely used in formal or semi-formal settings. One exception to this is Chen Shui-bian, who is commonly known as A-bian (阿扁) even by himself and in newspaper articles.

I found it useful.

[gato]

An interesting fact about Ba Jin is that he was an anarchist rather than a Communist. Ba Jin is a pen name and comes from the Chinese translation of the names of Bakunin and Kropotkin, two famous anarchists.

This may shed some insight on why there is so much more direct criticism of authoritarism in the book (as in the strict obedience to the dictates of the grandfather-patriarch of the family) than of capitalism.

http://www.crazyenglish.org/zhuanyeyingyu/shishi/2009/0307/39749.html

Ba Jin (real name Li Feigan) was born on November 25, 1904 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, into an official's family. He received a good education under private tutorship.

His pen name was chosen from the Chinese transliterations of the first syllable of the name Bakunin and of the last syllable of the name Kropotkin, two anarchists that he liked.

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4c01c1c5010096dz.html

“巴金”这笔名便采取安那其主义（Anarchism）者巴枯宁（Bakunin）和克鲁泡克金（Kropotkin）两人名字中之一音合成的。安那其主义否认一切原理原则，否认一切政治的社会的威权，而把众人置于平等的共产状态之下，相信这个主义的人自然容易倾向那思想绝对自由的“虚无主义”。

[Lu]

I don't know a lot about Ba Jin, but I was told that he started out as an anarchist, but later changed his views, and that's why for a long time he never told anyone where his pen name came from.

[gato]

The Communists despised the anarchists, so that's probably why he tried to hide his views.

In a 1977 preface to the a new edition of 家, Ba Jin wrote that he was immature when he wrote the book and didn't criticize the evils of feudalism and the exploitation of the poor by land owners thoroughly enough and still showed too sympathy for the characters he criticized. I am guessing that he wrote this out of a political need, and it doesn't represents his true feelings (even though he was already 73 years old by then).

See here for the text of the 1977 preface:

http://www.hxqw.com/wxxsgl/zgwxmz/200605/3468.html

小说里面我个人的爱憎实在太深了。像这样的小说当然有这样或者那样的缺点。我承认：我反封建反得不彻底，我没有抓住要害的问题，我没有揭露地主阶级对农民的残酷剥削，我对自己批判的人物给了过多的同情，有时我因为个人的感情改变了生活的真实……等等、等等。今天的读者对我在一九三一年发表的这本小说会作出自己的判断，不用我在这里罗嗦了。《家》这次重版，除了少数几个错字外，我并未作新的改动。

[renzhe]

The official version is that he saw the folly of his ways once he got a bit older and had a good think about it during the Cultural Revolution. The process involved having his wife die due to refused medical care and being struck by Parkinson's himself. It is understandable that he didn't feel like being too vocal about it as an almost 80 year old man.

Still, the version of the book I have has a foreword written in 1980 in which he goes on in great detail on how influenced he was by Sacco and Vanzetti, so I'm not totally convinced by this official version either.

Also interesting to note is that his life-long friends Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkmann had to flee the Soviet Union precisely because of persecution by the Communist party after the October Revolution.

[gato]

Still, the version of the book I have has a foreword written in 1980 in which he goes on in great detail on how influenced he was by Sacco and Vanzetti, so I'm not totally convinced by this official version either.

Here is the preface from the 1980 edition:

http://www.people.com.cn/GB/wenhua/22226/30600/30601/2207689.html

巴金自传：文学生活五十年

巴金

　　我不是文学家，但是我写作了五十多年。每个人从不同的道路接近文学。我从小就喜欢读小说，有时甚至废寝忘食，但不是为了学习，而是拿它们消遣。我做梦也想不到自己会成为小说家。我开始写小说，只是为了找寻出路。

　　我出身于四川成都一个官僚地主的大家庭，在二三十个所谓“上等人”和二三十个所谓“下等人”中间度过了我的童年，在富裕的环境里我接触了听差、轿夫们的悲惨生活，在伪善、自私的长辈们的压力下，我听到年轻生命的痛苦呻吟。

　　我感觉到我们的社会出了毛病，我却说不清楚病在什么地方，又怎样医治，我把这个大家庭当作专制的王国，我坐在旧礼教的监牢里，眼看着许多亲近的人在那里挣扎，受苦，没有青春，没有幸福，终于惨痛地死亡。他们都是被腐朽的封建道德、传统观念和两三个人一时的任性杀死的。我离开旧家庭就像摔掉一个可怕的黑影。我二十三岁从上海跑到人地生疏的巴黎，想找寻一条救人、救世，也救自己的路。说救人救世，未免有些夸大，说救自己，倒是真话。当时的情况是这样：我有感情无法倾吐，有爱憎无处宣泄，好像落在无边的苦海中找不到岸，一颗心无处安放，倘使不能使我的心平静，我就活不下去。一九二七年春天我住在巴黎拉丁区一家小小公寓的五层楼上，一间充满煤气和洋葱味的小屋子里，我寂寞，我痛苦，在阳光难照到的房间里，我想念祖国，想念亲人。在我的祖国正进行着一场革命与反革命的斗争，人民正在遭受屠杀。在巴黎掀起了援救两个意大利工人的运动，他们是沙柯（N．Sacco）和樊宰底（B．Vanzetti），他们被诬告为盗窃杀人犯，在美国麻省波士顿的死囚牢中关了六年，在我经常走过的街上到处张贴着为援救他们举行的“演讲会”、“抗议会”的海报。我读到所谓“犯人”之一的樊宰底的“自传”，里面有这样的话：“我希望每个家庭都有住宅，每个口都有面包，每个心灵都受到教育，每个人的智慧都有机会发展。”我非常激动，樊宰底讲了我心里的话。

[renzhe]

I'm still reading. I haven't had as much time as I'd like recently.

Perhaps I'm imagining, but I'm enjoying the slight touches of irony. The fact that 觉慧 is too busy writing about the horrors of the society to notice the same thing taking place in front of his eyes almost feels like a poke at the detachment of the intelligentsia from the real troubles of the people.

And 云剑's rant (to 觉民 of all people) almost seems satirical.

[randall_flagg]

OK, I haven't read any of the posts in this thread, just for the fact that I haven't been able to even get started on the book! This is not fun, especially since it was me who started this thread. I am so bummed about it, I haven't even been on the forums for the last couple of weeks (although I am always logged on, so I don't know how that shows up). I feel guilty about letting you guys down AND I am sad to be missing out on this. The reason why I have been so crazy busy is that I have been cracking down on my thesis.

I had a nice thesis planned out and had put more than three months of work into it...and then I ditched it! This is like the first time I've ever gone back on an academic commitment I made, so it kind of sucks. That's why I am putting in double time to work on my brand new thesis. I have read about 15 books cover to cover over the last 3 weeks and I finally know what direction my thesis is headed, so yeah for me!

Again, I feel so sorry about letting you guys down, especially renzhe. Like I said, I haven't even started on the book, so I am NOT reading any of the posts for now -- saving it for later.

Hope to be back from The Land of Books sometime soon.

Randall

[renzhe]

I was going to read to book anyway, so no worries.

[randall_flagg]

Still sucks, man. I WISH I could read it, though! But hey, I'm going on a five-day trip in about three weeks, so I hope I can get around to at least starting it (if the fish aint bitin')!

[Lu]

No worries, the book has been around for quite some time, and it'll probably still be there when you've finished your thesis :-) You can still join the thread later. Anyway I'm glad about the suggestion, it's a good book that I probably wouldn't have picked up otherwise.

[renzhe]

OK, I've finally finished this one. I would have finished earlier, but I've had a number of things occupy me over the weekends, so I fell behind.

Overall, I really thoroughly enjoyed this book. The weaknesses listed by other posters (wushijiao and gato mainly) and which were acknowledged by 巴金 himself, didn't bother me at all. I found it emotionally strong, with believable, plastic characters and it kept moving at a nice pace. Perhaps I'm a revolutionary at heart so I identified with it or something. It's scary how much of the subject matter still applies today all around the world. The circumstances change, but the generation gap and the conflict between the old and new are still relevant.

In the beginning, I identified with 觉民 the most. 觉慧 seemed too whiny at times, and it felt like he wasn't looking at the whole picture and was insisting on conflict where more shrewd methods could be more beneficial to everyone, but towards the end, I sided with him the most. Perhaps that's the message 巴金 wanted to convey, one of direct resistance and a cut with the old ways. Or maybe he (觉慧 ) grew up throughout the book, in any case, so many times he was the only one who dared to say what really needs to be said. On a related note, I had a lot of sympathy for 觉新 and his situation in the beginning, but I ended up resenting him at the end of the book. This was almost certainly intended by the author.

In any case, I recommend this book to all learners, including intermediate-level learners. The language is very easy, and there is much to be learned about old traditions, family structure, and the state of the country at that time. It is clearly written by somebody who detested this environment, but the fact that this feeling was based on the author's own childhood also carries some weight, as does the fact that he had to run away to study (like 觉慧) in order to break free from it.