Marianne Bastid-Bruguière on Life in China

Your first book?

I’ve always been interested in Chinese attitudes towards life: towards what happens, the misfortunes of life, and how they handle life in their society. And I think that, although you get a lot of hard facts through the historical record, of course, in order to get the mood and to understand deeper you need to look into literature. The first novel I really like is The Water Margin. It’s one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature, but it’s very different because it’s a story of bandits – in a way it’s like a Chinese equivalent of Robin Hood.

The novel came out of stories told among the people before the 14th century, and all these folk tales were taken together and put into written form by someone called Shi Naian, although it’s not even sure if this man existed. The story is based upon some historical facts: there was a bandit called Song Jiang who rebelled against the Song dynasty in the early 12th century. The novel takes the story of this bandit and his companions, and puts them into a kind of epic tale of rebellion against tyranny, which has been thrilling and inspiring Chinese readers for centuries. The novel is beautiful, because the personal stories of each of the bandits are taken together and also pursued individually, and as you have 108 characters it’s an extraordinary feat. It’s very vivid, and it shows the reactions of ordinary Chinese people: how they have a sense of justice, generosity, and humanity. And it also shows the extraordinary violence of Chinese society, and the way people make their lives with that: how they are able to subdue this violence, and turn it into human relations.

Are the bandits heroes?

Yes, they are the good guys! They are all painted as heroes of justice and people who want to be righteous, but in the end the chief bandit surrenders to the Emperor. Of course this has been disturbing to the Communist interpreters of this novel, but it is also very telling because it shows that Chinese people still have this feeling of justice, that they want to stick together.

What I think is interesting is that we often have an idea of China as a beautiful, great thing which is harmonious, and so grand that nobody dares to attack it. Here you see it in another light, and at the same time you understand how the people, despite their rebellions, like to be in an orderly society – and that tension is very strong in this novel. It shows that people are not slaves, they’re not blind to what is going on in their society and they’re able to act against it. It also gives ideas about what people like in life: how they like to drink wine and enjoy life and how they find ways to have a decent life even if they don’t have money or much means to do it. It’s extremely full of life, and it shows many aspects of Chinese social life in a very realistic way.

Let’s go on to Six Records of a Floating Life.

This is quite different – it’s a very short book. Shen Fu was a clerk who was born into a family of literati in 1763. What is interesting is that he tells a story of love, and of love between husband and wife, which is quite unusual in Chinese literature. He wrote a story of his life after his wife of 23 years had died, and it wasn’t published at the time but was discovered later and published in 1877.

It had enormous success because it was a very candid description of happiness despite misfortunes, and of the enjoyment of all the aesthetic sides of life. He loved painting, travelling, looking at landscape, and he loved looking at the moon with his wife. His wife was, in fact, his cousin, whom he had known since he was 13, and she is a very straightforward and very educated young lady. It’s about the way that intellectual people in China, and also ordinary people – because the young couple often meet peasants when they are looking at the moon – can enjoy everything that is beautiful in life, and the sincerity of the book is something extraordinary. Shen Fu says: ‘I don’t care about conventions.’ But also he’s a very dutiful son and is very faithful to the family.

It’s a picture both of the strength of the family and the domination that social ties exert on individuals, and the way that individuals were able to live for themselves, and enjoy simple things, and give a sense to their lives. The description of this love between him and his wife and the way they went on, despite sometimes being very poor and having no money, is a very true picture, and it goes deep inside the individuals and their humanity.

How would married life have differed from life in the West at the time?

It was written in about 1806 and that’s about the same time as Pride and Prejudice. Although it’s far away, and although Shen Fu didn’t know anything about foreign culture (though he buys something from some foreigners in the book, probably merchants), the mood, and the emphasis on sincerity and true love without conventions, or despite conventions, very much reminds me of the British novel at the time. It’s strange because it’s so far away, but in the sensibility and the disdain for riches and how what is important is to have a genuine life it’s very close. Also this idea that you have people who are more delicate than others, and they feel life and they feel beauty, because the sense of beauty is very strong in this book and it communicates to readers the aesthetic sense of the Chinese.