Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 12 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
This is a novel against the despotism of the family. It’s about two young people who get to know each other aged between eight and 12, and they’re in love, but then their families have to leave Peking at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, in 1898-1901. What is interesting in the novel, although it’s very sentimental, is the idea of individual freedom, and also the way the young people rebel against this domination of the family and the way they find other means to live.
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. I think that it’s really very close to the Chinese people’s most inner sensibility and sense of aesthetics, and of the beauty of life, nature and true relations with other individuals.
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Marianne Bastid-Bruguière studied and taught at Beijing University in 1964-65. She joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris in 1969, where she is now Director of Research, with her own studies focusing on modern China. She has been a visiting Professor of Chinese Studies at Harvard, and in London, Tokyo, Kyoto and Beijing. She was on the executive committee of China Quarterly magazine for 25 years. She received the Légion d’Honneur in April 2010.
