Selected Stories of Xiao Hong by Xiao Hong

First published: 1982

Type of work: Short stories

Form and Content

Xiao Hong was one of the best writers in modern Chinese literature. Her short stories, which are related to her novels in theme, characterization, and style, are essential to understanding both Xiao Hong as a Chinese woman writer and her creative development. This collection contains nine of her most representative short stories arranged in chronological order.

“The Death of Wang Asao” was Xiao Hong’s first attempt at fiction and was a collaboration with her common-law husband Xiao Jun. It actually appeared in their self-bound anthology of short stories and essays, Trudging, in 1933. The story is lyrical as well as class-conscious. It portrays the tragic death of Wang Asao under the cruelty of Landlord Zhang. Wang Asao has three children, but they all die. She adopts the homeless waif Little Huan as her daughter. Her husband, Big Brother Wang, is docked a year’s pay by Landlord Zhang because the horse he is using to work for the landlord breaks its leg. He is driven crazy by anger and burns to death in a haystack fire set at the order of Landlord Zhang. Then the pregnant Wang Asao is kicked by Landlord Zhang and dies in childbirth. The story ends with Little Huan, again homeless, rolling on the ground and bawling like a baby. Despite their sympathy for the dead, the other farmhands never come to see the cause of their deaths, and they even praise Landlord Zhang for his compassion.

“The Bridge” (1936) shows Xiao Hong’s unmistakable feminine style. Through poetic fluidity and musical refrains, Xiao Hong recaptures the tragic fate of a Chinese woman who is called by her husband’s name, Huang Liang, adding the diminutive “zi.” Huang Liangzi is married to a poor man and bears a child on the eastern side of the bridge, but she has to nurse a rich man’s child on the western side of the bridge. The callings from the both sides torture her, split her personality, and confuse her mind. In the end, her own child falls from the bridge into the ditch and drowns. By using expressionistic images, the author subtly questions the inequality between the rich and poor without didacticism.

“Hands” (1936) is Xiao Hong’s best-known story. The story reminds the reader of Jane Eyre’s tough experience at boarding school. Its heroine, Wang Yaming, who comes from a family of dyers with blackened hands, is not rebellious, however, but all-forgiving and self-effacing. Although she is treated as a laughingstock by the headmistress as well as her classmates, is forced to sleep in the hallway, and is forbidden to join the morning drill, she accepts her fate bravely. By caricaturing Wang Yaming, the author skillfully satirizes elitist cruelty as well as the slavish mentality of its victims.

“On the Oxcart” (1937) is also one of Xiao Hong’s best stories. The first-person narrator functions as a sympathetic listener. Through Aunt Wuyun’s sad but touching tale, told in an oxcart on a peaceful ride in the country, the story indicts the evils of war, which not only make men desert their wives but also turn them into deserters who are fated to be executed.

“The Family Outsider” (1937) is an autobiographical tale. Although the seven-year-old narrator is the spoiled insider of the family, she forms an intimate tie with the family black sheep, Second Uncle Yu. Her honest voice constantly seduces the reader back to his or her own childhood.

“Flight from Danger” (1939) portrays a sham revolutionary called He Nansheng, who encourages his students and colleagues to resist the Japanese invasion while he himself flees with his family. The story shows the influence of Lu Xun and Lao She in probing the diseased psychology of its protagonist. The story was later developed into the comic novel Mabole.

“Vague Expectation” (1939) captures the maid Li Ma’s love longings for Liu Lizhi, a bodyguard who joins the army to fight for the nation. It is the only tale in the collection that has an optimistic ending: In Li Ma’s dream, Liu Lizhi wins the war and returns to marry her.

“North China,” first published in a Hong Kong newspaper in 1941, is another story that studies the psychology of the Chinese during a national crisis. When Master Geng was young, he was enlightened and had even secretly joined Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Party; when his son Da Shaoye leaves home to fight the Japanese, however, he refuses to support him. Yet the son’s departure makes his father start thinking. When the father finally becomes obsessed with fighting the Japanese by unceasingly writing to his lost son, his obsession is regarded by his wife and others as madness. He is shut in a garden shelter and is eventually asphyxiated by smoke from the burning charcoal.

“Spring in a Small Town” (1961) is an affectionate story about Jade, a girl who is killed by a feudal marriage. Like many young ladies, Jade loves to dress up and even dares to try fashionable high heels. When she is asked by her mother to marry a man she does not love, however, she dares not say no, and when she falls in love, she is unable to articulate her feelings. Jade pines away and eventually dies (although the man she loved does not even understand why). Apart from challenging feudal customs in this story, Xiao Hong is also concerned with the courage it takes for a woman to break her muteness and assert herself.

Context

Unlike Chinese feminist writer Ding Ling, Xiao Hong seldom addresses gender issues. Although her autobiographical novels Tales of Hulan River and Market Streets reveal a feminist consciousness, her short stories mainly deal with the suffering of the victimized in society and the Chinese mentality during national crisis. Perhaps because of this broad perspective, in 1936 Lu Xun remarked that Xiao Hong “is the most promising of our women writers, and shows possibilities of becoming as much in advance of Miss Ting Ling as the latter was in succeeding Miss Bing Xin.” Xiao Hong’s special contribution to women’s literature is her writing style. Her writing has two prominent features. First is her artistic use of autobiographical materials. Unlike her contemporaries, Xiao Hong was never obsessed with modern solipsism. In her writing, the narrator serves as an objective witness and a natural voice of history. She resists conventional characterization. Her characters, including the narrator, merge with place, rituals, customs, and everyday happenings. Although Xiao Hong was influenced by Agnes Smedley’s autobiographical art in The Daughter of Earth and Upton Sinclair’s social realistic representation in The Jungle, her writing remains distinctively Chinese. The second feature of her writing is a distinctively female style. Although Xiao Hong also wrote about class oppression and war, her style was different from those of the male writers of her time. Her style, as is shown in the story “Bridge” in this collection, is fluid and vocal, a style that anticipates that of the Brazilian woman writer Clarice Lispector.

Bibliography

Chow, Rey. Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. A critical book that examines writing by male and female authors of the May Fourth period and after. The part concerning Xiao Hong analyzes the story “Hands” and its narrative techniques.

Gerstlacher, Anna, et al., eds. Women and Literature in China. Bochum, Germany: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1983. A collection of essays on Chinese women writers. Howard Goldblatt’s “Life as Art: Xiao Hong and Autobiography” gives an informative analysis of Xiao Hong’s use of autobiography in her Market Street: A Chinese Woman in Harbin.

Goldblatt, Howard. Hsiao Hung. Boston: Twayne, 1976. A comprehensive study of Xiao Hong’s life and works. Includes a chronology and a selected bibliography.

Hsaio, Hung. The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Contains the two best novels by Xiao Hong. “Wang Asao” can be read as a prelude to The Field of Life and Death, and “The Family Outsider” was the basis for chapter 6 in Tales of Hulan River. Includes a good introduction by the translator.

Smedley, Agnes. Battle Hymn of China. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. The author recalls that Lu Xun personally recommended Xiao Hong’s novel The Field of Life and Death to her “as one of the most powerful modern novels written by a Chinese woman.”

Snow, Edgar, ed. Living China: Modern Chinese Short Stories. London: George G. Harrap, 1936. Appendix A is Nym Wales’s article “The Modern Chinese Literary Movement,” which discusses Xiao Hong and other modern Chinese writers and includes Lu Xun’s comments on Xiao Hong.