by Shen Congwen; trans. by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine the China that existed before the Communist Revolution. A staggering eighty-five percent of China’s population lived in rural farming villagesi. Poor transportation meant that most of these villages, especially the ones in author Shen Congwen’s mountainous homeland of western Hunan, were remarkably isolated from the outside world: it took one British traveler at the turn of the century four months to travel across the country and backii. Since 1949, dramatic infrastructure improvements and massive urban migration have irrevocably changed and in some cases, destroyed these rural societies. Still, it is possible to visit the picturesque Sichuan/Hunan border and see farmers in the shadows of giant mountains plowing rice terraces by hand, hundreds of miles away from the closest city. The outside observer can only dream what life is like for these farmers, living the same way they have for centuries, far from the reach of modern civilization.

It is precisely this way of life that Shen seeks to capture in his touching 1936 novel, Border Town, a pastoral romance reminiscent of Daphnis and Chloe. Border Town is one of those marvelous small books that seeks only to tell the story of a single simple relationship. That relationship is between a young girl, Cuicui and her elderly grandfather, a ferry operator. Their home is the title border town of Chadong, a place where modernity has no foothold. The only connections to the outside world are the river, and an imperial highway built centuries ago; the only government authority is a tiny garrison of troops left behind by a long disbanded military force. Time in Border Town is marked not by political events, which are alluded to only briefly, but by the yearly tradition of the Dragon Boat festival. Even the prostitutes of Chadong are untouched by the corrupting influences of civilization:

Short-term commitments, long-term engagements, one night stands – these transactions with women’s bodies, did not feel degrading or shameful to those who did business with their bodies, nor did those on the outside use the concepts of the educated to censure them or look down on them. These women put principles before profit and they kept their promises; even if they were prostitutes, they tended to be more trustworthy than city people who knew all about ’shame’.

Although Border Town is at points overly sentimental, Shen’s spare, no-nonsense prose (beautifully translated into plain, un-Orientalized English by Jeffrey C. Kinkley) makes the dream-like, solitary existence of Cuicui and her grandfather a tangible reality.

What makes this novel effective, believable, and remarkably poignant, however, is the constant sense that the world of Chadong cannot last forever. Chadong is always described nostalgically, as a place that no longer exists, where Cuicui’s family “once lived.” Cuicui’s grandfather will not live forever: he believes that it’s “time for him to have his rest, but Heaven wouldn’t agree.” The rumblings of the outside world, while distant, can still be heard: American kerosene is traded in the market of Chadong, and the terrifying anarchy of Republican China lurks in the background. The idea of Chadong as a lost paradise also has a subversive political subtext. Chadong is a multi-ethnic society, where the Miao ethnic minority and Han Chinese villagers peacefully co-exist, and the intrusion of civilization and the state—as Shen, who was both Miao and Han, was painfully aware—often means the suppression of ethnic difference.
But the real pathos of the novel lies in the way that the unstoppable encroachment of civilization is echoed by the inevitability of Cuicui’s coming of age. In Chinese, “Border Town” is homophonous with “to become”, and the title border is not only the physical border between Hunan and Sichuan, but also the transition between childhood and adulthood. As we watch Cuicui grow from Dragon Boat festival to Dragon Boat festival, Shen reminds us that even in Arcadia, there is no growing up without the sacrifice of innocence. No one is more aware of the dangers of adolescence than the grandfather: Cuicui’s mother, unable to elope with the girl’s father, committed suicide. Much of the drama of the novel is derived from the grandfather’s desperate, quiet attempts to protect his granddaughter. In one touching scene, Cuicui’s grandfather tells her how her father courted her mother by singing traditional love songs. When Cuicui asks to hear more, her grandfather responds, “That would take a long time to tell. The important thing is that these songs gave us you.” But at the same time, he thinks to himself, “The songs gave us you and then they took away your father and mother.”

Reviewed by Dylan Suher

Border Town by Shen Congwen; trans. by Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Harper Perennial, 2009
Paper, 192 pp, $13.99
ISBN-10: 0061436917