Rickshaw Boy by Lao She; trans. by Howard Goldblatt

Really, any one of the lives of the great Chinese writers of the 20s and 30s would provide plenty of fodder for a biopic, but perhaps none would make a better film than Lao She’s. The fiercely nonconformist writer was driven by the events of the turbulent 1930s to embrace left-wing causes. During World War II, he became a fixture in virtually every Chinese writers’ resistance organization. After the war, he lived for three years in the United States until Zhou Enlai personally invited him back to the People’s Republic, where he was hailed as a hero. During the Cultural Revolution, he was targeted by Red Guards, who subjected him to a vicious beating and public humiliation and ransacked his house. And legend has it that Lao She, after seeing the cultural artifacts he had collected over his entire lifetime senselessly destroyed, simply walked into a lake and drowned himself.

Rickshaw Boy, originally published in 1937, can be said to be a haunting, unintentional allegory for Lao She’s own life: the story of a proud individualist brought down by the vicissitudes of a phenomenally unjust world. Like Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, Rickshaw Boy is one of those great literary portraits of single-mindedness. The title “rickshaw boy,” the protagonist Xiangzi, is a man for whom the answer to every question is a rickshaw. His only goal in life is to buy his own rickshaw, a fixation so firm that it is almost comic:

Every cent he saved brought him that much closer to his goal of buying a new rickshaw. Not buying one was unthinkable, even if it was taken from him the day after he got it. . . . He had no reason to live if he could not pull his own rickshaw. His talent was in pulling a rickshaw, and his unwavering hope was to buy one of his own; not to do so would have been a disgrace.

It is a preoccupation that eventually hooks the reader as well. We are given an immense amount of detail on the rickshaw business, and Xiangzi is one of those characters readers love to rally behind: sensible, hard-working and resourceful with a complete lack of self-pity. When calamity after calamity threaten to crush Xiangzi’s dream—and calamities abound; Xianzi is pressed into service by the Nationalists, hustled by secret police and forced to marry a girl he accidentally impregnated, just for starters—we feel Xiangzi’sdespair keenly.

Howard Goldblatt is the most masterful translator of modern Chinese fiction working today. His translations of Mo Yan and Su Tong are the gold standards for translations of contemporary Chinese Fiction, and this translation is of the same remarkable quality as his previous work. It should be noted that Lao She is famous among Chinese readers for his mastery of slangy Beijing dialect, a quality of the work that Goldblatt does not try to represent, as lesser translators might, by using awkward “folksy” English. He still manages, however, to effectively capture the colloquial feel of the original, although the dialogue is sometimes not as vividly rendered as in other translations of this work. Overall, readers are not likely to find an existing translation of Rickshaw Boy that comes as close as this one does to capturing the spirit of the original. Readers who can’t stand John Steinbeck likely won’t have much patience for Rickshaw Boy, which comes from a similar tradition of politically-aimed Naturalism. But, like Steinbeck, Lao She is a good enough writer to never let his politics get ahead of his humanism and his instincts for storytelling. One of the features of the novel that keeps it from falling into polemic is Lao She’s evident love for his hometown of Beijing, which is described beautifully in passages like this one, describing the scenes of summer in the city:

Vendors hugging the roadsides hawked piles of green apricots, eye-catching red cherries, rose-petal dates attended by swarms of honey bees; glass noodles in large porcelain bowls gave off a milky glare, while sellers of puddings and bean-starch noodles displayed their wares neatly on carrying poles, offering a range of condiments. People had changed into light, garish clothes, creating a colorful tableau on the streets, as if rainbows had fallen to earth.

These romantic descriptions of life in Beijing are what make the novel work; we understand Xiangzi when he says that, despite everything, he’d “rather starve here than thrive in the countryside.” Until the very end, there always seems to be hope for Xiangzi, so long as he can pull a rickshaw in Beijing. When Xiangzi’s dreams finally do come crashing down, his life story becomes the powerful antidote to every Ayn Rand novel. Despite his worth and his talent, Xiangzi’s stubborn insistence on self-reliance is ultimately his own doom.

Reviewed by Dylan Suher

Rickshaw Boy by Lao She; trans. by Howard Goldblatt
Harper Perennial, 2010
Paper, 320 pp, $14.99
ISBN-13: 9780061436925