Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu Read online

  In fact, most of Xu Xu’s fiction of those years, especially the short stories produced during his sojourn in Europe, is characterized by an exoticism that remains in large part aloof from politics and concerns itself more with questions of aesthetics and literary style. Written during his passage to Europe aboard the Conte Verde in August 1936 and serialized in The Eastern Miscellany 東方雜誌 later that year, his short story “The Goddess of the Arabian Sea” 阿拉伯海的女神, for example, describes the encounter onboard a steamer between a first-person narrator and a beautiful Arab woman who claims to be a sorceress. When she tells him a tale of a young goddess who roams the waters they are passing through, the narrator excitedly declares, “I want to pursue all artistic fantasies, because their beauty to me is reality,” and then announces that “in this world there are people who pursue dreams of the real, while I seek out the real within dreams.”2

  The narrator here appears to echo Bergsonian concepts of intuition that provide an artist with the impetus to seek for truths and realities beyond the purely mimetic and that continued to shape Xu Xu’s fictional worlds. Not surprising, the narrator in “The Goddess of the Arabian Sea” eventually meets and falls in love with the goddess, only to be brought back to reality when he awakens in his deckchair, drenched by a big wave. Illusion and reality are similarly interwoven in the novella The Absurd English Channel 荒謬的英法海峽 from 1939 in which a first-person narrator is kidnapped by pirates during a crossing from France to England and brought to a utopian island state. Despite voicing some veiled criticism of corruption in China and dismay over Soviet-style Communism and the Stalinist purges, the novella is foremost an exotic love story that comes to an abrupt end as the ferry docks in Dover and the narrator awakens from a dream.

  ***

  Even though Xu Xu largely refrained from commenting on the political realities in China in his fiction of those years, politics eventually caught up with him while studying in Paris. Following Japan’s invasion of China proper in the summer of 1937, many Chinese students studying abroad felt compelled to return home to show their support of the Chinese War of Resistance. This situation presented Xu Xu with a real personal dilemma, because he appears to have fallen in love with a Japanese classmate. Named Asabuki Tomiko 朝吹登水子 (1917–2005), this classmate would herself become a well-known novelist in postwar Japan, and their short-lived romance would eventually find its way into her autobiographical novel The Other Side of Love 愛のむこう側.

  In her novel, a tall, handsome, and poetically inclined young man named Yu falls on his knees near the entrance to the Parc Montsouris in Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement in the early fall of 1937 and declares his love to his Japanese classmate, asking her to marry him and to accompany him back to China. She politely declines, reminding him of the impossibility of his request in the face of Japan’s invasion of his homeland. The young man then gets up, looks at her one last time, and disappears into the night. The following day, he takes a train to Marseille and embarks on a steamer back to Shanghai.3

  Xu Xu himself never explicitly wrote about this episode, and we have no way of verifying Asabuki’s fictionalized account of their short liaison. The episode is nevertheless insightful, as it suggests that, for Xu Xu, the outbreak of war constituted not only a crisis of a national dimension but also a personal crisis that resulted in moral and emotional conflicts. While most progressive writers depicted the conflict as a clear dichotomy between aggressor and victim and frequently focused on the cruelty of the Japanese invader and the heroism of the Chinese resistance, Xu Xu subsequently explored the more abstract moral dilemmas and personal tragedies caused by war. This is particularly visible in his wartime drama. In his five-act play Brothers 兄弟 from 1942, for example, two estranged half-brothers suddenly face each other on opposite sides of the conflict. The younger brother is a guerilla fighting the invader, while the older is a high-ranking general of the Japanese army. When the older brother finds himself obliged to court-martial his younger brother after an attack on a train, a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions unfolds, sparked by the conflict over personal versus national allegiances.4

  The human tragedy of war is also explored in another popular short story that Xu Xu wrote shortly after arriving in Paris and that is included in this anthology. In “The Jewish Comet” 猶太的彗星 from 1937, a first-person narrator named Xu travels to Europe aboard an Italian steamer and falls in love with a Jewish secret agent who is fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Like Brothers, “The Jewish Comet” ends tragically, foreshadowing the catastrophe that was already looming over Europe. While the plot is driven by a similar mix of mystery and exoticism seen in many of Xu Xu’s prewar short stories, “The Jewish Comet” also bespeaks the interest cosmopolitan readers in Shanghai took in European politics and in the plight of the Jews in particular.

  The Jewish struggle for a homeland has featured in the imagination of Chinese intellectuals since at least the end of the Qing dynasty, allowing for ready identification with tales of national suffering but also bearing the potential to heighten Chinese readers’ own sense of nationalism and national survival. Xu Xu’s choice of a Jewish heroine fighting in the Spanish Civil War is not bereft of historical likelihood. A sizable portion of the volunteers fighting in the International Brigade were, in fact, Jews. Jews also formed a considerable contingent of foreigners living in Shanghai, some of whom were Baghdadi Jews who had come with the British following the Opium Wars; others were Russian Jews who had fled their homeland following the October Revolution and the subsequent civil war. In the wake of Hitler’s rise in Germany, and especially following the violent anti-Semitic attacks of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) of 1938, Shanghai further saw an influx of some 18,000 European Jews who fled ever harsher persecution in Germany and the territories that would soon fall under German control. Since the International Settlement did not require a visa for arriving visitors, Shanghai became one of the last safe havens for Jews desperate to leave Europe. Incidentally, the Italian Lloyd Triestino steamers Conte Verde and Conte Rosso, sailing from ports in Nazi Germany’s axis partner Italy, played a crucial role in helping many of them reach Shanghai.

  By the time Xu Xu returned to Shanghai from Europe in late 1937, the city was occupied by Japanese forces. Only the International Settlement and the French Concession remained neutral territory, forming what came to be known as the “solitary island” 孤島. Xu Xu resumed his editorship with the Analects Group’s journals and continued to publish his exotic romances that proved very popular with the reading public. Only when the Japanese also occupied the International Settlement following the attack on Pearl Harbor (the French Concession had already lost its neutrality following Germany’s invasion of France and had fallen under the jurisdiction of Vichy France) did he decide to leave the city for Chongqing, the Nationalists’ wartime capital in the hinterland. Here, he wrote what is probably his best-known work of fiction, the wartime spy novel The Rustling Wind 風蕭蕭.

  Set in Shanghai in the years leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and related through the eyes of a cosmopolitan first-person narrator named Xu, The Rustling Wind is an epic tale of love and espionage that captured its reading audience through its vivid depiction of life in the foreign concessions and the promise of agency in the fight against the invader. By way of his liaisons with two enticing female secret agents and the beautiful daughter of an American army doctor, Xu the narrator unwittingly gets drawn into the web of wartime intelligence. However, with its many quasi-existentialist meditations on the meaning of friendship and beauty in times of war, The Rustling Wind retained a literariness that was absent from most other popular wartime works. The Rustling Wind was initially serialized in the wartime newspaper Eradicator Daily 掃蕩報 throughout 1943 and solidified Xu Xu’s status as a national literary celebrity. It was subsequently turned into a movie and a TV series in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1954 and the 1960s respectively, where it has continually remained in
print.

  Near the war’s end, Xu Xu was sent to the US as a special envoy for Eradicator Daily. Upon his return to Shanghai in 1946, Xu Xu, with the help of Liu Yichang 劉以鬯 (1918−2018), resumed publication of his wartime works, many of which had previously only appeared in journals or newspapers. In 1949, Xu Xu got married and planned to settle in Ningbo with his wife and his son and daughter from a previous marriage. However, as Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic in Beijing that year and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan after succumbing in the civil war that had resumed between the CCP and the KMT after Japan’s capitulation, Xu Xu began to feel that his literary legacy might become a liability under the new regime.

  ***

  Xu Xu had been attacked by leftist critics all throughout the 1930s for writing fiction that was deemed escapist at best and detrimental to their political cause at worst. Then, in 1945, an essay on “Ghost Love” appeared in a short volume of criticism by the young Marxist critic Shi Huaichi 石懷池 (1925–45?) that clearly revealed the incompatibility of Xu Xu’s idealist aesthetics with the utilitarian role of art in Communist China. In the essay, Shi Huaichi condemned the corrupting and degenerating effects Xu Xu’s work had on upright revolutionaries, claiming that

  it will invariably cause you to forget the cruel reality of the world … cause you to ignore the hideous scars our nation has received, and lead you to distance yourself from that cruel struggle between old and new that is currently being carried out all around us…. Instead, it will invite you to enter an illusionary world.

  Shi then advised readers “to throw it into the cesspool.”5 It must have been criticism like this that compelled Xu Xu to board a train to Hong Kong in May of 1950, leaving behind his wife, who had just given birth to a daughter. Like many other writers who left the mainland in those years, Xu Xu mistakenly thought that his sojourn in Hong Kong would only be a temporary exile.

  Accessing illusionary worlds and alternative spheres of reality had indeed become increasingly central to Xu Xu’s literary quest. While the narrator in “Goddess of the Arabian Sea” had declared his unconditional surrender to artistic fantasies, he was nevertheless brought back to reality when he awoke from his dream. In his short story “Hallucination” 幻覺 published in 1947, however, the distinction between reality and illusion is altogether blurred. In “Hallucination,” the story’s narrator meets a painter who, whenever he gazes at one of his small oil paintings, is able to access his own past and temporarily relive the happiness he knew with his now deceased lover. Aware that his account might raise suspicion, the painter insists that “illusions and reality are very difficult to tell apart, for reality may consist of the common illusions of the majority, while an illusion can be one person’s reality.”6 The deliberate blurring of illusion and reality as well as of the past and present not only echoes the philosophy of Henri Bergson that encouraged the artist to transform reality through art, it also signals a shift in Xu Xu’s aesthetic concerns. No longer did his protagonists venture on exotic journeys to foreign lands; instead they embarked on quests to recapture irretrievably lost love or beauty they had known in bygone days. This nostalgic gesture became ever more pronounced in Xu Xu’s postwar fiction from Hong Kong.

  The short story “Bird Talk” from 1950 perfectly epitomizes Xu Xu’s use of nostalgia in his postwar fiction. It allowed him to give voice to a real sense of loss that resulted from his physical exile in Hong Kong, brought about by the political changes that were shaping China and the world in the wake of World War II. At the same time it allowed him to explore a metaphysical homelessness that is bound up with the experience of modernity and that has driven many twentieth-century artists to reject a purely scientific depiction of reality and instead seek alternative realities within dreams or the fantastic.

  “Bird Talk” is set in postwar Hong Kong, yet most of the story is narrated as a flashback that takes the reader to the prewar Chinese countryside. Here, a first-person narrator from Shanghai encounters a shy and introverted girl who appears to be able to communicate with birds. Intrigued by her unusual talent, the narrator offers to school her in conventional subjects if she agrees to teach him bird language in return. His attempts at socializing her, however, are just as futile as her efforts at teaching him bird talk. The only subject the girl excels at is poetry. In fact, when reading poetry, she experiences the same sublime happiness as when she talks with birds. After the two are eventually separated, the narrator ends up in postwar Hong Kong, a city that has forever removed him from the pastoral idyll of the prewar Chinese countryside.

  In “The All-Souls Tree” 百靈樹, the next work included in this anthology and another short story Xu Xu published not long after arriving in Hong Kong, the theme of physical exile is explored even more explicitly. Set in Taiwan after the Nationalists’ retreat to the island, its topic is the death-defying love of a young couple separated on account of the civil war. The story relates a tragedy experienced by countless Chinese people affected by the political reality of the postwar world order, not least Xu Xu himself. At the same time, “The All-Souls Tree,” along with his novella The Other Shore 彼岸 from 1951 that similarly delves into mythical and quasi-religious epiphanies, illustrates Xu Xu’s aesthetic conviction that art that explores sublime or otherworldly experiences might offer some comfort to those grappling with the pain of loss and homesickness. Xu Xu himself remained separated from his wife and daughter in Shanghai, and the two eventually divorced when his wife’s association with Xu Xu increasingly became a political liability. Xu Xu later remarried in Hong Kong and had a daughter with his third wife while his son of his first marriage settled in Taiwan.

  ***

  In Hong Kong, Xu Xu continued to publish large amounts of fiction. In the period between 1950 and 1952 alone, he published twenty-one short stories and novellas. Most of these appeared in the literary supplement of the Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao Evening Post 星島晚報. Buoyed by his prewar and wartime fame, Xu Xu remained popular with readers in Hong Kong, most of whom were refugees from the mainland like himself—by the end of 1950, almost two million refugees had arrived in Hong Kong from the mainland, and over the next two decades, several hundred thousand more would follow. As a result, living space was scarce and life in Hong Kong was far from easy. Conditions started to improve when, in the late 1950s, the colonial government began to invest in public housing. By the early 1960s, Hong Kong’s economy had also improved, in part because of the development of light industry, particularly electronics. And while immigration policies were increasingly tightened, Hong Kong continued to represent for many mainland immigrants the dream of a better life.

  Xu Xu explored this theme in “When Ah Heung Came to Gousing Road” 來高升路的一個女人, the last story in this anthology and one of Xu Xu’s later works of fiction. First published in 1965, this Cinderella story describes the fate of Ah Heung, a young mainland woman who has only recently arrived in Hong Kong to work as a maid in a rich family’s household on Gousing Road. Ah Heung and her three friends, two of whom, like herself, are recent immigrants, embody the hardworking and honest immigrant class that sought a brighter future in the Crown colony. Unlike most of Xu Xu’s fiction from his Hong Kong period, “When Ah Heung Came to Gousing Road” is hopeful and future oriented, yet by celebrating traditional virtues such as friendship and loyalty, Xu Xu also appears to voice nostalgia for a set of values that increasingly appeared to belong to a bygone era.

  With its lightheartedness and colloquial style, “When Ah Heung Came to Gousing Road” is arguably the work with the most popular appeal of all the short stories collected in this anthology. As such, it also gives us an indication of the changing nature of literature and art in Hong Kong. So-called Sky Fiction 天空小說—plot-driven popular fiction that was written to be performed on the radio—enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the postwar period. This phenomenon was accompanied by the growth of Hong Kong’s movie industry
. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai had been the undisputed center of the Chinese movie industry. However, in the wake of the founding of the People’s Republic, many of the studios and a good number of its most prominent stars left Shanghai for Hong Kong, which over time developed into Asia’s movie capital. Many writers, Xu Xu included, had their works adapted for the screen or provided screenplays to satisfy the ever-growing demand for Hong Kong cinema.

  About a dozen of Xu Xu’s works were turned into movies by Hong Kong studios, starring some of the best-known actors of the time. As early as 1953, Kuang-chi Tu 屠光啓 had directed an adaptation of The Rustling Wind for Shaw Brothers Studio, Hong Kong’s most prominent studio, starring Li Lihua 李麗華 and Chun Yen 嚴俊. In 1954, Xu Xu’s novella Blind Love 盲戀 was adapted for the screen and directed by Evan Yang 易文, with Li Lihua, Lo Wei 羅維, and Peter Chen Ho 陳厚 in the lead roles. Also known as Always in My Heart, it is a tragic love story between a blind young woman and a gentle, extremely talented writer whose Quasimodo-like appearance has turned him into a recluse. When, following surgery, the young woman regains sight, their relationship is forever changed. Xu Xu had a cameo appearance in Blind Love, which opened with him reading out the story’s manuscript to a circle of movie-star friends, all of whom then turn out to be part of the movie’s actual cast.

  In 1956, a remake of In Love with a Ghost followed, directed by Kuang-chi Tu and starring Li Lihua and Zhang Yang 張揚. In 1960, Richard Li Han-hsiang 李翰祥 directed Rear Entrance 後門, based on Xu Xu’s 1953 short story of the same title about a childless couple that adopts a young girl who subsequently upturns their hitherto stable lives. Starring Butterfly Wu 胡蝶, Wang Yin 王引, and Felicia Oi-Ming Wong 王愛明, it won the Best Picture Award of the seventh Asian Film Festival in Tokyo in 1960. Finally, in 1973, Shaw Brothers adapted Xu Xu’s epic bildungsroman The River of Fury 江湖行, an ambitious multivolume novel written between 1956 and 1961 that chronicles the stations of life of a first-person narrator through the Republican period and the war years. Directed by Tseng-chai Chang 張曾澤 and starring Lily Ho 何莉莉, Danny Lee 李修賢, and Ku Feng 谷峰, it was turned into an eighty-minute martial arts adventure that focused on the action and some of the romance of the original but barely explored the protagonist’s existentialist quests and unfulfilled yearning that characterize the original novel.