Border Town

"An old imperial highway running east from Sichuan into Hunan province leads, after reaching the West Hunan border, to a little mountain town called Chadong. By a narrow stream on the way to town was a little white pagoda, below which once lived a solitary family: an old man, a girl, and a yellow dog." So begins the tale of Cuicui.

I was particularly interested in reading this account of peasant life in China before the revolution, because I wanted to make a comparison to Pearl Buck's Good Earth. Both accounts were written about the same period in China and both were written in the 1930s, but one was written by a Chinese man and the other by an American woman (whose first language and home was in China). I found them so vastly different show more that they might have been written about completely different peoples and times.

It was difficult for me to see why this novel would have been banned by the Communist government that took over China. It seems so innocuous in its content and portrayal of these people. When I had finished reading it, I wondered if there was some deeper meaning that I was failing to see. I had loved the opening sentence so much that I expected to be in love with this novel by its end, but I was not. It plodded somewhat and I felt the characters were underdeveloped. Still, an interesting look at what a Chinese writer believed the peasant class was like before the country endured the upheaval of the revolution. show less

Though I felt like there were many parts that I missed, overall it was a little gem that I quite enjoyed. Except the ending which took me completely by suprise with way too many deaths all at once.

Shen Congwen is one of pioneers of modern Chinese literature, and with Border Town - one of his most famous books, it is easy to see why. Falling under the "native soil" genre of writings, Shen describes in detail the daily lives of the villagers in a semi-fictional town in the author's home province of Hunan. A descriptively simple book, Shen has managed to paint a picture almost frozen in time, of China before the turmoil of the mid-twentieth century.

in versione cinese :-O