Naked Earth
By Eileen ChangNYRB Classics, 2015When Eileen Chang was exiled to Hong Kong in the spring of 1952, she found her first job as a Chinese translator of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. She was commissioned for the job by Richard McCarthy, the Officer of the United States Information Service in Hong Kong, and the translation project was aligned with the Book Translation Program, an apparatus of cultural diplomacy funded by the US government during the Cold War. Chang’s bond with USIS was smooth and tight; she later worked on the translations of The Portable Emerson and Marjorie K. Rawlings’ The Yearling. Helped by the handsome financial support from USIS, Chang also finished writing two anti-Communist novels before she left for the US for good in 1955. One is her first critically acclaimed English novel The Rice-Sprout Song, published by Scribner in 1955, two years after the publication of its Chinese translation. The other is Chi di zhi lian (Love in Redland), which was widely referred to as her “flawed” political novel when it was published in 1954; its English revision was retitled Naked Earth and published in Hong Kong in 1956. Now, for the first time, it has been published in the United States.Chang had made her name decades earlier in her birth city, Japanese-occupied Shanghai, when her short stories were serialized in popular magazines alongside other romance writers in the early 1940s. Whereas mainstream writers, deeply affected by communism, reiterated revolutionary thoughts and moral responsibility in their work, these “mandarin duck and butterfly” writers, as they were called for being on the bottom rung of the hierarchy, were obsessed by love affairs and urban trivia—the Chick Lit writers of the day. Chang didn’t mind being called a romance writer—whatever sold books worked. Soon after the defeat of Japan in 1945, Chang divorced from the writer Hu Lancheng, who had collaborated with the Nanking puppet regime. Pressed for cash, she started writing movie scripts and began to work on two serial novels, in which she strictly followed the requirements of the Communist literary policy by showing progressive “left-leaning” views. In very little time she had succeeded in distinguishing herself from her peers through her commitment to sophisticated narratives and sharp observation of humanity.A descendant of aristocrats, Chang was interested in and inspired by canonical literature as well as popular art. Her curiosity about life made her an omnivorous reader and her reading list ranged from classical Chinese poetry to romance novels to tabloids. Her great strength was in representing the complexities of humanity and love in decadent Shanghai, when restrictions of old society were still rife. Love in a Fallen City (published by New York Review Books in 2007) collects many of her stories from her first volume of Chinese fiction, Chuanqi (Legends, published in 1943). In “The Golden Cangue,” sexually frustrated Ch’i-ch’iao has a crush on her brother-in-law, but, bound by the shackles of traditional morality, is forbidden to love him. Chi’i-ch’iao’s distress worsens in her widowhood as she compulsively tried to impose the same cultural yoke upon her westernized daughter Ch’ang-an, turning Ch’ang-an into a younger version of herself. In “Red Rose, White Rose,” Zhenbao sways between two types of women, a whore and a Madonna, his westernized lover and his conservative wife, and his need for tender love slowly appears just at the moment that it nearly dies out.Chang had an eye for the beauty in small things—colors, fabrics and textiles, dirt, moonlight, the incense stick, opium smoke, embroidered slippers, the scent of cheap perfume, “a beautiful and desolate gesture”—a worldly obsession so strong that she seemed to need to transubstantiate as many details as she could into words. A scene in which Ch’i-chi’ao tries to intimidate Ch’ang-an’s pursuer with her ostentatious clothing hints at her descriptive powers: She “wore a blue-gray gown of palace brocade embroidered with a round dragon design, and clasped with both hands a scarlet hot-water bag; two big tall amahs stood close against her.” In “Red Rose, White Rose, Zhenbao, about to be seduced by his friend’s wife, wanders around the streets of Shanghai, where “two leaves skittered by in the wind like ragged shoes not worn by anyone, just walking alone by themselves.” Suddenly he understands his vulnerability and his desire to be loved. Chang’s Shanghai cityscape is rich in both fin-de-siècle aesthetics and quiet moments of moody romanticism.Chang’s early education in English is also reflected in these books. She forced herself to write only English for three years when she was in Hong Kong as an undergraduate student. A self-imposed bicultural mindset is visible in her Chinese writings and later in her English novels. In the process of her creation and self-translation, she cleverly combines literary devices from both East and the West, blending the tactics of Western psychological realism into the Chinese domestic novel. Sensing this dualism in her writing, the eminent critic Chih-ts’ing Hsia contended that Chang was “the best and most important writer” in twentieth-century Chinese literature when his A History of the Modern Chinese Fiction was published in 1961. This statement, however, became problematic in his home country after the publications of Chang’s two anti-Communist novels, The Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth, which depicted the aftermaths of the failed campaigns launched by the Communist government in the early 1950s. Chang’s lack of patriotism—first in her marriage and now in her writings—made her an antagonist in China.Chang began The Rice-Sprout Song before she left Shanghai in 1950. The book explored the ways that the government-backed property redistribution had changed the life of people by focusing on the peasant Gold Root and his family, who barely survive the harsh weather and merciless governmental demands. Richard McCarthy was impressed with the first few chapters and proposed that Chang should work with the USIS, so the latter could provide her with research materials; he later helped Chang to get in touch with Scribner. Chang’s “greenback” (US-Aid) novel was, strategically, translated into Chinese to fight back against the sudden rise of Left Wing literature in Hong Kong. First, it was serialized for six months in World Today, a literary biweekly funded by the USIS, to whet the appetite of its Chinese readers. After the publication of The Rice-Sprout Song, Chang sent the prominent essayist Hu Shih a copy and promptly received an encouraging reply. This letter is facsimiled next to the title page in the Chinese edition of the novel in Taiwan. (Think Emerson’s letter to Whitman after the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.)Naked Earth was also funded by the translation program of USIS. It begins when the college graduate Liu Ch’üan joins the team of the Land Reform in 1950 and falls in love with a beautiful fellow student Su Nan. In an impoverished countryside in the Central Plain, they witness how poor peasants have been incited to turn against each other and lynch the wrongly accused with the consent of the cadres. Liu is soon transferred to a party-owned press in Shanghai to assist the “Resist-America Aid-Korea” campaign, when Chairman Mao decides to intervene in the Korean War by sending People’s Liberation Army to fight against the UN troops at the frontier in October 1950. Liu helps Ko Shan, “a real product of the times,” a jaded actress now the manager of the party newspaper, to retouch photos for the propaganda that slander American imperialists. Living in a foreign city far away from Su Nan, Liu feels vulnerable and starts a physical relationship with Ko Shan without realizing that Ko Shan has gradually fallen in love with him. Months later, Su Nan is transferred to Shanghai to work for another party press without knowing that anything has happened between Liu and Ko Shan; her love affair with Liu grows.The campaigns of the Three-Anti and the Five-Anti, launched in 1951 and 1952 respectively, were reform movements targeted against corrupted party members and greedy capitalists. Liu is sent to prison for further inspection after his superior was executed for possibly getting involved in a case of corruption. After learning of Liu’s predicament, Su Nan asks Ko Shan, the only party official she knows, to save Liu from prison; meanwhile, Ko Shan decides to set up Su Nan by introducing her to a lewd party superior. Returning home, Liu is heartbroken upon learning of Su Nan’ fate and he impulsively joins the army, fighting at the border of China and North Korea before being captured by UN troops. As a prisoner, he is presented with a choice—be released to China or move to Taiwan and embrace the world of freedom.The novel witheringly satirizes the effect of the Communist Party’s policies and failed campaigns in the early 1950s. It presents a grotesque caricature of party members who numbly recite self-righteous slogans while enjoying their illicit lifestyle. Even though Big Brother is watching, he tolerates backdoor dealings, merrily reaping commercial gain and luxuriating in extramarital affairs. The equivocal nature of collective life is torturous to honest intellectuals. Liu thus plays the role of witness to political turmoil and he reflects on the distortion of values and morality in his dystopian times. But Liu is also somewhat hard to credit as a character. His life is so dramatic—he’s present at seemingly every failed Communist campaign all across China—that he calls to mind Indiana Jones.Witnessing an execution of the falsely accused is only the first step in his rite of passage. Not only is Liu invited to watch this sham execution, he is forced to pull the trigger. His victim is a peasant who provided the living space for Liu. The village people are taught by the cadres to hate the rich and protest against the landlords. In one scene, they want to take down a landlord’s pregnant wife, who is “strung up in mid-air like a lumpy, triangular rice cake.” Some of Chang’s most devastating writing is found in her portrayal of the mob:
The crowd gave a shocked cry as the water splashed over them. If the woman screamed, it was drowned in the din. But after the general tumult there was silence, in which a kind of lapping sound could be heard, curiously gentle and yet heavy, like ducks’ feet paddling in shallow water. The body still hung there, but blood was flowing down the trouser leg to the foot and wrist bound together, then dripping to the ground below, the crimson wisps slowly fanning out in the water on the floor.
Chang consciously adopts a simplified objective description to expose the blind passion of the cruel crowd. Instead of directly describing torture, she uses metaphors to imply the savagery of the act and shifts the reader’s gaze to its last visible traces. The act of violence may be omitted, but the brutality of humanity is felt and the vulnerability of life is as bright and stark as that crimson red.In the author’s note to Love in Redland, published in 1954, Chang assures readers that the value of her novel lies in its assemblage and transformation of real sources and true stories. This short, problematic statement, reprinted in this year’s new English edition of Naked Earth, shows how much a fiction writer is eager to present readers “a whiff of what real life was like for the people living through those days.” Yet the sentiment is somewhat at odds with the ambivalence Chang felt when writing Love in Redland.In an interview with the writer Shuijing (Yang Yi) in 1973, Chang spoke of her discontent at having been “commissioned” to write Love in Redland. She complained that the story, with its dramatic fusion of historical events and its rather cornball love triangle, was actually “outlined” by someone else, and were therefore things she couldn’t change. She voiced the same complaint to her close friend Steven C. Soong, who also worked for USIS.The book followed a remarkably crooked path to its final form. Love in Redland was published in Hong Kong in 1954; however, because it touches on Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, and other sensitive political issues, an abridged edition of this novel was not made public in Taiwan till 1978. In Hong Kong it was published under the name Naked Earth in 1956, and only now has it come out in the US.Chang’s interview with Shuijing has been widely quoted, leading many to question Chang’s authority after being commissioned to write Love in Redland. In 2002, Quanzhi Gao conducted a phone interview with McCarthy, who reassured Gao that that USIS didn’t and had no right to interfere Chang’s writing. But he conceded that Naked Earth was indeed listed under “China Reporting Program,” a specified program handling anti-Communist publications. McCarthy was not being entirely honest. More and more classified reports have recently come out, including a book proposal submitted by William Hsu, then an editor of China Weekly, whose project was tentatively called Farewell to the Korean Front, in December 1953. Six months later, Chang was the one who needed to submit the report of the same project to the USIS and it was retitled Naked Earth in June 1954.Naked Earth, therefore, is less a second-language writer’s self-translation than an improved rewrite of Love in Redland: so many changes were made that the versions have effectively become two entirely separate novels. Love in Redland has eleven long chapters, whereas Naked Earth has thirty-two short chapters and more fillings-in and details to support the psychological transition of the characters. Chang translates Chinese idiom into curious American correlates like “hitting a rock with an egg,” and “all seven holes bleeding, he went to Hades.” After learning of Su Nan’s ill treatment, Liu goes talk to Ko Shan for the last time. When he walks by her apartment and finds “the red flag on top of the tower above the skyscraper.” He thinks it looks “like a star. He could not shoot it down.” In the Chinese version, Liu simply “wanted to shoot it down.” If the Chinese version was a commissioned work, Chang’s ambivalence about shaping it to her style is most apparent in small details like these. Love in Redland seems written in haste, without the touches that reveal her sense of irony and humanity. Because she was able to inject these qualities in to the English version, Naked Earth is a better novel.The most significant change between versions was made with the character Su Nan, who even has a different Chinese name, Huang Chüan, in Love in Redland. It is no superficial difference, however; the two characters have different personalities and destinies. In Love in Redland, Huang is merely a left-leaning stock character. Living a simple life in the oppressed countryside, she thoughtlessly recites Chairman Mao’s words, then suddenly bemoans the suffering of the people, blurting out, “these people are stuck in the hem of the times.” Her passionate faith in the Party makes her naïve and vulnerable when she is trapped by Ko Shan’s scheme. Huang’s interiority is so opaque that her feeling only shows when she is with Liu. At the end of the story she disappears for good, as if her only function is to be deprived from Liu.Su Nan, on the other hand, is built of layers; those lines Huang quotes from Mao are removed from Naked Earth. Chang adds more psychological descriptions of Su Nan and even devotes a new chapter about her life after being taken advantage of. Su Nan needs Ko Shan’s help and the tragedy she is going to face seems inevitable, because it is partly decided by the times and partly fated by her character. The portrait of her fear and helplessness is vivid and delicately achieved. One scene shows a snowy night when Su Nan waits for Ko Shan to get off work. She anxiously wanders around the dark lines of downtown Shanghai and finds a quiet temple:
Somebody had planted his incense stick in the snow on the top rail because there was no room at the bottom. The snow had piled thick there, wedged in at the corner at the end of the bar. But it was beginning to melt. Su Nan stopped by the gate and reached up to straighten the brittle, thin brown stick which looked as if it was about to topple over. For the first time in her life she came near to understanding why so many people clung to their mild, ineffectual idols. She carefully patted the snow into a hard mound. It was stinging cold and she was weeping.
It is a seemingly trivial moment in which Su Nan temporarily suspends her ideological views and finds peace of mind in religion. Only when she has to walk on a tightrope of fear can she understand the meaning of religious comfort. The epiphany comes right before Su Nan needs to face the tragedy of her life and hence it ominously foreshadows the approaching turmoil. It is also a moment when her revolutionary progressiveness succumbs to the fragility of her humanity. By returning to Su Nan her inner voice, Chang seems to discover her complex character. The writing, with the confidence of familiarity, turns Su Nan into a human being with real dimensions.Ultimately, although Naked Earth is undoubtedly didactic, it is illuminated by Chang’s distinctive strengths and preoccupations—her lavish scene descriptions, her interest in city life and the subtlety of human connections, and her sure-handed romantic touch. The love triangle between Liu, Su Nan and Ko Shan may be melodramatic, but it makes the story fly. Perceptive details abound: At one point, when Ko Shan receives a phone call from Su Nan and passes the mouthpiece to Liu, she deliberately winds the wire over her hand, making it so short that Liu has to turn around to talk privately. Her unconscious interruption is the best proof of her sense of loss.Chang chose to leave Communist China behind her by traveling to the United States in 1955; the closest she ever got to returning was a short trip to Hong Kong and Taipei in 1961. She never saw her beloved Shanghai again and she died alone in Los Angeles in 1995.Perhaps, during her time in Hong Kong, she sensed that she would have to leave China for good. Perhaps she saw the red flag flying above the skyscraper and realized that she “could not shoot it down.” Something of that melancholy appears in the artful revision from Love in Redland to Naked Earth. If the first is an anti-Communist assignment customized for the US, then Naked Earth is the author’s edition. The changes not only reflected her state of exile; they reflected her state of mind.____Yu-Yun Hsieh is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. An award-winning novelist from Taiwan and a former fiction fellow of the Writers’ Institute in NYC, she is currently working on her first English novel.