STORIES FOR SATURDAY
Twentieth-Century Chinese Popular Fiction
translated by TIMOTHY WONG
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. 280 pages, $49 (hardcover), $17.95 (paperback)

reviewed by Tony Giffone

At times, we seek from fiction a mirror, a reflection of our own lives; at times, we seek a window, a view into another world. For most readers in the West, contemporary Chinese fiction usually falls into the latter category; we seek a window through which we can gain a better understanding of Chinese culture. In general, popular fiction may give readers a more revealing look into a culture than fiction that is considered highly literary since great literature often achieves its greatness because it transcends the culturally specific. In Stories for Saturday, Timothy Wong has collected fifteen tales from twentieth-century China, none of which aspires to be "great literature"; all of them were intended as light entertainment for a Saturday afternoon. From a literary perspective, these stories would be the equivalent of such Western writers as O. Henry or Arthur Conan Doyle. One can read the stories for sheer escapist pleasure, as their original readers did; but the collection also intends to make the reader think about the genres and types of stories that were being read in China during the first half of the twentieth century. To this end, Wong divides the fifteen stories into five thematically organized sections: scandals, love, gallantry, crime, and satire. He provides a short but provocative introduction to each section that succeeds in forcing the reader to think about the way that the stories were initially read. There is also a useful appendix that includes not only brief biographical portraits of the fifteen writers, but also a brief publication history of each of the stories: its publication date, the journal in which it initially appeared, the history of the journal and its editorial practices.

Although the book is subtitled "Twentieth-Century Chinese Popular Fiction," the stories all date from the first half of the twentieth century, most from the 1920s; the most recent story is from 1949. Furthermore, most of the stories were published in Shanghai-based magazines. The volume is, therefore, not so much a collection of twentieth-century Chinese popular fiction as a sampling of what people in Shanghai were reading in the 1920s. In an afterward that is especially illuminating, Wong locates the rise of Chinese popular fiction in changes in the Chinese workweek at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the concept of "the weekend" was introduced to Chinese society. He also places these "stories for Saturday" within a history of Chinese literature, discussing the opposition to them by writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun who were attempting to reform and modernize Chinese literature. Studying popular culture is a thriving preoccupation in academic circles, and studies of Chinese popular culture have been no exception. Among the studies that Wong draws on in his introductory comments are Perry Link's Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies and Jeffrey Kinkley's Chinese Justice, the Fiction. The stories included in the sections on love and crime can almost be read as illustrations of some of the ideas set forth by Link and Kinkley. All things considered, this is an altogether worthwhile and useful bookI just wish that I had liked the stories better.

Different readers will have their favorite section, based not so much on the merits of the stories as on the readers' own individual tastes and preferences. Fans of classic detective fiction may enjoy Cheng Xiaoqing's "The Ghost in the Villa," which clearly follows the formula of a Sherlock Holmes story. Fans of martial arts films may enjoy the stories collected under the rubric of gallantry, which offer an escape to a world where the righteous have magical powers that allow justice to prevail. Though most of the stories are immediately forgettable and rely on the formulaic, a few do, indeed, stand out. Zhang Biwu's story, "Rickshaw Man," written in 1923, is of interest primarily because it yields a marked contrast with Lao She's 1936 novel Camel Rickshaw. The Lao She novel is one of the most harrowing I have ever read; in the short story, the protagonist is so wily that the reader is never forced into a sympathetic identification with his suffering. He Haiming's story "For the Love of Her Feet" probably had erotic overtones for its initial readers in 1923. The tale focuses on a shoe-store clerk who falls in love with a woman's feet and constructs an idealized image of her based on them. Readers today may find its resolution far too sweetly sentimental, but the central action is so absurd that it seems to foreshadow existentialism. The most recent of the stories, Bao Tianxiao's "So Near, So Far," from 1949, is also the one with the greatest relevance to contemporary China. In style and substance, it bears resemblance to Zhang Jie's 1980s collection of stories Love Must Not Be Forgotten. A young husband and wife are so busy with work that they have no time to share the same bed and can communicate their deepest feelings only via the letters that they write to each other. My favorite of the stories is probably the 1923 satire "A Writer's Tribulations," by Fan Yanqiao, in which a writer, Shakespeare East, discovers that "literary talent can be detrimental to one's well-being" when his readers object to his portrayals of characters that they feel resemble themselves too closely. Satirical of both the pomposity of writers and the censorious inclinations of readers, it, like all good satire, instructs and also delights. There is something charmingly quaint about these stories. In the frantic big-city life of Beijing and Shanghai today, where "to get rich is glorious," it is difficult to imagine many Chinese having the time on a Saturday afternoon to simply while away an hour reading an inconsequential story. That is China's loss.