Books: Pai-hua

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LIVING CHINA—Edited by Edgar Snow —Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

In China, biggest and oldest civilized country in the world, few people can read and write. Of those few, many fewer know the "correct," classical language, in which all Chinese masterpieces have been written, time out of mind. In 1917, when China's civilization began to come rapidly apart, plain speech (pai-hua} began to be literarily respectable, is now the accepted written language for China's literates. To give a sample of what present-day Chinese are reading, Journalist Edgar Snow last week published a translation of 24 pai-hua stories.

Since China has been heaving with revolution for the past 20 years, the great majority of these stories have social upheaval for their background. Most of the authors are Leftwing; many have been shot or imprisoned. Their names, well-known in China, will be mostly just queer names to U. S. readers: Lu Hsün, Jou Shih, Ting Ling, T'ien Chün, Shih Ming.

Some readers may recognize Lin Yü-t'ang (My Country and My People}, but Lu Hsün, "China's Chekhov," and Mao Tun, "perhaps the outstanding novelist of China today," will be new acquaintances.

Editor Snow admits his translations are very free, admits also that he has freely used his blue pencil, because even pai-hua is too discursive for occidental taste. Open-eyed readers of Living China will find these stories queerly human, may be surprised to find many of them bitter, strong, ironic stuff. Because they are written in pai-hua, China's national cussword appears frequently. A mild-seeming expression, "his mother's" (shortened form of "rape your mother") is apparently used to express any shade of any emotion.

Some of the stories:

¶Because it is well known that a dose of fresh human blood is a sovereign specific against consumption, an old tea- house keeper goes to an execution, gets a roll saturated in blood for his dying son. But the son dies; the two mothers meet in the crowded graveyard, find their sons are lying next each other.

¶An older brother, in a fit of older-brotherishness, wrecks his little brother's kite. Remorse pursues him; when they are both grown men he finally nerves himself to ask forgiveness. The younger brother has forgotten all about it.

¶To save himself and his son from starvation, a poor man leases his wife for three years to a childless rich man. She fulfills the contract, bears the rich man a son, then returns to her poverty, her heart torn between her two children.

¶An old woman, hearing the young people talk revolution, and understanding only that "they" (the Communists) are goodhearted, will take care of everybody, gets her old cronies together, makes a revolutionary flag to send "them."

¶When a village girl is caught in the act of love, her mother spends everything they have on a feast for the local big men, hoping that they will then commute her daughter's sentence from death to banishment. They do; the daughter goes off to starve while her penniless mother stays home.