The Mountain's Confession — Shen Congwen's Deep Attachment to Zhangjiajie
The Mountain's Confession — Shen Congwen's Deep Attachment to Zhangjiajie By Jin Kejian After finally enduring the long wait, the county government leaders at last took their leave, and Mr. Shen stood up and said repeatedly to the several admirers who had long been waiting outside the door: "Come in, all of you come in." We then walked toward him with uneasy hearts, and he smiled and extended both hands to us—grasping ours with the utmost respect. I was filled with awe and trepidation, and said: "Sir, given my current achievements in literature, I am not worthy to meet you…
The Mountains Speak
——Shen Congwen's Lingering Attachment to Zhangjiajie
by Jin Kejian
After enduring a long wait, the county officials finally took their leave. Mr. Shen rose to his feet and called out to several admirers who had long been waiting outside the door: “Come in, all of you, come in.”
We approached him nervously, and he smiled and extended both hands to us—grasping ours with the utmost respect. Trembling with awe, I said: “Sir, with my current achievements in literature, I am not worthy of meeting you.” He immediately corrected me: “It's not about literature, not about literature. I like all young people.” And so the conversation began with youth. He said, “I left Xiangxi over fifty years ago. Back then, I too was a young man of about twenty, muddle-headed, and I placed a bet at the gambling table of life. Who would have thought”—he sighed, touching his silver hair with emotion, and recited with a touch of sorrow: “Grow not old, return not home; to return home breaks the heart…”
Through those thick reading glasses, I suddenly noticed what seemed like tears glistening at the corners of his eyes. My heart sank—something must have stirred deep feelings in him. I had heard that when he recently returned to his hometown of Fenghuang and listened to villagers sing Nuo opera at the Yang Family Ancestral Hall, he had wept then too. He spoke with a thick Fenghuang accent, but his speech was no longer nimble; his voice was thin and trembling, and his movements lacked agility. I realized he was far different from the image I had painted of him in my mind. The robust, sharp-looking middle-aged man beside him, pipe in mouth, was the great painter Huang Yongyu, whose talkative, forthright manner stood in sharp contrast to Mr. Shen's quiet reserve. Huang Yongyu said: “My uncle only finished the fourth grade—barely better than an illiterate. The reason people from Xiangxi can make something of themselves once they leave home is that they endure hardship and stake their lives.” Shen Congwen waved his hand and said: “I haven't made anything of myself. I wrote some things decades ago, and Hong Kong has just published that big book of his, Studies of Ancient Chinese Costume. His spirits were high, so we came together to see Zhangjiajie.” Only then did I learn that among our companions were Mr. Shen's wife Zhang Zhaohe, the renowned painters Huang Yonghou and Huang Yongyu's wife Zhang Meixi, and his son and daughter who had studied in America and Italy. “My uncle will be turning eighty this year. He keeps insisting he's old and useless, worried about being a burden to others. It was I who coaxed, pulled, and forced him to come to Dayong.” Everyone laughed, and he laughed too, with an utterly childlike expression.
We chatted until past ten o'clock, and a literary friend and I escorted Mr. Shen to rest. Because there was a stretch of broken road and no streetlights, we supported him from both sides and slowly made our way. After just a few steps, he suddenly shook off our hands as if startled and said: “Don't do that, don't do that—this posture reminds me of the ‘airplane ride.’”
The “airplane ride”—that new term invented in a special era—sent chills down anyone's spine who heard it. I could feel him breathing softly, his whole body trembling as if with malaria, utterly shaken. I suddenly thought of a condition called “persecution mania.” It seemed Mr. Shen had once said: “The sense of persecution will not easily leave me for the rest of my life.”
Sir, I knew you bore wounds, but I never imagined they ran so deep.
The next morning, a sudden rainstorm broke out. Yet no sooner had we climbed up to Zhangjiajie than the sky smiled through its tears. Countless stone peaks and pillars were dappled with light, and the mountain ravines and gullies were lightly veiled in mist—it had a distinctly stream-of-consciousness quality. We followed closely behind Mr. Shen and his party, melting into the nourishing Golden Whip Stream.
Mr. Shen was captivated by the stone peaks and pillars rising one after another from the ground. He said repeatedly: “Wonderful, wonderful! How did this happen—growing so many stone bamboo shoots.” He pointed and commented as he looked, sometimes gazing pensively at peaks that resembled people or creatures, as if searching for the most fitting words to bridge the emotional distance between them. Across a small bridge were stilted wooden houses where forestry workers lived, with a stream murmuring before the eaves and lush greenery pressing in behind. Mr. Shen turned to Zhang Zhaohe and said: “Look, look—this is a painting of Xiangxi customs. This is exactly what the Xiangxi in my writing looks like.”
I paid close attention to Mrs. Shen's every movement. Though she was sixty-seven or sixty-eight, traces of her former elegance could still be found. She was curious about everything here, even examining the construction of the wooden houses in detail. She said she was editing Selected Works of Shen Congwen and wanted to use this visit home to fill in a lesson on Xiangxi, so as to provide accurate annotations for his works. She even asked me about the structural principles of water mills, the customs and ethnic psychology of the Tujia people. I had long known that Mrs. Shen was a former editor of People's Literature; in 1934, Literary Quarterly published her debut work “By the Lakeside,” which had a broad impact on readers. Mrs. Shen said that Mr. Shen's life's work numbered over seven hundred pieces, but many could no longer be found complete, and quite a few had been retrieved through contacts from America, Japan, and some Southeast Asian countries. In 1953, almost all of Mr. Shen's works were burned, and the printing plates were all destroyed as well. She had gone to some libraries to photograph and photocopy them but was refused. It seemed compiling a complete collection would be very difficult.
And so we walked and talked. At one point a small stream blocked our way, with a row of stone stepping blocks laid across the water. From a distance, they looked like a row of buttons sewn in place. In Xiangxi, these are called “jumping rocks.” Mr. Shen was delighted and wanted to cross them. We feared one misstep would become an eternal regret, so we offered to take off our shoes and socks and carry him across. He refused indignantly: “No, no. I'll do it myself, myself. If I can't even jump these few rocks, what kind of Xiangxi man am I!” On reflection, wasn't Mr. Shen's whole life rather like crossing jumping rocks? But now, after all, he was no longer the weak young man who once drifted on the Yuan River and braved the wharves. In the end, his strength failed him and he fell from the jumping rocks into the stream, soaking his feet and trousers. Quick as a flash, my friend and I jumped down into the stream to help him up, yet he still wore that same smile: “It's nothing, nothing. The water in Zhangjiajie bites at your feet with its cold!” He even said with great regret: “I really want to just sit on the jumping rocks and let my two feet make a splash of water…” I could read on his face a deep, bone-carved longing for childhood and his native land.
“So then,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “what do you think of the current state of Chinese literature?” Mrs. Shen quickly interjected: “He has never liked to talk about politics.” She said, “He has lived his whole life as a proper man, harming no one and killing nothing.” Mr. Shen smiled as if answering a different question: “It's like the cuckoo in these mountains. It cries until blood comes from the corners of its beak, yet the mountain hasn't crumbled or grown thin from its crying. And the mountain still embraces it with a broad heart, letting it sing alongside the other birds. Thus another kind of harmony is achieved—that is nature.”
Then we looked at flowers.
Walking along the stream, wildflowers bloomed everywhere by the path—lobster flowers and butterfly orchids seeming to swim or flutter, full of movement. Mr. Shen said: “The wonder is in the spiritual likeness rather than the physical resemblance—not letting people name it at a glance. Yet if you savor it carefully, you can still come up with a name. Best of all is wanting to speak but fearing you can't say it precisely—the effect is even better.” The speaker meant nothing by it, but the listener took it to heart. This great writer, lonely for some thirty years, still had the “thief's heart” for crafting literature—it had not died!
Bizarre and grotesque stone peaks came rushing at us one after another. In the distance, a stone pillar with sharp edges thrust straight into the heavens like a golden whip. Someone had dipped it in the sun and tempered it in fire—it blazed like gold, magnificent in its splendor. Opposite it was Arhat Peak, intoxicated by the colors of the stream, with riverside willows trailing, dyed emerald by the flowing water. In the forest, a thrush sang. Mr. Shen's eyes could not keep up, and he recited: “A stream of peak forest, weeping willows hang; through the ten-mile gallery, hear the thrush sing.” This was a pure land far from human clamor and strife. Mr. Shen looked around for a long time, then chose a stone by the stream and sat down. At that very moment, I suddenly noticed him taking out a handkerchief. These were a man's tears—the wordless outpouring of a man of great wisdom.
To make good time and reach the end of that long Golden Whip Stream, we urged Mr. Shen to get moving, but he just sat there without budging. His eyes were moist, and he murmured: “I don't want to leave. It's beautiful here, it's good here. Let me just stay here.” Mrs. Shen scolded him affectionately: “You old child.” Then, like a mother coaxing a child, she urged him to set off. Seeing his stubbornness, his utterly innocent, childlike expression, she said nothing more and quietly sat down beside him. At this, we all sat down at a distance, not even daring to breathe, afraid of disturbing the tranquility of the valley, of disturbing Mr. Shen's whispered confidences with the stream and his conversations with the birds. Eighty years of a rugged life's journey—it was simply too, too tiring.
At this scene, I could not help but sigh with regret that this “literary giant who stands on his own merits at home and abroad through his body of work alone, a historian rare in China who can represent China before the entire world” (in Huang Yongyu's words) had ended his literary career prematurely and buried himself in moldy silks and satins, broken bricks and tiles, and ancient bronze paintings to pass his days. I came up with a hundred “what ifs”—what if he had not stopped writing for over thirty years; I think things would have been entirely different. But he merely smiled faintly and said: “This is precisely my good fortune—or rather, the great fortune within misfortune.”
When the unbearable past was mentioned, Mr. Shen only smiled, as if using a spare, understated technique to dilute the world's grievances and gains and losses. For me, however, an inexplicable emotion rose in my heart—whether from the perspective of literature or from that of material culture. I do not know whether this should be called “losing at sunrise, gaining at sunset.”
The next day was overcast. According to plan, we were to climb Huangshizhai. Mr. Shen patted his legs and said with regret: “My legs are not up to it. Let Little Zhang look for me.” The night before, we had discussed for a long time and planned to ask Mr. Shen to leave some calligraphy for Zhangjiajie. Since he could not go up the mountain, this was the perfect time to do it. We laid out on the table the more than twenty scenic spot titles we had drafted, along with the four treasures of the study. Mr. Shen said: “My writing is too embarrassing to show people. When people gather around to watch, my hand shakes. You all go up the mountain. I'll write slowly at home and give them to you when I'm done.”
When we returned in the afternoon and pushed open the door to Mr. Shen's room, we found him lying back on the sofa resting, beads of sweat on his forehead. On the table was a stack of finished calligraphy, and on the floor were some crumpled paper balls—needless to say, these were the ones he was dissatisfied with. Hearing us, Mr. Shen sat up at once and said with a smile: “You've all worked hard, haven't you? Sit, sit.” My heart warmed. Mr. Shen's heart always held a vast “love.” Seeing that Mrs. Shen's spirits were still high, he urged her to quickly pass on to him the feeling of what she had seen “on his behalf.” Then, drawing on that borrowed feeling, he casually recited a poem:
The waist-turning peak is perilous indeed,①
Golden Whip Stream is deep and secluded.
Climb higher still to Huangshizhai,
And all the mountains below seem low.
It was very late. As I was about to take my leave, I could not resist asking Mr. Shen for the “true transmission” of creative writing. He thought for a moment and said: “I have always maintained that fiction should not be forcibly tied to politics. If you interfere with life, life will inevitably interfere with you.” He also said: “It's best not to insert personal commentary into a work. You must write out the passion hidden behind the work and the grief concealed behind the work. In a word, let the reader feel it, savor it, think about it…”
On May 31, Mr. Shen Congwen concluded his four-day visit to Zhangjiajie and was about to return to his hometown of Fenghuang. As he was about to board the vehicle, he kept repeating one sentence: “Zhangjiajie is too beautiful. I'll come again another day, I'll come again…” As he said this, I saw him constantly wiping his eyes. He was crying again, crying so that those seeing him off could not bear to look directly. Everyone understood that Mr. Shen's return home this time was likely to “take leave of the road”—parting meant farewell forever.
The people of Zhangjiajie remember the day when Mr. Shen Congwen, the father of China's greatest regional literature of this century, returned to Dayong: May 28, 1982.
(Selected from the combined issue 1—2 of New Writers, 1995)
Note ①: Yaozhi Peak, also known as Yaozi Peak, now called Yaozizhai.