Border Town: A Novel Paperback – September 1, 2009

This lush, bittersweet short novel centers around the lives of a ferryman and his orphaned granddaughter Cuicui living by a river bank outside a remote town on the Szechuan-Hunan provincial border (hence the title). The novel takes place at the time it was written, after the fall of the dynasty but before the chaos of the Japanese invasion and World War 2, when ancient traditions and morality were still intact, especially in distant outposts such as the town of Chadong.Cuicui, aged 13 to 15 through the course of the story, dreams of romance while dreading the negative consequence of marriage: leaving her beloved, aging grandfather. Meanwhile she is courted by two brothers from the nearby town, one through a match-maker, the other by means of the Szechuanese tradition of love song serenades. In her innocence, Cuicui both deliberately and unintentionally ignores the brothers' advances.The author depicts a beautiful and idyllic landscape as an almost cinematic backdrop for the reserved, taciturn relations between his characters. He employs short bursts of emotional dialogue, then pulls away to focus on the minutiae of rural life--the steel striker used to light a pipe, the feel of silk crepe turban cloth, jars of tung oil and bamboo tubes filled with wine--in the way that a bashful girl turns her head aside out of modesty.Chen packs concentrated bursts of emotion into scenes throughout the novel, telling a heart-grabbing story of life by the river. It's a gorgeous book, considered a masterpiece of modern Chinese writing, for which the author was to have been awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature had he not died just before the official announcement.The translation is beautifully written. Strongly recommended.

Border Town is a modern Chinese novel first published in 1934. It was banned in China from about 1949 to 1979 because it didn’t have the proper Marxist ideas of rural class conflict. It is admired by critics today primarily for its lyric prose style.The style is beautiful, even in translation. It is sort of ethereal, invoking a peaceful pastoral landscape of rivers, mountains, and small towns that as yet has not been much contaminated by war. The town is small and in an out-of-the-way location far from the centers of activity and conflict that beset the rest of the country. Nearly everybody there seems to be extremely honorable, and they mostly get along with each other.The book seems to be a love story, but I’m not sure I quite understand the way it turns out. The two sons of the riverfront boss are both in love with Cuicui, the granddaughter of the ferryman. The riverfront boss is rich, relatively speaking, and the ferryman is poor, but you get the impression that there isn’t a very wide class disparity between them, as nobody seems to be making a fuss about either of the boys marrying beneath his station.Cuicui seems to have a slight preference for the younger brother, Nuosong, mostly because he flirted with her a little after the dragon boat festival a couple of years earlier. But it is his older brother, Tianbao, who has his father send a go-between to the ferryman to try to arrange a marriage. The ferryman, worried about what will happen to Cuicui after his death, is not unwilling, but he respects her opinion, and Cuicui offers no opinion on Tianbao’s proposal.Instead of fighting over her, they agree to try singing from the bluffs across the creek for her. Nuosong, who is a better singer, even offers to sing on his brother’s behalf too (not sure how this was meant to turn out). But, though Cuicui enjoys the singing, she doesn’t answer back.In the end, nothing is resolved.

The story is simple, focusing on young Cuicui who is unable to transfer her adolescent affection for her grandfather into a maturing form of love for a young suitor. Their lives depend on the living her grandfather makes -- though he never charges his passengers -- as a ferryman who transports strangers and villagers across the river that separates them from town life. Cuicui increasingly acts in his stead.To me, their livelihood is a metaphor for their inability to go forward in life and representative of Cuicui's inability to choose between two potential husbands. Forward impulsion is replaced by back-and-forth routine. Congwen makes it clear that he admires and holds the people and way of life of rural ethnic Chinese to be superior to the lives of Han Chinese who were, at the time this book was written, embroiled in the Communist Revolution.There is no compelling reason to go out of your way to read this book, but it is worth exploration if you are, like me, interested in all the literary output of China. Except to see if you agree with the following characterization -- that Congwen is considered the Pearl S. Buck among modern Chinese writers.

I bought this book on a recommendation from a friend and was very happy with the read. I understand that this book is well known in China, but I had never heard of it and was not sure what to expect. The novel is about a young girl growing into adulthood, but also contains many scenes and customs of rural Chinese life (circa 1930s?) that I found just as interesting and engaging as the rest of the plot. The translator does a great job conveying the story in a way that makes it seem like a folk tale. The chapters are short and I found it to be a quick read.

A pretty predicatable book. Boring.