On “The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature,” edited by Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt ****

This is the second volume of Chinese literature put out by Columbia University Press that I've read. The first was classic lit; this volume deals chiefly with the literature of the twentieth century. The shame in that is that when the two volumes are put together, the one to two hundred years in between get short shift. Like the previous volume, I was not a fan of the manner in which this volume was put together. As someone who knows little about Chinese literature and who is trying to learn more about it, I would have relished a bit more attention to context. Why these selections? And what do these selections say about the state of Chinese literature at the time? This volume, rather, is set up like a literary anthology in which the editors' voices are relatively muted; the “literature” you're reading is the important stuff, even if you know little about it. There are no headnotes. Instead, there is a set of short biographies placed at the start of the entire book, forcing a reader to go back and forth between the selections and the bios for info. The bios give good life info and sometimes a little info about the selection itself, but it's hard to glean, from the bios and the overall setup, why the editors chose some works or how relatively important the writer or the piece is to the overall body of modern Chinese literature. I found myself no longer checking the bios by about halfway through the volume, as they began to run together.

Intriguingly, the editors chose to provide the volume in three sections, with three subsections each. First, the anthology is split up by genre: Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. Then, it is split up by period: pre-Mao (from 1918), Mao, and post-Mao. Personally, I would have preferred the genres not be split out, so that the work would have been wholly chronological, but I can see the value in the generic splits. The fiction section is the longest, taking up 5/7 of the overall text, with the poetry and nonfiction each taking up about a seventh. Initially, I would have thought the fiction—short stories, not chapters from longer novels—too long, but the editors choice here seems to be wise. It is the stories that are the strongest section of the book. The poetry, I found, though often full of profoundly beautiful imagery did not seem on par, as a whole, to the classic Chinese poetry of years before, the images often not evoking a parallel track of thought about life. The nonfiction was also not so inspiring or interesting to me. As such, the stories proved to be the section that most seemed to reflect the concerns of daily life for modern Chinese.

What is evident in the pre-Mao section stories is the poverty that must have dominated China before the coming of communism. Such helps explain why the revolution came about. One gets the sense in some tales, which present a more communistic view, of the hope some held out for revolutionaries. But mostly, one gets the feeling for the overall povery of the population. The Mao section of stories present only a few of idealism. That's because so much of the literature that the editors have chosen comes out of Taiwan. But there's probably good reason—idealistic stories of Maoist society do not generally make for interesting reading, except maybe the first one or two times. The Post-Mao world is surprisingly open about the failures and horrors of the Cultural Revolution—neighbors turning in/on neighbors to keep from being turned in themselves, no one truly guilty of anything outside a willingness to sell others out for alleged lack of loyalty to save one's own skin; old revolutionaries who have come to see the folly of their hopes; local party leaders who use their authority to perform heinous acts.

My two favorite pieces in the book stemmed from this post-Mao period. The first, “The Tunnel” by Chen Ruoxi, concerns a lonely older man whose adult children are devoted to the party and who are making their way up various government positions. This older man cannot be and is not allowed to have a love interest, since that would interfere with inheritance and potentially with the children's party status. During the course of the story and his service on one of the party committees helping to aid the community, he finds himself falling for a widow, whose husband had been accused of being against the party and had been taken away. The father finds various amusing ways to have small trysts with this woman, sneaking out, for example, to see movies with her. But the family will NOT allow him to remarry—it is simply shameful for an older man and would hurt his children's own economic needs. One day, the couple opts to skip the movie and go for a hike in some lesser known part of the city. They find a tunnel and some alone time. The ending here is heartbreaking, just as the man's experience of being denied love would have been.

The other story, and a very short one at that, that stood out to me was Liu Yichang's “Wrong Number,” not so much for its emotional connection as for its technical trickery. The tale is one told twice, once without the “wrong number” phone call and once with it, showing how a few minutes—a dead butfferfly, if you will, to use the old sci-fi trope—can change the course of one's life.

On “The Common People of Ancient Rome” by Frank Frost Abbott ***

This work had moments of lucid prose focused on the “common” people, but the majority of the early portions of the work focused on language and literature. In a sense, I understand why. We have mostly just what is written to gather information about such people. But in that sense, the work becomes one of linguistics and reflections on literary statements about the lives of such folks, itself not the most pedestrian discussion. I was fairly bored before Abbott got to stuff I was actually interested in—economics. Life, as Abbott notes, was quite hard for most common folks and luxuries few. Indeed, things we would consider staples, such as a well-balanced diet were not to be had. Bread and water might be your livelihood. Much of this I'd read elsewhere by now, for example, regarding housing and trade guilds. Still, it was interesting. Abbott closes with a couple portraits of Romans about whom we know a little from writings that survive. These were not “common” people, however, in my estimation, being friends to Caesar and various political entities. As Abbot''s work makes clear in its selection of things to discuss, finding info on common folk two thousand years ago is no easy task. Histories are written about the “important” people in our world.

On "Parthia" by George Rawlinson ****

Of the three books I've read on the Parthian Empire, this is the best. One focused on the political history of the empire and was difficult to parse without more understanding about the general history surrounding the events. One was really interesting and well written but had an agenda that made much of the information in it suspect. Rawlinson's text seems to strike a good balance, providing useful background info for the eventual political history that follows. But it doesn't just focus on events; it also gives information about the geography and culture, which gives one more of a feel for what those events meant to the folks living at the time.

As a work of history written before the 1950s, it does, alas, participate in some of the dated wording and colonialist perspectives that such older histories often do. Rawlinson, in other words, is too often willing to take on the views of Parthia's detractors, calling it a region of barbarians and critiquing its culture as less refined than those of the West. 

The book starts with a discussion of the geography of the area. Following that comes the bulk of the book: a recounting of the various kings and the wars in which they participated. Because so little information was recorded by the Parthians themselves, most of our history about the region comes from outsiders, most especially the Romans. Thus, the history to a large degree is a recounting of Rome's various wars with the empire--and usually over the kingdom of Armenia. My particular focus of interest was the warfare within Mesopotamia, so it was interesting to read about Cassius's disastrous invasion of Parthia--and then the later less disastrous invasions by Titus and another emperor (Severus, if I remember right). Rome never seemed to hold the land for long. Strangely, Parthia would often send royal family to be educated in Rome, which would give Rome the aura of holding "captive" Parthian royals and let it feel superior, even as Parthia often put the actual Roman army to flight.

Parthia was a rather loose empire, with many vassal states within it. The Parthian king was a "king of kings" insofar as many of the vassal states had their own rulers. One gets the feel that it had a more easygoing government than Rome did and that the people had more freedom (though, really, it wasn't likely the "people" who had the freedom but the vassal governments within the Parthia empire that had the freedom to rule over the people as they willed). That leant the kingdom both its strength and its weakness, insofar as the kingdoms ruled over were more often willing to fight for themselves but also, with less cohesion among the subject peoples, less unity between the various factions.