Five years have passed quickly. Meanwhile, I haven't written you a letter or reported any news in the papers with which you're often in contact. Perhaps you thought I already died. It is a very common, easy matter for a young person to perish in a chaotic country; you could have thought like this. If this had not been the case, why, after returning to my country, was I like a stone sunk into the sea, without a bit of impact?
E.G., I didn't die, but I did violate my original promise. I didn't do any of the things I originally agreed to. As soon as I returned to this country, I was imprisoned by various bizarre circumstances. I didn't resist, just let trivial matters sap my vigor and life. So I punished myself with silence. In your milieu, I was dead, I killed myself. I thought that, occasionally, after work, you and A. Berkman might discuss my death, that you'd heave a couple of sighs on account of it.
E.G., what a long, painful five years these have been! I still don't understand how I passed through them. But all of that is finally receding into the distance, just like a nightmare. All that remains are ten-odd novels2: these ten-odd books have sucked I don't know how much of my blood and tears.
But only you can understand this condition. You can know what miserable sacrifice I contributed in these five years. This sacrifice was not at all worth while. Only you know this. When I was fifteen years old you once called me back from life on a precipice. Later, in 1927, the law put two innocent workers in the electric chair in Boston3. While the cry of the entire world's working class was stifled, I harbored that kind of pained, candid heart which, opened to you, once told of my sorrow and cried out for your help. Many times you used caring, encouraging words to comfort me, used your precious experience to guide me. These beautiful letters of yours continue to be a wellspring of inspiration for me, when I have the opportunity to read them. E.G., my spiritual mother (you once permitted me to address you like this), E.G., you, daughter of a dream (L.P. Abbott called you this4), you are the only person who can understand my anguish.
Now people are discussing my moral education, life, consciousness. These people, they never comprehend the things I have written, they never understand my ideas, they never know my life. They have created a me from subjective imagination, then attacked this person overtly and covertly. Nihilist, humanist: people bestow this sort of title on my name. My novels invite these many misunderstandings. My novels completely conceal my ideas, my character. I once wrote a 300-plus page book explaining my ideas (there wasn't one metaphysical term in this book; everything was in language everyone can understand),5 but those who talk about my ideas and conclude that I am a whatever-ist are unlikely to read it. On the basis of one short story they conclude what my ideas are, then from this deduce various bizarre conclusions. These past few years I've fallen into this kind of pit and I have not yet begun to climb out.
I detest myself, detest the pieces I've written; I've decided to punish myself with silence. In the last few years I haven't communicated with you once; I myself have blocked this source of inspiration and comfort. This punishment has caused me much pain. I'm quite rightly in this kind of anguish, having buried myself alive.
Today reading the two thick volumes of your autobiography Living My Life6 -those two books, filled with life-made my soul tremble fiercely. Throughout the whole book your roaring of forty years, like spring thunder, knocked at the door of my living grave. At this time, silence lost its effect. The fire of my life was lit. I want to return to that active life. I also want to experience the peaks and depths of that life, experience that anguished melancholy and that joyous oblivion, experience that dark despair and enthusiastic hope. I want to use the attitude you taught me to live life calmly until I finish the last drop in my cup.
E.G., I am now starting to break the silence. With this letter, I wish to present my most recent collection of short stories to you. It is the result of my period of silence; it is soaked with my blood and tears. From it you can see my pained life of the last year. Also, in "On the Threshold,"7 you can catch sight of yourself. I only read Turgenev's magnificent prose poem because you introduced it to me, only got to know those Yelena Nikolayevna-like8 Parisian exile women because of you; in my mind my impression of them is forever indestructible. I hope that in the near future, you and I and they can meet on the Barcelona seashore.9 At that time I will never again chatter to you incessantly about my painful life.
| Ba Jin
September 1933 |
This letter appeared as the preface to a volume of Ba Jin's short stories titled The General (Junjiang). A different preface appeared in the first edition, published in August of 1934 by the Life Bookstore in Shanghai. The letter first appeared as the preface to The General in an edition of collected short stories published in April of 1936. In March of that year it was published as "To E.G." in an autobiographical work called Life's Confessions (Sheng de Chanhui) (Lang, 62-66).
The words "E.G.," " J.P. Abbott," the "A." in "A. Berkman," and "Living My Life" appear in English the original, along with "milieu" from the French.
Daniel Burton-Rose wishes to thank Yu Zhang and Yingquan Song for their comments on this translation.
2 Ba Jin's novels and novellas in the period preceding this letter include: Oblivion (1928), The Setting Sun (1930), New Life (1931), Fog (1931), Family (1931), Rain (1932), Dream of the Sea (1932), The Antimony Miners (1932), Autumn in Spring (1932), Snow (1933) and Thunder (1933). He also published the following short story collections: Revenge (1929), Light (1931), The Electric Chair (1932), The Dustcloth (1932) and The General (1933), as well as several volumes on non-fiction.
Of the above novels, only Family is available in English. It has appeared in several editions-Doubleday and Co., Inc (1972) and Waveland Press, Inc. (1989)-as well as in comic book format: The Family: A Contemporary Chinese Classic, illustrated and adapted, Asiapac Books (Singapore: 1995). Ba Jin's most well-known short story, "Dog", which first appeared in the collection Light, is also available in: Edgar Snow, ed., Living China: Modern Chinese Short Stories, Reynal & Hitchcock (NYC, NY: 1937) and Lance Halvorsen, trans., Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, Columbia University Press (NYC, NY: 1995)
3 This is a reference to Niccola Sacco and Bartholomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists arrested and charged with a payroll robbery and double murder. Their 1921 conviction was tremendously controversial, with passionate partisans declaring them either victims of a Red Scare or foreign devils. Ba Jin briefly corresponded with Vanzetti and was deeply traumatized when he was executed, along with Sacco, on August 23, 1927. Ba Jin participated in a protest in France; attacked by police, he saw that France no longer held to its professed revolutionary ideals, but was instead beholden to "the dollar country" of the United States.
4 Ba Jin is mistaken here: it was not her friend Leonard Abbott, but William Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis, who called Goldman the "daughter of a dream."
5 The book which Ba Jin refers to is From Capitalism to Anarchism, which he signed with his given name Feigan. From Capitalism to Anarchism was published in 1930 by the American Equality Society, a small group of Chinese Anarchist workers in San Francisco, California. Ba Jin can't blame his critics too harshly for being unfamiliar with this work; it was banned almost immediately by China's nationalist government (Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings, 150).
Of From Capitalism to Anarchism Lang observes: "The work is dedicated to Alexander Berkman, 'the author of Communist Anarchism, to whom I owe most of my arguments.' Actually, Pa Chin's book is a translation, with some modifications, of Berkman's Now and After: ABC of Communist Anarchism. In the preface Pa Chin says that in China, where very few people knew what anarchism stood for, there was a need for a popular book on it, and he chose Alexander Berkman's because it was written in a very simple style and could be read by workers." (Ibid., 137)
6 Goldman's autobiography, first published in 1931.
7 This is the title of one of the short stories in the collection. Its title and theme is derived from Ivan Turgenev's prose poem of May 1878, "The Threshold". Ba Jin translated this prose poem into Chinese, publishing it in a collection of translations called The Threshold (Menkan) in 1935.
8 Yelena Nikolayevna Stakova, the heroine of Turgenev's On the Eve (1859). Stakova was a Russian aristocrat who defied tradition, class and ethnic prejudice to marry a Bulgarian nationalist revolutionary, Dmitry Nikanorovich Insarov. After Insarov died, Stakova carried on his work.
9 Ba Jin dreamed of Barcelona because it was a stronghold of anarchist militance, as would soon be apparent to the world with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.