Chinese Literature

Three Stories

The following stories were written before China’s liberation.

Jou Shih’s A Slave Mother appeared during the period of darkest reaction which preceded the invasion of China by the Japanese imperialists. The story mirrors the poverty and oppression the Chinese people were made to suffer under feudal rule by landlords. The outcry of the slave mother described represents the protests of innumerable other innocent victims of this age-old feudal system.

Harvest by Yeh Tzu is the epitome of Chinese rural life, on the eve of Japan’s aggressive war on China. At that juncture, the reactionary ruling class adopted a policy of non-resistance while they intensified their oppression and exploitation of the people, with no concern at all for the fate of the country. The mass of the Chinese peasants were thrown into wretched misery. But the younger generation had begun to wake up, as is shown clearly in the person of Li Chiu in this novel. After Li Chiu joined the revolution, the things that happened to his father were so ghastly that even this stubborn old man saw that his son had taken the correct path, that in fact this was the only path for them on which to continue their existence.

Chang Tien-yi wrote New Life in 1938, in the early part of the Wor of Resistance to Japanese Aggression. This short novel portrays the mental conflict with which an intellectual of the landlord class faces this war of resistance. Because of his class origin, he does not know where he stands in this boiling over of popular sentiment. Because of its timeliness, the story exerted considerable influence upon China's intellectuals.

A Slave Mother

JOU SHIH

He was a dealer in animal skins which he bought from hunters in the countryside and sold in town. Sometimes he also worked in the fields; early each summer he turned farm-hand, transplanting rice for other people. As he had learned to transplant the seedlings in wonderfully straight rows, the peasants always asked him to help them. But

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