Chinese Literature

seemed a few minutes only... and then walk out of the cave when he woke up to find a happy China, a China with the hard struggles of fifty years behind her... . :

Then he reproached himself: ‘This is too negative a way of think1» Yes, he, too, ought to contribute some of his own strength. He ought to take part in this hard struggle, so that China could be liberated more quickly. Then he thought of Aladdin’s lamp. If he had that, all he would have to do was to rub the lamp and an omnipotent genie would be at his disposal... . After a while, some other beautiful fairy tales came to his mind. An angel might grant him three wishes. He tried to put his confused thoughts in order, to decide what these three wishes should be, wishes for positive things. .. .

Tt was already ten o’clock in the morning when he woke up. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He remembered the wild fancies he had had the previous night and how they had kept him awake for a long time. He was bored by these reflections. He stretched, walked over to the calendar and tore off a sheet.

“Sunday again, alas!”

Little Mr. Chen had gone out early that morning, leaving a note asking Mr. Li to come to a meeting at one o’clock that afternoon to discuss something about the weekly magazine. A servant of the school handed the note to Mr. Li.

‘Fim,’ he threw the slip of paper on his desk. “Business again, always business!”

Sunshine came through the window on the southern side, and shadows danced in his room. In the school garden, the twittering of the sparrows blended with the students’ singing and shouting. How could they be so cheerful!

Mr. Li stayed in his room all alone, reading the newspaper and sipping his flavourless tea. He seemed to be angry with someone for something and unwilling to see anybody.

“The people in the occupied areas... - How do they live?” he asked himself.

Perhaps some were carrying on their business as usual, while others were cultivating their land as before. And if he had not left his native place, perhaps he could have collected the rent from his tenants as usual, could have painted pictures and carved seals as before. All these things had nothing to do with military actions and politics. So long as he expressed no anti-Japanese sentiments in his essays, he might not have been molested.

But then he sighed in despair, for he remembered the atrocities com: mitted by the Japanese.

Only Peiping, he thought, seemed to have escaped this kind of fate. Peiping and Tientsin fell into the hands of the Japanese without a battle,

ing

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