Ripple on Stagnant Water by Li Jieren, and: Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family by Kristin Stapleton (review)

Errata

I believe that if there were ever any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It is written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist, or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; he knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”

The ripple on stagnant (or, literally, dead) water (sishui weilan 死水微瀾) of the title of Li Jieren’s 李劼人 novel, published in 1936 and revised and republished in 1955, is directly referenced at its denouement:

Although the news [of an embassy attack in Chengdu] did raise a slight ripple such as a clear breeze raises on a pool, the bureaucrats did not lose their composure, and the businessmen accordingly kept about their business, and the residents and pleasure-seekers and opium addicts kept residing in their homes and seeking their pleasures and smoking their opium, respectively, nor was the spread of the news even very fast; the hearts of the people in their various riches remained, like stagnant water deep beneath the surface, without the slightest agitation. That is to say, there was no movement great enough to penetrate the depths.

(Li, p. 201)

This rippling effect can be used to describe the effect of political events on the “periphery,” a state that the novel’s translator Bret Sparling argues is still recognizable decades later. Upon reading the novel, he notes that “farmers still felt isolated from Chengdu, and Chengdu still felt isolated from Beijing, and Beijing still felt isolated at the center of the world” (Li, p. x), to the extent that he muses on translating the novel entirely into the twenty-first century, substituting Internet café for opium den.

The novel is infused with other rippling effects, most notably the way that one character’s stories beget another’s desire for stories. At least this is the case for its heroine, Sister Cai, called “Baby Deng” at the beginning, who dreams of going to Chengdu. Ignoring her mother, a native of Chengdu, who describes the city as “no paradise . . . no kaleidoscope, and the impoverished families in Chengdu were still more wretched than the rural poor” (Li, p. 15), Baby Deng prefers the descriptions of the capital told to her by her neighbor Second Mistress Han, whose affection she has cultivated with her embroidery skills. Through Second Mistress Han, who “suffered a tendency to idealization,” Sister Cai instead,

assembled the metropolis as she received it . . . and although she had never glimpsed so much as the crenellations of the parapets, to hear her talk you would have thought she knew a good deal more about the city than even her older brother, whose business often took him there in person. She knew the height and thickness of the city wall, and knew how to describe the crowds of people pressing both directions through the portals in that wall, of which she knew that there were four—north, south, east and west. She knew the distance was nine and three-tenths li from the north gate to the south, and...