The Money Demon: An Autobiographical Romance

Introduction

The Money Demon (Huangjin sui), written in 1913, is an autobiography —and also a novel about a youth’s amorous and erotic development during a period of hectic social and cultural change. I hope that this translation will serve to introduce an example of the best fiction of its time as well as a rare, and perhaps unprecedented, kind of Chinese autobiographical writing. The author, Chen Diexian (1879–1940), was one of the most remarkable of the intellectuals whose working lives spanned the old China and the new. He had two passions that are seldom found together: a passion for the practice of literature , music, and art; and a passion for industrial invention and entrepreneurship. This unusual combination has given rise to the impression that, to put it crudely, he was an opportunist who made a living from churning out popular romances until, during a nationwide boycott of Japanese imports, he managed to seize control of the Chinese market for tooth powder (the precursor of toothpaste) and promptly gave up his literary career for the life of a tycoon. The reality is a good deal more complex—and far more interesting. Chen, whose personal name was Xu and whose most common pen name was Tian Xu Wo Sheng (Heaven Bore Me in Introduction 1 2 Introduction Vain), came from a wealthy Hangzhou family.1 His father, Chen Fuyuan, practiced medicine, while his uncle served as an official, and both families shared a single large compound in the city. Fuyuan’s first wife had been killed in the chaos of the Taiping rebellion, and his second wife, née Wang, was of delicate health and bore him no children. At her suggestion, he took as concubine (secondary wife) a girl surnamed Dai, who had been found, lost and homeless, during the rebellion and brought into the household. Dai bore her husband four sons, in whose upbringing Wang, as principal wife, took a leading role. Diexian was the third son, and his preference for Wang over his birth mother is made quite plain in The Money Demon and is discernible also in the memoir he wrote about his father’s wives. Diexian’s father died in 1885 and Wang in 1893, while Dai lived until 1906. The Money Demon’s narrative begins in 1885 and runs to 1901, but it is concerned mainly with events from 1894 to 1901, the period of the author’s adolescence during which Dai was the head of the family. In 1897 an inheritance dispute led to a decision to split the household. Dai and her three younger sons moved to a house beside Mount Ziyang in the south of the city. By this time Diexian was married to Zhu Shu, whom Wang had picked out for him years earlier. Pressed by Dai to earn a living, he reluctantly took himself off to Wukang, northwest of Hangzhou, to serve as secretary to the commissioner of customs. Later in 1898 he returned to Hangzhou to take the licentiate examination. The following year he gave up his customs position and bought a share in a dealership in tea and bamboo, the main products of the hill country around Wukang. (In the novel Wukang is referred to as Xiangxi, the name of a nearby river.) In 1900, following the collapse of the dealership, he and two friends founded a daily newspaper in Hangzhou, the Daguanbao (Grand view), their main purpose being to publish literature, Introduction 3 chiefly their own. By this time, before his twenty-first birthday, Diexian had some twenty works to his credit, including two novels, a tanci (verse novel), a play, several volumes of poetry, plus treatises on a variety of subjects.2 Both the Daguanbao and another paper he founded were closed down by the authorities because of the political views expressed in their editorials. Although heavily in debt, Diexian managed in 1901 to start a shop in Hangzhou, the Cui Li (gather profit) Company, that sold books as well as imported scientific instruments and appliances. It was the first such “modern” shop in Hangzhou, and it brought him little but ridicule from his peers. In 1902 he set up a publishing company in association with the shop, and followed it in 1906 with a public library-cum-reading room, the Bao Mu She (read-to-your-heart’s-content society). Early in 1907 he began publishing a journal, the Zhuzuo...