I first read Fortress Besieged as a teenager, when the novel, originally published in 1947 and out of print for decades, became a bestseller in China after it was adapted into a TV series in 1990. The book was so popular that its characters quickly became, in the public imagination, types—in fact, archetypes—as though a mere reference to the name of this or that character was enough to summarize the essence of an acquaintance or a family member. Memorable lines from the novel circulated. An old woman selling steamed buns by the roadside was likely to repeat to a young couple pondering her goods that “if men don’t get enough to eat, they’ll get irritable”—words spoken by Sun Jou-chia, a Vera Rostova–like character who has won a competition to become the wife of Fang Hung-chien, the hero of the novel, only to have the same epiphany as Vera did in War and Peace, that men are more or less children, to be put up with and to be put under discipline. A high school student could cite the epigraph of the novel to a friend—“Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out”—and surmise that the metaphor would apply to more situations than marriage; life itself must be like a fortress besieged. (I was one of those philosophizing teenagers.)
Fortress Besieged is reputed to have sold ten million copies in China since it came back in print. Written by the literary scholar Qian Zhongshu, the novel was published before communism took over, which exempted it from the censorship and state intervention that was a common fate of much Chinese literature written in the second half of the twentieth century. To two generations of readers fed on party-sanctioned propaganda, it brought the freshest air.
It seemed a miracle that the book existed at all. It takes place in 1937 and 1938, at the beginning of the eight-year Sino-Japanese War. My elders, coming from the same province as the Fang family, passed down stories that were essential to my understanding of that history: my great-grandfather, the owner of a fabric shop with a lame leg, was put to hard labor by the Japanese and haphazardly executed because his disability made him an inefficient worker; my uncle, eight years old, went out with a playmate to the field and returned in the evening to find that his family, unable to locate him on the day of an imminent invasion, had fled without him. Until his old age he could not forget his months of living as a vagabond in the heavily bombed country.
We are not the only family bearing such a history. A family friend once handed me a self-published memoir by her sister relating that their grandfather, a doctor of Western medicine, was betrayed by a nephew, a collaborator with the Japanese; the doctor was arrested and tortured, the family broken up. A neighbor in Beijing once told me all her wartime memories, including being thrown down into a well along with a cousin—they were young girls then—by their elders for fear that they would be captured and raped by the Japanese. “Here,” the old woman pointed to a dent in her hairline, “you can feel the scar. We were lucky that there was some water in the well but not too much.”
Wartime tragedies and atrocities happen in Fortress Besieged but mostly offstage, alluded to without being given a direct look. The brutal early months of the war, “from the retreat from Shanghai to the fall of Nanking,” flash by in little more than a paragraph. More vividly evoked are the effects of the fighting on the conditions of daily life in occupied Shanghai, one of the novel’s primary settings, where by the end of the book slums are proliferating “like ringworm” and commodity prices are rising “like a kite with its string broken in the wind.”
But most of the novel’s attention goes to the characters as they eat, drink, flirt, write mediocre poetry, discuss Western and Eastern philosophies, and stab one another in the back with puny, metaphorical knives for insubstantial gain and petty revenge. The civilian life in the novel—in Hong Kong, in Shanghai, and in a provincial town where a university is assembled halfheartedly to accommodate the refugee students from occupied regions—echoes the society life of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in War and Peace. The fiercest battles happen in drawing rooms or at dinner tables; close combat—carried out in words and gestures instead of with bayonets or sabers—doesn’t draw blood but kills off people’s spirits.
That people could live in an entirely different manner through wartime, largely untouched, was a revelation to me when I first read Fortress Besieged. It’s like War and Peace without the war. Fang Hung-chien is the quintessential superfluous character. There is a bit of Pierre’s naiveté in him, but none of Pierre’s curiosity or idealism. We follow him as he returns from “studying abroad,” having secured a fake diploma from an Irish con man in New York, and embroils himself in a love triangle in Shanghai, leading on an actual Ph.D. recipient named Miss Su while pining for her younger cousin, Miss T’ang:
Waiting for him to make his formal declaration of love, Miss Su inwardly faulted him for being so frivolous and tardy; he, on the other hand, was waiting for a chance to explain that he did not love her, and wished he weren’t so tenderhearted and could be courageous enough to cut the Gordian knot. Every time he went to the Sus, he came away reproaching himself for having gone one more time and talked so much again. He gradually realized that he was what Westerners called a “moral weakling,” and was worried that Miss T’ang would detect this major flaw in his character.
Eventually, after falling out of favor with both women, he gets a temporary job at the fictional National San Lü University, where he blunders his way into the ill-fated marriage that takes up the book’s last chapters. (“Though in the heat of anger they might find quarreling a great relief, when the quarrel was over they both felt exhausted and empty, the feeling one gets at the end of the opera or when one wakes from a drunken sleep.”) Reflecting on the prospect of meeting his former crush, he realizes how many of his old selves he no longer recognizes:
He had buried some of his dead selves in his memory, erected a monument to them, and occasionally paid them homage, such as by a moment of feeling for T’ang Hsiao-fu. Others seemed to have died by the wayside and been left there to rot and decompose or be devoured by birds and beasts—but never to be completely obliterated, such as the self which had bought the diploma from the Irishman.
There is a hint of Hamlet’s indecision in Fang, but he is a Hamlet without the pressure to take any revenge for a mother country being pillaged and raped, and his entire tragedy, in the end, is to have married the wrong woman. One supposes that, had Hamlet lived on, his marriage to Ophelia could hardly have been a happy one.
Everywhere Fang goes he comes across new spectacles of folly and pretension. As a sideline, a professor of literature runs a racketeering business. A university president speaks like a saint but covets other people’s wives. Young women strive to entrap a husband, like Jane Austen characters. Married women manipulate and cheat on their husbands, some skillfully and others as wistfully as Emma Bovary. Very few books force Chinese readers to so directly confront their own casual bigotry, calculated cruelty, and ingenuity for, as one idiom has it, pomp and vainglory in the space within the shell of a snail.
Fortress Besieged is widely praised as a masterpiece of satire. Its lineage within Chinese literature traces back to The Scholars by Wu Jingzi (1701–1754) and Officialdom Unmasked by Li Baojia (1867–1906), two well-known Qing Dynasty novels. The vivid portraits of characters of various social classes in both books offered much entertainment when we studied excerpts from them in middle and high school. Yet, few of us, I dare say, recognized the incarnations of those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century characters in our own lives: a chairwoman of the neighborhood association who seemed to have unlimited power (in my family’s case, she and her team liked to break into our apartment in the middle of the night, looking for an American or Taiwanese spy, because one of my uncles fled to Taiwan after 1949); a butcher who took in the rationing ticket for meat and then decided, depending on his mood, whether to cut a thin and yet decent slice or just a chunk of fat; or a woman who sat in front of the public bathhouse, whose power was to decide if you deserved a key to a locked cupboard or simply a bamboo basket in which to stow your belongs. Sometimes a novel serves as a mirror; but in other cases it serves as a veil over the meanest reality.
Not all the humor in Fortress Besieged has aged well; I winced, during my recent reading, at some of the jokes targeted at women’s physiques. But only a reader of propaganda, rather than of literature, could denounce the novel on those grounds alone. Much of the book’s abundant comedy could have descended either from the Qing Dynasty satires or from Dickens and Don Quixote. But is humor the point of the novel? I don’t know, and I often wonder how Qian Zhongshu would think of “satire” as a label for Fortress Besieged—one of the few works of fiction he produced in a long and prestigious scholastic career, including being a major translator of Mao Zedong’s work into English.
A work of satire carries laughter and wit in its social criticism, but it also gives readers a buffer. How many of them, after all, want to face down their own flaws and follies? Few Chinese readers I know, when laughing at the characters in Fortress Besieged, are laughing at themselves. They are laughing at their in-laws, their bosses, the lovers who have jilted them, and the high-status people they despise but can combat only with mockery. In that sense, satire has its raison d’être in producing a kind of compensation and relief. A satirical novel and its readers meet at a height where, arms intertwined, they can look down upon some people and some situations with a sense of superiority—more often than not a false one.
There is a character named Bilibin in War and Peace, a Russian diplomat whose forte is to produce mots that then circulate widely in society. He satirizes the French and the Russians and the Austrians and the Germans equally, and neither military nor civilian dignitaries escape his verbal lampooning. He will neither win nor lose the war for Russia, but he is a perennial winner in any situation—so long as there is a safe distance between himself and the cannonballs (and there always is that distance for people who know how to play it safe). He is, I often think, the prototype of those witty voices we’ve been hearing on social media for these past twenty years. There is a limit to even the greatest satire, which depends on this sort of safe distance between the satirist and his audience.
I suppose one could call Fortress Besieged a satire, as one could say about Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk or some of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories, but none of these writers—Hašek or Singer or Qian Zhongshu—was simply a Bilibin. To read them, for all their wit and irony, is to taste a fear or hear an alarm for human beings in crisis. Qian Zhongshu might have been prescient enough, pessimistic enough, or indifferent enough not to pay much attention to how future generations would understand his novel. (In a famous anecdote, he declined a foreign scholar’s visit, saying that a good enough egg should not cause its consumer to want to meet the hen.) But if I read Fortress Besieged as satire thirty years ago, on this rereading I sensed tears when I laughed.