2015 History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture - Writing From The Revolution's Debris

WRITING FROM REVOLUTION’S DEBRIS: SHEN CONGWEN’S
FAMILY LETTERS IN THE MAO ERA
Jie Li
(Harvard University)
More than six decades have passed. As I regard the papers on my desk after having copyedited them, I
do not know if I am in a dream or reading someone else’s story. What we went through was absurd and
strange, and yet utterly ordinary for our generation of intellectuals. … What Congwen and I shared, this
life, was it ultimately happy or unhappy? This cannot be answered. I didn’t understand him, not fully.
Later I began to understand him a little, but it is only now, after compiling and editing the papers he
left behind, that I really came to comprehend who he was, and the heavy burdens he bore throughout
his life. … The more of his writings in this moldering pile of papers I flip through—regardless of if they
are fragmented or unfinished—the more I realize how precious this man was. Too late! … I respectfully
offer this book to those readers who loved him. At the same time, I lay bare a little of my own feelings.
六十多年過去了，面對書桌上這幾組文字，校閱後，我不知道是在夢中還是在翻閱別
人的故事。經歷荒誕離奇，但又極為平常，是我們這一代知識分子多多少少必須經歷
的生活 … 從文同我相處，這一生，究竟是幸福還是不幸？得不到回答。我不理解他，
不完全理解他，後來逐漸有了些理解，但是，真正懂得他的為人，懂得他一生所承受
的重壓，是在整理編選他遺稿的現在 … 越是從爛紙堆裏翻到他越多的遺作，哪怕是零
散的，有頭無尾，有尾無頭的，就越覺斯人可貴。太晚了！… 謹以此書奉獻給熱愛他
的讀者，並表明我的一點點心跡。(Zhang Zhaohe, “Afterword,” Shen Congwen’s Family Letters)1
In 1949, Shen Congwen’s 沈從文 (1902–1988) renowned literary career terminated with an attempted
suicide, the exclusion from the Chinese Writers’ Association, and, a few years later, the destruction
and proscription of his works in both Mainland China and Taiwan. Thus wiped out of Chinese literary
histories, Shen Congwen devoted the second half of his life, the next forty years, to the preservation
and study of archeological artifacts, writing only cultural historical books and articles, personal and
professional letters, a few classical-style poems (intended and failed as propaganda), as well as the
requisite “dossier genres” of reports and confessions. Beyond a few self-criticisms published in
newspapers, Shen Congwen’s audience shrank from a broad reading public to a small number of
cultural bureaucrats, a handful of friends and family members, and the policing eyes of authorities in
successive political campaigns. Posthumously published in The Complete Works of Shen Congwen
(Shen Congwen quanji 沈從文全集 in 2002, Shen’s post-1949 writings have only recently begun to
1
Zhang Zhaohe, “Houji 後記,” in Shen and Zhang, Shen Congwen jiashu [hereafter: Shen Congwen jiashu] 740.
Li, Writing from Revolution’s Debris: Shen Congwen’s Family Letters in the Mao Era 2
receive some scholarly attention—as clues to his biography, as evidence of his literary death, and as
fragmented reflections of his historical and aesthetic vision.2
If we regard all writing as some form of letter writing, addressed to one or more persons,3 then
it becomes harder to draw a clear line between Shen Congwen’s private letters as biographical sources
and published writings as “literary works.” Rather than reclaiming his letters as works of literature in
their own right, I propose an epistolary reading method that takes into account not only the form and
content of the letters, but also the circumstances of their production, transmission, and reception.
This reading method attends to the intersubjective nature of these literary artifacts that meld together
the subjectivities of the author, his subjects, and his readers, so that even misreading and belated
recognition become essential parts of their story. For almost six decades, Shen’s wife Zhang Zhaohe
張兆和 (1910–2003) was the primary recipient of his letters, but as she suggests in the “Afterword”
cited in the epigraph, her reading and understanding of them was often belated. As well as a recipient,
she turned out to be a trustee of these letters. In selecting, editing, and publishing them for a wider
readership of later generations, she also served as a “postal service”—a medium through which these
letters were transmitted, filtered, and alloyed with historical patina and sentiments of her own.
This essay examines Shen Congwen’s correspondences with his wife and children in the Mao
era, as published in his Complete Works as well as in a separate volume entitled The Family Letters of
Shen Congwen (Shen Congwen jiashu 沈從文家書), edited by Shen Congwen’s second son Shen
Huchu 沈虎雏.4 It focuses on his three most prolific periods of family letter writing: the three months
between October 1951 to February 1952, when Shen participated in land reform in Sichuan; the first
three years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, when Shen was under investigation by his
work unit in Beijing and when his younger son joined his factory at the “Third Front” (sanxian 三線)
in the hinterland; and the two years from 1969 to 1971, when Shen, his wife, and their two sons were all
separated from each other between Beijing, Sichuan, and two locations in a May Seventh Cadre
School (wuqi ganxiao 五七幹校) in Hubei.
Unlike his professional letters or the confessional genres he wrote for the authorities,5 Shen
Congwen’s personal letters convey intimacy, spontaneity, and vulnerability. As the most literary of his
post-1949 works, these letters, even more so than his memorandum-like diaries, provide readers with
a glimpse into Shen’s inner world and material surroundings. Besides the well-known narrative of
Shen’s transformation from writer to connoisseur in 1949, Shen Congwen the public writer underwent
an internal exile into private letters—an ever-threatened sanctuary of individual thoughts and
feelings. Although stamped with the “revolutionary” marks of their time and overshadowed by
censorship, these family letters still bear intimate testimony to historical scenes and personal
experiences never documented in the era’s published literature.
2
Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation”; Li Yang, Shen Congwen de zuihou sishi nian; David Wang, Shuqing chuantong yu
zhongguo wenxue dangdai xing, 3–130; Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face, 54–107; Zhang Xinying, Shen
Congwen jingdu, 173–275.
3
McDougall, Love Letters and Privacy in Modern China, 1.
4
Even taken together, the Complete Works and Family Letters only provide us with a fraction of the total
correspondence between Shen Congwen and his family. Both sources have also transcribed rather than made
facsimiles of the original manuscripts, so I do not know if the editors have also excised passages within the letters.
5
Such works are mostly collected in volume 27 of Shen Congwen quanji.
Like many literary scholars, Zhang Zhaohe “used to think that, as a writer, it is enough to have
one work worth passing onto posterity,” but it is in the excavation of written fragments “without starts
or ends” that she truly came to discover and value his person. To be Shen Congwen’s “knower of the
tone” (zhiyin 知音), to be a reader of his oeuvre-as-letter, it is not enough to canonize his “best”
works, but also to reckon with inchoate fragments, interrupted thoughts, repetitive rambling, and
other traces of his hopes and fears. Revealing his literary ambitions and inhibitions after 1949, these
letters show the physical, material, and spiritual conditions in which Shen wrote or failed to write—
conditions emblematic of the literary production and censorship of the Mao era. Although the new
regime destroyed his literary works, Shen still expressed hopes to write about and for the new nation.
Yet even when he was part of a land reform work team in the early 1950s, Shen’s letters to his family
identified less with the revolutionary storm itself than the debris it had left behind. By the Cultural
Revolution, many of his private letters were censored, confiscated, and destroyed, not only by the
authorities but also by his family and himself. While Shen’s family, friends, and he himself
occasionally took on censoring roles, the censoring authorities sometimes became their intended,
even hoped-for, readers.
Beyond discovering literary fragments and understanding censorship, we can also read in
these letter exchanges the experiences of displacement by an “utterly ordinary” family, as Zhang
Zhaohe put it. The collectivist campaigns of the Mao era displaced millions from their homes and
loved ones for months, years, or decades. Physical separation gave rise to the widespread practice of
letter writing, which served to network families scattered all over the country. As intertwined strands
of individual destinies are woven into a larger historical fabric, letters also exchanged news and
rumors about local and national politics as well as accompanied material commodities to cope with
the inadequate distribution of goods under a planned economy.
More poignant than the physical separation was the emotional disconnect between extant
family letters—the ascetic denial of private sentiments in order to serve sublime yet hollow collective
causes. As suggested by Zhang Zhaohe’s “Afterword” and a few letters she wrote in the Mao era, at the
time of receiving her husband’s letters, she had not “read” them so much as “scanned” them for
trouble or mistakes. She was an editor by profession, a revolutionary by inclination, and a mother
with a keen instinct to preserve her family from harm. As the father of her children, Shen was a family
responsibility and liability, a “backward element” who could not keep up with the times. Holding
more revolutionary grit than private affection, those infrequent and short letters from Zhao Zhaohe
and their children may well be staging a revolutionary performance for the potential censors rather
than reflecting their true feelings. Although equally aware of censorship, Shen’s letters often showed
greater ambivalence and inner struggle. Thus the pathos of these exchanges arises from the initial
dissonance between his intimacy and their distance, as well as from the belated and posthumous
resonance of Shen’s letters with his family and other readers.
1. Land Reform Letters as Literary Embryos
After Shen Congwen fell in love with his student Zhang Zhaohe in 1929, he wrote her several hundred
letters over four years, finally convincing her to be his wife.6 Only a handful of these letters survived
the wars and political movements of the following decades, mostly as Zhang Zhaohe’s hand copies
into her diary.7 Still blissful over his new marriage in January 1934, Shen took a month-long trip to his
hometown to visit his sick mother—his first homecoming trip since 1922. He wrote Zhang Zhaohe
more than 50 letters along the way that became the basis of the essay collection Random Sketches on
a Trip to Hunan (Xiangxing sanji 湘行散記, 1934). These travels also helped inspire Shen’s best
known work, Border Town (Biancheng 邊城, 1934). Shen sometimes referred to these epistolary travel
sketches as “reading materials for Sansan’s eyes only” 三三專利讀物, Sansan being one of Zhang
Zhaohe’s nicknames.
In 1937, after the Japanese army occupied Beiping, Shen Congwen took flight with other
intellectuals first to Wuhan and later to Kunming, while his wife and their two young sons stayed
behind. These southward travels gave birth to the essay collection West Hunan (Xiangxi 湘西, 1938)
and the novel Long River (Changhe 長河, 1943). In the few extant letters from this yearlong
separation, Shen urged his wife to join him, but she kept postponing her move south on account of
the children and their home in Beiping. Above all, she seemed to fear for the loss of his letters and
manuscripts:
Second Brother: … As I sorted through our letters the past few days, I became even more reluctant to
leave. We have so many beautiful and lovely letters. It would be difficult to take them at this time but a
pity to discard them. And it’s not only the letters but also that messy pile of your books and manuscripts.
If I were to leave for the south now, nobody would take care of these things so we would have to
abandon them forever. … Three.
二哥 … 前兩天整理書信，覺得更不願意走了，我們有許多太美麗太可愛的信件，這時候帶
著麻煩，棄之可惜，這還只是書信而言，另外還有你一大堆亂七八糟的書籍文稿，若我此
時空身南下，此後這些東西無人清理，也就只有永遠放棄了。… 三8
Reporting the joy that greeted the arrival of his letters, Zhang Zhaohe’s responses meticulously
accounted which of his letters arrived when, via which routes, and how long it took, so that family
letters became intertwined with the war’s battlefronts.9 She wrote: “In this time, when ‘a family letter
is worth ten thousand in gold,’ I must be the richest person in all of Beijing.” 在這種家書抵萬金的
時代，我應是全北京城最富有的人了. He in turn complained that “You love me, but you love me
6
Shen Weiwei, “From Country Bumpkin to Gentleman,” 33–39.
7
Shen Congwen jiashu, 1–27.
8
Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, September 24, 1937, Shen Congwen jiashu, 60–61. In their correspondence,
Zhang often addressed Shen as “Second Brother” as he was the second-born of his family whereas Shen called her
“Third Sister” because she was the third-born of her family.
9
Ibid., 61.
more for my letter writing than for who I am as a person.” 你愛我，與其說愛我為人，還不如說

愛我寫信.10
As muse, reader, copier, and trustee of her husband’s writing, Zhang Zhaohe saw all of Shen
Congwen’s writings in epistolary terms and made no sharp generic distinctions between his letters,
manuscripts, or published works. In his study of Shen Congwen’s works from the 1930s and 1940s,
David Wang pointed out an intertextual relationship between his travelogues and his fiction as they
had been concurrent and symbiotic literary creations.11 As the travelogues grew out of his letters to
Zhang Zhaohe, we might also reconsider his Mao-era family letters as a nascent stage of literary
creation. When writing home from his participation in land reform in Sichuan, Shen Congwen often
referred to his 1930s travels to Hunan that resulted in the book Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan.
In the same vein, he planned on revising these 1950s family letters into a new collection called
Random Sketches on a Trip to Sichuan as well as several new works of fiction.12 Thus Shen Congwen’s
“letters from the south”—written in 1934, 1937–38, 1951–52—all began in the same genre of travel
sketches testifying to the vitality of the rural folk13 and addressed to a beloved reader. The eventual
abortion of these last literary embryos, however, is symptomatic of the hostile literary environment
under the new regime.
Following his attempted suicide and exclusion from the official literary circles in 1949, Shen
Congwen began a new career at the Palace Museum located inside the former Forbidden City.14 In
1950, he underwent ten months of thought reform at the Northern China Revolutionary University in
Beijing’s Western suburbs. In his diary, Shen wrote of his weariness with “an ox pulling a rickety cart-
style bureaucratic routine, completely dogmatic studies too much sleep, meaningless idle
conversations, as well as pure wastes of time.” 老牛拉車式的辦公，完全教條的學習，過多的睡
眠，無益的空談，以及純粹的浪費.15 Only occasional conversations with the cook lifted his
spirits. In late October 1951 to February 1952, however, Shen Congwen joined a land reform work team
in rural Sichuan and wrote of his experiences in nearly 50 letters to his wife and their two sons. The
first letter of this series considered the upcoming journey an important transition in his life, helping
him to break out of his claustrophobic despair:
Third Sister: … I hoped from this great historical transformation to learn to draw close to the people,
from doing this work to acquire a new kind of courage, to labor on behalf of the nation for several years
with discretion and sincerity, and to once again learn, to once again wield my pen, to write one or two
new books about the new people of this new era, to make up for the mistakes of the nonsense written in
my study over the past twenty years … Second Brother.
10
Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, January 31, 1938; and Shen, Letter to Zhang, August 19, 1938, Shen Congwen
jiashu, 86, 108
11
David Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China, 247–89.
12
Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhaohe, November 8, 1951 and January 24, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.156, 309.
13
In The Odyssey of Shen Congwen and “Shen Congwen and the uses of regionalism in modern Chinese literature”
(157–58) Kinkley points out that the description of the “vitality” of the country people was a salient feature of Shen’s
writing.
14
See Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face, and Jenny Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation,” for detailed accounts
of Shen Congwen’s career change in 1949.
15
Shen Congwen, Diary at Revolutionary University, September 3, 1950, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.77.
三姐 … 希望從這個歷史大變中學習靠攏人民，從工作上，得到一種新的勇氣，來謹謹慎慎
老老實實為國家做幾年事情，再學習，再用筆，寫一兩本新的時代新的人民作品，補一補
二十年來關在書房中胡寫之失。… 二哥16
The letter still takes the tone of “self-criticism” by an intellectual undergoing “thought reform,” but
there is reason to believe that the southward journey was therapeutic for Shen Congwen, as it brought
back fond memories from his 1930s travels and opened up new and broader vistas. Painting
panoramic scenes along the Yangtze River, Shen Congwen wrote of how moved he was to see the type
of small boats that first carried him from his hometown, the sailors with familiar accents: “In the last
three decades, the world has been completely transformed. Only these boats and the lives of those
who live upon them have not changed for a thousand years.” 這卅年來世界變了樣，中國也變了
樣，這些船隻和船上人的生活，卻千年不變.17 With loving attention to local sights, sounds,
tastes, smells, and textures, Shen used an external, concrete world to overcome his personal sorrows.
The ethnographic details in these writings also served as a kind of field research for future writing, as
one constant refrain in these letters was Shen Congwen’s vow to write again, “about the people” and
“for the people.”
Shen Congwen’s wish to write again was not entirely opposed to the Chinese Communist
Party’s new policies toward art as a form of propaganda. Expressing eagerness to catch up with the
times, he tried writing a song in praise of land reform and saw his own role as a “propagandist”
(xuanchuan yuan 宣傳員) and “agitator” (gudong yuan 鼓動員) for the present and future of the new
nation when he engaged conversations with the local folks.18 He tried writing about the cook at the
revolutionary university and wept afterwards: “Surprisingly I can still use my mind and my pen” 我頭
腦和手中筆居然還得用. He saw this piece as an “experiment” and a “new beginning,” as “its point of
view is that of the people and sings the praises of a new generation.” 觀點是人民的，歌頌新的一
代的.19
For Shen, his teenage sons—Shen Longzhu 沈龍朱, nicknamed “Dragon,” and Shen Huchu,
nicknamed “Tiger”—embodied this new generation. His letters admonished them to be patriots above
all, to study hard, work hard, and be ready to make sacrifices for this fledgling nation.20 His letters to
them described all that he had witnessed in vivid language, so that his children might see, hear, and
empathize with the rural folks, particularly the hardships they endured to enable urban privileges. He
urged them to go to the countryside at every future opportunity to learn to love the nation and to
understand why its people are admirable. In writing to his sons, Shen Congwen also planned on
writing for the “tens of thousands of passionate and brave youths” who must take up the task of nation
building through improving production and education after land reform and class struggle. So he
16
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, October 25, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.121–22.
17
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, October 30, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.128.
18
Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhaohe, November 4, 5, 8, 1951 and January 29, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19:142,
149, 154–6, 327.
19
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 13, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.157–58. The resulting story, “Old
Comrade” (Lao tongzhi 老同志), was only posthumously published in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.463–78.
20
See Antje Richter’s chapter on letters of familial admonition in this volume.
proposed to write ten short stories, ten “sculptures in words,” about model figures developed on the
basis of Mikhail Kalinin’s (1875–1946) educational theories.21
Referring to not only Soviet theorists but also Mao Zedong’s writings, Shen Congwen even
published two self-criticisms in Guangming Daily (Guangming ribao 光明日報) in June and
November of 1951. It is unclear whether Shen performed submission to the new regime out of self-
preservation or out of genuine conviction, but he does repeatedly express deference toward the steep
human price for the revolution’s present success. Asking his children whether they had read his self-
criticism, Shen went on to explain: “The individual is quite insignificant. The nation however is
something that has been built upon the excellent foundation of the millions of people who have
sacrificed their lives and suffered so much. My work had been too detached from this development.”
個人小得很，國家是萬萬千千人犧牲了生命，吃盡了苦，才奠定下那麽一個好基礎的。我
的工作和這個發展遊離了. As Jenny Huangfu points out, such feelings of “remorse and guilt”
pervaded the public writings of liberal intellectuals at the time as they “reflected on their political
enfeeblement” while “the Communists were taking bullets in battle.”22
Yet rather than merely reiterating the Party line, Shen Congwen appears to have given much
more thought to the concrete implementations of sublime goals. Answering his wife’s admonishment
for him to “wholeheartedly serve the people,” he wrote that he saw his task as mainly to learn and to
empathize with the rural cadres and peasants, to fathom the working method of “from the masses and
to the masses”:
Shuwen:23 … Didn’t I tell you that the impression I give others while working is easily mistaken for the
laissez faire of a liberal? In fact, with regard to every single situation I’ve run into—great or small—I
have taken an attitude of utmost seriousness in trying to understand it, to get to know it, because their
significance in my education will be far deeper and more far-reaching than any written works. What’s
more, while I know that working [in the countryside] will have a lifelong impact on every comrade from
Beijing, the moment they depart from the countryside they will undoubtedly also lose any connection to
the future fortunes of this place. I, however, am somewhat different—at the very least, the work [I do]
this year cannot be separated from the future development of this land and these farmers. … Congwen.
叔文 … 我不是說在工作中給人印象，易如一個“自由主義”者對事的不關心嗎，事實上這裏接
觸到的大小事情，我卻用得是一種嚴肅到極點的態度來理解，來認識。因為比任何文件書
本對於我教育意義都深遠得多！我且明白，這次工作，對於每個北來同志，都有終生影
響，但一和農村離開時，即必然也和這裏得將來榮枯失去聯系。我倒稍稍不同，至少有一
年工作要和這片土地這些農民的發展分不開。… 從文24
Shen Congwen describes the land and its people as a living organism, a fertile and resilient vital force
deeply intertwined with his own life and work. He cared for them not only in the present historical
moment, but also for their past and future, for their “flourishing and withering” in the long run. The
folks he met in the countryside reminded him of his own fictional characters from more than a decade
21
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe and their two sons, Shen Longzhu and Shen Huchu, December 12–16, 1951,
Shen Congwen quanji, 19.231. Shen is here referring to Kalinin’s On Communist Education.
22
Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation,” 52.
23
Shuwen is Zhang Zhaohe’s penname.
24
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, December 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.257.
ago, and he wanted to write about how they were faring in a revolutionary age. As he wrote to Zhang
Zhaohe, “the countryside is in motion but the natural world is so still. I am positioned between them,
and from here movement and stillness seem to be gestating something that, so long as it is given time,
will grow and mature.” 農村在動中，自然景物那麼靜，我置身其間，由此動靜總似乎在孕育
一種東西，只要有時間，即可生長成熟.25 Literature for him was a crop borne out of the union
between historical change, natural landscape, and the writer’s own subjectivity: “My life thus merges
into this reality and its myriad histories of joys and sorrows. … It destroys me but also re-creates me.”
我生命即融合到這個現實萬千種歷史悲歡裡 … 在摧毀我又重造我.26 Afire with the passions,
hopes, and ideals of this momentous historical transformation, Shen Congwen used family letters,
especially letters to his children, to mediate these lively scenes across time and space:
Little One: … The sugar mills are in full operation these days, using the same technology from a
thousand years ago to produce white sugar. As soon as evening falls, hundreds of people gather under a
large bell-shaped lamp in the sugar-drying yard to conduct Chinese revolutionary class struggle of the
twentieth century … Old women in their seventies also come with their hand warmers; by the time they
return to their neighboring villages it might already be past midnight. Heading home, they use all sorts
of torches, bamboo lanterns, and flashlights, which wave around on the ridges of rice paddies as the
villagers, laughing and quarreling, take their leave. The voices of the cadres are all raspy because they
have said so much and are so tired. … Congwen. 小小 … 這幾天各個糖房都在開工，用一千年前老
方式生產白糖。曬糖的大院子，一到晚上，就有幾百人在一盞大鬥篷燈下，進行二十世紀
中國革命的土地改革鬥爭。… 七十多歲的老太太，也帶了烘籠來說話，回到三五裏村子去
時，可能已過了夜半。回去時，是用大小種種火把和竹絲燈籠，手電筒，在田坎上晃來晃
去，一面說笑一面爭吵走去的。領導幹部共通都是喉嚨嘶啞啞的，因為說話太多，太累。…
從文27
What seems to move Shen Congwen here are the juxtaposition of stillness and movement, of ancient
traditions and contemporary upheaval, as well as the vivid sights and sounds that can capture the
atmosphere of a fleeting scene. Shen explicitly advocates such a lyrical approach to even a subject like
class struggle:
[If one] cannot write about uneventful times, cannot write about calm, cannot write about everyday life,
and due to this writes about extraordinary events, or about activity, or about suffering, then one will also
lack contrast, and will easily err towards hyperbole and be incapable of achieving an accurate and vivid
result.
不會寫平凡時，不會寫靜，不會寫家常，因之寫特別事，寫動，寫變故，也無個對比，易
失於誇，而得不到準確生動效果。28
In his own letters home, Shen was keen to note such juxtapositions between quietude and violence:
25
Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhaohe, November 19–25 and 30, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.175, 177–78, 191.
26
Ibid., 19.172, 180. See Zhang Xinying’s analysis in Shen Congwen jingdu, 204–18.
27
Shen Congwen, Letter to his son Shen Huchu, December 23, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.241.
28
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe and their sons, December 12–16, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.224
At struggle sessions, a woman might rock the baby on her back while jabbing her needle into a shoe sole,
one stitch at a time, and then, at a certain point of time, she would abruptly walk over to the landlord
and strike him—smack—with her shoe sole.
鬥爭會上婦女，一面背著個孩子搖蕩，一面一針一針戳，到某一時，卻會忽然走過去吧的
打了地主一鞋底。29
At these struggle sessions, which also took place in ox sheds and local theaters, Shen Congwen
claimed to find peasant women’s ‘speaking bitterness’ more mesmerizing than Russian novels or
Shakespeare, and lamented their reduction to dry meeting minutes.30 He often wrote his children that
what he had encountered was much more lively, intricate, and moving than what they could read in
the officially acclaimed land reform fiction by Zhou Libo 周立波 (1908–1979), Zhao Shuli 趙樹理
(1906–1970), or Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904–1986).31 Instead of following a teleological narrative from
peasant suffering and outrage to violent revolution, Shen Congwen’s own depiction of land reform
was often highly ambivalent, as indicated by this letter to his two sons:
Dragon, Tiger: Today is the fourth. We went to a sugar mill on a hill to hold a meeting for 5000 people
and executed that local tyrant right on the grounds outside his sugar mill. … The masses attending the
[5000-people] rally escorted a big group of landlords (about 400), tied up with ropes both thick and thin.
Some were dragged along only by nooses around their necks, and others were fully bound. The peasants
in military attire escorting the landlords, male and female alike, were fully equipped, with many carrying
swords and spears with bared blades. Some had escorted landlords from villages some twenty kilometers
away. The landlords were for the most part clad in extremely tattered clothes that did not appear at all
remarkable. If anything, most of them looked shabbier than the peasants—I heard that some clothes
had been exchanged. The crowd wore mostly blue shirts and white turbans. When they arrived along
various mountain paths, they stretched out in extremely long lines. Led by a big red flag, they crossed
through fields of rapeseed, beans, and wheat—a truly historical spectacle. … Dad.
龍龍，虎虎：今天四號，我們到一個山上糖房去，開一個五千人大會，就在那個大惡霸家
糖房坪子里，把他解決了 … 來開會的群眾同時都還押了大批地主（約四百），用粗細繩子
捆綁，有的只縛頸子牽著走，有的全綁。押地主的武裝農民，男女具備，多帶刀矛，露
刃。有從廿裏外村子押地主來的。地主多已穿得十分破爛，看不出特別處。一般比農民穿
得臟破，聞有些衣服是換來的。群眾大多是著藍布衣衫，白包頭，從各個山路上走來時，
拉成一道極長的線，用大紅旗引路，從油菜田蠶豆麥田間通過，實在是歷史奇觀。… 爸爸32
Unlike the land reform fiction promoted by the authorities at the time, Shen Congwen refrains from
second-guessing the psychology of the “masses” and reserves sweeping judgments, but instead re-
creates the color, texture, and intricate dynamics of this violent scene with just a few broad strokes
29
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, January 15, 1952, Shen Congwen jiashu, 19.287.
30
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 19–25, 1951; and Letter to Zhang, Longzhu, and Huchu, Shen
Congwen jiashu, 19.183, 221.
31
Shen Congwen, Letters to his son Huchu, December 27 and January 19 and 23, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.250, 292,
303. Paradigmatic land reform fiction included Zhou Libo’s Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu 暴風驟雨), 1948) and Ding
Ling’s 丁玲 (1904–1986) The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sanganghe shang 太陽照在桑乾
河上). For a thoughtful analysis of such socialist novels, see King, Milestones on a Golden Road, 15–70.
32
Shen Congwen, Letter to his sons Longzhu and Huchu, January 5, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.267.
and material details. Rather than a melodramatic polarization of the reader’s sentiments along class
lines, he renders the scene with vibrant images and arranges his sentences like melodies in
counterpoint. Amidst his marvel at the newfound power of the peasants—moving because of their
vindication of past injuries—is also pity for the current abjection of the landlords, who had to kneel
on the plaques that once graced their own halls or were tied together en masse in a bamboo forest.33
His sympathies for these class enemies, so misplaced in light of contemporary politics, extended to
the confiscation, exhibition, and redistribution of the landlords’ belongings: silver dug out of their
walls and from underground betrayed their paranoia of pillage, whereas the large number of coffins
they found spoke of an enduring obsession with the afterlife. The majority of landlords proved to be
hoarders who hid rather than flaunted their wealth, and the pathetic junk carried out of their homes
suggested thrifty and meager lives rather than evil and extravagance.34 Indeed, Shen Congwen’s letters
could not quite turn away from the debris left behind by the revolutionary storm. Having discovered
in a small restaurant a little wine jug in the style of the Six Dynasties that used to belong to a landlord,
he laments that many old and beautiful things were thus wasted and spoiled in the revolutionary
chaos when they ought to have entered museums and inspire new generations of artisans.35 The same
went for local architecture such as memorial arches, temples, theaters, and landlord’s old manor.
Much as these might be “feudal artifacts,” Shen found in them the wisdom of the people and a
tradition worth preserving and developing for the new nation.36 If land reform was the pang of labor
that gave rise to a new order, the toddling new nation ultimately had to rely much more on
construction rather than destruction. Shen Congwen’s letters suggest that violent struggle could only
be the beginning, and not the end, of the nation’s development—it was to the latter that he hoped to
contribute with future literary creation.
Yet the literary buds in these letters, as well as the nascent hopes Shen Congwen saw in the
new nation, were soon nipped. Despite being inspired by the vitality of the people amid revolutionary
changes, Shen never managed to share with the public any literary works based on his land reform
experiences. He did send a literary essay entitled “The Brigade: Miscellaneous Sketches from Land
Reform in Southern Sichuan” (Zhongduibu: Chuannan tugai zaji 中隊部：川南土改雜記) and a
short story entitled “The Landlord Song Renrui and His Son” (Caizhu Song Renrui he ta de erzi 財主
宋人瑞和他的兒子) to various journals, but none would publish them.37 Written in a style
resembling Lu Xun’s 魯迅 (1881–1936) “True Story of Ah Q” (A Q zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳) the landlord
in Shen Congwen’s story is miserly, superstitious, and grotesque, but not evil, degenerate, or inhuman,
thus evoking more ironical pity than plain hatred.38 Such characters and their feelings had no place in
a revolutionary narrative of class struggle. In a letter to his younger son, he wrote that it would be far
easier for artists and composers to adapt their techniques to a new regime than for writers: “My
language is too affected by the colors of painting, by the structure of music, such that my work
becomes constrained by formalism and is perceived as a luxurious waste” 文字受繪畫中顏色影響
33
Ibid., 19.267–68; Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, January 24, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.311.
34
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe and their two sons, February 2, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.340–41.
35
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, December 3, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.201.
36
Shen, Letter to his wife and two sons, December 12–16, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.219.
37
Huangfu, “Road to Salvation,” 60. The two stories are posthumously published in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.479–508.
38
See a more detailed analysis by Zhang Qianfen, Shen Congwen jianguo chuqi de tugai shuxie.
過大，受音樂中組織影響過深，工作反而受了形式限制，成為一種奢侈浪費了.39 Even
when visual art and music served politics, Shen suggests, it was still possible for formal beauty,
nuance, and their associated subjectivities to operate at a subterranean level. When literature served
politics, on the other hand, any individual sentiments that did not line up perfectly with collective
ideology might be construed as political dissent, and Shen Congwen expressed no intention on
becoming a dissident.
In the 1930s, a symbiosis between Shen’s personal letters and published writing was possible
because literature for him was the public articulation of private feelings: the life force of the writer
mingled with the heterogeneous humanity around him to produce writing or “letters” that resonated
with many readers as individual human beings. Yet by the 1950s, such humanist literature was
definitively weeded out and replaced by people’s literature or proletariat literature, so that the
individual no longer existed except in terms of his or her “class” and place in the “collective.”40 Having
tried and failed at such “literature for the masses,” Shen Congwen also recognized that his family
letters could no longer serve as literary embryos, but instead treated them as an asylum for personal
sentiments that could no longer be expressed in public. In the tumultuous years to follow, however,
even this private sanctuary of personal correspondences came increasingly under siege, as the
censorship that existed since 1949 became harsher and more intensive by the Cultural Revolution.
2. Letters under Surveillance, 1966–1968
In autumn 1965, Zhang Zhaohe joined a work team in a suburb of Beijing’s to implement the “Four
Clean-ups” campaign, a kind of rural prelude for the Cultural Revolution that began a few months
later. In a letter to her husband, she advised him to “collect letters into the same envelope. People are
already talking about the frequency of my family letters. This may be in jest, but we should still take
care” 信最好裝在一個信封里寄來，已經有人說我“家信頻繁”，雖屬笑話，也應注意.41 Once
the gladdest recipient and most devoted reader of Shen Congwen’s letters, Zhang Zhaohe had now to
consider what these letters meant for her public persona as a revolutionary cadre. In this volatile time
when the private realm came under increasing attack, family letters were not so much treasures
“worth ten thousand in gold” as they were potential weapons that could endanger their writers and
recipients. The very act of personal letter writing seemed suspicious, and all letters were written
under censorship, where censors were not only the cadres but also one’s family and friends and
oneself.
On May 16, 1966, Shen wrote to his friend Shao Xunmei 邵洵美:
In the last half year I have read the papers daily. The daily growth of new happenings has of course not
failed to startle my heart and soul. In ordinary times I used to feel as terrified as if I were walking on thin
39
Shen, Letter to his son Huchu, January 23, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.305.
40
I borrow this distinction from the 1947 essay by the modernist poet and theorist Yuan Kejia, “Ren de wenxue yu
renmin de wenxue.” Shen himself wrote in 1948: “For these twenty or thirty years my writing has been based on si
(contemplation). Now, however, one has to start everything from the perspective of xin (conviction).” See Wang
Xiaojue’s analysis of this distinction in Modernity with a Cold War Face, 55.
41
Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, October 14, 1965, Shen Congwen quanji, 21.483.
ice, but it looks as if the turbulence of this “Cultural Revolution” has turned [this ice] into foam and
sludge.
半年來日讀報刊，新事新聞日多，更不免驚心動魄，平時懷如履薄冰惶恐感。在此 “文化大
革命” 動蕩中，成浮沫沈滓，意中事也。42
On July 4, he urged his elder brother Shen Yunlu 沈云麓 to avoid going out and talking to people, to
keep up with the latest news, and to keep studying Mao’s “three old essays,” for if obsolete
intellectuals like themselves “were not careful, [they would be] ground into powder” 小不謹慎，即
成碎粉.43 In September, Shen Congwen was denounced and detained with others in his work unit in
Beijing, leaving little textual traces for the rest of 1966 beyond fragmented notes of his colleagues’
trivial and ungrounded denunciations.44 Shen was never the primary target of any denunciation
sessions but always an “accompaniment” (peidou 陪鬥). Due to his fragile health, he was sometimes
allowed to sit in a small room next to the denunciation auditorium with a loudspeaker that shouted
shrill speeches in his ear.45 It took nearly three years before his name was cleared.
Meanwhile, in July 1966, Shen’s younger son, Shen Huchu, and daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei
張之佩, both workers, relocated with their machine tools factory to Zigong, Sichuan, in support of the
“Third Front,” taking along with them their little daughter Shen Hong 沈紅 or Honghong.46 In a letter
to them on August 18, 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Zhaohe wrote:
Zhipei, Little Brother: … [Your] father’s head carries a heavy load of old bourgeois thoughts. He has a
very muddled understanding of himself and doesn’t understand the movement at all. When it comes
time for a broader “sweeping,” he must be forged through the conflagration of the revolution. The
thought reform of bourgeois intellectuals would have no hope without painful thought struggle. In past
political campaigns he was always protected; this time, if they know of his heart problems and show
consideration, it would do no good to his thought reform. / Will send Honghong’s cotton pants by the
end of the month. If you need anything else, write me. Mom.
之佩，小弟 … 爸爸腦子裏的舊的資產階級包袱很重，對自己很不清醒，對運動很不理解，
將來在橫掃時，應當在革命的烈火中好好燒一燒。資產階級知識分子的思想改造，不經過
痛苦的思想鬥爭是沒有希望改造好的。過去歷次運動他都是保護過關，這次如果因為心臟
有病，加以照顧，對他的改造沒有好處。/ 紅紅棉褲月底月初寄來，還需要什麽，來信。媽
媽47
We will never know if Zhang Zhaohe really meant what she wrote here, or if she was writing for
potential censors, in which case the private letter became yet another stage for the public
performance of revolutionary sentiments. Remarkably, the discussion of her husband’s thought
reform shifts abruptly to her granddaughter’s prosaic material needs. In fact, much of the family letter
42
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shao Xunmei, May 15, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22:16.
43
Shen Congwen, Letter to his brother Shen Yunlu, July 4, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.20.
44
Shen Congwen, Diary, September 15, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.21–24; Shen Congwen, Draft for a big character
poster, July 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 27.171–241.
45
Li Yang, Shen Congwen de zuihou sishi nian, 187.
46
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Yunlu, July 4, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.18.
47
Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to her son Shen Huchu and daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei, August 18, 1966, Shen Congwen
jiashu, 412–14.
exchange in the next three years would revolve around this child, her words and activities, her wants
and wishes. Perhaps this child was the only node of innocence and authenticity in letters that suffered
various degrees of duplicity, hypocrisy, and absurdity. In a letter to his mother three months later on
November 13, 1966, Huchu wrote:
Mother’s last letter mentioned the raids on our home in Beijing. This is an excellent rebellion … We also
brought a lot of material and spiritual four olds [from Beijing to Sichuan], yet here are no Red Guards to
come and help us make revolution, so we must take action on our own initiative.
媽媽上次來信說到北京抄家的情況，這個反造的好 … 我們帶自貢來的物質和精神上的四舊
也不少，紅衛兵在這裏不會來幫助我們革命，只有自覺行動起來.48
From 1966 to 1968, Shen Congwen’s home was raided eight times,49 and the “investigation teams”
(zhuan’an zu 專案組) confiscated several letter fragments in the collection before Shen Congwen had
a chance to finish them.50 According to Shen Huchu’s editorial comments, he and his brother sent all
their letters through Zhang Zhaohe’s work unit for “safety reasons.”51 So when Shen Longzhu wrote
from his “long march” to revolutionary base areas in November and December of 1966, or when Shen
Huchu or his wife wrote from their factory in Sichuan over the next two years, they all addressed
“Mother” and never directly “Father.” If one were to exclude the parts that talked about Honghong the
child, these letters—often accompanied by official documents, little red books, and revolutionary
songbooks—almost sound like military dispatches on the development of the Cultural Revolution in
different regions and arenas.52
Even though his children never wrote him directly, Shen Congwen wrote three dozen letters
to his son and daughter-in-law from 1967–68, interweaving national and regional news and rumors
with first-hand observations of everyday life and reports on families and friends. The revolutionary
storm swirled everyone into its orbit, but its impact still varied greatly across geographic regions,
institutions, and over time. The absence of a free press and the very uneven access to news also made
personal letters an especially precious source of information exchange. As a target of struggle and
with a faint heart, Shen Congwen rarely left his cramped home but for grocery shopping or hospital
visits, whereupon he would come across an “ocean of big-character posters and the huge crowds
reading them.”53 His wife and elder son spent their days going to large and small meetings, reading and
summarizing big character posters, and contributing to mimeographed publications of their own
work units.54 From these and parades of “capitalist-roaders” on the street they learned of the latest
48
Shen Huchu, Letter to his mother Zhang Zhaohe, November 13, 1966, Shen Congwen jiashu, 415.
49
Shen Congwen zishu, 189.
50
Footnote for an unfinished letter Shen Congwen wrote to his acquaintance Cheng Yingquan 程應銓, December,
1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.86, 90.
51
Shen Huchu as letter editor’s explanatory note in Shen Congwen jiashu, 401.
52
Shen Longzhu, Letter to his mother Zhang Zhaohe, November 28, 1966, Shen Congwen jiashu, 418–20.
53
Shen Congwen, Letter to his daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei, May 11, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.36, 38.
54
Shen Congwen, Letter to his younger son Shen Huchu and daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei, March 25, 1967, Shen
Congwen quanji, 22.29, 32; Letters to Zhang Zhipei, June 1 and August 5, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.44, 54; Letter
to Shen Huchu, November 14, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.71.
political winds and of factional violence in the provinces, which made Shen Congwen worry about
family and friends in those regions.55
In Everyday Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote of Soviet readers of newspapers who “looked
for hints and subtexts to divine exactly what was intended by the often obscure “signals” that came
down from on high.”56 In a similar vein, Shen Congwen carefully scrutinized newspapers and listened
to the radio to speculate about his own imminent plight and to put it into a larger context. He
recognized that “old intellectuals probably cannot work as before; their elimination is necessary,
inevitable” 舊知識份子，大致不能如過去工作，消滅是必然的，無可避免的.57 While shocked
and shaken by the arrests of “traitors” and “enemies” around him, Shen still wrote of his “gratitude” to
“the Party and the masses” for “protecting” him and sparing him the large denunciations held for other
famous writers who had continued their literary careers into the People’s Republic, such as Ba Jin 巴
金 and Lao She 老舍. 58 A letter from March 1968 to his son provides a self-deprecating report of his
psychic state and everyday life:
Little Brother: … Every now and then, I would hear news of this or that famous personage being
“seized”—probably already “old news” by the time they reach us. These people are either old power-
holders or new careerists, or otherwise associated with Chiang Kai-shek. Our close friends and family
mostly do not qualify. Yet my nerves are not quite sound, and insomnia inevitably creates hallucinations
(like early symptoms of schizophrenia). Sometimes I am afraid of going outside and seeing strangers.
Children shouting in the courtyard also frighten me. I even feel frightened when your mother speaks. …
The weather is gradually getting warmer; next week the coal stove will move outdoors. Cooking under
the eaves is naturally a bit trickier than in the room. On most days there is a strong sun, and when it
rains I’d have to rescue briquette, or carry an umbrella while stir-frying dishes. But with the passage of
time, I’ll get used to it. … Our mixed courtyard has one advantage: since there are many residents, there
are paradoxically fewer unexpected outside disturbances. Good neighbors lessen our worries … I kept
tidying up the courtyard, gutters, and toilet several times a day, yet there would always be a new mess,
which perplexed me. Recently I discovered that the “little generals” have been waging endless battles, so
they simply helped themselves to the weapons in the trash, like burnt briquette and vegetable dregs—
whatever they could use without causing real injuries. After this realization, my “spirit of service” could
not elevate accordingly. Only a few old women understand the situation. Meanwhile, the wars of the
“little generals” will continue until middle school.
小弟 … 我在這裏，間或可聽到某某知名人物“捉去”消息，對我們雖近於新聞，事實上或已是
“舊聞”，這些人不是舊當權派，即是新野心家，又或和過去蔣記有關系人物。相近親友中多
無此資格。但不大健全神經，一到失眠，即不免有些錯覺產生（近於神經分裂癥的前期征
兆）。有時上街見生人即害怕，小孩子在院中叫嚷也感到害怕，甚至於媽媽說話也害怕 …
天氣已日益暖和，再下禮拜就得移爐子了。在檐下做飯，自然不如房中方便。平時陽光直
射，大雨中還得搶救煤塊，或扛著雨傘炒菜。不過日子一久，也就習慣了 … 這裏大雜院好
處，即因人口眾多，反而不至於增加外來意外幹擾。同院住的關系一好，什幺通通不用擔
55
Shen Congwen, Letters to Shen Huchu, November 27, 1967 and March 29, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.74–77, 127.
56
Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 187–89.
57
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, May 15, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.41–42. See similar
sentiments in the same volume on pages 41, 51, 58–61, 66.
58
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhipei, February 16, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.108–09.
心了 … 院子和地道、毛房，一天我經常不斷去打掃，總還是有可掃除的東西，有些不理
解。近來才發現原是小將們長時期不停的戰鬥，隨手從垃圾箱取了些應用武器，煤球和菜
根，凡是可以使用又不至傷人的，統統用得上。這一來，我的服務精神不能不相應提高
了。只有幾個老大媽明白情形，小將戰鬥卻將依舊繼續下去，到升中學為止。59
As the games of the children in his courtyard mimicked the arbitrary violence and factional warfare
beyond the courtyard, the world around him was turning into a battleground and trash heap. The
world’s madness permeated his neighborhood, his home, and his dearest kin, terrifying him toward a
near relapse of schizophrenia that had in 1949 led to his attempted suicide.60 Compared to such
psychological pressure, it was much easier for Shen Conwen to adapt to material adversities. Doing
his best to get along with his neighbors, he even saw overcrowding as a sort of protection against
intruders and did not seem to suffer a loss of dignity from cleaning communal spaces.
Shen Congwen’s own circumspection, low-key profile, and lack of ambition and opportunism
translated into lessons for his children, conveyed time and again in his letters. In these turbulent
times, he often suggested, individuals are tiny and insignificant, and one can never be too careful.
Even his younger son was imprisoned for twenty-some-days as a “counterrevolutionary” before being
rehabilitated in 1967.61 Shen advised his son and daughter-in-law to subscribe to Beijing’s publications
like People’s Daily and Beijing Worker so as to keep up with the latest political trends, as well as to
find out more from factory colleagues who received letters reporting on Beijing’s industrial sector.62
Much as he thought they should inform themselves of what was going on, Shen urged his daughter-in-
law to dissuade his son from working for their factory newspaper:
Zhipei: … There are many things that Party members understand that ordinary cadres do not. Some
things are only privy to a certain level of Party members. … Newspapers are the Party’s throat and
tongue; only Party members working under Party leadership could hope to make fewer mistakes, or to
make smaller mistakes. [emphasis in the original] … Your big brother worked for the Youth League since
middle school. His character is so righteous, honest and unselfish, yet in the Anti-Rightist Movement, a
small mistake affected the rest of his life! … I go all out to “do my duty,” yet people think I “have
ambition.” … Congwen.
之佩 … 有許多事黨員懂，普通幹部不懂。有的某級黨員懂，一般黨員也不可能懂 … 報是黨
的喉舌，只有黨員在黨的領導下工作，才可望少犯錯誤，或犯錯誤較少，較小 … 大哥從中
學即搞團工作，人又那麽正派，老實，不自私，結果在反右中小有差錯，即影響到一生！…
我拼命在“盡義務”，人卻認為我“有野心”。… 從文63
In such admonishment, one might see the Chinese tradition of using family letters as a channel of
moral education. Whereas renowned family letter writers such as Zheng Banqiao 鄭板橋 (1693–1765)
59
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, March 23, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.122–25.
60
In Modernity with a Cold War Face, Xiaojue Wang discusses Shen Congwen’s schizophrenia and attempted suicide in
1949 at length and compares him to Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) Lumpensammler or trash collector in terms of his
art historical praxis. See pp. 70–80.
61
Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhipei, May 11 and June 1, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.36, 43.
62
Shen Congwen, Letters to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, October 21, 1967, Shen Conwen quanji, 22.65; Shen
Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, January 20, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.91.
63
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhipei, February 16, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.110–11.
and Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–1872) sought to instill ethical values in their children through positive
examples of family history,64 Shen’s letters presented his own and other family members’ experiences
as “cautionary tales.” These lessons of self-preservation were also lessons of modesty, diligent study,
and hard work. Shen certainly never spoke of “filial piety,” yet he always asked his son to write more
often for his mother’s sake, to show that they care and to reassure their worries in unpredictable
times.65 Yet Shen was also painfully aware that letters could cause worries as much they might soothe
them. In spring 1968, he wrote to his son about his increased blood pressure and premonition of
death. Then he added: “You may want to sift through the letters I wrote you over he years. What does
not need to be kept should be thrown away to avoid any future provocations. The rest you could keep
as a souvenir, because I have little else to pass on to you.” 年來給你們的信，可注意一下，不必要
留的，即處理一下，免得反而在另外一時引起是非。可留的即作個紀念，因為別的什麼也
沒有給你們.66 These instructions reflect the ambivalence Shen Congwen felt toward his own letters
as legacy and liability for his children.
In the Cultural Revolution, it was all too commonplace for intellectual families to destroy
personal correspondences in order to avoid difficulties with Red Guards. If they did not do so in time,
then the raiders of their homes could become readers of those letters, as was the case of the renowned
translator Fu Lei’s 傅雷 letters to his children. For over a decade Fu Lei and his wife Zhu Meifu 朱梅
馥 wrote over a hundred letters to their son Fu Cong 傅聰, who left China to study in Poland in 1954
and fled to London in 1958. In the Cultural Revolution, Fu Lei and Zhu Meifu committed suicide, and
Red Guards from the Shanghai Conservatory confiscated the back copies of their letters. Later, Red
Guards borrowed the letters under the guise of investigation to read them. After the Cultural
Revolution, Fu Lei’s second son Fu Min 傅敏 brought back the original letters from his brother and
published them as The Family Letters of Fu Lei (Fu Lei jiashu 傅雷家書), which went on to sell over
two million copies in China.67
Shen Congwen’s family certainly did not undergo such sensational tragedy, yet their letter
exchanges under surveillance tell a more nuanced story about censorship in the Cultural Revolution.
In fact, self-censorship played a role in the very composition of these letters, a tension made visible
when Shen Congwen himself crossed out words and sentences in his letter drafts, reproduced in his
Complete Works. Of six such instances in the surviving letters from 1967 and 1968, a few crossed-out
sentences could be construed as a critique of the broader status quo, such as a general sense of fatigue
with mass movements and the poor quality of literary production.68 Not so much in precaution
against censors as to lessen his children’s worries about himself, Shen also crossed out pessimistic
assessments of his own health: “Here life goes on as usual. This year might bring some changes, so life
might become simpler. My head is not feeling so well, perhaps because the other day, I lifted a
64
Liu, Transnational History of a Chinese Family, 135–39.
65
Shen Congwen, Letters to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, December 25, 1967; early January 1968; May 16, 1968, Shen
Congwen quanji, 22.82–84, 89, 134–35.
66
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, March 23, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.122.
67
Roberts, Friendship in Art, 165–79. Krauss, Piano and Politics in China, 93–98.
68
Shen Congwen quanji, 22.31, 117, 126, 134, 135, 151.
garbage bin that was too heavy.” 這裡生活一切如常。今年有可能會變變，生活更簡化。我頭

部不大好受，或因日前抬垃圾箱，過重出的毛病。69
The following instance of self-censorship falls more subtly between the personal and the
political, showing that the personal is the political: “Everyday life at home also underwent some
adjustments. All savings have been turned over to the authorities. Starting in June, I will only receive a
stipend, a paltry sum of twenty yuan or less, this is most reasonable.” 家中生活，也起了些應由變
化，存款全已上繳，我從六月起，只能領一點生活費數目恐只一二十元，這是極其合理的
事.70 After a sentence on his heart condition, he crossed out the following:
I will suddenly expire, yet have no particular regrets. In the last fifty years since leaving home, in the Old
Society I did my utmost, though my thoughts were on the conservative side, I never engaged in political
opportunism. These past two decades in the New Society, since I didn’t have the ambition of XX.
Because of my conservative thoughts and timid nature, in the past two decades I haven’t been able to
avoid making big and small mistakes that await investigation and criticism.
我會忽然完事的，也沒有什麽遺憾，因為出來五十年，在舊社會工作，已盡了自己能盡的
力，思想上雖比較保守，卻從未搞政治投機。新社會近廿年，因為無XX野心。我因思想保
守又膽小怕事, 廿年來工作上不可免會犯了些大小錯誤，一一待檢查批判。71
The letter is haunted by the compulsion of self-criticism, the practiced genre of intellectuals in
successive movements of the Mao era. Shen himself had to write more than 60 self-criticisms while
under investigation from 1966 to 1968, which often teetered between authentic feelings and
performative posturing, between justification and denunciation of his past.72 Since everything he
wrote could be seized and confiscated, family letters also had the authorities in charge as implicit
audiences. Yet like many other accused intellectuals eager to prove their innocence, Shen faced the
looming censors not only with fear of damnation, but also with hopes for salvation. As he wrote in a
letter to his elder brother in December 1968:
Big Brother: … Society has undergone total renovation; most acquaintances of my generation have
passed away. As for my few merits, hardly any of my colleagues of the past two decades understand
them. I thought my plans were quite ordinary and reasonable, but perhaps it’s only natural that they
cannot be fulfilled. There is just one chance for their “realization,” that is, when my case files are sent to
the Central Cultural Revolution Committee, if by some unlikely chance Premier Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng,
or Jiang Qing see my name and recognize that I am “still a good person” who hasn’t made “big
mistakes” … if my work is still meaningful to “the research of Chinese cultural history” that the
Chairman once mentioned, then I will surely be saved!
大哥 … 社會已完全翻新，舊時代同時數人多已謝世，我的一點點長處，在廿年同事中即已
少有人懂得。因此一切本來極其平常合理的打算，今後恐不能實現，也極其自然。也有可
能居然還能成為“顯示”，那就是當我被整的材料送到中央文革時，偶然的偶然名字為總
69
Shen Congwen, Letter to his son Shen Huchu, March 29, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22. 126.
70
Shen Congwen, Letter to the Revolutionary Committee at the Historical Museum, May 6, 1967, in Shen Congwen
quanji, 22.35.
71
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, May 16, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.135.
72
About 20 confessions Shen Congwen wrote for the authorities can be found in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.169–280.
理，康生或江青三人之一看到，承認我仍然“是個好人”，並未犯過什麼“大過錯”… 我搞
的研究工作，對於主席提起過的“中國文化史研究”更有意義，那我一定就得救了。73
In other words, Shen Congwen hoped for an unlikely zhiyin amid the top national authorities. His
case file was in the hands of young people in their twenties with no memory of the Republican era,
young people who could not possibly understand the historical context of his works and criticized his
works without bothering to read them.74 Hence Shen Congwen placed his hopes in the memories of
an older generation of authorities. He did not regard them as his persecutors, but rather potential
saviors who might “recognize” the goodness of his person and the value of his work. After all, Premier
Zhou Enlai first commissioned his research into the history of Chinese costumes. Shen Congwen also
knew Jiang Qing from the early 1930s, when she sat in on his class at Qingdao University. Hoping that
she might remember him, he wrote her a petitioning letter at the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution, seeking her help to keep his niece in Beijing. Yet these letters disappeared and Shen never
received a reply.75
3. Cadre School Letters as Fragile Memory, 1969–71
After almost three years of investigation and occasional incarceration, Shen Congwen was finally
“liberated” in June, 1969. In November, the revolutionary authorities at his work unit told him to pick
up a selection of his confiscated papers, including personal photographs, notebooks, and materials
related to two decades of cultural historical research for the museum. In a letter to his wife, Shen
noted that the investigation team sorted his papers into neat files and seemed to have even perused
them: “One responsible cadre asked me: ‘How come you wrote so much?’ I could only smile.”76 While
rejoicing over the survival of these papers, Shen Congwen quietly lamented the loss of his letters and
literary works from the Republican era. He dared not even ask for the English and Japanese
translations of his books as souvenirs, comforting himself by saying that the doctor advised him
against brain-intensive work anyway, so that the “disinfection” of his works helped rid him of all vain
hopes of writing fiction ever again.77 Reading over his returned papers in the next few days, Shen
Congwen was glad to affirm their value for future cultural historians and felt all the more upset that
the museum authorities had sold his cultural historical books at seven cents per kilo.78
Seeking to preserve cultural memories in the autumn of 1969, however, was an impossible
task. As Sino-Soviet relations worsened and a potential nuclear holocaust threatened to wipe out
civilization itself, Shen notes in his letters how everyone in Beijing was either busy digging bunkers or
being collectively evacuated. The “Third Front” had already sent workers like Shen Congwen’s
73
Shen Congwen, Letter to his brother Shen Yunlu, October 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22. 146.
74
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, December 4, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22. 152.
75
Shen Congwen adopted his niece Shen Zhaohui after her father’s death in 1959. When the Cultural Revolution
started, Shen Zhaohui was forced to leave Beijing and “return” to her “original” household registration in Manchuria.
See Li Yang, 188–90.
76
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 2, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.201.
77
Ibid., 22.202.
78
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 10, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.208.
younger son and daughter-in-law to the mountainous interior. The sent-down youth movement
mobilized young people in their teens to rural areas while cadres and intellectuals were sent to
militarized camps in the countryside known as “May Seventh Cadre Schools.” So many people were
going on the road, it was hard to procure ropes to bind luggage—Shen observed in a letter to his wife,
who had left in September with her work unit to the Cadre School in Hubei Province.79 Nearly 70 years
old and ranking among the “old, weak, ill, or disabled” 老弱病殘, Shen initially hoped to stay in
Beijing and continue working at the museum.80 Yet on November 17, only two weeks after his
confiscated papers were returned, Shen was summoned to a mobilization meeting that exhorted him
and others to leave Beijing for a Cadre School by the end of the month. On November 22, Shen
Congwen wrote to his younger son:
Little Brother: By the time you receive this letter, I may be on my way to Xianning. The museum decided
on it yesterday. Your mother’s departure was relatively unhurried, but ours was very rushed and chaotic.
It’s six o’clock in the afternoon. A desk full of papers, the sight of it makes me very sad. Despite promises
to keep them safely, I will probably not have a chance to sort through them ever again. So sad, the work
of the last twenty years will be gone overnight. In fact, many parts of it cannot be recovered even if
young people work on it for another twenty or thirty years. Or perhaps nobody will work on this ever
again. Yet hundreds of thousands of artifacts in the museum are also rotting away! Naturally, I’m in no
position to say anything. …
小弟：你們收到這個信時，有可能我已上咸寧的車了。這是館裡昨日通知決定的。媽媽走
時，還比較從容，我們可不免相當忙亂。這時正下午六點，一桌文稿，看來十分難過，雖
允為好好保存，我大致已無可望有機會再來清理這一切了。比較難過，即近廿年搞的東
西，等於一下完事，事實上有許多部分卻是年輕人二十三十年搞不上去的。也可能以後永
遠不會再有人搞的。但是庫藏中還有十萬八萬實物等著霉爛！我自然說不上什麼了。81
A fresh sense of trauma greeted every instance of destruction of his manuscripts, metonymical of
Chinese cultural heritage at large. One of the recurring lines in Shen Congwen’s post-1949 writings was
“Things are hard to make but easy to ruin” 物難成而易毀,82 which is a direct antithesis to Mao’s
maxim “Without destruction there can be no construction” 不破不立. Shen used the phrase to refer
to the fragility of his own life around his 1949 attempted suicide, to the 1950s destruction of his books
in China and Taiwan, and to the 1966 negation and confiscation of his work with artifacts. He was
speaking not only of his own autobiography, but also of his generation of May Fourth intellectuals, of
the cultural achievements over centuries, as well as of Socialist construction prior to the Cultural
Revolution, which considered even the most recent efforts at cultural renewal as “poisonous weeds” to
be uprooted.
As Shen prepared for departure to the Cadre School, his wife’s sister Zhang Yunhe 張允和
stopped by to visit him. She recalled that his room was so messy that there was no place to sit. When
she was about to say goodbye,
79
80
81
Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, November 22, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.234.
82
This line first appeared amidst what appear to be politically compliant pieces of writing, such as “Jiefang yinian xuexi
yinian” (One Year after Liberation: One Year of Study, 1950), In Shen Congwen quanji, 27.49.
from an overstuffed pocket, he took out a wrinkled letter. With a smile that looked like he was about to
cry, he said to me: “this was the first letter Third Sister [he also calls my third younger sister “Third Sister”
out of respect] wrote to me.” He held up the letter, and his expression was timid and tender. I said: “Can
I see it?” Second Brother Shen put down the letter and I couldn’t tell if he wanted to hand it to me or not.
He warmed the letter at his chest, did not give it to me, and then stuffed it back into his pocket, his hand
clutching the letter inside his pocket. I thought: How silly of me to ask to see their love letter! While I
looked at him bemusedly, Second Brother Shen said suddenly: “Third Sister’s first letter—first letter.”
Then he began to snivel and weep, a man nearly seventy years old crying as full of sorrow and joy as a
child. I didn’t know what to do, and so left him intoxicated in the “bittersweet” of his youth.
他從鼓鼓囊囊的口袋裡掏出一封皺頭皺腦的信，又像哭又像笑對我說：“這是三姐（他也
尊稱我三妹為‘三姐’）給我的第一封信。”他把信舉起來，面色十分羞澀而溫柔。我
說：“我能看看嗎？”沈二哥把信放下來，又像給我又像不給我，把信放在胸前溫一下，
並沒有給我。又把信塞在口袋裡，這手抓緊了信再也不出來了。我想，我真傻，怎麼看人
家的情書呢，我正望著他好笑。忽然沈二哥說：“三姐的第一封信——第一封。”說著就
吸溜吸溜哭起來，快七十歲的老頭兒像一個小孩子哭得又傷心又快樂。我站在那兒倒有點
手足無措了。我悄悄地走了，讓他沉浸、陶醉在那春天的“甜澀”中吧！83
On November 30, 1969, Shen Congwen boarded a train for Xianning county, Hubei province, and
learned that only himself and three others from his work unit obeyed the mobilization directives.
When they arrived at the Cadre School, the local authorities had no idea they were coming, and none
of the existing production brigades wanted to take him because he was too old and weak to engage in
physical labor. His wife Zhang Zhaohe belonged to the same Cadre School, which was associated with
the Ministry of Culture, but she lived in a collective dormitory and could not take him in either. Shen
had to move several times in the first few months until he “settled down” in an abandoned elementary
school in Shuangxi, a township 30 kilometers away from his wife.
This separation prompted Shen to write over 60 letters to his wife in the next year and half,
testifying to the quotidian experiences of material shortage and to a sense of homelessness from the
Cultural Revolution’s mass mobilizations. Even though a war had not begun, everyone was treated
like a soldier of a military unit, so it was actually the exception rather than the norm for urban
families to stay in one piece. As Ellen Widmer pointed out with respect to epistolary collections of the
Ming-Qing transition, “many letters traveled across unaccustomed distances, between people
uprooted by events.”84 From the end of 1969 to mid-1971, Shen Congwen, Zhang Zhaohe, their older
and younger sons were scattered between four different locations, each relaying the letter he or she
received from one family member to another. As Haiming Liu points out in a Chinese diasporic
context, “family correspondence is not necessarily a communication between one individual and
another, but rather a vehicle networking the entire family.”85 In the Cultural Revolution, this network
of letters remained the only antidote against the atomization of individuals into shiny revolutionary
“bolts” at the disposal of the state. At the same time, the family correspondences from this period
continue to reflect a tug of war between family ethics and revolutionary ethics.
83
Zhang Yunhe, “Cong di-yi feng xin dao di-yi feng xin.”
84
Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China,” 6.
85
Liu, Transnational History of a Chinese Family, 138.
Living amidst cobwebs, mosquitoes, mice, and other creatures under a leaking roof, Shen
could “raise frogs” and make “pickled tofu” in the dampness of his room.86 His letters detailed the
material bases of his daily existence from food to clothing, housing to transportation—a haphazard
and creative bricolage with scarce resources and the kindness of strangers. He appreciated every
minor improvement, such as getting a hand-made oil lamp so that he didn’t have to spend long nights
in the dark, or moving to lodgings a few hundred meters away from the local loudspeakers that used
to blare in his ears. The rainstorms posed the direst challenges, so that even after sweeping out dozens
of basins of water, he had to lay down bricks in order not to walk around in puddles. While “nagging”
about such dilapidated material circumstances, Shen Congwen’s letters to his wife still contain
moments of poetic allegory:
Zhaohe: With recent rainstorms, I can well imagine the strenuous toil of thousands of comrades at your
place. Is your lodging also turning into a disaster zone? … When you wade through water, you must be
extra careful. You must face reality. Old women cannot compete with the young, and you must take care
even when crossing with a boat. I’ve spent four or five years on a boat, floating here and there, so I know
how boats are. You must not move capriciously, even when you’ve reached the shore. Let other people
go first—you are not competing for this one moment. … Congwen.
兆和：這幾天大風雨，湖邊大幾千同誌的辛苦，可想而知。你們住處不知是不是也有點成
災景象？… 涉水務必要謹慎為是。要承認現實。老太太不比青壯。即過渡也必得特別小心。
我是住過四五年船在水上飄來飄去的，更明白船中規，不宜亂動，即攏岸時也不宜粗心大
意！讓人先上不爭此一刻。… 從文87
With high blood pressure and fainting spells, Shen Congwen had great difficulty taking care of himself
and naturally longed to have his wife come live with him. Yet he also did not want to take her away
from her colleagues, her work unit, and her “masses.” Responding to one of her letters in March 1970,
he agreed with her that “private interests should not harm public interests” 不宜以私害公.
Subsequent letters further vacillated between asking her to come and asking her to stay put. In her
letter to him in October 1970, Zhang Zhaohe approved of the success of his thought struggle so that
“public triumphed over the private” 公字戰勝了私字. She went on to write in an almost patronizing
tone:
Congwen: … Last Sunday, kindergarten teachers propagated the spirit of Dazhai to the children: “Your
mommies and daddies are busy learning from Dazhai and have no time to take care of you. This week
we will not go home to Mommy, does everyone agree? … This new generation of children receive
Socialist education already starting in kindergarten. Compared to our children, they are much better
off. … Three.
從文：… 上個禮拜天，老師對幼兒園的孩子宣傳大寨精神，說爸爸媽媽學大寨，沒有功夫照
料你們，咱們這個禮拜不去看媽媽，大家同意不同意？孩子們說同意！… 這一代的孩子從幼
兒園就接受社會主義教育，比起龍龍虎虎一輩又優越多了。… 三88
86
Shen Congwen, Diary, September 18, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.379; 23.84.
87
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, September 17, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.375.
88
Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, October 31, 1970, Shen Congwen jiashu, 506.
Two weeks later, Shen Congwen was hospitalized for 40 days for severe stomachache, and Zhang
Zhaohe took off from work to care for him. In a letter written shortly after her return to her brigade,
Shen Congwen reflected on their differences:
Zhaohe: … You grew up in a collective, and have thrived in a collective. You are respected and
recognized by people. … You cannot create, but you can preserve and adapt. Yet I am a creative
personality. … Even when I give an ordinary report, I make a hundred mistakes. Last time, when you said
that I “dragged on your hind leg,” it’s in some measure true. Your words tormented me, but I am the one
who ought to apologize, not you. … Congwen
兆和：… 你是在集體中長大，從集體中得到發展，受人尊重，得人認可的 … 不能創造，卻
能守常，應變。我卻是個創造型人物 … 作個普通發言，也毛病百出。所以你上次所說“拖
你後腿”，也有部分是實情，話說得使我極痛苦，應抱歉得還是我，而不是你。89
As this correspondence suggests, the revolution not only split apart families physically but also
psychologically, so much that even individual subjectivities became conflicted and fragmented. It was
not that Shen explicitly “resisted” the revolution’s hegemonic discourse, as he even tried to write
classical-style propagandistic poems in this period to celebrate national events. Still, he knew that
these are “just writing and reading for myself; at most a few others might look at them (even a wall
poster wouldn’t publish [my poetry]—even there they might find mistakes.)” 事實上，只是自己寫
寫讀讀，至多三五個人看看而已。（即作為墻報，也不會用上的。也會犯錯誤的）.90 The
readership of his writing shrank over time from a broad reading public to an academic audience and
now to just a few family members, whose worries often outweighed their appreciation. In April 1970,
his elder brother Shen Yunlu died, and his sister-in-law promptly burned Shen Congwen’s last letter to
him at his grave.91 Shen expressed his disconsolation in a letter to his old friend Xiao Qian, whom he
addressed as “classmate” because they were both in the cadre school: 92
Classmate Bing Qian: I received your latest letter and thank you for your sentiments. Recent troubles
with my heart and high blood pressure oppressing my brain have made me dazed and befuddled. I can
no longer hope to return to work. My amnesia is also shocking. Had your letter not reminded me, I could
not have remembered what I wrote you last. To make things simpler, please send me back m earlier
letter—thanks very much. [My elder brother] passed away, and another close family member suddenly
died as well. It is only a matter of time that I myself will be thrown on the scrapheap. All my works have
been destroyed; even in Taiwan, since 1953 they have been banned from circulation. At my brother’s
place, three decades’ of worth of our letter exchanges were all destroyed, lest there might be
meaningless provocations for his family. My children keep telling me: “Do not correspond with people in
your illness. Don’t bring trouble.” They are absolutely right. … Congwen.
秉乾同學：得近信，謝謝厚意。近因心臟不好，腦子又被高血壓威脅，弄得昏昏沈沈，一
切工作希望，已難說上。頭腦善忘，即得驚人程度，不是來信提起，已難於記憶給你信中
內容。為省事計，望把前信寄還，十分感謝。雲六故走，另一至親又忽然故去，我報廢將
89
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, February 21, 1971, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.443.
90
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, September 10, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22. 367.
91
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, April 30, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.303.
92
See Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation,” for a detailed account of Shen Congwen’s relationship to Xiao Qian from the
Republican period through the 1950s.
是遲早間事。所有習作已全毀，臺灣也在五三年即禁止流行。大哥處保存卅年信件亦全
毀，免生無意義是非，為子弟累，為他人累。孩子們一再囑咐“病中不宜和人隨便通信，
免除麻煩”，所說十分有道理。… 從文93
With the decline of his own health and the passing of his brother, Shen Congwen became keenly
aware of his own mortality. Yet it was not so much death that he feared as it was the loss of memories,
both his personal memories mediated through letters and the cultural memories mediated through
his literary and cultural historical corpus. He regarded all of his writing as a repository for what fragile
fragments he was able to salvage, and he would spend the remainder of his life in valiant struggle
against both physical and cultural amnesia. After his release from the hospital in January 1971, he
began anew to sort through his art historical papers, copying over his manuscript of the history of
Chinese costumes, in case the original became lost or wet, with a shaky hand. He also worked on
other projects from memory alone, without the aid of books or photographs. As he wrote to Zhang
Zhaohe in March, 1971:
Over several rainy days, I completed in bed a first draft of an article entitled “The Historical
Development of Employing Horses.” It was all based on memory. Hundreds, even thousands of horse
images have been running around in my mind. I could recognize their historical periods, properties, and
characteristics, and relate them to a hundred cultural historical issues.
連日陰雨中，在床上已初步完成了《關於馬的應用歷史發展》一文，一切全憑記憶，大幾
百匹，甚至於過千匹馬的印象，在頭腦中跑來跑去，且能識別他們的時代，性能和特徵，
和相關文化史百十種問題。94
Meanwhile, he wrote many letters petitioning authorities to allow him to return to Beijing to finish
working on his art historical projects. It was not until the spring of 1972 that he was finally permitted
to return to Beijing on account of illness, where he seemed to race with life itself in order to rescue
what fragments of cultural memory he could from the debris of revolution. He completed his
monumental study Research of Ancient Chinese Costume (Zongguo gudai fushi janjiu 中國古代服飾
研究) after the Cultural Revolution, yet it is his letters that provide us with an encounter with the
history that allowed these art historical works to come down to our own age. As Stephen Owen writes
of Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao’s afterword to her dead husband’s monumental study of epigraphy
Records on Metal and Stone, “Judgments on the histories of dynasties are embedded not only in the
records themselves but also in the story of their composition and their tenuous survival.”95 Shen
Congwen’s family letters remind us that cultural memory is mediated by vulnerable bodies and flimsy
artifacts, yet it was precisely such fragile media that proved to be the most enduring.
93
Shen Congwen, Letter to Xiao Qian, October 17, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.405.
94
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, March 30, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.466.
95
Owen, Remembrances, 82.
Conclusion: Belated Letter Readers
In January 1951, while participating in land reform in rural Sichuan, Shen Congwen found a copy of
Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 Historical Records (Shiji 史記) amid the debris of an executed landlord’s
possessions. He spent long, lonely nights reading this ancient book and wrote his wife of his thoughts:
Historical eras have gone by. All heroes and kings, generals and ministers, beauties and celebrities have
turned into dust and lost their meaning. Yet what a few solitary individuals had preserved in words
became the only vehicles to link past and present and to connect self and other. They make historical
continuity possible, so that feelings constrained by a specific time and space could still be re-enlivened,
as though face-to-face, after a thousand years and a hundred changes.
時代過去了，一切英雄豪傑，王侯將相，美人名士，都成塵成土，失去存在意義。一些生
死兩寂寞的人，從文字保留下的東東西西，卻成了唯一聯接歷史溝通人我的工具。因之歷
史如相連續，為時空所阻隔的情感，千載之下百事之後還如相晤對。96
It was as if Sima Qian had sent out a letter in a bottle that floated across two millennia, and Shen
Congwen was the letter’s most recent recipient. The power of literature lies in its epistolary capacity
to bridge self and other across time and space. While firmly grounded in specific historical and
personal contexts, letters at their best convey the vitality of their author and subject over to their
readers, however belatedly. Of course Shen had read Sima Qian’s canonical work before and was
conscious of the ancient master’s influence on his literary techniques, but as he re-read The Historical
Records in epistolary terms under the oil lamp at night in rural Sichuan, he felt the deep resonance of
Sima Qian’s person, his life and his feelings (qing 情), which
only matured and crystallized after great suffering. This qing was a profound empathy, deep love,
understanding and recognition beyond a history of feats, so that even a portrait of someone in three or
five hundred words reflected the harmonious union of the author and his subject.
由痛苦方能成熟積聚的情—這個情即深入的體會，深至的愛，以及透過事功以上的理解於
認識。因之用三五百字寫一個人，反映的卻是作者和傳中人兩種人格的契合於統一.97
Beyond expressing appreciation of Sima Qian, this may also have been Shen Congwen’s message to
his future readers as they peruse through his posthumously published writings.
The literary critic Chen Sihe considered Shen Congwen’s private letters a prime example of
what he termed “subterranean writing” (qianzai xiezuo 潛在寫作), writings from the Mao era that
could not be published in their time but still constituted an “organic component of the spiritual life of
that historical period.”98 This critical intervention to examine invisible, marginal, and non-official
writings may help resurrect the literature of the Mao era from easy dismissals of poverty and
propaganda and help us see “the variety and richness of the spiritual pursuit of the people from that
period.”99 Indeed, Shen Congwen’s family letters, even while stamped with the “revolutionary” marks
96
Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, January 24, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.312.
97
Shen Congwen, Letter to his wife and two sons, January 25, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.318.
98
Chen Sihe, “Women de chouti,” 68.
99
Ibid., 69.
of their time and overshadowed by censorship, still bear intimate testimony to historical scenes and
personal feelings never documented in the era’s published literature. Beyond engaging in a similar
project of reclaiming these letters as literature, I have argued for an epistolary reading of Shen
Congwen’s oeuvre, which allows us to approach Shen’s writings as a lifelong quest for readership, for a
“knower of the tone,” a quest frustrated and impeded by historical circumstances. In contrast to the
closure of canonization, letters are open-ended fragments awaiting understanding and reverberation
from their readers.
We are all belated recipients of Shen Congwen’s letters. The way his public loved him,
attacked him, forgot him and revived him paralleled the relationship his family had with him and his
letters. The portrait that emerges from Shen Congwen’s family letters in the Mao era is not so much
that of a hero or martyr but rather that of a vulnerable yet resilient survivor, whose dignity is
inseparable from his meekness and whose humanity is inextricable from his fears. Instead of radical
postures, his life under the Maoist regime was full of inner struggles and quotidian compromises. As
Zhang Zhaohe recognized while sorting through her husband’s papers, despite enormous political
pressure, this was a man who had never ceased to feel for the world around him.100 Shen Congwen
could not help but attend to the revolution’s missed opportunities as well as its human and cultural
costs. Even as such indiscriminate empathy ruined his public literary career, it was to preserve and to
convey such feelings that he had never stopped his private letter writing.
Bibliography
Chen Sihe 陳思和. “Women de chouti: Shi lun dangdai wenxue shi (1949–1976) de ‘qianzai xiezuo’ ”
我們的抽屜：試論當代文學史 (1949–1976) 的潛在寫作. In Zhongguo dangdai wenxue
guanjianci shijiang 中國當代文學關鍵詞十講. 65–92. Shanghai: Fudan daxue, 2002.
Ding, Ling. The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River. Translated by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi.
Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1984.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the
1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Huangfu, Jenny. “Roads to Salvation: Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian and the Problem of Non-Communist
Celebrity Writers, 1948–1957.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22.2 (2010), 39–87.
Kalinin, Mikhail Ivanovich. On Communist Education: Selected Speeches and Articles. Moscow:
Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1950.
King, Richard. Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945–80. Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2012.
Kinkley, Jeffrey. The Odyssey of Shen Congwen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
------. “Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese Literature.” Modern Chinese
Literature 1.2 (1985): 157–83.
Kraus, Richard. Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western
Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
100
Zhang Zhaohe, “Houji.”
Li Yang 李揚. Shen Congwen de zuihou sishi nian 沈從文的最後四十年. Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi
chubanshe, 2005.
Liu, Haiming. The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and
Reverse Migration. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
McDougall, Bonnie S. Love-letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu
Guangping. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Owen, Stephen. Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Roberts, Claire. Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2010.
Shen Congwen 沈從文. Shen Congwen quanji 沈從文全集. Compiled by Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和.
Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2002.
------. Shen Congwen zishu 沈從文自述. Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2006.
Shen Congwen and Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和. Shen Congwen jiashu 沈從文家書. Edited by Shen
Huchu 沈虎雛. Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005.
Shen, Weiwei. “From Country Bumpkin to Gentleman: Reading Shen Congwen’s Letters to Hu Shi.”
Chinese Studies in History 38.2 (2005): 21–68.
Wang, Xiaojue. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across
the 1949 Divide. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.
Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen
Congwen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Wang, David Der-wei 王德威. Shuqing chuantong yu Zhongguo wenxue xiandai xing 抒情傳統與中
國文學現代性. Bejing: Xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2010.
Widmer, Ellen. “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China.” Late Imperial
China 10.2 (1989): 1–43.
Yuan Kejia 袁可嘉. “Ren de wenxue yu renmin de wenxue” 人的文學與人民的文學. In Lun xinshi
xiandaihua 論新詩現代化. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1988: 112-124.
Zhang Qianfen 張謙芬. “Shen Congwen jianguo chuqi de tugai shuxie” 沈從文建國初期的土改書
寫. In Zhongguo xiandai wenxue luncong 中國現代文學論叢. 3.1 (2008).
Zhang Xinying 張新穎. Shen Congwen jingdu 沈從文精讀. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2005.
Zhang Yunhe 張允和. “Cong diyi feng xin dao diyi feng xin” 從第一封信到第一封信. In Zhang jia
jiu shi 張家舊事. Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 1999: 131-135.
Recommended Readings
Chen, Sihe. “On ‘Invisible Writing’ in the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, 1949–1976).”
Translated by Hongbing Zhang. MCLC Resource Center, 2000.
http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/chen.htm.
Fu Lei 傅雷. Fu Lei jiashu 傅雷家書. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998.
Wang, David Der-wei. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Chinese Artists and Intellectuals in the Mid-20th
Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Wang, Xiaojue. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across
the 1949 Divide. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.
Xu Xiao 徐曉. Minjian shuxin 1966–1977 民間書信 1966–1977. Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 2000.
Index terms
Shen Congwen
Zhang Zhaohe
Family letters
Censorship
Admonition
Land reform
Cultural Revolution
May Seventh Cadre School
zhiyin

2015 History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture - Writing From The Revolution's Debris

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WRITING FROM REVOLUTION’S DEBRIS: SHEN CONGWEN’S

FAMILY LETTERS IN THE MAO ERA

1. Land Reform Letters as Literary Embryos

more for my letter writing than for who I am as a person.” 你愛我，與其說愛我為人，還不如說

2. Letters under Surveillance, 1966–1968

garbage bin that was too heavy.” 這裡生活一切如常。今年有可能會變變，生活更簡化。我頭

3. Cadre School Letters as Fragile Memory, 1969–71

Conclusion: Belated Letter Readers

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