In 2002, I and other teachers of creative writing at Glasgow University read
the earliest pages of this novel and agreed that it would likely become a
good one. It is.
All long tales are historical novels. Sinbad the Sailor and Robinson Crusoe
are adroit heroes who leave towns where they are comparatively poor and,
after gaining and losing a lot through outlandish adventures, come back
rich. Their first readers belonged to societies separated by eight centuries
and the breadth of Europe, but both were highly mercantile, with new faiths
derived from the Jewish Bible.
The English novels following Robinson Crusoe are not commercial adventure
stories. Tom Jones, Clarissa, Humphrey Clinker, Tristram Shandy are about
landed gentry, and all they have in common with Defoe’s bestseller is action
confined to a few years, in societies without indications that they were
very different a few decades earlier, and are still changing. There is
something comfortingly static and (politically speaking) timeless about the
long conversations in Mr Shandy’s parlour while his wife is in labour, long
letters leading up to Clarissa’s rape, shorter letters in which Matthew
Bramble and his entourage describe their travels through fashionable
Britain. When Sophia follows Tom Jones to London, England is being invaded
by Prince Charlie’s Scottish army, but the only reference to this is made by
an innkeeper and his wife who mistake Sophia for Charles Stuart’s mistress:
they lock her up in order to claim a reward from the Whig government if the
Jacobites are defeated, or if the Jacobites win, claim a reward for
protecting her. In the eighteenth century, many South Britons thought
political history had come to an end around 1689, when the London parliament
got a monarchy it could control and established the Bank of England.
Jane Austen and Walter Scott knew otherwise. Born before the French Revolution
and dying after Waterloo, they saw a new class of gentry arrive, enriched by
the enclosure of land, the West Indian sugar trade and prize money from the
capture of French ships. Scott was the first novelist to show folk from
every social class struggling with each other to make new kinds of society.
His childhood and legal education in a country poorer than England let him
sympathetically show landlords great and small, cavaliers and princes,
clergy, lawyers, tradesmen, peasants and beggars. He gave a historical
perspective to even commonplace lives, inspiring a new school of social
historians but influencing novelists most. Thackeray and Dickens, Pushkin,
Balzac and Manzoni followed him in a great tradition of historical writing
that only ran thin in the mid-twentieth century, through Evelyn Waugh,
Solzhenitsyn and Sartre.
We now accept that everyone lives in a socially transitory state, but
sometimes assume that in rural or foreign parts life has stayed the same for
centuries. Westerners invading India and China in the nineteenth century
believed their conquests were unique, although in both lands they were only
the latest in a history of invasions. Every Chinese ruling dynasty had been
established by a conquering warlord – usually Mongolian and on one occasion
Muslim. Since China had a third of the world’s people no rulers could hold
it for a generation without talking, thinking and becoming Chinese. In 1839
a China government refused to let British merchants sell opium to their
people, so Britain sent in an army to defend Free Trade and Christianity.
Had it forced China into the British Empire, Britain’s government would
presently have shifted to Beijing and a Hanoverian Chinese Emperor would
have mounted the throne: alas, no one nation could occupy China without
every other nation uniting to stop it. The invading British army was joined
by armies from every other strong industrial nation. As Chiew-Siah Tei says
in her impressive new novel, they “cut up China like a large sweet cake”,
and ensured that for half a century the largest and most ancient
civilization in the world had no central government.
The chapters in Little Hut of Leaping Fishes are titled by date, and the first
is 1875. We meet the Chai family, who rule Plum Blossom Village from a
mansion containing four courtyards and apartments. One quarter houses the
patriarch Master Chai. In another his eldest son’s first wife is giving
birth to our hero, Mingzhi. In a third sits his second wife, jealous because
her child will be born a few weeks later, so he will never grow up to become
the Master, unless something bad happens to Mingzhi. The fourth quarter is
for visitors.
Mingzhi’s growth is given in clear pictures full of surprising details, like a
good Chinese drawing but always in motion; people and things are presented
swiftly and easily, but always in unhurried prose and the present tense. I
found the Chai mansion and Plum Blossom Village oddly familiar, like the
willow pattern plate I saw as a child and imagined living inside. The Chai
family's world, however, is not idyllic. It is ruled by a strong,
sophisticated etiquette that gives complete authority to the grandpa Master
of the mansion and village. Like all such codes, it is meant to be eternal
so cruelly oppresses the poor, the young and the intelligent who hate
cruelty. Mingzhi is one of the latter. From infancy he avoids the sight of
suffering by immersion in classical poetry. He easily passes exams, rising
to the rank of Mandarin and administrator among those who think anything new
must be evil. His grandpa hates novelty most, but his greed initiates
change. Mingzhi’s father (a drunkard and opium addict) tells the old man
that opium cultivation will fetch more money. They abandon mixed crops,
which leads to peasant starvation.
Only the peasants pay taxes – pay for everything in return for very little, as
happened in France before the French Revolution and in Ireland before the
Land League. Bribery is taken for granted in a Civil Service where most
bosses break the Confucian code which all are taught to revere, just as
Christian lawmakers ignore the Sermon on the Mount. Mingzhi tries to be
honest, but even so drives an over-taxed peasant to suicide before summoning
the courage to stop his grandfather overruling him. He is not perfect.
Here is an example of Chiew-Siah Tei’s prose at its best, a classroom where
the head teacher addresses his pupils:
“Can someone tell me why you are here?” Still, silence is his only answer. He
flops into his chair, rests his elbows on his desk, and waits.
From a corner a tiny voice raises: “To study and prepare for our exams.”
A tide of nodding heads washes across the room and someone adds: “To secure a
post in the Civil Service.”
“You bunch of useless bookworms!” Scholar Ning gets up, bracing himself
against the desk, puffing.
“Are you still indulging yourself in daydreams about the past, about the
glorious Qianlong period, when you bookworms could pore over classical
literature day and night? That was once upon a time, when the Great Quing
Empire stood firm as the centre of the world, when the foreign devils bowed
and kowtowed to our emperor. But now . . . .”
He looks his students in the eyes; they look away, uneasy.
“They are here, the white men, more and more of them, taking territory after
territory, and hungering for more . . . .”
Scholar Ning’s words come faster, his voice louder: “Listen to the screams and
groans of our soldiers as their ships are bombed and burnt, and they’re
forced to surrender. Treaties are signed, lands handed over. The French
landed in Annam, the British took Burma, the Russians grabbed the northern
region, and the Japanese have joined the queue too, fixing their gaze on
Korea!”
Bang!
The silent audience jump in their seats.
Scholar Ning, his hands still on the desk, continues: “And you, the educated
ones, our hopeful new generation, you bury yourself in the old classics like
ostriches with their heads in the sand . . . .”
He pauses, and after a long silence, he asks: “How are you going to sit your
exams if China no longer exists?”
If British teachers today asked their classes why they are studying would any
get a better answer than the one Scholar Ning received?
That quotation and my account of the novel have overemphasized its wide
political scope, but like any good story the politics are underlying what
Bernard Shaw called, “the exhilarating spectacle” of respectable families
driven by greed and generosity to breaking point, as brothers and sisters
love and hate each other, wives are bought and sold and commit adultery.
Though shorter than many great nineteenth-century novels, Little Hut of
Leaping Fishes has their breadth of scope and wealth of characters, and like
many such novelists of that age Chiew-Siah Tei, while concentrating on one
character, gives the thoughts and feelings of many. For me, the result reads
wonderfully true, though two characters near the end of her harsh but
sympathetic story go soft.
Mingzhi gets to know an Irish missionary and a British merchant, very
different people, but he finds both wise and honest, friendly and helpful.
There have indeed been such missionaries, but very few such businessmen, and
the merchant at least should have represented the greed for gain that caused
the foreigners’ exploitation of to China. I say this with regret for I share
his surname and his habit of immoderate laughter. Also, a little boy actor
who becomes Mingzhi’s only childhood friend, is dismissed from his troupe
because grandpa Chai wants young Mingzhi to have no friends. Years later,
when Mingzhi is a rich magistrate, he recognizes his former friend in a sick
and crippled dock labourer. He installs the poor man in his fine mansion,
meaning to nurse him back to health. The cripple hardly remembers him,
panics and runs away stealing a precious cup. This is horribly convincing.
But the poor man appears later and we are given a good reason for his taking
the cup, and for his unsuccessful, intention of returning it. Like Dickens
in Oliver Twist, Chiew-Siah Tei could not show an innocent young boy so
brutally treated that he is crippled in body and soul.
The novels ends with Mingzhi about to leave China in 1900.
Tomorrow the ship will enter the sea, across which the naval fleets of the
Eight-Nation Allied Powers – Britain, France, Italy, America, Austria,
Japan, Germany, Russia – will soon sail, bringing with them tens of
thousands of troops. All ready for a bite of the cake they have been hungry
for, sweet and soft and creamy.
A cake called China.
Chiew-Siah Tei plans more novels about Mingzhi in the twentieth century, but
her first book already explains most of what followed in China, especially
its conquest by Chairman Mao’s Communist Party. It confirms what Hendrik van
Loon wrote in The Home of Mankind, a children’s geography book published in
1933. He mentioned further chaos descending on China after the First World
War, when “it was forced to take the side of the Allies in a quarrel in
which, as usual, it had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose”. Van Loon
ended by saying, “I am no prophet. I don’t know what will happen during the
next ten or fifteen years. Conditions probably won’t change very much, for
poor China tried too late to catch up with the procession of modern states.
But may the Good Lord have mercy upon us if she ever does, for, oh, what a
bill we shall then have to pay!”.
Chiew-Siah Tei
LITTLE HUT OF LEAPING FISHES
400pp. Picador. £14.99.
978 0 330 45438 2
Alasdair Gray’s most recent novel, Old Men in Love, was published last
year.
