The Ultimate China Bookshelf #45: Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged

The Exuberant Misadventures of the Hapless Hero Fang Hung-chien, published in 1947

Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is a leisurely picaresque novel, occupying a watershed position in 20th-century Chinese fiction. Drawing on traditional Chinese techniques of social satire and storytelling, the novel also displays the influences of Western modernism. — The Independent (UK)

Fortress Besieged was initially published in China in 1947 and is debatably considered one of the finest Chinese novels of last century and for good reason; it is that rare book that borders on the literary yet defines its goals without losing its readability. — Historical Novels Society Journal

Qian is widely held to be one of China's most significant modern writers, and this novel a landmark in Chinese fiction. But the tradition it works out of is less Chinese than English and comic — Fielding through Dickens — adventures of innocent young men, odd "character" characters, and the linear progression of bumbling one's way into knowledge. — Kirkus

My favorite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge. — Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans

Author Bio:

Qián Zhōngshū (钱锺书, Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998) was from a conservative Confucian family, his father a university professor in Shanghai and later Nanjing. Surprisingly little detail beyond the basic facts is known of Qian’s life. After a basic primary education in Wuxi he attended two English-language missionary schools in Suzhou and back in Wuxi. He enrolled in the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University in 1929 where he was taught by many prestigious professors including George Y Yeh (Yè Gōngchāo, 叶公超, Yeh Kungchao). In 1933, Qian was engaged to Yang Jiang, a successful playwright and translator. They married in 1935. Qian received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to further his studies abroad at Oxford and then in Paris. In 1939, Qian returned to Shanghai where he was trapped by the war.

After Japan's defeat, Qian worked in the National Central Library in Nanjing, editing its English-language publication, Philobiblon. He later worked as a translator at Peking University and on the translation team for Mao’s collected works. Qian was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution and forced to work as a janitor. After the Cultural Revolution, Qian returned to research, and from 1978 to 1980, he visited several universities in Italy, the United States, and Japan. His work underwent something of a revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He died in Beijing in 1998. 

The Book in 150 words:

First published in 1947, Fortress Besieged is a Chinese satirical novel written by Qian Zhongshu. Set on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War it is the story of hapless Fang Hung-chien. Returned from studying in Europe with a fake university degree, he meets two “beauties” and his life becomes problematically entangled with theirs. It is widely considered to be one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Chinese literature. The novel is a humorous tale about middle-class Chinese society in the late 1930s. It has long remained popular in China (though may perhaps be due for a revival if permissible!) following a 1990s TV series and gained a worldwide reputation after it was translated into English in the 1980s. 

Your Free Takeaways:

Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out. – French Proverb quoted at the start of Fortress Besieged

It is said that “girlfriend” is the scientific form for sweetheart, making it sound more dignified, just as the botanical name for rose is “rosaceae dicotyledonous”, or the legal term for divorcing one’s wife is“ negotiated separation by consent.” Only after Fang Hing-chien had escorted Miss Su around Hong Kong for a couple of days did he realize that a girlfriend and a sweetheart were actually two completely different things.

On his way home Fang Hung-chien mentally drafted the letter to Miss Su, convinced that it would be more appropriate to write it in classical style, since its ambiguity contained a terseness that would make it an excellent tool for glossing over or playing down an error. 

This quarrel was like a summer rainstorm — severe while it lasted but over very quickly. From then on, however, each determined to control himself and avoid saying anything that would start a conflict. 

Why This Book Should be on Your China Bookshelf:

This is a novel (translated into English by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K Mao) that knows of what it speaks. Qian, who had studied abroad, began work on the book while living in occupied Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, looking back just a few years to the eve of the war. Within Fortress Besieged Qian encompasses so many character “types” and traits in pre-war Chinese bourgeois-intellectual society, and so many issues that commonly consumed this class. These include successfully studying abroad (Fang fakes his degree when he returns), children becoming leaches on the family purse and lacking sufficient filial piety, falling in with “loose women” and spending all their money on them to no good end, making a bad marriage (in Qian’s case with the alluring but not very suitable Sun Jou-chia). Fang commits just about every “sin” in the Chinese bourgeois family playbook. 

Fortress Besieged was at the time of its publication, and still is, much loved by readers. Partly this is due to its witty observations — comedies of manners novels were not overly common among the interwar Chinese literary community. They tended to be inspired by the Russians, or Left-wing politics, and so books (as we have seen with Mao Dun, Lu Xun, and Lao She in previous entries on the bookshelf) tended to be serious, highlighting the Republican era’s issues with corruption and nepotism, the wide social differences between rich and poor, urban and rural, as well as the iniquities of much of China being under colonial control. Not much room for comedy perhaps.

However, Qian Zhongshu’s novel is genuinely funny in its depictions of, not just the hapless Fang, but the wider calamities facing China and Chinese society. Perhaps we should not laugh, given the devastation and death of the war and all that followed, but it seems readers did indeed want to see, and recognize, the absurdity in their own society while many saw a plethora of revealing and oft-encountered characteristics displayed in Fang. 

Did Qian Zhongshu see elements of himself in Fang Hung-chien? Certainly Fang’s life follows a similar path to Qian’s at times — study abroad, arriving home to high expectations and a society in turmoil. Qian though made a long and very happy marriage with the writer and translator Yang Jiang. But he could obviously see how lucky he had been in that. 

Comedy writing, especially in English translation, is rare in Chinese literature. English readers coming to Chinese novels without having spent any time in the country might come to the conclusion that the Chinese are not a humorous people. Of course, this is not true (as Lin Yutang has shown us in another previous entry on the bookshelf), but humor rarely travels well and is often effectively untranslatable even from reasonably similar cultures. 

Yet Qian’s satire is of a universal nature. We do not have to be Chinese people in the Republican era to understand the high expectations people have of Fang nor his inability to reach them, of being trapped in an unhappy or unsatisfying marriage and the excruciating problem of extricating oneself from the relationship. Surely that is why Fortress Besieged proved so popular with Chinese readers, and, as the late, great Sinologist Jonathan Spence (who perhaps more than most Sinologists continually stressed the importance of reading novels to have a rounded understanding of China) wrote in a foreword to the most recent translation (from Penguin Classics): “Fortress Besieged may not be able to tell us where China is heading now, but it can certainly tell us what China went through on the way.”

Next Time:

Two out of the three novelists we’ve added to the Ultimate Bookshelf in the last few weeks were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution – Lao She driven to suicide; Qian Zhongshu made to do menial work. Who knows what would have happened to Lu Xun had he survived to an old age? The Cultural Revolution casts such a long shadow over modern Chinese history and society, even today. Who can discern how much his experiences in the Cultural Revolution have shaped Xi Jinping? So let’s look now at three very different memoirs of the Cultural Revolution.