Lao She

Reading: Beneath the Red Banner

After a lazy start to the weekend, I got through the first of eleven chapters of Lao She's 1966 autobiography. His artistry is similar to Yang Jiang's in that he builds up his imagination of the past mainly with characters that made a deep impression on him: his various aunts, his bird-raising grandfather, his absent father. This portraiture is obviously the most distinctive achievment of Lao She's writing. I love his grandpa who would rather talk about the art of raising birds than his past as a military officer.

Not only did he go on and on about what sort of birdcages one should use; he'd expound on the little clay food dish that goes inside the cage. And the little clay water dishes. Even the tiny bamboo shovel used to take the stool out of the cage! All of these things were, to him, the tools of the art. Ai! He really had forgotten that he was ever a military officer. Now all he would direct his attention to was the artistic potential inhering to food dishes and tiny shovels, in the gruff coughs and the bursts of laughter that marked his drunken descent, once again, into the small -- small irritations, small amusements.

There you go: a late-19th century recluse, a xiao yin, little hider, a hider-in-the-small, a builder of miniatures. Walter Benjamin might have befriended such; Friedrich Nietzsche might have offered his contempt. What's adds more interest here, though, is the much more fleshed-out ecology of daily living. Lao She speaks of the days leading up to his birth, just like Brad Pitt's voice-over that begins Benjamin Button, a third-person omniscient voice (quite a droll one too). What fixes his attention are the people, his relatives, their quirks and their petty weaknesses, but most of all the fact that each had a niche, each performed a crucial role that tells how the family is able to survive despited difficulty.