The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China by Yuan-Tsung Chen Read Free Book Online Page B

write until we have agreed to write as instructed by the Party? Does that mean that we should not stage any plays written from a non-Communist standpoint? For example, Mr. Cao Yu’s plays?”
    â€œThat would definitely rule out my
Metamorphosis
,” Cao Yu added with a self-deprecatory smile.
    â€œWhy should it?” inquired Feng Xue-feng, a well-known Communist critic, jerking his white-haired head. He spoke with a nervous intensity that dated from the imprisonment in a Guomindang jail which had wrecked his health. “Why shouldn’t your play be staged? Because its hero is a Guomindang commissioner? Because no one who has worked for the Guomindang government should be depicted as a hero? Now look here, I was locked up in one of the worst Guomindang concentration camps. Shang-rao Concentration Camp. Yes, that’s right.” He thrust his body violently forward as if he were about to get at some invisible opponent. “I hope that nobody will accuse me of apologizing for the Guomindang if I say there are good, decent people working in that government. We should write about real individuals, not stereotypes.”
    Cao Yu, whose penchant for dramatic tricks was a feature of his playwriting, suddenly gave an unexpected twist to the drama of the moment. “I wrote the
Metamorphosis
during the Second World War; the drama school I taught in evacuated to a small backwoods town, far away from Japanese air raids, and the stifling atmosphere there reminded me of the settings in Chekhov’s plays. I had always been an admirer of Chekhov, but it was only then that I began to feel deeply for his characters, people who are constantly chasing after rainbows—not even real ones,but just imagined ones. I realized that some people need dreams to chase or they would find life unbearable. That was when the hero of
Metamorphosis
took shape in my mind. The hero happens to work in the Guomindang government, nothing more—this way he can fit into the story. He is a Chekhov character of my invention. Instead of simply daydreaming he takes it upon himself to turn a dream into a reality. When I finished that play I felt free of that stage in my past. It was a good feeling.”
    That was when Ai Qing, acclaimed as one of the best of the contemporary poets, woke up, or at least seemed to wake up. He had been sitting for quite a while with his eyes closed; now he opened them wide as if perplexed to find himself in such company. We had not known he was in town so we had not invited him, but hearing of the session from theater friends, he came anyway. He spoke in his soft, sleepy voice.
    â€œTo regiment and impose restrictions on writers, Communists or not, is to kill their creative urge. I have been writing for years. But many of my poems—and some I consider the best—have never been published and never will be if some people have their way. The reason is simple: I was told first in Yanan and then in Peking, ‘They are not revolutionary. Why do you waste your time describing a cloud lit by the morning sun?’
    â€œSometimes when I take these poems out and recite them to myself I feel like an actor playing in an empty theater. Without lights. Without an audience. With neither applause nor hisses; surrounded by emptiness that responds to nothing I say or think. When people are constantly telling me to write this or that I feel my brain drying up. If this goes on, one fine day it will be as dried up as the orange peel that old wives use to make herb medicine.” This quiet outburst caused a considerable stir; he was a Communist and had spent the war years in Yanan.
    He was just about to resume his seat when on the spur of the moment he pulled out a sheet of paper and began to read aloud a poem, the very one describing the cloud in the morning sky. When he finished, the audience applaudednoisily while he himself bowed ostentatiously to all the prettiest actresses.
    As he replaced the poem in