In 1931, Ba Jin, anarchist and pioneer of modern Chinese fiction, wrote “Dog,” a short story in which a desperate street urchin—envious of the more comfortable lives of foreign-owned lapdogs—deludes himself into believing that he himself is a dog. Though artfully written and moving, Ba Jin’s “Dog” is unmistakably agitprop: the “dog” is really a man, and the man is really a symbol of a China cowed by imperial powers and rapacious warlords.
About seventy years later, Han Dong, a Chinese writer best known for his nonconformist poetry in the eighties, writes a novella entitled “花花传奇” (Hua Hua Chuanqi), translated by Nicky Harman in a recent Frisch and Co. web release as A Tabby-cat’s Tale. By way of contrast with Ba Jin’s “Dog,” Han Dong’s title tabby, Hua Hua, is simply a cat, albeit a very odd one. And if the reader comes to this novella seeking insight into the grand moral dramas of dissenters and dictatorships, she will be gravely disappointed. Instead, with the great care of someone who truly loves animals, Han Dong relates the daily drudgery of preparing catfish guts for Hua Hua’s nightly meal; the irritation of picking up after an animal who refuses to confine his excrement to a box; and the nightly chore of manually picking through the minion of fleas that infest the tabby and drowning them in a bowl of water until “the surface of the water is black with Tabby’s fleas.” And yet, this shaggy cat story is told satirically in a grand register that would more befit the historical dramas of Ba Jin’s “Dog.”
Unfortunately, while the English reader will have no trouble comfortably reading through this translation, she will likely miss out on some of the fun. In a recent post on the webjournal Necessary Fiction, Nicky Harman notes Han Dong’s mastery for shifting between registers for comic effect and comments, “I find it’s surprisingly hard to get the same balance in English; there’s a temptation to pitch the register too high. As I go through different drafts, I usually revise it ‘downwards,’ almost never ‘upwards.’” Harman is a talented and thoughtful translator, but I’m afraid I cannot agree with her strategy here. To give just one example of the problems with this approach, here is a sentence in which the narrator discusses the benefits of moving Hua Hua to the roof of the apartment building in which he lives:
“自从花花迁出以后，那跳蚤是一日少似一日”
Harman translates this as:
“But the fleas had disappeared when Tabby moved out.”
Now, a translator is within her rights to translate “迁出” (qianchu) as “moved out.” But the Chinese reader knows that this high diction verb is an odd one to use to describe the resettlement of a cat. The Nationalist government qiandao Taiwan; a cat qians when the writer is making a joke. And within A Tabby-cat’s Tale, such jokes abound, puncturing the lofty, elevated self-importance that much Chinese fiction has had throughout the twentieth century.
The greatest joke of A Tabby-cat’s Tale, however, might be that the switch in subject matter from the sublime to the worldly is not an innovation for Chinese fiction, but a return to form. 小说, Xiaoshuo, the Chinese term for fiction, literally means “small talk,” and it originally referred to gossipy accounts of eccentrics or strange events—or strange cats. As apolitical as A Tabby-cat’s Tale might seem, to return to “small talk” from the social and political imperatives of Mao-era and post-Mao-era fiction is in itself a political act. In one scene, as the narrator’s brother strokes Hua Hua, he tells the narrator a story about a woman undergoing a messy divorce. As the brother tells his story, the narrator reflects:
It was a sad story, I agreed, and I kept nodding as he told it. But what did it have to do with Tabby? Nothing. None of these things had anything to do with each other: Tabby’s dinner and his autumnal moult, my brother’s news and his rhythmic strokes, my earnest attention… and yet they were melded together. Each element of the scene impinged on and balanced the others. And in turn, they were all of a piece with the evening light that bathed the rooftop.
“All of a piece”—this is an ideology, then, but it is an ideology of having no ideologies. A Tabby-cat’s Tale is a celebration of the simple freedoms of being human, and the everyday joys of small stories. The narrator and the reader alike sit in the twilight of an era of unspeakable political horror and listen to this Tabby’s tale. And as they do so, they await a new morning, and changing weather.
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Dylan Suher is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born and raised in Brooklyn. He has published reviews, criticism and essays in The Millions, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and The New York Times.