How and Why The Battle of Chibi was written

March 9, 2013

Lao She, author of Tea House

About ten years ago, I complained to a group of friends that I found reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms   boring.  I had thought it would fill a gap in my education and had sought out the latest and greatest English translation.  One of my friends, a Japanese, protested that this was her father's favorite book, that many Japanese have read several translations of this Chinese classic even as younger generations knew it chiefly from manga or computer games.

Two or three years later,  overtaken by retirement, I undertook to study Mandarin.  I soon found the usual exercises in the usual text books quite dull and decided to take on some "real stuff."  Lao She's Tea House (茶館), written in the Beijing vernacular (although the author was a Manchu) lured me with its deceptively simple language; the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I thought, could not be all that much more difficult.


I hasten to add that I would never have progressed to this stage without the remarkable software developed by Pleco (link) that combines access to several Chinese-English dictionaries with recognition of Chinese graphs as they are handwritten on the touch screen of a personal digital assistant.  Even so, the Romance is 120 chapters and over a thousand pages long (in English).  Further, although the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history dates from 220 to 280 A.D., the Romance actually starts with the fall of the Han Dynasty (around 180 A.D.); by chapter 50, it is still preoccupied with the battle of Chibi that took place in 208 A.D.

A friend who is better versed in East Asian history explained that this Battle was pivotal to the character of the Three Kingdoms as it ensured that China would not be united during this period due to the stand-off among the three contenders for leadership.  This gave me pause and the excuse to bring some "unity" to the project.  The result is the selection and translation of 23 chapters ending before the Three Kingdoms period actually begins.  I also eliminated names that were not associated with a speech or an any action.  This would, as I envisioned it, mitigate the "shaggy dog" character of the classic to a novel that contained enough action, debate and stratagem as well as instances of heroism and stupidity that have made the Romance what it is--the best introduction to classical Chinese thought.  

I did not try to create a novel with anything like Aristotelian unity of form or action, only a story with a beginning, middle and end with my translation following the original fairly closely.  The Chinese text contained much dramatic dialog that I tried to reproduce.  It contained much poetry which I initially avoided (as I do not think there is a single poetic bone in my body) until I chanced upon Archie Barnes' brilliant book, Chinese Through Poetry published posthumously in 2007.  Working through this book gave me the courage to attempt the translation of the poetry I felt was essential for The Battle of Chibi; it also boosted my spirit through the final stages of writing.

This is a story I have told a few times in different ways, in response to those who were kind enough to ask about the making of this book; how a writer comes to write a book.  For the record, this is how and why I came to select from the Romance and translate what became The Battle of Chibi (link).

Beginning Life's Third Act

Blogging and writing are my preferred activities in Life's Third Act, as Jane Fonda so eloquently described it. For me it began when I retired; I needed something to keep myself from insanity or senility. I actually tried calculus first. That was a truly insane idea. Then I thought: I am Chinese but know next to nothing about China, its language, history or literature. Truth be told, I knew more about The Gilgamish Epic and the "Second Ecumenical Council at Nicea" than about Confucius' Analects or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I resolved to correct this and to succeed in the third attempt in my life to learn Mandarin--after all, new technologies had developed since my last failed attempt in 1985.

But "learn Mandarin" books like all learn this or that books are inherently boring, especially the exercises. So I tried to translate real books, starting with Lao She's "Tea House," which I eventually adapted into Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away, a Play. There is more about this on another page of this blog. My next translation project was The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and selections from it, retold, formed the Battle of Chibi and there's more about that on another page of this blog as well.

My attempt to "study up" on Chinese history and literature was not "scientific." I had always wanted to read Marco Polo but had never gotten around to doing so, hence I started out with that. But I was curious about what modern historians thought about his Travels, so I read up on those too, SOME of them anyway as these studies constitute almost an academic specialty. One observation struck me--Polo did not mention tea. Rereading the Travels confirmed this. My findings I have recorded in "Is it tea or chai?" as well as "Did Marco Polo go to China?"

There were other excursions, usually taken when something piqued my curiosity or disbelief. A historian claimed that a particular Chinese deity was a complete invention and that piqued my interest because I remembered my grandparents speaking about the deity in worshipful tones; hence "Toa Peh Kong." Another historian referred to Gibbon as 'the greatest historian," so I resolved to finish The Decline and Fall (started two or three times over the last thirty years) and determine for myself in "Reading Gibbon in the twenty-first century."

This memoir of my Third Act is not complete nor is the act itself over. It's just that I prefer these things to golf or fishing.

Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away, a Play

About this blog/script, Aug. 26, 2011

PREFACE

This is the story of Shopkeeper Wang and the friends, the regulars, and the transients who visit the Yutai (Abundant Peace) Teahouse, a Beijing neighborhood institution, during the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century.  The setting is intimate and the atmosphere, action and themes, Dickensian; it is as if someone might write about life in the American Colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century from the point of view of the working class.  We would see the toll house clerks, the tradesmen, the longshoremen, and other regulars at a neighborhood tavern in Philadelphia—as opposed to those frequented by the Sons of Liberty or by the Virginia aristocracy. 

I have reduced Lao She’s original from three acts, set over fifty years with nearly seventy characters, to a play in two acts set about twenty-five years apart with a cast of twenty (some multiple casting). The play tries, however, to reproduce as much as possible the characters and actions that Lao She created for a world of those living at the bottom edge of civility and into which corruption and exploitation roughly intrude.  This is a world of the poor and exploited caught up in the spin-cycle of world historical change.  Although the Chinese were (are) not much given to introspection, this adaptation attempts to explore the hopes, fears and concerns of the characters.  Lao She wrote in what is said to have been a distinct Beijing dialect;  I have resisted the temptation to transpose this into any modern day inner city dialect.  The adaption itself required changes to the characters and their dialog; this I have attempted to translate and adapt into standard modern English.

Act I (set in 1923) shows the Teahouse as it achieves a modest success in surviving for over twenty-five years since its founding by the Shopkeeper’s father.  Political chaos and economic uncertainty raged outside the walls of the teahouse. China under the Manchu Qing dynasty was singularly unprepared for its confrontation with the West.  This confrontation became nakedly obvious with the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.  The court divided among conservatives, pragmatists and reformers; each faction was used more or less temporarily by the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese and the Americans to further their own respective interests.  The fall of the Qing dynasty and foundation of the Chinese Republic in 1911 did little to clarify the national debate.  By 1923, Yuan Shikai, the most forceful leader of the Chinese Republic was dead and civil war among the warlords and provincial leaders, always simmering, came to a full boil.  The Shopkeeper strenuously tries to keep some normalcy within the walls of the Teahouse.  We meet an assortment of regulars, as well as those that prey on them, and in particular Kang Shunzi a woman now in her late 30s returns—she had been  sold about twenty-five years ago as a young girl by her desperate family to be a concubine to a Eunuch.

In Act II (set in 1948), the Teahouse has visibly succumbed to the deterioration of the economic and political conditions in China.  During that year, inflation reached 3,000 percent.  Some of the characters are now replaced by their respective offspring who continue in similar pursuits.  The Shopkeeper and two or three others are still active, including the woman Kang whose adopted son, off stage, has left to join the Communists, while the Nationalists still retained control of Beijing.  There has been consolidation among the main national contenders for wealth and power—the Nationalists and the Communists dominate although there are factions and warlords within each Party, and of the foreigners only the Americans, the Russians and the Japanese have significant roles by this time.  The play takes on a more political tone, but not so much as to obscure the human drama of making the right choices and making ends meet.

Each Act consists of four or five scenes; there is an Intermission between the two Acts.

Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away was a familiar saying in the provinces of China, especially those to the South.  It reflects, I hope, the sense (for the regulars at the Teahouse) of how remote are our ideals from our mundane reality.  Giving this drama a Chinese face does not at all suggest that China had an exclusive on exploitation, poverty and suffering.  The characters in the Teahouse, however, show how some manage to maintain their hope, fellow feelings and even humor.


Act I, Scene 1 can be viewed in the page "Excerpts from Heaven."

Friday, October 14, 2011

Staged reading -- now to print

On October 10, 15 volunteers capped four weeks of light rehearsals (once a week) with a "performance" at the Stone House (Old Brewery) in Nevada City.  It was gratifying to have about fifty in the audience and to hear laughter and applause.  For me, it was most critical to get feedback from actors and audience.

Most comments related to the absence of a "main character" and to the absence of "action" or "conflict" to spark the drama.  My own feeling is that there are action or conflict driven drama and there are dialogue and values driven drama.  Lao She's original is clearly of the latter sort.  Chinese drama and all non-Western literature (to make a bold assertion) emerged out of cultures that have not idealized "agon" (Greek for "contest"). these cultures have never been influenced by any school of thought remotely like Western Romanticism with its "Sturm und Drang" aspect. To "act without desiring the fruit of one's actions" is perhaps the antidote to "survival shows culture."

Regardless of the above, the play is on track for publication as an eBook as well as in hard copy --see "How to Purchase."