Cat Country Read Free

was initially published in 1970. Soon after, the Beijing magazine Chinese Literature published a screed attacking the translation indirectly, writing that ‘not long ago, the social-imperialists evoked the ghost of this shameless rogue and published a full translation.’ The article hinted at why this book in particular, angered the Maoists so much, ‘From start to finish the novel is a vicious attack on the guiding ideology of the party – Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.’
    After the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, Lao She was rehabilitated. It was during this era that Cat Country was finally republished in mainland China. The author’s death is still a sensitive topic – a memorial on the site was never permitted to be erected – but a play based on Cat Country was performed to enthusiastic audiences in several Chinese cities in 2013.
    The novel also occupies an uncomfortable place in modern Chinese literature. It can be seen in the Chinese tradition of fantastical encounters with strange peoples, but its Martian setting also makes it an early work of Chinese science fiction. The Communist Party, however, has long viewed this genre with suspicion. An early wave of science fiction died in the twenties when leftist-inspired critical realism took hold. Another was killed in the early eighties when it was deemed to be ‘spiritual pollution’ and most science fiction magazines closed.
    And yet appreciating Cat Country means shedding some of these labels and didactic explanations. When Lao She describes how the emperor is replaced by the head of Everybody Shareskyism, multiple interpretations are possible – not just the role that Chiang Kai-shek was assuming for himself in the 1930s, but the fate of many revolutions, from the French to the Chinese.
    Likewise, the novel’s reverie leaves do immediately bring to mind opium, but equally fascinating is that in 1932, the same year Cat Country was serialised, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World and imagined a product he called ‘soma’ that numbed his dystopian inhabitants into accepting their fate. In this sense, Cat Country is part of a broad trend in world literature, reacting to efforts to dumb down and control people.
    All of this makes Cat Country an anomaly in Chinese fiction, one that grew out of Lao She’s unique biography. Unlike his great contemporaries, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, Lao She had directly experienced western culture. He was deeply rooted in China, but as a Manchu he was enough of an outsider to go for the jugular when looking at his native land and to eschew the naïve belief, for example, of Lu Xun, that all would be well if China just trusted its youth. Lao She had a clearer view of what could beset a country when the old markers are gone, and in Cat Country he gives us a brutal look at a China that resonates today.
— IAN JOHNSON

TRANSLATOR ’ S NOTE
    T HE PRESENT translation was done from the edition of Lao She’s Maochengji that was issued as number fourteen of the Chen Guang Encyclopedia of Literature by the Chen Guang Publishing Company, Shanghai, 1949.
    Chapter titles have been added for the convenience of those readers who, having finished the novel, might like to locate a specific passage quickly.
    I should like to express my gratitude to my wife, Ruth, for her encouragement and help in this project. Thanks are also due to Don Marion for his close proofreading of the first draft. I am indebted to my colleagues in the Ohio State University East Asian Division for the help and advice they gave me while I was preparing this translation.
— WILLIAM A. LYELL, PH.D.
1970

THE CRASH
    T HE SPACECRAFT was a total loss. And as for my friend, a man who had been my childhood schoolmate and who had just piloted me through space for the better part of a month, there wasn’t a single bone of him left in one piece.
    And what about me? Well, I still seemed to be alive, but God only knows how it happened that I too