Fortress Besieged, by Qian Zhongshu

Translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao

New Directions

(1947, translated 2004)

(Romance, Picaresque Novel)

Mr. Qian’s partly comic, partly melancholy tale of the protagonist’s pursuit of love and his eventual marriage allows him to reflect on the state of modern marriage at the start of the Sino-Japanese War. The bellicose title is a reference to the French proverb: “Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, those inside want to get out.” His hero, Mr. Fang, is a failed academic who is returning from France with a fake doctoral degree from a non-existent university. A picaresque figure, he stumbles into a number of affairs and finds himself married and unemployed. Eventually, he finds work as a professor of Chinese literature in a backwater, where he works cheek by jowl with Chinese professors caught up in a wave of fascination for all ideas European. Though Fang himself is something of a buffoon, his more traditional Confucian thinking allows him to expose the superficial “modern” thinking his peers are embracing.  His wife is grasping and competitive, and as Fang comes closer and closer to being exposed as fake, she exacerbates his sense that he is a failure. Western readers compare Mr. Qian’s writing to Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov. (I have met 9th-grade Chinese students who have read this challenging book!)

 After shaking hands with her, Hsieh-ch’uan did not look at her directly, for he had adopted the manner of looking toward women of the old class scholars, which was either unrestrained funmaking—the dallying behavior toward prostitutes—or eyes directed at the nose and the nose pointed toward the heart, not daring a level gaze—the courtesy toward the female members of a friend’s family. Philosopher Ch’u eyed Miss Su greedily, his pupils imitating the German philosopher Schelling’s ‘Absolute,’ which was ‘like a bullet shot from a pistol,’ bursting from his eye sockets with double-barreled action and shattering his glasses. (86)