The King of Trees

By Ah Cheng

Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall

(1984, 1985 trans. 1990, 2010)

New Directions Books

This volume contains three novellas: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, and The King of Children. Ah Cheng’s parents were intellectuals involved in Chiana’s film industry. Ah Cheng’s father ran afoul of the party in 1956  and was sent to the countryside for reform through labor. When he returned in the early 1960s, the family enjoyed a short-lived period of opportunity during which Ah Cheng was able to attend Beijing North High School, a high-status institution where he studied side by side with the sons of the Party’s elite. Before he could complete the final two years of high school, the Cultural Revolution swept the country. His parents lost their jobs and Ah Cheng, an “Educated Youth,” was sent to the countryside to learn from the peasant class. While working in the North in Xanxi and Inner Mongolia, Ah Cheng discovered he possessed a talent for telling stories, using his recollections of Chinese and Western novels he snuck from his parents’ library. After returning to Beijing, Ah Cheng found success first with The King of Chess, then The King of Children, and finally The King of Trees. His friend, Chen Kaige, adapted the novella and directed The King of the Children in 1988. In this text, The King of Trees appears first. Here, Ah Cheng takes on an ecological theme. Having completed some short-sighted research and concluded that the trees on a local mountain are useless, The Party sends out orders to cut down all the trees and clear the vegetation from the local mountain. Once having burned off all remaining life, the peasants are to plant more “productive” trees and move on to the next area of wilderness. The local population and the “Educated Youth” are eager to get the work done and meet their quota, but an old soldier and master woodsman appears to prevent any harm from coming to “The King of Trees.” In The King of Chess, the orphaned narrator befriends the “Chess Fool,” a young man who pursues an almost monomaniacal obsession with chess. Though the world may be crumbling around him and more and more is taken from him, he chases any opportunity to play the game–even when facing starvation. In The King of Children, a young man living a brutal life high in the mountains clearing land with hand tools is called down to teach high school, even though he only completed his junior year before being “sent down.” Uncertain of his abilities, he discovers that despite attending school for more than ten years, his students are illiterate. There are no teacher training guides and only one textbook that has been passed from teacher to teacher. From what he observes, education consisted of copying texts – often political slogans or Chairman Mao’s poems –  from the blackboard, and rarely did students even comprehend the characters they were trying so hard to transcribe. Determined to at least teach them to read and write at a 6th-grade level, he writes his own curriculum. The students make quick progress, but soon a party official is alerted to the new teacher’s radical style and he is sent back to the mountain.

 
“…I asked him about ‘the grand strategy of life.’ The old man said that there are only so many pieces in chess and the chessboard is only so big, the principle is always the same, only the strategies are different. You can keep the whole board in sight in chess, but there’s too much you don’t know about in life. These big character posters–they paste new ones up all the time–you can see a hint of what they are saying but you can’t figure out what they really mean. If they don’t set out all the pieces, you can’t play the game.” – from The King of Chess