Cat Country, by Lao She

Translated by William Lyell

(1932, translated 1970)

Penguin’s Modern Classics


Lao She composed Cat Country in a time of great personal and historical significance. In his twenties, he had left China to live in London, where he taught Chinese for five years. No doubt the experience affected him in subtle and profound ways. We know for certain that he fell in love with the work of Charles Dickens, and we can see evidence of this in the novels he wrote in England: The Philosophy of Liao Liang,Zhao Ziyue, and Mr. Ma and Son, as well as his fifth, the masterpiece Camel Xiangzi, or Rickshaw Boy. According to Ian Johnson, who wrote the introduction for this translation, Lao She considered his fourth novel. Cat Country, which was written on his return to China, a failure. In Mr. Ma and Son, She asked his reading audience to consider the plight of the Chinese of the diaspora, highlighting the living conditions, xenophobia, and racism experienced by the people living in London’s Chinatown. But once back in Shandong and teaching in Chinese universities, She turned a harshly critical eye on Chinese culture, philosophy, government, and education. Perhaps he was primed to critique his countrymen–paricularly the elites– because, as a Manchu, he was of an ethnic minority, or because he had had the opportunity to view his country from a distant prospect. In any case, She takes the role of the outsider to the extremes in Cat Country, where the protagonist is a Chinese astronaut who is the lone survivor of a space ship that crashes lands on Mars. Setting off on foot and wearing shredded western pants and a sooty shirt, and carrying a pistol and a handful of bullets, he soon encounters the Cat People of Mars, beings who have the heads of cats yet are anthropomorphic in their upright, bepedal gait. Interestingly, Mr. Earth encounters no obstacles in communicating with the Cat People. He learns that there is an enclave of Foreigners not too distant, but he expresses a curious reluctance to approach that area. Instead, he focuses on observing the Cat People. Given the times, one might imagine that She is using the genre of science fiction to speak indirectly about the Japanese Colonial Empire, and he does, at the very end, speak of the brutality and soulless efficiency of the Foreigners who arrive to slaughter the men women and children of the Cat People. Yet his strongest, most relentless criticism is of the Cat People themselves, who are clearly She’s fellow Chinese. He speaks of a culture that has abandoned its values, stumbling into the modern world having squandered its economic, artistitic, and intellectual treasures, literally numbed like Lotus or Soma eaters. Their only motivation is avarice; they will blithely trade a priceless cultural artifact for any product or idea emerging from the West, which they will promptly toss away like yesterday’s new. These are literally the Hollow Men: She’s Cat People adopt and abandon faiths and philosophies so many times that their souls are desiccated. Likewise latch on to the latest trends in economics and government; according to Mr. Earth, they are outwardly embracing the code of Everybodyshareskyism while continuing to act with insatiable greed. In his most comically dark passages, She, himself a college professor in Shandong, explains that education among the Cat People is universal and Panglossian: when a child of the Cat People comes of age, they are registered in a university and immediately awarded a degree; every Martian is at the top of their class! Should we be surprised than that the upper ranks of the Cat People military is staffed with poitical appointees and their central tenet is to retreat immediately before encountering enemy forces? She called his work a failure and expressed regret that he did not add more humor to the text. The reading can be slow and repetitive, but Cat Country should be essential reading for anyone interested in dystopian science fiction in the first half of the 20th century, as well as those who are looking for more examples of Chinese writers of the 1920s to the 1930s who are openly speaking out about a crisis in the spirit of the Chinese people.

“…Among all of our people you cannot find a single one who fully understands anything. That’s why we are always imitating others: it makes us seem less mixed up and a casual observer might even be misled into believing that the imitation is the real thing and that we really do know and understand a lot. That’s why we sometimes pretend to understand something new even when we don’t. 

And yet, as you can well see by observing Revery’s reaction to these mystics, whenever catastrophe is imminent, we will toss to one side all of the new terms we’ve memorised, and returning to old ways, we will reach for the most absurd and confused of concepts–concepts which lie stored in the deepest cellars of our spirits–and haul them out again. You see, we are empty to begin with, and as soon as we panic we expose our emptiness and begin calling for mama just like little children. For instance, as soon as the followers of Everybody Shareskyism panic, they burn incense and pray to Uncle Karl the Great, blithely oblivious to the fact that their Uncle Karl was one of the greatest enemies of superstition who ever lived. When our revolutionaries panic, they begin the transport of the Great Mystics from the West wholesale, people who are much more mixed up than they are mystical, a muddle-headed crew who only know how to walk around carrying stalks of grass. No one has any understanding of problems, and then when the point arrives where a problem must be solved immediately, they call in the Great Mystics. This is the very reason that we are certain to perish; we are all muddle-headed and confused. Economics, education, military affairs–none is really enough to extinguish a nation–but when every last person is muddle-headed and confused–that is enough to destroy a race.”