Ba Jin's (1904–2005) Family is one of the best-known novels of China's twentieth century. First serialized in 1931–32, it tells a story of inter-generational conflict in a wealthy urban family loosely based on Ba Jin's own upbringing in the inland city of Chengdu. The drama in the novel centres on the tension between the patriarchal Confucianism of the older generations and the radical zeal of youth during and after the May Fourth student movement of 1919. The sympathies of the anarchist Ba Jin lie with his student characters, who struggle for social and political change in a conservative urban environment dominated by the strictures of elite patriarchs and the depredations of warlord soldiers.
Kristin Stapleton's Fact in Fiction brings together Ba Jin's novel and the history of Chengdu in the early twentieth century. In this astute dissection of a traditional Chinese city in the throes of change, fiction and history each bring the other to life. On the one hand, Stapleton uses the vivid characters and set-piece scenes of Family to pique our interest in the urban past and draw attention to those dark corners of city life that are sometimes missing from more familiar historical sources; on the other hand, she uses real people and events in Chengdu to flesh out, and sometimes challenge, the perspectives of the novel.
Fact in Fiction begins with one of the most memorable characters in Ba Jin's fictional Gao household. Mingfeng is a binü: a ‘slave girl’ or ‘bondmaid’, a girl sold by a poor family to serve an elite household. A binü’s masters could sell her at will – hence Stapleton's preference for the translation ‘slave girl’ – and when she reached adulthood was expected to find her a position as a wife or concubine. Firmly behind the closed doors of elite households, the phenomenon of the slave girl is missing from most urban histories of this period, with their focus on public social and political life. Taking the character of Mingfeng as a starting point, Stapleton uses what limited sources are available – including a full translation of a slave girl contract – to shed light on binü lives.
In this first chapter, Stapleton uses Family to draw attention to a particular subaltern experience that is largely missing from history but is present in Ba Jin's fiction. Elsewhere, though, she offers a twofold critique – albeit a sympathetic one – on the limitations of Ba Jin's depiction of urban life in 1920s Chengdu. First, by focusing on a single household Family offers a very partial view of a complex and changing city. Second, Stapleton rejects Ba Jin's wholesale denunciation of Chengdu's traditional elites.
With the first of these shortcomings, Stapleton is, in a sense, offering the same critique that was levelled at Family during the Cultural Revolution – that it was too focused on the narrow circle of an elite family – but she turns it to the much more constructive purpose of opening out the setting of the novel to today's readers. Chengdu in the early 1920s was a walled city with a population of around 350,000, political capital and cultural centre of Sichuan Province, but still unconnected by railroad and rather isolated from the rest of China. Even for historians of the period, it is difficult to reconstruct a three-dimensional view of a medium-sized inland city, certainly compared to the more familiar world of cosmopolitan 1920s Shanghai. For today's readers of Ba Jin – not least students reading the novel as a set text – the lack of contextual information in the novel is a formidable barrier.
Fact in Fiction is therefore an invaluable companion for those reading the novel; even for those not studying Ba Jin it is a lucid and well-rounded introduction to Chinese cities in general as well as Chengdu in particular. In her central chapters, Stapleton uses a rich variety of sources to construct a comprehensive and accessible portrait of those aspects of Chengdu life only fleetingly mentioned in Family. She brings to life commerce, handicrafts, transport, urban improvement, foreign residents and the world of the beggars, actors, prostitutes and sedan chair bearers who made up most of the urban poor. The final three chapters give social and political context for those issues which do run through the novel: the place of women in society, the student movement and the tense relationship between radical students, warlord soldiers and secret societies on the streets of Chengdu. Especially in tandem with the readily available English-language translations of Family, this makes Fact in Fiction a valuable teaching tool for courses in both modern China and global urban history.
Perhaps more importantly, Stapleton's second critique of Ba Jin forces us to rethink ideas of change and progress in the urban history of modern China. In a thoughtful discussion of Chengdu's elite leaders, Stapleton shows that many were by no means the die-hard reactionaries of Ba Jin's caricature. Men (and some women) from scholar-elite families took a lead in promoting new ideas and policies to Chengdu, including women's education, mass literacy and western medicine. A little later, Chengdu elites of different generations and backgrounds coalesced around ideas of national ‘construction’ (jianshe) in infrastructure and industry, rendering marginal the anarchism and social radicalism of Ba Jin. This urban developmentalism, Stapleton seems to suggest, may have achieved rather more for Chengdu than the radicalism of the most fervent activists, many of whom – including, in 1923, Ba Jin himself – left for what they regarded as a more enlightened environment along the coast.
Stapleton thus calls into question the ‘progressive’ narrative of the twentieth century, still mainstream wisdom in China (and perhaps beyond), that the student radicalism of the May Fourth Movement was on the right side of history, overthrowing the corruption and stagnation of old ideas. This is not to say that there was no opposition to change – Chengdu was in many ways a profoundly conservative city – but that older elites were more diverse and less mendacious than Ba Jin's portrayal. Many were convivial, thoughtful and broad-minded across a range of ethical traditions; indeed, Stapleton mischievously suggests (pp. 65 and 80–1) that in some ways uncompromising student radicals such as Ba Jin may have had more in common with the minority of the elite who were zealous Confucian moralists than they cared to admit.
The stakes of such questions are high, not least because Family itself played such an important role in establishing this progressive version of China's twentieth-century history. It is here that Stapleton is perhaps a little too unsympathetic to the radical position and uncritical of those advocating more cautious reform. In rehabilitating the forward-thinking credentials of traditional elites, Stapleton sometimes seems to tell her own narrative of ‘progress’, evading the issue of what coercion, exclusion and reproduction of oligarchic control may have been present in measures of elite-led urban reform.
Nonetheless, Fact in Fiction successfully complicates Ba Jin's savage depiction of both old ideas and old elites. In doing so, it also opens the question of whether, instead of the revolutionary, centralizing Nationalist and Communist parties, a local, elite-led, reformist version of China's twentieth century might have been possible. In raising such bigger issues, Fact in Fiction becomes more than a superb tool for teaching and forces us to rethink the dynamics of change in Chinese urban life. It deserves a wide audience among historians of modern China and cities around the world.
