Books: A Different Cup of Tea

STORIES FROM A MING COLLECTION (205 pp.)—Translated by Cyril Birch—Indiana University ($3.75).

These are stories by forgotten men. Some time in the 1620s there was published in the Chinese city of Soochow a book entitled Stories Old and New. They were collected by a literary vacuum cleaner named Feng Meng-lung, who dashed off dozens of books himself, but showed more talent in tidying up the writing of others. On one occasion, he read the play of a friend but refused to express an opinion. When the worried playwright returned later that night, Feng put him at ease: “Your play is excellent, but it is one act short. This act I have now added.”

Humanity & Virtue. Six of the stories that Feng collected—and presumably edited—have been translated by English Scholar Cyril Birch. Today’s readers will have to suspend all their literary leanings to appreciate the tales. They move with remarkable smoothness, but their authors cared not a kumquat about probability or credibility in the modern sense. The plots are supported by coincidence, and the passage of years is treated as offhandedly as a spilled cup of tea. What makes them interesting centuries later is a mixture of lusty humanity and shrewd weighing of human nature, an awareness that life can be hard, balanced by an insistence that only virtue can make it tolerable.

In The Journey of the Corpse, the hero spends years of his life earning a huge ransom demanded by barbarians for a captured fellow townsman. He deserts his wife and child and starves himself to raise the money. Not until the ransom was paid did the benefactor meet the goad to his sense of sacrifice, a man who had once done him a casual favor.

Wine Is the Cup. If virtue was always rewarded, the conventional virtues are not always practiced. Strong wine rather than tea is the cup that cheers, and one hero downs 30 pints in one night. In The Pearl-Sewn Shirt, a lovely young wife turns to a wine-guzzling old woman for companionship in her husband’s absence. The old woman returns her friendship by getting her drunk and pushing her into adultery with a wealthy young merchant. This is one tale that readers of lending-library triangle stories will have no trouble appreciating. The enraged husband divorces his wife; years later they meet again. She is now another man’s concubine and he is remarried; but love conquers, they go into a clinch, and all is forgiven. Being a decent chap, the hero keeps his new wife as well.

A fairy tale and a murder story round out the collection. It is an admitted literary curiosity, but it bridges the Centuries with surprising naturalness. It is not risking too much to guess that the Soochow reader of that day would have found it considerably harder to adjust to contemporary U.S. fiction.