The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son - Hardcover

Cao, Guanlong

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520204050 ISBN 13: 9780520204058

Publisher: University of California Press, 1996

Synopsis

Novelist Guanlong Cao's autobiographical account of growing up in urban Shanghai affords a rare glimpse into daily life during the forty turbulent years following the Communist Revolution. Forced to the bottom of Chinese society as "class enemies," Cao's family eked out a meager existence in a cramped attic. The details of their day-to-day existence―the endless quest for enough food, its preparation, Cao's schooling and friends, the stirrings of sexual desire, his dreams and fantasies―are brought brilliantly to life in spare yet evocative prose. The memoir illuminates a world largely unknown to Westerners, one where human pettiness, cruelty, joy, and tenderness play themselves out against a backdrop of political upheaval and material scarcity.

Reminiscent of the concise style of classical Chinese memoirs, Cao's lean, elegant prose heightens the emotional intensity of his story. Perceptive and humorous, his voice is deeply original. It is a voice that demands to be heard―for the historical moment it captures as well as for the personal revelations it distills.

About this title

About the Author

Guanlong Cao is the award-winning author of the trilogy Three Professors, published in China and translated in Roses and Thorns: The Second Blooming of the Hundred Flowers in Chinese Fiction, 1979-80, edited by Perry Link (California, 1984). He has also published Male River and Adam Parkinson in China, and he has twice won the prestigious Shanghai Literature Award. He emigrated to the United States in 1987 to matriculate at Middlebury College as a 42-year-old undergraduate. He now holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. His artwork includes sculpture, photographs, paintings, and prints.

From the Back Cover

"Emotionally intense. With candor and humor, Cao reveals the reality of human pettiness and cruelty at a time of political repression and material scarcity."―Rey Chow, author of Writing Diaspora and Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

"In this poignant and moving memoir, Guanlong Cao has captured the beauty and the cruelty, the mundane and the memorable, in prose that is deceptively sparse. With uncommon wit and an eye for the bizarre, he has created a haunting image of contemporary China."―Howard Goldblatt, editor of Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused: Fiction from Today's China and translator of Blood Red Sunset

"Beneath Cao's descriptions of daily life lurks an intense, troubled humanism. It generates metaphor and imagination that, like good poetry, can make you look again at ordinary things and see them as if for the first time. Occasionally it reaches out, grabs you, and pulls you cringing through pages you will never forget."―Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing and editor ofRoses and Thorns

From the Inside Flap

"Emotionally intense. With candor and humor, Cao reveals the reality of human pettiness and cruelty at a time of political repression and material scarcity."—Rey Chow, author of Writing Diaspora and Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

"In this poignant and moving memoir, Guanlong Cao has captured the beauty and the cruelty, the mundane and the memorable, in prose that is deceptively sparse. With uncommon wit and an eye for the bizarre, he has created a haunting image of contemporary China."—Howard Goldblatt, editor of Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused: Fiction from Today's China and translator of Blood Red Sunset

"Beneath Cao's descriptions of daily life lurks an intense, troubled humanism. It generates metaphor and imagination that, like good poetry, can make you look again at ordinary things and see them as if for the first time. Occasionally it reaches out, grabs you, and pulls you cringing through pages you will never forget."—Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing and editor ofRoses and Thorns

Reviews

One of a generation of Chinese who grew up during Mao Tse-tung's cultural revolution, Cao contributes in this memoir to the growing volume of personal testaments to childhood and family life during those turbulent times. Cao captures both the ordinary and the extraordinary events and relationships in a life ruled by Mao's Little Red Book. In his case, his father, a former landlord, was branded a "class enemy" and his family of five assigned to live in a tiny attic where they all cooked, bathed and slept. For Cao, these were accepted conditions of life; he found pleasure in their aerie, wallowing in his mother's love and struggling to conform to society's expectations. The author-painter, sculptor, photographer and award-winning writer in today's China (Three Professors)-now lives in the U.S. This unadorned but artful account of his daily life as a schoolboy, his sister's experience in an agricultural camp, his father's demoralization and his mother's salutary strength all jolt the Western reader into a keen sense of the hardships and upheaval of those times.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his first full-length work to be translated into English, award-winning Chinese writer Cao records his memories and observations, some fictionalized, of his life from age seven until his thirties. This memoir covers the 1950s to the 1970s, when to be part of the landlord class in China was to be stripped of standing and possessions and live as one of the officially despised and persecuted of society. Though he now resides in the United States and works as a sculptor and photographer, Cao passed his youth with his parents and three siblings in an attic over a Shanghai button factory. The cramped quarters provide a metaphor for the circumscribed existence the formerly landed Caos led. There is an underlying current of less-than-benign escape from the toils and political manipulations that were part of the family's daily existence. This form of escape is foreshadowed in gruesome gastronomical passages on eating live baby mice and monkey brains and is illustrated vividly in the chilling incident of Cao's sister crippling her own hand to insure her dismissal from a remote army-run rubber plantation. Despite an occasional awkwardly worded expression, Cao's style is tersely fluid and his stories unforgettable. Recommended for most collections.?D.E. Perushek, Northwestern Univ. Lib., Evanston, Ill.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son

By Guanlong Cao

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Guanlong Cao
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520204050


Memory of the Belly

I slept in the same bed as my mother until I was seven years old.

That was more than forty years ago, in the early 1950s, in Shanghai.

My mother was full and fair, with thin eyes and thin eyebrows, a little like palace ladies in Tang dynasty paintings. Mother seldom smiled, but when she did, her smile was charming—her teeth even and white. Mother had a full head of luxuriant hair. It was so shiny that if she ever had the chance to stroll down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, I am sure the fashionable New York girls would have approached her for the name of the fancy shampoo she used.

Mother, however, would not spend money on soap to wash her hair. Instead, she scrounged straw bags from the marketplace and burned them to ashes. When she wanted to wash her hair, Mother scooped a cupful of ash into a small pouch and soaked it in a big pot of warm water. Light gray trails seeped

out of the pouch, dyeing the water the color of Wulong tea. Mother said ash contains soda, and soda is a good detergent.

When the special solution was ready, Mother poured her hair into the pot. She rubbed, twisted, and squeezed it, torturing the hair to her heart's content. But after rinsing, the hair was still as silky and alive as ever. And it left a whiff of the straw's ash behind, making her smallest son dream of the soda-tinged fragrance of reed-wrapped rice.

I said I slept in the same bed as my mother, but, in fact, there was no bed in our home. My family lived in an attic. The two slanted roofs and the floor formed an equilateral triangle—no bed could fit into that compact geometric shape. But the two sharp angles created spaces ideal for pallets. A large dormer window projected from each roof slope. The pallet under the northern window was for Father and my two older brothers, Bao and Ling. Mother, my younger sister, Chuen, and I used the one under the southern window. Six members of my family lived in this cozy nest, far from our homeland, quietly enjoying the time heaven graciously granted to us.

My father was originally from Jiangxi Province. He was the third son of a farmer who had lived beside Poyang Lake. Third sons in Chinese fairy tales are always a bit odd. So was my father. Father could easily have stayed with the foot-bound wife chosen for him by his parents, worked the small plot of land inherited from his ancestors, peacefully enjoyed his life, and peacefully been buried in his homeland.

He, however, chose to stir up his lukewarm life and tried his hand at a variety of businesses. Fortunately or unfortunately, his luck ran hot and he made some money. He bought a few acres

of farmland and remarried, this time to a woman with big feet who became my mother. Four children were born to them. We moved to Shanghai when the Communist Revolution came. From that time on, Father spent his life, thirty declining years, in the attic.

My mother was the oldest daughter in her family. Her father had established a soap factory in Hunan Province. At eighteen, she had married a handsome officer from the local army. A couple of years after the wedding, she discovered her husband's insatiable whoring, and she went home to her parents. The officer tried to bring her back, but she never returned. She lived in her parents' house until her husband was killed in a battle in Jiangxi. Then, at thirty, my mother married my father.

Mother did not tell us about that part of her life until I was grown up and had to fill out an official curriculum vitae, a periodically updated biographical report. In order that her child could be truthful to the government, she briefly related her history. I was shocked.

When I think back, it seems I never saw Mother and Father sleep together. I never even saw any intimate behavior between them. In the minds of their four children, Mother and Father were eternally asexual. Their function was to raise the little creatures that came from nowhere, giving them food, giving them clothes, and, occasionally, giving them a good beating.

Mother belonged to me.

Her hair, with its fragrance of soda, belonged to me. Her back, her breasts, her tummy, even the sweat oozing from her body in summer, all of them belonged to me.

My sister, Chuen, is six years younger than I am. When I was

seven, she was only one. Mother, in her sleep, always held Chuen and turned her back to me, but that by no means prevented me from possessing her.

There is a fish called the remora, which lives in the sea. Remoras have suction cups on their abdomens. The fish attach themselves to the backs of whales and hang on. The whale can never get rid of them, nor could my mother get rid of me.

Every night I hung on Mom's back. Her back was soft, without any bones. One of my hands would trespass around Mother's waist to hold her even softer belly.

Fat, soft, smooth, and warm, Mother's belly concentrated all the feminine charms. While cradling my sister, Mother bent her legs, creating rolls of flesh at her tummy, just for my little hand to squeeze and squeeze. Mother always tolerated me. No matter how I tormented her belly, even when I dug my fingers into her belly button, she tolerated me.

After I had mangled her tummy for a while, I would invade upward.

Being skinny is fashionable nowadays. Chests as flat as airport runways frequently require colorful patches to signal their precise coordinates. Mother never wore a bra because she had voluptuous breasts. I approached them in the dark and I never missed my landing zone.

The diameter and weight of her breasts far surpassed those of the rolls at her stomach. My fingers tired after a few forays. Then I would rest my hand between her breasts, letting the palm and back of my hand sleepily absorb my mother's warmth.

Sometimes my body would make a rhythmic movement. My stomach pressed repeatedly against Mother's behind. A kind

of warm and swollen feeling would emanate from between my legs.

In those days I still occasionally wet the bed, but Mother never yelled at me or even made a fuss. In the morning when she got up, she would put a hot water bottle on the sheet where I had peed. Steam would arise, mixed with a faint smell of urine. My two brothers could probably smell it, but I never felt embarrassed. Chuen was younger than I and had not yet learned to defend herself. She had no alibi. She was my natural scapegoat.

But Mother was vigilant about the territory below her navel. Occasionally my little hand would probe downward. As soon as I touched a hair, my hand would be caught and escorted back to her tummy. I thought those hairs must be like the whiskers of a cat, remaining highly sensitive even when the cat is sleeping.

While wandering about Mother's body, my fingers frequently encountered my sister's tiny hands and tiny feet. But there was never any conflict. Sometimes Chuen put my fingers in her mouth and sucked on them. Nothing would come out, so she began to bite them with her pointed teeth. It hurt slightly, but only enough to register a few blips on my sleepy brain waves. So my sister and I shared Mother's love and maintained a harmonious coexistence. From those experiences, I presume, developed the bittersweet relationship Chuen and I shared when we were grown.

After my seventh birthday, for some unknown, or at least undeclared, reason, Mother exiled me to the northern reaches of the attic. Each night four males crowded onto a pallet like a

well-laid-out dress pattern. Heads and feet interlocked in a complex arrangement. At midnight, if someone wanted to pee, he first had to dig himself out by moving a few legs and arms aside, and then had to be careful not to step on anybody's face.

For the first several nights I cried shamelessly. I cried to go back to Mommy's bed. My two brothers laughed at me, but I didn't care. The only problem was that every time I began to cry, Mother started to snore, and my noise-making instantly lost momentum. Like a baby being weaned, I took more than a week to adjust to my new status.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Sonby Guanlong Cao Copyright © 1996 by Guanlong Cao. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520204050
• ISBN 13: 9780520204058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 255