On May 15, 1975, Mr. Fei Xiaotong returned to Lei Jin Dian Primary School, where he was a child. Photo/ Zhang Zudao/FOTOE
Fei Xiaotong, who wrote novels
Reporter/Qiu Guangyu
Recently, a novel called "Cocoon" was published with the latest collection of "Selected Works of Fei Xiaotong" published by Sanlian Bookstore. Written in English and translated into just over 65,000 words after Chinese, the thin pamphlet is a work by Fei Xiaotong, discovered at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2016 and never made public. In the summer of 1938, Fei Xiaotong completed the novel while waiting for the defense of his doctoral dissertation " Gangchon Economy " .
The public's impression of Fei Xiaotong generally stays on academic works such as "Jiangcun Economy" and "Native China", and few people know his love of literature. In fact, from his youth to his later years, Fei Xiaotong has been publishing articles in major newspapers and magazines, and is known for his eloquent and life-like prose writing, and he also believes that "academic articles are not as good as essays.". But beyond that, he never revealed that he had written a novel.
Today, the discovery of "Cocoon" is like a specimen sandwiched in the strata, which not only allows people to see a "writer Fei Xiaotong" outside the profession, but also forms a three-dimensional contrast with Fei Xiaotong's famous work "Jiangcun Economy" written in the same period, and reflects a key turning point in Fei Xiaotong's personal academic career and the development of Chinese.
Discover fiction
In 2016, Sun Jing, Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology of Peking University, exchanged with the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She searched the library of the Department of Anthropology for information about Fei Xiaotong, and stumbled upon a photo of Fei Xiaotong with the head of the department, Mark Bloch, in the 1980s. She was curious about Fei Xiaotong's visit to the UK, and followed the trajectory of this photo to search a large number of material archives related to Fei Xiaotong.
The batch of materials that Sun Jing inadvertently searched for was the "Fox Archives" saved by an anthropologist raymond Firth, one of Fei Xiaotong's doctoral supervisors in the United Kingdom. After the death of mr. and Mrs. Firth, the archive was held in the library of the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Contents of the Firth Archives are enormous, including proposals, correspondence, and more. Unexpectedly, the archives also contained a novel written by Fei Xiaotong in 1938 in English, Cocoon (under the title Cocoons).
The tombstone of Fei Xiaotong's teacher Raymond Fusi in the United Kingdom, many materials about Fei Xiaotong are collected in the "Fusi Archives". Photo courtesy of Sun Jing
Sun Jing told her mentor Wang Mingming, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University. Wang Mingming recalled that when he went to London in the 1980s, he had heard a doctoral student of Fei Xiaotong mention that he had seen something similar to Fei Xiaotong's diary at Foth's house, and he had an impression in his mind that Fei Xiaotong had left a book in Britain. Looking back now, Wang Mingming feels that perhaps this student saw the manuscript of Cocoon at that time. Because the contents of the "Fusi Archives" were too large, Wang Mingming suggested that Sun Jing could first translate the Cocoon in the material, because he believed that this novel had a lot of room for people to discuss.
Sun Jing found that the information about Fei Xiaotong was very limited in the archives of his "karma teacher" (that is, the thesis instructor in the British school system, the student would become the disciple of the "karma teacher", and there was an academic teacher-inheritance relationship), and the famous anthropologist Malinowski, and most of the materials related to Fei Xiaotong in the United Kingdom were actually left by Foth. Foth was the first Ph.D. to graduate from Malinowski's staff, both a teacher and a brother in law, with an age gap of less than 10 years, and there was plenty of time and opportunity to get together to discuss issues. During the writing of Cocoon, Fei Washilton was invited to vacation at Firth's apartment in Thorncombe, a rural village in the south of England. Perhaps out of such a teacher-student friendship, after the novel was written, Fei Xiaotong dedicated it to "Dear Mrs. Fox".
The Literary Edition of Gangchon Economy
Wang Mingming, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University, defines Cocoon as a literary version of Jiangcun Economy. He felt that the novel touched on facts that even exceeded many sociological texts. The title of the novel is easily reminiscent of the silk industry, and Fei Xiaotong's hometown of Suzhou Wujiang is one of the most developed areas of China's silk industry. Both "Cocoon" and "Gangchon Economy" are closely related to the personal experience of Fei Xiaotong's sister Fei Dasheng. Fei Dasheng graduated from Jiangsu Provincial Girls' Sericulture School and later studied silk making in Japan, when the silk industry in rural China was facing the impact of foreign silk weaving, and the decline was obvious. In 1923, after returning to his hometown, Fei Dasheng began to promote scientific silkworm breeding and improve textile tools. In 1929, she founded the "Raw Silk Exquisite Transportation and Marketing Cooperative" in kaibow string village under Wujiang County at that time, and made a series of earth-shattering moves such as organizing sericulture farmers to buy shares and obtain loans.
Returning to Wujiang in the summer of 1936 to recuperate and write "Gangchon Economy", it was a fortuitous choice for Fei Xiaotong, but it also became a turning point in his academic life. In 1935, about to graduate from the graduate school of Tsinghua University, he and his new wife Wang Tonghui went to Guangxi Jinxiu Dayao Mountain to investigate, and in the process of research, they fell into the trap set by hunters and were injured, and his wife Wang Tonghui died unexpectedly in the process of seeking help for him. In 1936, Fei Xiaotong, who had suffered physical and mental blows, returned to his hometown to relax under the advice of Fei Dasheng and came to Kaigongxian Village to recuperate. He was attracted by the silk cooperative set up by Fei Dasheng here, and conducted more than a month of investigation here.
Nowadays, comparing "Cocoon" and "Gangchon Economy", people can find many similarities with reality in it, and they can also peek into the situation in the rural areas of Jiangnan in that era.
Fei Xiaotong's "karma teacher" Malinovsky once pointed out in the preface to "Gangmura Economy" that the most wonderful chapter in the book is the twelfth chapter on the silk industry. This chapter discusses the industrial production of the silk industry and the impact of farmers' cooperatives on the original economic model and traditional rural social life. Among them, he praised the innovative models of cooperatives using technology to increase productivity, hiring women workers, and paying bonuses to workers, and also clearly pointed out the unemployment of women workers and the lack of subsequent profitability caused by the increase in productivity in factories. In Cocoon, these problems arise in the form of a social context and an overall structure. The novel takes the experience of Wang Wanqiu, an old classmate of the international student "Mr. Tong", doing management work in a new-style factory in a small town between Suzhou and Hangzhou as the axis clues, local farmers Zhang Auntie, Sanfu and Baozhu, enlightened squire Huang Laobo, social reformers (textile factory management) Wu Qingnong and Li Yipu who returned from overseas, Boss Zhao and Uncle Shi of the old interest group, and others in the face of the different choices and fates of the reform and impact of the new textile factory on the traditional silk industry.
In addition, "Cocoon", as a novel that tends to shape the character and emotional description of the characters, mainly reflects the changes in the relationship between people and people after the local economic model is challenged, that is, the changes in family relations and social relations discussed in "Gangmura Economy". For example, the eighth chapter of "Gangcun Economy" "Home" mentions the custom of "little daughter-in-law", that is, "child bride-in-law": "On average, every 2.7 households have a small daughter-in-law", "there are many girls who have been raised by their future mother-in-law since childhood, and they are very dependent on her mother-in-law, just like a daughter is to her mother" - the relationship between The two protagonists of "Cocoon", Aunt Zhang, and her child daughter-in-law Baozhu is like this.
Both gangura economy and cocoon mention that local village women generally do not work in the fields, but instead engage in the silk industry at home, which becomes the basis for their transformation into factory workers and thus their transformation into status. In "Jiangcun Economy", Fei Xiaotong cited several cases to illustrate the change in women's status: a woman working in a village factory suddenly became unusually tough and reprimanded her husband for not giving her an umbrella; another woman who "worked" in Wuxi had an extramarital affair, but her in-laws did not drive her away because of her high earning ability. In "Cocoon", the elderly farmers represented by Aunt Zhang not only hope that the daughters-in-law and daughters of the family will increase their income through the factory, but also worry that they will encounter various changes outside the home to change the originally stable family relations, and stage a farce of "snatching female workers home".
Yuan Xianxin, associate professor of the Department of Chinese at Tsinghua University, felt after reading Cocoon that this novel was very similar to the popular left-wing rural novels at that time, such as a grand social composition and a general judgment on social issues. But the difference between Cocoon and other left-wing novels is that it does not explicitly address the demand for the violent overthrow of an exploiting class, as Mao Dun did in the Rural Trilogy, which he wrote earlier. Fei Xiaotong sets the source of the plot moving forward as a series of misunderstandings caused by emotional entanglements, believing that many things are the "irrational" factors of human beings.
In Cocoon and Jiangcun Economy, Fei Xiaotong is willing to provide a development scheme for future China, but in his vision, people do not need to do so by destroying the original social structure of the countryside, as Mao Dun's "Rural Trilogy" advocates. He always believed that the power of change lies in the transformation of farmers themselves. As Yuan Xianxin analyzed: "He believes that within the countryside, there is a certain enlightened force that is open to the modernization plan. In addition to the heroine Baozhu, this kind of peasant progress is most fully reflected in one of the characters named Huang Laobo: he is an authoritative "old lady uncle" and an old-fashioned squire in the village, but he has an open-minded personality, is willing to accept new things, and firmly supports Baozhu to go to work in the factory.
This consideration of society is hidden in a half-bright, half-dark ending, like Wang Wanqiu, a Kochi woman who has not thought clearly about the way forward and encountered emotional obstacles, but "disappeared" in a bright light. As reflected in "Gangmura Economy", Fei Xiaotong has always been rational about Fei Dasheng's social experiments, and he is not sure whether it will succeed in the future. He probably didn't want to give such a clear answer. Personally, I think that perhaps he did not really understand why such a good and rational modernization program could not be implemented. Yuan Xianxin said.
The road sign near the English village of Mulberry Valley, where Fei Xiaotong lived when he wrote Cocoon. Photo courtesy of Sun Jing
Fei Xiaotong and Chinese class in the transition
"In 1935, when we inspected Yaoshan, she gave her life for anthropology, and her solemn sacrifice left me with no choice but to follow her forever." In the acknowledgment section at the beginning of Gangchon Economy, Fei Xiaotong affectionately dedicated the book to his first wife, Wang Tonghui. This setback became a heavy blow in his life, but it also indirectly contributed to the turning point of his academic career. In his later recollections, he considered the material obtained from his research in Guangxi to be "very unsatisfactory." Now it seems that this "failure" is not without gains, I am afraid that it is a kind of "uselessness" for the research direction he really wants to engage in, and he is gradually thinking about how to turn anthropology into a more "national salvation" and "practical" field.
When he was young, Fei Xiaotong had a very righteous side in his personality, and he maintained a rebellious attitude towards the white terror and various unfair social events under the rule of the Kuomintang. In 1930, Fei Xiaotong, who was studying medicine at Soochow University, was hinted at by the school to transfer because he participated in the student movement against the beating of people by school doctors, which directly prompted him to "abandon medicine" to study Chinese social problems, so he transferred to Yenching University to study sociology. After that, Fei Xiaotong found that the tradition of promoting social service at Yenching University's sociology department was not in line with his own interests, and he believed that the existing "social theories" in Britain and the United States did not conform to China's reality, and wanted to explore a set of ways to study Chinese problems through "community surveys" (that is, surveys of a specific region in sociology) and prescribe more prescriptions for the solution of social problems.
In 1936, Fei Xiaotong came to London to study for a doctorate at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the first teacher he met was Fu Si. He reported on the material of his two researches in Yaoshan and Kaibowson Village, and Fusi immediately took a fancy to the latter topic, suggested that he use it as the title of his doctoral dissertation, and gave the survey a name called "Peasant Life in China". Through this meeting, Fei Xiaotong found his own direction in the unintentional willow insertion.
Fei Xiaotong's ideas on sociology are in line with the "going to the field" proposed by Wu Wenzao, a professor at Yenching University. Sun Jing, one of the discoverers and translators of Cocoon, compiled 54 letters from the "Fusi Archives" in which you can see discussions and plans between Fei Xiaotong and Wu Wenzao about the future development of Chinese sociology, including various grand plans for research using funds from Sino-English Gengzi's reparations. Sun Jing believes that Fei Xiaotong very much wanted to graduate and return to his motherland earlier, and his study abroad in the UK was an "era that really needs to be opened" in Chinese sociology and anthropology.
At Malinovsky's recommendation, The Economy of Gangmura was published in England in 1939 and eventually became a classic in the history of international anthropology. Although many years later, Fei Xiaotong humbly believed that accepting himself as an apprentice and successfully passing the thesis defense was not because of how good he was, but more because of Wu Wenzao's recommendation, and Malinowski and others wanted to help create the "Chinese School" by accepting him as a Chinese guy, it was these external factors that drove Fei Xiaotong to abandon the past research direction and go all the way along the road of "community investigation" and truly touch the fabric of Chinese society.
(Intern Yuyue Cao also contributed to this article)