Border Town in 10 Minutes: A Love Song Written at the Ferry Crossing, Left Unfinished

Opening: A Song Left Unfinished

A clear stream, an old white pagoda on its bank. Beneath the pagoda is a ferry, and on it a girl of fifteen or sixteen named Cuicui. The Dragon Boat Festival has just passed, the crowds along the riverside street have thinned out, and she has moored the boat and is waiting for someone she cannot even name. This is not the kind of waiting where you stand on the dock craning your neck — it's sitting at the bow with your legs hanging over the water, watching the moon in the current break apart and piece itself back together, over and over. This is the novella called Border Town, and it still burns like the lamp at that ferry crossing, lit somewhere in the memory of countless readers.

Border Town ends on a line everyone remembers: that man may never come back, or he may come back tomorrow. Long before you reach that page, the sentence has already lodged itself in textbooks and in memory. So the real question isn't what Border Town is about — the story is short, and almost nothing resembling drama happens in it — it's whether you can sit with a girl from western Hunan at a ferry crossing that never answers back, and count the days alongside her, one by one.

What Kind of Book This Is

The author, Shen Congwen, was born in 1902 and died in 1988. In his early twenties he served in the army and spent a long stretch of time drifting through the borderlands where Hunan, Sichuan, and Guizhou provinces meet — and it is in the deepest layer of that memory that Border Town is set, in a small town called Chadong, a real place that today belongs to Huayuan County, Hunan. By the time he wrote the novel he had been away from that stream for years, sitting at a desk in Beiping, hauling that old stretch of time back up and letting it dry in the light. Border Town began serialization in the Guowen Weekly in January 1934, and came out that October as a single volume from the Life Bookstore — the first installment of a planned series of novellas called Ten Cities. It is an anomaly in modern Chinese literature: while the mainstream writers of the era were busy with urban malaise and the collapse of the countryside, Shen Congwen went the other way and wrote a pastoral for an almost utopian little border town. That is exactly why the book has stayed in people's minds — it tells you that the cleanest version of a Chinese person is not found in the big city, but on a ferry.

People and World: One Stream, a Few Families

Chadong is a small dock town where ferrying is the main trade, and everyone makes a living off the people and goods moving along the water. The story's core cast is really just four families, and each one can be summed up in a sentence. The old ferryman is Cuicui's grandfather, who has spent most of his life poling this same stretch of stream; fifty years of wind and weather have settled into his hard, creased face. He has exactly one thing on his mind: to see Cuicui placed in the hands of someone trustworthy before he closes his eyes for good. Cuicui is the girl who grew up on that ferry, as artless as the stream itself, secretly fond of Nuosong, the second son of Shunshun the boat master's family — though she can barely get the words out.

Shunshun the boat master is the most respectable man on the docks, a generous man who makes his living off the river. He has two sons. The elder, Tianbao, is open-hearted and outspoken, and he too has fallen for Cuicui; the younger, Nuosong, is known far and wide as the best folk-song singer in the region. Both brothers have lost their hearts, but there is only one Cuicui. This is a world with no court intrigue, no fight over an inheritance — its rules are plain to the point of innocence: if you love someone, you compete for her under the moon according to the local custom of singing folk songs, and whoever wins takes the girl home. That is the entire setup of the novel: one stream, one white pagoda, one family, two brothers, and a girl who won't be the first to speak.

Of everyone in this story, the old ferryman is the one who breaks your heart the most. He has lived a long life, fifty years on this same ferry, watched countless people come and go — and still he cannot read his own granddaughter's heart. He worries for Cuicui, frets over her, runs back and forth between the two brothers and Shunshun trying to smooth things over. But he can't read, he doesn't understand the winding logic of the folk songs, and he can't puzzle out what the young people are really feeling — the harder he tries, the more damage he does. By the time Nuosong turns cold, word of Tianbao's death comes back, and the old pagoda starts leaking, he is alone on a night of thunder and lightning, keeping watch over that crumbling tower, and he simply cannot hold on any longer. He falls. This is a man who gave his whole life to someone else, and the last posture he falls in is a solitary one. Shen Congwen writes his death with no wailing, no accusation — the thunder passes, the rain lets up a little, and he just stops moving.

By now you already know what happens in Chadong. But the real experience of Border Town is not in the plot — it is in the prose itself. Shen Congwen's sentences are like the streams of western Hunan: they look calm on the surface, and you have to put your own hand in the water to find out whether it runs cold or warm underneath. The smell of that early-summer evening at the ferry crossing — cooking smoke, moss, river weeds, the scent of wine drifting from somewhere downstream — is something no summary can hand you. You have to walk through it yourself, line by line, and let the white pagoda, the cool wind, the tiger-ear grass, and the folk song that never quite got sung seep out of the words on their own. More than that, the particular texture of the waiting cannot be translated by any summary. Cuicui waits at the bow for Nuosong; the reader waits before the page for Shen Congwen to give an answer — and he refuses. That experience of reading on, even though you already know the answer, is the gift Border Town gives its careful readers. So go read it. Pick a quiet afternoon, ideally with a little rain outside the window, turn to the first page, and let the stream of Chadong come flowing to you on its own.