Tales of Hulan River in 10 Minutes: Mao Dun Called It a Narrative Poem, a Genre Painting, a Mournful Ballad

The book opens without raising its voice, simply showing you the mud pit. A cart sinks into it. Sedan-chair carriers sink into it. A pig drowns in it. The whole town gathers to watch, argues over what happened, offers a pile of opinions, and not one person suggests filling it in. Year after year the pit stays where it is, the same carts keep sinking, the same crowd keeps watching. This is the first thing Xiao Hong plants: whatever is wrong with the people of Hulan River isn't lodged in any one of them, it is in all of them. Everything that happens later runs on that same sickness.

This is also where the craft is worth noticing. When Xiao Hong writes a crowd of onlookers, she never writes the words they were numb. She writes how they talk over each other, how they offer advice, how they sigh about it afterward. The reader arrives at that numbness alone, out of these small actions, and it lands harder than any adjective could.

Summoning Spirits and Floating River Lanterns — The Town's Great Occasions of the Spirit

Next come the liveliest events of the Hulan River year: when someone falls sick, a shaman is called in to drive out the spirits; on the fifteenth of the seventh month, lanterns are set adrift on the river for those who drowned in it; on the eighteenth of the fourth month, the temple fair for the fertility goddess draws crowds praying for children, with open-air opera running three days straight. Xiao Hong writes these scenes bright, festive, full of color and noise, as if painting a long scroll of her town's folk life. But the more fully she lays on the festivity, the harder the later contrast lands. The same crowd capable of pouring its grief into a river lantern will, a few years on, gather around a twelve-year-old girl to watch her scalded to death, slapping their thighs and wailing that they are saving her.

The Back Garden — The Only Warmth in the Book

The third chapter suddenly changes color. I spends her days with Grandfather in the family's back garden: small spiky cucumbers hang on the trellis, butterflies drift by and I gives chase, and when she can't catch one, Grandfather just laughs. Her straw hat blows up into a tree, and Grandfather climbs the ladder rung by rung to fetch it down and cheer her up. He teaches her poems, and she recites along, mostly for the fun of the sound. The whole chapter runs gold: soil, sunlight, vegetable blossoms, the drone of cicadas. It is the lightest stretch of writing in the whole book, and nearly the entire source of love in her otherwise gray childhood. Reading this chapter for the first time, I had to stop — how could the same book hold a page this bright.

The Child Bride — The Book's Most Painful Climax

The Hu family buys a twelve-year-old girl as a child bride. When she arrives she is healthy, lively, and a little tall for her age, and those three qualities are exactly what kill her. Her mother-in-law decides she is too forward, doesn't act like a proper young wife, walks too fast, and beats her daily to correct her, until the beatings make her sick. Once she is sick, the whole household panics: shamans are called in, effigies are burned, every folk remedy going gets tried. The last resort is to bathe the evil out of her in public, in scalding water, again and again. They carry her into a huge vat, hold her head down, pour the boiling water over her, pull her out half-conscious to revive, then push her back in and pour again. A crowd stands around the vat, all talking over each other with advice, while the mother-in-law slaps her thighs and wails, I'm saving her. The girl is scalded to death inside the crowd's good intentions.

The craft in this chapter deserves its own note. Xiao Hong never once raises her voice in protest. She never writes that society was cruel, never writes that the mother-in-law was a monster. She only writes how the onlookers talk, how they offer advice, how they sigh about it afterward. Halfway through, the reader suddenly realizes on their own: the person most deserving of blame believed, the whole time, that she was doing something good. That is the sharpest cut in the whole book. It isn't aimed at one villain, it's aimed at an entire crowd convinced it did nothing wrong. This scene cannot be illustrated; the visuals should stay clear of it.

Second Uncle — The Outsider Everyone Laughed At

The sixth chapter turns to a colder angle. Second Uncle, the family's aging manservant, is solitary and strange, forever talking to himself, to the cat in the corner, to the farm tools. Caught red-handed stealing, he becomes the household joke, and yet he sticks out his neck and refuses to admit fault, clinging to the last thin shred of his dignity to the end. He belongs to the saddest category of person in the whole book: insulted, wronged, laughed at, and still holding on to some small thing at the core of him that nobody can take away. Xiao Hong never pleads his case for him. She only lets you watch him sit alone in his corner.

Feng Waizuizi — A Small Light for the Lowly

Feng Waizuizi, the mill hand, becomes the book's last steady center. He is quiet, honest, poor, and somehow the landlord's daughter, Wang Dajiangu, falls for him anyway. The two of them move in together without a wedding and have a child. The whole village erupts: a child out of wedlock, no proper standing, shame brought down on the landlord's house, the gossip traveling three streets over. Wang Dajiangu dies in a difficult second labor, and Feng Waizuizi is left alone, one child in his arms and one by the hand, raising them through the village's contempt and his own hardship. Everyone waits for him to fall apart. He doesn't.

Xiao Hong chooses to end here, and that choice is deliberate. So much death has weighed down everything before it, and at the close she offers no happy ending, only Feng Waizuizi waking at the sound of his child crying in the night and getting up to stir a bowl of rice gruel. It is a gesture almost too small to notice. But after all the darkness that came before it, reaching this page feels like the first easy breath in the whole book.

Coda — A Hulan River She Can Never Return To

The coda is brief. I has been away from home for years by now, and looking back at the thatched house, the back garden, the people and everything that happened, she finds them scattered or dead; Grandfather has long since passed. Whether the town of Hulan River still stands hardly matters anymore. What matters is that I still remembers. The book closes on that act of memory alone, with no climactic accusation and no reconciled ending, just one person, far away, keeping the record of a town for everyone else.

What It's Really Saying

In the history of modern Chinese literature, Tales of Hulan River gets filed under the Northeastern Writers group, but Xiao Hong isn't writing about resisting Japan or class struggle. She is writing about something older and more everyday: how people live inside a world where everyone believes they are in the right. The mud pit that swallows livestock never gets filled in. The twelve-year-old girl is scalded to death in front of a crowd, and every single person there believes they are helping. That collective blindness to its own cruelty is the real edge of this book.