Bu Guo Wei Chen | The Grief Hidden Behind the Idealism — A Reading of the Title The Human Realm

Published in: Black & White Reading Club, January 15, 2025

As a newcomer who had just joined the Black & White Reading Club, I was genuinely looking forward to the online discussion of The Human Realm announced for January 2nd, and had downloaded the Tencent meeting app in advance to participate. During the online session, my circumstances did not allow me to unmute, so I was unable to join the discussion. Being able to listen attentively to others' remarks was itself a good process of learning and reflection. Since I had no opportunity to speak, I am now setting down in writing my experience and feelings from reading The Human Realm, in the hope of sharing them with everyone and making up for that missed occasion.

My own encounter with The Human Realm came in 2024, when I discovered Teacher Liu Jiming's Black and White being serialized online at Wuyou zhi Xiang [note: a well-known Chinese left-wing website]. I actually finished The Human Realm before I had finished the serialized Black and White — finding the pace of the serialization too slow, I went to my local public library to borrow a physical copy, and asked at bookshops as well, only to find it in none of the provincial, municipal, or district libraries, and unavailable in any bookshop. There was nothing for it but to follow along with the online serialization — the torment of waiting, I cannot describe. But while borrowing books at the library, I came across another of Teacher Liu's earlier novels — and that was my first encounter with The Human Realm.

Once I brought it home, I read it straight through in one sitting — something I had not experienced with a novel in many years. To find a comparable reading experience, I would have to reach back to reading Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe in middle school, which was already in the late 1970s. Since then, no work had held the same power over me — except, later, the Hong Kong edition of Black and White (purchased at an inflated price, having missed the original publication), three substantial volumes, which I also tore through without stopping, reading it again after having already read it once online, and experiencing once more almost exactly the same unforgettable absorption. To be honest, for someone of the post-1960 generation like myself, this was genuinely something of a surprise. I was even unable to stop myself from reading The Human Realm a second time when it was serialized on Renjing Net.

I remember that when my household's chief authority [note: an affectionate colloquial term for one's spouse] read it together with me after I brought it home, she asked me why the author had given the book the title "The Human Realm" [人境]. We were still only a third of the way through at that point, and my reading of the title then was fairly superficial — I explained to her that the meaning of "The Human Realm" as a book title could be simply understood in connection with Tao Yuanming's line: "I built my thatched hut within the human realm, yet hear no clatter of carriages and horses." In China's traditional agrarian society, the scholar-gentleman, whether by choice or necessity, in pursuit of inner peace, cherished the ideal of reclusion — gathering chrysanthemums beneath the eastern hedge, gazing unhurried at the southern mountain. As someone born in the same era as Teacher Liu, I even find myself believing that in the depths of the author's heart there must be, consciously or not, a similar cultural-lineage DNA. The most prominent expression of this is, of course, the protagonist Ma La — himself born in the 1960s — who returns to Shenhuangzhou. That place is not merely the real-world foothold where he must make his life upon his release from prison, after experiencing heaven and earth's reversals; it is also his spiritual homeland — and, as the lower volume reveals, Murong Qiu's as well.

And yet Shenhuangzhou as spiritual homeland — as this important symbol — though occupying a single physical space, manifests across time, or more plainly across the dimension of historical process, as two successive yet contradictory spiritual inheritances. One is the real-world "paradise on earth" — unprecedented across thousands of years of human history — centered on Ma Ke, built under the governance of Chairman Mao [note: 教员, "the Teacher," a common informal term for Mao Zedong among left-wing readers] during the "first thirty years" [note: 一共, shorthand for 一共和国前三十年, "the first thirty years of the People's Republic"]; the other is the "Peach Blossom Spring" — a symbolic image of Chinese agrarian civilization that has been continuously "dreamed of" across the long feudal centuries. On this basis, "The Human Realm" becomes, by virtue of the dual weight the author has placed upon it, a title charged with all the greater internal tension of contradiction.

But this is not the whole of it.

Just as Tao Yuanming lived through the Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties — an era when China was fractured for centuries — what Tao Yuanming was able to do and what Ma La faces in his choices are in truth not so very different. Drawing on Tao Yuanming's poetry, this ideal of retreat to the fields and gardens cannot be counted among the more passive dimensions of the protagonist Ma La — neither of them is a revolutionary. Both are chosen by their era, swept up remorselessly by the train of history; before they can be seized by advanced theory, before they can regain a conscious class awareness, "returning home" [note: 归去来兮 — the opening words of Tao Yuanming's famous prose-poem "Returning"] is the only option open to those who, harboring justice and goodness in their hearts, refuse to go along with the corrupt current.

Set against the revolutionary idealism of his elder brother Ma Ke, Ma Ke's death symbolizes that brief, real, and all-too-fleeting "paradise on earth" in the long river of human history being once again covered over by the long night — perfectly reflecting the different destinies that underlie the era in which the novel's two protagonists live. Ma La's return to Shenhuangzhou and his organizing of the Tongxin Cooperative are not a re-emergence of the socialist new countryside being built in that same geographic space during the first thirty years; they are only a reluctant choice akin to the lotus that rises unsoiled from muddy water. This fittingly demonstrates that individualistic struggle, however admirably solitary and brave, cannot shake the direction of social history — a point that resonates with the various sociological discussions of "rural society" in the lower volume, and further connects with and corroborates the case of He Jiazhuang [note: a rural reconstruction experiment depicted in the novel] and He Wei [note: a character modeled on rural reconstruction intellectuals], whose choices more closely resemble a return to the old literati tradition of the feudal scholar-official class.

The brutal logic of reality is, of course, that whether it is He Jiazhuang or Shenhuangzhou, amid all the contradictions and conflicts under the rule of capital today, this utopian ideal of a "contemporary Peach Blossom Spring" will inevitably come to nothing — as the novel's ending confirms. Though Ma La and Murong Qiu, united by their shared spiritual orientation, choose like Sisyphus — and like Don Quixote, as evoked by the key windmill image in the book — to hold on in Shenhuangzhou after the great flood, this concrete dwelling-place of their shared spiritual homeland, they still cannot truly alter the direction of social history.

"Return, return — the fields are going to waste; why do I not go back?" [note: from Tao Yuanming's "Returning"] Yet for the Ma La who has returned — after the floodwaters of the Jing River and the floodwaters of capital together sweep away the Shenhuangzhou of his reclusion — is there still a chance, for him or for Murong Qiu, to find the true spiritual homeland represented by his brother and that brother's former beloved? This is the reverie that the ending leaves us — Ma La standing on the river embankment, Murong Qiu walking out of the mist. It is also, I think, the grief I sense lurking behind the idealism of The Human Realm.

This also leads me to another layer of metaphor: as Genesis tells it, might Shenhuangzhou after the great flood — or Ma La and Murong Qiu themselves — be the Noah's Ark that preserves the bloodline?

Tracing back to the historical context of Tao Yuanming's Eastern Jin dynasty — that era of feudal dynasties from the end of Han through the Jin, with the disorder of all under heaven, the proliferation and usurpation of power by great aristocratic clans, the intensity of class conflict, the profound entrenchment of class stratification, all while the common people were plunged into misery and the powerful and mighty went on killing one another for their own gain without regard for those beneath them, until the nation was torn to pieces and the age of chaos stretched for hundreds of years. How deeply unsettling such a scene must feel to contemplate. Tao Yuanming preferred to live in honorable poverty, abandoning his post at Pengze to go into reclusion; Ruan Ji [note: a celebrated Wei-Jin poet and eccentric] feigned drunkenness and madness to protect himself from harm; even Ji Kang [note: another famous Wei-Jin literatus] — a kinsman of the Cao Wei royal house who had retired from office to spend his days in Daoist metaphysical conversation — could not escape being put to death by the Sima clan. This is what we must never forget when we read "The Peach Blossom Spring," when we read "Returning," when we read "I built my thatched hut within the human realm." And so, reading beyond the idealism of The Human Realm, an infinite melancholy rises: has Tao Yuanming's "human realm" ever truly been a dwelling place for the common people? For Ma La and Murong Qiu? For us?

Where does the road lead?