Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Page 27
The Rat Baron shed quite some tears and its underlings to the left and the
right also were awash in tears. None of them dared to look up; they only furtively glared sideways. The enemy had caught and killed an endless number
of rats, and even the rat chancellor and the rat commander had been lost.
The Rat Baron said, “What can we do about these depredations? Even when
we do not go out, we are killed, and when we do go out we are killed. But
instead of doing nothing and waiting for our death until all of our compa-
triots will have met their doom, it would be much better to brave death and go out to implore mercy. Perhaps we may be lucky. In the past our country
of rats embraced an doctrine of despising foreigners. Today we cannot but
change and adopt a doctrine of fawning on foreigners.”
Thereupon the Rat Baron rose and descended from the hall to lead the
assembled rats in going forward on their knees. The Rat Baron addressed
the cat in the following words: “We, the country of rats, have been in the
wrong, causing Your Majesty to kindly chastise us. We definitely all deserve to die. But Your Majesty has always been humane and compassionate, so
we implore Your Majesty to still your rage and to allow us to become your
slaves. If Your Majesty feels hungry and does not disdain to eat our flesh, allow me, your subject, to choose the fattest among us and offer them in
tribute on a regular basis.” The Cat King acted as if it heard this but also as if it didn’t hear this. It happened to have eaten its fill and left after purring for a while.25
This crisis allows the Rat Baron to raise the spirits of its subjects, whereupon it concludes an alliance with the fishes (Japan) and the birds (the United This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:43 UTC
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States) and, in a huge battle, manages to defeat and strangle the cat.26 In later confrontations with their enemies, the rodents scare them off by filling the hide of the cat with hundreds of their kind and by their cooperative action making “the cat” move as if it were real. Following this victory, the rodents are able to return to their original tiger nature:
After quite a while the rats slowly regained their pride. The Rat Baron once again issued an edict in which it addressed the people as follows: “Even
though our country of rats by our common strategy and our common efforts
for the time being has escaped from the disaster of annexation by strong
neighbors, the whole population should still with one mind strive for prog-
ress. We definitely cannot forget our original features because we took on
another’s skin.” Thereupon it raised its face and loudly proclaimed to the
masses, “Our country of rats has been renewed! Our country of rats has
achieved independence!”
“Now, taking on the skin of somebody else can only be a strategy that
is suitable for one moment. If we want to struggle for survival with the
other countries, we can only achieve victory if we all, united in ambition
and full of vigor, fight against the floodtide of evolution and selection.”
When the rats received this edict, they were all elated and congratulated
each other: “May our Rat Baron live ten thousand years! May our rat nation
live ten thousand years! May our rat country live ten thousand years.”
From that time on, high and low exerted themselves in harmony and court
and province were of one mind. Within a few years the rats turned once
again into tigers!27
Catherine Vance Yeh, who has studied this text in the context of the political novel of the first decade of the twentieth century, suggests that animal allegories of this kind derive their inspiration from the Zhuangzi, but while the educated author draws widely on high literature for his allusions, it is difficult to imagine that Bao Youfu in Shanghai would not have been
acquainted with the popular traditions of the court case of the mouse and
the cat, including the stories of the war between the cats and the mice.28
Whereas Bao Youfu portrayed the cat as China’s foreign enemy, later mod-
ern authors often would depict cats as the dissimulating enemies of progress and regeneration among the Chinese themselves. We already had occasion
to mention’s Lu Xun’s hatred of cats, which he despised for their fawning
toward their paymasters and their cruelty to small, defenseless animals such as mice and little ducks. Lu Xun saw in the cat an image for his political
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opponents in Beijing in 1927, whom he accused of feigning an objective stance but actually being only too willing to side with the authorities in suppressing protesting students.29 But even before Lu Xun wrote his “Dogs, Cats, and
Mice,” his younger contemporary, the poet Zhu Xiang, sketched a detailed
caricature of an outwardly modernized traditional scholar in his long narrative poem “The Admonition by the Cat” (Maogao) of 1925. Zhu had studied
English language and literature and spent two years in the United States. In his short life, he produced a relatively large and quite varied body of poetry.
Like poets such as Wen Yiduo (1899–1946) and Xu Zhimo (1897–1931), Zhu
Xiang sought to create formal rules for the new, vernacular poetry written
by the members of the May Fourth generation. Eventually he would become
one of China’s first accomplished sonneteers.30 At the same time, he shows
in his work of the mid-1920s a considerable influence from traditional popular Chinese poetry and balladry. This influence can be observed not only in Zhu’s lyrical works but also in his long narrative poems.31 One of these was “The Admonition by the Cat,” which was first published in the October 1925 issue of Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao). A very much revised version was included in his second poetry collection, The Wilderness (Caomang shi) of 1927. Modern editions of the poem as well as studies of the work, to the best of my knowledge, all are based on this later edition.
As an account of the cat’s ancient pedigree and life philosophy, this poem
may be compared to the long statements by the cat in his own defense in the court of King Yama. But whereas in traditional versions of the tale of the
court case it is the mouse that is unmasked as scoundrel, now it is the cat that has become the butt of satire. While in these traditional versions of the court case both mouse and cat may refer to the cat’s foreign origin, here the cat claims an ancient Chinese pedigree as descendant of Triple Meow (San
Miao), who lived in the time of the ancient sage emperors, and as a good
republican he claims his ancestors never served as imperial bureaucrats.
Now let me first number the branches of us Meows:
You absolutely must note this down on your sash.32
Our surname originated five thousand years ago
When Triple Meow rebelled against Yao and Shun.33
Triple Meow is the primal ancestor of our surname,
He was a great hero whose might was unbending.
And if you accept the findings of Western science,
The background of us Meows is even more surprising:
Geologists say that five hundred thousand years ago
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The tribe of us Meows was already quite thriving.
Now, the tiger that is honored as the mountain king
Also belongs to the clan of us Meows, the felines.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We have become the sworn enemies of China’s rulers.
That’s why we have always minded our own business,
And held on to our aim not to seek fame and fortune.
We Meows are by nature superior to the other mortals,
We obviously are far better than that proud white race.
They pride themselves on the invention of the clock,
But that’s only an event of the last one hundred years,
While our tribe even five hundred thousand years ago
Already had a pair of eyes that could tell you the time.34
Even though the old cat sprinkles his lecture to his son with fashionable
neologisms and references to Western science, and also rejects the polyg-
amy of the rooster and the whoring (and versifying) of the geese, he reveals himself as a pompous, ineffective representative of the traditional elite. From this perspective, Zhu Xiang’s poem may also be read as a modern version of
the tale of the hypocritical cat. But Zhu Xiang not only exposes the flaws of the old cat; he also shows the weak sides of his son, the little cat. Like many young men and women of the 1920s, the young cat is an inveterate romantic,
deeply in love with his young female owner, who allows the young cat to sleep with her in her bed, as we learn from his father’s speech:
Now, at present, Third Sister is infatuated with you:
Young people always are filled with love of beauty.
The fur on your body is as purely white as her bosom;
The black spots of your paws are as black as her pupils.
On top of that, my son, you are a present from him,
So when she sees you, it is like she’s seeing her lover.
When she cuddles you in her arms to play with you,
Make sure not to stretch out your nails and scratch her.
Appreciate that if she fondles and strokes you
That is a rare blessing not everyone can obtain!
And if at times you playfully touch her clothes,
You have to make sure to use your soft paws.
Everybody shares the psychology of caring for beauty;
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We even more deserve people’s respect by our softness.
How great you can rest lightly leaning on her bosom—
What a pleasure it is to hear the beat of her heart!
Clearly remember her soft and marvelous sighs
And then walk over and report those to her lover.
Or steal a handkerchief when she pays no attention:
If he obtains that, he will feel elated as if in heaven.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My son, Love, your good fortune is not little indeed:
You are intimate with her, and even earlier than he!
She even allows you to sleep by the side of her bed:
Nightly you chastely smell her marvelous fragrance.
Blessed you are, one on whom celestial relatives dote,
You always will be able to have the sweetest dreams!35
But while the old cat cynically advises him to benefit as much as possible
from his owner’s infatuation, the smitten kitten is overcome by lovesickness as he realizes the impossibility of his passion.36
Why had the Lord of Heaven made him a cat?
And why had He caused him to meet with her?
You might say that he was a poet that could dream,
But when he woke up there was no end to his grief.
You might say he at times might kiss her soft buds,
But for how much longer could that privilege last?
When one day the gale would blow of her marriage,
Wouldn’t he be roughly discarded among the chaff?
Alas, he was unable to speak the language of humans:
He could not disclose the extent of his feelings to her.
He’d lose the love of his life! Truly what bitter pain!37
But while his own love is doomed, the young kitten envisions a world of
peace, united by universal love:
Ever since he had fallen in love with her,
He not only revered her like his eyelids,
But had also conceived a notion of universal love.
Perhaps it’s the case that all barbaric people
Are so because passion never flowered in their heart.
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But every single person lives for a purpose,
So they then set out in search of profit and fame.
But once they encounter obstacles in that search
They will sacrifice others for their own gain.
Those terrifying wars all originate from this!
Oh, when will we see love’s peaceful world?38
The old cat may have lost nothing of his skill in catching mice, but when
father and son in the kitchen are confronted with the aggression of the dog, they equally make themselves scarce, with this difference that the old cat
defends his behavior by quoting appropriate platitudes.39
The maid poured the fish and rice into an earthenware bowl
And then carried the red-lacquered plate into the main hall.
Now, that old cat truly was one big-stomach general:
A ministerial belly in which a boat could be punted.
He also was well provided with discerning eyesight,
So he picked all the fish from the earthenware bowl.
The little cat, being in love, followed a vegetarian regime,
So he only swallowed some white rice to still his hunger.
Alas, when they had only finished half their meal
Unfortunately that dog ambled over to their side,
Without any courtesy at all pushed the cats aside
And in a few big mouthfuls finished all the food;
He stuck out his tongue and licked the bowl clean,
With such a force that the bowl was overturned.
The old cat was so enraged his eyes bulged out,
While blazing toward the dog, he also moved back.
When he saw that the little cat, too, was running off,
He turned his head and loudly preached to him:
“There is one phrase that has a use without end,
The phrase that says: ‘Great courage looks like fear.’”40
Zhu Xiang’s poem is written in rhyming couplets; most lines consist of
nine or ten syllables, but these studiously avoid the three-three-four pattern of the ten-syllable line in traditional folk poetry. The revised version increased the formal regularity of the poem by turning nearly all lines into ten-syllable lines and often used a more sophisticated language. More importantly perhaps, it stressed the political message of the poem even further by omitting This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:43 UTC
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the father’s advice in matters of love and the son’s confession of his love for his young female owner.41 As a result, the poem could be hailed in 2009 as
“the most incisive satirical long poem exposing the weaknesses of the national character of China’s modern period.”42 Two decades earlier a textbook had
stated, “Through its creation of the image of the old cat this poem incisively satirized the extremely weak and cowardly true nature of the reactionary
rulers of those days and forcefully laid bare the many ugly ‘national characteristics’ of our country.”43 This one-sided emphasis on the political nature of the poem, however, should not obscure its humorous qualities.44
Zhu Xiang’s portrayal of the cat as an internal enemy was followed by Lao
She’s (1899–1966) novel Cat Country (Maocheng ji) of 1932–33, in which the author took the lone survivor of an air crash on Mars to a dystopian society of cats.45 This novel is a savage indictment of China’s problems of the time as seen through the eyes of an author who had only recently returned from a
six-year stay in London. The indolent cats in this novel, however, display very few feline characteristics—according to Imamura Yoshio, their roles might
well have been played by other animals.46 In Lao She’s novel the cats are their own worst enemies, and their society is eventually annihilated by an invasion of foreigners (in whom one can easily recognize the Japanese). In the left-wing cartoonist Liao Bingxiong’s (1915–2006) works of 1945 in Chongqing,
lambasting the widespread corruption in the Nationalist-held areas, rats
portray sleazy profiteers and fat cats stand for venal and abusive officials. The first cartoon in the initial series of A Chronicle of Cat Country (Maoguo chunqiu) is clearly inspired by traditional New Year prints of the wedding of the mice. The cartoon shows a procession of rats carrying off their loot and hand-ing in fish as bribes to a fat cat that stamps their documents. The second
cartoon in this series shows the cat as judge, imprisoning a mouse but releasing a rat. The third cartoon shows both rats and cats robbing and stealing
under the cover of night.47
While children’s literature of the twentieth century was quite hospitable
to speaking animals in its fables and fairy tales, the political mission of adult literature in the early decades of the People’s Republic of China outlawed