Raise The Red Lantern - Three Novellas
by Su Tong
When the internationally acclaimed film
Raise the Red Lantern opened in North America, it was praised by
critics and nominated for an Academy Award. This extraordinary film was
based on one of China's most provocative New Wave writers -- a then
twenty-six-year old Nanjing resident named Su Tong (now thirty-one).
The title novella is a hauntingly beautiful, nightmarish tale of four
concubines competing for the sexual attentions of their master in a
stifling, 1930s rural clan house. Su Tong explores a world where
emotionally stunted men thoughtlyessly destroy the women in their lives;
where the women seem to rise above their surroundings even as they are
crushed by their circumstances; where insanity is both a weapon and a
refuge. Called "a little feast of venomous subtlety" by one critic,
Raise the Red Lantern dazzles ith its cold beauty, perverse cruelty,
violent sexuality, and hypnotic decadence ......
Excerpt from Raise The Red Lantern:
That year the opium collectors did not come.
The salt boat did not come, but the people were still waiting and
watching by the riverside.
The opium poppy fields dried up after the harvest, the ditches and dry
ruts looking like zebra stripes cut into the earth. The open fields were
incomparably dry and lifeless in the wind that swept down from the four
directions and shook my Maple Village like a thousand giant hands. When
you walked out of your black mud hut and down to the riverside, you would
see the usual colors of autumn on both sides of the river, but the wind
really would shake you from all sides like a thousand giant hands; the
wind was trying to throw you into the river, where you would drift back
like a fallen leaf following the directions of the current. The autumn
wind that year was terribly fierce; you only had to walk to the riverback
and you would see the pages of that period of histry torn off by the
wind; that was an even greater pile of fallen leaves drifting back,
following the direction of the river.
English Translation Copyright © 1993 by Michael S. Duke
Originally published in Chinese by Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. ©
1990