Scholar Zhang Offends a Widow and Loses His Lodgings
Late in life, the editor and essayist Zhou Shao 周劭 (also known as Zhou Li’an 周黎庵, 1913–2003) published several collections of observations and anecdotes about the cultural and political scenes of the ’30s and ’40s. In one entry in Xiangwan manbi 向晚漫笔 [“Sketches at Dusk”, 2000], he gives a brief sketch of the life and career of Zhang Ziping 張資平, the Creation Society 創造社 co-founder whose novels were bestsellers in golden age Shanghai and who was sent to prison for collaborationist activities. Here’s Zhou’s description of the circumstances behind his encounter with the novelist:
His wife and children weren’t in Shanghai, so upon his release from prison he was all alone and had no home to return to. He had to move into a room on the stair landing* of the home of an old friend’s widow. That friend was Liu Na’ou. Taiwanese and very wealthy, Liu had built ten or twenty lane houses near Hongkou Park. He had been shot by KMT agents, and after the Japanese defeat his property had been confiscated, leaving his widow with only one unit.
* 亭子间 tíngzijiān, a cramped room over the kitchen on the first landing in traditional houses in Shanghai, similar to the garret apartment in its association with writers.
Zhang Ziping behaved badly while living at the Liu house. His poor hygiene in particular so angered Liu’s widow that she locked him out of the only toilet. This left him in a bind—on one occasion he even took a dump in his room, wrapped it in newspaper, and then dropped it outside the toilet door. For Liu’s widow, this was the last straw, and she tried to evict him. He refused to leave, so they ended up in a lawsuit. I was a lawyer in those days, and someone set me up to represent Liu’s widow, giving me the opportunity to see the celebrated writer for myself in court. He was a dark, stocky man. Naturally, such a piddly case didn’t go to an actual verdict but was mediated by the judge, and in the end Zhang voluntarily backed down and promised to move out of the Lius’ place. I don’t know what happened to him after that.
What happened after that: Zhang managed to eke out a living as a translator and later obtained a teaching gig through Pan Hannian 潘汉年, an old Creation Society colleague (and underground Communist agent) who became deputy mayor of Shanghai in the ’50s. Arrested again on counter-revolutionary charges in 1955, Zhang died in a reform-through-labor camp in Anhui in 1959.
As anecdotes of misbehaving authors go, it’s an amusing one, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Writing in the late ’90s about events that occurred half a century earlier, Zhou’s memories are bound to include “inevitable factual errors,” as archivist Zhao Guozhong 赵国忠 puts it in a review of another retrospective collection. Earlier in this essay, Zhou’s account of one of Zhang’s literary scandals, the abrupt cancellation in 1933 of a serialization in the supplement to The Shun Pao 申報 because Zhang’s brand of torrid melodrama was out of step with a new editor’s more vocal left-wing positioning, misidentifies the novel in question as 明珠與黑炭 [Pearl and Charcoal] rather than 時代與愛的歧路 [The Crossroads of Time and Love]. The former was published in 1931 following a serialization in Lo Chun 樂群; both were banned by KMT authorities, Crossroads in 1934 for “fomenting class struggle” and Pearl in 1935 for “impropriety,” so perhaps that’s the source of Zhou’s confusion.
With that in mind, here’s a report from a mid-1947 issue of New Shanghai Weekly 新上海 that describes a lawsuit between Zhang and his landlord:
Under the puppet government, he served as a senior technical officer in the puppet Ministry of Agriculture and Mining and was also head of publications for the enemy’s China-Japan Cultural Association. Where he ought to have been satisfied with not being arrested after the war was won, he went and got into a fight over his flat in New Yiding Apartments on Edinburgh Road. The situation blew up and when the other party wanted to sue him, he got scared and fled Shanghai for Guangzhou, where he apparently found work at some official agency. But Zhang refused let the matter of the flat on Edinburgh Road rest, and once the government stipulated it would no longer turn over traitors for prosecution, he crept back to Shanghai last month, intending to approach the other party to negotiate the return of his rooms as soon as he was settled. But news travels fast, and because Zhang was a suspected traitor, the prosecution bureau of the high court seized the moment to refer him for investigation. He cooperated. When the investigation revealed his was not a serious case, his bail was approved, and he went on to negotiate the reclamation of his apartment, as had been his expectation all along. Fully prepared for a lawsuit when he came to Shanghai, the fact that he ended up in court didn’t bother him—and now he must be exceptionally pleased with himself.
So what does this mean? Here are some possibilities:
Zhou misremembered the year of the lawsuit, placing it after Zhang’s prison sentence rather than before his arrest and situating the house near Hankou Park (now Luxun Park) rather than Edinburgh Road (now Jiangsu Road);
Zhang was a problem tenant inclined to get into legal battles with his landlords; or
The court-mediated settlement Zhou describes was merely one episode of a long, drawn-out grudge match between Zhang and the widow.
I've written about Zhang Ziping's misbehavior before, way back in 2008: Willow fluff and trashy romance novels. (Just look at how those links have rotted!) And read about more badly-behaved literati: When editors lash out (2015).
Sources
The header image, by Cao Hanmei 曹涵美, is an illustration for the serialized version of Zhang’s 1941 novel 新紅A字 [A New Scarlet Letter] that ran in the fortnightly journal 華文大阪每日 [Chinese Osaka Daily] (7(4), p21), a Japanese organ promoting regional co-prosperity under the empire.
Zhao Guozhong 赵国忠. “周黎庵及《葑溪寻梦》”. 书脞谈录, 2008. Readable at https://www.xuges.com/xdmj/zhoushao/009.htm
Zhou Shao 周劭. “张资平的下落”. 向晚漫笔. 上海: 上海古籍出版社, 2000.11, 51.