1937 was a rotten year for China. Japanese forces moved their operations from the Peking to the Shanghai region, the Nationalist lines in Nanjing collapsed, and the remnants of the resistance moved their troops deeper upriver through the Yangtse gorges.
A comedy of manners featuring a hapless antihero is not something you immediately associate with Chinese literature, but in Qian Zhongshu's "Fortress Besieged," a novel set in a year that would seem to have been utterly devoid of humor or the capacity for laughter, that is more or less what we have. The title comes from a French proverb that says that "Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out." The fortress, of course, can also be seen as China itself.
Zhongshu was one of the most accomplished scholars of his day, fluent in several European languages and familiar with the Chinese classics. He was, like the protagonist of his novel, Fang Hung-chien, a returnee student from Europe, having attended the universities of Oxford and Paris. And like Fang, the author taught for a period in the interior. "Fortress Besieged" was originally published in 1947, another painful period in Chinese history with the country engaged in a vicious civil war that would bring the Communists to power, an event that would leadto great problems for free-thinking academics like Zhongshu.