Lao She's Cat Country and City Of Cats
So I read Lao She's novel the Cat Country, about a Chinese man
who travels to Mars to find himself in a cat country, an atomized corrupt country whose only crop is a natural drug that functions as food and tranquilizer. Their are many cute things in this funny book here with the cat people, like their worship of foreigners, a national treasury that is entirely funded by sale of national treasures like museum items and libraries to foreigners, an imported progressive educational system where students become graduates on their first day of elementary school, etc. Ideological convictions had to be divisive and paper thin as imported slogans about Everybodyovskism and Markovsky were used for personal power plays. Well, the foreigners invade an proceed to kill all the cat people, the cat people who haven't already died in internal conflict, but the invading army leaves the last two locked in a cage, biting each other to death. The cat people couldn't defend themselves because of corruption which left them powerless. There are also moments from the much shorter serialized original, City Of Cats, not as funny as the subsequent novel form, but unfortunately butchered in the English translation, sections deleted as 'not needed for the intent of the work'; it being good that at least the translator admitted doing it. This Cat Country is an actual Chinese novel, written in the 1930s, before the USSR imposed an anti-Chinese government called the Communist Party Of China which put a ban on Chinese literature in 1949. The author was killed by the leftist state of which he supported, in the 1960s. This could be yet another book I read from an author killed by something they believed in, but did he really support it, or was that a lie? After all, there's been no free media in China since 1949, and his supposed support could have been fabricated, maybe to protect the lives of friends and relatives in Mao's "backstab republic". One difference between fiction and grim reality is that the national treasures were not taken by the invading army but were destroyed by them, as entire libraries of China were destroyed in Mao's anti-Chinese policy of "erase the past". |
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