Four Generations Under One Roof in 10 Minutes: Eight Years of Occupation Down One Hutong Alley

His third brother, Ruiquan, is unmarried and has a fierce temper; within days of the first gunfire he climbs the city wall and slips out to join the resistance. Same parents, same household — one brother trapped, the other gone. It's the first time Lao She takes a knife to this family and lays it open.

His second brother, Ruifeng, is nothing like either of them — greedy, vain, spineless. The moment the Japanese puppet government opens for business, he wangles his way into a post there; to him, the wages the Japanese hand out are all the respectability he needs. That the Qi family produced such a son makes Old Master Qi want to tear the ancestral tablets off the wall. Next door, Guan Xiaohe and his wife Da Chibao — a nickname meaning something like 'Big Red Gourd,' a jab at her loud, blowsy manner — are even harder to look at than Ruifeng. He is a grinning fox who licks whoever holds power; she is a foul-tempered battle-axe who lands the job running the puppet regime's brothel-inspection office and throws her weight around until the whole hutong crosses the street to avoid her. Next door again, old Mr. Qian Moyin once cared for nothing but painting and poetry — until his son died taking a Japanese soldier down with him, and Qian himself was dragged in by the military police and had his fingers broken. He comes out a different man, and from then on quietly distributes anti-Japanese leaflets in the dark.

How the Eight Years Were Endured

In the first year, Old Master Qi still clings to his notion of three months' stockpiled grain. But the days wear him down like a dull blade, shaving away one layer at a time. Japanese military police set up checkpoints, the rising sun flag goes up over the city, goods grow scarcer by the day, and the rationed grain grows thinner and thinner.

The true turning point comes in the third year: Qian Moyin is arrested, and overnight Ruixuan sees the blood running beneath this hutong. In early spring of the second year, Qi Tianyou — Ruixuan's father, the honest old proprietor of the family cloth shop — is squeezed and humiliated by the puppet regime until his family is ruined, and he takes his own life under a weight of unjust shame. A small shopkeeper who played by the rules his whole life is driven to death by this war.

First, Lao She compresses the entire war into a single hutong. Fighting at the front is heroic enough, but the real shape of war is the line outside the ration shop at the mouth of the alley, the tears of a cloth-shop owner being squeezed dry, a little girl starving to death on the kang. Second, he writes the particular pain of being unable to get out. Ruixuan is no collaborator and no hero — he's a good man tied down by his own family, standing in for every Chinese person in those eight years who wanted to leave and couldn't. Third, he writes all of it in the most authentic Beijing dialect there is — not translated tragedy, but the neighbors in the hutong quarreling, sighing, counting off the days beside the pickle jar. That lived-in, street-level texture is what carries the whole epic.

This novel carries a lesser-known story of its own: the final thirteen sections of the original manuscript were lost somewhere in the chaos of war, and weren't restored until 1982, when Ma Xiaomi translated them back into Chinese from The Yellow Storm, the abridged English translation Lao She had authorized in his lifetime. A book about a conquered people nearly went into exile itself, as a text — which reads like a footnote history wrote onto the novel on its own.

You Know the Plot — So Why Still Read It

A summary can tell you what happens, who lives, who dies. But there's one thing it can't give you: the breath of Lao She's Beijing dialect.

'It felt like there was a pot of water boiling inside his chest' — a line like that only gives up its flavor when you turn to that page yourself. And the hutong's particular slowness, the patience ground out day after day between the ration line, the rising sun flag, and the neighbors' cold stares — that isn't something a few thousand words can capture either. Once you know that little Niuzi will starve to death, go back and read the passage where her mother stands at the stove holding an empty bowl. It will hit you differently.