Strange Events of the Last Twenty Years in 10 Minutes — Two Decades of Late-Qing Slices Collected by an Onlooker

The boy flees his hometown for Shanghai and lands at Wu Jizhi's money house. For the next twenty years his job, on paper, is bookkeeping and running errands; in practice it is sitting in the corner of the drawing room and listening. So the book has no single plot running through it start to finish — it is a string of social slices, stitched together out of teahouse gossip, drawing-room rumor, and stories picked up on riverboats. The people Wu Jizhi sees every day, the things they talk about, become the window Nine Deaths, One Life looks through at the late Qing.

The densest of these slices comes through a minor Hubei official in the capital named Wang Boshu. Wang is a disillusioned member of the reformist clique, too cautious to attack anyone openly, so instead he takes the whole bureaucracy apart for Nine Deaths, One Life, rank by rank, from the capital officials down to the provincial ones, from clerks to governors-general. How an expectant official buys his hat button with cash, how a bribe travels from the gatekeeper's lodge to the inner office, how family connections wind through seven turns before they land — this section carries the highest concentration of satire in the book, and it is the sharpest thing in it.

One section goes further still. A man named Gou Cai has bought himself the rank of circuit intendant but can't get a posting, and watches his family fortune drain away. When he hears that the provincial governor-general has just lost a favorite concubine, he offers up his own widowed daughter-in-law as a replacement, gambling that it will buy him a lucrative post. The scene is never staged directly; it reaches the page only secondhand, through Nine Deaths, One Life's retelling, which is exactly what pins it down: a system that pushes a man to trade his own relatives like merchandise, an officialdom that has hollowed out filial duty and family bonds from the inside. This section sets the register for the book's critique of the whole institution.

On the other side is the rot inside the clan. The coffin story from the opening has a sequel: the cousin, Li Jingyi, forces the widowed sister-in-law into a second marriage and then seizes the orphaned nephew's share of the family land, all to get his hands on the inherited fields. Traveling back and forth between his hometown and Shanghai, Nine Deaths, One Life keeps running into the same rot: clan ethics gutted by self-interest, relatives hauling each other into court over a plot of land, a coffin, an inheritance. The clan turns out to be just another net that eats people.

Further down, the old gentry collapse. Lu Weiyuan, headmaster of an academy in Nanjing, is an old-school scholar pushed out of his post by reforms to the examination system — his whole life's stock in trade was eight-legged essay writing, and now that the post is gone he tries doctoring and fortune-telling instead, and can't even keep a clinic running. In the same Nanjing examination hall, the young men coming out of the new-style schools know a few phrases of foreign language and some arithmetic and can't write a coherent letter home. Nine Deaths, One Life watches one generation replace the other, and neither comes out clean.

At the end, twenty years on, Nine Deaths, One Life goes back to visit his hometown. The little town called Escape from Death has rotted in a different shape than Shanghai, but it tastes much the same. He has strung twenty years of things he actually heard into a social history, and that is where the book stops, without a clean ending, because Wu Jianren died with the novel half written and left it unfinished.

Craft: How the Slices Add Up to a Book

What's worth talking about here isn't the story, it's the structure. There's no single plot running the length of the book; instead there's a string of short pieces, like a stack of slides cut from late-Qing treaty-port society, each one complete on its own, adding up to a panorama when you set them side by side. This anecdotal, chapter-by-chapter form is unforgiving: every single piece has to carry its own edge, or the whole thing falls apart into scraps. Wu Jianren came up as a Shanghai newspaperman, and it shows — every section reads like one of his newspaper pieces, some only a few dozen words, some running to a thousand, but every one of them has a barb in it.

What sharpens it further is the choice of a first-person bystander. Nine Deaths, One Life never gets involved: he watches, retells, and occasionally drops in a dry, cold jab. That gives the book a rare sense of being right there: the slang of the Shanghai concessions, the stock phrases of officialdom, the Cantonese dialect of Guangzhou, the jargon of pettifogging lawyers, all come straight out of his own mouth, unfiltered. The author never steps in to comment. He lets the reader feel the disgust on their own.

Theme: In a Society in Transition, Everyone Is Half New, Half Old

Officialdom exposed, commerce turned gray, the clan rotting, the examination system caught half-cooked: these four fronts are the core of the book. The exams have gone rotten before they're even abolished; the foreign-affairs reforms have decayed before they've succeeded; the new schools are half-baked before they're properly established. Every institution is failing in that gap between old and new, and everyone is scavenging a living in the crack. Wu Jianren never raises a slogan. He just pins down, one by one, every person caught in that gap.

What it means for a reader today has nothing to do with nostalgia. It's a portrait of a society in transition: every rule coming loose, every class getting reshuffled, everyone hunting for a new place to stand. That is exactly the kind of moment that breeds strange events, and breeds con men. Wu Jianren wrote down twenty years of them and left them behind as a mirror for whoever came after.

A bystander watched for twenty years and wrote a book with no ending — because the age itself had none.