Let's Go! Let's Go Upstairs

I WROTE A PLAY in which a destitute man throws himself and his entire family on the mercy of their relatives. When a quarrel erupts, he leaps indignantly up with the exclamation: "I can't take any more of this. Let's go! Let's get out of here!" Mournfully, his wife interjects: "But where are we to go?" He gathers his wife and children around him and says: "Let's go! Let's go upstairs." At dinnertime, when it is announced that food is on the table, they come back down again.
Chinese people have learned how to leave home from Nora in A Doll's House.' There can be no doubt that this stylishly bleak gesture has left an extremely deep impression on a generation of Chinese youth. In the personal ads in the newspapers, bulletins for missing persons like the following appear in shocking quantity: "Since you left at nine o'clock at night on the 12th without saying goodbye, Grandma is confined to bed, mother has had a relapse, and the faces of the whole family are awash in tears. Hurry
'Henrik Ibsen's drama was first published in Chinese translation in a 1918 issue of Xin qingn-ian (New youth), the flagship journal of the New Culture Movement. The play had an enormous impact on contemporary debates concerning the status of women, traditional social arrangements, and the legacy of Confucian culture. Nora, who leaves behind her husband and her dull bourgeois existence in the original text, became an emblematic and controversial figure in China whose very name came to represent the emancipation of women from traditional social restraints.
 back as soon as you see this." Leaving is one thing, but the question remains: what kind of escape counts as "braving the storm and weathering the elements," and which kind is just "going upstairs"? The conventional wisdom seems to hold that a woman who is a "flower vase" (pretty to look at but empty inside) has "gone upstairs," housewives have "gone upstairs," dreaming is "going upstairs," remaking the American film Rebecca is "going upstairs," copying from other books is "going upstairs," collecting antique coins is "going upstairs" (collecting modern currency counts as going downstairs), but there is in fact no single formula for making such determinations. The advantage of reality is that exceptions are so plentiful, and each individual case needs to be analyzed on its own terms. Actually, just moving from the back of the building to the front for a breath of fresh air and opening the window for a change of scenery can be quite nice. In any case, there's plenty of food for thought in all this, which is why I like that scene in my play.
There is, however, nothing else to recommend it, except that it's quite cheerful. There's grief, vexation, and acrimony, but it's cheerful vexation and cheerful acrimony. And another thing: at the very least, it's a play for Chinese people—loud and lively and fun for ordinary folk. If it were playing at a theater now, I would find a way to persuade you to go and see it. But I don't know when I'll ever get it produced. I suppose it may be too early to start advertising now. Because when the time comes—if there is a time—people might have already forgotten all about it, and the ads would be lost on them.
I wrote the play before the Lunar New Year and brought it over to Mr. Ke Ling so that he could have a look at it.2 The structure of the thing was far too diffuse, and the last act unusable. I am grateful for Ke Ling's guidance. After several rounds of revision, the play was really much improved. But when it was finally done, I was left at a loss. They say there is a serious drought of scripts at the moment. Maybe there really aren't any scripts around, at least not the ones Cao Yu hasn't found time to write yet.3 No one seems to have any use for scripts by people who've yet to make a name for themselves. I don't necessarily think that there's a monopoly, merely that the walls are fortified and the gates closely guarded. You would think that
2Ke Ling (1900-2000) was a prominent playwright, essayist, and literary critic, as well as the editor of one of the period's most well-respected literary magazines, Wanxiang (Phenomena). He was also an early advocate of Eileen Chang's writing.
3Cao Yu is perhaps the foremost modern Chinese playwright, whose work came to prominence in the late 1930s and 1940s.
 bringing a copy of a script round to the managers of the various theatrical troupes, as I did, would be the proper way to have your work recognized, but I am told that this route is impracticable here in China, where playwrights can only approach potential producers through the good offices of a go-between. I honestly don't know how to proceed.
Printing a copy of the script in order to capture their attention might be an option. But, to put it crassly, what happens if someone simply slips my play right into his own? I may sound ludicrously petty here, and perhaps overly generous in my self-estimation, but I could hardly be expected not to "measure the heart of the gentleman with the mind of a knave." Someone who's enamored of his own words and thoughts often tends to be possessive-which seems perfectly natural, really. I still remember the first time I saw the sea in Hong Kong: it reminded me of the deathly daubed-on blue of the ocean on a retouched color postcard. Later, I stumbled across much the same metaphor in an English book: 'You could cut out the Persian Gulf and send it home as a postcard, the blue of the water was so deep and so dull.' The discovery that someone else has long ago given voice to your own words, and said them much better than you ever could, is disconcerting enough. But to discover that he didn't say it as well as you might have done is heartbreaking.
That's one level. What's more, plays are meant to be performed, not read. In writing a play, a dramatist must always hope that the actors will be able to breathe life into the work onstage. People always think that when fiction writers write plays, they are better read than seen. How should I overcome this presumption?
Writing essays is a relatively simple affair; one's ideas reach the reader directly through the medium of movable type. Writing drama is another matter altogether, because the original work soon becomes entangled in all sorts of complex forces that I am unable really to understand. The more I think about the problems presented by finding a director and a group of performers I could trust, not to mention "the proper time, the proper place, and the proper spirit," the more my head spins.
In buildings along the street, the lower stories are liable to be a little noisy. But surely that's no reason to flee upstairs?