This, however, is not the case with Shen Congwen’s letters. Family Letters of Congwen was among the few Chinese books I brought with me when I came to the U.S. in 1996. Shen, who was considered one of the most important writers of his generation, had stopped writing, in the prime of his career, when Communism took over China, and his letters, though inadequate, offer the only available glimpse of those stories he might have written.

All the while I am aware that my obsession with his letters and his life story is unfair: that Shen himself has been transformed into a character, who, like the people in his stories, was caught between his love (in his case, for writing), and a fate intolerant of that passion.

Shen Congwen was born in 1902, in Phoenix, a small town in western Hunan. After leaving school at fourteen, he joined the army. His work started to appear in magazines in 1925, and over the next twenty years, he published widely—stories, novels, essays, many of them, I believe, among the best work of the twentieth century in China.

Like Chekhov, his favorite writer, Shen wrote about his characters—riverside prostitutes receiving passing boatmen, a mother and daughter eking out a living in a mill, an old man in charge of a ferry bringing up a granddaughter born out of wedlock, and many others: peasants, soldiers, fishermen, landlords, army officers—with a love and kindness that stood out in his time.

It also exposed him to criticism from leftist writers for his disinterest in politics and lack of commitment to the class struggles of the time. Relevance is always a useful tool for lesser minds to attack true artists.

In 1949, when the Communist party was about to take over China, Shen foresaw a nation that would have no place for his writing. After two failed suicide attempts, he gave up writing fiction and took a research position in a museum. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, he was demoted to a toilet cleaner, and his possessions were confiscated and burned. His experience during these years was not much different from that of other artists and intellectuals of his generation. In 1966, Lao She, another literary master of the twentieth century, drowned himself after being beaten by the Red Guards; the same year, Fu Lei, the translator of Balzac, Romain Rolland, and other French writers, swallowed poison in his apartment, and two hours later, after making sure he was dead, his wife hanged herself.

What makes Shen’s case special, at least to me, is that he chose to end his writing career—a suicide in itself.

Family Letters of Congwen, which his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, selected and edited for publication in 1995, begins with their courtship and covers a marriage that lasted for over fifty years. Shen had fallen in love with Zhang when she was eighteen and a student in the Shanghai college where he was teaching. When Zhang turned down Shen’s pursuits, the president of the college—Hu Shih, the most influential intellectual and a key figure of education and literary reform of the time—told her that Shen was a genius, with the most promising future. Zhang was adamant in her interest, and Hu then wrote to Shen Congwen: “My feeling is that this girl won’t be able to understand you, or your love, and I worry you are falling in love with the wrong person. You ought to struggle to get yourself out of this love. Don’t let that girl brag in the future that she once broke the heart of Shen Congwen.”

Shen, however, did not follow his mentor’s advice. After four years (and many letters) of courting, they married in 1933.

Shen died in 1988, never having broken his silence as a fiction writer.

Order a copy of APS 10 to read the Letters of Shen Congwen.

Further Reading: Border Town, Shen Congwen, translated by Jeffrey C. Kinkley; Selected Short Stories of Shen Congwen, translated by Jeffery C. Kinkley; The Odyssey of Shen Congwen, Jeffrey C Kinkley; Four Sisters of Hofei: A History, Annping Chin.

The project—in addition to the radio series, there is a book and an exhibition—started thirteen years ago, when Sam Stephenson's wife bought him a camera for Christmas. The camera shop owner introduced him to Smith's work, and then Sam discovered Smith's archives at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona: "Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of “everything” (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft—two bodies of work that have kept me busy for ten years. His work has become my work."

Read the rest of Sam's piece about Smith's archives, from APS 3.