Shen Congwen's Border Town follows people and ferry life on the western Hunan frontier, weaving love, family ties, and everyday scenes into a narrative rich in local character.
The author later studied cultural artifacts and clothing. Both his literary writing and material-culture research reflect an attention to the details of local life.
Cuicui and the river town
Border Town ( pinyin:), published in 1934, is a short novel about the coming of age and romances of an adolescent country girl named Cuicui in a mountain village in western Hunan, near the border with Sichuan province. The love dispute in the story revolves round Cuicui. Two brothers, Tianbao and Nuosong, who were always on the boat at Chadong Dock, fell in love with Cuicui at the same time. Cuicui only fell in love with Nuosong. Her grandfather only knew that Tianbao had come to ask for a bride, but he did not know what his granddaughter was thinking. The two brothers met to sing to get Cuicui to choose between them, but unfortunately encountered an accident. Shunshun and Nuosong misunderstood that Cuicui's grandfather was looking for another rich marriage for Nuosong. But Nuosong was still fond of Cuicui, and he left the city of Chadong along the river.
Her grandfather became aware of this, and, depressed during a thunderstorm, died one night, while Cuicui was still waiting for Nuosong. A film adaption of the book was released in 1984, winning the Golden Rooster Best Director (Ling Zifeng) award and the Montréal World Film Festival Jury Special Mention the following year.
Regional fiction and its wider setting
Although almost entirely unknown outside of China, Shen's oeuvre is considered vitally important inside China. His regional fiction with its use of folklore and local character has been compared to that of William Faulkner. He was a very prolific writer, producing more than 20 volumes of prose and fiction between 1933 and 1937. He published more than 200 stories and ten novels among other works. The more than five million characters of his written work are so diverse in both style and genre that Chinese literature scholar and Shen biographer Jeffrey Kinkley describes his work as a "Chaos of creativity". His early work includes lyric poems, one-act dramas, essays, and short stories written in a unique and varied style borrowing from regional language, naturalistic spoken dialogue, classical Chinese forms, and Western literary influences.
Later, his works included several novels and novellas and eventually, after he stopped writing fiction in 1949, many scholarly, non-fiction volumes about calligraphy, art history, museum preservation and other topics relevant to the history of Chinese art and culture.
Shen's style of creation tends to romanticism, and he demands the poetic effect of the novel, which combines realism and symbolism together. The language is simple with strong local color, which highlights the unique charm and charm of rural human nature. Shen's rural novels are typical rural cultural novels, which are not only in contrast with the urban "modern civilization" on the whole, but also always pay attention to the rural people's living mode, life footprint and historical destiny stipulated by different cultural collisions in the process of the western Hunan world's transition to modern times.
His works of fiction set in west Hunan have attracted the most critical attention. In these works he focuses on unassimilated Miao people who live in a traditional culture in the frontier region with the dominant Han culture and the modern world. With little first-hand experience of Miao life, Shen based these stories on his own imagination, life experiences and Miao legends told to him by his nursemaid and his country relatives. The descriptive nouns in the novel contain a great deal of western Hunan folk culture and skillfully apply proverbs and folk songs into the novel.