Intolerance & Tragedy in Chinese Literature: the Case of Six Records of a Floating Life

 

Charles Kwong

Associate Professor of Chinese & Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

 

Tolerance, or rather its negative manifestation as intolerance, is a perennial inspiration for and leitmotif in classical Chinese literature, although it is not often explicitly recognized or examined as such. From poems like “Encountering Sorrow” and “Southeast the Peacock Flies” to fictional works like The Story of the Stone and Six Records of a Floating Life, one finds multiple literary explorations of various kinds and levels of intolerance, ranging from the political and personal to the social and cultural.

This paper will analyze how tolerance and intolerance form part of a matrix of factors that underlie the central tragedy in Six Records of a Floating Life. Shen Fu and his wife Chen Yun, Shen’s father and brother as well as others, are by turns tolerant and intolerant of different matters and conduct. The incompatibilities and situational conflicts existing from these characters dictate that the non-scheming and ingenuous end up as victims of others’ and their own actions, with the result that Shen Fu and Chen Yun are forced down a trampled and tragic path which they do not deserve.