Shen Congwen's Border Town
Shen Congwen's " Border Town " was a novella. It was set in the tea cave of the border town between Sichuan and Hunan in the 1930s. Through the beautiful strokes of lyric poems and essays, it depicted the unique local customs and practices of Xiangxi. At the same time, it also narrated the love story of the young girl Cecelia. It expressed the beauty of human nature through describing the pure love between young men and women, the kinship between grandparents and grandchildren, and the kindness between neighbors. "Border Town" used the love between the granddaughter of the old man, Cuicui, and the two sons of the boat manager, Tianbao and Nuosong, as clues to express the yearning and pursuit of the idyllic life. It showed a primitive, simple and beautiful world full of human nature, while depicting the painful fact that the people of Xiangxi could not control their own destiny in the face of nature and human affairs. Cecelia, Cecelia's mother, and Mr. Boat's two sons were repeating their sad and bleak lives, but they could not find a way to escape this fate. Shen Congwen revealed the mystery of the fate of the characters through the novel "Border Town" and praised the honest and kind hearts of the border people. He described a few ignorant people in a small town in Xiangxi and a tea cave on the bank of Youshui River. When they were involved in an ordinary matter, they each deserved a share of sorrow and joy to give an appropriate explanation for the word "love" of human beings. Border Town was hailed as the purest novel in the history of modern Chinese literature, as well as the pinnacle of modern Chinese literature. It expressed Shen Congwen's aesthetic ideals of "beauty" and "love", and it was also the one that could best express the beauty of human nature among his works.