Short stories
Spring Silkworms
春蠶
Mao Dun · 1932
Synopsis
In a silkworm-farming village in Zhejiang, in spring, old Tongbao, in debt, hopes that a good harvest of cocoons will lift his family up. Attached to superstitions and averse to the foreign breed of worm, he borrows at high interest to buy mulberry leaves, at the risk of running short of rice, despite his daughter-in-law's protests. His younger son, Aduo, scoffs at omens; the villagers hold their neighbour Lotus to be a bearer of ill luck, and the young man is forbidden to speak to her. The whole family watches over the worms.
Context
Mao Dun dated the story 1 November 1932; it opens a trilogy continued by two other peasant stories. It details what silkworm rearing costs, eggs, leaves, equipment, financed by usurious loans, in a country where the silk mills depend on foreign markets. Cheng Bugao made a silent film of it as early as 1933 for the Mingxing company, from a screenplay by Xia Yan. It appeared in French in Beijing in 1958, then in Paris in 1980, and in English in the translation by Sidney Shapiro.
Who it is for
A short story, which can be read on its own; a little economic history of China in the thirties sheds light on what is at stake in it.
Prizes and reception
Britannica regards its author as the greatest realist novelist of Republican China; the story was brought to the screen as early as 1933.
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