Border Town: Cuicui Is Not Waiting for a Fairy-Tale Ending

100 Works of World Literature · Article 93

# Border Town: Cuicui Is Not Waiting for a Fairy-Tale Ending

At a ferry outside Chadong in western Hunan, an old ferryman raises his granddaughter Cuicui beneath a white pagoda. They take travellers across the river without charging them. Dragon-boat drums, mountain songs, stilted houses, trade boats, and clear water make the place appear ordered and serene. During a Dragon Boat Festival, Cuicui meets Nuosong, the younger son of the respected fleetmaster Shunshun. Affection grows through misunderstanding and shyness. Nuosong’s elder brother Tianbao loves her too. The brothers do not fight over possession; they agree to sing and let Cuicui’s response decide.

Goodness, however, does not guarantee understanding. Cuicui cannot state her preference openly. Her grandfather fears choosing wrongly for her. Tianbao withdraws and later drowns. Nuosong leaves under grief, guilt, family pressure, and unresolved suspicion. A storm ruins the ferry, brings down the white pagoda, and kills the grandfather. Cuicui remains to work the crossing and wait for a man who may never return—or may return tomorrow.

Shen Congwen’s Border Town is often called a pastoral, a lyric novella, or a tragic love story of western Hunan. Each term helps and can turn the book into a scenic postcard. Its deeper question is why a caring community still fails to understand itself: custom gives lovers a language yet inhibits direct speech; protection shelters a young woman while withholding information; and waiting becomes not a frozen emblem of purity but part of Cuicui’s movement from cared-for child to responsible ferryman.

The 1934 Chadong story

• Author: Shen Congwen (1902–1988), born Shen Yuehuan in Fenghuang, Hunan, and shaped profoundly by western Hunan.
• Serialisation: begun in Guowen Weekly in January 1934, interrupted, resumed in March, and completed in April.
• First book edition: Shanghai’s Shenghuo Bookstore, October 1934.
• Form: usually described as a novella, often more specifically as a lyric or poetic novella.
• Place: Chadong, its river, ferry, docks, neighbouring hills, and regional routes.
• English: several translations appeared across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; Jeffrey C. Kinkley’s Border Town was published in 2009.

This border is not an untouched utopia outside history. There are merchant boats, soldiers, goods, sex workers, marriage property, local authority, and external markets. People keep moving through it. The ferry matters precisely because the town is connected.

Why place comes before romance

The opening establishes river channels, town, ferry, pagoda, work, and festival before developing love.

Place is not décor. Local life supplies the forms of feeling: Nuosong first protects Cuicui by the water; the brothers compete through mountain songs; Tianbao leaves downstream; the grandfather dies in a storm; Cuicui inherits the crossing.

The plot does not sit upon scenery. It is made from transport, labour, season, and custom.

The ferryman’s refusal of payment

Cuicui’s grandfather is old and poor but treats the ferry as a public duty. He refuses fares, returns coins, or spends unwanted money on tea and tobacco to share with travellers.

The habit is not economic ignorance. It protects an identity: his value lies in reliable service rather than extraction from every crossing.

Cuicui inherits this ethic. At the end she receives no romantic monument. She receives work that has to be done every day.

Cuicui beyond the “natural girl”

Cuicui lives with grandfather and yellow dog. Healthy and perceptive, she has not yet acquired a public language for desire. The narration compares her to hills, water, plants, and young animals, presenting a life supposedly uncorrupted by urban calculation.

Nature must not mean mental emptiness. She fears abandonment, remembers Nuosong’s kindness, detects marriage beneath casual words, and sometimes uses silence to resist being decided for.

Her problem is not absence of thought but absence of an equal social position from which thought can be said.

Her parents and the inherited fear

Cuicui’s mother, the ferryman’s only daughter, loved a garrison soldier. Their relationship found no viable social path. The father died by suicide; after giving birth, the mother poisoned herself.

The grandfather raises the child and fears a repetition. He will neither force her towards a man she does not love nor leave her future entirely unprotected.

Protection and anxiety have the same source. His tenderness becomes a habit of hint, test, and delay.

A Dragon Boat meeting made of error

Cuicui waits by the river when her grandfather fails to collect her. Darkness comes. She is alone with the dog, frightened and angry. Nuosong returns from the races, learns that she lacks an escort, and arranges her safe journey home.

She initially misreads a joke as insult and abuses him. Shame joins gratitude after she understands his intention.

Love begins not in perfect recognition but in mishearing, correction, and remembered care. Festival drums will keep returning her to that moment.

Shunshun and his sons are not villains

Shunshun is a respected manager of boats and dock affairs, wealthier and more influential than the ferryman. His elder son is Tianbao; his younger is Nuosong.

A conventional romance would make the father an obstacle. Shunshun initially respects Cuicui and does not simply reject a poor household.

His later coldness comes from bereavement, suspicion, and wounded family authority. It should not be reduced to greed, although grief does not make his judgement fair.

Tianbao’s formal road

Tianbao is direct and seeks Cuicui through a formal proposal. He values her and believes his household can offer security.

The grandfather cannot accept without Cuicui; she cannot answer without embarrassment. Tianbao receives neither refusal nor consent.

He is not a brutal claimant. Discovering his brother’s love, he agrees to a fairer test and ultimately withdraws.

Why Nuosong enters her dream

Nuosong’s bond with Cuicui precedes matchmaking. His voice, boat, and festival kindness inhabit feelings she cannot explain.

Hearing song, she dreams of being carried to a cliff to pick tiger-ear grass. Desire becomes an upward reach: beautiful, dangerous, and beyond ordinary footing.

Daylight does not allow “I choose Nuosong”. Dream performs the movement. Lyricism becomes a language available to someone without direct speech.

The cart road and horse road

Courtship follows two metaphorical routes. The cart road is a matchmaker’s formal proposal between households. The horse road is nocturnal singing by which a young woman hears and responds to a suitor.

Tianbao begins with the cart road; Nuosong is gifted on the horse road. These are not simply repression versus freedom. Formal negotiation gives social protection; song gives preference room to emerge.

Trouble comes when both operate simultaneously while nobody possesses the same information.

Brothers who do not become enemies

On discovering their shared love, Tianbao and Nuosong do not fight or use wealth to possess Cuicui. They decide to sing in turn and accept her response.

Nuosong is the better singer. Tianbao recognises his disadvantage and leaves Chadong to travel and trade.

His generosity makes the tragedy harder. No villain earns punishment. Affection, pride, accident, and silence combine—and his withdrawal later prevents Nuosong from accepting marriage as a clean victory.

Why grandfather asks without learning

The old man wants Cuicui’s preference and fears humiliating her with a direct question. He circles through jokes, stories, proposals, and songs. Her shyness magnifies his uncertainty.

With Shunshun, he avoids appearing to pursue wealth. With Tianbao’s intermediary, he cannot promise his granddaughter. With Nuosong, he wants a guarantee.

Every step has an ethical reason and the sequence produces confusion. People communicate continuously, but each uses the form considered decent.

Tianbao’s death is not punishment

After withdrawing, Tianbao travels downstream and accidentally drowns. The book does not punish a failed suitor or make Cuicui morally responsible.

The river transports people and goods and abruptly kills. Its double nature becomes complete: it sustains Chadong and gives no promise of safety.

Death changes every relation. Nuosong bears fraternal guilt, Shunshun seeks an explanation for loss, and the grandfather fears that his hesitation harmed someone.

Who is responsible?

There is no case to close. Tianbao chose to leave; an accident occurred. The ferryman did not deceive him, Cuicui did not promise him, and Nuosong did not drive him away.

Mourning nevertheless converts contingency into cause. Shunshun associates the death with the failed proposal; the grandfather internalises blame.

Absence of legal fault does not prevent emotional prosecution. A community can fracture around suspicion that cannot be proved or removed.

Mill and ferry beyond money versus love

A wealthy family offers a grain mill as dowry if Nuosong marries their daughter. The mill represents accumulable property, regular income, and a secure alliance. The ferry represents Cuicui’s household and a public service maintained through daily labour.

Nuosong had preferred Cuicui and the ferry. After Tianbao’s death, the choice includes father, family continuity, livelihood, and guilt.

“Money versus love” is inadequate. These are rival structures of life: private security through property and belonging sustained through affection, reputation, and work.

Shunshun’s understandable and unjust grief

Shunshun loses one son while the other becomes estranged by the marriage question. He grows cold towards the ferryman.

His pain is real. It does not grant a fair causal judgement. Linking the accident to Cuicui’s household transfers loss onto a girl with little decision-making power.

The novel neither demonises Shunshun nor treats patriarchal sorrow as a verdict.

Why Nuosong leaves

Nuosong cannot marry Cuicui as though he had merely won a contest. His brother’s death, his father’s mood, the mill proposal, misunderstandings, and guilt converge.

He leaves Chadong without an absolute renunciation or a dependable date of return. Waiting becomes unequal: the traveller has movement; the person left behind carries daily uncertainty.

Nuosong deserves sympathy, not exemption. His departure extends the failure of speech.

Grandfather’s final efforts

The old man tries to clarify Shunshun’s and Nuosong’s intentions and to secure a marriage that will not wound Cuicui. The more anxious he becomes, the more indirect his speech; his questions can look like calculation or pressure.

He lacks the social power to demand an explicit reply. He relies on courtesy, old ties, and inference. Age, poverty, and memory of his daughter exhaust him.

Good intention without equal information and voice can fail. The novel honours his love by showing its capacity and limit together.

The storm and a nature without moral intention

Thunderstorm, river, wind, and night destroy the crossing. The white pagoda falls; house and ferry are damaged; the grandfather dies.

The same landscape that carried festival and desire now brings destruction. An untouched pastoral paradise cannot explain this night.

Shen’s nature neither rewards goodness nor punishes error. Human beings rebuild within change.

What Cuicui loses with grandfather

She loses family and the person who mediated past and society. He knew her parents, Shunshun, the docks, ferry rules, and how to protect her from adult risk.

His death makes unsaid questions irretrievable. Some misunderstandings will receive no complete answer; some love survives only in fragments organised by others.

Growing up is not exhilarating liberation. It is rising to work after the carer disappears.

Yang Mabing and practical community

Yang Mabing belongs to the grandfather’s generation. He helps organise the burial, repair life, and tell Cuicui what can be told of family and local history.

He cannot replace grandfather but prevents total isolation. The community persists beyond the failed marriage through concrete mutual aid.

The book is therefore not sealed individual tragedy. Custom can injure; neighbours’ work can make survival possible.

The pagoda rebuilt

The white pagoda marks the ferry and Cuicui’s childhood order. Its collapse beside the grandfather’s death gives physical form to a lost support.

People rebuild it. Reconstruction cannot revive him or ensure Nuosong’s return. It restores a public shape without erasing private damage.

Recovery does not reproduce the past. It builds habitable routine around an acknowledged absence.

Cuicui inherits the ferry

Summaries often leave her waiting, fixed as the riverbank girl. She also continues the ferry and assumes her grandfather’s work.

Waiting coexists with labour. She does not suspend life to prove purity. Within uncertainty she maintains other people’s passage and her own survival.

The ending becomes ethical maturation as well as romantic suspense. Whatever Nuosong does, Cuicui has become the person who takes others across.

What the open ending says

The novel does not confirm return. It holds contrary possibilities: Nuosong may never come back, or he may come tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not a coded happy promise. It is possibility that knowledge cannot remove. Cuicui does not know, and readers may not know for her.

We should resist completing the fairy tale. The actual ending is life continued without an answer; reunion remains future, not event.

Is waiting fidelity or confinement?

Tradition may praise Cuicui’s constancy. A modern reading asks why the man has mobility while female virtue appears as remaining.

The novel permits that question because her choice is mediated by grandfather, brothers, Shunshun, and custom. She never receives an equal conversation with Nuosong about their future.

Yet this does not erase agency. She waits, works, learns, and mourns. Critical reading must hold structural constraint and action within it together.

Mountain song as social institution

Song is more than lyrical soundtrack. It governs who sings at night, who hears within the house, and how personal preference becomes socially legible.

It can bypass household bargaining and still depends upon recognition and response. Cuicui answers in dream but makes no public confirmation.

Art expands expression but cannot replace conversation. A song can awaken desire; it cannot negotiate a shared life alone.

The repeated Dragon Boat Festival

Festival gathers contest, commerce, ritual, entertainment, and courtship on the river. Racing displays young men’s ability; watching creates encounter and evaluation.

Cuicui’s first meeting with Nuosong remains bound to drums. Each later festival measures change—who remains and who has disappeared.

The festival recurs; life does not. Drums can sound again, but an encounter cannot be repeated identically.

A ferry at the border

The title can make the border seem like a closed margin. The book places a ferry at its centre. Here the boundary is a waterway constantly crossed, not a wall.

Merchants, villagers, soldiers, and boatmen move with news, goods, marriages, and danger. Cuicui’s family does not guard exclusion; it enables passage.

The edge is a place of contact, translation, and misunderstanding among lives, not stasis outside civilisation.

Literature, not an ethnographic transcript

The work uses geography, custom, and speech known to Shen but is neither census nor complete ethnography. It selects and idealises relationships to create a literary and ethical world.

Shen described an aspiration towards a form of life that was beautiful, healthy, natural, and human. That aspiration can be admired beside poverty, patriarchy, restricted female choice, and death.

Literary truth does not make every detail representative of western Hunan. Treating one novel as the region’s single guide turns a living place back into an outsider’s fantasy.

The accuracy and danger of “pastoral”

Rhythm, landscape, and human relations justify the term. Characters usually have goodwill; the language avoids urban satire; work and festival carry beauty.

The label becomes dangerous when it hides the parents’ suicides, Tianbao’s drowning, marriage property, paternal authority, and Cuicui’s limited voice.

Mature reading need not choose admiration or exposure. Beauty can be real while violence and limitation remain inside it.

Tragedy without a villain

Grandfather loves Cuicui. The brothers show generosity. Shunshun is not a greedy tyrant. Cuicui deceives nobody. Nuosong is not playing with her.

Tragedy emerges from unequal information, decorous indirection, status difference, accident, and displaced grief. Each person makes a partly intelligible choice; together those choices produce a life nobody intended.

Everyday harm often comes from systemic misalignment without deliberate malice.

Protection as Cuicui’s boundary

Grandfather wishes the final choice to be hers, a genuine respect. He also filters messages, tests the men, and conceals his anxiety.

She is protected and separated from information that determines her future. The carer becomes bridge and threshold.

Respecting choice requires more than avoiding coercion. It requires information, language, and an opportunity to bear one’s decision.

Nuosong: love does not cancel responsibility

Nuosong is kind, capable, and affectionate. From their first meeting he ensures Cuicui’s safety, and he chooses song rather than property as his means of courtship.

His grief and guilt after Tianbao’s death are credible. Leaving without clarity makes Cuicui carry uncertainty.

Understanding is not acquittal. A lovable person can injure another through silence.

Cuicui: from dream ascent to daily crossing

In the first half, song carries Cuicui in dream towards tiger-ear grass on a cliff. Desire can appear only through an image of ascent.

After pagoda, death, and departure, she takes up the ferry. Imagined climbing becomes an actual horizontal crossing.

This is not the abandonment of love but a change in subjecthood. Her future is no longer only whom she will marry; it includes work and place that she sustains.

Why the prose feels clear

Shen builds transparency through short sentences, folk cadence, restrained dialogue, weather, dogs, drums, and river surfaces. Large emotions are seldom explained abstractly.

The narrator sometimes approaches with tenderness and sometimes withdraws, letting readers recognise how misunderstanding forms.

The more beautiful the prose, the more attention should go to unsaid pressure. Lyricism makes silence perceptible; it does not eliminate silence.

A practical reading method

On a first reading, mark the festival encounters, two courtship roads, Tianbao’s departure, the storm, and the final waiting.

Next, make columns for Cuicui, grandfather, Tianbao, Nuosong, and Shunshun. At each change, note what each knows, assumes, and fails to tell whom.

Finally, trace river, ferry, pagoda, and song. Record when each connects, endangers, or changes from scenic image into responsibility.

Why it remains necessary

Instant messaging has not ended indirect tests, protective filtering, or silence that delegates decisions to circumstance.

Property, career, family, and marriage still create choices like mill and ferry. The question is not love or money alone, but which form of life distributes cost to whom.

Care is not automatically understanding. Good intention requires clear expression, equal information, and permission for another person to choose against our hopes.

Conclusion: tomorrow is not a guarantee

If the only question is whether Nuosong returns, Border Town becomes a romance quiz without a key. More important facts are established: grandfather is dead, the pagoda has been rebuilt, and Cuicui works the ferry. She cannot postpone life until knowledge arrives.

Beauty did not prevent death; goodness did not prevent misunderstanding. Yet life is not wholly destroyed. Yang Mabing helps bury the dead, neighbours rebuild, and Cuicui keeps the crossing open. A community persists through material work rather than a perfect ending.

Nuosong may never return, or he may return tomorrow. Neither possibility cancels Cuicui’s achieved transformation. The child who once waited in the dark for grandfather to take her home now takes other people across the river. Waiting is no longer life surrendered to a distant lover. It is responsibility carried through an uncertain present.

Further reading and sources

• China Writers Association: Shen Congwen and Border Town
• China Writers Association: the 1934 first edition
• China Writers Association: serialisation and publication history
• Museum of Modern Chinese Literature: edition and serial record
• China Writers Association: rereading the novella at ninety
• Jeffrey C. Kinkley: English translation and reception of Border Town
• Google Books: Jeffrey C. Kinkley’s English edition