Edition note: An independent English rewriting of the Chinese essay, with names romanized in pinyin.

On East Second Street in Hulan stands a mud pit five or six feet deep. Rain turns it into a swamp. Horses become trapped, carts overturn, pigs drown, and children fall in. Everyone knows the location and the danger. No one fills it.

The townspeople are not without ideas. One proposal would remove part of a neighboring wall so pedestrians can pass elsewhere. Another would plant trees beside the pit, giving anyone who falls something to grab. Xiao Hong lists the improvements and then lets their shared omission become visible: no one suggests bringing earth and eliminating the hole.

The pit is more than neglected infrastructure. It is a compact model of Hulan's social intelligence. People understand the problem, discuss it energetically, and organize their understanding around the condition that the problem must remain.

I. A danger with social uses

The first use is entertainment. When an animal or cart sinks, the street acquires an event. People gather, comment, pull, advise, and retell. A town whose days otherwise repeat has been given suspense without needing a theater.

This does not mean residents consciously vote to injure the next traveler. Their pleasure and the danger can remain mentally separate. The pit is simply there; once an accident occurs, watching and helping seem natural. Yet the reliable supply of excitement makes removal less imaginable. A defect woven into communal routine stops appearing as a defect that could end.

The mechanism resembles the Hu courtyard in the previous essay. Spectators do not necessarily desire suffering. They arrive because something is happening, and their arrival turns the suffering into a public occasion with its own momentum. Concern and curiosity occupy the same bodies.

Calling this laziness would be too easy. Laziness describes a failure to spend effort. Hulan spends abundant effort discussing the pit, rescuing what falls into it, and designing ways to live around it. The activity is real. What remains unavailable is the act that would make the activity unnecessary.

II. The pit supplies an alibi

The second use is more revealing. Cheap pork appears in the market, and buyers suspect that some of it comes from diseased animals. The mud pit supplies another story: the pig drowned. Meat from an accident can be eaten with fewer questions than meat from an epidemic.

No deception needs to persuade anyone completely. Families can know what the low price probably means and repeat the safer explanation at the same time. The explanation is not information; it is permission. It lets appetite proceed without requiring an explicit decision to feed diseased meat to one's household.

When a child at the table names the pork as diseased, his mother slaps him. The punishment does not protect a secret. Everyone already possesses the relevant suspicion. It protects the convention that knowing and saying may be separated.

The mud pit's most valuable product is a sentence people can use against their own knowledge.

A danger that performs this service becomes difficult to remove. Fill the pit, and a future carcass can no longer be called drowned. The community would lose not only spectacle but a vocabulary for remaining innocent in its own eyes.

III. Public grandeur with another addressee

Hulan is not a town without communal life. Its annual calendar includes shamanic rites, yangge performances, river lanterns, outdoor opera, and the temple fair on the eighteenth day of the fourth lunar month. People dress, buy, visit, crowd the streets, and experience some of the year's most intense collective pleasure.

After describing this vitality, Xiao Hong offers a deliberately cold summary: the grand occasions are staged for ghosts and gods, not for human beings. River lanterns guide drowned and wandering souls. Opera is presented before divine spectators. Temple fairs honor sacred figures. The living enjoy the light, commerce, performance, and crowd almost as incidental beneficiaries.

The statement is satirical rather than a literal claim that no festival serves any living interest. Vendors earn money; relatives meet; children see wonders. But the official addressee matters. Hulan can mobilize beauty, expense, and labor on behalf of an invisible order more easily than it can organize sustained attention around a vulnerable child.

When the lanterns drift away, the crowd disperses and the river becomes dark again. The contrast does not prove that the participants felt nothing. It reveals how quickly intensity ends once the ritual obligation has been met. The living pleasure borrowed the ceremony's light; it did not become a durable provision for living needs.

IV. An explanation designed never to fail

Shamanic treatment in the novel operates through established roles: the drum begins, divine presence is invoked, and requirements are announced—an animal, cloth, money, another rite. If the patient recovers, the intervention has demonstrated its power. If the patient dies, the possessing force was unusually fierce, the household lacked sincerity, or the treatment began too late.

Any practice can sometimes fail. What distinguishes this explanatory system is that no possible outcome counts as evidence against it. Every result is translated into a reason to preserve the method.

This is not merely a problem of superstition opposed to modern truth. Secular institutions can protect themselves in the same form: success confirms the rule; failure proves that the rule was not applied strongly or early enough. The essential feature is closure. The procedure names every variable except itself.

The child bride's death therefore does not force Hulan to conclude that scalding baths and exorcism were wrong. Fate, spirits, expense, and timing remain available. The participants can grieve and still carry the method intact toward another household.

Again, structure does not erase degrees of personal responsibility. A ritual specialist who profits, a relative who orders violence, and a frightened neighbor who watches are not morally interchangeable. But each can locate a reason for continuing that does not require questioning the shared frame.

V. The standard has an address

At the fourth-month temple fair, visitors go first to the temple of the male deity and then to that of the goddess. Xiao Hong's narrator studies the clay figures. The male gods are made frightening, with expressions that produce submission. The goddess is gentle and compliant.

The narration then makes its satirical inference: men modeled these figures. Divine masculinity receives the power to terrify; idealized femininity receives softness. The arrangement teaches worshippers what authority and goodness should look like before anyone returns home to judge an actual woman.

The point is not that one temple statue mechanically causes every beating in Hulan. The statue gives a diffuse standard a visible address. Female compliance has been shaped in clay, painted, elevated, and incorporated into a yearly ritual. What might otherwise pass as individual preference acquires sacred repetition.

Return to the child bride's supposed faults: height, appetite, upright posture, quick movement, open laughter. Each makes her less like the patient goddess. The mother-in-law did not invent the specification on the day the girl arrived. The whole town possesses images, proverbs, ceremonies, and stories through which the specification feels self-evident.

The girl is not destroyed by a standard no one can see. Hulan keeps showing itself the standard.

This helps explain why local affection may coexist with enforcement. A person can believe she is protecting a girl by pushing her toward the only approved form of female safety. The belief is socially intelligible and morally disastrous.

VI. What has no stable place

Xiao Hong describes Hulan's response to birth, aging, and death with the same apparent simplicity she brings to seasons and weather. A child grows if it can; someone becomes old; death receives grief, burial, and then the routines of food and sleep resume.

It is tempting to call this coldness. Coldness is present, but it is not a sufficient explanation. The town can be emotionally intense: a spectacle excites it, a funeral feeds it, a ritual terrifies it, and a child's illness mobilizes tears and money. The problem is not an absence of feeling. It is the lack of a stable social position from which a particular living person's needs can interrupt the established use of feeling.

Ghosts have prescribed ceremonies. Gods have temples. The mud pit has spectacle and an alibi. The child bride has attention only after she becomes a problem to be corrected, a patient to be cured, and an event to be watched. What she wants as a living person never acquires comparable authority.

That is why the courtyard is not an isolated eruption in an otherwise healthy town. It condenses Hulan's ordinary operations. The city preserves what provides explanation, ritual, and amusement even when those arrangements fail the people inside them.

The next essay asks what happens to individuals who seek recognition within this order or act outside its permission. Second Uncle You owns almost nothing and fights over the honorific attached to his name. Big Sister Wang is praised until she chooses Harelip Feng for herself. The town then waits for the couple's life to prove that its judgment was right.

Primary text: Xiao Hong, Tales of Hulan River (《呼兰河传》), completed in Hong Kong in 1940 and first published in book form in 1941.