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

Second Uncle You announces that he is going to hang himself. Preparations are visible enough to draw people into the courtyard. The audience grows. Then the death does not occur. He sits and smokes; the spectators leave laughing.

The episode is comic in Xiao Hong's deliberately uncomfortable way. A threat of death becomes another Hulan spectacle, and the man who produced it becomes the joke. Yet the scene also asks what sort of public attention remains available to someone whose ordinary life has ceased to register.

Second Uncle You and Harelip Feng occupy the final two chapters before the novel's epilogue. One spends his life demanding the right form of address. The other appears almost indifferent to the town's verdict. Placed together, they reveal two very different relations to a community that continuously measures human beings.

I. The last property is a form of address

Second Uncle You has worked in the household for roughly three decades. He has no land, house, wife, or children. He sleeps where space is available and has grown too old for the heavy labor that once defined his usefulness. Habit, as much as need, seems to keep him attached to the compound.

What he guards fiercely is the name other people use. He wants an address carrying respect: Second Uncle You, Elder You, perhaps a form suggesting a minor proprietor. A diminutive strips that respect away and can provoke a long argument.

The behavior is easy to read as ridiculous status hunger, a poor man's imitation of social superiors. Xiao Hong does not remove the comic vanity. But ridicule alone overlooks the material precision of the demand. Labor, youth, household authority, descendants, and property have all been denied or exhausted. The honorific is one of the last social signs capable of distinguishing an elderly worker from a worn implement.

He is not asking the town to make him powerful. He is asking its language to register that someone is there.

The request remains compromised by the hierarchy from which it borrows. “Uncle” and “master” confer recognition through rank rather than equality. Second Uncle You cannot imagine dignity outside the town's vocabulary, so he fights for a favorable position inside it. The same scale that diminishes him supplies the only mark he knows how to demand.

II. A threat of death as a bid for an audience

The novel does not grant direct access to Second Uncle You's psychology, and it would be too certain to state that he never intends to die. One possible reading of his repeated threats—hanging in one instance, a well in another—is that the announced death functions as a bid to be seen.

Ordinary presence no longer gathers anyone. A possible death does. Work stops, people approach, and for a brief interval every eye is directed toward the man who usually occupies the edge of the household. Hulan, which prepares elaborate rites for ghosts, becomes attentive as he approaches the category of the dead.

But an audience is not recognition. Spectators come for an outcome. When no body appears, the event has disappointed them, and the man himself becomes entertainment. After they disperse, the disputed name and exhausted social position remain unchanged.

Second Uncle You is also described speaking animatedly to bricks, stones, and sparrows while sometimes withholding speech from people. The detail can be treated as mere eccentricity. It can also suggest a history of failed address: objects do not mock the name by which he asks to be called.

This is an interpretation, not a diagnosis Xiao Hong supplies. Its force lies in the pattern. Hulan provides abundant looking but little sustained acknowledgment. To attract the former, a disregarded person may have to threaten the disappearance of the self he wants others to notice.

III. The praised woman does not change

Chapter Seven introduces Big Sister Wang, initially a model young woman in the town's estimation. People praise her looks, strength, competence, energetic walk, and capacity to build up a future household. Any family that receives her, they say, will be fortunate.

Then the compound discovers that she has made a life with Harelip Feng, the poor worker who makes sticky rice cakes in the mill. They have a child and live in conditions that offer little privacy or comfort.

The old compliments reverse almost instantly. Large eyes become evidence of impropriety. A vigorous stride becomes unfeminine. A strong voice and healthy body become coarse. The observers do not acquire new facts about her body; they reclassify the facts they already praised.

This reversal shows that the original admiration was conditional. Big Sister Wang's strength was valuable while the community imagined it transferred into an approved marriage and placed at the service of an approved household. Her qualities were appraised as future assets.

By choosing Harelip Feng herself, she removes those assets from the expected transaction. The offense is not simply sexual or romantic impropriety. She has exercised the authority to dispose of her own future, making the community's valuation irrelevant.

The response repairs the wounded system. If the highly valued woman has chosen a poor mill worker, either the collective judgment was powerless or the woman was never valuable. Hulan selects the second explanation and rereads every admired trait as an early warning sign.

IV. Praise and punishment share a ledger

The child bride in the first essay was punished because she failed to match the approved image: too tall, too hungry, too upright, insufficiently ashamed. Big Sister Wang initially matches it well enough to receive general praise. Their positions appear opposite.

The outcomes expose a common structure. The girl who fails the standard is corrected; the woman who satisfies it is valued for future use. Neither is secure as long as the town retains the right to decide what her qualities mean.

Big Sister Wang's fall therefore does not show that social praise is always false. She may genuinely be strong, handsome, capable, and generous. It shows that praise can remain a form of possession when it depends on the praised person following someone else's route.

Being highly priced is not the same as leaving the market.

Her self-directed choice reveals the price's conditions. Once she can no longer be imagined as a resource for the household others would select, the adjectives lose their favorable sign. The ledger does not describe her; it disciplines the circulation of her life.

V. The town requires a conclusion

Harelip Feng and Big Sister Wang live in the mill, exposed to bitter cold and poverty. Their first child has almost nothing for warmth. Neighbors gather news and predict the collapse that must follow such a match.

When Big Sister Wang dies after giving birth to their second child, the expected conclusion appears close. A poor widower now has two small children, one still needing constant care, along with the work that fed the household. Sympathy and fatalism mingle in the town's commentary: surely this is the end of him.

Simple malice does not fully explain the watching. Hulan needs the household to confirm a rule. A woman who chooses beneath her assigned value must be punished by the choice; a poor man who exceeds his place must discover that the attempt was impossible. If Harelip Feng continues, the community's retrospective condemnation of Big Sister Wang loses its evidentiary ending.

His suffering is therefore recruited into a public argument. The more impossible his position looks, the more neatly his anticipated failure will prove that the town understood life correctly.

This need for a conclusion resembles the self-sealing cure in the previous essay. The explanatory order turns any result into confirmation. If the family collapses, convention was right. If it persists briefly, greater suffering must still be coming. A life under observation becomes a delayed verdict.

VI. Harelip Feng does not take up the measure

Harelip Feng does not collapse. He rises, grinds grain, makes and sells his cakes, carries one child, feeds the other, and continues. Xiao Hong does not convert this persistence into triumph. The cold is still cold, Big Sister Wang remains dead, and labor does not abolish grief.

The narration suggests that he does not understand the extremity of his position and therefore does not experience the despair others prescribe for it. Read literally, that can make him sound simple-minded. Read within the novel's larger pattern, it marks a refusal—or perhaps an absence—of self-measurement by Hulan's standard.

Second Uncle You fights for a better mark on the town's scale. Big Sister Wang is first raised and then crushed by it. Harelip Feng behaves as though the question “Has the town declared me finished?” has no practical priority. The answer cannot feed either child, so he feeds them.

This is not heroic rebellion. Rebellion would address the town, contest its authority, and seek a changed judgment. Harelip Feng offers no speech. His daily activity simply prevents the judgment from becoming his own description.

Chapter Seven closes with life continuing: the older child can lead a small donkey to water; the younger can laugh and clap, showing new teeth. This is the end of the novel's main sequence of character chapters, not the end of the book. An epilogue still returns to Hulan, the household, and the vanished garden.

The child's smile does not redeem the deaths that precede it. It denies the town one desired conclusion. Harelip Feng has not won recognition, escaped poverty, or overturned the social order. He has kept living without making the verdict the measure of what remains possible.

The final essay turns to the space against which all three essays can be read: the grandfather's garden. There, squash, cucumber flowers, insects, and a child are not asked to justify the forms they take. Its freedom is real, but it is neither universal nor permanent. It lasts only within a small relation that will disappear.

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.