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

The most celebrated passage in Tales of Hulan River belongs to vegetables. Squash vines may climb the trellis or the roof. A cucumber may produce fruit or open a flower that produces nothing. Corn may grow as high as it pleases. If these living things choose nothing at all—no fruit, no blossom—no one asks them to account for it.

The passage is remembered for summer abundance and the imaginative freedom of childhood. It is both. It is also the novel's most compact definition of liberty, and the definition lies not in the reach of the vines but in the absence of interrogation.

Nothing in the garden is sovereign. Plants remain vulnerable to weather, insects, hands, and time. Freedom does not mean unlimited power to achieve whatever one wants. It means that existence is not immediately converted into a question asked by someone entitled to correct the answer.

I. The right not to provide a reason

The previous essays show what such questions do elsewhere in Hulan. Why is the child bride tall, hungry, upright, and unashamed? Why has Big Sister Wang chosen a poor mill worker? Why does Harelip Feng continue when the town has declared his life impossible? The questions arrive with answers already prepared.

The child cannot explain why she inhabits her body as she does, because no explanation should be necessary. Her inability becomes further evidence that adults must interpret and repair her. Big Sister Wang's choice is likewise translated into a defective character. Interrogation appears to seek knowledge while actually enforcing a specification.

Second Uncle You complicates the pattern. In one sense, no one asks him anything because few people take his inner life seriously. That neglect is not the garden's freedom. The garden joins non-interrogation to presence: someone sees what grows without demanding that it become useful or properly shaped. Second Uncle You receives neither sustained attention nor release from the hierarchy he inhabits.

The non-fruiting cucumber flower is therefore essential. A plant that bears food can justify its space through output. A “false” flower, as the Chinese phrase names it, fails that test. In the garden it does not need another function. It may bloom without becoming evidence of future yield.

Freedom begins where existence no longer has to submit a defense.

II. The person who makes the garden possible

The physical garden does not create this condition by itself. It contains ordinary vegetables, weeds, insects, tools, and crops meant to be eaten. Its difference emerges through the narrator's grandfather.

He is nearly seventy during the remembered scenes. He wears a broad straw hat, and the child wears a smaller one. He plants; she imitates planting. He weeds; she joins the work without reliably distinguishing crop from weed.

On one occasion she hoes up grain while preserving foxtail grass that resembles it. The mistake produces a real loss. Her grandfather discovers what happened and laughs. He shows her the grain head and explains the difference. When her attention moves elsewhere and she runs off after another interest, he lets the lesson end.

The scene should not be romanticized into a world without instruction. He teaches names, poems, and gardening; crops still matter. The significant feature is that error does not become a judgment of character. He corrects the identification without deciding that the child herself must be corrected into a more obedient form.

Elsewhere, the grandmother responds to a child's damage of a paper window by pricking her finger with a needle. That small punishment is not morally equivalent to the Hu family's torture. Yet it belongs to a familiar pedagogy: pain fixes the rule in the body. The grandfather's laughter demonstrates another possibility. Learning can occur without making suffering the proof that authority is serious.

III. What he does not demand

It would be wrong to say the grandfather gives the child nothing. He gives affection, companionship, language, food, shelter, stories, and a model of attention. What he does not give is a program designed to turn her into a future asset.

She recites poetry noisily and imperfectly. She abandons botanical instruction. Her help may reduce rather than increase the harvest. The grandfather does not calculate these encounters by the skills they produce. He does not make his patience conditional on visible progress.

This restraint is an action, even though it often takes the form of not doing. He does not ask every impulse to justify itself. He does not turn a mistake into a defect of nature. He does not treat childhood solely as raw material for a useful adult.

The distinction matters because “giving freedom” is often imagined as the transfer of resources or power. Those can be indispensable. The grandfather controls neither the town nor the future, and the novel never makes him a political reformer. Within the relation available to him, however, he can refuse the ordinary conversion of care into manufacture.

His gaze differs from both neglect and appraisal. Neglect leaves a person unseen. Appraisal sees only what can be improved, exchanged, or condemned. The grandfather watches closely enough to notice the uprooted grain, and gently enough to let the child run toward the next thing.

The garden is free because attention does not automatically become correction.

IV. A garden is not a rescue of Hulan

The garden is only the size of a family yard. Outside it, the mud pit remains, temple figures retain their expressions, and household discipline continues. Nothing in the novel suggests that the child's summers transform the town.

Nor should the grandfather be assigned responsibility for every cruelty narrated elsewhere. The chronology and scope of his knowledge do not establish that he knew of the child bride's ordeal or could have intervened. The important contrast is formal and ethical, not an accusation that a benevolent man ignored an event occurring within his reach.

The garden's difference also depends heavily on one mortal relationship. The epilogue counts the ages with painful simplicity: the grandfather was already old when the narrator was born; he grew older as she grew; eventually he died. The former owner of the garden is gone, and the younger one has left.

No institution preserves his mode of attention. He does not convert laughter into a household rule, persuade the town, or leave a successor charged with maintaining the space. Once the relation ends, the particular freedom it sustained is no longer available in the same form.

This limit prevents nostalgia from becoming redemption. A happy garden does not balance the death of the child bride. The exception may even sharpen the indictment: Hulan's violence was not the only imaginable way for adults to meet a child. Another way existed in one yard, without requiring philosophical knowledge or extraordinary wealth.

V. Reconstructing a place she could not recover

Xiao Hong completed Tales of Hulan River in Hong Kong in 1940. The route between childhood and writing was not a single clean escape. She resisted an arranged marriage and made two attempts to pursue life and study in Beiping; after family support was cut off, the first attempt ended in a return. Later came renewed departure, poverty, literary work, relationships, war, and movement across cities.

By 1940, Japanese occupation made her native Northeast inaccessible. Her grandfather was dead, childhood could not be revisited, and the garden existed for the writer primarily through memory. She was twenty-nine while completing the book and already seriously ill.

Xiao Hong died in wartime Hong Kong in January 1942 at the age of thirty, amid displacement, grave illness, and medical confusion that included misdiagnosis and harmful intervention. It is tempting to turn this biography into the key that explains every page. The novel resists that simplification as firmly as its people resist the town's labels.

Still, the circumstances alter the force of its precision. The narrative counts colors of butterflies, positions of vines, insects in sunlight, poems recited beside an old man, and the difference between grain and foxtail grass. These details do not reconstruct an untouched paradise. They preserve a form of relation after return has become impossible.

The epilogue does not claim that the memories form an important or beautiful story. It says, in effect, that they filled childhood and could not be forgotten, so they were recorded. Like the “useless” flower, the book declines to justify remembrance by promising a practical result.

VI. Freedom at the scale of a relation

Across the four essays, Hulan appears as a system of questions whose answers precede the people questioned. A child bride must resemble submission. Big Sister Wang's strength must serve an approved marriage. Second Uncle You must borrow dignity from a rank. Harelip Feng is expected to turn suffering into proof of the town's wisdom.

The garden does not overthrow this order. It suspends the order between an old man and a child. Its freedom is radically small: to be watched without being measured, taught without being remade, and allowed to produce nothing without forfeiting one's place.

That smallness is not a reason to dismiss it. Grand declarations of liberty often begin from an already independent adult. Xiao Hong asks what liberty looks like before power—when a child, plant, or flower depends on a world it cannot command. The answer is relational. Someone with the capacity to demand an account chooses not to demand one.

The mother-in-law in Chapter Five never possessed such freedom herself. She was formed by punishment and handed its measure onward. This history does not excuse her violence, but it reveals why liberation cannot mean only moving from the struck end of the ruler to the end that holds it.

Near the close, the narrator imagines that the butterflies, grasshoppers, and dragonflies may still return year after year. The word is “perhaps.” She cannot verify the garden from afar, and memory does not authorize certainty.

What the novel can preserve is the condition once created there: squash may climb, a flower may fail to fruit, a child may abandon the lesson, and no one asks why it is that way. For a few years in one yard, existence did not have to become an argument for its own permission.

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.