ABSTRACT
After arriving in Hong Kong, desperately ill and emotionally spent, Xiao Hong surprised (and, for the most part, displeased) her readers and the writing community by publishing the first volume of a planned trilogy, a comic satire entitled Ma Bole (1940; Ma Bo-Ie); the second volume appeared in serialized form on the eve of the author's death several months later. Satire, an underdeveloped form in China, has generally appeared only in novels of fantasy. Xiao Hong, however, created a comical (eponymous) character who mocks the patriotism of his era and trivializes the war raging around him. It would take nearly half a century before other Chinese authors would feel sufficiently confident of their comic vision and secure enough politically to break free of Sinocentric realist conventions (socialist and otherwise) and treat contemporary life in China with this sort of barbed humor.
