IMPERFECT PARADISE By Shen Congwen. Edited by Jeffrey Kinkley. Translated by Jeffrey Kinkley, Peter Li, William MacDonald, Caroline Mason and David Pollard. 537 pp. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. $42.

THIS has been a hard century for China's writers. Dynastic collapse, civil war, Japanese invasion and the insistent pressures of dictatorial one-party governments have formed their political contexts. Their own once-hallowed language, with its rich traditions and endless subtleties, has been subject to constant assault and reconfiguration in the name of accessibility and modernity. Groping for order in the chaos, they have had to adjust their styles to the cadences of ordinary speech, and at the same time to absorb a bewildering mass of new foreign influences and concepts. As the century nears its end, only a handful among them can be clearly seen to have had a creative center so strong that they could overcome these challenges, forging a unified and enduring body of truly rich and original work. Among them is Shen Congwen.

Shen was born in the western part of Hunan province in 1902, to a family with military traditions going back several generations. The region in which he grew up was an area of wild rivers, hills and forests, a place where little influence from the newly emerging east coast urban centers had yet penetrated. After a brief stint in a local military academy, Shen was assigned at the age of 15 to a regiment stationed in a Hunan country town; there he performed mainly clerical work.

The regiment's supposed task was to keep the peace and cleanse the surrounding areas of bandits, but military action was sporadic, and Shen had ample time to observe the minutiae of garrison life, as well as the soldiers' responses to the civilians among whom they were stationed. He also noted carefully the rhythms of life of the Tujia and Miao tribal peoples who farmed, fished and hunted in the surrounding countryside. And he read voraciously: not only Chinese traditional and modern works but foreign literature in translation. By 1922, after some years of wandering, he settled in Beijing, determined to be a writer. By 1935 he had already completed 35 volumes of work: short stories, essays, vignettes, novels and transcriptions of Miao songs and rural tales.

Shen is unusual among major 20th-century Chinese writers in his refusal to be political. If politics impinge at all on his work, it is only to set the scene, and the details are always left hazy. What absorbs him, as can be seen so well in this new collection of translations, is human dignity and genuine emotion -- the ways that men and women are capable of responding to each other, and the ways that those responses relate to their culture's past and present.

This is not a naive rustic utopianism, as the book's editor, Jeffrey Kinkley (the leading expert in the West on the work of Shen Congwen and the translator of a number of the entries in this volume), makes clear in his choice of a title, "Imperfect Paradise." Shen's bygone world of western Hunan does look like paradise, and both the tribal peoples and the Han Chinese who live there are often of startling strength and physical beauty, and unsullied by the corruption that seeps across China from the eastern cities. But the inhabitants of this remote countryside are also capable of extraordinary violence and cruelty, and their stoicism can be so blinkered that at times it becomes indistinguishable from stupidity, causing irreparable damage to themselves and to those they most dearly love.

Shen Congwen is an expert on loss. This can be seen in many of his finest stories. "The Husband," for example, is a powerful and absorbing account of a married woman from the country who helps support her family by working in a brothel boat moored on a riverbank outside a market town. Here the loss is apparent in the face and gestures -- even in the cramped and uneasy sleep -- of the woman's husband as he comes on a rare visit to see her, and finds that he too must wait his turn. In "Guisheng," another simple countryman is partly done out of his chance for a lifetime's happiness by the superior wealth of the local elite family, but it is mainly his own gullibility and stubbornness that cause his ruin. "Sansan" features one of the most lyrically etched adolescent girls in Shen's fiction, a heroine who endures a double loss -- of her work in a mill, with its tranquil pond, and of the imagined love of an ailing man from the city. In "The Vegetable Garden," a widowed mother who has created her own ordered world through hard work and skill sees her only son snatched away by an incomprehensible act of official violence.

There is no doubt that Shen is a man who loves women, and he describes them in many ages, moods and modes. Their worlds of strength and dignity are most effectively contrasted with those of the men around them in the group of stories that draw on Shen's army and garrison-town experience. Especially in "Staff Adviser," written in 1935, he shows absolute mastery in contrasting the fleshly greed of the title character (as he gleefully gobbles down his noontime meal of stewed bull penis, cabbage soup and Scotch whisky) with the largely unseen world of the man's pregnant wife and child. This story, along with "My Education," written in 1929, gives perhaps the best descriptions extant of garrison and warlord life in China. In "The Company Commander," written in 1927 at the beginning of Shen's greatest creative decade and translated here with the skill and sensitivity shown throughout the collection, the military world is drawn together into the world of loss -- "passive, helpless, possessive" -- with an extraordinary economy and freshness.

At one point in the story, yielding to the entreaties of his mistress, an officer reluctantly remains with her through a snow-filled evening rather than return to camp:

"Deprived of drink, the company commander regarded the outline of the woman, now turned away from him, by the light of the faint blue flames of the brazier beside him; he still uttered no word. Then out of boredom he swept together the husks of the peanuts and chestnuts on his lap, on the table and from beside the brazier and strewed them on top of the burning charcoal. First they smoked and crackled, then burst all together into roaring flames. In this blaze the company commander could see that the woman's face was streaked with tears. Nodding his head, close shaven in army style, he said husk ily he would obey her order and not go back to the barracks."

As any fine writer must, Shen experimented by describing situations and moods that were outside his ordinary realm. It is to Mr. Kinkley's credit that he includes stories that are not always successful but show Shen's varied attempts to move beyond the depictions of rural, tribal and army life for which he was best known. These include "Quiet," which tracks the thoughts of a teen-age girl, a refugee in the countryside, as she looks after her little nephew and waits for her father to come back to her; "The Housewife" and "Gazing at Rainbows," which depict the anomie of an uneasy marriage and the varied worlds of erotic stimulation within a relationship; and several stories that in different ways illuminate or parody the mental and sensual worlds of university professors, whose ranks Shen himself eventually joined as a teacher of literature.

IN the 1935 story "Big Ruan and Little Ruan," Shen is overtly satirical as he sketches the school days and subsequent careers of two young men in republican China. Each joins one of the two groups into which the schoolboys have divided themselves, the Gentleman's Society and the Cudgel Club; these titles and the values they express stay with the young men as one becomes an amoral bounder, the other an amoral political activist. This is one of the few Shen Congwen stories that deal with political issues, and Little Ruan is perhaps one of the least sympathetic radicals in the 20th-century literature of any country. Cadging money from his landlord father so he can pay the rent on his garret, planning to "strike down this, abolish that," Little Ruan "ridiculed conservatism and sneered at compromise, so the life style from his days at school and in Shanghai continued developing in the new environment." But when Big Ruan hears indirectly that Little Ruan has starved to death in prison after a hunger strike, Shen joins with Big Ruan in an uncharacteristic reflection:

"He was very happy, and that was enough. In these strange times, many people looking for happiness fall down in silence and are gone forever. Others, among the living, tend to think that they live happily and that raising a family and being successful in everything makes them the backbone of society -- indispensable to it. Especially those like Big Ruan."

Shen wrote little fiction after the Japanese invasion of 1937, and though he stayed on in China under the Communists, he ceased fiction writing altogether. After enduring many "struggle sessions" on the ground that he was a "pro-bourgeois" writer, as well as a period of "thought reform" and an attempt at suicide, Shen found a kind of release by working in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Before his death in 1988, he wrote a distinguished history of Chinese textile design through the ages and a careful study of archaic bronze mirrors. These scholarly works have their virtues, but it is for the mirror that he held up to his own youthful world that Shen Congwen will be remembered.

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