A World History of Chinese Literature 9781000895063, 9780367764883, 9780367764968, 9781003167198

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A WORLD HISTORY OF CHINESE LITERATURE

Providing a broad introduction to the area, A World History of Chinese Literature maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities – and without – at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world. The thematic focus allows for a broad number of key categories, such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative explorations of new topics and issues such as inter-arts performativity and transmediation. The sections cover the circulation and reception of China in world literature, as well as the worlds of: • • • • • •

Chinese literature across the globe Borders, oceans, and rainforests Comparative literary genres Translingual writers and scholars Gender configurations Translation and transmediation

With a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection intervenes in current debates on global Chinese literature, Sinophone and Sinoscript studies, and the production and reception of literary works by ethnic Chinese in non-Sinitic languages, as well as Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary tradition. It will be of interest to anyone working on or studying Chinese literature, language and culture, as well as world literatures in relation to China. Yingjin Zhang was Distinguished Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at the University of California, San Diego, as well as Visiting Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. His publications include The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (2022), New Chinese-Language Documentaries (Routledge, 2017), and Chinese Film Stars (Routledge, 2010).

A WORLD HISTORY OF CHINESE LITERATURE

Edited by Yingjin Zhang

Designed cover image: “Traces of the Immortal” (Xianzong) in The Complete Illustrated Righteous Snake (Xiuxiang Yiyao quanzhuan), based on a manuscript by Chen Yuqian, edited by Chen Shiqi and Yu Xiushan, 1809, 1–2. Full-text available at Waseda University Library. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Yingjin Zhang; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Yingjin Zhang to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-76488-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76496-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16719-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to the memory of Yingjin Zhang and turned out to be his last project. While we celebrate his life and legacy, we mourn that he will not enjoy the rest of his career and golden years with family and friends. He had long looked forward to an upcoming sabbatical, watching his little grandchildren grow up and eventually retiring. Though Yingjin left us, his personal and academic contributions endure. Over 30 years ago, he ventured halfway around the world in pursuit of new opportunities and built a fulfilling career that allowed him to frequently return, bridging a gap between East and West. He was selfless and hardworking, fulfilling every commitment on time and putting others first. We are proud of what he accomplished. Yingjin was a caring husband, loving father, and doting grandfather. We miss his intelligent and vibrant presence but take comfort in knowing that he truly enjoyed his time in the world and never wasted a minute. Many thanks to the contributors of this book, to Routledge for a decades-long partnership, and to the wider academic community for rich collaborations through Yingjin’s career. – The Zhang family

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CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Contributors

xi xiii

PART I

Overviews: Literature, History, and the Multiple Worlds 1 General Introduction Yingjin Zhang

1 3

2 Modern Chinese Literary Historiography David Der-wei Wang

22

PART II

Circulation and Reception of China in World Literature 3 Zeitgeist and Literature: The Reception of Chinese Literature in Germany Until the First Half of the Twentieth Century Weigui Fang 4 Paris and the Art of Transposition, 1920s–1940s Angie Chau 5 Line, Loop, Constellation: Classical Chinese Poetry Between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds Luo Hui

vii

33 35

49

62

Contents

6 A Decade Apart: Bridging the US and China Literary Systems, 2010–2021 Jonathan Stalling

74

PART III

Worlding Chinese Literature Across the Globe

85

7 Chinese Literature at Large: Wong Chin Foo’s Border-Crossing Writing Ping Zhu

87

8 Engaging the World in Republican Literature Liyan Qin

98

9 The Rise of Author Museums in the PRC: How Institutions Make World Literature Emily Graf

107

PART IV

Sinophone Worlds of Borderlands, Urban Jungles, and Rainforests

121

10 Yi Literature: Traditional and Contemporary Mark Bender

123

11 Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness Alvin K. Wong

133

12 Taiwanese Literature in the Early Twenty-First Century Kuei-fen Chiu

145

13 Of Other (Chinese) Spaces: Sinophone Literature and the Rainforest Andrea Bachner

156

PART V

Comparative Worlds of Literary Genres

167

14 Modern Chinese Drama Across Media and Worlds: Centered on the Case of the White Snake Liang Luo

169

15 Reportage and the Forms of Nonfiction Art in China Charles A. Laughlin

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185

Contents

16 Reading World Literature in Chinese Science Fiction Lena Henningsen 17 Ecological Critique as World Literature: Alienation of Nature and Humans in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide Ban Wang

196

207

PART VI

Translingual Worlds of Writers and Scholars

219

18 Su Manshu’s “Broken Hairpin”: A Romantic Tragedy in the Hard Times Ping-hui Liao

221

19 Qian Zhongshu as a Cosmopolitan Ji Jin

230

20 Zhang Ailing and the Cold War Cultural Geography Xiaojue Wang

241

21 Worlding Jin Yong’s Martial Arts (Wuxia) Narrative in Three Keys: Narration, Translation, Adaptation Weijie Song 22 Yan Lianke’s Heterotopic Imaginaries Carlos Rojas

253

264

PART VII

New Worlds of Gender Configurations

275

23 Modern Intellectual Masculinities in Transformation Jun Lei

277

24 Nora in China Hu Ying

288

25 Reading Women: Rethinking a Trope in the Socialist Modern and Beyond Barbara Mittler

297

26 Feminine Neorealist Fiction in the New Millennium: Voice, Trauma, and Focalization in Fang Fang’s Fiction Li Guo

ix

330

Contents PART VIII

Changing Worlds of Translation and Transmediation

341

27 Frame Tales: Reading the 1,001 Nights in Early Twentieth-Century China Michael Gibbs Hill

343

28 Figuring Time: Lyricism in Contemporary Chinese Poetic Films Shengqing Wu

355

29 Performance and Performativity in Modern China Emily Wilcox

367

30 Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World Yiwen Wang

377

Index

388

x

FIGURES

4.1 4.2 7.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 13.1 14.1 14.2 14.3 25.1 25.2a–b 25.3 25.4a–c 25.5 25.6 25.7 25.8 25.9 25.10 25.11a–b 25.12a 25.12b 25.13 25.14 25.15a 25.15b 25.16a

Guo Jianying, “Introduction.” Chang Yu, “Nude on Tapestry.” Wong Chin Foo, “The Dragon” (1885). Lu Xun’s former Beijing residence on Xisantiao hutong No. 21. Lu Xun’s desk in his Beijing residence on Xisantiao hutong No. 21. Display of Lu Xun and Gorky, 1950s. Lu Xun included in digital display of 100 model heroes of New China. Lin Yutang’s typewriter on his desk at the Lin Yutang House in Taibei. Cover of Wu Yan’s 1957 translation of Rivera’s The Vortex. “Traces of the Immortal” (Xianzong 仙蹤). “Sent into Exile” (Fanpei 訉配). A scene from The White Snake. Past, present, and future for women. Visual(ly) present – women reading. Women reading (for enlightenment . . .). Women reading in the light. Women reading for a purpose: good motherhood. Women reading: the beauty of it. Women reading: the beauty of it! Women reading: the beauty of it; or, reading as accessoire. Indulgent reading? “My wife is a woman of the mind.” “My wife is a woman of the mind.” Purposeful alternatives to reading. Purposeful alternatives to reading: “New China’s female parachuters.” Reading as one option for women among many. “Striding forward audaciously on the road of revolution!” Alternative readers: “Sleep, do not disturb Daddy while he is using his head.” Alternative readers: “At home.” Alternative readers: “Learning from comrade Lei Feng.” xi

50 55 88 109 110 111 114 116 160 172 172 175 299 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 311 312 313 313 314 315 315 316

Figures

25.16b 25.17a 25.17b

Alternative readers: a man reading for women from different generations. Hierarchies of reading: “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live!” Hierarchies of reading: “To villages we go, to the borders we go, to places in the fatherland where we are most needed we go.” 25.18 Hierarchies of reading. 25.19a–c Urgency in action: “Improving children’s language skills.” 25.20 Urgency: “To think of one’s beauty is not enough . . . women have to take their fates into their hands – reading is the first step.” 25.21 Urgency resolving: reading for everyone? “The production brigade’s reading room.” 25.22 Reading into action: “Go among the workers, peasants, and soldiers and into the thick of struggle!” 25.23 Inspirational reading: “Mom must study the works of Mao.” 28.1 An Lu hopping through the words, Crosscurrent. 28.2 Gao Chun walking along the shore, Crosscurrent. 28.3 Chen Sheng’s motorbike ride to Dangmai, Kaili Blues.

xii

317 318 318 319 320 322 323 324 325 357 358 360

CONTRIBUTORS

Andrea Bachner 白安卓 is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her research explores comparative intersections between Sinophone, Latin American, and European cultural productions in dialogue with theories of interculturality, sexuality, and mediality. She is the author of Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (Columbia, 2014) and The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories (Fordham, 2017), as well as the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (Oxford, 2016). She is currently completing a third book, Uncomparison: China, Latin America, and the Politics of Sameness, a reflection on transregional comparison through case studies from the rich history of cultural contact, exchange, and affinity between Latin American and Chinese cultures. Mark Bender is Professor of Chinese Literature and Folklore at Ohio State University. He has published on Suzhou professional storytelling (pingtan) and the oral and written literatures of several Chinese minority cultures, such as the Yi, Miao (Hmong), and Daur. His books include Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (Illinois, 2003); Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou Province, China (Hackett, 2006); Tiger Traces: Selected Nuosu and Chinese Poetry of Aku Wuwu (Foreign Language Publications, 2006); and The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, coedited with Victor Mair (Columbia, 2011). His most recent books are The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry (Cambria, 2017), which features poems by 49 poets in Northeast India, Myanmar, Southwest China, Inner Mongolia, and Mongolia, and The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China, with Aku Wuwu and Jjivot Zopqu (Washington, 2019). Angie Chau 周安琪 is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film at the University of Victoria. Her forthcoming manuscript Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters, is a transnational investigation of Chinese writers and artists in Paris. Her essays on Chinese literature, art, film, and Internet culture have been published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Chinese Literature Today, Concentric, and various edited volumes.

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Contributors

Kuei-fen Chiu 邱貴芬 is Chair Professor of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. She has written extensively on Taiwan literature and Taiwan documentaries. She has published in scholarly journals, such as China Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and New Literary History. In addition to numerous Chinese publications, she is a coauthor of New Chineselanguage Documentaries (Routledge, 2015), a coeditor of Migration to and from Taiwan (Routledge, 2014), Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change (Routledge, 2017), a special issue, “Chinese Literature as World Literature,” for Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Spring 2018), The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (Hong Kong University Press, 2022). Weigui Fang 方維規 studied and worked between 1986 and 2006 at Humboldt University in Berlin and the universities of Aachen, Trier, Göttingen, and Erlangen, Germany. He received his PhD in comparative literature in 1992. In 2002, he successfully completed the German “Habilitation” procedure. Since 2006, he is Distinguished Professor at the School of Chinese Language and Literature, Research Fellow at the Centre of Literary Theory, and Director of the Center for Literature and the History of Ideas at Beijing Normal University, China. He became a Changjiang Scholar professor in 2012. His research is focused on comparative literature, the history of ideas, and sociology of literature. He has authored six books in Chinese, including Literary Language and Historical Consciousness and On German Literary Thought in the Twentieth Century. He is also the author of five books in German, including The Image of China in German Literature, 1871–1933; A Contribution to Imagological Research; SelfReflection at the Time of Awakening and Resistance: Modern Chinese Literature 1919–1949; and The West and the Middle Kingdom: The Spread of Western Knowledge in Late Imperial China. His edited English volume, Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal, came out from Palgrave in 2018. In addition, he authored more than 100 scholarly papers, published in Chinese, German, English, and French. Emily Graf is Junior Professor of Chinese Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Tübingen. Graf’s current research focuses on “barefoot doctors,” health workers lionized during the Cultural Revolution, and analyzes their role in the field of global health. She was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Global History and Chinese Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2018 to 2023. She received her PhD in Sinology from Heidelberg University in 2018, analyzing the institutional histories of author museums in the PRC, the GDR, and Taiwan. Her research interests include Chinese literature in a global context, past and present cultural politics in the PRC and Taiwan, and the interrelation between history, oral history, and collective memory. Her recent publication, published in MCLC 34, no. 2 (2022), analyzes visitors and meaning-making in the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. Li Guo 郭麗 is Professor of Chinese and Asian Literatures at Utah State University. Her interests in scholarship include late imperial and modern Chinese women’s narratives, folk literature, film, and comparative literature. Her research displays an interdisciplinary approach, bridging women and gender studies, narrative theory, vernacular literatures, and cultures, bringing an innovative perspective to traditional, text-based analysis of tanci fiction. She is the author of Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China (Purdue, 2015) and Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction (Purdue, 2021). She is coediting Reading and Writing Across Lines: Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600–1900 (under contract with Amsterdam University Press). Her articles appeared xiv

Contributors

in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture; Film International; Frontiers of Literary Studies in China (FLSC); Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC); Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature; and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She has coedited special issues for CLCWeb (2013), FLSC (2014, 2017), Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2017), and MCLC (2019). Lena Henningsen is Junior Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where she currently leads the ERC-funded interdisciplinary project “The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China.” From 2013 to 2018, she was an elected member of the German Young Academy. Henningsen approaches Chinese literary culture from a multitude of angles, including practices of reading and writing. She has published widely across peer-reviewed journals (including MCLC, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and China Information), edited volumes (Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature), and open-access resources (MCLC Resource Center, ReadAct Database). Her books include Copyright Matters, Imitation, Creativity and Authenticity in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010) and Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave, 2021). Michael Gibbs Hill 韓嵩文 is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies and affiliate faculty in the Program in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary. His research examines connections between China and the Middle East from the nineteenth century to the midtwentieth century, with a focus both on the history of translation between Chinese and Arabic literary and intellectual fields and comparative approaches to translation within these and other traditions. His first book, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford, 2013), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and reviewed in 20 academic journals. He also contributes regularly as a translator. China from Empire to NationState (Harvard, 2014), a translation of the introductory essay to Wang Hui’s four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015, and his translation of What Is China? by Ge Zhaoguang (Harvard, 2018), received the same distinction in 2019. Luo Hui 羅輝 teaches at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and conducts research broadly in Chinese literary and visual cultures, with particular interest in crosscultural production and reception. He has written on Chinese cinema, poetry, crime fiction, and issues of soft power. Recent publications include an essay on Pu Songling’s ghost tales in the Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2019), an entry on the contemporary Chinese poet Zheng Danyi in Bruccoli Clark Layman’s Dictionary of Literary Biographies (2020), and a coedited volume, Screening China’s Soft Power (Routledge, 2018). Luo Hui is Codirector of New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation. Ji Jin 季進 is Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Research Center of Overseas Sinology at Soochow (Suzhou) University, China. He specializes in the reception of Chinese literature overseas, the relationship between modern Chinese literature and overseas literature. His major Chinese publications include Qian Zhongshu and Modern Western Learning; A Dialogue between Leo Oufan-Lee and Ji Jin; Chen Quan: A Borrowed View from a Foreign Land; The Mirror Image of Reading; The Alternative Voice; Worlds Apart, Visions Meet; Studies of Modern Chinese Literature in the English-Speaking World; and A Biography of Zhang Xian. He also compiled and footnoted a five-volume Letters Between Chih-tsing Hsia and Tsi-an xv

Contributors

Hsia. As Editor in Chief, he completed several book series, such as Selected Translation of Modern Western Literary Criticism, Translations of Overseas Sinological Studies on Modern Chinese Literature, and Soochow University Research Series on Overseas Sinology. Charles A. Laughlin 羅福林 is Ellen Bayard Weedon Chair Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Duke, 2002) and The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Hawai’i, 2008). He is the editor of Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature (Palgrave, 2005). Laughlin has translated Chinese stories, articles, and poems for several collections and also coedited and contributed an introduction and translations to By the River: Seven Contemporary Chinese Novellas (Oklahoma, 2016). Laughlin’s current research includes the dynamics of desire in revolutionary fiction and film and images of aging in Sinophone film. Jun Lei 雷俊 is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include gender studies, history of sexuality, and twentieth-century Chinese literature and visual media. She has published articles in journals such as Modern China and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Her book on intellectual Chinese masculinities is forthcoming from Hong Kong University Press. Ping-hui Liao 廖炳惠 is Chuan Lyu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of a dozen of books in Chinese and hundreds of articles in English and Chinese, which cover a wide array of fields, including postcolonial theory, music and culture, and modern Taiwan literature and film. Among English books he coedited are Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule (Columbia, 2006) and Comparatizing Taiwan (Routledge, 2015). Liang Luo 羅靚 is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (Michigan, 2014) and The Global White Snake (Michigan, 2022). She is working on a new project, Profound Propaganda: The Interwar International Avant-Garde and Modern China. Barbara Mittler 梅嘉樂 holds a chair in Chinese studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where she cofounded the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS). Her research focuses on cultural production in (greater) China, covering a range of materials, music, print media, and visuality in China’s long modernity. Among her book-length publications are Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China since 1949 (Harrassowitz, 1997); A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in China’s News-Media, 1872–1912 (Harvard, 2004); A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Harvard, 2012); and a coauthored book titled Why China Did Not Have a Renaissance and Why That Matters – An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (De Gruyter, 2018). She has recently concluded a book-length study on women’s magazines, Portrait(s) of a Trope: Making New Women and New Men in Chinese Women’s Magazines, 1898–2008, and is currently working on a visual biography of Mao, Reading Mao: The Making of a Global Icon, as well as a monograph, “And there is only one Lang Lang . . . ” – Chinese Musicians on the Global Stage: A Transcultural Perspective. Liyan Qin 秦立彦 is Associate Professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature, Peking University, China. Her interests include relationships between Chinese and English literatures, xvi

Contributors

English poetry, and Chinese film. She is also a translator of William Wordsworth into Chinese and published a Chinese book on this British poet. Her English articles appear in journals and edited volumes published by Stanford and Hong Kong University Press. Carlos Rojas 羅鵬 is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at Duke University, with appointments in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Arts of the Moving Image. His single-authored English books include The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard Asia Center, 2008) andHomesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation (Harvard, 2015). Among his numerous coedited books are The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Literature (Oxford, 2016). He has also translated into English numerous literary works by Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, Ng Kim Chew, and Yan Lianke. Weijie Song 宋偉杰 is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University. He is the author of Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography (Oxford, 2017); From Entertainment Activity to Utopian Impulse: Rereading Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction (1999; revised and enlarged edition, forthcoming); and China, Literature, and the United States: Images of China in American and ChineseAmerican Novel and Drama (2003). His new projects include “Ide(c)ology: Environmental Objects and Chinese Ecocriticism,” “Chivalrous Psychogeography: Martial Arts, Avant-Gardes, Sinophone Cinema,” and “Reviving Northeast China: Contemporary Literature and Film Beyond the Great Wall.” He is the editor of Selected Works of Xu Dishan (1997, 2000, 2008, 2010), coeditor of Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, Nature Writing (with Yu-lin Lee, 2019) and Northeast China Reader (with David Der-wei Wang, work in progress), as well as the Chinese translator or cotranslator of Repressed Modernities (2003, 2005, 2007, 2011), Translingual Practice (2002, 2008, 2014), Comparative Poetics (1998, 2004), The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere (1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005), Understanding Popular Culture (2001, 2006), and After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (2010). Jonathan Stalling is Harold J. and Ruth Newman Chair of US–China Issues and Professor of International and Area Studies as well as Codirector of the Institute for US–China Issues, where he directs the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Newman Prize for English Jueju, Chinese Literature Today, the CLT book series (Oklahoma), and the US–China Poetry Dialogue. He is also the founder and curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive and an affiliate professor of English. Dr. Stalling specializes in comparative US–China culture, literature, and poetics, translation, and interlanguage studies. He is the author or editor of eight books: Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham, 2010); Grotto Heaven (Chax, 2010); Yingelishi: Sinophonic Poetry and Poetics (Counterpath, 2011); and Lost Wax: Translation through the Void, and he is the coeditor of By the River: Contemporary Chinese Novellas (Oklahoma, 2016) and Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers (Cambria, 2018). He is the translator of Winter Sun: Poems by Shi Zhi (Oklahoma, 2012), which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. His opera Yingelishi (吟歌麗詩) was performed at Yunnan University in 2010. Ban Wang 王斑 is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History (Stanford, 1997); Illuminations from the Past (Stanford, 2004); History and Memory (in Chinese, 2004); and China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (2021). He has edited and coedited eight books on the fields of Chinese studies, xvii

Contributors

including Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and Word Politics (Duke, 2017); Words and Their Stories (Brill, 2011); and Trauma and Cinema (Hong Kong, 2004). He has taught at SUNY–Stony Brook, Harvard, Rutgers, East China Normal University, Yonsei University, and Seoul National University. David Wang 王德威 is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, and Academician, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has written extensively on modern Chinese literature, comparative literary theory, and Chinese intellectuals and artists in the twentieth century. His English books include Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (Columbia, 1992); Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, 1997); The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (California, 2004); The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis (Columbia, 2015); and A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard, 2017). Xiaojue Wang 王曉玨 is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard Asia Center, 2013), which examines the diverse, dynamic cultural practices in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas across the 1949 Chinese divide and repositions modern Chinese literature in the global context of the Cold War. She has published numerous articles on modern Chinese literature, the cultural Cold War, feminism and revolution, film and visual studies, German literature, and comparative literature. She is also the Chinese translator and cotranslator of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Horkheimer Reader, and Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, among others. She is currently completing her second book, tentatively titled The Edges of Literature: Eileen Chang and the Aesthetics of Deviation. Yiwen Wang 王藝雯 is a doctoral candidate in cultural studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include the transmedia adaptation and aesthetics of appropriation. Her recent articles appeared on China Perspectives and Feminist Media Studies. She is also a fan fiction writer and an aca-fan self-identified as a member of internet fandom. Emily Wilcox 魏美玲 is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William and Mary. She is a specialist in Asian performance, with a focus on dance and socialist culture in the People’s Republic of China. Wilcox is the author of Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (California, 2018) and coeditor of Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (Michigan, 2020). She is the cocreator of the digital image collection Pioneers of Chinese Dance and is cocurator of the 2017 exhibition “Chinese Dance: National Movements in a Revolutionary Age, 1945–1965.” Wilcox has published more than 25 academic articles and book chapters on Chinese dance and performance and has given lectures on these subjects around the world. Alvin K. Wong 黃家軒 is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research covers Hong Kong culture, Chinese cultural studies, Sinophone studies, and queer theory. Wong is writing a book titled Queer Hong Kong as Method. He has published in journals such as Gender, Concentric, Continuum, Cultural Dynamics, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Interventions, and Place & Culture, and in edited volumes, such as Transgender China (Palgrave, 2012), Queer Sinophone Cultures (Routledge, xviii

Contributors

2014), Filming the Everyday (Rowan & Littlefield, 2016), and Fredric Jameson and Film Theory (Rutgers, 2022). He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020). Wong currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies. 盛青 is Professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Shengqing Wu 吳盛青 Science and Technology. She is the author of Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900–1937 (Harvard Asia Center, 2013) and Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture (Columbia, 2020). She also published many journal articles and chapters in edited books. 胡 is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her Hu Ying 胡纓 English books include Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898–1918 (Stanford, 2000), which focuses on the introduction of European female icons to China (e.g., Mme Roland of the French Revolution and Sofia Perovskaya of the Russian Anarchists) and how they were appropriated by Chinese reformists and revolutionaries. Her Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship and Loss (Harvard Asia Center, 2016) shows how traditionally trained Chinese women (e.g., revolutionary Qiu Jin, artist Wu Zhiying, and educator Xu Zihua) experienced and responded to the political and cultural sea change of modernity. Her current research is Nora’s Daughters, a study of three mother–daughter pairs that span the entire twentieth century to now, which aims to unearth the knowledge of the new woman/mother as inherited by, reflected upon, and reinvented by the daughter. Yingjin Zhang 張英進 was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego, as well as a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He is the author of The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Stanford, 1996; Chinese edition 2007), Screening China (Michigan, 2002; Chinese edition 2008), Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), and Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Hawaii, 2010); coauthor of Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (Routledge, 1998), New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place (Routledge, 2014); editor of China in a Polycentric World (Stanford, 1998), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford, 1999; Chinese edition 2011), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (WileyBlackwell, 2016); and coeditor of From Underground to Independent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Chinese Film Stars (Routledge, 2010; Chinese edition 2011), Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (Brill, 2013), Filming the Everyday (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Cambria, 2020), and The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (Hong Kong University Press, 2022). He has also published ten books in Chinese and over 200 articles in Chinese, English, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Ping Zhu 朱萍 is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Oklahoma and serves as the acting editor in chief of Chinese Literature Today. She is the author of Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2015), a coeditor of Maoist Laughter (Hong Kong University Press, 2019), which won Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title in 2020, and a coeditor of Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (Syracuse University Press, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph on the discourse of labor in modern China.

xix

PART I

Overviews Literature, History, and the Multiple Worlds

1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION Yingjin Zhang

The Project Scope A World History of Chinese Literature aims to map the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds. With the focus on the twentieth and twenty-first century, the project delineates both the “worlds” Chinese literature has engaged all along (e.g., historical, natural, psychological, fantastic, and transborder) and the “worlding” it is reinterpreted to have accomplished in various cultural and linguistic realms at different geopolitical scales (e.g., local, regional, national, and global). This project includes sections on Chinese literature circulating in the world, either as world literature or as part of dynamic transregional and translocal flows. The project also considers relations of Chinese literature to other literatures in line with comparative literature, although such comparisons may be situated both above or below the national literature parameters, sometimes in the distinct context of individual writers and scholars, be they world-famous like Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) or little-known as yet like Wong Chin Foo 王清福 (1847–1898) (Zhu’s Chapter 7). The project intervenes in current debates on global Chinese literature, Sinophone and Sinoscript studies, and the production and reception of literary works by ethnic Chinese in Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages, as well as Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary tradition (Luo Hui’s Chapter 5). In terms of structure and focus, the project is not a chronological sequence of close readings of individual writers or works, although some contributors undertake such readings in a historical or comparative context (e.g., Liao’s Chapter 20 on Su Manshu, or Xiaojue Wang’s Chapter 22 on Zhang Ailing). The project adopts a number of broader and more thematic approaches to key categories such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative explorations of new topics and issues such as inter-arts performativity and transmediation (e.g., theater, dance, film, and online video). It should be noted from the outset that this project does not aim to be comprehensive and representative, as the majority of mainland-produced multivolume Chinese literary histories claims to be. Numerous factors, such as the coverage in excellent recent English volumes (Denton 2016; Rojas and Bachner 2016; Zhang 2016a; Wang 2017), space limits for this volume, and writers’ availability at the time of planning, further explain why certain topics, works, or authors seem to be favored over others in this project. Still, with 30 chapters written by experts from around the world (including 11 scholars outside the United States), this project not only provides an introduction to key aspects of modern 3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-2

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Chinese literature but also performs a field-defining assessment by exploring new arguments and interpretations. The project not only covers a world history of Chinese literature as it stands now but also points toward the exciting new comparative, interdisciplinary, multilingual, transregional, and cross-media directions in which the field is traveling.

Concepts and Disciplines This volume is not a theoretical deliberation, and I have no intention to re-engage polemics on the key words embedded in the volume’s title – “world,” “history,” “Chinese,” “literature” – in the introduction. I opted for “a world history of Chinese literature” when the press editor first suggested “the world history of Chinese literature.” In my view, staying away from the definite is what the field of Chinese literature needs in order to keep various lines of inquiry open and to explore new frontiers of research. Obviously, this volume favors modern Chinese literature, but a few chapters discuss traditional literature and classical thought (e.g., Fang’s Chapter 3; Luo Hui’s Chapter 5) and link them to the modern periods. David Der-wei Wang’s Chapter 2 illustrates the issue of literary periodization and demonstrates that the study of modern Chinese literature – or “new literature,” as it was used in the Republic of China (ROC) and the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) periods – started with a full recognition of premodern literary connections.

Comparative Literature Looking at the methodologies used in the volume as a whole, I found comparative literature as a respected discipline no longer provides major incentives for scholars of modern Chinese literature.1 As a foundational book in the discipline, C. T. Hsia’s (夏志清, 1921–2013) A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961) is actually full of comparative references and seeks to justify a new discipline by citing famous Anglophone writers along with modern Chinese writers. Across the Pacific around the same time, Qian Zhongshu 錢锺書 (1910–1998) developed his unique takes on similarities and differences between traditional Chinese literature and thought and Western literary ideas (Ji’s Chapter 21). Neither Hsia nor Qian aims at a comprehensive coverage of their topics, but their works have remained influential in China to the disciplines of modern Chinese literature in general and comparative literature in particular. Although the conventional models of influence study and parallel study in comparative literature are rarely pursued in modern Chinese literature nowadays, while new models like comparison as relation have been proposed (Shih 2022), it is undeniable that contributors to this volume have learned from comparative literature’s methodologies of close text- and ideabased criticism. What happens now is that scholars tend not to start with a (Western) theoretical issue or genre and find (Chinese) evidence for it, as early East–West comparative literature used to do; rather, they choose their own topics and reference Western theories (e.g., Deleuze or Foucault) along the way as they please. To cite an example in favor to the continuing impact of comparative literature, a unique contribution to this volume comes in Fang’s Chapter 3, which documents with rigor a concise history of reception of Chinese literature in Germany toward the mid-twentieth century, very much in line with the German tradition of intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte).

World Literature Quite a few contributors have referenced world literature as topic of concerns in their chapters. A recent consensus in the Western humanities is that world literature has caught attention 4

General Introduction

because comparative literature as a discipline has been declared dead (Spivak 2003) and world literature resurged at the turn of the twenty-first century as a new force that has subsequently dominated literary study in the West. I have published on China in world literature (Zhang 2005; Zhang 2015, 2018) over the years and recently coedited a volume on Chinese/Sinophone literatures as world literature with my Taiwan colleague Kuei-fen Chiu (Chiu and Zhang 2022), so I will be brief in stating my current position on world literature. Whereas advocates for world literature in the twenty-first century reopened the field to a broader participation from non-Western literature and minor/small literatures around the world through their emphases on translation and circulation (Damrosch 2003), systems and competitions (Casanova 2004), as well as patterns and methods (Moretti 2000), critics of world literature tend to disengage with the new reality of globalization and close the door of world literature by narrowing it to an instance of “the unavowed imperialism of English” (Arac 2002, 44) or even “Anglo-globalist triumphalism” (Huggan 2011, 498) and therefore dismissing it as devaluing critical humanism, which is charged to uphold the “normativity” of world literature as a concept (Cheah 2014, 2016). In my view, world literature as literary practice – not just an aspiring concept – has historically exceeded and survived the normativity of any prescriptive measures (in China, Mao’s theory of revolutionary literature is a case in point), and the worlds created by world literature and national literatures are diverse, heterogenous, and competitive, both within their linguistic-cultural spheres and on the world stage. Chinese literature has long engaged with the contending worlds both in its literary imagination and in its historical encounters – either reluctant, restricted, or proactive – with the world, and our new project approaches such engagements at multiple scales in various directions of cultural flows. In this respect, the new project exceeds the parameters of world literature and national literature, and the challenge is to explore what we can find when we cross borders and reconfigure our disciplinary priorities. Let me emphasize a few more issues. First, world literature was conceived of with core Western humanism and cosmopolitanism at Goethe’s time, but pitting the world against the globe (Cheah 2014, 2016) now would preclude ample space where globalization has produced or enabled the production of new literary works of cosmopolitanism and humanism from the non-Western world. Besides, Western theorists are not the unquestionable authorities on the normativity of world literature. Second, world literature is never a monolingual phenomenon (not even in Germany, where the term Weltliteratur was first coined, and surprisingly not by Goethe himself (Fang 2018, 10). Despite its aspirational supralingual, transcendental status at the theoretical level, world literature has circulated in various languages outside the West for over a hundred years, although translations into major European languages (e.g., French, English, German) are still seen as instrumental to gaining a world literature status for a newcomer. Ironically, the recent critique of world literature as Anglo-globalist triumphalism does not fully appreciate French and German contributions, thus showing the entrenched US provincialism vis-à-vis the world; nor does it recognize the circulations of world literature in the non-Western world, to the ludicrous extent that China is dismissed as a country catching up with a few rare world literature programs, without providing any evidence (Huggan 2011, 505; Zhang 2022, 44). A few models of world literature have been proposed to challenge the West-centric paradigm. Following Karen Thornber’s model of East Asia literary contact nebula (2014), Satoru Hashimoto (2022) recommends “intra-Asia reading as a world literature” based on Japan’s reception of Lu Xun before and after WWII, which stayed entirely outside the Western scholars’ purview. Similarly, Michael Gibbs Hill’s Chapter 29 examines the ways Chinese New Cultural intellectuals justified the translations of the 1,001 Nights as a work of world literature 5

Yingjin Zhang

worthy of introduction to China, not just to enrich Arab literature, but also to contemplate on China’s rapidly changing position in the world. Sure enough, most of early translations of the 1,001 Nights were based on English translations, but reversely, there are Anglophone poets who have experimented with “translation” or transformation of classical Chinese poetry, and the extraordinary results may belong to a “Chinese-inflected world literature” circulated in the Anglophone world, this time largely outside the Chinese scholars’ purview (Luo Hui’s Chapter 5). Coming from translation studies, Tong King Lee (2022) proposes a conception of world literature based around the idea of distribution of memes and calls for world literature to investigate the potentialities of translation beyond language as such, that is, where a work may distribute itself across linguistic as well as modal and medial repertoires to herald a new global literary imaginary. Finally, Ban Wang’s Chapter 19 contends that the ecological critique may be seen as a form of “critical world literature,” and science fiction’s global and cosmic framework presents a horizon more worldly and broader than the current “human-centered world literature.”

Chapter Summary The volume is divided into eight parts and summarized in the following sections. From time to time, I will comment on individual chapters and make connections to other chapters and relevant issues outside this volume.

Overviews: Literature, History, and the Multiple Worlds The first part contains my general introduction as Chapter 1. Following my chapter, David Der-wei Wang’s Chapter 2, “Chinese Literary Historiography,” provides a succinct overview of literature historiography in modern China, written in both Chinese and English. Wang establishes the relevance of classical Chinese literature to early historiography in modern Chinese literature, traces the reconceptualization of “literature” in socialist efforts, and highlights the project of “Rewriting Literary History” in the post-Mao period. Wang does not dwell on Taiwan, which had an equally lively scene of rewriting literary history in the 1980s and 1990s (Zhang 2016b, #), but he has introduced competing and alternative approaches to the dominant nation-state model in the PRC, especially Sinophone and postmodern. I have contributed to discussions of the Sinophone (Chiu and Zhang 2022, 6–13) and will not elaborate the issues here again. The “postmodern,” on the other hand, is my description of Wang’s 2017 history, which is a remarkable achievement that he also takes time to showcase in his chapter here. The postmodern approach started with the Harvard French literary history volume (Hollier 1989). Meant for positive appraisal, Emory Elliott describes such approach as “modestly postmodern: it acknowledges diversity, complexity, and contradiction by making them structural principles, and it forgoes closure as well as consensus” (1988, xiii). My research (Zhang 2016c) has found other conceptual and structural experiments of the postmodern literary historiography, such as Latin American literature (Valdés and Kadir 2004) and East-Central European literature (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004–2010), and theoretic work behind the postmodern drive (Hutcheon and Valdés 2002). After intermittent additions in the series of Harvard literature history, for instance, the volumes on Germany (Wellbery 2004) and on the United States (Marcus and Sollors 2009), Wang’s long-anticipated volume on modern Chinese literary historiography came out in 2017 and has fulfilled the high expectation of producing a variegated history open to different authors, works, genres, media, and events. 6

General Introduction

Admittedly, the organization of the current volume is informed similarly by the postmodern approach – chapters presented as multiple entries to an art gallery or a library – and the viewer or reader is free to choose where to enter and what turns to take next at their will, not necessarily from front to end or cover to cover. Still, to facilitate the reader’s choice, the following summary groups chapters around specific topics and issues.2

Circulation and Reception of China in World Literature This part tracks Chinese literature outside China over hundreds of years. Weigui Fang’s Chapter 3, “Zeitgeist and Literature: The Reception of Chinese Literature in Germany until the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” is a comprehensive yet concise survey of the reception of Chinese literature in Germany. Fang focuses on various stages, turning points, and main features of the German reception while dealing with important works, people, and events. Fang’s aim is to illustrate the framework of the specific social and historical conditions of the reception of Chinese literature in Germany. He argues that the early translation and reception of Chinese literature in Germany must be perceived in the European context. Although Chinese literary works were received by the German public slightly later than by readers in France and England, translations in all these countries originated more or less simultaneously. Some German translations attained a fairly high level. Just as in other Western countries, the reception process witnessed in Germany during the entire period of 250 years reveals that this reception has a lot to do with the image of China and the European construction of “Chinese culture.” It is connected with the specific ideology and cultural field prevalent in each period. Fang provides a sketch of the general development up to the first half of the twenty-first century, concentrating on aspects that let us recognize the main trends and characteristics of the German reception of Chinese literature, that is, their preference for works influenced by Confucianism or Daoism, and their pronounced devotion to Chinese poetry. Other aspects are only outlined briefly. If Fang’s chapter gives the impression that classical Chinese literature was a respected – albeit all too often belated or misrecognized – body of works waiting for German scholars to browse and pick to their given tastes determined by their ideological and historical conditions, then Angie Chau’s Chapter 4, “Paris and the Art of Transposition, 1920s–1940s,” explores an intimate aspect of circulation in which Chinese writers and artists traveled to Paris specifically to soak in the French cultural spirit on-site. By focusing on two Parisian landmarks – the bohemian neighborhood of Montparnasse and the famed public park the Luxembourg Garden – Chau reveals how the city of Paris was crucial to the development of the image of the modern Chinese artist during a dynamic period of intercultural exchange. Chau views the experimental and marginalized work of painter Chang Yu, poet Li Jinfa, art critic Fu Lei, and writer Xu Xu through the lens of transposition, a concept originating in musical theory and commonly referring to transposing music from one key to another, or to transposing a song originally composed for one instrument to another. By discussing poetry and prose alongside visual art, three forms of artistic expression that are usually treated as distinct practices, Chau argues that the process of transposition provides a key to recognizing the various kinds of expectations placed on the Chinese artist in the context of the early twentieth century, and to understanding why Paris played such an influential role in the global circulation and reception of modern Chinese literature and art. Turning to an opposite direction in the influence model where China usually stands at the receiving end, as demonstrated by the previous two chapters, Luo Hui’s Chapter 5, “Line, Loop, Constellation: Classical Chinese Poetry between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds,” envisages a world history of classical Chinese poetry beyond the now-familiar 7

Yingjin Zhang

Pound-Rexroth-Snyder axis, drawing longer trajectories into other parts of the Anglophone world. Through an expanded mapping of the “worlds” of classical Chinese poetry in both geographical and demographic terms, Luo Hui uncovers a diverse range of echoes and resonances generated through translation, rewriting, rereading, and critique in the works of Diana Bridge (New Zealand), Sarah Howe (UK/Hong Kong), and Pain Not Bread (Canada). Reframing such works with the conceptualization of a “Chinese-inflected world literature,” Luo Hui argues that the impact of classical Chinese poetry in contemporary writing has shifted from the transmission and reception of aesthetics and poetic form to the transformation and redefinition of cultural identities, personal histories, and the very notions of cultural tradition and literary lineage. If Luo Hui brings to our attention a group of individual Anglophone poets actively engaging classical Chinese poetry, Jonathan Stalling’s Chapter 6, “A Decade Apart: Bridging the US and China Literary Systems, 2010–2021,” is a unique take on the institutional level of the promotion and circulation of modern Chinese literature in the Anglophone world. He tells a fascinating insider story of Chinese Literature Today (CLT), a new journal based on World Literature Today (WLT, one of the longest-standing literary trade magazines published by an academic institution). As a high-profile joint operation between Beijing Normal University (funded by Hanban 漢辦, the Chinese government office in charge of Confucius Institute 孔子學院 around the world) and the University of Oklahoma, CLT has had its ups and downs. Along the way, Stalling introduces the CLT book series, the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature 紐曼華語文 學獎, and the Chinese Literature Translation Archive – all administered by the University of Oklahoma. He also proposes a new model of translation studies, which he calls “actor network translation studies,” to emphasize that the translator or the author alone may not guarantee the success of a literary work, regardless of how famous the work is in the original culture. Stalling offers candid views on the differences between Chinese and US literary systems (including the roles of agents, editors, translators) and the difficulties translated Chinese literature still encounters in the Anglophone market. This part on tracking the circulation and reception of Chinese literature outside China demonstrates that a great deal has changed vis-à-vis China and the world over the past few hundred years. German scholars of the nineteenth century might not anticipate that out of the same body of classic poetry, a new group of Anglophone writers of the twentieth century would create something creatively new to both Anglophone and Sinophone worlds. In this case, we see not just reception but recreation of Chinese literature in English, or a “Chinese-inflected world literature,” as Luo Hui suggests, which unfortunately has been overlooked at the institutional level. Still, we have also seen the new institutional efforts of actively promoting Chinese literature outside of China, although the entrenched differences in China’s and Western literary systems pose a challenge to the further circulation of Chinese literature.

Worlding Chinese Literature Across the Globe This part examines Chinese writers’ engagement with the world, both physically through travels and imaginatively through writing. Ping Zhu’s Chapter 7, “Chinese Literature at Large: Wong Chin Foo’s Border-Crossing Writing,” introduces Wong as a “Chinese-American,” a term he allegedly first used in the United States. Besides being a political activist, Wong was a talented and prolific writer who produced a wide array of nonfictional and fictional works in English that were published in American periodicals. Zhu analyzes Wong’s deliberately pidgin English poem “The Dragon” (1885) and a short story, “Poh Yuin Ko: The Serpent Princess” (1888), which was his creative “translation” of the Chinese legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳 (L. Luo’s Chapter 16). Wong was not only the first Chinese who introduced those famous 8

General Introduction

Chinese tales to the English audience; he also recreated those stories as allegories to advocate a world of common humanity, to bridge the gaps between different races, religions, genders, and classes. Wong was aware of the marginal status of Chinese culture in the new-world system, so he constructed China as an ancient and moral other of Western modernity to critique the money-worshiping Western culture, nationalism, racism, and the linear conception of history. Wong’s diasporic literary works are arguably the earliest texts of modern Chinese literature, written in English to embody the Chinese desire for living in a diverse and inclusive world culture. By actively making the world home through the cross-cultural fertilization in his literary creations, Zhu argues, Wong Chin Foo’s cross-border writing represents Chinese literature’s transmuted life after it is freed from geographic and linguistic boundaries, which may lead us to conceive a new definition of Chinese literature based on its translation, transculturation, and transmutations in the world. Liyan Qin’s Chapter 8, “Engaging the World in Republican Literature,” asserts that the collective picture of the world that emerges from China’s Republican literature (1911–1949) often mirrors the power structure of the world and China’s position in it. Japan (東洋) and Europe (西洋) are prominent parts of this represented world, while Africa and Latin America are conspicuously absent. Many Republican writers were educated or traveled extensively abroad; some of them were translators, and some were even bilingual writers. Their cosmopolitanism, however, was often involuntary. In their imagining of the world was a deep sense of anxiety stemming from the weak political position of China on the international stage. They often saw the world in terms of the nation-states. In many works by male writers, world imagination was intertwined with sexual imagination. Japan occupied a special place, toward which writers were often ambivalent. Qin takes time to go through instances of such ambivalences in Yu Dafu 郁達夫, Lao She 老舍, Guo Moruo 郭沫若, and Xu Zhimo 徐志摩, with various discursive strategies deployed to mitigate male frustration when engaging the world. The chapter ends with Xu Dishan’s 許地山 fiction about Southeast Asia, an exception in which national identities seem unimportant for the foreign or Chinese characters. Concentrating on the material worlding of literature in a grounded space where memory can be preserved and reserved, Emily Graf’s Chapter 9, “The Rise of Author Museums in the PRC: How Institutions Make World Literature,” focuses on the rise of Chinese author museums since the mid-twentieth century and their global entanglements. An early example of such entanglements are Japanese literary tourists visiting sites of venerated Chinese poets in the imperial period. With the establishment of the PRC, author museums dedicated to Lu Xun appeared. They were inspired by Soviet examples and became prototypes of author museums in the PRC. Even during the Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun museums were seen as powerful tools to shape the author’s image, and even a few international guests continued to visit. In the Reform and Opening Period, the museum landscape diversified, moving beyond its focus on Lu Xun. Museums dedicated to writers of modern as well as traditional literature were established, even including those previously criticized, and Chinese author museums were integrated into an international network of museums and globally recognized taxonomies of cultural heritage. This diversification, however, remains limited, as museums rarely challenge official historiography. New theories and research methods have led scholars to acknowledge museums as institutional actors in literary production, reception, and criticism and demanded a re-evaluation of the trajectories through which writers enter into the canon of world literature. They have identified which historical actors guided, hindered, facilitated, or forced the author to become representative of a certain genre, nation, script, or voice and thereby shape societies’ memory of the writer. Museums became key in defining literary value and in deciding whether an author’s reach would become global. Author museums are therefore an important part of 9

Yingjin Zhang

the spatial, material, and global turns in literary studies, which have raised questions about the processes though which world literature is constituted. This part on worlding Chinese literature across the globe shows radically dissimilar strategies individuals and institutions take to position themselves while engaging the world at different times. In Wong Chin Foo’s case, he saw himself primarily as a Chinese American. From his Chinese side, he felt obliged to introduce Chinese literature, while from his American side, he knew his audience is Anglophone. Here, we have a case whether Wong’s border-crossing writing in English would earn him a place in Chinese literature “at large” or, better yet, a place in world literature where his generous cosmopolitanism of a harmonious multicultural world would fit Goethe’s vision of Weltliteratur. Whereas Wong seemed to be self-confident in his diaspora writing, the Republic writers in Qin’s chapter appeared definitely not. However, if we extend the selection, we will find other Republican writers who write with confidence. A good example is Lin Yutang 林語堂, who published in both Chinese and English. Still, it is interesting to observe that some of those Republican writers in Qin’s chapter would have museum dedicated to them. Also interesting is that, not necessarily all focused on literary authors, museum studies constitute a new cluster in modern Chinese literature studies (Denton 2014, 2021; Li 2020).

Sinophone Worlds of Borderlands, Urban Jungles, and Rainforests This part explores Sinophone articulations not just across the Pacific (Shih 2007) but also in various borders and divides – geographic, linguistic, social, economic, generational, and ecological. Mark Bender’s Chapter 10, “Yi Literature: Traditional and Contemporary,” begins with the question “What is Yi literature?” as it briefly introduces the Yi ethnic group, one of the largest ethnic minority groups in southwest China, numbering over ten million. The Yi language is in the Tibeto-Burman family, with many dialects among the 80-plus subgroups. There are ancient indigenous script traditions still utilized by ritual specialists in many areas to record genealogies, origin myths, epics, divination and astrological texts, history, and folklore. Among these works, several epic poems have been designated as “classics” and issued in Chinese translation, especially since the late 1970s, and serve as “cultural monuments” today, some being translated into other languages. A modern standardized script, based on Northern Yi script traditions, popularized in the late 1970s, is in limited use in southern Sichuan and northwest Yunnan. Since the 1980s, the modern script has become a vehicle for a growing number of Yi writers, especially poets. That said, most modern Yi literature is written in standard Chinese (and sometimes translated into other languages), which allows for national and international audiences. Images of traditional Yi folk life meld with contemporary themes in much of this poetry. Bender concludes with a post-1980s discussion of themes, theoretical orientations, and contexts of transmission (local, national, and international), including electronic formats. Alvin K. Wong’s Chapter 11, “Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness,” directs attention to Sinophone studies that examine the dissemination of Siniticlanguage communities and their lived histories and cultural expressions. Wong complicates Shu-mei Shih’s concept of the Sinophone by examining the epistemology of “queer worlding” in literary texts written by one of the most prolific writers in Hong Kong, Wong Bik-wan 黃碧 雲. He defines queer worlding as a form of worldliness that reckons with the material conditions of war, nationalism, capitalism, and historicism, while envisioning textures, spatiality, and temporality of queer desire that enact other modes of “being in the world.” Drawing on Edward Said’s theory of worldliness and Pheng Cheah’s theory of worlding, the chapter delineates 10

General Introduction

the queer worlding potentials of Wong Bik-wan’s 1999 feminist classic Portraits of Martyred Women (烈女圖) and her 2012 novel Children of Darkness (烈佬傳). Both novels exemplify the queer worldliness of Hong Kong by representing the politics of feminist toughness, gender solidarity, and materialist critique. Connecting these three themes is Wong’s literary encounter with the sedimentation, burden, and force of history itself. Overall, Wong’s novels capture other modes of being in the world not predetermined by the force of global capitalism. Kuei-fen Chiu’s Chapter 12, “Taiwan Literature in the Early Twenty-First Century,” delineates the post-millennium landscape of Taiwan literature and discusses new developments such as indigenous writers and new millennial writers. It argues that while Taiwan literature in the late twentieth century exhibited a postcolonial orientation, Taiwan literature in the early twenty-first century takes up a much more cosmopolitan outlook as writers face the daunting challenge of drastically dwindled literary readership in the domestic market. Chiu identifies three features of Taiwan literature in the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, many writers draw upon popular genre fiction and popular culture as a strategy to widen their readership. Second, these popular literature and culture are often transnational, circulated with the aid of media technology. For example, the ACG fan culture (e.g., the Japanese Yuri tradition) and Western fantastic movies (e.g., Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings) have exerted an impact on Taiwan’s millennial writers. Third, many award-winning millennial writers have received academic training in Taiwan literature and often write with a strong realization of their roles as heirs to a distinct Taiwanese literary tradition. Their writings often engage in constructive dialogues with their predecessors, and this creative stance is in sharp contrast to their predecessors’, because the concept of Taiwan literature is missing in the works by the older-generation writers. Literary writing is often defined by the millennial writers as an endeavor of recollecting Taiwanese literary and cultural memory. In the hands of millennial writers, creative writing is exercised as a kind of mnemotechnics, reclaiming the Japanese colonial legacy, reshaping Taiwanese historical consciousness, and redefining Taiwanese literature through archivization. Chiu concludes with a discussion of the implications of these features from the vantage point of world literature studies. Andrea Bachner’s Chapter 13, “Of Other (Chinese) Spaces: Sinophone Literature and the Rainforest,” claims that the rainforest is not one of the spaces that comes to mind when we think of Chinese literature. And yet by presenting two case studies, she demonstrates that the rainforest is, in fact, an important topos in Sinophone literature: one that is marginal to Chinese literature, but also one that is global and, hence, greater than Sinophone literature. The first case study traces the Chinese translation history of one of the most important rainforest novels of Latin American literature, José Eustacio Rivera’s 1924 novel La vorágine (The Vortex), which appeared first in Wu Yan’s 吴岩 Chinese translation in 1957. Here, another tradition’s rainforest becomes literarily transplanted into China. The second case study is the 1998 novel Elephant Herd (群象) by Sinophone Malaysian author Zhang Guixing 張貴興. In the novel, Borneo’s rainforest becomes a space through which diasporic Chinese negotiate the status of Chinese culture itself. Both texts feature different rainforests as well as different assumptions about the ways in which the rainforest space and Chinese literature can be connected. The space of the rainforest – as a literary biosphere – forges connections beyond the national sphere, as it makes different literatures comparable via a shared ecosystem, by way of similarity and/or literary influence. This global rainforest relationality resonates on a micro-level too: as a literary trope, the rainforest oscillates between centrality and marginality as it becomes a heterotopos, a multiple-contact zone in which different cultures and ethnicities come into friction, in which nature and civilization clash. Hence, to take the trope of the rainforest as a critical lens both complicates and enriches the worldedness of Chinese literature. 11

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This part on Sinophone articulations indeed enriches what Bachner terms “the worldedness of Chinese literature,” which differs from “worldliness” discussed in Wong’s chapter. My understanding is that “worldliness” reminds us that something belongs to the world, whereas “worldedness” denotes the actuality or potentiality that literature should be grounded in the world and that we should approach them in such a way, as the other term “worlding” implies. Bender brings the Yi literary tradition expressed in different Sinophone sounds and scripts and circulated among mountainous borderlands in southwestern China to our attention. Wong reveals that Hong Kong, a shining icon of globalization, is also a ruthless set of urban jungles where the underprivileged fight every way they can to preserve their space and solidarity. Worldedness in Chiu’s case in part appears in that the millennial writers who are aware of Taiwan literary tradition travel through the memory lane and work themselves into their stories. Bachner’s reading of rainforests as a trope makes unexpected connections across the Pacific and gathers bountiful discoveries textually and intellectually.

Comparative Worlds of Literary Genres This part investigates literary genres in a changing world. Liang Luo’s Chapter 14, “Modern Chinese Drama cross Media and Worlds: Centered on the Case of the White Snake,” is a succinct overview of the White Snake legend from its origin to its restaging in English in the United States as well as in the Sinophone worlds. Luo’s chapter uses the reinventions of the legend of the White Snake as a case study to test the boundary of “modern Chinese drama” by stretching its temporal, geographical, linguistic, and genre and media borders. She first traces how turn-of-the-nineteenth-century stage performances helped shape the modern forms of the legend. Some of the performance-shaped texts were then picked up by Western missionaries and diplomats, resulting in two important Anglophone renditions of the legend at the turn of the twentieth century. Luo takes the xiqu (traditional Chinese theater) legacies of the White Snake legend from the Republican period seriously and continues to trace their reinventions through painting and film in the People’s Republic of China. In contemporary Sinophone worlds, stage performances continued to experiment with the White Snake legend across modern dance, experimental theater, and Taiwanese opera. Such experiments then moved from stage performances to the printed pages. Moreover, a new wave of English renditions of the legend gained influence as renewed theatrical representations of Chinese culture abroad in the twenty-first century, further challenging conventional boundaries of modern Chinese drama. Charles A. Laughlin’s Chapter 15, “Reportage and the Forms of Nonfiction Art in China,” is a deliberation on the rise and fall of reportage literature 報告文學 as a unique literary genre in modern Chinese literary history. Reportage emerged in China around 1930 in the context of the international proletarian literary movement, responding to existing reportage practice in Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Under the cultural policy of the insurgent Chinese Communist Party (CCP), reportage became an attractive avenue for the vivid illustration of industrial labor conditions and the horrors of war, as well as the transformation of life in areas under CCP control. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 created a crisis for reportage, whose mandate was to correct the distortions of mainstream discourse and criticize oppression and corruption. Resurgences of reportage in the 1950s and 1980s restored the critical independence of the genre for a time, but its orthodox status ultimately undermined the genre’s legitimacy. Since the 1990s, other forms of nonfiction artistic expression, such as “documentary literature,” “nonfiction writing,” and independent documentary film, have emerged in reportage’s place, recovering the genre’s critical function while distancing themselves from the discredited term “reportage literature.” 12

General Introduction

Lena Henningsen’s Chapter 16, “Reading World Literature in Chinese Science Fiction,” takes a new approach to Chinese science fiction (SF), which has been hailed as China’s new success story in world literature. Rather than focusing on the genre itself, Henningsen examines the acts of reading world literature in the SF stories themselves and proposes an approach to Chinese SF through the lens of intertextuality. Intertextuality serves both for an analysis of a particular characteristic of the genre of Chinese SF and as a methodological exploration of one particular form of intertextuality, namely, reading acts in fictional texts, that is, scenes, often elaborate scenes in which literary characters read other texts. Fictional reading acts have distinct narrative effects and serve an interface function as links between two texts. Such links impact back on the reading and interpretation of both texts: text and intertext. Through an analysis of representative stories, intertextual references, and reading acts, Henningsen demonstrates, first, that Chinese SF is firmly located on the map of world literature. Second, these reading acts underline the literariness of individual stories and of the genre itself. Third, they add an extra layer of meaning to both. As an effect of the interface function, an intertext in a fictional story may provide a new reading of the intertext itself. And last, reading acts point to the transformative power of reading and to the power and relevance attributed to literature. Ban Wang’s Chapter 17, “Ecological Critique as World Literature: Alienation of Nature and Humans in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide,” goes beyond recent reading of Chinese science fiction as world literature (Chau 2018) and points to the powerful critique of ecological crisis that constitutes the attraction and value of Chinese science fiction. Ban Wang views ecocriticism as offering a broader perspective than humanism in conceiving world literature. With its pretensions to universalism and cosmopolitanism, humanism is parochial and is confined to Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism. Humanism ignores the ecological relations of interdependence and coevolution of humans and nonhuman beings on Earth. In contrast, ecocriticism and especially the Marxist ecological notions, by examining the anti-ecological tendencies of capitalist production, colonialism, extractions of natural resources, and exploitation of human labor, may prove to be effective in analyzing the most urgent issues faced by the whole world. Chen Qiufan’s 陳楸帆 novel Waste Tide delineates how profit motives, endless growth, and the imperative to colonize Earth and human body prove to be ecologically destructive. Transnational conglomerates extract natural and human resources from all around the world, dump toxic waste in the peripherals, and erode local environments and community. The “ecological rift” (Marx) manifests itself in the alienation of nature and of humans. Recognized as part of worldwide concerns of environmental collapse and the posthuman condition through abuses of intrusive technologies of AI, genetic engineering, and biochemistry, Chinese SF addresses ecological degradation, class polarization, and the existential threat to humanity. This part on examining literary genres comparatively in a changing world is meant to be selective rather than comprehensive. Among major genres, the novel, short stories, and poetry are all missing, and drama is considered together with theater. However, four chapters in this part gain in breadth and depths. The White Snake legend gives Liang Luo the opportunity to track this dramatic piece from the premodern to the contemporary, from the written to the performative, and from Sinophone to Anglophone. Laughlin demonstrates that reportage is a unique genre in Chinese literature which meets the call of the time and delivers memorable work in the twentieth century, and its uniqueness may also be that it is perhaps one of few genres that would disappear because similar writing now would rather take on other designations. The two chapters on Chinese SF are not so much about SF’s genre features as they are about how to approach its sudden rise in world literature. Henningsen recommends the reading acts and emphasizes on intertextuality, while Ben Wang advocates for ecological critique, calling world literature to confront issues of alienation of nature and humans. 13

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Translingual Worlds of Writers and Scholars This part returns to writers and scholars in translingual worlds of different historical periods, from the early Republican period through the Cold War to the present. Ping-hui Liao’s Chapter 18, “Su Manshu’s ‘Broken Hairpin’: A Romantic Tragedy in the Hard Times,” argues that in the disguise of an old narrative form in traditional Chinese mandarin ducks-and-butterflies romance, “Broken Hairpin” 斷-- by Su Manshu 蘇曼殊 (1884–1918) is among the very first instances in modern China to showcase “I” as an eyewitness to something relatively new and tragic in a period of difficult transition, with three young lovers hopelessly caught between two worlds – either following the elders’ dictates or finding one’s own true path to love and death. The story is an interesting and mixed retelling of Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet, but it is re-set in modern China, in which young people are struggling to cultivate their modern experiences in love and in identity formation (Lei’s Chapter 25 on masculinity; Hu’s Chapter 26 on Nora). The narrator is not a simple-minded Lockwood; he reveals himself to be Su Manshu, a most famous translator, educator, poet, and scholar-critic in modern China who appears to empathize and groan over his colleague’s longing, pain, and loss. Certainly, we can dismiss the story as a case of free translation to Western classics, but that would not explain why this piece of retranslation should appear in a new magazine, La Jeunesse (新青年), edited by the future Communist leader Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, with numerous modernization projects in mind. Liao draws on the notion of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” to examine the story, particularly around issues of sentimentality and subjectivity. Jin Ji’s Chapter 19, “Qian Zhongshu as a Cosmopolitan,” presents Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu 錢鍾書) as an internationally renowned figure whose contribution and influence are far more significant in scholarship than in creative writing. As a writer, Qian not only mercilessly ridicules Chinese literati and society but also fills unique insight into the world and life that responds to the wave of existentialist thought in the Western world, as manifested in his novel Fortress Besieged (圍城). As a scholar, Qian Zhongshu represents the highest academic achievements in twentieth-century China. As a classic of comparative literature, On the Art of Poetry (談藝錄) opens a dialogue between traditional Chinese poetics and Western poetics, seeking the common poetics and literary spirit of China and the West. Limited Views (管錐 編) is developed around ten ancient books of China. Based on Chinese culture and integrating literary discourses and cultural discourses of different languages and disciplines, Limited Views represents the voice of Chinese academic participation in world cultural dialogue during the Cultural Revolution. Qian’s works, with a broad global vision and a robust modern standpoint, strive to open up Chinese and Western literature and culture, open up various disciplines, and also open up literary creation and academic research. Qian Zhongshu’s works are examples of equal dialogue and exchanges between different cultures, which embodies the dialogue principle of “harmony with diversity” 和而不同 and continually proves the rationality and inevitability of the coexistence of multiple cultures and multiple discourses. With a cosmopolitan stance and vision, Qian Zhongshu’s writings have made a modern interpretation of Chinese and Western cultural discourse and literary concepts while exploring the possibility of dialogue, convergence, and integration between Chinese and Western culture and literature. Xiaojue Wang’s Chapter 20, “Zhang Ailing and the Cold War Cultural Geography,” considers Zhang Ailing’s (Eileen Chang’s) aesthetic engagement and strategies across the Cold War division to probe how writers and artists alike maneuvered between the boundaries of opposite ideological camps, art, and politics, as well as high art and popular culture. It explores the intertextual relationship between Zhang’s 1954 novel The Rice Sprout Song and two 1950 socialist films, Wu Yonggang’s 吳永剛 A Remote Village (遼遠的--) and Sang Hu’s 桑弧 Peaceful 14

General Introduction

Spring (太平春), in order to map out divergences and intersections between the apparently opposing policies implemented by the PRC and by the United States in the Asia-Pacific. In particular, a meticulous reading of a fictional artist (referencing Wu Yonggang) and his precariously psychological, physical (the hunger), and ideological struggle brings attention to possibility and limitation of artistic creation (specifically, whether or not to set a fire or how to) and real life in the early PRC. By tracing the networked spaces and places including Shanghai, Northeast China, Hong Kong, and New York involved in the conception, writing, and publication of The Rice Sprout Song, the chapter not only opens up a new perspective to Zhang Ailing studies but also entails a type of spatial literacy to chart the cultural topography of Cold War global Asia. Weijie Song’s Chapter 21, “Worlding Jin Yong’s Martial Arts (Wuxia) Imagination in Three Keys: Narration, Translation, Adaptation,” presents Jin Yong’s 金庸 (Louis Cha 查良鏞, 1924– 2018) martial arts (wuxia 武俠) narrative has built up an epic and lyrical, geographical, and emotional “cultural China” shared by a transregional, border-crossing, and worldwide audience from the Cold War to the post–Cold War eras since the mid-1950s. Jin Yong’s work is widely disseminated in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, Thailand, and later in Taiwan, mainland China, and overseas Chinese and non-Chinese communities (thanks to the multilingual translations and multimedia adaptations). By situating Jin Yong’s phenomenal and monumental imaginative and historical martial arts works into three entangled worlds of narration, translation, and adaptation, Song aims to understand Jin Yong’s method of imagining China as a chivalric topography, close to a “situationist psychogeography,” and thus examines its vocabulary, grammar, and storytelling in terms of (1) four major geographical coordinates that anchor his wuxia world – Jiangnan region and the south as the memorable yet inaccessible and nonreturnable homeland, the Central Plains as the origin or beginning of Chinese culture, the peripheries or frontiers as the sites of resistance and rebellion, and the imperial capitals as the labyrinth of conspiracy and desire; (2) the gratitude and vengeance – be it political or personal, public or private – between Han Chinese and non-Han peoples, and between the knights-errant and the political sovereign; and (3) his chivalrous imagination intermingled with folklores and tales, (un)official histories, and cultural memories to stimulate reflections on China’s past for contemporary readers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, Sinophone communities, and a global world. Carlos Rojas’s Chapter 22, “Yan Lianke’s Heterotopic Imaginaries,” starts with a discussion of Michel Foucault’s theory of space and geography, in particular, heterotopias such as the prison, the asylum, and the cemetery, and traces Foucault’s acknowledged inspiration from reading Borges’s fictional Chinese encyclopedia. Switching to contemporary China, we see a cancer village, an AIDS village, a Rightist re-education camp during the Great Famine, and so forth in many of Yan Lianke’s 閻連科 fictional works, which revolve around remote communities that are comparatively isolated from mainstream Chinese society yet are defined by unusual, distorted, or even perverse features that are indexical traces of a set of structural transformations affecting the nation as a whole. In this respect, Yan’s fictional spaces may be viewed as examples of what Foucault calls heterotopias. Rojas takes time to examine several of the heterotopian spaces in Yan’s recent novels, such as Lenin’s Kisses (受活, 2004), on a selfsufficient mountain village of people with disabilities; Dream of Ding Village (丁莊夢, 2006), on a devastating toll of AIDS across Henan villages; Four Books (四書, 2011), on a Rightists labor camp during the Great Famine; and The Day the Sun Died (日熄, 2015), on a sudden eruption of mass somnambulism in a community that would lead to violence and self-sacrifice. Rojas suggests that each of these works reflects on the underlying logics by which modern Chinese societies are constituted while at the same time gesturing to a set of creative processes that embody the possibility of society’s development and transformation. 15

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This section on individual writers in translingual worlds takes different approaches to traditional author studies. Liao could have easily built on Su Manshu’s rich biological information to highlight the poet/monk’s legendary status in early Republican China, but he chose a comparative, cross-historical method whereby “Broken Hairpin” is situated in Euro-American works as well as Chinese texts in tragic transition times. Qian Zhongshu’s concept of “harmony with diversity” should fit Goethe’s vision of cosmopolitanism in Weltliteratur, but despite Ji’s enthusiasm, we see little comparative literature work in English following Qian’s achievement. Xiaojue Wang’s mapping of the early Cold War geography opens up a new perspective on a precarious time when writers like Zhang Ailing were testing the expectations of the major Cold War players like the PRC, the United States, and Hong Kong. Weijie Song introduces Jin Yong as a Hong Kong martial arts fiction writer whose productive work captured both the local and global Chinese readers’ imagination and whose unique status poses a challenge to world literature. Finally, Yan Lianke’s powerful critique of contemporary Chinese social diseases is often disguised behind fantastic tales set in a series of uncanny heterotopias, but Rojas is able to tease them out and aims to strike a balance of critique and transformation in Yan’s recent works.

New Worlds of Gender Configurations This part tackles gender issues in modern China in different approaches. For readers interested in queer issues, they can consult Wong’s Chapter 12 in this volume. Jun Lei’s Chapter 23, “Modern Intellectual Masculinities in Transformation,” navigates the ebbs and flows of a paradoxical martial trend among literary men as coping strategies for the twofold crisis of Chinese men and the Chinese nation between the 1890s and the 1930s. In particular, it delineates various models of masculinities, such as martialized masculinity in the late Qing, neoromantic masculinity of the May Fourth generation, and middlebrow masculinity associated with Shanghai New Sensationalist writings. Through focused analysis of representative works by authors such as Liang Qichao 梁--, Lu Xun, Hu Shi 胡適, Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗, and Mu Shiying 穆時英, Lei argues that this era constitutes the crucible that forged modern Chinese manhood and the crucial link between premodern and contemporary configurations of masculinity in China. Studies of this era also allow an in-depth investigation into gender issues in relation to nation, race, and class, which were themselves nascent concepts or undergoing drastic reevaluation under modernity. Ying Hu’s Chapter 24, “Nora in China,” begins with the introduction of A Doll’s House to China in 1918. More of Ibsen’s works soon followed, and major New Culture leaders such as Hu Shi enthusiastically promoted what he called Ibsenism. In early twentieth-century China, Nora became the icon of the modern individual, her slamming of the door as she walks out the traditional family echoed in the real lives of women at that time as well as in countless literary works then and later. This chapter presents different aspects in the development of this gendered modern figure through individual lives, cultural debates, and literary works related to such notable women writers as Qiu Jin 秋瑾, Shi Pingmei 石評梅, Xiao Hong 蕭紅, and Eileen Chang 張愛玲. With brief comparisons of Nora’s reception in Germany, England, and Japan, Ying Hu demonstrates that the tortuous route of the Chinese Nora shares much with her fate around the world even as her particular challenges are deeply rooted in Chinese history and traditional gender norms. Along the way, Hu illustrates that we see also the enormous creativity and persistent efforts from Chinese intellectuals, male and female, as they responded to the radical gender transformation that is part and parcel of modernity. Barbara Mittler’s Chapter 25, “Reading Women: Rethinking a Trope in the Socialist Modern and Beyond,” argues that the reading women are a trope whose meaning has shifted 16

General Introduction

significantly in the past century. One of the important aims in female emancipation since the late Qing had been to make women literate. This call, however, addressed directly at the “women’s world,” was accompanied always by prescriptive formulas of what women could and should (not) read – their worlds of reading were carefully circumscribed. Chinese tradition has many stories of women damaged by clandestine reading: it is a common assumption that women could easily be “ruined by a book,” and accordingly, they must fear punishment if caught reading the wrong book at the wrong time – the figure of the reading woman, then, has served, in China’s twentieth century, both as an encouragement and a cautionary tale, depending on circumstance and reading matter, in a manner that often resonates with perceptions and depictions of reading women elsewhere in the world. Mittler’s chapter – mapping the field of female literacy by offering an alternative view from visual evidence – studies how different worlds of reading would be opened up to women, always already informed by specific (moral or political) readings of the world. Mittler’s focus on the socialist period also illustrates intricacies in the visual aesthetics of the Maoist modern. Li Guo’s Chapter 26, “Feminine Neorealist Fiction in the New Millennium: Voice, Trauma, and Focalization in Fang Fang’s Fiction,” studies women authors’ renovations of neorealist fiction by addressing Fang Fang’s 方方 development of fictional neorealism through representations of memory, forgetting, and focalization in her novel Soft Burial (軟埋, 2016). Portraying traumatized heroines against the turbulent backdrop of land reform and rural realities in the 1950s, the novel resorts to a variety of narrative techniques, including double focalization, free indirect focalization, and embedded focalization, to portray personal accounts of the past. In particular, the text addresses the strains and conflicts between what Jan Assmann identifies as “the normative element” and “the narrative element” underlying the connection between memory, identity, and cultural continuity, by staging an urgency of narrating the past (Assmann 2011, 2–3). The victimized characters’ unwillingness to recall their traumatic experiences presents a resistance against totalitarian discourses, which, modulated by authoritarianism, homogenizes political memories. Soft Burial dramatizes dialectical tensions between the politics of remembering and forgetting while calling for a poignant awakening from oblivious normalcy and cultural amnesia in the post-Mao era. Through effectual exposé of heterogenous and gendered modes of existence, Fang Fang’s experiment with neorealist fiction deconstructs the myth of the nation and its framed narratives of the revolutionary past. This part on gender, in a sense, comes in two interesting pairs. In the first pair, Lei’s discussion of three types of intellectual masculinities examines the debates in early Republican period on how to best reposition masculinity vis-à-vis a changing world of nation, race, and gender, whereas Hu demonstrates that Nora is not just a fictional proto-feminist character but has generations of real-life incarnations in China, and that women writers’ participation complicates gender issues surrounding Nora as a quintessential icon of modernity. In the second pair, Mittler shows that women seem to be reduced to passive images of reading, but this passivity is more than offset by their enthusiasm as they cheer and smile in countless socialist posters. On the other hand, Guo presents a more sobering picture of the socialist period in Fang Fang’s neorealist novel, which experiments with various focalization techniques and gender narration to maximize the effort of remembering and reconfrontation with trauma and amnesia.

Changing Worlds of Translation and Transmediation This final part investigates the impacts of translation and transmediation on modern Chinese literature and culture. Although both Luo Hui and Stalling touch on translation and translation studies, Michael Gibbs Hill’s Chapter 27, “Frame Tales: Reading the 1,001 Nights in Early 17

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Twentieth-Century China,” offers a unique look at the founding moment of modern Chinese literature when world literature works were translated or paraphrased/recreated in literary Chinese 文言, a time-honored language that would soon become the target of the New Culture intellectuals, who advocated for written vernacular 白話. Hill examines translations and critical discussions about the 1,001 Nights in early twentieth-century China. A significant pattern emerges in texts analyzed here: we see a persistent nostalgia and antiquarianism, especially in the way that translators and critics focus on the ancient culture of the Arab world and the ways it might share a sense of time or temporality with China. By engaging with this history of Orientalism and the creation and recreation of the Nights in China, as well as with other sources related to the places that were imagined in these translation – specifically, turn-of-the-century Egypt – we may find surprising possibilities for new comparative scholarship. Shengqing Wu’s Chapter 28, “Figuring Time: Lyricism in Contemporary Chinese Poetic Films,” treats the broader concept of lyricism as one figure of transmediality – referring to intertextual and intermedial transposition of lyrical effects into new media environments – and illuminates how Chinese lyrical tradition offered rich vocabularies, values, and sentiments grafted in cross-genres and intermedial practices. Focusing on two recent well-known “poetic films,” The Crosscurrent (長江圖, 2016) and Kaili Blues (路邊野餐, 2015), Wu elaborates the citation and recitation of poems as well as the cinematic recapture of landscape painting in these two films. For her, the functions of the frequent insertion of poetic text and voices, disruptive narratives, and the intricate intertwining of memory, reality, and multiple temporalities all contribute to the distinctive poetic qualities of these films. Wu argues that, as a characteristic style, method, and vision, lyricism – even with its constantly shifting definitions and attributes – has become a creative inspiration and force in facilitating cinematic representation and artistic experimentation of the shapes of time and the configurations of emotions in contemporary Chinese films. Emily Wilcox’s Chapter 29, “Performance and Performativity in Modern China,” brings us to performance studies that developed in the United States since the 1970s as a new field that introduced new ways of studying and conceptualizing performance, shifting it away from a maligned and marginalized subject to a source of theoretical and methodological innovation which sheds new light not only on the performing arts but also on a variety of sociocultural phenomena. Since 1999, Chinese performance scholars William Huizhu Sun 孫惠柱 and Faye Chunfang Fei 費春放 have systematized the introduction of performance studies to China, but with their own approach. Whereas US-based performance scholars often focus on the transgressive and individualistic aspects of performance, with a preference for the avant-garde and aesthetic, Sun and Fei argue for an approach they call “social performance studies” that places greater emphasis on what they regard as constructive and everyday performance. Building on Sun and Fei’s approach, Wilcox suggests that the concept of “performativity” deployed by performance theorists offers a useful lens for investigating the constructive and everyday nature of performance in modern and contemporary China. Both the aesthetic and the everyday thus serve as useful subjects for performance analysis, which places emphasis on the iterative nature of reality and continually challenges fixed notions of identity and social structure. Yiwen Wang’s Chapter 30, “Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World,” takes up an immense challenge to sort through popular Internet fictions and their adaptations in TV drama series and video games with admirable clarity by dividing them into dominant genres and subgenres, such as magical fantasy, martial artists, and immortals (both target male readers), as well as time travels, imperial court intrigues, and danmei 耽美 (the latter three geared toward women, with danmei stories specifically addressing male–male homoerotic romance for female audiences). Outside the Chinese context, Yiwen Wang reminds us that Internet fiction, as defined by its publishing venue, resides in the “World Wide Web,” a world detached 18

General Introduction

from the physical world we are corporeally situated in. This corresponds to Damrosch’s conceptualization of world literature as a “detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time.” Approaching Internet literature as world literature, this chapter explores Internet fiction’s deviation from the realistic setting of “our own place and time” in terms of temporal-spatial transportation and corporeal transfiguration. Spreading across national borders and medium conventions, the online story world is also subjected to transmedia adaptation and fan appropriation. Henry Jenkins proposes that the transmedia story world is a fictional world dispersed across multiple delivery channels and fan communities, with each adaptation and recreation adding up to the story world as a whole. Yiwen Wang, however, proposes that fan fiction and remix videos manifest a “what if” alteration rather than a “what is” extension of the original story world. She suggests that the otherworld fabricated in internet fiction constantly differentiates itself from the physical world it is supposed to anchor and from the story world in the source text from which it originated. This section on new developments in translation and transmediation foregrounds media, mediation, and mediality. Hill shows that through mediation of Chinese intellectuals, the 1,001 Nights was translated into Chinese as a legitimate world literature work, but the Chinese intellectuals’ justification actually has more to do with China’s need to strengthen its nation, culture, and citizens. Wu’s argument that lyricism is transmedia in nature finds two good examples in recent poetic films, which gain in frequent references to poetry on- and off-screen, in cinematic capture of landscape painting, and in an overall poetic mood derived from lyrical views of realities and minds. To a certain extent, lyricism is performative, and its performance tends to be trans-genre (poetry-painting-calligraphy) and transmedia. Beyond practices endorsed in “social performance studies” in contemporary China, Wilcox points to other performances in modern China that resemble the American tradition, those that are aesthetic, interventionist, and disruptive. Finally, Yiwen Wang delineates Internet fictions per their major genres, and her observation of some genres being censored one by one and replaced by a new genre sends a clear signal that, in reality, the Internet is not a free space, although in theory we can continue to speculate on its innovative measures and its cutting-edge potentials. In China studies, Internet fictions have received booklength treatments (Feng 2013; Hockx 2015). To place this chapter on a relatively new topic at the end of this volume on a world history of modern Chinese literature, I encourage scholars to keep an open mind to popular experiments of “what if” and “what is” and recognize Internet fictions’ transmediation as a new direction in our field’s long evolvement over a hundred years.

Notes 1 Comparative literature as an evolving discipline has shown increasing interest in China, and a few PhD programs in the United States started to develop East–West comparative literature in the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, scholars of Chinese literature have been active in the annual meetings of organizations like ICLA (the International Comparative Literature Association) and ACLA (the American Comparative Literature Association). Some specialists of Chinese literature and Sinophone studies have been elected to leadership positions, such as Zhang Longxi to President of the ICLA in 2016–2019, Eugene Eoyang to President of the ACLA in 1995–1997, and Shu-mei Shih to President of the ACLA in 2021–2022. 2 The rest of the chapter summaries are largely based on the contributors’ abstracts.

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Yingjin Zhang und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen in 1992. First English edition published in 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chau, Angie. 2018. “From Nobel to Hugo: Reading Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, no. 1: 110–35. Cheah, Pheng. 2014. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Concept of World Literature.” New Literary History 45, no. 3: 303–29. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Chiu, Kuei-fen, and Yingjin Zhang, eds. 2022. The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, eds. 2004–2010. History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 4 vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Denton, Kirk. 2014. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii. Denton, Kirk, ed. 2016. The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Denton, Kirk. 2021. The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Elliott, Emory, ed. 1988. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, Fang, Weigui, ed. 2018. Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Feng, Jin. 2013. Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance. Leiden: Brill. Hashimoto, Satoru. 2022. “Intra-Asian Reading; or, How Lu Xun Enters into a World Literature.” In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, edited by Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, 83–102. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Hockx, Michel. 2015. Internet Literature in China. New York: Columbia University Press. Hollier, Denis, ed. 1989. A New History of French Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Huggan, Graham. 2011. “The Trouble with World Literature.” In A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 490–506. London: Blackwell. Hutcheon, Linda, and Mario J. Valdés, eds. 2002. Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, T. K. 2022. “Memesis and Contemporary Chinese Poetry: A Distributed View on World Literature.” In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, edited by Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, 164–185. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Li, Jie. 2020. Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors, eds. 2009. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, no. 1: 54–68. Rojas, Carlos, and Andrea Bachner, eds. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2022. “Comparison as Relation: From World History to World Literature.” In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, edited by Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, 63–80. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Thornber, Karen Laura. 2014. “Rethinking the World in World Literature: East Asia and Literary Contact Nebulae.” In World Literature in Theory, edited by Damrosch, 460–79. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Valdés, Mario J., and Djelal Kadir, eds. 2004. Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press.

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General Introduction Wang, David Der-wei, ed. 2017. A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: HarvardBelknap Press. Wellbery, David E., ed. 2004. A New History of German Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Zhang, Yingjin. 2005. “Cultural Translation between the World and the Chinese: The Problematics in Positioning Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31, no. 2: 127–44. Zhang, Yingjin. 2015. “Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17, no. 1. Accessed February 2, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2714. Zhang, Yingjin, ed. 2016a. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. London: Blackwell-Wiley. Zhang, Yingjin. 2016b. “Modern Chinese Literature as Institution: Canon and Literary History.” In The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Kirk Denton, 27–37. New York: Columbia University Press. Zhang, Yingjin. 2016c. “Structure and Rupture in Literary History and Historiography.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, 657–81. New York: Oxford University Press. Zhang, Yingjin. 2018. “Introduction: Chinese Worlds of World Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, no. 1: 1–12. Zhang, Yingjin. 2022. “Locations of China in World Literature and World Cinema.” In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, edited by Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, 40–62. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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2 MODERN CHINESE LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY David Der-wei Wang

This chapter seeks to introduce modern Chinese literary historiography as an academic institution, a literary engagement with history, a pedagogical manual, and a cultural capital from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. It will identify figures, discourses, events, and titles that mark the changes and continuities of thinking and writing literary history in the Chinesespeaking spheres and Sinological circles. It will also engage with a series of contested key words and concepts that have concerned scholars and readers and project possible topics for further pursuit from the perspective of world literature. Although Chinese civilization has enjoyed a long tradition of recording and assessing literary achievements, “literary history,” as defined by Western academia, was not introduced to China until the early twentieth century. Such a model highlights a coherent narrative of canonical figures, masterpieces, notable movements and events, and most important, an articulation of national characteristics in line with a linear developmental sequence. It has occupied the discourse of Chinese literary modernity despite political upheaval, even becoming a venue of ideological debate, aesthetic contestation, and cultural entrepreneurship. To better understand the dynamics of writing and reading literary history in modern China, we have to rethink issues such as the periodization of “modern” Chinese literature, the conceptualization of Chinese “literature,” the feasibility of “literary history,” and more polemically, the meaning of “Chinese” literary history. We need to ask again: What makes Chinese literature since the nineteenth century “modern”? Literary modernity may arise in response to the shared global phenomena of political and technological modernization, but it need not repeat the same predetermined order or content. One needs to engage with the following questions: How has modernity manifested itself in the specific regional context of China? Is modernity an imported conceptual and empirical entity, and therefore a product of cross-cultural translation and transaction, or is it a native force of self-renewal arising in response to external stimuli? Can terms commonly associated with “modern,” such as novelty, creativity, and rupture, shed new light on a literary tradition that has valued convention, derivativeness, and “reactionary reform”? Finally, to what extent did the Chinese experience contribute to the global circulation of modernities? To begin with, Chinese “literature” as we understand it in academia today is a phenomenon that arose in late imperial China and gradually became institutionalized at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1902, at the order of Cixi, Empress Dowager and then de facto ruler of China, DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-3

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the politician and educator Zhang Baixi 張百熙 (1847–1907) proffered several regulations to reform the recently founded Imperial University of Peking. Via these regulations, Zhang introduced wenxue ke 文學科, literally, “division of literature,” which covered the following programs: Confucius studies, history, ancient thought, archival studies, foreign languages, philology, and literary works (詞章). While similar in some ways to the liberal arts, wenxue ke reflected the traditional paradigm of Chinese “literature,” one that comprised several different fields of humanistic learning. The prototype of “literature” in modern terms was the program of literary works. The core curriculum of literary works featured courses such as “Methodology of Literary Study,” “Etymology,” “Phonology,” “Literary Trends across Dynasties,” and “Classical Treatises on Writing.” Combining traditional Chinese philological study and the Western Romantic appeal to aesthetic taste, the program paved the way for the eventual institutionalization of literature as an exercise and appraisal of rhetorical forms and fictional narratives. We should polemically engage with the institution of “literary history” as a humanistic discipline in modern China. Although there was a cornucopia of historical accounts recording literary figures, activities, and accomplishments in dynastic China, the writing of Western-style literary history did not take place till 1904. When the Imperial University of Peking established its literature program, a young teacher named Lin Chuanjia 林傳甲 (1877–1922) was commissioned to write a History of Chinese Literature 中國文學史for the purposes of teaching. Modeled after the Japanese scholar Sasagawa Rinpū’s History of Chinese Literature (1898), which was in turn inspired by European literary histories, Lin’s history is an eclectic undertaking that comprises genre classification, philological inquiry, and chronological periodization. He highlights the vicissitudes of intellectual history from Confucius onward and describes the transformations of classical prose, paying little attention to poetry, vernacular fiction, and drama. The same year also saw the publication of the History of Chinese Literature 中國文學史, written by Huang Ren 黃人 (1866–1913), a scholar at Soochow University. His book borrows extensively from Japanese scholar Ōta Yoshio’s An Introduction to Literature (1896), which is in turn based heavily on Western literary discussions. Similar to Lin’s belief that literature is the essence of a country’s culture, Huang states that “preservation of literature is no different from preservation of other national essences. Literary history can inspire people’s love for the country; it is thus no different from national history.” But compared with Lin, Huang appears much more “Westernized” in conceiving of the formal issue of literature, and he puts more emphasis on its aesthetic-affective function. According to the extant paradigm, the May Fourth Movement – a nationwide cultural and political campaign begun on May 4, 1919, that called for self-rejuvenation in response to China’s setbacks in post–World War I international politics – was the turning point in China’s search for literary modernity. By contrast, the late Qing era, that is, the last decades of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), is seen as a transitional moment between the collapse of the old sociopolitical and literary order and the establishment of a new one. Scholars have taken issue with this paradigm in recent years, suggesting that the conception, production, and dissemination of literature during the late Qing possessed a vigor and variety that exceeded the narrow confines prescribed by May Fourth discourse. In the wake of the May Fourth Movement, there arose the first wave of literary histories, including Hu Shi’s 胡適 (1891–1962) Chinese Literature of the Past Five Decades 五十年來 中國之文學 (1922) and A History of Vernacular Chinese History 白話文學史 (1928) and Lu Xun’s 魯迅 (1881–1937) A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1924). While these histories each features a distinct scheme of periodization, they share the commitment to a sequential narrative that culminates in the modern era. Interventions with the May Fourth model, however, appeared in the early 1930s. In 1933, Qian Jibo 錢基博 (1887–1957) published his Modern 23

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Chinese Literary History 現代中國文學史, which comprises mostly premodern literature; the “modern” literature as proclaimed by the May Fourth literati receives only modest attention at the end of the volume. Qian contends that one can hardly make sense of modern literature without knowing its premodern counterparts in the first place. While his view can easily be denounced as being conservative, in hindsight, he may have sought to broach literary modernity from a different perspective: instead of the total call for new grounding, he finds in modernity an archaeological site with multiple layers of bygone textualities, against which the “new” undertaking becomes legible. In 1932, Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967), one of the most vociferous leaders of the May Fourth Movement, published The Origin of Chinese New Literature 中國新文學的源流. Zhou traced the origin of Chinese literary modernity to the late Ming moment, as evinced especially by the writing of the Gong’an and Jingling schools. For Zhou, the late Ming literati’s pursuit of personal calling and refined aesthetic taste anticipated the May Fourth spirit. Zhou was not alone in discovering the origin of Chinese literary modernity in a premodern moment. In 1934, Ji Wenfu 嵇文甫 (1895–1963), an intellectual historian committed to Marxism, published The Leftist School of the Wang Yangming Thought 左派王學, in which he traced the origin of modern Chinese literature and thought to the late Ming, when the radical vein of the Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) school of Confucianism thrived. Zhou and Ji, however, differ in that the former finds in the late Ming era the origin of the May Fourth liberal discourse of humanism, while the latter finds in the same late Ming era an incipient sign of revolutionary momentum. With these cases in mind, we should view Chinese literary modernization not as a monolithic process, with each stage inevitably leading toward a higher one in accordance with a certain timetable, but as a process with multiple entry points and ruptures. We need to believe that the advent of the modern at any given historical juncture resulted in a fierce competition of new possibilities, and the winners of this competition were not necessarily the best of those possibilities. Paradoxically enough, as literary history became increasingly institutionalized in the following decades, one witnesses more rather than less strictures imposed on its conception, writing, and circulation. Since the Great Divide in 1949, modern Chinese literature has bifurcated into two traditions, each with a distinct national agenda. The Republic of China (ROC) was founded in 1911 after the revolution to overthrow the Qing. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949 after the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. The ROC government withdrew to Taiwan, where it continues to exist to this day. For all the ideological antagonism between the two traditions, there were striking similarities between Nationalist and Communist governance of literary activities during the 1950s. Both regimes were eager to concoct a literary discourse to represent the authentic China they inhabit respectively. Therefore, when we discuss the literary history of modern China, there are at least five layers of meaning that comprise the term “China” that we must consider: China as a historical process, as a cultural and intellectual lineage, as a political entity, as an “imagined community,” and as an object of desire or fear. From the 1930s onward, new literature had attracted more attention from leftist historians such as Wang Zhefu 王哲甫and Li Helin 李何林 (1904–88), yet in general, it remained marginal in the discourse prior to 1949. In 1951, a young scholar and Communist Party member, Wang Yao 王瑤 (1914–1989), published A Draft History of New Chinese Literature 中國新 文學史稿, the first major modern Chinese literary historiography. A medievalist by training, Wang was nevertheless commissioned to write a modern literary history to assert the ideological agenda of the new regime. Wang organized his discussion of writers in terms of literary 24

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genres and devoted chapters in each period to poetry, fiction, drama, as well as nonfiction prose and reportage. Moreover, echoing Hu Shi’s concept of literary evolutionism, Wang proposed a linear development of literary modernity, but this time in terms of Mao’s 1942 Yan’an Talks. Still, contrary to his expectation, Wang’s Draft History was published to severe criticism the following year. He was attacked for adopting an ambiguous, “bourgeois” approach to the dynamics of new literature, evading the critical distinction between revolutionary literature and reactionary literature and, above all, the proletarian goal of a literature for “the people” (see Zhang 2017). In the midst of criticisms, Wang admitted his ideological mistake and set out to revise his work. When the new version of Draft History came out in 1953, the multiple storylines of new literature had been streamlined into a coherent plot, one driven by the momentum of proletarian revolution in pursuit of “new democratic literature.” Prominent figures from Lu Xun to Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897–1931) had been positioned in terms of their class nature rather than anything else. Realism was foregrounded as the discourse that best addressed the truth of historical experience, and most importantly, Mao Zedong’s 1942 Talks in Yan’an was treated as the guideline for not only summarizing the past but also projecting the future of Chinese literature. The case of Wang Yao is significant because it inaugurated the way literary history was defined, produced, and read throughout the Maoist era, with its impact looming even to this day. According to Communist ideology, literary development parallels political development; as the allegorical other of politics, new robust literature is said to replace old feudalistic literature on the path to the socialist telos. “Contemporary literature” was invoked to describe literature produced after 1949, when China supposedly achieved its final stage of historical development. This is contrasted against ideas of “early modern literature” and “modern literature,” which are used to refer to literature of the late Qing (1840s–1910s) and the May Fourth (1919–1949) periods, respectively. This periodization, with each period representing a further advanced stage in the development of literature, has been used to embed a progressive, revolutionary agenda in the most basic historiography of modern Chinese literature. Ideology alone does not explain why literature and literary history mattered so much to the new regime and the Chinese public. I call attention to the fact that although it has been deeply influenced by the Western impulse to develop systems of representation, modern Chinese literary practice still reflects the time-honored concept of wen 文 or literariness. This understanding of literature is deeply imbricated in the ancient poetics of wen, a classical Chinese term that can mean ornamentation, pattern, sign, artistic inscription, cultural upbringing, civilization, and a sign of the movement of the cosmos. By extension, wenxue 文學, or literature,1 refers to the art of registering, and being registered by, the incessant metamorphosis, from era to era and from region to region, of forms, thoughts, and attitudes regarding wen. In Stephen Owen’s words: If literature (wen) is the entelechy of a previously unrealized pattern, and if the written word (wen) is not a sign but a schematization, then there can be no competition for dominance. Each level of wen, that of the world and that of the poem, is valid only in its own correlative realm; and the poem, the final outward form, is a stage of fullness. (Owen 1985, 21) Although it has adopted the Western system of generic classification with categories such as fiction, prose, poetry, and drama, and though it experiments with modern discourses ranging from realism to postmodernism, modern Chinese literature continues an implicit dialogue with the traditional concept of wen and wenxue. That is to say, writers and readers of Chinese literature tend to associate literary exercises with not only the endeavor of using the word to 25

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represent the world but also the continued process of illuminating a cosmic pattern, a process that purportedly emanates from the mind and finds manifold manifestations – in corporal, artistic, sociopolitical, and natural terms – in the world. Thus, instead of merely playing with the dialectic of truth versus fiction, modern Chinese literature implants itself at every level of human experience, forming an ever-amplifying orbit of manifestations that are imaginatively evoked and historically embedded. Such a belief in wen as a manifestation of the heart and the world explains why literature was taken so seriously in China throughout the modern century: in the 1900s, when Liang Qichao 梁-- (1873–1927) promoted a literary reform as the foundation of national reform; the 1920s, when post–May Fourth radicals debated not only literary revolution but also literature as revolution; the 1940s, when Mao Zedong made literature a key principle of Communist revolution; the 1960s, when literature became the key to the “revolution fought in the deepest niche of the soul” during the Cultural Revolution; and the 1990s, when the nation was engulfed in a frenzy for the Nobel Literature Prize. Despite its anti-traditional platform, the Maoist regime uncannily has held on to this concept. As a matter of fact, the regime seems to have continued to implement the concept of wen in everyday life practice and even in the realization of national projects. The regime therefore cannot treat literature as merely a linguistic, fictitious representation of the world and instead must view it as an integral part of the process by which ideology becomes rooted in one’s heart and blossoms into an ideal polity. By corollary, literary history, as a chronicle of the zeitgeist, is subject to careful writing, reading, and revision. With this in mind, we must rethink the intertwined relationship between literature and history in traditional and modern Chinese literary historiography. Scholars have long pointed out that the “representability” of historical experience was a contested issue among ancient historians (see Li 2007). Narrating history – fleshing out the figures and events under treatment – requires not only archival data and a theoretical framework but also rhetorical expertise and personal integrity. According to the Analects, Confucius said that “when there is a preponderance of acquired refinement (wen) over native substance (zhi 質), the result will be ornamentation as performed by historians and bureaucrats (shi 史)” (Confucius 2009). Contrary to the conventional wisdom that favors history as more reliable than literature, the sage seems to suggest that historical discourse tends to be more exaggerated and insubstantial than literary engagement, and that both history and literature should be modulated in such a way as to illuminate the world truthfully. Thus, the arch-historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (135?–86 BC) is said to have created in his work the ideal juncture between the represented and representation, and between objective facts and palpable truth. With Sima Qian’s the Record of the Historian 史記 in mind, Shen Congwen 沈從文 (1902–1988), the greatest writer of lyricism and nativist literature in modern China, concludes that a great history must be a literary history (Wang 2015). When one comes to the contemporary scene of modern Chinese literary history in terms of critical methodology, geopolitical mapping, and worldview, four cases (and contested issues) come to mind. In 1961, C. T. Hsia 夏志清 (1921–2013), a Chinese American scholar based at Columbia University, published A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. This is a comprehensive survey of Chinese fiction from the literary revolution (1917) to the anti-rightist campaign (1957). Hsia demonstrated throughout the book a critical skill and vision which enabled him to stand alongside his peers in European and American literature, and thereby established modern Chinese literature as an academic discipline in the English-speaking world. The book had been banned in China for many years; when published in 1995, it became an instant classic. What Hsia has accomplished is, by traditional definition, remaking the canon. One may approach modern Chinese literature today from theoretical positions that Hsia could hardly 26

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have anticipated as early as 1961, but one can hardly start any new study of Chinese literary modernity without first consulting, challenging, or at least reflecting his opinions. Nevertheless, his magisterial style and critical confidence – even critical bias – have also constantly made him the center of controversy. Hsia won acclaim for calling attention to the writers once obscured by the socialist discourse, such as Shen Congwen and Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910–1998), and particularly for discovering amid pulp fiction the works of Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (1920–1995), the most talented woman writer in modern China. Meanwhile, he was criticized for denigrating Lu Xun, the founding father of modern Chinese literature, and other leftist writers for their ideological adherence. He adored Western literature, finding kindred spirits in contemporary critics from Lionel Trilling to Philip Rhav and F. R. Leavis. His vehement debate with the Czech Sinologist Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980) in 1962–1963, over the methodology and ideology of Chinese literary studies, marked a crucial moment of literary politics during the Cold War era. Until the Prague Spring in 1968, Průšek had been a devoted supporter of Marxism. He upheld the tenet of historical scientism and stressed that modern Chinese literature had to be examined in light of its entanglement with revolution. He criticized Hsia for pigeonholing writers and works at the cost of historical totality, to say nothing of the latter’s embrace of aesthetic subjectivism, a symptom of bourgeois taste. While Průšek’s argument can easily be disputed for being dogmatic, one tends to overlook the fact of the unique rationale behind his politics of literature. He believes modern Chinese writers’ subjective and individualistic inclination comes not from recently imported Western Romanticism as much as from the lyricism of premodern Chinese literature. This lyrical inclination, according to him, constitutes the quintessential element that helps lay out revolutionary literature, which he calls the epic. By tracing the “origin” of modern Chinese subjectivism and individualism to its indigenous, premodern roots, Průšek challenges the popular view that equates Chinese literary modernization with Westernization. His valorization of the Chinese lyrical heritage in modern literature prompts a rethinking of the linear, progressive plotting of literary development. For him, one should never overlook the mutual illumination of past and present. Průšek’s agenda was provocative in his time, particularly if one considers his allegiance to leftism. Presumably, he should have endorsed the linear timeline of (literary) revolution and upheld the inevitable overcoming of the old by the new. In 1971, C. T. Hsia coined the term “obsession with China” to describe the ambivalent attitude of modern Chinese literati toward the challenges of Chinese modernity. Hsia holds that modern Chinese literati are so obsessed by national crises as to turn their repugnance for the status quo into a masochistic mentality. These literati see any given social or political malaise as a sickness unique to China and thus grapple with Chinese modernity only negatively, by denouncing it. At their best, Hsia argues, Chinese writers were compelled to display in their works a high moral integrity rarely found among contemporary Western writers, but the price they pay for such an “obsession with China” is “a certain patriotic provinciality and a naiveté of faith with regard to better conditions elsewhere.” To remedy this syndrome, Hsia calls for a cosmopolitanism characterized by interaction with Western literature (1971, 533–54). Hsia’s critique has raised many eyebrows, from the nationalist camp as well as the multiculturalist camp, for adopting such a self-defeating posture. Insofar as Hsia criticizes the overall performance of modern Chinese fiction in light of Western models, one wonders if he, too, entertains an anxiety that is no less symptomatic of an “obsession with China.” Still, Hsia parts company with the writers he criticized in that, where the writers make their “obsession with China” a premise of revolution, Hsia sees in it nothing more than a symptom of involution. Hsia’s critique of “obsession with China” may bear an uncanny relevance to the ethos of contemporary China, in that the “obsession” now seems to take a self-aggrandizing dimension. 27

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In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, “rewriting literary history” became a top agenda item of the new era. Veteran scholars such as Wang Yao, Tang Tao 唐弢 (1913–1992), and Li Helin had just been rehabilitated and were able to recruit and train some of best students at that time. Meanwhile, works by overseas scholars, such as C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 李歐梵 (b. 1939) The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers, and Edward Gunn’s (b. 1946) Unwelcome Muse were introduced to China and offered new insights into topics, writers, and works eclipsed in the Mao era. In May 1985, Qian Liqun 錢理群 (b. 1939), Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 (b. 1954), and Huang Ziping 黃子平 (b. 1949), three scholars of Peking University, presented the new concept of “twentieth-century Chinese literature” at a junior scholar forum hosted by the Chinese Association of Modern Chinese Literature. They took issue with the rigid periodization of “early modern,” “modern,” and “contemporary” literatures based on the Communist Party’s timetable, calling instead for a more comprehensive inquiry into the movements and sentiments, ideas, and works that constituted the kaleidoscopic picture of Chinese literary modernity. Given the unpredictable political circumstances, these young scholars phrased their proposal cautiously, and still their project won warm feedback. As a result, interventions with the dogmatic discourse of literary history surfaced: the “dark side” of Lu Xun was unveiled, the Neo-Sensationalist School of Shanghai during the 1930s was excavated, works by overseas writers were brought into view, and the revolutionary canon underwent reassessment. In 1988, two young scholars based in Shanghai, Chen Sihe 陳思和 (b. 1954) and Wang Xiaoming 王曉明 (b. 1955), launched a column titled “Rewriting Literary History” in the magazine Shanghai Literary Forum. They sought to engage with a dialogue in the canon so as to project a methodology less burdened with ideological stricture and party interference. The result is a series of case studies of writers from Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904–1986), Zhao Shuli 趙樹理 (1906–1970), He Qifang 何其芳 (1902–1977), who are closely related to the Yan’an tradition, to Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Zhou Zuoren, and Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976), who had either been deemed marginal or completely fallen out of the sight for years. By then, Chinese literary studies had already made great advances in theoretical experimentation and archival discovery, but the two young scholars’ project to “rewrite” literary history encapsulates their desire to reinvent the field of modern Chinese literature. Implied in such a project, however, is nothing less than an effort to renegotiate the rationale of literature as mandated by the state. It is a revision, and re-vison, of the legacy of Chinese (literary) modernity, a task that requires further liberation of thought, a concerted effort to fight against the grains of the party line. After the Tiananmen Incident in June 1989, “Rewriting Literary History” suffered attacks from extreme leftists, who described the column as inaugurating the decline of the authentic historical view in literary studies. The case of “Rewriting Literary History” indicates again how literature was closely related to the state ideology in China, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century. The efforts to rewrite literary history, particularly those efforts that led to negative opinions of established authors and literary works, elicited strong reactions in academic circles. Leftists saw these efforts as unwelcome gestures of bourgeois liberalization. What came after was the rapid popularization of the discourse of “rewriting,” which was not limited to “rewriting literary history” in a modern context but also quickly spread to studies in classical Chinese literature, art history, and other related fields, where similar pleas for “rewriting” were voiced. The third case of contemporary Chinese literary historiography concerns the rise of Sinophone literature at the turn of the new millennium. Many modern Chinese writers shaped the spatial imaginary of the mainland from the vantage points of expatriatism, exile, and diaspora. What is more controversial is the recently introduced concept of “Sinophone literature”: 28

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Chinese-language literature produced in the regions of greater China, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese communities in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, as well as by Chinese-speaking subjects in diaspora. In contrast to the term “overseas Chinese literature,” which connotes a geopolitically peripheral position in relation to literature originating on the Chinese mainland, Sinophone literature refers to a heterogeneous body of articulations related to, but not necessarily subject to, the dominant discourse of China. The Han language, the predominant language of the Chinese people, serves as the common denominator of Sinophone literature. This language comprises numerous dialects and topolects and constitutes only one branch of the Sinitic language family. Still, all these linguistic articulations manifest themselves in the shared platform of the Chinese script system. Shu-mei Shih pioneered Sinophone studies (2007) by arguing for a Sinophone literature that highlights writings produced in both overseas Chinese-speaking communities and minority literatures on the mainland. As such, she pits her definition of Sinophone against PRC literature, which is deemed ideologically hegemonic and ethnically Han Chinese–centered. In contrast to such a confrontational approach, Jing Tsu (2011) argues for the theoretical framework of “literary governance,” which refers to the implicit negotiation and even coordination between linguistic and political antagonisms, as well as the “technology” of leveraging multiple linguistic sources in a given social environment. While both Shih’s and Tsu’s critiques speak to the polyphonic conditions of inscribing “Chinese” literary experience in relation to varied Sinitic contexts, they tend to overlook the elephant in the room: they leave “China,” the source of their Sinophone polemics, intact. I argue that if Sinophone studies is to successfully intervene in the current paradigm of Chinese literature and literary history, it must expand its domain from overseas to China proper. Instead of merely critiquing the hegemony of national language and literature, Sinophone studies must also account for the generative power of “linguistic nativity” within the national territory of China. The result is a discovery of multiplying individual voices, regional soundings, dialectical accents, and local expressions – from various age, gender, class, and interest groups – that are in constant negotiation with official linguistic and literary mandates. The Han Chinese language, however standardized by the state, is no monolithic language but comprises a diverse and lively set of complex voices. And a corollary to this principle is that so-called “standard” Chinese literature, despite the restrictions of the state, is capable of alternative expressions and experimentations. Accordingly, a Chinese literary history from the Sinophone perspective addresses the twin goals of the world of China and China in the world. Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896–1945), for instance, was driven to his notorious patriotic cries by the experience of being a frustrated student in Japan. Lin Yutang’s long-term sojourn in Europe and America enabled him to write about the Chinese experience from a cosmopolitan perspective. Eileen Chang first achieved popularity in wartime Shanghai by writing about Hong Kong; she fled Shanghai to Hong Kong after the Communist Revolution, finally finding refuge in the United States. Many modern Chinese writers shaped the spatial imaginary of the mainland from the vantage points of expatriatism, exile, and diaspora. It includes writers from “greater China,” as well as from the broader Sinosphere. Literary phenomena, such as the “Angel Island” poetry produced by Chinese laborers in the United States or the circulation of the leftist guerrilla novel Hunger in the jungles of northern Malaysia, point to the immense space in which Chinese experiences have taken place. Moreover, this literary history pays attention to minority literatures produced by Tibetans, Muslims, and Taiwanese aboriginal cultures, among others. For instance, Sino-Tibetan writer Alai 阿來 (b. 1959) was born to a Rgyalrong Tibetan mother and a Muslim father and grew up acquiring Han Chinese education. Although an internationally renowned writer of Tibetan 29

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mythology and culture, Alai can only speak Tibetan and write in Han Chinese, and he has always been reluctant to “represent” any designated nationality or ethnicity. Zhang Chengzhi 張承志 (b. 1948), a Han Chinese writer with a purportedly Muslim origin, was one of the first students to call himself a “Red Guard” during the Cultural Revolution. He later transferred his fervor to the Jahriyya school of Islam, a sect that spread throughout northwestern China during the late Qing. He became so devoted to his beliefs as to declare, “[M]y root is located not in China but in the Arabic world of Western Asia.”2 Lastly, as a way to conclude this survey, I introduce my edited volume Harvard New Literary History of Modern China (2017) as both a supplement to and a critique of the extant paradigm of literary history. This is a collective project that introduces the “long” modern period of Chinese literature from the late eighteenth century to the new millennium. The volume, with 158 essays contributed by 143 authors on a wide spectrum of topics, seeks to record the changing imaginaries of China by assessing the enunciative endeavors, ranging from classical treatises to avant-garde experiments, from foreign thoughts to native ruminations, which have informed Chinese literary discourse, and also to identify the historical factors that have affected the interplay of Chinese (post)modernities. More polemically, it recognizes the fact that modern Chinese literature is not merely a national project, with distinct linguistic, discursive, and cultural characteristics, but also part of a transregional endeavor that defines the nation in relation to other political and cultural entities. The structural framework of this volume has been influenced by a variety of Western theories, ranging from Walter Benjamin’s “constellation” to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia,” Michel Foucault’s “genealogy,” and Gilles Deleuze’s “assemblage.” However, echoing my argument in the preceding text, it is the mutual illumination between wen (literature) and shi (history) that underlies my editorial vision. How modern writers reflected upon, and how modern literature came to reflect, this dialogic writing remains a central concern of New Literary History. Through the essays, I intend to configure a world in which literature of myriad attitudes, styles, and levels is brought to bear on history, and history is similarly brought to bear on literature. These events are of very different sorts: the publication of a particular work, the establishment of a specific institution (a society, a magazine, a publishing house), the first use of a notable stylistic, thematic, or technological innovation, a debate or controversy over a specific issue, a political action, a romance, a scandal, etc. The purpose of each essay is to elicit the historical significance of that event, as represented through literary texts or experiences, be it in terms of its particular circumstances, its long-term relevance, or its contemporary resonance or dissonance. While examining the “making” and “becoming” of literature in the context of China encountering the world through the past two centuries, I call attention to the subtle reverberations between wen (the literary; literariness) and the Heideggerian concept of worlding. “Worlding” describes the conditions of being-in-the-world in relation to the foregrounding and evolvement of things as such. The conditions are less fixed essences than conduits of differences between verbal, written, and mental concepts. According to Heidegger, it is poetry that brings the world and things together in a topology of being, “gathering into a simple onefold of their intimate belonging together” (1971, 203). As discussed earlier, wen points to a multitude of artifacts, locations, or encounters that manifest the world over time. Wen is not a sign so much as an articulation of the meaning of the world through a set of correlating ideas, objects, or doings. To be sure, Heideggerian philosophy and traditional Chinese literary thought differ greatly in their conception of what constitutes the “world.” My point is that the concept of worlding nevertheless may help us understand Chinese literary modernity in the broader sense of wen, as 30

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a vehicle of “bringing the world home” and, more importantly, as an agency that continuously opens up new configurations of the world. In view of the continued publication of literary histories in the Chinese-speaking world, let me stress again that New Literary History is by no means a “complete” history in the conventional sense; rather, it creates more interstices than it can fill. As such, it invites readers to imagine the vast space implied in the concept of modern Chinese literature and, more importantly, explore its horizons as part of a process of worlding. Accordingly, the Sinophone intervention represents yet another attempt to broaden the scope of modern Chinese literature. It does not seek to overwrite the extant imaginary of “China” but rather seeks to tease out its complexity. Is it not a paradox that critics can subscribe to a “politics of marginality” and pontificate about a “clash of empires” and “global contextualization” while rigidly marginalizing forms of Chinese modernity and historicity that do not emerge within some preconceived mainstream? If one of the most important lessons one can learn from modern Chinese literature and history is the tortuous nature of Chinese writers’ attempt to grapple with a polymorphous reality, then this knowledge can be appreciated in full only through a criticism and literary history equally exempt from formulaic dogma and ideological blindness. One must genuinely believe that Chinese and Sinophone writers have been, and still are, capable of complex and creative thought, even at moments of political suppression and personally motivated reticence. I envision a literary history in the name of “modernity” must be unafraid to look squarely at this historical reality―a reality of contested modernities.

Notes 1 Literally, wenxue means the “study of wen,” a term later adopted for use as the translation of literature. 2 http://bbs.tiexue.net/post_6569889_1.html. Access on August 20, 2021.

References Confucius. 2009. The Analects. Chinese-English ed., D.C. Lau’s translation with modification. Taipei: Linking. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial Library. Hsia, C. T. 1971. “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature.” In Appendix 1 of A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 533–54. New Haven: Yale University. Li, Wai-yee. 2007. The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. Owen, Stephen. 1985. Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tsu, Jing. 2011. Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, David Der-wei. 2015. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Zhang, Yingjin. 2017. “The Genesis of Literary History in New China.” In New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-wei Wang, 556–62. Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Belknap Press.

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PART II

Circulation and Reception of China in World Literature

3 ZEITGEIST AND LITERATURE The Reception of Chinese Literature in Germany Until the First Half of the Twentieth Century Weigui Fang

In the Beginning, Everything Revolved in the First Place Around Confucius News about Chinese language and script as well as Chinese books reached Europe since the mid-sixteenth century, the first printed works ending up in the Vatican library and that of the Escorial. Initially, they were exclusively objects of an early modern curiositas – learned curiosity. A reception of Chinese literature did not begin in Europe until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, after the first Latin translations had been published. In the field of philosophy, excerpts from Confucius’s works in Latin translations by Fathers Prospero Intorcetta (1625–1696) and Philippe Couplet (1622–1693) appeared in 1672 and 1687 under the title Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. And thus, the Confucian world, which is later often used as a synonym for the Chinese world, was opened up to Western scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Confucius was admired and compared to Plato, Socrates, and St. Paul (d’Elia 1934, 4–9). The fact that, for a long time after the publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, mainly the Confucian “Four Books” (四書) and “Five Classics” (五經) were translated was due to the old concept of literature. Efforts to restrict the concept of literature to “belles lettres” did not gain acceptance until around 1840. Until then, based on the tradition of historia literaria, the broad spectrum of scholarly and scientific texts was usually also dealt with in presentations on the history of literature. But in the nineteenth century, the narrower concept of literature remained diffuse in its scope, which was usually determined pragmatically by interests, habits, and traditions (Fricke 2007, 445–6). This can be seen in the early studies of the history of Chinese literature by Western scholars – a field where Germany was having a lead. Because the early works on Chinese literary history reflect quite well the general state of reception of Chinese literature in the West and particularly in Germany (as a summary of what one has read and how one has judged), and because their evaluations of Chinese literature are also quite representative of the respective “zeitgeist,” they are often referred to in the present study, especially as characterizing accounts. In this way, one can assess not only the general reception of the literature itself but also the relevant state of research. However, one cannot deal with everything in the limited scope of this chapter. Therefore, I will give only a rough overview of the entire development up to the first half of the twentieth 35

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-5

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century, focusing on aspects that permit to examine the main tendencies and characteristics of the reception of Chinese literature, that is, the reception of literature impregnated by Confucianism or by Daoism, and the reception of Chinese poetry. Unfortunately, other relevant aspects can only be outlined briefly. The early spread of Chinese literature in Germany occurred in the same way as in some other areas of Europe, that is to say, it happened initially under the influence of earlier Latin translations. The works received were on the whole the same as in other countries, but they were often noticed years or decades later than in England and France. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743) printed the translation of the drama Zhaoshi gu’er 趙氏孤兒, done by Joseph Henri de Prémare (1666–1736), in his Description . . . de l’Empire chinois (Du Halde 1735). The play became popular thanks to Voltaire’s adaptation L’Orphelin de la Chine (1755). Du Halde’s work also featured translations of eight poems from the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Songs) and three smaller stories from the Jingu qiguan 今古奇觀 collections. In 1747, there existed already a German translation of Du Halde’s work; this resulted also in the first contact of German readers with Chinese literature (Du Halde 1747–1756). Haoqiu zhuan 好逑傳 is the first Chinese novel to be published in a European translation. The translation, supposedly begun in the early eighteenth century in Guangzhou by an English merchant named James Wilkinson, was edited and published by Thomas Percy (1729–1811). The Nuremberg-based polyhistor Christoph Gottlieb Murr (1733–1811) then translated it into German and printed it in Leipzig in 1766 (Murr 1766). At that time, the authors of general literary histories, which also took Chinese literature into account, were well aware of the extremely poor knowledge of Europeans in the field of Chinese literature. Ludwig Wachler (1767–1838) wrote in 1804 that “the news about Chinese literature . . . are partly inadequate, partly exaggerated,” and that they are of little interest to Europeans, “because this nation has always remained isolated” (1804, 334). The smaller works collected and published in 1825–1826 by Abel Rémusat (1788–1832) under the title Mélanges Asiatiques (1825–1826), as well as the Chinese Miscellany published in 1825 by Robert Morrison (1782–1834), led to the fact that in the sections devoted to Chinese literature of the encyclopedias that followed, a total of around 190 works of Chinese literature were named.1 In his Handbuch der allgemeinen Geschichte der literärischen Cultur (Handbook of the general history of literary culture, 1804), Wachler named Confucius the “most famous scholar” of China, as well as some of the books he edited. In the revised edition of the Handbuch, published in 1822, he gave an overview of the “holy books” (Wachler 1822, 70, 1833, 81f.). Because China had always been regarded by many as a country of literature, it was simply impossible in their eyes that Confucius was not a man of letters. The early European conception of Chinese literature revolved primarily around his teachings. In his contribution to the Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (General encyclopedia of sciences and arts), Wilhelm Schott (1802–1889) emphasized that prejudices against Chinese in Europe had an inhibiting effect on the study of Chinese language and literature, and that therefore only a few scholars had studied Chinese literature: “for that very reason it is no wonder that up to now we have only been able to properly appreciate a small proportion of it, but are not even able to overlook the whole” (Schott 1827, 369). In 1854, Schott published his Entwurf einer beschreibung der chinesischen litteratur (Draft of a description of Chinese literature); it was the first detailed presentation of the topic from a Sinological point of view in German, and probably also the world’s first historiography of Chinese literature (Schott 1854, 293–418). In Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle, Schott’s work was mentioned as the only – albeit insufficient – attempt in this direction (Larousse 1869, 133, column 2). 36

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Chinese literature was researched by several European scholars in the nineteenth century, but its impact on a wider European readership was limited. At the end of the 1880s, Meyer’s Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände (Myer’s conversational lexicon for the educated classes) stated: Our knowledge of Chinese literature is still in its infancy. Our culture rests on GrecoRoman and Hebrew foundations, the Indians and Persians are related to us; we entered into an intellectual exchange with the Arabs in the Middle Ages, the consequences of which continue to be felt to this day; on the other hand, the art and knowledge of the Chinese were, with regard to their origin, up to the most recent times also in their development quite alien to European intellectual education: is it surprising then that the circle of their admirers is a relatively small one? (Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 1885–1890/1892, 30) Initially, authors of general literary history, such as Wachler, only knew Confucius. Although Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), founder of Western Sinology, wrote his long essay “Mémoire sur la vie et les opinions de Lao-Tseu” (Abel-Rémusat 1824), in which he translated a few paragraphs of Laozi’s 老子Daodejing 道德經 (this is how the French and European scholars began their translation and research of the Daodejing), it was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that people really began to distinguish Confucius from Laozi 老子 after Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) had published a complete French translation of Laozi’s Daodejing 道德經 (Le Livre de la Voie et de la Vertu, 1842). But in the entire nineteenth century, Confucius still played a central role in Germany’s general literary historiography, as the Sinologist Wilhelm Grube (1855–1908) later discovered. As he saw it, the texts that were referred to as “the classical literature of the Chinese” by European scholars were “guarded and preserved as the palladium of the nation with a piety bordering on religious veneration” (Grube 1902, 31). These texts formed the basis of all popular education, both intellectually and ethically; they were considered by the Chinese as “the sum and the content of all knowledge,” and at the same time, they served as the norm for moral behavior (Grube 1902, 33). And of course, the cult of Confucius was keeping pace with the cult of the classical texts, Grube stated. As he saw it, the only bond by which they were united as a classical literature was the relationship – be it direct or indirect – which linked them to Confucius, in that they were grouped around him as their ethical and intellectual center. Grube wanted to emphasize that it was Confucius who laid the foundations for classical Chinese literature: “It owes its existence to his work, its validity to his name” (Grube 1902, 15). And for Eduard Erkes (1891–1958), Lunyu論語 (Conversations of Confucius) was a milestone that he valued as highly as almost no other in the West: Precisely because of its simple way, averse to all fantasy, in which it teaches purely rational morality, the Lun-yü has become one of the most important and meaningful ethical works not only of Chinese but of all world literature. It is a book that finds a place alongside the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas, despite all the renunciation of mystical and mythological drappings of its teachings; in any case, it did not edify and support fewer people than they did. (Erkes 1922, 20) Wachler’s Versuch einer Allgemeinen Geschichte der Literatur (Attempt of a general history of literature, 1794) contained a presentation of Chinese literature that is still indebted completely to Du Halde in his Description de la Chine: 37

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The Chinese, to be sure, boast too much about the age of their state and their erudition. . . . It is said of Emperor Tai-Tsong (976–997) for instance that he owned a library of 80,000 volumes, including 40,000 printed books. (Wachler 1794, 119f) Some people wanted to believe that men of letters could be found everywhere in the Middle Kingdom, and that among the 360 million Chinese, there were at least 2 million literary figures. It was said that even on tableware a poem was printed (Gützlaff 1838, 463). Undoubtedly, the “gradual awareness of the Sinesian language, writing and literature in Europe” was a fact (Eichhorn 1807, 63–89). But still, “all of their erudition was of little or no interest to us” (Wachler 1794, 120). In general, the reception of Chinese literature in Europe, and thus also in Germany, is always determined by the respective image of China. In other words, it correlates very strongly with the respective image of China that is current at a given time, whereas the literary quality of the works received often plays an insignificant role. During the Enlightenment, there were two leading philosophers in Germany – Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754) – whose ideas were partly influenced by China, and whose preoccupation with China resulted for the first time in a clear German image of China. Leibniz’s enthusiasm, and the fruits of his China research, became apparent in 1697 in his Novissima Sinica. Historiam Nostri Temporis Illustratura (The latest from China: to illuminate the history of our time) and especially in his preface to this book, a collection of reports and letters of Jesuit origin. Leibniz’s preface is not only the first weighty German publication about China; it undoubtedly also laid the foundation for the later positive image of China. For Leibniz, Chinese culture is at least on a par with the European one, if not superior to it. From all these convictions, Leibniz then derived a postulate that posterity must always remember as soon as one begins to appreciate Chinese culture: one should bring Chinese missionaries to Europe so that in Europe one can also “apply a practical philosophy and a more sensible way of life” (Leibniz 1985, 17). Just at a time when Leibniz and Wolff had made an open commitment to Confucian ethics and were hoping for a synthesis of Western and Eastern worldviews, the positive image of China was slowly and quietly changing – in the opposite direction, “until finally,” said Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), “unbelief awoke and refused to allow them either their high culture or even their strange peculiarities” (1985, 122).2 Not only this disbelief but also the mockery that grew out of it and propagated itself and the contempt that went with it, then lasted – like the previous belief – for more than a century: a development that began with Herder’s image of China as an “embalmed mummy” (1985, 129) and continued, thanks to Hegel, Schelling, Ranke, and Marx, until the beginning of the twentieth century. Herder’s “mummy” theory influenced and shaped the German image of China for more than a century, and in the nineteenth century, the negative image of China reached its climax, especially with Hegel. In the China chapter of his Vorlesungen (lectures), he pointedly referred to China as “the only empire of permanence in the world” (Hegel 1837, 1976, 274) – a country of extreme stagnation and despotic sterility that eliminates any change. The effects of such utterances about China by one of the leading intellectual personalities of the nineteenth century are not difficult to imagine, as they influenced the conception and scale of values of almost the entire generation of Hegel. And thus, we can read in Meyer’s Das große Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände (Extensive conversational lexicon for the educated class, 1845) this devastating judgment with respect to the “belles lettres” of the Chinese: “As far as the belles lettres are concerned, no people in the Orient can boast more poetry, and still none is less gifted 38

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than the Chinese. Precocious and formal, it lacks the freshness of spirit that poetic creation demands” (Meyer 1845, 341).

Only Diligence but No Literary Imagination and Creativity In the years around 1830, there was an increased interest in Chinese novels in Germany, but it was said with regret that we haven’t yet had a single German translation of these attractive [Chinese] stories after the Original itself or any work that issued in the context of oriental language studies; but content with the pure interest in material and subject matter, we have relied on translations of the French and English renditions that were based, however, on the original. (Conversations-Lexikon der neuesten Zeit und Literatur 1832–1834, 413) Here it is appropriate to first present the early French translations of Chinese works, most of which were also received in Germany. Abel Rémusat translated the entire novel Yu Jiao Li 玉嬌梨 (Iu-kiao-li, ou les deux cousines, roman chinois, 1826) into French; it was the second novel from China published in Europe. His remarks in the introduction to this translation work obviously served as the basis for information about Chinese prose works. He also edited an anthology of Chinese stories, the Contes Chinois (1827). His student Stanislas Julien completely translated Zhao shi guer (Tchao-Chi-Kou-Eul: Ou L’Orphelin de la Chine, 1834) into French, as well as excerpts from Huilan ji 灰闌記 (Hoeï-lan-ki, ou L’histoire du cercle de craie: drame en prose et en vers. And then followed Baishejing ji 白蛇精記 (Blanche et Bleue, ou les deux couleuvres fées (1834), Pingshan Lengyan 平山冷燕 (Les deux jeunes filles lettrées, 1860), Xixiang ji 西廂記 (L’histoire du pavillon d’Occident 1872–1880), etc. Julien’s pupil Marquis de Saint-Denys (1822–1892) produced his translation work Poésies de l’époque des Thang in 1862, in which 94 poems by 35 poets such as Li Bai 李白 (701–762), Du Fu 杜 甫 (712–770), Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846), and Li Shangyin 李商隱 (813–858) can be found – a work that became a classic of Chinese poetry in the West. Antoine Bazin (1799–1863), another student of Julien, had already published his translations of the dramas of the Yuan period as Théâtre Chinoise ou Choix de pieces de théâtre in 1838, and in 1841 he did the translation of the play Le Pi-Pa-Ki 琵琶記 from the Ming time. Due to his intellectual exchange with Herder as well as in the spirit of the “Sturm und Drang” period, the young Goethe had also rejected China until he changed his complete aversion to China in old age. His best-known preoccupation with China in a poetic manner is the series of poems titled Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tages-Zeiten (Chinese–German seasons and times of the days) from 1827, which is more about imitating the spirit of Chinese lyrical poetry and intuitively recreating it. In the same year, he also composed four poems from Baimei xinyong 百美新詠 (Poems of a hundred beautiful women), an appendix to the book Huajian ji 花箋記, translated into English by Peter Perring Thoms (1791–1855) under the title Chinese Courtship (1824). Already, around 1796, Goethe had become aware of the Chinese novel Haoqiu zhuan, which became known at that time in Europe and which apparently did not fascinate him that much. It was not until 1815 that he dealt seriously with this novel, and again in 1827, when he devoured some other newly published translations of Chinese literature with great interest – in addition to Thom’s translation, Rémusat’s Iu-kiao-li, and M. M. Davis’s Contes Chinois (1827). When Eckermann asked whether the novel Haoqiu zhuan was one of the most excellent Chinese novels, Goethe replied: “Not at all, the Chinese have thousands of them and already had them 39

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when our ancestors were still living in the woods” (Eckermann 1948, 228). Nevertheless, one can generally say that even in Goethe’s old age, when he modified his early negative opinion about China, the aversion to China can still be detected if we pay attention to the subtleties in his utterances. Thus, he said in the short introduction to his own “translations” of the aforementioned poems of a hundred beautiful women: “A novel, Ju Kiao Li, and a great poem, Chinese Courtship – the one in French, by Abel Rémusat, the other in English, by Peter Perring Thoms, enable us to look deeper and more sharply into the so strictly guarded land” (Wilhelm 1929, 13). Of course, Goethe receives special attention primarily because of his position in world literature, and it was just after having expressed his “admiration” for Chinese literature that Goethe came to formulate the subsequently much-cited passage: “National literature does not mean much now; the epoch of world literature is about to come, and everyone must work now to hasten the advent of this epoch” (Eckermann 1948, 229). In addition, it matters in our case that we see here one of the most important poets not only of Germany but also of Europe paying attention to the literature of the Middle Kingdom. Hence, his views had significant aftereffects and greatly influenced the mood of later poets who turned to China. The world’s first historiography of Chinese literature, mentioned earlier, is also highly influenced by the zeitgeist of that time, especially where the author Wilhelm Schott explains Chinese culture, and he even mentions in the tone of Hegel that China is lacking that “‘progress in the consciousness of freedom,’ without which the longest history of the greatest monarchy cannot actually be called history” (Schott 1854, 354). On the other hand, Schott seems to distance himself from Eurocentrism when he notes at the beginning of his work: [T]he Chinese could never be accused of ausländerei (a craze for things foreign, regarded as superior) in any relationship, including the literary one. But since with them the need to write books and booklets was much more generally present than the natural talent for it . . ., the most comprehensive inländerei (dedication to one’s own cultural achievements) developed very early on, i.e., imitation, also probably aping of great domestic models, and commentaries ruminating on the spiritual food inherited from the ancestors. (Schott 1854, 293) Wilhelm Grube writes something similar in his Geschichte der Chinesischen Litteratur: It is understandable that in a time of so general stagnation as has now prevailed in China for seven centuries, at best only one kind of intellectual activity could flourish: the learned collecting work. And what the Chinese have achieved in such a way is unique and unparalleled in the history of mankind. (Grube 1902, 357f) Traditionally, China has been seen since the eighteenth century as the clearest opposite of Europe. Perceived in relation to the contrastive foil of individuality, subjectivity, and a prevailing spirit of freedom in Europe, an unreceptive independence of the Chinese struck Hegel. When assessing Chinese literature, one saw, according to the same logic, that it had no self-awareness, no tragic spirit in drama, no epic, no myth, no individual hero. And of course, one saw in the learned collecting work only diligence, but no literary imagination and creativity at work. Such a continuity of tradition as China reveals is unique in its kind; but regardless of how much one may admire it, it has hardly been a blessing for the spiritual 40

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development of the nation. Due to its tenacious persistence, the old saps the vitality of the new, and the sacred bonds of tradition become fetters of the spirit. Hence the impression of the rigid, conventional, and screwed-up that many, if not most, products of Chinese literature leave behind in our senses, so that the European reader, when reading a Chinese novel, occasionally gets the feeling that his is “among larvae the only feeling chest.” (Grube 1902, 3f ) In Grube’s eyes, it was tragic for Chinese literature that Confucius was regarded as a spiritual principle, because literature is highly dependent on individuality and creativity that cannot be found in Confucius. In him, there is “nothing that can arouse human empathy or admiration” (Grube 1902, 16). Grube was convinced, however, that China produced men who were more outstanding than Confucius (Grube 1902, 24). This aimed without a doubt at Daoism. And indeed, in the literary histories produced by Sinologists – from Wilhelm Schott to Wilhelm Grube, Eduard Erkes, and then Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) – as well as in German-language accounts of Chinese literature produced in the context of general literary history, Confucius and Laozi were very often compared as the two important symbolic figures in Chinese literature – one as a master for the masses, one as an individual with a mystical peculiarity.

“There Is Something Revolutionary About Laozi’s Philosophy” The reception of Daoism in Europe began much later than that of Confucianism, although Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) had already briefly referred to Laozi as a “contemporary” of Confucius and as the founder of the Daoist religion in his De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, which was compiled after his death by the Belgian Jesuit Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) and published in 1615 in Germany (Ricci 1616, 110). In 1687, Philippe Couplet commented on the 42nd chapter of the Daodejing in the “Foreword” of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus and translated the well-known saying (“The Tâo produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things”) (Couplet 1687, XXIV). But by and large, it was the Confucian doctrine that was highly esteemed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century by the Jesuit missionaries, who made it known in Europe, where this doctrine would then have a strong effect among thinkers of the Enlightenment. In contrast, the Jesuits, on the whole, paid little attention to Daoism or to Buddhism. It was only in 1823 that Abel Rémusat published some chapters of the Daodejing plus his comments. Then the first complete and commented translation of the Daodejing appeared in 1842. As already mentioned further earlier, it was done by Stanislas Julien (Laozi 1842). Its impact was considerable, especially among the educated. Julien’s translation is still regarded as a pioneering achievement by Sinologists. Between the 1860s and the early twentieth century, there was a rush of Laozi translations, the first big wave, so to speak. This coincided with imperialist penetration of China, a phase ushered in by the First Opium War (1841–1842) and reaching a climax with the suppression of the Boxer Uprising. It was then that the image of China in Europe reached a low point. It is remarkable that it was exactly this phase that saw so much attention focused on Daoism in Europe. While its reception occurred later than that of Confucianism, it was undoubtedly more intense (Pohl 2003, 470f). The effect of Rémusat’s Daodejing translation, and especially Julien’s complete translation, also spread to other European countries. The Daodejing came into the focus of German scholars. “Belated” but extremely well done, two complete and annotated German editions appeared simultaneously in 1870 (Laozi 1870a, 1870b). 41

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It is in this period that the first translations of the Zhuangzi 庄子 appeared as well. We owe an excellent study of the language of the Zhuangzi to Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) (Gabelentz 1888). This work of the pioneering German Sinological linguist can be seen as the very beginning of profound scholarly research dedicated to this important Daoist book. Many scholars engaged in the debate about the authenticity of the classical writings of Chinese literature. This had been discussed for a long time in Europe, thus by Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) in his Mithridates (1806) and by Ludwig Wachler. In their opinion, there were many significant reasons that spoke against the authenticity of the books recognized as canonical. And in particular, there was an awareness of the mistrust voiced by the Chinese themselves until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the dispute over the falsification of the sacred traditions was still quite lively. By and large, Grube also harbored doubts as to the authenticity of some works. But he was fairly certain of the authenticity of the Daodejing, relying on the views of Abel Rémusat and James Legge (1815–1897). He said: I believe that we are still fully entitled to see it as a work by Lao-tszě – though not in the sense of an authentic, handwritten copy. If we wanted to assume that it was the work of a later forger, we would also have to admit that, despite all the darkness and difficult comprehensibility of the expression, he displays an originality and boldness of thought that is unparalleled in the middle kingdom. (Grube 1902, 144) Reinhold von Plaenckner (1820–1883), who presented the first complete Daodejing translation in German-speaking countries in 1870, wrote the following in the “preface” of his translation: I wrote it for all those who know how to turn their minds away from the material, to the truth, the good and the beautiful, to a general ethic that is rooted in the Táo. I also wrote it for those who criticize and laugh at China, the Chinese and everything that comes from China, to show them that there, too, and in the oldest, most distant times, sages with a healthy, noble way of thinking have lived, so that one gets free from materialism and capable of a pure, or at least purer, view of God and view of the world. (Laozi 1870a, xv) If at the time of their publication these words, as well as the Daoists’ wisdom propagating “non-action” (wuwei 無為), are not yet so sensational, they must then find all the more resonance with German intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the culturally pessimistic tendencies setting especially with Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century had spread more and more. Enduring effects in the German-speaking world can be attributed to a work by Martin Buber (1878–1965), Die Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse (The speeches and similes of Tschuang-Tse), that was published, with a profound afterword, in 1910 (Buber 1910). And also to Richard Wilhelm’s partial translation of the Daodejing: Tao Te King. Das Buch des Alten vom Sinn und Leben (Lao Tse. Tao Te King. The book of the old one about sense/meaning and life), published in 1911. In his interpretation of the Daoist ideas, Wilhelm gladly and frequently used the terminology or “language” of Western literature, philosophy, and theology that German readers were familiar with. He was ready to present Eastern philosophy simultaneously from a Western perspective. Hence, his Daodejing translation became 42

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quite popular. “There is something revolutionary about Laozi’s philosophy,” wrote Wilhelm about Laozi’s thoughts. All desire, everything that we can summarize under civilization, is evil. Instead, simplicity and unpretentiousness are real salvation. The people should have enough to eat, but they should not think too much. . . . A return to nature is the cure that Lao Tzu proposes in order to heal the damage to culture that the country had to suffer from for centuries. (Wilhelm 1926, 46f) The First World War, and the self-destruction orgy of the Occident that it implied, caused the greatest intellectual crisis in the modern Western world. The longing of many Europeans for a pure harmony of nature and soul, and also for the morality and spirituality of China, was nothing more than the expression of the general spiritual climate in Europe, which at that time was characterized by a general mood of decadence revealed symptomatically by the title Untergang des Abendlandes (The decline of the West, 1919), a widely read book by Oswald Spengler (1880–1936). A feeling of crisis that Rudolf Pannwitz (1881–1969) portrayed in his Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur (The crisis of European culture, 1917) was very much alive in European, and especially in German, intellectual circles. In these days, more and more contemporaries were looking to the East, and China was a focal point. In the West, people who hoped for Chinese ideas can be divided into two categories. There were those who were more irrational and obviously committed to Laozi; this was especially true of the pacifists, who increasingly turned to wuwei (inaction). The others were more rational and cherished Confucius. But the first current was obviously predominant (Reichwein 1923, 16). Ernst Bloch’s (1885–1977) assessment was quite apt: It is more difficult to state Lao Tzu’s Tao in European terms than it would be to state any basic religious category of East Asia; nevertheless, unspoken, it is the easiest to understand. As a religious category of wisdom, as a consonance with the deep calm that fulfills desires by forgetting them. (Bloch 1959, 1,445) The “revaluation of all values” by Nietzsche is often seen as a declaration of the reflection and criticism of modernity. Without doubt, the enthusiasm for Daoism has a lot to do with the contemporary mood of doom and, above all, with the ideological creed of the generation of the 1920, which saw their cultural pessimism and pacifism justified by Taoism. The poet Klabund (Alfred Henschke, 1890–1928) appealed in 1919 in the explosive wake-up call Hör’ es, Deutscher! (Listen, German!) directed at his compatriots to live according to the “holy spirit of the Tao” and to “become the Chinese of Europe” (Klabund 1919, 2). Due to Richard Wilhelm’s and Martin Buber’s translations of Daoist works, a real Dao fever broke out in Germany, which spread among writers and artists. Well-known writers such as Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) were particularly influenced by these translations. And after encountering the old Chinese concept of inaction, Alfred Döblin published the well-known novel Die Drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (The three leaps of Wang Lun) as early as 1915. The book interprets Daoist ideas while relying on an avant-garde style (Fang 1992, 220–51). In the case of Hermann Hesse and Bertold Brecht, there is no specific interest in Daoism; it is much more generally in things Chinese, and this in a multifaceted way. The Daoism euphoria gripped not only the German literary community but also the philosophical 43

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one. When writing about world religions in 1915–1920, Max Weber (1864–1920) created the work Konfuzianismus und Taoismus (Confucianism and Taoism), in which he saw Laozi almost as a fashionable philosopher, while he understood the ethics of Confucianism to be particularly comparable to that of Protestantism. The enthusiasm for Daoism and increased reception of Daoist literature during this period also played a decisive role with regard to the later upsurge of interest in Daoism in German-speaking countries. Sinologists then focused on Daoism also laid solid foundations for relevant research after the Second World War (until today).

The Discovery of China as a “Land of Poetry” and the Propagation of This Image At the beginning of the twentieth century, Daoism became the main characteristic of Chinese culture in Europe, like Confucianism had been 200 years earlier. A new generation of European intellectuals and writers now “rediscovered” Chinese culture from different perspectives and raved about a different China. Instead of Confucius, people discovered Laozi, Zhuangzi, the Yijing 易經 (Book of changes), Zen Buddhism, etc. The ossified image of China as the “land of morality” began to disintegrate. During this phase of new enthusiasm for China, there was also an unprecedented level of interest in Chinese poetry, which, to a large extent, corresponded to the predilections of the new intellectual and literary currents in Europe and Germany. When the well-known writer and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) took over the editing of the poetry section of the weekly newspaper Morgen in 1907, he wrote Richard Dehmel (1863– 1920) that he should continue to translate Chinese poems for this cultural magazine – the more, the better (Schuster 1977, 93). Dehmel had published his adaptations of Chinese poetry such as “Chinesisches Trinklied. Nach Li-tai-po” (Chinese drinking song. After Li-tai-po) between 1893 and 1895. The fascination with China at that time was indeed stimulated to a large extent by the German reception of Tang poems. In Germany, France was again of great importance for the discovery of China – now, as the “land of poetry.” And this was due to two French anthologies, the aforementioned Poésies de l’époque des Thang (1862) and Judith Gautier’s Le livre de jade (1867) – books that mainly offered adaptations of poems by the famous poet Li Bai (or Li Tai Po, etc.) from the Tang period, which then had an impact in European literary circles for a long time. Previously, apart from the Shijing as part of the Confucian canon, the translation of Chinese classical poems had happened only very sporadically in Europe. Friedrich Rückerts’s (1788–1866) adaptation of the Shijing, based on the Latin model of the French Jesuit Alexandre de la Lacharme (1695– 1767), was published in 1833 under the title Schi-King. Chinesisches Liederbuch (Schi-King. Chinese songbook). It had made this earliest Chinese poetry accessible to a wider audience. A complete German translation appeared only in 1880. It was a rhymed version by Viktor von Strauss (1809–1899), titled Schi-king. Das kanonische Liederbuch der Chinesen (Schi-king. The canonical songbook of the Chinese). A translation by August Pfizmaier (1808–1887) must still be mentioned; it is titled Ch’ü Yüan. Das Li-sao und die neun Gesänge: zwei chinesische Dichtungen aus dem dritten Jahrhundert vor der christlichen Zeitberechnung (Ch’ü Yüan. The Li-sao and the nine chants: Two Chinese poems from the third century before the Christian era). Even if this translation, published in 1852, is probably the first translation of Qu Yuan’s 屈原 (c. 340 BC–278 BC) works worldwide, it has hardly met with a response due to the difficulty of understanding the original. It was primarily through the writer and poet Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865–1910) that German poets became aware of the two French anthologies mentioned (Schuster 1977, 91). The Sinologist Alfred Forke (1867–1944) published his translation work Blüthen chinesischer Dichtung. 44

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Aus der Zeit der Han- und Sechs-Dynastie (Blossoms of Chinese poetry. From the time of the Han and the Six dynasties) in 1899. In addition to 140 poems from these two dynasties, the book also contains 27 poems by Li Bai. The book is the first German anthology of Chinese poetry to emulate the French and English lead in this field. A few years later, Hans Heilmann’s (1859–1930) Chinesische Lyrik (Chinese poetry, 1905), a secondary translation into German of the aforementioned French translation works, had great success with the general public. These publications were de facto the first beginnings of the German effort to produce translations of Chinese poetry, especially poetry from the Tang period. In the following years, many German poets published their adaptations of Tang poems. This created not only an interference between Sinologists and writers but also a relationship of competition. Poets who did not speak Chinese but who had a great interest in Chinese poetry ultimately made a great contribution to the spread of Tang poems. Hans Bethge’s (1876–1946) adaptations, published under the title Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese flute), based on models by Saint-Denys and Gautier and on Heilmann’s Chinesische Lyrik, were published in 1907. The poetry book Die chinesische Dichtung by Otto Hauser (1876–1944) was published in 1908, and in 1909, his Li Tai Po. Gedichte aus dem Chinesischen. Thanks to Dumpfe Trommel und berauschter Gong. Nachdichtungen chinesischer Kriegslyrik (Dull drum and intoxicated gong. Adaptations of Chinese war poetry, 1915) and to his collection titled Li-tai-pe (1916), Klabund became, alongside Hans Bethge, one of the best-known and most successful German poets due to his adaptations and interpretations of Chinese poetry. Their adaptations did not only arouse great interest in Tang poetry among German poets of various currents but also had a strong influence on contemporary literary production of poems, drama, and novels. Many German poets and intellectuals were particularly fascinated by Li Bai’s poems, which are impregnated by Daoist and Buddhist views and which reveal a pervasive, mystical connection to nature and the universe (Tscharner 1939, 105). According to Wilhelm Grube, Li Bai undoubtedly ranks first among the poets of the Tang period, and he “made himself immortal not only as a poet, but also as a drinking genius” (Grube 1902, 277). “As an eternally drunk, eternally holy wanderer,” Klabund once said, he is roaming “through the Chinese world” (Klabund 1916, 47). And he also sees Li Bai as “perhaps the greatest poet of all times and nations” (Klabund 1923, 16). In place of Confucius, Li Bai has now appeared as the most conspicuous symbol of Chinese culture. He threw overboard the stubborn impression of a Chinese literature, which tends to teach and has no imagination. The fact that the German translations of Tang poems particularly valued Li Bai from the very beginning and that a Li Bai fever arose around the First World War was due to the fact that his poems, which contain a keynote of eternal pain and grief, were now met in Europe with a great response from a frustrated and resigned generation. Li Bai’s life, replete with poetry and wine, like the Dionysian spirit of Nietzsche, seemed to appeal particularly to contemporary German writers and poets. Thus, Hermann Hesse, whose entire work is “permeated by mild DaoistBuddhist ideas” (Bauer 1984, 184), says in his novella Klingsors letzter Sommer (Klingsor’s last summer, 1919), about the eponymous figure who corresponds to Hesse’s essence, that Klingsor in the last months of his life . . . also consciously sought the rush of wine as a numbing of his pains and of a sadness that was often difficult to bear. Li Tai Pe, the poet of the deepest drinking songs, was his favorite, and when he was drunk he often called himself Li Tai Pe. (Hesse 2014, 284) 45

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The melancholy trait of the zeitgeist found its most grandiose expression artistically in Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (Song of the earth, 1909), in which he set four poems by Li Bai to music, and the other models were poems by the Daoist- or Zen Buddhist–oriented poets Qian Qi 錢起 (722–780), Meng Haoran 孟浩然 (689–740), and Wangwei 王維 (701–761). Some writers with left-wing orientations were enthusiastic about the poems of Bai Juyi and Du Fu, both contemporaries of Li Bai, as they saw here – in contrast to Li Bai – the socially critical aspects emphasized. In the pre-announcement of Albert Ehrenstein’s (1886–1950) PeLo-Thien (1923), a collection of renditions of Bai Juyi’s poems, we read: The peach blossoms of Chinese poets usually smelled a bit perfumed in German. The poems of Pe-Lo-Thien are free from such sweetness. . . . They are poems of the noblest melancholy, whose master and victim are not only Pe-Lo-Thien, but also the German Albert Ehrenstein. (Schuster 1977, 105) In this collection of poems, Ehrenstein mainly selected poems that deal with poverty and oppression. This tendency was even more noticeable in another volume of poems, titled by Ehrenstein, who revealed solidarity with China, Nachdichtungen revolutionärer chinesischer Lyrik aus drei Jahrtausenden (Adaptations of revolutionary Chinese poetry from three millennia, 1924). For German intellectuals, China no longer provided only opportunities to cope with the cultural crisis and a new spiritual orientation, or to engage in an exotic attitude suitable for their artistic design, but also – especially if they were left-wing intellectuals – a confirmation of their political convictions. This latter tendency became even more noticeable since the second half of the 1920s. The left-wing playwright and poet Brecht was particularly inspired by Chinese thought, for instance, by the parable poems of Bai Juyi. Because a topic like “Brecht and China” is all too well-known and a great deal has been written about it, it is no longer necessary to deal with it here in detail. As I have shown, the early translation and reception of Chinese literature in Germany must always be seen in a European context. Although in the early phase Chinese literary works were received a bit later by the German-speaking public than by readers in France and England, the reception was no less lively. Some translations to German and the related research reached a fairly high level, as the reception of Daoism and Chinese poetry has shown us. The competition between German Sinologists and writers who were creating adaptations of Chinese poetry is an interesting phenomenon that presents very vividly the close relationship between literary reception and production. Furthermore, it can be said that in Germany, as in other Western countries, the entire period of ca. 250 years of reception of Chinese literature reveals very clearly that this reception has a lot to do with the respective image of China and European construction of a “Chinese culture.” It is related to the specific ideology and cultural field prevailing in each period, and this even after the Second World War. In East and West Germany, completely different translation and research landscapes emerged with regard to the same Chinese literature. Apart from the Cold War as a general background, the factors described earlier with regard to the reception of Chinese literature up to the middle of the twentieth century still apply here – thus, the specific social and historical conditions for reception, different trends of the time, and changing images of China in the West. Perhaps as a result of China’s increasing significance in today’s world, there has been something like a “China boom” in Germany that became even more noticeable since German reunification. The new focus on China led to a lively reception of Chinese literature. Never before had so many Chinese works been translated to German. In addition to great successes enjoyed 46

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by certain authors, there was no lack of critical voices, mainly for political and ideological reasons. It would be interesting to outline the recent reception process in this chapter. But unfortunately, we have to leave this task to another project. There is simply too much material, which cannot be dealt with here in a few words. That much must be said here, however, about the recent reception of Chinese literature in Germany: for various reasons, German translators (and publishers) often choose literary works from China not necessarily on the basis of their literary or aesthetic quality but on the basis of such criteria as critical content, an explicit political tendency or the presence of a sensitive topic. This is regrettable, because critical or politically committed literature becomes worthless when the aesthetic qualities are patently lacking.

Notes 1 On the Chinese literature mentioned in the early German encyclopedias (and other publications), see, especially, Lehner 2011. 2 Herder had mocked: “The [Chinese] empire is an embalmed mummy, painted with hieroglyphics and wrapped with silk; their inner cycle is like the life of sleeping winter animals” (1985, 129).

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Weigui Fang Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1985. “China” (Ideen zur Philosphie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Part 3, extract). In Deutsche Denker über China, edited by Adrian Hsia, 117–34. Frankfurt: Insel. Hesse, Hermann. 2014. “Klingsors letzter Sommer.” In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Volker Michels. Vol. 1: Die Erzählungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Klabund. 1916. Li-Tai-Pe: Nachdichtungen. Leipzig: Insel. Klabund. 1919. “Hör’ es, Deutscher!” Der Revolutionär, no. 1: 2–3. Klabund. 1923. Geschichte der Weltliteratur in einer Stunde. Leipzig: Dürr & Weber. Laozi (Lao-tseu). 1842. Le livre de la voie et de la vertu. Translated and with a commentary by Stanislas Julien. Paris: Imprimerie Royal. Laozi (Lao-Tse). 1870a. Lao-Tse-Táo-Tĕ-King, der Weg zur Tugend. Translated and explained by Reinhold von Plaenckner. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Laozi (Laò-Tsè). 1870b. Laò-Tsè’s taò tĕ king. Translated, with an introduction and commentary by Victor von Strauss. Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer. Larousse, Pierre. 1869. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. Vol. 4. Paris: Administration du grand Dictionnaire universel. Lehner, Georg. 2011. China in European Encyclopaedias, 1700–1850. Leiden: Brill. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1985. “Vorwort zu Novissima Sinica.” In Deutsche Denker über China, edited by Adrian Hsia, 9–27. Frankfurt: Insel. Meyer, Joseph, ed. 1845. Das große Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände, 1. Abth., Band 7, 2. Hildburghausen, Amsterdam, Paris and Philadelphia (u.a.): Bibliographisches Institut. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encyklopädie des allgemeinen Wissens. 4th ed. Vol. 4. 1885– 1890/1892. “Chinesische Sprache und Literatur.” Leipzig and Wien: Bibliographisches Institut. Murr, Christoph Gottlieb. 1766. Haoh Kjöh Tschwen. Leipzig: s.n. Pohl, Karl-Heinz. 2003. “Play-Thing of the Times: Critical Review of the Reception of Daoism in the West.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30, no. 3–4: 469–86. Reichwein, Adolf. 1923. China und Europa. Geistige und künstlerische Beziehungen im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Oesterheld & Co. Ricci, Matteo. 1616. Storia dell’introduzione del cristianesimo in Cina. Lugduni (Leiden): Cardon. Schott, Wilhelm. 1827. “Chinesische Literatur.” In Allgemeine Encyclopaedie der Wissenschaften und Kuenste, in alphabetischer Folge von genannten Schriftstellern bearbeitet, Sect. I, Theil 16, edited by Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber, 369–74. Leipzig: Gleditsch. Schott, Wilhelm. 1854. “Entwurf einer beschreibung der chinesischen litteratur.” In Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, aus dem Jahre 1853, 293–418. Berlin: Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (F. Dümmler). Schuster, Ingrid. 1977. China und Japan in der deutschen Literatur 1890–1925. München: Francke. Tscharner, Horst von. 1939. China in der deutschen Dichtung. München: Ernst Reinhardt. Wachler, Ludwig. 1794. Versuch einer Allgemeinen Geschichte der Literatur. Für studirende Jünglinge und Freunde der Gelehrsamkeit. Vol. 2. Lemgo: Meyer. Wachler, Ludwig. 1804. Handbuch der allgemeinen Geschichte der literärischen Cultur. Vol. 1. Marburg: Neue Akademische Buchhandlung. Wachler, Ludwig. 1822. Handbuch der Geschichte der Litteratur. Zweyte Umarbeitung. Erster Theil: Einleitung und Geschichte der alten Litteratur. Frankfurt am Main: Hermann. Wachler, Ludwig. 1833. Handbuch der Geschichte der Litteratur. Dritte Umarbeitung. Erster Theil. Einleitung und Geschichte der alten Litteratur. Leipzig: Barth. Wilhelm, Richard. 1926. Die chinesische Literatur. Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion. Wilhelm, Richard. 1929. “Chinesisches. Gedichte hundert schöner Frauen, von Goethe übersetzt (Things Chinese. Poems of a hundred beautiful women, translated by Goethe).” In Chinesisch-Deutscher Almanach für das Jahr 1929/30 (Chinese-German Almanach for the Year 1929-’30), edited by the China Institute Frankfurt am Main, 13–20. Frankfurt: China Institute.

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4 PARIS AND THE ART OF TRANSPOSITION, 1920s–1940s Angie Chau

In Guo Jianying’s 郭建英 1930s cartoon “Introduction” (Figure 4.1), a Chinese man in a Westernstyle suit stands stunned as a male artist holding a painter’s palette presents him with a nude, curly-haired female model who dangles a cigarette holder in her hand and poses suggestively on a loose pile of drapery. The caption reads, “Old Huang, please allow me to present to you Miss Chen,” implying that the visitor Mr. Huang’s shocked expression is the result of being confronted with the model’s full-frontal nudity (Guo and Chen 2001, 21). The cartoon’s humor relies on the ironic contrast between formality, indicated by the physical appearance of Huang and the artist’s speech in respectfully presenting the model as “Miss Chen,” and the shock produced by the viewing of a naked female body. The familiar greeting “Old Huang” invoked by the artist only emphasizes the awkwardness of the encounter, mocking the model by addressing her with the more proper title miss (小姐). The three figures depicted in the cartoon represent being “modern” in their own ways, but the artist is of particular interest: with his short-sleeved collared shirt and belted pants, dress shoes, and cravat, he serves as a mediator between the controversial practice of using nude models for life drawing (Western scientific method in art pedagogy) and Old Huang, who appears modern in dress but has yet to change his conservative Chinese mindset. The question of how the artist has depicted the model’s body is not really important here, as the canvas surface is mostly obstructed by the artist, and the visual center of the cartoon is squarely focused on the blank expanse of Miss Chen’s nude backside, inviting us to imagine Mr. Huang’s titillating view. The dilemma, then, is not with aesthetic style or content of the artist’s work but, rather, with the uncomfortable position in which the everyday modern Chinese citizen may find himself when presented with a woman’s naked body under the pretext of scientific accuracy or artistic enlightenment. Guo Jianying’s illustration imagines the art studio as a potentially transformative site of encounter and negotiation. How much power the nude female model has in this interaction is debatable, but the male artist is clearly the one determining the message being conveyed, and he provides the physical space for provocation. The trope of the bohemian Chinese artist with his nude model as a source of anxiety and allure is a recurring image, especially prominent in creative work from the 1920s to 1940s by Chinese artists and writers in connection with travel to France during this period. Scholarly studies of Republican-era cultural production have conventionally focused on Shanghai, where a flourishing publishing industry and growing consumer 49

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-6

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Figure 4.1 Guo Jianying, “Introduction.” Source: Courtesy of Chen Zishan, East China Normal University.

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culture contributed to a hybridized and transcultural semicolonial urban space (Lee 1999; Lu 1999; Zhang 1999; Shih 2001; Pickowicz et al. 2013; Schaefer 2017). Shifting the discussion of Chinese aesthetic modernism from Shanghai to the setting of Paris, this chapter reveals the impact of cultural displacement on artistic production by asking: What was the role of modern art in promoting intercultural understanding – and misunderstanding – among Chinese intellectuals and the West in the early twentieth century? More specifically, what kinds of expectations did Chinese writers and artists face in Paris, the city described as “the capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest prestige on earth” (Casanova 2007, 24)? And what images of the modern Chinese artist circulated in China and France as a result of these encounters? To address these questions, I use the concept of transposition to highlight two key markers of the Chinese artist’s life in Paris: the art studio in the creative hub of Montparnasse, and the stately panoramas of the famous public park the Luxembourg Garden (Jardin du Luxembourg). This chapter bridges the fields of Chinese and French literary and art histories by revealing how, through the circulation of diverse images of the artist, Paris served as a site of negotiation where Chinese artists and writers were motivated to emphasize recognizable aspects of Chinese culture and identity, or “Chineseness” – an imaginary concept whose contours became at once more pressing as a way to represent China to the rest of the world and also more flexible and susceptible to experimentation outside of China. As a point of departure, Craig Clunas’s observation about the emphasis on the performative aspects of the artist in twentieth-century China is especially helpful: “[I]t is images of the artist, disseminated as they are through a broad range of media, and not images of the viewer, that come to stand for ‘painting’” (Clunas 2017, 181). In contrast to images found in traditional painting, which often depicted literati (wenren文人) appreciating completed works of art on display, Clunas identifies a shift beginning from the 1910s that emphasizes the act of painting, particularly “the performance of the role of the Chinese artist for foreign audiences” (2017, 181). While Clunas is more interested in the concept of painting, his observation nonetheless pertains to the case of Chinese artists in Paris, which reveals that the boundaries demarcating the “Chinese artist” and “foreign audiences” were not as consistent or as distinct as Clunas suggests. By the 1920s, many young Chinese were traveling abroad to Japan or Europe to study in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, the cultural and political push to modernize China after WWI. From 1919 to 1921, the work-study movement alone sent more than 1,600 Chinese students to France to work in factories in exchange for a Western college education (Levine 1993, 7). For those who could afford to travel abroad, Paris, the birthplace of Western modernism, was seen as the most desirable destination for foreign aspiring writers and artists, not only from China, but also from other parts of Asia and Europe. The international coterie belonging to the informal School of Paris (École de Paris) became associated with the neighborhood of Montparnasse, which was established during the interwar period as an artistic community for non-French artists working in Paris, including artists such as Picasso, Chagall, and Modigliani, who all migrated to France in the first decade of the twentieth century. While considerable antiSemitic and anti-immigrant sentiment was directed toward some of these artists, the foreign community helped foster national pride, affirming the cultural prestige of Paris. The art critic André Warnod coined the School of Paris in 1925, declaring: It’s undeniable our museums are famous, but even more than our artistic riches, these artists want to know the country where our great painters lived, breathe the air they breathed, be moved by our perspectives . . . to finally know the joy of living and to enjoy this liberty without which art cannot blossom. (1925, 8) 51

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Warnod’s vision of faithful foreign artists on pilgrimage in Paris certainly aligns with Casanova’s depiction of “an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived” (2007, 24), but not all its visitors were able to translate their so-called creative freedom into artistic influence and critical success. In the last decade, this period of cultural exchange has been increasingly commemorated by artistic institutions in China and France. The Musée Cernuschi in Paris held an exhibition in 2011 featuring the works of Chinese artists in Paris from 1920 to 1958, marking this as a formative period responsible for the artistic rupture from Chinese tradition. In 2014, the China Art Museum in Shanghai held an exhibit titled Shanghai/Paris: Modern Art of China to celebrate the influence of Shanghai-based artists that traveled to Paris from the 1920s through the beginning of the twenty-first century, affirming Shanghai’s development as “a portal of China for receiving and interacting with Western cultures” (Shi 2014, 3). An introductory essay in the exhibition catalog by French curator Philippe Cinquini is titled “Shanghai asked, Paris replied” (Shi 2014, 22), reflecting how the exchange between these two symbolic cultural centers has been narrativized in art historiography. While Chinese artists and writers were certainly excited about opportunities to learn from their experiences in France, these intercultural exchanges did not guarantee critical or even popular success in China or France, as suggested by historical accounts. Instead, Nan Z. Da’s conceptualization of the “intransitive encounter” provides a reconsideration of conventional narratives about intercultural exchange. As a cautionary against the circular argument underlying assumptions in East–West transnational studies that “an exchange – indeed any exchange – simultaneously forges ties and shows that ties have been forged” (Da 2018, 10), Da argues that as a way of thinking about transcultural exchange, intransitive encounter promotes “a mode of apprehending the lightness of contact in a very close world” (2018, 11). The chapter introduces a range of responses to the demand of “knowing” China through its art, even if these works failed to achieve commercial and critical acclaim, as Da points out that “[l]iterary exchanges often exaggerate their own qualities of being read, impactful, well traveled” (2018, 17). Through “lightness of contact,” we can better recognize which literary and visual elements of Chinese culture were perceived as inscrutable, impenetrable, or incommensurate and, on the other hand, which elements were seen as desirable and worth transposing to a new context.

Transposition as Alternative to Translation Dedicating Les poèmes de T’ao Ts’ien, a collection of French translations of classical Chinese poetry by Tao Qian (陶潛 365–427), to his contemporary the writer Jean Prévost, the poet Liang Zongdai (梁宗岱 1903–1983) recounted having the long-completed translations dormant in his desk, not daring to share them with his colleagues, until one night, “alongside the night glow of the Seine,” Prévost enthusiastically approved his translations. Liang credited Prévost with giving him the initial support and encouragement for the volume, which was published in 1930 by Éditions Lemarget in Paris, and concluded, “These poems, which we read together gradually as they were transposed into French, have since undergone many minor changes. But I am sure that you will recognize them” (Liang 1930). Liang’s use of the verb “transpose” describes the collaborative, if mysteriously inexact, process of reading and translating Tao Qian’s poetry, from literary Chinese to French, the latter a language relatively new to Liang. For Liang, revisions may be numerous, and even desirable, but ultimately the French reader must still recognize the translations as renditions of classical Chinese poetry. For Chinese writers experimenting with translation in freshly acquired Western languages, transposition offered a liberating approach that defied the conventional requirement of a translator’s 52

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linguistic fluency in the target language. By the early 1920s, Baudelaire’s poetry and prose appeared in China, translated by leading literary figures such as Zhou Zuoren 周作人and Xu Zhimo 徐志摩. Liang Zongdai himself subsequently published four translations of Baudelaire in 1934, including “Correspondances” from Les fleurs du mal, and he was likely familiar with the creative implications of transposition versus linguistic translation as he wrote his dedication to Prévost (Bien 2013, 51). The artist Chang Yu (常玉 1901–1966) was commissioned to create a series of three copperplate engravings for Les poèmes de T’ao Ts’ien to accompany three of the most famous poems. As an example of collaborative intercultural dialogue between Chinese and French cultural luminaries, the project reflects the flexibility of transposition as an open concept in the Baudelairean sense of moving across artistic media, geographic place, and historical time. In the book’s preface, Valéry attributes Liang’s literary skill to his Chinese identity: “Although Chinese . . . but no! . . . Because he was Chinese, Liang was necessarily better able than the average European, better than the average Frenchman even,” to transform language, extracting the most important bits to create “a rare stone out of one word” (Liang 1930, 17). The logic expressed in Valéry’s intuitive confession that one’s ethnic background could be a linguistic setback, followed by its ensuing correction, attests to a broader cultural ambivalence toward perceptions of Chinese and French literary prestige. Liang Zongdai’s French translations, together with Chang Yu’s visual renderings, serve as affirmation of Valéry’s claim that “[t] he Chinese race is, or was, the most literary of races,” by paying homage to one of the most venerated literary figures in classical Chinese poetry. Viewing these works as transpositions provides insight to the kinds of artistic agency that Liang Zongdai and Chang Yu had in France as Chinese intellectuals. In these uneven relationships with their French “mentors,” Liang Zongdai and Chang Yu, perceived as inheritors of Tao Qian’s legacy, could reclaim discursive control over French perceptions of Chinese identity through literature and art, a tangible way through which to insert themselves and their work, along with Chinese art and literature at large, into a global art movement and literary history. Transposition, used most frequently in music, refers to transposing music from one key or clef to another, or to transposing a song originally composed for one instrument to another. As such, this “deliberate misreading,” to borrow from David Kelley, relies on two seemingly conflicting goals: recognition of an original source of inspiration and celebration of creative transformation (Collier and Lethbridge 1994, 183). In other words, while translation relies on verisimilitude and emphasizing tropes of equivalence, transposition highlights the transposed work’s recontextualization, including into new media. French literary studies have used the concept of transposition d’art to discuss the relationship between visual art, music, and literature, primarily in the work of nineteenth-century poets and art critics like Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire (Lloyd 2002; Stephens 2017), as Baudelaire famously claimed in his “Salon de 1846” that “the best account of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy” (Baudelaire and Kelley 1975, 82). The role of the shift in context is a reminder of the relative difficulty with which images circulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, compared to the present day, when readers have quicker and easier access to the same materials as the writer. Rosemary Lloyd points out in Baudelaire’s World that critics faced the challenge “of summoning into the reader’s imagination the colors and tones and shapes of a work they may never have seen” (2002, 191). Chinese travelers faced this same problem when they were abroad, in that many of their compatriots would not be able to visit museums in Paris or view even reproductions of the art masterpieces in question, just as most French readers could not read classical Chinese poetry or necessarily know what Chinese calligraphy looked like. But this challenge could also present unique advantages in freeing up limitations shaped by long-held beliefs about style or language, potentially opening up the horizon of reader expectations. 53

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Rather than aiming to trace a historical chronology of China world-making in Paris, the chapter aims to reveal the connections and range of creative expression through which Chinese writers and artists experimented with cultural notions of new and old, foreign and domestic, Chinese and French identities and shows how the resistance they encountered can be traced to these transpositions or “deliberate misreadings” of Chinese and French art and literature. Compared to translation, which Casanova states is “a process of establishing value” (2007, 23), transposition is therefore precarious, with no guaranteed results. If “littérisation” refers to the transformation that a text undergoes to be recognized as proper literature, to acquire literariness (Casanova 2007, 136), then transposition is a much riskier undertaking that defies aesthetic constraints and conventions. Viewing Sino-French encounters through the alternative lens of transposition shifts from the linguistic guest–host model of translation and offers a much-needed way to account for creative adaptations that defy conventional national, linguistic, and media boundaries.

Montparnasse and the Allure of the Art Studio: From Chang Yu to Xu Xu When Shanghai-based poet Shao Xunmei (邵洵美 1906–1968) returned from a trip to Paris in the 1920s, he published an essay titled “A Treasure in the World of Modern Art” in the Golden Chamber Monthly, a pictorial journal run by his family’s publishing company. The essay, which refers to Chang Yu as the “treasure,” describes the allure of the artist’s nude drawings: “All the lines of his nudes can speak, and they cry out the anguish of sex! . . . Look at the composition! The lines! . . . Simplicity affirmed by complexity! Complexity embraced by simplicity!” (Wong 2014, 13). Shao placed the entire burden of modern Chinese art on Chang Yu as the “artist who is claiming glory for China in the international art circles” and cited his wife, Marcelle Charlotte Guyot de la Hardrouyère, as added legitimacy: “Thankfully at this time we still have Chang Yu, who is staying in Paris. His wife is a Frenchwoman, also an artist, and every day she holds a brush and paints on her own canvas” (Shao 2006, 343). Shao wasn’t bragging about Chang Yu, whose bohemian Chinese artist persona was equally of interest to French audiences. In 1946, a headline in the newspaper Parisien Libéré referred to Chang Yu by his French name, “Sanyu: peintre chinois de Montparnasse, ne peint ni en francais ni en chinois” (Chang Yu: Chinese painter of Montparnasse, who paints neither in French nor in Chinese) (Joffroy 1946), indicating that his identity as a Chinese artist was especially peculiar and appreciated in Montparnasse, in turn adding to Montparnasse’s international cachet. Chang Yu was born on October 14, 1901, in Nanchong, Sichuan, to a relatively prosperous family that owned a large silk mill. As a youth, he studied painting from his father and calligraphy with the Sichuan master Zhao Xi (趙熙 1867–1948). After studying in Japan and a brief period in Berlin, he traveled to Paris as an art student in 1921, probably sponsored by the Chinese government and also funded by his family. Chang Yu’s decision to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, the avant-garde hub of Paris, rather than the École des Beaux-Arts, the more typical choice of students seeking a proper academic setting – combined with his untimely death in France in 1966 – set Chang Yu apart from other modern Chinese artists like Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻 1895–1953), Lin Fengmian (林風眠 1900–1991), Liu Haisu (劉海粟 1896–1994), and Pang Xunqin (龐薰琹 1906–1985), all of whom also traveled to Paris during this time. Throughout his career, Chang Yu produced more than 2,000 nude drawings and paintings, and his 1930s painting Nude on Tapestry (Figure 4.2), which depicts a black-haired nude model with a stylish bob haircut, is a representative example of his nude paintings from the 1930s, which caused a stir back in China, where the use of live models was being hotly debated. 54

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Figure 4.2 Chang Yu, “Nude on Tapestry.” Source: Courtesy of the Li Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation.

Chang Yu’s use of color is simple, and the focus of the composition is on the model’s expansive white flesh, outlined in a black calligraphic curve. The woman lies on top of a taupe-colored, intricately illustrated textile that depicts various animals and nature scenes. The straight horizontal lines of the painting are gently offset by the rounded curves of the body’s outline, and the human shape is reduced to torso and legs, aside from the facial detail of one elongated eye peeking through the crook of her elbow. Chang Yu’s nude paintings of “cosmic thighs” traveled back to Shanghai and were fondly recounted, for instance, in a letter from modernist poet Xu Zhimo in Shanghai to Liu Haisu in Paris dated February 9, 1931 (Xu 1983, 145). As in Guo Jianying’s cartoon, the space where the viewer is accustomed to seeing detail, or expects to find detail, is surprisingly free of facial or anatomical features. Instead, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the minutiae of the fabric, Chang Yu’s transposition of Chinese silk textile design; through the centrality of the textile, the painting invokes the invisible artist, whose studio mise-en-scène implies the active artist’s agency, as confirmed by model’s steady eye contact with the viewer. A fascination with the art studio in Montparnasse can be found in Xu Zhimo’s 1927 essay “Sir, Have You Ever Seen Such Gorgeous Flesh Before?” (先生，你見過豔麗的肉沒有?) from his volume Fragments from Paris (巴黎的鱗爪), which depicts the eye-opening experiences of his protagonist Lin Lianfeng in the dilapidated Parisian art studio of a bohemian compatriot.1 The Chinese artist has the material means to maintain a steady stream of attractive young female models, despite his poor living conditions and lack of necessities like food and water, explaining: The aesthetic appreciation I have for the human body has already become a kind of physiological need, it’s a mandatory luxury, an inextricable addiction . . . you can definitely say that I’ve been bewitched, it’s become an illness, I’ve gone insane, call 55

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it whatever you want, I’ll admit it. I just can’t go one day without having a woman in front of me to provide for me, to comfort me, to satisfy my hungry eye. (Xu 2007, 331–2) We may perhaps imagine Lin Lianfeng, then, as Old Huang from the cartoon, equally offended and aroused. Moral ambivalence about the art studio resurfaces a decade later in Xu Xu’s (徐訏, 1908– 1980) semiautobiographical travel narrative “Montparnasse Studio” (蒙擺拿斯的畫室). The protagonist, a young Chinese man referred to simply as Z, meets a Dutch painter and his French girlfriend after attending a Mozart concert with a female Chinese music student, K. The location of Montparnasse is crucial: providing the essay’s title, it also figures prominently in setting up the story’s context. The first-person narrator explains the appeal of the quartier’s art studios, hotels, apartments, and cafés to artists, especially foreign students, and describes it to Chinese readers, who presumably have not been to Paris, as a cosmopolitan and artistic neighborhood where “strangers become familiar” (Xu 1948, 115). The plot unfolds at a café, when the Dutch artist introduces himself by sending to their table a remarkably accurate impromptu sketch of the Chinese pair on the back of a notebook. Impressed, the narrator surmises: I don’t know why, but in the blink of an eye, I was drawn to that casual sketch; not only because it captured our likeness, but because it also expressed the kind of sentiment we brought coming out of the concert. The word “sentiment” 情調 attempts to describe the indescribable effect of being under the influence of art, the aesthetic experience, in this case, the spiritual influence of music as felt in the exhilaration from attending a moving musical performance. However, when the artist tries to recreate the sketch for K, he is unable to reproduce the genius of the original sketch, and after wasting ten sheets of paper, he resorts to inviting the Chinese pair to his art studio: “He wrote his address on an eleventh sheet, insisting that we schedule a definitive time” (Xu 1948, 119). The narrator recalls, “And so our friendship began,” affirming the belief in Montparnasse as an international artistic community where strangers become intimate. At the studio, Z describes the space in meticulous detail, noting the mess of painter’s smocks and textiles scattered around the room, and seems impressed by the paintings hung on the wall, amply adorned with images of different models: A couple of these were large compositions, and I could tell from these works the artist’s lifestyle and his training; but despite the lavish use of color that characterizes the work of Dutch masters, he nonetheless kept wanting to step out of this tradition, and ended up not being satisfied. (Xu 1948, 120) Beyond aesthetic evaluation, Z continues his criticism, “There wasn’t a single proper chair in the entire place, so I sat next alongside an old chair piled high with broken objects” (Xu 1948, 121). The narrator indicates the importance of this seemingly off-handed observation by returning to it again when the Dutch artist suggests that maybe he can make an oil portrait for her that could be entered in the following year’s spring salon. After the artist convinces K to come back and model for him another time, having failed again to produce a satisfactory likeness during their visit, Z, still thinking about the studio, muses: 56

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I didn’t pay much attention to K’s reaction, because in my mind I was too busy thinking about why there wasn’t a single suitable chair to sit in. Then I remembered reading somewhere – I couldn’t remember where exactly – that in France, people were so sexually promiscuous because there were no proper chairs in any French rooms. Was there actually some truth to this? (Xu 1948, 122) Presented as a casual aside and brief interruption, the narrative action simply resumes when everyone stands up to leave the studio. The narrator observes the unusual effect the studio space has on individuals: “The strangest thing was that in this art studio, K – normally so lively – suddenly looked like a country bumpkin caught on film who didn’t even know where to place her hands and feet” (Xu 1948, 122). His astute observation overturns the sexual fantasy of the studio, which, instead of making K more attractive, actually decreases her sexual allure by making her overly self-conscious. The story suggests that the café is a site of spontaneous artistic (more authentic) expression, in contrast to the studio space, which is associated with artificial and technical oppression that stifles true creativity, as shown by the solution Z offers to return to the café. Although K confesses to Z that she never liked the Dutch artist and that she prefers to be with Z, she admits, “How could I love him? But his art studio did have some kind of magical power. After visiting twice, I always wanted to go back” (Xu 1948, 134). As the sexual victor in the story, Z also demonstrates his cultural superiority over the White Western painter through the transposition of Oriental characteristics associated with art appreciation and authentic (understated) individual expression. “Montparnasse Studio,” which was published in Xu Xu’s collection Sentiments from Abroad (1948), reflects a shift in the imagining of the Montparnasse art studio as a site of sexual fantasy. The studio’s sexually liberal atmosphere, and French culture in general, rather than being progressively admirable, proves to be a temporary illusion and ultimately less aesthetically effective.

At the Luxembourg Garden: Li Jinfa and Fu Lei In Li Jinfa’s (李金髮, 1900–1976) poem “Luxembourg Garden” (盧森堡公園), the speaker describes the enigmatic yet ubiquitous figure of the poet: “In the wall’s shady corner, a poet’s sigh remains preserved, youthful admiration and the tears of a fugitive, in harmony with the striking clock” 任牆陰之一角/ 存留著詩人之嘆息，少年之愛慕，/ 與逃遁者之眼淚，長襯鐘聲 而諧和也。 (Li 1986, 52: lines 9–11). The symbolist poet Li Jinfa was born in Meixian, Guangdong Province, and he arrived in France in 1919 at the age of 19, after one year of schooling in Shanghai. As part of a work-study program, Li studied sculpture in Paris and Berlin, returned to China in 1925, then taught art from 1928 to 1930 at Hangzhou Academy. His three major volumes of poetry – Light Rain (微雨, 1925), A Visitor in Hard Times (食客與凶年, 1926), and Singing for Good Fortune (為幸福而歌, 1927) – were composed during his stays in Paris and Berlin from 1920 to 1924. “Luxembourg Garden” from Light Rain is a representative work of Li Jinfa’s oeuvre in its ambiguous treatment of the relationship between the natural environment, sentimental emotion, and physical sensuality. In the four-stanza-long poem, the urban setting plays a central role, even in the poem’s title, which refers to Paris in a parenthetical as a “return,” a loud reminder to readers that the famed garden’s significance is inextricable from its location in the city and its status as a Parisian landmark, thereby lending legitimacy to the poet, who has been there in person. The city setting’s impact is strongly felt, a possible nod to Baudelaire’s famous 57

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practice in Les fleurs du mal of allegorizing Paris and reading the modern city as a psychological space. “Luxembourg Garden” begins by describing a dreamy setting, among the wild birds and mulberry trees of the Luxembourg Garden, and the poem’s first-person speaker directs his observations and pleas to an unnamed woman, perhaps a love interest, whom he eventually tries to convince to run away with him. When he mentions the “poet” 詩人 then, it is not even the poet himself that can be found in the marginalized space by any window’s shadow but the barely perceptible remnants of that poet in the form of a “sigh.” However slight or fleeting their impact, it was important for Chinese travelers to indicate in their work that they had been there, and as the recurring references to the Luxembourg Garden reveal, the modern artist’s education took place outside of more official settings like the Louvre or art studios, including at outdoor locations or city landmarks, which were equally invoked and used to showcase the modern artist’s engagement with a new culture. Six years after Li Jinfa composed his poem about the Garden, Fu Lei’s (傅雷, 1908–1966) “Dejected at the Luxembourg Garden” (在盧森堡花園悵惘), the last in a series of letters, Going to France by Letter (法行通信), authored en route from Shanghai to Marseilles and Paris, was published in Contribution (貢獻旬刊). Written a few days after his arrival in Paris, the letter’s title suggests to readers that the scenic spot does not fulfill Fu Lei’s expectations, but this is misleading in a way; Fu Lei is not disappointed at the Garden itself, only when he imagines the figure of the Chinese artist in this idyllic landscape. As he muses about the young French children playing in the park, he thinks of the youth in China: The children back at home in China during this cold harsh winter are traditionally prohibited to leave the house; not many of the most loving protective mothers will even allow a little recreation in the courtyard, and I do truly feel the true love of those mothers. (Fu 2000, 71) But faced with the “lively, strong and healthy” French children, Fu Lei admits feeling “a sense of dejection” at the thought of China’s “frail and delicate” youth. He is quick to point out the good intention of Chinese maternal care yet, in the process, cannot help but fault the generation of women who have raised such a frail and delicate younger generation: Frailty and daintiness, the wording once used by Chinese people to describe a gentle and refined demeanor, yet this weak literati scholar has turned the family’s eldest son into a sickly old man! Our children of the rising sun, who until now are still being forced to hold back their radiant splendor. (Fu 2000, 71–2) Rather than inspiring him to produce art, these observations of children at play fill Fu Lei with regret and worry, presumably as he wonders about the implications of his own upbringing on his future. Like Li Jinfa, who presented the image of the shiren in his poem “Luxembourg Garden,” the relationship between the author Fu Lei and his imagined self-referential subject, the literati wenren, is tenuous, an ambiguous projection of the writer’s role in this foreign space. Even though he did not receive a formal classical training, Fu Lei was an avid reader and writer, and well-versed in the classics. Born in Jiangsu on April 7, 1908, Fu Lei was educated in Shanghai, then studied art theory and art criticism in France from 1928 to 1932, during which he attended lectures on art and literature at the Louvre and the Sorbonne. Celebrated for his prolific work as a linguistic translator, Fu Lei argued for the importance of shensi 神似 (spiritual likeness), 58

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an aesthetic philosophy rooted in traditional painting: “In terms of effect, a translation, like an imitated painting, should seek after resemblance in spirit rather than in form” (Chan 2004, 102). His publications on art criticism, translation, music, as well as the letters to his son in the famous collection Fu Lei’s Family Letters (傅雷家書, 1981), reflect a lifelong obsession with seeking out likeness among different media forms and cultural backgrounds. The “Dejected at the Luxembourg Garden” letter praises the park’s “three or four large grassy areas, in which there are many trees and flowers, beautifully carved stone sculptures, chairs for resting, places for young children to stroll and play after school hours for a change of atmosphere,” but the added perspective on city planning only agitated Fu Lei’s worries about China: Outside Paris in the suburbs there are even more wooded forests, all for the use of the city dwellers. So Paris, whose industry flourishes hundreds of times greater than Shanghai’s, is actually far cleaner and more sanitary than Shanghai. Oh, have some consideration for our China! (Fu 2000, 72) Li Jinfa and Fu Lei invoke the park in different contexts, but both document their physical presence in the famed Parisian landmark, one that is potentially as important as the Louvre in stimulating the artist, as the former allows for people-watching, strolling, and flânerie beyond academic study. In both cases, the Luxembourg Garden is a site of public spectacle for peoplewatching and a man-made space for reflection, where anything can spontaneously become artistic inspiration. For the Chinese travelers, it’s a place for engaging with the public while making private observations about the position of the shiren, in Li Jinfa’s case, or the wenren, for Fu Lei, deeply personal investments. Like the images of Montparnasse and its art studios, Li Jinfa’s and Fu Lei’s responses to and interpretations of the Luxembourg Garden emphasize their experiences there, along with their expectations about the place, attesting to the impact of the city’s landmarks on their own artistic development. As prominent Left Bank sites of artistic inspiration, contemplation, and transposition in the City of Light, Montparnasse (and the iconic studios associated with the art district) and the Luxembourg Garden provided Chinese artists and writers a wide range of opportunities to share their experiences in France. Through these acts of transposition, they actively played with the global perception of Chinese identity by presenting and circulating cultural elements inspired by classical aesthetics in a new context, trying to make Chinese culture more approachable (or at least recognizable) for French readers or audiences, at the same time negotiating expectations as a foreign artist abroad. They devised creative and strategic ways to enter a more global art community, and they also risked not receiving critical, political, or popular acclaim or approval in either China or France. Their works were not only the products of intercultural exchange but, in turn, also generated new images and ideas of the modern artist, contributing to an ongoing dialogue full of questions, dreams, desires, and anxieties about creative possibility. In the early twentieth century, the issue of cultural prestige was as urgent as it remains today. This chapter complicates our understanding of modern Chinese cultural identity and reshapes our recognition of the ways in which both Shanghai and Paris have been mythologized by national histories that privilege particular artistic modes and categories over others. By paying attention to previously marginalized work, we can better understand the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth century, and the reasons Paris became an important site for experimenting with the circulation of Chinese cultural identity. These reasons may not fit with what national histories in China and France have asked us to 59

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imagine, that the nurturing atmosphere in Paris fostered creative freedom previously inaccessible in China, or that either nation’s artistic legacy was unshakeable. Instead, viewing literature and art through the lens of transposition uncovers what remained recognizable overseas and also what was transformed in this context, showing how cultural difference was circulated and promoted to challenge existing notions about modern Chinese art to a more global audience.

Note 1 This essay was later retitled “Sexy Paris” (Rouyan de Bali 肉豔的巴黎) and included in Xu Zhimo’s 1930 fiction collection Roulette (輪盤). In Brian Bernards’s reading of the story, “the images produced by the Parisian’s artist’s ‘hungry’ gaze have sufficiently aroused” the narrator Lianfeng’s own scopophilia, the sexual pleasure of looking (2015, 40).

References Baudelaire, Charles, and David Kelley. 1975. Salon De 1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bernards, Brian Christopher. 2015. Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bien, Gloria. 2013. Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chan, Tak-hung Leo. 2004. Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. Clunas, Craig. 2017. Chinese Painting and Its Audiences. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collier, Peter, and Robert Lethbridge. 1994. Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press. Da, Nan Z. 2018. Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press. Fu Lei 傅雷. 2000. Fu Lei sanwen 傅雷散文 (Prose essays by Fu Lei). Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Guo, Jianying 郭建英, and Zishan Chen 陳子善. 2001. Modeng Shanghai: Sanshi nian dai yangchang baijing 摩登上海：三十年代洋場百景 (Modern Shanghai: One Hundred Scenes from the Foreign Concessions in the 1930s). Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe. Joffroy, Pierre. 1946. “San-Yu: Peintre chinois de Montparnasse, ne peint ni en français ni en chinois.” Parisien libéré, December 25. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. 1999. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Levine, Marilyn A. 1993. The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Li Jinfa 李金髮. 1986. Wei Yu: Li Jinfa shiji 微雨：李金髮詩集 (Light Rain: Li Jinfa’s Collected Poems). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian. Liang, Zongdai, trans. 1930. Les poèmes de T’ao Ts’ien. Paris: Éditions Lemarget. Lloyd, Rosemary. 2002. Baudelaire’s World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lu, Hanchao. 1999. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pickowicz, Paul, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang, eds. 2013. Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926–1945. Leiden: Brill. Schaefer, William. 2017. Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925–1937. Durham: Duke University Press. Shao Xunmei 邵洵美. 2006. Xunmei wencun 洵美文存 (Shao Xunmei’s Collected Writings). Edited by Chen Zishan 陳子善. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe. Shi Dawei 施大畏, ed. 2014. Shanghai yu Bali zhijian – Zhongguo xiandangdai yishu jingpinji上海巴 黎之間 – 中國現當代藝術精品集 (Shanghai/Paris: Modern and Contemporary Works of Fine Art). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe.

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Paris and the Art of Transposition, 1920s–1940s Shih, Shu-mei. 2001. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stephens, Sonya, ed. 2017. Translation and the Arts in Modern France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Warnod, André. 1925. Les berceaux de la jeune peinture: Montmartre, Montparnasse. Paris: Albin Michel. Wong, Rita. 2014. Sanyu: Catalogue Raisonné: Drawings and Watercolors. Taipei: Li Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation. Xu Xu 徐訏. 1948. Haiwai de qingdiao 海外的情調 (Sentiments from Abroad). Xianggang: Yechuang shuwu. Xu Zhimo 徐志摩. 1983. Xu Zhimo quanji 徐志摩全集 (The Collected Works of Xu Zhimo). Vol. 5. Yonghe: Yangming shuju. Xu Zhimo 徐志摩. 2007. Xu Zhimo jingdian zuopin xuan 徐志摩經典作品選 (Xu Zhimo’s Classic Works). Beijing: Beijing dangdai shijie chubanshe. Zhang, Yingjin, ed. 1999. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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5 LINE, LOOP, CONSTELLATION Classical Chinese Poetry Between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds Luo Hui

Gathering 250 Chinese poems translated by four major American poets (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder) and one poet-translator (David Hinton) in his New Directions anthology (2003), Eliot Weinberger opens up the possibility of reading classical Chinese poetry through American poetry, or vice versa. Highlighting translations by wellknown poets, instead of scholars, the anthology presents these translations primarily as poems, to be appreciated for their literary value. The editorial decision to place side by side multiple translations of the same Chinese poems by different American poets not only demonstrates that literary translation is an interpretative art that can be as varied and distinctive as creative writing but also makes clear the extent to which these American poets were writing, through their Chinese counterparts, their own poetry. Pondering two different renditions of a Chinese poem by Rexroth and Snyder, the reader may be excused for asking: Are we reading Wang Wei 王維 (701–761), or are we reading Rexroth, or Snyder? Are we reading classical Chinese poetry or modern American poetry? There are no straightforward either-or answers to these questions, yet an inclusive or more nuanced response – both – can be equally unhelpful as it comes with its own set of biases and assumptions. The heart of the problem may be the questions themselves, for they follow, or may lead to, a type of thinking that is ultimately concerned with American poetry’s claim on classical Chinese poetry. Not that Weinberger explicitly asked or invited such a question, but it inevitably arises from this particular way of framing and reading classical Chinese poetry. A thin mist of America-centrism shrouds the perception of classical Chinese poetry in the English-speaking world. Writing for The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016, Lucas Klein chronicles the reception of classical Chinese poetry in English along a similar Pound-RexrothSnyder axis and laments a creative lacuna from the 1970s onward, when classical Chinese poetry appeared to have lost its appeal to the American avant-garde. This lacuna only serves as a counterpoint to the celebration of what Klein calls “a small rebirth of the poetic vanguard of Chinese poetry translation,” as he cites a recent wave of English translations, from Derangements of My Contemporaries (New Directions, 2014), Chloe Garcia Roberts’s translation of the late Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 (c. 813–858), and David Hinton’s translation The Late Poems of Wang An-Shih (New Directions, 2015) to Finding Them Gone: Visiting

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-7

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China’s Poets of the Past (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), a new anthology of classical Chinese poetry by Red Pine (Klein 2016). This genealogy of classical Chinese poetry in America is not itself invalid, but it obscures a much larger and more complex history of classical Chinese poetry in the world. As one of the most enduring global literary legacies, classical Chinese poetry has exerted its reach and impact over time and across cultures with multiple manifestations – its transmission and reception in the literary traditions of Korea and Japan, its translation and reimagination in Anglo-American modernism, and its complex and often uneasy relationship with modern and contemporary Chinese poetry. Even within the Anglosphere, it is not only in America that classical Chinese poetry appears to be “having a moment.” Daring experimentation with Chinese poetry did not stop with Rexroth or Snyder, nor has it only recently been revived. Weinberger’s earlier work, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (Weinberger 1987), pioneered a far more eclectic approach that transcended Americanism. New Zealand poet Diana Bridge published her first collection, Landscape with Lines, in 1996, after years of reading and studying classical Chinese poetry that culminated in a PhD thesis on Xie Tiao 謝脁 (464–499). In 2006, another New Zealand poet, Mike Johnson, published The Vertical Harp, a collection of “recreations” based on reading English translations of Li He 李賀 (791–817). In Canada, the collective Pain Not Bread published Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei in 2000, after a decade of intense reading and collaborative writing. In 2016, Sarah Howe’s debut collection, Loop of Jade, in which the poet merges personal accounts of her dual British Chinese heritage with oblique references to classical Chinese poetry, won the T. S. Eliot prize. So deeply ingrained has classical Chinese poetry become in the development of Anglophone poetry that George Elliott Clarke, while reviewing Tang poetry–inspired work by Pain Not Bread, remarks on “the peculiar fate of Chinese poetry [being] constantly summoned to reinvigorate English poetry whenever it begins to decay” (Clarke 2000). While critics have amply acknowledged the contribution that classical Chinese poetry has made to the world, with Stalling envisioning a trans-Pacific “poetics of emptiness” (Stalling 2010, 23) and Klein prophesying “a new sea swell of American poetry freshly inspired by an old Chinese seen anew” (2016, n.p.), that contribution is quickly subsumed under some developmental phase of American poetry, without sufficient reflection on American poetry’s place in the larger literary landscape. This critical blind spot is particularly problematic with the emergence of a new generation of poets writing in multilingual, cross-cultural, and diasporic environments, whose works defy neatly nation-based classification. A full account of the world history of classical Chinese poetry, therefore, must not be merely concerned with the cataloguing of classical Chinese poetry in translation and the identification of its influences but with the formulation of new frameworks and strategies of reading that will help recognize and accommodate new poetic voices that have emerged between Sinophone and Anglophone worlds. This chapter will embark on the “worlding” of classical Chinese poetry by extending the Pound-Rexroth-Snyder axis and drawing longer trajectories into other parts of the Anglophone world – Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and Hong Kong. Through an expanded mapping of the “worlds” of classical Chinese poetry, in both geographical and demographic terms, I seek to uncover a diverse range of echoes and resonances generated through translation, rewriting, re-reading, and critique. Reframing such works as part of a Chinese-inflected world literature, I argue that the impact of classical Chinese poetry in contemporary writing has gone beyond the transmission and reception of aesthetics and poetic form to the migration and transformation of personal histories, cultural identities, and the very notion of literary lineage.

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Beyond the Pound-Rexroth-Snyder Axis Diana Bridge began her relationship with Chinese culture as the spouse of a New Zealand diplomat with postings in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei, and more deliberately, as a student of classical Chinese poetry, completing her PhD thesis in 1991. From experiences both lived and learned, Bridge developed a poetic voice that is formally and thematically a hybrid: “They are written in English but bear the stylistic imprint of an attraction to Chinese classical verse” (Bridge 2008, 12). Her early poems are inspired by the vocabularies, allusions, and metrical and tonal patterns that are characteristic of the Chinese court poets she studied. Apart from a deeply absorbed aesthetic influence, Chinese subjects also enter Bridge’s poems, ranging from the work and lives of classical poets, painters, and historians to the experiences of friends who have survived the ups and downs of twentieth-century China. Even when not writing ostensibly about China, in a poem inspired by her experience in India, such as “Sati Marks,” Bridge admits to unconsciously structuring the poem in conformity with the prescription for Chinese lüshi 律詩 (regulated verse) (2008, 16). Bridge calls much of her poetry “compressed collages of a non-New Zealand life” (2008, 15). Recognizing the challenges that her work represents for the non-Asian New Zealand reader, she often resorts to notes at the back of her collections and relies heavily on images to build a bridge from the known to the unknown. On the difficult task of defining and placing her poetry, Bridge initially says her poetry may have “reflected a national identity and a literary community that were acquiring an increasingly sophisticated and diverse character as different cultures came forward to take their place in New Zealand society,” but then realizes that this articulation may feel pat, or somehow “not enough” (2008, 23). This hesitation corresponds with the halting manner in which Bridge’s work has been received in New Zealand. Although she has long been recognized for her lyrical poise and technical competence, the “foreignness” of her sources has meant that Bridge’s work has been more often admired from a distance than fully embraced by the reading public and the literary establishment. In New Zealand, her extensive references to Indian and Chinese cultures are either seen as “a stumbling block for some readers” (Stasko 2002, n.p.) or as embellishments that “give the poems a stylized quality” (Heritage 2016, n.p.). It is difficult, and perhaps undesirable, to frame Bridge’s poetry within the confines of a New Zealand poetry, just as the label “Canadian poetry” is equally fraught when applied to Pain Not Bread, a collective formed in 1990 by three Anglophone poets in Canada. Of the three members, two are Canadian (Kim Maltman and Andy Patton), and one (Roo Borson) is an American who became a lifelong Canadian resident. Pain Not Bread spent a decade reading classical Chinese poetry, mainly in translation and through commentary, and writing English poetry in response to it. The work resulting from their collective reading experience, titled Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, was published in 2000. Of the 86 poems, some are variations of a particular translation, some are variations of first lines, some sparked off by both the life and work of a poet, some triggered by a commentary. The book also includes notes on orthography and pronunciation, historical facts, literary sources, and a bibliography. Clearly, when read simply as Canadian poetry, the poems lose half, if not all, of the foundations they are built upon – their world becomes impoverished, and so does ours. Sarah Howe hails from a younger generation of poets with hyphenated identities who further complicate the discussion of cultural tradition, literary lineage, and personal identity. Born in 1982 in Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and a British father and immigrating with her family to the UK at the age of 8, Howe reluctantly accepts being labeled a British Chinese, or British Hong Kong, poet. In her much-acclaimed debut collection, Loop of Jade, Howe explores 64

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her sense of place, belongingness, and fascination with her mother’s life in China. Accessing Chinese culture through scholarly and creative readings of Pound and Borges, Howe knowingly performs a double-edged act of channeling the idea of the exotic Orient while at the same time critiquing it. As Jennifer Wong has argued, “By appropriating or translating her Chineseness via white, canonical writers such as Ezra Pound, Howe examines a meaningful tension between word and form and taps into the question of authenticity or a lack of completeness within a culturally hybrid person” (2020, 266). Compared to the China-inspired works of Bridge and Pain Not Bread that have a more tenuous relationship with personal identity, Howe’s poetry can be deceptively, and dangerously, easy to pin down. Wong pairs up Sarah Howe with Hannah Lowe, based on their ethnicity, and places them both under the banner of “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic” (BAME) poets in contemporary British writing (Wong 2020). Mary Jean Chan cautions against the pigeonhole effect of ethnicity-based reading and identifies “parody” as a core mechanism in Howe’s poetics to “counter racialized/racist notions of difficulty, readability and authenticity” (Chan 2020, 1). The emergence of poets such as Bridge, Pain Not Bread, and Howe suggests that the reach and impact of classical Chinese literature has long surpassed the Pound-Rexroth-Snyder axis. Their works show the extent to which classical Chinese poetry has become embedded in the consciousness and creative processes of contemporary English-language poets, often through the mediation of earlier poets, translators, and scholars. The difficulty of placing these works within narrowly defined national literatures has meant that new critical frameworks and strategies of reading are needed. Here I would like to engage with the concept of world literature as a means to break down the linguistic and ideological barriers that may hinder a fuller appreciation of the poets who write in the wake of Pound-Rexroth-Snyder but also depart from them.

New Trajectories of World Literature If we follow Bonnie S. McDougall’s simple adage that world literature is translated literature and translated literature is world literature (2014, 59), then classical poetry constitutes the bulk of Chinese literature that may qualify as world literature by virtue of the quantity and quality of the English translations, not to mention translations into many other languages. However, what counts as a translation, and the very notion of translation itself, has gone through significant changes since Pound stunned the world with his freewheeling translations of Chinese poetry in Cathay in 1915. The Cathay poems have long been reviled as translations yet revered as poetry. Pound’s imaginative rendition of Li Bai 李白 (701–762), although criticized as bona fide translations, has influenced generations of English-language poets, including Bridge, Howe, and Pain Not Bread. It is a legacy not to be dismissed but pondered and deciphered. In contrast with the bold borrowings and, sometimes, brazen appropriations that are evident in the Poundian approach and much of its critical assessment (Fenollosa and Pound 2008), Bridge has forged a relationship with the Chinese classical tradition that is at once more provisional and more considered. The title of her debut collection, Landscape with Lines, references the traditional Chinese practice of inscribing a painting with lines in the vacant spaces on the scroll: These lines are penned by other viewers, from the Emperor down: friends, scholars, connoisseurs who have owned or felt a particular affinity for the painting and recorded their feelings on it. A Chinese painting is read as testament to the temperament and character of the person who painted it and inscriptions will often reflect that knowledge. Their relationship to the actual work may be quite oblique. I saw my own 65

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“lines” as occupying an even more tangential relationship to the ancient “landscape” of China and the vast heterogeneous canvas of India. (Bridge 2008, 17) In Bridge’s imagination, a Tang dynasty poet might indeed become a friend, or a character, in her poem. Take, for example, a stanza from “Landscape with lines”: Somewhere a poet is slanting on moss, a voice heard or not heard. This landscape foregrounds a self lost between lines. (Bridge 1996, 18) Here, Bridge portrays the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, who enters his own poem, “Deer Park” (鹿柴), but through the “lines” that Bridge has inscribed on that poem, and, more tangentially, through the lines that Weinberger has so expertly curated in his 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. Or Bridge might “take off” from a poem by Li Bai, but without forgetting to bring Pound along, borrowing the title of his English translation and dissecting some of his lines: At first you want connectives, reach like anyone for “as,” your only chance, you think, of seeing how things stand; or how they might have stood for him, that is, the poet, for whom the Chinese word lay open. They, the trained and the knowledgeable, have their own bridges. Listen, they say, to the white waters that wind around the east part of the city, its outer rampart thrown across a range of hills; or that same mountain range – it might be green, was sometimes blue – crossing the straddle of those northern walls. Feel the palindromic pull of the furniture as Li Bo is saying goodbye. * (Bridge 2007, 157–8) Compare this with Pound’s “Taking Leave of a Friend” and Li Bai’s original poem 送友人: Blue mountains to the north of the walls, White river winding about them; Here we must make separation And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass. Mind like a floating wide cloud, Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance. Our horses neigh to each other as we are departing. (Pound 1915) 66

Line, Loop, Constellation 青山橫北郭 白水繞東城 此地一為別 孤蓬萬里征 浮雲遊子意 落日故人情 揮手自茲去 蕭蕭班馬鳴

(Tangshi sanbaishou) We begin to see how “faithful” Pound in fact was, or attempted to be, to Li Bai’s original, both in form and in sentiment, and how far a distance the later poet, Bridge, has traveled in the pursuit of a new relationship with Li Bai’s poem that speaks to her as well as to her belatedness. If Pound was at least attempting translation in the conventional sense of the word, Bridge, though more qualified as a translator due to her academic training, has all but given up on the idea of a word-for-word translation. Bridge is fully capable of offering yet another, perhaps better, more faithful, or more satisfying translation of the Chinese poem in her scholar-translator capacity. Yet here as a poet, she chooses to comment, footnote, observe, paraphrase, on the margins, at a remove. By choosing the “outsider incomprehension” of a student-reader over the insider knowledge of a scholar-translator, Bridge acknowledges the insecurities that she herself faces as a poet working in English “from within and without the Chinese tradition” (2008, 16). This is an altogether more sensitive, self-aware, and more sophisticated approach to reading literature in and through translation. It is an approach that echoes what Sarah Howe has called the “generative acts of selection and rearrangement as a species of translation” in her reading of Peter Larkin’s What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei, a poetic response to Wang Wei’s poems through G. W. Robinson’s 1973 translations (Howe 2018). According to Howe, Larkin’s is a species of translation that is not concerned with translation per se, but with the “carrying across” of the spirit of the source text. However, Larkin’s source text must be considered plural, including both Wang Wei’s original poems and Robinson’s translations. Similarly, Bridge’s sources include both Li Bai’s poem and Pound’s translation, although she further animates her “translation” by bringing in the poets themselves. Howe’s own “carrying across” often takes the form of a journey through physical and imaginary space – “Something sets us looking for a place,” the poet begins in “Crossing from Guangdong” (Howe 2015, 2). Unlike Larkin, whose poem carries across the spirit of Wang Wei from Chinese into English, by way of Robinson, Howe needs to cross over to the Chinese world before she could carry something back into English. Howe’s dual Chinese and British heritage has meant that, for her, each crossing is also a returning, or a loop – an image from the title of her debut collection that so vividly captures the trajectories of her poetic journey. And unlike Bridge, who inscribes her lines onto a Chinese poetic landscape, Howe physically enters that landscape and loops her way in and out of it. Yet like Bridge, she has Pound in her company, as friend, confidant, accomplice. Despite critical misgivings about Pound’s “historical white gaze” (Wong 2020, 263), Howe accesses classical Chinese poetry through “reading around a lot of translations and the originals too” and acknowledges Pound as an important influence, “not in an un-ironically uncritically accepting way, but as something to grapple with” (Howe 2016, n.p.). Thus, in the poem “Yangtze,” we hear a refrain: Someone I now forget once said journeying is hard. (Howe 2015, 57) 67

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In this refrain we hear Li Bai, but also something of Pound’s Cathay. The speaker “forgets” her Chinese source and, by extension, her Chinese heritage, not through a lapse of memory, but through a loss of language. Pound’s example of reimagining an old China in new English idiom provides a source of inspiration for Howe to complete her language loop, and her poetic quest acquires a poignancy as it conflates with her personal quest. “Journeying is hard,” according to Carol Rumen, may be “Howe’s reference to China’s costly march into modernity” (Rumen 2016, n.p.). But the refrain rings equally true for the difficult journey of Howe’s family, as well as her own. As Bridge and Howe trace out new routes to classical Chinese poetry, with lines and loops that emphasize reciprocity, intertextuality, and hybridity, Pain Not Bread envision a world that resembles what David Damrosch calls “a network of associations, circulation, and reception” (2003, 3). The collaborative relationship of the writing trio mirrors the functions of poetic societies or less formal literary circles of premodern China – poems written on social occasions, poems in response or alluding to poems written by friends – the difference being that the world that Pain Not Bread inhabit extends across time and space. It is a world where the poems of the Tang poets Wang Wei, Meng Haoran孟浩然 (689–740), Li Bai, Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770), Li He, and Meng Jiao 孟郊 (751–814) are juxtaposed on the same reading list as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. It is a world where the translators – David Hawkes, A. C. Graham, David Hinton, Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Xu Haixin, and Pauline Yu – are not only translators but also collaborators in a creative dialogue. To align the works of Pain Not Bread, as well as those of Bridge and Howe, with world literature is not to find more proof that classical Chinese poetry is an indelible part of world literature but to consider these works themselves as world literature. To say that classical Chinese poetry is a part of world literature is different from saying that Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, Landscape with Lines, and Loop of Jade are a part of world literature. The connotations of the two uses of “world literature” are not the same; the former implies a world literature that orbits around Anglophone poetry, perhaps along the Pound-Rexroth-Snyder axis, while the latter gestures toward a world literature with a different lineage – a line, a loop, or a constellation, with Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu among its brightest stars. For Bridge, the constellation may also include Robin Hyde and William Empson; for Howe, perhaps J. H. Prynne and, of course, Ezra Pound. Let us imagine this constellation, with multiple nodes that have different names in different languages, suggesting intimacies and distances, both spatial and temporal. Let us call it a Chinese-inflected world literature. It is a metaphor that Pain Not Bread take up in one of their poems, “The Constellations (An Introduction to Du Fu).” The poem comes close to a translation, but not quite a translation, of Du Fu’s “To the Recluse Wei” (贈衛八處士), written in 759, during the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) that devastated much of the country and brought a turning point of the Tang Empire from glory to decline. It recounts Du Fu’s brief reunion with a childhood friend after 20 years of separation, bracketing the warm domestic scenes of the joys and sorrows of friendship with allusions to constellations and mountains at the beginning and the end. The Shen 參 and the Shang 商, two stars that forever miss each other in the sky, provide a cosmic frame that accentuates the fatedness of human separation, and the mountain peaks that literally segregate human lives heighten the pathos of such a fate. I quote Du Fu’s poem in full, followed by Pain Not Bread’s poem in English. 人生不相見 動如參與商 今夕復何夕 共此燈燭光 少壯能幾時 鬢髮各已蒼 68

Line, Loop, Constellation 訪舊半爲鬼 驚呼熱中腸 焉知二十載 重上君子堂 昔別君未婚 兒女忽成行 怡然敬父執 問我來何方 問答乃未已 兒女羅酒漿 夜雨剪春韭 新炊間黃粱 主稱會面難 一舉累十觴 十觴亦不醉 感子故意長 明日隔山嶽 世事兩茫茫

(Tangshi sanbaishou) A man’s life is not-seeing another’s life – like two constellations, one always rising while the other is setting, Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Bellatrix in Orion; and the two unnamed stars, one perhaps Antares and the other Wei, in Scorpio. This evening then, what is evening but the sharing of lamp light? Youth’s vigor doesn’t last. Temples turn grey, and half my friends are ghosts. Those twenty years walk the halls. Sons and daughters form sudden rows tapering away in every direction, everyone a question-and-answer being. Night rain cuts the spring chives; rice, cooking, mixes with yellow millet. But friendship never empties. We are always separated from tomorrow by mountain peaks; and the world’s affairs, on both sides, are lost to sight. (Pain Not Bread 2000, 53) Pain Not Bread call their poem a “loose variation” based on their reading of a character-by-character translation of the original poem in David Hawkes’s A Little Primer of Tu Fu (1967). The poem is rewritten in a clipped, elliptical style in contemporary English but remains refreshingly close to Du Fu’s classical Chinese. The middle section of the poem that depicts the friends’ reunion almost qualifies as a direct translation, mirroring Du Fu both in words and in spirit. It is the two cosmic allusions at the beginning and the end from which Pain Not Bread choose to depart. That Pain Not Bread were touched by the elusive connection between the personal and the historical, and between the human and the cosmic, is clear in the title of their poem “The Constellations (An Introduction to Du Fu).” They have chosen to highlight and elaborate on that connection. The two lines that open Du Fu’s poem (人生不相見/動如參與商), juxtaposing human separation with constellational movement, are extended into a six-line preamble in the English poem, hesitantly identifying the corresponding names of the stars in Western astronomy: “Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Bellatrix in Orion; / and the two unnamed stars, one perhaps 69

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Antares / and the other Wei, in Scorpio.” In translation theory, this elaboration on constellations would represent an act of domestication, but it is domestication that crosses the cultural divide – the stars are given European names, yet two remain unnamed, and one is thought to be named Wei, the friend that appears in Du Fu’s poem. For a moment, it feels as though different vantage points from which to view the constellations harmoniously merged. The world is shared across time and space. Yet these are imperfect translations. In the end, one senses that the poets were not exactly sure to which stars or constellations Du Fu was referring. The indecision and imprecision in Pain Not Bread’s identification of the constellations are rooted in an ambiguity in Du Fu’s original poem. In his English rendition of the poem, Wu Juntao translates Shen and Shang, respectively, as Morning Star and Evening Star, and adds a note: “Morning Star and Evening Star are the same star Venus; but in ancient China people thought they were different ones and called the former Shen, the latter Shang” (Xu et al. 1988, 154). Wu seems to suggest that Du Fu was himself imprecise about this cosmic analogy, or at least he followed the “unscientific” way of folk wisdom. But this lack of scientific knowledge does not detract from the poetic effect – in fact, it further underlines the limits of human knowledge and its comprehension of the workings of the universe. As Pain Not Bread have demonstrated in their poem, even when equipped with vastly expanded modern science, hesitation, confusion, and perhaps resignation remain part of our common experience. Du Fu’s ending, the two most memorable and frequently quoted lines of the 24-line poem (明日隔山嶽/世事兩茫茫), could have been easily rendered in a straightforward translation, yet Pain Not Bread again choose to play a riff rather than to the note. Wu Juntao provides a more “faithful” translation in his version of the poem: Tomorrow, betwixt us the mountain will intrude; We’ll each be lost in the vastness of the world! Pain Not Bread’s rendition of the same lines reads: We are always separated from tomorrow by mountain peaks; and the world’s affairs, on both sides, are lost to sight. Franco Moretti defines world literature as “distant reading” (2013), whereas Gregory Rabassa calls translation “the closest reading possible” (Hoeksema 1978, 10). Pain Not Bread are the consummate reader and translator. If they start the poem by earnestly searching for English equivalents of Du Fu’s mysteriously non-seeing stars, only to realize that complete knowledge is humanly impossible, they end the poem deliberately displacing spatial separation (“betwixt us the mountain will intrude”) with temporal separation (“we’re always separated from tomorrow”), subtly suggesting that not knowing is a form of knowing. Not translating is a form of translation. And it is in this sense that Pain Not Bread are both humble and proud in refusing to call their work a translation. They call it “an introduction.” While a translation suggests an end point in the conveyance of meaning, an introduction signals a starting point – the reading process has just begun.

Toward a Chinese-Inflected World Literature The poem brings us back to the idea of constellation as a metaphor for a Chinese-inflected world literature. As such, this constellation remains invisible, or partially visible, to most viewers, and it might be considered “marginalized” or perhaps even doubly marginalized, as it 70

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remains unidentified and uncharted in both Sinophone and Anglophone worlds. But unlike the marginalization of contemporary Chinese literature, wider recognition of this constellation does not rest upon a reversal of cultural dynamics or the addition of newer and brighter stars, for it is already there and accessible to any individual. To navigate it, one needs a frame of mind that is both adventurous and tentative, some language facility, much tenacity, and constant reading. Reframing the works of poets such as Bridge, Howe, and Pain Not Bread as part of a literary constellation that links Anglophone poetry with its Chinese relatives, both past and present, has several theoretical and practical implications. First, it highlights contemporary Englishlanguage poetry’s indebtedness to Chinese poetry and the intertextual relationship between the two, thereby challenging a subtle yet persistent Eurocentrism (Zhang 2015) and its “technologies of recognition” in current discourses on world literature (Shih 2004). Second, it offers new ways of assessing Chinese contribution to world literature by drawing attention away from canons and prizes and refocusing it on cultural and personal relations. Here the thinking rises above counter-hegemonic imperatives. A Chinese-inflected world literature does not suggest a simple inversion of the China–West power imbalance, but rather ways to diffuse or dissolve it. More importantly, a Chinese-inflected world literature implies an embracing of the plurality of world literatures. This plurality leads to the possibility, and the liberating potential, of locating and examining other invisible or uncharted constellations, with different inflections. Through the power of reading, both close and distant, poets such as Bridge, Howe, and Pain Not Bread have demonstrated the simple truth that classical Chinese poetry is a common literary heritage available and accessible not only to Chinese poets but to all diligent students of poetry. They are every bit the rightful heir to the rich legacy of classical Chinese poetry as any contemporary Chinese poet – and this legacy is not to be inherited but to be acquired. To read the works of these Anglophone poets as part of a Chinese-inflected world literature, therefore, can inform a parallel process of China’s reassessment of its own cultural heritage. It points to a perennial issue in Chinese modernity, which is how to receive, and revive, its cultural heritage and maintain continuity with its past. These responsibilities and challenges are not limited to those writing in Chinese – it is a problem of world literature. Certainly, Diana Bridge, Sarah Howe, and Pain Not Bread are not alone in their desire to come into a relationship with older or distant traditions and create something utterly contemporary, and utterly their own, out of that relationship. Their ways of relating to classical Chinese literature, humble yet learned, alert and deeply engaging, may stimulate further reflection on contemporary Chinese poetry’s relationship with literatures from other cultures or eras. As the poet Zhou Zan 周瓚 has argued, modern vernacular Chinese poetry must not be narrowly understood as a revolt against the classical tradition but as the result from the opening up of new aesthetic space due to tremendous worldwide societal and cultural changes (2007, 43–55). Critical blinders, such as Owen’s “world poetry” (1990) and McDougall’s “anxiety of out-fluence” (1993), may have deprived the vast body of contemporary Chinese poetry of legitimacy or a habitat. A Chinese-inflected world literature makes it possible to envision a European-inflected world literature encompassing a different constellation of literary stars. In this constellation, the spiritual siblings of a contemporary Chinese poet may not be Li Bai or Du Fu, but Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, or Federico García Lorca. In a roundabout way, this chapter began with the question of how classical Chinese poetry might become world literature but ends with reflections on how world literature might become Chinese. This accidental emphasis on becoming, in a Deleuzian sense (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), may serve to link my divergent beginning and ending, suggesting that this discussion is less concerned with what world literature is – its canonization and 71

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de-canonization than it is with what world literature does – its lines, loops, and shifting constellations. As in a Deleuzian becoming, where one piece of the assemblage is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing its value and bringing about a new unity, poets such as Bridge, Howe, and Pain Not Bread are drawn into the territory of classical Chinese poetry, changing their habitual frame of reference and discovering new horizons. In the end, they do not become Sinicized any more than Du Fu becomes Anglicized. They become world poetry, in the best sense of the term.

References Bridge, Diana. 1996. Landscape with Lines. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Bridge, Diana. 2007. “Poetry.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9, no. 1: 156–8. Bridge, Diana. 2008. “O to Be a Dragon.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10, no. 1: 8–27. Chan, Mary Jean. 2020. “‘Journeying Is Hard’: Difficulty, Race and Poetics in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade.” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 12, no. 1: 22, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.16995/ bip.745. Clarke, George Elliott. 2000. “Pain Not Bread: A Poundian Pursuit.” Review of Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, by Pain Not Bread. The Halifax Herald, December 31. www.brickbooks.ca/ reviews/pain-not-bread-a-poundian-pursuit-reviewed-by-george-elliott-clarke/. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London, UK: Continuum. Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound. 2008. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry: A Critical Edition. Edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. New York: Fordham University Press. Heritage, Elizabeth. 2016. “Review of In the Supplementary Garden, by Diana Bridge.” http://elizabethheritage.nz/blog/2016/9/1/a-last-ditch-calligraphy. Hoeksema, Thomas. 1978. “The Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa.” Translation Review 1, no. 1: 5–18. Howe, Sarah. 2015. Loop of Jade. London: Chatto & Windus. Howe, Sarah. 2016. “Dream Libraries, Revolution and Literary Influences.” Interviewed by Arenike Adebajo. The Cambridge Student, May 28. www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/sarah-howe-dream-libraries-revolutionand-literary-influences. Howe, Sarah. 2018. “‘The Primitive Sap’: On Peter Larkin’s What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei.” https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/research/currentprojects/poetryatwarwick/onlinepublications/ werexatree/. Klein, Lucas. 2016. “Tribunals of Erudition and Taste: Or, Why Translations of Premodern Chinese Poetry Are Having a Moment Right Now.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 14. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tribunals-of-erudition-and-taste-or-why-translations-of-premodern-chinese-poetryare-having-a-moment-right-now/. McDougall, Bonnie S. 1993. “The Anxiety of Out-Fluence: Creativity, History and Postmodernity.” In Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture, edited by Wendy Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, 99–112. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. McDougall, Bonnie S. 2014. “World Literature, Global Culture and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Translation.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 1, nos. 1–2: 47–64. Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso. Owen, Stephen. 1990. “The Anxiety of Global Influence: What Is World Poetry?” New Republic, November 19: 8–32. Pain Not Bread. 2000. Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei. London, Ontario: Brick Books. Pound, Ezra. 1915. Cathay. London: Elkin Mathews. www.gutenberg.org/files/50155/50155-h/50155-h. htm. Rumen, Carol. 2016. “Poem of the Week: ‘Yangtze’ by Sarah Howe.” The Guardian. www.theguardian. com/books/booksblog/2016/may/02/poem-of-the-week-yangtze-by-sarah-howe. Shih, Shu-mei. 2004. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 111, no. 1: 16–30.

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Line, Loop, Constellation Stalling, Jonathan. 2010. Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press. Stasko, Nicolette. 2002. “Review of Porcelain, by Diana Bridge.” Southerly 62, no. 1. Tangshi sanbaishou 唐詩三百首 (Three hundred Tang poems). Web source. Accessed May 16, 2021. http://cls.lib.ntu.edu.tw/300/ALL/ALLFRAME.htm. Weinberger, Eliot. 1987. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. New York: New Directions. Weinberger, Eliot, ed. 2003. The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. New York: New Directions. Wong, Jennifer. 2020. “Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe: Multicultural Heritage and Questions of Identity.” English 69, no. 266: 246–69. doi: 10.1093/english/efaa015. Xu Yuanzhong 許淵沖, Lu Peixian 陸佩弦, and Wu Juntao 吳鈞陶, eds. 1988. 300 Tang Poems: A New Translation 唐詩三百首新譯. Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fanyi chuban gongsi. Zhang, Yingjin. 2015. “Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17, no. 1. dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2714. Zhou Zan 周瓚. 2007. Touguo shige xiezuo de qianwangjing 透過詩歌寫作的潛望鏡 (Through the Periscope of Poetic Writing). Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.

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6 A DECADE APART Bridging the US and China Literary Systems, 2010–2021 Jonathan Stalling

In the summer of 2007, I returned to mainland China for the first time in a decade. I had spent most of my adolescence and teen years in northwest Arkansas studying Chinese and dreaming of the day I would go to college in China, and when I finally arrived at Beijing University in the late spring of 1995, I loved every minute of it. While I would return to the United States to finish my degree at UC–Berkley, I could not wait to return. Yet life happens, and it wasn’t until after graduate school when I was finally able to return. It was my first week on the job as a young assistant professor of English specializing in East–West poetics at the University of Oklahoma (OU) when I was asked to accompany a delegation of faculty from Beijing Normal University’s (BNU) College of Chinese Language and Literature on their tour of OU campus. I sat in on several meetings that eventually resulted in a special issue of OU’s well-known journal World Literature Today dedicated to contemporary Chinese literature. Later that same year, I found myself attending a literary conference at BNU to commemorate the issue and to discuss the topic of Chinese literature’s reception abroad. I describe the conference in a short essay later published in WLT: To my right sit the world-renowned novelists Mo Yan (the author of Red Sorghum and himself a former candidate for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature), Yu Hua (whose recent novel Brothers is a runaway success and whose novel To Live was, like Red Sorghum before it, made into a film by Zhang Yimou), Ge Fei, and Li Er (both especially well known for their avant-garde styles). To my right are some of China’s most respected poets, including the legendary Shi Zhi (Guo Lusheng, the first “Misty poet”); and the relative newcomer, Han Yan, whom Zhang Qinghua, China’s premier poetry critic and scholar, handpicked to appear in the special China issue of WLT (July 2007). Along with Zhang Qinghua, other renowned critics like Beijing University’s Chen Xiaoming, and BNU’s Zhang Ning and Liu Hongtao, are in attendance as well as respected editors like Lin Mang and Wu Sijing (who are also directors of national poetry associations), among others. . . . And while it is an honor to read a public address by David L. Boren, President of the University of Oklahoma, giving one of the inaugural addresses in Chinese in front of this audience is akin to a dream that you wake from with simultaneous relief and regret – relief that the dream is only a dream, and regret for the same reason. Of course, I am not waking up anytime soon. (Stalling 2008, 40) DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-8

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Rereading this essay a decade on is incredibly nostalgic for me – if a little embarrassing. I could not have known then that most of these writers and scholars would become colleagues and friends over the next decade, nor could I have predicted the abrupt shift in cultural and political norms that capped a truly incredible decade of literary and scholarly collaboration, nor would I have predicted then, how naïve I would later feel looking back on the decade that followed. In 2007, Beijing was gearing up for the Beijing Olympics, and it seemed that everyone in China, including its literary establishment, was wondering aloud about their place in the global community, past, present, and future. There were frank discussions in those days about both the quality of mainland Chinese writing (not just the need for quality translations) and a far greater willingness to discuss sensitive issues like state intervention in artistic expression and the impossibility that state sponsorship of literary culture abroad could be effective. But to be frank, I was a young scholar focused principally on comparative poetics not the geoeconomics of soft-power politics, so I was excited by the prospect of new and productive ways of engaging Chinese language(s) literature, poetry, and poetics. It is important to note from the start, however, that while CLT was an experiment in US–mainland China editorial collaboration, the Newman Prize and CLTA were created and wholly funded from the beginning with OU resources and in the case of the Newman Prize, actively sought to decouple “Chinese literature” from any specific state or Sinitic language (華語), just as CLTA was created to reveal the complex material conditions that undergird translations on geopolitical and economic scales as well as cross-cultural and inter-linguistic hermeneutics. Thus in this chapter, I will explore some of the publications, public programming, and research resources I have either founded, cofounded, or directed at OU as a way to not only better understand this critical decade (2010–2020) of US–mainland China literary studies but to reflect on this as a decade of experimentation when we sought to test a wide variety of hypothesis about how to improve upon the way Chinese literature(s) are read, disseminated, promoted, curated, discussed, and studied. By describing the genesis and results of joint projects, like the Chinese Literature Today journal and book series, as well as independent projects, like the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Chinese Literature Translation Archive, I hope to show how each speaks to the challenges and opportunities unique to this decade and to the ways we can better understand the often-unseen barriers that stand between two very different literary systems.

Chinese Literature Today 1.0 Not long after I returned from Beijing in 2007, I began thinking more about why Chinese authors were not being read as widely, or discussed more thoroughly, as, say, world Anglophone literature in higher education or more generally. Was the problem on the supply side? Did we not have enough translations flowing into the literary market? Since only 3% of literature published in the United States is from translation, and only a fraction of this is translated into English from Chinese, could the general disinterest in Chinese literature be correlated to a lack of quality literary translations? Or did English readers need more scholarly context, more access to the “buzz” of critical conversations taking place in the broader Sinosphere? Could hearing mainland Chinese critics discussing the newly emerging voices of migrant worker poets, for instance, or reading their poems in translation speak directly to Western readers by connecting them to the lives of the women and men sewing their clothes and assembling their iPhones? Could Chinese and Western editors curate Chinese literature more effectively for Western audiences to unlock its richness without reducing literature to ethnographic information? If the establishment of the vigorously independent Newman Prize for Chinese Literature 75

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was going to provide more prestige capital for Sinophone literature and poetry in the West, would it be possible to partner with a mainland Chinese institution to help solve production and supply issues? These are just some of the early questions that informed a grant application I wrote toward the end of 2008 to establish a new journal and book series that would test these questions directly. In a Eureka moment, the notion that we could create Chinese Literature Today as a spin-off of World Literature Today hit all the right notes, and I submitted my draft to R. C. Davis, the executive director of World Literature Today, and Dr. Paul Bell, the dean of OU’s College of Arts and Sciences, and they submitted it to our BNU colleagues for their blessing and input. The idea was simple: BNU’s College of Chinese Language and Literature, with its top-ranked faculty, would bring their expertise and literary networks to the table, while OU would add its own faculty resources to expand Chinese literature to the wider Sinophone world and WLT’s long-standing commitment to academic rigor, cosmopolitan values, reader-friendly accessibility, and commercial design. Working together, OU and BNU administrations submitted a five-year start-up grant proposal to the Hanban 漢辦, the Chinese organization supported by China’s Ministry of Education responsible for establishing and maintaining the global network of Confucius Institutes. In hindsight, such an experiment looks naive (on both sides), but in 2008 with editorial safeguards in place, things looked differently than they do now. While OU and BNU invoked their shared CI as a key reason for their partnership, both the CLT journal and book series were created to be independent from the Hanban, and the CI board did not make editorial decisions. As CLT was owned and published by OU, the journal’s masthead was presided over a single executive director for WLT and CLT, Robert Con Davis Undiano, who had veto power over CLT content published. While these measures were put in place to ensure Western publishing norms were upheld, it is important to emphasize that in every other way, the journal assumed a deeply collaborative design predicated on a good-faith alignment of its core mission: to bring cutting-edge contemporary Chinese fiction, poetry, and literary criticism to a broad range of English readers. The content of every issue was split between that which was curated (solicited and reviewed) by the editors on the BNU side and content solicited and/or reviewed by OU editors, who also handled the translation, editing, design, distribution, and marketing. Yet to understand the genesis of CLT, one must look beyond the OU and BNU relationship to a much longer history of mainland China state-centered efforts to promote Chinese literature abroad. The largest previous effort included government-funded journals, like Chinese Literature (中國文學), which published 590 issues from 1951 to 2001.1 Yet the “China-centered” model was perceived to be ineffectual, so from the Chinese side, CLT could be viewed as another experiment, a new possible direction embracing collaboration that, if successful, might replace the “going-it alone” approach of the past. Yet it is clear from the name of the grant application chosen by our BNU colleagues, “Chinese Literature Overseas Dissemination Project” (中國文學海外傳播工程), that from the Hanban’s perspective, CLT still very much belonged to this longer Chinese history of state-funded translation and publication efforts. But what was clear to all in 2009–2010 is that CLT was to be something new, a truly collaboratively edited journal held to Western academic and language standards but populated with at least half of its content written and edited mostly by mainland Chinese authors and literary scholars. So let’s take a look under the hood of the CLT model. In every issue, our readers found a variety of regular special features introducing a Chinese author or poet (mostly though not necessarily from mainland China) with new literary translations of their work along with a collection of critical essays by leading Chinese and international scholars curated to contextualize 76

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the work for Western audiences as well as an interview with the author. Over those first five years of CLT, we published special features like these on well-known Chinese writers: Mo Yan 莫言, Jia Pingwa 賈平凹, Wang Anyi 王安憶, Bi Feiyu 畢飛宇, Li Ang 李昂, Su Tong 蘇 童, Li Er 李洱, Yan Lianke 閻連科, among other fiction writers, as well as poets like Shi Zhi 食 指, Zheng Xiaoqiong 鄭小瓊, Yi Sha 伊莎, and others. Beyond these special feature sections, CLT published new works by well-known poets, like Bei Dao 北島, Xi Chuan 西川, Zhai Yongming 翟永明, Yang Mu 楊牧, Wang Jiaxin 王家新, Han Song 韓松, Jidi Majia 吉狄馬加, as well as works by many poets who had never appeared in English translation before, like Tian He 田禾, Zeng Dekuang 曾德曠, and minority poets like Burao Yilu 布饒依露, Mo Du 莫獨, Luowu Laqie 倮伍拉且, Ma Deqing 馬德清, Eni Mushasijia 俄尼牧莎斯加, Sha Ma 沙馬, Lu Juan (Adu Axi 阿賭阿喜), Asuo Layi 阿索拉毅, among others. CLT was the first publication to bring some of these non-Sinitic into print. Most issues also included special sections celebrating scholars and translators whose careers have helped shape Chinese literature’s reception inside and outside of China. Finally, CLT published special issues devoted to a wide variety of short fiction, novellas, science fiction, and drama among other topics and featured works from across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and by overseas Chinese writers. Each issue was crafted with the assumption that CLT readers were interested in world literature but were not Chinese literature scholars. During the first five-year start-up period, every issue of CLT was printed in runs of 3,000– 5,000 copies and distributed for free to a wide range of possible reading publics. We direct mailed issues to the entire subscriber list of World Literature Today, to OU alumni association, to traditional Chinese medicine clinics throughout the United States (with the idea that the journal might gain new readers in their waiting rooms), Chinese literature departments, Confucius Institutes, book clubs, libraries, and academic and civic associations (like the Association for Asian Studies). During the CLT start-up period, CLT Assistant Editor Julie Shilling (who came to CLT from an earlier career as an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press) and I spent a considerable number of working hours creating social media posts, book club questions, and email newsletters and distributing issues to independent bookstores and handing out complementary CLT issues and swag at well-positioned booths at major international literature and Asia Studies conferences. In 2013, Ping Zhu 朱萍, a then assistant professor of Chinese literature at OU, assumed her early role as an associate editor, where she curated several special sections in CLT, including sections on Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文, Chen Jingrong 陳敬容 (with Luying Chen as the guest editor), and Shi Tiesheng 史鐵生 (with Hangping Xu and Elise Gabrielle Hureta as guest editors). In short, CLT came onto the scene with a bang as we tested the guiding questions that I posed earlier. However, by the end of the five-year start-up period, CLT subscribers still hovered in the low hundreds, and given the considerable capital and human labor investment, the results were disheartening. Furthermore, it was clear by the end of the first years the Hanban were having second thoughts about the join-patronage strategy, and they were not going to continue to support the journal beyond the initial start-up period.

CLT 2.0 When the journal ended its first five years, it was clear that it would not reach economic selfsustainability, and without the likelihood of future support of the Hanban, CLT’s future was anything but clear. Still, it did not fold. Instead, the BNU and OU legal counsel established a new biparty agreement between OU and BNU where OU supported CLT operational costs on the US side, while BNU covered the journal’s production costs in order to maintain the journal’s signature full-color, high-design style as we moved away from an independent publishing 77

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model to become a Routledge title. Now that CLT no longer had any affiliations with the Hanban, we were able to merge it with the Newman Prize, and Ping Zhu, now an associate professor of Chinese literature at OU, stepped into my old role while I assumed my new position as the Harold J. and Ruth Newman chair of US–China Issues and became a co-director with RC Davis and later stepped into the editor in chief role. CLT 2.0 officially became a publication of the Institute for US–China Issues. As a Routledge title with strong OU and BNU institutional support, we were able to create continuity of CLT’s signature full-color print design while expanding upon our digital footprint with Routledge’s bundled content distribution system. During the years of CLT 2.0, we published sections devoted to the work of Wang Anyi 王安憶, Dong Xi 東西, Han Song 韓松, Wang Ping 王平, Ai Wei 艾薇, Yu Xiuhua 余秀華, Xi Xi 西西, Jin Yong 金庸, Liu Cixin 劉慈欣, Dung Kai-cheung 董--, Xu Zechen 徐則臣, Lu Min 魯敏, Xue Yiwei 薛憶-, Yan Lianke ---, Zhu Wenying 朱文穎, with special topics: Chinese science fiction and avant-garde theater. Leaving distribution and marketing to Routledge also meant that I was able to spend more of my time focused on transforming my idea of a Chinese Literature Translation Archive into reality (which I will discuss in a moment). During this period of CLT’s life, Ping Zhu also initiated a new web blog, Chinese Literature Now! which expanded the CLT platform to publish our content that the limited page count of our print issues could contain. Yet in the last years of the decade, there was increasing friction between Chinese and Western publishing norms, and by the time the decade ended, it had become clear that these standards were intractably diverging, and thus ended a decade of genuinely collaborative BNU–OU editorial decision-making and likely marks the end of a short-lived collaborative era of Chinese literature “going out” history. In hindsight, the boldest experiment of CLT was not its marriage of academic content and commercial design, not who or what we published, not even our adventurous (if naïve) early marketing efforts, but the precociousness of our collaborative model itself. Of course, CLT was by no means the only such collaborative project launched during this moment of US– China academic relations. Many, far larger-scale endeavors, from the establishment of NYU– Shanghai to Duke Kunshan to a wide variety of joint academic programming, sprang into existence during this decade, and their future has yet to be determined. As CLT readers have discovered over the last decade, its editors, like Guo Changbo 過常寶, Zhang Qinghua 張清華, Zhang Ning 張檸, Liu Hongtao 劉洪濤, not to mention Yao Jianbin 姚建彬 and Lü Li 呂黎, are truly some of the most talented literary critics of their generation, and our readers have them to thank for much of the stellar content published in CLT over the last decade.

CLT 3.0: CLT to CLT² While CLT continues to be published in much the same way as it has in the past (same content, features, and style), in 2021, I assumed the role of the editor in chief of another Routledge title, the Chinese philosophy title Contemporary Chinese Thought, where I oversaw the publication of its last several issues under this name in order that we could merge CLT with CCT to publish a single interdisciplinary journal named Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT or CLT²) covering contemporary Chinese-language humanities more broadly while maintaining both journals’ historical focus on literature, poetry, and philosophy. Carine Defoort, the previous editor in chief of Contemporary Chinese Thought, helped transition the journal Chinese Studies in Philosophy, which had been recently renamed in the years just before she took the editorial reins in 1997. Chinese Studies in Philosophy was established in 1969 and edited for many years by Chung-ying Cheng 成中英, a scholar who 78

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pioneered the formalization of Chinese philosophy in the United States in the 1960s. From 1993 to 1997, the journal was guest-edited by Michael Schoenhals, who gave the journal its new name. Professor Defoort expanded the journal from a purely philosophical journal to one that explored a wider scope of contemporary Chinese intellectual life during her tenure, and now the legacy of both journals is living on in Chinese Literature and Thought Today as the journal continues to provide an important window into this unprecedented moment of global change by taking on larger interdisciplinary issues ranging from pandemics and virality to ecology and technology through aesthetic, literary, poetic, and philosophical lenses. Looking back at 2010–2020 decade, I remain proud of CLT’s journey, of the risks taken and their rewards, but I am also humbled by way in which the journal’s history has been shaped by exogenous factors that ultimately came to limit the potential of truly collaborative US– China projects like this.

CLT Book Series While the journey of the CLT journal came with its challenges, the CLT book series taught me far more about the challenges that have faced Chinese literary fiction in the US literary marketplace more generally. The series was created to publish Chinese literary fiction and poetry, and it included collections of poetry by Shi Zhi and the Yi 彝 minority poet Jidi Majia, as well as short fiction from Chinese authors who had yet to publish much, if anything, in English outside of China.2 The series also published the first anthology of Chinese novellas by many contemporary masters of the form, including Jiang Yun 蔣韻, Xu Zechen 徐則臣, Han Shaogong 韓少功, Chi Zijian 遲子建, Fang Fang方方, Li Tie 李鐵, and Wang Anyi. While Dong Xi’s 東西 novel Record of Regret introduced this relative newcomer to English to a wider reading public, most of the CLT novels were major works that had, for one reason or another, eluded translation, such as Li Er’s Coloratura 花腔, Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City 廢都, and Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death 檀香刑. Mo Yan’s novel, which debuted the week after his Nobel Prize was announced in 2012, was only the second volume in the series, and this helped launch the CLT brand on the international stage. The novel graced the cover of the New York Times book review section, and excerpts were featured in other mainstream print media. As I have already mentioned, Mo Yan had a long relationship with OU, as he had been nominated for OU’s Neustadt Prize for International Literature in 1998 and was the first winner of OU’s Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2009, and his work had been featured in both WLT and CLT numerous times. So when the announcement was made by the Nobel Committee, OU’s College of Arts and Sciences hired a publicist to organize a nationwide campaign of radio interviews for Mo Yan’s translator, Howard Goldblatt. An animated book trailer for Mo Yan’s novel, two years in the making at Yunnan University’s College of Art and Design, was also launched on time.3 Yet soon the initial excitement began to wear off, and I watched as the national conversation around Mo Yan’s prize quickly shifted from what might have been a larger discussion of the merits or demerits of his writing, or of modern Chinese authors more generally, to a few soundbites where Mo Yan voiced a nonchalant stance toward Chinese state censorship.4 The months leading up to the prize ceremony offered a critical education for me in the larger geopolitics of Chinese (mainland Chinese) literature outside of China. After neither Li Er’s or Jia Pingwa’s novels performed as well in terms of sales or critical reception as I had hoped, it became clearer to me that the issues facing Chinese literature in English could not be solved by improving upon the design or ratcheting up the supply of high-quality translated literature. Simply put, to improve upon the reception of Chinese literature abroad, we needed different approach. 79

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Newman Prize for Chinese Literature The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature 紐曼華語文學獎5 was established in 2009 just after the founding of the Institute for US–China Issues, and both were funded by a generous donation from Harold J. and Ruth Newman, two past trustees of the Asia Society, and the institute’s inaugural director, Dr. Peter Gries, an OU professor of Chinese political science. The Newman Prize was created to be an unbiased international prize for literature written in Chinese from anywhere across the globe. The Newman Prize was modeled on OU’s Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which is known as the “American Nobel” because it has had 33 laureates, finalists, or jurors, who, in the past 50 years, were later awarded Nobel Prizes (only José Saramago was a Nobel Prize recipient before being considered for the Neustadt). The Newman Prize charter includes the same transparent selection process as the Neustadt, with one difference – while the Neustadt jurors are made up of novelists, playwrights, and poets, the Newman jurors are scholars or translators of Chinese literature from diverse academic, regional, racial, and gendered backgrounds. Over the summer leading up to the jury deliberation, each juror shares her or his nomination statements with the jury and is provided with the relevant reading materials. The deliberations themselves take place in the first week of October and are held via teleconference or Zoom. Voting for both the Newman and Neustadt Prizes takes place in successive rounds of “positive” elimination. In this type of eliminative voting, jurors each vote for all but one of the candidates at each stage. At the start of each round of voting, every juror is given additional time to advocate for one of the remaining writers so that the entire jury remains actively engaged from start to finish. The criteria for the award is solely on the basis of literary merit but can be given to a single work or to crown a lifetime achievement. The prize is awarded to poetry every third and fiction on other years and has been awarded to a wide range of male and female authors from across the Chinese-speaking world and representing a wide range of writing styles and literary lineages. From 2009 to 2021, the writers who received this prize include Mo Yan (2009), Han Shaogong (2011), Yang Mu (2013), Chu T’ien-wen (2015), Wang Anyi (2017), Xi Xi (2019), Yan Lianke (2021), and most recently Kuei-hsin Chang (2023). Again, drawing on the traditions of World Literature Today’s history, the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature was featured in a special section of the journal Chinese Literature Today (and continues to be featured in CLT²) and is the marquee event within a larger celebration that spans a few days and includes a small symposium dedicated to the winner’s body of work, film screenings, poetry readings, and other events, depending on that year’s winners. Due to the pandemic, the award ceremony in 2021 was hosted live in person at Beijing at Renmin University and online after from the University of Oklahoma, but in 2023 we returned to in-person events with the celebration of the Taiwan-based Sarawakian writer Kuei-hsin Chang’s which I see as a culmination of the Prize’s raison d’être, to decenter states and promote a wider notion of Sinophone literature. I am proud that the Newman Prize has emerged as a cultural resource to both supplement and complexify the kinds of cultural capital associated with state-sponsored prizes like the Lu Xun -- and Mao Dun 茅盾 in the PRC or the Taiwan Literature Award, or the Singapore Literary Prize, etc. Independent international prizes are important as they can not only draw attention to Sinophone literature outside the Sinosphere but also serve as a step toward other larger international prizes. For instance, it can be argued that Mo Yan’s nomination for the Neustadt Prize in 1998 and his successful Newman Prize in 2009 were important external validators of his literary merit and thus as a positive data point for the Nobel committee consideration leading up to his Literature Prize in 2012. More convincing still, however, is the fact that both Yang Mu and Xi Xi went on to win Sweeden’s Cikada Prize for 80

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Poetry within a year of being awarded the Newman Prize. From the perspective of Western publishers, who often employ literary prizes to sell books, the shortage of Western literary prizes going to Chinese-language authors puts PRC, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong writers at a significant market disadvantage when compared to their Anglophone counterparts. So the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature can be understood as a public-facing literary program that exists to bring greater attention to Chinese-language authors and poets in Anglophone countries, to give greater agential power to internationally recognized Chinese-language authors within the Sinosphere, and to decenter states and monolingual ideas of “Chinese” as away of broadening and deepening the recognition of Sinophone literature more generally. To get a deeper understanding of the barriers that have prevented Chinese literature in translation to find a wider Anglophone readership, however, we need new scholarly resources and methods.

The Chinese Literature Translation Archive (CLTA) There is something intuitive about the need to do archival research for literary scholars. My first book publications (Stalling 2010; Stalling et al. 2008) were both based on archival research I had undertaken during graduate school. As I became more invested in studying the problems faced by Chinese literature in translation, I was surprised to find that its historical translation materials had not been gathered, protected, or described in ways that were available to scholars who, like me, hoped to better understand the lifeworld of Chinese literature in translation. So while Chinese–English translation studies is a thriving area of study (especially in China, as there were dozens of dissertations and books discussing Howard Goldblatt’s translations of Mo Yan, for instance), this field has been limited to comparing source and target texts and interpreting these differences through different theoretical frames. With the resources provided by a Chinese literature translation archive, however, scholars can now see that translations are not products of individual sovereign actors who embody specific cultural or ideological reading practices but are instead the emergent properties of much larger and more complex literary networks, which are shaped by state-centered or market-centered economic systems in distinct ways. In 2014, I pitched the idea of CLTA to OU’s dean of libraries, Rick Luce, who approved of the plan, so I was able to ask Howard Goldblatt if he would consider donating his papers to CLTA, which he did along with his personal library (roughly 8,000 books). Next, OU libraries acquired the papers of the Taiwan–Hong Kong–US poet-translator-scholar Wai-lim Yip 葉維廉 and the German Sinologist-translator Wolfgang Kubin and, soon thereafter, the personal library of Arthur Waley, along with his limited existent correspondence, and smaller collections of papers donated by Andrea Lingenfelter and Steven Bradbury and most recently the archive of the Scottish translator Brian Holton. Today, the Chinese Literature Translation Archive houses a collection of well over 15,000 books, so upon entering the CLTA reading room, scholars and students walk into the intertextual environments of these influential English translators of Chinese literature. In addition to their source and reference materials (which often include marginalia written by the translators), the archive houses their letters, drafts, contracts, notes, and other ephemera researchers need to gain a better understanding of the historical journey of Chinese literature into English (and German). In the case of the Howard Goldblatt Archive, the collection includes the letters between him and dozens of authors from Mo Yan, Bi Feiyu, and Alai to Chu T’ien-wen and Li Ang and many more, but also, perhaps more importantly, letters between him and his agents, editors, peers, and others.

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Over the last few years, nearly two dozen visiting scholars have conducted research at CLTA for periods of 6 to 12 months each. In the fall of 2018, I gave a keynote lecture at a translation studies conference at Shanghai Foreign Studies University, where I described their work in terms of a new archive-based methodology I called ANTS, or “actor network translation studies,” and in 2020, I coauthored a chapter titled “Unpacking the Mo Yan Archive: Actor Network Translation Studies” with the semiotics scholar Ronald Schleifer, wherein we attempt to provide a deeper theoretical model for ANTS (Stalling and Schiefer 2020). In 2023, I extend this line of inquiry further in a chapter entitled “Value-added Literary Labor in Chinese Literature Translation” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Modern Chinese Literature in Translation (Bruno et al. 2023). Drawing upon research made possible with CLTA resources, these two works discuss the complex networks undergirding works like Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballads, by revealing how Mo Yan’s American agent, Sandra Dijkstra, who was also Amy Tan’s agent, in concert with the publisher’s editors, Nan Graham and Courtney Hodell, among other things convinced Mo Yan to rewrite the ending of the novel to “improve” the book (Yan and Du 2019). These works explore the negotiations that take place within the US literary system which is undergirded by value-added economics, which assigns market value to literary works based on the accumulation of two correlated properties: “literary consensus English” (the aesthetic qualities resulting from layers of revisions provided by literary revision laborers, which embody the stylistic, narrative, and thematic norms fostered by the last 75 years of exponential growth of the creative writing industry) and “degree-ofnode” (the accumulated network status of the actors who have contributed to editorial shaping a literary manuscript). ANTS reveals how the market-oriented nature of the US literary system immediately places translated works at a disadvantage when compared with their Anglophone counterparts due to the fact that they cannot accumulate the positive network effects (degreeof-node and consensus literary English) that accrue to manuscripts as they pass through the value-added economics of the literary editing and publishing process. The Network turn in the humanities is often taken to be synonymous with big-data analysis or so-called “distant reading” practices (Ahnert et al. 2021), but in the case of ANTS, CLTA scholars are able to emphasize the need for “multi-scaler reading,” or “widely engaged reading,” no longer limited to close or distant analysis of source and target texts. Archives help us step back to see how translations are emergent properties of larger systems and interactions between systems, and this helps us see how translated works are far more than a negotiation between languages or cultures taking place within the minds of sovereign individual.

Translation as a Partial Bridge Between State- and Market-Centered Literary Systems While most comparative literature and translation studies focus on cross-cultural hermeneutics, ANTS focuses on the material conditions of literary production and consumption and the negotiations that take place or fail to take place when translated works of literature from one into the other. While scholars like Perry Link have provided a useful description of the Chinese state-patronage literary system (Link 2000),6 the same cannot be said about scholarship on the American valueadded economic literary system, and as a result, it has been difficult for Chinese–English translation studies scholars to adequately address the kinds of negotiations translation networks must undertake when navigating differences between these distinct literary systems. As we take a step back to get a broader understanding of the US literary system, we can begin to see the astonishing degree to which US writers rely on (and are compelled to rely on) the value-added literary labor of other actors employed by the creative writing, editorial, and 82

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publishing industries. With over 20,000 applicants a year to the now over 350 creative writing MFA programs in the United States (Abramson 2018, 7–12), there is a nearly endless supply of highly indebted and expertly trained literary professionals who are not able to make a living as writers (live off the revenue of book sales and honoraria) so must sell their labor to other aspiring writers. Most capital flowing within the US literary system is exchanged by parties producing and consuming these educational, editorial, and publishing good and services not as book sales or in public/state funding. In this highly competitive space, US writers gladly cede authorial authority to those who provide added literary labor to a text not only in order to “improve” a manuscript’s product–market fit (through their revisions, suggestions, and refinement) but also to allow their manuscripts to accrue the additional network status of those who help shape it (those invest their network status in it). In China, things could not be more different. Firstly, the majority of capital within the Chinese literary system flows from the state to writers rather than from book sales or value-added literary labor. Secondly, there are only a few creative writing programs in the higher education marketplace, so without a constant production of highly trained and indebted creative writing teachers and editors, there is neither the supply nor the demand for “value-added literary labor.” The result of this difference is that Chinese authors are not incentivized to cede authorial power to creative writing teachers, editors, or literary agents, as neither the writer’s status nor income are directly yoked to optimizing product–market fit. As a result, Chinese novelists and poets working within the mainland Chinese literary system are less willing to allow other actors to interfere with the final aesthetic shape of their published works when compared to their American counterparts. As a result, most Chinese language literatures can be said to be more aesthetically heterogeneous, even idiosyncratic (what Schleifer and I call “quality of personality”), than their US counterparts, and this translates to greater artistic variation, especially in the expression of local, provincial, dialectal textures, but this also means that English readers are more likely to perceive Chinese novels to be less developed as they have not benefited from the value-added literary industry practices that functions to ensure a general “quality of product,” which English readers have long grown accustomed to reading. So what does all this mean for the reception of Chinese literature beyond the Sinosphere? Firstly, it is reasonable to highlight the fact that every Chinese novel in English translation offers English readers a rare experience of reading a genuinely individualistic work of a single human intelligence. If American readers read translated Chinese fiction and poetry with the understanding that these works remain free of the design logic that has engulfed American horizons of literary expectation, then the sprawling nature of a novel like Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City can be read as an essential element of its literary appeal. And for Chinese authors, it is important to note how translation can mean different things, can entail radically different processes, and that these decisions will likely impact a work’s success. Chinese authors should feel at liberty to allow or even encourage their translators to introduce their work into the full value-added literary publishing process, just as a young Mo Yan once did. While I would be the first to defend the need to defend the traditional approach of translating Chinese literature prioritizing fidelity over domestication, I also feel as though each Chinese language author can and should know the full pros and cons of both choices so that they can make a decision based on their own needs. Finally, for translation studies and comparative literature scholars, I hope that the strange inversion of individualism and collaboration typically assigned to the essentialist binaries of “Eastern collectivism” versus “Western individualism” will help us reflect more deeply on just what we mean when we talk about the kinds of cultural negotiations taking place in literary translation. 83

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Notes 1 Unlike CLT, Chinese Literature was supported by the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration 中國外文局, which is now called the China International Publishing Group (CIPG) 中國國 際出版集團 and continues to offer financial support for the translation and publication of Chinese literature in English. 2 The CLT book series published a collection of short fiction in English translation originally curated by Ou Ning 歐寧 earlier in the decade and published as Chutzpah! which included work by lesser-known writers such as Ren Xiaowen 任曉雯, Zhu Yue 朱岳, Lu Min 魯敏, Chen Xue 陳雪, A Yi 阿乙, Li Zishu 李子樹, Ye Fu 野夫, Chang Hui-Ching 張惠菁, Lu Nei 路內, Wang Bang 王梆, Li Juan 李娟, He Wapi 何袜皮, and the Khazakh Chinese writer Aydos Amantay, as well as writers with more English readers, like Xu Zechen and Sheng Keyi 盛可以. 3 The trailer was supported entirely by the dean of Yunnan University Art School, Li Lisen, and Henry Wan Man Lai, a well-known and respected Hong Kong–based film composer, generously allowed us to use his score, and we worked with him to donate his proceeds from the trailer to the Hong Kong Children’s Cancer Foundation. To see the trailer and read about its making, visit www.worldliteraturetoday. org/creating-animated-trailer-mo-yans-sandalwood-death. 4 I wrote a number of short pieces published by WLT during this time. For example, see www.worldliteraturetoday.org/mo-yan-and-technicians-culture. 5 The prize’s Chinese name 華語文學 is always written in traditional Chinese characters and is normally translated as “Sinophone literature,” but due to its public-facing nature at an early stage of the development of Sinophone studies, it was decided by OU administrators that “Chinese literature” would be more widely relatable outside of specialists in academia. 6 While Link’s work focuses on the years leading up to the early 1980s, many of his observations remain relevant today, but we clearly need more scholarship on this topic, especially focusing on literary production, circulation, and reception between the mid-1980s to the present.

References Abramson, Seth. 2018. The Insider’s Guide to Graduate Degrees in Creative Writing. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ahnert, Ruth, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart, eds. 2021. The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities. New York: Cambridge University Press. Link, Perry. 2000. The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stalling, Jonathan. 2008. “Old Stories and New Stories in Beijing.” World Literature Today 82, no. 1 (January/February): 40–2. https://clt.oucreate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/January08_Stalling-1.pdf. Stalling, Jonathan. 2010. Poetics of Emptiness: Transformation of Asia Thought in American Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press. Stalling, Jonathan, and Ron Schiefer. 2020. “Unpacking the Mo Yan Archive: Actor-Network Translation Studies and The Chinese Literature Translation Archive.” In A Century of Chinese Literature in Translation (1919–2019): English Publication and Reception, edited by Leah Gerber and Lintao Qi, 22–40. New York: Routledge. Yan, Jia, and Juan Du. 2019. “Multiple Authorship of Translated Literary Works: A Study of Some Chinese Novels in American Publishing Industry.” Translation Review 106, no. 1: 15–34.

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PART III

Worlding Chinese Literature Across the Globe

7 CHINESE LITERATURE AT LARGE Wong Chin Foo’s Border-Crossing Writing1 Ping Zhu

A Forgotten Poem On February 4, 1885, Puck, a New York City–based general humor magazine often featuring political cartoons, published an outlandish poem, “The Dragon,” contributed by an ethnic Chinese named Wong Chin Foo (Figure 7.1). The poem was deliberately written in pidgin English often used in the yellowface minstrelsy in the nineteenth century. It consists of three stanzas, each bearing a subtitle, “Moonlight and Music,” “Homicide and Highway Robbery,” and “Crime Is Punished and Virtue Marries Rich,” respectively. In the first stanza, a young fellow is singing a song to the “pletty [pretty] little feet” of a “moon-faced” Chinese girl in a Juliet-and-Romeo fashion. The romance soon morphs into violence in the second stanza as the young fellow is killed by robbers on his way home. In the last stanza, the robbers are executed (chopped into bits), and the Chinese girl later marries a “velly lich [very rich] man” and gives birth to “a lot of little boys” (Wong 1885a, 356). Despite the dramatic turn of events in the three discrete stanzas, they all end with the same verses, depicting a “big old dragon” that lives in the cloud looking at the scenes and laughing aloud. Wong Chin Foo 王清福 (1847–1898), mainly known for his political activism and periodical autoethnographic writings, certainly intended to draw more public attention to this poem. For this poem, he endowed himself with the exotic title of “the Eminent Chinese Littérateur, Lord of the Ten Golden Pagodas and Mandarin of the Full Moons” (Wong 1885a, 356), signed his name both in Chinese and English,2 and also included his home address, “391 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn,” in the city of New York. Puck’s in-house cartoonist, Frederick Burr Opper (1857–1937), drew an illustration for the poem, in which he didn’t fail to reinforce the ostensible racial parody by placing the Chinese girl on a balcony of a laundry in the Chinatown and adding a long queue to the young fellow. The poem and the cartoon must have given some Americans a good laugh in 1885. However, Wong’s poem obviously failed to corroborate Wong’s self-label of “Eminent Chinese Littérateur.” Unlike his most famous essay, “Why Am I a Heathen” (1887), which stirred quite a few agitated responses from the Anglophone readers, “The Dragon” merely disappeared in the sea of the late nineteenth-century American periodical publications. To this date, this poem hasn’t been anthologized in any literary or poetry collections or discussed at length by any literary scholars. Hsuan L. Hsu’s groundbreaking essay of Wong Chin Foo’s periodical writing cites this poem 87

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-10

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Figure 7.1 Wong Chin Foo, “The Dragon” (1885). Source: Illustration by Frederick Burr Opper.

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but only focuses on the linguistic potential of the pidgin English used by Wong, arguing that the poem “attempts to counteract representations of Chinese dialect popular on the yellowface stage by demonstrating – albeit in a self-commodifying way – its eloquent and even musical potential” (2006, 89). In a 2013 full biography of Wong Chin Foo, this poem is mentioned briefly before Scott Seligman expresses his puzzlement: “Exactly what [Wong Chin Foo] hoped to accomplish via this unaccustomed foray into yellowface is unclear; it probably brought in a few dollars, but could not have done much to promote any of his causes” (2013, 133). The readers’ and scholars’ disposition to dismiss Wong’s poem may lead us to think about the constitutive parameters and process of canonization of literature. Is “The Dragon” really a poorly written poem from a literary perspective? If so, what particular criteria of literature is used to judge the absence of literary merit in this poem? From what literary tradition shall we evaluate this piece of work – American literature, Chinese literature, or world literature? When Johann Wolfgang Goethe fashioned the concept of world literature (Weltliteratur) in 1827, he was mainly concerned with the transmission of national literary traditions across the world (with Germany as its imaginary center). If world literature presupposes national literatures, a poem like “The Dragon” is destined for oblivion, as it was a product of temporal and spatial displacement and decentering, a text sprang from “the contact zone” – a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1991, 34). In Mary Louise Pratt’s words, the perils of writing in the contact zone inevitably include “[m]iscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning” (1991, 37). The literary merit of such a poem can only be illuminated if, as Homi Bhabha suggests, we regard “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refuges – these border and frontiers conditions,” as the terrain of world literature (1994, 12). In this way, the concept of world literature can be freed from national and geographical confines in order to valorize those literary works with “a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities” (Bhabha 1994, 5). “The Dragon” was produced in the beginning of the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943), when the demographic identity of “Chinese American,” a term that Wong Chin Foo coined in 1883, was contested both culturally and legally. Chinese immigrants in America not only faced the “yellow peril” cultural stigma (Wu 1982, 208) but were also prohibited from becoming naturalized American citizens by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. This means that to American readers, Wong could only write as a “Chinese” instead of a “Chinese American.” The Qing dynasty, on the other hand, was too weak to take care of its overseas subjects. In the poem, Wong Chin Foo deliberately picked a hybrid tongue, the “weird English” that could be “a new language of literature” (Ch’ien 2004, 4), showing the interstitial historical position of the Chinese Americans: they were neither Chinese nor American and were thus homeless in the world. They were caught up in a double frame of an old empire and a new modern nation-state that rendered every present moment precarious and incomprehensible. Their existence often bordered on racial violence, just like romance and homicide that run side by side in the poem. The double frame of the Chinese American life is also manifest in Wong Chin Foo’s bilingual signature: it is as if Wong wanted to claim a “both/and” identity for Chinese Americans instead of accepting the “neither/nor” nonidentity. By highlighting his indisputable Chinese American voice, including his real address located at the heart of the American metropolis, Wong Chin Foo made a loud statement to the American readers: I am Chinese and I am here. Such a textual performance not only challenges the “fantasy of distance” (Ahmed 2000, 167) underlying the racial stereotypes but also problematizes the “pure” and “original” American identity that was used to justify the Chinese Exclusion laws in the late nineteenth century. 89

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In Wong’s poem, a “big old dragon” witnesses and laughs aloud at the romance, crime, and karma from a cloud above the Chinese laundry in America. Each vignette in the three stanzas disrupts the former one, creating a discontinuous and incoherent narrative space that is held together only by the repetition of the dragon’s gaze and laughter. Installing the old dragon, possibly a symbol of imperial China, in the American air further intensifies the feelings of spatial, temporal, and cultural displacements. Without the dragon’s imaginary gaze, the poetic voice would be more fragmented. The dragon’s loud laughter is ambiguous and invites radically different interpretations: Is the laughter contemptuous, bitter, or victorious? Is the dragon laughing at the fate of the characters in the poem or at the American readers who would be lost in this poem without an explicit emotional register? Through the radical displacements, the poem has turned the dragon into a transnational symbol of moral authority while inverting the racial gaze that victimized the Chinese Americans. The dragon’s gaze can thus decentralize and disrupt any comfortable viewing position of American readers formed under the premise of a homogenous nationality, race, linguistic community, or religion. Equally noteworthy is the transition from the realistic mode in the first two stanzas to the imaginative mode in the third. If courtship and violence were common scenes in a Chinatown, one would raise eyebrows if criminals were chopped into bits and a Chinese girl from a Chinese laundry miraculously married a rich man in the late nineteenth-century America. The imaginative ending of the poem alludes to the mythical power of the big old dragon’s gaze and laughter: whereas in the first two stanzas the dragon seems to be a heartless or even malicious deity, in the third stanza it has potentially become the imaginary god of justice for the overseas Chinese. The repetition of the last two lines about the big old dragon, therefore, serves as a delayed revelation of the dragon’s benevolent power to the American readers, who would otherwise naturally see dragons as monstrous and fearful beings. This deliberate delay suggests Wong’s dual mission in writing the poem: breaking the artificial boundary of nationality and imagining a Chinese culture in migration (as represented by the dragon above the Chinatown in the poem).

The Transnational and the Translational Wong Chin Foo was born in a well-off family in Shandong in 1847 and later taken in by the Southern Baptist missionary Rev. J. Landrum Holmes and his wife, Sallie, when he was 14 years old. In 1867, he arrived in America with his foster mother, Sallie Holmes, and attended two American colleges. He returned to China in 1870 and got married to a Chinese woman but had to escape to America in 1873 when he was wanted by the Qing government for his revolutionary activities. He became an American citizen in 1874, but his citizenship would later be denied by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which declared all ethnic Chinese ineligible for naturalization. In the United States, Wong worked as an interpreter, public lecturer, activist, freelance writer, publisher, entrepreneur, lawyer, and Chinese inspector for the US Treasury Department. He was the first to employ the term “Chinese American” when he published New York’s first Chinese newspaper, Chinese American, in 1883; he founded America’s first association of Chinese voters and was the first Chinese to testify before Congress (Seligman 2013, xxi–xxvi). In 1898, Wong went back to his hometown in China to visit his wife and son. When he applied for a passport to re-enter the United States from Hong Kong, it was issued but quickly revoked by order of the State Department. Wong had to return to Shandong and died of heart failure in the same year (Seligman 2013, xxvi). Although Wong Chin Foo was born and died as a Chinese in China, his activism and writings were all devoted to the Chinese immigrants in America. His life was a peculiar case of transpacific literary exchanges. 90

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According to the appendix of Wong Chin Foo’s published works at the end of Seligman’s The First Chinese American, between 1874 and 1897, Wong had some 166 pieces of publications, which were predominantly written in English, most of them non-fictional. His writings appeared in leading American literary magazines, such as Harper’s Monthly, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic Monthly, The Youth’s Companion, and North American Review. Hsuan L. Hsu comments that Wong was “a talented writer without a definitive genre . . . a writer forced by circumstances into a versatile but uneven practice of transcultural bricolage” (2006, 85). Wong published intriguing autoethnographic essays, pungent social commentaries, provocative open letters, dubious autobiographical accounts, and “translations” of Chinese legends. Six months after the publication of the aforementioned “The Dragon,” Wong’s first fictional work, “The Story of San Tszon,” appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Wong provided a highly condensed and deliberately adjusted version of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West 西遊記, focusing on the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang’s 唐三藏 pilgrimage to India to seek the Truth for the people of the East. Wong wrote in the preface that he endeavored to reconstruct this ancient Chinese legend “in conformity to modern standards, and to present a narrative which, while it may interest the ‘barbarians of the West,’ shall at the same time truthfully portray a phase of the faith of three hundred million fellow-human beings” (Wong 1885b, 257). Hsu has rightfully pointed out: [T]he legend Wong recounts offers not a story of cultural purity, but rather an originary moment of transculturation in which fractious Chinese Buddhist sects were unified by a reinvigorating Truth brought back from India. . . . As such, it could be read . . . as a tale of transcontinental travel and theological syncretism that emphasizes the cosmopolitan nature of Buddhism as a world religion on par with Christianity. (Hsu 2006, 92) Wong’s two major fictional works were published in Cosmopolitan in 1888 and 1889 respectively, and both were marked as “translated from the original by Wong Chin Foo,” even though they display Wong’s literary talent and originality. Wu Chih Tien: The Celestial Empress is a fictional account of the monstrous reign of the usurper Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 and the Western-style odyssey of the true prince in exile, who eventually led a moral and righteous crusade to overthrow the evil empress. As Hsu points out, this “Chinese Historical Novel” was actually “translated” from the familiar Western historical romance into a Chinese story. “Wong’s only significant alteration to the formula of ‘chivalric heroism’ is to substitute a Chinese prince for the virile white hero” (Hsu 2006, 98). “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent-Princess” is a short story that was adapted from the Legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳, so Wong’s “translated from the original” claim appears more justified here. “Poh Yuin Ko, the SerpentPrincess” mirrors the structure of “The Dragon” in that it is also a story of romance, violence, and retribution. The story “presents an allegory of failed assimilation and exogamy on the part of the serpent princess, as well as ambivalent miscegenation on the part of the son,” as Hsu suggests (2006, 98). More importantly, it also depicts Wong Chin Foo’s imaginative cosmopolitan world by transculturating an old Chinese legend into a “Chinese Christmas story” for American readers, a significant literary invention that I will elaborate in the following section. Wong Chin Foo repeatedly positioned himself as a “translator” of time-honored Chinese legends, probably because he believed in the universal humanity in those Chinese legends, or probably because he was interested in the structure for adjudicating justice that could be found in Chinese legends and folklore. After all, when reality appeared like a nightmare, the legend seemed like a good dream. The supernatural narratives in Chinese legends and folklore aided 91

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Wong Chin Foo’s lifelong endeavor to imagine a new culture and a new world for the Chinese immigrants in the United States. Wong’s appreciation and knowledge of Chinese literature and folklore came mainly from his childhood in China, and he seemed to think racial conflicts could be alleviated by a commonly shared or mutually sympathetic culture. In 1883, he wrote an article comparing the Chinese theater with the Western theater for the humor magazine Texas Siftings and had also planned to bring a Chinese theater troupe from San Francisco to New York (Seligman 2013, 126). He wrote to the New York Tribune: “I care not for money – I work for the future. . . . I have an idea that will help each people to understand the other” (Wong 1883). In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes: To migrate is certainly to lose language and home, to be defined by others, to become invisible or, even worse, a target; it is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul. But the migrant is not simply transformed by his act; he also transforms his new world. Migrants may well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridization that newness can emerge. (1991, 210) Wong Chin Foo was clearly not content with passively living as a minority in the United States; instead, he actively participated in the imagination of an emerging cosmopolitan American identity through his literary activities. His border-crossing writing is reminiscent of Pheng Cheah’s new definition of world literature as “an important aspect of cosmopolitanism because it is a type of world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world” (2008, 26). Cheah believes that through the exchange and transaction of ideas across the world, which is the essential function of world literature, humans will leave the particulars and arrive at universal humanity (Cheah 2008, 28). The border-crossing experience gives rise to new literary imaginations. Krista Comer asserts that “the nation is weak in its imaginative textual presence and tropes of displacement signal [sic] populations on the move, populations who have never been easily located in the nation state” (2015, 171). For the same reason, Rushdie welcomes the “transnational, crosslingual process of pollination” of literature that is “bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative” (1991, 69). Such transnational and border-crossing literature represents one of literature’s essential functions of remapping and reimagining the world. Here, the notions of the “translational” and the “transnational” are conflated, both contesting the essentialist notions of nation, ethnicity, culture, literature, or language. The English word “translation” comes from the Latin translatus, which means “carried over.” Translation, therefore, is a special form of migration, and migration inevitably begets translation. The diaspora writer is a unique translator who translates his own culture for the making of a new world. As a “translator” of Chinese literature, Wong Chin Foo created a cosmopolitan literature out of his transpacific border-crossing experiences. It is noteworthy that although Wong was a vocal defender of Chinese culture, he was not a cultural essentialist. In fact, Wong saw no clear boundary between tradition and modernity, or between Chinese and Western cultures. He had no problem imagining himself to be both a traditional “celestial” and a modern American citizen. In his essay “Why Am I a Heathen,” Wong wrote: “we [Chinese] decline to admit all the advantages of your boasted civilization; or that the white race is the only civilized one. Its civilization is borrowed, adapted, and shaped from our older form” (1887, 174). Beneath the ostensible Sinocentrism of this statement, Wong actually suggested that civilizations are in constant transmutations and can be “borrowed, adapted, and shaped,” in other words, translated, from each other. 92

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Wong Chin Foo’s Allegory of the World Wong’s creative world-making “translation” of Chinese literature is best exemplified in the short story “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent-Princess,” which appeared in the December 1888 issue of The Cosmopolitan, a monthly illustrated magazine published by John Brisben Walker of New York.3 Wong’s story is clearly derived from the Chinese legend of the White Snake, whose fictional version became popular during the Ming dynasty thanks to vernacular writer Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) rendering in Stories to Caution the World (警世通言).4 Numerous adaptations were created during the Qing dynasty, making it one of the most wellknown legends in China. The popular version of the legend circulated during the Qing dynasty centered on the love tale between a female White Snake demon and a poor man, Xu Xian, who lent his umbrella to the beautiful lady that a snake demon transformed into and won her heart. They got married, but a Buddhist monk tried to separate the two by imprisoning the White Snake in a pagoda after she gave birth to a male baby. Twenty years later, the grown-up son released his mother.5 Wong Chin Foo’s “translation” is probably the earliest Anglophone rendering of the White Snake legend published in the United States.6 His “translation” was much more than a retelling. Commenting on the global circulation of the White Snake legend, Liang Luo writes: “It suggests that culture itself is that which appropriates; its artifacts are always already in the process of mediation and transformation” (2021, 1–2). This idea of a world of constantly adapting, appropriating, and transforming cultures as well as species is the cornerstone of Wong Chin Foo’s story. “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent Princess” not only uses different names for the characters and places but also significantly changed the plot. In his version, the male protagonist was no longer a poor orphaned guy but the 19-year-old Whey Goon, born in a gentry family, whose father was a retired mandarin. Whey Goon’s parents worried about their son’s lack of interest in women and marriage. However, one day the father saw a beautiful young girl in Whey Goon’s room. The girl was Poh Yuin Ko, who had been secretly married to Whey Goon in her fancy mountain palace. Poh Yuin Ko later bought a rich estate in the beautiful city of Soo Chow and invited Whey Goon’s parents to live with them. She had two sons with Whey Goon, and the big family lived happily for 40 years, until Poh Yuin Ko turned into a monstrous serpent after she ate meat and drank wine at the banquet for their wedding anniversary. Whey Goon dropped dead at the terrifying sight, and their son cut off the serpent’s tail. The serpent fled to the mountains and ever since then would take revenge on the humans by periodically summoning destructive floods in Soo Chow. The story consists of an introduction and eight sections. Wong starts the introduction by presenting his Chinese version of the Darwinian “evolution” to the English readers: “The Chinese thoroughly believe the Darwinian theory of human evolution from lower animals. The evolutionary maxim of occasional reversion to degraded ancestral types is also a part of every Chinaman’s creed” (Wong 1888, 180). The Chinese creator of heaven and earth, which Wong named Pon Ko Wong, is constantly watching the actions of all his creatures. He prolongs their lives and advances their conditions when their actions deserve it. If an ape of the forests has been exceptionally good and kind to his fellows and does not destroy life, intentionally or otherwise, his own life is prolonged until he breaks a law and is then punished by death. Should he continue ten thousand years innocent and good he may transform himself into a higher order of being until he reaches the rank of man, and then of a god. But a transgression sends him back to his animal condition. (Wong 1888, 180) 93

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In this opening passage, Wong smoothly connected the Chinese mythology with Darwinian science but replaced the rationale of Darwinian evolution, survival of the fittest, with that of the moral reward in Chinese mythology. It is noteworthy that it was not until 1895 that Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) introduced Darwinism to Chinese people, so Wong Chin Foo was probably the first Chinese ever to write about Darwinism. According to Wong’s new interpretation, different species all have a chance to progress along the evolutionary ladder from being animal, immortal animal, to human, and eventually god, as there are no absolute boundaries between those different states of beings. This new version of “evolution” is by no means onedirectional, as it also includes the possibility of regression. Wong therefore portrayed a world of immanent transformations, a world where pure and stable identities are nonexistent. In the same introduction, Wong pointed out that despite the commonalities between different species, a special law separated animals and humans in Chinese mythology: “whatever powers these Chinese monstrosities possess, they are always limited to their own domain,” even if they have changed forms (Wong 1888, 180). Wong’s emphasis on this segregation law appears to be an allusion to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first and only significant federal law restricting Chinese immigration based on race. Wong Chin Foo intended to challenge the arbitrary and exclusive notion of nationality based on race with his reconstructed Chinese boundary-crossing love story. Poh Yuin Ko and Whey Goon crossed the geographical boundary of different species out of their romantic love. Here, Wong Chin Foo seemed to suggest that love was a universal currency that could bridge differences and cross boundaries. Whey Goon had suspicions about Poh Yuin Ko’s identity, but his love for her triumphed in the end, as he declared: What is she? Well, I care not. I love her. I love her more than all the world. Whether she be beast, human, or spirit, or all three, I will love her the same. Is there any men or woman who is not also an animal and a ghost? (Wong 1888, 188) Whey Goon’s love manifesto is simultaneously a rebuttal to racism: due to the constant transmutations and cross-pollinations of different species in the world, everyone is a hybrid. Poh Yuin Ko showed a strong willingness to seek integration into the human world. It is interesting that although she was well aware of the law of segregation, she was optimistic that this problem could be solved by economic means. When Whey Goon was worrying about whether his parents would accept his mysterious wife, Poh Yuin Ko comforted him by saying: “When they see us living happily in luxury they will forgive us both” (Wong 1888, 189). It turns out that she was right. Wong seemed to suggest that other than love, mutual interests can also bring people together despite their differences. Wong talked about the money-worshiping tendency of American Christians elsewhere (Wong 1887, 173), so here he was probably trying to appeal to this common human aspiration as a means to transcend racial and geographical differences. It is interesting that in the story, Poh Yuin Ko was not only a graceful upper-class lady but also a shrewd merchant: before they moved to Soo Chow, she asked Whey Goon to find an “unprincipled rich man” who might buy her extravagant mountain palace. Whey Goon found a “mean pawnbroker” who “cheats men, women and children out of their possessions and is hated by all” (Wong 1888, 189). When the rich man was brought in front of Poh Yuin Ko, she “adroitly exacted from him a sum many times as large as he first offered, and then increased it by giving [him] an absolute sale of the palace and grounds” (Wong 1888, 189). After Poh Yuin Ko received the money from the mean pawnbroker, she bought a fancy estate in Soo Chow, where the couple lived happily with Whey Goon’s parents. Yet when the mean pawnbroker 94

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woke up in his newly bought magnificent palace, he found himself sleeping in a vast cave in the mountains, the palace had been transformed into rocks and grass. One would wonder why Wong Chin Foo chose to add this scenario of a cunning Poh Yuin Ko. This might be an example of how Wong Chin Foo played with the cultural phenomenon of what Rey Chow calls “coercive mimeticism,” which requires the ethnic minority to replicate the very preconceptions that are expected to objectify themselves “to authenticate the familiar imagings of them as ethnics” (2002, 107). The Chinese immigrants in the United States were often accused of being dishonest in the late nineteenth century.7 Wong’s added plot can be read as his negotiation with, and a rejoinder to, this racial stereotyping of the Chinese in America. Even though Poh Yuin Ko employed deception in her business, her act was to be viewed as a justifiable one as the man she cheated was morally corrupt. This humorous plot embodied Wong Chin Foo’s own transcultural moral ideal. In the last section of the story, the merry celebration of the couple’s 40th wedding anniversary ended in a diabolical tragedy: the wife regressed into her original self, “a monster white serpent, whose long body coiled horribly all about the room”; the husband “gasped in fright and fell dead upon her body, awakening her to hideous motion”; and one of their sons “seized an axe, saying the monster had killed his father, and with a single frenzied blow severed her tail” (Wong 1888, 190). In this ending, the husband lost his life, their son maimed the mother and lost both parents, and the mother lost her tail and all her loved ones. This tragedy was triggered by an accidental showing of physical differences and was deepened by (the son’s) misunderstanding. It is reminiscent of the racial discrimination and cultural misunderstanding that triggered the late nineteenth-century Chinese Exclusion violence, which destroyed thousands of Chinese immigrants’ homes and drove many settled Chinese immigrants out of the land of the United States. The particular detail of cutting off the serpent’s tail, which was Wong’s own creation, is reminiscent of the Chinese man’s queue, often called “pigtail,” being cut off by White men. Robert Lee notes that the queue was “a principal target for the victimization of the Chinese by every bigot, old and young”; the “cutting of the Chinaman’s pigtail allowed white men in the mid- and late nineteenth century to reenact, at least at a symbolic level, an earlier savage eighteenth-century ritual – scalping” (1999, 39–40). Poh Yuin Ko was not a man, but her tail, like the Chinaman’s queue, made her sexually ambiguous and marked her as an alien other. Therefore, like the Chinese immigrants in the United States, she was also driven out, by violence, from the home she established. By allegorically showing the horror and inhumanity of racial hostility, Wong Chin Foo begged people to adopt an open attitude to transcend racial differences by considering the commonalities in emotion, ethics, culture, and economic interests, as well as by viewing identity as fluid and nonessential. Poh Yuin Ko used to make kites for her children. Her kites “were always shaped in queer form with curious faces on them, many having the countenances of strange creatures” (Wong 1888, 189). She told her sons that these kites “should never be roughly treated, for they had souls that struggled hard to be human, and would indeed some time [sic] be beautiful men and women” (Wong 1888, 189). This is Wong’s Chinese concept of evolution, in which every creature with good morality would become equal over time. As a whole, “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent Princess” embodies Wong Chin Foo’s allegory of a new world where different peoples could mingle and live harmoniously.

Conclusion: Chinese Literature at Large Wong Chin Foo’s literary works were unanimously addressed to American readers, but they reveal the complex situation and multiple potentials of modern Chinese literary historiography. 95

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The history of Chinese literature will not be complete if it misses the puzzle piece of the “translated” and “migrated” Chinese literature that deals with the phenomenon of migration, displacement, and border-crossing. Since the 1970s, thanks to the rise of Asian American studies in the United States, quite a few forgotten writings have been restored and rediscovered and have been categorized under the label of “Chinese American literature.” For example, the Chinese poems inscribed on the walls of the detention barracks at the Angel Island Immigration Station were discovered in 1970 and immediately aroused a keen interest among Asian American scholars. Yung Wing’s 容閎 (1828–1912) English autobiography My Life in China and America went unnoticed in the United States for nearly a century, until Asian American scholars rediscovered it in the 1990s (Wang 2017, 87). In recent years, new histories of modern Chinese literature have started to extend toward Chinese American literature, bringing more scholarly attention to this onceforgotten domain outside national, geographical, and linguistic confines. The anthology Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (1994) coedited by David Der-wei Wang and Jeanne Tai, for example, includes the fiction work by the Chinese American writer Shi-Kuo Chang. As Wang explains: “the anthology intends to posit a new image of China, a China defined not by geopolitical boundaries and ideological closure, but by overlapping cultures and shared imaginative resources” (1994, 238). Wang Der-wei’s most recent edited anthology, A New Literary History of Modern China (2017), also contains chapters on Chinese American literature. Compared with the prospective Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island, who wrote classical Chinese poems, or Yung Wing, who took an official post in China and had a prominent place in Chinese history for being the first Chinese to study in America, or the contemporary Chinese American writers, who enjoy a highly developed transnational literary network, Wong Chin Foo falls out of all categories for the “technologies of recognition” (Shih 2004, 16) and has been forgotten by all existing literary histories. Wong Chin Foo did not have any publication in China. He only left one trace of himself in a Chinese newspaper. In 1874, A Review of the Times (萬國公報, 1869–1907), a weekly Chinese-language newspaper based in Shanghai, reported a Chinese man named Wong Chin Foo who committed political crimes in China and then fled to the United States by way of Japan. According to the report, the Chinese fugitive, who could speak and write fluently in English but was bad with Chinese, lectured about the “Chinese conditions and customs” in America and deceived many Americans and Chinese immigrants. The report describes Wong’s physiological features and comments in the end that the fugitive would not have the guts to ever return to China (Wanguo gongbao 1874, 22–23). This report from Wong’s homeland tells us that Wong was, after all, a Chinese fugitive at large. His writing, by analogy, was modern Chinese literature or Chinese American literature at large. Wong probably was not the “Eminent Chinese Littérateur” as he flamboyantly claimed in his poem “The Dragon,” but he was certainly a pioneer in translating and transculturating Chinese literature for the Anglophone audience. Wong’s cross-border writing represents Chinese literature’s transmuted life after it crossed the geographic and linguistic boundaries, which may lead us to form a new concept of Chinese literature based on its translation, transculturation, and transmutations in the world.

Notes 1 I would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Professor Yingjin Zhang, who passed away in 2022. I am grateful for his invitation to be a part of this collective project and for his pioneering scholarship that has played a significant role in shaping my academic career.

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Chinese Literature at Large 2 Wong Chin Foo’s naturalization certificate shows his last name as 王, which is consistent with his true family name (Seligman 2013, 93–4). However, in this poem Wong deliberately used a different Chinese character, 黄, instead of 王, for his last name in the signature. It was probably due to the fact that he was a fugitive wanted by the Qing government. 3 An earlier version of my discussion of Wong Chin Foo’s “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent Pricess” can be found in my article “The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Late Qing Chinese Cosmopolitanism” in Comparative Literature Studies 58, 4 (2021): 863–90. 4 The earliest versions of the White Snake legend can be traced to the Tang dynasty’s Chuanqi fiction and Southern Song dynasty’s vernacular literature. 5 For a more detailed discussion of the White Snake legend and its global circulation, see Liang Luo (2021). 6 In her study, Liang Luo has found two earlier Anglophone renderings of the White Snake legend, both published in London: “White and Blue; or the Serpent Fairies” (1834) and “Lüi-fung Tǎ, ‘Thunder Peak Pagoda,’ or The Story of Han-wǎn and the White Serpent” (1864). See Liang 2021, 271, fn4. 7 Bret Harte’s famous narrative poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” (a.k.a. “The Heathen Chinese,” 1870), for example, sarcastically depicts how a cheating white man calls the Chinese immigrant who plays cards with them a card sharp. The poem was widely received as a caricature of the foul of the Chinese.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Cheah, Pheng. 2008. “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” Daedalus 137, no. 3: 26–38. Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. 2004. Weird English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chow, Rey. 2002. The Protestant Ethnic & the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Comer, Krista. 2015. “Place and Worlding: Feminist States of Critical Regionalism.” In Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders, edited by Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibrraran Bigalondo, 153–71. Valencia, Spain: Portal Publishing. Hsu, Hsuan L. 2006. “Wong Chin Foo’s Periodical Writing and Chinese Exclusion.” Genre 39, no.3: 83–105. Lee, Robert G. 1999. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Luo, Liang. 2021. The Global White Snake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta Books. Seligman, Scott D. 2013. The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2004. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA 119, no. 1: 16–30. Wang, Chih-ming. 2017. “My Life in China and America and Transpacific Translations.” In A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-wei Wang, 85–90. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wang, David Der-wei. 1994. “Chinese Fiction for the Nineties.” In Running Wild: New Chinese Writers, edited by David Der-wei Wang and Jeanne Tai, 238–58. New York: Columbia University Press. Wanguo Gonbao 萬國公報 (A Review of the Times). 1874. “Huaren taobi jinshan” 華人逃避金山 (A Chinese fugitive in America). Wanguo gongbao (A Review of the Times), no. 302. Wong Chin Foo. 1883. “To Produce the Chinese Drama.” New York Tribune, September 2. Wong Chin Foo. 1885a. “The Dragon.” Puck, February 4. Wong Chin Foo. 1885b. “The Story of San Tszon.” Atlantic Monthly 56, no. 334: 256–63. Wong Chin Foo. 1887. “Why Am I a Heathen.” North American Review 145, no. 369: 169–79. Wong Chin Foo. 1888. “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent Princess.” The Cosmopolitan 6, no. 2: 180–90. Wu, William. 1982. The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850–1940. Hamden, CT: Archon books.

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8 ENGAGING THE WORLD IN REPUBLICAN LITERATURE Liyan Qin

Many important Republican writers (1910s–1940s) participated in the writing of the world, which, for them, was not a homogeneous space.1 The political position of China helped shape what they wrote about and how they wrote when mapping the global space. Such words as guojihua 國際化 (internationalization) and yu shijie jiegui 與世界接軌 (connecting with the world), both now frequently used in Chinese, seemed to be neutral but indeed were profoundly political. In different periods of China’s history, what was connected to was often different worlds, and the “world” that was spoken of in different times often pointed to different spaces. Which parts of the world are recognized as “the world,” which parts exist in the physical world but do not exist in the “world” imagined in literature – these are important problems to be addressed. The extent of “internationalization” and “connecting to the world” in Republican literature was impressive. Many writers in the Republican Period were proficient in foreign languages, with often years of overseas residence, extensive international connections, and in-depth experiences and observations of cultures outside of China. They not only wrote creatively but also worked as translators; some of them could even write in foreign languages. Seen from the most obvious level of their works, there are not only newly translated neologisms but also nonChinese words embedded in Chinese texts. The degree of “internationalization” in Republican literature was a prominent feature seen against the background of the entire history of Chinese literature. When writers came into more contact with the world outside of China, they also had more imaginations about the world. Yet although such “internationalization” might seem rich and pleasant, deep down there was a sense of reluctance and forcedness on the part of the writers. Rather than an openminded decision to take the whole world into consideration, the writers seemed to have no other choice. When imagining and depicting the world, they often displayed a sense of anxiety for themselves as individuals and for China as a country. Their imagining of the world was linked to their judgment of the political situation domestic and abroad. The weak position of China at that time, to a great extent, shaped their tone. Thus, the foreign languages that they were proficient in were often the dominant languages, such as English and Japanese. As patriotic intellectuals, the writers, when looking around the world, had an acute awareness of their Chinese identity. They did not look at the world with an even mind but were indeed looking for inspirations for China. In their works, both the individual and the country were faced with DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-11

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the problem of where to go and afflicted with the anxiety about what decisions to make. What the Chinese writers saw were often examples for China to emulate and counter-examples that China should avoid. In their works, the Chinese characters who find themselves in a foreign country are often despised and oppressed. The weakness of China and of the Chinese individual had far-reaching psychological consequences, causing the writers to internalize such discrimination. Although they were indignant at the contempt and oppression, they also admitted their own inferiority, a concept of the world based on nation-states, the power structure of the world, and the position of China as a big but senile country. Being looked down upon by the “modern states” such as the Western countries and Japan, Chinese writers also looked down upon themselves and admired the “modern” states. In 1918, Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897–1931) wrote about what he felt when he first came to the United States: I knew then that I came from a place that is dark, ugly, narrow-minded and dirty. . . . As to myself, I am also part of a community that is dark, ugly, narrow-minded and dirty. . . . It is as if I used to be in a shop of stinky fish, and I was accustomed to the stink, but now that I come to a world of fragrant flowers, I feel my own unworthiness. (Xu 2005, 1: 31) Based on these contrasts, he was determined to mend his ways and change himself. Xu Zhimo’s attitude was typical. The loss of confidence, within China, can be seen in an essay, “To Ask about Impressions” (Dating yinxiang 打聽印象), by Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936): “After the May-Fourth movement, it seems that the Chinese have acquired a new habit, which is, when renowned or powerful men from foreign countries came to China, the Chinese are eager to ask them about their impressions of China” (Lu 2005, 5: 325–6). Lu Xun was able to detect the sense of inferiority in this habit, but that does not mean that he was outside of the inferiority mindset. The writing of non-China spaces in Republican literature presented a map of the world that was more or less parallel to the global power structure. In the literary texts, except for some mentions in passing of such symbols of ancient civilizations as the pyramids in Egypt, there was no place for Latin America, Africa, or Australia. What dominate this mapping were the West and Japan, with their political and military strength translated into cultural superiority. The Chinese writers saw China as a weak country, tried to find some countries caught in the same plight, and the status of many such countries was seen as premonitory for China. In his essay “Silent China” (無聲的中國), Lu Xun wrote: “Let us enumerate which nations are silent now. Can we hear the voice of the Egyptians? The voices of the Vietnamese, the Koreans? In India, except for the voice of Tagore, are there any other voices?” (Lu 2005, 4: 15). Lu Xun found that China was voiceless, and he determined that this was because China had nothing worthwhile to say, not because China’s voice was suppressed or deprived by the world powers. To Lu Xun, Egypt, Vietnam, Korea, and India all served as warnings to China. If China did not strengthen itself, it would follow their path of colonization or even destruction. Indeed, China was not far from wangguo 亡國 (being a dead country). The positioning of China as an oppressed country in the world also prompted Chinese writers to invoke other national literatures in the same situation as inspirations to draw strength from. The Literary Research Society translated copiously literatures of oppressed nations, not only with an eye for their literary value, but also out of political considerations. The co-called “oppressed nations” 被壓迫民族 tended to mean Eastern European nations. Lu Xun, when recalling how he became a fiction writer, said that what was important was not to write but to 99

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introduce and translate: “Since the works sought after were those about outcries and rebellions, inevitably I tended toward Eastern Europe, so I read many works from Russia, Poland and the smaller Balkan nations” (Lu 2005, 4: 525). Here, Russia was included in Eastern Europe. Interests in Russia would prove to be of great significance for the future development of China. The inspirations of Russia stemmed not only from Russia as a space for a new social and political experiment but also from the fact that, seen by Chinese writers, Russia was similar to China, and Russia’s way out might be an example for China. Such identification with the oppressed nations initiated a way of thinking that continued after 1949, although then the idea of oppressed nations did not point to Eastern Europe but to Asia, Africa, and Latin America (亞非拉). Many male writers incorporated into their imagination of the world fantasies of love and sex. In the works by Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896–1945), Chinese men who are in Japan find it hard to maintain the dignity of men, while male dignity is often linked to the recognition from Japanese women. A heterosexual relationship as a metaphor of a national identity can also be seen in other writers. Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978), in his poem “Coal in the Hearth” (爐中煤), likened his yearning for his homeland to a yearning for a maid (Guo 1982, 58). Patriotism and romantic love, homesickness, and lovesickness, the collective, and the individual are thus intertwined. In the novel The Two Ma’s (二馬) by Lao She 老舍 (1899–1966), the Chinese father and son both fall in love with English women, but with no success, and the low status of the Chinese in England is the most important reason for their failure. Li Zirong, another Chinese character in this novel, admonishes junior Ma in this way: “[W]hen [your country] is despised by other countries, do not think of their girls” (Lao She 1980, 573). The two middle-class English women see the individual merits of the Chinese father and son. The mother admits that she loves senior Ma, but she has to give up due to social pressure. Junior Ma, when he is forced to decide, thinks along this line: if love with a foreign woman is impossible, then he can only fight for his country: “to die for old China is so much better than to die for a beautiful girl!” (Lao She 1980, 596). Thus, love of a foreign girl and love of the homeland become choices exclusive of each other. Japan occupied a special place in Republican writers’ imaginations of the world. Even before the breakout of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Chinese writers exhibited strong ambivalences toward Japan. In the beginnings of modern Chinese literature, elements from Japan played a significant role, and among Republican writers, many used to study in Japan. The rapid rise of Japan since the Meiji time stimulated Chinese writers in many ways. This, coupled with the past strong links between Chinese and Japanese cultures, led to a perceived contempt for the Chinese by the common Japanese, and a respect for the Japanese achievements by the Chinese was colored by contempt. Lu Xun’s and Yu Dafu’s works about Japan seem to be typical in this respect. In these literary texts, the protagonist is often a young man not unlike the author whose experiences in Japan are not unlike what China experienced in the world. Against the Japanese background in these texts, the spotlight is on the Chinese characters. Lu Xun, in his preface to the Call to Arms (吶喊, 1923), stressed the significance of his experiences in Japan in shaping his literary career, describing how his Japanese peers reacted when watching slides about the Russian– Japanese war in 1905, which was fought on the Chinese soil and for possessions in China. When the slides showed some Chinese being beheaded and the Chinese crowd watching the beheading, the Japanese students burst into cheers, which greatly humiliated Lu Xun, the only Chinese present. For Lu Xun, this was a pivotal moment in his decision to change from a medical to a literary career, since literature was the medicine to cure the Chinese people’s soul. Captured in this famous moment are many complex themes. The cheers of the Japanese students 100

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were indeed humiliating, but the beheading of the Chinese and the Chinese crowd watching the beheading were facts that Lu Xun was not able to deny, supplying evidence for a recurring theme of the critique of the Chinese national character in his later writings. He felt the Chinese people were despised, but also partly admitted that they deserved such contempt. His indignation was intertwined with self-loathing. In Lu Xun’s works, he had little admiration for the Japanese and not much to say about Japanese landscapes. One exception is “Mr. Fujino” (藤野先生, 1926), about a deeply respected Japanese professor, a character that was rare in Republican literature. However, Professor Fujino’s profound influence on Lu Xun was set against the background of Chinese disgrace, and the text also shows a trajectory of the stay of Lu Xu in a Japanese school from being welltreated to being humiliated and excluded. What distinguishes Fujino was that instead of despising the Chinese, he took extra care of the writer, not only for Lu Xun himself, but also for the development of medical sciences in China. Lu Xun was grateful, because Fujino seemed to be the sole precious exception to the general contempt in Japan of the Chinese. Yu Dafu also wrote many short stories set in Japan, and similarly, humiliation and shame weigh heavily on the young male protagonists, who are often highly autobiographical. Different from Lu Xun’s hero, who is decisive and who is able to make a choice of giving up medicine for literature, the protagonists in Yu Dafu’s stories are often sentimental and tormented. “Sinking” (沉淪) is perhaps the most famous and most extreme among such works by Yu Dafu, which can be used in our analysis as the lowest point or the yardstick against which other Republican works can be assessed. This story encapsulates many themes in Yu Dafu’s fiction. Yu’s portrayal of Japan is poignant, and the Chinese protagonist there carries the heavy burden of being a Chinese. Having been repeatedly rejected by Japanese women, and by the Japanese society in general, the protagonist finally commits suicide by drowning himself in the sea. Before his death, he cries out: “[M]y homeland! It is you who cause my death!” “Please be rich and be strong!” “You have so many children who are suffering!” (Yu 2007, 75). These sentences, famous in Republican literature, are also expressions of a profoundly tortured psyche. The Chinese experience in Japan is full of anxiety and melancholia. The protagonist attributes his predicament in Japan to China, since the weakness of China leads to the pains and even perdition of China’s children abroad. However, on closer reading of this story, we find that the confusion and depression of the protagonist can also be traced to elements that have nothing to do with what country he happens to be in. Even in China, he does not feel at home, and he is rejected too (although not in such an extreme way as in Japan). The root of his depression has already been planted in China, and his Chinese family members also contribute to his status as a marginalized person. Yet at the end of the story, the protagonist confirms that China is to blame, as if a strong China can cure all psychological woes. When he is under great pressures in Japan, China presents itself to him as the opposite of Japan, and it seems that what is deprived of in Japan can be conferred in China: “Aren’t there beautiful landscapes in the homeland? Aren’t there beautiful girls in the homeland? Why do I come to this island nation in the east sea?” (Yu 2007, 46). In the humiliations the protagonist suffers in Japan, those coming from the Japanese women are the most insufferable. “Sinking” boldly writes about the sexual frustrations of a young Chinese man whom the Japanese women often put in a pillory. He seems to have been deprived of opportunities of love and sex in Japan. As a Chinese man there, he cannot be wholly a man. That he cultivates a voyeuristic habit is because he believes that he can only look on, without the right to take part in the action. Thus, the male dignity (or lack thereof) in front of women and the Chinese dignity in front the Japanese are combined. Once he realizes his sexual failure, he has to make a decision similar to junior Ma in The Two Ma’s: “I will no longer love women. I will love my country, seeing my country as my lover” (Lao She 1980, 71). 101

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Many themes in “Sinking” reappear in otherstories by Yu Dafu, but “Sinking” seems to be the darkest and most extreme case. In some other stories of Yu Dafu, far from being nervous or fearful in front of Japanese women, the male Chinese protagonist can be intimate with them, flirt with them, or have them as soul mates and confidantes. Especially telling as a contrast to “Sinking” is an equally autobiographical story, “Moving to the South” (南遷). In this story, the protagonist is also lonely, but the text explores the familial and childhood reasons for this, for example, the early death of his father, and his harsh mother. Compared with “Sinking,” the sense of alienation is much weaker. Nature in Japan, especially the seascape, is no longer a place for the hero to shelter himself from the human world. What is highlighted is not the identity of the protagonist as a Chinese but his personality. In “Sinking,” the Japanese are lumped together as a group without individual names, abstract and symbolic, while in “Moving to the South,” the Japanese characters are more complex, with their individual histories. There is no favorable Japanese character in “Sinking,” but in “Moving to the South,” the Japanese are respectful to the Chinese protagonist and get along with him, and he has a female Japanese confidant. A significant moment in “Moving to the South” is when the hero takes the same bus with Japanese laborers. He feels for them. “To suffer all kinds of miseries, from youth to old age, from birth to death, a life so monotonous. Alas, what interest does such a life have? Laborers, laborers, why do you exist in the world?” Then he laughs at himself: “[Y]ou want to save the laborers in Japan, but why don’t you first save your own compatriots?” (Yu 2007, 94). No longer seeing the Japanese people as monolithic, and no longer considering solely from the perspective of nation-states, he sees the laboring people in Japan as also worthy of sympathy and in need of emancipation. Yu Dafu’s story “The Endless Night” (茫茫夜, 1922) can form another contrast to “Sinking.” In “The Endless Night,” the protagonist is back from Japan to China, but the problems that he encounters in Japan are not resolved just because of his homecoming. He voices the same frustrations as in Japan: “Miserable me! I have not been loved by any woman. . . . I can only commit suicide” (Yu 2007, 154–5). Japan and China are not so different. In both countries, the protagonist is a defeatist, unable to change his circumstances or himself. If we define “Sinking” as the nadir of the status of the Chinese abroad, and the nadir of China’s status in the world seen by Chinese writers, we find that such shame and frustration also exist more or less in the works by many other writers. However, Lao She, Guo Moruo, and Xu Zhimo, by employing different strategies, sometimes overcame this mold of thinking and writing, although it seemed impossible for them to entirely get rid of it. The novel The Two Ma’s by Lao She writes about the one-year stay of senior Ma and his son in London. Cultural clashes abound, some stemming from the differences of habits and customs, but more from the stereotypes the English have of the Chinese, which can be traced to the relative power of China and England. The two Mas reside in the house of the Wendus, an English lady and her daughter. In the beginning, the Wendus are full of biases against the Chinese, but after the lapse of the year, these biases almost disappear. The coexistence of the four is a rather successful cultural experiment and a partial reconciliation between races. Yet judged from the ending of the novel, reconciliation on the personal level is far from enough, when the social prejudices against the Chinese in the English society remain and even deepen. The goodwill of the Wendus does not change the overall picture, and they do not feel obliged to tell others that the Chinese are human beings too. Thus, cross-cultural romances fail under the pressure of the English society. The prejudices against the Chinese are pervasive among Westerners in The Two Ma’s. The Germans, French, Americans who cannot afford to travel to the Orient, when they come to London, will invariably visit Chinatown, to search for some materials 102

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for their fiction, journals, or newspapers . . . they feel free to attribute all kinds of crimes to those hardworking people who try to eke out a living in a foreign land. If there are twenty Chinese in the Chinatown, they will surely record 5,000, all of whom, brown-faced, smoke opium, smuggle firearms, kill people and hide the bodies under the bed, rape women old and young, and commit other crimes that deserve the severest punishments. Fiction writers, playwrights, film makers, all depict the Chinese based on these legends and reports. Then the theatre-goers, cinema-goers, fiction readers, old ladies, children, and the English monarch, retain these outrageous things fast in their mind, so that the Chinese have become the darkest, dirtiest, most repellent, most dastardly two-legged creatures! (Lao She 1980, 436) Faced with this situation, the author cries out in his own voice: “Chinese people! It is time for you to open your eyes and see . . . unless you are contented with being dogs forever!” (Lao She 1980, 436). The author’s voice is the only voice of an intellectual in the novel, apt to make comments and give advices to such young men as junior Ma. However, the art of the fiction seems to have its own mechanism and run in its own tracks. Senior Ma, who obviously is a confused character that the author disapproves of, becomes more and more lovely as a typical, old-fashioned Chinese as the novel goes on. On the other hand, junior Ma can never listen to the author’s advice and does not know what to do at the end. The author’s messages are clear enough, but the characters insist on going their own way. Judged from the basic plot of the novel, the two protagonists are representatives of two generations of Chinese. Senior Ma, of the older generation, is stubborn, not much aware of his national identity, and not eager to learn. Although he intends well, he is willing to play into the stereotypes of the Westerners. For him, from China to England, “life is just like this! Wherever you go, you eat there!” (Lao She 1980, 460). He even takes part in the making of racist films against the Chinese. Apparently, he is not conscious of the inseparable fate of China and himself. Junior Ma, of the younger generation, is where the future hope of China lies, but even he is not acutely aware of China’s situation. He does not feel alienated and outcast as the protagonist in “Sinking” is. Only at the end of the novel does he, for a rare moment, feel that London is so huge, but he has no place in it. Here the tone seems to be similar to the tone in “Sinking,” yet besides being the experience of a Chinese in England, it can also be seen as the typical experience of anyone who finds himself in a modern metropolis. In this novel, nature in England and the street scenes of London are often pleasant and interesting. Lao She finds everyday life in London charming, almost unaffected by what was happening on the national and international level. “Before Christmas, London bustles with life. Everyone, man or woman, old or young, comes unto the street. The merchandise in the markets seems to be free, and people carry big and small loads of it home” (Lao She 1980, 601). This passage is typical of the tone of the novel, diluting the sense of cultural differences. Although the citizens of London are biased against the Chinese, on the day before Christmas, the differences fade. In the good-natured open-mindedness of the author, there is no anger or sentimentality. The style of Lao She also blunts the sense of cultural and political differences. He makes full use of the Beijing dialect in this novel set in London. Unlike Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, and Xu Zhimo, who sometimes embedded Western words in their texts, and who in their Chinese translations of Western words tried to retain their “foreignness,” Lao She, in The Two Ma’s, told the story of two Beijingers in London in a Beijing style. The street names in London read much like those in Beijing: “He turned left, across the Taolingtun dayuan 大院 (courtyard), into 103

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the Gedeng hutong 胡同 (alley)” (Lao She 1980, 435). Such Chinese vocabulary as dayuan and hutong almost presents London as a continuation of Beijing. This confident grasp of the landscape of London also extends to a grasp of the English residents therein. The omniscient and omnipresent narrator can write about the Westerners, exploring their actions, dialogues, and psychology. In “Sinking” by Yu Dafu, the point of view of the protagonist limits the reader’s perspective. The protagonist is excluded from the life and thoughts of the Japanese people, and so are the readers. Lao She is different. In The Two Ma’s, he is confident of his grasp of the entire humankind, including the English people. He almost puts Chinese words into the mouths of English characters. Thus, an English priest, when walking on the streets of London, “said ‘duibuqi’ 對不起 (sorry), ‘mei liushen’ 沒留神 (excuse me) no less than a hundred times” (Lao She 1980, 435). Language barriers almost do not exist in the novel, and the Chinese men and English women do not have misunderstanding due to different languages. Cultures are transparent to one another, and cultural barriers are easily surmountable. The novelist, in his mild satire of both the Chinese and the non-Chinese, are forgiving of both. Another writer, Guo Moruo, was in Japan almost at the same time as Yu Dafu. Yet in Guo’s poems, there is little sadness and melancholia. Guo’s early poems are driven by an impulse that goes beyond the boundaries between nations, commanding a global space of imagination. In “The Earth, My Mother” (地球，我的母親), when the poet calls the earth “mother” instead of calling China his “lover,” all residents on earth are like brothers and sisters, and national boundaries no longer count (Guo 1982, 79). In “Morning Greetings” (晨安), the poet greets the whole world, bathed in the same majestic sunshine. In another poem, he quotes Leo Tolstoy as saying “the whole world is our family, and all human beings are our friends” (Guo 1982, 110). These early poems by Guo display a cosmopolitan tendency, which are especially enhanced by his use of the Whitman-esque cataloguing. Such catalogs often list characters and landmarks of the world, regardless of their periods and places, without an obvious order and without a center. The listed items are equal in their juxtaposition, collectively adding up to a powerful effect. In one poem, the poet admits that he admires the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Great Wall, and the Pyramids. In another, he lists the Chinese Zhuang Zi, the Indian Kabir, and the European Spinoza as pantheists. In yet another one, “the geniuses of Babylon, of Egypt, of India, and of the Middle Kingdom” are invoked in one breath (Guo 1982, 176). In these catalogs, the fact that Egypt and India were now Western colonies is not important, not affecting their past glories. One does not perceive China as a weak country, and the Chinese heroes in the dynastic past are equally admirable. At the same time, some poems that are set in Japan take the Japanese landscape as their subjects, praising the pines, mountains, skies, and plums of Japan, without labelling them as “foreign.” However, if we put Guo Moruo’s poetry and prose side by side, a more complex picture emerges. In his essay “Leaving Japan” (留別日本), Guo was not reluctant to depart from Japan: “[M]y ten years of imprisonment have ended.” He likened Japan to a “new-style prison” (Guo 1982, 316, 317), while China, in this respect, is more hopeful than Japan. Guo Moruo married a Japanese woman and had children in Japan. Yet judged from his prose works, Japan was, after all, not a home to him. It seems that in his poetry, his expansive style helps blur national boundaries, yet in his essays, a more down-to-earth style makes national boundaries manifest again. Guo Moruo’s poems, from his early themes of the self, dreams, love, and the world, later turn to the subject of workers, peasants, and revolution. This change was typical of the leftist literature in the Republican period, foretelling a post-1949 trend. When Guo had shifted his focus to revolution and classes, the West was no longer a space one yearned for but the home of capitalists. Guo extolled the alliances between oppressed people and proletariats in all 104

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countries across the globe. In this framework, the world was divided not just into nation-states but into classes as well. Xu Zhimo provided us with another strategy of writing about the world outside of China. Xu had traveled to Europe, America, India, Singapore, Japan, and Russia, leaving many related texts. The place that he wrote most about was Cambridge University, where he once studied. His fond descriptions of Cambridge were filled with nostalgia. To him, Cambridge was “my soul mate,” “the home of my spirit,” “the source of my life” (Xu 2005, 4: 61, 63–4). In his poems, Cambridge emerged not only as the place where he had studied but also as a home that even rivaled his “real” home – China. What is noteworthy is that, in the writings of Xu, Cambridge was not so much a university as the rural landscape around its campus. In Xu’s poems, we rarely see the professors, students, classrooms, and libraries in Cambridge, but we see the poet roaming in the pastoral English countryside, imbibing the nourishment of nature. His famous poem “Farewell to Cambridge Again” (再別康橋) is mainly composed of natural imagery, without mentioning Cambridge as an academic institution. Nature seems to be beyond the differences between nations and cultures. Similarly, in Xu Zhimo’s prose about Cambridge, we often encounter English farmers who are in harmony with nature, among whom Xu felt no pressure and no alienation. Xu Zhimo’s series of poems “Sand Yang Nora: 18 Poems” (沙揚娜拉十八首) is of praises of Japan, especially the Japanese women. Different from the nervous and self-conscious protagonists in Yu Dafu’s stories, Xu Zhimo’s poems are relaxed in their pace, not specifying any individual character but referring to Japanese women as a whole: “I can never have enough of their smiling cheeks and their tenderness” (Xu 2005, 4: 156). Xu still retained his confidence as a male subject, enjoying Japanese women, believing that they would favor him, just like he enjoyed the Black women in Singapore, and Katherine Mansfield in England, whose room he visited. He was confident enough that he could be a “consumer” of them both aesthetically and emotionally. Yet was Xu Zhimo’s “at-home” attitude in respect to Europe and Japan without the slightest trace of anxiety? Seen on the personal level, Xu was far from being a diffident person. Yet he was still not unconscious of his national identity and often expressed his awareness of his own inferiority to the West and Japan. In a poem, also titled “Leaving Japan” (留别日本), Xu, faced with the manifold achievements of Japan, was ashamed of the recent development of China: I am ashamed that I come from a country with its ancient civilization, I am ashamed that I have the blood of ancient people, I am ashamed that the waves of the Yangtze River are now muddied, I am ashamed – in the face of the majestic Fuji Mountain! (Xu 2005, 4: 158) Due to his early death in 1931, Xu Zhimo did not live to witness the later hostilities between China and Japan. In the poem quoted earlier, written in 1924, in sharp contrast to muddied and lackluster China was the “graceful, clean, and sublime” Japan. In all, Xu often saw in the West and Japan what he believed he was unable to see in China. As an admirer from the Orient, he paid personal visits to famous Western writers, for example, Thomas Hardy and Bertrand Russell, because there were no such giants in China. Perhaps, only with such a writer as Xu Dishan 許地山 (1893–1941), who had a deeply religious orientation, that one could escape from national anxiety. Among Republican authors writing about the non-China world, Xu Dishan was a unique one. His main focus was Southeast and South Asia, where there was a big population of Chinese immigrants. These spaces, 105

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outside of the map of “the world” perceived by most Republican writers, did not have a direct power relationship with China. Xu Dishan repeatedly wrote about women, both non-Chinese and Chinese living abroad. The male and female protagonists in one story are both Burmese, and Buddhism, Burma, and Yangon all feature in this story written in Chinese, which has almost no Chinese character in it. Another of his stories is set in Malaysia, featuring a saintly Christian woman. Yet another is about an Indian telling the story of his mother. Xu Dishan was leisured in his style in writing about these almost-neglected parts of the world. His “Wife of a Merchant” (商人婦) tells the life of Xi Guan, a woman born in Fujian who travels from Singapore to India. Not only are her adventures colorful, but she also sets an example of female independence. Xi Guan is a rare character as a Chinese woman overseas. She is dressed in Indian clothes and appears almost an Indian. To Xu Dishan, this is not something to be lamented but evidence for her independence and her ability to immerse herself in the local society. After all, for Xu Dishan, what is important is not to what nation one belongs but to learn the ultimate truth of human life. In conclusion, Republican authors were highly cosmopolitan in terms of their education and travels. Yet their conception of the world was profoundly shaped by the global geopolitics of the time, leading to a lopsided engagement of the world that put its spotlight on the West and on Japan, leaving big chunks of the other spaces of the world invisible. Faced with a dominant West, the Republican writers told stories of humiliation and anxiety for their Chinese characters, who were deeply conscious of their national identities. Yet with differing strategies, they also sometimes managed to break out of this prevalent mode of thinking and writing and, to varying degrees, achieve some precarious balance.

Note 1 This chapter is revised from my earlier Chinese article, “The Landscape of the World by Republican Writers,” Yuanzhuo 圓桌 (The round table), Autumn–Winter issue (2015): 81–95.

References Guo Moruo 郭沫若, 1982. Guo Moruo quanji · wenxue bian 郭沫若全集·文學編 (The Complete Works of Guo Moruo: Literary Works). Vol. 1. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Lao She 老舍. 1980. “Er Ma” 二馬 (The Two Ma’s). In Laoshe quanji 老舍文集 (Collected Works of Lao She). Vol. 1. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Lu Xun 魯迅. 2005. Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 (The Complete Works of Lu Xun). Vols. 4–5. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chunbashe. Xu Zhimo 徐志摩. 2005. Xu Zhimo quanji 徐志摩全集 (The Complete Works of Xu Zhimo). Vols. 1 and 4. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chunbanshe. Yu Dafu 郁達夫. 2007. Yu Dafu quanji 郁達夫全集 (The Complete Works of Yu Dafu). Vol. 1. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press.

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9 THE RISE OF AUTHOR MUSEUMS IN THE PRC How Institutions Make World Literature Emily Graf

A World History of Author Museums in the PRC This chapter focuses on Chinese author museums since their rise in the mid-twentieth century.1 After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (the PRC hereafter) in 1949, literature has been increasingly institutionalized by the state. While contemporary writers were included into the All-China Literature Workers Association (中華全國文學工作者協會), the literary estates of chosen writers of the past were enshrined in museums, often established in the writers’ former residences. The high degree of state involvement both in literary production and in museum management is particular to the PRC. Sketching a world history of author museums in the PRC, this chapter introduces the particularities of Chinese author museums and seeks out global entanglements in the histories of these sites and institutions. It inquires: When and why did author museums gain importance in China? Which actors introduced the concept of an author museum in the PRC? Did other local sites and practices precede the arrival of the author museum as a public museum? And how have Chinese author museums not only transformed the institutions and practices locally but also impacted current scholarly debates in literary theory, heritage studies, and global history? The veneration of writers, especially poets, was by no means new to China. Places associated with writers and their literary works had long served as imaginary and material pilgrimage sites in imperial times. The Du Fu Thatched Cottage (杜甫草堂) is located in Chengdu, where Du Fu (712–770) lived in seclusion for a few years (759–765) to escape the An Lushan Rebellion during the Tang dynasty (618–907), and it was long considered a sacred site (聖地) to his readers. In PRC history, the cottage was officially protected as a heritage site in 1961 and a museum was established on the site in 1985, but it had served as a site of pilgrimage since as early as the tenth century. Poet Wei Zhuang 韋庄 (c. 836–910) from the late Tang dynasty and early Five Dynasties period (907–979) describes his search for Du Fu’s former residence in a foreword to his poetry collection. He purchased and restored a cottage known as a thatched cottage near Huanhua brook (浣花溪草堂), which was considered the site where Du Fu had lived by contemporaries. Wei Zhuang would later even name his poetry volume the Huanhua Collection (浣花集) to honor this site. Ever since Wei Zhuang described his restoration of Du Fu’s former residence in 902 (Wei Zhuang 2021; Nienhauser 1986, 886), the site has been reconstructed again and again in the centuries to follow. Archeological finds from the Tang and 107

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-12

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Song dynasties were only recently discovered on the premises of the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum, which is argued to further strengthen the historicity of the site (Yang 2005). From a global perspective, it is fascinating to see that the creation of such a literary site in imperial times was also already (co)created by readers and literary tourists from outside of China. Literary tourists, visitors, and poets from Japan had contributed in the making of Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage as a literary site known beyond China from the late Qing dynasty onward, as their travel diaries, photographs, and poems have revealed (Fang 2015). It was, however, only in the twentieth century that museums (博物館), memorial museums (紀念館), or literature museums (文學館) were established as long-term institutions that systematically collect the personal and literary estates of writers, inform and educate about the writer using displays and exhibits, and maintain historic sites associated with the writer to make them accessible to a general public. Two developments coincided in the rise of the author museum in the PRC. Firstly, in the realm of public life and politics, both the Republic of China as well as the PRC recognized the potential of museums as a nation-building tool (Ho 2021), instrumental in educating “citizens” and “the masses” alike. Secondly, the realm of Chinese literature witnessed the birth of “the author.” While authorship had always been relevant for poetry, for example, the author became an increasingly important entity in other literary genres and literary criticism in the twentieth century. Author-focused reading of texts appeared as a scientific reading of texts, situating interpretations in the biographical, material, and social context of the writer. This form of reading was propagated by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) in his evidential scholarship 考證 analyzing the Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢). This reading led some texts to be associated with one particular author retrospectively, even though authorship had not played a key role in their interpretations in the past (Saussy 2003). The combination of these two developments – the rise of the museum and the birth of the author – sparked the establishment of many museums, often housed in authors’ former residences 故居 or, if no such site was available, in museums built for the purpose of their display. The museums which most clearly reveal the merging of these two trends and mark the beginning of the rise of the author museum in the PRC are the museums dedicated to Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) (Figure 9.1). The Lu Xun museums merged many trends in the Mao years (1949–1976), bringing authorship, materiality, spatiality, and the cult of personality to the fore.

Global Entanglements in the History of the Lu Xun Museums Inspirations From Moscow The history of the Lu Xun museums has, from its very beginning, been a global history, inextricably connected to developments around the world. The inspiration to establish a museum dedicated to Lu Xun came from the Soviet Union. Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) visited the Soviet Union during the Second World War from June to August 1945. After returning to China following Japan’s surrender, Guo Moruo published an article on October 19, 1945, in the Xinhua Daily (新華日報) titled “My Suggestion” (我建議), calling for the establishment of a Lu Xun museum similar to the museums dedicated to Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), and Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1936) (Beijing Lu Xun bowuguan 2006, 4). Mao Dun 茅盾 (1896–1981) traveled to the Soviet Union in May 1947, also visiting museums dedicated to Tolstoy, as well as to Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) (Mao Dun 1986). And Wang Yeqiu 王冶秋 (1898–1958), Deputy Director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH, 國家文物局), finally traveled to the Soviet Union in 1950 as part of an official delegation and visited many museums, among them 108

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Figure 9.1 Lu Xun’s former Beijing residence on Xisantiao hutong No. 21. Photographed March 3, 2015. Source: Courtesy of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum.

the Ostrovsky Museum, and published his impressions of his museum visits that year (Hung 2005, 917). All three would come to hold important offices in the institutional landscape of cultural politics in the PRC. It was their support that helped establish a museum dedicated to Lu Xun, and by sharing their impressions of author museums in the Soviet Union, they introduced the concept of an author museum to China. In 1950, Lu Xun’s partner, Xu Guangping 許廣平 (1898–1968), and son, Zhou Haiying 周海嬰 (1929–2011), donated the majority of Lu Xun’s personal and literary estate to the state. In 1956, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Lu Xun’s death, large-scale museum buildings were built near his residences in Beijing (Figure 9.2), Shanghai, and his hometown of Shaoxing, adding further exhibition spaces to the former residences and commemoration rooms which had been established from 1950 onward in not only Beijing, Shanghai, and Shaoxing but also Guangzhou and Xiamen. The appropriation of Soviet exhibition practices in the Lu Xun museums took various shapes. It is likely that Soviet experts were advisers in the construction of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum, as they were involved in many large-scale architectural projects in China in the 1950s. A halfbody bust of Lu Xun made of bronze and cast by a Belarusian sculptor was sent to the Beijing Lu Xun Museum for its opening in 1956 as a gift (Beijing Lu Xun bowuguan 2006, 17). In the museum archives, photographs further show that the long-term exhibition of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum was arranged to create a symmetric display of Lu Xun’s and Maxim Gorky’s photographs and prints of their handwritten manuscripts (Figure 9.3), spatially arguing for a reading of Lu Xun as China’s Gorky. This had been a key interpretation of Lu Xun in the late 1930s and early 1940s by Mao Zedong’s political rival, Wang Ming 王明 (1904–1974), and others close to the Comintern and the Soviet Union (Wang Ming 1938). This interpretation was later 109

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Figure 9.2 Lu Xun’s desk in his Beijing residence on Xisantiao hutong No. 21. Source: Beijing Lu Xun Museum Photo Archive. Album 35 (32), photo 0350107. Photographed September 12, 2014. Courtesy of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum.

appropriated by Mao Zedong, as David Holm (1985) has shown in his analysis of the conflicting interpretations of Lu Xun by various fractions of the Chinese Communist Party (the CPC hereafter). The Shanghai Lu Xun Museum organized special exhibitions on “Lu Xun and the Soviet Union” both in 1957 and 1958 (Wang Xirong 2010, 205), and the Guangzhou Lu Xun Museum placed political iconography (such as the red star) prominently in the display above a Lu Xun bust.2 The Sino-Soviet cultural exchange was not unidirectional. In the year of the museums’ inaugurations in 1956, a special traveling exhibition on Lu Xun was also organized in Moscow, where it was displayed at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music.3 After 1958, however, fewer Soviet connections were highlighted in the displays, with China choosing a path different from the Soviet Union, leading to the Sino-Soviet split in 1960.

Contradictory Sites: Lu Xun Cut Off From the World and Circulating Around the World In the 1960s and 1970s, the Lu Xun museums were contrasting sites. With the increasing isolation of China in matters of foreign policy, and with the closing of many museums during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the Lu Xun museums, on the one hand, appeared cut off from the world, yet on the other, Lu Xun’s works became increasingly read around the world in left-wing circles, with the circulation of his translations increasing. Within China, 110

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Figure 9.3

Display of Lu Xun and Gorky, 1950s.

Source: Beijing Lu Xun Museum Photo Archive. Album 62 (174), photo 0620088. Photographed September 12, 2014. Courtesy of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum.

Mao Zedong’s praise of Lu Xun catapulted him onto a literary throne and firmly institutionalized his work in the educational system. More readers of his works also meant more potential visitors interested in seeking out the places where Lu Xun lived and worked, drawing Chinese and international readers’ attention. The Lu Xun museums were contrasting sites because the spacious squares and exhibition halls were utilized as spaces for mass mobilization in political campaigns, which drew on Lu Xun’s image. At the same time, the exhibition halls and Lu Xun’s former residences, for the most part, closed their doors with the discontinuation of the work of the Ministry of Culture (1967–1975). The Beijing Lu Xun museum had redesigned its exhibition in 1965 to “highlight Lu Xun as a revolutionary,” but without success, as in the following winter of 1966, the exhibition was criticized by the Red Guards and forced to close, sinking the museum “into chaos in every respect” (Beijing Lu Xun bowuguan 2006, 155). Starting with Beijing, one Lu Xun museum after another closed their doors to the public. To see the museums as completely closed-off spaces during the Cultural Revolution would, however, not be accurate. When the museums reopened on occasions, the museums had to limit the number of visitors to control the crowds. Also, individual special guests still visited the former residences sporadically. The Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898–1989) visited the Shanghai Lu Xun Museum in August 1971, as did the French Sinologist, Lu Xun translator, and writer Michelle Loi (1926–2002) (Wang Xirong 2010, 43, 46). In June 1972, the 111

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museum was visited by Lois Wheeler Snow (1920–2018), wife of Edgar Snow (1905–1972) (Wang Xirong 2010, 47), only shortly after Nixon’s historical visit to China in February that same year. Thus, the museums were not completely cut off from the world. And even though public access to the literary sites was restricted, the spaces were to be brought to the people. Like other filmmakers who visited Lu Xun’s residences, Shen Pengnian 沈鵬年, came in his preparation for a biographical film on Lu Xun filmed in 1972 (Wang Xirong 2010, 48). Lu Xun’s former residences remained important for creating a stylized and politicized image of Lu Xun, be it in the form of film or in pocket-sized comic books 連環畫 (Lu 1972) that were to depict Lu Xun’s life as a revolutionary. Thus, even though the spaces were officially closed, they were not quite desolate. The major turning point in the history of the Lu Xun museums took place on November 1, 1975. On this day, a document circulated among all ministries and departments in the central government, consisting of a letter that Zhou Haiying, Lu Xun’s son, had addressed directly to Mao Zedong on October 28, 1975, and along with it, Mao’s response, written only three days later. Both the letter and Mao’s concise orders were circulated in the Politburo (Zhou 1977, 11). Zhou Haiying had requested that the Beijing Lu Xun Museum be reopened and once again attached to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage after having been downgraded administratively in 1958. Another request was the establishment of a Lu Xun research room in the museum. Mao agreed with Zhou Haiying and required a decision to be made in the respective ministries and then “carried out immediately” (Zhou 1977, 11). According to official historiography, the letter by Mao and the reopening of the museums marked a new era of Lu Xun research. It was the beginning of a “new life” for the Lu Xun museums (Beijing Lu Xun bowuguan 2006, 31) and put an end to the political instrumentalization of Lu Xun, which had led to his sacralization 神化 during the Cultural Revolution, a practice retrospectively criticized as a form of distortion (Mao Dun 2002). This presentation, however, needs to be read critically, as the political instrumentalization of Lu Xun did not end with the reopening of the museums, which becomes apparent in the use of Lu Xun’s image and heritage in criticizing the Gang of Four in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and in various campaigns and cultural policies of the CPC to the present day.

A Diversification of the Museum Landscape? Local Objectives and International Taxonomies During the Reform and Opening period, memorial museums, and among them author museums, mushroomed in the PRC, boosting local economies by offering cultural destinations to local and international tourists alike. The end of the Cultural Revolution resulted in a certain diversification of the museum landscape. Firstly, many formerly criticized writers of modern literature were rehabilitated, some during their lifetime, some only posthumously. For the Lu Xun museums, this meant that photographs of Lu Xun’s contemporaries who had been criticized during past political campaigns reappeared in the museum displays. Exhibits and objects associated with them were reintroduced into the exhibition halls and former residences. For instance, Lu Xun had kept the desk of the CPC leader and writer Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899– 1935) in his Shanghai residence, and it was returned in this period (Wang Xirong 2010, 43). In extreme cases, some writers had even been erased from historical sources by altering photographic material. One example is the removal of Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976) from group photos with Lu Xun (Findeisen 2001, 309, 375). These materials were also restored and reintroduced into the display. In the decades that followed, many of these writers would receive their own memorial museums in the PRC. A memorial museum dedicated to Qu Qiubai opened 112

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in his birth town, Changzhou, in Jiangsu in 1985. Lin Yutang, who had left China in 1935 and whose former residence had been established as a museum in Taipei in 1985, would later also receive a memorial museum in his birth town, Zhangzhou, in Fujian in 2001 (CCLM 2012, 113; Graf 2022b, 245–48). However, the degree to which the exhibitions address and come to terms with the hardship of formerly criticized writers, or the friction between their writing and past as well as present politics of the CPC, remains very limited, often reducing their time of isolation or prosecution to a few lines in introductory texts, if addressing them at all. Secondly, the diversification of the museum landscape took shape in the establishment of a National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (NMMCL 中國現代文學館), which opened in Beijing in 1985. Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), who, too, had been rehabilitated and had become the chair of the China Writers Association, replacing Mao Dun, promoted the establishment of a national museum of literature in addition to museums dedicated to individual writers. He had been inspired by archives and museums of modern literature in Japan and envisioned similar institutions in the PRC (Ba Jin 1985, 91–2). Yet the diversification of this canon also had its limitations. The display of the NMMCL would continue to largely focus on the formerly canonized writers, often referred to in one breath as Lu Guo Mao, Ba Lao Cao 魯郭 茅, 巴老曹, namely, Lu (Xun), Guo (Moruo), Mao (Dun), Ba (Jin), Lao (She), and Cao (Yu), who had formed the core literary canon prior to the Cultural Revolution. With each inauguration of further author museums in the decades to follow, the institutionalization of the writers presented in Lu Xun’s tradition became complete – the former Beijing residences of Mao Dun established in 1984, of Guo Moruo in 1988, and of Lao She 老舍 (1988–1966) in 1999, as well as the Ba Jin Former Residence, established in Shanghai in 2008, and the Cao Yu 曹禺 (1910–1996) Former Residence, finally established in Tianjin in 2010 (CCLM 2012, 123, 72, 93, 1, 51). Adding to the focus on writers of modern Chinese literature, museums dedicated to traditional Chinese literature were also increasingly established or restored and expanded. A Pu Songling 蒲松齡 Former Residence had been established as early as 1956 near Zibo in Shandong (Lu and Zhang 1957). Yet it had suffered much damage during the Cultural Revolution, with the residence converted into an office building, Pu Songling’s tomb looted, and its tombstone destroyed (Zhang 2008, 36–7). In the new period, a larger Pu Songling Memorial Museum was added to the reconstruction of his former residence in 1980 (Zhou 1993, 1). In 1984, a Cao Xueqin Memorial Museum was established in the outskirts of Beijing (Li Mingxin 2011, 197), and in 1985, the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum was established in the outskirts of Chengdu. The historicity and authenticity of these and other sites remain a matter of heated debates. Directed both at domestic and international visitors, the presentation of authors of modern and traditional Chinese literature increasingly drew on the taxonomies and denominations adopted from and adhering to international organizations such as UNESCO and ICOM. The Cao Xueqin Memorial Museum, located in his former residence, does not present itself as a tangible but instead as an intangible heritage site, officially designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage Site on National Level (國家級非物質文化遺產) in 2011.4 With the establishment of a Chinese Committee of Literature Museums as part of ICOM China in 2010, the PRC aimed to connect Chinese literary and author museums to a global network of museums. Today, author museums of modern and traditional literature alike are embedded in the institutional museum landscape of the PRC and remain under the regulation of the state. While the official historiography of the Lu Xun museums and some scholarly works in China present the Reform and Opening period as having largely ended an era of political instrumentalization of the literary estates of writers (Qian 2013, 71), author museums continue to play a key role in political campaigns in the more recent history of the PRC. Lu Xun spearheads revolutionary 113

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Figure 9.4 Lu Xun included in digital display of 100 model heroes of New China. Road to Revival Exhibition, at the National Museum of China, photographed September 25, 2014. Source: Courtesy of the National Museum of China.

modern literature, with many of his museums designated as sites of patriotic education, which have been promoted since the 1990s and have become a key component of the Red Tourism industry since 2005 (Denton 2014, 220). Sites connected to writers of imperial times similarly play their role in the presentation of a long national tradition and glorified past. It comes as no surprise that Lu Xun is included as a model hero of New China in the Road to Revival Exhibition in the National Museum of China since 2011 (Figure 9.4). But with the increase of institutional histories of author and literary museums and research on exhibitions displaying authors such as Lu Xun (Miao 2011), the self-awareness of the institution is increasing, and publications providing individual close readings and interpretations of objects in Lu Xun’s estate have enriched the field of Lu Xun studies (Ye and Yang 1999).

New Theories and Research Trends on Author Museums in a Global Context Literary and author museums, as objects of study, are situated between disciplines, speaking to historians, literary scholars, art historians, social scientists, political scientists, and scholars from communication studies and cultural studies alike. Especially, literature scholars, historians, art historians, and museum practitioners have reflected on the relationship between writing and materiality, be it how material objects play a central role in French literary production of the nineteenth century (Watson 1999) or how Chinese literary production throughout its history has been shaped by materiality, both by the technology of writing and by physical spaces of writing (Zeitlin and Liu 2003). Yet an unease has prevailed in academic circles when dealing with the material literary estates of writers and their connection to the author. The proclaimed “death of the author” in literary theory in the mid-1960s (Barthes 114

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1977) resulted in biographies of writers losing their authority to steer interpretations and their power over justifying literary quality. Returning to the author when reflecting on materiality and space in relation to literature was, by no means, beyond dispute. A study that analyzes the former residences of, among others, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) examines how these writers dealt with the sensual challenges they encountered during their lifetime (Dickenson’s approaching blindness and Freud’s deafness) by changing the interior of the rooms they lived in (Fuss 2004). With the help of understanding the interior of the author’s living environment, one comes to better understand “the interior” of the author, meaning, his or her psychological state, which in turn strongly influenced their writing. Turning the attention from the author to the reader, another study explains the emergence of literary tourism in Britain, focusing on nineteenth-century literary and non-literary texts. Analyzing the implied reader-tourist, the study argues that it is indeed the text itself that invented and solicited literary tourism by making the reader respond to the text in concrete acts of tourism, attributing all agency within the text itself (Watson 2008, 12–13). While the aforementioned studies present author museums as spaces shaped by the author or implied reader, Elisabeth Emery (2012) comes closer to acknowledging the author museum as a producing force operating posthumously, long after the author has exerted direct influence on his or her surroundings. Her focus lies on the importance of the birth of photography as a technology for the rise of the author museum as a concept. Even though Germany features some of the earliest author museums, with Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Birth House having opened to the public in his hometown of Marbach in 1859, the establishment of a Literaturmuseum der Moderne (LiMo) in 2007 next to the Schiller National Museum and the Marbach Literature Archive sparked discussions about author and literary museums anew, raising the question whether literature ought to be displayed at all, with the impossibility of displaying literature remaining a constant voice in the debate. If literature can and indeed should be displayed, these debates inquired into how such exhibition practices can be brought into dialogue with literary theory (Gfrereis 2007; Kroucheva and Schaff 2013). The accelerated technological progress in the digital age has facilitated the circulation of texts around the world, but it is accompanied by a perceived loss of the materiality that the production of literature once entailed. The writing brush and seal in Asia (displayed in the Lu Xun museums) or the quill or steel nib (displayed in the LiMo) have been replaced by typewriters (displayed in the Brecht-Weigel-Museum in Berlin and the Lin Yutang House in Taipei; see Figure 9.5). Lin Yutang invented a prototype for a Chinese-language typewriter, catapulting the Chinese language into an international arena, providing a new kind of linguistic mobility (Tsu 2010, 49–79). In the recent decades, this development has been surpassed by computers (displayed in the Lin Yutang House as early models built on his inventions and in museums of contemporary writers, such as the Mo Yan 莫言 (b. 1955) Literature Museum in Gaomi). The material process of text production has greatly changed, resulting in the gradual disappearance of the material paper manuscript, for example. Archives confronted with new forms of literary estates thus grapple with the perceived loss of the original and have come together to discuss new forms of displaying literary heritage in a digital age (Autsch 2005; Brenner and Singh 2008). Publications approaching author museums as a global phenomenon have mostly taken the form of edited volumes, in which numerous contributors cover writers institutionalized in different countries (mostly Anglophone and European), focusing on how writers’ houses are key in the forging of respective collective memories (Hendrix 2008), how museums have shaped the literary genre of biography, and vice versa (Hill 2012), and were key instruments in nineteenth-century Europe, including Russia, in the making of national literary icons (Leerssen and Rigney 2014). 115

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Figure 9.5 Lin Yutang’s typewriter on his desk at the Lin Yutang House in Taibei. Photographed August 23, 2014. Source: Courtesy of the Lin Yutang House.

Art historians and cultural historians working on China have largely highlighted the communication that takes place between the sender of the museum message, the materiality of the display, and the reception of the museum message. Reading the displays as a form of text and inquiring into the semiotics of the display, both of Kirk Denton’s recent monographs have focused on the intended messages of museum displays across a great breadth of museum genres in the PRC and Taiwan. Each has chapters dedicated to author and literary museums (Denton 2014, 177–98; Denton 2021, 162–76), which shows the importance this museum genre plays in the Chinese museum landscape. In addition to the production of museum messages, researchers are further including concrete visitor’s perspectives (in addition to the implied visitor) to account for their agency in the meaning-making processes that occur during the museum visit (Graf 2022a). When placing these museum readings in the context of cultural politics, the role of museums can appear to encompass a largely instrumental function, be it in nation-building or in solidifying the power of political parties (the CPC or the GMD and DPP in Taiwan). Museums and the materiality of objects and cultural artifacts 文物 have been shown to have played a key role both during the Chinese revolution and in its retrospective reproduction and presentation via spaces of commemoration (Ho 2018). Museums in the PRC are often perceived as unidirectional tools of CPC propaganda, but recent studies have highlighted the museums’ multiple functions. Some scholars have highlighted their similarities to schools and courtrooms, to temples and marketplaces (Ho and Li 2015). Others have emphasized their active role in knowledge production about authors (Graf forthcoming), exploring the agency of the objects on display, acknowledging, for example, the power of a wooden bust in conveying a particular image of the author (Graf 2022b, 237–42). Yet museums in the PRC remain spaces that rarely 116

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allow for a reading of history “against the grain” of official historiography or where the homogeneity of official historiography is outspokenly challenged. While no state-run museum of the Cultural Revolution has been established, some sites and memorial spaces, however, can be read as challenging orthodox CPC historiography (Li 2016, 2020, 227–59). Not just domestic historiography can be challenged through museum displays and museum histories. While the Soviet Union appears as a predominantly positive model that curators aimed to emulate in the history of the Lu Xun museums, recent research has shown that Sino-Soviet tensions already became palpable in other exhibition efforts in the course of the 1950s, be it in displaying China as part of the Soviet bloc exhibits abroad or in how Soviet bloc exhibits were displayed in China, in which a superiority of Russian culture was written into the display (Jersild 2018). Continuously questioning periodization schemes prevalent in the fields of foreign politics, international relations, and global networks of cultural exchange, such studies reveal the socio-political tensions that can be read between the lines of exhibitions and displays and challenge established narratives in global history. Chinese author museums have changed not only how writers are remembered and how their literary works are read but also which writers are remembered and which forgotten. Museums have acquired power in the force field of literary production, reception, and criticism. New theories and research methods have led scholars to re-evaluate the trajectories through which certain texts and writers entered into the canon of world literature. They have identified which historical actors guided, hindered, facilitated, or forced the author to become representative of a certain genre, nation, script, or voice and thereby shape societies’ memory of the writer. Museums became key in defining literary value and in defining whether an author’s reach would become global. Author museums are therefore an important part of the spatial, material, and global turns in literary studies that have raised questions about the processes through which world literature is constituted.

Notes 1 This chapter draws on different sections of my study on the institutional history of the Lu Xun museums (Graf 2023, 170–9, 201–8, 216–25, 278–93, 619–25). 2 The Lu Xun Memorial Room at the Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou. Source: Beijing Lu Xun Museum Photo Archive; Album 62 (5), photo 0620344. 3 A photograph of the traveling exhibition was included in the permanent exhibition of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum on September 12, 2014. 4 Its designation is marked with a sign at the museum’s entry, photographed by the author on August 9, 2014.

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PART IV

Sinophone Worlds of Borderlands, Urban Jungles, and Rainforests

10 YI LITERATURE Traditional and Contemporary Mark Bender

What Is Yi Literature? A good question to begin with is, “What is Yi literature?” A simple answer could be “literature of the Yi ethnic minority group,” as the Yi (or Yizu 彝族) are among several of the 56 ethnic groups minzu 民族 in the People’s Republic of China that have traditional scripts and bodies of inscribed literature. A little scrutiny, however, will reveal layers of nuance. Firstly, the name “Yi” 彝 obscures great diversity among local cultures grouped under that title in the 1950s, and similar questions regarding this grouping extend far back in the contentious history of southwest China. Secondly, when examining items identified as Yi literature, the picture is also one of diversity and localization. Very little, if any, Yi literature was known until recently outside its traditional locales, though certain forms and tropes occur between local traditions. The oral-based nature of Yi literature and the non-standard nature of the script traditions are only part of the answer. The following sections introduce the history, content, and transmission of traditional and contemporary Yi traditions of written and performed literature.

Ethnic Literature in China and the Yi Several of the 56 ethnic groups minzu 民族 in the People’s Republic of China have their own scripts and bodies of inscribed literature. The suffix “zu” 族 or “ethnic group” is added to each formal name. For instance, “Yizu” 彝族, or here, simply Yi. The Han 漢majority has among the richest traditions of written literature in the world, and Chinese is the official script of China. Among the 55 ethnic minority groups, the Tibetans 藏, Uighur 維吾爾, Kazakhs 哈薩 克, Mongolians 蒙族, Manchu 滿, Korean 朝鮮, Dai 傣, and Yi have fully workable writing systems. Other groups, including the Naxi 納西 and Shui 水, have less-versatile scripts that are used mostly in ritual and divination by ritual specialists. There are also bodies of writing in the epic and ritual literature of the Zhuang 壯, Yao 瑶, Dong 侗, Bai 白, etc. in southwest China that use versions of Chinese characters (often for sound) value. The Women’s Script (女書) of Jiangyong County, Hunan, is a syllabary created by Han women by modifying a selection of Chinese characters. Beginning in the nineteenth century, and accelerating in the 1950s, various romanization systems have been created for many of the minority languages without scripts, though few are in common use, indicating the practical function of written Chinese. Modern 123

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-14

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literature in the form of novels, short stories, poems, and essays is being written in many of these scripts, but most publications by ethnic minority writers in China are in Chinese, thus comprising a significant body of Sinophone writing. Of these scripts, Chinese scholars point to only two fully workable written languages native to China: Chinese and Yi.

The Yi and Yi Writing The Yi are a prominent ethnic minority group in Southwest China, numbering over nine million people. The creation of the category “Yizu” (which has been translated both as “Yi nationality” and “Yi ethnic group” in China) is part of the story of ethnic identification in the post-1949 history of the People’s Republic of China (Mullaney 2010). Yi languages are in the Tibeto-Burman family, a family of languages well-represented in southwest China, Myanmar, northeast India, and other parts of the Himalayan region. The category Yi includes over 80 subgroups with their own ethnonyms and cultural traditions, which vary quite significantly between groups. In a general sense, the Yi can be considered a group of peoples speaking closely related TibetoBurman languages and sharing certain similar cultural traits, often including agricultural practices, the use of felt (some groups) and other aspects of material culture, rituals for guiding the soul of the dead to the land of the ancestors, cultural memories of early “ancestors,” verbal art styles, and certain features of social organization that have developed differentially over time. Until recent decades, most Yi have been involved in upland agriculture, with cultural adaptations to local climate and geography. The largest of the Yi subgroups is the Nuosu 諾蘇 of southern Sichuan and northwest Yunnan. The Nuosu number well over two million, and though economic and outside cultural forces are swiftly bringing change, they are regarded as the most conservative and least-assimilated Yi. Yunnan province is home to over six million Yi and the largest number of subgroups, which include the Lipo 裡頗, Lolopo 倮倮潑, Nisu 尼蘇, Nasu 納蘇, Sani 薩尼, and Axi 阿西. The largest Yi group in Guizhou province is the Nasu. A few smaller Yi groups live in western Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and northern Vietnam. Traditional texts speak of the “Six Tribes” (六族), sons of Dumu 篤慕 (names vary), the ancient ancestor and survivor of a great flood. Many generations ago, these clan groups split up due to population pressures and migrated throughout the mountain and riverine landscapes of southwest China, and maybe even farther afield. Some Chinese scholars have suggested that local Yi polities formed over two thousand years ago in Guizhou and Yunnan, and some theories suggest that Yi groups were major players in the Nanzhao Kingdom 南詔國 (738– 902). During the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, imperial governments implemented systems of control over southwest China, investing power in local headmen among the Yi and other groups. Over the centuries, some Yi groups in closer proximity to Han culture, especially in Guizhou and Yunnan, became more assimilated, while groups in the Liangshan Mountains of southern Sichuan and the border areas with northwest Yunnan remained isolated until the late 1950s (Pu and Ji 2016; Zhang et al. 2007). Chinese scholars such as Fang Guoyu and nonChinese ones such as Stevan Harrell have speculated on Yi history over the last two millennia, though considerable debate continues over origins within a complex picture of ethnogenesis (Fang 1984; Harrell and Li 2003). One factor that does unite nearly all the recognized Yi subgroups is the use of an ancient writing system. This non-standardized writing system is still used by ritualists called bimo 畢摩 (bimox in Northern Yi romanization, with added “x” tone marker). Thousands of texts, written in ink upon folk-crafted paper, have survived the ages and constitute a large body of literature, much of it still unstudied or understudied by scholars. Content includes origin myths, genealogies, rituals for dealing with ghosts, divination and astrology, narrative poems, medical 124

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knowledge, missives, history, and a few translations from Han literature. Four major orthographic varieties of the script, going by various names, were historically in use in southwest China. One of the early Chinese names for what may be antecedents of later Yi scripts is 爨文, or Cuan writing. This term appears in early documents that describe a powerful ethnic group or clan known as the Cuan that controlled much of what is now the eastern areas of Yunnan and parts of western Guizhou and Guangxi. The present-day Nasu subgroups are associated with the kingdom, and groups may have dispersed from it into areas of Yunnan and Guizhou (Huang 2003, 51–3; Bradley 2009, 173). In scholarly transcriptions and translations today, the International Phonetic Alphabet is used to represent most of the script traditions. However, a standardized script, based on Northern Yi (Nuosu) script traditions in Sichuan, was developed by scholars in the 1970s. The Standard Northern Yi script (現代規範彜文) is used in newspapers, in public signage, in teaching materials, and on social media platforms, though few Nuosu can read it well in comparison to Chinese. The new script has been employed by some writers, especially poets, since the 1980s. However, the largest body of contemporary poetry and fiction by Yi authors is “Sinophone” – that is, written and published in Chinese. The relation between orality and writing is key in understanding the Yi literature and ritual traditions (Bamo 2000, 100, 286, 416). Despite rapid development in recent decades, some Yi groups maintain active traditions of oral, verbal art performed by folk singers and other tradition-bearers. The bimo priests may perform the content of written texts in ritual and nonritual contexts. Literacy was traditionally the province of only bimo ritualists (and possibly some officials). Writing had a still-unclear role within an ancient government structure consisting of rulers, officials, and ritualists that developed by the seventh century, though was altered during the period of imperial expansion and appointment of local overlords in later centuries. Ritualists and their writing have continued to exist among the folk despite the turmoil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the rapid development of the twenty-first century.

The Creation of Yi Traditional Literature Yi literature began to gain the notice of Chinese scholars in the late 1920s and 1930s through the work of ethnologist Yang Chengzhi 楊成誌 and geographer Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 on Yi literary texts from Yunnan (Zhu 1993, 32, 2000, 137). During the Anti-Japanese War/World War II era, many scholars and research organizations moved inland to Yunnan in the face of invasion. This development furthered Yi studies, and scholars of the era included Gao Huanian 高華年, Ma Changshou 馬長壽, Yu Xueliang 余學良, etc. Ethno-linguist Ma Xueliang 馬學 良 and his students studied Yi oral and oral-connected ritual texts in the 1940s and 1950s, collecting over 2,000 handwritten volumes (Ma et al. 1992). In the 1950s, historians and scholars of Yi literature emerged and research units were established. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, as recognition of the importance of ethnic minority literature was acknowledged by the state, Yi literature was established as a field of study by professors at some universities (several of which were “normal colleges” at that time), particularly Central Minzu University in Beijing, Yunnan University in Kunming, and Southwest Minzu University in Chengdu. After a pause in official research during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Yi studies were revived, and in the ensuing decades, great strides in the translation and analysis of key Yi texts were made at local and national research centers. For instance, the Yi studies at Bijie Teacher’s Research Institute 畢節學院 is rooted in earlier research of the 1950s and the mid-1980s. The Yi Culture Studies Institute of Chuxiong 楚雄彜族文化研究院 was established in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan in 1981 and is an important center of Yi studies today. Other research centers are located in Yuxi 玉溪 and Honghe 紅河 in Yunnan province, in Xichang 125

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西昌and Mabian 馬邊 in Sichuan province, and in Beijing with the Institute of Ethnic Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. A large archive of Yi texts was established at the Southwest Minzu University in 2005. Provincial and ethnic minority publishing houses in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Beijing have contributed to the publishing and dissemination of Yi literary works since the 1950s. Academic organizations include Guizhou Yi Studies Organization. A landmark work is History of Yi Literature, edited by scholars who participated in the collecting of Yi oral and written texts in the late 1950s (Zuo et al. 2006). The work divided the history of Yi literature into five periods, all based on gleanings from extant texts written in Yi and Chinese records. These periods were ancient (unrecorded time to AD 770), medieval (AD 770–AD 907), early modern (AD 907–AD 1840), and modern (1840–1949), followed by the present (post-1949). The earlier dates are based on content of origin narratives that feature ancient figures and events (such as the great flood) and genealogies (consisting of many generations of “begats”) plus stone carvings and bronze castings of what may be early Yi writing. The oldest written texts in existence (the vast majority of which are not dated) are from the late Ming and Qing periods. Due to a scribal practice of ritualists copying texts in a teacherto-student continuum, it is likely that the content of certain texts may date much earlier than the existing versions, and that discrepancies between versions can be attributed both to scribal transmission, the migration of Yi groups, and various social factors. Certainly, the level of literary achievement is high during some early periods, as reflected in critical essays on writing poetry written, like all Yi writing, in verse (Bamo 2000, 5–7). Among the Europeans who collected Yi materials in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century were several French missionaries and explorers, including the Catholic missionaries Paul Vial and Alfred Lietard, active in the Lunan 路南 and Zhaotong 昭通 areas of Yunnan, who produced word lists and translations of several traditional texts of the Sani, Axi, and Lolopo subgroups (Bamo 2000, 90–5). Up to the 1940s, other foreigners also collected texts, and consequently, hundreds of traditional texts are housed in archives in France, England, the USA, and Japan. Since the publication of The Lolo of Liangshan by Lin Yueh-hua in English in 1961, Yi studies have grown outside of China, taking off in the 1990s under the impetus of anthropologists such as Stevan Harrell, Thomas Heberer, and Margaret Byrne Swain and linguist David Bradley (Lin 1961). In the 2000s, Katherine Swancutt, Liu Shao-hua, Olivia Kraef, Halina Wasilewska, Kazue Iwasa, and others continued anthropological and linguistic work on the Yi. A few works of traditional Yi literature in translation have been published outside of the PRC (Qu et al. 1989; Mair 1995; Bender 1995; Vermander 1998; Mueggler 2016; Bender et al. 2019, XLIV–LIII).

Traditional “Classic” Texts The most widely circulated works of traditional Yi literature are epics and narrative poems collected in the 1950s and 1960s and published in Chinese translation. Many reprints of these “classics” have been issued since the late 1970s, and editions are still appearing, along with translations of other epics and collections of folk songs. Most of the reissued publications are solely in standard Chinese, although bilingual and multilingual texts have become the norm for recent translations targeting more academic audiences. Several Yi texts are now “cultural monuments” in the era of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the “China Dream” in the early twenty-first century (Bender 2020, 86–9). While the story of Ashima 阿詩瑪, associated with the Stone Forest ethnic theme park in Shilin County, Yunnan, is likely the best-known Yi story in the world, several other Yunnan 126

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Yi texts were published in the late 1950s and 1960s by Yunnan People’s Publishing Company, which had a line of ethnic minority translations. Many of the texts are “cosmographic creation epics” that relate the origins of the world, often understood as an ecological “pluriverse” of living beings dwelling within the varied landscapes of southwest China (Bender 2016, 88–90). The cover jacket of the 1981 reprint of Chamu 查姆, a creation epic from the Shuangbai County of Chuxiong Prefecture, lists Yunnan Yi works available to a reading public of that era (Guo and Tao 1981). The list includes Meige: Yi Epic (梅葛: 彜族史詩), Chamu: Yi Epic (查 姆: 彜族史詩), Xianji of the Axi: Epic of the Yi Group (阿細的先雞: 彜族史詩), Ashima: Narrative Poem of the Yi Group, Sani (阿詩瑪：彜族撒尼人敘事詩), Dancing to a Sweet Place: Narrative Poem of the Yi Group, Sani (跳到甜蜜的地方: 彜族撒尼人敘事詩), and Marriage between Snake and Human: Yi Nationality Narrative Poem (賽玻嫫: 彜族敘事詩). These texts were collected by groups such as the Yunnan Province Ethnic Folk Literature Chuxiong Investigation Team. Editors such as Guo Sijiu and Tao Xueliang participated in the collecting and editing process, which involved many enthusiastic students, local researchers and officials, members of local organized song and dance groups, and local tradition bearers (folk singers and ritualists known as bimo or duoxi多西. Since the 1980s, several versions (both Chinese-only and bilingual) of the Ashima story have appeared, and a comprehensive five-volume series devoted to versions of the story and relevant criticism was published in Kunming between 2002 and 2004 (Zhao 2002). Other recent publications of Sani works include various ritual texts, such as those associated with sacred grove rites (密枝節) (Ang 2015). Nienu Baxi 涅努巴西, a researcher from a long line of bimo, translated several narrative poems from the Honghe Hani and Yi Prefecture in the 1980s, including Palace Lamp of the Nanzhao Kingdom (南詔國的宮燈). The story, based on a text possibly dating to the Ming dynasty, is about palace intrigues during the Nanzhao Kingdom after the death of King Piloge 皮邏閣. Shi Youfu’s bilingual Translations of Selected Azhe Bimo Scriptures is a very literal collection of ritual texts and narrative poems of the Azhe subgroup in the Honghe region that have some relation to a regional religious tradition called bujiao 布教 (Shi 2006). Wuzha menzha is a multilinear collection of Axi creation and origin narratives and ritual chants from the Yuxi area, Yunnan (Yuxi 1999). Another genre of texts is funeral chants, including many chants called “Pointing the Way” (指路經), that guide a spirit of the deceased across the landscape, naming mountains, rivers, and villages, to the legendary hearth of Yi culture in the Guizhou–Yunnan borders (Bender 1995; Huang 2012). Probably, more traditional Yi texts have been translated and published in modern formats from western Guizhou than any area. Dozens of volumes, many issued in series, have been produced by scholars such as Wang Ziyao 王子堯, Wang Jichao 王繼超, Wang Ziguo 王子 國, Chen Zhangyou 陳長友, and many others, published in Guizhou and Sichuan publishing houses. These scholars are associated with the prolific Yi Literature Translation Group at the Yi Nationality Research Institute, established in Bijie, Guizhou, in 1988. Many of the texts feature multilinear formats that include Yi graphs, International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation, word-for-word equivalents in Chinese, and a grammatical Chinese translation. The compendiums, comprised of collections by bimo or local literati, include origin narratives, historical accounts, collections of folk songs, fantastic tales, and literary criticism. Among the many multilinear titles (in multiple volumes) are the well-known Chronicles of the Southwest Yi (Wang and Qu 2019; Shao 2021), Origins of the Yi (Bijie 1992), and Beginning of Things (Bijie 1990). For example, Origins of the Yi (a name assigned by the editors) consists of a multilinear translation (Yi graphs, IPA symbols, word-for-word Chinese, and colloquial Chinese) (Bijie 1992, 103). The text is based on a hand-copied version of the text that circulated in the areas around the small cities of Weining and Hezhang. During the Cultural Revolution, a well-known 127

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bimo named Wang Xingyou 王興友 hid the version in a cave, and although damaged, it was able to be copied into a more stable format. The text was translated by Wang Jichao and Wang Ziyao, with help from Wang Xingyou’s son Wang Ziguo. The text is divided into 12 major parts and subdivided into over 50 sections. Volumes 9–12 present the genealogies of several clans in a kind of “begat” order in which the father’s and son’s names are linked. Other parts outline stages in the creation of the world, beginning with the dualistic yin-yang principle of the creative forces of ai 哎and bu 哺 made immanent as sky and earth, light and dark, sun and moon, animals and plants, and so forth. Boundaries, order, and hierarchies are of special interest in the text, and the formation of these elements by genealogical lists is a major structural principle. Many of the genealogies include linkages between the early gods, ancestral clans, and great bimo to processes of the generation of waters, flora, and fauna (parrots, tigers, etc.), which the editors of the volume suggest may be totemic imagery. The pastiche of genealogies and sketches of origin stories – all in verse – are difficult to link together without the understanding that the assemblage is not made to be read but rather performed in ritual contexts. In fact, many of the texts seem to assume the primary listener is the soul of the dead being guided to the land of the ancestors. The lyrics may provide a sort of comfort by giving rationale for the inevitability of death, often using images from nature. Fieldwork reveals that bimo regularly recite the origins of local clans along with origins of the sky, earth, and its inhabitants as part of funerals, weddings, rituals for casting out negative forces, the recalling of wandering souls of children, etc. Some content of these texts might also have been performed in knowledge contests between bimo. Although works of great value to scholars of Yi culture and language and the result of prodigious effort, these texts have not received a degree of popular acclaim approaching that of the tradition-oriented texts from Yunnan. However, an origin narrative in dramatic form called Cuotaiji 撮泰吉, collected in Guizhou, was revived in the 1980s, developed into a tourism item, garnered the title of an Intangible Cultural Heritage, and has appeared online (Qu et al. 1989, 103–4). An example of the structure of a traditional Yi text is based on another hand-copied bimo ritualist manuscript from the Bijie area of Guizhou province. The translated, multilinear version titled Beginning of Things charts the origins of the sky, earth, living beings, and a host of supernatural, and sometimes odd beings and phenomena. Recounting origins and relations, delineating places within spaces, directionality, boundary marking, and constructing and acknowledging hierarchies are features of much of the discourse in these Yi texts about origins. The passage that follows is drawn from a section in Beginning called “Jitou” (Chinese transliteration of Yi), of which one-half is the “Nashijitou.” Four passages deal with supernatural beings who rule the four directions: the Sheep-headed Green Man of the East, the Cox-comb Yellow Man of the West, the Pig-bristle Black Man of the South, and the Nine-pinched Face Person/Woman of the South. Each description, or what ancient Yi literary discourse calls the “root” of the beings, is structured nearly the same, with only the names changing. This is the passage on the “Cox-comb Yellow Man of the South” (Bijie 1990, 129–30; Bamo 2000): The west of the sky and earth, Is controlled by the Cox-comb Yellow Man. He eats nine baskets of food, Swallows nine layers of tree leaves. Nine hundred pounds of animal hair, Were used to make his cloak Nine hundred lumps of copper, Were used to make his bracelets. A life of ninety-nine hundred years, 128

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A long life, And food so much, But wealth not so much. The Cox-comb Yellow Man, It is he of whom it is spoken. The literary commentary, written in verse, dates possibly to the Northern and Southern dynasty period (AD fifth to sixth centuries). The names Jushezhe 舉奢哲and Amaini 阿買妮 (the latter thought to be an accomplished female bimo) are associated with ancient guidelines to writing and critiquing verse, including the “three-part verse” form 三段 詩, in which a composer structures the images in a poem that begins with a vision of the sky, then moves down to mountains and landscapes, and finally engages a human situation (Bamo 2000, 349–71; Kang et al. 1997, 92). Due to relative remoteness and unrest during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the collecting and publishing of Nuosu oral literature in the Liangshan Mountains of southern Sichuan and contiguous areas in northwest Yunnan was delayed in comparison to most of Yunnan and western Guizhou. Among the most popular works in Chinese translation are versions of the origin narrative The Book of Origins (Hnewo tepyy 勒俄特依), tales of the culture-hero Zhyge Alu) (many of which appear in Origins), the Book of Conduct (Hmamu tepyy 瑪牧特依), the bridal lament Mother’s Daughter (媽媽的女兒), the antiphonal courting lyrics My Youngest Cousin (我的幺表妹), and the story of the runaway bride, Gamo Anyo (Gamop Atnyop甘嫫阿鈕). In 2006, a well-bound and illustrated two-volume collection of folk stories, songs, narrative poems, and origin myths in Chinese translation was issued by the Sichuan Nationalities Press. Despite high international interest in the Nuosu people, only Gamo Anyo, which was made into a dance drama by a team of well-known composers and choreographers from Beijing in 2006, and song and dance productions during the midsummer Torch Festival 火把節 have received national or international attention. The Nuosu Book of Origins is the first major translation of Nuosu traditional material into English (Bender et al. 2019).

Contemporary Yi Poets and the Use of Tradition Ethnic Yi poets such as Wuqi Lada 吳琪拉達 (of Guizhou and Sichuan) and Tipu Zhibu 替樸支 不 (of Guangxi) emerged in the 1950s and began exploring modern styles of poetry, often with folk themes. In the years after the disastrous Cultural Revolution, a new generation of Yi poets was stimulated by the emerging Chinese poetic currents of the time, in particular, the “Misty” or “Obscure” 朦朧 poets of the late 1970s and other trends in the 1980s that combined nostalgia for the traditional past with exploration of new form and content. Contemporary Yi poets writing in modern poetic registers influenced by mainstream Chinese writing and translations from Western languages have created a growing body of work that comprises contemporary Yi literature. Common themes in this very regional literature are aspects of traditional Yi folklore and verbal art and, increasingly, personal reflections on the confluence of rural-based experience and acclimations to urban realms, mostly written in Chinese. Poets hailing from Liangshan comprise the loudest collective voice of Yi poets. Formative influences on Nuosu poets range from classical Chinese poetry to styles of modern Chinese poetry to translations of foreign literature. With the outstanding exception of Jimu Langge 吉木狼格, who is associated with the “Not-Not” or “Non-ism” 非非 group that formed in Chengdu in the early 1980s, most Nuosu poets have not been deeply involved in the various avant-garde poetry movements (Dayton 2006, 87–91). Jidi Majia 吉狄馬加, the first Yi poet to gain national recognition, began publishing Yithemed free verse poetry in the early 1980s while a student at Southwest Minzu University. His 129

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work, which encompasses Yi and international landscapes, was influenced by South American and Western writers, including Pablo Neruda, Marial Mistral, Federico García Lorca, and Langston Hughes. By the 1990s, Jidi had become a head of the Chinese Writer’s Association and served for several years in the early 2000s as a governor of the Qinghai province, during which he hosted several international poetry festivals at Lake Qinghai. Originally from Butuo in Liangshan in southern Sichuan, he utilized cultural imagery of the Nuosu Yi in many poems, especially bimo priests, hunters, folk dress, myth, and legend. Translations have appeared in many languages, including English, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish (Jidi 2014). For example, “I, Snow Leopard” is a stunning ecologically oriented poem, translated into English (Jidi 2016, 41–6). By the mid-1980s, other poets in what can be called the “Liangshan School of Yi Poetry” 涼山詩歌派 formed in the wake of Jidi Majia’s success and include Luowu Laqie 倮伍拉 且, Ma Deqing 瑪德清, Bamo Qubumo 巴莫曲布嫫, Aku Wuwu 阿庫烏霧 (Luo Qingchun 羅慶春), Asu Yue’er 阿蘇越爾, and Eni Mushasijia 俄尼牧莎斯加. Several poets such as Lu Juan 鲁娟, Sha Ma 沙馬, Asuo Layi 阿索拉毅, Jikebu 吉克布 (poet and painter), and Fa Xing 發星 (a poet of Han background who writes on Nuosu themes) appeared in the early 2000s and followed by even younger generations (Li 2004, 420; Bender 2009, 117–19). Yi Wu 依烏, a scholar and indie filmmaker, began publishing introspective Chinese-language poetry after 2016 and swiftly gained popularity among young intellectuals at universities in Chengdu. Written literature in the Standard Northern Yi script begins in the mid-1980s. Aku Wuwu has authored several poetry collections in both Chinese and Yi and is regarded as the driving force in “mother tongue” Nuosu Yi literature. Aku’s poems are often concerned responses to cultural changes among the Nuosu and Yi in general. His Nuosu and Chinese-language poems have appeared in literary journals and on websites in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2006, Tiger Traces: Selected Nuosu and Chinese Poems of Aku Wuwu became the first collection of modern Yi-language poetry published in English (Aku and Bender 2006). His followers in the mother tongue movement include Lama Itzot and Jjinuo Dazzi (Bender 2017, 207–22). Besides single-authored collections published by a variety of local and national publishing houses, works of the Liangshan poets (and critical articles concerning them) appear in journals such as Liangshan Literature (涼山文學), Nationalities Literature (民族文學), various other local and national literary journals, journals of local universities and institutes, and unofficial collections and journals, such as Yi Wind (定筰彜風, printed at private expense). An early venue was Black Soil (黑土地), edited by Asu Yue’er and other young Yi poets at Southwest Minzu University in the mid-1980s. Many of the active poets are employed in local culture bureaus in the Liangshan mountain regions and at ethnic minority institutes and universities in Xichan, Chengdu, and Beijing. Conferences on Yi culture and literature sponsored by these entities are held regularly, at which many poets present. Commenting on the current state of Yi literary production, Aku Wuwu has argued that poems of the present era are written largely by “cultural hybrids” (conversant to varying degrees in both Yi and Han cultures). This “hybrid literature” exists within the dynamics of rapidly changing and complex cultural contexts increasingly removed from traditional Yi culture and literature (Luo 2001, 57–8). Along these lines, Jidi Majia has optimistically stated: I live in a region where traditional and modern thinking, traditional culture and modern civilization are in sharp conflict and collision, creating an immense head of water which will, I think, propel my people into unprecedented change and enable us to turn out world-shaking literature. (2004, 175) 130

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Conclusion Traditional Yi literature available outside local contexts is comprised of a body of written texts that have been collected, transliterated, and translated into Chinese (and in a few instances, other languages) by a dedicated cohort of researchers and translators, both within China and abroad. These texts, whose audiences may include locals, are primarily for a reading public divorced from the original contexts of transmission. The living, enacted dimension of this literature endures in the ritual performances of the bimo and folk singers. Some written texts may also be kept, and even published, by local literati. The future of traditional Yi literature studies depends on sustaining a critical mass of persons who can read the script and decode the texts. The contemporary literary scene of Yi poets and writers, most of whom compose in Chinese, is dynamic and growing, with more developments on the horizon.

References Aku Wuwu and Mark Bender, 2006. Tiger Traces: Selected Nuosu and Chinese Poetry of Aku Wuwu. Columbus, OH: Foreign Language Publications, The Ohio State University. Ang Ziming 昂自明. 2015. Yizu saniren yishi wenxue yanjiu 彝族撒尼人儀式文學研究 (A Study on the Ritual Literature of the Sani People of Yi). Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe. Bamo Qubumo 巴莫曲布莫. 2000. Yingling yu shihun: Yizu gudai jingdian shixue yanjiu 鷹靈與詩魂： 彝族古代經典史學研究 (Golden-Eagle Spirit and the Poetic Soul: A Study on Poetics of Ancient Yi Scriptures). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan chubanshe. Bender, Mark. 1995. “A Funeral Chant of the Yi Nationality.” In Religions of China in Practice, edited by Donald s. Lopez, 337–46. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bender, Mark. 2009. “Dying Hunters, Poison Plants, and Mute Slaves: Nature and Tradition in Contemporary Nuosu Yi Poetry.” Asian Highlands Perspectives 1: 117–58. Bender, Mark. 2016. “Landscapes and Life-Forms in Cosmographic Epics from Southwest China.” Chinese Literature Today 5, no. 2: 88–92. Bender, Mark, ed. 2017. The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press. Bender, Mark. 2020. Co-Creations, Master Texts, and Monuments: Long Narrative Poems of Ethnic Minority Groups in China. CHINOPERL 38, no. 2: 65–90. Bender, Mark, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu. 2019. The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bijie diqu yiwen fanyizu 畢節地區彝文翻譯組. trans. 1990. Wushi jilüe 物始紀略 (Beginning of Things). Chengdu: Sichuan minzu chubanshe. Bijie diqu yiwen fanyizu 畢節地區彝文翻譯組, trans. 1992. Yizu yuanliu 彝族源流 (Origin of Yi). Guizhou: Guizhou minzu chubanshe. Bradley, David. 2009. “Language Policy for China’s Minorities: Orthography Development for the Yi.” Written Languages and Literacy 12, no. 2: 170–87. Dayton, D. 2006. “Big Country, Subtle Voices: Three Ethnic Poets from China’s Southwest.” Master’s thesis. Sydney: Department of Chinese Studies, University of Sydney (Sydney eScholarship Repository). Fang Guoyu方國瑜. 1984. Yizu shigao 彝族史稿 (Draft History of the Yi). Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe. Guo Sijiu 郭思九, and Tao Xueliang 陶學良, eds. 1981. Chamu查姆 (Chamu: Yi epic). Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe. Reprint. Harrell, Stevan, and Li Yongxiang. 2003. “The History of the History of the Yi, Part II.” Modern China 29, no. 3: 362–96. Huang Jianming. 2003黄建明. Yiwen wenzi xue 彝文文字学 (The Study of Yi Script Written Characters). Beijing: Minzu chubanshe. Huang Jianming 黄建明. 2012. Yiwen jingji zhilujing yanjiu 彝文經籍指路經研究 (Study of Yi Classical Text Pointing the Way). Beijing: Minzu chubanshe. Jidi Majia 吉狄馬加. 2004. Jidi Majia de shi 吉狄馬加的詩 (Poems of Jidi Majia). Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe. Jidi Majia. 2014. Rhapsody in Black: Poems. Translated by Denis Mair. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

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Mark Bender Jidi Majia. 2016. I, Snow Leopard. Translated by Frank Stewart. Honolulu: Manoa Books and El Leon Literary Arts. Kang, Jian 康健, Wang Zhixin 王冶新, Wang Ziyao 王子堯, and He Jiquan 和積全, eds. 1997. Yizu gudai lunwenji 彝族古代論文集 (Ancient Literary Discussions of the Yi). Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe. Li Hongran 李鸿然. 2004. Zhongguo dangdai shaoshu minzu wenxue shilun 中國當代少數民族文學史 論 (Discussion of the History of Contemporary Chinese Ethnic Minority Literature). Kunming: Yunnan jiaoyu chubanshe. Lin, Yueh-hua. 1961. The Lolo of Liangshan. New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files Press. Luo, Qingchun 羅慶春. 2001. Ling yu ling de duihua – Zhongguo dangdai shaoshu minzu Hanyu shi lun 靈與靈的對話：中國當代少數民族漢語詩論 (Spirit to Spirit: Discussions of Contemporary Ethnic Minority Poetry in Chinese). Hong Kong: Tianma tushu. Ma Xueliang 馬學良, Liang Tingwang 梁挺望, and Zhang Gongjin 张公瑾. 1992. Zhongguo shaoshu Minzu wenxue shi 中國少數民族文學史 (History of Chinese Ethnic Minority Literature). Beijing: Zhongyang minzu xueyuan chubanshe. Mair, Victor. 1995. “The Book of Good Deeds: A Scripture of the Ne People.” In Religions of China in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, 405–22. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mueggler, Erik. 2016. Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mullaney, Thomas S. 2010. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pu Xuewang 普學旺, and Ji Tong 吉彤, eds. 2016. Yunnan shaoshu minzu huihua dianji jicheng shang juan 雲南少數民族繪畫典籍集成上卷 (A Collection of the Ethnic Painting Classics of Yunnan). Vol. 1. Kunming: Yunnan meishu chubanshe. Qu Liuyi, Xu Anxiang, and Richard Schechner. 1989. “The Yi: Human Evolution Theatre.” TDR 33, no. 3: 103–12. Shao Wenyuan. 2021. “Unheard Voices and Alternative Pasts: Deciphering Chronicles of Southwest Yi and Its Layered Ranges of Signification.” PhD dissertation. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University. Shi Youfu 師有福. 2006. Azhe bimojing xuanyi 阿哲畢摩經選譯 (Translations of Selected Azhe Bimo Scripture). Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe. Vermander, Benoît. 1998. Ritual for Expelling Ghosts: A Religious Classic of the Yi Nationality in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan. Taibei: Taipei Ricci Institute. Wang Jichao 王繼超, and Qu Se 瞿瑟. 2019. Xinan Yizhi 西南彝誌 (Chronicles of the Southwest Yi). Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe. Yuxi shi minzu zongjiao shiwuju玉溪市民族宗教事務局, ed. 1999. Wuzha Menzha 吾查们查. Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe. Zhang Chunde 张邨德, Long Luogui 龍倮貴, and Zhu Juyuan 朱琚元. 2007. Yizu yuanshi zongjiao yanjiu 彝族原始宗教研究 (The Primitive Religion of Yi Nationality). Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe. Zhao Deguang 赵德光, ed. 2002. Ashima wenhua congshu 阿诗玛文化丛书 (Ashima Culture Series). Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe. Zhu Chongxian 朱崇先. 1993. “Yiwen guji shouzang qingkuan gaishu” 彝文古籍手藏情况概述 (Introduction to the Archiving Situation of Yi Classic Works). In Yizu guji yanjiu wenji 彝族古籍研究文集 (Collected Yi Classics Studies), edited by Honghe Hanizu Yizu zizhizhou minzu yanjiusuo 红河哈尼 族彝族自治州民族研究所, 29–37. Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe. Zhu Chongxian 朱崇先. 2000. “Yiwen guji yanjiu gaishu” 彝文古籍概述 (Introduction to Yi Classic Literature). In Guizhou Yixue 貴州彝學 (Guizhou Yi Studies), edited by Guizhou Yixue yanjiuhui 貴 州彝學研究會, 131–43. Beijing: Minzu chubanshe. Zuo Yutang 左玉棠, Guo Sijiu郭思九, Rui Zengrui芮增瑞, and Tao Xueliang陶學良. 2006. Yizu wenxue shi shang/xiace 彝族文学史（上/下册） (History of Yi Literature). 2 vols. Kunming: Yunnan minzu chubanshe.

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11 QUEER SINOPHONE LITERATURE IN HONG KONG The Politics of Worldliness Alvin K. Wong

Introduction Sinophone studies is a new field of studies situated at the intersections of Chinese studies, transnational studies, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and ethnic studies.1 It examines the dissemination of Sinitic-language communities and their lived histories and cultural expressions. Shu-mei Shih pioneers the concept of the Sinophone in her book Visuality and Identity. Analyzing how the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) by Ang Lee engenders the different accented Mandarin spoken by actors and actresses from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Taiwan, Shih argues: The linguistic dissonance of the film registers . . . the heteroglossia of what I call the Sinophone: a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries. (2007, 4) In this chapter, I complicate Shih’s concept of the Sinophone by examining the epistemology of “queer worlding” in literary texts written by one of the most prolific writers in Hong Kong, Wong Bik-wan (黃碧雲, b. 1961). I define queer worlding here as a form of worldliness that reckons with the material conditions of war, nationalism, capitalism, and historicism, while envisioning textures, spatiality, and temporality of queer desire that enact other modes of being in the world. Before introducing Wong’s work, some elaboration of Hong Kong, Sinophone studies, and worldliness is in order. Hong Kong enters into a productive tension and relation with the Sinophone and the worldliness of the globe through, ironically, its (in)significance in global cultural studies and world history. As a Crown Colony ceded to the UK after the defeat of China at the end of the First Opium War (1842), the 1997 return of Hong Kong to the geopolitical polity of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) indicates for some a triumphant global narrative of China as a new empire. From the perspective of postcolonial theory, however, Hong Kong marks a site of temporal conundrum as the region had no possibility of decolonization to look forward to in 1997. Rey Chow thus raises the following questions: “How do we talk about a postcoloniality 133

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-15

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that is a forced return to a ‘mother country,’ itself as imperialistic as the previous colonizer? Is Hong Kong then simply an anomaly in the history of colonialism?” (1992, 153). Given the impossibility of defining Hong Kongness as exclusively aligned with British colonial influence or with China-as-the-motherland, Chow suggests that we understand Hong Kong as “precisely an in-betweenness and an awareness of impure origins, of origins as impure” (1992, 157). If Hong Kong’s postcoloniality does not fit well with dominant paradigms of postcolonial theory, neither does its literary production enter into the existing conversations on worldliness or world literature. Here, the Sinophone can powerfully intervene into the debate regarding the selective and Eurocentric politics of recognition governing the worldsystems of literature. The concept of the Sinophone disrupts the dominant tendency to include “the masterpiece” of national literatures into the category of “world literature.” In the case of China, only literatures that could possibly approximate the existing European, British, and American classical and contemporary genres and aesthetics of the epic, novel, and poetry get translated and included into the “world” canon. Shih thus points out the scandal of inclusion as the politics of recognition. Shih argues, “The politics of recognition involves the granting of universality to the exceptional particular – that is, Gao’s works are exceptional in that they, in their particularity, transcend the particular and approach the universal” (2004, 25–6). It should be noted that Shih’s criticism of the inclusion of “the exceptional particular” like the work of Gao Xingjian 高行健 (b. 1940) through the global recognition of the Nobel Prize in 2000 also parallels the emergence of the Sinophone. It is in this particular essay that Shih defines Sinophone literature as “literature written in Chinese by Chinese-speaking writers in various parts of the world outside China, as distinguished from ‘Chinese literature’ – literature from China” (Shih 2004, 29). I find her emphasis in this earlier work on the Sinophone interruption of world literature’s Eurocentrism highly relevant for reframing the relationship between Hong Kong, Sinophone studies, and worldliness. In particular, Hong Kong literature, often included only in the discussion of Chinese literature due to the exile and brief sojourns of mainland Chinese and Taiwan writers like Xiao Hong (蕭紅, 1911–1942), Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881–1936), Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 張愛玲, 1920–1995), and Bai Xianyong (白先勇, b. 1937), captures quite nicely what Shih terms Sinophone literature that “needs to be learned by effort” (Shih 2004, 27). Conceptually, the dominant paradigm of world literature also indicates the uneasy place of Hong Kong in the literary world-system. David Damrosch defines world literature in the following manner. “A work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (2003, 6). In fact, Damrosch’s definition of world literature employs a highly economic metaphor – literature, like the movement of capital, must spread outside its national context. The existence of world literature depends on its power to transcend national borders via the muscles of global publishing marketplace and translation. Yingjin Zhang also perceptively points out two geopolitics of mapping that intertwine world literature, China, and the Sinophone. The first set derives from the modern colonial-imperial world system of nation-states, in which France was viewed as the center of an emerging ‘world republic of letters’ . . . a second set of geopolitics comes into play in a different context in which the politics of recognition is refashioned in a new debate on the Chinese versus the Sinophone. (2015) 134

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Zhang’s analysis of the geopolitics of mapping reveals the complexity of scale, inclusion, and exclusion that conditions such categories as “world literature,” “Chinese literature,” and “Sinophone literature.” The marginality of Hong Kong literature within the infrastructure of world literature is further compounded by the politics of translation. To my knowledge, only Dung Kai-cheung’s (董啟章, b. 1967) Atlas (Ditu ji 地圖集, 1997), Chan Koonchung’s (陳冠中, b. 1952) The Fat Years (Shengshi 盛世, 2009), Shu-Ching Shih’s (施叔青, b. 1945) City of the Queen (Xianggang sanbu qu 香港三部曲, 1993–1997), Liu Yichang’s (劉以鬯, 1918–2018) The Drunkard (Jiutu酒徒, 1963), and selected works of Yasi have been translated into English, and Hong Kong literature is rarely taught in Chinese literature curriculum, if at all in world literature classes. One way to productively challenge both the Sinocentrism of modern Chinese literary enterprise and the Eurocentric politics of recognition in world literature would be to mobilize the Sinophone as a mode of accessing, widening, and indeed, embodying worldliness, which I posit here as a method of social indexing and queer worlding. Worldliness, for Edward Said, does not simply mean worldly historical contexts but also a mode of sensing the past and the present in details, namely, a form of secular criticism. Said suggests that there are “instead a small number of perhaps unexpected characteristics of worldliness that play a role in making sense of textual experience, among them filiation and affiliation, the body and the senses of sight and hearing, repetition, and the sheer heterogeneity of detail” (1983, 27). The recent work on the worlding force of postcolonial literature by Pheng Cheah treats worlding as a temporal logic that could overcome the spatial ambition of global capital. Cheah writes, “The persistence of time is infrastructural to capital and cannot be destroyed. As an enactment of the opening of worlds by the coming of time, world literature points to something that will always exceed and disrupt capital” (2016, 11). Drawing on Shih, Said, and Cheah, I coin the concept of “queer worlding” to illustrate how Sinophone literature in Hong Kong imagines other textures, spatiality, and temporality of queer desire that are not totalized by the violence of heteronormativity, war, neoliberal capitalism, and dominant historicism. Queer worldliness, as a temporal force that lives in and acts upon the world, can help us see Hong Kong beyond the conventional clichés of the region as a colonial port city and global Asian economic region. In particular, in Wong Bik-wan’s novels, history is not a static category serving as background or contextual platform for the literary plot; rather, she invents new ways of writing Sinophone Hong Kong by making temporal and spatial room for queer and gendered subjects whose stories are often buried by the larger historical processes of colonial modernity in the past and the neoliberal present. Specifically, I will examine how Wong’s novels “socially index” the violence of wars, heteronormative patriarchy, and neoliberal normativity and how such indexicality also imagines new queer worlding peopled by Hong Kong subjects. The tough women and social outcasts in Wong’s literary world daringly practice individual toughness, gender solidarity, and alternative masculinity. First, some introduction of the author is in order. Wong Bik-wan is one of the most prolific writers to have emerged in the late-1980s Hong Kong literary scene. Her writings often combine a startling attention to violence with an understated sensitivity to Hong Kong history and politics. In addition, many of the stories collected in Tenderness and Violence (溫柔與暴烈, 1994), Thereafter (其後, 1991), and Beautiful Sojourner (媚行者, 2000) are transnational in aspects, and they constitute what one might describe as the transnationalism of Hong Kong literature. Previous scholarship on Wong have compared her literary style with Eileen Chang and Lu Xun (N. Wong 2007), or they have illustrated the figurative language of dark violence more generally (Lau 1999). It is not my intention to revisit these well-trodden paths. Given the occasion of situating Wong’s work anew in light of her recent winning of the Fifth Dream of 135

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Red Chamber Award for her 2012 novel Children of Darkness, I will attempt to map various “queer worlding” of Hong Kong that Wong literalizes with regard to the politics of toughness, gender solidarity, and materialist critique. Since Wong has explicitly written that Children of Darkness can be juxtaposed retrospectively with her 1999 feminist classic Portraits of Martyred Women (Portraits hereafter), it makes much sense to use the former work as a way to scrutinize some of the queer textual representations and social critiques that emerge from the latter. Specifically, I argue that three crucial aspects constitute the “queer worlding of Hong Kong” in both novels. First, as reflected clearly in the titles of both novels, Wong displays a writerly sympathy toward Hong Kong subjects who are lie (烈). Through her astute appropriations of lie away from traditional Confucian meaning of modesty, piety, and female sacrifice – as preached in Biographies of Women (列女傳 by Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–76 ВСЕ)) – toward one of toughness, courage, and feminist rage, Wong illustrates the importance of toughness as both a personal and political means of resilience. In addition to the emphasis on toughness and street-smartness as modes of social survival, the politics of toughness also draws a parallel intersectionality with Wong’s textual complexity about queer gender. Here, unlike her other writings that focus on gender ambiguity (and there is a good dose of that in both novels), I argue that her unsung heroic women from three generations of Hong Kong history and her dark delinquents turned gang members corporeally embody the horizontal politics of queer gender solidarity. Specifically, in both texts, women and men from lower social strata bond together not due to some preconceived notions of gender, race, and class; their bonded solidarity is gendered within the very process of marginalization itself. Thus, both novels evince a queer solidarity that cannot be assumed in advance but must be engaged within the process of rethinking the very terms of sociality and embodiment. Finally, connecting the two thematic threads on toughness and gendered solidarity is Wong’s literary encounter with the sedimentation, burden, and force of History itself. History, rendered in the capital H, often effaces stories of the minor subject, the oppressed, the queer, and the vanished, as Walter Benjamin famously wrote in his critique of historicism and universal history (2007). Wong’s mode of queer materialism is much subtler and traffics in the realms of the minor, the quotidian, and the everyday. Indeed, Wong’s queer historical materialism turns to the “children of darkness,” whose voices embody Hong Kong temporality, place, and historiography within the crux of queer social differences.

Martyred Women, Unsung Heroic Men, and the Politics of Toughness The word lie usually connotes a quality of heroism, individual sacrifice for the emperor in Chinese dynastic eras, and those who are deemed fit for enshrinement. In Wong’s literary cartography, this normative notion of heroism receives a more humbling treatment. The martyred women and heroic men do not come from the intellectual class of Hong Kong, nor are they patriotic fighters who fought the Japanese invasion in the eve of the Asia-Pacific War. Rather, Wong resignifies lie through its identification with the lower rung of society. On the back cover of the 2004 edition of Portraits, the author describes her tough women in the following way: Born as Chinese women, suffering already becomes the memory of their lives. No matter which era they live in, Chinese women must always be more enduring, hardworking, and forgiving than their men. Those who cannot live already became the dust, and those who endure will survive through each succeeding eras. (B. Wong 2004) 136

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Portraits is a novel full of the trials and tribulations of lower-class women enduring violence and marginalization through gendered temporality. Take, for instance, the main protagonists Sung Heung and Lam Hing, who are the first wife and second wife/mistress of Little Moon. Sung sells cigarettes on the street for a living. Little Moon rarely returns home, and when he makes money, he spends it all on gambling. He even tells other folks that Sung is his “second wife” when he married Lam Hing. After Lam gave birth to a daughter, Little Moon, abandoning both wives, started womanizing a dancing girl in the Red Diamond Café. Lam, losing all hope for her life, decided to drown herself in the sea. The narrator describes Lam as “your grandmother”: Your grandmother Lam Hing jumps into the sea, kicking a little and swallowing mouthful of salty water. Help! Your grandmother holds onto the mooring and climbs up. She opens her mouth and breathes in deeply. This is not right! I can’t be this stupid. Lion doesn’t eat me, Japanese soldiers couldn’t kill me, I don’t want to die. (B. Wong 2004, 74) As David Wang elaborates on the toughness of the lienü, the novel demonstrates “the tenderness in violence: a desire to kill yourself first so that you will live again and a persistence of loving your life even though life is not worth living” (2002, 332). To be a tough Hong Kong woman during the Japanese invasion period is to be a self-reliant person, because men like Little Moon simply cannot be trusted for the sake of livelihood. Toughness here evokes a sense of resilience at the edge of hopelessness, well knowing that after the loss of hope, one still needs to survive. If toughness connotes a gendered temporality of survival in Portraits, it represents yet another layer of street-smartness in Children of Darkness. Toughness in the novel is radically disassociated from the normative meaning of being a “tough” guy. More creatively, Wong displays the actual imaginative, temporal, and spatial labor that goes into placing oneself in an unfamiliar social space, from the perspectives of those who are already abandoned by traditional kinship network. The protagonist, Chow Mei-naan, recalls his first encounter with his sworn brothers in the triad in the opening of the novel: “If I didn’t meet Ah Sheng at the Chatham Road Park, if I didn’t go biking with him and went to Wan Chai, I might just have become a professional Shanghai tailor like my father” (B. Wong 2012, 8). Subsequently, Chow, whom I prefer to call “Mr. Difficult” here, as indeed he endures a difficult life of drug addiction and criminalization, would befriend Ah Niu, another triad member who works in a bar in Wan Chai. But even before their initiations into the triad, known as the “dark society” in Hong Kong local language, Ah Sheng and Chow already learned how to be tough little boys through the street knowledge of making money. Specifically, they would go to the Tsim Sha Tsui harbor and open car doors for the British upper class. They often push other street kids onto the ground. Seeing that these street kids got into fight, a blond foreign woman gave each kid one dollar, which was a substantial amount back in the late 1950s, where the novel began. While some historical accounts construct the Kowloon Walled City as “often managed and policed by powerful triad societies – leading critics to contrast its lawlessness and crime with the law and order in the rest of Hong Kong” (Carroll 2007, 188), Wong’s novel displays how commercial centers like Tsim Sha Tsui and Wan Chai also contained social space of crime, delinquency, and marginalization. Besides socially indexing the diverse landscapes of crime and urban underclass, Wong’s novel on these “children of darkness” also represents toughness as an alternative mode of worlding, which replaces a dominant system of knowledge about model Hong Kong citizenship 137

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with one of bumming, drifting, and making do with hardship. Here, language, not only learning Cantonese for the Shanghai-born Chow but also placing oneself in a new linguistic social code of mafia gang system, becomes crucial for Chow’s and his sworn brothers’ survival in the new system. Sociolinguists Kingsley Bolton and Christopher Hutton even go so far as to claim that “triad language is a source of innovation for Hong Kong Cantonese” (1995, 159). Moreover, individual triad members’ immersion into the new linguistic system marks a “rebirth” into a new kinship system. “In the case of triad societies, initiation is traditionally accomplished through an elaborate ritual. This ritual is described metaphorically as death followed by rebirth, a renunciation of the kinship ties which constitute a person’s primary identity in society” (Bolton and Hutton 1995, 161). Language thus becomes a social means of reorienting oneself and toughening up. Specifically, during the first time Mr. Difficult met his mafia boss in a bar, he was introduced by Ah Niu. When the boss gave the newly inducted gang members money to buy new clothes to replace the primary school uniforms, Ah Niu asked the boss if he should buy one or two shirts and then said: “Thank you Big Brother.” When Ah Niu asks Mr. Difficult to repeat after him, the non-native Shanghai immigrant boy repeats: “Buy one shirt or two shirts!” instead of saying “thank you.” Seeing this Shanghai-accented Cantonese nonsense, all those in the bar burst into laughter. The mafia boss asks him: “Get smart. What bullshit is this. Are you a little Shanghainese?” (B. Wong 2012, 11). Everyone from then on calls Mr. Difficult a “Shanghai fellow.” This introductory moment in the novel marks the protagonist as regionally exterior to Hong Kong society. Yet his foreignness is politically specific to Hong Kong, given the high percentage of illegal mainland immigrants who fled south to Hong Kong – immigrants accounted for almost 2.5 million out of the 3 million increase in population during the 1950s–1980s period (W. Wang 2011). Besides indicating the accented and multilingual openness of Cantonese, this moment illustrates what Jing Tsu observes as the constructiveness of Chineseness and its correspondence between sound and script through the essentialist idea of “linguistic nativity” (2010, 3). But here, even within linguistic nativity, the novel depicts a Cantonese-centrism with a Sinophone twist as it shows that Mr. Difficult, precisely due to his awkward-sounding humorous Cantonese, is able to win the affection of the boss and is known as the “Shanghai fellow” throughout his risky career. From then on, Mr. Difficult learned that “opening the counter” (開檔) means taking marijuana, and that the local convenience stores merely serve as the production zones and commercial places for drug transactions. These are both linguistic and social means of learning how to be tough, how to be a lielao, for Chow.

Queer and Gendered Solidarity: Feminism and Humble Masculinity Deeply linked to the concept of toughness in Wong’s work is her consistent attempt to complicate what it means to be, or rather, to become, a woman, a man, or a gendered person across different times and places in Hong Kong. In Portraits, we see the complexity of gender, sexual subjectivity, and possible alliance of feminism through the multiplicity of subject positions. In the first section, titled “My Grandmother,” we have two contrasting female subjects, Sung Heung and Lam Hing, as mentioned earlier. Toward the end of their lives, when Little Moon had already died for many years, Lam would visit Sung, who is ten years older than her, in the hospital. The narrator describes: Your grandmother Sung Heung can no longer walk, she is sixty-year old and has broken her bone . . . your grandmother Lam Hing visits your grandmother Sung Heung, 138

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lights a cigarette for her . . . your grandmother Lam Hing takes out moisturizer from her black handbag and rubs Sung Heung’s hand for her. The skin of Sung’s arm is dry like an atlas. (B. Wong 2004, 70) Anyone who first read Portraits might indeed be frustrated by the constant self-referential second-person narration of “your grandmother,” only to be reminded that you, the reader, has two grandmothers. By calling these two older Hong Kong women who grew up in the 1930s and lived through World War II as “your grandmother,” Wong Bik-wan creates a nonlinear feminist worlding. The novel does not have a first-person narrator, nor is it a third-person omniscient voice. Calling “your grandmother” thus charges the reader with the ethical responsibility of owning, however partially, this part of Hong Kong history as the reader’s history as well. In other words, women’s subjectivity constitutes a queer feminist temporalization across the author, the narrator, and the reader. This scene of two older women caring for each other, despite the fact that they both used to fight over the same husband, also illustrates the possibility of women’s alliance within the heteronormativity of patriarchal marriage. Female solidarity exudes a force that transcends different temporality of Hong Kong politics, and it is specific to each era as well. Simply put, Wong’s novel of tough women both deconstructs a singular narrative of women’s story across Hong Kong history as well as creates the possibility of multiple women consciousness within a specific epoch. In other words, feminism provides a lens onto how “temporalization constitutes the openness of a world, the opening that is world” (Cheah 2016, 9). Specifically, as the novel progresses toward the 1960s era of political riots, leftism, and the rise of working-class women culture, it imagines a peculiar queer solidarity. In the second segment of the novel, called “My Mother,” the narrator centers on two women, called Ngan Ji (銀枝) and Daai Hei (帶喜), which respectively means “silver bough” and “bring happiness” or “bring fertility.” Working in a textile factory as part of the rising light manufacturing industry that contributes to the modernization of 1950–1970s Hong Kong (Salaff 1995), these two young female workers commiserate during work time and carry out sisterly romance during the night. The narrator describes: One night, as they walk home after watching a Hollywood film, Daai Hei impersonates the male character in the film and tells Ngan Ji: ‘I love you, I will love you my whole life.’ Your mother Ngan Ji laughs: We will marry men eventually. Daai Hei wholeheartedly promises: even after marriage, I will still love you . . . the two of them hold their hands together. If there is no man in this world, how wonderful would it be? (B. Wong 2004, 120) Of course, this is not the first time that Wong Bik-wan experiments with lesbian desire. Her 1994 short story “She Is a Woman, I am Also a Woman” is in fact one of the earliest Hong Kong lesbian stories ever written that thematizes queer desire in the capitalist city (A. Wong 2014). Daai Hei would later cross-dress into masculine attire, hold workers’ strike on the street, and drop fake bombs on the road during the 1967 Leftist Riots. Here, female solidarity is politicized into a “revolution plus queer love” story, rewriting the classic “revolution plus love” literary formula in Republican China as well (Liu 2003). Children of Darkness in many ways inherits the gendered politics of solidarity from Portraits, but in this later work, Wong significantly steers away from her well-known feminist concerns toward an exploration of what I call the “humble masculinity” of the lowest class of 139

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Hong Kong men, namely, drug addicts, “black society” triad members, and delinquent youth. The main character, Mr. Difficult, first entered into a correctional facility as a delinquent at the age of 14, only to commit more crimes and re-enter into the prison system more than one can count in the story. However, the novel is more than a usual account of social criminality or what social work scholar T. Wing Lo calls the “triadization of youth” – it narrates how lower-class social subjects make room for survival in a city where no one wants them to exist (Lo 2012). Therefore, the novel places much emphasis on ephemeral friendship and horizontal masculine solidarity. For instance, Mr. Difficult describes how a more senior brother in his former mafia gang turned poor. The loss of glory of the older Brother Chau/Qiu evokes a sense of obligated generosity in him. Despite Pig-head Lady’s refusal to give Brother Qiu heroine powder, Chow pays the drug for him. Pig-head Lady laments, “You are lucky, your boss couldn’t take care of you and now your younger brother cares for you” (B. Wong 2012, 34). Besides these moments of horizontal generosity and solidarity, the novel also depicts an expansive global worlding of interracial proximity within the space of the prison. Across the many prison sites that the novel touches on, from Stanley Prison, Victoria Prison, to Lai Chi Kok Reception Centre, different scenes of racial exchanges and regulations can be observed. For instance, Chow describes how in Victoria Prison, leftist prisoners captured from the 1967 Riots are tortured till blood is bleeding from their heads (B. Wong 2012, 65). In the Lai Chi Kok correctional facility, there are “white foreigners and Indians, and even white Indians. There are Blacks, Vietnamese, and Hunan people, just like the United Nations.” Of course, by marking some prisoners as “white” Indians, Wong, the author, is telling the history of racial categorization that is central to the administration of colonial modernity in Hong Kong (Erni and Leung 2014). Beyond this institutional and socially enforced solidarity and comradeship among the prisoners, the novel is similar to Portraits in the way that it queers normative masculine brotherhood itself. Specifically, a character named Ah Kiu/Ah Giu is introduced to the reader as someone who was stalking Mr. Difficult when our protagonist tried to pickpocket from American Navy men who are drunk at night in Wan Chai. While the feminine boy first introduces “himself” as Ah Kiu to Mr. Difficult, as the story unfolds, we learn that “he” is in fact a girl who would later have sex with Mr. Difficult and follow his drug-addicting lifestyle for a while. From these textual examples of how solidarity is formed and practiced, it becomes evident that Children of Darkness narrates a form of humble masculinity that is horizontal, generous, and even alternatively queer.

Toward a Queer Materialist Critique of the Neoliberal Present Interlocking the politics of toughness, feminism, and humble masculinity is the grounded critique of how Hong Kong rapidly transforms from a British colonial modernizing city into a neoliberal region. While Portraits narrates the newer generation of young college women who come under the age of postcolonial transition and “one country, two systems” as wild, uninhibited by patriarchal morality, and somewhat lost in the postmodern city, the neoliberal present in Children of Darkness bespeaks a kind of social urgency. The historical present in Children of Darkness is one that requires a critical reappraisal of neoliberalism as both a mode of spatial regulation and a regime of devaluation and dehumanization. For example, in Portraits, the third section of the novel is called “You.” This is the part that most immediately places the reader in the present, the late 1990s, when the novel was published. Unlike the two previous generations of “martyred women” who either lived under the turbulence of war in the 1930–1940s or worked in low-wage factory jobs, the postmodern,

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postcolonial generation is apparently free but lost any idealism and political hope for the future. The protagonist, Li Wan Er/Lee Maan-yi, tells the dilemma of her generation of Hong Kong women: My mother said, in my grandmother’s generation, girls didn’t go to school and had to carry the mud for farming, working days and nights and providing sex for their men with no choice. In my mother’s generation, without finishing primary school most women went to work in manufacturing factories. If you were not a virgin anymore, no man would want you. Who would have thought that in my generation, women are free as birds, flying anywhere as you wish and making and spending your own money? (B. Wong 2004, 259) Indeed, throughout the last part of the novel, the lienü, tough woman, does not stand for individual resilience under wartime, leftist idealism, or queer-gendered solidarity but one of postmodern capitalist freedom. This loss of the female self in the postcolonial handover moment is also deeply symptomatic of what Ackbar Abbas terms the deja disparu in the politics of disappearance, which is “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been” (1997, 25). While in Portraits Wong Bik-wan fully captures the feeling of melancholia, loss of idealism, and anxiety that characterizes the symptoms of Hong Kong postcoloniality, in Children of Darkness, the reader can detect a more grounded temporality and spatiality of neoliberalism in postcolonial Hong Kong. In other words, the novel positions the reader to do the critical work of moving beyond postcolonial conundrum and seeing anew the social realities that are facing Hong Kong people. First, a few remarks on neoliberalism and its spatial governmentality in Hong Kong are in order. Neoliberalism as a form of governmentality in late liberal society functions through what Nikolas Rose terms “governing at the distance”: “It does not seek to govern through ‘society,’ but through the regulated choices of individual citizens, now construed as subjects of choices and aspirations to self-actualization and self-fulfilment” (1996, 41). More recently, Aihwa Ong argues that neoliberalism in “nondemocratic,” authoritarian, yet capitalist states in East and Southeast Asia often operates through two regimes of “neoliberalism with exception” and “exceptions to neoliberalism.” These modes constitute neoliberalism as exception because government-managed calculative rationality and policy encourage safety and prosperity for the middle and upper class on the one hand while denying certain marginalized population access to the benefits that capitalism generates on the other hand. Neoliberalism in a place like post-handover Hong Kong hinges on “the interplay among technologies of governing and of disciplining, of inclusion and exclusion, of giving value and denying value to human conduct” (Ong 2006, 5). While Ong draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben to demonstrate the extent to which the state of exception is not limited to wartimes and modern racism but in fact has been absorbed into the logics of late capitalism in a place like Hong Kong (Agamben 2005), the daily scenes of “exception,” social marginalization, and urban subalternity are much more quotidian, immediate, and brutal. For instance, in October 2015, a 50-something-year old woman died in a 24-hour McDonald’s located in Ping Shek Estate, while bystanders only discovered her death hours later (Ming Pao 2015). This incident drew public attention to the phenomenon of “McDonald’s refugee” in Hong Kong, meaning, those low-income dwellers, single elders,

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and homeless people who have no home to go and rely on “affordable” public spaces like McDonald’s. These quotidian scenes of urban poverty and subalternity should not be seen as merely “social background” that exists “outside” of literary texts; instead, literature might be more rigorously theorized as what I term “social indexing,” where the diverse lifeworlds of the social and the historical are metaphorically sedimented and formalized. Wong Bik-wan’s Children of Darkness precisely indexes various modes of neoliberal marginalization in the present. The present, as a temporal marker, is folded into the ways that capitalism marks certain subjects as normative and others as not even fully human. Children of Darkness demonstrates how the colonial modernity and modernizing process of Hong Kong from the 1960s through the present depends on hierarchal mapping of social space, including the demonization of social outcast. For instance, when Mr. Difficult is released from the prison and lacks his previous connection to sell drugs, he turns to the petty survival strategy of theft, especially targeting those drunk American sailors visiting the Wan Chai district. When the sailors are all drunk and passed out, three or more $10 US bills would slip out of their wallets. As Mr. Difficult gets addicted to this practice, which parallels his drug addiction as well, he is caught by the police one day even before he carries out the misdeed. The narrator/criminal explains to the reader that this is because an American officer who oversees the sailors is looking from afar; thus, the Hong Kong police must do something to show respect and prove that the colonial Hong Kong police is efficient too (B. Wong 2012, 32). Here, the local police, representing British colonialism, is ideologically and materially complicit with the US empire and its overarching influence in Cold War Asia. Thus, the Hong Kong criminal subaltern is trafficked within multiple regimes of power and discipline, akin to what Law Wing Sang terms “collaborative colonial power” (2009). Finally, the novel constructs a worldliness of the present in which Mr. Difficult still finds it hard to belong to Hong Kong, the postcolonial region that has witnessed one of the most severe income inequality around the world. While the government has raised the minimum wage to $32.5 as of 2014, according to the well-known sociologist Paul Yip, “[o]verall, monthly median earnings have only increased by 30% over the last 10 years, while Hong Kong’s GDP has jumped 60%. Although the city’s economy has grown, such economic improvement doesn’t benefit the majority of the people” (Yan 2014). Wong’s novel can be read as a literary social indexing, measuring who is deemed worthy to belong in postcolonial Hong Kong, a cityregion that is increasingly driven by economic polarity, mainlandization, and spatial exclusion via real estate inflation and speculation. Mr. Difficult, narrating in the contemporary moment, tells of an incident when he was getting high at midnight in a football playground, only to have his body brushed over by the broom of a janitor (B. Wong 2012, 131). Obviously, even the working-class street sweeper does not see him as normal or human. What emerges in the comparison of Wong’s earlier work Portraits of Martyred Women and her recent novel Children of Darkness is less the parallel worldview of Hong Kong history but more its condensation, materialization, and critical reckoning in literary worldliness. While both novels pay close attention to the “discrepant spatialities and disjunctive temporalities” across Hong Kong’s colonial modernity and its postcolonial present (Shih 2015, 434), they also suggest ways of activating individual toughness, gendered solidarity, and humble masculinity. In its manifold queer materialist interventions, Children of Darkness’s trajectory of subalternity, dehumanization, and bold survival constitutes a force of queer worlding. Wong Bik-wan’s works demonstrate that Hong Kong queer Sinophone literature can reworld the colonial past and the neoliberal present.

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Note 1 I have significantly revised my arguments in A. Wong (2016) through the concept of “queer worlding” for this chapter.

References Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bolton, Kingsley, and Christopher Hutton. 1995. “Bad and Banned Language: Triad Secret Societies, the Censorship of the Cantonese Vernacular, and Colonial Language Policy in Hong Kong.” Language in Society 24, no. 2: 159–86. Carroll, John M. 2007. A Concise History of Hong Kong. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Chow, Rey. 1992. “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s.” Diaspora 2, no. 2: 151–70. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature?. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Erni, John Nguyet, and Lisa Yuk-ming Leung. 2014. Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lau, Joseph. 1999. “The ‘Little Woman’ as Exorcist: Notes on the Fiction of Huang Biyun.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, no. 2: 149–63. Law, Wing Sang. 2009. Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Liu, Jianmei. 2003. Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lo, T. Wing. 2012. “Traidization of Youth Gangs in Hong Kong.” British Journal of Criminology 52, no. 3: 556–76. Ming Pao 明報. 2015. “Guoye changke Maidanglao cusi jing diaocha qijian shike ruchang jincan” 過夜常 客麥當勞猝死 警調查期間食客如常進餐 (Regular Homeless Died at McDonald’s, Customers Keep Eating While the Police Conducted an Investigation). Last modified October 4, 2015. Accessed July 1, 2021. http://news.mingpao.com/pns/dailynews/web_tc/article/20151004/s00002/1443894527274. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1996. “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies.” In Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, edited by Andrew Barry, et al., 37–64. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Salaff, Janet W. 1995. Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in the Family? New York: Columbia University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2004. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA 119, no. 1: 16–30. Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2015. “World Studies and Relational Comparison.” PMLA 130, no. 2: 430–8. Tsu, Jing. 2010. Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wang, David Der-wei 王德威. 2002. Kua shiji fenghua: dangdai xiaoshuo 20 jia 跨世紀風華: 當代小 說20家 (Splendor across Centuries: 20 Contemporary Writers). Taipei: Rye Field. Wang, Wen-Chun 王文君. 2011. “Da taogang de zhenhan yu fansi” 《大逃港》的震撼與反思 (Shock and Reflection on The Great Exile to Hong Kong). Xinjiyuan 新紀元 (Epoch Weekly). Last modified August 4, 2011. Accessed July 1, 2021. www.epochweekly.com/b5/237/9702p2.htm. Wong, Alvin Ka Hin. 2014. “Queer Sinophone Studies as Anti-Capitalist Critique: Mapping Queer Kinship in the Work of Chen Ran and Wong Bik-wan.” In Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, 109–29. New York: Routledge.

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Alvin K. Wong Wong, Alvin Ka Hin. 黃家軒. 2016. “Huang Biyun bixia de Xianggang yu tu” 黃碧雲筆下的香港輿圖 (Wong Bik-wan’s Cartographies of Hong Kong). In Diwujie Hongloumeng jiang pinglun ji: Huang Biyun Lielao zhuan 第五屆紅樓夢獎評論集: 黃碧雲《烈佬傳》 (A Critical Companion to the Fifth Dream of the Red Chamber Award: Wong Bik-wan’s Children of Darkness), edited by Lo Kwai Cheung 羅貴祥, 79–95. Hong Kong: Cosmos Books. Wong, Bik-wan 黃碧雲. 2004. Lienü tu 烈女圖 (Portraits of Martyred Women). Hong Kong: Cosmos Books. Wong, Bik-wan 黃碧雲. 2012. Lielao zhuan 烈佬傳 (Children of Darkness). Hong Kong: Cosmos Books. Wong, Nim Yan 黃念欣. 2007. Wanqi fengge: Xianggang nü zuojia sanlun 晚期風格: 香港女作家三論 (Late Style: Discourses on Three Hong Kong Women Writers). Hong Kong: Cosmos Books. Yan, Sophia. 2014. “Hong Kong’s Growing Wealth Gap Fuels Protests.” CNN. Last modified November 7, 2014. Accessed July 8, 2021. http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/06/news/economy/hong-kong-incomeinequality. Zhang, Yingjin. 2015. “Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17, no. 1: online. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/2/.

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12 TAIWANESE LITERATURE IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Kuei-fen Chiu

New Trends in Taiwanese Literature This chapter tries to identify some new features and trends of Taiwanese literature in the early twenty-first century.1 While Taiwanese literature in the late twentieth century can be seen to be driven by the quest for postcolonial subjectivity, Taiwanese literature in the early twenty-first century takes up a cosmopolitan outlook as writers face the daunting challenge of drastically dwindled literary readership in the domestic market and abroad. I discuss three features in recent works of Taiwanese literature, particularly those by millennial writers who began to claim critical attention after 2000. First of all, there is a tendency to appropriate elements of transnational popular culture, for example, the Japanese Yuri tradition, fantasy, time travel, ACG (animation, comics, and games), and global blockbuster movies (such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings) as the writers attempt to reinvent Taiwanese literature. Secondly, many millennial writers make it a point to write Taiwanese literature and writers into their works. Engaging in constructive dialogues with their predecessors, they highlight the importance of Taiwanese literature as a valuable literary capital. This creative stance is in sharp contrast to their predecessors. Thirdly, the reclaiming of the Japanese colonial legacy enacts a redefinition of Taiwanese literary tradition. In the hands of millennial writers, creative writing is exercised as a kind of mnemotechnics, reshaping Taiwanese historical consciousness and redefining Taiwanese literature through archivization. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of these features from the vantage point of world literature studies.

The Emergence of “Taiwanese Literature” as a Concept Although the concept of “literature” was introduced to Taiwan by Chinese literati in the seventh century, the concept of “Taiwanese literature” as a distinct category of literary production with a literary history of its own and a set of canonical texts worthy of transmission and propagation only gradually took shape after the lifting of martial law in 1987. The reason is simple. As Jan Assmann points out, the formation of cultural memory requires institutions of preservation and re-embodiments, which enable collective memory to be transformed into cultural memory (2008). Institutionalized mnemotechnics that shape a historical consciousness of Taiwanese literature as part of Taiwan’s cultural heritage did not exist in Taiwan during the 145

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martial law period. Very few Taiwanese literary texts were included in the pedagogical design in Taiwan from the primary to the graduate level. The 1990s witnessed the academic institutionalization of Taiwanese literature as an independent pedagogical field in Taiwan. The first department of Taiwanese literature was set up in 1997 in a private university. Since then, about 18 departments or graduate institutes of Taiwanese literature have appeared in Taiwan; 15 of them are state-funded. Arguably, the literary tradition of Taiwanese literature only came into being in the 1990s, when Taiwanese literature began to be taught, studied, and propagated through courses devoted to Taiwanese literature in the universities. In addition, the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature was established in 1997. It has also been working as part of the new institutionalized mnemonic structure to assure the archival preservation, interpretation, repetition, reproduction, and promotion of Taiwanese literature. In a sense, the lifting of martial law created what Jacques Derrida calls an “archive fever” (1995) in Taiwan, which addressed the forgetfulness and repression of certain dimensions of Taiwanese historical memories. The emergence of the concept of Taiwanese literature can be understood as part of this archive fever – a desire to change the mnemonic economy of literary memory cum cultural memory in Taiwan. As a result of the lifting of martial law, Taiwanese literature in the last decade exhibits a great interest in the issues of identity and historical memory. The woman writer Li Ang’s 李昂 (b. 1952) The Lost Garden (1991, 2015), the indigenous writer Walis Nokan’s award-winning poem “He Makes Another Survey” (1996), and the second-generation mainlander writer Zhu Tianxin’s “Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound” (1992) are illustrative examples. Compared to The Butcher’s Wife (1983), which established Li Ang as an advocator of women’s rights in the early 1980s with its exclusive focus on gender oppression, The Lost Garden is a historical novel that interweaves gender politics and the question of national identity with a highlight on the suppressed historical memory of the White Terror period under KMT’s rule. Walis Nokan’s poem recalls the memory of Inō Kanori (1986–1935), a Japanese anthropologist known for his contribution to the study of Taiwanese indigenous people in the colonial period, to portray the oppression of Taiwanese indigenous people in contemporary Taiwan. Zhu’s work, as Hillenbrand’s (2006) insightful study demonstrates, evokes the memory of the military village to redefine mainland people in Taiwan as quasi-colonized rather than colonizers. In Hillenbrand’s view, the Taiwanese literary field in the late twentieth century was populated by many different allegories of many different pasts. They suggest that “new kinds of subjectivity can be imagined through the evocation of lost, hidden, or taboo pasts” (2006, 658). Identity literature dominated the first decade of the post–martial law period. The aforementioned works exemplify to what extent Taiwanese literature at that time played on the theme of the postcolonial search for Taiwanese subjectivity and how the intervention of postmodernism in this search helped open up the possibilities for a more inclusive multiethnic Taiwan (Hillenbrand 2006, 648). Concepts such as resistance, oppression, exploitation, and intervention are instrumental in understanding Taiwanese literature in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Cosmopolitan Taiwanese Literature in the New Century If Taiwanese literature in the last decades of the twentieth century is characterized by the postcolonial quest for Taiwanese subjectivity, it takes on a cosmopolitan outlook after the turn of the new century. The paradigm shift in the recent development of indigenous literature since 2000 is particularly telling. I argue elsewhere that the development of Taiwan’s indigenous literature can be divided into two stages: the first is from 1984 to 2000, and the second 146

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begins roughly with the turn of the new century (Chen and Chiu 2021). Indigenous literature in the first stage is marked by the paradigm of indigenism as indigenous writers foreground the notion of homecoming, emphasizing the importance of roots-searching, reclaiming dying indigenous cultural practices, and pitting the indigenous identity against oppressive, external dominant culture (Chiu 2009; Huang 2013). Thus, in his The Eternal Tribe (1990) and The Call of Wilderness (1992), Walis Nokan (b. 1961, Atayal tribe) actively intervenes in the debates on the issues of national parks, Christian churches, the market economy, and tourism in indigenous villages. Liglav A-wu (b. 1969, Paiwan tribe) speaks as an indigenous feminist writer in Who Will Wear the Beautiful Clothes I Weave? (1996) and The Red-lipped Vuvu (1997). Syaman Rapongan (b. 1957, Tao tribe) portrays how he returns to his tribal village in Orchid Island and learns to be a true Tao man by relearning all the knowledge and skills associated with Tao culture. Arguably, a shift from the paradigm of indigenism to cosmopolitanism takes place in indigenous literature after 2000 (Chen and Chiu 2021). As noted, the term “cosmopolitanism” may mean different things in different contexts. It may refer to the appreciation of the differences among different groups, but it can also be used to suggest individual attitude, ethical orientation, or a condition of collective life (Calhoun 2008, 429). In the recent works of oldergeneration indigenous writers, cosmopolitanism suggests a subjective consciousness of being connected with other social groups and the practice of expressing that interconnectedness. For example, Walis Nokan develops a cross-cultural perspective in his recent works, such as War Cruelties (2014) and Readings in Seven Days (2016), by connecting the victimization of Taiwanese indigenous people to that of contemporary Palestinian refugees and native Americans in the fifteenth century. In Floating Dreams in the Ocean (2014), Syaman Rapongan also tries to map a cross-cultural indigenous network by showing how the protagonist travels to South Pacific islands (Chen and Chiu 2021). In the hands of emergent indigenous writers who began to attract critical attention after 2000, however, cosmopolitanism suggests an openness to cultural resources in the outside world. Instead of portraying external cultural forces and value systems as oppressive power to be rejected, as most indigenous writers did in the late twentieth century, Badai (b. 1962, Buyuma tribe), Domas (b. 1972, Atayal tribe), and Neqou Soqluman (1975, Bunun tribe) draw upon global blockbuster film series like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings to tell stories about indigenous people in Taiwan. They show a great interest in global literary modes and the devices of popular culture, such as magical realism, fantasy, and time travel. Badai’s The Journey of a Witch (2014) is a case in point. This novel uses the device of time travel to tell the story of how a 15-year-old indigenous young girl answers her calling to be a Beinan witch. It borrows many elements from mainstream popular culture. Neqou Soqluman draws heavily upon the legends, customs, and ancient songs of the Bunun tribe to tell a fantastic story of the battle between the indigenous protagonist and evil spirits in The Legend of Tongku Saveq (2008). Chen and I conclude in our discussion of contemporary indigenous literature: “While [emergent indigenous writers] continue to take indigenous culture and history as their main subjects, they also draw upon cultural resources in the outside world in their search for new forms of telling indigenous stories” (2021, 65). The theme of “roots-searching” continues in indigenous literature after 2000, but there is an interesting stylistic change as the notion of postcolonial resistance is replaced by a cosmopolitan gesture of openness to a larger world. This version of cosmopolitanism in connection with global or transnational popular culture also finds expression in the works of many millennial ethnic Han writers in Taiwan. Anecdotes of a Magnificent Island: The Key (2017), a collection of five short stories by five prominent millennial writers, serves as an illustrative example. Anecdotes is a joint effort of five writers 147

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born in the 1980s: He Jingyao 何敬堯 (b. 1985), Yang Shuangzi 楊双子 (b. 1984), Chen Youjin 陳又津 (b. 1986), Xiaoxiang Shen 瀟湘神 (b. 1982), and Sheng Haowei 盛浩偉 (b. 1988). He Jingya’s preface to Anecdotes reveals that the whole publishing project takes the Japanese popular manga Bungo Stray Dogs 文豪野犬as a model, and the idea of its “relay” form also comes from a publishing project launched by the Japanese magazine Faust 浮士德. Except for Sheng Haowei’s “Flowers in the Mirror” (鏡裡繁花), which identifies itself as literary fiction, all the other four stories in the collection are genre fiction closely connected with Japanese popular literature, including Japanese monster literature, Japanese Yuri 百合literature, Japanese BL (boys’ love) literature, and Japanese fantasy literature. Like emergent indigenous writers, millennial writers of Han ethnicity show a great interest in popular culture. Their works blur the boundary between literary fiction and genre fiction. This turn to popular literature should be understood within the context of a rapidly changing literary environment. Unlike their predecessors, who started writing careers at a time when literature still worked as a powerful medium to intervene in social debates, millennial writers find themselves writing in a sociocultural milieu in which literature no longer plays the critical role as it used to do. Literary supplements in major, widely circulated newspapers, such as the China Times and The United Daily, served for decades in Taiwan as an important venue for writers to interact with the social public and to exercise their influence. They disappeared one by one in the 1990s. The publication and sales of literary works continue to drop annually; the literary market has dwindled dramatically (National Central Library 2019, 9–10). Moreover, as consumers of cultural products, millennial writers inhabit a world saturated with popular fan culture. They read Japanese manga, play video games, watch Japanese animations and Hollywood movies. Popular culture is not only part of their daily life; it also provides important resources for their creative works. In his preface to Anecdotes (He et al. 2017, 7–17), He Jingyao gives abundant examples to show how, in Japan, the strategic appropriation of popular elements through book cover designs and literary exhibitions boosts the sales of literary works and attracts a younger audience to Japanese literature. The turn to popular literature reflects the increasingly significant role of popular culture in the contemporary Taiwanese literary environment and its great impact on writers who find literature an endangered species. It is often adopted as a strategy to reinvent Taiwanese literature and widen its readership.

Millennial Writers and Taiwanese Literature For readers familiar with Taiwanese literature, Anecdotes is particularly interesting in that all the five authors make it a point to refer to Taiwanese literature and write Taiwanese writers into their stories. He Jingyao, the convener of the Anecdotes project, points out in the preface that the two key words of the book title are associated with two prominent writers in colonial Taiwan. The term “magnificent island” evokes the memory of the Japanese writer Mitsuru Nishikawa 西川滿 (1908–1999) – an extremely influential literary figure in colonial Taiwan. He coined the term “magnificent island” for Taiwan. The other key word, “key,” comes from an anecdote about the Taiwanese writer Lu Heruo 呂赫若 (1914–1950), who was said to have entrusted the Taiwanese artist Guo Xuehu 郭雪湖 (1908–2012) with a bunch of keys before he fled from the political prosecution of KMT. Both Mitsuru Nishikawa and Lu Heruo appear in Anecdotes as fictional characters. This practice of referring to Taiwanese writers and their works or historical anecdotes marks the literary writing of many millennial ethnic Han writers. Another two examples are The Blooming Season series by the writer Yang Shuangzi, and 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature: 1900–2000, a collection of 101 stories about Taiwan writers and literary phenomena from the 148

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colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Yang’s The Blooming Season series borrows the title from a short story of Yang Qianhe 楊千鶴 (1920–2011), a Taiwanese woman writer born in the colonial period. The original version of “The Blooming Season” was written in Japanese and published by Yang Qianhe in 1942. It portrays how three young girls struggle to maintain their sisterly tie after they graduate from high school. Acknowledging the influence of Yang Qianhe and paying homage to her, Yang Shuangzi turns the story of sisterhood in the original version into a Yuri story – a subgenre of contemporary ACG (animations, comics, and games) fan culture (迷文化). Yuri literature, originated in Japan, takes the romance relationship between girls as its main subject. Yang Shaungzi’s Yuri version of “The Blooming Season” tells the story from the perspective of a Japanese girl, Hatsune, who discovers by accident the unusually close relationship between two of her classmates – Sakiko, also a Japanese, but of a noble lineage, and Yukiko, a Taiwanese from a rich local Taiwanese family. Yang Shuangzi published the short story “The Blooming Season” in 2015, which won her an award in a local literary competition, and developed it further into a historical novel with the same title in 2017. In this fiction series, she portrays the daily life of women in the colonial period in minute detail. Building on interesting details ranging from Japanese girls’ magazines popular among high school students in colonial Taiwan to the prices for household items such as the newly invented refrigerators, Yang mixes Japanese terms in common use in the Japanese Showa period with the Chinese language in her narratives to evoke the cultural zeitgeist of the Japanese colonial period. For Yang Shaungzi, the fiction series has three objectives. First of all, it aims to create a historical consciousness that acknowledges the importance of the Japanese colonial legacy in the shaping of Taiwanese culture. Secondly, by rewriting the story of the same title by a Taiwanese woman writer, Yang Shuangzi identifies herself as an heir to a Taiwanese literary tradition that has been gradually taking shape after the lifting of martial law. As I discuss elsewhere (Chiu 2021), her act of inheriting should be interpreted in Derridean terms, which relaunches cultural heritage “otherwise” so as to keep it alive (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004). The Blooming Season series sets her in a critical dialogue as well as a competition with her literary mother, Yang Qianhe. Finally, linking the series to contemporary ACG culture implies a critique of the traditional literary hierarchy that devalues popular fiction. These three objectives are also shared by the authors of Anecdotes. Like The Blooming Season series, Anecdotes tells stories about colonial Taiwan, pays tribute to Taiwanese literature by transforming important writers in the colonial period into fictional characters, and makes use of popular literature elements. 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature (S. Li et al. 2018), a joint effort involving 12 millennial writers as coauthors, shares with the aforementioned works the same objectives, though the form it adopts is different from them. In terms of structure, this collection of 101 stories maps the trajectory of the development of Taiwanese literature in the twentieth century in chronological order. Each story is devoted to either a writer, a literary movement, a specific literary genre, or a literary community that has played a significant role in the shaping of twentiethcentury Taiwanese literature. Its narrative structure is modeled on the Nobel Prize Laureate Gunter Grass’s My Century. Theodore Ziolkowsk remarks that in this book, “Grass announces his intention to reclaim the whole twentieth century in an imaginative coup” (Ziolkowsk 2015). The 12 millennial Taiwan writers are trying to do something similar to reclaim the whole twentieth-century Taiwanese literature in 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature. While The Blooming Season series and Anecdotes take inspiration from Japanese culture, 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature looks toward Western literature in its search for a model for emulation. It is noteworthy that 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature also takes pains to reclaim the Japanese colonial legacy. In addition to Taiwanese writers whose contributions have been 149

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recognized in acclaimed histories and anthologies of Taiwanese literature published after 1987, 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature pays special attention to less-known and less-studied writers. Japanese writers in the colonial period occupy a significant place in this collection. For example, the year 1901 is devoted to the Japanese writer Nakamura Okei中村櫻溪 (1852– 1921), who left a significant corpus of travelogue about Taiwan during his stay in Taiwan as a teacher from 1899 to 1907. The year 1904 tells the story of how the Japanese Sinologist Momiyama Isyou 籾山衣洲 (1855–1919) created one of the most important classical Chineselanguage poetry societies in Taipei. Mitsuru Nishikawa, an important character in Anecdotes, is the protagonist of the story for the year 1910 – the year he came to Taiwan to become eventually one of the most influential literary figures in colonial Taiwan. The inclusion of Japanese writers in the colonial period has intriguing implications for the definition of Taiwanese literature and the construction of its historical narrative. These Japanese writers are scarcely mentioned in extant histories of Taiwanese literature, which implies a conceptualization of Taiwanese literary history without taking into account the contribution of Japanese writers in colonial Taiwan. Taiwanese literature is thereby defined as literary works written by Taiwanese writers only. The attention paid to Japanese writers in this collection suggests a new historical perspective and a new narrative of Taiwanese literary history. Highlighting the importance of the Japanese colonial legacy in the shaping of the Taiwanese literary tradition, this chronological account of Taiwanese literature in the twentieth century brings Japanese writers in colonial times into its purview. Like The Blooming Season series and Anecdotes, 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature also questions the literary hierarchy that belittles popular literature. This critique is expressed through the genealogical accounts of Taiwanese popular literature. For example, the year 1909, titled as “Taiwanese CSI One Hundred Years Ago” (百年前的臺灣CSI), traces the roots of Taiwan’s detective fiction back to a work on a murder case in Taipei published by a Japanese writer in Japanese-language newspapers in Taiwan in 1899. It preceded the detective works in the classical Chinese language by the Taiwanese writer Li Yitao 李逸濤 (1876–1922) that began to appear in Taiwan in 1909. The year 1921 probes into the roots of Taiwanese “monster literature” 妖怪文學. It focuses on the works on Taiwanese folktales by the Han ethnic Lian Heng 連橫 (1878–1936) and those by the Japanese court interpreter Kataoka Iwao 片岡巖 (1876–?). The year 1933, titled “The Ukiyo-e of Taipei City in Japanese Colonial Times,” introduces a popular fictional work by a Taiwanese writer. This love story paints a picture of metropolitan Taipei City under the impact of colonial modernity. By including popular literature in this archival project of Taiwanese literature, 100 Years of Taiwanese Literature redefines Taiwanese literature by granting popular literature an important position in Taiwanese literary tradition.

Taiwanese Literature as a Capital An examination of the shared interests and objectives of these new generation writers suggests that they are trying to make Taiwanese literary tradition visible and identifying Taiwanese literature as a valuable inheritance. This interest in Taiwanese literature certainly continues the aforementioned archive fever in the post–martial law period. By writing about Taiwanese literature, millennial writers draw attention to literary production as a medium of remembering, recollecting, and recirculating the works of their predecessors. They are consciously engaged in the act of creating the afterlives of Taiwanese literature. If intertextuality, rewriting, intermediality, and remediation are key to the afterlives of literature (Erll 2011), millennial writers’ rewriting and references to Taiwanese writers and their works certainly point to a large-scaled project of creating the afterlives of Taiwanese literature. 150

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This creative stance is remarkably different from what we find in Taiwanese literature in the twentieth century. The names of Western, Japanese, and Chinese writers populate the Taiwanese literary writings in the last century, but the names of Taiwanese writers are scarcely mentioned. The history of Taiwanese literature is a history of foreign patrimonies. For example, Lai He 賴和 (1894–1943), often hailed as the father of Taiwanese new literature, was said to be inspired by the Chinese writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936). The poets of Le Moulin poetry society (風車詩社) in the 1930s openly acknowledged their debt to French surrealist poets, such as André Breton and Jean Cocteau, as well as Japanese modernist writers, particularly Nishiwaki Junzaburō. Taiwanese modernist writers who launched the Taiwanese modernist movement in the 1960s constantly referred to Western modernist writers, such as Henry James and William Faulkner, as their models for emulation. It is well-known that Zhang Dachun 張大春 (b. 1957), a much-acclaimed writer who dominated the Taiwanese literary scene in the 1980s, borrowed heavily from the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez and experimented with magical realism in his works. The link between Taiwan’s nature-writing and Western naturewriting is quite obvious in the works of nature writers like Liu Kexiang 劉克襄 (b. 1957) and Wu Ming-yi 吳明益 (b. 1971). Given the deep influence of Western, Chinese, and Japanese literature on Taiwanese literature, it is not far-fetched to say that twentieth-century Taiwanese literature constantly reinvented itself through the appropriation of foreign patrimonies. Thus, Taiwanese literary production can be seen as a productive site of transcultural memory that generates the afterlives of literary works traveling to the island from different parts of the world. In addition to literary creative practice, the historical imagination of Taiwanese literature reflects the domination of transcultural literary memory. The commonly accepted scheme of literary periodization of Taiwanese literary history reveals how the historical narrative of Taiwanese literature is conceptualized in terms of literary importation. The scheme is as follows: the Chinese classical literature period, the Taiwanese new literature period, the antiCommunist period, the Taiwanese modernist literature period, the nativist literature period, the postmodern literature period, and the postcolonial literature period. This periodization scheme suggests an understanding of Taiwanese literary history in terms of transcultural literary memory. Taiwanese classical literature, the major form of literary writing from the Qing dynasty to the early colonial period, took Chinese classical literature as the model. The new Taiwanese literature period, beginning roughly around the 1930s, emerged with the introduction of the Chinese new literature. The end of Japan’s colonial rule saw the arrival of the anti-Communist literature, which transplanted many ideas of the Chinese new literature to the island through the émigré mainlander writers. Particularly noteworthy is the intriguing gender politics found in the works of many women émigré writers, as discussed by Mingju Fan (2002, 13–48). The Taiwanese modernist literature in the 1960s, as a challenge to the anti-Communist literature prevalent in the 1950s, was inspired by Western modernism. The nativist literature of the 1970s is probably the only literary period that does not tag Taiwanese literature in terms of transcultural memory. The 1980s Taiwanese literature is often called the postmodern period because of the diversity of literary schools. Literary writings in the 1990s are usually characterized as “postcolonial” not only because the lifting of martial law opened up a space for writing about Taiwan’s suppressed, traumatic past but also because the term “postcolonial” was deployed as a key term by Taiwanese literary critics in their studies of Taiwanese literature (Liu 2006). Seen from the perspective of world literature studies, the powerful role of foreign patrimonies in the creative practice and historical imagination of Taiwanese literature characterizes Taiwanese literature as what Pascale Casanova calls “small literature” – literature occupying a dominated and peripheral position in the world literary space and perceived as “literarily deprived” (2004, 181). For writers on the island, the appropriation of foreign patrimonies has 151

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been seen as an effective way of accumulating literary capital and instigating literary reforms on the island. Casanova contends that literary capital is constituted by material objects such as texts (2004, 14). The literary capital is “embodied by all those who transmit it, gain possession of it, transform it, and update it” (Casanova 2004, 15). “Age” constitutes an important aspect of this capital: The age of a national literature testifies to its “wealth” – in the sense of the number of texts – but also, and above all, to its “nobility,” to its presumed or asserted priority in relation to other national traditions and, as a result, to the number of texts regarded as “classics” . . . or “universal.” (Casanova 2004, 14) Taiwanese literature has none of these advantages. The absence of the intertextuality between Taiwanese writers of different generations, in a sense, implies a failure of Taiwanese literature to be “capital” for Taiwanese writers, at least in the twentieth century. It was not recognized as capital, deemed worthy of being possessed, and therefore transmitted or transformed. Not surprisingly, the concept of a Taiwanese literary tradition was missing. The Man Booker International Prize nominee Wu Ming-Yi remarked in an interview (Wu 2019): “As I was advancing in my reading of literature, the world literature series of the local publishing houses Chih-wen (Zhiwen) and Laureate (Guiguan) influenced me tremendously, while Chinese-language literature exerted less influence.” Taiwanese writers of Wu’s generation did not have free access to Chinese-language literature, including many works by Taiwanese writers. Naturally, they turned to foreign literature for literary models. Seen in this light, Taiwanese millennial writers’ self-conscious identification of themselves as heirs to a Taiwanese literary tradition marks a new page in the development of Taiwanese literature. As this discussion shows, millennial writers continue to seek inspiration from foreign literature and appropriate foreign cultural resources to boost their literary capital. However, they also claim Taiwanese literature as their valuable capital. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney argue that literature has three roles to play in the production of cultural memory: “literature as a medium of remembrance,” “literature as an object of remembrance,” and “literature as a medium for observing the production of cultural memory” (2006, 112). As a medium of remembrance, literature recollects the past in the form of narratives and thereby helps produce collective memories. Writing Taiwanese literature and writers into their narratives, millennial writers certainly demonstrate very well how literature works as a medium of remembrance. At the same time, the act of reclaiming Taiwanese literary works in their writings identifies those works as objects of remembrance. It constructs intertextuality with them and sheds new light on them. This exercise of literary remembrance contributes significantly to the production of cultural memory. To borrow the words from Erll and Rigney (2006), “literature establishes a ‘memory of its own’ in the form of intertextual relations that give new cultural life to old texts” (2006, 113). By recognizing Taiwanese literature as a valuable literary capital, millennial writers integrate Taiwanese literature into the body of Taiwanese cultural memory. Literary creative writing performs the work of mnemotechnics.

Conclusion Situated within the context of world literature studies, these new features of Taiwanese literature suggest several directions for further research. First of all are the implications of the cosmopolitan outlook that replaces the quest for postcolonial subjectivity in the last decade of 152

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the twentieth century as the new creative gesture. Instead of promoting a view of Taiwanese literature as resistance literature against dominant external cultural forces, Taiwanese writers highlight literary creativity as a site of transcultural and transnational connections. Not only do they try to reclaim the Japanese colonial legacy that was suppressed in the martial law period, but they also draw upon resources of foreign literature in their attempt to reinvent Taiwanese literature in a new literary environment. A close look reveals that this cosmopolitanism reflects a long-standing tradition of Taiwanese literary hospitality toward foreign literature since the precolonial period. However, unlike their predecessors, who turned to internationally acclaimed writers of literary fiction for models, young-generation Taiwanese writers extend their literary hospitality to popular cultures, such as Japanese monster literature and Yuri literature, and global popular cultures, such as global blusters like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. How does this configuration of a cosmopolitan literary Taiwan impact our interpretation and understanding of Taiwanese literature? Does it suggest new theoretical frameworks beyond the postcolonial theorization and resistance literature that have dominated the studies of Taiwanese literature for the past decades? Seen from the vantage point of world literature, the long-standing cosmopolitanism of Taiwanese literature uncovers ironically the position of Taiwanese literature as a “small literature” in the world literary space as defined by Casanova (2004), as well as the asymmetrical circulation of world literature remarked by Franco Moretti (2000). It is within this context that millennial writers’ attempt to reinvent Taiwanese literature by defining it as a valuable literary capital and positioning themselves as heirs to a distinct Taiwanese literary tradition is particularly significant. Although the interest in foreign literature continues, millennial writers launch a collective project of building intertextuality with the literary writings of their predecessors. They engage consciously in writing stories about Taiwanese literature. In so doing, they call attention to a distinct Taiwanese literary tradition and generate the afterlives of Taiwanese literary works. Literary creativity becomes an exercise of mnemotechnics. This new role of Taiwanese literature as a means of remembrance distinguishes Taiwanese literature in the early twenty-first century and ushers the history of Taiwanese literature into a new phase.

Note 1 This chapter develops the major points from my following publications: (1) a coauthored English article (Chen and Chiu 2021), (2) a single-authored Chinese article (Chiu 2021), and a short essay titled “Millennial Writers and the Taiwanese Literary Tradition”(2021) published in TaiwanLit 2, no. 1 (Spring 2021): http://taiwanlit.org/essays/millennial-writers-and-the-taiwanese-literary-tradition. It was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of TaiwanLit. The Chinese version of this article appears in my monograph Taiwan wenxue de shijie zhi lu 台灣文學的世界之路 (The Long Journey of Taiwan Literature to World Literature) published by Chengchi University Press in 2023. I would like to thank Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology for its continuous support of my research.

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13 OF OTHER (CHINESE) SPACES Sinophone Literature and the Rainforest Andrea Bachner

Of Literary Spaces For world literary approaches, to think of a cultural space, such as Chinese literature, with the world means, for the most part, to think about the global circulation of cultural products from and to a space such as China. From such a perspective, the link between literary texts and space is passive, as texts are objects moved in and through space. But literature also maintains a more active relation to space. Literature goes places as readers and cultures traffic it, but literature also creates spaces and crafts fictional worlds. As literary texts build their own spaces, complexly linked to those of the real world, they also script, to some extent, how they themselves might be perceived within this world’s space, how they might travel, and what such travel does to their sense of space. By the same token, a text’s place within a global system also often determines what kind of world it can represent within its pages, how such a space will be read, and how its ties to reality are constructed. For instance, Fredric Jameson’s (1986) famous reading of Third World texts as national allegories presupposed a direct link between literary texts from the margins of the world system and their national realities, thus making literary space, via an allegorical exegesis, irrespective of its form and reference, always already an avatar of national space. This chapter constitutes an experimental proposal: What if we focused on literary spaces that (though of this world) are removed from the experiential context of a given literary tradition and, rather than reading such other spaces as yet another figment for that tradition’s real and imagined spaces, focused on the ways in which its otherness might allow us to think anew what spatial relations literature can craft beyond its place of origin? More precisely, what if we thought about literature in Chinese through the lens of other spaces, spaces that are not conventionally connected to Chinese culture? For instance, the tropical rainforest? The rainforest is certainly not one of the spaces that come to mind when we think of Chinese literature. And yet, in this chapter, I will make the claim that the rainforest is, in fact, an important topos in Sinophone literature: one that is marginal rather than central to Chinese literature, but also one that is global and, hence, greater than Chinese (or even Sinophone) literature. Effectively, this allows for a repositioning of “Chinese” literature on different levels: The space of the rainforest – as a literary biosphere – forges connections beyond the national sphere. But it also casts shadows back onto the national or cultural spaces associated with China. DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-17

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For Chinese literature, the rainforest constitutes, for the most part, an alien space – an exotic locale for tales of travel, adventure, or conflict.1 But we can also read the rainforest more conceptually, inspired by Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopos as formulated in “Of Other Spaces” (“Des espaces autres”) as a kind of counterspace outside of all spaces that potentially contains a multiplicity of other spaces (Foucault 1986). The rainforest, as such, is already a global space, spanning three continents as one type of ecosystem with local specificities. As a geopolitical space, it has also been overdetermined by similar cadences of world history. Despite significant historical differences, the rainforests on three different continents have all been spaces subjected to colonial encroachment and systems of settler colonialism, to the violence against, oppression of, and often massacres of indigenous populations, as well as to environmental degradation through extractive economies. After all, the jungle is the perfect avatar for colonialism’s world vision: blank spaces on the West’s maps awaiting discovery, uncleared ground in need of being parceled out and made useful, savage cultures to be brought into the fold of civilization. In its literary form, rainforest narratives often share stylistic and formal characteristics, such as a penchant for evoking tropical exuberance in a baroque, metaphor-rich style that suggests allegorical readings. In many instances, the rainforest serves as background for a quest narrative, as a journey of initiation in which its sublime, suffocating nature doubles as a cipher for the protagonist’s development or, in a Heart of Darkness mode, their mental and moral degradation. The rainforest might not quite constitute as classic a heterotopos as Foucault’s own example of the movie theater. But like Foucault’s heterotopos, it oscillates between real and imagined (or literary) space, provides a space of initiation and enclosure often likened to a prison or a graveyard (examples of heterotopic spaces in Foucault’s essay), and becomes an arena in which nature and culture as well as different cultures and ethnicities clash, thus oscillating between the local and the global. The rainforest thus constitutes a privileged space for thinking about literary space from a global perspective, also (and maybe especially) for a literary tradition, such as Chinese literature, for which it is also an alien space. The rainforest as “other” space has entered Chinese literature in different ways. In what follows, I will focus on two examples that showcase different approaches. In the first case study, the rainforest enters the Chinese literary world through translation. Another cultural tradition’s rainforest becomes literarily transplanted into China. This is the case in the Chinese translation history of one of the most important rainforest novels (novelas de la selva) of Latin American literature, José Eustacio Rivera’s 1924 novel La vorágine (The Vortex), which appeared first in Wu Yan’s 吳岩 Chinese translation in 1957. The second case study is the 1998 novel Elephant Herd (群象) by Sinophone Malaysian author Zhang Guixing 張貴興. In this text in Chinese from an author originally born in Malaysia’s Sarawak but living and writing in Taiwan now, Borneo’s rainforest becomes a space through which diasporic Chinese negotiate the status of Chinese culture itself. Both texts feature different rainforests as well as different assumptions about the ways in which the rainforest space and Chinese literature can be connected. But both texts rethink Chinese culture, as well as China’s place in the world, through the lens of the rainforest. Both showcase how the trope of the rainforest as a critical, comparative lens both complicates and enriches the worldedness of literary texts in Chinese.

Translating the Rainforest Before the success of the Cuban revolution of 1958 made China’s state powers take an active interest in Latin America, literary translations of Latin American texts were the exception rather than the rule. Even during the decades of booming literary translations into Chinese 157

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from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth century, Latin American texts received scant attention, and there were virtually no Spanish- and Portuguese-language experts in China. Consequently, most translations from Latin American literature into the early 1960s were retranslations, mostly of English or Russian translations. The first Chinese translation in 1957 of Colombian writer José Eustacio Rivera’s novel The Vortex was no exception. Chinese novelist and translator Wu Yan (real name Sun Jiapu 孫家普 – best known for his translations of Tagore) translated Rivera’s novel from the English translation by Earle K. James published in 1935 by Putnam in New York. As Chinese Spanish-language expertise became more widespread in the late 1950s and the 1960s – one of Wu Yan’s consultants for the 1957 translation, Wang Yongnian 王永年, in fact became the head of Xinhua News Agency’s Spanish translation office in 1959 – Wu Yan prepared an updated translation in the 1960s that took the Spanish original more directly into consideration but which would not be published until 1981 due to the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution. In Wu Yan’s translation, the Amazon rainforest is connected to China in several ways. Much of this connection is strategically forged in the translator’s postface to the 1957 translation. When Wu Yan published his second version in 1981, the cultural context in the PRC had shifted radically, and literary translations started to boom once again. In this context, neither Latin American literature nor the locale of the rainforest held the same kind of ideological interest then as in the 1950s (for an overview of Chinese translations of Latin American literature between 1949 and 1999, see Teng 2011). For the 1957 translation, the rainforest was of central importance, albeit fraught with ambivalence. In the postface, the Amazon rainforest is represented first and foremost as alien and exotic for Chinese readers, as a space of “swamps full of strange animals, swarms of flesh-eating ants that devastate all living beings, Indian customs and tales” (Rivera 1957, 340; my translations) – marvelous yet still true to reality. For the translator, one of the main attractions of the novel is that of a completely unfamiliar space that lures the reader in, as it does the novel’s protagonist, Arturo Cova: “As I was reading, I followed the protagonist Cova, entering a completely new world, aware that each line and each page exuded the breath of the tropics and shone with a brilliance peculiar to Latin America” (Rivera 1957, 335–6). The gripping attraction of the rainforest – so Wu Yan argues – is highlighted by the firstperson perspective of the text, which, for the most part, is couched in the form of a written report by the protagonist-narrator, Cova. It is this perspective which allows, via its lyrical, subjective exuberance, a closer emotional link between text and reader (Rivera 1957, 340). This is also what makes the novel’s political message more forceful for Wu Yan. What James, the English translator of The Vortex, problematizes as the novel’s combination of “stark realism with a high degree of subjectivity and grandiloquence” that is in character for a Latin American context yet “perplexing” for an “Anglo-Saxon reader” (Rivera 1935, ix) fits extraordinarily well within Maoist literary objectives, for instance, the combination of real-life subjects and emotional-artistic heightening that Mao put forth in his “Yan’an Talks” of 1942. Most of the passages from the novel quoted (and thus highlighted) in Wu Yan’s postface are taken from the beginning of Parts 2 and 3 of the novel, lyrical invocations and laments that interrupt the narrative flow of the novel. From both passages, Wu Yan selects excerpts that suggest a more straightforward political message. From the powerful, first-person invocation of the rainforest at the beginning of Part 2, Wu Yan selects the last part in which the narrator wishes for an escape from this space to the open space of the pampa, “where slavery is impossible” (Rivera 1957, 336). While the desire for an absence of slavery refers proleptically to the plight of the rubber tappers in the jungle that will be central to the rest of the novel, this social reference is the only one in an otherwise lavishly metaphorical passage that celebrates 158

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the rainforest as a space of death and suffocation. The passage cited from the lament of the cauchero, the rubber tapper, at the beginning of Part 3 of the novel excerpts the descriptions of the cauchero’s horrible work conditions and violent oppressions as worse than those of slaves and prisoners yet omits the thirst for riches and the inhuman violence against others that the first-person narrator also highlights. This is followed by a citation of the very last passage of this introduction to Part 3, excerpted quite selectively to highlight the speaker’s thirst for rebellion, since “what the hand did to the trees it can also do against the enemy” (Rivera 1957, 338). Put back into its context, however, the passage invokes a cataclysmic revenge of the rainforest, an explosion of cosmic violence rather than suggesting a rebellion of the oppressed against their oppressors. Consequently, the novel’s treatment of the rainforest heightens the pathos of oppression; it also potentially weakens social critique. Framed as an overwhelming natural force that enthralls and maddens humans, the rainforest can become a powerful metaphor for human exploitation. However, its figurative power also threatens to make this a struggle of humans against nature or destiny more than the presentation of a concrete sociohistorical, geopolitical battlefield. In fact, Wu Yan’s choice of title for his 1957 translation might suggest the translator’s anxiety about the novel’s political message. To translate “la vóragine,” “the vortex,” not as xuanwo 漩渦 (which is the literal translation of the titles of the Spanish original as well as the English translation and would serve as the title of Wu Yan’s Chinese translations after the 1957 version) but as A Whirlwind of Evil on the Pampa and in the Rainforest (草原林莽惡旋 風) puts the natural spaces of the pampa and the rainforest front and center. But it also makes them into settings (rather than causational agents) of the evil that takes place. In the postface, Wu Yan explains the meaning of the title of the original (though he renders it there as xuanfeng, “whirlwind,” rather than the more general “vortex” or xuanwo 旋渦) and justifies his decision to change the title as a move toward making its symbolic force explicit: “the story unfolds on the pampa and in the rainforest, especially in the rubber forest, and the whirlwind symbolizes the exploitation, oppression, and cruel murder suffered by wretched humans at the hands of evil powers” (Rivera 1957, 335). The focus on the rainforest in the 1957 translation is reinforced by the illustrations in and around the text. For an inexpensive edition, the two-tone cover, the three black-and-white images at the beginning of each of the novel’s three parts, as well as an additional colored photograph are rather lavish. All images highlight what Wu Yan proposes in his postface as the key importance of the novel: its denunciation of exploitation. But the overwhelming presence of nature in these images, selected most likely for the exotic and emotional appeal of such scenarios, also brackets, to a certain extent, the social critique that the postface foregrounds. Several of these illustrations feature toiling, desperate half-naked human figures, dwarfed by nature. But only the cover – and, potentially, the vignette on the title page made up of crossed guns and chains – references a social structure of oppression (Figure 13.1). A whip-wielding, moneybag-holding man dominates the left upper corner of the cover image, lording it over the smaller, half-naked figures of rubber tappers. This figure, with its sombrero, boots, necktie, and decorated cropped jacket, presents a rather-stereotypical Latin America (i.e., not context-specific) image. Despite its stereotypical cultural reference, the figure otherwise closely resembles the iconic representations of typical oppressor figures in PRC literature and film of the era. But even here the green of the trees and rainforest vegetation dominates the image. The serpentine form of the whip is echoed, or even continued, in the liana-like plants of the right bottom part, as well as by the large snake that occupies the upper right corner. Once again, the rainforest context and exotic appeal threaten to override the translation’s political message. 159

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Figure 13.1 Cover of Wu Yan’s 1957 translation of Rivera’s The Vortex.

This ambivalence resonates with Wu Yan’s explanation in the postface. As the translator highlights, in the end, Cova kills the tyrannical rubber baron as an act of revenge, not as a political act with more structural repercussions, even though he leaves his account as testimony of the atrocities he has seen and experienced before the jungle devours him. For the narrator, the focus of the novel is less social analysis and critique and rather uses nature as symbolic anchor and context for human suffering. And yet for Wu Yan, the novel is still politically powerful: Even though the author did not treat what he describes from the perspective of a true working-class warrior, even though he was not aware of the true path of struggle and attempted to frame social struggle as a confrontation between man and “cruel” nature, the vivid realist images he provides, the horrific wrongdoings he reveals are still sufficient to excite us, are still sufficient to make us deeply understand that the white and Indian men suffering far away in the rubber forests of Latin America are our brothers, too! (Rivera 1957, 338–9) Even as the political message of Rivera’s novel is found lacking, Wu Yan praises its emotional impact. While it does not teach its (Chinese) readers how to act politically, it does teach them how to think (or, rather, feel) beyond China (for China’s socialist internationalism, see Volland 2017; Rofel 2017). This global perspective is affective rather than analytical. The link of brotherhood between the Chinese readers (and their history of exploitation) and the hardship of rubber tappers in 160

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the Amazon works only fantasmatically. After all, the time lag between the rubber boom (the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century) and Wu Yan’s 1957 translation is considerable. In fact, in 1935, two decades before Wu Yan’s translation, the English translator James mentions in his preface that the “tragic thirst for rubber that the advent of electricity and the automobile created” and that formed the basis for the description of the atrocities in the Amazon’s green hell in Rivera’s novel had “shifted from South America to the East Indies, and with that shift has vanished from the Amazon much of the mad exploitation of humans that the search for latex unloosed” (Rivera 1935, vii–viii). Rivera had firsthand knowledge of the situation in the Amazon through a commission to survey the border between Colombia and Venezuela – as both James and Wu Yan highlight. But by the time his novel, which already provides a fictionalized and, through the narrator’s perspective, highly subjectivized account, in contrast, for instance, to Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report, was translated into English, and even more so by the time it was translated into Chinese, the global economic and political arena had undergone profound changes. Of course, for the emotive (and thus ideological) charge of Rivera’s novel in Chinese translation, this matters very little. Published at the cusp of the success of the Cuban revolution, Wu Yan’s reference to the international brotherhood of the oppressed was, after all, standard rhetoric for Communist China’s connection to other places non-aligned with the Cold War blocs. And after all, what had not changed in the 1950s was the presence of social and economic oppression at large in non-Chinese spaces that PRC propaganda set out to save. In the end, the heightened tone of Rivera’s novel and its rainforest charged with symbolic power is not an obstacle to ideology. Its exotic otherness provides fuel for the imagination of Chinese readers at that time. Its pathos of violence and suffering translates on an affective level, not on that of social analysis. By emphasizing the novel’s emotional-political appeal, however, Wu Yan also manages to speak to the importance of literature for and with politics. Throughout the postface, he lauds the novel for its lyrical and theatrical features, integrating it not only within a Communist vision of global brotherhood but also within that of a world-literary continuum: as one of three classical Latin American novels of the era, as a mundane version of Dante’s Inferno, as the Odyssey of the pampa, or as striking a balance between the marvelous and the realistic, as per a quote from Liu Xie 劉勰 (Rivera 1957, 336–7, 340). It is the archetypical force, but also the fungibility of the rainforest trope, that allows Rivera’s The Vortex to work as a Chinese socialist novel while not foregoing its literary merit. By maintaining cultural and political distance between China and the novel’s Amazon, it also makes it possible to integrate other places into a Maoist notion of China at the heart of an affective global network.

China’s Tropics The rainforest tropes in Sinophone Malaysian literature often craft an even stronger, if also more problematic, link between the tropical jungle and China than Chinese translations of rainforest texts from other traditions. Their choice of Chinese as literary medium inscribes them within Chinese culture, while their diasporic position also frames their texts as only marginal parts of that tradition, as coming from the “South where language is lost” (Ng 1998, 53–92). For these authors, “translating” the rainforest for their Sinophone audiences elsewhere constitutes a challenge (Li 2010, 27). Sinophone Malaysian author Zhang Guixing transforms this challenge, however, in many of his novels into a scenario in which the diasporic space of Borneo’s rainforest becomes a site for writing back against and, finally, rewriting the Chinese cultural tradition itself. In his novel Elephant Herd, for instance, Zhang connects China and Borneo’s rainforest by turning China symbolically into a tropical, savage space itself. 161

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One of the lessons that Shicai, the protagonist of Zhang’s novel Elephant Herd, learns in Chinese school in Borneo’s rainforest is about the link between China and the Chinese diaspora in the “barbaric” South Seas. In one of these lessons, his Chinese teacher, Shao An, expounds on Han Yu 韓愈, the famous Tang dynasty writer and politician, and his “Speech to the Crocodiles” (Eyu wen 鱷魚文). Even though what is cited in Zhang’s novel as text for the Chinese students to copy is not from Han Yu directly but rather from different classical sources that give definitions and descriptions of the crocodile, Han Yu’s text, as invoked by Teacher Shao’s lesson, becomes, in Zhang’s novel, a reflection on the Chinese diaspora in the South Seas and its connection to the “homeland.” But Han Yu’s textual haunting of the novel also suggests a darker reading of Chinese culture itself. The content of this writing lesson connects Sinocentric values and symbols to the Bornean rainforest. According to Teacher Shao’s explanations, before the Xia and Shang dynasties, China’s Central Plains had a climate as well as flora and fauna that were similar to those of the Asian tropics – the rainforest space in which this writing lesson takes place. One of the autochthonous animals was the crocodile, which Teacher Shao reads as the model for the most “Chinese” of symbols: the dragon. Shao effectively sees the traces of Chinese culture everywhere, as he connects the dragon patterns on Shang ritual vessels to the crocodile carvings of the indigenous Dayak tribes. However, to equate twentieth-century Borneo with China’s Shang dynasty (1766–1050 BC) does not mean to accept intercultural equality. Rather, the gesture morbidly resembles Western primitivism that is obsessed with finding the origin of civilization by staging the other as an innocently pure or savagely violent predecessor in need of civilizing, or that is destined to extermination under the juggernaut of progress. Teacher Shao’s lesson for his diasporic students is a mixed one: the inculcation of a feeling of cultural inferiority because of their “savage” second homeland, but also the impulse to take part in a civilizing mission whose leaders, like Teacher Shao, sent from the PRC to foment Communist thought, have drunk directly from the fountain of “pure” Chinese culture and have become missionaries in a “savage” land. The lesson’s ideological subtext hinges on Han Yu’s “Speech to the Crocodiles.” Invoking topoi of civilization and barbarity, the speech exhorts the crocodiles to remove themselves from the province under Han Yu’s governance. Han Yu writes this text in a situation of quasiexile, having been put in charge of an outlying province, Chaozhou, in the area of today’s Guangdong province, which, through a “Central Plains” lens, amounts to the barbaric South. He couches himself in the guise of the kings of old [who] ruled over everything under heaven, . . . used fire to clear mountains and swamps, wielded nets and blades to drive out all kinds of wild animals which harmed the people, [and] expelled them from the land between the four seas [China]. (Han Yu 1997, 244) While Han Yu’s exhortation can be read allegorically as a critique of corrupt officials, in the context of Teacher Shao’s lesson in the rainforest, the metaphors of clearing and civilizing the wilderness return to their literal form. By the same token, Han Yu’s allegorical texts can be reread as rife with the justificatory logic of imperialism: the violent act of turning barbarity into civilization assumes the superiority of its own culture and dehumanizes its other. In the text, two possible reasons are given for why the crocodiles do not follow Han Yu’s order to relocate, which ultimately warrants their extermination. They are unwilling to do so, persisting in their crimes, and are thus to be punished, or else, they do not understand Han Yu’s exhortation, in which case they are beings lacking of reason and can be killed. 162

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The invocation of “Speech to the Crocodiles” in Zhang’s text elicits the readers’ knowledge of Chinese culture and invites them to confront the violence of Han Yu’s civilizational logic. This casts doubt onto Teacher Shao’s Sinocentric vision: Teacher Shao equates premodern China and Borneo, thus seeing the diasporic South Seas as battleground for the continued Southward movement of Chinese culture’s civilizing mission, which in this case has Maoism as important ingredient. Chinese culture comes to the rainforest with a mission that resembles the spread of Chinese civilization in a premodern era over a similarly tropical space. But in Zhang’s novel, the unequal rainforest equation between China and its other is turned into a critique of China. The crocodiles are, from the outset, ambivalently related to both the “barbarity” of the South Seas and to Chinese civilization through Teacher Shao’s connection of the crocodile with the dragon. If China is the realm that expelled the crocodile, it is also a space that assumed its avatar, the dragon, at the heart of its own culture. This ambivalence around the crocodile becomes virulent in Elephant Herd as the Communist group in Borneo’s jungle turns rogue. With clear intertextual references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Communist leader Yu Jiatong, not unlike Conrad’s Kurtz, is “touched” by the wilderness, and Communism itself aligned with the crocodiles. The crocodiles are not driven away but are rather invited back into the picture. The Communist guerrilla leader Yu Jiatong keeps the animals close to his jungle hideout in anticipation of using them as instruments in his revenge against the “traitors,” who abandoned the lost cause of Communism. Ironically, his former comrade and co-leader, who has become Yu Jiatong’s enemy after accepting a state amnesty, capitalizes upon the crocodile by running a crocodile-farm-cum-wildlife-park. Both Communist leaders, with their different crocodile “alliances,” have swerved from Communism’s path. But Communism here – in Teacher Shao’s Sinocentric fantasy – had reiterated the typical patterns of a colonial discourse as another avatar of Han Yu’s imperial civilizing mission from the beginning anyway. In the end, though, Teacher Shao’s fantasy of a similarity of China and the South Seas diaspora, or even of a cultural continuum between the two spaces, is debunked in the book. Chinese Communists turn from anticolonial forces into oppressors themselves, and the veneer of Chinese culture gives way to savagery. In fact, the crocodiles become, at various points in the novel, directly connected to Chinese culture, albeit negatively so. When the protagonist, Shicai, enters Teacher Shao’s study, now relocated to the jungle camp of the rogue Communists under Yu Jiatong’s leadership, he chances upon a scene in which Chinese writing and rainforest nature are complexly linked. A scenario of damaged books and half-erased Chinese characters is overrun by denizens of the jungle, as insects fly around and geckos roam freely: Geckos were also crawling through Teacher Shao’s calligraphic rendering of the jadefaced God of War’s poem “Snowscape, to the tune of Spring Garden Show.” Compared to the characters in Teacher Shao’s rendering of the line “When the angry lion kicks aside a stone, the thirsty stallion can then drink from the spring,” these geckos appeared quite charming and delicate, like white ducks gracefully swimming through a pack of crocodiles. (Zhang 1998, 150; Rojas’s translations) In this scene, it is Chinese characters that become crocodiles, taking on a threatening, violent guise. In the metonymic guise of Teacher Shao’s calligraphy, Chinese culture itself assumes the violent face of the crocodile. As David Wang points out, through homophonic connection, “the home of the crocodiles” (鱷-) has become “the evil homeland” (惡-) (Wang 2001, 27). Here, the text’s alignment between the rainforest of the South Seas and the space of China – synecdochically forged through the crocodile motif – has been turned around. Teacher Shao’s 163

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crocodile fantasy had tried to turn Borneo’s jungle symbolically into a mirror image of China (albeit a different era’s China), charging the diasporic Chinese in the South with a civilizing mission. Paradoxically, the translation of the crocodile into the Chinese dragon already creates a paradoxical link between that which is ejected from Chinese culture or accepted in a different guise. The return of the crocodiles in the South, however, also casts its shadow back onto Chinese culture: as a violent culture (a culture of the dragon, or, actually, the crocodile) whose violence expresses itself precisely by way of cultural and civilizational imposition. Rather than inscribing the Chinese in the South Seas diaspora within Chinese culture, Chinese culture itself becomes rewritten as savagely violent. In the end, this ambivalent connection between China and its other by way of a precarious tropical similarity is replaced by another type of cultural translation, an adaptation and transmutation of Chinese culture in the tropical South rather than the attempt of the South to live up to its Chinese origin. In Teacher Shao’s study in the Communist jungle camp, the novel’s protagonist also beholds a Song dynasty landscape painting which, in the rainforest, under the light of the lamp, through the protagonist’s impressions of the Bornean landscape, changes shape: Under the lamp light, the Landscape of Wind and Rain scroll displayed a different charm, as it was transformed into a tropical landscape, like the one the boy had seen on the banks of the Rajang River, with orangutangs and monitor lizards climbing the hillside, durians and rambutans dotting the riverbanks, and long houses and stilt houses replacing the painting’s original palaces and pavilions. Meanwhile, the image of scholars and book boys climbing mountains and playing in the river was replaced with an image of young, half-naked Iban women. In this way, the entire Southern Song Dynasty landscape was transformed into a batik painting perfused with South Seas sentiment. (Zhang 1998, 149–50) In this vision, an iconic rendition of the Chinese landscape and a tropical rainforest scenario are superimposed as the text activates and invokes the Chinese painting even in the act of transforming it into something else. However, this is not a superficial transformation either. Not only are the image’s contents changed; its medium also shifts from the paper scroll of the Chinese original to the batik cloth of its Southern other. Read metaphorically, this transformation also suggests a different connection between China and its Bornean diaspora. This link no longer functions according to a logic in which parts of the other space (that of the South, that of the rainforest) are read as similar and thus connected to China. Instead, it projects a scenario in which Chinese cultural traditions and images have adapted to the experiences of the new homeland as diaspora nears its end date (Shih 2010). China survives in Borneo’s rainforest. But this survival does not happen on China’s terms, but on those of the rainforest homeland, resulting not in a precarious mirror image of the cultural center at the margins but in a thorough transmutation of the center itself.

Of Literary Spaces – Otherwise My goal in sketching two case studies of what the rainforest might mean as a space of Chinese literature is twofold: (1) to think Chinese literature in the world from an unusual vantage point and, thus, (2) to conceive of the possible links between literature and space differently. The two

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“Chinese” novels analyzed here feature the rainforest as a non-Chinese space while also forging complex links between this other space and Chinese culture. Admittedly, these texts stand at the margins of the Chinese literary tradition – one a literary translation, the other a diasporic Sinophone text. But they use Chinese as literary medium, draw on Chinese culture as references, are read by Sinophone audiences, and thus circulate within Chinese literary spaces. In any case, precisely because of their liminal status, these are good entry points for scrutinizing the spaces between literary traditions and their supposed other, and thus for appreciating the porosity of these limits, as well as mapping the complex ties that traverse them. For such an appreciation, we need to think the links between literature and space themselves as a complex, multilevel network in which the boundaries between literary and extraliterary spaces become blurred. The rainforests in these and other novels both reference real-world spaces and contribute to the creation of a literary space, a textual continuum that virtually extends across all rainforest texts. The rainforest’s heterotopian characteristics enhance such a multisystemic thought as rainforest texts teach us a type of relational and, indeed, global, thinking beyond the usual categories of referentiality, literary worlding, and world-literary circulation.

Note 1 Apart from the examples discussed here, Taiwanese writer Zhang Dachun’s 張大春 story “A Leap beyond the Jungle” (Zi linmang yuechu 自莽林躍出) and Deng Kebao’s 鄧克保 (Bo Yang) Alien Lands (Yiyu 異域) also present interesting cases.

References Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskoviec. Diacritics 16, no. 1: 22–7. Han Yu 韓愈. 1997. Han Yu sanwen xuanji 韓愈散文選集 (A Selection of Han Yu’s Prose Writings). Edited by Gu Yisheng 顧易生 and Xu Zuiyu 徐粹育. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15: 65–88. Li Yongping 李永平. 2010. Dahe jintou II: Shan 大河盡頭（下）：山 (The End of the River, vol. 2: Mountains). Taipei: Maitian. Ng Kim-chew 黃錦樹. 1998. Mahua wenxue yu Zhongguoxing 馬華文學與中國性 (Malaysian-Chinese Literature and Chineseness). Taipei: Yuanzun wenhua. Rivera, José Eustacio. 1935. The Vortex. Translated by Earl K. James. New York: Putnam. Rivera, José Eustacio. 1957. Caoyuan linmang e xuanfeng 草原林莽惡旋風 (A Whirlwind of Evil on the Pampa and in the Jungle). Translated by Wu Yan 吳岩. Shanghai: Xinwenyi chubanshe. Rivera, José Eustacio. 1981. Xuanwo 漩渦 (The Vortex). Translated by Wu Yan 吳岩. Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen chubanshe. Rivera, José Eustacio. 2003. La vorágine (The Vortex). Edited by Montserrat Ordóñez. 5th ed. Madrid: Cátedra. Rofel, Lisa. 2017. “China’s Tianxia Worldings: Socialist and Postsocialist Cosmopolitanism.” In Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, edited by Ban Wang, 212–34. Durham: Duke University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2010. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” In Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, 29–48. Leiden: Brill. Teng Wei 滕威. 2011. “Bianjing” zhi nan: Lading Meizhou wenxue Hanyi yu Zhongguo dangdai wenxue (1949–1999) “邊境”之南：拉丁美洲文學漢譯與中國當代文學学（1949–1999）(South of the “Border”: Latin American Literature in Chinese Translation and Chinese Contemporary Literature, 1949–1999). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Volland, Nicolai. 2017. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Andrea Bachner Wang, David 王德威. 2001. “Zai qunxiang yu houdang de jiaxiang: Zhang Guixing de Mahua gushi” 在 群象與猴黨的家-──張貴興的馬華故事 (At Home with Elephant Herds and Simian Gangs: Zhang Guixing’s Malaysian-Chinese Stories). In Zhang Guixing 張貴興, Wo sinian wo de chang mian de Nanguo gongzhu 我思念我的長眠中的南國公主 (In Memory of My South-Seas Sleeping Beauty), 9–38. Taipei: Maitian. Zhang Guixing 張貴興. 1998. Qunxiang 群象 (Elephant Herd). Taibei: Shibao Wenhua; Translation as Elephant Herd by Carlos Rojas forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

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PART V

Comparative Worlds of Literary Genres

14 MODERN CHINESE DRAMA ACROSS MEDIA AND WORLDS Centered on the Case of the White Snake Liang Luo

This chapter uses the reinventions of The Legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳 as a case study to test the boundary of “modern Chinese drama” by stretching its temporal, geographical, linguistic, and genre and media borders. I first trace how stage performances of the late eighteenth-century chuanqi 傳奇 plays and the early nineteenth-century tanci 彈詞 storytelling versions helped shape the modern forms of the legend. Some of the shorter and more accessible performance-shaped texts were then picked up by Western Sinologists, missionaries, and diplomats, resulting in two important Anglophone renditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Republican Period (1912–1949), Jingju 京劇 (often translated as Beijing or Peking opera), tanci (often translated as string-ballads) storytelling, and Yueju 粵劇 (often translated as Cantonese opera) renditions of the legend dominated Shanghai stages. These relatively recent developments in stage performances from the late eighteenth century onward came to be branded as xiqu 戲曲 (“traditional Chinese theater”) and was often presented in opposition to xiju 戲劇 (“modern Chinese drama”) or huaju 話劇 (“spoken drama”). I take the xiqu legacies of the White Snake legend seriously in studying modern Chinese drama across media and worlds and continue to trace their reinventions through painting and film in the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–). In contemporary Sinophone worlds, stage experiments from performance groups represented by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre 雲門 舞集, Tien Chi-yuan 田啟元, and Ming Hwa Yuan 明華園 continued to experiment with the legend across modern dance, experimental theater, and Taiwanese opera. Such experiments then moved from stage performances to the printed pages, with Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee’s (Lee Pik-Wah 李碧華, b. 1959) novel Green Snake (青蛇, 1986) and Yan Geling’s (嚴歌苓, b. 1958) novella White Snake (白蛇, 1998) written in the diaspora as two prominent examples from the late twentieth century. Moreover, a new wave of English renditions influenced by the Sichuan and Beijing opera and baojuan 寶卷 (Buddhist precious scrolls) versions of the White Snake legend gained influence as renewed theatrical representations of Chinese culture abroad in the twenty-first century, with Tony Award–winning playwright Mary Zimmerman’s 2013 play The White Snake and the social activism inspired by the Pulitzer Prize–winning 2010 Madame White Snake opera challenging conventional boundaries of modern Chinese drama.

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Tales Shaped by Performances and Their Journeys to the West The Shaping Influence of Stage Performances Often traced back to the “Li Huang” 李黃 story included in the tenth-century tale collection Extensive Record of the Taiping Era 太平廣記 about a young man’s horrifying death after his sexual encounter with a beauty who turned out to be a White Snake spirit (Li Fang et al. 1926, juan 458, snake story 3), the White Snake legend took on relatively mature shape in “Lady White is imprisoned forever under Thunder Peak Pagoda” 白娘子永鎮雷峰塔, a vernacular story included in Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 1624 collection Stories to Caution the World (Feng 1956, Chapter 28). A radical shift of the White Snake legend took place in the late eighteenth century, manifested in a 1777 chuanqi play attributed to Fang Chengpei 方成培, an 1806 13-chapter vernacular story attributed to Yushan zhuren 玉山主人, and a tanci storytelling version attributed to Chen Yuqian 陳遇乾, with a preface dated 1809 (Fang 1995; Yushan zhuren 1995; Chen 1809). The narrative changes and developments that these versions record likely appeared first onstage in local opera and storytelling performances. They present White Snake as an endearing character and recast Abbot Fahai as the destructive power. They also granted White Snake the ability to have a son and made it possible for him to return to save his mother after passing the imperial examinations as top-of-the-list (Idema 2009, xvii). Most of these texts, except for the medium-length rendition attributed to Yushan zhuren, lend themselves to fully fledged plays and often take hours, if not days, to perform in full length. They often focus on romances between the young male and female leads and conventionally demand big happy final scenes. These genre developments signal a key transformation in the retelling of the White Snake legend: responding to strong social, political, and cultural factors, the legend underwent an important transformation in its thematic focus through the mediation of the stage. The White Snake performances’ popularity, reflecting the demands of the large number of ordinary theatergoers, helped redefine the good and the evil in the legend, turning the Buddhist abbot into the ultimate villain and the snake woman into an increasingly humane and righteous protagonist. The happy ending – in particular, the birth of a son, and the son’s deliverance of his mother from under the Thunder Peak Pagoda, as well as the snake woman and her human husband’s ascent to heaven – further popularized the legend and its protagonists.

Reinventing Love in The Mystery of the White Snake If stage performances redefined the good and the evil in the White Snake legend, it is the resulted medium-length vernacular rendition attributed to Yushan zhuren that attracted Western translators. This 1806 version, titled The Strange Tale of the Thunder Peak Pagoda 雷 峰塔奇傳, likely was picked up for both its relative shortness and accessibility. Stanislas Julien’s 1834 rendition in French, Blanche et Bleue, ou Les deux couleuvres-fées; roman chinois, was the first known translation of the White Snake legend in any Western language (Julien 1834). It had already been introduced in an English-language summary later the same year, and an English rendition based on the same Chinese source text was serialized in full in 1864 (“White and Blue” 1834; H. C. 1864a, 1864b). Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo’s 1888 short story written in English, “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent-Princess,” published in The Cosmopolitan (Wong 1888, 180–90), adds to this early Anglophone tradition of retelling the White Snake story to celebrate the transgressive energy it embodies (see Ping Zhu’s chapter). 170

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This cluster of texts in Chinese, French, and English, published between 1806 and 1888, became some of the most likely candidates to have influenced American missionary Samuel I. Woodbridge’s 1896 English rendition, The Mystery of the White Snake (Woodbridge 1896). Regardless of his actual sources, Woodbridge’s intimate touch in portraying his male protagonist Hanwin (Hanwen 漢文) is rather different from both Feng Menglong’s focus on the “lust, caution” morality tale and Chen Yuqian’s focus on the righteous White Snake. Reinventing the legend as a love story and accentuating the perspective of the only protagonist who is human, Woodbridge makes important choices to highlight the emotional intimacies of his protagonists, especially the human male Hanwen. After lending his umbrella to Albia (White Snake) and Flora (Green Snake) in the rain, Hanwen goes to their residence to claim it and is entertained with food and drink. Woodbridge has Hanwen declare his passion for Albia first; she promises to be his wife afterward, a rare occurrence in any White Snake rendition that the human male takes the lead in confessing his love, with Wong Chin Foo’s 1888 short story as the only precedent and a possible influence (Woodbridge 1896, 8; Wong 1888, 187). Woodbridge’s evident love for the Chinese legend and his intimate portrayals of its loving, impulsive, and devoted young protagonists, be they a human male or a snake woman, seem to have been at odds with his pronounced missionary purpose of critiquing the animal worship of the Chinese popular mind “polluted” by Buddhism. Quite remarkably, within such an imaginary world filled with snake spirits and powerful deities, Woodbridge did manage to bestow love and devotion, as well as psychological depth, on humans and nonhumans alike, making his English-language text a new and rather successful contribution to the feverish world he set out to condemn and redeem. By representing the White Snake legend as a love story, a theme already started to take hold in late imperial China, Woodbridge contributed to romantic English literature as well as to the modern reinvention of the White Snake legends.

Humanizing the Snake Woman in Hangchow, the “City of Heaven” Frederick D. Cloud’s Hangchow, the “City of Heaven” was written in 1906 while he was serving at the American Consulate in Hangzhou. Though designed as a comprehensive guide to the city, Cloud’s book features another substantial rendition of the White Snake legend, apparently considered worthy of being included in a handbook ostensibly focused on the transmission of “reliable and practical knowledge” (Cloud 1906, 73–102) – a strategy comparable to earlier Anglophone renditions of the White Snake legend (“White and Blue” 1834; H. C. 1864a, 1864b). Unlike Woodbridge, Cloud clearly identifies his retelling as following the version of the legend known locally in Hangzhou, and “as told” to him and “supplemented from an edition titled Hsiu-hsiang-i-yao-chu’an-chuan” (繡像義妖全傳, The Complete Illustrated Righteous Snake) (Cloud 1906, 73). What Cloud cites here is precisely the 1809 tanci version attributed to Chen Yuqian, a version widely performed and circulated at the time of his writing. After describing many of Hanzhou’s historical and cultural sites of interest, Cloud moves to retelling the White Snake legend; 16 coarsely sketched illustrations in the tanci version attributed to Chen Yuqian tell the White Snake legend in 16 visual installments (Chen 1809, 1–2). Carefully examining the 16 illustrations side by side with Cloud’s retelling provides further evidence concerning the possible connections between Cloud’s and Woodbridge’s renditions and the widely performed tanci version. The two English renditions a decade apart both resemble The Complete Illustrated Righteous Snake to some extent: Woodbridge takes more liberty in structural elements than Cloud due to heavy influence from the aforementioned cluster of texts from 1806 to 1888, and Cloud’s account echoes Woodbridge’s version, but with subtle variations and closer connection to the 1809 tanci storytelling version (Figures 14.1–14.2). 171

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Figure 14.1 “Traces of the Immortal” (Xianzong 仙蹤).

Figure 14.2 “Sent into Exile” (Fanpei 訉配). Source: Both in The Complete Illustrated Righteous Snake, based on a manuscript by Chen Yuqian, edited by Chen Shiqi and Yu Xiushan, 1809, 1–2. Full-text available at Waseda University Library: http://archive.wul. waseda.ac.jp/kosho/he19/he19_03304/.>.

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Whereas Woodbridge focuses on the male protagonist, Hanwen, from the start of his narrative, both the tanci and Cloud’s versions emphasize “traces of the immortal” to highlight the White Snake’s nonhuman characteristics, creating dramatic tensions for her later humanization. The two English versions converge from time to time throughout the storytelling process, with Cloud continuing to humanize the White Snake as Woodbridge did, endowing the snake woman with psychological depth and the ability to love. For example, Cloud explains away the White Snake’s theft of silver as the act of a woman “desperately in love,” who simply wanted to marry her lover “at once.” In this context, when the White Snake discovers that Hanwen has been exiled because of the stolen silver, she is “filled with bitter remorse and deep sorrow” (Cloud 1906, 79). The humanization of the White Snake, including the granting of her maternity, first happened on performance stage as reflections of audience demands and then entered textual transformations in China in the late eighteenth century. The more accessible vernacular versions of the legend then made their journeys to the West, joining hands with Woodbridge’s and Cloud’s articulations of the legend as modern romances about love and family at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Power of Popular Performances in Republican Shanghai The humanization of the snake woman continues in the early decades of the twentieth century, with Jingju, tanci, and Yueju emerging as the three most influential performance genres on Shanghai stage, and with an interesting twist. The leading female impersonator, Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 (1894–1961), first received attention for his White Snake performances from the Shanghai press in 1913 (Shenbao 1913, 12). By 1914, his works were already reported to enjoy a “nationwide welcome” (Shenbao 1914b, 9). In 1917, another female impersonator Shang Xiaoyun 尚小雲 (1900–1976) advertised his “brand-new embroidered costume from Guangdong and special scenery with colorful electric lights,” along with a radically revised plot for his White Snake performances (Shenbao 1917, 16), while yet another male performer, Ouyang Yuqian 歐陽予倩 (1889–1962), joined the ranks of White Snake impersonators in 1918 (Shenbao 1918, 8). The continued popularity of female impersonation in portraying the White Snake might seem to be at odds with the legend’s radically humane reinterpretations through realistic settings and technical innovations. However, the Chinese patrons who bought tickets to the performances and prompted more advertisements in Shanghai News (Shenbao 申報) evidently did not see the shift in performance paradigms as a dichotomy based on traditional versus modern approaches, or old versus new styles. During the early years of the Republic, the world of the White Snake had developed into a robust industry affecting the lives and livelihoods of a large number of consumers and practitioners. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, female White Snake performers such as Fen Juhua 粉菊花 (artistic name of Sun Qiao’er 孫巧兒) emerged on the male-dominated stage and started to develop avid followings (Yunlu 1920, 3; Xinfo 1920, 3). Performances of newly composed tanci xiaoshuo 彈詞小說 (storytelling fiction) featuring both men and women appeared on the White Snake stage in 1914 in Shanghai (Shenbao 1914a, 9). A shift from the fantastic to the realistic, and even the farcical, was also apparent in this transition. The story’s fantastic and magical elements, when stripped of “superstition,” that is, folk spirituality, appear to have become merely laughable. Although the 1914 performance of the newly composed tanci fiction already featured a mixed cast and female performers gained popularity in the late 1910s on Jingju stage, female impersonators still dominated. Moreover, from the mid-1910s onward, the still male-dominated tanci style of performance became one of the most important vehicles for the White Snake performances’ popularization. 173

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If, in 1916, you had entered one of Shanghai’s popular Western-style restaurants, such as Heaven Beyond Heaven 天外天, or one of the leading entertainment venues, such as the New World 新世界 or the Grand World 大世界, you would likely have heard the Wu brothers (Wu Yusun 吳玉蓀, Wu Xiaosong 吳小松, and Wu Xiaoshi 吳小石) retelling the White Snake legend in the style of tanci, accompanied by the Chinese string instruments the pipa and sanxian (Shenbao 1916, 9). Later, the twin brothers Xiaosong and Xiaoshi became exceedingly popular for their joint performances in some of the leading venues. Tanci’s popularity was so enduring that it not only became one of the major genres widely featured in product endorsements following the rise of radio broadcasting but also survived the political vicissitudes of the 1930s and remained popular into the 1940s. It has endured many transformations and still enjoys a special following in contemporary Chinese popular culture (Shenbao 1934, 11; Feng 1942, 7).1 At the same time, the Cantonese opera actress Li Sut-fong 李雪芳 carved out her own space as a White Snake performer in an urban milieu dominated by tanci and male performers (Guanglei shizhu 1924, 8). Her 1919 charity performance boasted of striking “new costumes, electric lights and colorful special effects, which complemented her singing” (Shenbao 1919, 8). Such a spectacular performance focusing on its flashy appearance and visual stimulus would come under attack in theater reform movements from the early 1950s onward as superficial, or, worse, decadent, in the changed climate of the new Communist regime (Luo 2021a, 150). In the early 1920s, however, such a flashy style was what the Shanghai audience wanted. Despite opposition from intellectuals, White Snake performance in the form of tanci storytelling emerged as one of the most versatile and easily adaptable to new technological and media developments (Jiang 1961; Jiang and Liu 1984; Wang and Xia 2017). At the same time, this storytelling form also informed and shaped creative ways of experimenting with new media. Pathé Records, the leading record company in Shanghai at that time, announced in 1923 that it had recorded tanci storyteller Wu Yusun, the oldest Wu brother, performing Jade Dragonfly 玉蜻蜓, Golden Phoenix 描金鳳, and The White Snake on three records, celebrating his career in advance of his imminent retirement (Shenbao 1923, 18). The three Wu brothers’ popularity warranted a full article in the “Shuoshu xiaoping” 說書 小評 section of Shenbao’s local supplement (Sihu 1924, 18). The article praised the three as leaders among the young generation of members of Guangyu Guild 光裕社, the longest-running (est. 1776, renamed 1912) and most influential professional storyteller association based in Suzhou (Liu and Wang 2017, 21–6). The impressive daily earnings of the three Wu brothers at a few dozen yuan, the highest among all Guangyu Guild members, further evidenced their popularity. More importantly, the twin brothers Xiaosong and Xiaoshi were presented as emerging entrepreneurs, engaging in various business practices and social activities beyond storytelling. In time of national crisis signaled by pending Japanese invasion in the mid-1930s, the Wu brothers came together to perform the White Snake legend in the style of shuxi 書戲 (dramatized storytelling) to collect donations for buying fighter jets for the resistance effort (Shenbao 1933, 25). The power of the White Snake performance enabled its performers to emerge as important players in the cultural and political scenes of Republican China.

Xiqu and Its Transmedia Reinventions in the PRC Painting the Spirit The power of the White Snake legend in shaping and reflecting social and cultural changes and artistic experimentations continued into mid-twentieth-century China, and one example among 174

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many was ink brush paintings of White Snake theatrical performances onstage. These xiqu paintings connected the multiple important trends central to the revamping of the White Snake legend in modern times, including the humanization of its snake-women protagonists. More importantly, with the rise of state feminism in the new PRC and an emphasis on class politics from bottom up, the powerful role of Green Snake, the former supporting character and often portrayed as a maid/sister to White Snake, came to be emphasized. Spiritually less cultivated than White Snake and with an ambiguous gender background, she emerged as an even more fiercely transgressive figure than White Snake, heightening the dramatic tensions onstage and in the xiqu paintings. One of these paintings is Guan Liang’s 關良 1956 ink brush painting of the “Broken Bridge” 斷橋 scene, when the human husband, Xu Xian, after betraying White Snake’s love and trust, attempted to reconcile with her at Broken Bridge, the site of their first meeting. The painting highlights the spirit of the Green Snake as performed on the Jingju stage and deeply echoes my previous study on Tian Han’s avant-gardist spirit as reflected in his Jingju version of The White Snake (Luo 2014, Chapter 5), created just a few years before Guan’s painting. A leading Cantonese painter of the twentieth century, Guan reminds us of the importance of Southern Chinese painting in the development of the Japanese monochrome film Ugetsu in the early 1950s, as elaborated in my study on the Japanese cinematic remaking of the White Snake legend (Luo 2021b, Chapter 4). Importantly, Guan Liang, like Tian Han, loved stylized Chinese stage performances as a child and went to Japan to receive a Western-style education in his late teens. He was influenced by both ritualized Chinese theatrical performances, which inspired Bertolt Brecht and other modernists in their artistic experimentations (Saussy 2006, 8–29), and by fauvism, especially Henri Matisse’s “neo-impressionist”

Figure 14.3 A scene from The White Snake. Ink painting by Guan Liang, 1956. It portrays Green Snake accusing Xu Xian of betraying White Snake. The depicted scene is from “Broken Bridge” (斷橋), one of the most performed excerpts of Jingju White Snake. The artwork is held at the National Art Museum of China.

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painting style. Such encounters were mediated, ironically, by Guan’s experience learning realistic Western-style painting in Japan. As a result, Guan’s 1956 ink brush painting “Broken Bridge” synthesized his rich exposure to oil painting and Chinese painting, and realism and impressionism. However, such a painting may appear childish to viewers at first glance, precisely because of its lack of interest in photographic realism. Its powerfully economical brushstrokes bring out the characters’ life force, highlighting the androgynous and audacious spirit of Green Snake, who is at the center of both the painting and the dramatic conflict that it depicts (Figure 14.3). This dynamic tension that characterizes Green Snake, vividly brought to life in Guan Liang’s painting, is also exemplified in the practice in some Sichuan opera performances of using two actors, one male and one female, to play Green Snake. The “tender care” and “earnest service” offered by Green Snake to White Snake, as practiced in Sichuan opera performances, requires a specific tiedan 貼旦 (secondary female) role, while fighting White Snake in the “Subduing Green” 收青 scene, supporting White Snake in the “Water Battle” 水鬥 scene, accusing Xu Xian in the “Broken Bridge” scene, and demonstrating mask-changing skills unique to Sichuan opera require male roles ranging from chou 丑 (clown), jing 淨 (mighty male) to wusheng 武 生 (martial male) (Balivet 2020, 73–80; Tang 2013, 58).2 The range of changing gender roles partly gives rise to the reinterpretations of Green Snake; in other words, splitting the role between a male and a female actor gives substance to the problem of restrictive definitions of the feminine. Of course, the very fact that the same role was played by two actors also suggests Green Snake’s androgynous character, manifesting both feminine and masculine attributes and archetypes.

Inter-Asian Stage and Screen Connections The Shaw Brothers’ 1962 Huangmei diao film Madam White Snake 白蛇傳 (Hong Kong, starring Lin Dai 林黛), the 1975 kung fu film/slapstick comedy Snake Woman’s Marriage 白 蛇大鬧天宮 (Taiwan, starring Chia Ling 嘉凌), and the 1980 Jingju film Legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳 (PRC, starring Li Bingshu 李炳淑) reinforce the inter-Asian connections of White Snake stage performances in an intermedia context. The 1962 Hong Kong version and the 1975 Taiwan version can be understood as cinematic experimentations of White Snake stage performances in the style of commercial melodrama, with a strong tendency to demystify, humanize, and eroticize the image of the White Snake. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Shaw Brothers, who collaborated with Tōhō Studios in Japan to produce Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yōren 白夫人の妖恋, starring Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Li Xianglan 李香蘭) in 1956, attempted to use the Huangmei diao film with Lin Dai in the title role to launch a new commercial venture. Like many other film practitioners at that time, both the director, Yueh Feng 岳楓, and the leading actress, Lin Dai, had moved from mainland China to Hong Kong in 1949. Where Yueh contributed his experience in commercial filmmaking in 1930s Shanghai, Lin brought the ability to perform in Mandarin Chinese. With the phenomenal success of Mainland Huangmei opera films such as Heavenly Match (天仙配, 1955) and Female Imperial Son-in-Law (女駙馬, 1959) in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, the Shaw Brothers launched its own Mandarin-language Huangmei diao film enterprise in Hong Kong (Lin 2009). These included Heavenly Maiden Spreading Flowers (天女散花, 1959) and Madam White Snake (1962), both starring Lin Dai in the title role. The popularization of Huangmei diao films in Hong Kong worked well with the celebration of the folk legend and the pursuit of sensual enjoyment in modern life, as embodied in three ways: by the tagline “to pursue happiness you need to go to 176

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the human realm” 要快樂到人間, by the image of the enigmatic White Snake in the film, and by the enchanting actress Lin Dai in real life. The 1975 Taiwanese film Snake Woman’s Marriage starring Chia Ling, a martial arts film resembling a slapstick comedy, saw the coming together of the comical and the erotic and the transformation of the literary into the martial, magical into melodrama, and stage into screen. Female singing voices functioned as narrative voiceover, developing plot and releasing emotion. The complete humanization of the White Snake brought the comical and the erotic closer together as the scholar-turned-martial-hero saves the beauty and, in turn, the beauty rejuvenates the spirit of the hero 英雄救美, 美救英雄. Combing through the inter-Asian connections and reflecting on how these films were responding to PRC filmmaking from the 1950s, we discover how they provoked and facilitated the rise of stage-based Mandarin-language cinema in Taiwan in the 1970s. Not completely surprisingly, a Hong Kong producer and a Hong Kong special effects director were in fact behind Snake Woman’s Marriage. The film was likely categorized as a Taiwan production because it was shot on location in Taiwan and because its leading actress was Chia Ling, a star in both martial arts and xiqu-style Chinese opera in Taiwan before she entered the film industry. Born into a leading opera singer’s family, Chia was known as a multitalented performer of dan 旦 (female) roles who excelled in both wenxi 文戲 (civil) and wuxi 武戲 (martial) plays in canonic xiqu pieces such as The White Snake. Produced by the Huaxing Film Company from Hong Kong, the big-budget production achieved some of the best special effects to date in Taiwanese filmmaking, including the two lifelike giant snakes and the water battle scene between White Snake’s water troop and Abbot Fahai’s heavenly soldiers.3 Such a vibrant inter-Asian cinematic mapping of the White Snake story from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s presented a challenge to the PRC film industry. During the first few years of the cultural rebirth following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Shanghai Film Studio produced the Jingju film Legend of the White Snake as a possible response to the earlier attempts at recreating White Snake during the Cold War. This 1980 Shanghai version can be best understood in the context of multiple dialogues between the film world of 1920s Shanghai, when the first commercial White Snake films were made, the tradition of xiqu films in the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s, and the inter-Asian White Snake performance connections from the 1950s to the 1970s. The 1920s Shanghai femme fatale traveled to 1950s Beijing in the garb of traditional Chinese theater in Tian Han’s Jingju version and returned to 1980s Shanghai in this Jingju film, but her transgressive female sexuality and revolutionary energy could not be tamed. Such transgressive sexuality and revolutionary energy joined hands with the international socialism and state feminism that prevailed in Beijing during the 1950s (Luo 2021a, 140–1). This hybrid image of the “new woman” combined feminism with socialism, and traditional aesthetics with modern political aspirations.

From Stage to Page and Back: Contemporary Sinophone Articulations Outside mainland China, the expressive and transgressive energy of the androgynous Green Snake, which echoed the gender and class dynamics of the PRC and had long simmered beneath the surface in popular versions and on local opera stages, found more explicit expressions on the modern stage to speak to new desires and aspirations. This trend was especially visible in the mid-1970s with Cloud Gate’s rendition of the White Snake legend in Taiwan, in which stunning choreography heightened the expression of the triangular love and lust between Green Snake, White Snake, and Xu Xian (Jiang 2004, 110–11), and continued in the early 1990s with Tien Chi-yuan’s experiments celebrating male homosexual desires in White 177

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Water 白水 (Wang 2018, 578–96). Taiwanese opera White Snake Spectacular 超炫白蛇傳 by Ming Hwa Yuan is another energizing attempt at recreating White Snake. Ming Hwa Yuan’s multimedia performance often takes place in huge arenas and resembles a thronged pop music concert, and the audience must wear raincoats to avoid being completely soaked by water when high-pressure water hoses are employed during the water battle scene (Ming Hwa Yuan 2008; Chun 2019, 307–26). This focus on spectacular stage magic brings us back to the experimental and commercial qualities of early twentieth-century White Snake stage. At the same time, it prepares us for our exploration of the renewed interest in the White Snake legend in print in the Sinophone worlds and onstage in the twenty-first-century United States. White Snake stage performances are thoroughly represented on the printed pages. Echoing this recent emphasis on the transgressive Green Snake onstage, Hong Kong female writer Lilian Lee’s Green Snake foregrounds the androgynous Green Snake as both a dancer and a writer (Lee 1986). In fact, the novel is constructed as Green Snake’s autobiography. The writing and dancing aspects of Green Snake become the key to deciphering Yan Geling’s novella White Snake, written by a female writer in the late 1990s in the diaspora, and provide a fresh perspective for our investigation of the rewriting of the White Snake legend in contemporary times (Yan 1998). The many talented actresses who made their name performing the White Snake on the Chinese opera stage beginning in the 1950s attest to the continuing relevance of the legend in the performance culture and social practice of the PRC. One of these White Snake actresses would later emerge as the female protagonist in Yan’s White Snake. On the Chinese mainland in the early 1950s, Tian Han’s Jingju version of The White Snake already summoned White Snake’s maid/sister Green Snake back to “liberate” her from under the Thunder Peak Pagoda. This can be understood as the model for the young fangirl “liberating” the incarcerated White Snake dancer in Yan’s novella, attesting to the feminist and grassroots revolutionary spirit celebrated by the new Communist government, and its possible queer implications. The key themes of dancing, writing, and the formation and transformation of gender and sexual identities are front and center in Yan’s White Snake, a story about a cross-dressing female fan’s homosexual infatuation with an actress famous for playing the White Snake onstage before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. The female hybrid dancing body is celebrated as expressive in performance, but that same body can be seen as politically suspicious in real life; the White Snake can be revered onstage and at the same time considered scandalous offstage. In Yan’s White Snake, the fate of the fictional White Snake performer, who during the Cultural Revolution is accused of being “worn shoes” (破鞋, a “loose woman”) in her offstage life, serves as an allegory for the life-shaping power of performance. The female fan of Yan’s novella radically identifies with Green Snake, who in some versions of the legend is a male who wishes to marry White Snake but is transformed into her female servant after losing a bet (Tang 2013, 56–8). The female fan disguises herself as a man and visits the White Snake dancer every day, while the latter is incarcerated during the Cultural Revolution. These daily visits become something of a monthlong therapy session for both of them. Throughout Yan’s novella, both the White Snake dancer and the Green Snake fangirl function as metaphorical human/nonhuman hybrids. In particular, the transgressive energies embodied by the androgynous Green Snake in the local opera version of the legend merges with the powerful persona of the antiestablishment fangirl in the story. The actual lived past and the mythical past generated by the White Snake legend are joint together in contemporary times, and their regenerative powers are used to project into the future. Yan’s White Snake, read together with Lee’s Green Snake, reaffirms the interrelatedness of class politics and gender transgression. At the same time, their celebration of gender and 178

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sexual experimentations countered the officially sanctioned asexual relationship of revolutionary comradeship. Such experiments emphasized queer identity as transgression, rather than as lesbian longing per se. Such transgressive and antiauthoritarian actions could target any systems of oppression, be it sexual or political. In particular, with the Cultural Revolution as historical background, these fictional accounts actively participated in the antiestablishment politics of the time and in the formation of a post–Cultural Revolution memory ecology. The question of species queerness and class queerness, together with queerness as homosexual desire, forms an important entryway into twenty-first-century retellings of the White Snake legend.

Staging the Snake Women in Twenty-First-Century United States From Zhao Qingge to Mary Zimmerman Such mid-twentieth-century legacies are most prominent in Tony Award–winning director Mary Zimmerman’s English-language play The White Snake. In her published foreword to The White Snake, Mo Zhou, Assistant Director for the play’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere in 2012, remarks that their rendition of this “epic love story” was based on the prose text written and published in Beijing in 1956 by “arguably the most underrated female writer,” Zhao Qingge (趙清閣, 1914–1999), “who infuses the story with immense elegance” (Zhou 2013, xi). In addition, Zhou lists Wilt Idema’s The White Snake and Her Son, which includes a translation of a Buddhist baojuan published in 1908, as a powerful influence (Idema 2009). Zimmerman’s play contributes to the already-canonized twentieth-century practice of treating the legend as an “epic love story,” with an emphasis on the humanity of the nonhuman. In Zimmerman’s own words, deep down, the play is about how “you can be loved for who you truly are.”4 It becomes clear that the Zimmerman play is drawing directly upon the politicized interpretations of Zhao Qingge’s 1956 prose text. The atheist rhetoric in the PRC of the 1950s and the use of the White Snake legend to propagate the nascent regime’s new marriage law provided an impetus for reinterpretation – of the Buddhist abbot as the representative of an evil “feudal” regime, and of the relationship between the White Snake and her human lover as a case of free love against arranged marriage. In this context, Abbot Fahai is referred to as “a fundamentalist monk who disapproves strongly of anyone marrying a different species.” The legend becomes “a very adventurous, very romantic story,” while at the same time integrating fantasy with reality.5 In her foreword to the 1956 Chinese version, Zhao Qingge calls the White Snake story a beautiful folktale about a “fairy maiden’s pursuit of freedom and happiness” and classifies the role of the “rascally monk” as a “representative of the reactionary feudal forces.” Zhao mentions her six revisions of the text, based on her watching different performances of the White Snake legend in Jingju and in local operas. Most of these operas were based on Tian Han’s Jingju text, which had been finalized just a few years earlier. As was customary at that time, Zhao positioned her novel as a reflection of the “sharp conflict between the common people and feudal ruling classes” (Zhao 1998, unpaginated), endowing the world of fantastic legends with class politics. Zhao’s 1956 novel has proven very popular and far more accessible than many other White Snake renditions from her time. It is also indicative of its era: its ending (in which Greenie/Green Snake returns to defeat Fahai and liberate White Snake from under the Thunder Peak Pagoda) was likely the only one possible during that period. Such an ending feels 179

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lacking for my students reading the novel in English translation in twenty-first-century United States, as there is no final reunion of husband and wife or mother and son. In particular, this ending pales in comparison to the one found in Ma Rufei’s tanci storytelling version, which features the harmonious coexistence of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings: the son returns to save his mother (Confucian), the human lover Xu Xian becomes a monk (Buddhist), and the human/nonhuman couple eventually reach enlightenment and ascend to heaven (Daoist and Buddhist) (Idema 2009, 6). Such a harmonious religious convergence, of course, had become impossible in the time of Zhao’s writing. However, that was not the case for Zimmerman. Her text allows room for audience intervention and experimentation, and the multiple narrators speaking at the ending of the play make available a range of spiritualities and possibilities.

From Madame White Snake to White Snake Projects Similarly, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize–winning opera Madame White Snake (Zhou and Jacobs 2010) reflects multiple layers of theatrical influences from Chinese local operas, Western musical educations, and the cultural politics of being Singaporean and Chinese, from Asia of the second half of twentieth century to the United States of the twenty-first century. In this opera, Green Snake is specifically designated as a man in love with White Snake in a previous life, a characterization that follows conventions in the Sichuan opera versions and echoes the desires of the cross-dressing fangirl in Yan’s White Snake. Acclaimed as “one of the greatest singers of his generation” who “possesses a remarkable voice, one that marries trumpeting high notes with a warm and supple middle voice and secure bottom,” Michael Maniaci proved to be a thoughtful choice, given the long history of using male actors or multiple actors to bring out Green Snake’s complex character onstage in the Chinese tradition.6 With White Snake and Green Snake listed as the opera’s two leading roles, Jacobs and Zhou clearly emphasize the characters and perspectives of the snake women. Seeing Cantonese and other local opera versions of the White Snake legend was an important experience for the young Cerise Lim Jacobs, reflective of her childhood growing up in a traditional Chinese family in colonial Singapore: The immortal snake’s quest for love represented for us all – grandmother, great-aunt, mother, nanny, and children – the yearning for the ineffable, the courage to follow your heart. We sat for many Saturdays, millions (perhaps billions) of us, to have our hearts broken again and again by love’s death.7 Examining Jacobs’s libretto grants us a renewed understanding of what she refers to as “love’s death,” as materialized in the tragic ending of the Madame White Snake opera. In a recent interview, Jacobs also mentioned the Shaw Brothers’ Madam White Snake and its leading actress, Lin Dai, as major influences. Although she loved the film as a child, when recreating the White Snake legend for the opera, she was determined to remold the “fragile” and “hopeless” characterizations of the snake women as fighting against authoritarianism (Fang 2019, 56–7). It is helpful to consider the multicultural and multilingual background of the creators of the Madame White Snake opera in a broad inter-Asian context historically, as well as through their shared minority perspectives in their American context at our present moment. Jacobs forcefully articulates the attraction of the White Snake legend, wholeheartedly identifying with the White Snake as “a complete outsider” who, uprooted from her cultural background, had to struggle as “a woman, a ‘yellow-skinned’ minority, an immigrant from outside” in a 180

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new environment for survival and success (Fang 2019, 56). Following the critical success of the Madame White Snake opera, Jacobs went on to establish an IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) opera foundation and the White Snake Projects opera company, with the express purpose of helping minority composers and librettists break into mainstream American venues. The COVID-19 pandemic posed a unique challenge to all performance companies. White Snake Projects confronted these challenges head-on and used Jacobs’s vision of minority activism as the direction in which online events have been initiated and organized. A series of events organized by the Boston-based company forms a well-conceived online exhibition to become part of an evolving “global White Snake digital archive,” encompassing a wide range of avant-gardist performance projects inspired by the Chinese legend. These projects include a sequence of community-based performance programs responding to issues relevant to immigration, decolonization, and the pandemic conditions, forming the Sing Out Strong (SOS) series, as well as full-fledged digital operas “Alice in the Pandemic” (October 2020) and “Death by Life” (May 2021) broadcasted to the world from online platforms, the former centering the essential workers in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the latter conceived as a response to the killing of George Floyd and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement (Luo 2021c, 131, 141). Experimental performance and social activism come together in the most recent digital opera endeavors from White Snake Projects, opening White Snake performances across time and space, and media and worlds, as both poetic and documentary, both cutting-edge and impactful.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I treated “modern Chinese drama” as broadly inclusive, with the case of the reinvention of The Legend of the White Snake at the center. I demonstrated the importance of stretching the temporal boundary of the “modern” by showing how stage and textual developments from the late imperial times redefined the good and the evil in the White Snake legend. These stage-shaped texts were then rendered into English at the turn of the twentieth century, helping to transform the legend from a cautionary tale to a story about love and family and broadening its geographical and linguistic boundaries. In my explorations of stage experiments throughout the twentieth century, I took what was considered “traditional Chinese theater” (xiqu) seriously, with a focus on the power of popular, experimental, and commercial performances, in generating social changes in Republican Shanghai. I then explored how xiqu was reinvented via painting and film in the PRC and how it continued to revamp the White Snake legend across media in contemporary Sinophone and Anglophone worlds. Specifically, the mid-twentieth-century developments in the PRC focusing on gender and class politics are paralleled with further Sinophone articulations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, from performance stages to the printed pages, and with new desires and aspirations. Importantly, the revolutionary legacies of the mid-twentieth century are also prominently visible in twenty-first-century Anglophone White Snake performance works, celebrating love across boundaries and fighting for minority rights and social justice. These critically acclaimed Anglophone projects remind us of the Anglophone missionary and diplomatic renditions of the White Snake legend from the turn of the twentieth century and how they helped shape our understanding of the legend as a love story. By stretching the legend’s temporal, geographical, linguistic, and genre and media borders, the White Snake works examined in this chapter speak volumes about the importance of writing a world history of modern Chinese culture. 181

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Notes 1 As a performed storytelling 說唱 genre, tanci does not require props, scenery, or elaborate costume, and this may have contributed to its mobility and adaptability. Tanci was joined by pinghua 評話 in its development, and they collectively formed the hybrid and even more robust storytelling genre of pingtan 評彈 throughout its development in twentieth-century China. The current Suzhou Pingtan Group (founded in 1951) is located on the historical site of the Guangyu Guild and claims lineage from the guild’s founding in 1776. See www.szsptt.com/page.php?id=1. A 2017 30-episode televised pingtan series Legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳 can be found on the YouTube channel Y. Yu, which is “devoted to the promotion and preservation of Suzhou pingtan”: www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLhbYKZKr81efuYzNB-rS7CUHX_de301dt, accessed May 28, 2019. 2 According to Aaron Balivet (2020), the use of male role types for Green Snake goes back at least to the time of Fang Chengpei’s play in the late eighteenth century. Fang’s play uses a chou role type to depict Green Snake in the scenes “Subduing Green” and “Suppressed by the Alms Bowl” 合缽. The “Subduing Green” scene was a popular excerpt in both pihuang 皮黃 and kunqu 崑曲 (often translated as Kunqu opera) traditions up to the late nineteenth century, although the detail of Green Snake’s hope to win White Snake’s hand in marriage may be unique to Sichuan opera. 3 See “Chia Ling,” Hong Kong Movie Database, accessed January 14, 2019, http://hkmdb.com/db/people/view.mhtml?id=3866. 4 “Writer/Director Mary Zimmerman Discusses ‘The White Snake,’” Chicago Sun-Times, May 16, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ivlrWSUSU. 5 “The Story of the White Snake,” Oregon Shakespeare Festival, October 5, 2011, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SEwhtOwkKfk. 6 “Michael Maniaci as Xiao Qing,” accessed August 10, 2018, http://ouroborostrilogy.org/featuring/ view/Michael-Maniaci. 7 Personal interview with Cerise Lim Jacobs, July 11, 2020 (on Zoom).

References Balivet, Aaron. 2020. “The Many Transformations of White Snake: Gender, Ritual, and Performance in Late Imperial China.” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ann Arbor: ProQuest Dissertation Publishing. Chen Yuqian 陳遇乾, ed. 1809. Preface. In Xiuxiang yiyao quanzhuan 繡像義妖全傳 (The Complete Illustrated Righteous Snake), edited by Chen Shiqi 陳士奇 and Yu Xiushan 俞秀山. Full text available at Waseda University Archive. http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/he19/he19_03304/. Chun, Tarryn Li-Min. 2019. “Mediated Transgression and Madame White: Technology and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Stagings of a Chinese Folktale.” Theatre Journal 71, no. 3: 307–26. Cloud, Frederick D. 1906. Hangchow, the “City of Heaven”. Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1906. Fang Bo 方博. 2019. “Lin Xiaoying tan geju Baishe zhuan” 林曉瑛談歌劇《白蛇傳》 (An Interview with Cerise Lim Jacobs on Madame White Snake). Geju 4: 52–7. Fang Chengpei 方成培, ed. 1995. Leifengta chuanqi 雷峰塔傳奇 (Legend of Thunder Peak Pagoda; 1771). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Feng 風. 1942. “Tanci suohua” 彈詞瑣話 (Radom Discussions on tanci). Shenbao, July 8: 7. Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. 1956. “Bai niangzi yongzhen Leifengta” 白娘子永鎮雷峰塔 (Lady White Is Imprisoned Forever under Thunder Peak Pagoda). In Jingshi tongyan 警世通言 (Stories to Caution the World; 1624), Chapter 28. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Guanglei shizhu 光磊室主. 1924. “Yueju suotan” 粵劇瑣譚 (Radom Discussions on Yue Opera). Shenbao, December 22: 8. H. C. 1864a. “Lüi-fung Tǎ, ‘Thunder Peak Pagoda,’ or ‘The Story of Han-wǎn and the White Serpent.” In Vol. 1 (July 1863–June 1864), The Chinese and Japanese Repository of Facts and Events in Science, History, and Art, Relating to Eastern Asia, edited by Rev. James Summers, 357–65, 401–10, 429–35, 461–8, 503–13. London: W. H. Allen and Co.; Paris: Benjamin Duprat; and London: The Office of the Chinese and Japanese Repository. H. C. 1864b. “Luo-fung Ta, ‘Thunder Peak Pagoda,’ or ‘The Story of Han-wan and the White Serpent.” In Vol. 2 (August 1864–December 1864), The Chinese and Japanese Repository of Facts and Events in Science, History, and Art, Relating to Eastern Asia, edited by Rev. James Summers, 11–19, 89–97. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint Limited; Tokyo: reprinted by Yushodo Booksellers Ltd, 1967.

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Modern Chinese Drama Across Media and Worlds Idema, Wilt L. 2009. The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of “The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak” with Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Jiang Xun 蔣勳. 2004. Wudong Baishe zhuan 舞動白蛇傳 (Dancing White Snake). Taipei: Yuanliu. Jiang Yuequan 蔣月泉. 1961. Baishe: shang Jinshan 白蛇：上金山 (White Snake: Going Up the Golden Mountain). Suzhou pingtan Storytelling Performance. Recorded at Shanghai Music Hall. Last updated by Y. Yu, December 20, 2016. https://youtu.be/uD22vkff5pI. Jiang Yuequan 蔣月泉, and Liu Yunruo 劉韻若. 1984. Baishe: penfu 白蛇：噴符 (White Snake: Puffing Out Water Talisman). Suzhou pingtan Performance in Commemoration of Jiang Yuequan’s Fifty-Year Career. Last updated by Y. Yu, June 2, 2017. https://youtu.be/GWeaakB5LAk. Julien, Stanislas, trans. 1834. Blanche et Bleue, ou Les deux couleuvres-fées; roman chinois/Baishe jingji (Legend of the White Snake Femme Fatale). Paris: Gosselin. Lee, Lilian (Lee Pik-Wah 李碧華). 1986. Qingshe 青蛇 (Green Snake). Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu. Li Fang 李昉 et al. ed. 1926. “Li Huang” 李黃 (Li Huang). In Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (Extensive Record of the Taiping Era; 977–984) Vol. 458, snake story 3. Shanghai: Saoye shanfang. Lin, Qinghua 林青華. 2009. “Huangmeixi dianying zai Xianggang ji Taiwan de fazhan” 黃梅戲電影在 香港及台灣的發展 (The Development of Huangmei Opera Film in Hong Kong and Taiwan). Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan xuebao 115, no. 2: 74–82, 120. Liu Xiaohai 劉曉海, and Wang Shuwen 王書文. 2017. “Jindai Suzhou pingtan chuancheng tixi de goujian – yi Guangyu she wei zhongxin” 近代蘇州評彈傳承體系的構建 – 以光裕社為中心 (The construction of a system of inheritance for Suzhou pingtan in modern times – Centered on Guangyu Guild). Difang wenhua yanjiu 1: 21–26. Luo, Liang. 2014. The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Luo, Liang. 2021a. “The Experimental and the Popular in Chinese Socialist Theater of the 1950s.” In Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era, edited by Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, 135–61. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Luo, Liang. 2021b. The Global White Snake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Luo, Liang. 2021c. “The Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project.” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 5, no. 1: 127–42. Ming Hwa Yuan 明華園. 2008. Chaoxuan Baishe zhuan 超炫白蛇傳 (White Snake Spectacular). Taiwanese opera. DVD. Live recording of 2007 performance in Taipei in Taiwanese. Saussy, Haun. 2006. “Mei Lanfang in Moscow, 1935: Familiar, Unfamiliar, Defamiliar.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, no. 1: 8–29. 1913. “Qingyi Mei Lanfang” 青衣梅蘭芳 (Female Lead Mei Lanfang). Shenbao, November 13: 12. 1914a. “Benshe xinbian zhuming tanci xiaoshuo” 本社新編著名彈詞小說 (Newly-Arranged Famous tanci Fiction from Our Society). Shenbao, November 10: 9. 1914b. “Quanguo huanying” 全國歡迎 (Nationwide Welcome). Shenbao, December 20: 9. 1916. “Wu Yusun, Wu Xiaosong, Wu Xiaoshi chang Baishe zhuan” 吳玉蓀吳小松吳小石唱白蛇傳 (Wu Yusun, Wu Xiaosong, Wu Xiaoshi Perform The White Snake). Shenbao, March 22: 9. 1917. “Quanxin guangxiu” 全新廣繡 (Brand-New Embroideries from Canton). Shenbao, February 13: 16. 1918. “Ouyang Yuqian” 歐陽予倩 (Ouyang Yuqian). Shenbao, March 13: 8. 1919. “Diyi nü mingling Li Sut-fong” 第一女名伶李雪芳 (No. 1 Famous Actress Li Sut-fong). Shenbao, November 30: 8. 1923. “Baidai gongsi zengzhi xin changpian” 百代公司增製新唱片 (Pathé Company Produces New Records). Shenbao, January 9: 18. 1933. “Lühu quanti Guangyu sheyuan kechuan Wu Yusun kechuan Wu Xiaosong Xiaoshi” 旅滬全體 光裕社員客串吳玉蓀客串吳小松小石 (All Shanghai Members of the Gugangyu Gild with Guest Performances by Wu Yusun, Wu Xiaosong, Xiaoshi). Shenbao, May 19: 25. 1934. “Zuixin chuban erji tanci” 最新出版二集彈詞 (Newly Published Two-Volume tanci). Shenbao, May 19: 11. Sihu 思湖. 1924. “Shuoshu xiaoping” 說書小評 (Storytelling Commentary), no. 7. Shenbao, local supplement, March 13: 18. Tang Simin 唐思敏. 2013. “Chuanju Baishe zhuan tanwei” 川劇白蛇傳探微 (A Preliminary Discussion of Sichuan Opera White Snake). Zhongguo xiju 4: 56–8. Wang Peijun 王培君, and Xia Xiyan 夏夕燕. 2017. Baishe zhuan 白蛇傳 (Legend of the White Snake). Suzhou Dianshi Shuchang, last updated on August 10, 2018. www.youtube.com/playlist?list= PLhbYKZKr81efuYzNB-rS7CUHX_de301dt. Full-length Suzhou pingtan storytelling performance, 30 televised episodes with Chinese subtitles.

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Liang Luo Wang, Wei-Chih. 2018. “The Body That Can(Not) Represent Us: Tian Chi-Yuan’s White Water and Modern Taiwanese Theatre.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 19, no. 4: 578–96. DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2018. 543373. “White and Blue; or the Serpent Fairies.” 1834. “Analysis of Works” (a Summary of Stanislas Julien’s Blanche et Bleue, ou Les deux couleuvres-fées; roman chinois). The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1, no. 2: 307, 315–21. London: John W. Parker, West Strand. Wong Chin Foo. 1888. “Poh Yuin Ko, the Serpent Princess.” The Cosmopolitan 6, no. 2: 180–90. Woodbridge, Samuel I. 1896. The Mystery of the White Snake: A Legend of the Thunder Peak Tower. Shanghai: printed at the office of the North-China Herald. Xinfo 心佛. 1920. “Fen Juhua xiaozhuan” 粉菊花小傳 (A Brief Biography of Fen Juhua). Da shijie, June 9: 3. Yan, Geling 嚴歌苓. 1998. Beishe 白蛇 (White Snake). Shiyue, no. 5. Yunlu 雲盧. 1920. “Fen Juhua zhi juguan” 粉菊花之劇觀 (Viewing Fen Juhua’s Performances). Da shijie, May 14: 3. Yushan zhuren 玉山主人. 1995. Leifengta qizhuan 雷峰塔奇傳 (Strange Tale of the Thunder Peak Pagoda; 1806). Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe. Full text available at Chinese Text Project. https://ctext. org/wiki.pl?if=gb&res=906942&remap=gb. Zhao Qingge 趙清閣. 1998. “Foreword,” dated January 1956. Translated by Paul White. In The Legend of White Snake, unpaginated. Beijing: New World Press. Zhou, Long (music), and Cerise Lim Jacobs (libretto). 2010. Madame White Snake: An Opera in Four Acts. New York: Oxford University Press. Zhou, Mo. 2013. “Foreword.” In The White Snake: A Play, edited by Mary Zimmerman, ix–xiii. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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15 REPORTAGE AND THE FORMS OF NONFICTION ART IN CHINA Charles A. Laughlin

A Problem of Terminology In the field of modern Chinese literature, the term “reportage literature” (baogao wenxue 報 告文學), which itself translates from the French “reportage” (in the sense of a literary genre), denotes a tradition of nonfiction writing practice that can be traced back at least to the late nineteenth century, assumed the name “reportage literature” in 1930, and continues to be used to the present day, although works under this designation have been said to be dwindling since before the end of the twentieth century. I have previously described Chinese reportage literature as “any consciously literary nonfiction text that narrates or describes a current event, person or social phenomenon” (Laughlin 2002, 2), but its recent usage in Chinese literary and scholarly circles is narrower than that. For many, “reportage” is thought to adhere to the revolutionary political agenda promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP hereafter) and guides its authors and readers into a collective identification with the Chinese nation; it is distinguished in this manner from other forms of nonfiction literary writing that have been called “documentary literature” (jishi wenxue 紀實文學) and, more recently, “nonfiction writing” (feixugou xiezuo 非虛構寫作). As such, it emerged only in the midst of the international proletarian literary movement in the early 1930s, became an important literary vehicle among the CCP and its constituency in the War Against Japan (1937–1945) and subsequent Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (the PRC hereafter), in the manner that had been established during wartime in the Revolutionary Base Areas, reportage transformed into a vehicle primarily for extolling the achievements of socialism, the Communist Party, and its leaders, especially Mao Zedong. In the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956, it also became an important avenue for social criticism within socialism, but after the suppression of such criticism and the persecution of its authors, it was restored to its orthodox role as a vehicle for government propaganda, occupying the status of a literary genre in its own right in the most prestigious literary journals, such as People’s Literature (人 民文學) and Literary Harvest (收穫). This narrowing of the definition is debatable, especially in that it does not acknowledge reportage’s unprecedented popularity and legitimacy as a vehicle for social criticism and reflection during the “Culture Fever” moment of the 1980s (Chen 1985, 91–3), but there is still some merit to these claims. The problem is that when a subject of study (let’s call it “literary 185

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journalism”) gets caught up in a single term like “reportage” so that it is expected to adhere to the precise referents of that term in the limited historical period in which it served its purpose, it is bound to be of little or no relevance even when the study first emerges. It is much more interesting to explore what factors enabled the phenomenon denoted by that term to emerge and flourish, what other manifestations that phenomenon there have been, and especially what manifestations continue to exist under other names, even if the term that gave rise to the subject is falling out of use. The previous circumscription of the word baogao wenxue indicates a stigmatization in China that has made it difficult to theorize and place into a meaningful context. To many, it would seem just as well to discard the term and relegate it to the dustbin of history. In fact, reportage is a highly significant facet of a much larger trend in Chinese narrative art to get as close as possible to actual historical or social reality, and that trend, to date, does not yet seem to have an overarching name (Laughlin and Guo 2019, v–vii). For example, in the past decade or so, there has been a great deal of excitement in the literary scene over fei xugou nonfiction writing, especially since the publication in 2010 of Liang Hong’s book China in One Village (Liang 2014, 2021a). There have been many studies, media events, and workshops on this form, and these have been accompanied by a widespread narrative about the demise of baogao wenxue. Liang, a professor of modern Chinese literature herself, has said that whatever her nonfiction writing may be, she is quite sure it is not reportage (Liang 2021b). As Harlan Chambers puts it: The distance Liang poses between her nonfiction writing and the political engagement of reportage literature corresponds to a broader discourse in China’s contemporary literary field in which historical practices of literary reportage and their theoretical grounding in political commitment offer little to the present. (2019, 251) In a 2014 interview, Liang explains that reportage literature is maybe a rather large and macrocosmic (hongguan) kind of narrative; it informs you about another person’s affairs; it tells you a kind of definite truth . . . [but nonfiction] is an individual perspective, it is my Liang Village. . . . Maybe I’m completely perplexed, maybe I myself have lots of doubts, hesitations, and I cannot be clear. I only try to present this kind of complexity, right down to its ambiguity. (Chambers 2019, 254; emphases mine) While Liang Hong’s account of reportage stated here is a common understanding in the PRC, it is not accurate to say that reportage dismisses the perspective of the individual or the marginal in favor of the macroscopic, or that its messages convey definite truths. I have argued that the first wave of Chinese reportage in the 1930s and 1940s endeavored to create a collective point of view and narrative subject position, but it was not always identified with the nation, and it also often involved anxiety and uncertainty. Moreover, many of the individual works of Chinese reportage from its three major waves that are most celebrated and best known take the experience of one or more marginalized individuals as points of departure for their critiques of systemic injustices or social issues. The reason I think this is worth pointing out is that Chinese reportage old and new manifests the insistent and repeated return of a definitive Chinese creative impulse to unmask falsity and reveal historical and social reality, especially where the false narrative oppresses marginal groups or ordinary people in general. This was a demonstrable aspect of the first wave 186

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of Chinese reportage, which focused on the experience of laborers and ordinary citizens in the 1930s, in addition to soldiers, peasants, and medical workers during the years of the war from 1937 to 1945; it was true in the second wave in the Hundred Flowers Campaign seven years after the establishment of the PRC, and it also was the case in the third and most prolific wave of Chinese reportage in the early years of the period of Reform and Opening, which was initiated by new works by Liu Binyan 劉賓雁 (1925–2005), who had been rehabilitated by the Deng Xiaoping regime like many other writers and intellectuals who had been persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. The implication seems to be that, like other aspects of socialist or “Maoist” culture, reportage is a thing of the past and of no meaning or use to contemporary writers. There are, in fact, other reasons for the decline of reportage as well, as I will elaborate next. What is interesting to me here is that contemporary discussions of nonfiction literature rarely, if ever, mention reportage but rather associate nonfiction writing with American and European literary nonfiction, such as the new journalism (Chambers 2019, 252, 255–6). It would be worthwhile to investigate what Chinese nonfiction writing resembles more: reportage or new journalism. Discussions of modern Chinese literature occasionally get caught up in this issue of cultural influence: to what degree does it try to adopt and imitate European or American literature? Is that, in fact, possible? There can be a tendency to essentialize cultural difference and identify “Chinese” with “traditional” and “Western” with “modern,” but in practice, modern Chinese culture often turns out to be of another category altogether. Saying that reportage is a “response” to an “impact” is misleading, as reportage gained much more traction in China than it did in Europe or America. To be sure, Chinese reportage would not have gotten very far without the support and guidance of the CCP. But what also needs to be understood is that Chinese reportage, at least in three waves throughout the twentieth century, took on a life of its own and often subverted and attacked the CCP, its leadership, or the historical practice of socialism in China, and this is evidence of something larger and more significant than the narrowed definition of reportage as an orthodox socialist genre (Chen 1985, 92).

On the Origins of Chinese Reportage When an externally introduced cultural or literary practice takes hold in a new culture, it is because the receiving culture has an existing capacity or tendency that the practice can serve and amplify; this is the case with Chinese reportage. Long before the notion of “reportage literature” was imported to China, the accurate, reflective, and often polemical prose expression of the emerging Chinese national crisis was a familiar part of intellectual life, even saturating the late Qing novel. Zeng Pu’s Flower in a Sinful Sea (孽海花, 1903), for example, was written in an almost-contemporary setting and featured many known historical figures among its characters and could be said to have been a commentary on China in the midst of internal convulsions and external threats, trying to find its place in a modern world of nations (Liu and Minford 1984, 137–92; Hu 2000). At least since the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1860s, the composition and circulation of factual accounts about the contemporary world, often with the purpose of reflecting on China’s situation and possible directions of future development, became a familiar aspect of the cultural and intellectual scenes (Chou 1985: 212–15). The habit of commenting morally or politically on contemporary affairs had been an integral part of intellectual life throughout the Qing in the form of the modern prose essay (shiwen 時文). As Alexander Des Forges (2021) compellingly argues, despite modern disdain for civil service examination essays, they were perhaps the defining prose genre of the Ming and Qing dynasties, in that they integrated literary talent with the extensive philosophical and moral cultivation of education in 187

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the Confucian classics, in essays that commonly apply these elements to the in-depth discussion of pressing contemporary social and political problems. While it is true that the path of reportage in mainland China has been more dramatic and storied than in most other countries, its leftist-internationalist cosmopolitan quality in the twentieth century suggests looking beyond China’s borders for a full understanding of its significance and impact. In 1921, less than four years after the Russian Revolution, Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, who a few years later would become general secretary of the CCP, embarked on a journey by train to Moscow to witness and record his observations on the world’s first successful major socialist revolution (Qu 1922, 1924; Hsia 1968: 3–54; Laughlin 2002: 44–53). Though originating, arguably, from the German-language work of the Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch, word of the reportage trend came into China from Japan, where a proletarian literary movement had been developing throughout the 1920s (Balk 1935; Kisch 1935; Laughlin 2002, 22). There was reportage in colonial Korea in the 1920s, before there was in China, and there were writers of the genre in colonial Taiwan in the 1930s (Yang 2019, 46). Liu Binyan’s inspiration in the 1950s was not so much the existing modern Chinese tradition of baogao wenxue but the Soviet author Valentin Ovechkin’s “sketches” or ocherki (Wagner 1992, 245–79). More recently, in Taiwan, baodao wenxue 報導文學 re-emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not to designate the genre in China, but to promote it in Taiwan. The left-leaning Taiwanese novelist Chen Ying-chen 陳映真 (1937–2016) and the influential journalist Gao Xinjiang 高 信疆 (1944–2009) drew readers’ attention to politically engaged literary nonfiction in Taiwan from the 1930s, as well as its counterpart on the mainland, and, more importantly, established an influential journal In Society (人間) to promote the form in post-war Taiwan (Yang 2019, 45–6; Chen 2019, 81–3). This regional interpenetration makes reportage literature an excellent object for the study of literary cosmopolitanism. When, some years after the establishment of the CCP in 1921 (years during which they devoted scant attention to contemporary literature and culture), its membership became aware of the international proletarian culture movement, it resonated with China’s aforementioned long-standing fascination with the literary construction of contemporary realities. Summaries of the genre’s history and major authors were translated from the work of Japanese critic Kawaguchi Hiroshi, as well as further elaboration for the Chinese audience by Yuan Shu 袁殊 (1911–1987), which made Chinese readers aware of the work of French novelist and reportage practitioner Henri Barbusse as well as Egon Erwin Kisch (Yuan Shu 1931). By 1930, the newly established League of Leftwing Writers resolved to form committees for the promotion and development of proletarian culture, as a strategy for its revolutionary mobilization; two of the key initiatives were the education of industrial workers and the promotion among them of reportage literature, a genre that had been moving quickly through international proletarian literary circles in tandem with proletarian fiction. The idea that illiterate workers could be brought to write compelling literary works turned out to be largely aspirational, but the opportunity to commit workers’ experiences and subjectivity to writing was irresistible to literary activists. Writers like Ah Ying 阿英 (Qian Xingcun ---) both tried their hand at the form and vigorously promoted it;1 the novelist Ding Ling 丁玲 began reportage experiments in 1932 and continued them throughout the war; dramatist Xia Yan 夏衍made use of activists to infiltrate Shanghai textile mills to gather evidence and perspectives for what would become the most representative work of Chinese reportage in the first wave, “Indentured Workers” (Ding Ling 1932; Xia Yan 1936a, 1936b; Laughlin 2002, 124–31). Mao Dun 茅盾, already a major novelist, wrote both critically and enthusiastically about reportage in the early 1930s; his own fiction sometimes reads like reportage, particularly sections of his magnum opus, Midnight (子 夜, 1933), devoted to the lifeworld of Shanghai laborers. 188

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In addition, thanks in part to the influence of French author Henri Barbusse, who had been writing reportage about war since the early 1920s, it was seen that reportage literature need not be limited to the subject of industrial labor – since war had already become a recognized feature of the twentieth century, and China was under the looming threat of war with Japan. Ah Ying’s collection The Shanghai Incident and Reportage (1932) included accounts of the aftermath of Japan’s bombing of parts of Shanghai in 1932, and writers like Qiu Dongping 丘東平 (1938) and Ah Long 阿龍 wrote harrowing accounts of the battlefield in the early weeks of the War Against Japan, while other writers wrote of hospitals and the wounded (Shu 2000). While themes of heroism and national identification are often present, these are mainly texts of terror, tragic irony, and despair, quite different from what contemporary views in China of reportage emphasize (Laughlin 2002, 149–92). Reportage as an orthodox Communist literary discourse took shape during the Pacific War and Civil War in the mid- to late 1940s, particularly among Communist military units in the base areas under their control. It was generally in the form of education and literary mobilization and consisted of accentuating the positive in the new society envisioned by the CCP and among their protagonists in history: workers, peasants, and solders. This practice of centrally organized, collective reportage, a kind of self-directed propaganda campaign, was the beginning of the aspect of reportage that would come to estrange readers in the 1990s. But the first work of collective reportage was not so upbeat. One Day in China (中國的 一日) was an anthology of short pieces of all kinds of writing, including fiction, essays, and reportage, written by ordinary people from all walks of life and from most of the provinces of China to illustrate a cross section of Chinese society on May 21, 1936. Inspired by a project initiated by Maxim Gorky in the Soviet Union around the same time (Den’ mira or Day of the World, 1937), One Day in China turned out to be a highly successful edited volume initiated by Mao Dun and a small committee of editors, published in 1936 (Mao Dun 1936; Cochran et al. 1983). The works were solicited through calls for contributions in literary magazines and newspapers. The number of contributions included in the published anthology were only a small fraction of those sent in, which suggests that the editors had a certain specific vision of what the content of this anthology should be. But it was not propaganda in the sense of supporting or justifying the (Nationalist) government’s policies; it was instead a portrait of China as a crossroads of tensions: class, gender, economic stress, military threat from Japan – in short, China in crisis. This could be viewed as “propaganda” sympathetic to the interests of the CCP, but it is more important to view it as a critique of many contemporary situations and practices (as well as some entertaining moments) that confronted China in 1936. By contrast, the wartime collective reportage projects of the Communist Base Areas during the 1940s were in support of the insurgent political authority, and though they are at times critical of phenomena outside their sphere of influence (i.e., areas of Nationalist control), they did not perform the crucial role of speaking truth to power and critiquing government and mainstream discourse. The early years of the PRC saw mostly this kind of “positive” reportage by authors like Liu Baiyu 劉白羽 (1916–2005) and Wei Wei 魏巍 (1920–2008), a great deal of which dramatized the Korean War with as much heroism and hyperbole as the fiction of the time. It would not be until years after the establishment of the PRC in 1949, in the course of the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956, that Chinese reportage would return to the role of using stories of actual people and incidents to critique social problems, and in fact, this is the first time it would play this role under socialism, at least in China. Emboldened by the apparently liberalized public sphere, and supported by similar fictional forays by novelist Wang Meng 王蒙 (b. 1934) and the editorial support of Qin Zhaoyang 秦兆陽 (1916–1994), 189

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a young journalist named Liu Binyan made his debut on the literary scene with scathing critiques of the laziness and corruption of the socialist system (Liu 1956a, 1956b; Laughlin 2011, 142–5).2 Liu preferred the use of the term “close-up” 特寫, which translates from the Russian ocherk, designating a similar genre in the Soviet Union that younger writers like Valentin Ovechkin, with whom Liu was personally acquainted, used to re-energize the cultural sphere by showing the spotlight on older, more complacent bureaucrats and the regression of socialist society there (Wagner 1986, 1992).3 Liu seemed to accept the inclusion of texie into the larger category of reportage, which had taken on a status of a literary genre, equivalent to fiction, poetry, and drama, after 1949. In this gesture of adopting a foreign form, although it was broadly understood by others to be “reportage,” it is significant that as early as 1956, Liu Binyan’s writing was a deliberate departure from what was then understood to be reportage. This semantic tension would accompany Chinese reportage all the way to the present. Though the impact among readers was considerable thanks to a vigorous public debate, Liu’s intervention was not taken up more broadly due to the harsh official reaction in the form of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. Liu was stripped of his party membership and spent the majority of the ensuing 20 years in and out of labor camps. He could be said to be a representative figure of intellectuals who had been persecuted in the Anti-Rightist Campaign as well as the Cultural Revolution and, as such, was conspicuously rehabilitated (including having his party membership restored) at the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping regime’s Period of Reform and Opening. Beginning as early as 1978 with “People or Monsters?” (人妖之間), a lengthy narrative about the rise and fall of a corrupt party official near Harbin, Liu pinpointed cases of sometimes-criminal corruption and bureaucratism (the subject of this article, Wang Shouxin, was sentenced to death for her crimes) (Liu and Link 1983). In this case, unlike the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Liu inspired many imitators, and the space for reportage opened wide due to the 1980s’ unprecedented focus on post–Cultural Revolution Chinese society and its unique challenges. Many works of book-length reportage were published in this phase, and the genre’s official support (which, for the most part, did not take the “teeth” out of the genre’s critical edge in the 1980s) contributed to substantial academic research on the entire history of Chinese reportage, the renovation of a magazine entirely devoted to reportage as well as conferences, and forums and workshops in which younger writers in the field actively participated (Laughlin 2002, 19–28). These practitioners and their enthusiastic readers did not associate reportage literature with tightly controlled, orthodox literature. On the contrary, it has been said that the attraction of reportage literature in the 1980s was that it afforded access to publication for indepth analysis of emergent social problems that would have been too controversial to see the light of day in the official news media. If Chinese reportage in the past had been a short form – articles ranging from a few to a few dozen pages – the 1980s saw the emergence of book-length reportage and book-length singleauthor collections for the first time. Qian Gang’s 錢鋼 The Great Tangshan Earthquake (唐山 大地震, 1986), Su Xiaokang’s 蘇曉康Memorandum on Freedom: A Collection of Panoramic Reportage (自由備忘錄：蘇曉康全景報告文學集, 1988), Jia Lusheng’s 賈魯生 Prisons of Western China (中國西部的監獄, 1986) and Jia’s collaboration with Su Ya 蘇婭, Who Will Take Over? A Look at the Current State of the Chinese Economy (誰來承包？中國經濟現狀 透視, 1990), and Xu Gang’s 徐剛 books on the environment, such as Our Sinking Land (沉淪 的國土, 1985) and Loggers, Wake Up! (伐木者，醒來!, 1987) – Xu is the only one on this list who has continued to publish reportage well into the twenty-first century – all were published in book form, a testament to publishers’ confidence in the market for such writing (under the term “reportage”) during its heyday in the 1980s.4 At the same time, the major literary 190

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magazines across the country continued to churn out shorter reportage works every month in their designated reportage sections. The decline of reportage began in the early 1990s and can be related both to the commercialization of literature in the context of increasing marketization of the economy as well as the devastating impact on literary practice of the violent suppression of the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The first aspect had to do with the phenomenon of new entrepreneurs and/or new management of state-owned enterprises commissioning “reportage” works on their businesses, which in effect functioned as commercial advertising (Yuan 1993). The exposure of this practice (which would have made a good reportage piece on its own) greatly undermined the legitimacy of reportage literature among readers. This is important because much of the power of reportage literature derives from the reader’s belief in the author’s reliability and sincerity; once that faith is betrayed, the genre loses its value. The second factor that led to reportage’s decline is the resetting of literature in the aftermath of the Tiananmen violence. Before and during 1989, not only reportage, but also drama, film, fiction, and poetry, had frequently and aggressively taken on the socially critical and deeply reflective mood of the Culture Fever of the 1980s. Literature of all kinds continued to be published in the aftermath, but by the early 1990s, it became clear that the rules had changed: while many kinds of artistic innovation like magic realism, avant-gardism, and absurdism were still welcomed, and there seemed to be a greater tolerance among cultural authorities for frank descriptions of sex and violence, including in works that were set during the socialist period, the kind of penetrating social criticism that had been common only years before would no longer be published.5 Given the role reportage had played in the truth-telling of the 1980s, this meant that anything written under that rubric in the post-Tiananmen period was assumed to be inauthentic and would gloss over, rather than unmask, the government’s inequities and overreach, not to mention its neglect of emergent social problems. While in practice it was still acceptable for reportage writers to expose corruption on the local level or write critically about the threat of globalization or dangers to the environment, this effective depoliticization of literature dealt what would appear to be a fatal blow to the legitimacy of the term “reportage.”6 It was at this time that the alternative terms like “documentary literature” (even “documentary fiction”) and “nonfiction writing” began to arise, packaging that only seems to confirm the abhorrence of the term “reportage.”

Diversification, Transmediation, and Regional Proliferation These changes also reinforced the need for forms of expression that performed the role reportage once performed well. Chinese literature and film would not long be content to simply escape from reality, however rewarding that may be in the marketplace. Beginning with the emergence of the “Sixth Generation,” film directors Lou Ye 婁燁 (b. 1965), Jia Zhangke 賈 樟柯(b. 1970), Zhang Yuan 張元 (b. 1963), Cui Zi’en 崔子恩 (b. 1958), and others, with the technological developments that made film production and post-production more accessible to those outside the official (state-owned) film system, began in the late 1980s and early 1990s to form an independent film scene, including documentary films, that provided a gritty, sober counterpart to the escapism and propaganda of most mainstream films. Sixth Generation fictional and documentary films, with their aesthetics of sober realism and attention to the fault lines of contemporary Chinese society, may have contributed to a renewed interest in nonfiction writing and other forms of reflection and critique focused on ongoing social problems, such as poverty, marginalized groups, and the environment. 191

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In the effort to distance themselves from “reportage,” writers, editors, and publishers have, in “nonfiction writing,” adopted a term with virtually no content whatsoever. The problem here is that the various forms of “nonfiction writing” mushrooming over the first two decades of the new century, including works like Chen Guidi 陳桂棣 and Chuntao’s 春桃 “China Peasant Investigation” (中國農民調-, 2004), Yang Jisheng’s 楊繼繩 “Tombstone” (墓碑, 2008), Xu Gang’s many books on the environment, as well as Liang Hong’s works on Liang Village, represent much more than the anodyne term “nonfiction” expresses. Moreover, with the onset of new media, a new wave of journals and columns, many notably online, has emerged, like Biography (人物), The Paper (澎湃新聞), and Noon Story (正午故事), which all purvey longform journalism – in-depth studies of social phenomena or individuals whose stories exemplify larger social and historical forces.7 In fact, all these works attract attention because they are focused on sensitive issues in recent history and contemporary society, and they approach them in varying degrees with particular attention to artistic techniques. One may debate in many cases the degree to which artistic qualities are a concern, but it should be emphasized that style matters in all kinds of Chinese writing. Many people have come out of rural villages and achieved success in large cities as professionals of one kind or another, but an essential factor to Liang Hong’s celebrated status, apart from the compelling content of her books, is her voice, the deeply contemplative and complex affect into which she translates her encounter with the place of her origin, members of her family, and others from her past and the village’s present. Similarly, Yang Jisheng’s studies on tragic historical episodes, such as the Great Famine of the early 1960s and the Cultural Revolution, attract attention not only because of their content. No matter how much celebrated authors of “nonfiction” document and analyze information in their works, it is the figurative way this material is presented, and the moral posture, voice, and tone of the author, that engrosses their readers. This is evident particularly in the case of the environmental writer Xu Gang. There are many voices in the environmental movement in China, and some of them are as prominent as Xu Gang, but Xu’s works carve out their own niche by virtue of their profound lyricism (Guo 2019, 172–4). Xu takes the challenge of writing about the earth from a deliberately nonhuman perspective as an artistic project to which he applies himself through the vehicle of lyrical prose. The “content” of his works could no doubt be presented as facts, figures, arguments, and analysis, but they take on a greater intensity due to his unique ability to translate them into a kind of subject position, a voice that speaks to readers from the forest, even as the forest, thus transporting them into an unfamiliar world and giving them a different perspective. The foregrounding of voice is not inherent to nonfiction per se, but it is inherent to literature. John Hartsock (2011) illustrates the distinction between literary reportage and literary journalism (including the new journalism) in the Euro-American context: literary reportage or reportage literature (which is clearly the origin of reportage as we know it in modern China) is described as primarily a European form, while Anglo-American tradition of “literary journalism” is described as “less polemic” yet no less literary than reportage. The American contributions to this tradition of literary journalism include book-length works of literary nonfiction, like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem; it would be wrong to say that none of these is polemical, but the author’s individual personality and style are much more central to new journalism than we see in reportage, including its Chinese manifestations. This distinction resonates with Liang Hong’s distancing of her work from reportage; she is not 192

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denying reportage’s literary quality, but when she refers to “definite truth” and “macroscopic narrative,” these could be associated with the polemics of reportage and not a concern of her writing. Without suggesting that contemporary Chinese “nonfiction” is simply an imitation of new journalism, its departure from reportage, if any, does seem to lean in this direction. On the other hand, I would say it has more in common with the critical types of Chinese reportage throughout the twentieth century than with these other forms. The reason for this is that one of the fundamental ongoing endeavors in Chinese literary writing has been to reveal uncomfortable aspects of contemporary reality (and historical memory) as a corrective to official or mainstream discourses. This mainstream discourse need not be the CCP’s propaganda department – indeed, Chinese reportage had taken form before the CCP was in political power. It could just as easily be the “mainstream discourse” of globalization under Reform and Opening. The key is that reportage functions as a corrective to simplifications and distortions that sustain and/or mask inequitable social and political social relations, or relations between humanity and the environment. All the different manifestations of reportage throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries serve as an artistic sounding board for leftist politics and a perceived need to talk back to mainstream media discourses. Such gestures were not always verbal – reportage takes on many manifestations, including dramatic performance, film, and poetry. These remain to be studied in the Chinese case as well as throughout the Sinophone world and the regions of East and Southeast Asia. The visual forms in particular lend themselves to transcultural crossfertilization, where the conditions make it possible, such as through regional documentary film festivals in Yamagata, Pusan, Hong Kong, and Taipei, as well as international art and photography exhibitions.

Notes 1 Ah Ying’s volume (1932) was the first Chinese work to use the term 報告文學 in its title. 2 Interestingly, Hua-ling Nieh’s pioneering Literature of the Hundred Flowers included Liu Binyan (1981) in the “Fiction” section, with a translation of excerpts from “Inside News of the Newspaper.” In the biographical notes, both this and “On the Bridge Construction Sites” are referred to as “short stories.” No mention of “reportage” is given (Nieh 1981, 2: 579–80). 3 Wagner translates texie and ocherk as “sketch,” but 特寫 is a term borrowed from photography and should be rendered “close-up”; the Chinese sumiao 素描 and suxie 速寫 (especially for writing) correspond better to “sketch.” 4 With the exception of Xu Gang’s works, these examples are all drawn from Moran 1994. 5 Though they did gradually return to fiction over the ensuing decades, especially in the emergence of more socially conscious and topical fiction about migrant laborers, sex workers, and other marginal groups under the critical banner of “subaltern literature” (底層文學). 6 On the other hand, the death of reportage had previously been announced in 1951 by He Qifang 何其 芳 (Wagner 1992, 265). 7 These writings are neither produced nor consumed as literature but came to my attention because they are becoming a focus of interest among English-language aggregators of contemporary narrative analysis. These include Changpian, edited by Tabitha Speelman, Chinarrative, and Sixth Tone, a product of Shanghai United Media Group, to name a few.

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16 READING WORLD LITERATURE IN CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION Lena Henningsen

Introduction Science fiction (SF) is a global literary genre, circulating widely in translation.1 “Gaining” in this process of circulation makes it a genre of world literature in the sense of David Damrosch (2003); circuits of global translation spurred on also by literary awards for the genre, such as the Hugo Award elucidate that SF has its own power centers in the sense of Pascale Casanova (2004) bestowing literary authority and recognition on authors whose works are shortlisted or awarded prizes. Chinese SF has been part of global literary exchange since its first inception with waves of translations into Chinese (Jiang 2021; Li 2021; Chau 2018). It used to be a marginalized genre, both in terms of scholarly research and in terms of its status within the Chinese literary field, but gained global recognition in recent years. The global and transcultural integration of Chinese SF in literary markets, I argue, is mirrored by an intertextual engagement of Chinese SF with world literature, or, rather, with various strands of world literature. While intertextual references abound in Chinese SF, I will focus on a particular type of intertextual reference: fictional reading acts, scenes in which characters in a fictional text engage with reading matters and thus attribute the meanings to these. Reading acts in fictional text establish a particular type of intertextual relationship among two (or more) texts (Henningsen 2021b). They portray literary characters engaging with reading matters: these reading activities, as I define them, may be reading in the conventional sense but also the borrowing of a book or the discussion of a text with a teacher. They differ qualitatively from “mere” intertextual references, as the activity of reading serves as a connector between two texts and between the real-world reading of the fictional text and the reading that takes place within the text. Such reading acts can be brief and (seemingly) irrelevant or elaborate, exerting significant impact on the plot. The first type of scenes is relevant nonetheless, as book titles on characters’ bookshelves may serve the purpose of a quick characterization of the respective character. The second type of scenes may propel the action of the story at hand, probe into its own literariness, and connect the two texts at hand closely. I contend that as part of a fictional reading act, such two (or more) texts serve to interpret one another. A fictional reader may offer her interpretation of the text she read through words or action; the text read may attain a metatextual function vis-à-vis the fictional text at hand, serving as an interpretational device for the fictional text; and conversely, the fictional text may serve a metatextual DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-21

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function vis-à-vis the text read within it, in particular, if the real-life reader has no immediate access to the text read inside the fictional text or if she is moved to change her own interpretation through her reading of a fictional reading act. As the two texts thus impact on each other, each may serve as a point of entry into the other one. To capture this process of mutual influences, I propose the concept of the interface function to elucidate that – similarly to texts on the internet – the real-world reader may navigate back and forth between the fictional text and the texts read within it. Reading acts demonstrate the distinct transformative power or reading: reading exerts a transformative power on the texts read and, at times, on the individuals (or groups of individuals) who read. In this chapter, I therefore begin by sketching the development of Chinese SF with a focus on its global connections. Next, I analyze a few exemplary stories and their reading acts using a sample of stories translated into English. Reading acts in these texts transform SF into a medium for the circulation of world literature. As a carrier of intertextual references to and reading acts of global literature, these translations suggest that the processes of translation and transcultural circulation have taken either a full circle or entered the next loop in the elliptical circulation of world literature. The reading acts, I argue, highlight and probe into the literariness of SF and emphasize the global connections of the genre.

Chinese SF as World Literature The development of SF in China has been tied to intellectual and political developments both on the domestic and on the global level. SF first entered China during the late Qing (1895– 1911), both in translations (Jiang 2013) by famous intellectuals such as Lu Xun 鲁迅 and in original works by the likes of Liang Qichao 梁启超 (Wu 1989). SF at that time fed into emerging discourses about science and about the nature and role of fiction and can be seen as a product of colonial modernity based on indigenous literary traditions and translations of foreign works (Isaacson 2017). After 1949, three waves of SF writing emerged in the PRC. Each wave is clearly tied to its domestic historical and political conditions and to distinct foreign literary influences. The texts of the first wave of SF during the 1950s were inspired by translations of SF from Soviet Russia (Volland 2015, 2017) and contain many similarities to socialist realist fiction, thus contributing to the creation of New China and to the remolding of its citizens (Jiang 2021). SF at that time was targeted at young readers in order to popularize scientific knowledge and to inspire its audience to pursue scientific endeavors themselves. At the same time, the genre “filled a gap left by the banning of both Chinese and Western pulp fiction after 1949” (Volland 2017, 97), projecting visions of a prosperous future under socialism: the stories’ focus on future technological innovations can be seen as utopian visions, anticipating prosperity achieved through the envisioned policies of the Great Leap Forward. Because of the tense political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, SF publications came to a standstill. A second wave of SF publications appeared after the Cultural Revolution. These texts mostly have adult readers as their intended audience. They have been seen as “lobby literature,” calling for recognition for scientists after the persecution they experienced during the Cultural Revolution (Wagner 1985). As part of the post-Maoist thaw in literature (Li 2021), some texts explicitly treat the harm done to scientists and intellectuals in a fashion similar to the genre of “scar literature” confronting the traumas suffered during the Cultural Revolution, but remaining within the limits set by the official discourse. Most texts provide an optimistic vision of the future and portray how scientific inquiry and technological change will bring about a better, 197

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more prosperous future for the people and the nation. These texts brought Western notions of SF into Chinese understandings and practices of the genre before the 1983 campaign against spiritual pollution once again put a halt to the production of SF. The current third wave of SF began around the turn of the century and has been studied by numerous scholars (Healey 2017; Jia 2013; Schneider-Vielsäcker 2017, 2020; Song 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019). Whether or not the stories take place in China, many can be read as critical inquiries into current domestic and global problems, including social and gender inequalities, urbanization and overpopulation, or the destruction of the environment. The popularity of the genre is increasing, but – at least until recently – it still remained marginal enough within the Chinese literary field to be allowed the leeway to include more or less veiled criticism of current domestic and international affairs. The circulation of Chinese SF has reached a global scale, with many contemporary novels and short stories now available in translation or even adapted into movie. Global interest in the genre also has to do with China’s perceived “rise” and “threat” and with the expectation that (science) fiction may provide Western readers with a better understanding of the country. In addition, there is also an interest in Chinese SF not for its Chineseness but for its literary value, exemplified, for example, by Barack Obama’s well-publicized praise for Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (Chau 2018) and by Liu Cixin (in 2015 and 2017) and Hao Jingfang (in 2016) winning the prestigious Hugo Award. Each period of SF production has its distinct characteristics, which are clearly related to the distinct foreign points of reference in each epoch: while the Republican era was dominated by the works of Jules Verne, in the early PRC, these were works by soviet Russian authors and, in the years after the Cultural Revolution, works by American authors. The current era now sees a reversal in the direction of translation, with Chinese texts translated into foreign languages, in particular into English, and being read by a wider audience – including moviegoers who watch movie adaptations of Chinese SF novels. Chinese SF thus has always been embedded into world literature, albeit with changing references. Writing about the initial success of current Chinese SF in translation, Angie Chau argues that: [It] may be the result of linguistic translation from Chinese into English and other languages, but an additional layer of literary transmutation has taken place: the English translations of these works facilitate a shift in perception of SF from genre fiction to literary fiction. (2018, 113) Translation thus leads not only to popular recognition abroad but also to recognition of the texts as literature in its own right. There are, however, at least two more characteristics inscribed into the genre that call for careful literary analyses. First, SF always responds to literary developments of its respective time (in addition to intellectual, technological, social, and political debates) by weaving traits of socialist realism, of scar literature or avant-garde literature into its literary fabric. Second, the sheer amount of intertextual references in the texts similarly points to the literariness of the genre in at least three ways, onto which I will focus for the remainder of this chapter: first, through these, SF stories characterize their protagonists; second, they position themselves on a distinct point of a global literary map; third, they use such references to interrogate and/or to claim their own literariness. For this purpose, Table 16.1 presents reading acts and intertextual references in translated Chinese SF. These stem from a sample of anthologies of translated SF stories from the second and third waves (Ye and Dunsing 1984; Wu and Murphy 1989; Liu 2017, 2019; Song and Huters 2018; stories that are published both in Ye and Dunsing 1984 and 198

Reading World Literature in Chinese Science Fiction Table 16.1 Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF Reading Acts

Other Intertextual References

Science

Newton

Philosophy

Russel, Dewey, Confucius, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Feuerbach, Hegel, Heidegger, Rousseau, Mendelssohn, Moleschott; Huainanzi, Plato, Augustine, Kant, Lacan, Zizek, Desi Sangye Gyatso Lu Xun

Archimedes, Darwin, Einstein, Asimov, Rachel Carson, Lamarck, Webb and Hubble, Freud, Emmanuel Todorov, Jung Sunzi, Confucius, Montesquieu, Mendeleyev, Mozi, Laozi, Socrates, Nietzsche, Xunzi, Adam Smith; I Ching (Yijing, translated by Wilhelm)

Chinese literature Foreign literature

Salinger

Non-fiction

Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, Jules Vernes, The Orphans “Sunset at the pavilion” by Li Qingzhao, Li Yu, “Going down to Jiangling,” “Nine Thoughts,” “Seeing Meng Haoran off” by Li Bai, “River Snow” by Liu Zongyuan, “Yellow Crane Tower” by Cui Hao, “Spring Dawn” by Meng Haoran, “Behind a mountain the clay fades . . .” Joseph Wood Krutch

Other

Bible

SF Poetry

Journey to the West, Water Margin, Wang Xiaobo, Book of Songs Alice in Wonderland, Odyssey, Travels of Marco Polo, Paradise Lost, Clockwork Orange, Samuel Butler Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke

The Road to Riches, Rorvik, John Seymour, Guiness Book Chang’e, “Rumpelstielzchen”, Diamond Sutra

in Wu and Murphy 1989 are sampled only in their English translation). In addition, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (Liu 2008) and the short story “G is for Goddess” by Chen Qiufan (Chen 2016) are also included. While most Chinese SF plots have China as their primary geographical point of reference, Table 16.1 illustrates that reading acts and other types of intertextual references point to classic authors of Western SF – like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke – or to canonical foreign and domestic literary authors, but also to scientists or philosophers. Chinese texts are less prominent than foreign ones, with Lu Xun, The Journey to the West (西遊記), The Book of Songs (詩經), the classical philosophers, and a number of premodern poets (most of which relate only to Liu Cixin’s “The Poetry Cloud”). While this points to the variety of sources referred to in intertextual references, it does not reveal anything about how these sources are interpreted and evaluated in the respective plots or about the narrative function of the source. They may be alluded to by the narrator of the text or quoted by a protagonist in the story in the “classic sense” of intertextuality as defined by Genette, serving as paratexts, for example, in the form of mottos to a story, as metatexts when one text serves as a comment to another, or as hypertexts when one text is derived from another. Or they may exercise transformative 199

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power within the plot when reading a text prompts a character to act and thus change the course of the narrative.

The Transformative Power of Reading: Reading Acts in Translated Chinese SF In a number of SF stories, the plot is propelled by reading acts that exert transformative power on the protagonists, be they human or robots. Liu Cixin’s famous The Three-Body Problem, first published in 2006, rests on a transformative reading act central to the entire plot of the trilogy: After having suffered severely from the attacks of the Red Guards on her family, the protagonist of the story reads Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Reading the book proves eyeopening for her as she realizes the full amount of devastation that the Red Guard generation had brought to the entire nation and to the environment. Having lost all trust in humanity, she soon after decides to send out a message to extraterrestrials, thus prompting the destruction of her own species. In a different way, Wei Yahua’s 1981 story “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus” can be seen as a story of self-empowerment through reading. The submissive robot-wife of the human protagonist attains outstanding intellectual skills after her husband started an experiment on her diet, modifying both her food intake and encouraging her to read widely, including Heidegger, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, Feuerbach, Aristotle, Mendelssohn, and Moleschott. Through her readings, she can lead intellectually challenging discussions with her husband. Moreover, as her vision broadens, she emancipates herself from him, claims agency, and divorces her husband, stating the superiority of robots over humans, who “look civilized but are savage, noble but are mean, clean but are dirty” (Wei 1989, 38). Her action clearly breaks with the behavioral patterns that were programmed into her. After reading widely in philosophy, she claims her rights and independence from the human race that had created her. She only remains grateful to her husband for providing her with books to read. Reading, in this story written shortly after the end of the Mao years, has transformative power on those who read, making a robot realize her own dignity, claiming her life, and leaving home somewhat similar to Ibsen’s Nora. Fictional characters never read Lu Xun by accident. Unsurprisingly, then, characters in Chinese SF stories also read Lu Xun. In Liu Cixin’s 2001 short story “The Village Schoolteacher,” the plot is propelled by various reading acts. The protagonist is an idealist and devoted teacher in a remote village in China. Strongly convinced that only education and knowledge will pave the way for a better future for his students, he continues teaching them even when he is dying of cancer. He does not want to waste his money on hospital expenses; instead, he uses his savings to buy books and stack up the school library. He teaches Newton’s three laws. He is aware that the children do not understand the theory at this early moment in their life, so he has them memorize them. Ironically, this important yet, for the students, fully opaque piece of knowledge, in the end, saves the Earth and mankind from extinction, thus proving the teacher right, albeit not in the sense he had expected. This tale can be read as an ironical reflection on the importance of scientific knowledge and on the value ascribed to it. It is also a tale reflecting social and educational inequality in China in the late 1990s and on what is perceived as the backwardness of the Chinese villagers by the schoolteacher. Lu Xun enters the narrative as an important point of reference by way of allusion to his “Diary of a Madman” (狂人日記, 1918) when the teacher reflects upon the situation in the village: “The ignorance and despair that smothered his village were suffocating. But there was still hope for the children” (Liu 2018b, 53). With this, Liu’s protagonist 200

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alludes to the last sentence of “Diary of a Madman,” in which the madman expresses his hopes that the children who so far have not eaten human flesh will be saved from also submitting to the degenerate values of a cannibalistic Confucianist China. Before teaching Newton, the teacher put another middle school content on his agenda: “Diary of a Madman.” He urges the students to read and learn by heart this text, convinced that “[e]very Chinese should read him” (2018b, 60). He was tired. He paused for a moment to catch his breath and rest. While he watched the flickering candle, Lu Xun’s words floated through his mind. They were not from “Diary of a Madman,” nor were they in the textbooks. Those words were what he had read in his own dog-eared volume from Lu Xun’s complete works. Even when he read them for the first time many years ago, they were etched into his mind. “Imagine an iron room. It has no windows and is nearly impossible to destroy. Insider there are a great number of people, all of them sound asleep. They will soon suffocate and die. But they will die in their sleep, feeling no pain whatsoever. Suppose you were to shout, waking a number of them who are a bit more clearheaded, thereby bringing this unfortunate minority to an awareness of their irremediable predicament. Wouldn’t you owe them an apology? “But now that several people are awake, you could no longer say that there is absolutely no hope of destroying the room.” (Liu Cixin 2018b, 60) “The Village Schoolteacher” thus operates as an interface into two texts by Lu Xun: “Diary of a Madman” and the famous iron room metaphor (also translated as iron house or iron cage) from the preface to Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (呐喊, 1923), which contains the short story “Diary of a Madman.” The texts matter to the protagonist; they appear as commentary on the current situation in China. The protagonist reveals the impact that Lu Xun’s words had on him, as he memorized the text on first reading. His personal copy contains the complete works of the author and is torn from multiple readings, suggesting that Lu Xun accompanied him through life. More than that, he seems to be inspired in his teaching mission to do everything for a better future for his students, who – as children – represent the only hope for a better future of the nation. On a second level, the teacher’s reading of Lu Xun is a slightly veiled criticism of the current situation in China. Remote villages are backward, grown-up villagers are dumb, and there is only a little hope for the children to receive a decent education. What Lu Xun wrote as commentary of his contemporary situation, thus, is reframed with respect to the inequality observable in contemporary China. The teacher’s reading of Lu Xun, however, also serves a metatextual function. The narrative consists of two plotlines: one focusing on the dying teacher in a remote village, the other about negotiations about the creation of quarantine zones taking place after a major intergalactic war. All planets in a designated quarantine zone are destroyed safe for those that contain life considered valuable. Planet Earth is considered a backward place, particular so for the existence of the species of a teacher. Accidentally, the automatic testing zone for determining whether the Earth is worth to be preserved is the teacher’s room. Even more accidentally, one of the random test questions is the one about Newton’s laws. The schoolchildren, mourning their deceased teacher, answer what they had just learned from him and thus unknowingly save the Earth – unknowingly insofar as they were not aware that the Earth was under imminent danger of destruction, and unknowingly insofar as they had in no way understood the implications of the laws they recited. The inhabitants of the Earth, and the village students in particular, thus 201

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resemble the inhabitants of Lu Xun’s metaphorical iron room. They are unaware, if now ignorant, of the basic scientific knowledge, of the larger conflicts in the universe and of their own insignificant position therein. Reading Lu Xun exerts transformative power on the teacher. His memory of the reading act (long time ago in a tattered copy!) inspires his teaching. Moreover, the message of “Diary of a Madman” almost turns into a prophecy as the children – backward and disadvantaged as they are – turn into the saviors of the planet. The teacher saved them through literary and scientific education, which in turn saved the Earth. The transformative power of reading acts is also center stage in Ma Boyong’s “City of Silence” (Ma 2017, originally published in Chinese in 2005; for analysis, see SchneiderVielsäcker 2020). The story portrays a totalitarian society in which the government aims at preserving stability through utmost control of people’s actions and thoughts. Realizing the futility of controlling language by censoring certain words or expressions, the “appropriate authorities” switched to publishing and updating a “List of Healthy Words” – a list of permitted words that is getting shorter with each day passing in response to the last remaining subversive usages of words. In their everyday lives, people are kept apart from each other as much as possible and are only allowed to communicate with each other wearing a “listener,” a headphone device that makes sure only healthy words are spoken and that, as a side effect, frustrates any meaningful or deep conversation. While the place of action is New York (in the English translation, this is changed to a nameless state), it is easy to decode the plot as a dystopian vision of language and thought control in China. Arvardan, the first-person narrator of the story, is living and working by himself as a programmer for the system, implementing bits and pieces that constantly refine the language and thought control system (though he mostly gets no information as to the larger aims of the mission, trapped as he is in another metaphorical iron room). Wishing for a bit more variety in what he might be reading, he undergoes the tedious application process for a BBS account (after all, he remembers BBS as a source of fresh and different postings), only to find that BBS carry only the same kinds of texts as anything else. However, the paperwork he receives lead him to the secret “Talking Club.” Here, in the shielded environment of the apartment of one of its members, five members meet weekly for free speech and free sex. Arvardan’s life suddenly has a regained meaning as he can speak his mind and as he also enjoys the physical pleasures of sexual intercourse. For the meetings, the members choose pseudonyms. Arvardan picks “Wang Er” as a token of memory of a friend who loved to tell stories about a character named Wang Er – and, most likely, a reference to Wang Xiaobo (王小波) (1952–1997) and his semiautobiographical fictional “Wang Er.” This choice of name anchors the plot in China and sets a tone for Ma’s text. After all, Wang Xiaobo’s essays have touched upon various controversial issues in China. His fiction has been described as postmodern and also treats various forms of sexual relationships (Huang 2007). During the meetings of the “Talking Club,” one of highlights is “Duras” reciting excerpts of Orwell’s 1984. The book has long been banned, but Duras read it in her youth, and remembering each word of it, she recites it to the others before they discuss the respective excerpts. Whereas the reader of the story can see the parallels of the two texts early on, through this reciting, the characters likewise become aware of the parallel between their own world and the fictional world of 1984. “Wang Er” is absent for one meeting, as he has fallen ill. With an upgrade of the surveillance technology, the meeting apparently was exposed and its members “shielded”: the other members of the “Talking Club” meet the fate of Winston Smith (of which Arvardan had not learned yet) and are fully brainwashed. Arvardan is devasted at the loss of his friends, of this opportunity for free speech, and at the loss of memory of 1984 – as “Duras” 202

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was shielded, the memory of the novel vanished, and he will not learn the end of it. Upon this, in the English translation, he decides to leave behind his life and join the radical rebels who live and fight somewhere in the wilderness of the mountains and to oppose the system he helped create as a programmer. The free-roaming spirit of the Chinese figure Wang Er implicitly may have inspired Arvardan to take this path and thus avoid the fate of another fictional character, Winston Smith. “The City of Silence” thus represents a threefold update of 1984: a technological one with algorithms and highly sensitive technology as central part of the surveillance system, a historical and political one into the (albeit unnamed) Chinese present, and a narrative upgrade with a Chinese protagonist pointing to an alternative ending with an escape from the system of control and to at least a slight chance for fighting that very system, inspired by the spirit of Wang Er. For Arvardan in Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence,” listening to the story of 1984 is eyeopening. The literacy situation – the concrete context of listening to and discussing the dystopian novel (Snaza 2019) – and the reading act reassure him of his own humanity, of his capability to think and to feel. Winston Smith’s and Wang Er’s fictional experiences inspire him, in the end, to take to the mountains and join the rebels against the system. Reading thus exerted a transformative power on the fictional character. Here, we encounter fictional characters moving within a textual space using the interface function of reading acts to move from one text to the other and to inspire readers of the story to access the texts through each other, thus cross-interpreting the texts. In his 2013 story “The Poetry Cloud,” Liu Cixin already investigated the relationship of literature and science (or AI) by means of explorations into the transformative power of reading acts. “Poetry Cloud” describes an alternative world in which humans are bred. They are taught classical literature, as this improves the quality of their meat. The poetry cloud stores poems created through AI, containing the most beautiful poems imaginable, surpassing any humancreated piece of writing. The god in this universe, a high-intelligence creature who collects and researches the arts of the universe, in an experiment of his own, transforms into Li Bai. Impersonating the poet, he takes a brush, gets drunk, vomits, and attempts to write for himself. Appreciating the poetry cloud, Yiyi, the human teacher of classical literature, acknowledges the beauty of technology, while “Li Bai” realizes that he is lacking poetry recognition software: “I have indeed composed the most supreme pieces of poetry by means of our great technology, but I have been unable to locate them in the Poetry Cloud” (Liu 2018a, 173). While the creation of texts may be easily ceded to computers, reading and aesthetic appreciation, it seems, still require the involvement of human agency.

Conclusion: Reading Acts and the Interface Function Intertextual references, reading acts, or literacy situations operate as interfaces into other (literary) texts. They can provide readers with access to texts otherwise unavailable to them. This is, of course, not unique to Chinese SF: both SF from other parts of the world and other fictional genres also contain such interfaces into other literary universes. Liu Xinwu’s (劉心武) “The Class Teacher” (班主任, 1977), one of the formative pieces of scar literature, for example, may be read as a debate on the value of literature that is undertaken in a string of reading acts and through conscious intertextual references (Henningsen 2021a). Characters in popular fiction such as that of Han Han (韓寒) also read widely, and so does the heroine in Yang Mo’s (楊沫) classic of socialist realism, Song of Youth (青春之歌, 1958), to name just an arbitrary choice of reading protagonists of Chinese fiction. Yet the amount of these references in Chinese SF is immense and creates, I argue, a number of distinct textual effect and affects. 203

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First of all, intertextual references to both fictional and non-fictional texts add a distinct layer of literacy to the piece of fiction. Through this literary device, the fiction in science fiction is emphasized, and the texts are positioned proactively in the realm of literature. References to scientific or other non-fiction texts serve as a bridge to science in science fiction, yet as a literary device, they still point to the literariness of the respective text. Second, the large amount of intertextual references (and reading situations) may likely suggest this characteristic as one of the conventions of the genre, in particular, as these references at the same time cater to and play with readers’ expectations. Third, reading acts serve as distinct characterizations of the protagonists; reading acts, like any intertextual reference, situate the story somewhere on the map of literary history. Yet, if characters act upon their reading, if the plot takes a distinct twist starting off from an extant literary text, this very story claims, in a way, to rewrite literary history – or to propose an alternative version of an extant text, often an extant literary classic. Both texts, I argue, operate as links to each other through what I have called the interface function. The texts invite their readers to move from one to the other, and this wandering of the reader through two (or more) texts impacts on both: the SF piece is given new meaning through the texts that are read on its pages just as the texts read are reconfigured through their inclusion into a new narrative. Fourth, the examples chosen all come from pieces translated into English. They are thus part of globally circulating SF. As such, they may be perceived by readers as “just” SF or as SF from China – in the latter case, the reading acts need to be considered within these circuits of world literature, as a global readership gains access to Chinese authors and their works read (or otherwise referred to) in the text, be it Lu Xun, Wang Xiaobo, or The Journey to the West, which also features prominently in Chinese SF. The multitude of Western authors and their texts, however, also results in a refracturing of these texts as they are presented through the eyes of fictional characters in text emanating from the writing of Chinese authors (and originally targeting a Chinese audience). Foreign readers of the stories may thus get a glance into how Western or world literary texts are perceived through this particular filter of Chinese authors writing for a Chinese audience. Fifth, what happens in these narratives is more than “just” a reference to add a bit of erudition to the text. Rather, it points to the essence of what SF and what fictional literature in general are about. These transformative plots pose the crucial questions that SF asks according to Asimov: What if? If only? Or if this goes on? (Packard 2019, 190) Yet in this context, the questions do not have as their object the technological, social, or psychological effects of technological change. The stories pose these questions with respect to their own literary status, with respect to alternative worlds emerging through a fictional re-reading of another literary text, or with respect to the value and purpose of fiction in general, and with respect to the status of Chinese literature on a global scale, a world literature taking full circle through a series of translations. Reading both literary and non-literary texts can transform its reader who in turn – when prompted to action – can change society or the fate of humankind.

Note 1 This chapter has been developed as part of the project “The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China” (READCHINA), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 757365). I thank Mira Grünwald for her continuous collaboration on the database, and Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker as well as the READCHINA team (Damian Mandzunowski, Eve Y. Lin, Duncan Paterson, and Lara Y. Yang) for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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References Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chau, Angie. 2018. “From Nobel to Hugo: Reading Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature.” MCLC 30, no. 1: 110–35. Chen, Qiufan. 2016. “G Is for Goddess.” Translated by Thomas Moran. In The Sound of Salt Forming: Stories by the Post-’80s Generation in China, edited by Geng Song and Qingxiang Yang, 255–72. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Healey, Cara. 2017. “Estranging Realism in Chinese Science Fiction: Hybridity and Environmentalism in Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide.” MCLC 29, no. 2: 1–33. Henningsen, Lena. 2021a. “Fictional Texts as Sites of Knowledge: From Intertexts to Transtextuality.” In Wissensorte in China, edited by Martin Hofmann, Virginia Leung, and Joachim Kurtz. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Henningsen, Lena. 2021b. “What Is a Reading Act?” ReadChina Interventions no. 1. Last modified April 21, 2021. https://readchina.github.io/interventions/What_is.html. Huang, Yibing. 2007. Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Isaacson, Nathaniel. 2017. Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Jia, Liyuan. 2013. “Gloomy China: China’s Image in Han Song’s Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 1: 103–15. Jiang, Jing. 2021. Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Jiang, Qian. 2013. “Translation and the Development of Science Fiction in Twentieth Century China.” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 1: 116–32. Li, Hua. 2021. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Liu, Cixin. 2008. The Three-Body Problem. Translated by Ken Liu. New York: A Tom Dorothy Associates Book. Liu, Cixin. 2018a. “The Poetry Cloud.” Translated by Chi-Yin Ip and Cheuk Wong. In The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters, 143–73. New York: Columbia University Press. Liu, Cixin. 2018b. “The Village Schoolteacher.” Translated by Jiang Chenxin. In The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters, 45–79. New York: Columbia University Press. Liu, Ken, ed. 2017. Invisible Planets: 13 Visions of the Future from China. London: Head of Zeus. Liu, Ken, ed. 2019. Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. London: Head of Zeus. Ma, Boyong. 2017. “The City of Silence.” Translated by Ken Liu. In Invisible Planets: 13 Visions of the Future from China, edited by Ken Liu, 153–96. London: Head of Zeus. Packard, Stephan. 2019. “Conjugations of the ‘What If’: Golden Age Science Fiction: From Thought Experiment to Narrative Critique.” In Literature as Thought Experiment, edited by Falk Bornmüller, Johannes Frantzen, and Matthias Lessau, 185–201. Paderborn: Fink. DOI: 10.30965/9783846764299_015. Schneider-Vielsäcker, Frederike. 2017. “An Ideal Chinese Society? Future China from the Perspective of Female Science Fiction Writer Hao Jingfang.” Monde Chinois, nos. 51–52: 50–62. Schneider-Vielsäcker, Frederike. 2020. “Alternative Zukunftsentwürfe einer zerrissenen Generation: Kritische Reflexionen sozialpolitischer Diskurse in der gegenwärtigen chinesischen Science-FictionLiteratur” (Alternative Future Visions of a Torn Generation: Critical Reflections of Socio-Political Discourses in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction Literature). PhD dissertation. Berlin: Free University Berlin. Snaza, Nathan. 2019. Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Song, Mingwei. 2013. “Variations on Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 1: 86–102. Song, Mingwei. 2015. “After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction.” China Perspectives no. 1: 7–13.

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Lena Henningsen Song, Mingwei. 2016. “Representations of the Invisible: Chinese Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, 546–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Song, Mingwei. 2018. “Introduction: Does Science Fiction Dream of a Chinese New Wave?” In The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters, xi–xxi. New York: Columbia University Press. Song, Mingwei. 2019. “A New Continent for China Scholars: Chinese Science Fiction Studies.” In Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited by Ken Liu, 465–72. London: Head of Zeus. Song, Mingwei, and Theodore Huters, eds. 2018. The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Volland, Nicolai. 2015. “Soviet Spaceships in Socialist China: Reading Soviet Popular Literature in the 1950s.” Modern China Studies 22, no. 1: 191–213. Volland, Nicolai. 2017. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965. New York: Columbia University Press. Wagner, Rudolf G. 1985. “Lobby Literature: The Archeology and Present Functions of Science Fiction in China.” In After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978–1981, edited by Jeffrey C. Kinkley, 17–62. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wei Yahua. 1989. “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus.” Translated by Dingbo Wu. In Science Fiction from China, edited by Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy, 9–51. New York: Praeger. Wu, Dingbo. 1989. “Looking Backward: An Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction from China, edited by Dingbo Wu abd Patrick D. Murphy, xi–xli. New York: Praeger. Wu, Dingbo, and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. 1989. Science Fiction from China. New York: Praeger. Ye, Yonglie, and Charlotte Dunsing, eds. 1984. SF aus China: Kurzgeschichten (SF from China: Short Stories). München: Wilhelm Goldman Verlag.

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17 ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUE AS WORLD LITERATURE Alienation of Nature and Humans in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide Ban Wang

The humanistic tradition has been the most favored ground for conceiving world literature. Works centered on the modern enlightened individual have had worldwide appeals and smoothly circulated across national borders. Premised on the values of the Enlightenment, rationality, and autonomous subjectivity, humanist literature has been regarded as modernity’s decisive break with the theological regime and provincial backwaters of benightedness and parochialism. Ecocritical discourse, however, challenges this venerable tradition for its anthropocentric, nationalistic, and Eurocentric underpinnings. Timothy Clark suggests (2011, 4): In its customary focus on personal development, family, the social and the political, the classical novel seems more focused on the human self, society, and history. The human self presents an image not of a world citizen but a member of a particular national community. Rooted as they are in their native traditions and values, such a human person tends to treat foreigners and women as aliens unworthy of the humanity defined by the humanist tradition. A typical reading of Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, for example, will place the novel within the cultural politics of the early Victorian period, its determinations of class and gender, [its mannerism and context of the British Empire]. (Clark 2011, 4) The history of capitalism also reveals that the humanist self is a globe-trotting homo-economicus, an explorer, a merchant, a venture capitalist, or a trader roaming the world, frequently backed up by armed colonialists in warships. The idea of world literature, in fact, coincided with the rise of capitalism as it reached out in the nineteenth century into all corners of the world. Goethe’s world literature was confirmed by Marx’s observation of the far-reaching penetration of capitalist production into every nook and cranny of the globe, bringing down local resistance symbolized by the Chinese walls. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nationals. The intellectual 207

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creations of individual nations become common property . . . and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx and Engels 1972, 338–9) But the capitalist-colonial world is not open to everybody and to every group; it presents a hierarchy based on the division of labor and the domination of the center over peripherals. Global capitalism, as Brett Clark and John Foster put it, “is divided into numerous nation-states competing with each other both directly and via their corporations” and evinces a world system of domination and dependence, “with nations occupying fundamentally different positions in the international division of labor” (2009, 312). The powerful nations expropriate natural resources and labor from the peripherals and engage not only in economic exploitation and destruction of age-old, premodern economies but also the pillaging of natural resources, giving rise to the phenomenon of ecological imperialism and colonialism. This means violent and intrusive offshore operations to expropriate natural and human resources from the underdeveloped regions. The flooding of the world with carbon dioxide, the control of oil and minerals, biopiracy directed at native germplasm, and dumping of toxic waste – all this has created an unequal global flow and ecological disasters. The reality of an uneven and divided world calls into question the claims of world literature based on breezy circulation, free flows of culture, cross-border immigration, and the translation of literary works that “circulate beyond the culture of their origin” (Damrosch 2003, 4). But the real world belies the dream of world literature. Intensely fragmented, conflicted, and disconnected in ever illusory connectivity, the world is open to some and closed to others, is heaven to some and hell to others. To include the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) into world literature in no way signifies that Chinese culture is recognized and respected as a member of the world. To anchor “world literature” on a truly cosmopolitan basis, an ecologically critical reading may offer a broader horizon and a concrete focus of global concern. With its deep insights into humanity’s vital bonds of interdependence with nature and Earth, ecological writing deals with the biosphere – air, water, plants, and animal life – as a broader context that far exceeds an individual’s life and career, the saga of a family, and national culture and history. A humanistic reading of the classical novel, as Clark notes, is “inherently anthropocentric” and local and rests on the “assumption that it is only in relation to human beings that anything else has value” (2011, 2). Ecological features appear only as remote and implicit settings. In contrast, ecocriticism refuses to treat human characters as culturally and nationally bonded beings and political events as geographically isolated processes. It sees human history as the only one trajectory among myriad evolutions of nonhuman species. This global and cosmic framework presents a horizon more worldly and broader than the human-centered world literature. The term often used to characterize our world, Anthropocene, however, by focusing on “human as geological agent” (Davis 2018, Preface), obscures the fatal contradictions within the global system of capitalism. The Anthropocene inquiry, writes Mike Davis, worries about climate change “as a threat to human survival.” It obscures the unequal, exploitive, and antiecological mode of production ruled by capitalist conglomerates, financial elites, and technocrats. It obscures the fact that “the rich will surely survive,” probably for a few more decades or by colonizing a new planet. The existential threat of climate crisis is in fact imperiling “the poor majority” and ruining the Earth (Davis 2018, Preface). By lumping all humans as equally guilty in damaging the planet and climate, the Anthropocene fails to account for capitalism’s excessive extraction of nature and exploitation of labor. An abstract idea like “human fossil fuel footprint” glosses over social rifts and inequality: the alienation of the human majority 208

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from nature and damages to the bodily integrity of working classes. Human footprint has little to do with the class of humans who cannot afford a car, live in a hut, and travel on foot all their lives, and has everything to do with an unsustainable mode of accumulation, production, and consumption. Critical ecology has delved into the contradictions of capitalism and rediscovered Marx’s ecological insights of the dual alienation of nature and humans.1 Capitalist industry and its progress, wrote Marx in Capital, “is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil” (1976, 638). “Robbing the workers” refers to the expropriation of their bodily integrity and health and the exploitation of surplus value. “Robbing the soil” describes the metabolic rift in feedback loops and interflows of energy, resources, and waste within the natural cycle and between humans and nature. As corporeal beings, humans are part of nature. The expropriation of nature is thus the other side of the expropriation of labor. The theme of the dual alienation of nature and workers addresses both natural ecology and social ecology and sees climate and environmental crises as much a problem of capitalism’s domination of nature as the exploitation of working classes. The critical-ecological approach has shed light on literary works concerned with science, technology, and environmental crises. A new generation of Chinese SF writers have explored how a blind faith in technology and economic growth ravages human society and Earth. Taking Chen Qiufan’s (陳楸帆, 1981) novel Waste Tide (荒潮) as a case, I argue that Chen’s novel deals with the dire consequences of hasty industrialization, global capitalism, social disintegration, and ecological crises. Social crises are endemic to ecological crises: manifest in increased class divides, the destruction of the land and communities, and worsening conditions of working classes. The novel links environmental and social crises to the larger historical contexts of global capitalism and geopolitical rivalry in the scramble for natural resources. Criticism of Waste Tide has focused on its global and generic aspects. Mengtian Sun (2019) has explored tensions and complicity between transnational corporations and local governments, between the global and local. Investigating the entanglement of cyborg punk and Chinese realism, Cara Healey (2017) suggests that the cyborg punk hybrids mirror the hybrid of SF and modern Chinese realism. Blending surreal and real, the hybrids effect a powerful estrangement of the contemporary reality, probing the environmental issues and human relations with nature. Looking further beyond SF analysis and intersections of global, national, and local categories, this chapter examines how Waste Tide exposes capitalism’s expropriation of nature and labor. Essential to this argument is the theme of the dual alienation of human and nature, which has proved to be a continual, destructive process in the last 300 years and across all nations, extending in recent decades to a posthuman condition. Technical advances – artificial intelligence, brain–computer interface, biochemical and neurological technologies, and cyborg construction – all these intensify ecological and metabolic ruptures in the human–nature relations, threatening human bodies, regional culture, human history, and local traditions. By critiquing the dual alienation of nature and humans, the ecological critique may be seen as a form of critical world literature.

Toxic Colonialism “The competitive and exploitive logic of capital accumulation in the context of nation-state system,” writes Ellen Meiksins Wood, “constitutes the greatest threat to world peace”; subordinating “everything to the requirements of the self-expansion of capital and so-called growth,” the drive for profit and accumulation “is unavoidably hostile to ecological balance” (1988, 5). Bearing out this reality, Waste Tide depicts ecological and human destruction in a neocolonial 209

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global economy. Under the banner of global trade, investment, and growth, powerful nationstates, in the footsteps of their colonial predecessors, continue to enforce the unequal structure of domination and dependence. Transnational conglomerates, aligned with neoliberal states, dump waste on the underdeveloped regions, extract their resources, destroy local environments, deracinate the indigenous communities, and exploit cheap labor. For all its SF trappings, the novel paints starkly realistic episodes of toxic colonialism by invoking the 1992 treaty of the Basil Convention aimed to regulate the transboundary movement of hazardous waste. But the United States, the leading exporter of e-waste, refused to ratify the Convention. In the eyes of Western economists, dumping toxic waste in the underdeveloped countries makes great economic sense. Lawrence Summers, onetime Chief Economist of the World Bank and Undersecretary of Trade in the Clinton administration, commented that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable” and that the trade in air pollution and waste could be “welfare-enhancing opportunity” for the rich and poor countries (Harvey 1996, 366–7). In this trade, the affluent countries do not have to accept toxic materials in their backyard, whereas poor regions have no choice but to accept and process the dumps in order to attain economic welfare. The natives have to endure hazardous waste in exchange for opportunities to have jobs, feed themselves, and increase their income – at the high cost of egregious health hazards, environmental degradation, and the collapse of the communities. Silicon Isle 硅嶼, the novel’s setting, is based on a real place not far from the author’s hometown in the city of Shantou, Guangdong province. In this electronic waste dump of the world, the workers each year dismantle and recycle one and half million pounds of e-waste shipped from around the world. In the shoddy sheds, the workers – all migrants from elsewhere in China – ransack and dig into “metal chassis, broken circuit boards, plastic components, and wires . . . scattered everywhere like piles of manure” (Chen 2013, 31). They are drowning in junked computers, electronic devices, medical protheses contaminated with viruses and poison, and other hazardous devices. Subjected to slave labor and exposed daily to toxic metal and foul air, the waste people are “fated to live in the company of trash, destined to be filthy until their deaths” (Chen 2013, 263). Although the industry has created wealth and prosperity, its working conditions invoke Dante’s Inferno (Chen 2013, 32) and William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” of nineteenth-century England. The past specters haunt this small isle, where a new episode of robbing of workers’ biological existence is written, as Marx famously put it, “in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (1976, 875). Ecologically, what used to be a rice and fishing haven has been laid waste: “rice paddies dry up and wither and our soil turn into poisoned wasteland” (Chen 2013, 114). Scott Brandle, commissioned by transnational conglomerates, arrives at Silicon Isle to broker a project called TerraGreen to replace the inefficient workshops. For all its rhetoric of clean air and water, better life, and growth, TerraGreen turns out to be another ploy of exploiting human life and extracting local natural resources. As an “economic hitman” (Chen 2013, 170), Brandle has a long track record as an agent for global conglomerates’ neocolonial operations. He roams the world from Ghana to the Philippines “like a hungry hunter” (Chen 2013, 171), making financial killings by taking control of native economies and resources. “He played the roles of energy expert, high-level financial analyst, environmental researcher, or infrastructure engineer, and, employed by giant chaebols or famous multinational conglomerates, he wandered the vast interiors of Third World countries like a hungry hunter” (Chen 2013, 171). From the Amazon rainforests to the prairies of Mozambique, from the slums of southern India to the waters of Southeast Asia, Brandle acts like a con artist, selling lovely futures to local governments and promises double-digit economic growth, jobs, social stability, industrial 210

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parks, power plants, clean water, and airports. He “tossed out sweet lures like advanced technology, easy credit, and favorable purchasing terms” and, in the name of “progress” and “joint development,” enticed the local GDP-driven governments to sign agreements that require them to “construct massive projects, take up heavy debt, and then offer up precious, irreplaceable sources like oil fields, minerals, and the genes of endangered animals” (Chen 2013, 171). Brandle’s missions, as the protagonist Chen Kaizong’s Boston University professor remarks, have long operated as legalized looting on a global scale. Globalization has revealed “a perpetual cycle of looting, exploration, and forceful extraction: from the Amazon, from Africa, from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Antarctica, even outer space” (Chen 2013, 45). One episode narrates how Brandle is tasked to crack down on logging by natives in Papua New Guinea so that a Western company will take control of the lumber supplies. Under the pretext of “green” technology, he seeks to drive out businesses that do not meet “environmental” standards. But green technology ends up killing green landscapes. As a result, there is no longer “an unspoiled patch of paradise” in the area. The pipes laid down by oil corporations were like “a web of exposed capillaries, crossing forests, rivers, and villages to suck the black essence of the ancient past out of the rich soil to slake the unquenchable thirst of the developed world” (Chen 2013, 105). The natives, driven out of their land and in desperation, jump on the bandwagon of development and progress, “wielding electric chain saws to cut down the mother trees that had once borne the names of the ancestors” (Chen 2013, 105). The new phase of global capitalism is manifest in its global operations to extract and plunder resources from the underdeveloped regions. Driven by the imperatives of accumulation and profit, waste colonialism robs nature of its integral richness and wealth and robs native people of their biological existence, health, and life. In the digital and high-tech era, this new round of global accumulation continues and produces a deterioration of human labor power and energy, degrading and destroying the physical conditions for normal human life.

Geopolitics and Biopiracy The secret behind TerraGreen Recycling is the quest for rare earth, a strategic material vital to military technology. A small amount of it is “enough to greatly improve the tactical value of ordinary materials and bring about astounding leaps in military technology, allowing the possessor to hold on to an overwhelming advantage on the modern battlefield” (Chen 2013, 176). Accounting for over 90% of global rare earth production, China put a strict quota in 2007 to reduce its exports of rare earth, causing an uproar in the Western media about a new superpower in the Chinese century. TerraGreen Recycling Co. Ltd., a US company, however, does have the capacity to retrieve and recycle rare earth elements from electronic waste. But the pollution and health risks exceeding EPA standards, high labor cost, and expensive insurance for environmental harms and diseases make the recycling unprofitable. The solution, therefore, is to outsource the risks to the developing countries. A creative strategy under the banner of green economy is born, designed to “transfer waste and related risks of pollution and diseases overseas, to the vast lands of the developing nations” (Chen 2013, 178). Building industrial parks and production lines in places like Silicon Isle, the recycling project will enjoy their endless cheap labor and enjoys priority access to cheaply produced but prized rare earth. But a hidden agenda lies further behind TerraGreen Recycling and bears the novel’s title, “Waste Tide.” A clandestine program sponsored by the military industry and scientific complex of the Cold War, Project Waste Tide has the goal of engaging in the research and development of a biochemical weapon of mass destruction. Dr. Suzuki, the fiancée of the commander of Japanese destroyer Arashio sunk by American Navy in the Pacific War, is the project’s 211

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mastermind and lead scientist. Moving to the United States after the war and earning her PhD in biochemistry at Columbia University, Dr. Suzuki, sponsored by the military, has supervised a research to produce “hallucinogenic weapons capable of mass deployment so that victories may be won without having to fire a single shot in the battlefields” (Chen 2013, 185). The result is a compound of biological, neural, and synthetic drug called QNB, which proves to be lethal on a massive scale. Absorbable through skin or respiratory system, the drug has the power to damage the neural system, impair memory and cognition, and distort normal perception and senses by inducing frenzy and madness. Dr. Suzuki has long worked under the illusion that her invention has saved American lives without bloodshed and killings. But witnessing the horrendous fallout of the drug in causing tremendous trauma, injury, and death in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, she is guilt-stricken. Pressed by guilt, Dr. Suzuki lobbies the international agency to ban QNB in the Chemical Weapons Convention and proceeds to find a cure. The cure involves “gene-modified viruses” designed to repair muscarine receptors in the brain-damaged victims (Chen 2013, 236). Due to the lack of funding, the research stalls. Yet with the surging waves of high-tech, genetic engineering and AI, the Suzuki virus undergoes modification and is repurposed for civilian use: it targets neural structures of humans and nonhumans and is extended into brain–machine interfaces, cyber–biological fields, and genetic engineering. Contained within protheses that enhance human bodies, the new Suzuki virus seeks to merge human and nonhuman bodies with drugged devices, producing advanced cyborgs intermeshed with human and nonhuman organisms. Under Silicon Biological Technology (SBT), the program takes aim at the increasingly blurred boundaries between organism and algorithm, paralleling Google’s bio-project and Tesla’s brain–machine interface (BMI). [It] developed a revolutionary substance to mediate between the biological and electronic worlds. Extracted from the gladii of squids, this modified chitosan complex could convert biological ion flow that carried brain signals into electronic currents that could be deciphered by machines, thereby seamlessly forming a feedback loop between the nervous system and the prothesis. (Chen 2013, 240) The use of this product is manifold: it could stop aging and promises eternal life, augment and refine the human perception of the external world, and enhance sensuous excitement and sexual pleasure. Playing with this technology, Chen Kaizong’s American friend Ted and his girlfriend “swap limbs” with each other and have renewable mutual erotic stimulation by updating “their protheses to maintain a sense of freshness” (Chen 2013, 241). The virus has also been used to “civilize” and “humanize” a chimpanzee into a being with human attributes and behavior. These experiments of bio-machine interface are fraught with perils and disasters, as in the case of Ted’s girlfriend, who is burned to ashes. The new Suzuki variant fails in the experiment subject chimpanzee, Eva, who is reduced to a mangled corpse at the hands of her fellow chimps hostile to her “human” attributes. Yet the virus, through contaminated waste protheses, filters into Silicon Isle and has lodged in the mind and body of Mimi, the novel’s central character. At the critical moment of her rape and murder by the thugs, her spirit (neurological or biochemical or digital?) animates a discarded mecha, becoming a cyborg nemesis. How does the virus find its way into Silicon Isle? Brandle has strong hunches that some medical protheses tainted with the virus have been shipped to Silicon Isle, not by mistake, but by design. This intuition points to a parallel between drug trials on chimpanzees and on human subjects in the Third World. The SBT research team runs a virus–prothesis experiment 212

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on a chimpanzee named Eva because the FDA forbids such trials on humans. It is thus legal to risk a dangerous experiment on the chimps. And what can be legally applied to chimps can also be legal with natives of Third World countries. In fact, it has been a routine practice by the research centers of the rich countries to “creatively outsource” such high-risk drug trials to the impoverished native populations. The scientists run trials on underage subjects in the poor regions, because young, unspoiled bodies were “highly sensitive to the active ingredients of trial drugs – pristine laboratory mice” (Chen 2013, 251). In return, the subjects receive “a few wrinkled dollar bills, a free breakfast, unknown side effects, the risk of a lengthy incubation period, and high probability of dying from complications” (Chen 2013, 251). Such trials, in fact, amount to a dehumanizing expropriation of biological existence and integrity of the natives, a robbery of their health and lives for profit: “Most of the money went to the hospitals, the doctors, and the recruiters of the trail subjects, while the pharmaceutical companies obtained the data they needed to secure FDA approval and then made billions with the new drugs” (Chen 251). We are told that the virus/prothesis implanted in Eva the chimp is designed for the skulls of gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. The environmentalist group chasing the contaminated prothesis believes the revelation of this secret would be a huge public health scandal, if the evidence can be detected in the waste shipment to Silicon Isle. But SBT has a way of covering it up. Hirofumi Otogawa, the CEO of the company, brushes aside the question of the tainted prothesis, saying that the prothesis has been “identified by the automatic systems as a piece of medical waste and then sorted and packed into the waste shipped to Silicon Isle by computerized processing” (Chen 2013, 259). Thus, nobody is responsible for this accident. If this is the case, Project Waste Tide looks like a deliberate attempt to run a trial among Silicon Isle natives and waste people. Any random person coming in touch with the virus will be an unwitting trial subject. Here we witness a three-tiered destruction of environment and human beings for capital accumulation and geopolitical agenda. Dumping toxic electric waste is the most obvious and shocking. The second element is extracting rare earth from the e-waste by exploiting cheap labor and at the expense of workers’ health for gaining strategic material and geopolitical power. The third and more clandestine level, exposing the waste people to virus trials on a par with chimpanzees amounts to treating the biological makeup of natives as guinea pigs.

Technology and Class Divide Driven by the motives of accumulation and profit, the waste processing industry creates a social ecology where three ruling clans dominate and exploit the waste people. Silicon Isle is divided into two worlds, which instantly hits Scott Brandle on arrival. The nouveau riches display their wealth and status by parading their Mercedes-Benz, Porches, and BMWs on the jammed streets and flaunt their tasteless aesthetics by building ersatz European-style mansions. Located on the high ground of the hill, the residence of the rich stays away from the squalor and toxic shacks steeped in trash, waste, and filth. This environmental injustice is mirrored by the gulf between the haves and have-nots: “Silicon Isle Town is located upwind from the rest of Silicon Isle, so that the air quality was at least passable” (Chen 2013, 30). To avoid the undrinkable water, the rich have their drinking water transported from elsewhere. The class divide of Silicon Isle also mirrors a digital divide. The waste recycling trade, a game of investment and speculation, relies on fast information and financial data from the stock markets around the world. Aware that “making capital flow and circulate was the key to true prosperity” (Chen 2013, 222), Luo Jincheng, the head of a local recycling business, has 213

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built an effective intelligence network to gather the latest information about the prices, ports, and shipments of e-waste in order to stay atop of the trade. Luo’s digital regime operates as a surveillance system to maintain social and political control over the waste people. In fact, all three ruling oligarchies of Silicon Isle try to keep workers in submission by turning them into docile and blind consumers of digital media. They sell digital mushrooms to drug them and immerse them into consumerist mind-numbing indulgence and addiction, robbing their minds, thoughts, and bodies. Cutting-edge technologies of human–machine interface, exemplified by ubiquitous cyborgs, testifies to a subtle form of environmental injustice in terms of dual alienation of nature and humans. The cyborg takes on mechanical forms as well as high-tech hybrids that blend neurological, biochemical, digital, and AI elements, both Suzuki virus and drug trials on humans and nonhumans being cyborg experiments. In Donna Haraway’s definition, the cyborg is “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (2004, 7). Based on human–prothesis interface through the use of genetic, biological, and digital technologies, the cyborg, Haraway goes on, is a mode of capitalist production “decoupled from organic reproduction” of the human body, representing “a dream of cyborg colonization of work” more reifying and dehumanizing than the nightmares of Taylorism (2004, 8). In short, much of cyborg construction in the novel alienates and expropriates the biology of human bodies, seeping and penetrating into human characters, biology, and the environment. Human bodies are constructed and replete with protheses, devices, virus implants, and biochemical gadgets. Dogs are chipped, and fish have mutated into biochemical freaks. Even Scott Brandle has a high-tech pacemaker to keep his heartbeat normal. The Waste Tide project is shrouded in the mystery of the protheses contaminated with the Suzuki virus, sneaked “by mistake” into the cargos of e-waste shipped from New Jersey to Silicon Isle. It represents a “substance for mediating between “biological and the electronic worlds” (Chen 2013, 240). Brain–computer technology reflects the belief that human artifice can dominate nature and remake the world in its image. The Marxist ecological perspective, by contrast, views technology not as a means of domination but as a medium of human engagement with nature, an extension of human power as a universal species being. Unlike animals, humans freely and consciously labor on nature to serve human needs and create meaningful life in a sustainable balance with nature. A humanized technology implies the possibility of “good” cyborgs and reflects the desire for utopia, a vision of humanized technology and the organic mediation of human and nature through labor, aspiring to what Marx termed “the humanization of nature and naturalization of humanity” (quoted in Buck-Morss 1995, 146). This eco-utopia envisages a seamless ecological union of human intelligence, biology, and the natural world by way of science and technology. Chen Qiufan points to this ecological interface in the observation that brain–machine interface can convert the biological ion flow that carried brain signals into electric currents that could be deciphered by machines, thereby seamlessly forming a feedback loop between the nervous system and the prothesis. The invention had expanded the definition of the boundary of the body beyond imagination. (Chen 2013, 240) Under capitalist production and power relations, however, the cyborg, by yoking together of organism and algorithm, widens the cleavage between humans and nature, alienating human bodies in the interest of capital power and dismantling the ecological bonds between human and nature. The cyborg and its breakthrough biochemical, genetic versions, instead of bridging 214

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human and nature, implicate humans in a ceaseless war against nature and other human beings. Technologies of human–machine interface polarize people and have proved to be highly alienating and destructive of the social fabric. In the West, the hybrids of organism and algorithm appeal to the desire of consumers, insatiable pleasure seekers, and party revelers, providing ever-stimulating yet hollow sensory and sexual frisson. “The rich switch body parts as easily as speople used to switch phones” (Chen 2013, 240). Chen Kaizong watches his American roommate Ted “swamp limp with other people” by means of a neural prothesis at weekend parties, “so that they could experience wild bash through each other’s senses” (Chen 2013, 240). Seeking mutual erotic thrills, Ted and his girlfriend, Rebecca, “frequently update their prostheses to maintain a sense of freshness” (Chen 2013, 241). But a tech glitch burns Rebecca to ashes, leaving no traces of her DNA for postmortem identification. The tragic incident suggests that the humanity of Rebecca is now a blank and reduced to ashes. Through many changes in prosthetic implants, she has been erased to nothingness, neither a cyborg nor a human being. For the true believers enthralled to the technological fetish, digital and neural protheses were no longer tools of assistance for the disabled and diseased or as aesthetic decorations for deformed bodies. They have become a crucial part of what defines human life: “they were the repositories for our joys, sorrows, terrors, and passions, our class, our social status, our memories.” Exchangeable and upgradable at will, they define humanity. “Your protheses are you” (Chen 2013, 243). The human–machine interface works to widen class inequality and creates a small cabal of superior cyborgs over underclasses. Through prosthetic and genetic engineering, “one percent could extend their lives by swapping out the components of their bodies endlessly, achieving de facto perpetual monopoly on society’s wealth” (Chen 2013, 264). Although America is his new home and prides on freedom and democracy, Chen Kaizhong muses, the technologically induced superiority of “human” qualities makes all those noble values hollow and hypocritical. Invitations to clubs and parties were sent to prosthetic eyes to be read by retinal scanners; those who couldn’t afford to implant enhanced enzymes couldn’t buy special foods and beverages at supermarkets; those with genetic flaws might not even be able to obtain birth permits. (Chen 2013, 264) Infected with a virus, Mimi, as Brandle realizes, “was endowed with a strong survival instinct that drove it to adapt constantly to the needs of humans, to transform itself to gain the opportunity for the lineage to continue” (Chen 2013, 258). To Brandle, the transformed Mimi as a cyborg promises another opportunity of making a financial killing as well as a superspecies. He hatches a plan to abduct her for research in the United States and cash in on the commercial potential of the mutated virus within this reincarnated giant. Mimi’s secret is “ten times more valuable than the Silicon Isle recycling project” (Chen 2013, 331). In the hope of making profit while creating a new species, Brandle stands on the verge of a posthuman horizon where “new life has crossed the boundary between biology and machinery” (Chen 2013, 331), signifying the impending demise of human history.

Posthuman Dystopia Where there is oppression, there is rebellion. To avenge his sister’s rape and murder by the thugs of the Luo clan, Li Wen, college-educated and an autodidact techie, comes to settle in Silicon Isle and designs a computer virus that sweeps across the official network terminals of 215

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Silicon Isle. Technology is deployed to resist and counter the technologically induced oppression and alienation, exposing the local government’s shady bidding for capital investment, corruption, and scandals. By means of social media, Li acts as a “union representative of sorts for the waste people” (Chen 2013, 60) and pushes back against Luo’s brutal treatment of Mimi and migrant workers. Battles are waged via cyberspace between the oligarchy of the Luo clan and the abject yet digitally savvy subalterns. His apps enable them to connect and unite to confront their oppressors. Mimi, the waste girl who “turns into a posthuman after much suffering” (Chen 2016, 372) takes over as the leader of the popular revolt. In the moment of her rape and death, she magically transforms into a gigantic cyborg and a “revived goddess” (Chen 2013, 250). Mimi breaches the official and corporate cybernetic networks, galvanizes the waste people in resistance, and kills Scott Brandle as he is trying to abduct her to the United States. In the raging anarchistic pandemonium, the rebels invade the surveillance systems, break the digital prison gates, and release the criminals from the prison. As the storm and flood threaten all lives in Silicon Isle, Mimi calls on the waste people to come to the rescue of the victims, many of whom are the oppressors. The waste people get organized and reach out to victims by recycling waste material. Pieces of silicon rubber waste “were tied together into rafts: bundles of plastic fiber are twisted into safety cables . . . artificial skin and LED bulbs were turned into emergency lights” (Chen 2013, 314). They search for trapped survivors and help them to places of refuges. When vengeful Li Wen objects to Mimi’s kindness toward the oppressor, Mimi sounds a humanistic note: But we are not only saving lives; we are also going to open the eyes of the souls of the Silicon Isle natives: If we allow ourselves to be filled with hatred, then they have won. We have to show them that we are not polluting waste or parasite animals. We are human, the same as them. . . . We can even risk our lives to rescue them. (Chen 2013, 314) The goddess splits into two personalities: Mimi 1, a powerful cyborg with intellect, and Mimi 0, a body with instincts and drives. Allegorically, the split intensifies the tension and widens the gap between human and nature, as technological alienation severs humans further from millennial biological and moral evolution and moves them into a posthuman condition. The acts of rescuing “oppressors” in the flood trigger a philosophical debate on humanism and technology. When Mimi 1 asks Mimi 0 about the latter’s pain at seeing Luo Jincheng swept away by the flood, Mimi 0 replies, “He’s evil but he’s still a human being” (Chen 2013, 325), and her compassion comes from her mother, like a genetic inheritance. But Mimi 1, from a posthuman perspective, launches into a philosophical discourse about the impending collapse of the biological, evolutionary foundations of human morality and society. Pity, sympathy, shame, fairness . . . morality. These things have long been engraved in your posterior cingulate cortex, your frontal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, and the dorsolateral and ventromedial regions of your prefrontal cortex, perhaps even long before the origin of the human species. These neural patterns allowed you to empathize with the pain and fear of other individuals. In the long process of evolution, this physiological foundation helped human species to overcome or suppress various instincts of primates – selfishness, incestuous sexual desires, brutal competition, and so on – by substituting bonds of clan identity and cooperation in place of 216

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conflict, elevating group harmony above individual sexual desire. Instituting morality over force. This is how the human race survived and thrived as a species. (Chen 2013, 325–6) Under the accelerated progress of technoscientific advances, like AI and genetic engineering, such millennial foundations are being eroded, and human society is degenerating into a posthuman, amoral dystopia. Modern technology has damaged the foundation. Technology addicts indulging in overdoses of dopamine have destroyed their synaptic connections and become ill with moral failings. In one experiment, the test subjects had to choose between saving ship full of passengers by tossing a heavily wounded individual overboard or doing nothing. All those with damaged moral-emotive brain regions chose to kill in order to save, while the normal subjects chose to do nothing. The diseased think of life as some zero-sum game in which there must be winners and losers, even at the expense of the interests of others, including their lives. This is a planetwide plague. (Chen 2013, 326) This critique of technological hegemony derives from the ecological premises that undergird human biological evolution in sync with moral improvement – what Marxist ecological thinker Paul Burkett calls “the mutual constitution, or co-evolution of society and nature” (2014,107). This ideal of human–nature coevolution envisages an evolutionary path of “human development in and through nature and society” (2014, 107). Alienating and destructive trends of technoscientific modernity, however, are diverging from human social evolution in pursuit of power and capital, leading to the collapse of both society and nature. Robbed of the capacity to empathize with fellow humans and the ability to overcome primal aggressiveness by forging bonds of sociality, thereby “instituting morality over force” (Chen 2013, 326), technoscientific modernity is destroying the millennial human tradition as we know it. Mimi 1 laments the antagonist force field engulfing our techno world, where the struggle for existence among individuals, groups, and nations cancels out human history and moral improvement, sinking the world into a new dark age of the social Darwinist jungle. Waste Tide offers us sober warnings about dystopic, posthuman conditions. The novel delineates bleak scenarios of alienation of humans from natural and social ecologies and from their age-old moral and communal fabrics. The name of the game in the modern techno jungle is power and money, capital, and domination. Like drugs of digital mushroom or hedonistic protheses, the whole array of advanced technologies is deployed not for the well-being of the human majority and for a more equitable world but as a vast alienating mechanism. The green project barely masks the environmentally ruinous agenda of toxic colonialism; the increasing class divide and oppression lead to digital and physical battles between the oligarchy and waste people; and the genetic engineering of the human brain and body aggravates amoral competitiveness, power struggle, and the robbery of labor and ecosystems. The bleak prospect of posthuman conditions bears witness to a real and prevalent dystopia dominated by technology, naked power, and global capitalism.

Note 1 By “critical ecology,” I refer to the “red and green” tradition inspired by Marx’s critique of capitalism. This tradition includes the Frankfurt school criticism of instrumental rationality and the domination of

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Ban Wang nature linked to the domination of humans (Biro 2011). Red–green scholarship is well represented by John Bellamy Foster (2000, 2010) and Paul Burkett (2014), whose works have done much in building a rich and comprehensive theory of Marxist ecology.

References Biro, Andrew, ed. 2011. Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1995. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Burkett, Paul. 2014. Marx and Nature. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Chen Qiufan. 2013. Waste Tide. Translated by Ken Liu. New York: Tor. Chen Qiufan. 2016. “The Torn Generation: Chinese Science Fiction in a Culture in Transition.” In Invisible Planets, edited and translated by Ken Liu, 369–75. New York: Tor. Clark, Brett, and John B. Foster. 2009. “Ecological Imperialism and Global Metabolic Rift.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, nos. 3–4: 311–34. Clark, Timothy. 2011. Literature and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davis, Mike. 2018. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. London: Verso eBook. Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, John Bellamy. 2010. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Haraway, Donna. 2004. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Healey, Cara. 2017. “Estranging Realism in Chinese Science Fiction: Hybridity and Environmentalism in Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, no. 2: 1–33. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker. New York: Norton. Sun, Mengtian. 2019. “Imagining Globalization in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide.” Science Fiction Studies 46, no. 2: 289–306. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 1988. “Capitalism and Human Emancipation.” New Left Review, no. 67: 3–29.

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PART VI

Translingual Worlds of Writers and Scholars

18 SU MANSHU’S “BROKEN HAIRPIN” A Romantic Tragedy in the Hard Times Ping-hui Liao

Poet-Monk Turned Translator A translator, educator, poet, painter, calligrapher, monk, and fiction writer, Su Manshu 蘇曼殊 (1884–1918) published an interesting piece of short story in the second issue of La Jeunesse (Xin qingnian 新青年) in 1916, under the editorship of a future Communist leader, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀. The work titled “The Broken Hairpin” (斷簮記) is in traditional style of a mandarin ducks and butterflies 鴛鴦蝴蝶 romance, but it employs the implied author as a first-person narrator who not only serves as an eyewitness to the tragedy as it unfolds but also participates in meddling in a modern love affair between a young scholar and two pretty women that turns fatal. The story is also a forerunner in the history of Chinese literature in which a Western pop song and opera aria in English are cited and incorporated to evoke an atmosphere of vernacular cosmopolitanism on top of complicating the plot, for the story draws on the local vernacular narrative tradition of the mandarin ducks and butterflies, with allusions to things specifically Chinese – West Lake, arranged marriage practice, and the late Qing intellectual milieu. But it also highlights Western modernity of affective individualism and global popular trend of fashions and commodity consumptions, to portray the main characters’ struggle with new ideas and subject positionalities while still caught in multiple layers of contradictions between confirmative and progressive ideologies, between freedom and restraint. In many ways, the story is a hybrid intertext and free translation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther in the background, exploring such themes as family feuds, emotional turmoil, love, and death. Su Manshu was born on September 28, 1884, in Yokohama to a Japanese maid-concubine (who mysteriously disappeared soon even before the baby was adopted by her Japanese mistress) and a Chinese merchant, Su Jiesheng, originally from Xiangshan, a small Cantonese town made famous by many of its native sons – among them, Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), founder of the Republic of China. With a childhood full of surprises and traumas, Su’s early life was enmeshed in identity crisis, inheritance dispute, and in the words of Liu Wu-chi, “strange contradictions” (1972, 19). As a foreign-born and son of a wealthy southern Chinese trader who spent most of his time in Japan selling Chinese tea, Su was from the very start a product of transnational and translational relations or negotiations. When Su returned to China with his 221

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-24

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family relatives in 1889, he found the reception back home hardly warming, as the Meiji Japan was perceived to be a threat to the then deteriorating Qing Empire. He spent several years with his father at the latter’s hometown from 1892 to 1895 and then moved with the patriarch to Shanghai the next year. However, the father–son relationship was by no means intimate. On top of such ambivalent and conflictive relationships, the Su family members also had to redefine their business ties and identities while the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) raged on, ending in the Qing Empire’s defeat and in ceding Taiwan to Japan. At the “impressionable age of eleven,” Su “harbored the same resentment that students everywhere felt” regarding China’s humiliating defeat by Japan (Liu 1972, 18). He was “drawn,” as Liu Wu-chi puts it, “into the political and intellectual maelstrom” that “agitated young people in the big cities” across China. The irony was that one could only learn from the “enemy” to overtake them. And it was only with his aunt’s support that Su managed to study in Japan on a partial scholarship, first, as an apprentice and companion to his cousin at a high school set up by the Chinese immigrants, and then as a college student at a most prestigious university in Japan. But Su’s path could hardly be described as straightforward or even patriotic. After graduating from Waseda University with promising career ahead, Su broke ties with his father when he found to his horror that the old man had secretly attempted to arrange a traditional marriage with a local prominent Chinese family for him. In 1904, when Su was told of his father’s illness, he refused to return home. He didn’t even attend his father’s funeral later that year. As a matter of fact, Su might have entered the monastery to become a monk out of frustration over what his father had done. The motif of a young rebel challenging the patriarchal system dominates his short stories, but not without internal contradictions. In more subtle and refracted modes of renarrating the past, such contradictions stem from Su’s own life experience with his father, as we will demonstrate in the chapter. After Su took the tonsure as a Buddhist novice, he found himself nevertheless to be all too human to give up all things earthly and fleshly. In his short lifetime (spanning just thirty-four years), Su at least disavowed monkhood three times, even though he would quickly reintroduce himself as a poet-monk and translator who helped modernize China by rendering Byron’s poetry in addition to rewriting Les Miserables in Chinese, among other creative projects. A monk in appearance, Su was deep down a dandy and a liberal who couldn’t help ceasing to startle (not to mention enlighten) his world in unexpected ways that certainly have no shortage of passions, impetuosities, and at times scandals. In many ways, Su’s life epitomizes modern China’s or even East Asia’s truncated experiences of “compressed” modernity, with almost everything old and new not just in convergence but in constant contestation with each other as well.

“Broken Hairpin”: A Story That Gains in Translation The romance narrative that concerns us here might well be considered as a hybrid intertext in critical responses to Su’s trauma and memory in the hard time of a difficult transition, not just at the personal and microcosmic level, but on the national, transregional, and macrocosmic scale – with the Qing China struggling to regain its feet from the shadows of multiple-layered semicolonial foreign occupations and influences. All these complications in the translator and writer’s life experience appear to play vital roles in the story, particularly in the episode in which our protagonist agonizes over the conflicting worldviews posed by the old patriarchal mode of arranged marriage and the new trend of romantic love based on affective individualism and freedom. Indicative of the interregnum, “Broken Hairpin” has been underappreciated or at least understudied. Among its first readers, Chen Duxiu succinctly praises the story for braving “the loss of freedom of action” and relates it a bit abruptly to the main trend in Chinese 222

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and world literature. In his literary biography of Su, the prominent critic Liu Wu-chi focuses on Su’s poetry and painting. In his 1972 book, Liu only provides a brief plot summary of the story after describing it as the “longest and finest” (1972, 117). However, Liu did later on choose “Broken Hairpin” out of Su’s six stories and translate it into English in 1978. Over the years, scholars are more into Su’s autobiographical fiction, “Lone Lost Wild Goose” (斷鴻零 雁記, 1911; translated as “Lone Swan” in Liu 1972, 111), to the neglect of Su’s intriguing free adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The story opens with our poet-translator and narrator arriving at the West Lake. After five days, he encounters a young woman looking for his friend (her lover) Chuang Chih. Employing a frequent visitor to the beautiful place as his persona, Su indicates that “the West Lake from a distance was beautiful as ever, but the friends who accompanied me there were different at different times” (1978, 234). This time it is about a friend getting into the traps of love and death. Now, this may not immediately remind us of the beginning of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, especially Lockwood’s comments about how he gets to meet his host, Heathcliff, and then goes on to retell the tormenting love story between his willful landlord and the passionate rebel Catherine amidst all sorts of family feuds and domestic violence. The role of Lockwood as a narrator and a commentator is evidently in the background. In describing the locale, Su actually goes several steps further in detailing not only his touristic gaze but also the intellectual communities of friends and colleagues, including scholars and monks, about their varying travel routes or personal destinies. This, in fact, better prepares us for what is to come – Chuang Chih’s dilemma as he is caught between arranged marriage and romantic love. The author insists that the story is “based on [his] early life experience and feelings” (Su 1991, I: 73); however, in many nuanced ways, Su seems to draw on fictions by the Brontës – Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, to be more precise – with a first-person narrator as participant and interpreter of what he (Mr. Lockwood) hears from another narrator, Nelly Dean, or what Jane Eyre experiences as a governess. We might, therefore, be better off seeing the short story as a hybrid product of free translation, for Su is well-read in the Romantic and Victorian literature, on top of being attracted to Byron and making friends with several British poets of his time – John B. Fletcher, for one (Liu 1972, 67–8). To establish Su’s “Broken Hairpin” as a revealing case of life into art and free adaptation in world literature, we should point out that it fits into what Pascale Casanova calls “world literary space,” in which each national literature innovates in a “distant reading” or cross-cultural pollination mode and defines itself in critical response to what is being put out at the cosmopolitan center (Casanova 2007). In doing that, our poet-monk is very much like J. K. Rowling, who appropriates a rich variety of mythic and gothic corpus (those by Lewis Carrol or J. R. R. Tolkien, for example) in the making of her Harry Potter or, perhaps, much closer to what Victoria Holt does in her Mistress of Mellyn by drawing on the Brontës on the one hand and by updating the gothic and Victorian romance traditions on the other (see Liao 2022, 52–62). This is an interesting case not only of “writing that gains by translation,” as David Damrosch suggests, but also of “turning life into art,” of mixing the personal, national, and transcultural subjects on the recurring theme of love and death (Damrosch 2013). In other words, the story on broken hairpin expands the horizon of receptive aesthetics by translocalizing Western romantic tragedies in a cosmopolitan vernacular fashion.

From Charlotte Brontë to Victoria Holt to Xin Qi: A Detour Holt’s rewriting of the Brontës may help illuminate here. Victoria Holt is one of the pen names adopted by Eleanor Hibbert (1906–93), a British popular fiction writer who interweaves gothic 223

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romance and suspense. In Mistress of Mellyn, Holt rewrites Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca in the manner of synthetic simulation, not only bringing the governess to the castle to be caught in an intricate set of triangular relationships, but also developing the noir plot around a number of traumatic and dramatic scenes underneath which mystery and murder intertwine, rearing their beguiling serpentine tails. The heroine is Martha Leigh, a prim governess who has just been hired by the remote and demanding Connan TreMellyn to care for his daughter Alvean. As the departure of the three prior governesses suggests, Alvean is a difficult charge, though understandably so due to the recent death of her mother, Alice. As Martha tries to connect with Alvean, she researches the history of Mellyn and discovers hidden family secrets that still haunt the present. Now growing familiar with Alvean, she feels herself falling for Connan. As the affinity between Martha and Connan grows, they find themselves enmeshed in entangled temporalities, not just with Alice’s mysterious death from the recent past that continues to haunt them, but with both caught in a network of aromatic pursuits and intrigues that put any conceivable future at risk. The novel was soon translated by Cui Wenyu (1936–1989) into Chinese in 1961, first appearing in the literary supplement column of a Taiwanese evening post, Dahua 大華, as serial and then as a book in 1964. The serial in translation gained popularity and caused a sensation among local Taiwanese readers who found the mysteries that shrouded the Cornish house of Mount Mellyn and its residents to be intriguing. Because of its success, Chinese renditions of almost all romance novels by Holt (Hibbert) ensued: 31 of Holt’s 32 novels were translated (Lai 2017, 324–5). In his postscript to the Chinese translation, Cui Wenyu advertised that the novel Mistress of Mellyn was to be made into a film, with such cast as Audrey Hepburn and Allan Durand. However, Hollywood didn’t give a green light signal to such a film project. And this might be partially the reason that a Taiwanese film director, Xin Qi (辛奇, 1924–2010), thought he could attempt its adaptation in Taiwan. Certainly, the popularity of Qiong Yiao (琼 瑶, b. 1938) romance novels at that time, as Lin Fangmei and Wang Liru (2017) suggest, also contributed to the adaption, making Xin Qi an Akira Kurosawa in Taiwan cinema. This “almost alike but not quite” aspect, as I argue in a different context, can be said to be a most innovative translation strategy, as suggested by Walter Benjamin, Lawrence Venuti, Henri Meschonnic, and many other scholars on the ethics and politics of translation (Benjamin 2012; Meschonnic 2011; Venuti 2013). It may enable us to better appreciate the ways in which director Qin and his film production team translate or appropriate Holt, who is indebted to works by the Brontë sisters and tries to make them her own, in giving a new life (or, in Benjamin’s words, “afterlife”) to Mistress of Meryll as the novel is adapted into a Taiwanese film. Throughout Xin’s The Bride Who Has Returned from Hell (地獄新娘 1965), we witness remarkable instances of appropriation in which numerous techniques that are the footprints of Alfred Hitchcock and James Bond movies help build spectral ambience, noir suspense, psychological depth, and tempo control, among others (Liao 2022). As Venuti argues, “the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences of the source text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences drawn from the receiving situation to enable the translation to circulate there” (2013, 11). For works such as The Bride Who Has Returned from Hell or “Broken Hairpin,” the differences the adaptation makes are more sensible and nuanced. It seeks not to find the equivalents or to reproduce but to give the source text a translocal and productive twist that goes along with global trends across genres and media, not just acquiring “significance and value in relation to literary trends and traditions in the translating culture” (Venuti 2013, 103). This “translocal and productive twist” is what makes Su’s short story in question here a representative case of cosmopolitan vernacularism in an earlier time. 224

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Composite Story Produced in a Hard Time As we have mentioned, Su draws on his own life experience, especially the episode with his father’s arrangement for him to marry someone our poet doesn’t even know, while inspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Like Holt, Su interweaves multiple literary sources, including English pop song and arias from a European opera. Even though this is not the first time Su employs a self-conscious narrator “I” to provide an eyewitness account, “Broken Hairpin” marks an important departure from earlier stories in which the narrator often declares to be Su himself and, in the act of telling the story, claims autobiographical authority. In contrast, the first-person narrator of “Broken Hairpin” is an observer and participant who not just makes moral judgment but intervenes all too frequently, as if he were taking advantage of the role as a confidante to cut short the protagonist Chuang Chih’s desperate love affairs so that the latter could comply with the traditional Confucian behavior codes in obeying the elders – in this case, the arranged marriage made by Chuang’s uncle and aunt. The use of “I” in the story makes Su among the very first writers in Chinese history to highlight the linguistic subjectivity and political agency, years ahead of Lu Xun 魯迅 and other latecomers who begin to adopt such a narrative strategy. In fact, Lu Xun is often miscredited as the first novelist to introduce the first-person narrator, as in his “Diary of a Madman” (狂人日記, 1918), “Kong Yiji” (孔乙己, 1919), or “Hometown” (故鄉, 1920). Su resorts to such a narrative mode as early as 1911, and “Broken Hairpin” shows him to have fully utilized the first-person narrator in its most complex operations. In Problems in General Linguistics, Émile Benveniste discusses the lack of the first-person pronouns in East Asian literature by singling out the fact that Asian societies tend to be “polite,” that is, less assertive and individualistic. However, Su begs to differ. He uses a personal approach to make public his life experiences – for example, a son’s search for the long-absent foster mother in the autobiographical novella “Lone Lost Wild Goose.” However, in “Broken Hairpin” the narrator has more diverse (if not dynamic) roles to play. First of all, Su the narrator serves dual roles both as an observer and as a participant in the unrelenting triangular relationships between Chuang Chih and the two equally lovely, talented women. Even before our protagonist appears, the narrator has the first encounter with a lovely woman (who turns out to be Tu Ling-fang in search of Chuang). In Chuang’s absence, our narrator meets another woman (Yen Lien-p’ei). It is through the first-person and self-conscious narrator (Su, our poet-monk, himself) that we, readers, get to know the strange beauties who are desperate to convey their messages to Chuang Chih. Our narrator performs not just as a messenger but as an investigator, determined to get to the bottom of the emerging triangular relationships. He won’t stop there, however, as he also plans to persuade Chuang to choose the destined and prearranged – Lien-p’ei. Even though realizing Chuang is in love with Ling-fang while feeling torn because of such a romantic (and to his uncle, “selfish”) choice, Su goes on to meddle in Chuang’s affairs with the two women. In a self-righteous and sarcastic (not to mention misogynistic) gesture that immediately reminds us of Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, our narrator recycles an ancient Chinese proverb on femme fatale: “All women in this world are a source of calamity!” (Su 1978, 235). The angry interjection is perplexing and a bit out of place, as Su himself is a monk who is supposed to be neutral or, at least, morally and emotionally detached. In Lockwood, we find an explicitly naïve but deep-down complex case of ironic comments made by a woman novelist under the guise of a male writer. Here, Su seems to think that he is in Chuang’s shoes, lamenting over the poor guy who is hopelessly caught in the tough situation posed by modern ways of finding love on one’s own or traditional matchmaking marriage practice. However, a second 225

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look reveals that our narrator is not that naïve or doctrinaire. He actually articulates Chuang Chih’s pains and understands what torments him. He listens to alternative voices of freedom and of love: “On Solitary Hill, I and Chuang saw a group of foreigners strolling and singing: ‘Love is enough. Why should we ask for more?’” (Su 1978, 236). Evidently, the “foreign” (and modern) mode of love catches our immediate (albeit abrupt) attention, but the incident also provides a point of contrast to what is going on between Chuang and his two women in a world of interregnum, where the old system refuses to cede while the new is not yet ready to take over. To make things worse, the two are almost indistinguishable and mutually feeding: in the story, Ling-fang and Lien-p’ei are classmates; they seem to admire each other, as if they would embrace and die (which they do eventually) for each other. In “Broken Hairpin,” which is cast in the traditional mandarin ducks and butterflies romance, the two women – Ling-fang and Lien-p’ei – are not rivals in any conventional sense. A heroine in the traditional Chinese romance narrative would often take action to rescue or redeem her man by ridding the evil force, disguised as a gallant knight or a brilliant scholar-judge. Here, we have Ling-fang announcing herself as Chuang Chih’s “old acquaintance,” to our narrator’s great amazement that Chuang should have such a lovely woman coming all the way to meet him. “How could this pretty, splendid woman visit her man, unaccompanied, and not fearing any gossips?” our narrator ponders. By instinct, he feels alarmed that something awful may happen to his dear friend. And then, another woman, equally charming and respectable, comes along, also looking for Chuang, to render the situation even more complicated. Su goes on to foretell the chaos to ensue, while finding himself completely lost as to whom Chuang should choose to be with. In this way, by the time the readers come to meet the real Chuang, we have already known what sort of misery lurks for our protagonist. As a first-person narrator, Su recounts, argues, muses, and muddles, often echoing voices of the ancient regime (of Chuang’s uncle and aunt or, more ironically, Su’s father) but, at the same time, entertaining new ideas (romantic love, individualism) and making good use of modern inventions (watch, cigars, banknotes, fashions, and indeed, commodity exchange for quick cash to help Chuang while back in Shanghai). All these suggest that Su Manshu has taken us to an entirely new – and, in fact, crucial, if not foundational – phase of mandarin ducks and butterflies in anticipating the “sentimental” 言情 romance genre to come in the 1920s. In this new phase, crises and losses rather than simple denouement and solution (always ending in the lover’s reunion) reign supreme to highlight a new world disorder during the difficult transitional years of China’s first Republic (ROC, 1911–1947).

Love and Death: Blending Wuthering Heights With Romeo and Juliet Su’s role as a confidant establishes his narrative credibility and moral authority when Chuang Chih asks him for help: “I want to bare my heart to you – that will surely work better than medicine.” And then making reference to Ling-fang, Chuang implores our narrator-translator: So I beg you to stay with me, and if I fail to communicate my feelings to her, you’ll have to help me out. . . . [Y]ou’ll render me a great service if you testify to her my sincere feelings for her; later you could also help by telling my uncle about her virtuous conduct and gracious manner when I plead my case with him. (Su 1978, 237) Now, this episode marks a beginning in traditional Chinese story on confiding heartfelt secrets to someone close. However, after musing over the relations between the troubled lovers, our 226

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narrator is quite ambivalent and eventually decides to take the side of conventional wisdom. He admits: “Upon returning home that night after witnessed the meeting between Chuang Chih and Ling-fang, I pondered over it time and again but failed to make out the exact relationship between the two” (Su 1978, 239). He listens to what Chuang Chih has to say about his attitude toward Lien-p’ei, the girl arranged by his aunt in the proposed marriage: “I love her as much as I love my aunt” (Su 1978, 240). Su concludes that Chuang is torn between love or respect for the two women – his pen pal and best friend’s sister, Ling-fang, and Lien-p’ei, the other woman introduced by his aunt. But his advice on such a dilemma strikes one as very Victorian: It seems obvious that your uncle and aunt plan to arrange a proper marriage for you. Even though you refuse to change your mind, you are bound to marry Lien-p’ei in the end. Moreover, if in time you could reverse your position and shift your love from Ling-fang to Lien-p’ei, your problem would be resolved most satisfactorily for everyone concerned. Ling-fang, too, will eventually come to forgive you. Otherwise, sorrow will pursue you endlessly even unto your grave, and remorse will come too late for you. (Su 1978, 241) Now, this, in fact, runs against what Su experiences in real life. One is left to wonder if Su is being cynical here. Su was a rebel in his college days, and that was why he rewrote Hugo’s Les Misérables in Chinese. But the disappointing political corruptions in the early years of the Republican era might have “further dampened Man-shu’s already dwindling interest in politics” after he broke with a longtime friend, Liu Shipei, who turned out to be a royalist in full support of the restoration of the monarch and the coronation of Yuan Shikai, a warlord, as emperor (Liu 1972, 52–3). However, Su’s rather-compromised advice to Chuang on the difficult choice between the two women is very much like Lockwood’s moral stance in labeling Heathcliff as wild and monstrous in bringing the turbulent relationships with Catherine and then ending by destroying the Earnshaw and Linton families. In such a conservative and anti-Romantic way, our narrator strikes us as very Victorian. However, Su also provides detailed account of the lovers in “Broken Hairpin.” First of all, he learns that Chuang Chih has missed a few times the occasions to actually meet Ling-fang, only to make absence all the fonder for the lovers to each other. Chuang has also misheard about Ling-fang’s engagement to someone else. This sort of missing each other and of misinformation serves to bring the lovers closer. By contrast, the arranged three meetings by the aunt with Lien-p’ei seem forced on Chuang Chih, even though he does find her to be adorable and intelligent. After providing morally strong but politically regressive advice urging Chuang to honor his uncle’s wish to marry Lien-p’ei, our narrator has a chance to admire Lien-p’ei in close encounter. He is totally overwhelmed by Lien-p’ei’s gift to translate a European opera at the request of the aunt, especially the last line of the aria, “What the world calls I neither know nor want” (Su 1978, 245). Then, a tragedy begins to unfold, with Lien-p’ei’s broken hairpin discovered. Chuang’s uncle is so upset with the disobedient nephew that he breaks the engagement token in half. Lien-p’ei and Chuang Chih are doomed. It is of interest that by renarrating or rendering his own life experience of arranged marriage into art, Su Manshu blends several of his relatives. In real life, he hates his father but owes a lot to his aunt and uncle. But in the story, the love-andhate relationship is at least twice removed or distanced, with no mention of the father figure in the primal scene of offense, and it is Chuang Chih, rather than Su himself, who has to struggle with the arranged marriage. The aunt and uncle appear to be kind and generous, though not 227

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very forgiving. They think they know much better, but when the uncle realizes that Chuang Chih is in love with Ling-fang, he takes it badly by breaking Lien-p’ei’s hairpin. (The Chinese words for Lien-p’ei, 聯珮, in fact, mean “joint jade or paired couple.”) Things take a tragic turn after the hairpin gets broken. Uncle blames Chuang for not being filial or dutiful. As if in outburst, he comments: This young man has ignored my advice and acted most outrageously! Will you please tell him that it was I who broke the jade hairpin? Being young and licentious, he has failed to heed the instructions of the ancients that “a coquette is without chastity and a libertine without loyalty.” (Su 1978, 247) Chuang is heartbroken and becomes seriously ill. His uncle thinks the illness “comes from an attack of evil influences in the liver.” It is interesting that Su Manshu should highlight that the uncle is a patriarch and also a physician who is capable of diagnosis and of providing Chinese herbal medicine, capable of giving life or death. But in the case of Chuang Chih, the liver attack proves fatal, even beyond his uncle’s power to remedy. The story ends with all three dying tragically. Yen Lien-p’ei cut her throat with a knife, feeling rejected. In the meanwhile, Ling-fang writes a letter to Chuang asking him to renounce his love for her and to devote himself to Lien-p’ei in compliance with the uncle’s wishes. And when she hears about what happens to Lien-p’ei, Ling-fang hangs herself. Su hastens to his friend’s deathbed, only to find Chuang breathing his last. As in Wuthering Heights, “Broken Hairpin” concludes with the funeral in the Cemetery of the Multiple Blessings. The narrator muses, “Now that the fated relationship between Chuang Chih, Ling-fang, and Lien-p’ei has come to an end, the three may yet get together one day in their next existence. But this is something about which I am unwilling to speculate” (Su 1978, 249). Here, we certainly find resonating intertextual references to the romantic gothic novel by Emily Brontë, but perhaps to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther as well. As in Su’s free rewrites of Hugo, our poet-monk’s “Broken Hairpin” is a work that also gains by translation, not just a transitional, but translocal work that brings a traditional Chinese story in cross-cultural pollination and dialogues with Western Romantic and Victorian fictions in terms of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

References Benjamin, Walter. 2012. “The Translator’s Task” (1923). In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 75–83. London: Routledge. Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Damrosch, David. 2013. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lai, Ciyun 賴慈雲. 2017. Fanyi chentan shiwusuo: weiyi jiemi! Taiwan jieyan shiqi fanyi guaixiang da gongkai 翻譯偵探事務所：偽譯解密！台灣戒嚴時期翻譯怪象大公開 (A Checklist of Books Translated in Martial-Law Taiwan: 1945–1989). Taipei: Azure Publishing Co. Liao, Ping-hui. 2022. “Xin Qi’s Bride from Hell and Its Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” In 32 New Takes in Taiwan Cinema, edited by Emilie Yeh, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 52–62. Lin, Fangmei 林芳玫, and Wang Liru 王俐茹. 2017. “Cong Yingwen roman shi dao Taiyu dianying: ‘Diyu xinniang’ de gede leixing jiqi wenhua fanyi” (From English Romance to Taiwan Film: The Gothic Genre and Its Cultural Translation in Bride from Hell). In Baibian qianfan bu shiyi: Taiyu pian de hunxue yu zhuanhua 百變千幻不思議：台語片的混血與轉化 (Taiwanese-Language Cinema), 351–73. Taipei: Lianjing.

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Su Manshu’s “Broken Hairpin” Liu, Wu-Chi. 1972. Su Man-shu. New York: Twayne. Meschonnic, Henri. 2011. Ethics and Politics of Translating. Edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Su Manshu. 1978. “Broken Hairpin.” Translated by Liu Wu-Chi. In Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations, edited by Y. M. Ma and Joseph Lau, 234–47. New York: Columbia University Press. Su, Manshu 蘇曼殊. 1991. Su Manshu xuanji 蘇曼殊 選集 (Selected Works of Su Manshu). Edited by Ma Yijun. 2 vols. Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe. Venuti, Lawrence. 2013. Translation Changes Everything. London: Routledge.

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19 QIAN ZHONGSHU AS A COSMOPOLITAN Ji Jin

Qian Zhongshu as Cosmopolitan Writer and Scholar Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu, 錢锺書, 1910–1998) has become a monumental figure in the history of modern Chinese literature and scholarship with his exquisite literary masterpieces and his idiosyncratic academic writings. He has not only advanced Chinese academic culture in the twentieth century toward a higher level but also opened up many possibilities for the development of Chinese academic culture in the twenty-first century. Hence, it has become no longer possible to neglect Qian Zhongshu in any study of modern Chinese cultural history, academic history, or literary history. Especially in the era of globalization, Qian’s cosmopolitan vision and stance are of great revelation and inspiration for us to consider the development of Chinese literature and Chinese scholarship in the world, as well as the relationship between Chinese literature and world literature. For general readers, Qian Zhongshu as a writer is surely more memorable than Qian Zhongshu as a scholar. Qian’s only full-length novel, Fortress Besieged (圍城, 1947), is a lasting bestseller and a household name. In fact, with the exception of his composition of traditional-style Chinese poetry, which continued until his later years, Qian has completed all his works of creative writing as early as 1940s. As a young writer and poet, Qian has literary creation that includes prose, novels, and classical poetry, all of which reveal his vigorous creativity and somehow-flamboyant disposition. In particular, his novels and essays are both sharp and subtle, crafty yet not in lack of spontaneity, while his language never fails to carry out his steady shrewdness. In effect, these writings not only fire taunting criticism at the hitherto society and the particular social segment of the so-called “literati” but also weave together Qian’s philosophical contemplation on life. They have fully demonstrated Qian’s talent as a litterateur and his affective capability of moving countless readers with words. Behind Qian Zhongshu’s superb art of irony and incontestable erudition, however, a distinctive aspect is often overlooked. One may summarize this aspect as Qian’s sober vision of human existence that regards “human beings as the basic nature of hairless, two-legged animals” (Ch’ien 2004, 1). Such understanding of human nature is overtly presented in Qian’s commentary on life in his essay collection Written on the Margin of Life (寫在人生邊上, 1941), bitterly insinuated in his exploration of human psychology in the short story collection Humans, Beasts and Ghosts (人·獸·鬼, 1946) and satirically metamorphosed to be the central aporia of DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-25

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Fortress Besieged (圍城, serialized 1946–1947). To some extent, it was Qian’s realization of the “basic nature” of human being that gives rise to some of the most resonating, albeit cynical, lines of great literature. For example, to quote from the famous titular metaphor in Fortress Besieged, marriage and life are nothing but “fortress under siege”: “the people outside the city want to break in and the people inside the city want to escape” (Ch’ien 2004, 91). Characterizing the universal dilemma of human existence, this witty line pronounced to the novel’s protagonist, Fang Hongjian, echoes another high-minded aphorism from Qian’s essay collection On the Art of Poetry: “weariness grows in involvement, envy sprouts in exclusion” (當境厭境，離境羨境) (Qian 1984, 351). Later on, Qian’s frequent references to Martin Heidegger’s existentialist concepts in Limited Views, such as Auswegslosigkeit for the no-exit state of death (Qian 1994, 574), or Geworfenheit describing human existence as being “thrown” to the world (Qian 1994, 1424), can also be read as further rhetorical and philosophical derivatives of the same tragic dilemma foregrounded in Fortress Besieged. Resonating to Western existentialist philosophy, Qian Zhongshu’s remarkable insight on life and the world unveils his vision as a cosmopolitan and renders his literary works with a unique sense of modernity. While Fortress Besieged and other narrative works of Qian Zhongshu’s are often considered as masterpieces in the history of modern Chinese literature, his two major collections of scholarly writings in classical Chinese, On the Art of Poetry (談藝錄, 1948) and Limited Views (管錐編, 1979), continue to be the canon of modern Chinese scholarship. In fact, Qian’s academic contributions are much higher than his literary accomplishment in belles lettres. Together with Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1969–1936), Wang Guowei 王國維 (1977–1927), Hu Shi 胡适 (1891–1962), Xiong Shili 熊十力 (1885–1968), Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 (1890–1969), and a few others, Qian represented the zenith of Chinese scholarship in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Limited Views, written during the darkest hours of the Cultural Revolution, claims to be “isolated thoughts” in forms of reading notes (劄記) on ten “classics” of early Chinese letters, namely, The Book of Changes 周易正義, The Books of Songs 毛詩正義, The Zuo Commentary 左傳, Records of the Grand Historian 史記會注考證, Laozi with Wang Bi’s commentary 老子王弼 注, Liezi with Zhang Zhan’s commentary 列子張湛注, Master Jiao’s Forest of Changes 焦氏 易林, The Songs of the South with Hong Xingzu’s subcommentary 楚辭洪興祖補注, Marvel Tales of the Taiping Period 太平廣記, and The Complete Pre-Tang Prose 全上古三代秦漢三國六 朝文 (see Egan 1998, 12–13) What comes out of Qian’s “note-keeping” effort, however, exceeds far beyond the mere examination of the ten ancient Chinese classics. Oriented toward a cosmopolitan culture, Qian converges multilingual discourses in English, Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc. and integrates concepts from a variety of disciplines in humanity studies, including literature, history, psychology, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. Hence, Qian’s references extend from classical scriptures, miscellaneous compendia, novel, and opera from ancient China to canonical works of Western literature, art, history, and philosophy, and further on to the less-known texts of various world religion and mysticism. One can infer that the aim of this ambitious scholarly work would include forming a dialogue between different cultures and seeking a common literary ground between East and West. Yet such work of grandeur was given a humble and even minuscule name. “Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters” is Qian’s own English translation of his Chinese title, 管錐編 (Egan 2015, 110), literally meaning “tube and awl collection,” which alludes to the Daoist parable on the futile patched attempt of “using a tube to scan the sky or an awl to measure the depth of the earth” (Zhuangzi 2013, 136). Tube and awl are the “small instruments” of a fool’s choice to pursue complexity and preserve ephemerality. Qian’s word choice for this title thus yields a self-disparaging humor that nevertheless manages to highlight the formalistic character, if not the distinctive methodology, of his

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reading of the selected ancient texts. The image of “tube and awl” represents Qian’s resolution to unveil the meaning and significance of the “grand” letters of Chinese literary history through his composition of “minuscule” or fragmented comments, criticism, as well as citations from various cultural traditions, which again manifests his humble respect for the richness of world literature and cultural discourse. Apart from embodying Qian’s discerning intercultural vision as an ambitious comparatist, Limited Views also secures Qian Zhongshu’s significant role as an uncompromising cosmopolitan intellectual in the history of modern China. Years before during the Sino-Japanese war, Qian had conceded that On the Art of Poetry is not only a work of literary aesthetics but also “a book borne of anxiety and worry” (憂患之書) (Qian 1984, 1). The same caption could also have been given to Limited Views, since it was likewise born out of the darkest years of Cultural Revolution, filled with melancholic insinuations and apprehension of a deeply concerned intellectual. Despite the indirectness of its criticism, Limited Views represented the only remaining attempt from the Chinese side to participate in the world cultural dialogue at that time. In recent years, the complete collection of Qian Zhongshu’s manuscripts in Chinese has been published, including 3 colossal volumes of Notes on Rong’an Pavilion, 20 volumes of Notes on the Collected Writings of Qian Zhongshu’s Manuscript in Chinese Language with more than 15,000 pages, and 48 volumes of Notes on the Collected Writings of Qian Zhongshu’s Manuscripts in Foreign Languages with more than 35,000 pages. These manuscripts, covering ancient canons, historical and philosophical scripts, novels, court books, literary theories from various disciplines in different languages once again attest to Qian’s cosmopolitan vision and erudition unprecedented of his time. In the history of Chinese culture in the twentieth century, there were quite a few scholars who strove to bridge the cultural grounds of the East and the West. In fact, one of the most important characteristics of twentieth-century Chinese scholarship is the tendency to introduce and probe Western knowledge and paradigm by following the indigenous scholarly tradition of China. However, no one has ever been as broad-minded as Qian Zhongshu. With a grand global vision and a strong modern stance, Qian takes all human cultures as his object of investigation, striving to integrate and to communicate, to excavate the inextricable connections inherent behind human cultural discourse. Qian Zhongshu has reiterated on different occasions his academic pursuit of “striking a connection” (打通) (Zheng 1988, 124; Egan 2015, 126). Here, to “strike a connection” is not only to bridge Chinese and Western literature and culture but also to find the common ground for various disciplines and to put literary creation on the equal footing of academic research, or, in Ronald Egan’s paraphrase, to “create a connection between two things by breaking down or through barriers between them” (Egan 1998, 15). It is precisely because of his determination to “strike a connection” that Qian Zhongshu can move freely across the boundaries between different disciplines and different cultures. It enables Qian to further deconstruct the theoretical fences on which cultural discourse relies and to reveal the universal aesthetic psychology and cultural laws of human beings hidden behind Chinese and Western cultures, thus establishing an expandingly cosmopolitan and contemporary discourse space.

Qian Zhongshu and Comparative Literature In effect, Qian Zhongshu’s method of “striking a connection” endows his writings with a natural vision of world literature and a distinct position as a comparativist. Although Qian has never accepted the label of “comparativist,” nor has he ever clearly affirmed the practice and methodology of “comparative literature” (Zheng 1988, 124), his writings on this subject matter can be 232

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easily found in his various collections, including On the Art of Poetry, Limited Views, Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature (七綴集, 1985) and other independent writings. As early as in 1945, in an essay titled “Trivial Fiction and Trivial Knowledge,” Qian juxtaposes ancient Chinese novels with Western novels to expand on the topic of “literary influence,” or “crenology,” as a rising sector in the study of comparative literature. Despite his reservations, Qian affirms certain valuable aspects in the application of the comparative method in literary scholarship: In recent times, comparative literature has flourished, and the so-called “crenology” has even become a research field of its own. Although such research tends to be trivial, it can still be quite helpful for certain authors and critics. For writers are prone to be playful with their ancient hypotext. They make use of these ancient texts in order to compose their own writings, as if they were to turn a block of iron into a block of gold, or to shed the mortal body and to exchange the bones of a text. In reality, however, the meaning of the ancients is close by. The mind of the ancients is hence understood, and that is an unintended result of literary composition under the influence from earlier times. The critics, on the other hand, may observe how much the writer has learned and mimicked from the ancients, so as to judge the writer’s talent and to see whether his literary craft is plagiarized or original. (Qian 2001, 22) In 1979, Qian visited the United States together with a delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and met with several American scholars in the field of comparative literature, including Lowry Nelson Jr., Harry Levin, and Claudio Guillen. During this meeting, even though Qian purported to regard “comparative literature” merely as his “amateur interest,” he was thrilled to realize that he shared with his American colleagues the belief that comparative literature helps to understand the literature of one’s own country; the literature of each country has its own characteristics as well as shared commonalities in its development and aesthetic propensities; the method of seeking commonalities from differences and extracting differences from the appearance of similarities will enable the study of art and literature to acquire scientific universality; the literature of a small and isolated country often helps to solve bigger problems in the history of world literature. (Qian 2001, 147) For Qian, comparative literature as a discipline “refers exclusively to literary comparison across national and language boundaries,” and in order to “develop our own comparative literature research, one of the important tasks is to examine the interrelationship between Chinese literature and foreign literature” (Zhang 1981, 132). For instance, in the eighteenth century, the French priest had translated a zaju (雜劇, miscellaneous opera) from Yuan dynasty, The Orphan of Zhao, into French. The play became popular in Europe, and Guy de Maupassant’s was likely to have written his novella Une Vedetta based on the Chinese play’s prologue, especially when considering the similarities in “plot and denouement” (Qian 1994, 531) of the two works. In addition to English and French literature, The Orphan of Zhao has also exerted influence on Italian opera, specifically L’Eroe Cinese by the Italian poet Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), which is worthy of further study by scholars interested in Sino-Italian literary relations. From the other way around, there are even more work left to be done, namely, the influence of foreign literature on Chinese literature. To this, Qian has pointed out in particular that comparative 233

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literature as a discipline is never based on purely speculative and far-fetched comparison. One should not only seek similarities in different literatures but also examine the differences. In the process of clarifying the similarities and differences, it is important to recognize the various characteristics of the Chinese and Western literary traditions and to involve the literary comparisons in a larger cultural context, considering the links between literature and history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines (Zhang 1981, 137). Indeed, Qian’s research, starting out from traditional Chinese classics, is not only a cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparative literary study but also a study with cosmopolitan orientation. It is a study that encompasses encyclopedic knowledge and bridges the ancient and modern worlds, extending far beyond the strict sense of comparative literary research. The most systematic collection of Qian’s writings on comparative literature so far is Zhang Longxi’s compilation (1981). In the preface of On the Art of Poetry, Qian has pronounced a famous aphorism: “Between people from the East Sea and the West Sea, there exists a common thinking; between scholarship from the South and from the North, the art and the method do not diverge” (1984, 1). This aphorism could also represent what Qian believes to be the principle of comparative literature as an academic discipline. In the absence of intercultural literary communication, different texts in different cultural contexts may share the same motifs and compositional strategies, whereas similar insights may appear in the minds of theorists and critics across culture. Thus, the study on literary influences merely represents a small sector of comparative literature studies, whereas more attention could be paid to the juxtaposition of literature from different cultures. As Zhang Longxi summarizes Qian Zhongshu’s thought on comparative literature: The ultimate purpose of comparative literature is to help us understand the basic laws of literature in general (littérature générale) and human culture. This is why “parallel studies” of Chinese and Western literature beyond the scope of actual connection are not only possible, but also extremely valuable. Such comparisons are made with references to different cultural contexts, and the conclusions drawn are usually of universal significance. (Zhang 1981, 135) For Qian, it is necessary not only to go beyond factual connections to conduct “analogical” and “comparative” studies but also to link literature with other human intellectual discourses and to conduct interdisciplinary studies. Qian’s works, such as On the Art of Poetry and Limited Views, are filled with a large number of cases of such parallel and interdisciplinary researches. In discussing Song Yu’s (宋玉, 298 BC-222 BC) romantic sentiment of “ascending to a high place and saddened by a height” (登高而悲), for example, Qian not only draws parallel to similar themes recurrent in traditional Chinese poems, rhymed proses of fu, essays, and plays but also evokes writings of Henry Fielding, Lewis Carroll, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, poems of Charles Baudelaire, Novalis, and Zibaldone Leopardi, pointing out that this particular sentiment is shared by numerous prominent men of letters, Chinese and foreign alike (Qian 1994, 875–8; Qian 1998, 74). In noting the peculiar term of “the coughing of the turtle” (鱉咳), which is “a rather new and bizarre image, not to mention being extremely mocking,” Qian relates to Xue Wei’s transfiguration into a fish in the ancient Chinese text The Book of Ongoing Mysteries and the similar fate of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, before concluding on the universal status of human isolation: [T]he talkers may think that they were living in a crowd while actually experiencing full isolation (die völlige Kontaktlosigkeit). I think it is more miserable to move one’s 234

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lips without uttering a thing (as Xue Wei the fish) than to hear voices from the next door without understanding (as Gregor Samsa the monstrous insect). (Qian 1994, 568) Nevertheless, arbitrary comparisons are meaningless. Qian Zhongshu also reminds us that “if we make a wise comparison between the two, we will find them in a beautifully balanced relation; but if we insist upon a rigid comparison, even two virtuous subjects will end up hindering each other” (Qian 1984, 351). Whereas On the Art of Poetry primarily takes classical Chinese poetics as its research object, Limited Views covers topics ranging from classical literature to numerous fields of classical humanities. Rooted in Chinese cultural tradition, both of them aim to initiate dialogue with the world. They are both pioneering theoretical studies on Chinese and Western comparative poetics. The study of comparative poetics deals with the complex similarities and differences between the poetic systems formed in different cultural systems and searches for a universal theoretical discourse that not only explains but also transcends the poetical similarities and differences. Qian Zhongshu believes that the study of comparative poetics “is an important and promising research field,” and that “one of the important tasks of comparative poetics is to compare and interpret literary concepts and terminologies in traditional Chinese literary theory with those of the West” (Zhang 1981, 135). Thus, Qian pays special attention to the comparison and connection between Chinese and Western literary concepts and specific literary phenomena so that “one can cite them at any time, and that those participating in the discourse of art and literature will know that their immediate neighbors are also in the same discourse and may frequently inspire them” (Qian 1994, 881). In effect, Qian aims to sketch out a comparative exposition of different aspects of Chinese and Western poetics, such as poetic and reception psychology, artistic techniques, style, mood, and motif, so as to probe the common poetic mind underneath these transcultural literary theories and phenomena. For Qian, traditional Chinese literary theories include not only specialized “remarks” (話) on poetry, lyrics, and music but also argumentative treatises on painting, music, individual works, and even rhymes and exegesis, where very few lines and simple words often provide tremendous insights. For instance, the concept of “rhythm” (韻) of poetry in Chinese literary theory is developed as a metaphor from music and is first found in Xie He’s (fl. the early 5th century 謝赫) six methods of painting. To this, Qian goes further to point out the parallel concept of “dhvani” (sound) as the essence of poetry in Sanskrit poetics and the poetic aesthetics of “obscurity” or “beauté cache,” “idea confuse,” “chiara,” in European literary theory from ancient to modern times (Qian 1994, 1352–61). It is precisely in the extensive mutual interpretation and complementation of Chinese and Western poetics that Qian Zhongshu’s understanding of the terms in traditional Chinese poetics such as “divine rythme” (神韻), “subtle insight” (妙悟), “rational interest” (理趣), “entrust” (寄託), “synesthesia” (通感) are reflected. Furthermore, Qian has summed up classical concepts and many other poetic laws of universal significances, such as “poetry as a vehicle of grief” (詩可 以怨), “poetry and painting” (詩與畫), “the two handles and multilaterality of the metaphor” (比喻之兩柄多邊), “persona poetica and persona practica” (為文與立身), and so on. Since the 1990s, the theoretical reconstruction of Chinese literary discourse has been a much-debated topic in Chinese academia. Since there are no modern Chinese theories of literature, Chinese literary scholars have to rely on foreign theoretical discourses and methodologies to analyze poetic problems and literary phenomena specific to Chinese cultural context. Faced with the hegemony of the Western theoretical discourse, Chinese literary scholars were experiencing the anxiety of losing the discursive power in the cross-cultural dialogue with the West. In fact, despite the lack of literary theories in modern China, traditional poetic discourses 235

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abound in the history of ancient Chinese literature, including the theoretical masterpieces of The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons 文心雕龍 by Liu Xie (劉勰, c. 465–532), the poetical criticism Poetry Appreciation 詩品 by Zhong Rong (鍾嶸, c. 468–c. 518), and Canglang Remarks on Poetry 滄浪詩話 by Yan Yu (嚴羽, between 1192 and 1197–c. 1245). Theories of poetical aesthetics ranging from Yuan Mei’s (袁枚, 1716–1798) “theory of spirituality” (性靈), Wang Shizhen’s (王士禎, 1634–1711) “theory of daemon resonance” (神韻說), to Wang Guowei’s “theory of the realm” (境界說) have all put forward poetic discourses of great substance. The urgent need for the modern Chinese scholars is to explore and develop the universal potentiality of traditional Chinese poetic discourse in critical conjunction with Western poetic discourse, thereby transfiguring traditional Chinese literary thoughts into a modern theoretical discourse. In this regard, Qian Zhongshu’s comparative poetics study has already set a model for his fellow Chinese colleagues through his theoretical contribution in two aspects. First, Qian has probed the distinctive features of Chinese traditional poetics discourse, including its inherent ambiguity. The traditional Chinese poetic discourse, ranging from Ouyang Xiu’s (欧阳修, 1007–1072) Poetic Discourse to Wang Guowei’s Poetic Remarks on the Human World (人 間詞話), can all be categorized as impressionistic and intuitive criticisms. Traditional poetic concepts such as the aforementioned divine rhyme, air and bone (風骨), momentum (氣勢), sentiment (情味), bone strength (骨力), meaningful pleasure (意趣), stylistics (風致), divine reasoning (神理), meaningful energy (意氣), metrics and rhyme (格韻) are mysteriously vague concepts or merely “key words,” the connotations and exact meanings of which are impossible to be truly grasped. As Stephen Owen insightfully observes, “in the Chinese tradition conceptual precision was not a value and therefore no one need maintain the pleasant illusion that a precise technical vocabulary existed” (1996, 5). To this, Qian Zhongshu once elaborates on the traditional concept of “emblematic images” (象) to discuss the ambiguity and metaphorical characteristics of Chinese language, since the relationship between “images” and “meaning” is also a central issue throughout the history of ancient Chinese literature and philosophy. The Book of Changes, for instance, harbors the paradigmatic formulation to relate imagery and meaning in the proposition of “establishing the Images to give the fullness of the concepts in their minds” (Owen 1996, 31). The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi 莊子 further casts doubts on the semantic relationship between words (言) and meaning (意) by pronouncing that “words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words” (2013, 233), which was later developed by Wang Bi (王弼, 226–249) into another proposition that rearranges the three key concepts of image, words, and meaning: Words are used to clarify the meaning of the emblematic images, and once the image is understood, the words can be forgotten. The emblematic images are used as storehouses of concepts; and once the concept is apprehended, the image be forgotten. (Qian 1998, 136) The issue at stake here concerns the relationship between words, images, and meaning. While The Book of Changes dictates that the meaning should be fully expressed through image, Zhuangzi and Wang Bi believe that the “emblematic images” are separated from the meaning associated with them. Taking these ancient propositions into account, Qian seeks to reveal the connotation of the “image” in Chinese literary tradition through an analysis of the similarities and differences between the concept of “emblematic images” (象) in the Book of Changes and the concept of “figurative imagery” (喻) in the Book of Poetry (Qian 1998, 134–9). According to Qian’s 236

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analysis, traditional Chinese poetic discourse, such as the fragrant elephant crossing the river (香象渡河), the antelope hanging with its horns (羚羊掛角), the divine rhyme and style (神韻 風骨), emotional flavor and interest (情味意趣), are often expressed through images that are not only the emblematic images reflecting the principle (理) of knowledge and eventually leads to the essential meaning so that one may “forget about the words” once meanings are conveyed but also the metaphorical imagery that harbors a distinctive meaning. Without references to this dual connotation of images, poetic discourses are no longer possible. In other words, the triadic formulation of “forgetting the words, once the idea has been grasped, and forgetting the emblematic image, once the words have been found” (Qian 1998, 138) is integrated into the traditional Chinese poetic discourse, characterized by its inherent semantic richness and inherent ambiguity. Ancient Chinese poetics is hence in urgent need to undergo the hermeneutic task of interpretation as well as modern theoretical transformation. Second, Qian insists on placing traditional Chinese literary thought in dialogue with Western poetics on an equal footing, so as to excavate its modern and global significances. Since traditional Chinese poetic discourse possesses the characteristics of semantic richness and ambiguity at the same time, one may fully expound its richness in conjunction with Western poetic discourse. The aim of Qian’s comparative poetics research is precisely to re-evaluate the traditional Chinese poetics, that is, to clarify the concepts, categories, expressions, and rhetoric characteristics of traditional Chinese poetic discourse and to restore the vitality of traditional poetic discourse in the dialogue with Western poetic discourse. For example, as a typical traditional poetic discourse, “daemon resonance” (神韻) mainly refers to the ethereal and transcendent artistic realm created by poetic language without leaving any formalistic traces. Qian Zhongshu reviews discourses on daemon resonance by Xie He, Jing Hao (荊浩, 895–907), Han Zhuo (韓拙, fl. 1094–1098), Sikong Tu (司空圖, 837–908), Jiang Kui (姜夔, 1154–1221), Su Shi(蘇軾,1037–1101), Yan Yu (韓愈,768–824), and other writers to conclude on the concept of “resonance”: Combing these various descriptions, and plucking off the flowers to get at the fruit, this is what they mean: painting, in its delineation of scenery, does not assign highest value to skill and detail. Poetry, in its description of affairs, does not give priority to full articulation. In both, it is desirable to leave something out to allow people to savor the flavor, so that they may use what is depicted to explore softly what has not been, or so that they may start from the affairs that have been described to perceive darkly those that have not been. What the viewer or reader gets beyond the image or apprehends beyond the words (to overhear the understood), this is what is meant by “resonance.” (Qian 1998, 97–115) Citing more examples from works of Western literary theories to contextualize the concept of “daemon resonance,” Qian further expounds connotations of this rather-broad term, rendering this traditional Chinese concept with clarity and certain universal significance. By engaging in the intercultural exegesis of traditional poetical terms, Qian probes into the interior cultural content of Chinese poetic discourses and excavates meanings of important terms. Grounded in the canon of Chinese and Western poetics, Qian casts his literary outlook to the broad vision of world literature. Adopting the traditional Chinese formalistic style of “reading notes,” Qian integrates methods and theories of modern Western literary studies, such as hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, new criticism, reception aesthetics, deconstruction into his excavation of Chinese poetic concepts. These Western theoretical schools may offer references and opportunities to revisit and re-evaluate traditional Chinese literary thought, while 237

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Chinese poetic discourses constantly provide new insights for Western theories. Hence, Western theories can be “sufficient for the interpretation of our ancient sayings” (Qian 1994, 62), as an “extraordinary encounter between Chinese and Western literature” (Qian 1984, 276) may finally take place. Western literary theory poses neither as a destructive force nor as an alternative discourse to the traditional Chinese literary thought. Instead, it can be regarded as an incentive for the Chinese traditional poetic discourse to go global. In other words, the influx of Western theories does not necessarily bring about the loss of discursive power from the Chinese side. On the contrary, it may bring the traditional Chinese poetic discourse to the discursive realm of modern theory of world poetics.

Qian Zhongshu’s Global Vision of Cosmopolitanism As a cosmopolitan, Qian Zhongshu never confines his research subject to Chinese literature per se but always places the study of Chinese literature and Chinese culture in a global context. His tenet is to initiate a truly equal and effective dialogue between different cultural backgrounds and cultural systems so as to advance intercultural communication and mutual understanding among heterogenous cultures. In effect, literary studies and cultural studies are interconnected in Qian’s scholarly vision. The interplay, interaction, and integration of intellectual discourses in humanities and social sciences constitute the distinctive features of Qian’s writings. In his analytical interpretation of specific texts, Qian always starts from the textual evidences but goes beyond the limitations of the texts and involves the cultural context in which the text is embedded. Textual meanings and contextual implications are thus in a constant and dynamic process of mutual movement and mutual constraint. In addition, Qian places traditional Chinese cultural discourse and Western cultural discourse on the same footing to initiate a dialogue of mutual interpretation. In this way, he seeks to establish a universal theoretical discourse that not only explains but also transcends the similarities and differences between heterogenous cultures. For Qian, cultural communication is not merely the exchange of “affairs of civilization” but, more importantly, concerns the integration of “cultural affairs” (1994, 331). Only when integration at the level of cultural affairs is achieved can a true cultural dialogue be reached. Such cultural dialogue will eventually lead to Qian’s visionary realm, in which borders between ancient and modern China are completely obliterated and the two cultures are merged into each other as if salt in water. Upholding his tenet of building dialogue between different cultures on an equal footing, Qian Zhongshu never fails to retain a global vision in his writings while, at the same time, being rooted in the Chinese cultural tradition. His works successfully connect the East and the West through extensive citations that reflect the author’s endeavor to seeking transcultural commonalities in the reading of Chinese and foreign cultures. As Qian once remarks: “[When we learn] to discern differences throughout the ancient and modern history and to differentiate, . . . to see their commonalities and to understand them, then there arises a constant law for the acts of reasoning, a common tendency of different affairs; the ancient times and the modern times will be like the dawn and the dusk, and the changes will no longer deviate from the core, all peculiarities will have a constant principle. (Qian 1994, 1088) In this regard, Qian’s references to vast Chinese and Western cultural phenomena are precisely used to highlight the “constant law” and the “common tendency” therein. Furthermore, Qian 238

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uses Western literary and cultural theories to interpret Chinese literary texts and cultural phenomena and sometimes combines heterogenous cultural theories and phenomena to develop a twofold or multifaceted interpretation so that one may look back at one’s own cultural discourse and see it under a different light. To look at one’s own culture “under a different light” usually evokes a nostalgic sense of “homecoming.” Indeed, no matter how many Western cultural phenomena Qian quotes or how abstruse those foreign theories of his references are, his ultimate concern is still how to strike a connection between these cited works and the classical Chinese texts and cultural discourse. In his essay “On ‘Homecoming,’” Qian Zhongshu makes the following observation: Ancient Chinese thinkers, especially the Taoists and the Zen Buddhists, tend to use “homecoming” as a metaphor whenever they reach a conclusion in their debates, or their spiritual quest reach its goal. Similar metaphors are also found in the West. Such similarity indicates a realm of universal reality for human thought and reasoning. “Home” (家) is the objective, and “coming back” (回) refers to the journey. The journey requires the act of “coming back” for a peaceful end; the objective needs to rest comfortably in a place that is not estranged, familiar, and original. I think of those times when we pursue and arrive at results, when we solve our doubts and acquire faith, such are the typical psychological condition of those times. (Qian 2001, 129) In a similar fashion, world cultural dialogue and exchange may endow traditional Chinese classics with a new sense of identity and a feeling of “homecoming.” Dialogue and integration among different cultures have become the basic features of contemporary world culture, which makes an entirely independent cultural identity no longer possible. The sense of homecoming to our own culture can only be retained when we engage ourselves in dialogue with various other cultures. Only then can we reappropriate our own cultural identity in this new era of multiculturalism so as to better engage ourselves in all cultural communications on a global level. In the era of globalization, mutual understanding and respect between different cultures have become increasingly important. In response to the imminent question regarding China’s cultural destiny, Qian Zhongshu’s cosmopolitan stance and vision provide us with direct and useful insight. As noted by Yue Dayun 樂黛雲, the founding scholar of Chinese comparative literature: [C]ommon concerns of human beings can be answered more satisfactorily in our time through mutual recognition, examination and complementation between different cultural systems and multiple two-directional dialogues. In addition, cultural mutuality will open up a broader horizon and a better prospect for the discussion and solution of these issues, so that human thoughts and feelings can also be communicated and understood. (2007, 9) Qian’s works embody precisely the spirit of cultural mutuality, as well as the dialogic principle of “harmony in heterogeneity.” The interplay between different cultural discourses manifested in his writings is the result neither of the pursuit of uniformity for the sake of abolishing differences nor the annexation of one discourse with another, but evidence for his effort to establish an equal discursive realm for multiculturalism and pluralistic discourses. Qian Zhongshu believes in the commonality of thoughts and methods between people from different cultures 239

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and always refers to the “two canons from the West to deduce triple issues from the one” (1984, 1). In this way, Chinese and Western Cultures, humanity disciplines, and all forms of writings will maintain their unique values in the dynamic communication and dialogue and maximize the discursive realm to seek basic consensus for coexistence, thus finally achieving the “sincere fusion of ideas” (Qian 2001, 159). In contemporary Chinese scholarship, one of the biggest issues at stake is how to actively promote Chinese culture and Chinese literature to go out and participate in the dialogue of world culture and world literature. We can only revalidate Chinese cultural identity in the dialogic fusion of different cultures, and the basis of this validation is the principle of “harmony in heterogeneity.” The method of validation can be drawn from Qian Zhongshu’s scholarly practice, namely, to place Chinese culture in the context of world cultural dialogue and to make one’s own voice heard in the process of “self”-valuation. Of course, this is already a new “self” in the reference of the world cultural context. As Qian said in the essay “A Characteristic of China’s Inherent Literary Criticism,” this process is “like a child who seeks the light of the mirror, but ends up finding oneself in the light” (2001, 78). With a cosmopolitan stance and vision, all of Qian Zhongshu’s writings have advanced a modern interpretation of Chinese and Western cultural discourse and literary concepts while exploring the possibility of dialogue, convergence, and integration between Chinese and Western culture and literature. This reminds us that in the face of the challenges and crises in today’s world, the question of how to seek cultural mutuality and subjectivity while reserving differences is in urgent need to be answered. (Translated to English by Gu Wenyan)

References Ch’ien, Chung-shu. 2004. Fortress Besiege. Translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. New York: New Directions. Egan, Ronald C. 1998. “Introduction.” Translated by Ronald C. Egan. In Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters, 1–26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Egan, Ronald C. 2015. “Guanzhui bian, Wester Citations, and Cultural Revolution.” In China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters, edited by Christopher Rea, 109–32. Leiden: Brill. Owen, Stephen, ed. 1996. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Qian Zhongshu 錢锺書. 1984. Tan yi lu談藝錄 (On the Art of Poetry). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Qian Zhongshu 錢锺書. 1994. Guanzhui bian管錐編 (Limited Views). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Qian Zhongshu. 1998. Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters. Translated by Ronald C. Egan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Qian Zhongshu 錢锺書. 2001. Xiezai rensheng bianshang寫在人生邊上 (Written in the Margins of Life). Beijing: Sanlian shudian. Yue Daiyun 樂黛雲. 2007. “Wenxue: mian dui chonggou renlei jingshen shijie de zhongren” 文學：面對 建構人類新的精神世界 (Literature: Facing the Heavy Responsibility of Reconstructing the Human Spiritual World). Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究 (Studies in Literature and Art), no. 6: 4–11, 166. Zhang Longxi 張隆溪. 1981. “Qian Zhongshu tan bijiao wenxue yu ‘wenxue bi jiao’” 錢锺書談比較文 學與 “文學比較” (Qian Zhongshu on Comparative Literature and “Literary Comparison”). Dushu 讀 書 (Reading), no. 10: 132–8. Zheng Chaozong 鄭朝宗. 1988. Haibin gan jiuji 海濱感舊集 (Collection of Seaside Sensation). Xiamen: Xiamen University Press. Zhuangzi. 2013. The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press.

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20 ZHANG AILING AND THE COLD WAR CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY Xiaojue Wang

On June 23, 1950, Yibao (亦報, 1949–1952), a short-lived private newspaper in early socialist Shanghai, published a review on the newly released film Peaceful Spring (太平春), “On the New-Year-Picture Style of Taiping chun” (年畫風格的《太平春》).1 The author Liang Jing 梁京 highly praised the movie, particularly its characteristic of Chinese folk art: “The lines are simplistic and the tones are markedly bright and sharp. It is not strictly realism, but it nonetheless feels real and familiar.” The review, though only 900 words long, reflects on a critical matter confronting filmmakers and artists alike at the advent of socialism in China: how to venture into unfamiliar topics and adjust representational strategies to fit into the highly politicized new era. Liang emphasized that the film marked an “epoch-making work,” for it, for the first time ever on the big screen, adopted the aesthetic traits of traditional New Year picture with “loud and bold red and green colors, and robust and vigorous atmosphere.” The film critic Liang Jing, as we know today, is none other than Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang, 1920–1995), one of the foremost Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Peaceful Spring was directed by Sang Hu 桑弧 (1916–2004), the veteran director from the Republic of China who collaborated with Zhang on two films, Everlasting Sorrow (不了情, 1948) and Long Live the Missus (太太萬歲, 1948). Peaceful Spring was Sang’s first attempt catering to the fledgling People’s Republic of China (PRC). The challenge, as Zhang specified for her friend Sang, is precisely what she herself faced in the new socialist regime. Zhang rose to fame in occupied Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War with her early short stories and essays, collected in Romances (Chuanqi 傳奇, 1944) and Written On Water (Liuyan 流言, 1945). Probing human nature, psychology, and fragility in China’s transition to modernity, her writings established an aesthetic of everyday life marked by a pervasive mood of desolation, thus undercutting the grand narratives of nationalism, patriotism, and revolution of the 1940s, not to mention the socialist realism mandate of the young PRC. How to straddle the line between politics and art for a writer who was known for her inclination to eschew works of “monument to an era”? Shortly before her review of Peaceful Spring in Yibao, Zhang began to serialize her first full-length novel, Eighteen Springs (十八春, 1950– 1951), in the same newspaper, followed by a novella, Xiao’ai (小艾, 1951–1952). Both works wrap up with socialist political imprints. Eighteen Springs, a story of ill-fated love through 18 years in Republican Shanghai, ends in 1949 with the post-liberation protagonists volunteering to participate in socialist construction in Northeast China. As Zhang observed through 241

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-26

Xiaojue Wang

the character Mujing in the novel: “So my previous thoughts were wrong. I have never been interested in politics. I always thought that things like politics are too broad and abstract. Ideals may not be able to be implemented nor may they meet ideals when implemented” (Zhang 1992, 380). Political devotion offers the ultimate solution to all personal entanglements and problems. The novel partly won the author, a formerly condemned traitor due to her marriage to a Japanese collaborator, an invitation to attend the first Congress of Shanghai Literary and Arts Workers. In 1952, Zhang left Shanghai for Hong Kong, and eventually the United States, where she led a reclusive life until passing away in 1995. During her three-year sojourn in Hong Kong, she wrote two English novels, The Rice Sprout Song (1955) and Naked Earth (1956), marked by anti-Communist ideologies. Commissioned by the book publication program of the United States Information Service (USIS), these two works describe Chinese people’s lives during the land reform, Shanghai’s socialist construction, and China’s participation in the Korean War. Zhang’s post-1949 cultural practices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States are intricately embedded in the formation of Cold War geopolitics in Asia and Asia Pacific. The 1949 divide in China engendered a rupture, but also a continuation and a turning point; it was a crisis but also an opportunity. It opened a new phase for modern Chinese literature by generating linguistic and cultural multiplicity, diverse thematic and aesthetic concerns and imaginations, and convoluted notions of China and Chineseness. The geopolitical division and reintegration caused by the Cold War led to the flows of people, ideas, cultural forms, as well as military and economic forces across different parts of the world. On the political, cultural, and linguistic levels, the Cold War occasioned a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization concerned with diverse racial or ethnic groups, terrains and territories, identity and subjectivity. It initiated not only a new historical epoch but also a spatial reconfiguration of the world, producing new boundaries, centers, paths, networks, and intersections and necessitating a distinctive Cold War cultural geography. What kind of maps and mapping does the Cold War geography compel, in cartographical terms as well as in words and images? How should we conceive, chart, and read literature and culture born out of the Cold War process of world building or worlding? How do these literary and cultural works create new ways of imagining the world, engage experiences of migration and displacement, and constitute the Cold War geography? This chapter considers Zhang Ailing’s aesthetic engagement and strategies across the Cold War division to probe how writers and artists alike maneuvered between the boundaries of opposite ideological camps, art and politics, as well as high art and popular culture. By investigating the intertextual relationship between Zhang’s novel The Rice Sprout Song sponsored by the USIS and two films produced in early socialist China, Wu Yonggang’s 吳永剛 (1907–1982) A Remote Village (遼 遠的--, 1950) and Sang Hu’s Peaceful Spring (1950), it seeks to understand how these artists envisioned their cultural positions and explored viable ways of artistic creation so as to map out divergence or unexpected intersections between the apparently opposing and evershifting cultural policies implemented by the PRC and by the United States in the Asia-Pacific. This chapter ventures to trace the networked spaces and places, including Shanghai, Northeast China, Hong Kong, and New York, involved in the conception, writing, and publication of The Rice Sprout Song. A new “spatial literacy,” as Karen E. Bishop proposed in her study of modern exile experiences, enables us to “identify and cultivate new ways of reading these spaces of displacement and our engagement with them” (2016, 2). The cultural geographical endeavors in this chapter would not only open up a new perspective to Zhang Ailing studies but also allow us to acquire a type of spatial literacy to chart and read the cultural topography of Cold War global Asia. 242

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Peaceful Spring and Chinese Folk Culture The Rice Sprout Song is set in a village near Shanghai during the 1950s land reform movement in the young PRC. After Moon Scent, a helper in Shanghai, returned to her hometown, she soon discovered that there was a dire shortage of food in the countryside. As the Lunar New Year approached, the cadres ordered all households to hand in grain to support the front lines of the Korean War. Gold Root, Moon Scent’s model labor husband, rebelled openly, which led to the villagers’ riot, suppressed by the military intervention of the local government. Gold Root was injured and died, and Moon Scent set fire to the granary. On the gloomy New Year’s Day, the surviving villagers were forced to perform the yangge folk dance to honor the military and welcome the unknown future. Another main line of the novel tells about Comrade Ku (Gu Gang 顧岡),2 a screenwriter sent from Shanghai, who was there to collect raw materials for a film script praising the prosperous socialist countryside after the land reform. Faced with the reality of starvation, Ku suffered from writer’s block, until being inspired by the barn fire. His final script turned the village revolt into a spy story, in which the remaining landlords and Kuomintang agents schemed to sabotage local socialist construction. The Rice Sprout Song is Zhang Ailing’s first novel written in English. It was completed in Hong Kong in 1954 and then rewritten into Chinese, bearing the title Yangge 秧歌. The Chinese version was first serialized in the USIS weekly magazine The World Today (今日世界), followed by a monograph published as Book 9 of the World Today series in Hong Kong in 1954. The book cover and illustrations were drawn and designed by the cartoonist Xue Zhiying 薛志英, who, like Zhang, belonged to the large group of “Southbound artists” who migrated from the mainland to Hong Kong ensuing the 1949 divide. The English version, The Rice Sprout Song, was not published until 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons Publishing House in New York. The close entanglement between the book’s publication and distribution and the American Cold War propaganda agencies, particularly their investment in the establishment of a cultural and political “Free Asia,” is unquestionable. Since the late 1940s, Hong Kong had become an outpost of the Asian cultural Cold War. In addition to the USIS, the official American propaganda agency in Hong Kong, the Asian Foundation was of key importance, which was a non-governmental organization clandestinely funded by the CIA and assisted the US political propaganda through providing local intellectuals with research funding and publication subsidy.3 The existent scholarship on The Rice Sprout Song mainly focuses on its political themes (Hsia 1961; Ke 1985). This chapter, however, discusses its intertextual dialogues with two 1950 PRC films, Wu Yonggang’s A Remote Village and Sang Hu’s Peaceful Spring, in order to parse Zhang’s distinctive notion of realism and her politics of writing in the era of cultural Cold War. Wu and Sang were both leading film directors notable for their portrayal of modern urban life in the golden age of Shanghai cinema. Both urban directors transitioned to the socialist era by turning to tackle the new subject of the changing countryside. A Remote Village focused on the rural Northeast, and Peaceful Spring a small town to the south of the Yangtze River. Both first productions of the directors after the foundation of the PRC, these two films received completely different responses from the mainstream critics of the time. Interestingly, both films had a major influence on Zhang Ailing as she endeavored to deal with political themes in her new literary adventure after leaving socialist China. Peaceful Spring, starring Shi Hui 石揮 (1915–1957) and Shangguan Yunzhu 上官雲珠 (1920–1968), was produced by the then-private Wenhua 文華 Film Company and released in 1950. As Sang Hu’s debut work in new China, it was quite popular, with 467 screenings in Shanghai alone in 1950 (Pickowicz 2007, 270). Zhang Ailing’s review begins with her 243

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observation: “virtually every single scene won a burst of applause from the audience.” The film tells the life experience of an old tailor, Liu Jinfa, and his family in a small town in Zhejiang province from the end of the Anti-Japanese War to the liberation of East China. The tailor betrothed his daughter Fengying to his apprentice, Genbao. The local gentry, Master Zhao, craved Fengying’s beauty and framed Genbao. Fengying and Genbao eloped. Soon, when the Communist Army came, Zhao and his wife escaped with the KMT government, leaving their savings in the custody of Liu. In spite of his daughter’s objection, Tailor Liu abided by moral codes and kept his promise to take care of the Zhaos’ money. It was not until the Zhaos’ evil was laid bare that the old tailor decided to hand over the Zhao family’s wealth to the revolutionary government and finally transformed into a new socialist citizen. Prior to 1949, Sang Hu was known for his sophisticated style and humanistic concerns illustrating the complicated and subtle familial relationship in modern urban lives. The two 1948 movies he collaborated with Zhang Ailing, Everlasting Sorrow and Long Live the Missus, were both characterized by a delicate and gentle narrative style exploring joys and sorrows of ordinary people against the backdrop of historical crisis. Peaceful Spring marks evident changes. Not only does the scene move from Shanghai to the countryside but also the narrative become flat and sketchy, feelings and psychology remain unexplored, and the flow and pace of events are brisk and straight forward. As Zhang, using the pen name Liang Jing, observed in her film review, Sang’s directorial feature demonstrates the same striking style of traditional Chinese New Year painting, distinguished by its “loud and bold red and green colors, and robust and vigorous atmosphere.” What impressed Zhang is particularly Fengying’s escape scene in the middle of her wedding procession: The sedan chair dropped halfway, and the veil opened. The bride was pleasantly surprised, and her lover looked directly at her. Some female audience couldn’t help but urge softly: “Hurry up!” They fled to the boat, and another woman in the audience murmured, “Hurry up! Hurry up!” In the movie, in exchange for Genbao’s release from prison, Fengying consented to become Master Zhao’s concubine. The wedding procession moved slowly along the ridge of the rice field; halfway, Genbao managed to save Fengying and stuffed a swine wrapped with her wedding gown into the sedan chair. When the sedan arrived at Zhao’s house, unveiled, the sow’s long beak arched out, and everyone found out that the bride was switched. Similar scenes like the court case story “The Fox Cat Substituted for the Crown Prince” are popular on Chinese opera stage. This sow-substituted-for-the-bride scheme is obviously one of the selling points of the film. The movie poster produced by Wenhua film studio depicts precisely the moment when the sedan veil is lifted with the sow/bride looming. This was surely her source of inspiration when Zhang composed Chapter 12 of The Rice Sprout Song. Aunt Tan recalled her traumatic experience of losing her son during the Anti-Japanese War. In order to avoid the looting, Aunt Tan hid the only pig of the family on the bed and disguised it to be a bedridden sick woman: Grunting protests, the sow was dumped on the bed and covered with an old padded blanket of bright red cotton with little white flowers. The old woman drew the blanket over its head and tucked it in all round. For the finishing touch she bent down and fished under the bed for a pair of shoes, placing in front of the bed. (Zhang 1998, 131) 244

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The soldiers finally discovered the sow on the bed and forced Aunt Tan’s son to carry the pig away with them, and her son never returned. What inspired Zhang in Peaceful Spring is more than merely the crude but popular story line. Laughing with the crowd on- and off-screen in the movie theater, Zhang wrote, “I have never felt so in harmony with the mood of the masses. It made me so happy.” Similar moments of empathy emerged elsewhere in her responses to Chinese folk culture, such as regional operas, rural handspun cotton cloth, or even grocery shopping in a filthy and bustling morning market. As C. T. Hsia well captured with regards to her aesthetic trait of desolation: To her the monotonous cadence of the insistent music and the crude enactment of the so-called feudalist morality on a bare stage reveals the essence of life underlying the more refined manners of the contemporary world. In a sense her own fiction tries to capture what the Chinese stage presents crudely and unself-consciously: the sense of desolation inherent in all human hunger and frustration. “Desolate” (ch’i-liang or ts’ang-liang) is her favorite word. (Hsia 1999, 394–5) In the vulgar yet resilient, vigorous nature of folk art, Zhang sees hope for any form of culture to survive a time when refined human civilizations would not stand a chance against the barbarianism of history or the progress of modernization: “On the future wasteland, among ruined walls and debris, only a woman like huadan from the bengbeng theater can survive with resolution, for she alone feels at home everywhere, in any age and any society” (Zhang 1991, 5:8).4 In the unique quasi-realistic style of Peaceful Spring, where a naïve but vital vulgarity blends with artistic sensibilities, Zhang envisions a breakthrough for literature and arts in an era when political machinery became more and more pervasive. A veteran film critic and screenwriter, Zhang might not expect that the mainstream critics responded almost oppositely from her enthusiasm. The day after Zhang’s film review appeared in Yibao, Wenhui bao 文 匯報 also published two articles, Mei Duo’s 梅- “Comments on Peaceful Spring” (評《太 平春》) and Li Yuangang’s 黎遠岡 “Some Opinions on Peaceful Spring” (對《太平春》的 幾點意見), fiercely accusing the film of indulging in indiscriminate sentimental humanism. The major defect, according to the reviews, was the old tailor, who treated Master Zhao and his wife, the class enemy, with courtesy. The movie never managed to shape any awareness of class conflicts or formation of political consciousness. Just as Paul G. Pickowicz pointed out, in the early days of socialism, the filmmakers of Peaceful Spring did not realize that the humanism “overshadows the attention it pays to human conflict, including class tensions and international conflict. Taiping chun tries very hard to be revolutionary but ends up a humanistic work” (2007, 269). Obviously, the young PRC ideologues were concerned with the film’s lack of political motives and stances rather than any new artistic approaches. Zhang Ailing was, in effect, no stranger to such criticism. Ever since her early career, she was frequently under attack for the lack of political relevance of her work. To borrow her own words in her essay “Writings of My Own” (自己的文章), Peaceful Spring is not a work of strength, of “monument to an era,” with no characters either “extremely neurotic or extremely enlightened” (Zhang 1991, 3:18). Before long, Peaceful Spring was withdrawn from distribution and disappeared from new socialist cinema. There are no direct accounts of whether or not Zhang ever read the critical articles on Peaceful Spring in Wenhui bao and how they might have affected her following writing strategy. However, a careful scrutiny of The Rice Sprout Song, her first work after leaving socialist Shanghai, provides interesting clues. 245

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A Remote Village and The Rice Sprout Song The Rice Sprout Song, a novel about the land reform movement, devoted substantial attention to the writing practice of Comrade Ku, a novice socialist playwright. Vicariously through Ku, who struggled to create his very first film script for new China, Zhang Ailing contemplated contemporary literature and art policies disclosed by the mainstream PRC media. Around the same time when she enjoyed and commented on Peaceful Spring, Zhang also saw a movie titled A Remote Village released the same year. Like Peaceful Spring, A Remote Village also describes the changes that took place in the rural region before and after the establishment of the PRC. Whereas the latter was well hailed as successful, the former was harshly condemned. Although she did not have a high evaluation of A Remote Village, Zhang used it as an essential dialogic text when she debated, via Ku, what subject matters, narrative tactics, and realistic methods would be permitted by the ever-shifting political propaganda parameters of the fledgling socialist regime. A close reading of the Ku plotline enables us to fathom Zhang’s responses to socialist Chinese cultural doctrines as well as her politics of writing maneuvering in the interstice of mainland China and the ideological opposite world of Hong Kong, the United States, and the Cold War cultural spaces at large. In the postscript of the Chinese version, Zhang wrote: “Although the characters in Yangge are all fictitious, the facts are all well-founded” (Zhang 1991, 1:193). She carefully listed the sources of information that she referred to. In addition to major journals and newspapers, such as People’s Literature (人民文學) and Liberation Daily (解放日報), she also included “an anonymous movie, Yaoyuan de xiangcun 遙遠的--.” The original movie title is actually “Liaoyuan” 遼遠, rather than “Yaoyuan” 遙遠, probably due to a slip of the tongue or misremembering. This is the very first film on the topic of land reform since the founding of socialist China. It was directed by Wu Yonggang, produced by the Northeast Film Studio in 1949, and released the following year. Wu rose to fame with his debut work, Goddess (神女), for Lianhua 聯華 Film Studio in Shanghai in 1934. Featuring China’s silent film superstar Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉 (1910–1935), Goddess tells the story of a single mother who was forced to become a prostitute to make a living. After killing the rogue who harassed her, she was sentenced to jail. She entrusted her son to the primary school principal in the hope that education would offer a future. Wu employed clean and concise cinematic language, pungent yet subtle narrative techniques to explore urgent social matters, including the predicament of women split between corporeal compromise and humiliation as a prostitute and her resilient moral integrity of motherhood, the double moral standards imposed on women by a patriarchal culture, and whether modern education could facilitate social changes. With A Remote Village, Wu Yonggang made his first appearance in socialist Chinese cinema. The movie was set in Northeast China in 1947. After the People’s Liberation Army defeated local KMT government, it implemented land reforms to help strengthen and consolidate its control of the area. After the initial success, farmers in East Village and West Village had a dispute with regards to dam repair, which seriously hindered local farming. Party cadre Wang Hanlong and his wife, Zhang Juan, were sent there to preside over the work, to organize the masses, and successfully accomplished the dam project. The film ended with a boisterous celebration of the harvest. The Communist chairman of the province mobilized people to work collectively to support the front lines, defeat the US imperialism and the KMT reactionaries, and build a new China. The Rice Sprout Song depicts the new socialist countryside through the observation of two outsiders: Moon Scent, the returnee, and Comrade Ku, the newcomer, who was sent to the village by the Shanghai Federation of Literature and Arts to accumulate writing materials. 246

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From the perspective of Ku, Zhang Ailing envisioned how the director, Wu Yonggang, or any new socialist artist, step by step, probed the possibility of artistic creation without violating the CCP’s cultural policy. Soon after arriving in the village, Ku began to suffer hunger. This is both physical and psychological torture: “the strange dull, gnawing sense of hunger, something new to him – a cross between toothache and heartache” (Zhang 1998, 84). No main press mentioned anything about famine in this area. If he leaked anything, he would “run the risk of being arrested as a Nationalist spy spreading malicious rumors” (Zhang 1998, 85). Ku began to go to the nearby town to buy food, hiding and eating secretly. The bigger challenge comes from the film writing: How to craft a story about the prosperous socialist countryside without touching on the famine or the deteriorating rural economy? Ku ran into the village brook on one of his food-hunting trips and was inspired to write a story about building a dam: Suppose that the stream overflowed every year, flooding the fields and wiping out the crop. Well, let’s make the engineer from the city and some old farmers put their heads together and solve the problem by building a dam with a door. (Zhang 1998, 92) Evidently, Zhang got the idea of the dam from Wu Yonggang’s film. A Remote Village centers on the story of building a dam in the village after the land reform. Wang Hanlong, the cadre sent from the city, worked with two local farmers who had gained technical experiences in a Japanese factory during the puppet Manchukuo time to design a movable gate for the dam. As a result, the dam was successfully built, which solved the annual flooding problem. Zhang not merely borrowed the subject from the movie but, more importantly, elucidated why it worked well as a safe and viable subject even under the strictest regulations on literature and art at that time. Through Comrade Ku, Zhang offered her own interpretations of related policies published in the official propaganda newspaper, Literature and Art Newspaper (文藝 報): First of all, the peasants’ sheer joy over the success of the land reform has become an outdated theme. Writers cannot dwell on the description of materialistic satisfaction. They must take it to the next level to deal with how villagers began to form new political consciousness. Secondly, the subject matter of agricultural collectivization and the establishment of mutual aid groups is even more precarious. Any work about such sensitive topics could easily develop into a story treacherously exposing peasants’ discontent with the government’s repossession of their newly distributed land. Building a dam to improve production is both a safe and manageable topic: This would serve to illustrate the union of technical knowledge and peasant wisdom. If the engineer thought it up all by himself he, of course, would be guilty of the Selfglorification of the Intellectual. And if the old farmers refused to co-operate, relying only on their past experiences, they were guilty of Experiencism. This idea would avoid both. (Zhang 1998, 92) Ku continued to ponder that there had already been films showing engineers collaborating with experienced workers in urban factories to repair boilers, lathes, and machine parts, which were all imported from the United States before 1949. Now they could rely on the experience and wisdom of the people to fix them. Such topics were all set up in urban factories and never in rural stories. Therefore, the story Ku conceived “opened up a whole new vista” for 247

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new Chinese literature and film (Zhang 1998, 93). Zhang went to great length to specify Ku’s thought process, which reads like a commentary on Wu Yonggang’s A Remote Village or any sanctioned film production in the early 1950s China. It bespeaks the daunting challenge for writers and artists surviving radical political regimes, left or right: to write entails constant rewriting and negotiations with volatile party doctrines; to exert artistic imaginations often entails fabrication or even falsification of reality. Zhang’s reflections on socialist literature and film also revolve around its favoritism toward spectacular grandeur, denoting the “aesthetics of the sublime” that Ban Wang identified as the essential attribute of Maoist revolutionary culture (Ban Wang 1997). One of the condemned flaws of Peaceful Spring is precisely its lack of power and excitement, nothing to showcase revolutionary sublimation or cathartic revelation. The tedious daily life of ordinary people, even if it bears strong tonality, would barely instigate any revolutionary actions, hence, effective political mobilization. A Remote Village, on the contrary, has created a theatrical climax in the arson scene. In a dark night, the landlord, Dong Batian, along with his daughter and the Nationalist agent, attempted to destroy the village barn with a bomb stamped with a giant “Made in America.” The militias ambushed them in time to stop the arson and also found Dong’s letter of appointment as Lieutenant General issued by the KMT government in his pocket. In the postscript of The Rice Sprout Song, Zhang wrote that after watching the movie, she found this plot ridiculous: “When I watched the arson sequence, a thought popped up in my mind: If it was not completely fabricated, it must be the villagers’ action of revenge, a distorted version” (Zhang 1991, 1:195). Later in The Rice Sprout Song, Zhang developed the plot of Moon Scent’s setting fire to the barn as a way of seeking vengeance for her husband’s death. When Comrade Ku, who had tried vainly to construct a grand climax for his script, saw the raging fire, he felt “a wild, primitive exultation”: “‘But this is just what I am looking for,’ he thought. ‘A splendid and stirring spectacle for the climax of my film’” (Zhang 1998, 170). Then he realized that depicting peasant arson, even if the incident was placed before liberation, was a taboo subject. Both Literature and Art Newspaper and People’s Literature had explicit instructions on that: “Rather than curse the darkness, praise the light” (Zhang 1998, 170). However, Comrade Ku was reluctant to give up that spectacular fire and used it nonetheless as the climax of his dam story. Like Wu Yonggang, Ku designed the landlord to be the arson criminal: He was caught red-handed, together with the concubine who scurried in his wake, carrying a small bundle. They were probably thinking of fleeing the country after the deed. The bundle contained, among other valuables, his treasured credentials of a Nationalist general. (Zhang 1998, 180) Ku’s script reads like a synopsis of A Remote Village. Just like in the film, this great fire was put out in time before it could spread: One or two sacks of rice had barely started to smoke when a guard had already rounded the corner shouting, “Fire! Fire! Saboteurs!” Otherwise, it would reflect on the efficiency of the local militia. Wrathful newspapers would call it “the indiscriminate use of the weapon of satire on the people’s own organizations . . . far exceeding the bounds of constructive criticism.” The film would not be banned, which would attract too much attention to it, but just quietly withdrawn in the 248

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middle of its showing. And any chance of making a name for himself would be gone for good. (Zhang 1998, 180) This fire, whether extinguished immediately or not, constitutes the indispensable monumental climax in any political narrative. For the leftist ideological discourse, the fire scene is the key to propel the birth of political consciousness. Therefore, whether it is Ku’s fictional script or Wu Yonggang’s PRC debut film, although the fire never got a chance to rage and thus would have wrongly boosted the enemy’s morale, it is a required moment of culmination, an embodiment of socialist monumentality. More intriguingly, on the other side across the Cold War Iron Curtain, ostentatious spectacles were also considered the best weapon for literary information warfare. To build up the climax, the fire in The Rice Sprout Song was roaring and engulfed the storehouse, which eventually kindled the wild imagination of the CCP cadre Comrade Wong for his spy theory as well as that of Ku for his movie script. Zhang Ailing, who had favored plain and realistic portrayal of life, had to craft a theatrical moment to complete the political narrative of The Rice Sprout Song. Otherwise, as she confessed in her letter to Hu Shi, “[t]he story of The Rice Sprout Song would have been too plain to suit the tastes of readers in my country – especially readers in Southeast Asia” (Zhang 1991, 8:145). Facing the audience who were curious about the evil of Communism behind the Iron Curtain, no matter where they lived, in the United States or scattered across the Transpacific Free Asia, this fire constituted a critical political component and a testimony to the misery under political tyranny. But at the same time, Zhang Ailing, in a tedious and excessive manner, dragged on and on about Comrade Ku’s agonizing deliberation process in order to tease out the fact that under political coercion, the only permissible version of reality is unavoidably the falsified one. Like Wu Yonggang or Ku, under high ideological pressure, left and right, Zhang had to engage in constant negotiations with ever-changing cultural doctrines, attesting to the possibility and/or impossibility of writing. The novel’s grand ending was handled differently in the Chinese version, the first draft in English, and the finalized English version. The Chinese version largely retains the contour of the ending in the English draft, except for translingual rewordings. It insinuates rather than directly portrays the death of Moon Scent: a member of the local militia spotted and chased a woman into the fire. The editor of Charles Scribner’s Sons was not happy with this narrative design and asked Zhang to add detailed descriptions of Moon Scent’s death so as to intensify the political condemnation of the novel. Consequently, at the end of the final English version, there appears a spectacle scene. When the villagers were clearing up the fire ruins, they found the body of a woman: “It was in a sitting position and was a smooth, bright pinkish red all over. The color had stood out glaringly against the charred ruins” (Zhang 1998, 176). For New York editors looking for authentic experiences behind the Iron Curtain, the scorching blaze seemed just a little shy of sensational. It required something mysterious and oriental in order to arouse awe, to genuinely touch readers in the free world: “the seated figure suggested one of the bald, slim images of Arhans lined up on both sides of a temple” (Zhang 1998, 176). The novel was adapted into a TV drama by the CBS in 1957, with yet another twist of the ending scene. For the popular audience targeted by American television, blunt accusations seemed to be too intense and vulgar. The CBS screenwriter preferred the power of sentimentality.5 At the end of the TV drama, Moon Scent howled hysterically, screaming to conjure up her husband’s soul and begging him to forgive the cowardly people on the land of China. The two camps on the opposite sides of the Cold War have unexpectedly reached a consensus in terms of political aesthetics: the inclination toward political sentimentalism and 249

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spectacles, the manipulation of words and narratives, and the strategies to reinforce effective propaganda.

Conclusion: Writers as Information Agents In his research on information science that emerged in the early days of the Cold War, Richard So noted that the US Information Agency gave literature a special strategic significance to win information warfare during the Cold War. A new generation of communication theorists represented by Wilbur Schramm believes that literature is a kind of humanistic and emotional information science. Compared with the cold data and statistics of traditional social sciences, literature is able to organize pieces of information into a sensible and coherent narrative, which is comprehensible and accessible to general readers. For Schramm, literature functions as an information medium, a “kinetic thing” that operates by means of “fusion, concentration, and intensity” (So 2013, 730). As shared by his friend and colleague Richard M. McCarthy, the director of the USIS in Hong Kong who helped Zhang Ailing with her first English fiction, literature could better communicate social reality than mere numbers and facts (Gao 2011). In this sense, a writer is no less than an intelligence agent whose competence concerns collecting, filtering, processing, and encoding information to convey and shape reality. The entanglement of literature and information, literature as information and information as humanized narratives, complicated and at the same time enriched the Cold War cultural geography that this chapter seeks to chart. Through the intertextual study of Zhang Ailing’s The Rice Sprout Song with two early socialist rural films, the chapter parsed how the Cold War, as a transnational political, economic, military, and cultural force, is intricately reflected in the cultural productions, narrative styles, and spatial displacements of the writers moving across distinct geographical or ideological boundaries. In the introduction for the Chinese and English reprints of The Rice Sprout Song four decades after their first publications, David Der-wei Wang observed that Zhang’s sarcasm about Ku’s creative falsification under political totalitarianism also reverberated in her own situation stranded between socialist China and an anti-Communist free world (Wang 1998). Writing from the other shore of the Cold War divide very much mirrors the same set of problems: how to carve out a space of creative freedom, if existent at all, to accommodate the political restraints. From urban modernity in Republican Shanghai to socialist realism in the Northeast, from the folklore art in a small Zhejiang town to literary information warfare in Cold War Hong Kong and New York, this chapter sought to trace the spatial movements – geographical as well as ideological – of the group of early Cold War intellectuals. This Cold War cultural map was marked by Comrade Ku, the fictional new socialist writer in The Rice Sprout Song, or Sang Hu and Wu Yonggang, who worked strenuously to integrate into the new Chinese cinema, or even Zhang Ailing herself, who migrated, after an abandoned attempt to fit into socialist literature, to the other camp of the Cold War, only to discover a similarly demanding political environment. These intellectuals were also cartographic agents who mapped the space of literature and art in an era of radical global political antagonism. The cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove once remarked, “surveying and mapping is always a performance that leaves traces or marks in the world, and is a spatial behavior that leads to the creation and communication of individual and group identities” (2005, 32). As they moved around and across geopolitical and geocultural boundaries, this group of intellectuals also marked spaces, no matter how confined or fractured, and created new cultural forms and possibilities, no matter how troubled or captive. While their cultural practices were restricted by political hegemony, they also contested and 250

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compounded the apparently binary opposition of the Cold War, therefore engendering crossregional cultural routes and currents in Sinophone Asia and beyond and leading to a dynamic, heterogenous Cold War cultural geography.

Notes 1 Zhang Ailing’s article, “On the New-Year-Picture Style of Taiping chun,” was reprinted in Xie Qizhang’s ---essay “Zhang Ailing yiwen faxian ji” 張愛玲佚文發現記 (On the discovery of a lost article by Zhang Ailing), published in Zhonghua dushubao 中---- on November 24, 2010. All quotations come from this reprint; no page numbers available. 2 In the Chinese version of The Rice Sprout Song titled Yangge 秧歌, the playwright Comrade Ku has a full name Gu Gang 顧岡, whose given name, “Gang,” might very well refer to that of the director Wu Yonggang. Interestingly, the English version only keeps his surname, Ku/Gu. 3 Scholars such as Poshek Fu (2019) and Wang Meixiang (2020) have done substantial research on the relationship between the Asian Foundation and local cultural productions in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Cold War. 4 Zhang Ailing made the remarks in her preface to the reprint of Romances, “Comments on the Reprint of Romances,” in 1947. The English translation here is quoted from Yingjin Zhang (2011, 255). 5 “The Rice Sprout Song,” Westinghouse Studio One. Episode no. 399, first broadcast on April 15, 1957, by CBS. It was directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Loring D. Mandel. On the production of this CBS drama, see Christopher Lee (2006, 58–78).

References Bishop, Karen Elizabeth, ed. 2016. The Cartographical Necessity of Exile. New York: Routledge. Cosgrove, Denis. 2005. “Mapping/Cartography.” In Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, edited by David Sibley, Peter Jackson, David Atkinson, and Neil Washbourne, 27–33. London: I.B.Tauris. Fu, Poshek 傅葆石. 2019. “Wenhua lengzhan zai Xianggang: Zhongguo Xuesheng Zhoubao yu Yazhou jijinhui, 1950–1970” 文化冷戰在香港：《中國學生週報》與亞洲基金會，1950–1970 (The Cultural Cold War in Hong Kong: Chinese Students Weekly and the Asian Foundation, 1950–1970). Ershiyi shiji 二十一世紀 (Twenty-First Century), no. 6: 47–62 and no. 8: 67–82. Gao Quanzhi 高全之. 2011. “Zhang Ailing yu Xianggang meixinchu: fangwen Maikaxi xiansheng” 張 愛玲與香港美新處：訪問麥卡錫先生 (Eileen Chang and the USIS in Hong Kong: An Interview with Richard M. McCarthy). In Zhang Ailing xue 張愛玲學 (Eileen Chang Reconsidered), 249–58. Taipei: Maitian. Hsia, Chih-Tsing. 1999 (1961). A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917–1957. 3rd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ke Ling 柯靈. 1985. “Yaoji Zhang Ailing” 遙寄張愛玲 (Dedicated to Zhang Ailing). Dushu 讀書 (Reading), no. 4. Lee, Christopher. 2006. “Rethinking Realisms through the Writings of Eileen Chang.” Amerasia Journal 32: 58–78. Pickowicz, Paul G. 2007. “Acting Like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking, 1949–52.” In Dilemma of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, edited by Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz, 256–87. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. So, Richard. 2013. “Literary Information Warfare: Eileen Chang, the U.S. State Department, and Cold War Media Aesthetics.” American Literature 85, no. 4: 719–44. Wang, Ban. 1997. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wang, David Der-wei. 1998. “Foreword.” In Eileen Chang, The Rice-Sprout Song, vii–xxv. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wang Meixiang 王梅香. 2020. “Lengzhan shiqi feizhengfu zuzhi de zhongjie yu jieru: Ziyou yazhou xiehui, Yazhou jijinhui de dongnanya wenhua xuanchuan, 1951–1959” 冷戰時期非政府組織的中介與 介入：自由亞洲協會、亞洲基金會的東南亞文化宣傳 (1951–1959) (The Mediation and Intervention of Non-Governmental Organizations during the Cold War: The Cultural Propaganda of the Free

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Xiaojue Wang Asian Association and the Asian Foundation in Southeast Asia, 1951–1959). Renwen ji shehui kexue jikan 人文及社會科學集刊 (Journal of Social Sciences and Philosophy) 32: 123–58. Zhang Ailing 張愛玲. 1991. Zhang Ailing quanji 張愛玲全集 (Collected Works of Eileen Chang). Multiple vols. Taipei: Huangguan. Zhang Ailing. 1992. Shiba chun 十八春 (Eighteen Springs). In Zhang Ailing wenji 張愛玲文集 (Selected Works of Eileen Chang). Vol. 3. Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe. Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang). 1998. The Rice-Sprout Song. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zhang, Yingjin. 2011. “Gender, Genre, and Performance in Eileen Chang’s Films: Equivocal Contrasts across the Print-Screen Divide.” In Chinese Women’s Cinema: Translational Contexts, edited by Lingzhen Wang, 255–73. New York: Columbia University Press.

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21 WORLDING JIN YONG’S MARTIAL ARTS (WUXIA) NARRATIVE IN THREE KEYS Narration, Translation, Adaptation Weijie Song

The recent popularity and critical acclaim of the four-volume English translation of Legends of the Condor Heroes (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), based on the synonymous martial arts (wuxia 武俠) novel (射雕英雄傳, serialized in 1957–1959, revised in 1975, newly revised in 2003), have belatedly yet firmly again put the author Jin Yong 金庸 (pen name of Zha Liangyong 查 良镛, Louis Cha Leung Yung, or Louis Cha, 1924–2018) on the map of world literature and culture. Jin Yong has been one of the few most-read novelists in the modern Chinese-language world. His 15 martial arts works, originally serialized as newspaper installments (1955–1972), later revised and canonized (1970–1980) in standard 36 volumes in book form (one final yet controversial round of minor revision was made in 1999–2007), have been widely and continuously disseminated in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, Thailand, and later in Taiwan, mainland China, and overseas Chinese and non-Chinese communities. In addition to the role of a versatile writer, he is also a journalist, editorialist, and entrepreneur and well versed in medieval and late imperial Chinese history from Tang to Qing dynasties. His wuxia narrative, an empire of chivalrous words and images, has triggered the ongoing border-crossing circulations, multilingual translations, and transmedia adaptations. Jin’s enchanting and erudite storytelling has built up a fictional and historical, heroic and lyrical, geographical and emotional martial arts world, a mirror image of “cultural China,” shared by a transregional, translingual, and worldwide audience from the Cold War to the post–Cold War eras since the mid-1950s. 1 Chivalrous imaginations may well provide an intriguing entry point into the mind and heart of China against the great backdrop of modern world literature and culture. Literary historian Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 (b. 1954) once stated that, over a thousand years, Chinese literati have shared a dream of becoming a knight-errant 俠客夢 (Chen 1993, 2016). Academy Award winner Ang Lee 李安 (b. 1954), the auteur of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), also noted that every Chinese-language director would dream to make a martial arts film. The passing of Jin Yong, a master of wuxia narratives, does not spell the end of his era. His 15 martial arts works have been continually reissued in different editions in traditional and simplified Chinese characters, extensively rendered into foreign languages, and unceasingly adapted for commercial and art films, television drama series, theatrical performances, local operas, comic 253

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-27

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books, animations, video games, and theme parks (Hamm 2005; Huss and Liu 2007; Song 2013; Foster 2019). From the 1950s to the 2020s, Jin’s novels have been translated into English (John Minford, Rachel May, Graham Earnshaw, Olivia Mok, Anna Holmwood, Gigi Chang 張菁, and Shelly Bryant), French (Jiann-Yuh Wang 王健育), Spanish, Japanese (Yumi Okazaki), Vietnamese (Hàn Giang Nhạn), Korean (Kim Il-gang), Cambodian, Thai, Burmese, Malay, and Indonesian, among others, thanks to the contributions from translators, scholars, amateurs, fans of his writings, machine translation, and artificial intelligence translation. These renditions appear in different formats, from formal publications with academic and commercial presses to Internet databases, webpages, and links. Jin Yong was quite confident about his popularity in all the Asian regions and Oriental languages, such as Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Yet he worried about the reception of his novels in the worlds of English and other Western languages (Lin 2021). The challenges of English translation of his works and martial arts stories at large, more or less, lie in the “untranslatable” fighting scenes, fictional and historical character names, esoteric jargons and terms, Chinese-centered ethical values, and insurmountable cultural differences between the East and the West. These barriers and constraints derive from the uneven domesticating translations between the host and the guest languages, as well as between the original and the target texts, which are overdetermined by the intentional omissions and deletions of paragraphs and chapters, the mix of transliteration, literal translation, and free translation, as well as the interventions, (over)interpretations, and simplifications from the translators (Wong 1997; Minford 1997; Liu 1997; Shen 2007; Rehling 2012; Luo 2017; Li 2019). Within the multilingual and worldwide translations and circulations of Jin Yong’s works in Asia, America, and Europe, there are also disparate reactions to the multilingual renditions in different socialcultural contexts, which provide a salient example about the aesthetics and politics of cultural translations and translingual receptions in the arena of world literature. Yingjin Zhang uses Jin Yong’s case as an entry point into the problematic field of world literature, film, and culture: Yong Jin, a Hong Kong-based writer of martial arts fiction, who has enjoyed sustained popularity among Chinese readers around the world for decades, but whose writing apparently does not gain in translation – not even when his English editions were issued by a prestigious publisher like the Oxford University Press – and whose name is therefore virtually un-known in world literature. Interestingly, as a parallel project to my study, the topic of “mapping China in world cinema” would reveal the high profile of Chinese martial arts film in international screen culture – the exact opposite of the status of Chinese martial arts fiction in world literature. Not surprisingly, many of Jin’s novels have been adapted into the big screen and enjoy recognition at international film festivals around the world. Returning to literary scholarship, [Eileen] Chang’s and Jin’s cases remind us that what we understand as world literature in the global arena is mostly canonized elite literature rather than popular literature. There are exceptions, of course. Different processes of national and international canonization, indeed, have yielded different results on a global atlas of literary maps. (Zhang 2015) Nevertheless, the belated and (un)expected success of the four-volume English rendition of Legends of the Condor Heroes (2018–2021) has won Jin Yong yet another label as Chinese Tolkien (Hui 2021) and triggered other follow-up translations in Western languages with publishers in the United States, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Finland, Poland, Hungary, and Romania.2 It also brings to the limelight a new wave of reading and reception of Jin’s 254

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martial arts novels as a salient example of world literature and its (un)easy tours in the global markets and cultural fields. Anna Holmwood, one of the translators, once forcefully stated: Many have considered Jin Yong’s world too foreign, too Chinese for an Englishspeaking readership. Impossible to translate. . . . With a dictionary by my side, I started to wander great emotional landscapes of love, loyalty, honor and the power of the individual against successive corrupt governments and invading forces. (Holmwood 2018, ix) And “[t]he greatest loss that can occur in translation can only come from not translating it at all” (Yi 2017). With regard to the trans-generic and popular culture industry, in particular the multimedia adaptation of Jin Yong’s works, Henry Yiheng Zhao once pointed out: There have been almost 120 television drama and film adaptations of his novels, averaging eight adaptations of each novel, thus making Jin possibly the world record holder as the most filmed living novelist. The names of the heroes in his novels have entered everyday Chinese vernacular for computer games, toys, comics, songs, software, or even typhoons. (2015) And in a time of increasing global popularity of multimedia productions and adaptations of fantasy works such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s (1892–1973) The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), J. K. Rowling’s (b. 1965) seven-volume Harry Potter series (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007), and George R. R. Martin’s (b. 1948) A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2011; adapted into the HBO series Game of Thrones), we may further raise the following questions about film adaptations of Jin Yong’s novels in the Chinese cultural context and beyond: How did Ann Hui 許鞍華 (b. 1947), a Hong Kong New Wave female filmmaker, take painstaking efforts to faithfully adapt Jin Yong’s first tour de force, The Book and the Sword (書劍恩仇錄, serialized in 1955–1956, revised in 1975, newly revised in 2002), and represent the chivalrous interventions in the astonishingly vast and heterogeneous Chinese geographical regions outside of Hong Kong? Why did King Hu 胡金銓 (1932–1997) and Tsui Hark 徐 克 (b. 1950), two avant-garde film directors and trendsetters, clash and contradict with each other regarding how to visually display the martial arts world created in Jin Yong’s The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (笑傲江湖, serialized in 1967–1969, revised in 1980, newly revised in 2003; adapted as the popular and critically acclaimed The Swordsman trilogy, 1990, 1992, 1993)? Why did Wong Kar-wai 王家衛 (b. 1958), an auteur and poet of time, create his cinematic interpretation of ashes of time, traces of diasporic subjectivities out of a bold and radical reworking of Jin’s Legends of the Condor Heroes as Ashes of Time (東邪西毒, 1994), and slightly revised Ashes of Time Redux (東邪西毒·終極版, 2008)? These avant-garde filmmakers and trendsetters balance and mediate between Jin Yong’s literary world and their signal reworking of the wuxia genre. Ann Hui and King Hu exemplify their meticulous approaches to details and accuracy of a chivalrous China imbued with poignant historical complications, such as dark imperial conspiracies and the rebellious loyalism, and thus showcase their understandings of diaspora and exile, historical violence, and social justice immersed in political and cultural crisis. Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-wai boldly rewrite Jin Yong’s stories with their trademark visual representations of troubled identities, lonely individuals, and homeless/stateless knights-errant drifting in tumultuous times and dislocated martial arts worlds. 255

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The everlasting and expanding Jin Yong phenomenon calls the attention to the ongoing debates: Does the popular wuxia genre compromise Jin Yong’s literary representation and historical reflection, or on the contrary, it provides him with new modes and methods to portray an imagined China? Would his politics of writing reshape and even revolutionize the martial arts tradition, or the latter’s innovative and creative potentials were tamed or undermined by the rule and force of the commercialized market and popular culture industry? Let’s return to the beginning of Jin Yong’s world to seek the answers. On February 8, 1955, in the then British Crown colony Hong Kong, mainland immigrant, Jin Yong, started to publish his literary debut, The Book and the Sword, which marked the advent of an extraordinary Jin Yong era and the rise of the new school martial arts fiction. Jin Yong’s work maps out diverse geographical regions ranging from his hometown Haining 海寧 of Zhejiang in East China to the remote frontier Gobi Desert and Islamic community in Xinjiang, from Chinese peripheries beyond the Great Wall to the imperial capital, Beijing. The Book and the Sword is composed of two imbricated themes, the political and the romantic. It depicts the quest of the secret “Red flower society” (紅花會), under the leadership of Chen Jialuo 陳家洛, to overthrow the Manchu Qing dynasty and restore Han Chinese rule. Seeking alliance with an Islamic tribe in northwestern China, Chen becomes involved in a triangular love relationship with two Islamic sisters. He struggles between the anti-Manchu political mission and his personal romantic liaisons. To Chen’s and the reader’s surprise, Emperor Qianlong 乾隆 turns out to be Chen’s elder brother, not a Manchu, but a Han Chinese who was intentionally switched at birth with Emperor Yongzheng’s 雍 正 daughter. Chen and his companions take Qianlong hostage to persuade him to acknowledge his ethnicity and assist the anti-Manchu cause. Qianlong is forced to take an oath of alliance, which he later renounces. After a second defeat by the Red Flower Society, Qianlong agrees to a truce. Chen and his friends eventually retreat to the Islamic western regions of the Qing Empire. Jin Yong’s inaugural work exhibits the fundamental vocabulary, grammar, themes, and methods of his chivalrous imagination: (1) four major geographical coordinates that anchor his wuxia world – Jiangnan 江南 region, Jin Yong’s hometown (an inaccessible homeland to which he could not return due to the Cold War confrontation and separation), as well as the south at large; the Central Plains 中原, the origins of Chinese (martial arts) culture; saiwai 塞外, or the frontiers, peripheries, borderlands, and marginal regions beyond the Great Wall, outside of the Shanhai Pass, and even far away from China; and the imperial capitals 帝都; (2) the theme of gratitude and vengeance – be it political or personal, public or private – between Han Chinese and non-Han peoples, and between the knights-errant and the political sovereign; (3) a series of chivalrous writings intermingled with folklores and tales, (un)official histories and cultural memories to stimulate reflections on China’s past for contemporary readers in Hong Kong, overseas Chinese-language community, Taiwan, mainland China, and a global Sinophone world. I understand Jin Yong’s method of imagining China as a chivalrous topography, close to what Guy Debord once defined as a situationist “psychogeography,” which sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. (Debord 1955/2006, 23) 256

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Jin Yong’s knights-errant, outcasts, and outlaws wander across vast Chinese terrestrial regions beyond the urban milieu or “geographical environment,” steered by the four major coordinates and related psychogeographical navigations. His second novel, The Sword Stained with Royal Blood (碧血劍, 1956, revised in 1975, newly revised in 2003), is set at the time of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and centers on the adventures of Yuan Chengzhi 袁承志, the fictional son of Yuan Chonghuan 袁崇煥, a military commander who was executed by Emperor Chongzhen 崇禎. Yuan Chengzhi is tutored by the martial arts master of the Mt. Hua School in the Central Plains. Yuan joins forces with the rebel leader Li Zicheng 李自成 to overthrow the corrupt Ming regime and avenge his father. He meets and befriends two beauties: Wen Qingqing 溫青青, the daughter of a cynical and enigmatic swordsman, and A Jiu 阿九, who is, in reality, Emperor Chongzhen’s daughter Princess Changping 長平. Yuan Chengzhi helps the rebels retrieve the gold stolen by the Wen family, attempts to assassinate the ruler of the Manchu invaders, sabotages a battery of cannons supplied to the Ming army by foreigners, and finances the rebellion with a treasure he discovers in Nanjing, an ancient capital and cultural center of the Jiangnan region. After overthrowing the Ming government, Li Zicheng fails to restore peace and stability and condones his followers’ brutality toward the common people. The former Ming general Wu Sangui 吳三桂 defects to the Manchus and allows them to pass through the Shanhai Pass. The Ming Empire falls to the Manchus, and Li Zicheng’s forces retreat. Yuan Chengzhi leaves China and sails to Brunei with his companions. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of martial arts literature, Legends of the Condor Heroes focuses on the thirteenth century, when the Southern Song dynasty was being invaded by the Jurchen Jin dynasty and by the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan 成吉思汗. The two main characters are both natives of Song in the Jiangnan region, but Guo Jing 郭靖 grows up in Mongolia under the care of Genghis Khan after he and his mother take refuge there to escape the persecution of a treacherous Song court official, and Yang Kang 楊康 becomes the scion of a Jurchen prince. Yang, clever but scheming and self-serving, refuses to acknowledge his natural father and plots with the Jurchens to conquer his native land and attain wealth and power. Guo, slow-witted but honest, loyal, and righteous, is the hero of the story. He grows up with the pretty Mongolian princess Huazheng 華箏 and establishes profound friendships with the fourth Prince Tolui 拖雷, the youngest son of Genghis Khan, and the great marksman Jebe 哲別. But when Genghis Khan invades Song territory, Guo returns to his homeland to help his countrymen battle the Mongols. The Mongol invasion is halted by Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, and Guo and his beloved, Huang Rong 黃蓉, choose a hermit life. The novel became the first installment in what is known as the Condor Trilogy. Jin Yong’s The Giant Eagle and Its Companion (Shendiao xialü 神雕俠侶, 1959–1961, revised in 1976, newly revised in 2003), the second work in the Condor Trilogy, features Yang Guo 楊過, the orphaned son of Yang Kang. The passionate, willful, and unrestrained Yang Guo constitutes a new type of martial arts hero with psychological and moral ambiguity and complexity. Yang attempts to murder Guo Jing and Guo’s wife, Huang Rong, to exchange their heads for medicine to save his lover and master, Xiaolongnü 小龍女, who is suffering the effects of the poisonous “love flower” (情花). He experiences an epiphany, however, that a great knight-errant should serve the kingdom and the people. Yang abandons his selfish goals, joins Guo Jing in resisting the Mongol invasion, and becomes the foremost hero of the age. After the Mongols are defeated, he withdraws from the stage with Xiaolongnü, who is gradually cured in miracle by eating white fish and honey of the Jade bees at the bottom of “Passionless Valley” 絕情谷) during her 16-year separation from her beloved. John Christopher Hamm forcefully argues that “gradually extricating itself from the dynastic and territorial concerns that govern the early works,” the vision of an essentialized and celebratory Chinese cultural 257

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identity “locates itself within a timeless, mandala-like mythic geography; simultaneously, it asserts the priority of individual emotional experience – expressed above all in romantic relationships – over political and ethnic allegiances” (Hamm 2005, 79). The final installment in the Condor Trilogy, The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Saber (倚天屠龍記, 1961–1963, revised in 1976, newly revised in 2005), centers on the late Yuan dynasty and features Zhang Wuji 張無忌, young leader of the Ming Cult, a rebel force committed to overthrowing the Mongol regime. Zhang becomes entangled in a complex web of love relationships with four maidens, including the Mongol princess Zhao Min 趙敏, who turns against her own people to help him. The Ming cult does overthrow the Yuan dynasty, but Zhang gives up the opportunity to become the new sovereign to dwell in seclusion in mountains and forests and paint Zhao Min’s eyebrows for pleasure. The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (天龍八部, 1963–1966, revised in 1978, newly revised in 2005), another critically acclaimed work, is set in the Northern Song dynasty, which included the non-Han Chinese empires of Liao 遼, Dali 大理, Western Xia 西夏, and Tubo 吐蕃. The Dali prince Duan Yu 段譽 is deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy and disdains bloodshed and political power, but he eventually acquires martial prowess and becomes the sovereign of the kingdom. (Qiao) Xiao Feng (喬)蕭峰 is ostracized by the martial arts society when he is discovered to be a member of the nomadic Khitan ethnic group. He commits suicide to seal a truce between Liao, whose bloodline he carries, and Song, where he was raised. Xu Zhu 虛竹, a monk of the Shaolin Temple who is revealed as the illegitimate son of the abbot, achieves great martial arts prowess, becomes the leader of several unorthodox sects, and marries the princess of Western Xia. Hailed as his most important work, Jin Yong’s final book, the anti–martial arts and historical novel The Deer and the Cauldron: A Martial Arts Novel (鹿鼎記, 1969–1972, revised in 1981, newly revised in 2005), features the illiterate but sly and witty teenager Wei Xiaobao 韋小寶 (Trinket), who was born to a prostitute in a Yangzhou 揚州 brothel during the Qing dynasty. He makes his way to Beijing and develops a close friendship with the young Emperor Kangxi 康熙. The antihero Wei has a series of turbulent adventures involving court politics, the martial arts world, secret societies, the Lamaist section of the Wutai Mountains, the Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功) court in Taiwan, the satrap Wu Sangui’s ambitions in Yunnan, and the border negotiations with Russia leading to the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689. For his accomplishments, Wei is rewarded with wealth and titles of nobility; he also gains respect from the anti-Manchu secret societies for eliminating tyrannical officials and defending China from foreign invaders. When his conflicting loyalties become too uncomfortable, Wei returns to Yangzhou and Dali and leads a reclusive life with his seven wives, including Princess Jianning 建寧, a younger sister of the Kangxi emperor. In his martial arts works, Jin Yong intentionally focuses on social, ethical, political, and cultural crises during the dynastic transitions from the Song to Yuan, Yuan to Ming, and Ming to Qing dynasties and explores a wide range of topics, including the ethnic conflict and reconciliation between Han Chinese and non-Han peoples (Manchu, Islamic, Mongolian, Khitan, and Tibetan, among many others), the construction and development of individual identity and collective memory under non-Han rule, as well as the subtle articulations of broad and narrow nationalisms. His martial arts world (jianghu 江湖) is a rich combination of real and imagined geographies, utopian and counter-utopian places and spaces, where knights-errant, hermits, hooligans coexist inside and outside of wulin 武林 (martial arts fraternities) as well as the demonized and/or sometimes romanticized secret societies. Jin Yong’s work can also be understood as a chivalrous Bildungsroman in which young knights-errant develop their cultural and ethnic identities, conceive or redefine their notions of masculinity and femininity, form their 258

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distinctive ideas of family and state, nation and ethnicity, loyalty and betrayal, along the wuxia trajectory of dominance and resistance, exile and return, transgression and submission. Embedded in Jin Yong’s chivalrous imaginations of Chinese imperial geography are not just his everlasting passion for premodern Chinese history but also his keen awareness of the geopolitical and psychogeographical separation of Chinese terrains during a time when Hong Kong was the British colony in the high Cold War years. How to come to terms with the division and boundaries in the British Colony of Hong Kong? How to preserve a historical and cultural consciousness in the peripheral Hong Kong without being subject to any dominant ideological restraints, Communist in Beijing or Nationalist in Taipei? Jin Yong’s martial arts stories complicate the ideological binary confrontation during the Cold War time (Liu 2011, 2019) and are to be considered in a Sinophone context. Jin Yong’s literary remapping of imperial China, in a multilayered and decentralized fashion, addresses and enriches what Shu-mei Shih calls “geopolitical situatedness, a place-based practice,” and the Sinophone areas as places of cultural production (Shih 2011, 717). Imperial China is continuously localized and situated in the image gallery and literary landscape of colonial Hong Kong, highlights the intriguing dialectic of absence and presence, or more precisely, “absent presence” and “present absence” in Jin Yong’s martial arts imagination. Giorgio Agamben uses “exception” and “example” to inquire into the coherent relation between “inclusive exclusion” and “exclusive inclusion”: “Exception” functions as an “inclusive exclusion” (including what is excluded), and “example” serves as an “exclusive inclusion” (excluding what is included) (Agamben 1998, 21–2). In this sense, Jin Yong’s Hong Kong Sinophone articulation and his chivalrous topography of imperial China can also be situated in the categories of “example” and “exception” among manifold Sinophone articulations:3 imperial China is an “example” or an “exclusive inclusion” because the premodern China is included in Jin Yong’s chivalrous geography but excluded from the British colony; Hong Kong turns out to be an “exception” or an “inclusive exclusion” in that it is excluded from Jin Yong’s wuxia narrative but included in Jin Yong’s mechanism of Cold War remapping of the imperial China. When examining the literary travels and global imagination of Sinophone literature under the shadow of culturally dominant and geographically remote mainland and homeland, David Der-wei Wang borrows Zhang Ailing’s (also Samuel Goldwyn’s) famous proposal, confession, or paradox of “include me out” to call attention to the complex entanglement between the genealogy of Sinophone writing and the geopolitical dissemination of mainland Chinese literary tradition. He further redefines the Sinophone connection with mainland Chinese literature as a possibility of “including China out” (Wang 2006, 91). I would go further and argue that Jin Yong’s Hong Kong Sinophone chivalrous remapping of imperial China “includes China out” and “excludes Hong Kong in.” “Absent presence” and “present absence,” “exclusive inclusion” and “inclusive exclusion,” as well as “including China out” and “excluding Hong Kong in” present and display Jin Yong’s method of imagining China, covering the topography of imperial China from his modern perspectives of ethnicity and race, Han and non-Han liaisons, as well as imperial, national, and colonial questions. Imperial China is geopolitically absent and far away from Hong Kong yet appears as a significant literary place and space, and it is represented and dramatized as a story setting constantly violated by imagined intervention and bodily transgression in Jin Yong’s martial arts fictions. Hong Kong is absent in the chivalrous Chinese narratives, yet the colonial experiences in the British colony stimulate Jin Yong to showcase the utopian impulse of paying imagined face-to-face visits to the emperors in the imperial capitals and getting involved in the critical moments of grand historical events in China, although this chivalrous manifestation is fictional and fabricated emplotment. In The Book and the Sword, Master Yu, Chen Jialuo’s 259

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mentor, breaks into the Forbidden City, meets with the Emperor Qianlong for two hours, reveals the secret that the Emperor Qianlong is Chinese, and urges Qianlong to overthrow the Manchus and restore the throne of China to the Chinese while remaining as emperor himself (Jin Yong 2004, 85, 231). In The Sword Stained with Royal Blood, Yuan Chengzhi accidentally ventures into Princess Changping’s palace room, meets and talks with the Emperor Chongzhen, reveals his own identity as the son of the wronged and framed Yuan Chonghuan, and witnesses the decline of the Ming Empire (Jin Yong 1994, chapters 17–18). In The Deer and the Cauldron, Wei Xiaobao lives and grows in the Forbidden City, situated amid court politics, martial arts assassinations, sexual affairs with imperial princess, and the ongoing alliances and grudges between Han people and Manchu rulers, which connect and displace the complex colonial situation in Hong Kong (Jin Yong 1994, chapters 4–7, 10–12, 21, 25, 37, and 43). Ricard Hughes (1968) describes Hong Kong and its many faces as a “borrowed place” and “borrowed time.” If Cold War Hong Kong lives on “borrowed time,” then Jin Yong’s chivalrous writing borrows time – premodern Chinese legends and epic fantasies – and, on “borrowed time,” reconstructs a collective memory and imagined history for Hong Kong and Sinophone readers and audiences. If Hong Kong is a “borrowed place,” a city on lease from China to Britain for 99 years, then Jin Yong’s chivalrioustopography borrows spaces – the vast Chinese lands from the center to the peripheries, from Jiangnan regions to the areas beyond the Great Wall – and situates factual and fictional literary spaces in the “borrowed place,” or more precisely, not to rent Hong Kong but to reverse its status as a British colony by virtue of imagined chivalrous intervention in the imperial capital, the Forbidden City, the Central Plains, the Jiangnan region, the frontiers and borders, and the adjacent foreign territories, to claim an imagined takeover of the greater China, the ethnic territories, and the areas occupied by foreign powers. David Der-wei Wang coins the term “post-loyalism” to examine the poetics and politics of disenchantment and enchantment, memory and amnesia, hometown and foreign land, and argues that: If loyalist consciousness always implies the disappearance and dislocation of time and space, substitution and evolution, then post-loyalist consciousness further intensifies the trend, would rather displace the dislocated time and space, remember and reflect an orthodoxy that may never have been orthodox. (Wang 2007, 6) With regard to political orthodoxy, Han and non-Han gratitude and revenge, the loss and gain of romantic love, Chen Jialuo’s ambivalence and melancholia, Yuan Chengzhi’s hesitation about assassination, and Wei Xiaobao’s hybrid identification and multiparty negotiations exemplify the dislocation and relocation of post-loyalist mentality/identity, as well as the ambivalence and ambiguity of post-loyalist narration and representation in Jin Yong’s martial arts writings. In light of home and exile, the remote Islamic district in Western Regions, the overseas kingdom Brunei in Southeast Asia, the unknown hiding place in Qing Yangzhou City and Dali district, all suggest that post-loyalist positions cannot be predicted, traced, navigated, or confirmed. The post-loyalist specter wanders in Jin Yong’s Cold War Hong Kong Sinophone chivalrous topography of imperial China, which invokes the China’s dramatic past in the Song–Yuan, Yuan–Ming, and Ming–Qing dynastic crisis and transformation, dislocates the already-displaced time and space, performs the ritual of evocation and resurrection, reappears in the British Colony, and travels in and haunts the Sinophone world. Addressing topics including spatial representation, chivalrous topography and “situationalist psychogeography,” gender and sexuality politics, nationalism, fan culture, and Sinophone 260

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articulation, Jin Yong’s work is marked by his distinctive method of imagining China. His martial arts fiction triggers “a silent literary revolution” (Yan 1994, 18), which challenges the canonization of modern Chinese literature, compounds the resilient debates between elite and popular culture, and complicates the relations among martial arts fiction, politicized or commercialized mass culture, and other forms of popular culture in the changing literary, cultural, and social domains of the Sinophone world. By emplotting political, ethnic, and cultural crises in dynastic transitions, Jin Yong explores a wide range of topics, including gratitude and revenge between Han and non-Han peoples, loyalty and betrayal, and imagined cultural memory against the great backdrop of the 1949 Chinese division and migrations that reshaped the Sinophone world. And by intertwining martial intervention and escapist hermitage, historical rewriting, and martial arts fantasy, Jin Yong inscribes the “post-loyalist” ethos and emotional attachment into the imagery of the imperial China, as well as that of Hong Kong as the colony at the imperial margin. In his chivalrous psychogeography produced in the interstices of the British Colony and the two antagonist regimes across the Taiwan Strait, he creates an ambiguous yet flexible identity to respond to the included/excluded zone of contact between the center and the margin, Chinese and non-Chinese, literature and history in modern Sinophone articulations. To sum up, Jin Yong’s phenomenal and monumental, imaginative and historical martial arts works can be situated into three entangled worlds: the original literary texts (including the newspaper serialization to the later revisions), the multilingual translations circulated from the original Chinese areas to other different regions in the entire world, and the transmedia adaptations in all the artistic forms ranging from films and television dramas to local operas, from monuments and theme parks to video games and profitable IP. In this sense, Jin’s entangled world of narration, translation, and adaptation sheds new light on the ongoing debates about the forms and formations of “world literature” in terms of indigenous cultural production, global production and circulation, and multilingual translation and reception.

Notes 1 This chapter draws and develops from different sections of my studies on Jin Yong’s literary storytelling, chivalrous topography, and Chinese imagination (Song 2013, 2018, 2019, used with permission). 2 The list includes St. Martin’s Press, US; Heyne, Germany; Mondadori, Italy; Salamandra, Spain; ASA, Portugal; Intrínseca, Brazil; Moebius, Finland; Zysk i S-ka, Poland; Helikon Kiadó, Hungary; and ART Publishers, Romania. See https://frankfurtrights.com/Books/Details/a-heart-divided-18949251. 3 Jin Yong’s position in Hong Kong, Chinese, and Sinophone literary history is yet another significant case of “inclusion” and “exclusion,” “exception” and “example”: he is incorporated into the literary history compiled by mainland Chinese scholars; his martial arts fiction is regarded as a model example of Hong Kong and overseas literature and even labeled as a canon of Chinese-language literature. But on the other hand, Jin Yong’s literary praxis is also understood as an exception in terms of content, language, genre, and literary categorizations of popular and elite writings.

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22 YAN LIANKE’S HETEROTOPIC IMAGINARIES Carlos Rojas

Michel Foucault famously concluded his 1976 interview with the editors of the new Marxist geography journal Hérodote with an acknowledgment that he had experienced an epiphany over the course of the interview: I have enjoyed this discussion with you because I’ve changed my mind since we started. . . . Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. (Foucault 1980, 77) Although in this interview Foucault suggests that his interest in geography is belated, in a talk he gave nearly a decade earlier, he had already asserted that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (1986 [1984], 22). Moreover, it was in that same earlier talk, titled “Of Other Spaces,” that Foucault offered a detailed discussion of one of the concepts that best incapsulates his approach to spatiality. In contrast to utopias (and, by extension, dystopias) – which he describes as being “sites with no real place” that “present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down” – Foucault suggests that we may also consider the significance of a set of real places he may call heterotopias: There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (Foucault 1986, 24) Characterizing heterotopias as “real places – places that do exist,” Foucault cites institutions ranging from boarding schools and military units to psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and it DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-28

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is surely no coincidence that he made several of these institutions, such as the mental asylum, the teaching hospital, and the prison, the object of book-length studies (Foucault 1988 [1961], 1994 [1963], 1995 [1975]). For Foucault, these institutions function as miniature worlds, producing and reproducing attitudes, ideologies, and social imaginaries. Despite this focus on heterotopias as “real places,” Foucault’s first allusion to heterotopias was actually in reference to a fictional text. The preface to The Order of Things – first published in 1966 – opens with his now-famous invocation of Borges’s fictional Chinese encyclopedia: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography. . . . This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous . . .” (Foucault 1970 [1966], xv; Borges 1964) Foucault then reflects that the reason he found this (fictional) taxonomy so astonishing was that it was not simply “incongruous” but also reflected “the dimension . . . of the heteroclite” (1970, xvii). He explains this concept of the heteroclite by invoking a contrast between utopias and heterotopias: Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold. . . . Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that. . . . This is why Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (Foucault 1970, xvii) More than alternate kinds of spaces, heterotopias, for Foucault, constitute different ways of describing and conceiving space itself. Rather than pointing to an ideal or anti-ideal social configuration, accordingly, heterotopias instead designate sites of social production, underscoring the conditions under which new social configurations may emerge in the first place. Despite the initial emphasis on the fictional dimension of Borges’s fable about the Chinese encyclopedia, Foucault’s ensuing discussion stresses that the reason that the fable resonated so strongly for him is the position that China occupies within the Western imagination. Describing China as “a precise region whose name alone constitutes for the West a vast reservoir of Utopias,” Foucault suggests that “in our dreamworld [China is] precisely this privileged site of space” (1970, xix). It is precisely through an engagement with this imagined space of China as a site of a radically different epistemologies that Foucault is able to reassess the epistemological order on which he perceives modern Western society to be grounded. In the following discussion, however, I propose to turn this logic on its head and instead examine how heterotopic spaces have been imagined from within China itself. I consider works by contemporary author Yan Lianke 閻連科 (b. 1958) and, specifically, the way that several of his recent novels revolve around a set of remote social spaces. Originally from a rural region in 265

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Henan province, Yan Lianke began working for the People’s Liberation Army in 1978 and published his first short story in 1979. Many of his early works were relatively realistic, but in the late 1990s, he shifted to a more experimental approach that focused on topics relating to China’s marginalized communities. His 1998 novel Streams of Time (日光流年), for instance, is narrated in reverse chronological order, beginning with a chapter that culminates with the protagonist’s death at the age of 40 and concluding with a chapter that describes the circumstances of that same protagonist’s birth. This focus on mortality is apt, given that the work is set in a remote village whose residents all suffer from an array of ailments that invariably lead to their death before they reach the age of 40.1 In both its innovative narrative structure (in that it features an inverted chronology) and its focus on a marginalized community that is directly impacted by mainstream Chinese society, Yan establishes a model here for many of his subsequent works. In the following discussion, I consider several of Yan Lianke’s novels featuring marginal communities that may be viewed as Foucaultian heterotopias. I suggest that each of these works reflects on the underlying logics by which modern Chinese societies are constituted while, at the same time, gesturing to a set of creative processes that embody the possibility of society’s development and transformation.

Peach Blossom Spring Yan Lianke’s 2004 novel Lenin’s Kisses (受活) is set in the (fictional) Henan village of Shouhuo (“Liven”), which is distinguished by the fact that all its residents suffer from different physical disabilities. The villagers themselves, however, do not seem overly troubled by these disabilities, and many have developed a set of compensatory “special skills.” As the novel explains: [B]ecause many of the inhabitants of Liven are disabled, they need some area in which they can compensate for their shortcomings, simply to survive. Blind people, for instance, use their acute hearing, and deaf people use their exquisite sense of touch. (Yan 2012, 122) Just as the villagers transform their disabilities into assets, Yan’s novel similarly transforms the work’s geographically remote setting into a source of structural innovation. Capitalizing on the premise that Liven’s geographical remoteness has led its residents to develop a distinctive local dialect, the novel incorporates a considerable amount of dialectal terminology and even includes numerous endnotes that supply definitions of local terms and phrases. For instance, the work’s first endnote marker appears in the very first sentence, following the dialectal word shouhuo 受活, which appears in both the novel’s Chinese title and the name of the village in which the work is set, and the corresponding note explains that “the term means to experience ‘enjoyment, happiness, and passion,’ and also carries connotations of finding pleasure in discomfort, or making pleasure out of discomfort.” In addition to these sorts of definitions, the endnotes also provide detailed backstory relating to the village’s history, with some of the notes being so long that they themselves carry additional endnotes appended to them. The work’s reliance on endnotes for narrative exposition could therefore be viewed as a sort of compensatory “special skill” that is an artifact of the geographically remote status of the community that is the focus of the narrative itself (Yan 2012, 4). In the endnotes, we learn that Liven was founded in the Ming dynasty, and for a long time, it was so isolated that it didn’t even appear on local maps. In the 1950s, however, the town’s leader, Grandma Maozhi, realized that the town was being left out of new China’s collectivization efforts, and therefore, she began making a concerted effort to convince one of the nearby 266

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counties to accept Liven under their jurisdiction. Shortly after neighboring Shuanghuai County agreed to accept the village, China began to be ravaged by the Great Famine, and county officials repeatedly came to commandeer the village’s grain reserves. Furious at this perceived betrayal, Grandma Maozhi vowed to find a way to permit Liven to regain its former independence, and she proceeded to dedicate the next several decades pursuing this goal. Set in the latter half of 1998, meanwhile, the novel’s main plotline revolves around a harebrained scheme by Liu Yingque, the county chief of Shuanghuai, to purchase Lenin’s preserved corpse from Russia and install it in a local memorial site modeled on Beijing’s Mao Zedong Mausoleum. To raise money for the purchase, Liu Yingque recruits a group of residents of Liven to form a traveling performance troupe in which they would each perform the “special skills” they had developed to compensate for their disabilities. Grandma Maozhi agrees to support Liu’s efforts, but only on the condition that after he has raised the necessary funds, he will permit Liven to separate from the county and regain its former independence. Liu Yingque’s scheme and his agreement with Grandma Maozhi underscore some of the dialectical tensions that characterize the relationship between socialism and capitalism in contemporary China. For instance, although Liu launches a scheme predicated on profiting from the commodification of the disabled bodies of the Liven villagers, his objective is to raise money to purchase the preserved corpse of one of the fathers of socialist theory. Liu’s primary objective in establishing the mausoleum, however, is not to honor Lenin but rather to raise tourism revenue. At the same time, the novel also specifies that Liu’s ultimate objective is not the pursuit of profit for its own sake but rather to redistribute the tourism revenue to the residents of his county. Lenin’s Kisses concludes with a similar series of dramatic reversals. First, Grandma Maozhi’s scheme to return Liven to its former state of independence is almost undermined when several members of the performance troupe develop a taste for the capitalist culture to which they are exposed while traveling with the troupe, and it is only after their handlers (who are from outside the village) detain the performers and attempt to extort their money from them that the performers re-embrace Maozhi’s attempts to help the village withdraw again from society. In a final reversal, meanwhile, the country governor, Liu Yingque, deliberately maims himself by stepping in front of his own sedan so that he might be able to join the village as a disabled figure in his own right. While the main body of Lenin’s Kisses presents Liu Yingque as a symbol of the possibility of dialectically integrating a set of socialist and capitalist tendencies, accordingly, the work’s conclusion instead transforms him into an icon of the possibility of somehow recovering a space outside of this dialectics altogether. To the extent that that Liven, before its “entry into society” in the 1905s, represented a version of Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 legendary “peach blossom spring,” Liu could be viewed as a modern-day version of Tao’s fisherman, who ultimately succeeds in finding and returning to the utopian space of the peach blossom spring (for further discussion, see Rojas 2016, 2022).

Cancer and AIDS Villages Although Lenin’s Kisses does not specify the precise reason that all the residents of Liven are disabled, Yan Lianke’s 2006 novel Dream of Ding Village (丁莊夢) focuses on a village devastated by a more specific malady: HIV/AIDS, or, to be more accurate, an array of diseases associated with the AIDS syndrome. Unlike the West, where male–male sexual contact was the main vector driving the spread of HIV, in China the virus was instead spread primarily via contaminated blood donation equipment in rural regions. The irony is that it was precisely Beijing’s decision, in the late 1980s, to try to limit its exposure to the HIV by restricting the 267

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import of human-blood medical products, which in turn drove the country’s need to expand its own domestic sources of blood. As a result, rural areas were encouraged to ramp up their existing blood collection systems, wherein locals were paid to donate blood. Due to contaminated equipment, once HIV was introduced into these rural communities, it was often able to spread quickly through the population. Henan was one of the provinces that was most directly affected by the resulting crisis, and several villages had such high infection rates that they came to be known as AIDS villages (Yan 2011; Rojas 2015). As a Henan native, Yan Lianke took a particular interest in the crisis, and on several occasions he accompanied a medical anthropologist colleague to visit AIDS villages in the region and observe the devastation firsthand. Dream of Ding Village is set in a fictionalized version of one of these villages, though Yan Lianke has observed that, in an act of what he calls selfcensorship, he deliberately toned down many of his descriptions of the village’s AIDS crisis in order to increase the possibility that the novel could avoid being censored (the work was ultimately published in China, though it was subsequently banned) (Zhang Ying 2006). Dream of Ding Village revolves around the family of the local “blood head,” Ding Hui, whose support of blood-selling helped exacerbate the village’s AIDS crisis. Shortly before the time frame covered in the novel, fellow villagers kill Ding Hui’s son, Ding Qiang, by leaving a poisoned tomato for him to eat. Given that the son was only 12 when he died, he therefore was buried not in his family’s ancestral plot but rather in a makeshift grave behind the village school, and his coffin was filled with a variety of textbooks, notebooks, and writing utensils – symbolizing the possibility that he might continue his education in the afterlife. These same writing implements, meanwhile, are also theoretically linked to the novel’s own narrative – in that every other chapter is narrated by Ding Qiang, speaking from a liminal zone between life and death. Another pivotal figure in the novel is the Ding Hui’s father, known as Teacher Ding, whose job it is to ring the schoolhouse bell at the beginning and end of each school day. The novel opens with Teacher Ding returning to Ding Village after having met with some local cadres in town, where he learned about China’s rural AIDS crisis and the role of blood-selling in driving the crisis. As a result, Teacher Ding realizes that his own son, Ding Hui, has a major role in contributing to the village’s AIDS epidemic. Moreover, even after local blood-selling is suspended, Ding Hui continues to profit from the crisis by reselling the discounted coffins that the government offers the village. At the end of the novel, Teacher Ding kills Ding Hui, after which he is arrested and imprisoned. After he is released, Teacher Ding returns to the village but finds it to be deserted. He then goes to the schoolhouse, where he falls asleep and dreams that a rainstorm transforms the region into an enormous mud pit, whereupon he sees the following: a woman, digging in the mud with the branch of a willow tree. With each flick of the branch, each stroke of the willow, she raised a small army of tiny mud people from the soil. Soon there were hundreds upon thousands of them, thousands upon millions, millions upon millions of tiny mud people leaping from the soil, dancing on the earth, blistering the plains like so many raindrops from the sky. Grandpa found himself gazing at a new and teeming plain. A new world danced before his eyes. (Yan 2011, 341) In this vision of the goddess Nüwa, who is credited with having repaired the vault of heaven and created humanity out of yellow clay, Teacher Ding imagines that the region that has been left deserted by the AIDS epidemic may be viewed as a “new world.” 268

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In Foucaultian terms, the village’s schoolhouse may be viewed as a heterotopia within a heterotopia – a discrete institutional space within the relatively self-contained heterotopic space of the village itself. Just as the novel’s premise is that the story is being narrated in the voice of Ding Qiang, who was buried behind the schoolhouse in a provisional coffin filled with writing instruments, composition books, and dictionaries after having been murdered while still a boy, the novel concludes with Teacher Ding’s dream inside the schoolhouse, in which he fantasizes of how the deadly crisis may have laid the groundwork for a new process of creation. In both cases, death and devastation provide the ground for a new process of production and creativity.

Re-Education Through Labor If Lenin’s Kisses takes inspiration from the unexplained array of physical disabilities that afflict the residents of the fictional village of Liven and Dream of Ding Village reflects on the HIV/ AIDS crisis that afflicted large swaths of central China in the 1990s, Yan’s 2011 novel The Four Books (四書) pivots instead around the famine that ravaged much of the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the heels of the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956), which encouraged citizens to lodge criticisms of the regime, and the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957), which sentenced many of those same citizens to compulsory re-education, the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) began as a set of policy directives designed to jump-start China’s economy but which instead produced a devastating famine resulting in tens of millions of deaths. The Four Books, meanwhile, is set in a re-education compound for accused rightists and includes a detailed description of the famine that devastated much of the country during this period (Yan 2015). Although the title of The Four Books echoes the conventional term for the Confucian “Four Books and Five Classics” (四書五經), in context the title actually refers to the fact that the novel is composed of interwoven fragments from four separate texts, or “books.” The first is a journal in which a character known as the Author records everything that he observes at the camp, in the hope that he will later be able to use it as material for a new novel. The second text, meanwhile, consists of a parallel set of records that the Author compiles for the authorities – who promise him leniency if he reports on infractions committed by his fellow detainees. The third text is narrated anonymously in the third person and uses distinctly biblical language to describe the labor camp, including many of the same incidents described in the first two books. The focus of the latter text is a mysterious character known as the Child, who runs the camp in an authoritarian manner and who regularly confiscates the books the detainees happen to have in their possession and burns them in huge bonfires. Finally, the fourth and final text is said to have been authored by another detainee known as the Scholar and features a fable inspired by the myth of Sisyphus (in this version, however, Sisyphus is condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder down a mountain, after which the boulder rolls back up the incline on its own accord). The circumstances described in the first three of these interwoven narratives become increasingly desperate as famine afflicts the camp. Prisoners begin to turn on each other, and at one point, the Author sneaks out of the camp and begins secretly cultivating a plot of corn that he irrigates with his own blood. The work’s climactic moment occurs when the detainees wake up one morning to find that the Child has crucified himself on a large wooden cross erected in front of the building where he is staying. Still clinging to life, the Child tells the detainees, “It was I who nailed myself here. . . . You should all leave.” Then he adds: Everyone go into my room, and take whatever books you need from there. Leave me here. . . . But I just ask one thing of you, which is that you not bring me down. I want 269

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to bake up here under the hot sun . . . you absolutely must remember this. Remember my words . . . let me bake under the hot sun! (Yan 2015, 326) The prisoners then enter the Child’s room, where they find copies of many of the books that he had been collecting from the detainees and publicly burning, leading them to realize that the Child had only been burning the duplicate copies of the confiscated texts, while keeping one copy of each text for himself. Although set in the aftermath of the late-1950s anti-rightist movement, the novel’s plot, in its focus on the Child’s confiscation and destruction of the detainees’ books, implicitly reflects on the censorship restrictions that Yan Lianke was increasingly facing in the present. The 2004 Chinese publication of Lenin’s Kisses had led to his dismissal from his position working for the People’s Liberation Army, and his subsequent novel, Dream of Ding Village, was banned shortly after its initial publication. His next major work, the 2005 novella Serve the People! (為人民服務) was published in a Chinese literary journal but was not permitted to be published in book form in China, and his 2011 novel The Four Books was never permitted to be published in China either. At the same time, however, the latter work’s revelation that even as the Child is confiscating and destroying forbidden books he is simultaneously collecting and enjoying those same works suggests that the contemporary censorship regime is dialectically intertwined with the sort of creative literary impulse that Yan Lianke himself embodies.

Crematoria Although Lenin’s Kisses, Dream of Ding Village, and The Four Books all revolve around communities that are geographically separate from mainstream society, Yan’s novel The Day the Sun Died (日熄, 2015) instead focuses on a community whose separation from mainstream society is more structural than geographic. The Day the Sun Died is set in the Henan village of Gaotian, and most of the work unfolds over the course of a single night during which virtually all the villagers suddenly start sleepwalking. During this period of mass somnambulism (Rojas 2021), the villagers begin exhibiting impulses that are normally suppressed when they are awake, leading the community to degenerate into chaos and hundreds of villagers ultimately lose their lives in the violence (Yan 2018). This outbreak of violence and death has significant implications for the family of the narrator – a boy by the name of Li Niannian, who describes himself as “slow” but who is nevertheless an astute social observer and aspires to become a novelist when he grows up. Nianian’s parents run a local funerary shop that sells wreaths and other items used in traditional funerals, and their shop has a surge of business following the hundreds of deaths that occur during the night of mass somnambulism. Niannian’s uncle, meanwhile, runs a local crematorium, and for years he had been collecting the highly flammable “corpse oil” 屍油 that is generated when human corpses are cremated, and he sells many barrels of this corpse oil to Niannian’s father at a steep discount. Finally, one of Niannian’s neighbors is a novelist by the name of Yan Lianke, and The Day the Sun Died repeatedly references works allegedly written by this fictional Yan Lianke – all of which are distorted versions of books by (the actual) Yan Lianke. This fictional Yan Lianke carefully takes notes as Gaotian degenerates into chaos, hoping to use the crisis as inspiration for a future novel. Each section of The Day the Sun Died specifies a precise time frame, down to the minute, and the sections proceed chronologically until approximately three-quarters of the way through the novel, when a section is labeled with time span with no duration: 6:00–6:00. The 270

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following sections describe how, just before dawn, all the clocks in Gaotian suddenly stop and the sunrise is delayed indefinitely. The villagers fear that they will be trapped forever in this extratemporal space, and the novel concludes with a dramatic sequence in which Niannian’s father wades into the middle of a vast pool of corpse oil in an underground pit (the pool is formed from the barrels of oil that Niannian’s uncle had previously sold to his father) and proceeds to light himself on fire. In so doing, the father produces a light as bright as the sun, which somehow induces the actual sun to rise and time to restart. As Niannian’s father is about to immolate himself, however, the fictional Yan Lianke begins to wade into the pool of corpse oil to try to save him. In the father’s last breath before immolating himself, he exclaims to the fictional Yan Lianke, “The sun has come out! Write me into your novel as a good person!” (Yan 2018, 322) With his final words being an entreaty to the fictional Yan Lianke to “write [him] into [his] novel as a good person,” the father’s death marks not only the end of the dark night that had engulphed the town but also the beginning of a process by which the fictional Yan Lianke endeavors to transform the preceding night’s events into a coherent literary narrative. At the same time, however, even as the novel repeatedly alludes to the prospect that the fictional Yan Lianke will ultimately write a novel about the events described within The Day the Sun Died itself, there is also the implication that these same events may themselves somehow be the product of the fictional Yan Lianke’s own earlier works. For instance, at one point, referring to one of the fictional Yan Lianke’s earlier novels, Kissing Lenin (the title in Chinese, Huoshou 活受, is the inverse of the Chinese title of Lenin’s Kisses, Shouhuo 受活), Niannian remarks: I was reminded of a passage from Kissing Lenin. I don’t know whether it is because of Kissing Lenin that the events in our town subsequently came to pass, or whether it was instead on account of the events that happened in our town that Kissing Lenin came to be written. I don’t know whether it was Yan Lianke’s novel that foretold this night’s events in our town, or whether it was this night’s events that helped conceive a future Yan Lianke. (Yan 2018, 59)

Heart Sutra While many of the Chinese versions of Yan Lianke’s novels, including Dream of Ding Village and Lenin’s Kisses, feature intricate papercut illustrations, his 2020 novel Heart Sutra (心經) takes this practice a step further by incorporating papercut illustrations into the novel’s own plotline. The work is set in religious training center located in the National Politics University in Beijing, which is intended primarily for high-ranking members of each of China’s five official religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam.2 The plot, however, revolves around a pair of younger disciples: an 18-year-old Buddhist nun by the name of Xia Yahui and a 23-year-old Taoist master by the name of Gu Mingzheng. We are told that Yahui is skilled in the art of making papercuts, and the novel includes multiple descriptions of the papercuts that decorate her room. At the same time, paralleling the work also features a series of papercut illustrations that depict a love affair between the Bodhisattva Guanyin and the Daoist deity Laozi, which is obviously meant to parallel Yahui’s eventual romantic relationship with Mingzheng (Yan 2023). Having spent her entire life in a monastery, Yahui is eager to purchase an apartment in Beijing and leave the Buddhist faith – or, as the novel puts it, “return to secular life” 還俗. It turns out, however, that the apartment in question is in a residential quarter that had previously 271

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been used as a prison and execution grounds for religious disciples. The novel culminates in sequence, in which Yahui is informed that someone has broken into her apartment, so she rushes back and finds five mysterious figures sitting in her living room. The visitors turn out to be the deities Mohammad, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Laozi, and the Bodhisattva Guanyin, and they tell Yahui that it has come to their attention that she has recently dreamed that senior deities, including God, Allah, and the Daoist Patriarch, have succumbed to dementia and forgotten how to rescue humanity from its suffering. The five deities insist that Yahui agree not to disclose their secret, and alluding to the myth of Gilgamesh, they offer to make her a deity in return for her silence. However, Yahui declines the offer, indicating that she would prefer to remain human – though she does request that, in return for keeping the deities’ secret, after her death, she would be permitted to have her name inscribed on a deity’s headstone rather than on a human’s. As Yahui and the deities are discussing this matter, the door to her apartment locks shut, apparently trapping all the deities inside. There is a frenzied discussion, whereupon the deities ask Yahui whether she has anything in the room “that isn’t human, but which has a human soul.” After a brief pause, Yahui suggests that her papercuts fit this description, and she proceeds to toss papercuts containing the images of Guanyin, Laozi, Mary, Jesus, and Mohammad off the balcony, and as each papercut is thrown out, the corresponding deity is able to ride it to freedom. The novel then concludes with a description of how Yahui and Mingzheng live happily ever after in their new apartment, but with the specification that Yahui would then be able to have her name inscribed on a deity’s headstone after she died. With both the papercut sequence, we find a suggestive inversion of conventional relationship between representation and reality, wherein the papercut representations effectively contain the deities’ own “reality.” In the final allusion to the headstones, meanwhile, we find an ironic twist on Yahui’s decision to decline the deities’ offer to make her a deity, in that the headstone is both a symbol of her own mortality but also a vestigial reminder of the deification that Yahui has already turned down.

Death and Rebirth Although Foucault’s 1966 discussion of heterotopias in the context of Borges’s fictional Chinese Encyclopedia appears at the beginning of one of his best-known books, his subsequent 1967 reflection on heterotopias as “real places” was initially delivered only as a talk to a group of architects and did not appear in print until a few months after his death 17 years later.3 It is, therefore, fitting that one of the spaces that receives the most extended consideration in his 1967 talk is what he calls the “strange heterotopia of the cemetery.” Noting that “the cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces,” Foucault observes that as societies become increasingly secular, the fate of one’s corporeal remains comes to assume ever-greater importance: From the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay; but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. (Foucault 1986, 25) 272

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the promise that, after she dies, her name will be “forever inscribed on a deity’s headstone” – thereby literally making the cemetery a heterotopic space of textual production.

Notes 1 A footnote mentions that a UN health team determined that the community’s health problems were caused by an excess of fluoride in the water supply, suggesting that the village may be viewed as an example of what would subsequently be called cancer villages, or Chinese communities with unusually high cancer rates resulting from industrial contaminants. 2 Although the modern Chinese state is often perceived to be antagonistic toward religion, according to one of the Chinese government’s own white papers, as of 2017, there were almost 200 million religious disciples in China. See www.scio.gov.cn/zfbps/ndhf/37884/Document/1626520/1626520.htm. 3 Foucault passed away in June of 1984, and the essay was first published in French in October 1984 in the journal Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité under the title “Des Espace Autres,” while Miskowiec’s English translation was published in 1986 in Diacritics under the title “Of Other Spaces.”

References Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In Other Inquisitions (1937–1952), by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, 101–5. Austin: University of Texas Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970 [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1986 [1984]. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, no. 16: 22–7. Foucault, Michel. 1988 [1961]. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1963]. Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Rojas, Carlos. 2015. Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rojas, Carlos. 2016. “Time Out of Joint: Commemoration and Commodification of Socialism in Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses.” In Red Legacies in China: Afterlives of the Revolution in Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society, edited by Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, 297–315. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. Rojas, Carlos. 2021. “Wandering the Garden, Waking from a Dream.” Chinese Literature Today 10, no. 1: 25–33. Rojas, Carlos. 2022. “Dialectical Utopianism: Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses and Ou Ning’s Bishan Commune.” In Sinophone Utopias: Exploring Futures Beyond the Chinese Dream, edited by Andrea Riemenshnitter, Jessica Imbach, and Justyna Jaguscik, 205–224. New York: Cambria Press. Yan Lianke. 2011. Dream of Ding Village. Translated by Cindy Carter. New York: Grove/Atlantic. Yan Lianke. 2012. Lenin’s Kisses. Translated by Carlos Rojas. New York: Grove/Atlantic Press. Yan Lianke. 2015. The Four Books. Translated by Carlos Rojas. New York: Grove/Atlantic Press. Yan Lianke. 2018. The Day the Sun Died. Translated by Carlos Rojas. New York: Grove/Atlantic Press. Yan Lianke. 2023. Heart Sutra. Translated by Carlos Rojas. New York: Grove/Atlantic Press. Zhang Ying. 2006. “Being Alive Is Not Just an Instinct.” In Southern Weekend, cited and translated in ESWN Culture Blog. www.zonaeuropa.com/culture/c20060327_1.htm.

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PART VII

New Worlds of Gender Configurations

23 MODERN INTELLECTUAL MASCULINITIES IN TRANSFORMATION Jun Lei

Introduction: Repositioning to Wen 文 (Literary) and Wu 武 (Martial) Masculinities In the mid-nineteenth century, China was falling from a “celestial empire” into a semicolony after numerous failed military contests with Western and Japanese imperialist powers. Older models of Chinese masculinities, mostly inscribed by Confucian political, familial, and conjugal structures, were greatly challenged amid the disintegrating old social order and national crisis. The twofold crisis of the Chinese nation and masculinity can be identified in male intellectuals’ repositioning to wen and wu (Lei 2022, 7). While wen refers to literary masculinity of Confucian literati with literary accomplishments, cultural refinement, emotional sensitivity, and genteel mannerism, wu describes warriors’ physical prowess, martial valor, and military strength (Louie 2002, 11–18). Historically, literary men won government appointments through keju 科舉 (imperial civil service exam), and shi dafu 士大夫 (scholar gentry) enjoyed political and sexual privileges over other classes since the Song dynasty (960–1279) (Song 2004; M. Huang 2006; Hinsch 2013). In late Qing, however, the imperial exam was abolished in 1905, which fundamentally destroyed literary men’s channel of advancement to high politics. Confucian literati increasingly became an object of ridicule for foreigners and the Chinese alike for their outdated knowledge and effeminate mannerism (Lei 2022). Younger generations of male writers and scholars, especially those who were born in the second half of the nineteenth century, witnessed China’s drastic decline and their own increasingly marginalized social status and political power. They also became more sensitive to “unmanly” traits under the colonial gaze. Many began to strategically distance themselves from older generations of Confucian literati, repositioned themselves to martiality, and hoped to create new tenets for Chinese masculinities. This chapter navigates the ebbs and flows of a paradoxical martial trend among literary men as coping strategies for the aforementioned twofold crisis, with a focused analysis on models of masculinities between the 1890s and the 1930s. This era constituted the crucible that forged modern Chinese manhood and the crucial link between premodern and contemporary configurations of masculinity in China. Studies of this era also allow an in-depth investigation into gender issues in relation to nation, race, and class, which were themselves nascent concepts or undergoing drastic re-evaluation under modernity. 277

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-30

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Racial Discourse and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in the Late Qing Martial valor and physical prowess gained unprecedented appeal among Chinese men of letters during the decade and a half between the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the 1911 Revolution. This modern version of martial masculinity, unlike the traditional wu for warriors, was constructed by and for male writers and scholars. The First Sino-Japanese War destroyed the lingering self-complacency of Chinese scholar-officials and instilled in them a fear of national subjugation and racial extinction. Japan’s military triumph, more so than the victories of the European powers, shocked the Chinese literati and conveyed to them a powerful message about the social Darwinist principle of “the survival of the fittest.” “Baozhong” 保 種 (preserving the seeds/breed), a nationalistic slogan with implications for both gender and racial issues, became a warning for the entire Chinese population (Lei 2020, 2022). Intellectual discourse championed by Liang Qichao 梁-- (1873–1929) held that unless effective measures were taken to preserve the “seeds” of the Chinese people, racial decay would bring the downfall of the Chinese nation and the extinction of the Chinese race. Although male intellectuals who proposed plans for national renewal included both genders, their projects to forge xinmin 新民 (new citizens/people) mostly had men, especially educated young men, in mind. The specific references in their essays to the key roles of sons and husbands and to the literati tradition indicate a strong association between masculinity, patrilineality, and national identity. The physical attributes of Chinese women, as “guomin zhimu” 國民之母 (mothers of citizens), were certainly under urgent demand to change for the sake of the nation (Gimpel 2006; Yu 2009; Lei 2020). However, the fitness of Chinese men, not only fathers of citizens, but also citizens themselves, was believed to have more direct impact on the strength and vigor of the masculine spheres of the military and politics (Schillinger 2016). The male body, therefore, ought to be reforged as well so it could make men better fighters and breeders for the nation. Martialized intellectual masculinity in late Qing was bolstered by widespread human “sciences” among Chinese intelligentsia, such as social Darwinism and eugenics. Originating in Europe, these pseudoscientific discourses (mis)shaped knowledge on race, nation, and gender on a global scale (Lei 2020, 2022). They also championed the superiority of a masculinist militant culture and, concomitantly, an imperialist masculinity that emphasized “nationalist, racist, and militaristic aspects of masculinity” (Dawson 1994, 30–1). Liang Qichao was most beguiled by this hard-bodied imperialist masculinity. In a series of essays published from 1902 to 1906 titled Zhongguo zhi xinmin 中國之新民 (new people of China), he blamed China’s military failures, among other factors, on the soft-bodied Confucian scholar, whom he set in sharp contrast with the physical prowess of the White man. He strongly encouraged fragile Chinese scholar types to emulate European and American political and military leaders. His manly icons included Napoleon, who he claimed slept only four hours a night; Gladstone, who could walk 100 li every day at an old age; and Bismarck, whose impressive body was 280 pounds of seasoned muscles and bones (1994, 159). Dazzled by the physical power of Western military leaders, Liang complained that “the masculine type has been eliminated in China for the past thousands of years. In such a big country, there is only female virtue, no male virtue, only sick people, no healthy people” (1994, 41). Advocacy for physical strength in these essays exposes Liang’s ambivalence about China’s long history and civilization, and about the softening and emasculation of intellectual Chinese males by the decadent and sedentary tradition. This nationalist representation of the ideal masculinity requires refutation of Chinese weakness and incorporation of the White race’s physical prowess, as contrasted with an essentialized and femininized notion of Chinese tradition. 278

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Liang Qichao mainly targeted educated young men as the object of his reformation project. In his view, these men should be the hope of the nation but followed the old path of the Confucian literati (1994, 160): They marry extremely early, to pass their seeds of course, but the seeds are already weak. When kids reach school age, they bend over the desk reading all day, doing no physical exercises. Fragile gentility is a lauded quality; timidity and weakness are considered delicate and noble. Elegant young men are too weak to withstand a gust of wind, bearing the name of “true man” but in fact weaker than girls. Once they reach adulthood, they linger between bedsheets and exhaust their [sexual] energy, or smoke opium and weaken their bodies. . . . Alas, if all people are sick people, how can the nation not be a sick nation? In this unglamorous depiction of a young man’s unhealthy lifestyle and sexual practice, Liang shows deep concerns about the collateral damage to the nation. He compares educated Chinese men to “weak ladies” to reinforce the association between sickness, weakness, cerebral men, and femininity. The sick and weak educated young man, who inherited fragility, gentility, immobility, and timidity from the literati, serves a conspicuous reminder of a stark absence of true men in China. This male “lack” would disqualify Chinese men as breeders and fighters for a new nation-state. In particular, Liang’s blunt comment that “their seeds are already weak” points to the dysgenic effects of early marriage and premature sexual activity, evoking the urgency of hygienic practices and genetic improvement. Besides the sick man, the yellow peril was another racist stereotype that emerged alongside European colonial expansion in Asia and became widespread at the turn of the twentieth century. While Germans and Russians used this term to evoke the European dread of the medieval Mongolian invasion, British and American media focused on Chinese males as a source of genetic contamination (Lei 2020, 2022). Facing the yellow peril discourse, some Chinese authors protested that the Chinese people were peace-loving or pointed out that the yellow peril was Western propaganda against the Asians (Luo 2001; Yang 2010). Many others, however, undertook the task of reinventing the Chinaman and the Yellow race in terms of an imagined male virility and sexual prowess (Sun 2003; Lei 2020). Liang’s book Chinese Bushido (中 國武士道), with more than 70 stories of warriors and knights-errant, argued that China once had a martial tradition that was nevertheless corrupted by too long a period of peace, comfort, ideological control by rulers, and the customary preference for men’s literary achievements over physical strength (1999b, 357). Liang’s reinvention of the yellow people as a martial race involved the search for Huang di 黃帝 (Yellow Emperor) as the common ancestor. He praised the heroism of ancient Chinese conquerors led by the Yellow Emperor to expand the western borders, proud of the yellow peril that caused the Europeans to shiver (Liang 1999a). Politician and poet Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) and Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884–1919), a philologist, also supported the invented myth of the Yellow Emperor as the brave common ancestor of the Chinese race and the Han ethnicity (Huang 2005; Liu 1936). With this newly invented genealogy of the Yellow race, Liang and his peers sought to establish for this perilous “yellow power” a solid basis in race that was not a Western fabrication. Rather, they believed that innate character of the Chinese race was originally combative and that fragility and timidity were only symptoms of later ill influences (Lei 2020). In 1902, Liang Qichao also advocated for a “new fiction” that would blend patriotism and heroism into romantic stories to enlighten young people and promote martial valor. Zhang 279

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Zhaotong 張肇桐 (1881–1938), a loyal follower of Liang’s and a student in Japan, answered Liang’s call to arms in 1903. He wrote a political allegory, “Free Marriage” (Ziyou jiehun 自 由結婚). The male protagonist is literally named Huang Huo 黃禍 (Yellow peril), alias Huang Zhuanfu 黃轉福 (Yellow-turned-blessing), which play on the semantic opposition of the oftpaired characters huo 禍 (peril) and fu 福 (blessing). With his unparalleled patriotism, courage, and physical strength, Yellow Peril stands out in his own country and frightens foreigners. The author praises him as the “unrivalled hero” and matches him with Guanguan, an “unrivaled beauty,” to show the protagonist’s sexual prowess and his capacity for proliferating the yellow peril (Zhang 1991). Typical of political novels of the time, Yellow-Turned-Blessing’s manifestations of masculinity, sexuality, and even his very ontological status are dependent upon needs of the nation. His marriage signifies the Yellow hero’s potential to proliferate the Yellow race of peril. Chinese writers and scholars in late Qing reappropriated Eurocentric stereotypes about the asexual or sexually perverted Chinaman – namely, the fragile Confucian gentleman, the sick man, and the yellow peril – to confront such prejudices. While some still tried to balance nationalistic imperatives with demands for Westernization and Confucian with Western imperialist ideals of men, many took to more radical ideologies and martial measures. They deployed racial politics to gain leverage in shaping the new national and gender identities as part of an anti-Orientalist project. This way, Chinese intellectual discourses turned stereotypes into reinvented images of the Chinese nation and Chinese men.

Neoromantic Masculinity and New Love Ethics of the May Fourth Generation In the middle 1910s, the May Fourth generation became the new cultural leaders of Chinese enlightenment. Intellectual efforts to reconstruct masculinities largely shifted emphasis from shen 身 (body) to xin 心 (heart/mind). Changes in three interconnected spheres – the institutional, the affective, and the epistemological – shook the core of older ethics of Confucian masculinities and reshaped the interiority of the younger generation in forming a neo-romantic masculinity based on modern love (Lei 2022, 90–4). Institutionally, male intellectuals could no longer sustain high levels of politics and the extended family system as principal arenas to perform masculinities. In dynastic China, different levels of government, together with the extended Confucian family system, were one of the primary fields of gender production. A scholarly man’s masculinity was primarily defined by his capacity to obtain official appointments through imperial exams and, subsequently, his responsibilities and privileges in assisting the ruler to govern the state. The May Fourth generation, however, was blocked from the traditional path to officialdom when the imperial exam was abolished in 1905. After the 1911 Revolution, Beiyang generals and military men dominated the government of the new republic. Without an active political role to play in the power center, the May Fourth generation needed to cultivate new spheres and channels through which to manifest masculinities as scholars. New social institutions such as Western-style universities and print media industry began to facilitate new professional practices for male authority on social problems. Leading writers and scholars, such as Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879–1942), Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), and Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), were professors affiliated with Peking University. They were also professional writers, journal editors, and contributors for the proliferating print media, which functioned as new platforms for masculine performance. In terms of family as an institution, the May Fourth generation targeted the Confucian marriage and sexual ethics and promoted the nuclear family as the new model to modernize 280

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Chinese households. An ideal nuclear family required monogamous heterosexual couples with fewer, healthier children and equal parental responsibility for child-rearing. Not only should women’s education level be elevated as mothers, but also men’s roles needed modernizing as husbands and fathers. As polygamy and prostitution practiced by older generations jeopardized the May Fourth goals of presenting modern images of Chinese families and Chinese men to the world, May Fourth writers made repeated and eloquent pleas for new sexual morality, lovebased marriage, women’s rights, and men’s responsibilities. As the older state and the family systems went through transformations, the human relations and affective bonds that were most definitive of masculinity began to move away from zhong 忠 (subjects’ loyalty to the emperor) and xiao 孝 (children’s filial piety to parents). Confucian governance of the state and the family, more than mere institutional top-down control, had also depended upon mutually affective bonds between ruler and subjects, and between parents and children. The May Fourth generation dismissed zhong and xiao as the incubator for unhealthy relations and subservient younger generations. Rather, they utilized Western-style romantic love to retool the Chinese qing 情 as a new affection, where not only can a modern man’s autonomous self be formed but also his masculinity can be authenticated and revitalized. They thus forged new ties to “men of feelings” in the world based on qing as a more universal feeling compatible with cosmopolitan moral principles. The third parameter concerns the changing epistemological base for measuring one’s level of intellect and quality of thought, which carries more weight for male writers and intellectuals than men of other classes and professions. As Western scientific discourses were gaining epistemological ground during the Chinese enlightenment, the May Fourth generation intended to use them to replace Confucian classics as the fundamental knowledge base and criteria by which to measure individuals’ intellect and acculturation. Some used imported scientific discourses to renew ideas on love ethics and sexual morality. Writers, translators, and literary critics made creative and fruitful (albeit not always accurate) explorations into Western texts of various disciplines – ranging from evolution theory, biological, medical, and natural sciences, to philosophy and literature – as literary and cultural studies of heart/mind and moral guidance for love and sex. The May Fourth intellectuals also carried out linguistic reforms to reshape Chinese minds and hearts. New linguistic expressions were required for newer and more cosmopolitan qing. They used neologisms, such as aiqing 愛情 and lian’ai 戀愛, to express a new topos of romantic love. Hu Shi was one of the earliest users of aiqing. He used qing to describe the passion and sentimentality of male protagonists in older novels but chose a neologism, aiqing, for the title of his new vernacular poem, “Love’s Woe” (愛情與痛苦), published in Weekly Comments (Meizhou pinglun) in 1919. Similarly, Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) made differentiations of two loves: “Fengliu 風流 (amorous escapades) in old [Chinese] novels and qing’ai 情愛 (romantic passion) in the new [Western] ones” (Guo Moruo 1958, 113). While individual characters of ai, qing, lian that compose the neologisms aiqing and lian’ai already existed in classical Chinese, aiqing was a loanword from Japan. This is because the particular combination of ai and qing first appeared in the Japanese language, which used Chinese characters to represent a Western style of romantic love, and then such usage was borrowed back to the Chinese language around the turn of the twentieth century. The feelings expressed by the neologisms, from deep pleasure to pain and longing, which Hu Shi described as aiqing in his poem, overlap considerably with Chinese qing 情 (passions), si 思 (longing), and yu 欲 (desire) in scholarbeauty romances and butterfly fiction. However, these words were new in the sense that such new combinations in vernacular Chinese not only reflected but also shaped the changing view of heterosexual romance among the May Fourth young men to emphasize intensity of passions, 281

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exclusivity of the relationship, and mutual devotion as checkmarks for an authentic modern romantic masculinity. Another catchy neologism, lingrou yizhi 靈肉一致 (union of flesh and soul), served as the key word and guiding principle for modern ethics of love. Besides the demand for mutual devotion of lovers physically and spiritually, it also dictated the primacy of soul over flesh in love. Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923), a Japanese literary critic and scholar, was a key figure in introducing this concept to Chinese intellectual circles. Kuriyagawa’s phallocentric analysis of heterosexual relationships divides the evolution of love into three stages: first, the pursuit of flesh, in which a man behaves bestially, copulating with any woman; second, the pursuit of soul, in which a man idolizes a woman and loves her spiritually; third, the union of flesh and soul, in which a man only has sex with a woman he is in love with. According to Kuriyagawa, Eastern cultures did not have the same romantic feelings as those in the West; while European men have reached the third stage, men of Eastern cultures are mostly still stuck in the first stage (quoted in Pan 2015, 114). Despite disagreement about what stage Chinese men were in and to what extent they should constrain carnal desire, May Fourth writers in general shared Kuriyagawa’s concern about the negative associations of sexual desire with the bestial realm, primitive culture, and low level of civilization, but many equated “spiritual love” to men’s rational control of sexual desire in debates about sexual morality. Debates about love, sex, and marriage betrayed worries among the May Fourth intellectuals about modern love that may throw off the balance between freedom and self-discipline, between irrational passions and social responsibilities. In 1918, Hu Shi proposed a new principle in New Youth that primed romantic love as the basis for choosing spouses and sexual partners. Lan Gongwu (藍公武, 1887–1957) questioned this proposal. He argued that love based on passion and physical pleasure is often blind and changeable; only when one’s feelings are morally refined and turned into the love of the other’s renge 人格 (personality) can such feelings be regarded as true love (Lan 1919, 403). Hu Shi’s reply reached agreement with Lan on necessary moral sanctions. In line with the ongoing eugenics and evolutionary discourse, May Fourth intellectuals often emphasized the responsibilities of modern men, asking men to constrain sexual desire and take their duties as fathers seriously. Hu Shi attacked irresponsible men: “If I were infected with syphilis and caused my son to be permanently deaf, blind, or crippled, should he love and respect me?” (1919b, 523–4). In “What’s Required of Us as Fathers Today,” Lu Xun expressed similar views on filial piety, male sexuality, eugenics to underscore moral codes which a modern man should observe (2003, 56). This demand on modern men’s practice of “union of flesh and soul” somewhat shifted procreating and parenting responsibilities from Confucian demand on female chastity and women’s domestic roles. This shift held the key to the May Fourth vision of a bettered Chinese humanity. As a differentiation from men of feelings from earlier generations, the May Fourth generation legitimized the modernness of performing romantic masculinity by linking it to Western knowledge, people, and practice. They explored Western texts of various disciplines as literary studies of heart/mind and rationalized moral guidance for the new generation’s modern sex, love, and marriage, in contrast to traditional literati and butterfly writers, whose “outdated” feelings lacked bolstering of modern knowledge and self-control (Lei 2022, 109–12). To sum up, checkmarks for an authentic neoromantic masculinity required a man to oppose the Confucian extended family system and embrace the nuclear family, to observe exclusivity of his relationship and mutual devotion, to express his sincere passions with vernacular rather than classical Chinese, and to acquire a scientific outlook and center passions and emotions within rational control. 282

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The New Sensationalists and Middlebrow Masculinity The May Fourth influence waned after the mid-1920s, and the subsequent decade was a turbulent era filled with increasing brutality of various policing forces, Japanese invasions, imperialist suppression and anti-imperialist protests, escalating activities of secret societies and criminal organizations, and finally, ongoing power struggles between warlords, the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party), and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Despite political violence and social disturbance, the glamorous cosmopolis of Shanghai became China’s new literary center in the late 1920s. In Shanghai, writers and journalists, together with doctors, lawyers, and clerks, were among the modern professions that grew into a distinct socioeconomic middle class in the 1920s. The KMT government officially identified them as “free professionals” (自 由職業者) (Xu 2000, 2), but their freedom was rather restricted amid the convoluted political, ideological, and economic tensions. Their lives and careers were endangered by violence. The New Sensationalists (新感覺派) were emerging young writers and artists in Shanghai who gathered to discuss modern global aesthetic trends to better capture urban youth’s perceptions of the exhilarating metropolis. Lou Shiyi 樓適夷 (1905–2001), a leftist critic, used this term to satirize this group’s self-centered writing and their materialistic lifestyle without concern for the masses (1931, 4). Indeed, unlike their contemporary leftist writers, whose works were charged with Marxist slogans and revolutionary ideology, the New Sensationalists treated revolution as a novel subject matter to experiment with rather than a guiding principle for creative works. They attempted to disengage from politics, at least not to pick political sides. Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗 (1905–1940) and Mu Shiying 穆時英 (1912–1940) were two leading New Sensationalist writers who took issues with tension of urban life as middlebrow men would experience it, specifically in terms of the emasculation complex elicited by an unfulfilled desire for the Modern Girl in the oppressive racial and class hierarchies. Mu Shiying’s works exemplify an acute awareness of class and excel at revealing victimhood of middlebrow Chinese men. His story “Shanghai foxtrot” (Shanghai de hubuwu), for example, simultaneously captures lurking dangers behind visual attractions: the moon casts “dark gray shadows of trees and crowded shadows of villages” on the plain as “the sea surges with waves of crime and evil,” and a priest in Moore Memorial Church prays for men and women doomed to hell (1996a, 249). The urban space, filled with the latest modern architecture and technology, physically isolates and emotionally estranges the city dwellers: they are swallowed by tall buildings and “vomited to the front gate,” “lifted up by elevators like goods,” or lost “like headless flies” at the traffic lights. Mu creates a continuum of hierarchical human geography – British bankers and American tycoons, Chinese politicians, Sikh policemen, White Russian refugees, Filipino bandsmen, sailors, laborers, Communist agitators, dangerous criminals, fashionable women, and sex workers – to remind readers of racial, class, and sexual conflicts and the imminent danger of a chaotic era. In a cityscape shrouded by danger and allure, Mu does not focus on a single character or plot. Instead, he delineates the victimization of a few Chinese men from different walks of life one night. Mu first condemns gang violence as a recurring cause of urban men’s deaths. He then identifies capitalism as another detrimental force, especially to poor laborers. His criticism of capitalist exploitation is rather explicit: “[the new buildings] are burying the laborer’s strength, his blood and his life underneath” (1996a, 255). While this criticism is reminiscent of the leftist stance, Mu does not hold the leftists’ sanitized view of the poor as morally pure. In fact, poor people in his stories are equally deceptive, as the story of another victimizer shows: a poor elderly woman plots with her daughter-in-law to lure in a writer for money. Yet the ultimate danger, particularly harmful to middlebrow men, predictably comes in the form of 283

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an unscrupulous modern woman. Among the female perpetrators, Mr. Liu’s wife, Rongzhu, is a typical Modern Girl who indulges in a hedonistic lifestyle and has a one-night stand with a Belgian jeweler who pretends to be a French gentleman. Mr. Liu himself, ironically named Youde 有德 (virtuous), is ridiculed for his Chinese male “virtue” of doting on his unfaithful wife. Mu reveals the true identity of the counterfeit Frenchman to mock the Chinese Modern Girl’s blind worship of foreign men. By foregrounding the blurred nationalities of foreigners in China, the author underscores how colonial masculinity conspires with the Modern Girl to inflict injury upon her middle-class Chinese husband. Liu Na’ou similarly explores the middlebrow Chinese man’s vulnerability, with a stronger emphasis placed on racial hierarchy. Liu’s short story “Etiquette and Hygiene” (Liyi yu weisheng, 1929) presents a lawyer named Yao Qiming’s failed pursuit of modern masculinity when measured against Western standards of social etiquette and sexual hygiene. The story begins with Yao’s self-diagnosis of a modern disease: phlegmatic melancholy (黏液質的憂鬱), which intensifies his sensitivity to women, heightens his libido, and causes sadness about unfulfilled sexual desires. Navigating his way through hierarchical locations, from the sunlit Bund area to the dark and smelly Chinese business district, Yao feasts his senses on women of different races. The author deliberately links the locations in Shanghai to odors of women from different races, the hygienic levels the odors represent, and the availability of these women to the protagonist. While Yao can only look at a blond girl from afar in Bund, a Slavic saleslady in the pharmacy seems more accessible, and he can get close enough to smell “a wild taste like roast lamb from the Caucasus” (2016b, 94). Based purely on smell, Yao immediately differentiates the Slavic woman racially from White women: “Her race is not as advanced in machinery, so they are not as cold and mechanical” (2016b, 94). However, Yao’s accumulated libido can only find sexual relief in a Chinese prostitute from a gloomy, filthy, and stinky brothel (2016b, 96). The author uses sensory mapping of different women’s odors as a racialized yardstick of modernity. There are two conflicting value systems at work in the male protagonist: he is obviously familiar with Western standards of hygiene and etiquette but craves a more “primitive” human connection. With this set of hygienic standards in mind, Yao initially places the odorless and distant White women as the most desirable by modern standards, followed by the Slavic woman, and finally, the Chinese prostitute. However, his sharpened sense of smell tells him another story and points to a set of rules opposite to the so-called modern standards of etiquette and hygiene (Lei 2022, 126–7). Yao renders the odorless female body, and the detached emotions that allegedly constitute an integral part of modernity, as “cold and mechanical.” In contrast, the “foul odor” of human bodies in the brothel confirms its poor hygiene levels, but the Chinese prostitute offers him much-needed human warmth and basic human connection. Highly sensitive to the racial hierarchy and its signs, he sees himself sadly mirrored in the Chinese prostitute: an incompetent competitor in the game of urban romance, an outdated player who attaches too much emotion to “modern professions” and lacks the efficiency that the modern economy requires. The deeper roots of Yao’s melancholy are not exposed until the middle of the story, when the author reveals Yao’s unfaithful wife, Keqiong, as the cause of his sexual frustration and impotency. Keqiong’s hybrid looks and mannerisms attract Western and Chinese men alike. One of her suitors is a Frenchman, who offers Yao a trade: an antique store for some precious time with Keqiong. Up to this point, Yao has been complacent with the Frenchman’s “connoisseurship” of Oriental women. This “offer,” however, leaves him with “trembling lips.” Initially, the humiliation vexes Yao, and he wants the Frenchman penalized by law, but soon he determines that “the law would not be applicable to this case, at least not in modern times. Perhaps this is the new social etiquette” (2016b, 118). The incident verifies Yao’s earlier realization that he is 284

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an outmoded and inadequate player in the modern urban space. He grieves over the inadequacy of the law in resolving issues in modern romance as well as his own incapacity as a divorce lawyer to override norms dictated by colonial hierarchies. More than mere anxiety and humiliation, Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying also more explicitly depict male violence as a revenge by deploying the textual tactic of “surrogate violence” to project their ambivalence about male aggression as ways to assert masculinities. In stories such as Mu’s “Our World” (1996b) and Liu’s “Attempted Murder” (2016b), the authors present male violence steeped in fear, anger, and desire (Lei 2022, 133–9). However, middle-class characters that the authors identify as the “self” are not depicted as violent. Rather, the authors feature sexually frustrated lower-class young men as the protagonists and violent “others,” who meticulously account murders and rapes they committed, and justify these atrocities as the only way to revenge privileged male rivals and the unattainable Modern Girl, the unattainable love interest (Liu 2016a; Mu 1996b). As a narrative strategy, surrogate violence in both stories involves the change of narrators. Initially, the author conflates the authorial “self” with the violent male protagonist so he can be fully immersed in the craze of violence and its sensations through the surrogate/protagonist. But after a minor character – a writer in Mu’s story and a lawyer in Liu’s – interjects as a more reliable narrator, the author switches his identification to the latter, who questions the legitimacy of violence. Such a switch of the narrative perspective allows the author to present his ambivalence about violent means to achieve true masculinities. Concentrating on the cerebral males’ injured psyche, the New Sensationalists partook in redefining a vulnerable middlebrow intellectual masculinity amid the hierarchical class, gender, and racial economies of Shanghai in the late 1920s to the 1930s. In the cosmopolitan and commercialized cultural sphere complicit with political power, the New Sensationalists deftly crossed the boundaries between the higher and lower cultural spheres with innovative portrayals of eroticism and violence. However, they were doomed to compromise their early idealism and optimism to carve a “middle way” for freedom of expression. They had to find a balance between depicting eroticized violence and condoning it, often via detached narrators, to get past the censorship of the era. These alienated, self-conscious modern scribes, trapped in the excitement and alienation in their own minds, lived in fear of selling out their masculinity and thus failed to challenge existing social codes. Their writings, which sought to explore and challenge, ultimately appear to have upheld the gender, class, and racial status quo. The spectacle of the Modern Girl, therefore, was a means for male intellectuals to aestheticize violence and to anesthetize themselves to a sense of impending panic, danger, and death.

Conclusion Male intellectuals’ perceptions of masculinity intersected in complex ways with race, class, and national identity. This chapter has presented the male gender not as an assumed subject but as a problematic gender construct that needs constant maintenance and negotiation in matrices of both intra- (between men of different social categories, such as race and class) and intergender (between men and women) relations. It has extrapolated textual tactics of varied groups of male writers and scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who aspired to reassert the male authorial self and subjectivity against the pursuits of gender equality, national strength, and cosmopolitan citizenship. Their ideas and articulations of modern masculinities drew upon competing conceptualizations of gender and society in Chinese tradition as well as in Western Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideas. Central to their remasculinizing endeavors was a martial valor applied to what I call the modern trinity of Chinese intellectual masculinity: shen (body-person), xin (heart-mind), and bi 笔 (pen/words), which broadly 285

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correspond to the bodily, affective, and aesthetic dimensions thereof. These three dimensions comprise an idealistic self-image of a scholar warrior that shoulders multiple conflicting roles and goals of asserting individuality versus promoting national solidarity, emulating Western modernity versus denouncing foreign aggression, discarding Chinese tradition versus resorting to its legacy, boosting martial valor versus protesting violence, upholding Enlightenment rationalism versus professing irrational sentiments, and sustaining male control versus advancing a feminist agenda.

References Dawson, Graham. 1994. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinity. London: Routledge. Gimpel, Denise. 2006. “Freeing the Mind through the Body: Women’s Thoughts on Physical Education in Late Qing and Early Republican China.” Nan Nü 8, no. 2: 316–58. Guo Moruo 郭沫若. 1958. Guo Moruo wenji 郭沫若文集 (Literary Anthology of Guo Moruo). Vol. 6. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Hinsch, Bret. 2013. Masculinities in Chinese History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hu Shi 胡適. 1919a. “Aiqing yu tongku” 愛情與痛苦 (Love’s Woe). Meizhou pinglun 每周評論 (Weekly Comments), July 7. Hu Shi 胡適. 1919b. “Wode erzi” 我的兒子 (My Son). Meizhou pinglun 每周評論 (Weekly Comments), August 3. Huang, Martin. 2006. Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Huang Zunxian 黃尊憲. 2005. “Chujun ge” 出軍歌 (The Army Songs). In Huang Zunxian quanji 黃尊憲 全集 (Complete Collection of Huang Zunxian). Vol. 1, 221–3. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Lan Zhixian (Lan Gongwu) 藍志先. 1919. “Lan Zhixian da Hu Shi” 藍志先答胡適 (Lan Zhixian’s Response to Hu Shi). Xin Qingnian 新青年 (New Youth) 6, no. 4: 403. Lei, Jun. 2020. “Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China.” Modern China 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700420976603. Lei, Jun. 2022. Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Chinese Masculinities in Modern China, 1890–1930. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Liang Qichao 梁--. 1994. Xinmin shuo 新民說 (On the New People). Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe. Liang Qichao 梁--. 1999a. “Aiguo ge sizhang” 愛國歌四章 (Four Patriotic Songs). In Liang Qichao quanji 梁---- (Complete Works of Liang Qichao). Vol. 18, 5428. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe. Liang Qichao 梁--. 1999b. “Zhongguo zhi wushidao” 中國之武士道 (Chinese Bushido). In Liang Qichao quanji 梁---- (Complete Works of Liang Qichao). Vol. 5, 1376–423. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe. Liu Na’ou劉吶鷗. 2016a. “Liyi yu weisheng” 禮儀與衛生 (Etiquette and Hygiene). In Liu Na’ou xiaoshu ji 劉吶鷗小說集 (Collection of Liu Na’ou’s Fiction), 91–120. Beijing: Dangdang Digital. Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗. 2016b. “Sharen weisui” 殺人未遂 (Attempted Murder). In Liu Na’ou xiaoshu ji 劉吶 鷗小說集 (Collection of Liu Na’ou’s Fiction), 172–86. Beijing: Dangdang Digital. Liu Shipei 劉師培. 1936. Zhongguo minzu zhi 中國民族志 (Chinese Ethnography). Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe. Lou Shiyi 樓適夷. 1931. “Zuopin yu zuojia: Shi Zhecun de xianganjue zhuyi” 作品與作家：施蟄存 的新感覺主義 (Writers and Works: Shi Zhecun’s New Sensationalism). Wenxue xinwen 文學新聞 (Literary News), no. 33. Louie, Kam. 2002. Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. London: Cambridge University Press. Lu Xun 魯迅. 2003. “What Is Required of Us as Fathers Today.” Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. In Lu Xun: Selected Works. Vol. 2, 56–71. Beijing: Foreign Language Press. Luo Fuhui 羅福慧. 2001. “Qingmo minzhu Zhongguo ren dui huanghuo lun de fanying” 清末民初 對黃禍論的反應 (Chinese Reactions to Yellow Peril in Late Qing and Early Republican China). Jindai shi xuekan 近代史學刊 (Anthology of Academic Journal Articles of Modern History), no. 1: 1938–56.

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Modern Intellectual Masculinities in Transformation Mu Shiying 穆時英. 1996a. “Shanghai de hubuwu” 上海的狐步舞 (Shanghai Foxtrot). In Xin’ganjue pai shengshou: Mu Shiying xiaoshuo quanji 新感覺派聖手：穆時英小說全集 (A Master Hand of New Sensationalism: Complete Fiction of Mu Shiying), 241–59. Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe. Mu Shiying 穆時英. 1996b. “Zanmen de shijie” 咱們的世界 (Our World). In Xin’ganjue pai shengshou: Mu Shiying xiaoshuo quanji 新感覺派聖手：穆時英小說全集 (A Master Hand of New Sensationalism: Complete Fiction of Mu Shiying), 17–29. Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe. Pan, Lynn. 2015. When True Love Came to China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Schillinger, Nicolas. 2016. The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China: The Art of Governing Soldiers. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Song, Geng. 2004. The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sun, Lung-Kee 孫隆基. 2003. “Qingji minzu zhuiyi yu Huangdi chongbai zhi faming” 清季民族主義與 黃帝崇拜之發明 (Late Qing Nationalism and the Invention of the Yellow Emperor Cult). Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 (Historical Research), no. 3: 68–79. Xu, Xiaoqun. 2000. Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937. London: Cambridge University Press. Yang, Jui-Sung 揚瑞松. 2010. Bingfu, huanghuo, yu shuishi—xifang shiye zhong de Zhongguo xingxiang yu jindai Zhongguo guozu lunshu xiangxiang 病夫, 黃禍與睡獅—“西方”視野中的中國形 象与近代中國國族論述想像 (The sick man, the Yellow Peril and the sleeping lion: China in Western discourses and the imagined modern Chinese nation). Taipei: Zhengda chubanshe. Yu Chien-ming 游鑒明. 2009. Yundong chang neiwai: jindai huadong diqu de nüzi tiyu 運動場內外： 近代華東地區的女子體育 (Inside and Outside of the Playground: Women’s Physical Education in Modern Eastern China), 1895–1937. Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindai yanjiusuo. Zhang Zhaotong 張肇桐. 1991. “Ziyou jiehun” 自由結婚 (Free Marriage). In Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi 中國近代小說大系 (Compendium of Modern Chinese Fiction), edited by Zhang Peiheng 章培 恆 and Wang Jiquan 王繼權. Vol. 25, 103–286. Nanchang: Baihua wenyi chubanshe.

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24 NORA IN CHINA Hu Ying

More than a character in a play, Nora has been a worldwide cultural phenomenon from her first appearance on the Norwegian stage in 1879. The theater critic James Gibbons Huneker was prescient in his review of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House “that slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world” (1905, 186), as indeed it would for a century and more. Even though Ibsen proclaimed himself averse to adaptation of his play by “less tender and competent hands,” the worldwide reverberation of Nora’s departure turns out to be not so much echo as repeated transformations: actors were known to refuse to play the final act as written; Ibsen himself was forced to pen an alternate ending in which Nora does not leave, an ending that he soon repudiated; and drastically different plotlines of the original play have played out around the world (Janss 2017; Kano 2001). Ibsen was first introduced to Chinese readers in the early days of the twentieth century in overseas student journals. In 1918, a special issue on the playwright in the leading journal New Youth ignited a veritable Ibsen craze. The special issue contained a full translation of A Doll’s House and excerpts of An Enemy of the People and Little Eyolf, and in the next few years, translations of Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and The Lady from the Sea also became available. During the heydays of the May Fourth era, Nora became the iconic embodiment of the modern subject as a new creed of individualism intersected with a radical reconceptualization of gender. Three themes clearly dominate in Nora’s reception in China: individualism, women’s liberation, and the West. In debates over the years that follow, these themes manifest themselves in different guises and are often deeply entangled. Thus, in the early stage, individualism was seen as the perfect weapon to shatter the Confucian mores as women’s liberation became a potent symbol of China’s march toward the modern world. But in the 1930s and 1940s, as China found itself besieged by foreign invasions and civil wars, individual freedom came to be seen as selfishness, epitomized by the Westernized modern woman. Thus, Nora (as the play was known then) became a touchstone in a series of intense debates concerning notions of individual freedom versus traditional ethics, and women’s liberation versus national salvation. In a century marked by wars and revolutions in China, Nora took on ambiguous, sometimes conflicting, connotations. Even in contemporary China, a century after Nora’s introduction, the figure of the woman outside the family could still generate heated debates. DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-31

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Shaping the discussion early on is a lead article in the special issue on “Ibsenism” by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), a young scholar at that time, freshly back from studying philosophy at Cornell and Columbia. Soon to become a leading voice in the New Culture Movement, Hu Shi enthusiastically championed individualism and what he termed a “realistic” approach toward life and society. Clearly influenced by the dominant interpretation of Ibsen of his time represented by George Bernard Shaw, Hu Shi advocated the Enlightenment project of stripping away the masks and falsehood that mankind has placed on frightening truth. He thus applauds Nora for “the courage to take off the mask, say goodbye to the stage manager [her husband] and jump down from the stage to live her own life” (Hu 1918b). In sharp contrast to a doll manipulated and animated by external forces such as law, religion, and morality, Nora’s humanity is defined in terms self-determination and sovereignty. Her awakening gives her the moral courage to face the truth, to stand up against hypocritical social conventions and false moral principles, and ultimately, to leave the house of pretense. Thus, in answer to her husband, who tries to hold her back by proclaiming a woman’s sacred duties to home and children, Nora asserts: “I have other duties equally sacred, my duties toward myself” (Ibsen 1879, 116). And a new conception of the individual was introduced to China when Hu Shi highlighted her words in his introduction. Part of a pantheon of Western female figures introduced to China at that time, Nora’s apparent difference from normative Chinese womanhood catapulted a radical reconceptualization of gender. Unlike some of the political and militant figures such as Joan of Arc, Madame Roland, and Sofia Perovskaia, Nora appears to be a woman of the home, someone who presides over the hearth and dinner table. The impact of her departure from the home is, for that reason, all the more revolutionary. A few months before the New Youth special issue on Ibsen, in a speech given at the Beijing Women’s Normal College on “American Women,” Hu Shi expounded a conception of modern womanhood very similar to the Nora at the end of Ibsen’s play. Extrapolating an essential quality in an American woman he met at a dinner party and contrasting her with the Chinese and British ladies also present at the table, Hu Shih observed that this woman was a distinctly different being as she “held a life view that transcends being a good wife and wise mother. . . . She considered herself a full human being, with many responsibilities to fulfill and worthy causes to contribute to.” Notably, while this woman was no more than 30 years of age, she “exhibited a tough outlook and stubborn spirit . . . a woman on her own, traveling thousands of miles, not afraid of hardship or danger” (Hu 1918a). This fiercely independent image of the modern woman was modified considerably once she was transplanted to China. In a one-act play, “Life’s Greatest Event” (終身大事), written by none other than Hu Shi himself and published in the New Youth in 1919, the protagonist, Tian Yamei, is a tender young woman (rather than “tough in outlook”), and she does not so much stand alone as running off with her lover. As she prepares to leave her parents, who have refused to give consent to her marrying the man of her choice, her departure words faintly echo Nora’s: “This is the most important event of my life and I should be the one to make the decision. I’m leaving with Mr. Chen in his car. Goodbye for now” (Hu 2013). In this early attempt at modern drama, Hu Shi thus introduces a significant plot change from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: instead of leaving alone, the protagonist joins her lover, and instead of walking out of a bourgeois marriage, Nora’s Chinese counterpart walks out on her birth home. The dramatic conflict thus shifted from gender equality within a marriage to adult children rebelling against parental authority, an authority that Confucian ethics long considered to be sacrosanct and obedience to it, the very basic definition of a human being. Despite the change in the plotline, the social blowback was not dissimilar to what Ibsen faced with his early casts: Hu Shi’s first draft (in English) meant as a skit for a students’ gathering was not enacted, and its Chinese 289

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version commissioned by a women’s college also could not be staged at first, as no one was willing to take the lead role. And yet within a few years, as a sea change swept over China, love became “a symbol of freedom, autonomy and equality” for the May Fourth generation (Lee 2007, 5). “Life’s Greatest Event,” along with A Doll’s House, became very popular on school campuses, as young men and young women enacted onstage as well as in their real lives the Chinese version of “slamming the door.” In cities large and small, young actors put on A Doll’s House and came into conflict with societal forces: in Beijing in 1926, police stormed a performance on the ground that men and women performing together was corrupting public morals; in 1935, the lead actress was accused of harming morality and sacked from her day job as a schoolteacher, although the school was forced to rescind its decision amid public outcry. Partly because of the highly publicized conflict, the year 1935 became known as the Year of Nora, with still more performances and discussions in media and in public forums. Even as the heady pursuit of love and independence swept through the land, one skeptical voice insisted on other considerations more vital to Nora’s enterprise. Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881– 1936) had earlier championed the fierce individualism represented by Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, who proclaims that “[t]he strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone” (Tam 2019, 2–4). In his 1923 speech to women college students on “What Happens after Nora Walks Out,” however, he gives an ominous prediction: “Logically, she really has only two options: to fall into degradation or to return home” (Lu 2017, 256–62). Lu Xun’s insistence on the need for women to have economic rights offers a sobering antidote to the enthusiastic embrace of Nora’s iconoclastic slamming of the door on the traditional family. Strikingly, he does not offer any solution to his young audience, except for a facetious suggestion that “dreams are what we need if we cannot find a way out,” or the rather-distant hope that “for parents in the future to exercise their authority to liberate their own children . . . and divide up the family property and share it evenly between sons and daughters” (Lu 2017, 258–9). Without quite engaging Ibsen’s Nora, Lu Xun’s speech nonetheless changed the trajectory of Nora’s discursive path in China, from individualism and freedom to economic considerations and social transformation (Chien 1995). In his 1925 short story “Regrets for the Past,” Lu Xun portrays a young couple brought together by “free love.” At first, the female protagonist, Zijun, bravely echoes Nora in saying “I am my own mistress. None of them has any right to interfere with me,” and the male protagonist, Juansheng, enthusiastically holds forth “on the tyranny of the family, the need to break with tradition, the equality of men and women, Ibsen” (Lu 1972, 198). But soon enough, shunned by society and finding themselves in desperate financial straits, Juansheng announces that he does not love Zijun anymore, and Zijun is taken back to her father’s home and quietly dies. The bleak ending underlines Lu Xun’s insistence on realistic considerations and the need for larger social reform. Although the basic thrust of his short story is to critique the romantic image promulgated by works like Hu Shi’s Life’s Greatest Event, there is a surprising similarity in the conception of the Chinese New Woman by these leading male intellectuals: she is young and naïve, not able to think or live on her own. In the decades following Ibsen’s introduction, a slew of plays and novels was written in imitation. Known as the Nora plays, they include A Shrew (潑婦, 1922) and After Coming Home (回家以後, 1922) by Ouyang Yuqian 歐陽予倩 (1889–1962), Wang Zhaojun (王昭君, 1923) and Zhuo Wenjun (卓文君, 1924) by Guo Moruo郭沫若 (1892–1978), Miss Youlan (幽蘭女 士, 1928) by Chen Dabei 陳大悲, and many others. Either incorporating particular elements such as concubinage or reinterpreting traditional legends, these plays try to reimagine the Nora plot within the Chinese context. In fiction, the most influential story is perhaps The Family 290

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(家, 1931) by Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005), which chronicles the life in a traditional large family in the 1920s. Presenting a gallery of young men and young women stirred by the ideals of love and independence from the New Culture Movement, the novel depicts their different relationships to the patriarchal family. Most touching is the portrayal of the obedient eldest son trapped in an arranged marriage while loving another, and his devoted wife duty-bound to fulfill the wishes of the family elders. Toward the end of the novel, she dies unnecessarily in childbirth as a result of following the blind superstitions of those elders. As he witnesses more young lives sacrificed on the altar of filial obedience, the youngest son decides to leave, to “fly out of the bird cage, never to return” (Ba Jin 1972). It would seem that in Nora’s initial introduction and the ensuing debate over her fate in China, the leading voices were all from male intellectuals. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, as enumerable young women walked out on their oppressive home environment in search of educational opportunities, romantic love, and individual fulfillment, many of them found their voice in writing about this radically new experience, aided in no small part by the vernacular movement that was underway at that time. The Nora theme of stepping out of the family was a mainstay in the rise of modern Chinese women writers, in their literary works as much as in their personal lives. Thus, in many autobiographical or semiautobiographical works, we find vivid descriptions and reflections from Nora’s counterparts in China. In a 1922 play “Whose Crime Is This” (這是誰之罪), Shi Pingmei 石評梅 (1902–1928) uses the newly introduced genre of the spoken drama 話劇 to represent a typical conflict for her generation: the male protagonist is privately engaged to a classmate he loves but pressured by his parents to marry another. In the end, both the intended bride and the girlfriend take their own lives, a tragic ending that points to society as well as the weak-kneed male protagonist as the culprit. In the short story “Separation” (隔絕, 1924) by Feng Yuanjun 馮沅君 (1900–1974), for another example, the first-person narrator proclaims her fervent commitment to the ideal of love and freedom but also reveals the painful psychological conflict between her desire to escape an arranged marriage and her strong emotional attachment to her mother, an attachment that could not be easily dispatched by the critique of filial piety. Going beyond the slam of the door, women writers delved deep into what happens after their Noras (or they themselves) take leave of the traditional family. The writer Bai Wei 白薇 (1894–1987) gives perhaps the most dramatic embodiment and literary renditions of Nora’s difficult path. Filled with desire, incest, and murder, her three-act play Breaking Out of the Ghost Tower (打出幽靈塔, 1928) is a melodrama staging the conflict between a villainous patriarch and a multitude of women he has abused and ends with a climatic fatal shooting of the father by his own illegitimate daughter. The author’s autobiographical work, A Tragic Life (悲劇生涯, 1936), gives all the painful and authentic after-story in the pursuit of love and independence – the constant financial difficulties, the physical ailment from venereal disease contracted from a lover, and the wrecking isolation of the modern woman after she severs ties with the traditional family structure. The most important writer to emerge from this cohort of New Women is, without question, Xiao Hong 蕭紅 (1911–1942). Her personal life charts a tragic arch all too familiar: she, too, ran away from an arranged marriage, frequently found herself in financial difficulties, and repeatedly experienced sexual and emotional abuse. In her literary production, except a few early autobiographical pieces that give unflinching portrayal of the devastating reality of what happens to this Nora after she leaves home, her major works – Field of Life and Death (生死場, 1935) and Tales of Hulan River (呼蘭河傳, 1940) – paint a large canvas of ordinary people in a northeast small town, their brutalized lives, unrelenting suffering, and psychological numbness. In one crucial aspect, Xiao Hong’s work gives a profound answer to the repeated question about what happens to Nora after she leaves home: she would be homelessness, not 291

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just from a homeland lost to the invading Japanese troops, but also from the acuity of a deeply alienated female consciousness, always already marginalized in the traditional home, and all the more so for having walked out on it. Even as the stories of women seeking independence proliferated, by the late 1920s, another trend was becoming more visible: after this Nora leaves home, her journey would not stop at the pursuit of personal fulfillment; instead, she would devote herself to a revolutionary cause. In 1928, Xie Bingying 謝冰瑩 (1906–2000) published her War Diaries (從軍日記), to be followed by A Woman Soldier’s Story (一個女兵的自傳) in 1936. In her revolt against an arranged marriage, in her pursuit of educational opportunities, and even in her powerfully ambivalent feelings toward her mother, Xie’s story is similar to the experience of many others. Where it stands out is in the larger cause that is now hitched to the young woman’s pursuit of personal freedom. Her works chronicle her participation in the Nationalist Revolutionary Army and the Northern Expedition against the warlords. Patriotism was the banner under which many young women like her gathered, a worthy cause that gave justification for their unconventional behavior and a legitimate outlet for their ambition beyond the role of wife and mother. A still more famous personage illustrates this trend powerfully. In 1935, a major production of A Doll’s House in Shanghai featured the female lead by Lan Ping 藍萍 (1914– 1991), a left-leaning young actress who would soon join the Communists at their Yan’an base. In time, Lan Ping would change her name to Jiang Qing 江青 and become the fourth wife of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the chairman of the Communist Party. Jiang Qing eventually came to have an outsized political role in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and her early embodiment of Nora lent grist for contemporary playwrights interested in the confluence of changing gender roles and the Chinese Revolution (Chen 2002, 226–9). Lan Ping/Jiang Qing’s early transition from a bourgeois rebel to a bona fide revolutionary provides a prime example of many young people of the post–May Fourth generation as the line between realist theater and real life became increasingly blurred. That the Chinese Nora would end up a revolutionary is at once a response to wartime conditions of the 1930s and 1940s as well as a reflection of Chinese cultural and social traditions. For while individual autonomy was the key concept symbolized by Nora and enthusiastically embraced by many in the May Fourth era, the very idea was anathema to traditional conceptions of relational personhood, so much so that it was disputed almost as soon as it was introduced. Even Hu Shi himself, barely two years after introducing Ibsenism, felt compelled to distinguish between what he called “egoism” that seeks self-gratification and escape from social ills, and “true individuality” that he defined by two characteristics: independent thinking and social responsibility (Hu 1920). By the late 1920s, criticism of individualism was mounting, so much so that the distinction between egoism and true individualism that Hu Shi took pains to emphasize was becoming impossible to maintain. Indeed, Hu Shi himself would, in time, become the target of those railing against individualism. In literary production, as individualism increasingly took on negative connotations, more stress was being put on concerns with the society and the depiction of the masses. By the late 1930s, with increasing threat of total invasion by the Japanese, criticism of individualism became still more vehement and politicalized. In 1942, Guo Moruo again raised the question of what happens after Nora leaves home, this time with a pointed critique of contemporary feminine follies. After first endorsing the liberation of “a toy doll” to “an independent agent,” Guo quickly turns to ask: “The curtain comes down when Nora leaves home, thus leaving a question behind: Where exactly is Nora headed? Ibsen did not give much of an answer to this question. But our martyr Qiu Jin answered with her life” (Guo 1942, 469). Using Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875? – 1907) to recast Nora’s story, Guo 292

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emphasizes Qiu’s initial step of walking out on her husband and children nearly 40 years earlier. Qiu is then set up as the antithesis of contemporary women, who left the traditional home in pursuit of self-gratification rather than a grand cause. Quoting Qiu Jin’s words to “my two billion sisters” who were tied down by “silk sashes and embroidered ropes,” Guo derides so many New Women of today whose feet are no longer bound but whose heels are high, whose hair is no long sleeked back but is now permed . . . all those “silk sashes and embroidered ropes” have simply changed in style, their “bondage” just so much more trendy now. (1942, 470) Thus, Guo concludes, “the right answer” is to “fight for women’s liberation within the liberation of the entire society, and to take up women’s responsibilities in the liberation of the entire society” (1942, 470). Ultimately, according to Guo, the revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin gave the “right answer” because she “did not begrudge her own life in fulfilling these responsibilities” (1942, 470). Thus, the ultimate refutation of individualism is self-sacrifice, a clear indication that the call for individual freedom had by then completely lost legitimacy. Guo’s call for women to sacrifice themselves in national salvation takes on a distinct Marxian undertone as Guo himself was, at that time, working as a propagandist for the Communist Party, which was in a precarious alliance with the Nationalists in the war effort. And indeed, among the Communist ranks, there were many women who had rebelled against the traditional family and espoused the liberation cause. These were the Noras who may have at first walked out of their fathers’ houses to rebel against arranged marriages but who now had dedicated themselves to the Communist cause of liberating all of humanity. In their political journeys, the May Fourth spirit of individual freedom and women’s liberation became subsumed by the commands of the party. In the all-consuming political atmosphere, individual autonomy became equated with disloyalty to the cause as feminist concerns were increasingly seen as narrow-minded and unpatriotic (Wang 1999). After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, earlier periodic criticism of individualism became the norm. Although there were a few attempts at linking Ibsen’s anti-bourgeois and anarchist inclination with Marxian ideology, these were generally overshadowed by the criticism that his rebels did not stand with the masses. There is another line of Nora’s descendants in China whose departure from the traditional family did not become hitched to nationalism or Communism. This is admittedly a minor line of descent, but it is well represented by the works of Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (1920–1995), whose fiction became an instant sensation in the early 1940s in occupied Shanghai. In many of her stories, she depicts a home – usually a variation of an old and declining literati-official family headed by a weak patriarch or his various surrogates – as directly threatening to the female protagonist’ well-being. Dispensing with sentimentality that characterizes the generation before her, Chang depicts the traditional large family as rotten to the core and demonstrates the severely limited choices available to women. At one time or another, most of Eileen Chang’s female characters realize that home is uninhabitable, and they decide to leave. Some of them never make it, and some fall into degradation. Even so, a few of her characters in her fiction refuse to go back, and they become permanent roamers. One such figure is modeled after Chang’s own mother Huang Suqiong 黃素瓊 (1896–1956), who left her husband and two young children and went to Europe to study art. Another figure comes from Chang’s selfportrayal. With Chang as a second-generation Nora, her own fictional double inherited her mother’s legacy: “It was all because of her mother that, like a seaman’s child who always faced 293

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the sea, something goes wrong, Julie’s first thought is to go to sea” (2018, 258, translation modified). Unlike most May Fourth versions of Nora, Chang’s permanent roamer is not primarily motivated by love but by a rejection of a life without any chance of self-determination. Fiercely independent, she will not subject herself to those around her or even to those she falls in love with. Refusing to put any stock in the promises of religion, progress, revolution, or even love that pervaded early twentieth-century China, Chang gives her roamers no promising destination. In rendering a powerful critique of systematic oppression, falsehood, and pretense that make it impossible for human beings to live a humane life, her works echo Ibsen’s as they document the ills of a kind of dollhouse particular to twentieth-century China. Even more important, her stories chronicle the complex processes of the modern gendered subject exploring the world once she is outside the dollhouse, the fraught decisions, the many kinds of degradation, and the hard and long psychological path. Without knowing what the future brings, without knowing if she will arrive at a better place, she pushes ahead, motivated by her aspiration to live and by the value of life itself. Deeply skeptical of the illusion of easy solutions or the consolation of hope promised by ideologies of progress or revolution, she must face the naked reality of life and bear it with dignity. Alone, battered, and exhausted, she is often tempted to stay put and rest but then pushes forward. Without signing up for any grand causes, this may be the most realistic depiction of Nora after leaving behind the shelter of a family, whether bourgeois or Confucian. Although Chang’s roamers do not make speeches or strike an iconoclastic posture, they nonetheless carry on a fundamental May Fourth legacy that is centered on an ethics of autonomy rather than a morality based on obedience. Toward the later part of the twentieth century, the questions raised in A Doll’s House appeared in somewhat different guises in a new geopolitical context. In 1982, the Hong Kong popular romance writer Isabel Nee Yeh-su 亦舒 (b. 1946) published The First Half of My Life (我的前半生), a modern rewrite of Lu Xun’s “Regret for the Past,” featuring a third-generation Nora, so to speak. Using the same names, Zijun and Juansheng, for her protagonists as in Lu Xun’s short story, Yeh-su reimagines what would happen to the woman protagonist after her marriage dissolves. On the basic plot level, this Nora is not voluntarily walking out on the bourgeois family but is deserted by a husband who has found a new love. Rather than dying quietly at her father’s home as Lu Xun’s protagonist did, or lamenting poetically like an abandoned woman in traditional literati imagination, Yeh-su’s protagonist fights for financial and psychological independence, eventually achieving both, in the end even remarrying happily. In returning the focus to the institution of marriage, Yeh-su’s novel makes a partial return to the original conception of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In her realistic portrayal of women’s struggle for financial security and personal dignity, the story echoes Lu Xun’s concern expressed in his short story and his speech “What Happens after Nora Walks Out.” Unlike the May Fourth generation, however, the emphasis is no longer on the protagonist’s flight from the father’s home and finding independence via love. Instead, the main concern of the story is the survival of the woman on her own, without the support of a traditional or modern family. Still, from Lu Xun and Hu Shi, Yeh-su inherits a female protagonist who is naïve and innocent, well-educated, and well-bred. Even in her reaction to male desertion, she is all restraint and ladylike. The Nora of 1980s Hong Kong retains a good measure of traditional femininity even while incorporating modern independent features. Much of this changed in the 2017 mainland adaptation of Yeh-su’s novel for a popular television drama by the same title, featuring a fourth-generation Nora. Once again, the names of Lu Xun’s protagonists remain mostly intact. Set against the backdrop of gleaming high-rise office buildings and glitzy malls of contemporary Shanghai, the female protagonist begins as

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a comically silly and wealthy housewife, spending her days shopping and having manicures. Unlike her predecessor, she is not ladylike when she finds herself abandoned for another by her husband. Much of the series chronicles her gradual rise to independent woman step by painful (and comic) step. With the unstinting support from her best friend, the modern Zijun works from the bottom up, in time achieving success as a professional woman, and marries the male protagonist, who happens to be her best friend’s former boyfriend. Even as this Nora achieves an enviable measure of financial independence, she is clearly a product of postsocialist commercial culture, not a traditional proper lady or a stereotypical feminist. Even as Nora figures proliferate through several generations on the native Chinese soil, new introductions arrive from Ibsen’s homeland, revising earlier transplants of his play and generating new and different adaptations. In 2006, as part of the worldwide celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ibsen’s death, a flurry of Ibsen-related plays were staged in China, including A Doll’s House (jointly produced by Norwegian and Chinese actors), a dance show Hunting for Nora, and a new play by the Norwegian playwright Jesper Halle, Nora’s Children. During rehearsals for Nora’s Children, disagreements broke out between the Chinese director, Lin Zhaohua 林兆華 (b. 1936), known for his experimental works, and his Norwegian counterparts (Budde 2011). Apparently, Lin was intent on the staging of this play as an allegorical critique of past Chinese perception of Ibsen. Reflecting on the history of Ibsen in China, he said: We have been so used to thinking of A Doll’s House as a social problem play that we hardly ever considered it in terms of theater. People think of Ibsen as nothing but a realist . . . I do not want to be tied to this traditional interpretation. I want to be rid of Nora. (Beijing Morning Post April 26, 2006) The Chinese director was not alone in repudiating earlier reception of Ibsen and Nora as too narrowly realist and/or too overtly feminist (Qi 2016). Productions in recent years also tend to de-emphasize feminist and social concerns (Tam 2019). Critics typically cite Ibsen himself, who publicly disavowed any feminist agenda in a speech given in 1898 to the Women’s Rights League. Like Ibsen, who was loath to have his works simplified into slogans and pressed into service of -isms, Chinese artists and scholars may be tired of decades of yoking art to political causes, including state-sponsored versions of realism and feminism. In seeking to understand Ibsen in “purely” artistic terms, in turning their focus onto the formal and experimental aspects of his theatrical techniques, the repudiation of earlier Ibsen reception on purely artistic ground was itself no less a political gesture. And yet theater is arguably the most engaged form of literature, depending on a live audience to come into full being. And engagement must, by definition, acquire its meaning from a highly particularized time and place. That A Doll’s House would become a catalyst in the worldwide movement of women’s emancipation and that it would ignite a thoroughly new understanding of the individual was not surprising, as it rode on the waves of radical social changes that were also happening in China at that time. Nor is it surprising that Nora would be transformed back into a bourgeois woman post-divorce, fighting to find her footing in an increasingly capitalist economy of Hong Kong or Shanghai. Nora’s journey in China illustrates that works worthy of world literature cannot be taken as pure literature alone, as its very effective circulation is dependent upon the particular needs of a given society at a particular time.

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References Ba Jin. 1972 [1932]. Family. Translated by Sidney Shapiro. Edited by Olga Lang. New York: Anchor Books. Beijing Morning Post 北京晨報. 2006. Interview with Lin Zhaohua 林兆華, April 26. Budde, Antje. 2011. “Nora’s Children: A Norwegian-Chinese Theatre Adventure.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 38, no. 2: 240–54. Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing) 張愛玲. 2018. Little Reunions 小團圓. Translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz. New York: New York Review of Books. Chen, Xiaomei. 2002. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Chien, Ying-Ying. 1995. “Feminism and China’s New ‘Nora’: Ibsen, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun.” The Comparatist 19: 97–113. Guo Moruo 郭沫若. 1987 [1942]. “Nala de da’an” 娜拉的答案 (The Answer to Nora). In Qiu Jin yanjiu ziliao 秋瑾研究資料, edited by Guo Yanli 郭延禮, 466–71. Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe. Hu Shi 胡適. 1918a. “Meiguo de furen” 美國的婦人 (American Women). Xin qiannian (New Youth) 5, no. 3: 213–24. Hu Shi 胡適. 1918b. “Yibosheng zhuyi” 易卜生主義 (Ibsenism). Xin qiannian 5, no. 6: 489–507. Hu Shi 胡適. 1920. “Fei geren zhuyi de xinshenghuo” 非個人主義的新生活 (Non-Individualistic New Life). Shishi xinbao 時事新報 (The China Times), January 15. Hu Shi 胡適. 2013 [1919]. “The Greatest Event in Life: A Farce in One Act.” In English Writings of Hu Shih, edited by Chih-P’ing Chou, 33–40. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Huneker, James Gibbons. 1905. Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Ibsen, Henrik. 1889 [1879]. A Doll’s House. Translated William Archer. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Janss, Christine. 2017. “When Nora Stayed: More Light on the German Ending.” Ibsen Studies 17, no. 1: 3–27. Kano, Ayako. 2001. Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism. New York: Palgrave. Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lu Xun 魯迅. 2017 [1924]. “Nala zouhou zenyang” 娜拉走後怎樣 (What Happens after Nora Walks Out). Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall, In Jottings Under the Lamplight, edited by Eileen J. Cheng and Kirk A. Denton, 256-62. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lu Xun 魯迅. 1972 [1925]. “Regret for the Past.” Translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. In Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, 197–215. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Qi, Shouhua. 2016. “(Mis)reading Ibsen: Chinese Noras On and Off the Stage and Nora in Her Chinese Husband’s Ancestral Land of the 1930s as Reimagined for the Globalized World Today.” Comparative Drama 50, no. 4: 341–64. Tam, Kwok-kan. 2019. Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation. Singapore: Springer. Wang, Zheng. 1999. Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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25 READING WOMEN Rethinking a Trope in the Socialist Modern and Beyond Barbara Mittler

In China, the reading woman has become a trope whose meaning has shifted significantly in the long twentieth century.1 One of the aims of female emancipation since the late Qing had been to make women literate. This call, however, addressed at the “women’s world,” was accompanied always by prescriptive formulas of what women could and should (not) read. Chinese tradition has many stories of women damaged by clandestine reading. Worldwide, too, it is a common assumption that women could easily be “ruined by a book” (Widmer 1992), and accordingly, they must fear punishment if caught reading the wrong thing at the wrong time: the figure of the reading woman in China’s long twentieth century has served both as an encouragement and a cautionary tale, depending on circumstance and reading matter – in a manner that often resonates with perceptions and depictions of reading women elsewhere in the world. Mapping the field of female literacy in China by offering an alternative view from visual evidence, this chapter will scrutinize the image of the reading woman, highlighting the importance in reconfigurations of this trope in two specific media, the women’s magazine, geared openly toward women readers, and the propaganda poster, a political advertisement with broad public reach. I will focus on the visual record as it enables new findings on the woman reader and her worlds of reading: viewing history from images can challenge as well as sharpen, reorient as well as redefine, conventional historical understanding (Mitchell 1995; Pinney and Thomas 2001; Mittler 2007). In my attempt at formulating alternative interpretations of the reading woman, I will zoom in on the Mao era but move beyond it, both into the past and the present, in order to situate the particular makeup of women’s reading worlds at a specific moment in time. I concur with Kate Flint’s argument that the trope of the reading woman becomes “fragmented into several distinctive sets of rhetorical patterns, each serving particular ideological ends” (Flint 1995, 322), thus opening up different “worlds of reading” (Section1 of this chapter) to women, intimating at the same time very particular (restrictive) reading practices, informed by specific (moral or political) “readings of the world” (Section 2). As I address the question of how women as individuals or groups would adapt to, subvert, or appropriate official gender politics in creating their own (not always private) worlds of reading, I will be triangulating female reading practices from the angles of leisure, pressure, and censorship: what did they hope to read, what were they asked to read, and what were they not allowed to read and why? 297

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And how open, distinguishing, or clandestine were their reading practices accordingly? How and why did all this congeal in a particular variation of the visual trope of the reading woman across time? I will thus explore how the contours of the trope changed, deliberating models of solitary vs. communal, secret vs. public, popular vs. elite, utilitarian vs. leisurely reading, and considering the importance of communities of reading, linking these to earlier models looming large in (trans)cultural memory and to later post-Mao practices.

Opening Up? – Worlds of Reading Focusing on the female reader will allow me to address a number of broader points about reading practices in China: I will highlight the stratification of reading worlds and its careful restrictions and prescriptions, and thus, I will be able to address a number of points about the changing worlds of reading as China moves, at the end of the nineteenth century, into what I call the Socialist Modern. In discussing how actual readership by women found its repercussion in the way women would be portrayed as readers (or not), I would like to question whether those receiving and reading these texts were engaged in a negotiating process – one which may, in fact, be equally important as the act of production. In this chapter, therefore, from the “communications circuit” established by Robert Darnton (1982), which begins with the conception and planning of texts, to their material production and circulation, concluding with their consumption, I will focus on the interplay between actual consumers (female readers) and their idealized image. Scrutinizing this specific world of readers and how it is imag(in)ed and constituted over time, I will consider who should and could (not) read. Focusing on the Maoist period but harking back to the late Qing and moving on to the present, I suggest to think about the female reader as a long-established and well-kept visual trope throughout the twentieth century (and beyond), whose meaning has been determined by elements sedimented deep in cultural memory. It is my aim to highlight the process of continuing superscription and negotiation with multiple potential meanings of the woman reader (who may be captured variously as the “talented woman” 才女; the alluring, pretty “modern girl” 摩登小姐; the “mother of a citizen” 國民之母; or the revolutionary “woman worker” 女工, to give but a few examples), arguing that all these potential meanings hover in the background and inform the significance of the female reader to the present. Probing the visual record, I will contend that reading is acknowledged to provide women with a space of their own (a reading world, or even reading worlds), and it is for this very reason that the reading woman – thus informing and building a mind of her own (i.e., her own ways of reading the world) – appears as always already an ambiguous figure in need of careful circumscription, even as her numbers are growing increasingly. The fictional Du Liniang 杜麗娘 in the sixteenth-century play The Peony Pavilion (牡丹 亭, 1598), or the historical (but obscure) young Hangzhou concubine Xiaoqing 小青, who died sometime early in the seventeenth century, are just two of the most prominent examples (Widmer 1992) for women ruined by a book. The figure of the reading woman, therefore, serves not primarily as an encouragement but also as a warning. Why and how this changes over time and why the figure of the reading woman continues to be a crucial element in the visual grammar of contemporary China is my question throughout this chapter. There are, of course, several options and methods of mapping the field and tracing the female reader: we could ask how much literacy rates tell us about the potential pool of female readers, we could think about circulation and survey editorial discussions about how to address the female reader, and we could also trace reading experiences and attempt to find inventories of reading matter provided for women. This chapter, however, will privilege the visual, as it has been used, throughout the long 20th century, to intimate the urgency of establishing the woman 298

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reader. Clearly felt in the late Qing where most women were still illiterate and this began to be perceived as a problem, the reading woman is a recurring trope in pictorial magazines – which, in turn, were able to reach illiterate women, in spite of themselves: on the pages of Tuhua ribao 圖畫 日報 (1909–1910) we can see the women of the past politely curtseying, the women of the future drilling for the army, and the women of the present reading a newspaper together, on a park bench, outside, that is, in public view (Figure 25.1 THRB 1909.12:9). While the urgency to establish this (public!) female reader may have receded increasingly after 1949, as more and more women were actually reading in Maoist and contemporary China, just as men did (although, as will be seen in the following, not quite the same way) and as the literacy figures were going up considerably throughout the first decades of the People’s Republic of China (CASS 1987), the visual trope of the reading woman does not disappear. We will explore how, when, and why the colors and contours of this trope shifted, thus opening up and, at the same time, restraining the variety of options for interpreting the woman reader. We will explain how and why a clear difference continues to be made between male and female readers as the image of the woman reader becomes a reality. In terms of literacy rates, changes over time have been radical. Evelyn Rawski had estimated late Qing female readership between 2 to 10% of females in the 1800s (Rawski 1979, 140). Susan Mann (1997, 229–32) documented a much higher female literacy rate for a specific

Figure 25.1

Past, present, and future for women.

Source: Tuhua ribao THRB 1909, 12:9.

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area, the Jiangnan region, in the same period and points to regional differences, and these will continue throughout the twentieth century – depending on where they lived and how privileged their situation therefore was, women would or would not be able to read. It is for this reason that John L. Buck’s survey of rural society in the 1930s found that only 2% of the female population aged 7 and above had ever attended school, and only 1% could read a letter (1937, 373). Given the advances made in female education, Joan Judge estimates, on the other hand, that by the 1910s, already we should make a very gross estimate of 10 to 25 or even 30% of female readers in urban areas like Shanghai, tendency growing (2015, 68–9; 266–78). This is also why circulation figures for readings targeted at women, women’s magazines among them, are on the rise at this time, beginning with a few dozen copies at its beginnings in 1898 and booming in the millions by the 2000s (Hockx et al. 2018, 2–3; 17). While after 1949, the reality behind the figure of the reading woman is thus truly revolutionized and significant advances in female literacy that become visible in the early twentieth century are notably accelerated in the post-1949 period, with a stark rise of female education mainly in two periods, the 1950s to 1958, and the late 1960s to mid-1970s (CASS 1987), differences between rural/minority and urban areas remain. Since the 1990s, these differences begin to dwindle – they are completely gone with the youngest generation, in a China that is now urban by majority count (Lavely et al. 1990, 61; Peerenboom 2008; Lieberthal et al. 2016). According to World Bank estimates, China’s female literacy rate – at around 92% in 2010 – is significantly higher than the literacy rate for women worldwide at 82% (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2021). So in Maoist China and beyond, the woman reader is no longer a figment of the imagination but has become a tangible reality. It is not difficult, therefore, for the Maoist period and beyond, to find records of women reading. Lena Henningsen (2020, 2021) has provided us with plenty of evidence for reading experiences recorded in diaries, in letters, and with these sources we are able to see, quite conveniently, individual and collective readings that mattered – both official and unofficial. Yet while for the more recent past, it is possible to trace women’s autobiographical accounts of reading, and lacking those, we can always interview women readers, this is different for earlier periods. We have records by outstanding men such as Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) who provided reading lists and lengthy commentaries on their readings of the Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報 or of foreign novels and writings (Kang 2011, 14; Liang 1896, 1902, 1923). We have evidence, too, of men such as Liu Dapeng 劉大鵬 (1857–1942) living in some of the more remote corners of the country, and their daily readings of the Shenbao 申報 (Harrison 2005). But we have very few, if any, such records of women reading.2 While some of the early Republican magazines and reading rooms had sporadically asked their readers to provide information on gender, occupation, education, reading habits, subjects of preference, and purpose of reading, few such records are still extant (Shenbao liutong tushuguan chubanshe 1935). And even when we have sales lists and inventories of (online) stores and (public) libraries today, they provide us but with a rough estimate of reading matter and do not furnish a complete picture of all the printed matter that entered specific households or communities, even less can we be sure about the identity of those who actually read these materials, although we could argue, of course, that, in theory, women and men were, at this point in time, equally “enabled” to do so. Turning away from these traces and figures of reality to the visual record and images of reading women, we find that illustrators have used reading matter in the hand of women to signify status, achievement, and morality – and, accordingly, that these visuals must be read not so much as accurate records of female reading but more as significant reflections of particular ideologies about women as readers. It is to these that I will turn in the remainder of this chapter. The proliferation of images of women readers, throughout the twentieth century, in women’s 300

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magazines and propaganda posters – the latter of which are interpreted here as (political) advertisements, as some of them were actually painted by the same artists who had been producing commercial advertisements during the Republican period (Laing 2004) – cannot be read to indicate that every kind of (female) readership is tacitly accepted or normatively expected, however, to the contrary. In the Chinese context, as elsewhere, these images speak to ideas of leisure, pressure, and censorship. I will argue that while the actual number of reading women increases, images of reading women take on ever-new functions in Maoist China and beyond.

Closing Down? – (Restrictive) Readings of the World A Space of Her Own – Unleashing the Reading Woman I have argued that the portrait of a woman with a print product in hand, be it a book, a (women’s) magazine, or a newspaper, is one of the (if not the) most significant tropes in the late Qing and Republican period. Clearly, such images suggest that she ought to appear in reality. The print product in her hand acquires a myriad of different meanings: in China as elsewhere, painters used reading matter, books, or otherwise, in the hands of women, as signifiers of status and achievement of enlightenment and morality (Docherty 1998, 338). Reading women would be depicted as cover girls of the women’s magazines at that time, reading, leisurely, in their private homes, more or less lavishly depicted – with easy chairs, clean brick walls, and beautiful flowers in the background (Figures 25.2a–b FNZZ 1915.1/1; FNZZ 1928.4/3.1).

(b)

(a) Figure 25.2a–b

Visual(ly) present – women reading.

Source: Funü zazhi FNZZ 1915.1/1.

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These reading women may often also appear in beautiful natural settings outside, taking a leisurely stroll on a lake, or sitting out in a comfortable garden (e.g., FNSB 1911.1/1; FNSB 1911.1/4). As in comparable images from Victorian England, the backgrounds to these images would mark their “culture, polish, grace, and refinement” (Golden 2003, 23). One caricature in Linglong 玲瓏 makes this very clear, as it shows that women’s more “frivolous” activities – mostly to do with beautification – which are considered “wasting time” 消耗時間, take up much more of her day (indicated by the shape of a clock as the backdrop of the image), whereas the “time for serious research” 研究時間 associated with reading a book, which the woman in the caricature is holding in her nicely manicured hand, is allotted only a very small proportion of her time (Figure 25.3 LL 1931.10:337): the caricature thus advocates female reading for edification. This enlightening function is emphasized frequently: in Nü qingnian 女青年 (Young women), reading women regularly appear under bright rays of sunlight (Figures 25.4a–b–c NQN 1928.2; NQN 1930.8; NQN 1930.1). Reading must be purposeful, then. Not unlike in the West, in China, advocating a rise in female literacy would be sanctioned by arguing that

Figure 25.3 Women reading (for enlightenment . . .). Source: Linglong LL 1931.10:337.

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(a)

(b)

(c) Figure 25.4a–c Women reading in the light. Source: Nü qingnian NQN 1928.2.

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as mothers of future citizens (Figure 25.5, FNSB 1915.16), women needed to be educated themselves. While such images of female readers proliferate in the early decades of the twentieth century, as variations of the alluring, pretty “modern girl,” they have, in fact, existed for a long time already (Wu 1997; Cahill 2010). Still, there is a marked difference. While traditionally, such images would appear in paintings and as book illustrations (for example, in so-called Collections of 100 Beauties 百美圖), a variety of media whose access was private and restricted, the early twentieth century sees the reading woman move into the public print media. These images of reading women cannot yet be understood, as we have seen in the brief survey of literacy numbers, to reflect a popular readership among women in reality.

Figure 25.5 Women reading for a purpose: good motherhood. Source: Funü shibao FNSB 1915.16.

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Moreover, they are more often than not portraits in which the sitter’s gender plays a defining role – and here, they are, in fact, quite close to their predecessors in the Collections of Beauties: they are not devoid of the traces of aesthetic objectification and fetishization. This is evident into the Maoist period and beyond. Reading matter thus becomes simply accessoire; these images can be interpreted as speaking more to the beauty than to the intellectual aspirations of women. In a depiction from an entertainment journal such as Libailiu 禮拜六 (Saturday) from the 1930s, for example – the reader is titillated by seeing two women sharing the reading of a book together, one sitting on the armrest of the easy chair that the other occupies: both are exposing their leisurely crossed legs to the gaze of the audience (Figure 25.6, LBL 1930.354:3). Several decades later, Zhongguo funü 中國婦女 (Woman of China), the official publication of the All China Women’s Federation in Beijing, still uses many a beautiful

Figure 25.6 Women reading: the beauty of it. Source: Libailiu LBL 1930.354:3.

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minority woman as “cover girl” (Figure 25.7, ZGFN 1958.4) – the audience’s gaze is directed first to her smooth and beautiful face in profile, with a set of elaborate, long, suspended earrings, then down her shiny, colorful dress, from the elegant standing collar to her arms, down to her hands holding a golden book, which appears to be by Mao Zedong, as one can make out part of the character Mao in red, just under her hand, ornated by a valuable ring. Another three decades later, in the 1990s, the same journal would feature an equally gracefully presented stylish businesswoman browsing a magazine (Figure 25.8, ZGFN 1996:2:30), all the while exposing to the reader her fashionable coat, hat, and leather boots, as well as her hair,

Figure 25.7 Women reading: the beauty of it! Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1958.4.

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Figure 25.8

Women reading: the beauty of it; or, reading as accessoire.

Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1996:2:30.

swirling around her face. The reading matter in the hand of this type of reading woman has but an “ornamental effect.” Painters and photographers alike create increasingly disparate types of images that bespeak ambivalence toward female literacy. Counterintuitively, some of these images cannot be read 307

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as encouragement to engage the leisurely pastime of reading – quite the contrary: they warn of too much and the “wrong kinds” of reading. In China, as elsewhere, female readers have been considered potentially problematic, indulgent, and perverse: falling in love by reading, a motif from Peony Pavilion, is replayed on a 1912 cover in Funü Shibao with a girl asleep next to her copy of the journal, which lies open, a rose next to it, on the table (Figure 25.9, FNSB 1912.8). Following the traditional perspective, reading appears as a threat to women’s health as well as their “innate” duties, as seen in one caricature in Linglong in 1932 which

Figure 25.9 Indulgent reading? Source: Funü shibao FNSB 1912.8.

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shows a woman with a stack of books on her kitchen table, one held up in a book stand. It is not entirely clear whether this is done so she can continue to read even while cooking or whether it is actually a cookbook that she reads – presumably because she has not internalized her “natural task” of cooking. Her husband and mother-in-law are observing her – outraged and dismayed (Figure 25.10, LL 1932.73:1066a).

Figure 25.10

“My wife is a woman of the mind.”

Source: Linglong LL 1932.73:1066a.

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Female bookish idleness is impinging on traditional views of female morality or duty. Women and girls had to fear anger and punishment if caught reading at the wrong time or with the wrong book: “Household obligations came first, and to admit to reading was tantamount to confessing neglect of (one’s) . . . family responsibilities. The idealized image of the good housekeeper seemed incompatible with reading” (Lyons 1999, 321). In China, this observation carries well into the days of the People’s Republic: a 1956 caricature in Zhongguo funü (Figure 25.11a–b, ZGFN 1956.9:4; cf. Docherty 1998, 368) shows a wellread woman giving a speech in front of a large female audience – ironically reminding them that one should “make sure that all employees eat on time,” while everyone in the audience is nervously looking at their watches. A second image illustrates what is happening at home, at the same time, as we see a father walking into the kitchen, surprised to find his son, who is making quite a veritable mess of it: “Where is Mom?” – “She is at yet another meeting.” Why this fear of reading women? The images speak to the idea that reading provides space, opens up new worlds – physical, temporal, and psychological – that permit women to exempt themselves from particular (gender) expectations, whether imposed by moral or social tenets, family obligations, or others. Books, or reading matter, more generally, could be dangerous. Books obviously do not care who is reading them: all readers are equal to them, reading is anonymous, both private and intimate as well as shared and common, and all that could, of course, make it, at least potentially, subversive (Jack 2012, 4). Reading could thus become a “symptom not a cause of the desire for liberation” (Lyons 1999, 322), and thus, female reading is visualized as potentially disruptive and dangerous. So as women were expected to begin to read more extensively since the late Qing, as they were called upon to gain education, along with influence and independence, illustrators recognized a potential for historical progress but immediately passed pictorial judgment on it. While the many images of reading women in China from the beginning of the twentieth century seem to suggest a general acceptance of female reading, they cannot be taken as a sign of unanimous support for reading women. Particular types of purposeful or utilitarian readings – educative or consultative readings – were privileged in the discourse. Encyclopedic entries or advice sections on how best to treat one’s children or cook a meal, in the women’s magazines, for example, would have been acceptable as part of a particular diet of (homely) fair-sexed enlightenment (Mittler 2014). As this kind of consultative reading is “fragmented,” it was also quite perfectly attuned to the disjunct work rhythm of a (modern) housewife and mother (Lyons 1999, 318), yet interestingly, this is not this type of reading that is regularly visualized. Instead, it is the leisurely, contiguous, consumptive reading, of novels, poetry, and literature, of pictorials and other such reading matter that is being depicted – and all these constitute types of reading matter which is condemned frequently (see Figures 25.2, 25.6, 25.8, and 25.9). So while – quite obviously – the proliferation of images of reading women throughout the late Qing and the Republic is an indication of (the will to) changing realities, these images possess historical value not primarily as documents of fact but as windows on ideology (Docherty 1998, 339) – and this can be read as both positive and reifying but, at the same time, also as a negative and cautious reaction to these very changing realities: female reading, in these images, does not remain unambiguous. There is pressure, to exchange fiction for more edifying – “fair-sexed” – works (Mittler 2004). The female reader, once unleashed, would have a mind of her own in her reading of the world – and one potentially disruptive. She needed to be circumscribed – captured (Lyons 1999, 333).

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(a)

(b) Figure 25.11a–b “My wife is a woman of the mind.” Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1956.9:4.

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A Mind of Her Own Capturing the Reading Woman How do the potential dangers of women reading translate into visual evidence, and are they perpetuated in Maoist China? Already during the Republican period, women are depicted with alternatives to reading, to be sure. They would be seen working, as in the Jiangxi-based journal Nongcun funü 農村婦女 (Rural Women), not only as teachers (e.g., the covers to NCFN 1941.4 and NCFN 1941.6), but in the fields as well (covers NCFN 1942:2; NCFN 1941.8). Often, they are also depicted as mothers(-to-be) (e.g., NCFN 1941.12; NCFN 1942.2). These alternatives to reading are echoed in Maoist China. In the visual record from the 1950s, women appear as workers, mothers, and soldiers, as seen in the short-lived journal Xiandai funü 現代婦女 (Modern Woman; XDFN 1950.3; XDFN 1950.7), published by the Shanghai Women’s Federation. They reappear in Zhongguo funü, the official journal of the All China Women’s Federation, as well as in political advertisements (Figure 25.12a–b, ZGFN 1958.15; Zhang Yuqing 1955, “New China’s female parachuters”). Reading appears as just one option among many for women – and its alternatives, from performance artist to nurse or factory worker, sometimes appear in one and the same image (Figure 25.13, ZGFN 1958.1):

Figure 25.12a Purposeful alternatives to reading. Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1958.15.

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Figure 25.12b

Purposeful alternatives to reading: “New China’s female parachuters.”

Source: Zhang Yuqing, 1955. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-27.

Figure 25.13

Reading as one option for women among many.

Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1958.1.

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reading is no longer foregrounded, while driving a tractor is (Figure 25.14, ZGFN 1966.3). With wars and the regime changes in the 1940s, working women – and women working their muscles and large hands in the industries, inscriptions of the revolutionary “woman worker” 女工 – become an ever more important motif (Mittler 2019). The (leisurely) reading woman, on the other hand, so prominent in Republican times, recedes to the background. Indeed, woman is now often shown in alternative action while others are seen reading – men! In two household scenes from the 1950s and 1970s, the first (Figure 25.15a, Shao 1955),

Figure 25.14 “Striding forward audaciously on the road of revolution!” Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1966.3.

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titled “Sleep, do not disturb Daddy while he is using his brain,” shows a mother taking the children to bed while their father is reading (with books scattered on a chair), thinking, with his pen held high, and beginning to draw a plan; while the second shows father and son reading while mother and daughter are doing their sewing (Figure 25.15b, Chen 1973). In image

Figure 25.15a

Alternative readers: “Sleep, do not disturb Daddy while he is using his head.”

Source: Shao Jingyun 1955. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e16-631.

Figure 25.15b

Alternative readers: “At home.”

Source: Chen Jiren (1973). https://chineseposters.net/gallery/e15-684.

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after image, and in many different scenes, be it small children learning from Lei Feng 雷鋒 (1940–1962), as in a propaganda poster of the same title, “Learning from comrade Lei Feng” (Figure 25.16a, Ma and Pang 1963), or adults making revolution, as shown on the cover of Zhongguo funü (Figure 25.16b, ZGFN 1966.8), it is men, more often than women, holding on to reading matter. And even when women join in the performance, there are clear hierarchies – women stand behind; they are not usually the ones holding the books in mixed groups, or if they are, they do not appear as confident as men, and inevitably, men are reaching higher with their books. A set of 1970 posters illustrates this (Figure 25.17a, Shanghai Fine Arts Academy Workers Propaganda Team, Revolutionary Committee 1970): “Long Live Chairman Mao! Long Live!” shows a huge group of youths waving their Little Red Books and eulogizing Mao on Tian’anmen. While the image contains many men and women and a woman

Figure 25.16a Alternative readers: “Learning from comrade Lei Feng.” Source: Ma Lequn and Pang Ka (1963). https://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-165.

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Figure 25.16b

Alternative readers: a man reading for women from different generations.

Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1966.8.

is actually foregrounded, still, the book she holds cannot reach as high as that of her male counterpart standing behind her. A similar situation appears in “To villages we go, to the borders we go, to places in the fatherland where we are most needed we go” (Figure 25.17b, Shanghaishi gemingzu 1970), which shows a group of youths in a train departing for the countryside. Foregrounded are one girl and boy (again, with many others, supporting them from the back). Both are leaning out of the train window, both are muscly and broad-shouldered, both are wearing khaki military wear, both are holding the Little Red Book – but he is standing above and she is seated below. There are many more such examples, of men reaching just a bit higher with their books, or almost always – and the exceptions, one to be found in Zhongguo Funü, may serve to prove the rule: in a woodblock print from 1966, “Resolutely act in accordance with the 16 Points,” the central figure is the woman who is holding up the document. This young woman is surrounded by a group of youths, and the two men in the foreground are also holding up the document – but this time, not quite so high (Figure 25.18, inside cover ZGFN 1966.12). By the 1970s, then, women readers have become tamed as a somewhat ambiguous, if important, visual object.

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Figure 25.17a Hierarchies of reading: “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live!” Source: Shanghai Fine Arts Academy Workers Propaganda Team, Revolutionary Committee, 1970. https:// chineseposters.net/posters/e13-701.

Figure 25.17b Hierarchies of reading: “To villages we go, to the borders we go, to places in the fatherland where we are most needed we go.” Source: Shanghaishi gemingzu (1970). https://chineseposters.net/posters/e16-331.

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Figure 25.18

Hierarchies of reading.

Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1966.12 (inside cover).

Evidently, increasing literacy among the population had been one of the key strategic aims after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (and the Soviet Union serves as the most significant model in many of the articles on this topic, for example, ZGFN 1956.4:16–17, “The Soviet Union’s Ambitious Sixth Plan”), yet it may be significant that women readers are not singled out in the USSR model while there is, still, a certain urgency conveyed in pictorial matter throughout the 1950s in China: in a discussion on language improvement among children published in Zhongguo Funü, the two children depicted reading are girls, while the boys are seen playing with balloons and cars (Figure 25.19a, ZGFN 1956.2:24, “Paying attention to children’s language development”). And indeed, this kind of connection recurs frequently. A discussion of age-appropriate reading again is illustrated with the sketch of a little girl, not a boy, reading (Figure 25.19b, ZGFN 1956.1:22, “Advancing age-appropriate education”). Female reading is also singled out in an image illustrating the country’s New Year’s achievements: three generations of women are shown, each with a book in her hand (Figure 25.19c, ZGFN 1956.3:10–1, “We must make our fatherland’s countryside an even better place to live”). Women are thus pressured to read throughout the 1950s: whenever they are called upon 319

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(a) Figure 25.19a–c Urgency in action: “Improving children’s language skills.” Source: (a) Zhongguo funü ZGFN1956.2:24.

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(b)

(c)

to take their lives in their hands, this inevitably begins with reading (see ZGFN 1956.2:7; ZGFN 1956.2:10). Just relying on one’s husband and looking pretty is not enough, and caricatures speak a very open language here: one, cheekily titled “Getting married, following one’s husband” 321

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(Figure 25.20, ZGFN 1956.12:10), shows a woman, sitting in front of her mirror, making up her hair, who is reminded by another woman, standing behind her, with a stack of books in her hands, “If you do not study, you will be in difficulties later.” To this, the woman answers frivolously, “I do not have to worry about the future myself any more,” meaning, that she relies completely on her husband now – a clear sign that what she has done is what the title of the caricature indicates: she has married to “follow her husband” (出嫁从夫, a four-word phrase used to epitomize the “feudal” patriarchal family structures of old). The pressure and urgency to encourage women to read begin to disappear in the 1960s, and as seen in the propaganda posters, it is confidently undone in the 1970s, most evident perhaps in a 1975 poster (Figure 25.21; “The production brigade’s reading room.” Zhao Kunhan 1975) which shows all generations and genders mingling together in the commune library – reading has been universalized and naturalized, so these images suggest (and with it, new hierarchies appear, edging reading women out). Along with evolving literacy figures, urgency seems to have disappeared almost completely in the 1990s, when illiterate women are said to be found

Figure 25.20 Urgency: “To think of one’s beauty is not enough. . . . Women have to take their fates into their hands – Reading is the first step.” Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1956.12:10.

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Figure 25.21

Urgency resolving: reading for everyone? “The production brigade’s reading room.”

Source: Zhao Kunhan (1975). https://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-268.

elsewhere – in Arabian countries, for example, where the woman depicted in a photo in Zhongguo funü, allegedly learning how to read, comes from – but no longer in China (e.g. ZGFN 1996.2:46, “An Arabic woman receiving literacy education”). But not only do depictions of reading women lose their urgency; they also change in quality: while in the Republican period, the (beautiful) leisurely solitary reader or the symbiotic pair of readers (Figures 25.2–25.6) would be the most frequent type of reading woman visualized, one of the most distinctive features in the Maoist record of women reading is its collective nature: one inside cover shows four different scenes of collective reading by women, of all generations and all professions, all of which exude an atmosphere of concentration and contentment (ZGFN 1966.8). Reading also moves from constituting an act of quiet absorption to become exuberant performance (e.g., ZGFN 1966.3:20; ZGFN 1966.11): many an illustration shows groups of (young) women waving their Little Red Books in excitement (e.g. ZGFN 1966.9), while the act of reading itself is no longer foregrounded. Ideology is extremely important in these depictions of the (woman) reader; knowledge acquired through reading becomes embodied – by waving the book or holding it high – and thus turns into action, sometimes indicated, mise en abyme, as pictures within the picture appear on the poster image itself to illustrate the actions that are to be the result of (every)one’s reading. The caption of a 1966 inside cover showing scenes of collective reading (ZGFN 1966.8) is “Read Mao’s writings, hear Mao’s words and act in accordance with Mao’s instructions.” The same spirit is evident in a 1970s poster titled “Go among the workers, peasants and soldiers and into the thick of struggle!” where we see a young woman sent down to the countryside, her book with Mao’s “highest instructions” in the jacket pocket, next to a peasant. She is holding a hand barrow, and in the background one can 323

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see that what she has learned from reading is already happening in the background, as different groups of workers, with red flags flowing, are working the land and “moving mountains.” (Figure 25.22, Shanghai renmin chubanshe, ca. 1970). In short, reading must lead to action always; it is inspirational reading, or to put it otherwise, it is always already purposeful, utilitarian, as we have seen: fighting illiteracy in the 1950s

Figure 25.22 Reading into action: “Go among the workers, peasants, and soldiers and into the thick of struggle!” Source: Shanghai renmin chubanshe (ca. 1970). https://chineseposters.net/posters/e3-733.

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(ZGFN 1956.2:10), selfishness in the 1960s (ZGFN 1966.4:10), improving life in the factory (ZGFN 1966.3:24–25), the grocery shop (ZGFN 1966.4), or even simply, the family (ZGFN 1966.5:29). Indeed, if, instead of fighting, as in the days of “feudalism,” daughter-in-law and mother-in-law read, they inevitably read Mao together, as is suggested in some of these images (ZGFN 1966.4:28, “As Mother and Daughter-in-Law study Chairman Mao’s books together, they are advancing the family revolution”). A mother’s good example of studying Mao incessantly, even when the kids want her attention, hoping to go off with her, to the park or to the movies, eventually makes them go back to their books as well, as one comic strip relates (Figure 25.23, ZGFN 1966.4:26, “Mom must study the works of Chairman Mao”). Evidently, official print production during the Maoist period – specific readings, as it were – was expected to create specific types of reading communities. These official expectations are reflected in the propaganda record, and this is why a sent-down youth depicted in Zhongguo funü (ZGFN 1966.3: 28–29), from what we can see in the picture, only carries the works of Mao with her, when we know that her basket must have contained much more (Henningsen 2020; Mittler 2013). Nevertheless, the official pictorial evidence suggests that everyone wanted to read but the Marxist Classics, including Mao – even the herdspeople, as in a poster titled Herdspeople love to read books by Lenin and Marx 牧民爱读马列书 of 1976 – the rest is censored away. What one finds in the visual record, therefore, is obviously not a reflection of the actual woman reader and her reading experience but of an idealized woman reader, captured always in a particular pose that shows her readiness to read and thus serve the revolution – by moving mountains like the peasants of Dazhai and the workers of Daqing (as the sent-down youth in Figure 25.22), but also, some decades later, by becoming a fashion designer (Figure 25.8, ZGFN 1996.2:30 “Design fighting at the ‘tide’ of the market” tells the story of fashion designer Guo

Figure 25.23 Inspirational reading: “Mom must study the works of Mao.” Source: Zhongguo funü ZGFN 1966.4:26.

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Pei 郭培 (b. 1967)), or by inventing a new economic theory, as does economist Lu Xin 魯昕 (b. 1955; see ZGFN 1996.4:8–9, “Lu Xin and her prospective budget theory”). Here, in the 1990s, the elite reader who had been largely absent in public print for a dozen or so years comes back, as articles are now telling the life stories of these businesswomen or intellectuals. These figures return, one could argue, as a powerful superscription of the talented woman, the cainü 才女, who, herself, also makes a comeback to the visual record: Chen Duansheng (1751–1796?) 陳 端生, for example, who at age 18 had begun to write a long prosimetric tanci 彈詞, The Destiny of Rebirth (再生緣), which became one of the most famous tanci, and which features a heroine who, disguised as a man, succeeds spectacularly in the examination system and rises to the position of prime minister, eventually refusing to return to her “proper” role of wife to a man clearly her intellectual and moral inferior, is featured in a typical exemplary story in the 1990s (ZGFN 1996.2:39). Even if tanci as a genre more generally has been read to conform with, rather than resist to, the status quo, the case of Chen Duansheng is important to show how reading women have railed against ideas such as women’s confinement to the home (Widmer 2006, 14–15). With her work, Chen is acting against established conceptions and conventions, as young readers are encouraged to do on the pages of this magazine, now, too – confidently striding forward, without thinking they have to rely on men or to feel inferior to them all the time (ZGFN 1996.4:7).

Conclusion – Normalization? Women Reading as Performative Practice Women are reading in Maoist and contemporary China, just as men are, and yet, they are not: women are, so the visual evidence suggests, always already different or particular readers. One of the reasons the trope of the reading woman has not disappeared in the visual record, in spite of the fact that she is no longer in need of being urgently pushed to the fore, as she is able to read, after all, is the fact that reading women are seen as minds in need of being captured, and thus they are pressured to read for a purpose, while certain types of reading – in private, in leisure – are censored, or eliminated from the visual record. The woman reader is a reality in Maoist China; she is there, in literacy rates, in circulation figures, in inventories, in reading experiences, but she has apparently not been completely normalized, as the visual evidence indicates. She attains special mention; the visual record holds her up prominently – and didactically. In spite of the fact that women’s literacy is near total by the end of the twentieth century, then, reading women continue to play a significant role in the visual record; they do not disappear – a fact which thus adds an important dimension to the textual and empirical, quantitative evidence we would consider otherwise – and they continue to change (as a new emphasis on elite and non-conformist women by the end of the twentieth century indicates, for example). The trope persists, then, with very important functions, and it is to these that I have turned in this chapter. I have suggested to think about the female reader as a long-established and well-kept visual trope throughout the twentieth century (and rooted far beyond) whose meaning has thus been determined by elements sedimented deep in cultural memory. It was my aim to highlight some of the elements indicating the continuing superscription and negotiation with multiple potential meanings of the woman reader (the educated “girl of talent,” the “good mother,” the “pretty girl,” the “revolutionary woman worker” being only some examples), arguing that all these potential meanings still hover in the background and inform her significance to this day. I have argued that reading is acknowledged to provide woman with a space of her own, and it is for this very reason that the reading woman – thus informing and building a mind of her own – has

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remained an ambiguous figure in need of careful circumscription. Throughout the twentieth century, therefore, while the trope of the woman reader is indeed “fragmented into several sets of rhetorical patterns, each serving particular ideological ends” (Flint 1995, 322), each is also building on (or contradicting, by implication) previous images of the reading woman. Depictions of women readers are thus opening up and, at the same time, restraining the variety of options for imagining her (Flint 1995, 322). We have seen that communal rather than solitary, and purposeful rather than leisurely, reading is the norm in the visual record in the second half of the century, and that obvious and visible hierarchies exist and persist when men and women are depicted reading or performing reading together. We have also seen that solitary, indulgent, or elite reading (and reading beyond the assigned canon of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist lore) is seldom found in the Maoist period, and if so, then, again, only to be purposely directed – through identifying specific reading matter and/or an ultimate purpose – but it returns, to an extent, if in a much more lighthearted manner, after Mao’s death as part of a Socialist Modern. I have thus shown that while the colors and contours of the trope have shifted and changed, the woman reader remains a figure holding a very special and carefully designated space in the Chinese contemporary visual mind map – caught between leisure, pressure, and outright censorship.

Notes 1 This chapter is preliminary work for an ongoing study on the image of the female reader (Mittler n.d.). I am indebted to several panel discussions (Mittler 2015, 2016, 2018) and would like to acknowledge the intellectual impact of my copanelists. Invaluable was the help of my research assistants, Sun Meng and Li Shuang. 2 Even for the Republican period, sources to provide evidence about readers are few and far between. And those few are not women-specific records.

Abbreviations Funü shibao 婦女時報 = FNSB Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 = FNZZ Libailiu 禮拜六 = LBL Linglong 玲瓏 = LL Nongcun funü 農村婦女 = NCFN Nü qingnian 女青年 = NQN Tuhua ribao 圖畫日報 = THRB Xiandai funü 現代婦女 = XDFN Zhongguo funü 中國婦女 = ZGFN

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Barbara Mittler Docherty, Linda J. 1998. “Women as Readers: Visual Interpretations.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 107, no. 2: 335–88. ECPO Early Chinese Periodicals Online Universität Heidelberg. N.d. https://kjc-sv034.kjc.uni-heidelberg. de/ecpo/. Flint, Kate. 1995. The Woman Reader: 1837–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Golden, Catherine J. 2003. Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Harrison, Henrietta. 2005. The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Henningsen, Lena. 2020. “Poaching World Literature in China’s Long 1970s.” Asian Journal of African Studies 48: 119–49. Henningsen, Lena. 2021. Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hockx, Michel, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, eds. 2018. “Introduction: Women’s Journals as Multigeneric Artefacts.” In Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own?, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jack, Belinda. 2012. The Woman Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press. Judge, Joan. 2015. Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kang, Youwei 康有為. 2011. Woshi 我史 (My History). Reprint. Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe. Laing, Ellen Johnston. 2004. Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-TwentiethCentury Shanghai. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lavely, William, Xiao Zhenyu, Li Bohua, and Ronald Freedman. 1990. “The Rise in Female Education in China: National and Regional Patterns.” The China Quarterly, no. 121: 61–93. Liang, Qichao梁啟超. 1896. Xixue shumu biao 西學書目表 (Bibliography of Western Knowledge). Shanghai: Shanghai Shiwu baoguan. Liang, Qichao. 1902. “Dongji yuedan” 東籍月旦 (Guidelines to Japanese Books). Xinmin Congbao 新民 叢報, no. 9: 109–20 and no. 11 (June 6): 103–20. Liang, Qichao. 1923. “Guoxue rumen shuyao jiqi dufa” 國學入門書要目及其讀法 (A Bibliography of Important Introductory Books on Chinese Studies and How to Read Them).” Qinghua Zhoukan 清華 週刊 no. 3 (May): 1–26. Lieberthal, Kenneth, Joyce Kallgren, Roderick MacFarquhar, and Frederic Wakeman. 2016. Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. New York: Routledge. Lyons, Martyn. 1999. “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers.” Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. In A History of Reading in the West (Orig. Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental), edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 313–45. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Ma Lequn 馬樂群, and Pang Ka 龐卡. 1963. “Learning from comrade Lei Feng” 向雷鋒同志學習. Tianjin: Tianjin meishu chubanshe. Mann, Susan. 1997. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1995. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mittler, Barbara. 2004. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. Mittler, Barbara. 2007. “Gendered Advertising in China: What History Do Images Tell?” European Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 1: 13–41. Mittler, Barbara. 2012. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mittler, Barbara. 2013. “‘Enjoying the Four Olds!’ Oral Histories from a ‘Cultural Desert.’” The Journal of Transcultural Studies 4, no. 1: 177–214. Mittler, Barbara. 2014. “China’s ‘New’ Encyclopaedias and Their Readers.” In Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge (1870–1930): Changing Ways of Thought, edited by Milena DoleželováVelingerová and Rudolf G Wagner, 399–424. Berlin: Springer. Mittler, Barbara. 2015. “Gendering Form and Content: Women Readers of Early 20th Century Chinese Encyclopedia.” Presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Taipei, Taiwan.

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Reading Women Mittler, Barbara. 2016. “Tracing the Elusive: Female Readers in the Early Republic.” Presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Seattle. Mittler, Barbara. 2018. “Reading Women: Rethinking a Trope through Maoist China.” Presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Washington, DC. Mittler, Barbara. 2019. “A (Wo)Men’s Revolution? Small Feet, Large Hands, and Visions of Womanhood in China’s Long 20th Century.” In Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China, edited by Alan Baumler, 136–57. London: Routledge. Mittler, Barbara. N.d. “The Female Reader: A Short History in Genres.” Book project. Peerenboom, Randall. 2008. China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinney, Christopher, and Nicholas Thomas, eds. 2001. Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Oxford: Berg. Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida. 1979. Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shanghai Fine Arts Academy Workers Propaganda Team, Revolutionary Committee. 1970. Shanghai renmin chubanshe. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-701. Shanghai renmin chubanshe, ca. 1970. “Go Among the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers and into the Thick of Struggle!” 到工農兵群眾中去，到火熱的鬥爭中. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e3-733. Shanghaishi gemingzu (上海市革命組), 1970. “To Villages We Go, to the Borders We Go, to Places in the Fatherland Where We Are Most Needed We Go” 到農村去到邊疆去到祖國最需要的地方去. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e16-331. Shao Jingyun 邵靚雲. 1955. “Sleep, Do Not Disturb Daddy While He Is Using His Head” 睡吧別打 擾爸爸動腦筋. Shanghai: Shanghai huapian chubanshe. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e16-631. Shenbao liutong tushuguan chubanshe 申報流通圖書館出版社, ed. 1935. Shenbao liutongguan diernian gongzuo baogao 申報流通館第二年工作報告 (The Shenbao Mobile Library: Second-Year Work Report). Shanghai: Shenbao liutong tushuguan chubanshe, 1935. Sichermann, Barbara. 1989. “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late Victorian America.” In Reading in America: Literature & Social History, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, 201–25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. N.d. “Literacy Rate, Adult Female: China | Data.” Accessed September 16, 2021. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.FE.ZS?locations=CN. Widmer, Ellen. 1992. “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China.” Late Imperial China 13, no. 1: 111–55. Widmer, Ellen. 2006. The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wu, Hung. 1997. “Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art and the ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’.” In Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, 306–65. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Zhang Yuqing 章育青. 1955. “New China’s Female Parachuters” 新中國的女跳傘員. Shanghai huapian chubanshe. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-27. Zhao Kunhan 趙坤漢. 1975. “The Production Brigade’s Reading Room” 大隊圖書室. Shanghai renmin chubanshe. https://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-268.

Sources for Propaganda Posters and Women’s Magazines • “Chinese Propaganda Posters | Chinese Posters” (Landsberger Collection). https://chineseposters.net/ • ECPO Early Chinese Periodicals Online CATS Library Heidelberg. https://kjc-sv034.kjc.uniheidelberg.de/ecpo/ • Scans from CATS Library Heidelberg Copies of Zhongguo funü 中國婦女 = ZGFN • Scans from CATS Library Heidelberg Copies of Tuhua ribao 圖畫日報 = THRB

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26 FEMININE NEOREALIST FICTION IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM Voice, Trauma, and Focalization in Fang Fang’s Fiction Li Guo

This chapter examines women authors’ renovations of neorealist fiction by addressing Fang Fang’s 方方 (b. 1955) reconfiguration of traditions of fictional neorealism and her development of feminist narrative aesthetics that inscribes intersections of gender, sexuality, and bodily experience. Earlier neorealist works by Chi Li 池莉 (b. 1957) constructed an “unheroic world” by exploring women, petty urbanites, and mundane everyday life realities, revealing “the loss of faith in ‘transcendent values’ in post-socialist China” (Gong 2010, 60). Works by Fang Fang have been identified as “neorealist” because of “a direct and fierce confrontation with reality” and because of her grasp of the “immediacy of experiences” characteristic of China’s avant-garde female writings in the 1990s (Leung 2005, 264). This chapter studies feminine neorealist novels in the new millennium, which transcend earlier concerns about urban realities and embrace a wider range of social, historical, and political foci in their narrative landscapes. Outdoing the emblematic norms of feminist self-narratives, this repertoire of neorealist writings is characterized by vested voices, hybrid temporalities, and embedded narrative frames. This chapter examines representations of memory, forgetting, and focalization in Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial (2016), which portrays disremembering and mentally distraught heroines against the turbulent backdrop of rural land reform in the 1950s. The text’s deployment of character focalization facilitates nascent understandings of gendered agency, feminine remembrance, and embodied experiences of knowledge. Soft Burial suggests the possibility of constructing a gendered historiography beyond canonical social and political discourses.

Neorealism and Feminist Remembrance Critical attention to realism in post–Cultural Revolution literature could be traced to conversations in 1982 at a conference, “Contemporary Chinese Literature: New Forms of Realism?” These new forms of realism differ from “socialist realism” that is characterized by revolutionary

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-33

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optimism and ideological indoctrination. Instead, this “new realism” explores reflections of Chinese reality and the grim structures of the social system. Kam Louie observes: [I]n the early phases of this new literature, when authors were mainly men, most heroes were men and the women on the whole were negative characters. Only when women writers like Ru Zhijuan 茹誌鵑 (1925–1998) and Zhang Kangkang 張抗抗 (b. 1950) began to write was some kind of balance restored. (1983, 105) Depictions of people’s lived experiences focused on the economic challenges for love and romance. This new literature portrays the disillusionment of the Mao generation in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and a turn toward humanism. Haomin Gong offers a pioneering study on the 1990s “neorealist” author Chi Li and neorealism’s exposure of “the conflict in human relationships” and in “class relationships” (2010, 63). The rise of neorealism reflects the “uneven condition in the post-socialist era” against a social and historical juncture of market economy and commercialization under the rise of capitalism (Gong 2010, 90). Bridging neorealism to feminine avant-garde writing, Alberto Castelli examines how works by Wang Anyi 王安憶 (b. 1954), Chen Ruan 陳染 (b. 1962), Can Xue 殘雪 (b. 1953), and Wei Hui 衛慧 (b. 1973) provide “alternative reading of the political allegory of the male narrative” (Castelli 2019, 449). Castelli observes that post–socialist realism and new realist literature in the 1990s could be “a reaction to the Avant-gardist experimentation, the waving structure of the text and the destructiveness of the content” (2019, 449). These writings center on realist expositions of inner experiences, and they manifest individualist feelings and longings and the subjects’ alienation caused by collectivist repression or capitalism’s sway on human relationships. Castelli elucidates how contemporary women introduce heterogenous and multilayered realisms mediated through various genres, voices, and styles of writing. These writings break away from allegorical fashioning of the histories of the nation and turn the focus to the affective, cultural, and psychic realities in the lives of average heroines. Resonating with Louie’s examination of earlier women-authored realist fiction that depicts suppressed sexual desires and ascetism, Castelli presents avant-garde women authors’ reflections on sexuality and names this new literature as “female neorealism” (2019, 470). Whereas the term “female” reclaims the importance of sexuality in feminist narration, this chapter deploys “feminist neorealism” to address the importance of feminine consciousness in contemporary women’s writings. Writings by Fang Fang invite a recontextualization in the tradition of writing trauma and memories. Critics have described Fang Fang’s writings as a kind of “tragic existentialist narration,” a humanist narrative perspective that could be traced to her earlier works (W. Zhang 2013). This notion of women’s “non-belonging” in a post-socialist society is particularly poignant in Ten Thousand Arrows Have Pierced the Heart (萬箭穿心, 2013), when the heroine, after moving to a new apartment allegedly with ill fengshui, experiences a series of calamities, including her husband’s betrayal and subsequent suicide, and ten years of supporting her son and mother-in-law by laboring as a street vendor. The novel presents a scintillating irony against urban materialism, marriage crises, the fall of familial ethics, and afflictions of uneven modernization on working-class women. As Ban Wang argues, “[t]he allegorical severing of the individual from the community, of artworks from historical reality, can also be seen as a symptom of traumatic rupture between private experience on the one hand and cognitive and cultural resources on the other” (2004, 83). Yet Fang Fang’s writings portray such sutures between aesthetic perception of history and collective history-making, between personal stories

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of trauma and allegorical narratives of the nation, and their respective rationalizations of lives in the real world. As Letty Chen observes, in writings of collective trauma, silence could represent a new language for articulating suffering: “Silence manifests in many forms – in forgetting, distortion, absence of confession, and perpetuation of (self) censorship” (2016, 455). The Crazed (2002) by Ha Jin 哈金 (b. 1956) and Dictionary of Maqiao (馬橋詞典, 1997) by Han Shaogong 韓少功 (b. 1953), Chen argues, “disquiet the silence with a ‘language of silence’ that releases the silenced/repressed memories and rearticulates them in a new syntax and lexicon” (2016, 45). Yingjin Zhang argues that these narratives of remembrances and forgetting, of collective rituals of commemoration and individual forms of amnesia, bespeak “the inner contradictions in Chinese modernity and those competing voices of articulating the Chinese experience of modernity, including postmodernism and postsocialism” (Y. Zhang 2016, 496). Whereas Chinese modernity could be a form of “cultural historiography,” individual authors’ works, including the early “avant-garde” novels by Ge Fei 格非 (b. 1964), the “magical realist” writings by Mo Yan 莫言 (b. 1955), and the “neorealist” fiction by Chi Li and Fang Fang, have been resistant against being categorized within a singular form, register, or genre.

Inward Remembering In his study on post-Maoist politics of memory, Yomi Braester elucidates three forms of postMaoist politics of memory: the state-engineered commemoration of the nation’s past (which is selective appropriation rather than remembering the truths), the repudiation of dissidents of “the collective amnesia brought about by repeated erasure of public records,” and a cynical, playful form of forgetting the past as a way of “coping with an absurd reality,” as manifested in the novels by Wang Shuo 王朔 (b. 1958) (Braester 2016, 445). Fang Fang’s Soft Burial is an ambitious endeavor to address the political memories of the individuals who could not fit into the collective remembrance of the nation, portraying a female rememberer who suffers dementia and who resembles many of the author’s disfranchised female characters in her other works (Guo 2017, 73). The protagonist is a landlord’s daughter-in-law who suffers trauma and dementia after all her landlord’s family committed suicide to protect their dignity during the land reform in 1948. Whereas narratives on trauma could take on the perspectives of the victimized to retrieve the lost and forgotten, the author’s deliberate choice of a heroine who suffers dementia as a rememberer indicates the impossibility of acquiring truth. Presenting interlocutions of memories as traumatic narratives, Soft Burial illustrates the poignant fissure between state-engineered commemoration of revolutionary heritages and the emotional suffering of politically abject citizens in recalling the past. The traumatized rememberer in the novel displays a defective, personal form of memory characterized by unreliability and disembodiment. In the novel, set at the height of the land reform, a prominent landlord’s family, the Lus, all commit suicide by swallowing arsenic on the night before the village’s public interrogation of them. Hu Daiyun follows her father-in-law’s instructions and buries the bodies of the deceased without coffins in the family garden. The procedure is a folk ritual called “soft burial,” which does not allow the deceased to be reincarnated in their next lives. She then flees the house with her infant son through a secret tunnel that leads to a river at the back of the mountain. Fu Tong, a servant of the Hus, is about to help them escape by boat. Unwittingly, he hears of the family’s suicide, including that of Daiyun’s maid, Xiao Cha, with whom he was in love. Grief-stricken, he abandons Daiyun in the boat and hastily swims back to rescue Xiao Cha. Daiyun is swept away in the current and loses her son. When she is rescued by some villagers in the lower stream, she is seriously wounded and nearly unconscious. A doctor, Wu Jiaming, saves her life but finds that she has lost almost all her memories. Years later, under the name of 332

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Ding Zitao, Daiyun finds a sheltered life as a live-in nanny for a military officer, Liu Jinyuan. She later marries Dr. Wu, gives birth to a son, Wu Qinglin, and endures a life of hardship after her husband, Jiaming, dies in a car accident. Later Qinglin becomes a successful businessman and buys a large house for Daiyun. Shortly after moving in, she falls into a year-long coma and, in her unconsciousness, begins a journey of recalling her family’s traumatic deaths. On that tragic night, Fu Tong rescues Xiao Cha, who, in her desperation, chooses to become a nun, leaving the panic-stricken Fu Tong guarding the manor alone. The novel ends with the death of Daiyun, whose memories of the past die with her. Her son from her second marriage, Qinglin, retrieves his family histories from the diary of his father, Wu Jiaming (whose name, 吳家名, ironically puns on “with neither home nor name”). However, Qinglin discovers that his father is a survivor of the Dong family, a landlord’s clan that was also destroyed during the land reform. In the novel, “soft burial” implies death without reincarnation, grief beyond remembrance. Being buried underneath earth, without the coverage of a coffin, that is one kind of soft burial. A living one is determined to cover the past and seal up where she comes from. She lets go of the past and refuses to recall, perhaps intentionally, or unwittingly. These situations are soft burials by time. Once buried, they would perhaps remain unknown forever and ever. (Fang Fang 2019, 297) When Qinglin manages to find the Hu family’s house, Daiyun’s natal home was flooded by a reservoir in the 1950s. Following the massive land reform, the remaining traces of the family are swept away in socialist modernization and agrarian economic reform. As Daiyun struggles with dementia, [e]very year is like a tight and impenetrable membrane that conceals the secrets behind her memories layer by layer. A new layer every year; year after year. The cover grows thicker and firmer, and hardens into a board which caps and suppresses all the demonic spirits hidden in her unconsciousness. (Fang Fang 2019, 2) On top of these two layers of soft burial, there is the author’s own recollection of her family trauma, which was kept as a secret by elder generations who passed away. Mieke Bal’s theory of focalization could yield new insights in the current study of memory and narrative in the traumatic mode, as exemplified in Fang Fang’s Soft Burial. Bal observes that focalization is “the placing of the point of view in or with a specific agent” and, thus, is “the principal tool for subjectifying the story” (2009, 66). Focalization is “the relation between the vision, the agent that sees, and that which is seen. This relationship is a component of the content of the narrative text: A says that B sees what C is doing” (Bal 2009, 135). Bal emphasizes that the subject that sees and the object of focalization must be separated, and that the position of a focalizer, or “the point from which the elements are viewed,” be it a character in the story (character focalizer) or one outside the story (external focalizer), could have political or aesthetic implications. Most of Fang Fang’s earlier works showcase situations of double focalization, that is, “that of the anonymous focalizer, which may be located with or in the narrative agent, and that of the character to which it is partial” (Bal 2009, 19). In such cases, an external focalizer (EF) “embeds” the focalization of character A (CF A), who focalizes character B (CF B). In Soft Burial, double focalization is multiplied with rotating CFs whose visions are accessible to an anonymous third-person narrator and the readers but are inaccessible to others in 333

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the story. The main plot is Zitao’s remembrance of her life before and during land reform in her coma. The double focalization, with Zitao as the CF, creates a sealed narrative situation to which other characters do not have access. In this sealed-off space, readers gain fragmented insights into Zitao’s family histories, the ruthless land reform, and the collapse of her natal family, her husband’s family, and the rural gentry class. The book illustrates paralleled double focalizations, including Zitao’s recollection; her son Qinglin’s search for and visit to the Lu family’s abandoned mansion and his discovery of his father’s diary; the retired Liu Jinyuan’s visits to surviving cadres and the tombs of the deceased during the campaign to suppress bandits in Southwest; Zitao’s deceased husband Wu Jiaming’s disjointed recollection of his families and his life with Zitao. In each case of double focalization, the CF never dominates the narration but instead is subjected to an anonymous third-person narration or a form of “free indirect focalization” (Bal 2009, 144). In free indirect speech, “the narrating party approximates as closely as possible the character’s own words without letting it speak directly” (Bal 2009, 144, my emphasis). Free indirect focalization allows the reader to share the perceptions of the CF; it highlights the ironized distance between the reader and character and the irreducible difference between the reader, the character, and their joint pursuit of the elusive past. In Soft Burial, this embedded structure indicates the inevitability of forgetting. As the narrator comments, “[w]hen all the truths are buried in everlasting time, even if you know something happened in the past, how would you know if it was indeed true?” (Fang Fang 2019, 286). Writing does not inscribe the past but remembers it through a form of intervention or even resistance. In this ironizing narrative edifice, the CFs can neither communicate with others nor piece together their recollections of the past. Soft Burial presents a female rememberer who suffers dementia and resists remembering her family’s death during the turbulent land reform. Narratives of the politically abject ultimately cannot be remembered. As Zitao’s son puts it, “[d]ust is dust. Whether these are things you should forget, you can only choose to forget them” (Fang Fang 2019, 101). The act of forgetting can be understood in terms of its political significance and the inscription of the nation-state. Aleida Assmann argues that memory and history impacted on the account of the past through social and political strictures. “Only those of highest rank were singled out for a continuation in memory and only those feats and achievements were selected that contributed to the honor and fame of those who were remembered” (A. Assmann 2008, 58). Personal and individual accounts of the past, if not assimilated as part of a collective “memory” and turned into a shared knowledge, could be forgotten and erased in the patriotic discourse. Whereas narratives of the politically abject and disenfranchised fail to be absorbed into the discourse of the nation and thus are unable to be “remembered,” they could contribute to what Foucault calls “countermemories,” which both resist the nation-state discourse and rewrite it through new perspectives (Foucault 1977, 7). Memory in Soft Burial extends Bal’s discussion of focalization. Bal argues that “memory is an act of ‘vision’ of the past, but as an act, it is situated in the present of the memory” (2009, 145). Whereas memory is “a narrative act” that seeks to connect fragmented episodes into a coherent story, it is also highly unreliable. Traumatic events disrupt the capacity to comprehend and experience them at the time of their occurrence. As a result, the traumatized person cannot remember them; instead, they recur in bits and pieces, in nightmares, and cannot be ‘worked through’. The incapability that paralyzes the traumatized person can be situated on both story and text levels. (Bal 2009, 145) 334

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The novel presents disjointed and open-ended narrations of various people’s experiences during the land reform. The plot arrangements present the impossibility of remembering characters’ lives either as coherent, individual stories or as linked accounts of the past. This narrative impossibility is displayed through Daiyun’s schizophrenic recounting of the past in her inner journey to the past, Qingyun’s initial reluctance to read his father’s diary in resistance to pursuing the truth, Wu Jiaming’s inability to recall his natal family, and ultimately, Liu Jinyuan’s failure to locate the tombs of his sacrificed fellow soldiers. If memories by politically abject subjects are “ephemeral social memories” that failed to be assimilated in the discourse of the nation, the novel presents the impossibility of transforming these memories into a collective one and passing it down to later generations. Double focalization, free, indirect focalization, and embedded focalization did not suture individual accounts into a mobilizing narrative but show that social memories become relics of the past. The act of “remembering” involves vacillating encounters with past events that cannot be retransmitted or resurrected. The notion of “soft burial” attests the author’s personal struggle to resist the very act of forgetting by galvanizing traces of the past in her family histories and the histories of the politically disenfranchised through writing. Forgetting in narratology entails an ellipsis or gap of information between an embedded text and the fabula of the primary narrative. The primary narrative is Qinglin’s foiled effort to care for his unconscious mother. The embedded text is Daiyun’s palpable experience in an imagined world of her own, re-envisioning the agonizing memories and reliving the sharp pangs of guilt. With Daiyun, a daughter of a literatus and daughter-in-law of a landlord, as the frame narrator, the narrative structure is marked by its liminality as it is told by the politically abject subjects, the countless landlords’ families that were tortured and killed as the state pushed for the cleansing of the rural gentry class under the rhetoric of class struggle and egalitarian ownership. As Bal argues, in embedded narrative texts, there is often “a liminal affiliation between the structure of narratorial embedding and the social structure of a class society” (2009, 75). Daiyun 黛雲, named by her father after the fictional heroines Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 and Shi Xiangyun 史湘雲 in the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), represents a gentry femininity that is doomed to exile, death, or deathlike suffering. As readers, we see what Daiyun “sees” in her unconsciousness. The readers depend on a narrative frame that is personal and political in projecting a counter-memory to the state discourse of peasant liberation and land reform, but it is fragile and defective in that Daiyun the focalizer is traumatized. The Lu family’s garden, where the deceased were buried, becomes a site that represents “palpable relics” (A. Assmann 2008, 55). Enclosed by a long meandering high wall, the garden is adjacent to an airy pavilion that overlooks the valley outside. Aesthetically attractive, the pavilion’s function is military: it is a watchtower and barricade for invaders and roofs a cannon that is erected to fight against the mountain bandits. Underneath the western wall, a cluster of canna lilies blossom. The canna lilies bear Buddhist resonances. Legend has it that when Gautama Buddha was walking with a disciple in a valley, his vicious cousin Devadatta pushed down a large rock toward them. The rock did not hit the Buddha, but a piece of stone falling from it cut the Buddha’s feet and made him bleed. The Buddha’s blood grows into canna lily as it sinks into the ground. The legend of the flower being the blood of Buddha’s toe, as Daiyun herself accounts to her husband earlier, unwittingly foreshadows her own fate as a witness of violence and death. With the rural revolution and its repudiation of feudal histories, the traditional garden, “with its overtones of exclusive elite leisure, languished in relative obscurity” (Meyer-Fong 2014, 77). In Soft Burial, the garden as a site of personal and familial remembrance could not be registered in the state’s collective memory. Later named “Haunted Mansion” by the locals, the house repels real estate developers. Nor would the 335

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two surviving sons of the Lu family invest in transforming their parents’ burial ground into a tourist site to boost the village’s economy. The family’s adversity could not be registered in the discourse of agrarian reform and peasant empowerment and also eludes the narrative of state capitalism and tourist consumerism. Further, Fang Fang’s writings enrich studies of remembrance and traumatic narratives, thanks to her substantial preoccupation with the issue of temporality. Judith Butler contends that gender “is an identity tenuously constituted in time” and should be reconceived as “a constituted social temporality” (1988, 519–20). Fang Fang’s writings present intersecting levels of temporality organization, including gender as a social temporality, historical temporality, and narrative temporality. Among her works that foreground feminine existence, some illustrate gender as a socially constructed temporality and explore the connection between temporality and feminine becoming, such as her novel Water under Time. However, the narrative perspectives in these works are shifting and blended and not fully fitting to be read from a feminist phenomenologist approach. Second, quite a few of Fang Fang’s works highlight an abstract, historical temporality through shifting narratives of identity, place, and belonging. Examples include “A Chronicle of the Wuni Lake” (烏泥湖年譜, 1999) and “The City of Wuchang” (武 昌城, 2006). Water under Time displays an intersection of gendered temporality and historical temporality, by aligning the life of an opera singer with the polemical history of Wuhan from the 1930s to the new millennium. This preoccupation with historical temporality in Fang Fang’s writings transcends the category of feminine writing or feminist history writing. Finally, Fang Fang’s writings invite fresh understandings about narrative temporality. Temporality, Paul Ricoeur argues, is “the structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent. Their relationship is therefore reciprocal” (Ricoeur 1980, 169). This structural reciprocity between temporality and narrativity highlights narrative’s potential to produce new forms of temporality. A narrative’s temporal dialectic comprises two aspects. One is the chronological dimension, also called episodic dimension, “which characterizes the story as made out of events” (Ricoeur 1980, 178). The other is called “the configurational dimension, according to which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events” (Ricoeur 1980, 178). This twofold plot indicates that narrative “brings us back from within-time-ness to historicality, from ‘reckoning with’ time to ‘recollecting’ it” (Ricoeur 1980, 178). In Soft Burial, in the chronological dimension, the “rememberers” Liu Jinyuan, Wu Jiaming, and Ding Zitao die without being able to mend together their memories. In the configural dimension, readers are exposed to intersecting accounts of several families’ sufferings that act as agents of remembrance to piece together these stories, with approximation to “truths.” This configural dimension of the temporal dialectic creates “a sense of ending” and helps overcome loss and forgetting in episodic narratives (as of each character focalizer). And yet “the configurational dimension cannot overcome the episodic dimension without suppressing the narrative structure itself” (Ricoeur 1980, 178). The temporal dialectic in the narrative inevitably involves “forgetting.” If the configurational dimension of the narrative “remembers” truths in a sutured, coherent whole, it creates further amnesia and loss of marginal reminiscences in this secondary process. To remember the past is not the opposite of forgetting, or an antidote against it. To remember is to accept “forgetting” as a psychic and narratological prerequisite for recounting the stories of the past.

Re-Encountering Collective Amnesia In contrast with the state-initiated commemoration of the nation’s past through tourism or cultural preservation projects, the novel showcases different forms of “forgetting” or amnesia. 336

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Liu Jinyuan’s first son finds comfort in a middle-class, “small-scale life” (Fang Fang 2019, 138). Liu’s second son, a successful businessman, strives for material affluence as the state turns to market economy and capitalism. Liu’s grandson is absorbed in a techno-life and finds joy and relief in video gaming. At Liu’s funeral, Liu’s grandson and an old friend of Liu’s are discussing video games, without being long hampered by grieving Liu’s death. Qinglin seeks contentment in accumulating personal wealth and handles the family’s past in “a professional manner.” This collective “amnesia” is depicted as follows: “Time is not only beyond language. It is also colorless, soundless, and formless. It dissolves countless beings in the world into nothingness. This is what soft burial means, I think” (Fang Fang 2019, 293). The characters are often reluctant to remember the past, or traumatized and inevitably walled off from the facts. Silence, unreliability, uncertainties are dramatized to indicate the state’s failure to conform politically marginalized individuals to the norms of citizenship. As the novel illustrates, narrative unreliability is political in that it foregrounds heterogenous voices, bodies, and tempospatialities that exceed the framing of nationalist discourse. The haunted mansions of rural elites, many like the Lu family’s house, indicate a form of political internal exile of these rural gentry clans in the relentless rural reform. As Judith Butler argues, the apparatus of the state “is supposed to service the matrix for the obligations and prerogatives of citizenship” (1988, 3). However, the state also “expels and suspends modes of legal protection and obligation” and thus produces a form of “non-belonging” and puts citizens in perilous situations (Butler and Spivak 2007). The Lu family’s phantom house, together with many similar abandoned mansions, signify a status of “being at once contained and dispossessed by the state” (Butler and Spivak 2007, 5). These once-impressive southern mansions endure, but their owners have dispersed. “Rather than being eroded and deserted by time, they were destroyed and forsaken by history” (Fang Fang 2019, 231). Architectural references signify different ideals of human–nature relationships and human–human interactions in social and historical contexts. Qinglin 青林, whose name means “green woods,” pursues a humanist ideal in architecture design and finds inspiration from traditional aesthetics of the deserted mansions in southern provinces. However, his humanist vision could not relate to the socialist discourse of conquering the “rivers and mountains” for the people. Ironically, the new house that he purchases for his mother, with traditional aesthetic designs, triggers her memories and propels her into an inner search for the past. The disturbed Daiyun falls into a prolonged coma, a state of “non-belonging.” In the novel, traditional houses, such as the Great Well, the Lu family’s “Hall of Three Knowings,” the Hu family’s “Hut of Forbearance,” with divided inner and outside areas and high defense walls, reflect Confucian humility, tolerance, self-concealment, and gendered divisions of labor. These edifices’ spatial designs and the classical architectural vocabulary lose their allure as rural revolution and class struggles sweep up even the remotest villages. The demolition of these once-glorious mansions is a fated outcome of political suppression. To live in oblivion allows the traumatized characters to survive without pain. Whereas Daiyun’s amnesia is involuntary, the surviving sons of the Lu family choose forgetting as the only way to break away from their family’s horrific tragedy. They refuse the village’s utilitarianist economic agenda and reject the proposal to relocate their relatives’ tombs and transform the house into a tourist site. What is compelling here is the contrast between two elements underlying a connective structure between “memory (or reference to the past), identity (or political imagination), and cultural continuity (or the formation of tradition)” that Jan Assmann observes (J. Assmann 2011, 2). One is normative, the other narrative. Both the normative and narrative elements “create a basis of belonging, of identity, so that the individual can then talk of ‘we’” (J. Assmann 2011, 3). Jens Brockmeier further notes that the normative aspect of this 337

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connective structure “is expressed and enforced by law, political, economic and . . . religious power” (Brockmeier 2002, 27). The narrative aspect of this connective structure “is articulated and dispersed through a culture’s countless discursive registers: from myth and fairy tales to literature, film, advertisement and everyday conversation” (Brockmeier 2002, 27). The boundaries of the normative and the narrative aspects are porous and shifting and could be mutually constructive, However, the essence of cultural memory is “narrative’s distinctive capacity to give shape to the temporal dimension of human experience. Put differently, narrative endows the inherent historicity of human experience with cultural meanings” (Brockmeier 2002, 27). Soft Burial addresses the tensions between the normative (i.e., state initiated) formation of cultural memory and the narrative formation by staging an urgency of narrating the past. Daiyun’s and other characters’ unwillingness to recall the past presents a resistance against totalitarian discourses, which, modulated by authoritarianism, homogenizes political memories. The Lu family’s blood-tainted dispute with the Wangs over the expansion of family land to build a clan shrine foreshadows the Wang family’s revenge through political cleansing. The extinguishment of the Lu clan in the agrarian reform is a “revenge” of the peasants instigated by the family’s decadence. The novel depicts as complex and intertwined the relationship between rural elites and peasant women. Tina Chen observes that “the forged link between women’s subjectivity and peasant’s subjectivity in Maoist discourse transforms the feudal female body into a strategic reference to bespeak ‘dual objectives of class and gender liberation’” (2011, 65). Soft Burial presents “feudal” women across vastly uneven class and educational backgrounds, including Daiyun, a gentry lady; her mother (an embroidery expert); female servants; her father’s concubine; her mother-in-law; and her sister-in-law, Huiyuan, a modern educated young woman who also commits suicide with her family. Even though the female servants would not be persecuted, they are still part of the feudal structures that need to be torn down and would be divided up as objects by peasants as wives, against their will. The narrative entails land reform and marriage reform through the subplot of Hu family’s daughter Huiyuan’s thwarted love with Jindian, the surviving son of the shattered Wang family, who is taken in by the Lu family as an infant and serves as a house servant. Huiyuan’s suicide highlights the failure of the political agenda of freeing women from traditional family strictures. Even though Huiyuan is educated and progressive, she could not be married to her true love, Jindian, first because of feudal patriarchy, and later because of the new class divisions between the peasant and rural elites. Land reform deprives rural women of their agency in social, political, and familial lives, leaving death as the only option out. As Edward Said observes, “memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority” (2000, 176). Focalization in Soft Burial displays contesting perspectives of recalling the nation’s past through local memories that could not be commemorated by the nationalist discourse. Although Liu Jinyuan could be a narrative agent to restore history, he, at 84, feels out of joint with time and incapable of finding an audience for his stories. On top of aphasia, or loss of language in communication, he suffers amnesia. An even deeper psychological challenge for him is to mend the gap between the memory of the nation (a recurrently invested “social, political, historical enterprise”) and the unsung sacrifices of ordinary people. These marginal memories are no longer or have never been “desirable” or “recoverable” (Said 2000, 179). Ironically, when reaching out for a photo of Wu Jiaming, trying to confirm that Dr. Wu is Qinglin’s father, Liu suffers a stroke and passes away. Liu’s friend Lao Qi, the only surviving witness who could confirm Wu’s identity, is not able to show a photo of his cousin (Wu Jiaming) to Liu. The novel determinately seals off Wu’s family history to all his relatives and acquaintances. Whereas the extradiegetic narrator enjoys a degree of epistemic authority, some facts are kept as opaque and 338

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unknown both to the EF narrator and the readers. The Hu family’s experiences, and the whereabouts of their grandson, just like their house under the reservoir, become a perpetual mystery. As Said argues, “the invention of tradition is a method for using collective memory selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others, elevating still others in the entirely functional way” (2000, 179). The quest for the past exposes suppressed narratives that problematize the state-engineered collective memory.

Conclusion As Cathy Caruth argues, texts on individual or collective histories of suffering both “speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience” (2016, 4). Traumatic memories merit a narratological consideration, for “it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 2016, 4). Soft Burial resorts to a variety of narrative techniques, including double focalization, free indirect focalization, and embedded focalization, to portray personal and individual accounts of the past that could not be assimilated as part of a collective “memory.” Narrative uncertainty, Catrina Brown observes, signifies “a gendered and discursive context of violence and trauma” and, instead of being read as absences, calls for an ethical reading beyond stories on the surface (2013, 2). The deaths of key characters/rememberers before having a chance to give their accounts, at the plot level, halt the story momentarily. However, the narrative’s mechanism continues to move forward and offer new signs and clues of the past. At the end of Soft Burial, Qinglin’s friend, an archeologist, manages to find Xiao Cha’s convent and plans to visit her, a trauma witness and survivor of the Lu family. This small discovery tips off Qinglin’s fragile sense of safety built on material comfort, leaving his sealed-off emotional realm open to uncertainties. As the elapsed past keeps resurfacing, remembering and forgetting are engaged in perpetual dialectics, “the dialectics of ‘having been’ and ‘no longer’” (Ricoeur 2009, 364). In Daiyun’s experience, when she loses her memories, she manages to live a normal life. However, when she begins to remember, she falls into deep unconsciousness. In her coma, “she wanders into another world, and look at the people and events there” (Fang Fang 2019, 57). Soft Burial foreshadows the tensions between the politics of remembering and forgetting and calls for a poignant awakening from oblivious normalcy and cultural amnesia in the post-Mao era. Soft Burial meaningfully exposes heterogenous and gendered modes of existence and the diverse function of discursive subjects, be it the CF, the EF, or the author herself, as a textual construct. Susan Sontag holds that “all memory is individual,” and that “collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating . . . Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings” (2003, 86). Sontag’s contention aids a deeper understanding of feminine historical consciousness in Chinese women’s writings since 2000, and of gendered memories as counter-memories against the state discourse on national and history writing. When Fang Fang was writing this novel, she was entangled in a prolonged dispute with a party-loyalist “poet” who produced mediocre simulated classic poems to praise the nation’s revolutionary heritages. Not coincidently, Fang Fang, with her compassion for personal trauma, fell out of favor in the state “systems of valorization” (Foucault 1977, 115). One of the slipshod commentators compared Fang Fang and Chi Li as two opposing representatives of “neorealism,” accusing Fang Fang of betraying the nation’s heritages for an individualistic “deliberate neorealism” that exploits social deficiencies and dark realities. This purported battering is not new among the countless assaults that Fang Fang suffered for her “unpatriotic” Wuhan Diaries (Fang Fang riji, 方方日記, 2020). Yet such ideological attack also merits a counter-reading. That is, 339

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feminist neorealism deconstructs the myth of the nation, and its defiant kernel is destined to pierce through the framed narratives of the revolutionary past, if not to directly refute them.

References Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Transformations between History and Memory.” Social Research 75, no. 1: 49–72. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. First published in Germany for Verlag as Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen in 1992. First English edition published in 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bal, Mieke. 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Braester, Yomi. 2016. “The Post-Maoist Politics of Memory.” In A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Yingjin Zhang, 434–50. New York: Wiley. Brockmeier, Jens. 2002. “Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory.” Culture and Psychology 8, no. 1: 15–43. Brown, Catrina. 2013. “Women’s Narratives of Trauma: (Re)storying Uncertainty, Minimization and Self-Blame.” Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations, & Interventions 3, no. 1: 1–30. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–31. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 2007. Who Sings the Nation-State? London: Calcutta. Caruth, Cathy. 2016. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Castelli, Alberto. 2019. “Female Writing in Chinese Postmodern Literature: From Neorealism to AvantGarde.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 21, no. 4: 448–75. Chen, Letty Lingchei. 2016. “Writing Historical Traumas in the Everyday.” In A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Yingjin Zhang, 452–64. New York: Wiley. Chen, Tina Mai. 2011. “Peasant and Woman in Maoist Revolutionary Theory, 1920s–1950s.” In Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China: Essays in Honor of Maurice Meisner, edited by Catherine Lynch, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Robert B. Marks, 55–79. Lanham: Lexington. Fang Fang 方方. 2019. Ruanmai 軟埋 (Soft Burial). Beijing: Wenlian shuwu. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gong, Haomin. 2010. “Constructing a Neorealist Reality: Petty Urbanites, Mundaneness, and Chi Li’s Fiction.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, no. 2: 59–95. Guo, Li. 2017. “The Aesthetic of Hysteria in Fang Fang’s Water under Time (2008).” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, no. 1: 73–105. Leung, Laifong. 2005. “Fang Fang.” In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, edited by Edward L. Davis, 264–65. New York: Routledge. Louie, Kam. 1983. “New Forms of Realism in Chinese Literature: The St. John’s University Conference.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs no. 9: 99–113. Meyer-Fong, Tobie. 2014. “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 13: 75–98. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1: 169–90. Ricoeur, Paul. 2009. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward W. 2000. “Invention, Memory, and Place.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2: 175–192. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. Wang, Ban. 2004. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zhang, Weitian 張蔚天. 2013. “Cunzai zhuyi shide beiju shushuo: Fang Fang xiaoshuo lun” 存在主義式 的悲劇訴說: 方方小說論 (Tragic Existentialist Narration in Fang Fang’s Fiction). MA thesis. Hefei: Anhui University. Zhang, Yingjin. 2016. “Toward a Typology of Literary Modernity in China: A Survey of English Scholarship on Modern Chinese Literature.” In A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Yingjin Zhang, 483–500. New York: Wiley.

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PART VIII

Changing Worlds of Translation and Transmediation

27 FRAME TALES Reading the 1,001 Nights in Early Twentieth-Century China Michael Gibbs Hill

The translation, rewriting, and circulation of the 1,001 Nights, or The Arabian Nights Entertainments (Kitāb alf layla wa layla), into Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century provides a compelling case study for how we might move beyond readings of translation and world literature that are guided by the historical circulation of English, French, and German texts to other parts of the world, especially the so-called non-Western world. The Nights unquestionably served as a generative text in twentieth-century China, because, in the eyes of translators, editors, and critics, these stories brought readers the essence of an ancient culture located outside of East Asia and opportunities to reflect on ancient and recent Chinese history and contemporary Chinese identities. Despite the small number of texts from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature translated into Chinese in the first half of the twentieth century, the Nights played an outsize role in modern Chinese literature. Eight different books calling themselves translations of The Arabian Nights were published between 1900 and 1949; some translations, such as Xi Ruo’s 奚若 (1880–1915) Tianfang yetan 天方夜譚, were reprinted multiple times (Beijing tushuguan 1987, 28–9). None of these collections were complete – though the completeness of any collection in any language could be debated – and the only full translation based on an Arabic-language source was not completed until the 1980s.1 Other translations of individual stories were also published, and the adaptation of the plots or contents of individual stories that were passed off as works of “original” fiction expands the Nights’ reach even further. Along with Bocaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Nights stand out among the most famous frame narratives in world literature. They stand apart from these other works, however, because they were a prized product of Orientalist knowledge production of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The translation produced by Antoine Galland (1646–1715) in the early 1700s, which was the result of his many years spent in diplomatic service in Istanbul, was a watershed event in world literature. As translators, writers, and critics reflected on the Nights, they inevitably drew on Orientalist knowledge, even as China itself was the subject of a different strain of Orientalist study and knowledge production. This connection to the superstructure of Orientalist knowledge about the Middle East produced in Western European languages characterizes Chinese-language reflections about the Middle East throughout the late Qing and, indeed, much of the twentieth century. By engaging with this history of Orientalism and the creation and recreation of the Nights, as well as with other sources 343

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related to the places that were imagined in these translation – specifically, turn-of-the-century Egypt – we may find surprising possibilities for comparative scholarship. My three main sources for this chapter are, first, an unsigned translation published in the revolutionary journal The Continent (大陸報); second, Zhou Zuoren’s 周作人 (1885–1967) translation of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” which he titled “The Heroic Slave Woman”; and third, Ye Shaojun’s 葉紹鈞 (Ye Shengtao 葉聖陶, 1894–1988) long preface, written in 1924, to Xi Ruo’s translation of the Nights. Since I do not have space to rehearse a history of the editions of the Nights or their many translations and adaptations, I will only note that, before the translation by Na Xun 納訓 (1911–1989), the sources for translations of the Nights were nearly all in English: both the Xi Ruo and Zhou Zuoren based their versions in Chinese on the English version by Edward Forster (Lai 2021). This edition, in turn, was translated from Antoine Galland’s French edition. A significant pattern emerges in the three texts that I analyze here: we see a persistent nostalgia and antiquarianism, especially in the way that translators and critics focus on the ancient culture of the Arab world and the ways in which it might share a sense of time or temporality with China as ancient cultures facing modern problems, including imperialism and colonialism, internal political strife, and unprecedented cultural transformation. This way of making meaning out of the Nights as an ancient text opens the possibility for a comparative reading of the circulation of the Nights in both China and the Middle East. Although this exploration of the Nights does not provide a solution to the problem of the East– West or West-and-the-Rest hierarchy in our scholarship or modes of thinking, it may provide new ways of working around or sidestepping these divisions.

Mobilizing History In translations of the Nights, we see a twofold fascination with the Middle East: on the one hand, the region (Egypt in particular) appears as a civilization whose ancient roots are comparable to China’s. On the other hand, the Middle East becomes a negative example, a place that represents the possibility that one day China might also become a colony of Europe. Late-Qing discussions of the current state of Egypt drew many parallels with China. Of particular interest to commentators at that time was the political leader Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (1769–1849), who implemented reforms in the bureaucracy and military, promoted industry in the countryside, and worked to establish a strong degree of independence from the Ottoman state and from European powers. The state that ‘Ali built declined, however, and Egypt was occupied by British forces at the end of the nineteenth century. In its efforts to navigate a route toward modern statehood between the old imperial regime and modern colonialism, then, Egypt would be a natural point of interest for intellectuals inspired by the Self-Strengthening Movement and similar intellectual and political developments. Rebecca Karl argues that Egypt had become the “best proximate example of reformism gone awry because of imperialism” (2002b, 178–81). We can see how commonplace this view have become by reading an unsigned review in Liang Qichao’s (1873-1929) The China Discussion (新民叢報) of A History of Modern Egypt by Shiba Shirō (1852-1922). The review hailed the book as a potential mirror for understanding Chinese history. Egypt and China resemble one another the most. Their ancient civilizations resemble one another, and their recent history of reviving themselves from weakness resemble one another, as does their subsequent fall from revival. Thus, if one wants to understand China’s future, one must read the history of Egypt. (“Aiji jinshi shi” 1902, 96) 344

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Writing in his diary in 1902, the scholar and official Sun Baoxuan 孫寳瑄 (1874–1924) also recorded his own take on the minor Egyptomania among journalists and publicists. Some people have compared the difficulties described in the history of Egypt to those of China today. I disagree. How can China dare to compare itself to Egypt? . . . If we were to look for a ruler like [Muhammad] Ali or a citizen like Ya-la-fei [reference not clear] in China, we still would not be able to find them. Therefore, when I look to Egypt’s past, I just sigh with regret for China. (Sun 2015, 532) With this background already in place, translators of the Nights had a ready point of historical reference that would allow them to locate the text and its significance against a larger history. This interest in the recent history of Egypt and the Middle East would dovetail with a longstanding practice of treating the Nights as a catalog of Arab customs. Since the 1820s, virtually all English-language commentaries on The Arabian Nights argued that, despite its many tales of the extraordinary, the supernatural, the bawdy, and the sexually risqué, there remained valuable as “a catalog of the true East, an index of the timeless characteristics of oriental, or Arabian, life” (Rastegar 2007, 46). This utility was reinforced by its publisher, the Victorian-era Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. This instrumental approach to translation certainly carried great weight during the late Qing, as many publishers touted their works of translated fiction as valuable guides to other cultures. What was held, then, in that catalog of knowledge?

The Continent: Ancient Echoes, Revolutionary Politics A notable translation of the Nights first appeared from May through September of 1903 in The Continent, a journal largely run by students who had spent time in Japan. In its editorial positions, the journal supported Sun Yat-sen and advocated for the overthrow of the Qing government; it can also be connected to intellectuals with a strong anti-Manchu outlook. The journal was published in Shanghai (probably in the Japanese concession) by the Renewal Society, which was financed by the Japanese educator named Shimoda Utako (Li and Macdonald 2016, 87–8). Early issues of the journal cast “new learning” and Western learning in a developmentalist/evolutionary frame. The first long essay in the journal, “Elimination,” discusses forms of knowledge in bluntly evolutionary terms, with great concern about the implications for China (“Taotai pian” 1902). The journal also published several short pieces – probably fictional or rewritten from the news – under the title “Annals of National Humiliation.” Other texts, such as “The Story of American Independence,” had a clear fascination with national sovereignty and political power (“Meiguo duli ji yanyi” 1903). The translation of the Nights fit with these concerns. The unsigned preface that appears before the first installment of the translation of the Nights offers a new take on the value of the book for understanding the customs of the Arabs, specifically their lost cultural superiority to the West. The writer of this preface extends the judgment cast on Egypt to the entire Arab world: At that time their learning in such fields as philosophy, in poetics, in physics, in medicine, in anatomy, in astronomy, in mathematics, in geography, and history were supreme; they were exemplars of the age. European scholars went hand in hand to Spain to immerse themselves in their [the Arabs’] teachings, which they used to

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create the world of science of today. How they flourished! . . . In the past, Arab scholars were the teachers of the Europeans, but now they are the Europeans’ slaves; in the past, they held the leading position in the scholarly world, but among learned people today there is nothing to restore the Arabs’ status. All that is left to make later generations sigh with emotion and to move women and children to sing and weep is this trifling work of fiction, One Thousand and One Nights. Alas! Was this caused by their religion, or was it caused by their racial makeup? (“Yi Qian Yi Ye” 1903, 77) The preface also lamented that the people of Arab lands had lost their “martial spirit” and “sense of the nation” (1903, 77), characteristics that were routinely debated in late-Qing nationalist discourse. Here we see a convergence with longstanding Orientalist discussions of the Middle East that held up the splendors of the ancient Near East to cast the current moment in a negative light – and often to justify Western colonial domination (Said 1979, 79–80, 185–6). These arguments also echo discussions of the ancient Chinese origins of Western technological and scientific prowess that were very common in the late-Qing period (Huters 2005, 23–42). In this case, however, the ancient origins lie not in China but elsewhere. Rather than argue for the cultural uniqueness located in East Asia or on China, the translation in The Continent seeks a mode of identification that is based on a shared loss of ancient glory. This identification authorizes a reading of the Nights that continues to foreground its presumed value as a catalog of customs of the Arab world and seeks to rescue the latent potential for realizing a non-Western modernity. In the opening chapter, we see Scheherazade step forward as an opponent to Oriental despotism. When the King of Persia decides to go on a killing spree in which he murders one new woman every day to take revenge on his wife (and all women), the translator in The Continent explains that this was possible because “originally the despots of the East could exercise their power without limitation” (“Yi Qian Yi Ye” 1903, 80). When placed in this new context, this comment about despotism immediately referenced discussions about reform of the Qing state in the early twentieth century: many sides of the political spectrum believed that limiting the power of the Qing rulers, whether through constitutional monarchy our outright revolution, was an unavoidable step in making China part of the modern system of nation-states. Scheherazade challenges this despotism through her willingness to risk her own life for others. She says to her father that: She regretted that she could not become the sultan’s wife. Her father was shocked at her words, and pleaded with her not to have such thoughts, for serving as a minister or queen [for this Sultan] would surely lead to death. But the girl held fast, believing that if she could follow her plan, then she could change the sultan’s mind, and save the people from this cruel fate. She said to her father, “I am not unaware of the danger, but my intentions are set and cannot be changed. If I die without helping others, then there will be glory in death; if I can help, when would it not be of benefit to our country?” (“Yi Qian Yi Ye” 1903, 80–1) The translation in The Continent locates within this ancient story the roots of the Arab world’s long-lost superiority over the West and its utility in the present: the courage to stand against “Eastern Despots” and impose, in whatever way, limits on the power of rulers. Scheherazade’s spirit is what has been “eliminated” and can be recovered through translation and reading of 346

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this account of the “customs and habits of the Arabs.” Given the revolutionary stance of The Continent, this opposition to unchecked power might have another meaning: opposition to the Manchu court in favor of new forms of governance. A look to other articles in The Continent confirms this interpretation as we see them decry China’s corruption and hurl criticisms at the New People’s Miscellany, edited by Liang Qichao, which supported the establishment of a constitutionalist state (“Jinggao Zhongguo zhi xinmin” 1903 and “Zhina zhen xiang” 1903). Additionally, following this installment of the translation, we see a long record of a speech given by Kang Tongbi 康同璧 (1887–1969), a political reformer and daughter of Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927), and other materials related to Zhang Zhujun 張竹君 (1876–1964), founder of the Red Cross in China and commonly known as the “Chinese Florence Nightingale” (“Ji Kang Tongbi nüshi Datong xuexiao yanshuo” 1903). In this arrangement of texts, the character of Scheherazade enfolded into a group of exceptional women that were regularly featured in periodicals and newspapers of the early twentieth century (Judge 2004).

Thoroughly Modern Morgiana: Zhou Zuoren, the Nights, and Another Route of Comparison This exemplary female subject also appeared in Zhou Zuoren’s retelling of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” Although “Ali Baba,” like “Sindbad the Sailor,” is not commonly recognized as a part of the canonical Nights collection, Galland included it in his collection, and many English editions followed suit (Chraïbi 2007). Zhou’s “Ali Baba,” which he titled “The Heroic Slave Woman” (俠女奴), focused on the connections of gender, heroism, and the mind of the modern citizen. The story, which was one of Zhou’s first published works of fiction, appeared first in Women’s World (女子世界) and later as a book. In both versions, Zhou used a feminine pen name, “Ms. Duckweed Cloud” (萍雲女士); this intersection between translation and gender shows how male-gendered writers used the figure of the new woman to break into the literary field.2 An editorial note posted at the beginning of the story commented on the story’s importance: Morgiana was a slave woman from Persia. She had a keen eye and a quick wit. Her master was killed in a robber’s cave, but when the thieves traced [her master’s] trail back to his home, she defeated them in one swoop. Her courage is very much like China’s own female knight-errant, Hongxian. Adrift in the sea of slavery, this amazing story appeared before me, and I felt compelled to translate it from the European language as an example for all the world’s natural slaves. (Pingyun nüshi 2006, 721) With such importance attached to Morgiana and her potential meaning for “natural slaves” out in Duckweed Cloud’s audience, readers should pay close attention to how the translation depicts Morgiana and other major characters. A close reading shows that the outcome of “The Heroic Slave Woman” hinges on the degree to which the main characters possess and deploy their “alertness,” “quick thinking,” “courageous character,” and “spirit of adventure.” Ali Baba’s brother, Kasim, for example, suffers from the greatest impoverishment of these characteristics. He is described as “a greedy thug, with no inclination toward adventure and with no quick wit to handle changing situations” (Pingyun nüshi 2006, 730). Kasim blackmails his brother into telling him the secret words needed to open the cave door – “Open, Sesame!” – but when he enters the cave and the door closes behind him, Kasim was “so frightened that 347

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his memory gave out, and no matter how he racked his brains, he could not think of the word ‘Sesame’” (Pingyun nüshi 2006, 730). For his lack of wit, Kasim is killed by the thieves, his corpse mutilated and spread about the cave. When Ali Baba discovers the pieces of the body, he returns home and summons Morgiana to help him hide the cause of Kasim’s death and hold a quiet funeral. The moment she enters the story, Duckweed Cloud’s translation highlights her special nature: When he knocked at the door, it was answered by a slave-woman named Morgiana. She was clever and quick-witted, full of initiative, and could undertake the most dangerous and adventurous tasks. Thus, her moral character far exceeded the average person, and Ali trusted her with many important duties. (Pingyun nüshi 2006, 809–810) Morgiana then carries out feats of observation and cunning to kill the thieves when they sneak into Ali Baba’s home and to protect the family from revenge. What makes Morgiana’s heroism possible are mental qualities and modes of thought, including her “moral character,” “essence,” and “spirit,” which enable her to respond to change and challenge. Although the story contains little self-consciously interior language about Morgiana’s thoughts, the narration makes it clear that these interior qualities serve as the foundation for cultivating citizens that are no longer “natural slaves.” In late-Qing discourse on gender and nationhood, the trope of slavery frequently pointed to another figure: the modern citizen (Karl 2002a). As a model character, then, Morgiana fits well within the mold of the hortatory fiction so enthusiastically advocated by many intellectuals at the turn of the century. So far, I have discussed how Zhou Zuoren’s “Ali Baba” reflects on its host culture, lateQing China, but now I want to reset the frame and examine how Zhou’s story and the translation in The Continent might relate to contemporaneous debates about gender, culture, and society in the places that were seen, however vaguely, to be the source of the Nights. Despite the mediating functions of Orientalist views of the Middle East and translation and retranslation of the Nights through English, French, Arabic, and (finally) Chinese, we can nonetheless connect these versions of the Nights to places such as Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. Both Scheherazade in The Continent and Morgiana in The Heroic Slave Woman use fictional women from the ancient Arab world and Persia to evoke the modern citizen and subject in the late Qing. This idealization of female heroes fits closely with late-Qing discussions of the new woman. For example, Jin Tianhe’s (金天翮, 1873–1947) The Women’s Bell (女界鐘, 1903), the first full-length tract on women’s rights in modern China, regularly cited the examples of Chinese and foreign women from ancient times to the recent past: the introduction refers to Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ban Zhao, Hua Mulan, and many others, all in the same breath (Jin 2013, 210–11). Even a cursory examination of Egypt in the Nahda or so-called Arab Renaissance shows that the mode of writing about exemplary women found in the Nights that I discussed earlier and in male-centered feminist tracts from the late Qing overlaps with contemporary debates about feminism and the “woman question” in Egypt. Jin Tianhe’s Women’s Bell might be compared with the work of Qāsim Āmīn (1863–1908), another so-called father of feminism who called for the elevation of the status of women in turn-of-the-century Egypt in The Liberation of Women (Kitāb taḥrīr al-mar’ah, 1899) and its sequel, The New Woman (al-Mar’ah al-jadīdah, 1900) (see Āmīn 2000). More interesting, however, is the convergence in print culture between Shanghai and Cairo in the fascination with exemplary women. As Marilyn Booth (2001) and Joan Judge (2008) detail in their research on print culture in Egypt and China, book publishers and the periodical press in both 348

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places regularly printed individual stories and collections of stories about exemplary women whose lives embodied many facets of questions about gender, nation, and modernity in their respective societies. Booth’s discussions (2015) of Jin Tianhe, He-Yin Zhen, and masculinist feminism and its critics in Egypt and late-Qing China provide an important starting point for thinking about these possibilities of comparison. The convergence between the Chinese renditions of Morgiana and Scheherazade and Arabic literature also appears when set against the first novel in Arabic devoted entirely to China, The Young Woman From China: A Literary, Historical, and Romantic Novel (Ghādat al-Sīn: Riwāya ‘Adabīyya Tārikhiyya Gharamīyya, 1899) by Ṣāliḥ Jawdat, which is the subject of a recent study by Peiyu Yang. The novel, which appears to be a creative pastiche of Frenchlanguage sources about China, uses “unflattering portrayals of Chinese men as a way of creating narrative space for female empowerment in the Arab Middle East” (Yang 2019, 67). Just as Orientalist knowledge about the Middle East, or what Wen-chin Ouyang calls “Orientalism by proxy” (2021, 447–8), travels through the translations and retranslations of Galland and Forster to late-Qing journals, the movement of Orientalist discourse about China provides writers in the Middle East with new resources to reflect on possibilities for reconfigurations of gender in that context. Even without direct contact between figures like Zhou Zuoren, Ṣāliḥ Jawdat, and Zaynab Fawwaz, the compiler of a biographical dictionary of women of the world in the 1890s, we still see their historical moments and concerns loop together through multiple levels of mediation and translation. Some of these connections, particularly as they relate to translation, are the result of parallel histories in how infrastructures of translation developed in China and the Ottoman Arab world (Hill 2020, 862–4). The connections provided by Orientalist knowledge are double-edged: on the one hand, the exotic modes of writing practiced by Zhou and Jawdat allowed writers to accrue prestige and authority to their writings at the turn of the twentieth century by repeating and reshaping cultural stereotypes that were part and parcel of colonial domination. On the other hand, they have a different use in the current moment: by recovering these connections now, we find a way to sidestep or partially circumvent the models of comparison that implicitly place China and the Arab world in a dyad that makes them visible only in relation to the metropolitan West. Whether we can build the intellectual and institutional structure to understand these points of mutual illumination further remains an open question, particularly for the field of Chinese literary and cultural history.

Ye Shaojun and Xi Ruo: Recovering and Disavowing the Ancient Moving forward roughly two decades, we see how later thinkers re-evaluated this initial enthusiasm for the Nights and again made use of its reputation as an ancient text to reflect on the current moment and recent past. In this case, the starting point is Xi Ruo’s version of the Nights, which bears the iconic Chinese name Tianfang yetan 天方夜譚. This translation was published in serial form in two influential journals: Illustrated Fiction (繡像小說), which carried stories from 1903 to 1905, and then The Eastern Miscellany (東方雜誌), which ran portions of the book in 1905 and 1906. The full collection appeared as a book from the Commercial Press in 1906 and in many subsequent reprints and editions through the late 1930s (Tarumoto 2021, 4710–18). This version included 50 stories and was the most systematic and relatively complete translation available in Chinese before Na Xun published a six-volume translation in 1984 based on a reprint of the Bulāq version, which was first printed in Arabic in 1835. What interests me here is the afterlife of the Xi Ruo translation, especially how its language was understood. Like many translators from the first decade of the twentieth century, Xi Ruo 349

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wrote his version of the Nights in classical Chinese. The use of classical Chinese to translate narrative fiction had always been a choice available to translators in the late Qing, but it was another translator who regularly published his work with the Commercial Press, Lin Shu (林 紓, 1852–1924), who brought a new level of vitality and prominence to the practice. As is well known, Lin became a prime target for scholars and writers associated with the New Culture movement, who attacked his use of classical Chinese and his relentless marketing of traditionalist cultural values as a symbol of all that was wrong with Chinese literature, education, and even politics (Hill 2013, 192–217). Xi Ruo’s translation of the Nights, however, gained a very different reputation among scholars who were important players in the New Culture and May Fourth Movements. For Ye Shaojun, a major writer and scholar who figured prominently in the reform of the teaching of language and literature in the twentieth century, the book represented an acceptable bridge to the past – China’s past. In 1924, Ye Shaojun edited and prepared a new edition of Xi Ruo’s translation for the Commercial Press. This version carried a special distinction: it was an approved supplementary textbook for middle school Chinese-language courses under the new Republic of China state curriculum. Beginning in 1920, the Ministry of Education had required all primary textbooks to be written in the vernacular, and subsequent rules called for middle school textbooks to transition students slowly from the vernacular to a mix of classical and vernacular materials (Culp 2019, 106–7). It appears that Xi Ruo’s translation would serve this latter purpose. Ye Shaojun’s long preface to this edition makes an extended statement on the problem of language, style, and translation. Much like Hu Shi, who highlighted the problem of language and translation in his important essay, “Chinese Literature of the Past Fifty Years” (五十年來中國之文學,1922), Ye gave faint praise to Lin Shu’s achievements, treating them ultimately as a last gasp for the use of classical Chinese in literary writing. For Xi Ruo, however, he held special praise: The reader will always enjoy this kind of clear, clean, and lively [writing]. . . . If we do not cling to old ideas about schools and groups of writers, then we can say that if you want to read something in ancient-style prose (古文), then translations like this one make for good material. (1924, 20) The preface clearly extends Ye’s extensive work to institutionalize the New Culture movement’s version of the baihua 白話 vernacular as “written vernacular” (語體文) in textbooks (Culp 2008). Rather than define the vernacular in this essay, however, Ye uses the Xi Ruo translation to define the limits of what might be acceptable or salvageable about the vast number of texts written on classical Chinese or “ancient-style prose” (古文). In singling out the translation for its clarity, ease of reading, and expressiveness, Ye advocates reading these works as a kind of ancient-style prose that is emptied out of the referentiality and webs of allusion that is so essential to many of its genres. Xi Ruo’s translation of the Nights, however, most likely had to operate at a certain level of surface clarity if it were to convey the many twisting details of the stories. With Xi Ruo dead and much of the dust settled from the debates about the vernacular language, the clarity of the translation’s language serves a new purpose: the Nights as a foreign text in translation served to evacuate meaning from and rehabilitate parts of the disavowed Chinese tradition that had been condemned as hopelessly incompatible with modern culture. As with the previous translation I have discussed – especially the version that appeared in The Continent – the problem of the text’s ancient origins plays a central role in the assessment of its value for contemporary readers. Rather than attempt to recover some aspect of Arab culture that is locked within the text of the Nights, however, Ye Shaojun finds aspects of archaism 350

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and (harmlessly) antiquated aspects of Chinese culture that can be salvaged for contemporary readers.

Comparison, Circulation, Modernity By way of conclusion, I would like to compare the circulation of the Nights in China with how the Nights were re-evaluated in Arabic-language discourses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This thumbnail history might give us a glimpse beyond the usual impasse that we reach when theory and area-studies particularism face off against one another. At roughly the same moment that our late-Qing translators were introducing the Nights to their readers, Alf layla wa layla was finally being introduced to Arab readerships as serious literature. Kamran Rastegar has shown that, although versions of the Nights had been printed in Arabic in the early nineteenth century, it was only “in the late nineteenth century, as the European fascination with the Nights began to be registered with the Arab literary classes, [that] an educational endeavor was introduced, attempting to inform Arab readerships of the value of the Nights” (Rastegar 2007, 59). Rastegar highlights how the movement of the Nights between Europe and the Middle East allowed for special types of authority to accrue around the collection, which previously was not seen as a work that held much literary merit. Even by the turn of the twentieth century, the innovation of the text [i.e., the Nights] for an Arab context lies in its double legitimacy; arising both from its association with a classical heritage, as well as its translation and popularity in European contexts. Public interest accumulated around this still-unfamiliar text – word circulated from various sources about of the regard for the Nights in European societies, and, now living largely under one form or another of colonial hegemony, Arab readers could not ignore this fact. (Rastegar 2007, 64) Rastegar further argues that this translation and “transaction” between Arabic, Persian, English, and French versions of the Nights played a decisive role in all these languages in the formation of ideas about what it meant to call a piece of writing “literary.” It would be a stretch to argue that the Nights took on the same role in the formation of a sense of the literary field in China, but in its many disparate appearances, the fact of its frequent translation into European languages confirmed the collection’s literary value for readers of both vernacular and classical-language translations, enshrined its authority as a catalog of customs of the Arab world, and authorized its translation, retranslation, and even incorporation into the official Republican-era school curriculum. In this transmission of authority, the Nights in China remain joined to the work of Orientalists such as Antoine Galland and Edward Lane, as well as popular publishers like Edward Forster. This experience, however, was largely contemporary and shared with readers in the Arab world; it can hardly be argued that the mediating role of Orientalist scholarship makes these translations derivative or belated. Here Laura Doyle’s recent study of the circulation of the Nights might help us place the Chinese-language Nights in a broader context. “Like all hegemonies,” Doyle writes, “Orientalism’s effort to structure the terms of existential and political relations continues to provoke countermotions, played out in the same expressive realms that it seeks to dominate” (2020, 96). A kind of countermotion can be seen in all the primary texts I have examined from the late Qing and early Republic: the Orientalist fascination with the ancient past of the Middle East enabled a nostalgia and antiquarianism that, in turn, served contemporary ends. In the China 351

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studies field, the influence of the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement makes such nostalgia the object of suspicion, but critics writing in other contexts have cautioned against such an attitude. According to Rita Felski, “[e]xperiences of fragmentation and dislocation are not always perceived as liberating, but often engender a counter-response which seeks to establish a sense of continuity and stability by invoking the metaphorical power of an imagined past” (Felski 1995, 59). In writings that take an “antagonistic or dissident” stance in relation to the present, “the yearning for the past may engender active attempts to construct an alternative future, so that nostalgia comes to serve a critical rather than a simply conservative purpose” (Felski 1995, 59). What is interesting about these renditions of the Nights is that they use nostalgia and antiquarianism to reject particularism and argue specifically against the idea that China’s long history is unique. Arguments about the shared fate of two ancient civilizations enabled reflections on the causes of the decline of empires and failure of states in the present – the Qing Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt under British colonial rule – and provided support for varying ideas about cultural reform and modernization. In the case of The Continent, Scheherazade’s selflessness lent itself easily to calls for patriotic overthrow of the Manchu Qing regime; in Zhou Zuoren’s translation, Morgiana becomes the quick-witted knight-errant who possesses the qualities that so many male feminists said they wanted for women – sometimes to liberate themselves from Qing rule. For Ye Shaojun, Xi Ruo’s elegant rendering of the Nights into Classical Chinese offered a way to understand a way of writing that he had helped to dislodge from its central place in Chinese education and culture and to smooth over the memories of that bruising conflict. Since we know that the questions The Continent, Zhou Zuoren, and even Ye Shaojun took up also concerned their contemporaries in the Middle East, many of whom were themselves just becoming acquainted with the Nights as literature, the question for a world history of Chinese would be how to work around the boundaries of national literatures and area studies to study these connections in a serious way. When so much of the study of modern Chinese literature is built on assumptions about its difference from and even opposition to “the West,” returning to these often-provisional attempts at comparative thinking beyond the “China and the West” model may be one place to begin. If we extend these arguments through an engagement with secondary materials and (if the right combination of skills are available) primary sources, we may be able to glimpse a new map for world literature.

Notes 1 Na Xun began translating the book in Egypt in the 1930s but was unable to publish a complete translation until 1984 (Na Xun 1984, 6: 549–55). 2 For a more extensive discussion, see Hill 2011. This section of the chapter borrows heavily from the primary source analysis in that article, though my conclusions move in a direction that I did not anticipate when conducting the initial research.

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28 FIGURING TIME Lyricism in Contemporary Chinese Poetic Films Shengqing Wu

In the early spring of 1948, the writer Li Tianji 李天濟 (1921–1995) was invited to meet with the director Fei Mu 費穆 (1906–1951) about the script to the film Spring in a Small Town (小城之春). After expressing interest in the script, Fei Mu inquired whether Li knew these two lines from Su Shi’s 蘇軾 (1037–1101) poem: “Laughter dies away and voices fade, / the passionate vexed by the passionless” (笑漸不聞聲漸悄，多情卻被無情惱). Pleasantly surprised, Li confirmed that Su Shi’s poem, which he constantly recited while writing the script, perfectly captured the mood and sentiment of the story. Li spontaneously recited the entire poem, and the two men quickly reached a mutual artistic understanding and came up with a plan to begin shooting the film (Li 1992, 83–4). Recognized as a “poet director” 詩人導演 (Wong 2015), Fei Mu turned Spring in a Small Town into a cinematic masterpiece by a variety of artistic methods, such as adopting long takes and medium shots, creating a brooding rhythm with the camera movement, using voice-over, and deliberately suppressing expressions of the agonized love between the characters (Zhang 2004, 102). The previous anecdote, recounted by Li decades later, highlights this generation of artists’ shared literary education and artistic sensibility that were conducive to creating a distinctive Chinese cinematic style in its early stages. It has been a collective understanding that China’s literary traditions, characterized by a dynamic interplay of image and text and a merging of emotion, verbal patterning, and visualization, have permeated and informed modern cultural practices in a variety of significant ways. In the context of momentous cultural transformations in the twentieth century, lyricism, or to employ a modern compound word, shiyi (詩意, poetic resonances), lyrical ways of envisioning the self and the world, and lyrical effects and sensibilities, have been transferred and transplanted into a range of narrative genres and visual media (Wang 2015; Wu 2020). This chapter treats the broad concept of lyricism as one figure of transmediality – referring to the intertextual and intermedial transposition of poetry and lyrical effects across different media – to explore the significant impacts of lyrical modes of seeing, experiencing, and imagining the world in contemporary Chinese film. Cinema as a composite art form has evolved by assimilating other art and literary forms and media, and “lyrical film” as a distinctive subcategory has received critical attention in the West since the mid-twentieth century.1 While tracing the history of the intersection of Chinese poetry and cinema and dissecting the “poetic” qualities of films could warrant a book-length 355

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-36

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exploration, the goal of this chapter is to take preliminary steps to map out the relationship between poetry and film through close readings of two recent films. I adopt the term “poetic film” 詩意電影 to refer to the film’s relation to the literary mode of poetry (citations of poetry in the film in particular) and also to generally address the lyrical sensibilities, feelings, rhythms, and poetic modes of storytelling in feature films (excluding other subgenres such as the essay film or visual poetry). Critical attention will be paid to poetry as text and voice as used in the films, as well as to poetry’s negotiation with narrative progression and realistic representation, with a focus on images of time. Two well-known and representative poetic films that will be explored in the following are Crosscurrent (長江圖, 2016), directed by Yang Chao 楊超 (b. 1974), and Kaili Blues (路邊野餐, 2015), directed by Bi Gan 畢贛 (b. 1989).2 In addition to the constant insertion of poetic text and voices, both films adopt disruptive storylines, a deft intersplicing of memory, reality, and manifold temporalities, and a melancholic ambiance, which all leave distinct traces of their poetic attributes. In both cases, poetry becomes a style, method, and vision, working to either enhance or challenge the narrative discourse, through which the complexity of emotional experience can more powerfully unfold. The Yangtze River, a significant symbol of cultural history covering a large geographic space, has been prominently showcased in literary history and in a number of noted contemporary films, including Rain Clouds over Wushan (巫山雲雨, 1995), directed by Zhang Ming 章明 (b. 1961), and Still Life (三峽好人, 2006), directed by Jia Zhangke 賈樟柯 (b. 1970). Crosscurrent begins with a cargo boat leaving from Shanghai and heading upstream against the current of the Yangtze River to deliver goods, which is revealed to be a white-finned dolphin, an endangered species. A handwritten anonymous poetry manuscript, Changjiang tu (Picture of the Yangtze River), is discovered by the ever-solemn, amateur poet/captain Gao Chun. Over the course of 32 days, the dilapidated cargo ship travels upstream through bare or mist-filled wintery scenes, industrial ruins, cultural sites, and the imposing Three Gorges Dam. Paralleling the storyline of an illegal business deal that ends up in dispute and fatal failure, while sailing crosscurrent from Shanghai to Yibin starting in the winter of 2009, Gao Chun encounters the beautiful and enigmatic An Lu, who appears younger each time he encounters her at a river port. The two timelines, memory, and diegetic reality are simultaneously intertwined and crisscrossed. While Gao Chun experiences a romantic obsession over An Lu, his constant departure from her, and his search for this elusive woman and the truth behind her, An Lu experiences love, marriage, spiritual musings at the temple, an extramarital affair that results in her husband committing suicide and turning to prostitution in Shanghai. Because her storyline is told in reverse, the film finally reveals that it is in 1989 in Yibin that the poetic “I” meets with An Lu and is enamored by her smile for the first time. At the same time, Gao Chun, after some tumultuous experiences, decides to tear up a picture of the Yangtze River and the pages of manuscript, letting them sink into the water. Shedding the past experience is a way to protect An Lu from getting hurt. This is where the love story ends and also begins. After Gao Chun is stabbed because he fails to deliver the goods that were set free by the Uncle, his “soul” travels to the snowy land of Tibet, where the Yangtze River originates. By locating the tombs of An Lu and her mother, the film more explicitly acknowledges the birth of An Lu, who, like the river itself, leaves home to experience sensuality, loss, suffering, and spiritual enlightenment before converging into the ocean. Twelve poems from the poetry manuscript Changjiang tu, shown on the screen, function to tie together the episodic plot and mark the appearance of An Lu each time she emerges at a river port. More importantly, the discovery of the poetry manuscript mysteriously energizes the cargo ship, making it move and allowing Gao Chun to go on his realistic journey to deliver goods. It is also a device to reactivate fragmentary memories and fold into time to search for the past, either 356

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his own or that of his father’s generation. Only through poetry is Gao Chun given the opportunity to meet with An Lu in temporal paradoxes to reclaim shreds of past experiences. Or to put it in Yang Chao’s own words, “[i]t is language which opens up the gate of time and space” (言語打開了時空之門) (Yang Chao 2016b). The poetic undercurrent moves backward against the linear and narrative progression, proclaiming its power to trigger memories. The poems, supposedly written by one of the boat workers (or likely Gao Chun’s father), is suffused with the diction, style, and ideas characteristic of the literary writings of the 1980s. The unifying firstperson lyrical voice declares its passion or hatred for, or alienation from, the quickly transforming environment in a straightforward manner; the manner in which it does so shows the stylistic influence of political slogans from previous decades. For instance, superimposed against a shot of the ruined Guanyin Temple in Ezhou, the lines of poetry on the screen read: “The cities on both banks have lost their faith and righteousness, / I will not go ashore, / to join the fire and lamps of the ten thousand families” (兩岸城市都已背信棄義，/ 我不會上岸，/ 加入他們 的萬家燈火). The words, overlaid upon the image of the decayed temple precariously standing alone in the river, emphasize a self-reflective consciousness that appears alienated from its environment. In addition to serving as poetic nodal points in the narrative progression, the poetry provides a first-person meditative flow depicting the interiority and subjectivity of the protagonist as a lonely freighter on a life journey for love, memory, and truth. Albeit appearing in the guise of a cargo captain, the male character is reminiscent of a young intellectual living in the feverish literary ambience, idealism, and cultural passion of the 1980s. Gao Chun, who also appears to be writing poetry in the film, is the one shown to connect with language and words, emphatically expressed through the constant close-up shots of his poetry and map reading. The main female character, An Lu, writes her poetry metaphorically, through her sensuality and body, in the course of her tumultuous life. There are two conspicuous examples in which An Lu is endowed with the majestic power of language. After failing to locate Gao Chun, An Lu paces the riverbank, where she encounters enormous words traced into the sand. The lines are from “Heavenly Question” (天問) by the famous Warring States Period poet Qu Yuan屈原 (340 BC–280 BC) and represent one of the earliest inquiries into the origins of the universe in human history: “How did Heaven and Earth meet? How are the twelve months divided? How do the sun and moon stay on their courses? How are the many stars arranged?” (天何所沓？十二焉分？日月安屬？列星安陳)? Beneath the Chinese characters,

Figure 28.1

An Lu hopping through the words, Crosscurrent.

Source: Yang Chao (2016a).

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four rough ideographs (fish, bird, house, tortoise) are drawn. The high-angled long shots of An Lu hopping through the words on one foot like a child playing hopscotch employ a “heavenly eyes” perspective to stress the unending quest for answers. The second scene involves An Lu hanging in the air, suspended from a cliff in the Dianyi Cave in Fuling, using a bag of ink and paper to copy the words carved into the stone wall. These details also underline the enigmatic and spiritual aspects of the female figure, which further connects to more ancient cultures and other symbols (e.g., fish and rivers). When An Lu screams, “This is my Yangtze River,” her image on the shore merges with the alluring yet unattainable literary figure of the beautiful lady in “the lush reeds and rushes” (jianjia cangcang 蒹葭蒼蒼) in the Book of Songs (詩經) and the goddess from the Poetry of the South (楚辭). Both the director and cinematographer insisted on shooting the Yangtze River in the winter, echoing the “pictorial effects” 畫意 and sentiment associated with the “frosty river” 寒江. In a typical tableau, the large swath of water is always foregrounded, with the zigzagging boat and the landscapes in the distance appearing dark blue and often lit with flickering fire. The 35mm film renders not only hazy, desolate atmospheric shots but also imitates the texture and quality of ink scroll paintings of landscapes. In Figure 28.2, yellowish dry weeds and decayed bushes quivering in the wind constitute the foreground, while Gao Chun, dwarfed by his surroundings, trembles and staggers along the shore; the river and the horizontally arranged cargo are in the far distance. The overall compositional effect is of “level distance” 平遠 and is imbued with a typical “poetic feeling and pictorial effects” 詩情畫意.3 Three handwritten lines of poems, together with the location, are shown on the screen, evoking the image–text collaboration of traditional painting. Yet the phrases, such as “everyone is against everyone” (一切人反對一切 人), arouse feelings of distress rather than harmony. Long shots and extreme long shots track the movement of the cargo boats in slow motion faraway, against the dark-blue river and sky in an evocation of traditional pictorialism as well as a reminder of industrial destruction. The interplay of light (whether a shimmering reflection of the water surface or a steep cliff shining bright in the darkness) constitutes some of the most beautifully rendered and memorable images in the film, significantly adding to the allegorical message of the film. If Crosscurrent attempts to unfold an ambitious allegory concerning interwoven national and personal histories, Kaili Blues, shot with extreme budgetary constraints, provides a lyricism that replicates personal subjectivity, memory, and intimate feelings. It begins with a local

Figure 28.2

Gao Chun walking along the shore, Crosscurrent.

Source:Yang Chao (2016a).

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doctor and poet, Chen Sheng (played by Chen Yongzhong, Bi Gan’s uncle), who returns to his hometown, Kaili (Bi’s hometown), after serving nine years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. Moving from Kaili to Dangmai and Zhenyuan, and eventually returning to Kaili, Chen Sheng attempts to establish a bond with his nephew Wei Wei (the son of his estranged halfbrother) to reclaim the meaning of his existence. In the course of following his search for Wei Wei, the film unfolds three generations of love relationships (the old female doctor, Guanglian, with Mr. Lin, Chen Sheng and his wife, and the adult Wei Wei and Yang Yang) amid crimes, revenge, accidents, troubling interpersonal relations, and everyday life in local communities. Told in a fragmented and convoluted manner, intermixed with dreams, memories, and surreal imageries, the film begins with an epigraph from the Diamond Sutra (金剛經), including the lines “The mind of the past is unattainable, the mind of the present is unattainable, the mind of the future is unattainable” (過去心不可得，現在心不可得，未來心不可得). The film sets up the staging of different temporalities, but also, it suggests Bi’s ambitious plan to explore the issue of time in personal and philosophical terms. This citation also alludes to Bi’s remarkable short film The Poet and Singer (金剛經, 2012), which clocks in at only 22 minutes. Skillfully exploring the hideous side of human nature, it tells a horrific story that two persons go on the road to collect a reward for murder before incidentally encountering the victim’s father. His poetic line, “Hell overthrows hell to become heaven” (地獄顛覆地獄成為天堂), encapsulates his paradoxical view of cyclical temporality and logic of karma. An aspiring poet, in 2016 Bi Gan published a collection of 24 poems titled Roadside Picnic (路邊野餐, which is the Chinese title of the Russian novel that inspired Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker). Some of those poems are used in these two films. Kaili Blues incorporates eight of Bi’s poems, narrated by the middle-aged ex-con Chen Sheng in his Guizhou dialect, along with subtitles. The sensuous extradiegetic voice, as an act of enunciation, sets the tone of the film, lending it a captivating and melancholic mood, even though a Chinese audience can only comprehend some of words aurally. The poem, quoted in the following, read in a voice-over to accompany Chen Sheng’s ride on the adult Wei Wei’s motorbike toward Dangmai, serves as a meditative foray, preparing us to enter into a Borges-like labyrinth. A hand lit by the light of fate props up forty-two windmills for me in unending nature the universe originated in balance the nearby planets originated in echoes marshes originated in the sleeplessness of the earth folds originated in the ocean ice originated in alcohol emergency lights lead to the floor of time lead to the crevice where I write my poetry surely someone who has left will come back the empty bamboo basket is filled with love surely a kind of brokenness will be like the earth some valley spread out just like a hand 命運佈光的手 為我支起了四十二架風車 源源不斷的自然 359

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宇宙來自於平衡 附近的星球來自於迴聲 沼澤來自於地面的失眠 褶皺來自於海 冰來自於酒 通往歲月樓層的應急燈 通往我寫詩的石縫 一定有人離開了會回來 騰空的竹籃裝滿愛 一定有某種破碎像泥土 某個谷底像手一樣攤開 The poem, which meditates on time, memory, and love, works as a prelude, signaling to the audience that it is crossing a threshold, while at the same time the visual of the motorbike ride seamlessly leads the narrative into a new, hyperreal realm without liminal marks or cuts. With its abstraction and metaphorical images, the poem establishes a sharp contrast with the following scene, which is deceivingly rendered in a true-to-life visual style. In this heatedly discussed and mesmerizing 41-minute long take, which takes place in Dangmai (the name literarily means “nonexistence” in the Miao language), the past, present, and future are conjured up concurrently and intermingled. Leaping forward into the future, Chen Sheng encounters in Dangmai a grown-up Wei Wei, who is courting a young lady named Yang Yang, who holds a paper “windmill” in her hand (line 2). As Chen waits for Yang Yang to sew a loose button back on his shirt, he happens to spot a hairdresser who is played by the same actress that plays his dead wife. In this way, he witnesses a woman “who has left” coming back (line 11). Later in the hair salon, the hairdresser washes Chen’s hair, and he tells her his story in the third person, recounting background plots concerning his arrest, release, and marriage and the deaths of his

Figure 28.3 Chen Sheng’s motorbike ride to Dangmai, Kaili Blues. Source: Bi Gan (2015).

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wife and mother. After learning of the wish that Chen’s wife expressed in her last letter, the hairdresser expresses the same wish to go to the ocean and see the dolphins. Chen then turns on a flashlight and asks the hairdresser to put her hand over the top of the flashlight. He places his hand on hers, and the purplish glow gleams through their fingers. Chen tells her that this is how the blue ocean feels when it sees a dolphin. Bi Gan commented in an interview that this “emotionally and erotically charged scene” of Chen Sheng’s re-encounter with his wife is a constructed image inspired by his own poetic images (Xiao 2019). Multiple intertextual relationships can be unpacked in this powerful scene. In the poem cited earlier, the hand is a key image. This hand with a flashlight is “a hand lit by the light of fate” (line 1). As a recurring image, the flashlight first appears when Guanglian tells Chen the story of her lover using a flashlight to keep her warm. For Guanglian, the flashlight also signals “the light of fate.” On the second occasion, the flashlight appears as a textual image. Complementing a scene showing embroidered shoes falling into water (a repeated, colorful image) right before Chen’s arrival in Zhenyuan, the extradiegetic voice speaks: “Cramming my memories into the veins of my palm / the flashlight’s light passes through the back of my hand / as though I were seeing a dolphin falling into the clouds” (把回 憶塞進手掌的血管裡 / 手電的光通過掌背 / 仿佛看見跌入雲端的海豚). “A dolphin falling into the clouds” and the flashlight shimmering through the fingers are fanciful metaphorical equivalents for conjuring up past sensory and affective experience. Memories take on shapes or are crystalized in amber-like mementos. Layered recollections – whether triggered by music (e.g., the song “Little Jasmine”) or embedded in the flashlight shining through fingers – take their shapes in images through which Chen’s inner and outer worlds can be more intricately grasped. However fanciful, Bi Gan reassures the audience that what happens in Dangmai is not a dream. Instead, it is an extension of reality or a virtual coexistence of different time frames. Like many ancient supernatural stories in which the ghost often leaves traces and marks, the shot of the shirt buttons in Chen’s hand in Zhenyuan establishes a referential link to experience in Dangmai, where he reunites the past and future with the present in the synthesis of time. In general, for Bi Gan, the lyrics are inspirational for creative compositions, unbound by the specificity of diegetic time and space, communicating emotions through the idiosyncratic juxtaposition of images (whether it is dolphins falling into the clouds in the poem or a train rushing through Wei Wei’s cave home). The metaphorical associations, inherent in modernist language like that which Bi Gan exercises, go beyond the visual image’s narrative meaning and its logic; the symbolic power of language offers layers of signification and affects beyond what can be seen on-screen. Further, as Jiwei Xiao and Dudley Andrew insightfully point out, poetry facilitates the editing process and allows Bi’s camerawork to replicate the rhythmic patterns “in the often arbitrary and illogical mode of reverie” (2019, n.p.). In both Crosscurrent and Kaili Blues, poetry and language facilitate a crystalline narrative. The journey involving moving cargo along the Yangtze River or in the space of Dangmai can be interpreted as “time-images” in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s theorizing of cinematic temporality and the disruption of empirical linear progression. Deleuze, who offers innovative ways of addressing time and movement, clarifies how films reveal images of time in which time is layered to form crystalline circuits. Time-images disclose conditions in which depiction, narration, and actuality become uncertain, in contrast with films that deploy movement-images. His insights concerning “the crystal of time” – as a remarkable figure of a time-image in which the relationship of past and present, actual and virtual, is presented as colliding and condensing – are particularly pertinent to poetic films in terms of narrative time-space (Deleuze 1989, Chapter 4). In Crosscurrent, Gao Chun, the elusive image of his father and others, and An Lu and her many embodiments intermingle as each virtually complements the others in an inscrutable 361

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manner. In Kaili Blues, various layers, circuits, and timelines are reflected and reflexed, as in a crystal, where “the smallest internal circuit” between the actual image and its virtual double is confronted and “in continual exchange” (Deleuze 1989, 69–70). Chen Sheng’s encounter with the hairdresser can be taken as one prominent type of a short circuit in the film’s crystalline narrative. Affectively stirred by this encounter with the hairdresser as the virtual counterpart of his wife in an illusion of the simultaneous time strands, Chen experiences heightened emotions through tactile and visual sensations. Trapped in their different temporalities, Chen feels powerless, except for being able to tell a story and touch hands. Singing the song “Little Jasmine” out of tune, accompanied by wobbly camerawork, accentuates his inner turmoil about the missed opportunity for love and his deep sense of guilt. Chen gives the hairdresser a cassette tape of the song “Farewell.” Both the tape and the shirt that Chen is wearing are provided by Guanglian, who instructs him to deliver them to the Miao musician Mr. Lin in Zhenyuan. Shared emotions and subjectivities are articulated through the interlocking of actual and virtual temporalities and stories within stories. In the film, multiple mirrored images are reflected upon each other among the love relationships across the generations, as the couples experience comparable, circular fates involving missed chances and lasting remembrance. Chen Sheng is the mirror image of Mr. Lin, as he wears the shirt in Dangmai. Chen also sees himself in the young Wei Wei; Chen, as a narrator of the poems, is also reminiscent of the authorial voice of the director himself. Numerous narrative counterpoints and imagistic repetitions (e.g., the clock, the embroidered shoes, the white truck, or the banana) populate the film. These “circuits,” like shattered mirrors, form connections through doubling, repetition, or virtuality in multiple temporalities, all of which dynamically bring together different sequences of the past moments, the living present, and future becomings (Deleuze 1994). The crystalline as a compositional strategy in modern art, representing a will to abstraction against the chaotic world (Rodowick 1997, 212), finds its distinctive echoes in these directors’ poetic approaches to experiences. Consciously trans/figuring time, neither director offers an explanation along with the fragmented temporality, although in Crosscurrent, the film does reveal that the trip ends and begins in 1989, a time marking a primal scene with repressed memory and melancholic fixation. The entire journey of traveling crosscurrent suggests a lyrical experience, in contrast to the documentary-style footage showing the everyday life of ordinary people living along the Yangtze River at the end of the film. The dialectical collision of surreal experience and everyday existence, between lyrical and narrative, real and imaginary, is deliberately contrived through an aporetic structure in which Yang Chao links a personal and subjective experience to a collective one. Personal reminiscences are correlated to wider intellectual discourse but also intervene in the continuity and coherence of the collective time, resulting in temporal preoccupation and a sense of asynchrony in contemporary cinema (Ma 2010, 7). In contrast, Bi Gan explores the uneven or viral shapes of time and memory, in a more individualistic and philosophical gesture. Bi uses a vivid metaphor to suggest “time is like a bird of invisible shapes” (-----------). How to present this invisible shape of time through media is the ultimate challenge. Thus, Bi creates a cage in order to make this invisible bird visually available to the audience. That cage could be materialized in the recurrent or echoing images (e.g., the backward-running clock and train) or in a riveting long take, one enclosed cinematic duration of continuous and condensed time and space (Bi 2016a). Both Yang’s and Bi’s critical attention to the folds, disruptions, and fissures in a purportedly coherent and continuous history of a nation, community, or individual propel them to focus their artistic efforts on creating crystal-images wrapped in disjoint time frames and varied mediating perspectives.

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To characterize a loosely defined subgenre of Chinese “poetic film,” we may understand poetry and poetics approximately as an artistic style, as a method for editing and narration, and ultimately, as a vision and mode of being in the world. Chu Tien Wen 朱天文, in her elaboration on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝賢 (b. 1947) A City of Sadness (悲情城市, 1989), cites the theories of the “lyric tradition” 抒情傳統 formulated by Chen Shih-hsiang 陳世驤 in an endeavor to rearticulate the distinctive features of the Chinese poetic tradition against the Western literary discourse in early 1970s.4 Chu asserts that Hou, who is a lyrical poet instead of the storyteller, takes “the poetic approach” 詩的方式 to engage in cinematic art, endowing his work with lyrical expressions (Chu 2006, 274). Unlike Greek tragedy that takes dramatic conflicts and redemption to their apex, “the poetic approach” suppresses dramatic tension and action and instead seizes upon “endless chanting, contemplation, and meditation” 終生無止的綿綿詠 歎、沉思與默念 over blank images of time and space that are designated as fate (Chu 2006, 274). In A City of Sadness, emotional reservation, static camerawork, and iconic long shots and long takes – attributed to Hou’s distinguished cinematic style – work to challenge the grand historical narrative of traumatic events, pointing to profoundly ineffable lingering thoughts and affects, like a Song dynasty poem. Chu’s insights here remind us of the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren’s assertion that poetry is “an approach to experience.” The poet approaches experience typically not in terms of dramatic tension but, rather, emphatically underlining the “poetic construct” of a loaded moment, an emotion, and a meaning (Deren 2000, 174). Lyricism in this intermedial context can be comprehended by way of at least three aspects. First of all, poetic sensibilities and rhetorical adornment, particularly cultivated by literary canons (especially from the Tang and Song dynasties), are transferable between poetry, pictorial genres, and cinema. From the mise-en-scène in Crosscurrent and the rich symbolism (e.g., the direct time-image of the clock, or the recurring shots of circles, mirrors, trains, the Wildman, etc.) in Kaili Blues to the editing, soundtrack, ambient music, or rhythmic patterns in general, the lyric tradition offers rich vocabularies, materials, and sentiments that can be grafted onto cinematic and intermedial practices. Incursions of alternative discursive forms, the extensive use of voice-over, and the first-person perspective or pictorial tableaux are all featured in many contemporary poetic films, such as My Memories of Old Beijing (城 南舊事, 1982), directed by Wu Yigong 吳貽弓 (1938–2019); Yellow Earth (黃土地, 1984), directed by Chen Kaige 陳凱歌 (b. 1952); The Time to Live and the Time to Die (童年往事, 1985), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; and Sacrificed Youth (青春祭, 1985), directed by Zhang Nuanxin 張暖忻 (1940–1995), all of which are notably influenced by the “lyric tradition” at large (Song and Xu 2020). Secondly, and more specifically, vernacular poetry and the translation of world literature as prominent literary forms are quite often incorporated into narrative films as text or voice. To offer three more examples, in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (二十四城-, 2008), cowritten by Jia and the prominent female poet Zhai Yongming 翟永明 (b. 1955), there are multiple discursivities – including citations of W. B. Yeats’s “The Coming of Wisdom With Time,” Ouyang Jianghe’s 歐陽江河 “The Glass Factory” (玻璃工廠), quotes from Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓 夢), popular songs, subtitles, and lengthy narration directed to the camera – to tell the stories of the displaced lives in the decline of the state-owed Factory 420. Poet on a Business Trip (詩 人出差了, 2015), directed and shot by Ju Anqi 雎安奇 (b. 1975) in a documentary style, tells of a journey that a poet named Shu 豎 undertakes across Xinjiang in 2002, intermixed with 16 poems written by Shu in an unsentimental manner. Blind Massage (推拿, 2014), directed by Lou Ye 婁燁 (b. 1965) and adapted from the novel by Bi Feiyu 畢飛宇 (b. 1964), depicts lives surrounding a massage clinic staffed by blind workers, who rely on voices and haptic sensation for meaningful connections with the world. These lines from the emblematic poet Haizi 海子 363

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(1964–1989) are appropriated to crystallize the emotional core of the characters’ internal vision and their blinkered hope: “The night is completely empty, / why does it give me comfort?” (黑 夜一無所有，/ 為何給我安慰) (Haizi 2009, 548). Because the horizons of Chinese literary culture, in terms of styles, themes, and subgenres, have radically diversified and expanded in the modern and contemporary periods, lyricism, a dynamically changing conception, is not limited to the “lyric tradition” or a list of literary canons. Lyricism connects instead to the fast-transforming social fabrics, cultural milieu, and lexicons. The lyricism that nourished the early generation of filmmakers such as Fei Mu, Zhu Shilin 朱石麟 (1899–1967), and Sang Hu 桑弧 (1916–2004) is quite different from that of directors from subsequent generations of filmmakers, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang Chao, or Bi Gan. Even between Yang Chao and Bi Gan, who both write vernacular poetry without rhyme or other formal features, there are clearly distinct poetic styles and thematic emphases at work. Varied literary sources and manifold inspirations further mark the individual trades of their cinema. In preparation for shooting Crosscurrent, Yang Chao consumed a good amount of science fiction, including works that won a Hugo Award for science fiction, while Bi Gan originally named his film Huangran lu 惶然錄 (1996), the Chinese title of The Book of Disquiet by modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (Yang 2016; Bi 2016a; Xiao 2019). In this collection of fragmentary pieces disguised as a fictional diary, Pessoa’s self in multiple and mutilated personas, grasping the lack of a meaningful wholeness of existence, engages in lonely meanderings and introspections about time, dreams within dreams, or a journey in the mind to the unknown; some of this can be seen in uncanny echoes in Kaili Blues. Furthermore, as Andrei Tarkovsky casts his great shadow over contemporary Chinese art films, the infiltration of poetry in film can be partially credited to the preferred method of quoting poetry in his films (Stalker and Mirror in particular) and aesthetic ideas articulated in his widely read book, Sculpting in Time (雕刻時光, 2002). Lyricism, attributes of a set of literary and aesthetic qualities, styles, and sensibilities, is premised upon the dynamics of literary sources, education, and inspiration, none of which constitutes a unified or ossified whole any longer. Both Crosscurrent and Kaili Blues are exemplary cases of the centrality of text in film, and the dynamics of the objective and subjective journeys that concern lyrical meditations on the passage of time, memory, and loss in personal and collective experiences. To paint with a broad brush, word-image or sound-image in film forms a variety of metonymic and metaphorical relationships. While occasionally texts can be seen in a referential association with the unfolding scenes, in most cases, the poetry freely creates metaphorical interpretations to visual narratives, establishing a range of text–image dynamics. These “poetic links” form their own logic of representational events beyond cause and effect, resulting in the poeticization of the narrative and a heightening of feeling (Tarkovsky 1987, 18–20). The introductions of the “voice” (whether a voice-over or an intertitle in the film), positing subjective positions and an inner life, facilitate seamless transitions between objective and subjective perspectives and bring the past and the future into the present moment. Such lyricism, formed through the strata of literary and discursive materials, keenly reflects upon diverse personal elements, such as dreams, fantasies, reminiscences, and other imaginative processes. Lastly, as Tarkovsky asserts, poetry as “an awareness of the world” embodies “a particular way of relating to reality” (1987, 21). Yearning for poetry has become a creative force and artistic gesture in some Chinese directors’ aesthetic experimentation that attempts to interweave different temporal strands of memory and subjectivity into a cinematic fabric and to unfold truth as filtered through lyrical eyes and the subjective mind. Both Yang Chao and Bi Gan, professed admirers of Tarkovsky’s work, strive to transcend narrative logic in order to convey the profound affections and complexities of the concealed occurrences of existence 364

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and their intangible relations. If we simply presume that the film narrative is dominated overall by verisimilitude and the diegetic present, the “poetic approach” permits greater space for the elevation of the character out of its narrative world for the sake of rumination, self-conscious reflection, and the articulation of a lyrical vision. By adroitly presenting multifaceted crystalline images, these Chinese artists, following in Tarkovsky’s footsteps, endeavor to discern “the lines of the poetic design of being” (Tarkovsky 1987, 21). Temporality, remembrance, and human experience enact spatial schemas, and return would signify a repetition with difference. As Chen Sheng articulates in his melancholic voice toward the end of Kaili Blues: “When my light is exposed on your body, / the re-encounter is a darkroom.” 當我的光曝在你身上 / 重逢就是一間暗室.

Notes 1 In 1953, at a Cinema 16 symposium, Maya Deren offered seminal remarks on the “vertical structure” of poetry and poetic film (2000). Pier Pailo Pasolini identifies the free indirect point-of-view shot as one of the major features of poetic film (1965). P. Admas Sitney defines “lyrical film” in the context of American experimental films and understands lyrical visions as subjective experience functioning as framing devices (1974). 2 Crosscurrent was nominated for the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. The director of photography Mark Lee Ping-bing won numerous awards for his marvelous cinematography in this film. Bi Gan, the winner of the Best New Film Director award at the 52 Golden Horse Awards for Kaili Blues in 2015, earned instantaneous international fame and a cult following among literary youths in China. I would like to express thanks to Eleanor Goodman for helping improve my translation of the poems used in this chapter. 3 For more discussion of transferring of yi in shiyi, xieyi (sketching ideas), huayi, and shiqing huayi, see Wu 2020, Chapter 6. 4 Chen Shih-Hsiang (1971) used “lyricism” to characterize the Chinese literary tradition. The scholarship on “lyric tradition” has been substantially enriched by contemporary scholars (e.g., Wang 2015, 1–38).

References Bi Gan畢贛. 2012. Jingang jing 金剛經 (The Poet and Singer). Prod. Bi Gan. 22 mins. Bi Gan 畢贛. 2015. Lubian yecan 路邊野餐 (Kaili Blues). Prod. Heaven Pictures. 113 mins. Bi Gan 畢贛. 2016a. Interview with Bomi at Phenix Entertainment, “Dianyingren zaixian” (Filmmakers online), no. 193. http://ent.ifeng.com/movie/dianyingrenzaixian/special/dyrzx193/. Bi Gan 畢贛. 2016b. Lubian yecan 路邊野餐 (Roadside Picnic). Taipei: Qianjing yule youxian gongsi. Chen Shih-Hsiang 陳世驤. 1971. “On the Chinese Lyric Tradition.” Tamkang Review 2, no. 2–3, no. 1: 17–24. Chu Tien-wen 朱天文. 2006. Zuihao de shiguang: Hou Hsiao-hsien dianying jilu 最好的時光 – 侯孝 賢電影記錄 (The Best of Times: Records of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films). Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deren, Maya, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler, and Willard Maas, 2000. “Poetry and Film: A Symposium.” In Film Culture Reader, edited by P. Adams Sitney, 171–86. New York: Cooper Square Press. Haizi 海子. 2009. Haizi shi quanji 海子詩全集 (The Complete Poems of Haizi). Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe. Li Tianji 李天濟. 1992. “Weile fanwan ganshang dianying 為了飯碗干上電影” (Filmmaking for a Living). Dianying yishu 電影藝術 (Film Art), no. 4: 80–85.

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Shengqing Wu Ma, Jean. 2010. Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1965. “The Cinema of Poetry.” In Heretical Empiricism, translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, 167–86. Washington: New Academia. Pessoa, Frenando 佩索阿. 1995. Huangran lu 惶然錄 (The Book of Disquiet). Translated by Han Shaogong. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Rodowick, David. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke University Press. Sitney, P. Adams. 1974. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde. New York: Oxford University Press. Song Jie 宋傑, and Xu Jin徐錦. 2020. “Shuqing chuantong xia de Zhongguo shiyi dianying 抒情傳統下 的中國詩意電影” (Chinese Poetic Film in the Lyric Tradition). Beijing dianying xueyuan xuebao 北 京電影學院學報 (Journal of Beijing Film Academy), no. 1: 4–14. Tarkovsky, Andrey. 2003 [1987]. Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Film Maker Discusses His Art. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. University of Texas. Chinese ed. Diaoke shiguang 雕刻時光, translated by Chen Ligui and Li Yongquan. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Wang, David Der-wei. 2015. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Wong Ain-ling 黃愛玲, ed. 2015. Shiren daoyan Feimu 詩人導演費穆 (Poet-Director Fei Mu). Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe. Wu, Shengqing. 2020. Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Xiao, Jiwei. 2019. “Creating a Cinema of Dream and Memory: An Interview with Bi Gan.” Cineaste 44, no. 3: 17–22. Xiao, Jiwei, and Dudley Andrew. 2019. “Poetics and Periphery: The Journey of Kaili Blues.” Cineaste 44, no. 3. www.cineaste.com/summer2019/poetics-and-periphery-journey-of-kaili-blues. Yang Chao 楊超. 2016a. Changjiang tu 長江圖 (Crosscurrent). Prod. Beijing New Century Media Co.116 mins. Yang Chao 楊超. 2016b. Interview with Wei Xidi 衛西諦 at Read01. https://read01.com/BGRLJK.html#. YOPhVuhKg2w. Zhang, Yingjin. 2004. Chinese National Cinema. London: Routledge.

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29 PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY IN MODERN CHINA Emily Wilcox

Whether in China or elsewhere, performance is a subject fraught with prejudice. Professional performers in China have historically been stigmatized for their itinerant lifestyles, which are seen to disrupt and endanger the stability of community relations with their mobility and the fluid nature of their social networks. Today, performers in China are revered but, at the same time, often demeaned, because they are thought to peddle beauty and external appearance over intellectual substance and depth and because their pathways of professionalization often emphasize bodily skills and techniques over book learning and abstract knowledge. That performance exists in the realm of the oral and not the written makes it a slippery target for supervision, documentation, and analysis. It also locates performance and performers in an ambiguous relationship to traditional notions of culture, which invest value and prestige in written texts. The idea that performance is a false or misleading imitation of reality continually haunts performance and performers at an ontological level. Performance, so the conventional wisdom goes, mimics the “real thing,” sometimes so convincingly that one can be mistaken for the other. And herein lies the perceived danger, betrayal, and hollowness of performance. As the culture of the imitation, as well as the illiterate, the bodily, and the socially transgressive, performance is multiply condemned. Not only is performance false but also vulgar. How could such a thing be worthy of serious study? This is the dominant conventional view. Since the advent of performance studies as a named academic (inter-/anti-/post-) discipline in the United States from the late 1970s onward, scholars who identify with this field of study or contribute to it have levied challenges to conventional prejudices against performance. These scholars have questioned all the common assumptions, most notably performance’s supposed ephemerality (Phelan 1993) and its role as a representational substrate of reality rather than the substance of reality itself (Butler 1990). Within US academic institutions, performance studies departments grew out of intellectual dialogue between anthropology and theater (in the NYU-based Turner/Schechner lineage) and between speech, arts, and social activism (in the Northwestern-based Conquergood lineage). However, the larger field of performance studies discourse transcended these disciplinary boundaries. The key theoretical traditions in performance studies drew much more widely from fields such as semiotics, literary theory, phenomenology, gender and sexuality studies, political economy, and postcolonial studies, to name just a few examples. In other words, as theorists of the North American academic meta-discourse of performance have pointed out, the close of the twentieth century saw “performance” emerge 367

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as both a transdisciplinary theoretical turn and a methodological imperative across the arts and humanities (Reinelt and Roach 1992; McKenzie 2001; Jackson 2004). Performance thus went from a dirty word to suddenly what everyone wanted to do – if not literally through study and practice in the performing arts, then methodologically as a new ontology for approaching the world. To view the world and its reality “as performance” became increasingly common. This meant questioning the very existence of a “reality” distinct from “performance” and instead seeing reality itself as an infinite series of performances. It also meant bridging the oral–textual divide in new ways, by challenging notions of textual fixity and questioning the analytical distinction between sign and signified. The philosophical implications of performance gained great weight that in some cases overshadowed performance itself in the traditional sense. At the same time, it washed away much of the conventional suspicion and antiperformance biases formerly rampant in the Academy, and it lent the study of performance in all its meanings a new aura of academic legitimacy, even metamorphosizing into a new scholarly vogue of sorts. Studies of the performance of gender and sexuality, the performance of race and ethnic identities, the performance of authority and political power all became widespread subjects of inquiry. Likewise, studies of dance, theater, and music as performing arts in the narrower sense also grew and expanded, sometimes without connection to performance studies per se yet nevertheless riding the wave of performance’s rise. Amid this flurried explosion of performance theorization and performing arts scholarship, the term “performativity” emerged as a key locus of attention. Those unfamiliar with the theoretical genealogy of performance studies may read the term performativity in a mundane sense as something like “performance-ness” or the quality of being a performance or having performance elements. For example, they might think a popular narrative such as The White Snake that is often theatricalized possesses performativity. However, this understanding misses the technical meaning of performativity as a theoretical concept in performance studies. In the latter discourse, performativity relates not to the quality of being a performance but, rather, its opposite. That is, performativity is the capacity of a performance act to break the bounds of performance as it is traditionally understood – as imitation, representation, or falsification. Rather, when a performance is said to be performative in the technical performance studies sense, this means that the performance pierces the boundary between “reality” and “performance” – it constitutes or changes the very reality in which it takes place, turning performance into reality and vice versa. Simply put, performativity is the capacity of an action embedded in webs of meaning to instigate transformation in the world via those meanings. This transformation may be in a set of social relations, a chain of representation, a person or group’s identity, or something else. Performativity refers to this specific capacity of action (a speech act, a bodily movement, a choice of clothing, a musical expression, etc.) to enact change. The theoretical emergence of this concept of performance has been recounted on multiple occasions, and it is not my intention to rehearse it again here. Rather, I want to instead use this chapter as a space to think through some of the ways that performance and performativity may frame or inspire our study of modern China. William Huizhu Sun 孫惠柱 (b. 1951), a student of NYU performance studies founder Richard Schechner and the first Chinese scholar to introduce performance studies on a large scale in China, has written much on the relevance and future of performance research in China. Beginning in 1999, Sun established what he defines as a new branch of performance studies specific to China, which he calls “social performance studies.” According to Sun, this new branch of social performance studies is better suited to China than the US-based performance studies, because it de-emphasizes performance as an aesthetic project aimed at confrontational or activist intervention (a common theme in US-based performance studies) and places more focus on performance as a social project of 368

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improving human interactions and building a healthy and stable society (Sun 2016). Sun offers important critiques of the narrow scope of US-based performance studies and the need to adopt new approaches and perspectives when analyzing performance in China. In this chapter, I build upon Sun’s insights and suggest further ways that performance studies can productively inform modern Chinese studies.

“Social Performance Studies”: A Chinese Critique of US Performance Studies William Huizhu Sun was the first Chinese scholar trained in performance studies in the United States to return to China and systematically introduce the new discipline there. Sun works actively with his wife and collaborator, Faye Chunfang Fei 費春放, who also received her PhD in the United States and participated in the conceptualization and implementation of social performance studies with Sun in China (Fei and Sun 2013). In 2005, Sun established the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA), which became a hub for performance studies graduate education, research, and teaching in China. Sun has taught at STA since 1999, serving as Director of Graduate Studies in 2004–2007 and Vice Dean in 2006–2012. He has also long served as Consortium Editor for TDR: The Drama Review, the leading academic journal of performance studies in the United States, where he regularly publishes English-language commentaries and guest edits special issues to bring his work in China to a wider audience.1 Sun’s intervention centers on a distinction between what he sees as the confrontational, individualistic sensibilities of the Schechnerian brand of performance studies established in the United States and what he regards as a need for a different approach to performance studies in China. In their 2013 article in TDR titled “Social Performance Studies: Discipline vs. Freedom,” Fei and Sun ground the emergence of the NYU school of US performance studies in Schechner’s background as a practitioner of avant-garde theater with an adversarial relationship to traditional theater: The founding of performance studies was a conscious effort to break with the traditional discipline of theatre studies. . . . As an influential avantgarde theatre director in the 1960s and ’70s, [Schechner] led a revolt against the dictatorship of the playscript/ playwright and created a deconstructionist theatre based on group improvisation and textual collage. (2013, 13) As a result, they argue, “[Schechner’s] main interest is not so much in normal, daily disciplines, as in dramatic disruptions of them, such as protest rallies, marches, and carnivals” (2013, 14). According to Fei and Sun, these interests of Schechner also reflect trends in US performance studies more broadly: Like most Western liberal intellectuals critical of their governments, or other governments, most performance studies scholars often try to tear down boundaries and break the rules of society while promoting their own individual ideas and agendas. When they are involved in collective social actions – for example, the large-scale social demonstrations that take place “in the street” – they are usually promoting their own rebellious opinions of existing social rules. (2013, 12) 369

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In other words, for Fei and Sun, US performance studies is interested in performance primarily as a means to disrupt and challenge social conventions rather than as a resource for building and maintaining social connections and the structures that order them. Sun and Fei’s conception of “social performance studies” (社會表演學) is meant to offer an alternative mode of performance studies that is less narrowly focused on what they see as disruptive, individualistic, or avant-garde performance practices and is more embracing of diverse contexts of performance in everyday life, including in commercial settings, schools, leisure, political speeches, television, etc. Through a series of Chineselanguage publications and diverse teaching and outreach projects based at the Shanghai Theatre Academy since 1999, Sun and his collaborators expanded the insights and methodologies of US-based performance studies beyond the realm of theater and performance art, to inform and analyze what he calls “social performance” – that is, the activities of reality television hosts, lawyers, salespeople, government officials, retirees, service workers, students, and others. While these everyday activities are not tied to art or activism per se, in Sun’s view, they can and should be productively approached as performance through the lens of social performance studies (e.g. Sun 1999; Sun 2005, 2011; Sun and Deng 2017). In his introduction to a 2016 special issue of TDR dedicated to social performance studies, Sun summarizes the field and his activities as follows: In my view, the field of performance studies can be divided into aesthetic performance studies and social performance studies (SPS). In a broader sense, SPS is about all performances offstage which, unlike aesthetic performances onstage, include all other human actions intended, fully or partially, consciously or unconsciously, for others to see. In a narrower sense, SPS, as I have been developing it in China since 1999 when I returned from the United States, covers two main areas. One is the analysis of individual professional performances, and the training of the actors in these performances, such as teachers, salespersons, and lawyers. The other is about collective, community-building performance in various groups, such as those of neighborhood afterschool programs, community performance clubs, and dancing in public spaces. Both areas comprise mundane daily social performances, as opposed to dramatic social disorder, such as street demonstrations and the more elaborate events of the various Occupy movements. (Sun 2016, 15) Sun then goes on to explain why he believes societies such as China necessitate an alternative approach to performance studies: Two philosophical approaches underlie all social performances and their studies. One is more activist and polemic, often promoting or even instigating confrontation, or empowering individuals against groups/institutions. This is largely common in the West, where there are relatively well-established rules governing most areas of society. To improve people’s lives involves breaking and changing the existing rules – albeit within the general political and legal system. In much of the rest of the world where systematic changes, often chaotic and/or opaque, are happening all the time, however, an important function of social performance studies, whether as training for individual professionals or as community-building 370

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performances, is to help build a healthy, harmonious society with reasonable rules, when no imminent revolution is necessary or feasible. (Sun 2016, 15) While the distinction Sun draws here is likely either too stark or otherwise unpalatable for many – Sun engages several performance studies scholars who challenge his claims later in the essay – there is nevertheless a useful point here in Sun’s encouragement of performance studies scholars to look beyond only the transgressive and confrontational when defining the ideal subjects of performance studies research. As Sun readily acknowledges, one of the most important theoretical contributions of performance studies in both the US and Chinese contexts has been its expansion of the notion of “performance” beyond theatrical or artistic activities to include everyday performance and performance in nontheatrical settings. In his 2002 book Performance Studies: An Introduction, for example, Schechner encourages readers to think with an expanded notion of performance that includes sports, commerce, religion, politics, and a range of other fields. In fact, the idea of seeing diverse activities “as performance” has become one of Schechner’s most important methodological contributions, and it is at the heart of what makes performance studies distinct from theater studies in the US context (Schechner 2002). What Sun is calling for is simply a fuller application of this maxim that is already seen as a central feature of performance studies, particularly in ways that do not privilege the transgressive over the non-transgressive or artistic over non-artistic performance. Sun defends his position by insisting that non-transgressive, non-artistic performance is the most common, familiar, and relevant in contemporary China: [T]he daily, mundane, collective, ensemble performances like dancing in public squares are definitely more frequently present and closer to common people’s life than individual activist shows. By comparison, however, Western performance studies discourse has paid less attention to the former than to the latter. (Sun 2016, 17)

Rethinking Performance and Performativity in Modern China What is surprisingly absent in the debate over social performance studies and its proposed development of performance studies theory and methods in China is an attention to modern China’s extensive history of transgressive and activist performance, which exists in both categories Sun describes as “aesthetic performance” and “social performance.” Historians and theater scholars writing about China in English have already recounted much of the history of transgressive and activist aesthetic performance in great detail. Looking at the late Qing and early Republican periods, for example, scholars have studied how newly created plays in a range of genres – including indigenous Chinese opera (戲曲), hybrid “civilized theatre” (文明 戲), and Western-style spoken drama (話劇) – took up politically progressive themes ranging from global racial justice and anti-imperialism to class and gender equality and free marriage (Karl 2002; Chen 2010; Liu 2013). Dominant narratives of the development of modern Chinese theater, dance, and music, similar to the history of Chinese cinema, highlight the 1930s and 1940s as a pivotal era when the upsurge of progressive activism of China’s democratic and Communist movements melded with mass-oriented patriotic arts projects during the War of Resistance Against Japan, resulting in the emergence of a socialist revolutionary arts tradition that enjoyed mainstream status in China through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and remains highly influential to the present day (Luo 2014; Ma 2016; Wilcox 2018; Fan 2018; Chen 2017). 371

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As scholars have demonstrated, much of this aesthetic performance practice, similar to the nonconformist avant-garde performance art prized by contemporary US performance studies, engaged in direct social action that aimed at – and, crucially, succeeded in – transforming Chinese society. Performances on battlefields, in village squares, and on street corners and factory floors were all common components of this artistic performance tradition, which preceded the experimental theater movements of the 1960s and 1970s US that gave rise to performance studies but nevertheless engaged in similar forms of public, mass-oriented, and aesthetically experimental political theater for social change (DeMare 2015; Tang 2016). Alongside this well-documented tradition of what Sun calls “aesthetic performance” – performance framed as artistic practice – there is also a vibrant legacy of activist and confrontational “social performance” – activities in other contexts that can be read as performance – in modern China. One of the most iconic acts of rebellion in the late Qing, the cutting of the queue (a long-braid men were mandated to wear according to Qing custom, which it was forbidden to cut) is a perfect example of what performance studies scholars today would call a performative – an act or statement that, by virtue of its signifying power in a particular context, can be profoundly generative, having the potential to both reinforce and remake the identity of the performer, the broader social relations in which they exist, or sometimes both at once. The cutting of the queue exemplifies performativity because it not only branded the newly short-haired person an enemy of the state (a revolutionary who could be potentially punished by death) but also contributed to a series of iterative performative acts that, taken as a whole, resulted in significant social change – the fall of the Qing Empire. A rich array of behaviors and phenomena in modern China can similarly be productively read and analyzed as activist social performance. The emergent practice of public oratory, new ways of dressing and presenting oneself in social settings, engagement in political marches and protests, the coordinated launching of factory worker strikes, new ways of writing, and more all constitute complex sites of performative possibility in China during the early decades of the twentieth century. Rather than diminishing, these activities only grew and became more widespread in subsequent decades. The Chinese Communist movement actively embraced social performance as a mode of mass action and societal transformation, exemplified in wideranging initiatives such as soldier–civilian interactions, “speaking bitterness” (訴苦) gatherings, public denunciations of landlords, and other “counterrevolutionaries,” reciting of slogans by schoolchildren, events held to honor model workers and other labor heroes, new modes of communal living and collective enterprise, political meetings and discussions, etc. So much of China’s most iconic cultural practices of the Mao era seem to lend themselves to reading as performance – from competitions to display agricultural productivity during the Great Leap Forward, to mass gatherings of Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, to public mourning upon the deaths of national leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. While the reading of life in socialist China as performance is common, such readings typically employ the more conventional notion of performance as false or duplicitous action, rather than the more recent understandings of performance as generative of new social realities. In performance studies, reading something as performance does not mean questioning its validity or regarding it as a hoax or a mode of pretending. Quite the opposite, it means investigating the ways in which actions that may seem transitory, contrived, or imitative in fact constitute the durable and the real. Over the years, different performance studies scholars have theorized performativity in diverse ways. What these approaches share, however, is the basic idea that performance is iterative and that it is through iteration that performance produces effects. Rather than seeing stable things or structures, or even singular events, performance scholars tend to see chains of enactment. In these chains of enactment, each doing has the potential to 372

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make or unmake a world. In this sense, the social performances of socialist China are no more performative than those of other times and place. They merely announce their performativity through a more self-conscious framing and explicit theorization as socially constructive. One might argue that Chinese Communist thinkers recognized the power of the performative avant la lettre and made real efforts to harness it through mass movements and coordinated social planning. Regarding modern China through the lens of performance and performativity thus shifts our thinking away from the question of the real versus the false or authentic versus imitative, and it instead directs our attention to what people are doing, how they are doing it, and what worlds or realities this doing may be calling into being. One question that arises from this line of thinking, of course, is whether after 1949 the possibility for bringing new worlds into being actually existed in China. In some ways, this returns us to Sun’s critique of performance studies and what he perceives as its narrow focus on subversive performance that, to his mind, excludes far too much of the everyday performance activities of contemporary China. I am sympathetic to Sun’s argument, but not to the way he makes it. That is, I agree with Sun that US performance studies tends to place too much value on activities perceived as challenging to the status quo and that this tendency leads it to ignore much of what goes on in modern and contemporary China in the realms of both aesthetic and social performance. Activities perceived as commercial, mainstream, popular, or state-endorsed tend to draw criticism, disdain, or at best disregard from performance studies scholars, who regard them as uninteresting and inauthentic. This is similar to what Xiaobing Tang (2015) describes as the “dissident hypothesis” among curators of international film festivals, who tend to prefer independent or “dissident” films over blockbusters with mainstream appeal. What I don’t agree with, however, is Sun’s assertion that China’s apparent lack of subversive performance arises from the instability of its social systems, or what he calls the absence of “relatively well-established rules governing most areas of society.” Chinese intellectuals have a long history of citing their country’s perceived insufficiencies as a way to justify introducing new areas of knowledge from abroad. However, in the US context, this discourse can be easily twisted to support racist logics of the perpetual backwardness of non-Western countries, inadvertently fueling the very US-centered biases that Sun seeks to dismantle with his critique. As a political and economic system, modern China has often directly challenged the US-led global order, and it continues to do so today in many aspects of its domestic and international strategies and policies. In this sense, China’s revolutionary project of establishing an alternate model of modernity is still ongoing, and its everyday social performances should be read in some respect as part of this longer project, even if they no longer possess the intense confrontational orientation they had in the early days of Revolution. I am not arguing that upholding a Chinese state-endorsed vision of the world is subversive inherently because it challenges US dominance. I am arguing, however, that there is much more complexity in the everyday performances we witness in modern and contemporary China than is often assumed. This is where my view and Sun’s views converge. The seemingly conformist social performances happening in contemporary China are as filled with potential for world-making as the more obviously confrontational avant-garde performances that US-based performance scholars have traditionally idealized. It is just that the worlds being made in each case need to be understood on different terms. In this sense, Sun’s emphasis on the constructive nature of performance in modern and contemporary China merits greater attention. I would argue that this emphasis on the constructive is not a result of some social deficiency, as Sun seems to suggest, but rather that it is taken more seriously and thus more effectively harnessed. It is because the deployment of performance for shared world-making has been so successful in modern China that 373

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stray realities are less easily performed and brought into being. This further asserts the power of performance and the importance of investigating histories of performance in modern China. When looking at performance and performativity in modern China, we need to turn our questions as much to what is being constructed as what is being critiqued or torn down. Despite the recent increase in scholarship on Chinese performing arts, as well as a growing attention to China’s diverse modern and contemporary cultures from a performance perspective, there remains much we do not know. To investigate these questions through the lens of performance will widen our scope. First, it will push us to move beyond what is said or written (a focus on the textual record and on statements) and turn our attention to what is done, enacted, and carried out (a focus on process and action). Second, it will insist that we look at ideas, institutions, and people not as enduring and stable entities (an emphasis on fixed identities and generalizable claims) but rather as things-in-process, subjects, and relations that are shifting and morphing continuously through streams of iteration that produce a new reality with each doing. To study modern China through the lens of performance will remind us that no single doing represents the whole and that action is ongoing and incomplete. Most importantly, it will remind us that performance is a series of rehearsals, just as it is a series of repetitions – and each one carries with it the muscle memory of a future, a past, and a possibility. When we think we have arrived at a fixed and enduring understanding of modern China, this is when we know we have fallen off course. The only constant of performance is that no two performances are exactly the same.

Coda: Chinese Performance in the World The debate over social performance studies reveals the ways in which ideas about China and modern Chinese culture are often articulated through perceived comparison and dialogues with a US-centered “West.” As Fei and Sun write in their 2013 TDR essay: Social performance studies is a new brand of performance studies that was developed in China in 1999. Unlike the three better-known types of performance studies in the West – theatre performance studies (mostly in the UK), human performance studies (derived from Richard Schechner’s work in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU), and oral communication performance studies (Northwestern University) – social performance studies is uniquely Chinese. (Fei and Sun 2013, 9) This ambition to produce things that are “uniquely Chinese” and to position them as such visà-vis a perceived relationship to “the West” is not specific to Fei and Sun. Rather, it is a recurring motif in modern Chinese cultural discourse – we might call it a performance that has been stuck on loop, repeating itself with only slight modifications since at least the late nineteenth century. It is a logic that has shaped not only ways of describing and legitimating aesthetic and social performances but also of creating and organizing these performances. To behave in one way is said to be “Western”; to behave in another is said to be “Chinese.” These categories are likewise stubbornly applied to aesthetic performance – techniques, genres, repertoires, sounds, movements, stories, etc. are all purportedly classifiable as “Western” or “Chinese.” Surprisingly little attention is paid in Chinese performing arts discourse to the fact that these categories are of different orders, both of which are entirely constructed. Again, it is the repeated performance of these categories, not their inherent stability or value, that gives them reality and meaning. To move forward in the field of Chinese performance studies, it will be imperative to outgrow this limiting frame of “China and the West.” In Fei and Sun’s case, this framework 374

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is understandable, given that it reflects their life experience, having lived mainly in two countries – China and the United States. However, this expectation that China will always be understood as China in dialogue with or opposition to “the West” needs to be retired. We must do this in the way we categorize performance forms and genres, the way we employ and develop theoretical concepts and dialogues, and the way we select cases of transnational circulation and interaction to investigate and write about, for example. To truly speak of a “world history” of modern Chinese performance and performativity, we will need to recognize that performances in modern China resonate with and cite – and are cited by – performances from all over the globe. Ideas, institutions, and practices from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are key interlocutors and sites of exchange in the development of both aesthetic and social performance in modern China. It goes without saying that Russia and Eastern Europe are also critical forces in this story, as are the many not fully captured by this overly simplistic geographical shorthand, such as overseas Chinese communities, migrants, and other diasporic groups. How can the lens of performance help us move toward the goal of deconstructing this hackneyed and yet commonplace “China and the West” framework? The global circulation of performance is different from that of written texts in several ways. First, performances are more closely tied than texts to the bodies of people who create and carry them. Encountering performance most often entails encountering a living human being, or at least a visual or sonic image that indexes one, maintaining the marks of embodiment through features such as vocal timbre (as in a music recording) and body image (as in a dance film). This is not to say, however, that performances are not separated from the bodies that enact them. When that happens, though, it demands work and explanation, in a way that the travel of a text away from its creator or community of origin is more routine, especially though translation, and yet also more easily retains its original connection. Second, traveling performances change more dramatically and absorb more diverse components from different sources than a text typically would as it circulates. While translation and interpretation each transforms the shape and meaning of a text, performances by virtue of their iterative nature – unless in the form of a recording – are much more open to reassembly and revision. In this sense, performance may offer a more dynamic space in which to observe crossgeographic and transcultural citation, conversation, and circuits while, at the same time, reminding us to replace abstract notions of “cross-cultural exchange” and “influence” with concrete movements and meetings of specific, heterogeneous people, each of whom have their own nonsingular identities and complex experiences that grow from particular contexts and trajectories. The notion of entire cultures or nations “meeting” is simply not tenable, and the location of performance in concrete, individual bodies reminds us of that fact. Within this, we find that some bodies travel more easily than others; some are attached more readily to national or cultural identities (and some constantly refused the national or cultural identities they identify with), which itself illuminates the methods through which constructed national and culture categories are reinforced and maintained iteratively through performance, including performative misfires (when an act is not read properly or does not have the intended effect). The question of why places other than “the West” rarely appear in Chinese performance discourse is itself a conundrum worth exploring through a performance lens. Who is enacting the constant redeployment of this term, and with what effects? What would need to shift for a glitch to be introduced in the chain of rehearsals and repetitions, for the broken record of “China and the West” to skip with enough inertia to veer into a new direction? One thing is certain: such a new direction would certainly be more reflective of the full complexity of performances happening in modern China. This is a world worth constructing through new iterations of our scholarly performance. 375

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Note 1 I served as a nonresidential international postdoctoral fellow at STA under Sun’s mentorship in 2011– 2013 and contributed to one of his special TDR issues in 2014. Thus, I am also a beneficiary of and contributor to Sun’s project of expanding performance studies in China.

References Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Chen, Xiaomei, ed. 2010. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Chen, Xiaomei. 2017. Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda. New York: Columbia University Press. DeMare, Brian James. 2015. Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fan, Xing. 2018. Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera During the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Fei, Faye C., and William H. Sun. 2013. “Social Performance Studies: Discipline vs. Freedom.” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 3: 9–19. Jackson, Shannon. 2004. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Karl, Rebecca E. 2002. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Liu, Siyuan. 2013. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Luo, Liang. 2014. The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ma, Nan. 2016. “Transmediating Kinesthesia: Wu Xiaobang and Modern Dance in China, 1929–1939.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, no. 1: 129–73. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Reinelt, Janelle, and Joseph Roach, eds. 1992. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Sun Huizhu 孫惠柱. 1999. “Chong zai biaoyan: shehui biaoyanxue daolun” 重在表演: 社會表演學導 論 (Performing Again: Introduction to Social Performance Studies). Xiju yishu 戲劇藝術 (Theatre Arts) 3: 12–6. Sun Huizhu 孫惠柱. 2005. “Renlei biaoyanxue he shehui biaoyanxue: Zhexue jichu ji shijian yiyi” 人類 表演學和社會表演學: 哲學基礎及實踐意義 (Performance Studies and Social Performance Studies: Philosophical Foundation and Practical Meaning). Xiju yishu 戲劇藝術 (Theatre Arts) 3: 55–9. Sun Huizhu 孫惠柱. 2011. “Zhudong vs. kedong: shehui biaoyanxue de zhexue tansuo 主動 vs. 客動: 社 會表演學的哲學探索 (Action versus Reaction: A Philosophical View on Social Performance Studies). Xiju 戲劇 (Theatre) 2: 50–61. Sun, William Huizhu. 2016. “Social Performance Studies: An Evolving Process of Endless Dualities.” TDR: The Drama Review 60, no. 4: 14–21. Sun Huizhu 孫惠柱 and Deng 鄧添天, 2017. “Guanyu ‘shehui biaoyanxue’—Shanghai xiju xueyuan Sun Huizhu jiaoshou fangtan 關於‘社會表演學’—上海戲劇學院孫惠柱教授訪談 (On ‘Social Performance Studies’—An Interview with Shanghai Theater Academy Professor William Huizhu Sun). Sichuan xiju 四川戲劇 (Sichuan Theatre) 2: 4–8. Tang, Xiaobing. 2015. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge University Press. Tang, Xiaobing. 2016. “Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art.” Cross-currents 5, no. 1: 85–114. Wilcox, Emily. 2018. Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy. Oakland: University of California Press.

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30 CHINESE INTERNET FICTIONS IN THE TRANSMEDIA WORLD Yiwen Wang

As the outbreak of the COVID-19 heavily restricted physical travel and social gathering around the globe, the atomized individuals sitting in front of computer screens swarmed into the digital space, with the promise of mobility without geographical borders and shared synchronicity without time differences. The increasing reliance on online space has led to a concomitant flourishing of Internet fiction: According to an annual report by Yuewen Group (閱文集團, which houses the website Chinese Literature Limited), the largest entertainment company in mainland China, the company’s Internet fiction platform and transmedia adaptations into films, televisual drama, comics, and animation has reached 9.0 million writers, 13.9 million literary works, and 228.9 million active users on its online reading platform as of December 31, 2020.1 Given such wide coverage, Internet fiction has significantly changed the habitual way of reading and writing literary works. What is Internet fiction? Scholarly works on Internet fiction adjust their definition according to their research agenda. In Consuming Literature, Shuyu Kong recognizes the Internet as a new publishing platform with democratic potential while contending that Internet fiction has not led to novel stylistic elements or subject matter (2005, 180). In Romancing the Internet, Feng (2013) argues that Web romance is a new phenomenon that allows females to negotiate their identities vis-à-vis the masculine others in a detailed study of Jinjiang 晉江 Literature City, the largest women’s web fiction. In Internet Fiction in China, Michel Hockx (2015) complements Feng’s research by providing an overview of the largest male-oriented literature website, Qidian.com 起點, and its navigation of state regulations and commercialization. Both Feng and Hockx recognize the generic innovations of Internet fictions, yet they focus their analysis on the Internet fiction platform instead of offering a close reading of specific works, due to the sheer amount of online works and their ephemerality. Tracing the fictions that emerged from Jinjiang.com and Qidian.com, Shao Yanjun approaches Internet fiction as “genre literature,” with each specific genre following a formulaic structure that can maximize the profits gained from a large readership. Shao outlines the history of Chinese-language internet fiction as a series of chronicles of canons, the status of which is granted based on popularity and commercial value (2019, 11). Xiqing Zheng (2019) finds fan fiction, the transformative writings of existing canons voluntarily produced by fans, neither assimilated into the mainstream culture nor fully commercialized popular fiction. As fan fiction is circulated within its own community, constantly being censored and marginalized by the profit-driven fiction 377

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167198-38

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market, Zheng acknowledges that it is impossible to provide a “general history” of fan fiction or to present a signature work as an example for all Chinese fandoms. Instead, Zheng sketches a migration pattern of the fan communities across different platforms. Despite their various approaches, scholarly research into Internet fiction has reached a consensus that Internet fiction should be defined in terms of its platform, the World Wide Web, instead of its content. Taking the World Wide Web as its publishing venue, Internet fiction is, by default, world literature, with a transmedia story world spreading across national and linguistic borders and across medium, format, and generic convention. The term “transmedia storytelling” was originally conceptualized by Henry Jenkins (2007) as a fictional world dispersed across multiple delivery channels, with each medium contributing to the unfolding story as a unified and coordinated whole. Jenkins (2007) believes that such a world-building process aims at the readers’ “additive comprehension,” with each extension adding to the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the original story world. Marc Steinberg further explicates the character–world relation of a Japanese transmedia system termed sekaikan (worldview): the grand narrative of a sprawling media mix complex constituted by small narrative fragments, character goods, and fan productions. The character stands as the constant across the variations of the narrative segments, and the consumer’s accumulated consumption of the fragmented narratives in the secondary products help them gain access to the “worldview” of the whole story (Steinberg 2012, 178–80). Jinying Li argues that a character–world relation and coherent worldview are absent in the Chinese IP system. The concept of an “IP system” was coined by two of the largest Internet companies in China, Tencent in 2014 and Alibaba in 2015, referring to the content of Internet fiction purchased by the company as intellectual property (IP) and distributed across multiple media formats, such as novels, games, music, and comics (Li 2011, 204, 2020). Given its ultimate goal of maximizing the story’s sales, this new production system seeks to connect the IP user base, the fans, and the stars, which Li believes is common practice for transmedia franchising in the global media industry. Li argues that what is new about the IP system is the algorithm infrastructure of the platform that structured an affective module and evoked a sensational correspondence between the audiences, and the audiovisual fragments are new in the IP system, as opposed to the character–world model predicated upon the entire story unfolding. However, Li’s analysis assumes the algorithmic structure of the platform’s overdetermination of the consumers’ affective responses, while the fan recreations that further elaborate on or subvert the character–world relation is left undiscussed. Separately, Jenkins’s discussion includes the fans’ active participation, yet his analysis is geared toward a canonical extension that aims at explaining and comprehending “what is” the original story world while overlooking the “what if” alteration of the original story world. For Jason Mittell (2014), the “what if” paradigm includes the fan fiction and remix videos that posit hypothetical possibilities that “could not be real” within the fictional universe of the original story. This chapter suggests that Internet fiction carries a centrifugal force of “what if” that calls for a “detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” that is characteristic of world literature according to David Damrosch (2003, 281). Without situating “our place and time” as the frame of reference, the “beyond” in Damrosch’s articulation points toward an otherworld that constantly moves away from the “what is” anchorage of the physical world or imaginary world. Guided by this inquiry, the selection of the Internet fiction discussed in this chapter is based on its popularity, its deviation from the realistic setting, and its adaptability to other media formats, which determine the size of the readership the story world can reach. This chapter will outline the development of three dominate categories of Internet fiction that show a “what if” deviation from the realistic setting: the male-oriented fantasy involving physical 378

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transportation to a magical landscape, the heterosexual romance with temporal transportation to a distant past, and the male–male romance that fabricates unconventional love that would be impossible in a real-life scenario. Each of these categories has undergone three stages of development: sporadically emerged in independent forums in the 1990s, monopolized by the major literature websites in the early 2000s, and adapted to televisual dramas, animation, and video games in a “what is” expansion of the original story world facilitated by the commercial IP system since 2011. Alongside the IP empire is the fan fiction that has survived several waves of censorship in an insurgent retreat from the public sphere to underground and finds the leeway of forbidden desire in the “what if” transformation of the original story world. In what follows, I will explore the different trajectories that each of these genres has taken to unfold in the matrix of the transmedia story world.

Male-Oriented Fiction: The Otherworld of Wish Fulfillment The common ancestor of male-oriented Chinese-language Internet fiction is The Tale of the Wind (風姿物語), which was serialized on the Fengyue dalu 風月大陸website in 1997. The setting of Fengyue dalu and the names of the characters are borrowed from a Japanese video game, RANCE, which was imported to Taiwan in the 1990s. It tells the story of a swordsman who becomes the king of a magical landscape, yet his prowess is not gained through his martial superiority but by acquiring supernatural power from the universe, establishing the embryotic form of a new genre: xuanhuan 玄幻 (magical fantasy). Concomitantly, Taiwan has seen a surge in video games that feature xianxia 仙俠 fiction in the 1990s, such as Xuan Yuan Jian 軒 轅劍 and Xianjian Qixia Zhuan 仙劍奇俠傳, which were produced by Softstar. Compared to xuanhuan fiction, xianxia fiction imbricates more of Daoist alchemy and martial art skills, as the swordsman has to cultivate internal energy to ascend to immortality. The first wave of the xianxia genre to appear on Chinese-language websites was The Jade Emperor (誅仙), which was serialized in Huanjian Shumeng 幻劍書盟 from 2003 to 2007. In 2002, a group of xuanhuan lovers established a literature website, Qidian.com, which soon became the most popular Chinese-language literature website; it was purchased by the Shanda Group in 2014. Xuanhuan and xianxia are two of the most popular genres on Qidian and constitute 42.39% of all the fiction uploaded to the website (Liu and Wan 2019). In 2014, Wuxiaworld, the first Chinese-to-English novel-translation website, was established. It was originally devoted to translating Wuxia classics by Jin Yong 金庸 (Louis Cha) and Gulong 古 龍,2 yet xuanhuan and xianxia constitute 75% of the fiction uploaded to the website (Liu and Wan 2019). Like Chinese-speaking readers who are drawn to the unrealistic setting of the magical landscape, Wuxiaworld fans are attracted to the exotic otherness of xuanhuan and xianxia, which is distinct from the way-too-familiar Western fantasy and Japanese manga (Wang 2017). The narrative of popular xuanhuan fiction follows a formulaic structure: The story usually starts with the rebirth of an ordinary male protagonist into a magical world in which he gains supernatural powers. After a series of adventures that involve killing beasts and demons, collecting magical weapons, and accumulating treasure, the male protagonist finally becomes the ruler of this magical world, marries the beauty, and even becomes immortal. In The Soul Continent (鬥羅大陸), written by Tang Jia San Shao 唐家三少 and serialized on Qidian from 2009 to 2010, the protagonist, Tang San, was a practitioner of hidden weapons in his previous life, was reborn into the soul continent as a genius, cultivated his magic energy by collecting spiritual treasure, and finally becomes the god of this magic continent. In Battle Through the Heaven (鬥破蒼穹), written by Tiancan Tudou 天蠶土豆 and serialized on Qidian from 2009 to 2011, the protagonist, Xiao Yan, was an ordinary boy on Earth who was reincarnated on the 379

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fantastic continent of Dou Qi 鬥氣, successfully beats all the enemies, marries the girl he loves, and rises to the highest level of magic. In either case, the ordinary character seems invincible once reborn to the magical continent and can beat all enemies and overcome all obstacles. The wish-fulfilling narrative of xuanhuan fiction that provides immediate satisfaction for the reader is categorized as shuangwen 爽文 (the fiction of pleasure) in netslang. Shao suggests that the grand narrative of shuangwen is characteristic of Internet fiction uploaded to Qidian, which resembles the “level-up” system of a video game (2019, 6). As in Battle Through the Heaven, the story starts with a line that specifies Xiao Yan’s position in the ranking system, “level three, low rank,” which makes the xuanhuan story easily adapted to video games. Simultaneously, xuanhuan fiction also follows a serialized structure, with a monster to beat in each session to achieve ultimate success, making it adaptable to televisual dramas and animation. The process of transmedia adaptation was facilitated by the merger of host Qidian.com, the Shanda Group, and one of the largest Internet company in China, Tencent, into a new franchise, Yuewen Group, in 2015. In the following years, the Yuewen Group gradually established a transmedia IP system by purchasing the copyrights of Internet fiction and adapting the works into drama series, animation, and video games: Battle Through the Heaven was first adapted into animation by Tencent in 2017 and further developed into a televisual drama and mobile game in 2018. The Soul Continent was subsequently adapted to animation by Tencent in 2018, a mobile game in 2019, and a televisual drama in 2020 (Yuewen Group 2021). With the collaboration of an Internet fiction website and online video streaming platform, readers are first transported to the otherworld of xuahuan, which gradually expands into a transmedia story world across multiple platforms. As in xuanhuan fiction, the narrative of xianxia fiction also resembles a video game narrative, making it further adaptable to xianxia games. Inspired by video games with an avatar constantly improving its equipment to climb to higher levels, xianxia fiction usually consists of more than ten cultivation stages toward immortality and special aids such as tool refinements and dharma jewels (Ni 2020, 11). The embedded video game narrative makes xianxia fiction easily converted into video games: the most famous work of xianxia fiction, The Jade Tmperor (誅仙), was developed into a video game in 2007, and A Commoner’s Journey to Immortality (凡人修仙傳) was developed into the first 3D action role-playing game in China by Xuanhuang Workshop 玄黃 in 2013. The English-speaking reader also finds the cultivation system in xianxia fiction its most attractive quality, as it resembles a gamified system that guarantees immediate wish fulfillment and a sense of control (Wang 2017). Falling prey to the cultivation system of the xianxia video game, a group of non-Chinese-speaking fans established a translation group on Discord, a chat app designed for video game players, and translated the 600,000 Chinese words in the video game The Amazing Cultivation Simulator (了不起的修仙模擬 器) into English, with a peak of 8,209 players in 2020.3 Accordingly, the xianxia fiction that originated from Japanese and Taiwan video game found an afterlife in video game adaptations exported to the English-speaking world.

Female Oriented Fiction: The Alternative Universe of Counter-Actualization The first Internet fiction to address heterosexual romance is commonly known as The First Intimate Contact (第一次的親密接觸) and was written by Taiwanese writer Pizi Cai 痞子蔡 and circulated online in 1999. However, the spread of heterosexual romance in mainland China can be traced back further to the import of the works of the Taiwanese writer Qiong Yao 瓊瑤 in the 1980s, whose phenomenal success fueled the boom of female-oriented literature websites dedicated to heterosexual romance, such as Rongshuxia 榕樹下, founded in 1997, and 380

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Hongxiu Tianxiang紅袖添香, founded in 1999. In 2003, Jinjiang Literature City was established as a female-oriented counterpart for Qidian and gradually outcompeted Rongshuxia and Hongxiu Tianxiang and became the most popular website for heterosexual romance. The first wave of female-oriented Internet fiction emerged on Jinjiang as time-travel fiction, represented by Dreaming Back to the Qing Dynasty (夢回大清), serialized in 2004, and Startling by Each Step (步步驚心), serialized in 2005. Like the male protagonists in xuanhuan or xianxia fiction who travel to a magical space distant from their everyday lives, the female protagonists in chuanyue 穿越 fiction often start with a modern girl traveling in time to the distant past of ancient China. As the male protagonist in xuanhuan fiction becomes invincible in the magical landscape and fulfills a wish that is impossible in real life, the female protagonist in time-travel fiction engages in an extraordinary romance with the emperor, something impossible in their ordinary modern lives. However, the story never ends with the desires of the modern girl fully satisfied, as in the case of the male-oriented xuanhuan fiction. Even with her modern knowledge, the female protagonist in time-traveling fiction can neither change her destiny and bring her love to fruition nor change the course of history. In both Dreaming Back to the Qing Dynasty and Startling by Each Step, the female protagonists died on their journeys to the past, and the disturbances they caused in the past were erased by their deaths. The wishfulling narrative is therefore twisted into a narrative of self-cancellation that keeps what happened in the dream within the dream. The formula of time-travel fiction is well received among readers of Internet fiction, and Startling by Each Step was adapted into a televisual drama in 2011 and became the top 10 most popular dramas of the year.4 It has also gained popularity in South Korea and won the “Most Popular Foreign Drama of the Year” at the Seoul International Drama Awards in 2012. However, after the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television banned the broadcasting of time-travel televisual series during primetime hours from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., the time-travel craze soon cooled down. The televisual adaptation of Dreaming Back to the Qing Dynasty produced by Tencent was not aired until 2019, and the time-travel drama has disappeared from the IP market since then. The next popular genre to target female readers is hougong (後宮, imperial court romance), which depicts the life of a concubine who gains the affection of the emperor, beats all her competitors, and finally becomes the Empress Dowager. The story of the imperial court is often based on real historical figures, female politicians who had not only won the king’s favor over all other concubines but also became the regent of the kingdom. The process of climbing up the imperial concubine ranks resembles the wish-fulfilling narrative in male-oriented fiction. However, the empress is always portrayed as a powerful politician frustrated in love, who has been betrayed by her husband and forced to kill her lover. The stories of the imperial court were led by The Empresses in the Palace (甄嬛傳), serialized on Jinjiang by Liulianzi 流瀲 紫 from 2007 to 2009. The archetype of the female protagonist, Zhenhuan, is the Empress Dowager Niohuru, and in The Empresses in the Palace, she has killed both her husband and her lover, despite ascending to the throne. The Empresses in the Palace was subsequently adapted into a televisual drama in 2011 and achieved incredible popularity outside of mainland China after it was broadcasted in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the USA. Inspired by the success of The Empresses in the Palace, another imperial court romance, The Legend of Miyue (羋月傳), initially published on Tencent by Jiang Shengnan 蔣勝男, went viral online, and its televisual adaptation became the most popular drama in 2015 (Entdata 2019). The archetype of the protagonist, Miyue, was based on Queen Dowager Xuan, who became the de facto ruler of the Qin Empire at the price of exiling her husband and killing her lover, the King of Yiqu, to expand Qin’s territory. With the sustained heat of the genre, two of 381

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the televisual dramas that feature the story of Empress Nara, Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace (如懿傳) and The Story of Yanxi Palace (延禧攻略), have risen to the top 2 popular televisual dramas in 2018 (Entdata 2019). However, as the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television banned dramas set in ancient times that “deliberately distort history,” the imperial court romance stories suddenly evaporated from IP market after 2019 (Entdata 2019). The female-oriented xianxia fiction took the place of hougong fiction because it survived the ban on ancient dramas with its mythical setting. Unlike its counterpart in the male-oriented xianxia fiction that is dominated by the video game narrative of “level up,” the weight of female-oriented xianxia fiction is heavily placed on the heterosexual romance. However, the trope of rebirth remains prevalent in the xianxia genre, with the heterosexual lovers reborn several times before they conquer all the obstacles and conflicts to finally live a happy life together in seclusion. The initial burst of xianxia fiction occurred in Jinjiang in 2008, represented by The Journey of Love (花千骨), Eternal Love (三生三世十里桃花), and Ashes of Love (香蜜 沉沉燼如霜). As a legendary complement to the imperial court romance with a realistic setting, the televisual adaptation of xianxia romances such as The Journey of Love and the Eternal Love became the second most popular dramas of the year (Entdata 2019). Xianxia drama adaptations not only rose to their zenith in the Chinese market but also become one of the most popular foreign televisual genres in other East Asian countries. Ashes of Love, for example, has become one of the hottest televisual dramas on Chinese-language websites and won the “Most Popular Foreign Drama of the Year” at the Seoul International Drama Awards in 2019. With its emphasis on romance rather than on martial art skills, female-oriented xianxia dramas also show a particular appeal to audiences in North America and Vietnam (Phan 2021). This way, the heterosexual romances that dominated the Chinese-speaking world extended their popularity overseas after being further adapted into a televisual series.

Danmei Fiction: The Routes of Insurgency Danmei 耽美 is a fictional genre that addresses male–male homoerotic romance for female audiences. It was first introduced to the Chinese-speaking world via the Chinese translation of the Japanese danmei manga RG Veda, published by Taiwan Tohan Co. Ltd., and made its way into the Chinese market via pirated copies (Yang and Xu 2016, 166). It reached the online community in Chinese language through Sangsang discussion boards 桑桑部落 established by Japanese manga fans, and the Sangsang Academy was established in 1993. In 2000, the first Chinese-language danmei fiction website, Xianwang 鮮網 (Myfreshnet.com), was established with its host server in Taiwan. As the publication of physical copies of danmei fiction that contain explicit male-male sex is strictly prohibited in mainland China, most of the mainland writers circulated their danmei fiction online. Even with such restrictions, the popularity of danmei fiction soon outpaced the male-oriented fantasy and heterosexual romance. On Jinjiang Literature City, which originally targeted heterosexual romance, for example, clicks on the top 10 most popular works of danmei fiction equaled almost four times that of heterosexual romance as of 2021. In its earliest stage, danmei fiction is unchained territory of erotic love and exotic pleasure with explicit male–male sex scenes. It involves not only the temporal-spatial transportation of the reader to a magical landscape detached from a realistic setting but also the unconventional romance that female readers and writers cannot experience: male–male homoerotic love. As Feng suggests in her survey, most danmei fans are self-proclaimed heterosexual women who have no experience with real-life homosexuality but are tired of the heterosexual cliché and appreciate the novelty of homoerotic tales (2013, 57). Correspondingly, rather than a truthful 382

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resemblance to the daily life of the gay couple, danmei fans crave a trope that is impossible for a biological male–male couple: male pregnancy. The trope of male pregnancy can be found in two of the most famous danmei fiction works written by Tianlai Zhiyuan 天籟紙鳶 and serialized in Jinjiang from 2006 to 2007. The first, The Right Wings of the Angel (天神右翼), is xuanhuan fiction based on the Bible that addresses homoerotic love between St. Michael, one of the principal angels, and Lucifer (Satan), a fallen angel. The other work, The Beauty of Her Age (花容天下), a work of wuxia fiction, depicts homoerotic love between a cult master and a swordsman. In both works, the homosexual male lovers not only travel across time and space and consummate their unconventional love in physical sex but also give birth to a child, which is impossible in real life. However, the male–male sex scene is never tolerated on screen, and Tianlai Zhiyuan’s danmei fictions are never adapted to televisual dramas, despite its immense popularity. The heterosexual sequel to The Beauty of Her Age, and the Winner is Love (月上 重火) has been adapted into a televisual series in 2020 that features a romance between a heterosexual male and the daughter of the male–male couple in The Beauty of Her Age, with the identity of her gay parents obscured. Concomitant to the flourish of the original danmei fiction was the boom of danmei tongren 耽美同人 (homoerotic fan fiction), which fabricates a homoerotic romance between two existing male characters. Danmei tongren fiction can be broken down into two subgenres: tongren fiction, which depicts the male–male love between two fictional characters in the original canon without explicit gay depictions, including Chinese classical texts, Japanese manga, and Euro-American televisual dramas, and the real person slash (RPS), which fabricates male– male love between real people who are not self-proclaimed as LGBTQ, ranging from historical figures, soccer stars, and music stars to televisual and film stars. Initially, fans gathered on online forums that accepted such fan fiction to be uploaded as threads in specific discussion board, such as Lucifer (西陸) and Netsh (樂園), but these sites were forced to close after the four-month anti-pornography campaign in 2004 (Yang and Xu 2016, 169). Subsequently, the fans migrated to the independent forums established by their fandom, subforums hosted by Baidu Post-bar, and the discussion board Fanfiction Library (同人文庫) hosted by Jinjiang Literature City, which is exclusively devoted to danmei tongren and is considered a secluded place freed from censorship. Circulating within the niche fan club, fan fiction exclusively targets fan readers who are way too familiar with the story world in the original canon. Correspondingly, fan fiction often starts without a backstory that is necessary for general readers to contextualize the story world and, in some extreme cases, runs counter to the setting of the original stories, as in two of the most popular subgenres of danmei tongren, AU and ABO. AU addresses the temporal-spatial transportation of the characters to an alternative universe that drastically differs from the time– space they inhabited, such as historical figures traveling to another planet in a future world or a contemporary singer traveling to another country during World War II. ABO involves the corporeal transfiguration of the characters in the kink trope, which assumes that all males can bear children and belong to one of the three categories, alpha, beta, and omega: alphas can impregnate betas and omegas, omegas can be impregnated by alphas and betas, and the beta is asexual, with limited reproductive capacity (Zheng 2016, 193). AU originated from fans of the televisual series The Sentinel (1996–1999), and ABO can be traced back to X-Files fans in the 1990s (Zheng 2016). Both of these genres were imported to Chinese-language fandom via AO3, the largest English-language fan fiction archive in 2011, and quickly spread across other Chinese-language fan platforms. In 2014, the net-cleansing campaign against pornography caused a tectonic shift for the Chinese-language fan community that takes the danmei fiction as its major target (Zheng 2019). 383

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In response, Jinjiang Literature City has imposed a severe self-censorship that prohibits any sex content and descriptions beyond the neck (Zheng 2019). Subsequently, Jinjiang closed the discussion board dedicated to danmei tongren for half a year. Losing their secret club, the fan communities further retreated from the forums to personal blogs, such as Lofter, established by NetEase, and the microblog hosted by Sina. Both of these light blogs were initially designed for social networking within a closed circuit, so the newly updated fan fiction and other fan art can only be traced by the followers of the uploader and those who intentionally search for the right key words. However, Jinjiang cannot afford to close the most profitable section, the original danmei fiction, and changed its name from danmei to chun ai 純愛 (pure love), which connotes the purification of the sexual content: Jinjiang has locked all the chapters in uploaded works susceptible to containing physical sex and ask the writers to rewrite the part to unlock it. Accordingly, the sex crave that once dominated danmei writings disappeared in the works produced by leading writers in post-2014 era, such as Moxiang Tongxiu 墨香銅臭 and Priest, whose works contain virtually no hardcore sex. As Ni (2018) contends, post-2014 danmei writers can no longer feed the reader with sexual fantasies and must transform the homoerotic romance to homoplatonic tales. The purification of danmei fiction is also reflected in its televisual adaptation, which excludes not only homoerotic sex but also the homosexual love in the original story. In 2016, Addicted (上癮), serialized in Liancheng Reading (連城閱讀), a danmei fiction about a gay couple in the high school, was adapted into a televisual drama and aired online. The clicks on Addicted reached 10 million in 24 hours after its release, yet it was pulled off the shelf before the full series was released (Guduo Media 2016).5 The reason was never publicly announced, but none of the televisual adaptations of danmei fiction released afterward contains explicit gay content. For example, Priest’s most famous danmei fiction, The Guardian (鎮魂), serialized in Jinjiang, was adapted into a televisual series and aired on Youku in 2018, with the explicit homosexual romance between the two male protagonists in the original fiction transformed into a homosocial bromance. A similar tactic was used in The Untamed (陳情令), the televisual adaptation of Moxiang Tongxiu’s most famous work, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (魔道祖師), serialized in Jinjiang, which is a hybridization of xianxia and danmei. With every trace of the male–male romance removed, the drama was promoted as a xianxia drama instead of as a danmei adaptation. Capturing attention from the niche group of danmei fans and the mass market of the xianxia fans, The Untamed rose to be one of the most popular televisual dramas in 2019 and was aired in Korea and on Netflix. The repressed homoerotic romance finds its leeway in the form of fan video remakes and fan fiction writings, which extend the “second life” of danmei fiction and its televisual adaptation. In the fan video remake, the fans disassembled and reassembled the footage from the televisual drama to fabricate exchanged glances and intimate contact, which cannot be shown in the televisual drama (Wang 2020a, 20). Some of the fans even use the footage of the actress to represent the role performed by the actors, giving rise to a new genre of fan art called gender-switching (性轉) (Wang 2020b, 497). The gender-switching trope soon migrated from fan videos to fan fiction writings, as some of the fans changed the biological sex of the male couple from male to female in their fictional works. Other fans transferred their desire for the prohibited onstage homoerotic romance to the affective attachment between the male actors offstage in their RPS fiction: The fans’ fabricated male–male romance between Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, two of the male actors in The Untamed, who never openly claimed to be LGBTQ, has risen to the top of the RPS pairings in 2019. However, the prosperity of fan writing did not survive the censorship campaign targeting Chinese-language fan communities in 2019. In May 2019, Baidu Post-bar hid all its posts uploaded before 2017, and in September 2019, Jinjiang 384

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Literature City closed its fan fiction library, which had been reopened for five years. The fans moved their works to the English-language fan fiction archive AO3 to hide from the next wave of censorship. Panic and distrust began to spread across the fan communities and exploded in February 2020 after a work of fan fiction called Fallen (下墜) was uploaded to AO3. The fiction is a hybrid genre of RPS, gender-switching, and AU that depicts Xiao Zhan as a female sex worker pursuing a romantic relationship with Wang Yibo, a high school student, which is irrelevant to either the televisual drama Fallen or the personal background of the two actors. In February 2020, Xiao Zhan’s fans reported the fiction and AO3 for harming his reputation, and access to AO3 was banned from mainland China shortly afterward. On February 27, the fan community initiated a boycott against Xiao Zhan and his fans, accusing them of being responsible for the ban of AO3. The RPS fan community also imposed rules for self-censorship, asking the writers to claim that their fiction is irrelevant to the actors they write about and to change the names of the actors in the fiction. However, these pre-emptive measures still failed to prevent the censorship in July 2020 that resulted in the deletion of massive amounts of fan fiction on Lofter. To circumvent the censorship, the fans had no choice but to save their deleted works as online documents or in cloud storage and to share it via a link to the document in the comment section. Fan fiction writers finally found their last refuge in the file-sharing network prior to the age of the World Wide Web. By the beginning of 2021, six televisual adaptations of online danmei fiction have finished filming, and fans are expecting a boom in danmei drama produced by large media corporations after the cracking down on the fan fiction community. The first danmei drama aired in 2021 is The Word of Honor (山河令), adapted from Priest’s Travelers (天涯客) and serialized on Jinjiang in 2010. The drama was among the most popular and widely discussed series in the first quarter of 2021, and its English translation was uploaded to YouTube and Netflix. The next danmei drama, scheduled to air on April 9, 2021, is Immortality (皓衣行), adapted from Husky and His White Cat Master (二哈和他的白猫师尊, abbreviation: 2HA) and serialized on Jinjiang in 2020. Even though the series has not yet been aired, 2HA has received 30,713 fan fictions and fan art updates on Lofter. A fan MV edited the footage from the heterosexual romance Ashes of Love, and the male-oriented xuanhuan, Battle Through the Heaven, which fabricated itself as the film adaptation of 2HA, has received 2.36 million clicks on Bilibili. However, on April 7, the Chinese official newspaper Guangming Daily posted an article criticizing the danmei adapted drama for satisfying the female gaze and claiming it would disseminate “unhealthy sexualities” that are harmful to teenagers (Meng 2021).6 The release of danmei adapted dramas in mainland China has thereby been brought to a sudden halt. Nevertheless, Chinese danmei fan fiction and fan art continue to extend their afterlife in the online community outside of the reach of censorship in mainland China: There were 1,970 fan fiction works about 2HA on AO3 as of September 1, 2021, and 68.3% of them are written in non-Chinese languages. There is also fanart of 2HA with an unknown author circulating online that depicts the male protagonist in 2HA lying in the arms of his lover, holding a passport and a boarding pass in his hand. On the window of the airport, there is a line that reads, “Welcome to Korea.”7

Conclusion This chapter sketches a genealogical account of the generic formations of Chinese-language Internet fiction in the dynamic process of transmedia adaptations: the male-oriented fantasies that originated from video games in the 1990s gradually developed into an established genre from 2008 to 2009 and rapidly expanded their story worlds after its adaptation to televisual 385

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drama, animation, and video games since 2017; the female-oriented heterosexual romances that emerged from 2003 to 2004 and quickly dominated the televisual screen since their adaptation into a drama series in 2011; the danmei fiction that emerged in 1990 with the introduction of the Japanese manga endure several waves of censorship as it retreated underground from the public sphere and is still looking for its next host platform. All the genres of the original internet fictions discussed in this chapters have shown a “what if” deviation from the real-world scenario in its verbal forms, either in the form of temporal-spatial transportations or corporeal transfiguration, and finds a “what is” extension of the story world in the transmedia adaptations monopolized by media corporations. Fan fiction seeks a further “what if” transformation of the original story world and the leeway to experience suppressed desire. Given the enormous volume of online writings, this chapter is by no means a comprehensive summary of the evolution of Chinese Internet fiction but a preliminary outline of several of the most influential genres birthed by the Internet, flourished in their symbiotic relation to the websites, cracked down by censors, and extend their afterlife in the transmedia world.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See https://ir.yuewen.com/en/index.html. See www.wuxiaworld.com/page/about. See https://steamcharts.com/app/955900#All. See www.csm.com.cn/Content/2016/11-11/1055231502.html. See http://news.guduomedia.com/?p=6425. See https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2021-04/07/nw.D110000gmrb_20210407_1-14.htm. See www.pinterest.pt/pin/816207132459349233/.

References Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Entdata. 2019. “Xianguling xia guzhuangju shichang dongcha baogao” 限古令下古裝劇市場洞察報 告 (The Report of the Costume Drama Market under the Ban), August. www.endata.com.cn/Market/ reportDetail.html?bid=0a8aaf3b-3155-4dfb-a7a1-52aa04070c65. Feng, Jin. 2013. Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance. Leiden: Brill. Guduo Media. 2016. “2011 nian dianshiju bochu yu shoushi pandian” 耽美網路劇《上癮》上線，24小 時播放量破千萬 (The Danmei Adapted Drama Addicted Reach More Than 10 Million Clicks Upon Release).” Accessed July 1, 2021. http://news.guduomedia.com/?p=6425. Hockx, Michel. 2015. Internet Literature in China. New York: Columbia University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-fan 22, no. 3 (March 21). http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Kong, Shuyu. 2005. Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Li Hongling 李紅玲. 2011. “2011 nian dianshiju bochu yu shoushi pandian” 2011年電視劇播出與收視 盤點 (Summary of the TV Drama in 2011). CSM Media Research. Accessed July 1, 2021. www.csm. com.cn/Content/2016/11-11/1055231502.html. Li, Jinying. 2020. “The Platformization of Chinese Cinema: The Rise of IP Films in the Age of Internet+.” Asian Cinema 31, no. 2: 203–18. Liu, Xiping, and Changxuan Wan. 2019. “What Are You Reading: A Big Data Analysis of Online Literary Content.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Mining and Big Data. Berlin: Springer. Meng Lei 孟蕾. 2020. “Danmei zuopin gaibian shengxing daipian dazhong shenmei” 耽美作品改 編盛行帶偏大眾審美 (Danmei Adapted Works Deviate the Public’s Aesthetics Appreciation).” Guangming Daily 光明日報. Accessed July 1, 2021. https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2021-04/07/ nw.D110000gmrb_20210407_1-14.htm\.

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Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World Mittell, Jason. 2014. “Transmedial Narration and Fan Fiction: The Storyworld of the Vampire Diaries.” In Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 253–77. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ni, Zhange. 2018. “Steampunk, Zombie Apocalypse, and Homoerotic Romance: Rewriting Revolution Plus Love in Contemporary China.” ASPECT Working Paper, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA. Ni, Zhange. 2020. “Xiuzhen (Immortality Cultivation) Fantasy: Science, Religion, and the Novels of Magic/Superstition in Contemporary China.” Religions 11, no. 1: 25. Phan, Anh Quang. 2021. “From Print Texts to Online Gaming: The Cross-Cultural History of Wuxia Fictions in Vietnam.” SAGE Open 11, no. 2. DOI: 21582440211021392. Shao, Yanjun 邵燕君. 2019. “Wangluo wenxuede ‘duandaishi’ yu ‘chuantong wangwen’ de jingdianhua” 網路文學的 “斷代史”與 “傳統網文”的經典化 (The Chronicle of Internet Literature and the Canonization of Traditional Internet Literature). Modern Chinese Literature Studies no. 2: 1–21. Steinberg, Marc. 2012. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Yiwen. 2020a. “Homoeroticising Archaic Wind Music: A Rhizomatic Return to Ancient China.” China Perspectives, no. 2: 15–23. Wang, Yiwen. 2020b. “The Paradox of Queer Aura: A Case Study of Gender-Switching Video Remakes.” Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 4: 496–514. Wang, Yuxi. 2017. “Globalization of Chinese Online Literature: Understanding Transnational Reading of Chinese Xuanhuan Novels among English Readers.” Inquiries Journal 9, no. 12. www.inquiriesjournal. com/a?id=1716. Yang, Ling, and Yanrui Xu. 2016. “‘The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name’: The Fate of Chinese Danmei Communities in the 2014 Anti-Porn Campaign.” In The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture, edited by Mark McLelland, 163–83. London: Routledge. Yuewen Group. 2021. “Corporate Overview.” Accessed July 1, 2021. https://ir.yuewen.com/en/index. html. Zheng, Xiqing. 2016. “Borderless Fandom and Contemporary Popular Cultural Scene in Chinese Cyberspace.” PhD dissertation. Seattle: University of Washington. Zheng, Xiqing. 2019. “Survival and Migration Patterns of Chinese Online Media Fandoms.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 30. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1805.

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INDEX

1001 Nights: Chinese translations of 5, 17–18, 343–52 Abbas, Ackbar 141 Abel-Rémusat, Jean-Pierre 36, 37, 39, 40, 41 actor network translation studies (ANTS) 82 Adelung, Johann Christoph 42 Agamben, Giorgio 141, 259 Aku Wuwu 130 Ali Baba 344, 347–8 Alibaba company 378 Amaini 阿買妮 129 Amantay, Aydos 84n2 amnesia: collective 332, 336–9; cultural 17, 260, 339; individual forms of 332 amnesty, state 163 anecdotes 355 Anecdotes of a Magnificent Island (multi-author) 147–50; He Jingya’s preface 148 Ang Lee 133 Anglo-globalist triumphalism 5 An Lushan Rebellion 68, 107 antiquarianism 18, 344, 352 ANTS see actor network translation studies aphasia 338 Archimedes: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 artistic creation 15 artistic experimentation 174–5 artistic expression 7; nonfiction 12; state intervention in 75 artists: café as site of 57; Chinese, in modern Paris 51–60; Dao and 43; depiction of 49, 51; filmmakers and 241; foreign 52; invisible 55; New Sensationalists 283; socialist 247;

“Southbound” 243; trope of bohemian Chinese 49; writers and 242, 248, 283; see also Chang Yu; Guan Liang; Guo Jianying; Guo Xuehu art studio: in Paris 54–7 Ashima 阿詩瑪, story of 126–7 Asimov, Isaac 199, 204; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Assmann, Aleida 334 Assmann, Jan 17, 145, 337–8 Asuo Layi 阿索拉毅 77, 130 Asu Yue’er 130 Augustine: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 author museums: PRC and rise of 9, 107–17 Bachner, Andrea: on Sinophone literature and the rainforest 11–12, 156–65 Badai 巴代 147 Bai 白 123 Baidu Post-bar 383, 384 baihua 白話 vernacular 350; see also vernacular Bai Juyi 白居易 39 Bai Wei 白薇 291 Bai Xianyong 白先勇 134 Ba Jin 巴金 113, 291 Bakhtin, Mikhail 30 Ba Lao Cao see Lu Guo Mao, Ba Lao Cao 魯郭 茅, 巴老曹 Balivet, Aaron 182n2 Balkan nations 100 Bal, Mieke 333 BAME see Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic Bamo Qubumo 巴莫曲布嫫 130 Ban Wang 王斑 see Wang, Ban

388

Index Ban Zhao 348 baodao wenxue 報導文學 188 baogao wenxue 報 告文學 185, 188 baojuan 寶卷 (Buddhist precious scrolls) 169 Barbusse, Henri 188, 189 Barthes, Roland 68 Baudelaire, Charles 53, 57–8, 234 Baudrillard, Jean 68 Bei Dao 北島 77 Beijing: dialect 103; Diana Bridge posted as diplomat in 64; jingju opera 169, 177; London and 103–4; Lu Xun’s residence and museum in 109–13; Yi literary works disseminated by 126 Beijing Normal University (BNU) 8, 74 Beijing Olympics 75 Bender, Mark: on Yi literature 10, 12, 123–31 Benjamin, Walter 30, 136, 224 Bernards, Brian 60n1 Bethge, Hans 45 Bhabha, Homi 89 Bible 37, 199, 383 Bierbaum, Otto Julius 44 Bi Feiyu 畢飛宇 77, 81, 363 Bi Gan 畢贛: Kailu Blues 18, 356, 358–65 biochemistry: Chinese SF and 13 biological evolution 216, 217 biopiracy 208; geopolitics and 211–13 biosphere: literary 11, 156 Bishop, Karen Elizabeth 242 Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) 65 Black Lives Matter 181 blackmail 347 “black society” 140 Black Soil 黑土地 130 Black women in Singapore 105 Blake, William 210 Bloch, Ernst 43 Bocaccio 343 Bolton, Kingsley 138 Book of Changes 周易正義 231 Books of Songs 毛詩正 231, 358 Boren, David L. 74 Borges, Jorge Luis 15, 65, 265, 272, 359 Bradbury, Steven 81 Bradley, David 126 Braester, Yomi 332 Breton, André 151 Bridge, Diana 8, 63–8, 71–2 Brockmeier, Jens 337–8 Brontë, Emily 221, 223, 225, 228 Brontë sisters 224 Brown, Catrina 339 Bryant, Shelly 254 Buber, Martin 42, 43 Buck, John Lossing 300 Bungo Stray Dogs 文豪野犬 (manga) 148

Burao Yilu 布饒依露 77 Butler, Judith 336–7 Butler, Samuel 199 Cantonese: language 138; opera 169, 174, 180; painter 175 Can Xue 殘雪 331 Cao Xueqin Memorial Museum 113 Cao Yu 曹禺 113 Capote, Truman 192 Carroll, Lewis 223, 234 Carson, Rachel: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199; Silent Spring 200 Caruth, Cathy 339 Casanova, Pascale 54, 151–3, 196; on ‘world literary space’ 223; see also small literature Castelli, Alberto 331 CCP see Chinese Communist Party Chagall, Marc 51 Cha, Louis (Louis Cha Leung Yung) 253 Chambers, Harlan 186 Chang, Eileen 張愛玲 (Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 ) 27, 29, 134, 241, 254; Peaceful Spring (Zhang Ailing): Chinese folk culture and 244–5 Chang, Gigi 254 Chang Hui-Ching 張惠菁 84n2 Changjiang tu (Picture of the Yangtze River) 356 Chang, Kuei-hsin 80 Chang, Shi-Kuo 96 Chang Yu 常玉 (Sanyu) 7, 53–5; “Nude on Tapestry” 55 Chan Koonchung 陳冠中 135 Chan, Mary Jean 65 Chau, Angie: on Chinese writers in Paris and the art of transposition 7, 49–60; on the success of Chinese SF in translation 198 Chaucer, Geoffrey 343 Cheah, Pheng 10, 92, 135 Chen Dabei 陳大悲 290 Chen Duansheng 326 Chen Duxiu 陳獨 14, 221, 222, 280 Chengdu 129, 130 Chen Guidi 陳桂棣 192 Chen Jialuo 陳家洛 256, 259–60 Chen Jingrong 陳敬容 77 Chen Kaige 陳凱歌 363 Chen Kaizong (fictional character) 215 Chen, Letty 332 Chen Luying 77 Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 28, 253 Chen Qiufan: “G is for Goddess” 199; Waste Tide 13, 207–18 Chen Ruan 陳染 331 Chen Sheng 359–62, 365

389

Index Chen Shih-hsiang 陳世驤 363, 365n4 Chen Sihe 陳思和 28 Chen, Tina 338 Chen Xiaoming 74 Chen Xue 陳雪 84n2 Chen Ying-chen 陳映真 188 Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 231 Chen You-jin 陳又津 148 Chen Yuqian 陳遇乾 170, 171 Chen Zhangyou 陳長友 127 Chia Ling 嘉凌 176, 177 Ch’ien Chung-shu see Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 Chikada Prize for Poetry 80–1 China see CCP; PRC; ROC China International Publishing Group (CIPG) 中國國 際出版集團 84n1 Chinese Civil War 24 Chinese Committee of Literature Museums 113 Chinese Communist Party (CCP): artistic film creation under 247, 249; power struggles with KMT 283; reportage under 12, 185, 187–9 Chinese folk culture: Peaceful Spring and 243–5 Chinese internet culture and fan fiction 18–19, 377–86 Chinese literary periodization and historiography 4, 22–31 Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT or CLT2) 78–9 Chinese Literature Today (CLT) 8, 75–82 Chinese Literature Translation Archive (CLTA) 75, 81–2 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT): “free professionals” in Shanghai and 283; Lu Heruo and Guo Xuehue “key” story and 148; Peaceful Spring plotline and 244; Remote Village plotline and 246, 248; Rice Sprout Song plotline and 243; White Terror period 146 Chiu, Kuei-fen 5; on Taiwan literature in the twentyfirst century 11–12, 145–53; on worldedness 12 Chi Zijian 遲子建 79 Chongzhen 崇禎 (Emperor) 257, 260 Chow Mei-naan (fictional character) 137–8, 140 Chow, Ray 95, 133–4 Christianity 91; American 94; churches 147 Christmas: Chinese legend turned into a “Chinese Christmas story” 91; Chinese people in London on 103 Chuang Chih (fictional character) 223, 225–9 chuanqi 傳奇 plays 97n4, 170 Chung-ying Cheng 成中英 78 Chuntao 春桃 192 Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文 77, 80, 81, 363 Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan 125 CIPG see China International Publishing Group Clark, Brett 208 Clarke, Arthur C. 199; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199

Clarke, George Elliott 63 Clark, Timothy 207 Clinton administration (United States) 210 Cloud, Frederick D. 171, 173 Cloud Gate Dance Theatre 雲門舞集 169, 177 CLT see Chinese Literature Today CLTA see Chinese Literature Translation Archive Clunas, Craig 51 Cocteau, Jean 151 “coercive mimeticism” 95 Communism: Borneo 163, 164 Communist Army 244 Communist Base Areas 189 Communist China: Cold War and 161; see also CCP Communist Revolution 26, 29 Complete Pre-Tang Prose 全上古三代秦漢三國 六朝文 231 Confucianism 7, 24; ethics 38, 289; family system 280; literati 277; masculinities 280; scholars 278; values 337; women’s roles defined by 282, 288 Confucius 23; Analects 26; classics of 188, 281; Confucius Sinarum Philosophus 35; Four Books” (四書) and “Five Classics” (五經) 35, 269; Grube’s opinion of 41; Konfuzianismus und Taoismus (Confucianism and Taoism) (Weber) 44; Laozi and, comparisons between 37, 38, 44; Li Bai compared to 45; Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and 201; Ma Rufei’s storytelling and 180; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199; reception in Germany of works by 35–9; Weber on 44 Confucius Institute 孔子學院 8; network of 76 Confucius studies 23 Contemporary Chinese Thought (CCT) 78 Cosgrove, Denis 250 cosmopolitanism 5, 9–10, 13, 27, 92, 147, 153; Goethe’s vision of 16; literary 188; Qian Zhongshu’s global vision of 238–240; vernacular 14, 221, 228 Couplet, Philippe 35, 41 COVID-19 181, 377 Crosscurrent, The 18, 356–8, 361–4 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 133 Cui Hao 199 Cui Zi’en 崔子恩 191 cultural memory see memory cyber-biology 212 cyberspace 216 cyborg 209, 212, 214–15 cyborg punk 209 Damrosch, David 19, 68, 134, 196, 223, 378 Da, Nan Z. 52 danmei 耽美 fiction 18, 382–5, 386

390

Index Dante: Inferno 161, 210 Daoism 44 Daqing 325 Darnton, Robert 298 Darwin, Charles: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Dazhai 325 Dehmel, Richard 44 déja disparu 141 Deleuze, Gilles 4; “assemblage” of 30; “becoming” of 71–2; on cinematic temporality 361–2 Deng Xiaoping 187 Deren, Maya 363 Derrida, Jacques 146 Des Forges, Alexander 187 Dewey, John: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Dianyi Cave, Fuling 358 Dickens, Charles 207 Didion, Joan 192 Dijkstra, Sandra 82 Ding Hui (fictional character) 268 Ding Qiang (fictional character) 268–269 Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 125 Dong Xi 東西 78 ducks-and-butterflies 鴛鴦蝴蝶 romance 14, 221, 226 Duckweed Cloud see Zhou Zouren Du Fu 71, 107; Pain Not Bread on 68–72; poems of 46; To the Recluse Wei” (贈衛八處士) 68–9 Du Fu Thatched Cottage (杜甫草堂) 107–8, 113 Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste 36, 37–8 Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章 78, 135 Dunsing, Charlotte 198 Earnshaw, Graham 254, 262 Eckermann, Johann Peter 39–40 ecological critique as world literature 6, 13, 207–18 Egan, Ronald 232 Ehrenstein, Albert 46 Einstein, Albert: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Elephant Herd 群象 (Zhang Guixing) 11, 157, 161–2 Elliott, Emory 6 Emery, Elizabeth 115 Empson, William 68 Eni Mushasijia 俄尼牧莎斯加 77 Erkes, Eduard 36, 41 Erll, Astrid 152 Extensive Record of the Taiping Era 太平廣記 170

fandoms 378, 383 fan fiction 377 Fanfiction Library 同人文庫 383 Fang Chengpei 方成培 170, 182n2 Fang Fang 方方 17, 330–40 Fang Guoyu 方國瑜 124 Fang Hongjian (fictional character) 231 Fang, Weigui 方維規 : on the reception of Chinese literature in early twentieth century Germany 7, 35–47 Fan Mingju 151 fans 254, 378; danmei 383, 384; manga 382; Wuxiaworld 369; xianxia 380; Xiao Zhan 385 Faulkner, William 151 Fa Xing 發星 130 Fei, Faye Chunfang 費春放 18, 369 Fei Mu 費穆 355 female impersonator 173 Feng, Jin 377, 382 fengliu 風流 (amorous escapades) 281 Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 93, 170–1 fengshui 331 Feng Yuanjun 馮沅君 291 Fengyue dalu 風月大陸 379 films and filmmakers: Ang Lee 133; Chinese poetic 18, 355–65; Crosscurrent, The 18, 356–8, 361–4; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 133; Cui Zi’en 191; Harry Potter 147; Hollywood 139, 148, 224; Jia Zhangke 191; Joris Ivens 111; Kaili Blues 18, 356, 358–64; Lord of the Rings 147; Lou Ye 191; Peaceful Spring 241; “poetic” 18, 19; PRC 159, 169, 177, 181; Rice Sprout Song (Zhang) and two socialist films, intertextual relationship between 14, 242, 243–6; Sang Hu 241; screenings 80; Shaw Brothers 176, 177; Shen Pengnian 112; Ugetsu 175; White Snake legend reinvented in 12, 176–7, 180–1; Wu Yonggang 247; Xin Qi 224; Yi Wu 130; Zhang Yuan 191 Fletcher, John B. 223 Flint, Kate 297 Floyd, George 181 focalization, theory of 333 foreign patrimonies 151; see also Taiwanese literature Forke, Alfred 44 Foster, John 208, 218 Foucault, Michel 4, 15; “countermemories” of 334; death of 273n3; “genealogy” of 30; heterotopias of 157, 266, 269, 272; “Of Other Spaces” 264; Order of Things 265; “systems of valorization” of 339 France 7, 36; archives in 126; bohemian, trope of 49; Chang Yu’s death in 54; Chinese artists in 51–9; Chinese intellectuals in 53; discovery of Chinese literature by 44; Going to France by Letter (Li Jinfa) 58; see also Paris

391

Index Frankfurt School 217n1 Freud, Sigmund 115, 199 Fu Lei 7, 57–60 Fu, Poshek 251n3 Gabelentz, Georg von der 42 Galland, Antoine 344, 347, 349, 351 Gauthier, Théophile 53 Genette, Gérard 199 Genghis Khan 成吉思汗 257 Germany: Kubin 81; Nora’s reception in 16; reception of Chinese literature in 4–8, 35–47; see also Goethe Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5, 10, 16, 39–40; Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tages-Zeiten 39; Sorrows of Young Werther 221; world literature, concept of (Weltliteratur) 89, 207 Goldblatt, Howard 79, 81–2 Golden Chamber Monthly 54 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de 234 Gorky, Maxim 108 Graf, Emily Mae: on author museums in the PRC 9, 107–17 Graham, Nan 82 Grass, Günter 149 Greek tragedy 363 Grube, Wilhelm 37, 40–2, 45 Guangyu Guild 174 Guangzhou 36, 109; Lu Xun Museum 110 Guanyin (Bodhisattva) 271–2 Guanyin Temple, Ezhou 357 Guo Changbo 過常寶 78 Guo Jianying 郭建英: “Introduction” 49, 50, 55 Guo Jing 郭靖 257 Guo Lusheng 74 Guo Moruo 郭沫若 9, 100, 102–4; as Communist Party propagandist 293; critique of Doll’s House (Ibsen) 292; differentiation of two loves 281; former Beijing residence of 113; on New Women 293; visit to the Soviet Union 108; Zhuo Wenjun (卓文君) 290 Guo Sijiu 127 Guo Xuehu 郭雪湖 148 Haizi 海子 363–4 Halle, Jesper 295 Hamm, John Christopher 257 Hanban 漢辦 8, 76, 77 Hangchow 171–3 Hàn Giang Nhạn 254 Hangzhou 171 Hangzhou Academy 57 Han Shaogong 韓少功 79, 80, 332 Han Song 韓松 77, 78 Han Yan 74 Han Yu 韓愈 162 Hao Jingfang 198

Harrell, Stevan 124, 126 Harry Potter (films) 147 Harte, Bret 97n7 Hartsock, John 192 Hashimoto, Satoru 5 Hauser, Otto 45 Hawkes, David 69 Healey, Cara 209 Heberer, Thomas 126 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 38, 40, 200; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Heidegger, Martin 30, 199, 200, 231 Heilmann, Hans 45 He Jingya 148 He Jingyao 何敬堯 148 Henningsen, Lena: on Chinese Science Fiction and world literature 13, 196–204; on reading experiences recorded in diaries 300 He Qifang 何其芳 28 Herder, Johann Gottfried 38–9, 47n2 heritage: British Chinese dual (Howe) 63, 67; Chinese lyrical 27; cultural 71, 149; Intangible Cultural Heritage 126, 128; Intangible Cultural Heritage Site on National Level (國家級非物 質文化遺產) 113; literary 115; revolutionary 332, 339; State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) 108, 112; Taiwan cultural heritage 145 heritage site 107, 113 heritage studies 107 hermeneutics 237; cultural 82; linguistic 75 Hesse, Hermann 43, 45 heteroglossia 30 heterotopia 16; see also Foucault heterotopic imaginary 15 heterotopos 11 He Wapi 何袜皮 84n2 Hibbert, Eleanor 223 Hillenbrand, Margaret 146 Hill, Michael Gibbs: on Chinese New Cultural intellectuals’ translations of 1001 Nights 5, 17–18, 343–52 Hinton, David 62 Hitchcock, Alfred 224 Hockx, Michel 377 Hodell, Courtney 82 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 44 Hollywood 139, 148, 224 Holm, David 110 Holm, J. Landrum (Rev.) 90 Holm, Sallie 90 Holmwood, Anna 254, 255 Holton, Bruce 81 Holt, Victoria 223 homo economicus 207

392

Index homoeroticism and homosexual desire: female 178; male 18, 177, 382, 383, 384; queerness and 179 homophones 163 Honghe 紅河 125; Hani 127 Hong Kong: Asian cultural Cold War and 243; Children’s Cancer Fund 84n3; Chinese language literature produced in 29; contributors from, in CLT 77; Diana Bridge born in 64; documentary film festivals 193; film industry 176–7; gender and class politics 181; Jin Yong 253, 254, 256, 259, 261n3; Lilian Lee 169, 178; Newman Prize and writers from 81; New Wave 255; postcoloniality 141; PoundRexroth-Snyder axis in 63; queer Sinophone literature in 133–43; USIS 250; Wan Man Lai 84n3; Wong Chin Foo 90; Zhang Ailing 242–3, 246 Hou Hsia-hsien 侯孝賢 363, 364 Howe, Sarah 8, 63–5, 67, 71 Hsia, C. T. 4, 26–7, 245 Huainanzi: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 huaju 話劇 (“spoken drama”) 169 Huang Huo 黃禍 (fictional character) 280 Huangmei diao 176 Huang Ren 黃人 23 Huang Ziping 黃子平 28 Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 279 Huanjian Shumeng 幻劍書盟 379 Hughes, Langston 130 Hugo Award 196, 198, 364 Hugo, Victor 227–8 Hui, Ann 255 Hume: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Hundred Flowers Campaign 189 Hunecker, James Gibbons 288 Hungary 254 hunger, hungry as literary theme 15, 245, 247; ‘hungry’ eye or gaze 56, 60; ‘hungry hunter’ 210 Hu Shi 胡適 16, 289; “American Women” 289; Dream of the Red Chamber, analysis of 107; Ibsenism of 289, 292; “Life’s Greatest Event” 289; literary evolutionism, concept of 25; Shaw, influence on 289 Hutton, Christopher 138 Hu Ying 胡璎: On Nora’s reception in China 14, 16, 17, 288–95 Hyde, Robin 68 Iawasa, Kazue 126 Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House in China 16, 288, 295; adaptations of works by 295; anti-

bourgeois and anarchist inclinations 293; New Youth special issue on 289; see also Nora “Ibsenism” 289, 292 ICOM 113 Idema, Wilt 179 indigenism 147 indigenous: communities, deracination of 210; individualism 27; literary traditions 197; literature 147; populations, massacre of 157; script traditions 10; Taiwanese indigenous people 146; writers 11, 148 Inō Kanori 146 Intangible Cultural Heritage Site on National Level (國家級非物質文化遺產) 113 intertext and intertextuality 68, 81; afterlives of Taiwanese literature via 150, 152, 153; Chinese poetry and 71; in Chinese science fiction 13, 196–8, 199, 203–4; hybrid 221, 222; Zhang’s Rice Sprout Song and two PRC films 242–3, 250 interwar period 51 Intorcetta, Prospero 35 Jacobs, Cerise Lim 180–1 Jahriyya school of Islam 30 James Bond films 224 James, Earle K. 158, 161 James, Henry 151 Jameson, Fredric 156 Japan: Sino-Japanese War 222; see also manga; Meiji Japanese colonial legacy 11, 145, 150, 151, 153 Japanese writers and literature: fantasy literature 148; Inō Kanori 146; Kawaguchi Hiroshi 188; monster literature 148; Nishiwaki Junzaburō 151; popular literature 148; Yang Shuangzi 楊 双子 148, 149; Yuri 百合literature 148, 149 Jenkins, Henry 19, 378 Jeunesse, La 14, 221 Jia Lusheng 賈魯生 190 Jiang Kui 姜夔 237 Jiangnan region 15, 257, 260, 300 Jiang Qing 江青 292 Jiangxi 312 Jiangyong County 123 Jiang Yun 蔣韻 79 Jia Pingwa 77; Ruined City 廢都 79, 83 Jia Zhangke 賈 樟柯 191; 24 City 363; Joris Ivens 111; Still Life 356 Jidi Majia 吉狄馬加 77, 79, 129–30 Ji Jin: on Qian Zhongshu as cosmopolitan 4, 14, 230–40 Jikebu 吉克布 130 Jimu Langge 吉木狼格 129 jing 淨 (mighty male) 176 Jing Hao 荊浩 237 Jingju 175, 177, 178

393

Index Jing Tsu see Tsu, Jing Jinjiang 晉江 Literature City 377, 381, 382, 383–5 Jin Yong 金庸 78; Wuxia narrative of 16, 253–61 jishi wenxue 紀實文學 185 A Jiu 阿九 (fictional character) 257 Ji Wenfu 嵇文甫 24 Jjinuo Dazzi 130 Johnson, Mike 63 Ju Anqi 雎安奇 363 Judge, Joan 300, 348 Julien, Stanislas 37, 39, 41, 171 Jung, Carl: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 jungle: as avatar of colonialist world vision 157; Borneo 163–4; Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 163; Malaysia 29; rubber 158, 160; social Darwinist 217; tropical 161; urban 12 Jun Lei 雷俊 : on modern intellectual masculinities 16, 277–86 Jushezhe 舉奢哲129 Kafka, Franz 234 Kailu Blues (Bi Gan) 18, 356, 358–65 Kang Tongbi 康同璧 347 Kangxi (Emperor) 258 Kang Youwei 康有為 300, 347 Kant, Immanuel: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Kawaguchi Hiroshi 188 Kelley, David 53 Kim Il-gang 254 King Hu 胡金銓 255 Kisch, Egon Erwin 188 Klabund (Alfred Henschke) 43, 45 Klein, Lucas 62–3 KMT see Chinese Nationalist Party Kong, Shuyu 377 Koran 37 Kraef, Olivia 126 Krutch, Joseph Wood: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Kubin, Wolfgang 81 Lacharme, Alexandre de la 44 Lama Itzot 130 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Lane, Edward 351 Lan Ping 292 Lao, Ping-hui 廖炳惠: on Su Manshu’s ‘Broken Hairpin’ 14, 221–28 Lao Qi (fictional character) 338

Lao She 老舍 9,103–4; Two Ma’s 100 Laozi 老子: Confucius and, comparisons between 37, 41; Daodejing 道德經 (Le Livre de la Voie et de la Vertu) 37; as Daoist deity 271–2; Qian Zhongshu 231; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199; revolutionary character of philosophy of 41–4; Ricci on 41; Weber on 44; Wilhelm on 43 Larousse, Pierre, 36 Laughlin, Charles: on reportage and nonfiction art in China 12–13, 185–93 laughter: Borges on 265; at China 42; of dragon (in poem by Wong Chin Foo) 90; laughing aloud 87; tanci xiaoshuo as object of 173 Law Wing Sang 142 League of Leftwing Writers 188 Lee, Ang 133, 253 Lee, Christopher 251n5 Lee, Leo Ou-fan 李歐梵 28 Lee, Lilian 169, 178; see also Lee Pik-Wah 李碧華 Lee Maan-yi (fictional character) 141 Lee Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵 28 Lee Pik-Wah 李碧華 169, 178 Lee Ping-bing, Mark 365n2 Lee, Tong King 6 Legge, James 42 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 38 Lei Feng 雷鋒 316, 316 Leigh, Martha (fictional character) 224 Leopaldi, Zibaldone 234 lesbian longing 139, 179; see also danmei fiction; homoeroticism and homosexual desire; LGBTQ; queer worlding LGBTQ 383–4; see also queer worlding Liancheng Reading (連城閱讀) 384 Li Ang 李昂 146 Liang Hong 186, 192 Liang Jing 梁京 241, 244 Liang Luo 93, 97n6; on legends of the White Snake 169–80 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 16, 26, 52–3; China Discussion of a History of Modern Egypt (Shiba Shirō) 344; new fiction championed by 279–80; People’s Miscellany 347; reformation project of 278–9; science fiction in China and 197; Zhongguo zhi xinmin 中國之新民 (new people of China) 278 Liangshan Mountains 124, 129 “Liangshan School of Yi Poetry” 130 Liang Village 192 Liang Zongdai 梁宗岱 52–3 Li Bai 39, 44–5, 65–8, 71, 99; Liu Cixin’s character with name of/impersonating 203 Libailiu 禮拜六 (Saturday) 305 Li Bingshu 李炳淑 176

394

Index lielao 138 Li Er: Coloratura 花腔 79 Li Guo 郭麗: on feminine neorealist fiction 17, 330–40 “Li Huang” 李黃 170 Li Jinfa 李金: “Luxembourg Garden” 7, 57–60 Li, Jinying 378 Li Juan 李娟 84n2 Lin Chuanjia 林傳甲 23 Lin Dai 176, 180 Lin Fangmei 224 Lin Fengmian 林風眠 54 Lingenfelter, Andrew 81 Link, Perry 82 Lin Lianfeng (fictional character) 55–6, 60 Lin Mang 74 Lin Yueh-hua 126 Lin Zhaohua 林兆華 295 Li Shangyin 李商隱 62 Li Sut-fong 李雪芳 174 literary: capital 145, 152–3; enterprise, modern Chinese 135; evolutionism, concept of 25; historiography 22; literary reportage versus literary journalism 192; literary studies 10; production, Hong Kong 134; professionals 83; reforms 152; remapping 259; tradition, Chinese 165; worlding 165; writing 11 literati: abandoned woman figure in imagination of 294; artistic depictions of 51; bimo 127, 131; Chinese 14, 27, 145, 253, 268; concept of literature in Taiwan and 145; Confucian 277, 279; dream of knight-errant held by 253; male “lack” of 279; martialized masculinity and 278; masculinity and 282; May Fourth 24; old and declining 293; Qian Zhongshu and 230; wenren文人 51, 58, 59 Li Tianji 李天濟 355 Li Tie 李鐵 79 Liu Baiyu 劉白羽 189 Liu Binyan 劉賓雁 187, 188, 190, 193n2 Liu Cixin 劉慈欣 78; “Poetry Cloud” 203; Three Body Problem 198, 199, 200–1 Liu Dapeng 劉 大鵬 300 Liu Haisu 劉海粟 55 Liu Hongtao 劉洪濤 74, 78 Liu Jinfa (fictional character) 244 Liu Jinyuan (fictional character) 333–8 Liu Kexiang 劉克襄 151 Liulianzi 流瀲 381 Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗 16, 283–5 Liu Shao-hua 126 Liu Shipei 227, 279 Liu Wu-chi 221, 222, 223 Liu Xiang 劉向 136 Liu Xie 劉勰 161, 236 Liu Yichang 劉以鬯 135 Liu Yingque (fictional character) 267

Liu Zhongyuan: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Li Zishu 李子樹 84n2 Lloyd, Rosemary 53 Ah Long 阿龍 189 Lord of the Rings 147 Louie, Kam 331 Lou Shiyi 樓適夷 283 Lou Ye 婁燁 191, 363 Lowe, Hannah 65 An Lu (fictional character) 357, 358 Luce, Rick 81 Lu Guo Mao, Ba Lao Cao 魯郭 茅, 巴老曹 113 Lu Heruo 呂赫若 148 Lu Juan (Adu Axi 阿賭阿喜) 77, 130 Lü Li 呂黎 78 Lu Min 魯敏 78, 84n2 Lu Nei 路內 84n2 Luo Hui 羅輝: on Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary translation 3, 4, 6; on translation and translation studies 17; on world history of Chinese Classical poetry 7–8, 62–72 Luo Qingchun 羅慶春 130 Luowu Laqie 倮伍拉且 77, 130 Luxembourg Gardens, Paris 58 Lu Xun 魯迅 3, 16; author museums 9, 108–14; on Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann 290; political instrumentalization of 112–13 lyricism: in contemporary Chinese poetic film 18–19, 355–65; Foucault on 265; of premodern Chinese literature 27; Shen Congwen as preeminent writer of 26; transmedia nature of 19; of Xu Gang 192 Ma Boyong 202, 203 Ma Changshou 馬長壽 125 Ma Deqing 馬德清 77 Mahler, Gustav 46 Mailer, Norman 192 Maltman, Kim 64 Man Booker Prize 152 Manchu 滿 123 Manchukuo time 247 Manchu Qing dynasty 256–8, 260; anti-Manchu 345, 347; anti-Manchu secret societies 258; overthrow of 260 manga 148, 379, 382, 383, 386 Mann, Susan 299 Mao Dun 茅盾 80, 108, 113, 119; Midnight 188; One Day in China 189 Maoism 163, 187; aesthetics of the sublime in revolutionary culture of 248; post-Maoism in literature 197, 200 Mao Zedong (Chairman): centering of China in affective global network 161; focus on literature as principle of Communist revolution

395

Index 26; Lan Ping as fourth wife of 292; Lu Xun and 109–12; post-Mao period 6; reading women as trope and reality during era of 297–301, 306, 312, 323–5, 325–7; reportage and 185; theory of revolutionary literature 5, 26; visual aesthetics of 17; Wang Ming as political rival of 109–10; “Yan’an Talks” 158 Maozhi (Grandma) (fictional character) 266–7 mapping 8, 16; of classical Chinese poetry 63; of Cold War geography 242; of female literacy 17; geopolitical 26, 98, 134–5; hierarchical, of social space 142; intellectual cartography and 250; inter-Asian cinematic, of White Snake story 177; literary remapping of Imperial China 259; on non-Chinese space 99; remapping and reimaging the world 92; sensory, of women’s odors 284 Márquez, Gabriel García 151 martial arts see Wuxia Martin, George R. R. 255 Marvel Tales of the Taiping Period 太平廣記 231 masculine Others 377 masculinist feminism 349 masculinities: alterative 135; cross-dressing 139; feminism and alternative masculinity 138–40; intellectual 17; literary and martial 277–80; martialized 16; middlebrow 283–5; modern intellectual 14, 277–85; neoromantic 280–2 masculinity and femininity, archetypes of 176, 258 Master Jiao’s Forest of Changes 焦氏易林 231 Matisse, Henri 175 Maupassant, Guy de 233 Ma Xueliang 馬學 良 125 May Fourth Movement/Generation 23–6, 51, 99; iconoclasm of 352; masculinity and 16, 280–2, 283; Nora (fictional character) during 288, 290, 292, 293–4; Xi Ruo’s translation of Nights, reception by 350 McCarthy, Richard M. 250–1 “McDonald’s refugee” 141–2 McDougall, Bonnie S. 65, 71 Meiji Japan 100, 222 Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 173 Mendelssohn 200; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Meng Haoran 孟浩然 46, 68; “Seeing Meng Haoran Off” (Li Bai) 199 Meschonnic, Henri 224 Metastasi, Pietro 233 Meyer, Joseph: Das große Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände 38 Meyer’s Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände (Meyer’s conversational lexicon for the educated classes) 37 Miao 360, 362 millennial writers 11–12, 145, 147–50, 152–3

Ming Cult 258 Ming Empire 257, 258, 260 Ming Hwa Yuan 明華園 169, 178 Mingju Fan 151 Ming-Qing dynastic crisis 260 Mistral, Marial 130 Mitsuru Nishikawa 西川滿 148, 150 Mittell, Jason 378 Mittler, Barbara: on reading women, trope of 16–17, 297–331 mnemonics 146 mnemotechnics 11, 145, 152, 153 Modigliani, Alberto 51 Mo Du 莫獨 77 Mok, Olivia 254 Moleschott 200; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Moretti, Franco 70, 153 Morgiana 347–9, 352 Mo Yan 77; American literary agent 82; Garlic Ballads 82; Goldblatt’s translation of 81; Newman Prize 80; Nobel Prize 79; Red Sorghum 74; Sandalwood Death 檀香刑 79 Mo Zhou 179 “Ms. Duckweed Cloud” 萍雲女士 347, 348; see also Zhou Zouren Murr, Christoph Gottlieb 36 museums: author museums in Germany 115; author museums, rise during PRC of 9–10, 107–17; Cao Xueqin Memorial Museum 113; China Art Museum, Shanghai 52; literary 116; literature 108; Lu Xun Museum, Beijing 111, 112; Lu Xun Museum, Shanghai 110; memorial 108; National Museum of China 114; Ostrovsky Museum 109; in Paris 51; Musée Cernuschi 52; Paris 53 museum studies 10 Mu Shiying 穆時英 16, 283 Nee Yeh-su, Isabel 亦舒 294 neo-impressionism 175 neorealism and neorealist fiction: “deliberate” 339; feminine 17, 330–40 neoromantic masculinity 16, 280–2 Neo-Sensationalist School of Shanghai 28 Neruda, Pablo 130 Neustadt International Prize for Literature 74, 79, 80 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature 紐曼華語 文 學獎 8, 75, 78–81 New Sensationalists (新感覺派) 283 Nietzsche 42, 43, 45, 199 Nishiwaki Junzaburō 151 Ni, Zhange 384 Nobel Prize for Literature 26, 79, 80, 134, 149, 151 Nokan, Walis 146–7

396

Index “non-action” (wuwei 無為) 42 “non-belonging” of women 331, 337 non-conformist women 326 non-ism 非非 group 129 non-Western literature 5, 343 non-Western modernity 346 Nora (fictional character) 200; in China (on Ibsen’s Doll’s House) 16–17, 288–95 nostalgia 18, 105, 129, 344, 351, 352 Nuosu poets 129 Okazaki, Yumi 254 Ong, Aihwa 141 opera: aria, fictional use of (Su) 221, 225, 227; “Fox Cat Substituted for the Crown Prince” 244; Jingju 京劇 (often translated as Beijing or Peking opera) 169, 179; Jin Wong’s works adapted as 253, 261; Kunqu 182n2; Madame White Snake (Shaw Brothers) 180–1; Orphan of Zhao, influence on 233; Qing Zhongshu’s references to 231; Sichuan 176, 182n2; Taiwanese 12, 169, 170, 179; Water Under Time (Fang Fang), storyline centered around 336; White Snake legend, stagings as 170, 178, 180; White Snake Projects opera company 181; White Snake Spectacular 超炫白蛇傳 (Ming Hwa Yuan) 178; xiqu-style Chinese opera in Taiwan 177; Yueju 粵劇 (often translated as Cantonese opera) 169; Zhang Ailing’s response to 245 opium 103, 279 Opium Wars 187; First Opium War 41, 133 Orientalism 343 “Orientalism by proxy” 349 Orphan of Zhao 233 Orwell, George 199, 202 Ostrovksy, Nikolai 108 Ōta Yoshio 23 Ottoman Empire 344, 349, 352 Ouyang Jianghe 歐陽江河 363 Ouyang Yuqian 歐陽予倩 173, 290 Ovechkin, Valentin 188 Owen, Stephen 25, 71, 236 Pacific War 189 Pain Not Bread (Canadian collective) 8, 63–6, 68–72 painting and painters: Chang Yu 7, 54–7; Chinese 65, 164, 175–6; classical concepts of 235; Clunas on act of 51; Diana Bridge’s writing, as subject of 64; Guan Liang 175–6; images of reading women/female literacy by 301, 307–308; Jikebu 130; landscape 18, 19, 164; Lu Fei on 59; PRC 12, 169, 181; Qian on 235, 237; reinventions of 169; shenshi 神似 in 58–9; Su Manshu 221, 223; White Western 57; Xie He’s six methods 235; see also xiqu

painting the spirit (White Snake legend) 174–6 paradox of “include me out” 259 paratexts 199 Paris, France: Chinese writers and the art of transposition in 7, 49–60; Luxembourg Gardens 57–60; Montparnasse 54–7; Musée Cernuschi 52; School of Paris 51 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 365n1 patrimonies, foreign 151 Peaceful Spring (Zhang Ailing): Chinese folk culture and 244–5 People’s Republic of China (PRC): Cold War and 16; establishment of 185, 189; films and filmmaking 177, 178; founding of 24; Hong Kong and 133; Hundred Flowers Campaign 187, 189; Literature Award 80; nation-state model of 6; “new literature” of 4; opposing policies implemented by US and 15; Peaceful Spring (Sang and Zhang) and 241, 242, 245, 246; propaganda 161; reportage of 186, 187; Rice Sprout Song and 243, 246; rise of author museums in 9, 107–17; Science Fiction (SF) writing emerging in 197, 198; Sinophone literature versus PRC literature 29; typical oppressor figures in literature and film of 159; White Snake legends 169, 179, 181; writers of 81; Wu Yan and 158; xiqu’s transmedia inventions in 174–6; Yi literature published outside 126 Percy, Thomas 36 performance studies 367 Pessoa, Fernando 364 Picasso, Pablo 51 Pickowicz, Paul G. 245 pilgrimage: to India 91; to Paris 52 pilgrimage site 107 Ping-hui Lao see Lao, Ping-hui Ping Shek Estate 141 Ping Zhu 77, 78; on Wong Chin Foo 87–96 Plaenckner, Reinhold von 42 Plato: Confucius compared to 35; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 platonism: homoplatonism 384 poetic film 355–65 poetry: Byron 222; Chinese Classical 7–8, 62–72; On the Art of Poetry (Qian) 231–5; Poetry Appreciation (Zhong Rong) 236; Poetry of the South (film) 358; Qian on 237; Su 223; traditional-style Chinese 230; vernacular 71, 363; women’s reading of 310 popular: audience 249; culture 11, 14, 145, 147, 153, 242, 261; culture industry 255; education 37; fiction 203, 223, 224; films 243; genre fiction 11; Internet fictions 18; literature 148–50; narrative 368; performances in

397

Index Republican Shanghai, power of 173–4; plays 233; readership 301; recognition 198; revolt 216; romance writer 294; songs 363; trends 221; wuxia genre 256 popularization: of discourse of rewriting 28; of Huangmei diao films in Hong Kong 176; of scientific knowledge 197 popular vs. elite 298 postcolonial 11; literary writing 151; literature 135, 151; resistance 147; subjectivity 145, 146, 152; theorization 153; theory 133–4; transition 140 postcoloniality: Hong Kong 134, 141–2 “post-loyalism” 260 Pound, Ezra 62, 66; Cathay 68; “historical white gaze” 67 Poundian approach 65 Pound-Rexroth-Snyder axis 8, 63, 64–5, 68 Pratt, Mary Louise 89 Prémare, Joseph Henri de 36 proletarian: culture 188; fiction 188; literary movement 12, 25, 185 proletariats 104 Pu Songling 蒲松齡 Former Residence 113 Qāsim Āmīn 348 Qian Gang 錢鋼 190 Qian Jibo 錢基博 23–4 Qian Liqun 錢理群 28 Qianlong 乾隆 (Emperor) 256, 260 Qian Qi 錢起 46 Qian Xingcun 钱杏邨 188 Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu 錢鍾書): as cosmopolitan 4, 14, 230–40; harmony with diversity, concept of 16; Hsia and 27 qing 情 281 Qing Dynasty 108; conception, production, and dissemination of literature during late Qing 23–5; defeat of 222; Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage 108; female emancipation during 17, 297; female illiteracy during 299; female reader during 298, 301, 310; gender and nationhood, discourse on 348; Han Chinese rule and 256; imperial control during 124; imperial exam, abolition of 277; Islam, spread of 30; masculinity in late Qing 16, 278–80; Meiji Empire and 222; Middle East, reflections on and attitudes to 343–6; Ming-Qing dynastic crisis 260; novels of late Qing 187; overseas subjects of 89; ROC and 24; science fiction during 197; Taiwanese classical writing during 151; Wong Chin Foo 90, 93, 97n2; Yi writing during 126 Qin, Liyan 秦立彦: on engaging the world in Republican Chinese literature 9, 98 –106 Qin Zhaoyang 秦兆陽 189 Qiu Dongping 丘東平 189 Qiu Jin 秋瑾 16, 292–3

queer and gendered solidarity 138–40, 141 queer materialist critique of neoliberal present 140–2 queerness 178; class 179; species 179 queer worlding 10–11, 133, 135–5; definition of 133; see also homoeroticism and homosexual desire Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 112–13, 188 Qu Yuan 屈原 44 Rapongan, Syaman 147 Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida 299 real person slash (RPS) 383 Red Pine (poet) 63 Remote Village (Wu Yonggang) 14–15, 242–3, 246–9 Ren Xiaowen 任曉雯 84n2 reportage, Chinese 12–13, 25, 185–; as Chinese term 185; diversification and proliferation of 191–3; as French term 185; origins of 187–91 reportage literature see baogao wenxue 報 告文學 Republican Chinese literature 9, 98 –106 Republic of China (ROC) 24; literacy goals 319;“new literature” of 4; state curriculum 350; transitional years of 226 Rexroth, Kenneth 62, 63; see also PoundRexroth-Snyder axis Ricci, Matteo 41 Rice Sprout Song (Zhang) 14–15, 242–50 Ricoeur, Paul 336 Rigney, Ann 152 Rilke, Rainer Maria 71 Rivera, José Eustacio: La vorágine 11, 157–61 ROC see Republic of China Rojas, Carlos: on Yan Lianke and heterotopic imaginaries 15–16, 264–72 Rose, Nikolas 141 Rousseau 200; Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Rowling, J.K. 223 RPS see real person slash Rückerts, Friedrich 44 Rumen, Carol 68 Rushdie, Salman 92 Russel: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 sacred site 聖地 107 Said, Edward 10, 135, 338–9 St. Augustine see Augustine Saint-Denys (Marquis de) 39, 45 St. Paul 35 Salinger, J.D.: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199

398

Index Sang Hu 桑弧 14, 364; Peaceful Spring 14, 241, 242, 243–4, 250 Sangsang Academy 382 Saramago, José 80 Sasagawa Rinpū 23 Scheherazade (fictional character) 346–9, 352 Schiller, Friedrich 115 Schiller National Museum 115 Schleifer, Ronald 82, 83 School of Paris 51 Schott, Wilhelm 36, 40–1 Schuster, Ingrid 46 Seligman, Scott 89, 91 Shakespeare, William 221, 228 Sha Ma 沙馬 77, 130 Shanghai: Neo-Sensationalist School of Shanghai 28 Shanghai Foreign Studies University 82 Shang Xiaoyun 尚小雲 173 Shao An 162–4 Shaolin Temple 258 Shaoxing 109 Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 54 Shao Yanjun 377, 380 Shaw Brothers 176, 180 Shaw, George Bernard 289 Shenbao 300 Shen Congwen 沈從文 26 Sheng Haowei 盛浩偉 148 Sheng Keyi 盛可以 84n2 shenshi 神似 58–9 Shiba Shirō 344 Shih, Shu-Ching 施叔青 135 Shih, Shu-mei 19n1, 29, 133–4, 259 Shilin County, Yunnan 126 Shilling, Julie 77 Shi Pingmei 石評梅 16, 291–2 shiren 58, 59 Shi Youfu 127 shuangwen 爽文 (the fiction of pleasure) 380 Shu-Ching Shih 施叔青 135 Shu-mei Shih 19n1, 29, 133–4, 259 Sima Qian: Record of the Historian 史記 26 Sindbad the Sailor 347 Sino-Japanese War 222 Sinophone and Anglophone worlds: Chinese classical poetry and 8, 62–72 Sinophone literature and the rainforest 11–12, 156–65 Sisyphus 269 site of pilgrimage see pilgrimage site Sitney, P. Adams 365n1 “Sixth Generation” film directors 191 Sixth Plan, Soviet Union 319 Sixth Tone 193n7 slash fiction 383 small literature 5, 151–3

“small scale life” 337 Smith, Winston (fictional character) 203 Snyder, Gary 62, 63; see also Pound-RexrothSnyder axis Socrates 35, 199 Song Dynasty 97n4; archeological finds dating from 108; Genghis Khan and 257; landscape painting 164; poetry 363; privileges of literary men during 277 Song, Jin: martial art (wuxia) fiction and 16, 253–61 Song of Ice and Fire (Martin) 255 Song of Youth 青春之歌 (Yang Mo) 203 songs: Books of Songs 毛詩正 231, 358; Bunun tribe 147; Chinese drinking 44, 45; folk 126, 129; groups 127; “Little Jasmine” 361, 362; opera 221, 225; Song of the Earth (Mahler) 46; Songs of the South with Hong Xingzu’s subcommentary 楚辭洪興祖補注 231; transposing of 53; Western 225; Western pop 221; see also Rice Sprout Song Songs of the South with Hong Xingzu’s subcommentary 楚辭洪興祖補注 231 Song, Weijie: on Jin Song and martial art fiction 16, 253–61 Song Yu 宋玉 234 Sontag, Susan 339 Soqluman, Neqou 147 So, Richard 250 Stalling, Jonathan: on US and China literary systems, 2010–21 74–84 Steinberg, Marc 378 Su Manshu: ‘Broken Hairpin’ 14, 221–28 Summers, Lawrence 210 Sun Baoxuan 孫寳瑄 345 Sun, Mengtian 209 Sun, William Huizhu 孫惠柱 18, 368, 369 Su Xiaokang 蘇曉康 190 Su Ya 蘇婭 190 Suzuki (Dr.) (fictional character) and Suzuki virus 211–12, 214 Swancutt, Katherine 126 Tai, Jeanne 96 Taiwan: authors, market disadvantages of 81; Chinese-language literature in 29; CLT in 77; filmmaking 177; Jin Yong’s work in 15; Kuei-hsin Chang 80; literary and cultural memory of 11; opera 12; ROC government in 24; Snake Woman’s Marriage (film) 177 Taiwanese literary tradition 11, 145–6; Japanese colonial legacy, impact on 150; millennial writers and 153; Yang Shuangzi as heir to 149 Taiwanese literature 6; 100 Years of Taiwanese literature 1900–2000 148, 149–50; as capital 150–2; cosmopolitan 146–8; millennial writers and 148–50; new trends in 145–6; as “small

399

Index literature” 153; twenty-first century 11–12, 145–53 Tan, Amy 82 tanci 彈詞 169, 170–4, 180; tanci xiaoshuo 彈詞 小說 (storytelling fiction) 173 Tang dynasty 107; Li Shangyin 62; poems, German reception of 44–5 Tang Jia San Shao 唐家三少 379 Tangshi sanbaishou 唐詩三百首 (Three hundred Tang poems) 67, 69 Tang Tao 唐弢 28 Tao Qian 陶潛 52–3 Tao Xueliang 127 Tarkovsky, Andrei 359, 364–5 Tencent 378 thatched cottage near Huanhua brook (浣花溪草 堂) 107 Thompson, Hunter 192 Thornber, Karen 5 Tian He 田禾 77 Tianlai Zhiyuan 天籟紙鳶 289 Tien Chi-yuan 田啟元 169, 177 Todorov, Emmanuel 199 Tōkai Sanshi 344 Tolkien, J. R. R. 223, 255; Jin Yong compared to 254 transcultural: bricolage 91; citation 375; commonalities 238; connections 153; crossfertilization 193; exchange 52; integration, of Chinese SF 196, 197; literary theories 235; memory 151; moral ideal 95; space 51; subjects 223 transculturation 9, 91, 96 transmediality 18, 355 “transmedia storytelling” 378 transmediation 3, 17–19; adaptation 253, 261, 380; Chinese internet fictions and 377–86; diversification, regional proliferation, and 191–3; sekeikan 378; xiqu and 174–6 Trigault, Nicolas 41 Tsui Hark 徐 克 255 Tsu, Jing 29, 138 Tu Ling-fang (fictional character) 225–8 Ugetsu 175 UNESCO 113 Valéry, Paul 53 Vedas 37 vernacular: 1001 Nights, translations into 351; baihua 白話 vernacular 350; Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 as writer of 93, 170; fiction 23; neoromantic masculinity and 282; Nora (character of) and vernacular movement in China 291; poetry 71, 363; Song dynasty 97n4; written vernacular 白話 18, 350 vernacular cosmopolitanism 14, 221, 223, 224, 228

Verne, Jules: Reading Acts and Other Intertextual References to Titles or Authors as Mentioned in the Sample of Translated SF 199 Wachler, Ludwig 36–8, 42 Wagner, Rudolf 193n3 Waley, Arthur 81 Walker, John Brisben 93 Wang Anyi 王安憶 77, 78, 79, 80, 331 Wang, Ban 王斑: on aesthetic sublime 247; on ecological critique as world literature 6, 13, 207–18 Wang Bang 王梆 84 Wang Bi 231 Wang, David Der-wei: on Chinese literary periodization and historiography 4, 22–31; on home of crocodiles/evil homeland 163; on paradox of “include me out” 259; “postloyalism” of 260; on Rice Sprout Song 250; Running Wild 96; on toughness of the lienü 137 “Wang Er” (fictional character) 202 Wang Guowei 王國維 231, 236 Wang Jichao 王繼超 127 Wang Liru 224 Wang Meng 王蒙 189 Wang Ping 王平 78 Wangwei (or Wang Wei) 王維 46, 62 Wang Xiaobo (王小波) 202 Wang Xingyou 128 Wang, Yiwen 王藝雯: on Chinese internet culture and fan fiction 18–19, 377–86 Wang Ziguo 王子國 127, 128 Wang Ziyao 王子堯 127, 128 Warnod, André 51–2 Warring States Period 357 Wasilewska, Halina 126 Weinberger, Eliot 62–3, 66 Ai Wei 艾薇 78 Wei Wei 魏巍 189 Wei Yahua 200 Wei Zhuang 107 Wen Qingqing 溫青青 (fictional character) 257 wenxue 文學 25, 31n1; baodao wenxue 報導文學 188; baogao wenxue 報 告文學 185, 188; jishi wenxue 紀實文學 188 wenxue ke 文學科 23 White Snake, legends of 169–80 Wilhelm, Richard 41–3 Wilkinson, James 36 Williams, William Carlos 62 WLT see World Literature Today Wolfe, Tom 192 women: as aliens 207; All China Women’s Federation 305; “American Women” (Hu Shi) 289; Biographies of Women (Liu Xiang) 136; “Blooming Season” (Yang Shuangzi) depiction of 149; Chi Li’s exploration of 330; Confucian

400

Index standards and expectations imposed on 282; education of 281; émigré writers 151; English 104; female emancipation 297; femme fatale 225; Han 123; Hong Kong 141; illiterate 299; images of women reading 297–32; Japanese 102, 105; martyred 136–8; New Culture Movement and 291; odors of 284; physical attributes of Chinese women 278; Portraits of Martyred Women (Wong Bik-wan) 11, 136–40, 142; snake women 175, 179–80; stage actors 173; subjectivity 338; Women’s Script 123; Xu Dishan’s writing about 106; see also ducks and butterflies romance; Fang Fang; Morgana; Nora; Scheherazade; Zhang Ailing women’s college 289, 290 women’s liberation 288, 293 women’s rights 146; Women’s Bell (Jin Tianhe) 347 Women’s Rights League 295 Women’s World magazine 347 Wong, Alvin K., see queer worlding Wong Bik-wan 黃碧雲 11, 133, 135–42 Wong Chin Foo 王清福 3, 9–10, 87–96; allegory of the world 93–5; “Dragon, The” 88, 87–90, 96; naturalization certificate 97n2; “Poh Yuin Ko, Serpent Princess” 8, 91, 93–5, 97n3, 170–1 Wong, Jennifer 65 Wong Kar-wai 王家衛 255 Woodbridge, Samuel I. 171, 173 worlding 3, 12; alternative modes of 137; of classical Chinese poetry 63; Cold War and 242; concept and theory of 10–11, 30, 135; definition of 30; expansive global 140; Jin Yong’s wuxia narratives 253–61; literary 165; material, of literature 9, 10; nonlinear feminist 139; queer potential of 11; temporal logic of 135; worldliness and 133; see also queer worlding worldliness 12; politics of 10, 133–42; queer 11; theory of 10; worlding as form of 133 world literature: ecological critique as 6, 13, 207–18 World Literature Today (WLT) 8, 74, 76, 79 A-wu, Liglav 利格拉樂·阿女烏 147 Wu Ming-Yi 吳明益 151, 152 Wu Qingling (fictional character) 42–4, 333–5 Wu Sangui 吳三桂 257–8 Wu Shengqing 吳盛青 : on contemporary Chinese poetic films 18, 355–65 Wu Sijing 74 Wuxia 15, 253–61, 383 Wu Yigong 吳貽弓 363 Wu Yonggang 吳永剛 250; Goddess 246; Remote Village 14–15, 242–3, 246–9 X-Files (television show) 383 xianxia fiction 379–84 Xiaoxiang Shen 瀟湘神 148 Xia Yan 夏 188

Xi Chuan 西川 77 Xie Bingying 謝冰瑩 292 Xi Guan (fictional character) 106 xiju 戲劇 (“modern Chinese drama”) 169 Xiong Shili 熊十力 231 xiqu (traditional Chinese theater) 12, 169, 174–7, 181 Xi Ruo 奚若 343, 344, 349–52 Xi Xi 西西 78 xuanhuan 玄幻 (magical fantasy). fiction 378–81, 383, 385 Xu Dishan 許地山 9, 105–6 Xue Yiwei 薛憶溈 78 Xu Gang 192 Xu Guangping 許廣平 109 Xu Xu 徐訏 7, 56 Xu Zechen 徐則臣 78, 84n2 Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 9, 25, 53, 99; early death of 105; “Leaving Japan” 105; “Sand Yang Nora: 18 Poems” 105 Yamaguchi Yoshiko 176 Yang Chao 楊超 : Crosscurrent 356, 357, 362, 364 Yang Chengzhi 楊成誌 125 Yan Geling 嚴歌苓 169, 178 Yang Jisheng 楊繼繩 192 Yang Kang 楊康 257 Yang Mo 楊沫 203 Yang Mu 楊牧 77 Yang Qianhe 楊千鶴 149 Yang Shuangzi 楊双子 148, 149 Yan Lianke閻連科 77, 78, 80; critique of contemporary Chinese social diseases and heterotopic imaginaries of 15–16, 264–73 Yao Jianbin 姚建彬 78 Yasi 135 Yeats, W. B. 363 Yeh-su, Isabel Nee 294 Ye Shaojun 葉紹鈞 344, 349–51 Ye Shengtao 葉聖陶 344 Ye Yonglie 198 A Yi 阿乙 84n2 Yi Culture Studies Institute of Chuxiong 楚雄彜 族文化研究院 125 Yi literature 123–30; contemporary poets 129–30; defining 123; ethnic literature in China and the Yi 123–4; traditional “classic” texts of 126 –9; traditional literature, creation of 125–6; Yi and Yi writing 124–5 Ah Ying 阿英 188, 189, 193n1 Ying Hu see Hu Ying 胡璎 Yingjin Zhang 134, 251n4, 332; Chinese world literatures, general introduction to 3–19; death of v “Yi Qian Yi Ye” 346 Yuan Chengzhi 袁承志 (fictional character) 257 Yuan Chonghuan 袁崇煥 (fictional character) 257

401

Index Yuan Shu 袁殊 188 Yu Dafu 郁達夫 9, 29, 100–5 Yueh Feng 176 Yuewen Group 閱文集團 377, 380 Yushan zhuren 玉山主人 170 Yuxi 玉溪 125, 127 Yu Xiuhua 余秀華 78 Yu Xueliang 余學良 125 Zeitgeist 26, 46; cultural, of Japanese colonial period 149; literature and 7, 35–47 Zeng Dekuang 曾德曠 77 Zeng Pu 187 Zhai Yongming 363 Zha Liangyong 查良镛 253 Zhang Ailing 張愛玲: Naked Earth 242; Rice Sprout Song (Zhang) 14–15, 242–50 Zhang Baixi 張百熙 23 Zhang Chengzhi 張承志 30 Zhang Dachun 張大春 151, 165n1 Zhang Guixing 張貴興 11, 157, 161 Zhang Longxi 張隆溪 19, 234 Zhang Ning 張檸 78

Zhang Qinghua 張清華 78 Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 231 Zhang Yuan 張元 191 Zhang Zhan 231 Zhang Zhaotong 張肇桐 279 Zhao, Henry Yiheng 254 Zhao Qingge 趙清閣 179–80 Zheng, Xiqing 377 Zhou Haiying 周海嬰 109, 112 Zhou Mo, 179 Zhou Zan 周瓚 71 Zhou Zuoren 周作人 24, 28, 53, 352; “Ms. Duckweed Cloud” 萍雲女士 as pen name 347, 348; translation of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” 344, 347–9, 352 Zhuangzi 庄子 42, 44, 236 Zhu Shilin 朱石麟 364 Zhu Tianxin 146 Zhu Wenying 朱文穎 78 Zimmerman, Mary 169, 179–80 Ziolkowsk, Theodore 149 Zuo Commentary, Records of the Grand Historian 史記會注考證 231

402