Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China 9780674286955

Citation preview

Homesickness

Homesickness C u lt u r e , C o n tag io n, a n d Nat io na l T r a n s f or m at io n i n Mode r n C h i na

Carlos Rojas

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015

Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Printing Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-674-74394-6 (alk. paper)

Contents •

Preface  vii Introduction  1 Part I  1906: Phagocytes  35 1)  Reform  41 2)  Rebellion  66 3)  Rebirth  95 Part II  1967: Pharmakons  123 4)  Revolution  129 Part III  2006: Phantasms  149 5)  Information  157 6)  Capital  185 7)  Labor  227 8)  Membranes  257 Conclusion  283 Postface  295 Chinese Glossary  notes 

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Acknowledgments  Index 

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Preface

“This girl, in my opinion, is suffering from homesickness.” This diagnosis—​in a scene from Li Ruzhen’s 1820 novel Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan)—​is in reference to a girl named Melody Orchid (Lanyin), whom the novel’s protagonists meet while island-­hopping through the China Sea.1 It turns out that Melody Orchid has an ailment that causes her abdomen to swell up as tight as a drum, which leads her father to request that the visitors take her with them to seek treatment. After they succeed in finding her some medicinal herbs and attempt to take her back, however, they discover that her symptoms reappear as soon as she reenters the coastal waters of her island home. It is this unexpected relapse that the travelers regard as a peculiar form of what they ironically call “homesickness” (lixiang bing)—​ referring to a condition caused not by a longing for home, but rather by an excessive proximity to it. This is a homesickness, in other words, in which the home itself becomes literally a space of illness. Though mentioned here only in passing, this figure of (inverse) homesickness captures a logic of internal alienation and outward movement that not only drives the plot of Flowers in the Mirror itself but also has broader implications for an understanding of the constitution of individuals and social collectives. Operating at a variety of levels ranging from the nation to the individual body, homesickness represents a condition wherein a node of alterity is structurally expelled from an individual or collective body in order to symbolically reaffirm the perceived coherence of that same body. A critical examination of tropes of homesickness, accordingly, underscores the constructed nature of these unities, while at the same time suggesting ways in which they may be productively reimagined.

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At a societal level, for instance, it is significant that Melody Orchid’s homesickness forces her to leave her island nation and sentences her to a state of virtual exile that, in turn, is one of the defining conditions of the novel as a whole. Not only has the protagonist Tang Ao gone into voluntary self-­exile after having been falsely accused of plotting a rebellion against emperor Wu Zetian, Melody Orchid herself is actually already in a state of exile when Tang Ao first meets her, given that she was originally one of a hundred flower fairies who were sent down to the mortal world after their lead fairy inadvertently committed an infraction against heaven. The entire novel, accordingly, revolves around figures who have been exiled as a result of (perceived) acts of resistance or insurrection. Like Melody Orchid herself, these exiled figures represent a condition of societal sickness, in that they are viewed as nodes of alterity that must be expelled to ensure the stability of society and its ruling regime. At a familial level, Melody Orchid’s homesickness makes it necessary for her to leave not only her country but also her father, and this fracturing of family bonds is also a key theme in the work. In particular, while the first half of the novel describes the voyages of Tang Ao and his companions through the China Sea after they have gone into voluntary exile, the second half of the work revolves around Tang Ao’s own daughter’s fruitless search for him after he achieves enlightenment and departs from the mortal world. More abstractly, the novel’s emphasis on the separation of fathers and daughters is symptomatic of an exogamic practice wherein young women (but sometimes young men) were traditionally expected to leave their natal home and marry into their husband’s. Structurally driven by a nearly-­u niversal incest taboo that marked unwed daughters as figurative others within their own families, the resulting pattern of marriage exchange creates a web of interdependency between different lineages that may have productive consequences not only for the lineages but also the society within which they are positioned. Finally, at a corporeal level the primary symptom of the illness that leads Melody Orchid’s father to send her away from home is her swollen belly. The text indicates that the illness may be caused by parasitic “worms” (chong), but given the exogamic connotations of the sequence, this abdominal swelling also carries obvious connotations of ­pregnancy.



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Part of the normal human reproductive cycle, pregnancy may be viewed as a condition wherein the woman’s body becomes inhabited by a foreign entity that must ultimately be expelled, through childbirth, in order for both it and the mother to survive. The birth process marks the end of pregnancy and is essential for the mother’s and infant’s future health, while also establishing the enabling conditions for a strong social bond between them. Although it is true that there is no suggestion in the novel that Melody Orchid is actually pregnant, I would nevertheless argue that the text positions her as a site of internal alterity that structurally mirrors the condition of pregnancy itself. At each of these homologous levels of analysis, accordingly, Melody Orchid’s homesickness represents a process of self-­d ifferentiation and outward movement that produces a dynamism on which a vision of unity is grounded. Nations, families, and even corporeal bodies are fundamentally heterogenous collectives, and their imagined coherence is predicated on a perpetual tension with sites of internal alterity. For political communities, this internal alterity may take the form of rebellions or insurrections, which are frequently addressed through a process of exile and internal marginalization. Families and clans, meanwhile, are haunted by the specter of incest, which is structurally addressed by exogamic marriage practices; while individuals are continually threatened by the possibility of disease and infection, which may be addressed through the use of medicine and the body’s immune system to remove identify and eliminate internal pathogens. In each case, a condition of internal alterity generates an outward movement that, in turn, helps reinforce the perceived coherence of the corresponding entity or collective. The paradox, though, is that the resulting sense of coherence is itself an artifact of a continual engagement with this kernel of internal alterity. In Homesickness, I consider how this condition of homesickness has been deployed across several sets of disease discourses spanning China’s long twentieth century, from early modern characterizations of China as the sick man of Asia to more recent discussions of the recent SARS epidemic that spread rapidly through Chinese communities around the world. I look at how discussions of disease have been used to reassess notions of individual, family, and national identity, and particularly how a fascination with disease as a site of internal

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alterity within the body mirrors a parallel set of concerns with the constitution of social formations ranging from families to nations. I argue that, in these discourses, sickness and its discursive correlates are viewed not only as sites of weakness and instability, but also as potential sources of dynamism and structural transformation. These discourses of disease, accordingly, reflect fault lines within the existing social order, while at the same time pointing to the possibility of productively reforming or even restructuring that same order. Without illness, in other words, there can be no prospect of long-­term health. Homesickness is not a conventional medical history, or even a straightforward analysis of medical metaphors. Instead, this study is concerned primarily with the underlying sociopolitical and cultural logics that have helped make disease such a resilient and powerful metaphor in the first place. Accordingly, this work may be seen as an exercise in medical humanities—​though not in the sense that it seeks to mobilize humanistic inquiry in order to advance the goals of medical education and practice (as “medical humanities” is conventionally understood), but rather in that it uses humanistic approaches to analyze cultural representations of medical phenomena. At the same time, however, I also draw on a set of scientific models in order to propose a new understanding of how one might go about performing a cultural analysis in the first place. My objective is not simply to use scientific models to develop a new cultural hermeneutics, but rather to use the resulting hermeneutics to reassess the interrelationship between a set of scientific and political concerns. I contend, in short, that through an examination of these cultural representations of infectious pathogens, it is possible to develop a better understanding of the intimate interrelationship of culture, politics, and science, and particularly the way in which certain tropes and discursive logics move fluidly back and forth between the three. More generally, I propose that through an analysis of homesickness as a site of internal alterity and a source of dynamic transformation, it is possible to reassess the status of individuals and political communities, and even humanity’s relationship to the global ecosystem.

Introduction

On the heels of the pro-­Tibet protests that repeatedly disrupted the Olympic torch relay as it wound its way through Europe in April 2008, multiple versions of an anonymous poem began circulating through the Chinese cybersphere.1 Rehearsing an array of Western critiques of early modern and contemporary China, the poem was received with a mixture of indignation and nationalistic pride by Chinese readers around the world. The result was a paradoxical situation wherein Chinese readers rallied around an anonymous statement detailing the nation’s putative ills—​fi nding in this articulation of “homesickness” a ground for a new affirmation of national strength. Entitled, in some iterations, “To the West: What Do You Want Us to Do After All?—​A modest tribute to part of world history over the past 150 years,” the poem opens with a reference to the West’s perception of late nineteenth-­century China as “sick” and of contemporary China as a threatening superpower: When we were called the Sick Man of Asia, We were also called the Yellow Peril. But now that we are regarded as a superpower, We are called as a threat. When our doors were closed, You forced open our market with the illegal opium trade. But now that we embrace free trade, You blame us for taking away your jobs.2

The remainder of the text continues in a similar vein, juxtaposing early modern critiques of China’s perceived weakness with contemporary

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recriminations of its apparent strength. The poem notes that whereas China was once demonized for being Communist, for instance, it is now upbraided for being too capitalist; whereas it was once disparaged on account of its poverty, it is now resented for being so rich that it can buy up much of America’s foreign debt; and whereas it was once belittled for having been “cut up like a melon” by foreign imperialist powers, it is now attacked on account of its own imperialistic claims to Tibet and other border regions. Through these juxtapositions of early modern and contemporary Western attitudes toward China, the poem illustrates not only how much these views have shifted over the past century and a half but also how they are driven by an underlying dialectic of sickness and infection—​a dialectic that is succinctly captured in the poem’s opening reference to the now-­familiar tropes of China as both the sick man of Asia and as a pestilent yellow peril. The sick man and yellow peril tropes both use metaphors of illness to describe China and its people, with the characterization of the Chinese nation as sick mirroring a parallel comparison of the Chinese people to an infectious plague (the term yellow peril appears to have been partially inspired by yellow fever, a deadly illness prevalent in the nineteenth century). Both tropes, furthermore, can be traced back to almost precisely the same historical moment immediately following China’s defeat in the first Sino-­Japanese War (1894–1895). The latest in a string of Chinese military defeats dating back to the First Opium War (1839–1842), the Sino-­Japanese War underscored the perception that China was no match for the world’s leading developed nations, and it primed observers both in China and abroad to view China as dangerously weak. The late Qing scholar and translator Yan Fu is often credited with having been the first to describe China as a sick man, having used the phrase in a March 1895 article in the Tianjin newspaper Zhibao, in which he wrote, A nation is like a human body. If a person is not physically active, the body will be weak, but if a person is physically active, the body will be strong. This is common sense. How about a sick man? If he wants to transform his sick body into a strong one overnight, he is bound to overdo it. Pursuing this strategy to become strong will



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instead speed up his death. Does not contemporary China resemble a sick man?3

In characterizing the Chinese nation as ill, Yan Fu was drawing on a popular discursive convention. Around the mid-­nineteenth century, it had become common to refer to the Ottoman Empire as the “Sick Man of Europe,”4 and an essay published in the English-­language Shanghai newspaper North China Daily News, just a year after Yan Fu’s 1895 article, refers to Turkey, Persia, China, and Morocco as the “four sick people of the world.”5 This phrase quickly became virtually synonymous with China itself and was adopted not only by foreign critics but also by intellectuals and reformers from within China itself. It was also in 1895, meanwhile, that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II is credited with having been the first to use the phrase yellow peril (“die gelbe Gefahr” in German) to refer to Asians. At the time, the Kaiser was using this label to describe Japan following its defeat of China in the first Sino-­Japanese War, though the same metaphor was soon extended to China itself. In 1898, for instance, the British writer M. P. Shiel adopted a variant of the phrase in his short story serial The Yellow Danger and a decade and a half later Sax Rohmer further popularized it in his Fu Manchu series (1913–1959), the first volume of which famously describes the titular protagonist as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”6 Like the sick man trope, this latter metaphor caught on and quickly became closely identified with the Chinese people. Resonating with contemporary social Darwinist discourses that viewed the world’s white, black, yellow, and red races as being in direct competition with one another, the yellow peril expression captured Western fears that Asians, and specifically Chinese, might constitute a threat to Western powers precisely on account of their comparative weakness vis-­à-­vis the West. These two metaphors, accordingly, are almost precise mirror images of one another, in that one compares the Chinese nation to a diseased body while the other likens the Chinese people to an infectious disease. The implication is that the sociopolitical dysfunction associated with China may impact and spread to the broader international community, thereby transforming the nation’s apparent vulnerability into a potential source of strength.

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Shortly after the two metaphors were first applied to China, they were brought into dialogue with one another in an anonymous essay titled “The Condition of China.” This piece initially appeared in English in an October 1896 issue of Shanghai’s North China Daily News, and it was republished the following month in Chinese in another Shanghai-­based newspaper, Shiwu bao, under the title “China’s True Condition” (Zhongguo shiqing).7 The opening paragraph of the original English-­language essay begins with an allusion to the sick man trope and concludes with a description of China as a “warlike, yellow, and innumerable host”: China has long been the sick man of the Far East, but since the [Sino­Japanese] war all the world has seen for the first time how very sick the sick man is. That blithe omniscience of the Western Press (which led it to locate Kucheng in Szechuan, to speak of the Empress as a woman with bound feet, and to do many other funny things) deceived the world as to the strength of China. It is a pity if poor China, over and above the other penalties, has to pay for our stupidity by loss of our sympathy. China did not deceive us; the war only revealed the rottenness which every honest observer knew to be there. The world sees these things in their true proportions now; Europe and Lord Wolseley are at present relieved from a fear of a warlike, yellow, and innumerable host overrunning our Western civilization.

The yellow peril metaphor is deployed here in a negative sense, to suggest that the West’s earlier perception of China as a dangerous threat was actually the product of a misunderstanding. The implication, in other words, is that China came to be perceived as sick just as the West was realizing that its own former anxieties about the threat posed by China were in fact unfounded. In this respect, the sick man trope could be seen as a precise inverse of the attitudes reflected in the yellow peril trope, insofar as it was the perception of China’s underlying sickness that helped provide the ground for the converse belief that the nation was dangerously infectious. Even after the West began to realize that China was not as powerful as it had previously feared, however, it instead became concerned that China’s weakness could be threatening in its own right. The “Condition of China” essay, for instance, describes how the prospect



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that China might soon “fall to pieces” was viewed as a threat to the West, given that China’s collapse would force the Western powers to compete with one another over the nation’s remains, thereby transforming China’s own weakness into a direct threat to its fellow nations. Or, as the article puts it, “if a division of China were inevitable, England would be obliged to take a large share,” though it would “be no easy task to divide the carcass of China so as to please all the eagles.” A few years after the anonymous “Condition of China” essay, the influential reformer Liang Qichao invoked a similar metaphor of China as a diseased entity waiting to be consumed by Western powers. In On the New Citizen (Xinmin shuo, 1903–1905), Liang posits that our nation is known throughout the world as a sick man (bingfu), and is viewed as paralyzed and as having completely lost its powers of resistance. Throughout the East and West, there is not one country that is not eagerly sharpening its knives and waiting to dice us up like fish meat.8

Here, Liang invokes the sick man trope to characterize how China is perceived by the rest of the world and then uses language very similar to the “divide the carcass” discussion in the “Condition of China” essay to describe how foreign countries are eagerly waiting for an opportunity to carve up China’s remains like a large fish. While Liang Qichao, in On the New Citizen, is primarily concerned with analyzing China’s condition during the late Qing period in which he was writing, he also looks comparatively at earlier eras. In another passage from the same text, for instance, he uses almost precisely parallel language to describe the Song dynasty’s relationship with the Jurchens, Khitans, and other northern pastoral peoples to whom Liang refers collectively using the pejorative ethnic label man, or “barbarians”: China was known to all under heaven for its refined and effete (wenruo) qualities, and its disease of timidity has penetrated deeply into its core. When even the fierce and valiant man were assimilated by us, they too become infected (chuanran) with this disease (bing), thereby becoming weak and completely losing their fierce disposition.9

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The opening clause of this assessment of the Song dynasty precisely mirrors the syntax and discursive logic of the corresponding Qing dynasty discussion—​with the Qing passage using modern terms like woguo (literally, “our nation”) and shijie (“the world”), where the Song passage used the more traditional terms Zhongguo (“Middle Kingdom”) and tianxia (“all under heaven”). Similarly, where the Qing passage refers to China as a “sick man,” the Song passage instead uses the binome wenruo, which consists of characters connoting “cultivated” or “effete” and “weak” or “frail,” respectively. In describing how this quality of being “effete and weak” may figuratively infect foreign invaders, Liang Qichao suggests that this same weakness grants the Song the ability to transform its enemies into mirror images of itself. The character wen in the binome wenruo, which I have rendered above as “cultivated” or “effete,” has a wide range of meanings that include “writing,” “culture,” and “cultural refinement” and is frequently contrasted with wu, or “martial prowess.” This strategic opposition between wen and wu was particularly significant during the Song dynasty, which found itself so overmatched by its northern neighbors that it eventually had to pay them tribute in exchange for temporary security. Confronted with the military strength of these neighboring states, accordingly, the Song instead emphasized the symbolic superiority of its own literati culture, and Liang suggests that even after the Song was defeated its conquerors quickly became infected with China’s distinctive civilizational and cultural values.10 For instance, when the Jurchens seized control over northern China from the Song in 1127 and established the Jin dynasty, they became increasingly Sinicized in the process. Even the Mongols, when they conquered what remained of the Song in the early thirteenth century, established a dynasty, the Yuan, that appropriated many sociocultural and institutional qualities from the Song and earlier Chinese dynasties, while also initiating a number of institutional reforms that would be retained by the Ming and the Qing. A similar process has been played out many times throughout China’s history, with Chinese political and cultural institutions having been repeatedly adopted by various non-­Han peoples after they conquered the regions within what is now broadly viewed as “China.”



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Liang Qichao’s description of Chinese culture’s ability to figuratively infect foreign invaders is an example of what Friedrich Nietzsche calls ressentiment, or the transvaluation of material weakness into an assertion of symbolic strength. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that Christian morality is the product of a process by which physical disempowerment is reimagined as a symbolic asset: The slave uprising in ethics begins when ressentiment becomes creative and brings forth its own values: the ressentiment of those to whom the only authentic way of reaction—​that of deeds—​is unavailable, and who preserve themselves from harm through the exercise of imaginary vengeance.11

In particular, Nietzsche contends that Christianity’s valorization of the ideals of humility, self-­sacrifice, and the importance of “turning the other cheek” were actually the result of early Christians’ need to make a virtue of their comparative weakness at the time. The result was the emergence of what Nietzsche calls a slave morality that transforms weakness into a strategic asset in its own right. Liang Qichao adopts a similar perspective when he suggests that the Song dynasty’s valorization of wen over wu permitted it to transform its military inferiority into an assertion of symbolic superiority—​on the logic that even if the Song were to be conquered by outsiders, it could nevertheless retain the ability to “infect” its conquerors with its own values. The implication is that the Song’s strength lay precisely in its putative weakness, that it was precisely in being defeated by the barbarian man that the Song would be able to assimilate them, “infecting” them with the “disease” of wen. By extension, Liang’s corresponding discussion of late Qing China as a figurative sick man in danger of being devoured by foreign powers implies that those same powers might themselves, in the process of consuming China’s remains, become infected with Chinese cultural values. If so, then late imperial China’s status as the “sick man of Asia” actually carries connotations not only of weakness but also of empowerment, and specifically it suggests that the nation’s weakness may very well be its source of future strength. An inverse version of this belief that China may infect its enemies with its own values, meanwhile, can be found in China’s late nineteenth­century Western Learning movement, which sought to import foreign

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knowledge and cultural perspectives in order to strengthen the nation. A central assumption of this movement was the belief that it was possible for China to introduce specific bodies of knowledge from the West without, in the process, thereby becoming “infected” with Western values and losing its own “Chinese” identity. One early example of this strategy can be found in the nineteenth-­century scholar Wei Yuan’s (1794–1856) Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (Haiguo tuzhi). Compiled in 1844, soon after the conclusion of the First Opium War, this volume is regarded as the first modern world geography in Chinese and consists of Chinese translations and summaries of Western-­language texts describing the geographical and material conditions of a wide array of foreign nations. Referring to foreigners with a term, yí, that is often translated as “barbarian,” Wei Yuan explains in his preface that one of his volume’s primary objectives is “to study the barbarians’ skills in order to subdue them.”12 This attempt to learn from the foreigners may be seen as one of the guiding principles of Wei Yuan’s volume as a whole, as he proceeds to translate numerous Western-­language texts (containing what he would call “barbarians’ skills”) in order to help China respond more effectively to the challenges those same foreigners might pose. Implicit in Wei Yuan’s approach is a tension between a desire to import Western knowledge and an inverse wish to preserve a sense of Chinese cultural identity. While in China there has been clear support for the possibility that the nation might sinicize its neighbors, there has understandably been less enthusiasm for the possibility that China might itself become desinicized as a result of being exposed to “non-­ Chinese” values. Instead, late imperial reformers hoped that they might import Western knowledge and technology while at the same time allowing China to retain its underlying identity. This latter objective was articulated succinctly several decades later by the late Qing reformer Zhang Zhidong, who famously advocated a strategy of taking “Chinese learning as the basis, and Western learning as the instrument” (zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong).13 Fre­ quently abbreviated as zhongti xiyong (“Chinese basis/Western use”), Zhang’s formulation uses a term that literally means “body” (ti) to refer to the underlying Chinese principles that the imported Western learning is theoretically being used to reinforce. At the same time,



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however, many of the texts that were being brought into China during this period were contributing to a systematic reassessment of the very nature of the body itself. In particular, the late nineteenth-­ and early twentieth-­century period marked a watershed moment in the development of modern biomedicine, and many of these new discoveries were introduced into China shortly after they were developed in the West. The result helped revolutionize understandings not only of medicine and disease but also of public hygiene and even what it means to be a patient in the first place.14 It was also in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the theory of evolution and natural selection was first developed in Europe, and this too was quickly imported into China. Closely intertwined with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, meanwhile, were social Darwinist models that sought to apply principles of natural selection to racial, social, and even national relations. Social Darwinism became popular among many Chinese commentators, who found in it a ground for seeing the “yellow race” as inherently superior to all others—​with the exception of the “white race.” The resulting racialized worldview even led the influential late Qing intellectual Kang Youwei to propose that Chinese men should strategically intermarry with white women in order to strengthen the racial stock of the Chinese people.15 The biomedical paradigms introduced into China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had significant implications not only for an understanding and practice of medicine itself but also for the ways in which medical metaphors were deployed to comment on a broad range of social phenomena. Infection became a dominant metaphor not only for sociopolitical dysfunction but also for ideological differences, and many Chinese reformers used a thematics of illness to underscore the perceived weaknesses of the Chinese body politic while at the same time using these discussions as a clarion call for sociopolitical reform. For instance, Lu Xun’s 1918 essay “Random Thoughts #38” posits a parallel between the contagion of the human bloodstream by syphilis bacteria and the ideological “confusion” of the social corpus as a result of the influence of “Confucians, Taoists, and Buddhist monks,” adding, “even though we might now want to become real people, it is uncertain whether or not we will [be able to avoid being] confounded by the dark and confused elements in our

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bloodstream.”16 The essay expresses concern that this ideological disease not be allowed to reach the nadir of syphilis and concludes with the hope that science might find a way to address this problem through a sort of miracle panacea that Lu Xun calls 707—​alluding to arsphenamine (popularly known as 606), the recently discovered treatment for syphilis. The irony is that the pathogens with which Lu Xun imagines the Chinese body politic to have been infected are actually not of foreign origin but rather are elements traditionally associated with China itself.17 The implication, accordingly, is that the root of China’s illness lies in the degree to which it has been figuratively infected by its own tradition. Many other early twentieth-­century authors—​including Ding Ling, Yu Dafu, Lao She, and Shen Congwen, among others—​explore themes of sickness and disease in their works. They not only use sickness as a symbol of contemporary China’s perceived weaknesses, they also frequently use a strategic contrast between Chinese and Western medical practice to underscore China’s apparent deficiencies. Contem­ porary China’s sickness, in this view, was compounded by the backwardness of its traditional medical practices. In the early 1970s, literary critic C. T. Hsia famously characterized this tendency as an “obsession with China,” of which he contended one key symptom was a tendency to focus narrowly on Chinese peculiarities instead of addressing more general issues of the “human condition.” Hsia argued that, in contrast to “every modern writer of England, America, France and Germany [who] automatically identifies the sick state of his country with the state of man in the modern world, . . . ​the Chinese writer sees the conditions of China as peculiarly Chinese and not applicable elsewhere.”18 Like a doctor who becomes infected with the very disease he is attempting to treat, however, Hsia’s characterization of this so-­called “obsession with China” as a phenomenon that is itself “peculiarly Chinese and not applicable elsewhere” simultaneously rehearses a version of the same problem he is ostensibly attempting to critique in the first place. What is most interesting about Hsia’s analysis, accordingly, is not so much his assessment of early twentieth-­century Chinese discourses on illness but rather the way in which his own critical intervention unwittingly illustrates the



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hold that this metaphor of social illness continues to maintain on the popular imagination. Like Hsia, I am interested here in Chinese literary and cultural representations of disease and argue that these particular discursive formations have developed in response to specific sets of sociopolitical circumstances with which they themselves engage. At the same time, however, I do not claim that this cultural phenomenon is “peculiarly Chinese and not applicable elsewhere,” and instead propose that similar discursive practices may be found in a wide range of other contexts. What is distinctive about the historical and national context under consideration here, meanwhile, is the specific ways in which these cultural phenomena are conceived and understood, and how they intersect with other political and epistemological paradigms. Through an analysis of the ways in which these Chinese works theorize dif­ference, I attempt to develop a broader model for understand­­ing the relationship between cultural production and the sociopolitical environment within which it is embedded. Body Politics

The late nineteenth-­ and early twentieth-­century popularity of these Chinese discourses of disease build on a long tradition, in both China and the West, of viewing the body as a model for political community. In the early Han dynasty Chinese medical text Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing), for instance, the physician Qipo offers the Yellow Emperor a detailed list of the sociopolitical functions corresponding to twelve of the major organs: “The heart functions as the prince and governs through the soul; the lungs are liaison officers who promulgate rules and regulations; the liver is a general who devises strategies,” and so forth.19 The Tang dynasty Taoist master Sima Chengzhen, meanwhile, proposes a similar model when he observes that “the country is like the body: follow the nature of things, don’t let your mind harbor any partiality, and the whole world will be governed.”20 This sort of explicit mapping of political institutions onto corporeal organs was not as common in the late imperial period, though an elaborate body of court ritual did use corporeal figures as

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symbolic correlates of the Chinese imperium. As Angela Zito argues, Qing dynasty court ritual and its underlying metaphysics were predicated on a practice of centering (zhong), wherein human beings are brought into harmony with the cosmos, and one of the objectives of imperial ritual sacrifice was to “illustrate and display the fact that there was not and had never been a gap between man and nature.”21 A similar set of metaphors is developed in more detail in the Western tradition. Plato’s Republic, for instance, proposes a set of organic models to describe the structure and composition of the city while at the same time using political tropes to describe the relationship between the body and the soul.22 Aristotle developed a version of the same trope in his Politics, in which he argues that “the polis is prior in the order of nature to the family and the individual. The reason for this is that the whole is necessarily prior [in nature] to the part. If the whole body be destroyed, there will not be a foot or a hand.”23 One of the most influential examples of this parallelism between the structure of the organism and of society, meanwhile, can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), which argues that individual members of a commonwealth need to be subordinated to the greater power of the community itself. This latter concept was famously captured in the illustration that Abraham Bosse developed, with Hobbes’s assistance, for the volume’s frontispiece, and which features a gigantic crowned figure whose torso and arms are composed of hundreds of human bodies. Dubbed the Leviathan, after a biblical sea monster, this figure evocatively reflects Hobbes’s vision of an ideal government capable of overseeing and coordinating the citizens of the commonwealth the same way that a person’s head oversees and coordinates the various parts of the body. The surface similarities between these Chinese and European meta­ p ­ hors of society as a figurative organism, however, obscure significant divergences with respect to the underlying medical epistemologies on which they are each grounded. Whereas Western medical theory dating back to ancient Greece has tended to view the body as a discrete and bounded entity, a corresponding tradition of Chinese medical theory has instead emphasized the body’s position within a system of flows between itself and its external environment. These disparate perspectives have important implications for an understanding not



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only of anatomy and physiology but also of corresponding metaphors of societal structure and governance. Medical historian Shigehisa Kuriyama, for instance, argues that “the Chinese conception of the body differed from the body envisioned by Greek anatomy not just by the multiplicity and equality of governing sources, but also, and more profoundly, by an alternative conception of governance.”24 Kuriyama contends that while ancient Greek medical theory emphasized a hierarchical relationship between major organs and subordinate structures such as muscles and arteries, the corresponding Chinese conception instead stressed the ability of invisible blood vessels, or mo, to “link the fates of distant parts [of the body].” In sociopolitical terms, these two visions of the body extrapolate to two distinct understandings of political power and social organization, with the former corresponding to what Michel Foucault describes as a model grounded on a hypervisible deployment of monarchical power and the latter corresponding to what he characterizes as a “capillary” distribution of power through a wide range of social institutions. Foucault argues that the former was characteristic of the pre-­modern West, and although the latter is presented as a distinctive characteristic of the deployment of power in modern city it also captures an important dimension of the hyper-­bureaucratized nature of premodern China society. While the metaphor of China as the sick man of Asia was tacitly in dialogue with these earlier discourses of the “body politic,” the modern trope was also shaped by the specific sociocultural environment out of which it emerged. More specifically, the metaphor originated at a historical moment when contemporary understandings of both corporeal and political bodies were themselves undergoing a process of radical transformation. These overlapping medical and political revolutions were part of the social reality that the sick man trope was attempting to capture, even as they themselves were simultaneously transforming the conceptual ground with which the metaphor was in dialogue in the first place. In particular, Yan Fu’s initial deployment of the sick man metaphor happened to coincide with a pivotal paradigm shift in the understand­ing of infectious disease. Known as the germ revolution, a wave of late-­ nineteenth and early-­twentieth century discoveries and ­conceptual

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advances fundamentally transformed contemporary understandings of disease, revealing that many diseases are caused by microscopic organisms including bacteria, fungi, protists, prions, and viruses. These insights, in turn, made possible the development of an array of new medical practices ranging from antibiotics to immunizations, which had important ramifications for approaches to social policy, public hygiene, and health management. In addition, the germ revolution also encouraged a profound rethinking of the relationship between the human body and its environment, underscoring the degree to which our bodies and the environment are thoroughly saturated by microscopic organisms that move fluidly back and forth between the two. The result demands a new appreciation of the fundamentally heterogeneous nature of all organisms, together with a reevaluation of what it means to be healthy in the first place. The emergence of the trope of China as sick man also coincided with a parallel paradigm shift in political visions of the Chinese nation. The first known invocations of the trope came on the heels of China’s defeat in the Sino-­Japanese War, which was one of several political setbacks that contributed to the collapse of the Qing dynasty a decade and a half later. After the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, China’s first republican government was established in January 1912—​marking the end of more than two millennia of dynastic rule and bringing with it a new understanding of the relationship between the government and the people. Under this new model, citizens were perceived as having more formalized input into the government, and there was a more explicit recognization of the fundamentally heterogeneous nature of the nation’s citizenry. Although the sick man trope initially emerged at the end of the Qing, it remained in wide currency during the early Republican era, suggesting not only that the country’s structural problems had not been fully resolved by the 1911 regime change but also that the republic regime had brought with it new challenges of its own.25 Part of the appeal of the sick man trope lay in its status as a symbol not only of weakness but also of the possibility of structural transformation. Just as a medical treatments attempt to cure an illness while preserving the patient, turn-­of-­the-­century attempts to address China’s metaphorical illness similarly sought to reform the nation’s political structure,



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social conventions, and popular beliefs while simultaneously reaffirming China’s underlying national identity. These efforts to address the nation’s figurative sickness have taken a variety of forms, ranging from attempts to reform the political structure from within to more comprehensive attempts to reinvent it altogether. Although ostensibly driven by a desire to strengthen and reform the nation, these various forms of political engagement simultaneously underscore a set of conceptual tensions embedded within the very notion of community itself. Political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that ideological fields derive their coherence from the structural interrelationship of the different conceptual elements that constitute the field itself. They contend that an ideological field is an “articulated discursive totality” anchored on a set of master signifiers. Even as these latter ideological nodes help provide the conceptual ground against which the other elements within the ideological field are rendered intelligible, however, their own meaning is similarly dependent on the same semiotic field. The values that define a political community, in other words, are fundamentally relational and interdependent and are themselves the product of the ideological system itself. The result, as Slavoj Žižek explains in his discussion of this model, is “a theory of the social field founded on . . . ​a notion of antagonism—​on an acknowledgement of an original ‘trauma,’ an impossible kernel which resists symbolization, totalization, symbolic integration.”26 By a similar logic, the metaphorical illness plaguing turn-­of-­the-­century China is a symptom not only of the concrete threats challenging the nation but also of the structural conditions on which the nation’s very existence is predicated. This figurative sickness represents a point of instability and incommensurability at the heart of Chinese political regime, but it is precisely this instability that permits a political community to adapt in response to shifting external conditions. The spread of discourses of disease in early twentieth-­century China, accordingly, was paralleled by a set of medical and political revolutions that transformed China’s sociocultural landscape. Both of these conceptual revolutions generated a paradigm shift wherein corporeal and political collectives came to be viewed as amalgamations of disparate and potentially antithetical elements, with the coherence of the collective being predicated on a dynamic response to the disparate

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e­ lements of which it is composed. The result is a condition of what I am calling homesickness, which is often reflected in the cultural domain in the form of an interest in diseased bodies or bodies politic. Whether focusing on microscopic pathogens or political insurgents, these cultural representations focus on points of weakness and instability that are simultaneously a source of dynamism that conditions on which the potential long-­term health of the collective is necessarily predicated. Cultural Contagion

My primary focus in this study, accordingly, is not on “actual” illness, but rather on the logics of various tropes of illness within a body of cultural discourses. My interest in these tropes lies not so much in what they represent, but rather what they reveal about the underly­ ­ing cultural logics that produced them in the first place. I approach these tropes not as straightforward symbols or metaphors, but rather as examples of what we may call cultural memes. Although the concept of the meme has recently become a household word thanks to the growing ubiquity of the Internet and contemporary social media, it is useful to consider the biological context out of which the concept was initially derived—​not because one must defer to this original formulation but rather because it offers a useful way of reassessing the relationship between the scientific and cultural fields themselves. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which argues that natural selection—​ understood as a process that effectively rewards entities that are successful at replicating themselves—​actually operates at the level not of entire species or even individual organisms but rather of discrete sequences of genetic material that Dawkins loosely calls genes.27 Dawkins argues that it is in fact genes that are the key units of natural selection, insofar as they are capable of producing precise replicas of themselves, and although it may be tempting to focus on the organism—​since this is what we can observe most easily—​Dawkins argues that organisms in reality function merely as “survival vehicles” that the genes use as a means of self-­replication. Rather than



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seeing organisms as individuals that use their genes to reproduce them­ ­selves, in other words, Dawkins suggests that it would be more productive to view the genes as quasi-­autonomous entities that parasitically use the organisms they have helped create in order to maximize their own chances of survival and reproduction. In practical terms, there are some situations in which the fate of individual genes may literally diverge from that of the organism to which they correspond. For instance, although genes are usually passed down from one generation to the next, there are also some ­circumstances under which they may jump horizontally from one organism to another, and even from one species to another. More abstractly, there are countless examples of animals that have adapted altruistic behaviors wherein individuals sacrifice their own putative self-­interest (e.g., their individual safety and reproductive capacity) in order to benefit their immediate relatives or the broader community, thereby indirectly optimizing the survival of their gene pool to which they belong. In each of these instances, the genes’ ability to replicate themselves is secured independently of, or even potentially at the expense of, the corresponding organism’s own chances of survival and self-­replication. In this way, this line of analysis invites a rethinking not only of the underlying logic of natural selection, but also of the status of the organisms and communities that are yielded by this evolutionary process. The argument here, it should be noted, is not one of genetic determinism (wherein genes determine absolutely the appearance and characteristics of an organism) but rather it simply builds on the postulate that an organism’s phenotype is, by definition, the product of a complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors, and consequently reflects the influence of a multitude of genes, even if it is not necessarily directly determined by any of them. In one section of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins extends this discussion of natural selection to the sphere of cultural production, suggesting that cultural units he dubs “memes” may function in a way analogous to biological genes. He notes that cultural elements may also appear to take on a life of their own, encouraging their own self-­ replication in the same way that successful genes do, and proposes that a memetic approach offers a useful way of understanding this phenomenon of cultural self-­replication. One advantage of this sort of

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approach is that, by focusing on resilience and self-­replication as key measures of success, it invites a mode of cultural analysis that is not dependent on traditional notions of aesthetics, morality, or truth. That is to say, although perceptions of aesthetic value or institutional validation may contribute to the reproductive success of a meme, they are not essential preconditions. By considering the interrelationship between a wide array of factors that may contribute to a meme’s resilience and its ability to replicate itself (either in absolute terms or within a specific context), it is possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the underlying logics that drive cultural production, circulation, and consumption. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins cites “tunes, ideas, catch-­phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” as paradigmatic examples of memes. As Dawkins himself subsequently acknowledged, however, the parallel between genes and memes suggests that a meme should be conceived not as directly observable cultural elements such as “catch-­phrases or clothes fashions” but rather as the underlying logic that contributes to the generation of those cultural elements in the first place.28 That is to say, just as biological traits such as eye and hair color are not genes in their own right but rather phenotypic expressions of genes, cultural forms such as tunes and catchphrases should similarly be viewed not as memes themselves but rather cultural expressions of memes. A memetic analysis, accordingly, should focus on identifying the logics responsible for ­perceptual cultural forms, rather than on the forms themselves. The difficulty lies in determining what precisely the appropriate unit of analysis would be, given that—​unlike genes, which can be isolated and identified—​cultural memes have no corresponding tangible entity. It is necessary, therefore, to extrapolate a plausible cultural logic from visible phenomena—​which is essentially how Dawkins develops his biological analysis in The Selfish Gene (which contains relatively little discussion of actual genes and instead speaks more hypothetically about how genes must work in order to explain observable biological phenomena). Even as Dawkins applies biological principles to cultural phenomena, he nevertheless attempts to maintain a distinction between scientific and cultural discourses. For instance, in his 1993 essay



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“Viruses of the Mind” Dawkins notes that “the rapid spread of a good idea through the scientific community may even look like a description of a measles epidemic.” He claims, however, that there is a crucial difference between the infectiousness of a scientific idea and that of an ordinary cultural meme—​on the grounds that the “underly­ ­ing reasons” for the popularity of a scientific idea “are good ones, satisfy­­ing the demanding standards of the scientific method.”29 The implication, in other words, is a scientific idea stands in the same ­relationship to cultural memes as a theory of measles stands in relationship to the measles virus—​in that the former, in each case, spreads because it is “good,” while the latter spreads merely because it is ­infectious. This putative distinction between scientific ideas and cultural memes, however, begs the question of what objective standards one might use to distinguish between “good” memes and merely popular ones. Any attempt to assess the value of a meme (cultural or otherwise) requires an appeal to a set of postulates that may appear to be commonsensical but which are actually contingent on their position within a broader epistemological and discursive environment. Even the scientific method is a relatively recent development, and furthermore it encompasses a wide range of different methods of assessing the validity of empirical results. Moreover, most scientific ideas are not isolated facts (that can potentially be verified) but rather involve a set of complex interpretive issues—​meaning that they, to paraphrase Dawkins’s own observation in his discussion of his “selfish gene” model, are concerned not with “the truth of any factual proposition” but rather attempt to offer a new “way of seeing biological facts.”30 It is useful, therefore, to invert Dawkins’s analytical hierarchy and rather than treat cultural memes as necessarily subordinate to scientific ideas, instead use a memetic approach to reassess how we understand scientific knowledge itself. For instance, a memetic analysis of a “good” idea would similarly focus on the underlying intellectual framework that renders the idea intelligible in the first place. This is not to say that a scientific explanation doesn’t help explain “real world” phenomena but rather that the popularity—​a nd even the basic intelligibility—​of any scientific explanation is necessarily dependent on the broader intellectual environment within which it is positioned.

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To borrow from Dawkins’s own example in “Viruses of the Mind,” a modern biomedical explanation of the communicability of measles may in fact spread through the scientific community like a measles epidemic, but if this same explanation had been proposed a century earlier, it presumably would have achieved little purchase, given that the basic conceptual ground on which the explanation is predicated had not yet been established. Being good, in other words, doesn’t guarantee reproductive success, just as reproductive success doesn’t mean that an idea will necessarily measure up to certain specific standards of what is “good.” Consequently, although Dawkins himself attempts to differentiate between memes that are merely cultural and scientific ones that benefit from being putatively correct, the underlying logic of the two types of memes is actually quite similar. Drawing on a memetic approach to analyze discourses of disease in modern China, accordingly, I use some of the biological assumptions that inspired the original concept of the meme in order to reassess conventional understandings of what is entailed in a memetic analysis. At the same time, I also propose that this reformulated memetic approach may be applied not only to cultural phenomena but also to sociopolitical and even scientific discourses. More specifically, I contend that these twentieth-­century discourses of disease consistently emphasize the importance of internal nodes of alterity—​within the body itself, but also in more abstract cultural, political, and scientific collectives. The implication is that these nodes represent sites of weakness and instability but may also facilitate a process of renewal and transformation on which the long-­term health of the collective is itself predicated. To illustrate how I propose to approach memes as true “viruses of the mind,” I will reflect briefly on the status of actual viruses. Responsible for a wide array of human illnesses ranging from AIDS to the common cold, viruses are capable of infecting all types of living organisms and are themselves the most abundant biological entity on earth. Capable of jumping between different organisms and even different species, viruses infect a host by entering living cells and using the cell’s own genome to replicate themselves. Paradigmatic parasites, viruses have virtually no autonomous functionality independent of their biological hosts, but are uniquely adapted to use a host’s cellular



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resources to disseminate themselves. There are relatively few medical treatments for most viral infections, and often there is little doctors can do other that let the patient’s own immune system respond. Although biological viruses were not isolated and identified until the 1890s,31 the term itself has a much longer history. The Latin word virus, for instance, referred to a secretion having either poisonous or medicinal properties, while the Middle French word virus referred to a substance that conceals an infectious agent. By the early nineteenth century, the corresponding English word was used to refer to a harmful or corrupting influence capable of spreading easily through society. 32 The contemporary uses of the word virus and its derivatives to describe sociocultural phenomena, accordingly, are metaphorical only when viewed in the context of the relatively recent biomedical understanding of viruses, but they are quite close to the original “literal” mean­­ing if viewed in the context of the term’s own etymology. The result is a precise inversion of a conventional understanding of the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning, insofar as the current literal meaning of virus (in the sense of a submicroscopic organism) is revealed to be a metaphorical adaptation of an earlier term used to refer either to corporeal secretions or pernicious influence, while the current “metaphorical” meaning (in the sense of a sociocultural ­phenomenon) is revealed to be closer to the term’s original “literal” meaning.33 This compounded metaphoricity of the term virus illustrates a quality that Jacques Derrida argues is one of the determining conditions of language itself. In his well-­k nown critique of John Austin’s speech act theory, for instance, Derrida notes Austin’s attempts to cordon off certain domains of language use that Austin deems to be “not serious, but in many ways parasitic upon its normal use.” In particular, Austin cites words uttered by an actor on stage or read in a poem as paradigmatic examples of what he calls “certain kinds of ill, which infect all utterances,” and he notes that “at present” he is “excluding [them] from consideration.” In outlining his theory, Austin insists on the need to carefully quarantine the subdomain of “serious” utterances “issued in ordinary circumstances,” so that the “other kinds of ill” characteristic of “not serious” utterances do not infect the body of language use under consideration. Derrida, on the other

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hand, takes seriously Austin’s medical metaphor, and specifically Austin’s remark that these “certain kinds of ill” already “infect all utterances.” Derrida argues that not only is Austin’s attempt to figuratively quarantine these parasitic utterances necessarily ineffective, given that the “ill” in question has already infected “all utterances,” but also that it is precisely in this so-­called parasitism that we may find one of the key features that makes language use possible in the first place.34 In particular, Derrida contends that it is precisely language’s ability to be iteratively cited in different contexts—​a nd thereby be separated from both its speaker/author as well as from its referent—​ that makes linguistic communication possible in the first place. The implication, accordingly, is that the sorts of “parasitic” utterances that Austin attempted to provisionally bracket do in fact exemplify “certain kinds of ill” that “infect all utterances,” and furthermore this figurative virus that parasitically infects all utterances represents one of the enabling conditions of language itself. A similar point may be made with respect to viruses themselves. Not only are viruses parasitically dependent on their organismic hosts, they are positioned at the very margins of life as it is conventionally understood. Consisting of little more than a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecule ensconced inside a protein membrane, viruses lack many of the qualities that are frequently considered to be necessary preconditions for life itself—​including having a cell wall and the ability to metabolize nutrients, produce proteins, and reproduce on their own—​and consequently they are often viewed as being not fully alive. At the same time, however, there is growing evidence that viruses and viral processes have played a critical role in the evolution of life as we know it. In particular, viruses are virtual laboratories of genetic innovation, producing genetic mutations at a much faster rate than other organisms. Given that viruses under certain conditions may even write themselves into the genome of a host organism (specifically, RNA-­based retroviruses have the ability to write their genetic code back onto the DNA of their host, and if the virus happens to infect the host’s stem cells those changes may then be passed down to the organism’s offspring), they therefore offer the possibility of a constant infusion of new genetic material with far-­ reaching implications for evolutionary development.



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While my primary focus here is not on biological viruses per se, I am very interested in the “viral” qualities of cultural memes. I argue that memes are not parasitic supplements to more fundamental concerns such as science and politics, but rather they may help reveal underlying resonances between seemingly disparate epistemological fields. Accordingly, I use a memetic approach to reassess the relationship between intersecting cultural, political, and medical paradigms in the modern period. I propose that this memetic approach helps illuminate the underlying cultural, political, and medical logics that inform these various cultural assemblages, revealing not only how these logics may vary from one context to another but also how some aspects of these underlying logics have remained remarkably stable over time and across regions. Temporal Nodes

It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive survey of all of the different permutations that Chinese discourses of disease have taken over the long twentieth century. Instead, like a traditional Chinese doctor who ventures a diagnosis based on an examination of a few specific pulse points on a patient’s wrist, I propose to use a handful of texts to explore a broader set of sociopolitical and cultural concerns. More specifically, I focus on three specific years, which I have chosen not because they are associated with recognized historical milestones, like 1911, 1949, or 1976, but rather precisely because they were actually rather unremarkable—​which is to say, they are examples of what China historian Ray Huang would call “years of no significance.”35 Although the three years I have chosen are indeed of no particular historical significance in their own right, I have selected them in part because they each fall precisely halfway between two watershed moments in modern Chinese history. For instance, 1906 comes halfway between the end of the Boxer Uprising in 1901 and the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and consequently offers a glimpse of China’s transition from a dynastic to a republican regime. Similarly, 1967 falls halfway between Mao’s launch of the Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958 and Deng Xiaoping’s launch of the Reform and Opening Up campaign in 1978, and therefore captures a pivotal

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moment in the transition from high Maoism to the post-­Mao Reform Era. Finally, 2006 marks the halfway point between China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 2011 announcement that China had eclipsed Japan as the world’s second largest economy, 36 and accordingly presents a snapshot of the nation’s transition from an insular post-­socialist state to a global superpower. Collectively, these three years offer a window into China’s century-­ long transformation from a moribund dynastic regime into a pivotal player on the world stage. I open with a consideration of several clusters of texts anchored in the year 1906. Still reeling from its defeat in the first Sino-­Japanese War and from the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, the Qing court was struggling to adapt to a quickly changing world. Just a year earlier, the court had abolished the traditional civil service examinations and instead encouraged students to study modern subjects such as politics and biomedicine. Many reformers during this period turned to literature to help address some of the challenges facing contemporary society, advocating approaches ranging from strategic reform to iconoclastic revolution. In particular, many of these reformers used a focus on illness not only to underscore the problems plaguing contemporary Chinese society but also to point to potential solutions. Chapter 1 opens with a consideration of Liu E’s 1906 novel Travels of Lao Can, whose eponymous protagonist is an itinerant doctor who offers advice on a variety of problems relating to illness, social concerns, and flood control. Regardless of what specific problem he happens to be treating, Lao Can attempts to redeploy potentially disruptive elements for more productive ends, advocating a reformist approach that attempts to address contemporary challenges by carefully balancing opposing forces. At a time when many reformers were looking abroad for perspectives that might be used to help address the challenges facing late imperial China, Liu E’s fictional protagonist instead appeals to classic Chinese texts for guidance. In an early twentieth-­century context, however, these classic texts constitute both symbols of tradition but also alien elements that present the contemporary environment in a new light. Chapter 2 turns to Zeng Pu’s 1906 novel Flowers in a Sinful Sea, which takes inspiration from the legendary Chinese courtesan Sai



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Jinhua. Sai Jinhua allegedly met German general Alfred von Waldersee while she was in Europe in the late 1880s with her husband Hong Jun, a Chinese diplomat, and a decade later when foreign troops were ransacking Beijing at the end of the Boxer Uprising, Sai Jinhua is reputed to have used her friendship with Waldersee—​who by this point was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in China—​to persuade him to order his troops to step down. Although the story of Sai Jinhua’s intervention with Waldersee in the Boxer Uprising is almost certainly apocryphal, the story nevertheless captures a turn-­of-­the-­century conviction that an embrace of foreignness (Western knowledge, Western political structures, and so forth) could help address China’s contemporary problems. In the process of selectively appropriating these foreign elements, however, it thereby becomes necessary to reassess one’s understanding of one’s own society and culture—​which is to say, one’s figurative home. Both of these chapters focus on a set of elements originating either from China’s distant past or from beyond its geographic borders, and which help challenge contemporary assumptions about Chinese society and what it might become. Both sets of elements, moreover, are distinctly uncanny—​in the Freudian sense of something that is perceived as being disconcertingly unfamiliar precisely because it is simultaneously too familiar. Freud famously notes that the root of the German term for uncanny, unheimlich, is heim, which literally means home or hearth, and that the corresponding adjective, heimlich may refer either to something homely and familiar or alternatively to something secret and unknown. Just as heimlich is an example of a contronym, meaning that it carries mutually contradictory meanings, Freud argues that its negative, unheimlich or “uncanny,” similarly refers either to something unfamiliar and strange or to something “that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”37 Freud argues that the uncanny is a symptom of the “return of the repressed,” but I propose that it also reflects a condition of homesickness, or a node of alterity embedded within the familiarity of the metaphorical home. Chapter 3 takes as its starting point Lu Xun’s famous account of his 1906 decision to discontinue his medical studies in Japan and instead devote himself to cultural and political reform. Here, I ­consider

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some of the ways in which medical concerns nevertheless continued to inform Lu Xun’s subsequent literary and sociopolitical writings, as well as those of other May Fourth authors. More specifically, I look at the status of a set of medical allusions in early May Fourth writings, and particularly how these texts deployed new biomedical theories of immune response in order to reflect on issues of sociopolitical reform. These immune system metaphors not only provided a model for the possibility of a reformist intervention, they also offered a way of understanding the inevitable limits of those reformist efforts themselves—​ in that there is always the necessary possibility that reform efforts may inadvertently undermine the integrity of the social order they are attempting to support in the first place. Chapter 4, meanwhile, jumps ahead to the year 1967. Having just relocated to Taiwan from Hong Kong, the Beijing-­born director King Hu released the martial arts classic Dragon Gate Inn, whose narrative of Ming dynasty political persecution and infighting may be read as an allegorical commentary on the Cultural Revolution that was raging back in China. I use a consideration of what I call the trope of du (which means “poison” but also “treatment”) in King Hu’s film to develop a broader analysis of the contradictory connotations of the figure of the Chinese knight-­errant, or xia, particularly with respect to the xia’s implications for the possibility of political reform. I argue that the figure of the xia may represent either a point of resistance to an unjust political regime or the apotheosis of that same regime itself. These latter two chapters examine interrelated metaphorics of medicine and poison. Medical and immunological agents are both positioned at the structural margins of the body, and their ability to destroy pathogens is closely bound up with their capacity to harm the body itself. There is always a necessary possibility, however, that the immune system may begin targeting the body’s own tissue, just as there is always the possibility that a pharmacologically active drug may function instead as a harmful poison. Viewed as metaphorical medicines or immunological agents, accordingly, political reformers or autonomous xia are able to provide a catalyst for sociopolitical reform only to the extent that there is also a possibility that they may instead end up undermining the integrity and stability of the political body itself.



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Following the death of Chairman Mao and the official conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up campaign helped catalyze a period of rapid growth that would eventually establish China as one of the world’s largest economies. Although the result was a sociopolitical landscape markedly different from that which characterized China at the turn of the twentieth century, a thematics of illness and disease nevertheless continued to play an important role in helping articulate a broader set of sociopolitical concerns. In Part III, I consider several sets of contemporary works that use tropes of illness and infection to reflect on the circulation of information, labor, and capital, together with their sociopolitical implications. In particular, I argue that these overlapping economies provide the foundation on which contemporary political formations are grounded, while at the same time being fundamentally destabilizing elements that may help catalyze new forms of community and social organization. Chapter 5 takes as its starting point Hu Fayun’s novel Ruyan@ SARS.come, which was first published in print form in 2006. Set in 2003, Hu Fayun’s text examines not only the spread of the SARS virus but also the dissemination of information about the virus. More specifically, the novel reflects on the Chinese government’s initial attempts to restrict the circulation of information about the epidemic, together with Chinese citizens’ corresponding use of the Internet and other means in an attempt to circumvent these restrictions. In this way, the work invites a epidemiological approach to the circulation not only of infectious pathogens, but also of information. A similar set of considerations informs the status of Hu Fayun’s text itself, in that it was initially published and distributed online, but its popularity increased dramatically after it was subjected to the same sort of governmental controls that, in the text, are applied to information about the SARS crisis. Chapter 6 turns to China’s rural AIDS epidemic and opens with a discussion of Yan Lianke’s 2006 novel Dream of Ding Village. Inspired by the author’s 1996 visit to some AIDS villages in his home province of Henan, which was one of the regions hardest hit by the epidemic, Dream of Ding Village explores the practice of blood selling that was the primary vector of contagion driving rural China’s AIDS epidemic. I use Yan’s novel to reflect more broadly on the

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r­ elationship between processes of self-­commodification and a necro­ political logic of capitalist development, arguing that these processes of self-­commodification reflect the growing influence of capitalist ideologies in post-­Maoist China, while at the same time offering ways for subjects to challenge these same ideologies. Underlying these considerations of the circulation of information and capital is a double logic of the fetish, and more specifically the emphasis on loss and displacement that underlies Freud’s notion of a fetish object, together with the attention to the strategic elision of labor and social relations that is the focus of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Both the Freudian and the Marxian theoretizations of fetishism, moreover, emphasize the relationship between the physical artifact and the abstract sense of loss for which it comes to substitute, with the latter sense of loss and absence coming to shape the ways in which the artifact’s physicality is itself conceived. In the works discussed here, a thematics of disease and infection parallels a focus on fetish objects that mark a locus of instability within the contemporary sociopolitical regime, while at the same time representing the possibility of a reconfiguration and reimagination of that same regime. Chapter 7 takes Tsai Ming-­liang’s 2006 film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone as a starting point from which to examine the transnational circulation of labor and related considerations of community formation. The film uses a focus on stranded guest workers in contemporary Malaysia to explore issues of dislocation and alienation, together with their imbrication with inverse forces of desire and attachment. Throughout his oeuvre, Tsai Ming-­liang repeatedly returns to a common set of themes, images, and actors, and here I place I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone in dialogue with several of his preceding works, considering how they each use circuits of migration and displacement to explore the possibility of new forms of identity and attachment. Moreover, these films do not merely reflect on these dialectics of desire and alienation, they also actively perform them by using a technique I call antisuture to place the viewer in a position of both desire and alienation with respect to the scenes unfolding on-­screen. Finally, Chapter 8 turns to Yu Hua’s 2006 novel Brothers, which follows a pair of stepbrothers who experience first-­hand many of the



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sociopolitical transformations China underwent from the late 1950s to the early 2000s. Taking inspiration from a scene in which the protagonist, in the course of organizing a “virgin beauty pageant,” has a surreal vision of “all of the nation’s hymens lined up into a Great Wall,” I reflect more broadly on the novel’s use of the hymen as a paradigmatic figure for the symbolic limits of contemporary political communities. While technically a tiny fringe of tissue located around the vaginal opening, the hymen has nevertheless come to assume an oversized significance within the popular imagination, symbolizing an idealized corporal coherence as well as its necessary limits. In Brothers, the hymen is invoked as a paradigmatic symbol of corporeal, familial, and national boundaries, although its significance lies precisely in the necessary possibility of its rupture and transgression. It functions, in other words, not so much as a tangible juncture between inner and outer but rather as an imaginary border zone between two putatively opposed realms. In this respect, it is fitting that Yu Hua’s novel gives significantly more attention to artificial and surgically reconstructed hymens than it does to putatively “natural” ones, given that it is precisely these artificial boundary zones that play a critical role in shaping the modern sociocultural order as it is lived and experienced. Starting from this figure of the hymen, I use Yu Hua’s work to reflect more generally on the status of figurative membranes, and particularly the boundary zones between individuals and the societies they inhabit. While each of these sets of texts reflects a set of distinct features and concerns, they nevertheless all pivot around a dialectics of Self and Other. For instance, the Freudian uncanny is understood as a disconcerting sense of overfamiliarity wherein the familiar comes to be perceived as alien, just as the significance of both medicines and immunological elements lies in their status as foreign or autonomous elements that are literally incorporated by the Self. A fetish, similarly, is a material object onto which a set of anxieties about loss are displaced, while a membrane is a paradigmatic boundary that underscores the necessary imbrication of the very regions that it is ostensibly separating. Each of these four conceptual nodes, accordingly, speaks to the way in which the constitution of the Self is predicated on a perception of internal alterity. Collectively, these nodes capture a crucial conceptual dynamics underlying the discourses of disease I examine

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here, wherein a social or corporeal body’s alienation from a part of itself generates an internal dynamism that may in turn help maximize its ability to adapt to changes in its environment. In Homesickness, I use tropes of sickness and infection to examine the conceptual border regions between medicine and politics, between order and disorder, and between language and reality. I argue that these border regions reflect the tensions between putatively opposed conceptual domains while at the same time symbolizing the necessary limits of those same domains. I examine the shifting position of the body in relation to an overlapping set of modern biomedical and political paradigms, though my primary focus is not on biomedicine or politics themselves but rather on an array of cultural texts through which competing conceptions of the individual and the community are continually interrogated. This body of cultural production is positioned in an interstitial region within which the very possibility of political community is continually being reimagined. Consequently this cultural domain may be viewed as a figurative membrane mediating between medicine and politics, between theory and practice, and between knowledge and belief. Just as the hymen symbolizes the overdetermined juncture between corporeal bodies and the symbolic matrices through which they are comprehended, the discourses of disease I examine here similarly mark the intersection of shifting conceptions of bodies and bodies politic, and of the cultural arenas through which they are conceived. Coda

A key concern during the period leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games involved China’s record on human rights, and particularly its policies on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. One of the couplets in the “To the West” Internet poem speaks directly to these issues: When we were silent, you said you wanted us to have free speech. Now that we are silent no more, you say we are brainwashed xenophobes.

The poem’s critique of the West’s vision of China as “silent” is apt, given that the very existence of the poem—​which was ironically



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attributed to “a silent, silent Chinese”—​may indeed be seen as evidence that China is indeed “silent no more.” While some forms of public expression remain sharply curtailed in contemporary China, others are permitted or even encouraged. In particular, the rapid popularization of the Internet in China since the mid-­1990s has opened up vast new terrains for both communication and regulation. The anonymous “To the West” poem attracted considerable attention not only in the Chinese-­language blogosphere but also in the Western press and academic community. A couple of weeks after the poem initially surfaced, for instance, Robert Daly, director of the Center for Global Chinese Affairs at University of Maryland, wrote a detailed public response listing what he claims are the poem’s historical errors, though he nevertheless acknowledges the legitimacy of the work’s basic charges of Western prejudice toward China. 38 A similarly conflicted response can be found in a commentary by China historian Andrew Field. Like Daly, Field takes the anonymous poet to task for the poem’s alleged historical inaccuracies, noting that the work presents a wonderfully naive evocation of modern Chinese history. It goes very far in explaining the collective mentality of imagined victimhood that lies behind the recent youthful protests against “Western media” depictions of China and Tibet.

Field extended his critique of the poem in a series of posts over the next several days before eventually offering a public mea culpa, acknowledging that his responses had been driven by his own emotional investment in the topic: Now that I have vented my own anger and frustration over recent events, it’s time to ’fess up and offer a self-­criticism. First, having read and reread the poem a few more times together with a Daoist friend of mine, I have come to the conclusion that I misread it originally by attaching too much weight to current events, and by reading my own obsession with China’s modern history into the poem. 39

In alluding here to C. T. Hsia’s notion of an “obsession with China,” Field is effectively following in Hsia’s own analytical footsteps by dramatizing the logic of ressentiment that characterized Hsia’s original

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formulation. Just as Hsia’s critique of May Fourth discussions of China’s metaphorical illness was implicitly illustrating the underlying power of those same discourses, Field’s own responses to the anonymous Internet poem could similarly be seen as a tacit recognition of the effectiveness of the poem’s own rhetoric of ressentiment. That is to say, the intensity with which Field responds to what he himself dismissively calls an anonymous piece of doggerel suggests that the poem had, in fact, succeeded in its presumptive goal of getting under the skin of the same Westerners to whom it was attributing these reductive characterizations of China in the first place. To the extent that China’s original embrace of the sick man metaphor reflected a collective attempt to transform an acknowledged weakness into a source of symbolic strength, Daly’s and Field’s contemporary responses to the Internet poem’s strategic inversion of the traditional sick man discourse may be seen as evidence of the ultimate success of the same rhetorical inversion. The poem’s focus on Western discourses of China’s perceived weaknesses is remobilized as a critique of the West itself, and the rhetorical effectiveness of this critique is reflected in the emotional responses that it elicited from Western critics. What we observe in these responses, accordingly, is essentially a second-­order ressentiment—​wherein the discursive transformation of a weakness into strength comes to be perceived as threatening in its own right. While the concept of ressentiment describes a strategic transvaluation of material weakness into a locus of symbolic strength, this inverse process of transvaluing symbolic weakness into a second-­order position of strength underscores the inherently symbolic dimension of all power. What originates as a purely abstract response to a condition of objective disempowerment, in other words, may develop into a form of productive empowerment. Conversely, the very act of theorizing ressentiment could itself be seen, as Fredric Jameson has argued, as “the expression and production of ressentiment,” insofar as the act of theorization recognizes the effectiveness of ressentiment but at the same time seeks to undermine it by exposing its cultural logic.40 The inversion that Jameson points to here, wherein the theorization of ressentiment is folded back into the phenomenon itself, ­captures



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one of the central concerns of this project as a whole. That is to say, while the original model appears to pivot on a dichotomy between real and symbolic power, Jameson’s observations underscores the degree to which symbolic power—​as well as second-­order theorizations of symbolic power—​can have “real” consequences in its own right. In particular, cultural representations of weakness and instability may have ultimately have productive implications, as they encourage an attention to processes of transformation and reinvention. In the following chapters, I use a memetic mode of cultural analysis to examine an overlapping set of discourses of disease in modern China, while at the same time drawing on medical and biological insights to reassess how we may understand the viral nature of these cultural memes themselves. My ultimate objective, however, is not merely to use cultural studies methods to analyze medical phenomena, nor is it to use scientific notions to reassess how we approach cultural analysis, but rather to propose a mode of analysis that challenges assumed boundaries between the domains of culture, politics, and ­science. In addition to tropes of infection proper, I am equally interested in a parallel set of discourses of disease focusing on tropes of incest and insurrection, and argue that these tropes of infection, incest, and insurrection all underscore similar kernels of alterity within the body, the family, and the nation. By considering of the parallel logics by which the constitution of these (real and figurative) bodies comes to be understood in the modern era, one may better appreciate not only the inherently contingent nature of each of these bodies, but also the ways in which they may be reshaped and reimagined. In particular, the result is a view wherein flows of contagion within and across bodies politic—​together with the complex patterns of affiliation and alienation that they may inspire—​point to a vision of political commu­ ­nity as the product of a set of decentered processes of self-­recognition, wherein acts of recognition operate independently of the autonomous subjects that they ostensibly presuppose. Like corporeal bodies, these national bodies are deeply contested entities, constantly renegotiating their identities through and against what, paraphrasing Nietzsche, we might call a mobile army of aliens, antigens, and anthropomorphisms.41

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Just as medical metaphors offer a figurative language through which nations and other political communities may be understood, over­ lapping medical and political discourses similarly provide a way of rethinking our very understanding of the relationship between individuals and the matrix of political communities and ecosystems they inhabit.

1

Part I

1906 Phagocytes

Born on February 7, 1906, Aisin-­Gioro Pu Yi was destined to be the last emperor of China. As was conventional for an heir to the imperial throne, Pu Yi was raised in the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing, and no effort was spared in attending to his health and livelihood. All of his bodily functions were meticulously monitored, and detailed records were kept of everything from his food consumption to his bowel movements. The attention that was lavished on the infant’s body, however, stood in stark contrast to the increasingly decrepit status of the dynastic regime of which he would become a living metonym. From the nation’s defeat in the first Sino-­Japanese War in 1895 to the disruption caused by the Boxer Uprising, China had just experienced several traumatic events that dramatically underscored the nation’s military weakness. In particular, in the years immediately preceding Pu Yi’s birth, there had been numerous attempts to address the problems with the nation’s sociopolitical system, ranging from the failed Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 to Empress Dowager Cixi’s 1901 edict calling for reforms addressing everything from the education system to the military. In 1905, the civil service examination system, which for centuries had been one of the primary routes into the government bureaucracy, was finally abolished—​reflecting a growing perception that the exegetical training in the Confucian classics that had been the primary focus of the exams was not providing 35

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China’s aspiring officials with the knowledge and skills they needed in order to operate effectively in the modern world. Pu Yi was named the Xuantong Emperor in December 1908 after the nearly simultaneous deaths of his uncle, the Guangxu Emperor, who had been held under house arrest since 1898, and the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had held the real power in the Qing court over most of the preceding several decades. Less than four years later, however, the young Pu Yi was forced to abdicate the throne in February 1912 following the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Although Pu Yi never wielded any real power during his brief thirty-­eight month reign as China’s last emperor, following his official abdication he was nevertheless permitted, under the “Articles of Favorable Treatment” drafted by the new republican government, to retain his official imperial title and his residence within the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace. This peculiar arrangement—​wherein the boy was treated as though he were an all-­powerful sovereign while essentially remaining a prisoner within his own home—​persisted more than a decade, until eventually the warlord Feng Yuxiang tired of the charade and, in 1924, expelled the teenager from the Forbidden City. Ten years later, Pu Yi was installed as the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo in what is now northeastern China. In this new position, Pu Yi was theoretically granted authority over the new state of Manchukuo, though in reality he was merely a stand-­in for imperial Japan, which held the true power in the puppet state. Pu Yi retained this latter figurehead position until Japan was defeated at the end of World War II and Manchukuo was returned to Chinese control. Following the war, Pu Yi was imprisoned by the Communists on charges of treason, but was declared rehabilitated in 1959. He quietly lived out his final years working as a gardener in Beijing while holding a token position as a member of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference. He ultimately died of natural causes in 1967, at the age of sixty-­one. From his thirty-­eight-­month tenure as last emperor of the Qing, to his decade-­long tenure as a closet emperor under the Articles of Favor­ able Treatment, to his nine-­year tenure as emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, Pu Yi spent much of his life in positions defined by a stark disparity between the nearly boundless political power he



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theoretically embodied and the strict limits that were imposed upon his person. Although Pu Yi’s situation was admittedly unusual, it nevertheless dramatizes a more general tension between political leaders’ status as mortal individuals and the idealized political stations they embody. Medieval English theories of kingship described this phenomenon as that of the “king’s two bodies,” and similar attitudes underpin understandings of Chinese dynastic authority.1 The emperor’s mortal body is conceived as a metonym of both the office he inhab­ ­its and of the dynastic realm that he spearheads, even as his status as an embodied subject is strategically contrasted with the theoretical immortality of the political order he represents. The relationship between these two forms of embodiment is dialectical, in that the mortality of the emperor’s physical body contrastively underscores the transcendent quality of the office he occupies, and vice versa. The fall of the Qing and the effective abolition of the position of the emperor, meanwhile, encouraged a far-­reaching reimagination of the nature of political power and its relationship to figures of embodiment. An inverse perspective on this question of the relationship between abstract power and material corporeality can be found in the turn-­of-­ the-­century Boxer Uprising. Comprised mostly of poor peasants from Shandong province, the movement arose in the late 1890s during a period of acute drought and economic uncertainty. Possessing only rudimentary weaponry and having no claim to formal political authority, the Boxers’ primary strength lay instead in their sheer numbers, combined with their physical training and their belief that they were impervious to conventional weaponry. Their power, in other words, lay not so much in the super-­corporeal abilities with which they believed themselves to be endowed but rather in their physical bodies themselves, and it was precisely this threatening yet vulnerable mass of humanity migrating northward from Shandong to Beijing that ended up playing a pivotal role in shaping the final years of the Qing dynasty. Although the Boxer Uprising is often referred to in English as a “rebellion,” the movement’s precise political implications are in fact rather complicated. A rebellion is conventionally understood as an insurgency that challenges the legitimacy of the existing political order, but the Boxers were nominally dedicated, as one of their key

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mottos put it, to “supporting the Qing, and exterminating the foreigners” (fu Qing mie yang). After the Boxers reached Beijing in June 1900, they forced the foreigners and Chinese Christians in the capital to barricade themselves inside the Legation Quarter. As the Boxers were initially mobilizing, there had been considerable controversy within the Qing court over how to respond, and in the end Empress Dowager Cixi directed the Qing imperial army to stand behind them. As a result, after foreign troops under the command of the Eight Nation Alliance put down the rebellion, the alliance proceeded to hold the Qing court responsible for the uprising and demanded that it pay an enormous financial reparation that would outlive the dynasty itself. The Boxers occupied a curious position within the Chinese body politic. Although they announced their intent to support the Qing, their uprising nevertheless directly contributed directly to the eventual collapse of the dynasty a decade later. This is because the Boxers not only failed in their stated goal of expelling the foreigners from China, they also inadvertently weakened the Qing court’s position with respect to those same foreign powers. In this respect, the uprising could be compared to an autoimmune condition wherein the immune system misrecognizes its target and ends up attacking the body’s own tissue. Seen in these terms, the Boxers resembled immunological elements that inadvertently comprised the stability of the very organism they were ostensibly attempting to defend in the first place. As chance would have it, in 1908—​the same year that Pu Yi was named Qing emperor—​the Russian-­born scientist Élie Metchnikoff was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his research on the immune system over the preceding three decades, and specifically his discovery of the ability of the body’s white blood cells to target and consume foreign pathogens. Metchnikoff realized that this process, which he dubbed phagocytosis, played a critical role in helping identify and eliminate harmful agents—​though he also came to recognize that if the immune system had the ability to recognize harmful pathogens, it simultaneously had the capacity to misrecognize its targets and begin attacking the body’s own healthy tissue. Analogously, the Boxers could similarly be seen as an immunological force attempting



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to rid China of foreign pathogens but which in the process ended up undermining the Chinese dynastic regime it was ostensibly attempting to support. The immune system offers a useful model for conceptualizing broader processes of sociopolitical transformation. Generally speaking, societal change may be driven either by the existing political establishment, independent social groups, environmental or contextual factors, or by a combination of all three. Under some circumstances, the political establishment and independent social movements may complement one another, though under others it is equally possible that they may end up operating at cross-­purposes. A grassroots movement, for instance, may challenge or attempt to overthrow an existing political order, while the political establishment may in turn view the movement as a destabilizing and illegitimate. If viewed in immunological terms, accordingly, the political establishment and the grassroots forces may each be acting in ways that reflect very different visions of what is in the best interests of society itself. In the following three chapters, I examine several clusters of texts and discursive fields from the period immediately following the Boxer Uprising. These literary interventions reflect different responses to what was widely perceived as the sickness afflicting contemporary Chi­ ­nese society, ranging from reform to rebellion to revolution. Drawing on an array of uncanny elements positioned at the structural margins of the sociopolitical system itself, these texts simultaneously defamiliarize contemporary Chinese society even as they offer the possibility of reimagining what that same society might become. Depending on the context, these uncanny elements may symbolize either a societal disease, and potential cure for that disease, or even the degree to which the disease itself might offer the possibility of its own cure. We find a paradigmatic example of this uncanny quality in the figure of Pu Yi himself, who was positioned at the interstices of past and present, foreign and domestic. As the last emperor of the Qing, Pu Yi was a living embodiment of a traditional dynastic system that had already become a virtual anachronism, while in his subsequent role as emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo he represented a foreign presence positioned at the very margins of the Chinese nation.

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Although in neither instance was Pu Yi perceived as a national savior, his presence on the contemporary political scene nevertheless helped ground contemporary debates over the nation’s future. Pu Yi functioned, in other words, as a symptom of the structural fissures that existed within contemporary China’s sociopolitical order, while at the same time pointing to the possibility of alternative configurations.

1 •

Reform

The first chapter of Liu E’s 1906 novel Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji) opens with a description of the protagonist’s encounter with a man suffering from a mysterious disease that causes “his whole body to fester in such a way that every year several open sores appeared, and if one year these were not healed, the next year several more would appear elsewhere.”1 The patient’s family notices that the sores appear to follow a seasonal rhythm, erupting every summer and then subsiding around the time of the autumn equinox. The family has no idea how to treat the disease, however, and therefore they seek Lao Can’s assistance. Lao Can recommends that the family look to the teaching of the ancients for a potential cure. Noting that whereas for other diseases one might seek guidance in the works of the legendary sage emperors Shen Nong and Huang Di (the “Divine Farmer” and the “Yellow Emperor”), in this case he recommends that they instead turn to the methods of the Great Yu and the Han dynasty physician Wang Jing. While Shen Nong and Huang Di are traditionally credited with having authored two of the foundational texts of traditional Chinese medicine—​Shen Nong’s Herb-­Root Classic (Shennong bencao jing) and Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing) 2 —​the Great

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Yu’s primary technical expertise lay not in medicine but rather in flood control. In particular, Yu is reputed to have spent thirteen years taming the flooding of the Yellow River, as a result of which the emperor at the time, Shun, appointed Yu to be his co-­r uler. Seventeen years later, Shun abdicated the throne, leaving Yu as the emperor of what Chinese historiography has traditionally recognized as the nation’s first hereditary dynasty, the Xia. Lao Can’s appeal to the teachings of the legendary sage emperor Yu suggests that his patient—​whose surname, Huang, literally means “yellow,” and whose full name, Huang Ruihe, is a close homophone of the phrase huangshui he, or literally “yellow-­water river”—​symbolizes the Yellow River, and that Huang’s recurrent skin sores correspond to the river’s devastating floods that have plagued China throughout its history. Originating in the Bayankala Mountains in the northwestern Qinghai province, the Yellow River traverses China’s heartland before emptying into the Bohai Sea, and it gets its name from the large quantities of yellow silt it picks up in North China’s Loess Plateau—​silt that lends the river its distinctive color while also contributing to its destructive propensity to overflow its banks. To the extent that the fictional Huang Ruihe symbolizes the river that has been viewed as not only a national treasure but also a perennial scourge, Lao Can’s efforts to treat Huang’s sores represent contemporary attempts to address China’s sociopolitical challenges. While the Great Yu used his success in taming the flooding of the Yellow River to establish himself as the founding emperor of what has been traditionally regarded as China’s first dynasty, the Xia, Liu E was writing roughly three thousand years later during what would prove to be the final years of China’s last dynasty, the Qing. By Liu E’s time, China’s political system had become increasingly compromised by factors that included not only foreign assaults but also internal rebellions, an inflationary economy, and a critically weakened imperial court. Just as the history of the Yellow River has been characterized by a series of devastating floods and dramatic course changes, China’s three millennia of dynastic rule have similarly been punctuated by recurrent periods of political instability and regime change. In symbolizing the Yellow River, therefore, Huang Ruihe simultaneously



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provides a compelling metonym for a set of conflicting visions of the Chinese nation itself. By opening Travels of Lao Can with an allegory that aligns his protagonist with one of China’s most legendary leaders, Liu E underscores the importance of using traditional principles to address the challenges facing contemporary China. The irony, though, is that by the early twentieth century many of these early principles had already been partially forgotten, and consequently in reintroducing them Lao Can was offering something that was nominally familiar yet also distinctly alien. One of his key principles emphasizes the importance of maintaining a happy medium between mutually opposed forces or elements, which also describes his own efforts to maintain a balance between the familiar and alien connotations inherent in his own approach. In order to accomplish this objective, however, Lao Can had to position himself as a tacitly alien element within the same cultural and political structures that he was attempting to reform in the first place. Rivers and Lakes

In Chinese, the same verb zhi may be used to describe the practice of medicine or managing the body (zhishen), governing the nation (zhiguo), managing rivers and waterways (zhishui), suggesting an underlying continuity between medicine, politics, and flood control. These three areas are not only brought together in Travels of Lao Can’s initial discussion of Huang Ruihe’s mysterious sores, but they also reflect the author’s own primary areas of interest and professional expertise. Like his protagonist, Liu E was also a practicing physician and had written two volumes on Chinese medicine. In 1888, he was appointed to help repair a breach in the dikes of the Yellow River in Henan province, whereupon the governor of Shandong invited him to come serve as his official advisor on flood control. Liu E’s novel itself, meanwhile, may be viewed as an attempt to use literature to offer a commentary on the political challenges facing contemporary China, as it explicitly juxtaposes discussions of governmentality with ones of medical treatment and flood control.

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The novel’s initial discussion of Huang Ruihe’s illness is immediately followed by a sequence in which Lao Can and his companions notice a ship out at sea that appears to be listing dangerously. After observing the vessel’s predicament from a distance with their telescopes, Lao Can and his companions decide to try to help, and they recruit a small fishing boat to carry them out to the ship. More specifically, having determined that the ship is in need of orientation, they attempt to take it a compass, a sextant, and other nautical instruments. Before they arrive, however, Lao Can and his companions notice that several men on board appear to be encouraging their fellow passengers to give them money, whereupon the men promise to give the passengers their “freedom and lifeblood” in order to “lay the foundations of a freedom that is eternal and secure” (12/10). Upon observing this development, Lao Can and his companions decide to lower their sails and sit back to see what happens. After collecting everyone’s money, the men on board the ship encourage the passengers to attack the ship’s captain and helmsmen, arguing that if the passengers act together they will surely be able to overpower the ship’s crew. Some of the passengers follow this advice but are promptly killed, at which point Lao Can and his companions decide to approach the ship after all. Just as they are trying to board, however, some of the crew notice them and cry out, “They’ve got a foreign compass. They must be traitors sent by the foreign devils! They must be Catholics! They have already sold our ship to the foreign devils, and that’s why they have this compass” (13/11). Lao Can and his companions are therefore forced to retreat, and the first chapter concludes with their boat being destroyed and sinking beneath the waves. The following chapter opens with Lao Can waking up and realizing that the entire sequence of the sinking ship had all been but a dream. In this dream, the ship clearly represents the Chinese ship of state, which was growing increasingly unstable during the late Qing period in which the novel was written and set. The modern nautical instruments, meanwhile, symbolize the Western knowledge that was being introduced into China during this same period, apparently suggesting that China needed these Western resources as much as the listing ship needed modern navigational equipment. Although the compass is presented in the novel as a symbol of the West, however,



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the technology was actually invented in the Han dynasty for use as a divination device, and it began to be employed for navigation in China as early as the eleventh century—​more than a century before the first recorded use of the technology in Europe. The irony, accordingly, is that even as the compass functions as a paradigmatic symbol of geographical orientation, the technology’s own geographic origins are frequently misunderstood. In any event, to the extent that the compass invoked in Liu E’s novel is understood as a traditional Chinese technology that has been redeployed for contemporary purposes, the implication would appear to be not that China needs to rely on Western learning to address its problems, but rather that it must instead look back to its own tradition for solutions. Just as the opening description of Lao Can’s treatment of Huang Ruihe may be read as a commentary on the application of traditional Chinese teaching to address modern problems, Lao Can’s dream of the ship condenses various contemporary responses to the nation’s difficulties. For instance, Lao Can’s use of the compass and sextant to help rescue the ship symbolizes the use of Western learning to strengthen the nation; the men on board the ship stand for revolutionaries urging violent insurrection; and the crew’s paranoiac response mirrors the xenophobic attitudes of the Boxers. All of these efforts ultimately fail, however, and the ship eventually sinks. The juxtaposition of the novel’s discussions of Huang Ruihe and the ship, accordingly, suggests that the deployment of traditional Chinese teachings may offer a more effective solution to the nation’s problems than do rebellion, revolution, or even the introduction of foreign technology. The collective failure, in the dream, of the various efforts to rescue the sinking ship is contrasted with Lao Can’s simultaneous success in treating and curing Huang Ruihe’s mysterious illness. A similar emphasis on finding traditional solutions to modern problems is also developed through the figure of Lao Can himself. Like the author Liu E, the protagonist Lao Can spent several years studying for the civil service exams, and after failing to pass the exams he encountered a Taoist monk who offered to train him in the arts of traditional healing. Lao Can agreed to become the monk’s apprentice, and upon completing his training he proceeded to spend the next two decades working as an itinerant doctor whose views on medicine are

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explicitly inspired by the Chinese medical canon. The novel further specifies that during the period Lao Can spent working as a doctor, he was continually “wander[ing] through the jianghu” (6/4)—​the novel here uses a term that literally means “rivers and lakes” and refers to a quasi-­mythical space located at the margins of organized society. Traditionally associated with bandits, outlaws, and political loyalists, the jianghu is a liminal zone popularized in fictional works like the classic Ming dynasty novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), where it represents a space of exile to which each of the novel’s 108 “heroes” retreat after run-­ins with the law. In the latter third of the original Ming dynasty version of The Water Margin, however, the Song emperor recruits the outlaws to help repel an attack by the Khitans to the north and also to help suppress an internal uprising led by the Chinese rebel leader Fang La. The ensuing reversal of the protagonists’ status, from social outlaws to imperial allies, has been a recurrent object of fascination. The influential seventeenth-­century critic Jin Shengtan, for instance, found this reversal so disconcerting that he proceeded to edit a new version of the work that cut the original novel’s 120 chapters down to only 70, removing the entire discussion of the outlaws’ political realignment and its aftermath while also adding a voluminous body of commentary criticizing the outlaws and everything they represented. For centuries, this abridged edition—​which concludes with the capture and execution of the outlaws—​functioned as the orthodox version of the work, emphasizing a fundamental separation between the political orthodoxy of the dynastic regime and the putative heterodoxy of the jianghu. In Liu E’s Travels of Lao Can, meanwhile, the jianghu is not only positioned as a space at the margins of the social order, but it also carries a more literal significance of being a region of actual “rivers and lakes.” That is to say, much of the novel takes place near the Yellow River, and one of the work’s recurrent themes involves the need to manage the perennial risk of the river’s flooding. Lao Can’s approach to flood control is symptomatic of his more general views on governance in that, when presented with a problem, he invariably recommends an approach that relies not on an overt display of authority but rather on a strategic leveraging of countervailing forces. Or, to borrow one of the novel’s own metaphors, Lao Can’s goal is to produce a state



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of equilibrium similar to that of the work’s so-­called Golden Thread Spring—​a pool that gets its name from what appears to be a gossamer thread floating on the surface of the water. It turns out that this apparent thread is actually a juncture where the currents from two different streams meet, and while the line that is visible on the surface of the water periodically shifts back and forth as the force of one stream momentarily exceeds that of the other, in the long run the two streams maintain a stable equilibrium with one another. The novel applies this principle of harmonious equilibrium to the issue of flood control when a governor requests Lao Can’s advice on how to deal with the periodic flooding of the Yellow River. Observing that the governor is following an approach to flood control that had been proposed by the Han dynasty official Jia Rang (who had advocated that the river simply be allowed to overflow its banks when necessary, rather than attempting to control it with dikes and other physical barriers), Lao Can recommends instead the teachings of Wang Jing—​the same Han dynasty physician and public servant he had cited in his earlier diagnosis of Huang Ruihe’s illness. Lao Can explains that Wang Jing’s method consists of a process of “uniting and dividing” and, more specifically, deepening the riverbed so as to increase the speed of the water flowing through it, thereby reducing the rate of silt deposit and decreasing the risk of future flooding. Rather than simply letting the river overflow its banks and flood the surrounding region, this latter approach instead enables one to harness the river’s own strength to help regulate its course. The novel’s discussion of the Golden Thread Spring and of Wang Jing’s “uniting and dividing” approach to flood control is immediately followed by detailed accounts of two inverse strategies to controlling banditry, each of which illustrates a different dimension of this principle of harmonious reciprocity. In the work’s first major subplot, an innkeeper tells Lao Can about a family surnamed Yu that has been robbed by bandits. The family had reported the theft to the local prefect—​whose surname, coincidentally, also happens to be pronounced Yu, though it is written with a different character—​a nd the prefect proceeded to track down the bandits and lock them inside a cage until they suffocated. While on the surface this punishment might appear to constitute an effective deployment of governmental power for the

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public good, the reason why this particular incident comes to Lao Can’s attention in the first place is because the prefect subsequently arrested several members of the same family that had been robbed. It turns out that the bandits, furious at the family for having reported the original robbery and thereby indirectly causing the execution of their comrades, retaliate by framing the family for theft. When Prefect Yu and his representatives find the falsified evidence that the bandits have prepared for them, the prefect is as ruthlessly efficient in his persecution of the Yus as he had been in his treatment of the original bandits, eventually arresting and executing four members of the Yu clan in order to teach the rest of the community a lesson. The innkeeper relating these events concludes that the bandits were subsequently overheard claiming responsibility for the family’s deaths, explaining that they had been using the prefect to help them exact revenge on the family—​or, as the bandits put it, they were “killing with a borrowed knife.” Lao Can agrees that the bandits had used Prefect Yu as their virtual “tool” (46/54), but emphasizes that this does not mean that the prefect was necessarily corrupt or incompetent. Instead, he suggests, the problem is actually the exact opposite—​that it is precisely the prefect’s desire to be an upright official that renders him so easily manipulated by the bandits, just as it is the fact that the prefect is a “man of ability” that renders the consequences of his persecution of the Yu family so devastating. In fact, the bandits themselves are said to have been somewhat taken aback when they learned that their actions had led to the deaths of four innocent people, acknowledging that they had fully intended to use the prefect to exact revenge against the family but claiming that they never intended for their actions to result in anyone’s death. In this sequence, Liu E’s novel is articulating a version of Ming dynasty critic Li Zhi’s famous critique that the only thing worse than a corrupt official is an uncorruptible one. Li Zhi’s argument was that a narrow adherence to a strict set of regulations was more likely to result in a perversion of justice than an approach that complemented the enforcement of formal rules and regulations with strategic input from the people themselves. Li Zhi viewed this sort of supplementary input—​which typically takes the form of bribes and other unofficial



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interventions—​as constituting not so much a corruption of the legal process but rather as a way of rectifying potential miscarriages of justice that might result from a strict adherence to the law. A similar logic applies to the novel’s critique of Prefect Yu, who appears to be neither corrupt nor particularly incompetent but who produces a gross injustice precisely because he focuses too narrowly on attempting to enforce the laws based on the evidence available to him, without realizing that he is actually being manipulated by others. After the innkeeper finishes retelling this story about Prefect Yu and the bandits, Lao Can then meets with Shen Dongzao, the newly-­ appointed magistrate of Chengwu county, and after briefly discussing the situation involving Prefect Yu and the Yu family, Lao Can soon moves on to the question of how Shen will address the threat of bandits in the area under his jurisdiction. The problem, as Shen explains, is not merely that there are bandits, but more importantly that the sheer size of the territory for which he is responsible makes it impossible for him to guard against all potential attacks. In response, Lao Can explains that there are actually two kinds of bandits: the “greater bandits,” who “have chieftains, obey orders, and have regulations,” and the “lesser bandits,” who “are simply rogues and vagabonds who go about looting whenever and wherever they have a chance” (65/74). Lao Can proposes that one must use different tactics in dealing with each of these groups of outlaws—​forming strategic alliances with the greater bandits while confronting the lesser bandits directly. More specifically, he recommends that Shen take a page from the methods of private insurance companies, explaining that a token number of insurance company guards are usually sufficient to deal with a much larger number of bandits, precisely because the bandits and the insurance companies exist in a delicate symbiotic relationship with one another. Lao Can notes that it is an accepted rule among the greater bandits not to harm the guards belonging to the insurance offices. So all the carts with escorts carry a mark. When they travel, they have a password, and when this password is called, even if the bandits meet them face to face, they merely exchange a greeting and will never make an attack. The bandits all know the marks of the various insurance houses, and they have several lairs that the insurance guards know about. If a

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PART 1  ▪   19 0 6: P H A G O C YTES member of a band reaches a place where there is an insurance office and goes in and gives a secret sign, he is recognized as a comrade belonging to such and such a “route” and is at once made welcome and given wine and food, and on leaving must also be given two or three hundred cash for travel expenses. If he is an important leader, then they must make every effort to entertain him. This is known as the law of the jianghu. (66/75)

The implication is that the greater bandits will accept payoffs from the insurance companies in return for helping maintain order along the highways, thereby effectively becoming an extension of the same insurance system that was originally designed to help protect against the threat posed by the bandits themselves. Once the greater bandits have been taken care of, Lao Can continues, it would be relatively easy to deal with the lesser ones—​since if one of the latter commits a robbery, representatives of the greater bandits will inevitably capture and bring him to justice. In other words, just as Lao Can had recommended strategically deepening the Yellow River so that the strength of the river itself could be used to decrease the risk of flooding, he similarly proposes that the best way of dealing with bandits is to empower them so that they may then regulate themselves. To help implement his proposal, Lao Can recommends his friend Liu Renfu, who is described as having been trained in various forms of “boxing” and also as being dedicated to the cause of national reform. Ultimately frustrated with his inability to enact change through traditional political means, Liu Renfu had decided instead to withdraw from public life and become a farmer. Lao Can’s description of Liu’s desire to “bury himself in anonymity” is rather ironic, since he emphasizes in the same breath that Liu is actually quite “well-­known throughout the jianghu.” Like Lao Can himself, Liu Renfu is a paradigmatically liminal figure, positioned at the interstices of two mutually opposed social worlds. As someone who was trained in traditional boxing but is also committed to national reform, for instance, Liu is a hybrid of what the novel identifies as the “Southern boxers” and “Northern revolutionaries”; as someone who was previously involved in public affairs but has subsequently withdrawn from social life, he represents a hybrid of political activism and reclusion. Finally, it is precisely Liu’s familiarity with the bandits, combined with his ­willingness to work with



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the authorities, that makes him an ideal figure to implement Lao Can’s proposal. Liu Renfu, accordingly, is a direct correlate of the figure of the Golden Thread discussed near the beginning of the novel, perfectly positioned to mediate between various sets of mutually opposed imperatives. At its heart, Lao Can’s proposal for handling the bandits involves an elaborate hermeneutics. Through a patchwork of marks, passwords, and secret reports, the bandits and insurance guards learn to recognize each other, thereby allowing them to coalesce into a stable unit that benefits not only the bandits and the guards themselves but also society as a whole. The resulting social order, meanwhile, is predicated on a semiotic system intelligible to only a small minority, each of whom is acting out of a sense of duty not to the social body as a whole but rather to the specific subgroup to which he belongs. In its emphasis on a network of marks, passwords, and secret signs, Lao Can’s scheme for dealing with the bandits envisages the jianghu as a fundamentally textual space, in which the status of its various actors, together with the relationships between them, is a product of reading and interpretation. Travels of Lao Can, accordingly, presents the jianghu as a virtual text that parallels the status of the novel itself, which itself must literally be read and interpreted. For instance, like many late imperial novels, each chapter of Travels of Lao Can opens with a seemingly cryptic couplet, such as the following one from the first chapter: The land does not hold back the water: every year a disaster. The wind beats up the waves: everywhere is danger.

These lines allude elliptically to the two major narrative threads developed in the chapter itself: namely, Lao Can’s diagnosis of Huang Ruihe’s illness and his parallel dream of the sinking ship. The implication is that Huang Ruihe’s illness symbolizes the perennial flooding of the Yellow River, while the ship represents the crisis currently faced by the Chinese nation, and in using a coded couplet to help explicate this double allegory, the text is simultaneously hinting at how the objects of this pair of allegories—​namely, river flooding and national crisis—​ may in turn be related to one another. One of the more elaborate examples of this sort of coded language can be found in the couplet at the beginning Chapter 11:

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PART 1  ▪   19 0 6: P H A G O C YTES A plague rat carrying calamity becomes a panic-­making horse; A mad dog spreading disaster develops into a poisonous dragon.

In the ensuing narrative, a character known as Yellow Dragon explains that the significance of the animals alluded to in the couplet lies in their position within the Chinese zodiac: Preparations for the Boxer outbreak in the North began in the wuzi year [1888] and were already mature by the jiawu year [1894]. In the gengzi year [1900], zi [rat] and wu [horse] will clash with a great explosion. . . . ​Preparations for the Southern revolution, begun in wuxu [1898], were mature by the jiachen year [1904]. In gengxu [1910], chen [dragon] and xu [dog] will clash with a great explosion. (108/119)

Under this scheme, the Boxer Uprising of 1900 has its roots in a historical trajectory that can be traced back to 1888, while the Hundred Days’ Reform Movement of 1898 conversely marked the beginning of a historical trajectory that would ultimately culminate in “a great explosion” in the year 1910. Just as the Chinese zodiac offers a basis for understanding the historical references in this chapter’s opening couplet, the couplet itself similarly offers a key for understanding the broader historical trends on which the chapter is itself commenting. In particular, this reference to the Southern Revolutionaries’ “great explosion” of 1910 appears to predict with uncanny accuracy the Xinhai Revolution of 1911—​though with the distinction that the 1910 event alluded to in the novel is presented as having been unsuccessful while the historical Xinhai Revolution did in fact lead to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. Although Liu E, who wrote and published these chapters in 1906, obviously could not have known that five years later the Xinhai Revolution would bring down the Qing dynasty, he nevertheless correctly observed that the sociopolitical repercussions of earlier events such as the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 were still being played out. Hidden within the coded couplet at the beginning of Liu E’s chapter, accordingly, we find a commentary not only on the ensuing plot of the novel but also on the historical events that continued to unfold even as the novel itself was still being written.



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From this decoding of the opening couplet’s historical allusions, the novel’s narrative then offers a new metaphor for how history itself may be approached as a virtual text in its own right. More specifically, while Yellow Dragon criticizes the destabilizing potential of both the Southern Boxers and Northern Revolutionaries, he nevertheless concludes that it is ultimately the revolutionaries who represent the greatest threat to China. As he explains, The Boxers are like a man’s fist. He strikes, and if he succeeds, he succeeds; if he doesn’t succeed, he stops, and nothing serious ­happens. . . . ​Then there is the revolution (ge). The character ge means a hide, like a horse’s or ox’s hide. It covers the body from head to foot. However, don’t think what we are talking about is merely a mild skin disease, because if eruptions appear all over the body, they can be fatal. The one good thing about it is that such a disease proceeds slowly and if you take pains to cure it, it doesn’t generally cause serious harm. (111/123)

The etymology of the term ge—​which is short here for geming, or “revolution”—​proposed by Yellow Dragon resembles the novel’s earlier account of Huang Ruihe’s disease, though in this latter case the epidermal eruptions are symptoms not of an underlying illness in late-­Qing society but rather of the reformist or revolutionary forces attempting to address that same illness. From the revolutionaries’ perspective, accordingly, their goal presumably lay not in curing the diseased skin in which traditional Chinese society was cloaked but rather in radically transforming it by overthrowing the existing government and replacing it with a new one. In a precise inversion of progressive political discourses popular at the time, however, Yellow Dragon suggests here that revolution is not a solution to the problems facing contemporary China but rather should be seen as a figurative disease in its own right. Yellow Dragon further argues that rebellion and revolution may be viewed as mirror images of one another. Associating rebellion with the so-­called Northern Revolutionaries and revolution with the Southern Boxers, Yellow Dragon notes that the superstitious Boxers rely on a “belief in spirits,” while the secular revolutionaries rely

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instead on a “disbelief in spirits.” He then points to the advantages and limits of both of these mutually antithetical orientations, but rather than supporting either of these approaches himself, he instead argues that one must find a way of recognizing—​a nd thereby strategically avoiding—​both the Boxers and the revolutionaries. In effect, Lao Can is recommending that one must seek to maintain a virtual Golden Thread between these mutually opposed political forces, either of which might otherwise end up undermining the nation whose sickness they are ostensibly attempting to address in the first place. Like the original Golden Thread discussion, Yellow Dragon’s remarks here suggest that the middle ground between of rebellion and revolution takes the form of a virtual text and must therefore be interpolated from the corresponding phenomena themselves. In particular, this imaginary line between rebellion and revolution may be derived from an analysis of the sociocultural impact of these alternative approaches to reform. Not only are the symptoms of the original societal sickness theoretically legible within contemporary phenomena, so are the consequences of various approaches that have been taken in an attempt to address these underlying problems. The path to national reform, in other words, is informed not only by the specific problems and challenges facing contemporary society but also by the legacy of alternative approaches that have been introduced previously. Even as Yellow Dragon’s comparison of revolution to a kind of skin disease harkens back to the novel’s earlier description of Huang Ruihe’s mysterious boils and pustules, it simultaneously anticipates the work’s next major subplot. More specifically, Chapter 12 describes how Lao Can, while staying at an inn on his way back to the provincial capital, runs into an acquaintance by the name of Huang Renrui—​ a businessman who is also a local prefect and who works on water conservation.3 Huang Renrui brings with him two prostitutes, Cuihua and Cuihuan, and indicates that he has brought the former for himself and the latter for Lao Can. The four of them chat for a while, but when it is time to retire for the evening, Lao Can demurs and informs Huang Renrui that he doesn’t want Cuihuan to spend the night with him. Huang, however, points out that Cuihuan’s madam would surely punish her if she were sent back because a customer had rejected her and therefore encourages Lao Can to let her stay with him, even if



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for merely platonic purposes. Lao Can eventually agrees, whereupon Huang Renrui notes that he had actually wanted to talk to Lao Can about Cuihuan’s situation. He shows Lao Can the woman’s arms, which are covered with bruises and scars, and notes, “If her arms are like this, the rest of her body must be even worse” (132/145). He then orders Cuihuan to remove her clothes so that Lao Can may see her body. Like Huang Ruihe’s boils and pustules and the skin disease allegedly implicit in the etymology of the Chinese word for revolution, Cuihuan’s scars function as a virtual text signifying an underlying set of societal tensions. Unlike the earlier two examples, both of which focus on the effects of imaginary diseases, however, Cuihuan’s scars are indexical traces of the physical punishment she has endured. Given that Cuihuan demurs when asked to show Lao Can her scars, the reader is left to imagine what her body looks like, even as Cuihua launches into a detailed description of the sequence of events that originally led to Cuihuan’s becoming a sex worker in the first place. In this way, the novel’s narrative relates a version of the same story that is presumably contained within the virtual text inscribed on Cuihuan’s body. Cuihua explains that Cuihuan originally came from a wealthy family that owned property near the Yellow River. To address the problem of repeated flooding, however, the provincial governor proposed an approach modeled on the one previously advocated by the Han dynasty official Jia Rang, which, as specified near the beginning of the novel, involved deliberately widening the river in areas that were prone to flooding. In particular, in this region there are generally two sets of dikes along the river—​including a set of so-­called people’s dikes located near the river and built by the residents themselves, and the larger main dikes that are located further from the river bank and constructed by the government. Like many other residents of the region, Cuihuan and her family lived in the fertile area between these two sets of dikes, positioning them in an interstitial zone between areas of popular and governmental authority. As a result of the governor’s decisions, however, the Yellow River permanently flooded this region between the two sets of dikes, driving Cuihuan’s family from their home. It was only after Cuihuan’s family was left destitute by

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these developments that Cuihuan herself was forced into prostitution, ultimately leading to the beatings that left her physically scarred. Upon hearing this story, Lao Can concludes that the factors that led to Cuihuan’s current circumstances were actually the result not of the provincial governor’s selfish or malicious intentions but rather simply his ignorance and general myopia. In particular, Lao Can is critical of the governor for relying on book learning and lacking sufficient practical experience in actual governance, and he quotes the Confucian classic Mencius (Mengzi) to the effect that, “To believe everything in the Book of History (Shangshu) would be worse than having no Book of History at all.” The irony, of course, is that even though Lao Can’s trademark approach throughout the novel involves an attempt to apply traditional teachings to address contemporary problems, here he is citing Mencius to illustrate the dangers of relying too heavily on those same canonical texts and the traditional teachings they ­contain. The results of the governor’s approach to flood control, accordingly, are visible not only in the reconfigured terrain surrounding the Yellow River but also in the network of scars that cover Cuihuan’s body. The significance of this corporeal text is nevertheless made quite clear in the ensuing narrative, with the marks on Cuihuan’s flesh functioning as indexical traces of the hardships she has previously endured, and as such they parallel the biographical account that Cuihua proceeds to relate, together with the more general text of the novel as a whole. At the same time, however, the fact that Cuihuan’s scarred body is apparently never actually seen by Lao Can points to the possibility of a negative hermeneutics that attempts to make sense of a text, the significance of which lies precisely in the fact that it can’t be read. It is, in other words, in the symbolic illegibility of the marks covering Cuihuan’s body that we find a catalyst for the resulting narrative of her life. In this respect, Cuihuan may be viewed as a direct corollary of the figure of Huang Ruihe at the beginning of the novel, in that the material legacy of the sociopolitical conditions that shaped her is directly visible on the surface of her body. Cuihuan’s scarred flesh is a site of uncanny return, wherein the legacy of prior sociopolitical conditions intrudes into the present. Her body is a site of trauma and, as such, represents the compulsive return of the past—​with the scars



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that cover her skin paralleling both the story that Cuihua tells about her as well as Liu E’s novel itself. At the same time, however, Cuihuan stands as a figure not only of the uncanny return of the past but also of a potential vision of the future. Upon hearing this account of Cuihuan’s past and learning that her mistress now plans to sell her to a new owner with a reputation for sadism, Lao Can proposes that he might purchase Cuihuan himself and subsequently grant her her freedom and help her find a ­husband. These plans for Cuihuan’s future are unexpectedly precipitated in a scene in the following chapter, when a fire suddenly breaks out in the inn where Lao Can and Huang Renrui had been staying with the two women. Huang Renrui’s and Cuihua’s belongings are retrieved undamaged, but it turns out that Lao Can’s travel bag and Cuihuan’s bedding have both been destroyed by the fire. Lao Can claims that most of his possessions were of little value and could be easily replaced, whereupon Huang Renrui points out that Lao Can has lost the string of bells that symbolize his status as an itinerant doctor. Huang then suggests that just as Cuihuan’s loss of her bedding represent the end of her career as a sex worker, given that she will now hopefully be married and become someone’s wife, Lao Can’s simultaneous loss of his string of bells similarly marks the end of his career as a travelling physician, given that these bells functioned as the symbol of his trade. In the end, the fire does prove to be an important turning point in Cuihuan’s life, since Lao Can decides that he must purchase her out of prostitution and make her his own concubine. In doing so, however, he ironically reaffirms the commoditized logic of the system in which Cuihuan finds herself positioned, precisely by freeing her from that same system. As for Lao Can himself, meanwhile, it turns out that the fire does not mark the end of his medical career but rather overlaps with a final case that pivots around a strategic juxtaposition of life and death. In this case, Lao Can learns of a father and daughter who are being tortured by a local magistrate on charges of having poisoned to death all eighteen members of an extended family. Lao Can manages to secure a letter from the governor ordering that the interrogation be halted, and it is subsequently revealed that the father and daughter are

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in fact innocent. As the investigation continues, it turns out that the real criminal, who bore a grudge against the family, had managed to secure a tasteless poison that leaves its victims in a deathlike coma. Lao Can is able to find a foul-­tasting antidote to the poison, and the authorities proceed to disinter the family’s bodies and use the antidote to revive them. This final subplot of the original twenty-­chapter version of the novel brings together several of the themes at the heart of the work as a whole—​including a woman whose past is visibly inscribed on her body, an official who is perpetrating a miscarriage of justice precisely because he is too upright, and an eventual resolution that pivots on the juxtaposition of mutually opposed forces (in this case, the poison and the antidote). The final twist, wherein the entire family is exhumed and seemingly revived from the dead, illustrates the logic of uncanny returns on which the work as a whole is predicated. Lao Can’s practice of repeatedly appealing to ancient medical and political writings in order to address contemporary problems reflects the degree to which the present remains haunted by vestiges of the past. A similar fascination with remnants is also reflected in Lao Can’s name. The opening chapter of the novel explains that Lao Can’s actual name is Tie Ying, but that he selected Bu Can as his hao or style name after having been inspired by a Tang dynasty Buddhist monk known as Lan Can, whose own name was derived from his reputation for being lazy (lan) and fond of eating scraps (can). The narrative notes that the fictional Lao Can was inspired by an anecdote in which the Tang monk instructed the statesman Li Bi, who was visiting him in his monastery, that Li Bi should agree to be prime minister for ten years. In selecting Bu Can—​which could be translated literally as “supplementing vestiges”—​as his own style name, accordingly, Lao Can was underscoring his interest in drawing on traditional teachings to address contemporary problems and specifically his interest in leveraging external forces for his own ends. On the other hand, however, the fact that Liu E’s protagonist subsequently comes to be known not by his chosen name Bu Can but rather as Lao Can, or literally “old vestiges,” suggests that he himself may be viewed as an extension of the same historical vestiges that his name implies he was attempting to supplement in the first place. In this respect, Lao Can is positioned



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as both cure and disease—​rendering it fitting that his trademark approach to virtually any challenge lies in trying to leverage mutually opposed forces against each other. With respect to the political considerations suggested by the novel’s opening allegory, Lao Can’s approach emphasizes the importance of establishing a balance between domestic and foreign, contemporary and traditional, or even authoritarian and laissez-­faire governmen­ ­tal approaches. At the same time, however, Lao Can himself, together with the approach he is advocating, is invariably viewed as an outsider to the communities he is attempting to advise. He represents, accordingly, a site of alterity and difference—​which is to say, of ­homesickness—​on which his proposed reformist approach is ultimately grounded. Coda: Oracle Bones

The issues of flood control, medical treatment, and political reform that Liu E explores in Travels of Lao Can are paralleled by the author’s concurrent contributions to one of the most important historical discoveries of modern China. In 1899, Liu E had travelled to Beijing to visit his friend Wang Yirong, who had come to the capital to offer the Empress Dowager advice on the Boxer Uprising. While in Beijing, Wang had fallen ill from malaria and begun taking a potion made from ground up “dragon bones,” which had recently become popular as treatment for the disease. Upon receiving one batch of these so-­ called dragon bones, Wang noticed that some of them had a variety of odd markings, and being an expert on early bronze inscriptions, he realized that these inscriptions were actually a version of the Chinese language that was much more ancient than any known at that time. It turns out that these three-­thousand-­year-­old characters were written in what is now known as oracle bones script, which is one of the oldest extant versions of written Chinese. Wang Yirong committed suicide the following year, in protest of Empress Dowager Cixi’s decision to support the Boxers, but his son sold Liu E the entire collection of “dragon bones” that Wang had in his possession at the time of his death. Liu E continued collecting more of these artifacts, acquiring thousands over the next several years, and in

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1903, he published a monograph consisting of copies and analyses of the inscriptions. At the same time, he attempted to determine the original source of the bones (the merchants who were serving as middlemen had been careful to keep the location a secret), though it was not until 1910, a year after Liu’s death, that the source was finally revealed to be a site just outside the village of Xiaotun, near the city of Anyang in Henan province, where flooding of the local Huan river had unearthed the artifacts.4 Just as Huang Ruihe’s illness at the beginning of Travels of Lao Can symbolizes the perennial flooding of the Yellow River, the oracle bones themselves were first rediscovered in a fissure in the earth’s crust that had been opened up when a river overflowed its banks; and just as Huang Ruihe’s skin sores offer a commentary on contemporary China’s sociopolitical situation, the inscriptions on these oracle bones were literally prophecies with significant implications for our understanding not only of the historical society that produced them but also of contemporary China’s view of its own past. Dating mostly from the latter half of the second millennium bce, these oracle bones were used in divination rituals and consisted of ox scapula and turtle shells on which a diviner would inscribe queries about future events. The bones and shells were then heated until they fractured, and from an analysis of the resulting cracks, the diviner would determine whether his query had been answered positively or negatively. Often this response would be inscribed on the surface of the bone or shell. The diviner would then wait to see whether or not the divination actually came to pass, and sometimes would inscribe this final result on the surface of the oracle bone as well. The result was a durable body of text that would not only offer invaluable insight into an early version of the Chinese script but would also provide a fascinating view into the ideals, desires, and anxieties of this early society. In contributing to the rediscovery and interpretation of these oracle bones, Liu E helped open a window into one of the earliest periods of Chinese recorded history. Although both the Shang dynasty and its predecessor, the Xia, are discussed in early historical texts, late nineteenth-­century Chinese historians had observed that there was in fact no firm archeological confirmation of the existence of either of



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these early dynasties. These historians concluded that these dynasties were probably retrospective inventions on the part of the Zhou period, from the first millennium bce. The assumption was that the Zhou, in an attempt to reinforce its own pedigree, essentially invented a preced­ ­ing dynastic tradition on which it could ground its claims to political legitimacy. Not only did the dating and content of the oracle bones indicate that they originated from the period corresponding to the Shang dynasty, however, these inscriptions also confirmed some of the details about the dynasty contained in traditional accounts. In recording divinations about what was then viewed as the future, in other words, these texts offered what would come to be compelling historical descriptions that would not become intelligible until read in the distant future. The rediscovery of these Shang dynasty oracle bones had two very different implications for contemporary understandings of Chinese culture and civilization. First, the artifacts were originally used to make divination inquiries directed to a celestial figure known as di, the historical antecedent of the figure of tian, or “heaven.” Given that di, unlike tian, was perceived not as a moral authority but rather as a mercurial force that shapes historical developments in fundamentally arbitrary ways, the objective of these Shang dynasty divinations was not to obtain moral guidance but rather to get a hint of what fate might have in store. The oracle bones texts, therefore, offer a glimpse into a worldview that was fundamentally arbitrary and capricious. Second, it is ironic that the very existence of the oracle bones had been forgotten for so long, given that the divinations constitute not only some of the oldest surviving examples of Chinese writing but also what are arguably the earliest attempts at anticipatory historiography. In particular, the fact that some of the inscriptions record instances of divination failure is striking evidence that they were not only conceived as a means of communicating with a celestial di but were also tacitly written for the benefit of future readers. These inscriptions, accordingly, testify to a desire not only to predict the future but also to record the past—​or rather, to record a vision of the present that would become the past when viewed from the perspective of a future observer. Both of these impulses, moreover, are grounded on a practice of reading and writing. The divinations are interpreted by parsing the

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quasi-­textual marks that appear on the surface of the bones or shells, and are then acknowledged by being translated and reinscribed on the same surface. While these oracle bones were initially viewed as enigmatic curiosities when they were first rediscovered at the turn of the twentieth century, they have now come to be regarded as paradigmatic symbols of the underlying continuity of the Chinese written language as well as of the Chinese culture and civilizational values to which that language is often assumed to be inextricably linked. Oracle bones script, meanwhile, has become a potent emblem of Chinese culture’s process of dissemination and transformation as it moves through space and time. A good example of this contemporary reimagination of oracle bones script can be found in the work of the contemporary Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew. Born in 1967 in Johor, West Malaysia, Ng grew up in a village in a rubber forest. In 1986, he went to study in Taiwan, where he is now a professor of Chinese literature and a prize­winning author. Virtually all of Ng’s fiction is set in peninsular Malaysia and the surrounding archipelago, and many of his stories thematize a struggle among contemporary Malaysian Chinese to negotiate their conflicting allegiances to their ancestral homeland and their new adopted homes. This struggle is particularly evident in Ng’s use of a written language that incorporates a considerable amount of local Chinese dialect and foreign vocabulary, including Malay, Japanese, English, and the Chinese dialect of Hokkien. A central concern in Ng’s works involves an interrogation of conventional assumptions about the relationship between language and identity as well as of the ability of language to convey meaning, and nowhere is this exploration of the limits of language more evident than in Ng’s fictional invocations of the figure of oracle bones. In several stories, Kim Chew Ng uses oracle bones and oracle bone script to explore these intersecting perspectives on cultural origins and ethnonational identity. In his 1995 story “Fish Bones” (Yuhai), for instance, the protagonist is a Malaysian Chinese professor who is so fascinated with oracle bone inscriptions that he not only studies the ancient texts themselves, he also recreates the original divination process by heating turtle shells until they crack. It is eventually revealed that the protagonist’s obsession with oracle bone inscriptions is rooted



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in an earlier crackdown on a Communist resistance group that had included the protagonist’s older brother. Years after the attack, the protagonist discovers what he believes to be his brother’s skeletal remains in a forest, surrounded by an array of turtle shells. The protagonist takes one of the bones and tells everyone who asks that it is a “fish bone.” This material relic functions as a metonym for both the protagonist’s traumatic past (in the form of the politically motivated assassination his brother) as well as for the limits of language itself (insofar as the “fish bone” functions as a stand-­in for the protagonist’s fascination with the inscriptions found on the oracle bones). By extension, oracle bones symbolize here the protagonist’s ambivalent relationship to the Chinese cultural tradition that ostensibly anchors his own identity as an overseas Chinese.5 Oracle bones also play an important role in Ng’s 2001 story “Inscribed Backs” (Kebei), which describes a Malaysian Chinese scholar researching the history of the transnational Chinese coolie trade. After catching a glimpse of a mysterious text tattooed on the back of a former coolie, the scholar spends years trying to track down the origin and meaning of these corporeal inscriptions. Although he ends up falling into a coma after being struck by a car before coming up with any credible leads, one of his assistants subsequently succeeds in tracing these tattoos back to a couple who once ran a brothel in Singapore. The couple tell the assistant about one visitor to the brothel who embarked on a quixotic project to create a literary masterpiece that he calls a modern-­day Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), which he planned to write entirely in oracle bone script and inscribe on an array of ten thousand tortoise shells. Before this visitor left the brothel, he was observed by an Englishman known as Mr. Fu, who was so intrigued by the tortoise shell inscriptions that he decided to undertake a similar project of his own, which he hoped would eventually become another Ulysses. Rather than writing in oracle bone script on tortoise shells and sheep scapula, however, Mr. Fu instead used an error-­riddled version of modern Chinese to inscribe tattoos on the backs of live Chinese coolies. Mr. Fu’s comparison of his text to Ulysses is revealing, in that the latter work was composed by an expatriate author who—​like Ng Kim Chew and perhaps Mr. Fu himself—​ had spent much of his adult life away from his homeland, and

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furthermore is known for his emphatically heteroglossic writing style. The text that Mr. Fu inscribes on the back of the coolie whom the narrator encounters, meanwhile, consists of countless miswritten variations on the Chinese character for hai 海, meaning “sea” and suggesting the diasporic trajectory of both the story’s protagonist and the author himself. While Liu E’s Travels of Lao Can emphasizes an attempt to draw on traditional teachings in order to help address contemporary problems by establishing a delicate balance between opposing forces, Ng Kim Chew’s thematization of oracle bone inscriptions in his stories a century later reflects an inverse version of a similar logic, wherein the inscriptions function not as familiar symbols of traditional Chinese culture but rather as deeply uncanny elements that effectively reaffirm the political, social, and cultural tensions that underlie the contemporary sociopolitical order. In this respect, it is fitting that the oracle bones-­inspired tattoos that cover the former coolie’s back in “Inscribed Backs” consist of an array of virtually illegible variations of the character for “sea.” In this way, the coolie is literally transformed into a figure of the maritime space of dislocation and diasporic movement of which he himself is a product. This symbolic sea functions as a marker not only of identity but also of the possibility that one’s own identity may be subject to a continual process of erasure and reappropriation. At the same time, however, it is significant that not only is the coolie himself illiterate, the characters tattooed all over his back are all so badly miswritten as to be virtually unintelligible. This body of corporeal inscriptions, accordingly, symbolizes not so much a locus of identity and identification but rather the necessary possibility of misidentification and misrecognition. It is precisely within this space of misrecognition, which underscores the coolie’s conflicted position at the interstices of a variety of different semiotic systems, meanwhile, that these miswritten characters for “sea” represent the possibility of new communities and spaces of identity.6 In this respect, the tattooed coolie in Kim Chew Ng’s story may be viewed as a modern-­day incarnation of Li Ruzhen’s Melody Orchid. Like Melody Orchid, with her mysteriously swollen belly, Hai similarly bears the physical traces of his conflicted position at the margins of the social order. The matrix of textual marks that literally covers



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his body functions both as a trace of past trauma but also as a horizon for future possibilities. For Hai, the array of virtually illegible variants of the Chinese character for “sea” that cover his back symbolizes not only his mediated connection to an ancient Sinitic linguistic and cultural tradition (in that the characters in question written in a garbled form of Chinese, while the text itself was originally inspired by a parallel compositional project written in ancient oracle bones script) but also his contemporary diasporic position (in that he is an “overseas Chinese,” as well as a paradigmatic exemplar of the transnational Chinese coolie trade). Hai’s diasporic status, meanwhile, makes him a paradigmatic figure of homesickness, in that he is positioned at the margins of an idealized Chinese cultural tradition theoretically dating back to the period of the oracle bones inscriptions themselves, even as the nearly illegible Chinese characters that mark his body are presented as sites of difference and alterity with respect to his own self-­ conception. While Liu E’s Travels of Lao Can focuses on the return of elements associated with China’s ancient past, meanwhile, Zeng Pu’s novel Flowers in a Sinful Sea and other contemporary texts discussed in the following chapter emphasize elements that instead carry foreign connotations. The uncanniness of these latter foreign figures is regarded as destabilizing and even threatening, but for this very reason also represent a potential locus of productive transformation, leading to a reimagination of the very possibility of political community itself.

2 •

Rebellion

In 1906, writing under the nom de plume “Sick Man of Asia” (dongya bingfu), Zeng Pu completed what was intended to be the first third of his novel Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Niehai hua). The work opens with a prologue describing a fictional Island of Happy Slavery whose inhabitants believe that because they have food, clothing, family, and honor, they are therefore “free.” In reality, however, we learn that the island—​ whose coordinates coincide roughly with those of China itself—​doesn’t actually have a single breath of freedom, and instead all of its inhabitants live in a state of unwitting servitude. The island is repeatedly buffeted by violent storms until eventually, in 1904, it sinks into the sea. Shortly after the island disappears beneath the waves, a man identified as Lover of Liberty (Aiziyouzhe) arrives in Shanghai and attempts to look into what happened to this mysterious island. He is surprised, however, to find everyone going about their business as though nothing had happened, and when he asks a woman in the street where the island can be found, she replies that it is actually located “everywhere.” The woman then shows the visitor a scroll, and when he returns home he tries to transcribe the scroll’s contents from mem­ ­ory. After unsuccessfully attempting to write down the narrative himself, he eventually decides instead to relate it to a friend who goes

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as by the name Sick Man of Asia and is described as being “an expert in translating and editing modern novels.” It is implied that this ­narrative, which is dictated by Lover of Liberty and then written down by Sick Man of Asia, becomes the text of the novel Flowers in a Sin­ ­f ul Sea. This opening vignette offers an allegorical commentary not only on contemporary China but also on the compositional history of the novel itself. It turns out that Zeng Pu originally borrowed the idea for the work from a fellow writer named Jin Tianhe, who had already composed the first six chapters of what he projected to be a sixty-­ chapter novel. Jin Tianhe had published the first two of these chapters in 1903 under the pseudonym Lover of Liberty, but ultimately decided not to complete the work. Instead, he handed over what he had written to Zeng Pu, who proceeded to revise these initial six chapters, compose another fourteen of his own, and then publish the resulting twenty chapters with the Forest of Literature (Xiaoshuo lin) press in two ten-­chapter volumes in 1905 and 1906. In 1907, Zeng Pu published an additional six chapters of the novel with the journal Forest of Literature, and in the 1920s, he revised these new chapters, wrote ten additional ones, and serialized all sixteen of the new chapters in the journal Zhenmeishan (Truth, beauty, and the good). He republished Chapters 1–30 in three stand-­alone volumes between 1927 and 1929, but he died in 1935 before completing what would have been the latter half of the projected sixty-­chapter novel. Whereas the Huang Ruihe allegory at the beginning of Travels of Lao Can presented Huang’s illness as a metaphor for the troubles afflicting late Qing China, the Island of Happy Slavery allegory at the beginning of the almost precisely contemporary Flowers in a Sinful Sea invokes the Sick Man of Asia as a figure not of China itself but rather of the processes by which the nation’s condition may come to be recognized and narrated. The sick man metaphor, in this latter instance, is an attribute that corresponds not to the nation as such but rather to the circumstances under which the nation becomes legible in the first place. More generally, the sick man trope functions here as a figure of alienated return, wherein visions of the past continually haunt the present, providing reminders of the original trauma while also gesturing forward to alternative futures.

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Imagined as an uncanny region that is both disconcertingly foreign yet also uncomfortably familiar, the Island of Happy Slavery offers an unconventional vision not only of Qing China itself but also of the inability of China’s residents to recognize the nation’s true condition and its underlying problems. The referent of the Sick Man of Asia who appears in the novel’s prologue, meanwhile, is not so much the Chinese nation itself but rather the process whereby the nation’s weaknesses are perceived and represented. The Sick Man’s function, in other words, is precisely to take this vision of the nation and make it accessible to a wider reading public, and it is within this space of uncanny recognition and public communication that the possibility of alternate social visions and configurations thereby becomes thinkable in the first place. Rebellion and Romance

Flowers in a Sinful Sea is a sprawling roman à clef that uses fictionalized versions of scores of historical figures to describe and help diagnose the sociopolitical disease afflicting contemporary China. The most notorious of these historical figures was the courtesan Sai Jinhua. In the late 1880s, Sai Jinhua had accompanied her husband, the diplomat Hong Jun, to Europe, where she made the acquaintance of Alfred von Waldersee. At the time, Waldersee was serving as Germany’s General Field Marshal, which was the highest position in the German army, and he was subsequently appointed Allied Supreme Commander of the Western forces in China. Legend has it that a decade after they first met, Sai Jinhua used her relationship with Waldersee to help convince him to bring an end to the foreign troops’ looting of Beijing after they had succeeded in putting down the Boxer Uprising. Sai Jinhua has been both excoriated and celebrated for this legendary intervention, accused of literally sleeping with the enemy while also being credited with helping to save Beijing—​and, by extension, China—​from further destruction. The legend of Sai Jinhua, accordingly, is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Boxer Uprising. Having originated in a region of rural Shandong that at the time was suffering from a devastat­ ­ing drought, the Boxers gradually adopted an explicitly patriotic and



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a­ nti-­foreign stance that was emblematized by their slogan “Support the Qing, Eliminate the Foreigners.” Nevertheless, there had initially been considerable debate within the Qing court over how to respond to the Boxers, with some officials recommending that the Boxers be treated as an unsanctioned uprising, while others advocated that they instead be supported as a patriotic force. The latter faction ultimately won out, and when the Boxers attacked Beijing’s Foreign Legation Quarter in the summer of 1900, the Qing imperial army helped them maintain the siege against the foreigners for nearly two months. Eventually, however, a deployment of about twenty thousand foreign troops under the authority of the Eight Nation Alliance reached Beijing, where they quickly overwhelmed not only the Boxers but also the Qing army itself. The foreign troops proceeded to loot and ransack the capital, and it was at this point that Sai Jinhua is reputed to have intervened with Waldersee, convincing him to order an end to the destruction. The conclusion of the uprising was officially marked by the signing of the Boxer Protocol in September 1901, which permitted the Empress Dowager Cixi to remain in power but obligated the Qing court to pay the governments of the Eight Nation Alliance an indemnity of 450 million taels over the next thirty-­nine years, to compensate them for the damage and expense they incurred as a result of their intercession against the Boxers. This enormous indemnity further exacerbated contemporary China’s political and economic instability, and ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Qing a decade later. After the fall of the Qing in 1911, China’s new republican government continued to honor the terms of the Boxer Protocol that had been signed by the Qing court, though in 1917 China suspended its payments to Germany and Austria on account of their role in World War I. As early as 1908, moreover, the United States had announced it would reinvest part of its share of the indemnity to support higher education in China. One result of this decision was the establishment of Tsinghua University in Beijing, which was funded largely from America’s share of the original Boxer indemnity. Over the following two decades, most of the remaining signatories of the treaty followed the United States’ lead, returning their respective portions of the indemnity to China. Like Sai Jinhua herself, these remitted funds

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were returning to China after having circulated abroad, and while some nations specified that their funds be used to support domestic transportation projects, the United States and the Soviet Union both earmarked their funds for educational initiatives, thereby inserting their influence directly into the process of transmitting knowledge and values from one generation of Chinese to the next. Just as these remitted funds represented an amalgam of Chinese and foreign elements, the Boxers themselves carried a combination of domestic and foreign connotations. While a rebellion is typically understood as a movement challenging a ruling regime, the Boxers viewed themselves as supporting the Qing by helping rid the nation of foreign presence. In the process of challenging the foreigners, however, the Boxers inadvertently set off a complex chain reaction that nearly ended up toppling the Qing court itself. Although the Qing by that point had ruled China for more than three and a half centuries, the ethnically Manchu ruling house was still perceived by some in China as “foreign.” Therefore, to the extent that the Boxers, through their alliance with the Qing, inadvertently contributed to the eventual downfall of the ethnically “foreign” Qing dynasty, they could indeed be viewed as simultaneously “supporting the Qing” and “expelling the [Manchu] foreigners.” Ironically, though, a key factor in the Boxers’ destabilization of the Qing court’s grip on power involved the court’s eventual decision to support the Boxers. As a result of this decision, the Eight Nation Alliance was subsequently able to make the court take responsibility for the uprising and force it to pay a set of crippling indemnities. That is to say, in deciding to ally itself with the Boxers and thereby validate their loyalist claims, the Qing court was inadvertently undermining its own strategic interests. In contrast to Liu E’s Travels of Lao Can, which repeatedly appeals to traditional Chinese teachings to find solutions to contemporary problems, Zeng Pu’s Flowers in a Sinful Sea instead takes inspiration from a doubly foreign figure: a courtesan whose most famous client was a European general. Like their respective shares of the Boxer Protocol indemnities that the foreign signatories of the Boxer Protocol decided to reinvest in China, Sai Jinhua functions as an uncanny figure whose value to the nation is inextricably intertwined with her own status as a paradigmatic outsider. Sai Jinhua’s public image is marked



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not only by her experience of having returned to China from abroad, but also by her status as a former sex worker, who originally sold her body for profit. Her professional status, accordingly, is explicitly grounded in her ability to assume the role of a virtual commodity and thereby figuratively straddle the economic and social spheres on which the very understanding of commodity value is itself predicated. Sai Jinhua’s identity, accordingly, is simultaneously grounded in, yet positioned in opposition to, her relationship to the commodity form. In an influential essay, French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray uses Marxist theory to reexamine the position of women within exogamic kinship structures, proposing that the monetary and structural economies of these societies are grounded in a process by which women are transformed into figurative commodities that are circulated and exchanged by men and corresponding patriarchal institutions. Within this system, Irigaray argues, the figure of the prostitute undermines conventional distinctions between use value and exchange value, insofar as “prostitution amounts to usage that is exchanged. Usage that is not merely potential: it has already been realized.”1 In this respect, Irigaray suggests, the figure of the prostitute dramatizes the commoditized dimension that characterizes the general category of woman. Women, she argues, derive their value and significance from their position within a generalized exogamic regime, predicated on the structural exchange and circulation of women as figurative commodities. By this logic, the significance of Sai Jinhua’s return to China and her intervention during the Boxer Uprising lies not so much in her individual identity and specific circumstances but rather in the underlying sociocultural logic of the exogamic system of which she is a product. As a former sex worker returning from abroad, Sai Jinhua is a deeply uncanny figure, whose position at the margins of a set of patrilineal and ethnonational social orders tacitly underscores their pervasive influence as well as their internal contradictions. Even though it was Sai Jinhua’s intervention at the end of the Boxer Uprising that provided the inspiration for Flowers in a Sinful Sea, Zeng Pu’s novel never makes it to the historical moment of the actual uprising. In the thirty chapters of the novel that Zeng Pu completed before his death, the narrative covers a period extending from the early 1860s to the early 1890s, with the portion relating to the Boxers having

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been planned for the remaining half of the projected sixty-­chapter novel. Not only does the completed portion of Flowers in a Sinful Sea not discuss Sai Jinhua’s role in the Boxer Uprising, the novel doesn’t mention her at all until seven chapters into the work. Instead, following the prologue’s discussion of the Island of Happy Slavery, the narrative proper opens with the protagonist Jin Wenqing (the fictional correlate of the diplomat Hong Jun) having recently passed the civil service exams and traveled to Shanghai. In Shanghai, some friends take him to see a courtesan named Chu Ailin, whom he finds in an apartment full of valuable antiques. When Jin Wenqing sees Chu, he realizes that he had previously met her when she was operating under a different name, and Chu immediately asks him about another courtesan, Liang Xinyan, with whom he had once been close. Jin Wenqing, however, turns pale at the mention of Xinyan’s name and mutters that he hasn’t seen her, then quickly changes the subject and instead asks Chu Ailin about one of her former lovers—​a man by the name of Gong Xiaoqi—​a nd Chu responds with a detailed description. Although there is no further discussion of Liang Xinyan immediately following this initial reference, she nevertheless ends up playing a critically important role in the novel, though in a highly mediated manner. In particular, fifteen years and several chapters later, Jin Wenqing meets a fifteen-­year-­old courtesan named Fu Caiyun, which was a performance name originally used by the historical Sai Jinhua. When Jin Wenqing and Fu Caiyun see each other for the first time, they feel a strong sense of mutual recognition, as though they had known each other in a previous life. Fu Caiyun subsequently marries Jin Wenqing as his concubine and accompanies him to Germany after Jin is appointed special emissary to Europe. It is in Germany that Fu Caiyun meets a character corresponding to the historical Alfred von Waldersee. Jin Wenqing is ultimately dismissed from his diplomatic post after having inadvertently used falsified maps in an attempt to resolve a border dispute between China and Russia. He becomes acutely ill following this humiliating incident, and as Fu Caiyun is attending him on his deathbed, he briefly sees her as the reincarnation of his former lover, the courtesan Liang Xinyan. It turns out that Jin Wenqing had been with Liang Xinyan while preparing for the civil service exams and had promised that after passing them he would



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return for her. When he failed to do so, she hanged herself, and when Jin Wenqing met Fu Caiyun fifteen years later, he viewed her as a reincarnation of the woman to whom he felt he owed a mortal debt. This deathbed revelation of Fu Caiyun’s spectral connotations itself has a ghostly quality when one considers its position within the text of the novel itself. As noted above, Zeng Pu published the first twenty chapters of the novel in 1905 and 1906, and then continued revising these initial chapters even as he added new ones. The extended version of the novel that Zeng Pu published in 1927, accordingly, varied in several respects from the 1905–1906 version. One modification that Zeng Pu introduced in this revision process, for example, involved the elimination of a key detail from Chapter 8 of the 1905 version—​in which Jin Wenqing, upon first meeting Fu Caiyun, notices that she has a “red line” (hongsi) on her throat. The fifteen-­year-­old Fu Caiyun’s explanation that she has had this mark since birth leads Jin Wenqing to recognize that she must be a reincarnation of Liang Xinyan, who had hanged herself fifteen years earlier. To the extent that Fu Caiyun’s scar traces the intersecting fates of these two women, the subsequent elision of this scene in Zeng Pu’s revised version of the novel twenty years later functions as a kind of textual scar in its own right. In this way, the disappearance of the scar from the text ironically performs the loss symbolized by the original scar itself.2 Not only does the red line on Fu Caiyun’s neck connect her back to her former incarnation as Liang Xinyan, it simultaneously captures Fu Caiyun’s own status as an embodied symbol of obligation and indebtedness. Just as Sai Jinhua’s historical significance is rooted in the story of how she allegedly mobilized her personal connections with Waldersee to convince him to intervene at the end of the Boxer Uprising, the significance of her fictional counterpart in Zeng Pu’s novel is grounded in the way in which Fu Caiyun represents a personal debt Jin Wenqing owes Liang Xinyan. Fu Caiyun’s scar, accordingly, functions as a virtual text through which this historical network of debts and obligations is rendered legible on the surface of her own skin. More abstractly, the red scar on Fu Caiyun’s neck in Flowers in a Sinful Sea may be seen as a precise inverse of the Golden Thread Spring that anchors Liu E’s Travels of Lao Can. Whereas Liu E’s Golden Thread Spring symbolizes an idealized harmony between mutually

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opposed forces, Fu Caiyun’s red scar functions instead as a symptom of Jin Wenqing’s failure to reconcile the competing demands of the past and the present. Fu Caiyun’s scar, in other words, constitutes a visible trace of the traumatic legacy of Jin Wenqing’s complicity in Liang Xinyan’s suicide. Its presence underscores the degree to which Jin Wenqing’s entire subsequent relationship with Fu Caiyun follows a logic of what Freud calls repetition compulsion, or the drive to reenact the conditions of an earlier and unresolved traumatic experience in an unconscious attempt to gain symbolic control over it. In Flowers in a Sinful Sea, the traumatic kernel in question is Jin Wenqing’s knowledge that Liang Xinyan took her own life in response to his failure to find her as he had promised, meaning that his subsequent relationship with Fu Caiyun functions effectively as an unconscious reenactment of his aborted relationship with Liang. To the extent that Liu E’s Golden Thread represents an ideal balance of mutually opposed forces, Fu Caiyun’s red scar symbolizes an irreconcilable tension between mutually opposed imperatives associated with the past and the present. A similar logic can be found in the relationship between Flowers in a Sinful Sea and the Boxer Uprising. Just as the opening portion of the novel’s plot is informed by Jin Wenqing’s memory of Liang Xinyan’s death, the work as a whole is similarly inspired by the traumatic legacy of the Boxer Uprising. The uprising is never actually mentioned in the novel, though its spectral presence haunts the narrative, shaping the work’s fascination with the figure of Fu Caiyun and the disruptive possibilities she represents. Fu Caiyun’s origins as a courtesan located outside of the orthodox marital order, together with her subsequent connections with foreigners, position her as a figurative outsider in relation to a traditional Chinese social order. Like the Boxers themselves, this foreignness may have disruptive and destabilizing consequences, but it may also help create a space for new transformative possibilities. War and Displacement

Although it is true that there is no mention of the Boxer Uprising in the portion of Flowers in a Sinful Sea that Zeng Pu was able to finish



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before his death, the uprising does figure prominently in two other works that were published within six months of each other in 1906. Entitled Stones in the Sea (Qin hai shi) and Sea of Regret (Henhai), both of these ten-­chapter novellas use the Boxer Uprising as a backdrop against which to reflect on the relationship between romantic desire and social propriety. Each of these latter works focuses on contemporary debates over the relative merits of arranged marriage and the practice known as free love—​in other words, the Western-­inspired practice of having couples choose their own marriage partners, which was beginning to be actively promoted during this period. In each work, young couples become romantically intimate before marriage, and the resulting societal and moral tensions help destabilize and even overturn core familial relations. In this way, a set of tensions at the familial level mirrors a parallel set of disturbances at the national level, and both are manifested symptomatically in the illnesses suffered by the works’ respective protagonists. Published in May 1906 and attributed to an otherwise unknown author identified as Fu Lin, Stones in the Sea opens with the unnamed narrator confessing that he is sick: “Reader, let me be frank with you. I am ill, and so serious is my illness that I have adopted a cynical view of the world and no longer wish to live.”3 The narrator proceeds to describe how he is haunted by the memory of a young woman he had once loved, but whom he was not allowed to marry. He suggests that his current illness is a direct result of the heartbreak he suffered as a consequence of not having been permitted to be with his beloved. He blames his situation on the Mencius and specifically its advocacy of arranged marriages, implying that had it not been for the emphasis on arranged marriage his present hardship could have been avoided. While Lao Can repeatedly appeals to classical Chinese texts in order to find ways of reconciling tensions found in contemporary society, the narrator of Stones in the Sea instead looks to the writings of one of China’s most influential Confucian philosophers for the origins of an ethical precept that, the narrator claims, has been responsible for a pernicious pattern of injustice that has persisted down to the present day. The narrator recalls how, when he was twelve, he had become romantically involved with a classmate named Aren and would frequently meet her under a tree behind their school, where he would

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kiss and caress her. Although the young couple was separated when the narrator’s father received another appointment the following year and had to move away, they were fortuitously reunited a few years later when Aren and her family happened to rent a set of rooms in the same courtyard where the narrator and his father were staying. The narrator and Aren are able to spend considerable amounts of time together, and eventually the narrator arranges for an intermediary to help petition his father to permit them to be married. His father, however, initially declines, on the grounds that he feels it would be scandalous and virtually incestuous for two young people already essentially living together to marry one another. In other words, the same physical proximity that permits the couple to become intimate in the first place simultaneously provides the basis for the father’s refusal to allow them to marry. After considerable negotiation, the narrator’s father ultimately relents, but before the couple has a chance to arrange the wedding, the approach of the Boxers forces the narrator and his father to flee the city while Aren stays behind with her father, who it turns out is an enthusiastic supporter of the Boxers. As a result, the couple is separated, and the marriage is postponed indefinitely. Published six months later by the influential late Qing author Wu Jianren, meanwhile, Sea of Regret describes a similar set of circumstances but uses them to draw rather different conclusions.4 The latter work begins with a government bureaucrat from Guangdong who has moved to Beijing with his wife and two young sons, Bohe and Zhongai. He then rents out rooms in the same compound to the family of his cousin and another family from his home province. Both of the latter families have daughters, Dihua and Juanjuan, who are roughly the same age as the bureaucrat’s own two sons. Eventually, the boys’ parents suggest that they be engaged to the two girls, and the girls’ parents agree—​despite the fact that the youngsters have been raised as virtual siblings. Before the couples are able to marry, however, the approach of the Boxers delays each of their marriage engagements indefinitely. One of the couples, Rongai and Juanjuan, is separated when Juanjuan flees with her parents while Rongai stays behind in Beijing to help his father, and neither of them is mentioned again until the very end of the novel. Meanwhile, Bohe and Dihua flee Beijing,



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together with Dihua’s mother, though their relationship ends up being radically transformed as a result of their experiences on the road. The initial promise and eventual failure of each of these marriage engagements, in turn, mirrors the corresponding turmoil within contemporary Chinese society. The Boxer Uprising that shadows each novel was initially viewed by some as an emancipatory and even revolutionary intervention, but it ultimately resulted in large-­scale social upheaval. Each of the marriages, moreover, attempts to circumvent the exogamic imperative embedded in the traditional convention of the arranged marriage by proposing a union that carries incestuous connotations, just as the Boxers yoked a xenophobic agenda (“expel the foreigners”) to a nationalistic rhetoric (“support the Qing”). At both a familial and a societal level, then, both works describe how an embrace of similitude (quasi-­incestuous marital unions and nationalistic uprisings) ends up turning in upon itself, becoming a destabilizing and even disruptive force in its own right. Illness plays a key role in both of these works. For instance, when Bohe, Dihua, and Dihua’s mother stay overnight at an inn after fleeing Beijing, they discover that they will all need to share a room with a single bed. Bohe feels that it would be unconscionable for him to sleep in the same bed as Dihua, even though Dihua’s mother suggests that her own physical presence between them would serve as an effective symbolic barrier. Bohe nevertheless insists on sleeping on the floor and consequently ends up falling ill. In this way, his resulting sickness functions as a symptom not only of the social tumult in which the couple find themselves but also of a set of internal tensions within the Confucian ethical system. Bohe’s theoretical ability to marry someone who is already his close friend and virtual sibling, in other words, stands in stark contrast to the strict constraints on premarital contact under which he continues to operate, and this tension is manifested through the debilitating illness with which he comes to be afflicted. Later, Dihua’s mother herself falls ill, and Dihua, following a filial practice frequently celebrated in classical texts, attempts to treat her by feeding her broth made from a piece of flesh taken from her own arm—​though this self-­sacrificial gesture fails to ameliorate her mother’s condition.5

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The theme of illness in both novellas, accordingly, functions as a symptom not only of the chaos wrought by the Boxer Uprising, but also of a structural challenge to traditional understandings of marriage. Both works foreground romantic relationships that are presented as a hybrid between a traditional arranged marriage and a more modern union initiated by the couple themselves. Not only do the proposed marriages between two young people who have already been living together as virtual siblings present a challenge for traditional views of marriage, they simultaneously precipitate a series of societal and personal crises on the part of the protagonists. In particular, the Boxer Uprising puts each of the proposed marriages permanently on hold, and even after each couple is briefly reunited at the end of the two works, they nevertheless discover that marriage is no longer a viable option. In each case, one of the two former lovers is found to have been fundamentally transformed by his or her experiences under the tumultuous environment of the Boxer Uprising and its aftermath, thereby rendering the original matrimony an impossibility. In Stones in the Sea, for instance, the narrator is so traumatized after losing touch with Aren that he becomes physically ill, and his condition immediately worsens when he learns that in the interim his father has arranged for him to marry someone else. At the end of the novel, he belatedly discovers that after Aren and her mother fled Tianjin, they subsequently fell into the company of a man who then tried to sell Aren into prostitution. In response, Aren attempted to take her own life by swallowing raw opium, and although she was rescued at the last minute, she was nevertheless left on the brink of death. In the final chapter, the narrator finally succeeds in tracking Aren down and finds her on her deathbed. After assuring the narrator that she is still a virgin and vowing to meet him again in her next life, Aren dies. The narrator is plunged into an abyss of despair, leaving him stricken with the illness from which he reports he is suffering at the beginning of the narrative. The narrator concludes that he holds the text’s responsible for his fate, reasoning that had it not been for Mencius’s insistence on arranged marriage, he and Aren would have married long before the disruption caused by the Boxer Uprising. On the other hand, in this same discussion the narrator tacitly points to an inverse conclusion, reasoning that had either Aren’s or his own



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family declared themselves to be firmly opposed to the marriage when it was originally proposed, and consequently intervened and cut off all contact between the couple, the couple’s passion would almost certainly have cooled on its own accord and the narrator would not have ended up in his current state. The implication, then, is that the arranged marriage system is at fault, either because its restrictions are too strict or because they are not strict enough. Sea of Regret similarly concludes with descriptions of the bittersweet reunions of the two sets of couples introduced at the beginning of the story. First, Dihua manages to find Bohe, whereupon she discovers that after they originally lost contact he subsequently stumbled onto several chests full of valuables that, in the disruption caused by the Boxers, had been abandoned by their former owners. He had proceeded to squander this ill-­gotten fortune in the pleasure quarters, and had even married a prostitute who robbed him of everything he had left. By the time Dihua finds Bohe, he is acutely addicted to opium and furthermore is suffering from an advanced case of malaria. Dihua and her father initially try to force Bohe to break his opium addiction, but they find that he is already too far gone. Instead, they take him home, where Dihua cares for him during his final days—​preparing his opium pipe for him, and even feeding him his malaria medicine mouth-­to-­ mouth after discovering that he is too weak to take it himself. Everyone who observes Dihua’s behavior is astounded that she could be so devoted to Bohe, given that the two of them were only engaged and never formally married. The tacit irony in everyone’s reaction to Dihua’s behavior, however, is that they appear to see her devotion as both exemplary (she willingly sacrifices herself for a partner to whom she is not even formally wedded) and scandalous (in caring for Bohe, she engages in the sort of physical intimacy with a partner that is normally not permissible outside of marriage). In this way, Dihua is viewed as both a hyperidealized incarnation of, and a degenerate parody of, a conventional vision of a wife. Sea of Regret ends by returning briefly to the novel’s second couple: Bohe’s elder brother Zhongai and his former fiancée, Juanjuan. After Juanjuan’s father flees with his family to Shanghai at the beginning of the novel, neither Juanjuan nor Zhongai is mentioned again until the end of the work. In the final chapter, though, Zhongai visits a brothel,

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where he sees a courtesan “with a pretty face and a graceful figure,” who bears a distinct resemblance to the Juanjuan he once knew. To confirm whether or not the woman is in fact Juanjuan, Zhongai repeats a phrase that they used to exchange jokingly after getting engaged, asking: “Will we still be cousins when we grow up?” As soon as these words cross his lips, however, the woman immediately blushes and rushes from the room, saying, “I need to put in an appearance at another party; wait for me.” Upon seeing her reaction, Zhongai realizes the woman must be Juanjuan, and he faints. He subsequently sells all of his possessions and becomes a hermit. In both novellas, accordingly, the debate over arranged marriage and free love is haunted by the specter of sex work, with prostitution functioning as the ultimate symbol of moral degeneracy. Just as the possibility of being sold into prostitution drives Aren to kill herself in Stones in the Sea, in Sea of Regret it is Bohe’s fondness for the pleasure quarters that provides the catalyst for the precipitous decline that ultimately culminates in his death. Zhongai is so shocked by his discovery that Juanjuan has become a courtesan, meanwhile, that he withdraws from society and becomes a hermit. At the same time, however, there is a sense in which, in narrational terms, this motif of sex work represents a space of freedom and potentiality. Counter­balancing the tragic conclusion of Stones in the Sea, for instance, is Aren’s insistence that she and the narrator will surely meet up again in the next life. Similarly, the depiction in Sea of Regret of Dihua’s figurative miming of the behavior of courtesan while caring for Bohe during his final days leaves open the question of whether her behavior should be viewed as a virtuous act of self-­sacrifice or an abject act of self-­abnegation. The narrative reveals virtually nothing about Juanjuan’s presumptive life as a courtesan prior to her brief reunion with Zhongai at the end of the work, and we are told even less of what happens to her following this encounter. Juanjuan’s final words, “Wait for me,” gesture toward the possibility of an open-­ended future. Like Zhongai, we as readers are left waiting at the end of the novella, uncertain of what will become of Juanjuan. This indeterminacy is implicit in the question Zhongai originally used to try to verify Juanjuan’s identity when he ran into her in the



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brothel: “Will we still be cousins when we grow up?” Generally speaking, the practice of cousin marriage is positioned at the boundaries of the incest taboo. While some societies prohibit unions between cousins, just as they do unions between first-­degree relatives like siblings, others actually encourage these sorts of unions. In China, cousin unions are generally condoned, as long as the individuals in question technically belong to different patrilines (for instance, if the parents of the couple are a brother and a sister rather than two brothers).6 In Sea of Regret, meanwhile, Zhongai and Juanjuan are actually only second cousins (their parents are first cousins), thereby making them comparatively distant fifth-­degree relatives with different surnames. On the other hand, in social terms, the fact that they grow up together in the same compound positions them as virtual siblings. The original implication of Zhongai’s “will we be cousins” question, accordingly, had been to ask whether after their marriage (“when we grow up”) they would still be able to retain the sibling-­like intimacy they had enjoyed as children. Would their marriage, together with the incest prohibition that it skirts, have required a fundamental recalibration of the couple’s understanding of themselves and their relationship to one another? Or would they instead have continued to regard each other through the lens of their intimate kinship and social ties? In the end, however, not only do Zhongai and Juanjuan fail to marry, they eventually grow so estranged that they barely even recognize one another when they happen to meet again in the final chapter of the novella. While this mutual alienation may be seen as the ultimate reversal of the marital union to which the couple had originally aspired, it simultaneously opens up a space of new potentiality. In particular, while it is true that Sea of Regret offers a corrective to the critique of the tradition of arranged marriages found in Stones in the Sea, contending that permitting individuals to choose their own spouses may open the door for social disruption, this particular scene nevertheless offers a tantalizing possibility of an alternate social vision. Even as the alienated reunion between Zhongai and Juanjuan testifies to the necessary failure of the quasi-­incestuous marriage they had tried to pursue, the scene nevertheless leaves open the question of what alternative to such an arranged marriage there might have been. In particular, while

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one reading of the novel’s conclusion would suggest that Juanjuan’s entry into prostitution marks a nadir of moral turpitude and a direct antithesis of the original ideal of an arranged marriage, the scene in question also offers the possibility of an alternate interpretation with potentially very different implications. More specifically, given that we are told virtually nothing about Juanjuan’s experiences in the period following her separation from Zhongai, and furthermore we are given no direct indication in this final scene that she is necessarily unhappy in her new position, there is therefore a plausible possibility that she may have found in courtesanship a space of relative freedom, and perhaps even happiness. To the extent that a conventional reading of Sea of Regret would interpret the work as an indictment of the destabilizing consequences of the contemporary “free love” movement and an advocacy of a return to traditional arranged marriages, accordingly, this alternate reading of the conclusion of the novella suggests a rather different possibility—​ namely, that the free love movement actually doesn’t go far enough, and that a more effective response to the social problems in question might in fact lie in a system that breaks away from the tradition of marriage altogether. Juanjuan’s eventual fate occupies a narrative aporia within the text, in that we merely glimpse her at the end but are told virtually nothing about her situation. It is certainly plausible that she may have fallen into some form of involuntary sexual servitude, like Aren in Stones in the Sea, but there is also the possibility that she may have instead managed to find a space of partial autonomy outside of the constraints of marriage as traditionally ­conceived. While Sea of Regret presents Bohe’s illnesses as symptoms of a fractured vision of traditional marriage, Juanjuan’s appearance at the end of the work instead represents both a challenge to a vision of traditional marriage as well as an invitation to explore new possibilities. In her appearance in the novella’s open-­ended conclusion, accordingly Juanjuan appears as a figure of homesickness who structurally mirrors the figure of the narrator of Stones in the Sea—​whose own illness (as a result of losing Aren) not only drives him to recount the tragic story of their relationship but also to speculate about alternate understandings of love and marriage.



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Nine-­Tailed Turtle

In addition to Flowers in a Sinful Sea, Sai Jinhua also inspired a wide array of other literary works. As early as 1899, for instance, Fan Zengxiang composed a poem now known as “Former Song of Caiyun” (Qian Caiyun qu), which details Sai’s historical relationship with Hong Jun. Four years later Fan composed a sequel, entitled “Latter Song of Caiyun” (Caiyun hou qu), which focuses on Sai’s subsequent relationship with Waldersee. More than forty years later, meanwhile, Zeng Pu’s friend Zhang Hong published Sequel to Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Xu niehaihua), which extends the story of Sai Jinhua through her re-­encounter with Waldersee during the Boxer Uprising. One of the most interesting extensions of the Sai Jinhua narrative, however, can be found in Zhang Chunfan’s novel Nine-­Tailed Turtle (Jiuwei gui), which was begun in 1906—​the same year that Zeng Pu completed the original twenty chapters of Flowers in a Sinful Sea.7 Serialized in nearly two hundred chapters over four years, Nine-­ Tailed Turtle presents an expansive survey of the Shanghai demimonde as seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Zhang Qiugu. Zhang, whose given name is homophonous with the Chinese phrase “modeled after the ancients,” is a self-­avowed polygynist and philanderer who seems to regard his ability to pursue countless women as an assertion of his individual freedom. This application of discourses of rights and freedom to questions of sexual relations is ironic, however, given that the novel makes essentially no acknowledgement of the women’s liberation movement that was already attracting increasing attention in China during this same period. Not only does Zhang Qiugu appear to be uninterested in the question of the potential freedom of the courtesans with whom he spends much of his time, but he even appears to regard these courtesans as his greatest threat—​on the logic that if men don’t assert themselves, they may well be exposed and manipulated by the courtesans with their seductive wiles.8 Sai Jinhua is not mentioned in Nine-­Tailed Turtle until chapter 172 of the 192-­chapter novel, when Zhang Qiugu and his friend Xing Xiupu visit a Beijing brothel and encounter a courtesan in her thirties—​which would have been considered rather elderly for an elite sex worker. Both men feel that they have seen the woman before, but it is

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only after she greets Xing Xiupu by name that he belatedly realizes she is in fact none other than the famous Sai Jinhua, with whom he had previously had a relationship. Xing Xiupu remarks that he had heard that Sai had left Beijing for Suzhou on account of a legal case against her, whereupon she invites them inside and offers to tell them her story. At this point, the narrator steps in and asks the novel’s readers if they are familiar with Sai Jinhua’s story, and what follows is technically not Sai Jinhua’s account of her own experiences but rather the narrator’s ventriloquized version of that same narrative. The narrator explains that Sai was initially known as Cao Menglan, but that she changed her professional name a couple of times before eventually ending up with Sai Jinhua. He observes that the story of Sai’s early career has already been covered in detail in Flowers in a Sinful Sea, and therefore he quickly summarizes that earlier portion of her ­biography before proceeding to describe subsequent developments in more detail, including Sai’s intervention with Waldersee during the Boxer Uprising and the legal case that Xing Xiupu mentioned when he saw her. Just as a key focal point in the account of Sai Jinhua’s life from Flowers in a Sinful Sea occurs in the scene in which Jin Wenqing, on his deathbed, misrecognizes Fu Caiyun as his dead lover Liang Xinyan, the retelling of Sai Jinhua’s life story in Nine-­Tailed Turtle is similarly punctuated by two moments of sickness that underscore the limited perspective of the narrative medium itself. These parallel moments of sickness mark points of rupture in the corresponding chronicle, allying Sai Jinhua with a space of narrative indeterminacy. First, in the discussion of Sai Jinhua’s efforts to convince Waldersee to agree to a peace treaty with the Chinese, the narrator notes that she was ultimately successful, but asks, “Who would have thought that such an important development would be accomplished as a result of the efforts of a weak woman working behind the scenes?” (1013). The narrator then observes that Sai Jinhua should have been recognized for her efforts. Unfortunately, Zhang Hongtang, the octogenarian Chinese Minister of Justice who was most directly involved in negotiating the peace agreement with the Eight Nation Alliance, died before the treaty was even signed, while his second-­in-­command left soon after in order



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to arrange the funeral of one of his parents. As a result, there was no one left on the Chinese side who was even aware of the role that Sai Jinhua had played in the negotiations, and consequently there was no way for her contribution to the resulting settlement to be officially recognized. Zhang Hongtang’s illness and subsequent death, accordingly, left a key lacuna in the historiographical record of this pivotal event—​one which elided the role played by this courtesan with her notorious foreign ties. On the other hand, however, it was precisely out of this gap within the official history of the event that the subsequent legend of Sai Jinhua was able to emerge. The following chapter describes a sequence of events that takes place several years after Waldersee’s return to Germany. Sai Jinhua at this point has two prostitutes working for her in her brothel, one of whom constantly flatters Sai Jinhua and the other who is described as very obstinate. One day when the latter, Yincui, is asleep in her room and suffering from “chills and fevers,” a client arrives and insists upon seeing her. After the client forcibly pulls her out of bed, she lunges at him, and he hits her in return. When Sai Jinhua comes to intervene, the client demands that she punish Yincui. Sai Jinhua, knowing that Yincui is sick, initially declines to intervene, but after the client insists she eventually lightly strikes Yincui. Humiliated by both by the client and her madam, Yincui commits suicide by swallowing raw opium. Meanwhile, a former client known as Bu Shilang, who bears Sai Jinhua a grudge, hears about the incident and files legal charges, accusing Sai of “having forced someone into prostitution, and driven her to her death” (biliang weichang, lingnü zhisi). As these charges gradually wind their way through the legal system, Sai Jinhua maintains her innocence and, by relying on a combination of bribes and personal connections, manages to find a number of people willing to speak in her defense until eventually the charges are dismissed. Throughout this entire subplot, we never actually hear Yincui speak in her own voice. In fact, the closest we come to hearing her “speak” is when she takes her own life—​using her body to express her frustration not only with her treatment but also with her general position. In this respect, Yincui mirrors the figure of Cuihuan in Travels of Lao Can, whose experiences as a sex worker are similarly inscribed on the surface of her body even as her history is being retold by others.

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At the same time, Yincui also parallels the figure of Sai Jinhua herself, in that the question raised with respect to Yincui’s position in the sex trade is equally relevant to Sai Jinhua. Accordingly, the passage implicitly asks whether Sai Jinhua has the same degree of control over her own life as she does over the life story that she relates to Zhang Qiugu and Xing Xiupu, or whether she is instead forced to rely on others to tell her story for her. Indeed, Zhang Chunfan’s novel specifies that Sai Jinhua is recounting her recent history to Zhang Qiugu and Xing Xiupu, but then proceeds to tell a version of that same story not in Sai Jinhua’s own voice but rather in the voice of the narrator. More generally, the novel raises the question of whether Sai Jinhua is an autonomous subject who successfully manipulates her social relationships to her advantage, or whether she is instead fundamentally constrained by socioeconomic forces beyond her control. Or, to borrow the terms proposed in the prologue to Flowers in a Sinful Sea, the question is whether Sai Jinhua is imagined here as a true “Goddess of Liberty,” or whether she is instead comparable to the residents of the Island of Happy Slavery, who remain blissfully unaware of the conditions of their own oppression. Similar questions of freedom, identity, and alienated return also converge at the beginning of Flowers in a Sinful Sea, in the story that the courtesan Chu Ailin recounts when Jin Wenqing asks her about her former lover, Gong Xiaoqi. Chu Ailin explains that she and Gong Xiaoqi are no longer together, but then offers a detailed summary of the circumstances that had made it necessary for her to leave him. She describes how in 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War, Gong Xiaoqi (who is modeled on a historical figure by the name of Gong Cheng, who was the son of the influential Qing scholar Gong Zizhen) had allied himself with Sir Thomas Wade and the British forces and assisted them in the destruction of Beijing’s Yuanming Yuan, also known as the imperial Summer Palace. Zeng Pu’s novel notes that Chinese observers at the time had interpreted Gong Xiaoqi’s actions in a variety of different ways, either condemning him as a “traitor to China” (hanjian) or celebrating him for his “anti-­Manchu” (paiman) and “revolutionary” (geming) commitments. Chu Ailin, how­ ­ever, claims that both of these sets of responses reflect a fundamental



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misunderstanding of Gong Xiaoqi’s actions, and that in fact he had been motivated first and foremost by a sense of filial piety. Chu Ailin further explains that around 1840 Gong Xiaoqi’s father, Gong Zizhen (who in the novel is given the same name as the historical figure on which he is based), had been involved in a romantic affair with one of the consorts of a Manchu prince. As a result of this affair—​which is based on a historical incident that came to be known as the Lilac Affair (dingxiang an), and which subsequently received considerable attention in other Chinese literary sources—​Gong Zizhen was fatally poisoned by the prince. Chu Ailin recounts how Gong Zizhen, on his deathbed, told his son what had happened, leading Xiaoqi to vow he would avenge his father’s death. In helping the British destroy the Yuanming Yuan palace twenty years later, Xiaoqi was actually driven neither by a traitorous desire to aid the British on polit­ ­ical grounds nor by a revolutionary desire to challenge the Manchus on ethnonationalistic grounds; instead, he was acting primarily out of a sense of filial piety. Chu Ailin observes, furthermore, that Gong Xiaoqi and his father had had numerous disagreements when the elder Gong was still alive, and consequently for a long time father and son had not been particularly close. Gong Xiaoqi’s subsequent decision to collaborate with Thomas Wade in his attack on Yuanming Yuan, accordingly, does not appear to have been motivated by Gong Xiaoqi’s personal fondness for his now-­deceased father but rather more by a purely abstract ideal of filial obligation. Gong Xiaoqi’s participation in the 1860 destruction of the Yuanming Yuan palace functions as a temporal hinge within the narrative—​ occurring two decades after the death of Gong’s father and roughly two decades before Sai Jinhua’s subsequent alliance with Waldersee. A similar combination of belatedness and anticipation also characterizes the position of the anecdote within Zeng Pu’s text itself. There is actually no mention of the Lilac Affair in the version of the novel that Zeng Pu originally published in 1905, and in its place that version instead included a discussion of the historical development of various Chinese secret societies, including the peasant anti-­Manchu organization known as the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandi hui) and a revolutionary organization known as the Youth Society (Qingnian hui). In

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substituting the novel’s original allusion to secret societies with this new discussion of the Lilac Affair, Zeng Pu was therefore able to eliminate the earlier anachronism of having a character allude, in the 1860s, to a secret society inspired by one that historically would not be established until three decades later.9 At the same time, the revision has the added benefit of shifting a consideration of nationalistic and revolutionary sentiments from an explicitly political register (the secret societies) to a more intensely personal one (Gong Xiaoqi’s conflicted decision to avenge his father’s death),10 thereby rehearsing the novel’s more general practice of using personal narratives to reexamine late nineteenth-­century historical developments. Gong Xiaoqi occupies a curious position at the margins of both the national imagination as well as of the general vision of family relations that theoretically underlies it. Gong Xiaoqi’s attack on Yuanming Yuan challenged not only conventional assumptions about patriotism, nationalism, and treason but also traditional understandings of filial piety itself. Chu Ailin explains that Gong Xiaoqi and his father had previously quarreled over an issue relating to the interpretation of the Chinese classics, after which Gong Xiaoqi rarely went home to see his family. One of the last times Chu Ailin herself saw Gong Xiaoqi, moreover, he was in the process of editing his father’s collected works for publication and was rapping angrily on his father’s funeral tablet each time he found a mistake. Chu Ailin was shocked by this apparent breach of traditional conventions of filial piety, but Gong Xiaoqi explained that, given that he had already avenged his father’s death, he felt he was therefore justified in now getting vengeance for all the times his father had beat him whenever he made a mistake in his compositions. In this vignette, accordingly, we find a situation in which an abstract discourse of filial obligation is delinked from the actual interpersonal relationships that the ethical ideal is ostensibly intended to affirm. In the end, Gong Xiaoqi is left without any meaningful attachments to either his family, his nation, or even his former political ideals. He has barely any money left and is so poor that he even has to send Chu Ailin away. As a symbol of his continued goodwill, however, Gong Xiaoqi gives Chu Ailin several of his precious antiques to take as souvenirs, and it is these same artifacts that decorate Chu’s room



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when Jin Wenqing visits her. When Jin Wenqing asks Chu Ailin about the rumor that she had run away from Gong Xiaoqi and stolen his valuables, she points to the antiques on display in her apartment and asks why she would be openly displaying them if she had originally stolen them. Chu Ailin notes that, even when they were together, Gong Xiaoqi—​ whose given name contains a character, xiao, that literally means “filial piety”—​was known for his hedonism. In addition to breaking with his father over an argument about the classics, Xiaoqi left his wife and son and instead spent his days relaxing with prostitutes, learning Mongolian, as well as riding horses and practicing archery with the Tartars (Semu ren).11 Chu Ailin describes how Gong Xiaoqi effectively renounced all five of the traditional Confucian social bonds (i.e., between ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife, brother and brother, and friend and friend), to the point that his only remaining personal attachment was to Chu Ailin herself. Given that Chu is only Gong Xiaoqi’s concubine and not his formal wife, he was therefore given the nickname “half virtue” (banlun), suggesting that he observes only half of one of the original five Confucian virtues. In her recounting of Gong Xiaoqi’s story, moreover, Chu Ailin notes that, for all of their differences, Gong Xiaoqi and his father shared one key trait, which was their fondness for women. This characteristic, which Chu Ailin explicitly calls a “sickness” (bing), was the instigating factor behind the romantic affair that eventually led to the elder Gong’s murder, and it similarly contributed to the younger Gong’s rejection of his formal ties with his own family. Accordingly, Gong Xiaoqi’s nickname, Half-­virtue, may be seen as a reflection of the compounded effects of this metaphorical sickness. This discussion of Chu Ailin’s relationship to Gong Xiaoqi near the beginning of the revised version of Flowers in a Sinful Sea, in turn, directly foreshadows the story of Sai Jinhua’s relationship to General Waldersee that theoretically provided the inspiration for the original novel itself. Like Chu Ailin, Sai Jinhua was a former courtesan who subsequently developed a romantic affair with a figurative outsider. Gong Xiaoqi and Waldersee may be seen as mirror images of one another, in that Gong was a Chinese accused of having committed a treasonous assault against China (by helping destroy the Qing court’s

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Yuanming Yuan), while Waldersee was a foreigner whose intervention arguably helped protect China from itself (by helping put down both the Boxer Uprising as well as the looting by foreign soldiers that followed). The parallel between these two figures is further reinforced by the fact that, like Gong Xiaoqi, Waldersee was also involved in an attack on Yuanming Yuan when, in 1900, foreign troops under his command burnt and destroyed much of the compound that had been partially reconstructed in the decades following the original attack of 1860. In this early encounter between Jin Wenqing and Chu Ailin, then, we find a doubled moment of traumatic return and spectral anticipation. Jin’s reluctance to discuss his former relationship to Liang Xinyan stands in contrast to Chu Ailin’s eagerness to discuss her own relationship with Gong Xiaoqi, while Liang Xinyan’s anticipation of Sai Jinhua mirrors the way that Gong Xiaoqi anticipates the position that Waldersee will subsequently occupy in the Boxer Uprising. The Lilac Affair, accordingly, functions as a traumatic origin that drives the narrative arc of Zeng Pu’s overall novel, but one that is added only after the fact to help explain the narrative’s own ­prehistory. To the extent that the Lilac Affair functions as a belated articulation of the traumatic origin that drives the novel’s narrative, it simultaneously illustrates a more general link between contagion and narration found in each of these early twentieth-­century works. From the narrator’s illness in Stones in the Sea to Bohe’s sickness in Sea of Regret, and from the status of disease as a symbolic narrative lacuna in Nine-­Tailed Turtle’s discussion of Sai Jinhua to the Sick Man of Asia as a figure of textual transcription in Flowers in a Sinful Sea, sickness in each case is linked to a process of narration and imagination—​invoked both as a symptom of and as a potential solution to the nation’s sociopolitical problems. Coda: The Morning Bell

In 1903, the same year Jin Tianhe published his original two chapters of Flowers in a Sinful Sea, he also released a much longer treatise entitled The Morning Bell (Nüjie zhong).12 Inspired by the women’s liberation movements that were gaining influence in many Western



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societies at that same turn-­of-­the-­century moment, Jin Tianhe opens his treatise by positing that China’s men are finally beginning to awaken from their long slumber and are finding themselves stimulated by foreign philosophical notions of “natural rights,” “liberty,” and the utilitarian principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” He contends, however, that China’s women “are still kept as ignorant as before, in chains and fetters, obsessed with dreams in winter and wallowing in melancholy in spring, knowing nothing of the ideas of equality between men and women or ideas of women’s participation in politics that are held by free people in civilized nations.” Jin concludes that China’s only viable path to modernization and reform will be through a process of granting its women more power, autonomy, and equality, and therefore vows to help ferry the nation’s women across the proverbial “sea of suffering” (kuhai) so that they may achieve their potential. The main text of The Morning Bell proposes a number of specific reforms that China could make with respect to its treatment of its women. The treatise emphasizes, for instance, the importance of permitting women to receive an education and enter the workplace, arguing that these reforms would be beneficial not only to the women themselves but also to the nation as a whole. Jin Tianhe argues that the country’s current weakness is rooted in no small part in the popularity of opium smoking, foot binding, and the obligatory separation of male and female spheres, together with an excessive emphasis on ornamentation and superstition. To help reform these traditional attitudes, Jin recommends that his compatriots travel to Europe and America to learn about foreign practices and then return to China where they may serve as politicians, doctors, lawyers, or reporters. As for the nation’s women, Jin recommends that China immediately establish a series of women’s colleges, which would then be responsible for contributing to the education of all of China’s citizens, including both men and women. Jin Tianhe further notes that “education is a machine for manufacturing people,” and argues that education should be spread widely among both women and men. I have never heard of a situation where a half-­paralyzed educational

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Drawing on a metaphor of the nation as a body politic, Jin Tianhe contends that not only is the harm caused by a lack of education infectious—​its effects radiating through society the way a disease moves through the body—​but also that the benefits of education may similarly circulate through the body politic, its advantages extending far beyond those who actually receive the education. Jin’s goal, accordingly, is not only to help make education more widely accessible but also to encourage that this advocacy of open access to education itself be allowed to spread freely through society. The penultimate chapter of Jin’s treatise extends these reflections to a consideration of the history of the institution of marriage. Jin argues that, broadly speaking, there have been two main eras in the history of marriage: the “era of mixed lineages” and the “era of same-­ surname marriages.” For Jin, the former was a period in which the coherence of the patriline was not effectively regulated, and wherein various practices ranging from concubinage to wife selling contributed to a divergence of strictly hereditary lines of descent from socially legitimized patrilineal ones. Jin characterizes the result as a process of the mixing of lineages, and he notes that this has remained a problem up to the present day. The latter era, meanwhile, was a period that Jin argues was characterized by a failure to adequately restrict quasi-­ incestuous marriages between individuals sharing a common surname. He calculates that if all of one’s ancestors from the preceding millennium (spanning roughly thirty-­three generations) had had different surnames, they would have needed to have had over eight million different surnames to choose from in order to guarantee that there would be no unions between individuals with the same surname. Noting that China currently only has about a thousand different surnames in all, Jin concludes that everyone must already have a lot of same-­ surname unions in their ancestry. He contends that this is a serious concern, on the grounds that same-­surname unions will tend to have lower fertility, and he cites as evidence the fact that China’s Manchu



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population grew four times more slowly than the Han population during the same preceding two-­and-­a-­half-­century period—​a disparity that Jin attributes to the fact that the Manchus had a much smaller number of surnames available to them than did the Han. While the preceding analysis might appear to imply that the next historical stage of marriage practice in China would involve an attempt to assert greater control over the coherence of the patriline and restrictions on same-­surname unions, Jin instead argues for the precise opposite. More specifically, he contends that the institution of marriage in China is currently mired in what he calls “the stage of matchmakers, the stage of fortune-­tellers, and the stage of money.” In place of these existing structural constraints on marital unions—​restraints, it should be noted, that could help preserve patrilines and restrict same-­surname unions—​Jin argues that China should instead learn from the West and allow its young people to freely choose their own marriage partners. In particular, this would involve permitting young people to get to know each other prior to marriage, as is described in both Stones in the Sea and Sea of Regret. The result of this increased freedom and flexibility, however, would likely be a weakening of the very same patrilineal structures that earlier constraints on marital practices were attempting to uphold. The chapter of The Morning Bell on marriage concludes with a curious mixing of metaphors, in which the internal tensions within the countries in the Eight Nation Alliance that maintain extraterritorial possessions in China’s treaty ports are compared to the squabbles between wives and concubines within a traditional polygamous Chinese household, as Jin expresses hope that China will instead pursue a more monogamous union with the West. He then compares freedom of marriage to a “perfect jade” that China has received from a female beloved and expresses hope that the nation may in turn “give birth to a child” of the revolution. In this intricately sedimented metaphor, accordingly, China transitions from being viewed first as a household, then as a groom, and finally an expectant mother, while the Western nations similarly transition from representing traditional China’s support of polygamous relations and arranged marriages to the modern ideal of free and monogamous marriage to which China now aspires.

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Though framed as a social treatise rather than a work of fiction, Jin Tianhe’s The Morning Bell articulates a version of the same sociopolitical logic that presumably inspired Jin to conceive the original version of Flowers in a Sinful Sea in the first place—​namely, a conviction that the fate of the nation is inextricably intertwined with that of its women. In this respect, both The Morning Bell and Flowers in a Sinful Sea appeal to a version of the exogamic imperative that underlies the Melody Orchid anecdote in Flowers in the Mirror, in that they each insist that the key to China’s salvation lies in exposing the nation’s women to a variety of foreign ideas and worldviews. It was hoped that the resulting circulation of knowledge and information might help productively destabilize the nation’s sociopolitical structure, opening the possibility that contemporary Chinese would develop a new understanding of their position within the national community.

3 •

Rebirth

One day in 1906, Lu Xun saw an image he claims changed his life. As he later describes in the 1923 preface to his first collection of short stories, at the end of one of the microbiology classes he was taking in Sendai, Japan, his professor screened some slides of the ongoing Russo-­Japanese War. One of these slides depicted Japanese soldiers in Manchuria executing a Chinese man who had been accused of spying for the Russians, and what disturbed Lu Xun most about this image was not the execution itself or even the nationalistic enthusiasm it evoked on the part of the other Japanese students in his class, but rather what he perceived to be the apathetic expressions on the faces of the Chinese spectators appearing within the image. It was this apparent apathy that convinced Lu Xun that the main problem confronting contemporary China involved not so much his countrymen’s physical health but rather their spiritual health. He therefore resolved to drop out of medical school and instead devote himself to political and cultural reform, subsequently going on to become one of the leading figures of China’s New Culture Movement.1 One of Lu Xun’s first interventions as a cultural reformer involved his effort to help found a new literary journal that was to be titled Xinsheng, or “new life.” Lu Xun and his partners, however, ran into

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difficulties with their financial sponsors, and as a result New Life was, as Leo Ou-­fan Lee succinctly puts it, “stillborn.”2 Though ultimately unrealized, New Life represents Lu Xun’s new understanding of his potential role as a sociocultural reformer and a vision that would continue to shape his literary career for the rest of his life. Although Lu Xun’s decision to abandon the study of medicine marked a crucial turning point in his development as a cultural reformer, medical concerns nevertheless continued to play an important role both in his subsequent writings and in the May Fourth Move­ ment he helped inspire. Indeed, many reformist figures during this period enthusiastically introduced modern perspectives on medicine and hygiene in an attempt to improve the health of the Chinese population, while at the same time translating these medical models into nuanced commentaries on the possibility—​and limits—​of sociopolitical reform. For instance, in the short prologue to Lu Xun’s 1918 short story “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji), the narrator describes his discovery of a journal by an old acquaintance, which recounts the acquaintance’s conviction that his neighbors and even his own family have cannibalistic tendencies. The narrator explains that he has decided to transcribe and publish the journal “so that it might be of use to medical doctors (yijia).”3 This seemingly straightforward explication of how one should read the fictional diary is complicated, however, by an underlying uncertainty regarding how the explanation itself should be understood and specifically how one should understand the reference to “medical doctors.” What assumptions about medical practice are being invoked here, and who is the intended fictional audience of the journal—​which is to say, the audience for whom the fictional narrator ostensibly edits and publishes the journal he has found? One could, of course, take the journal at face value and treat it as a discussion of an infectious disease that transforms its victims into actual cannibals. Or one could instead follow the narrator’s lead and approach the work as a symptom of a mental illness (which the narrator calls “paranoiac schizophrenia” [pohaikuang]) that leads the diarist to believe he is surrounded by cannibals. Alternatively, one could follow the current scholarly consensus and read the story as an allegorical critique of China’s “cannibalistic” culture, or what C. T. Hsia



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has famously called the nation’s “spiritual disease.”4 In the first instance, the work’s presumptive readership would be conventional doctors who would approach the story for its portrayal of a mysterious infection; in the second, it would be psychologists and psychiatrists interested in the madman’s apparent mental illness; while in the third, it would be the nation’s political reformers—​which is to say, what C. T. Hsia calls “spiritual physician[s].”5 The hermeneutic gulf separating these three approaches to the text suggests that the preface’s rhetorical appeal to medicine (yī) doesn’t provide an absolute ground for determining the text’s meaning as much as it opens up a set of underlying questions concerning how that meaning may be understood in the first place. The trope of medicine, in other words, offers not a key to a “correct” reading of the story but rather functions as a symptom of the indeterminacies inherent in the reading process itself. Published in the reformist journal New Youth (Xin qingnian), “Diary of a Madman” was the first story Zhou Shuren composed in the modern Chinese vernacular, and it was also the first text he released under his now-­famous penname, Lu Xun. One of the author’s most influential and widely read works, “Diary of a Madman” not only presents a critical reading of contemporary Chinese social values, it simultaneously offers a nuanced reflection on the question of how to read. In one famous passage, for instance, the madman consults an unidentified Chinese historical text in an attempt to corroborate his hazy recollection that “in ancient times, people often ate other people.” Initially, all he sees in the document is the Confucian phrase “virtue and morality (renyi daode) scrawled unevenly over each page,” though as he continues studying the volume deep into the night, he gradually begins to discern an injunction to “eat people” (chi ren) hidden “between the lines” (cong zifengli kanchu zilai) (425/10). While the latter “cannibalistic” reading is clearly presented as an allegorical (mis)reading of the unidentified historical text, the orthodox Confucian reading with which it is contrasted is arguably no less a product of allegoresis in its own right.6 Interpretation, the story suggests, involves a process not so much of differentiating literal from allegorical meaning but rather of parsing the various discursive and institutional forces that help shape these different strata of textual signification.

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Here, I will apply a similar “between-­the-­lines” approach to Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” itself, interpreting the story through the overlapping medical frames within which it is implicitly positioned. Taking inspiration from the madman’s own conviction that he is surrounded by an epidemic of cannibalism, together with the narrator’s suggestion that the madman may have been suffering from a case of paranoiac schizophrenia, I draw on a set of overlapping immunological and psychoanalytic models to reexamine the now-­standard interpretation of the story as a progressive political allegory. While many readers view the madman as a prototype of a political reformer with insight into the ills plaguing contemporary Chinese society, I suggest instead that the work simultaneously presents a cogent critique of the reform process itself. In particular, I argue that the story underscores the degree to which political reform is grounded on a process of recognition that entails the necessary possibility of misrecognition. By foregrounding this possibility of misrecognition, Lu Xun’s story functions not only as a clarion call for reforming a cannibalistic sociopolitical structure, as the story is commonly read, but also as a warning about the potentially cannibalistic consequences of reform itself. In the following reading of “Diary of a Madman,” I approach Lu Xun’s work via two sets of contextual materials that each offer different insights into the underlying logic of the text itself. These contextual materials include Lu Xun’s autobiographical account of the circumstances that led to his decision to compose the story in the first place, together with the discursive environment of the journal New Youth, in which the story was initially published. My approach to these two sets of contextual materials, in turn, is itself contextual, in that I view them through the conceptual lens of two bodies of medical theory that emerged as Lu Xun was growing up. In particular, the end of the nineteenth century witnessed not only the consolidation of modern germ theory but also the birth of psychoanalysis,7 and although germ theory and psychoanalysis obviously differ from one another in many important respects, they nevertheless share a commitment to interpreting visible symptoms in order to draw conclusions about “invisible” factors that are the true cause of the illness. Whether focusing on microbes or on the unconscious, both approaches yield a vision of the individual as internally fractured and at odds with itself.



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My objective in proposing this sort of psychoimmunological herme­­ neutics is not only to help elucidate the discursive environment within which Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” was conceived and to examine some of the assumptions about political reform that the text appears to presuppose, but also to reconsider what it means to conceive of a community, an individual, or even a text as a unified and coherent entity in the first place. In particular, I argue that during the early twentieth-­century period in which Lu Xun was writing, views on the structure of political community were intimately bound up with new biomedical understandings of immunity, and the latter ­provided a reassuringly concrete basis for theorizing reform, while also underscoring the self-­destructive potential inherent in any reform movement. Cannibalism, accordingly, was a powerful symbol not only of the backward attitudes that progressive reform movements were attempting to correct but also of the inherent limits of the very possibility of sociopolitical reform itself. Lu Xun’s early dream that he might use his contribution to help grant the Chinese nation a figurative “new life,” in other words, was haunted by his concerns that Chinese society might instead continue consuming and reinfecting itself with its own underlying weaknesses. As a result, his attempts to facilitate a process of political rebirth was compromised by the possibility that the new configuration would end up reinscribing the structural problems he was ostensibly trying to address in the first place. Misrecognition

Published in 1923, Lu Xun’s first short story collection, Nahan [usually translated as either “Call to Arms” or “Outcry”]—​which opens with a reprinting of “Diary of a Madman”—​is prefaced by an autobiographical essay in which the author details the trajectory that led him to begin writing the sort of socially critical literature for which he is now best known. In this preface, Lu Xun traces his decision to write “Diary” back to his early frustrations with traditional Chinese medicine and, specifically, his childhood memory of how, over a span of four years, he repeatedly visited a pharmacy to fill prescriptions for esoteric remedies such as “aloe root dug up in winter, sugar-­cane that had been three years exposed to frost, twin crickets, and ardisia.”

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These treatments were intended for Lu Xun’s father, whose health nevertheless continued to deteriorate until he finally died in 1896, when Lu Xun was fifteen. Two years later, meanwhile, Lu Xun enrolled at the Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing, where woodblock editions of translated Western physiological texts such as A New Course on the Human Body and Essays on Chemistry and Hygiene provided him with a taste of Western medicine that helped convince him that traditional Chinese medical doctors like the one who had treated his father “must be unwitting or deliberate charlatans.” This realization that Chinese medicine was fundamentally unreliable in turn inspired Lu Xun to study modern biomedicine so that he might help treat other patients like his father and, by extension, help cure the Chinese nation as a whole (415-­416/1-­2). Following Lu Xun’s lead, many critics have used the account of his viewing of the Japanese execution slide as an entry point into understanding his subsequent literary oeuvre and the broader issues with which it engages. The passage, though, is perhaps most interesting when read against the grain. David Der-­wei Wang, for instance, points out that Lu Xun’s focus on this image of decapitation suggests that his desire to narrate the origins of his professional identity was driven by an underlying “anxiety about the primordial loss of meaning—​ meaning and life symbolized by the head, loss symbolized by the mutilated body.”8 Wang argues, in other words, that Lu Xun’s recollection of this moment of anticipatory self-­recognition is haunted by a specter of corporeal dismemberment that not only reflects the author’s subsequent anxiety about a lack of biographical coherence but also provides the conceptual ground against which that previous lack itself becomes meaningful in the first place. Lydia Liu develops a related point when she notes that this vignette is notable not merely for its representation of violence but also for its deployment of what Liu calls a “violence of representation.” Beyond the description of the contents of the slide, she argues, the force of Lu Xun’s account lies more in its depiction of the complicated relationship between the spectacle and its various tiers of spectators—​including spectators located both within and outside the frame of the original slide.9 Rey Chow, meanwhile, draws on Martin Heidegger’s and Walter Benjamin’s iconic



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essays on visual imagery in the modern era to argue that Lu Xun’s response to the photographic slide may be regarded as “an index to the relationship between visuality and power” wherein Lu Xun, “through his own act of watching,” is confronted with “the transparent effect of a new medium that seemingly communicates without mediation.”10 Whether focusing on textual or visual works, each of these preceding readings underscores a dialectics of violence and elision embedded at the very heart of representation itself. Another way of approaching these themes of mediated recognition, corporeal fragmentation, and representational violence in Lu Xun’s discussion of the execution slide, however, would be to read the scene through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage model of subject formation.11 In this model, Lacan describes a seminal moment of recognition in which an infant projectively identifies with its own (external) specular image, which thereby provides a critical catalyst for the infant’s subsequent perception of itself as a unified subject. Noting that the mirror stage occurs at a developmental moment when the infant still lacks any firm understanding of itself as a unified entity and even lacks reliable control over its own body and instead remains “sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence,” Lacan argues that this process of specular “recognition” is actually a function of what he calls “misrecognition” (méconnaissance)—​wherein the infant, through a “succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image [une image morcelée du corps] to a form of totality,” models its self-­ conception on the idealized unity of the visual imago it sees before it.12 The mirror stage, in other words, is predicated not on a process of straightforward identification but rather on a strategic misidentification that then provides a catalyst for the retrospective constitution of the equivalence of self and image. While Lacan’s mirror stage theory is mapped onto a process of maturational development, this moment of (mis)recognition is itself positioned at a temporal chiasmus. It provides a conceptual ground for the infant’s subsequent self-­identification as a unified subject, even as it simultaneously generates an understanding of the anterior state of disunity out of which the infant’s self-­conception originally emerged. As Jane Gallop explains,

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The mirror stage is a decisive moment. Not only does the self issue from it, but so does “the body in bits and pieces” [corps morcelé]. This moment is the source not only for what follows but also for what precedes. It produces the future through anticipation and the past through retroaction. And yet it is itself a moment of self-­ delusion, of captivation by an illusory image. Both future and past are thus rooted in an illusion.13

In providing a catalyst for the subject’s subsequent self-­conception, the mirror stage helps anchor the temporal scaffolding through which that process of self-­transformation is itself understood in the first place. The infant’s projective identification with its mirror image, in other words, generates not only the subject’s subsequent vision of his or her corporeally unified self but also the temporal continuum within which this developmental narrative is itself positioned in the first place. Lu Xun’s description of his viewing of the execution slide shares with Lacan’s mirror stage a concern with the way in which a subject comes to understand him or herself in relation to an external image. Although the execution slide that Lu Xun sees is obviously not an actual mirror image of himself, it does nevertheless reflect a vision of the Chinese countrymen with whom he is presumably attempting to identify. The key difference between Lacan’s model and Lu Xun’s account, however, is that whereas the former emphasizes a process of projective identification, the latter functions instead as a site of violent disidentification. Lu Xun, by his own account, begins to come to terms with his identity and positionality precisely through an attempt to work through the result of his inability to identify with the subject position and the perspectival position that the execution slide offers him. To theorize this logic of disidentification, we may turn to a version of the mirror stage model as mediated through cinematic suture theory. As formulated by Jean Pierre Oudart and Stephen Heath in the 1960s, suture theory posits that a viewer’s engagement with a cinematic work typically begins with an ecstatic identification with the images on screen, followed by an acute sense of anxiety once the viewer is reminded of the existence of the film’s frame separating him or her from those same images. The resulting structural gap, or



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“wound,” Oudart argues, helps drive “the image into the order of the signifier, and the cinema into the order of discourse.”14 This semiotic turn, meanwhile, makes it possible for the viewer to projectively identify either with one of the embedded gazes within the film or with the metaphoric gaze of the camera itself, and it is this gesture of projective identification, in turn, that figuratively sutures the rift between the viewer and the cinematic image—​while at the same time inscribing the scopic wound back onto the act of perception itself. Viewing the execution slide in his Sendai classroom, Lu Xun finds himself unable to identify with either the image itself or with any of the perspectival positions offered by the image and its immediate context—​including the nationalistic fervor of his Japanese classmates, the disciplinary gaze of the Japanese military carrying out the execution, or even the embedded perspective of the Chinese spectators visible within the image itself. The resulting perspectival aporia forces Lu Xun to critically reexamine his own subject position, leading him to (mis)recognize his (future) identity within the scopic wound separating him from the image he sees before him—​positioning himself within the perspectival gap between observer, image, and embedded gaze. Even as Lu Xun subsequently claims to have found, in his reaction to the execution slide, an anticipatory glimpse of his future calling as an author and political reformer, the underlying dynamic of the scene is nevertheless one of misrecognition and counteridentification—​suggesting that the more immediate significance of this autobiographical account lies in the way that it anticipates the internal struggles and alienated disavowals that so famously characterize Lu Xun’s subsequent literary and political endeavors. Although considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to the execution slide itself, comparatively little has been said about the broader visual context within which Lu Xun would have viewed it. While there is no record of what precisely Lu Xun might have seen in the actual class that day (before the screening of the wartime slides at the end), he does note in the Call to Arms preface that it was a microbiology class, and that the equipment used to project the slide was normally used to display “forms of microbes (weishengwu de xingzhuang)” (416/2). In another essay about the same incident that he wrote three years later, Lu Xun further specifies that “bacteriology

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(meijunxue) had just been added to the curriculum, and invariably slides were used to display the forms of the bacteria.”15 The bacteriology course Lu Xun was taking in 1906 was not only new to the Sendai curriculum; it represented a body of medical knowledge that had only just begun to take shape during Lu Xun’s own lifetime. While some scientists had previously theorized that disease might be caused by microscopic organisms, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that researchers were able to prove conclusively that this was actually the case. It was in the late 1870s and early 1880s, for instance, that Robert Koch finally succeeded in isolating the bacteria responsible for anthrax and tuberculosis, and in 1884 Koch and Friedrich Loeffler provided a key conceptual underpinning for understanding the significance of these bacteria when they formulated the first version of what has come to be known as Koch’s postulates, which specify the basic conditions necessary for establishing a causal relationship between a microbe and a corresponding infection. Paralleling these developments in bacteriology were a set of concurrent advances in the understanding of the body’s response to infection. In 1880, for instance, Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine for chicken cholera; in 1881 he did the same for cattle anthrax; and in 1885 he carried out the first human trial of an artificially generated vaccine, for rabies. It was also in the early 1880s, meanwhile, that Élie Metchnikoff began to develop his model of immune system function that would help explain, among other things, how vaccines provide an organism with immunity in the first place.16 In an autobiographical account published near the end of his life, Metchnikoff traces his discovery of the immunological process of what he called phagocytosis back to a day in late 1882, when it occurred to him that a category of amoeba-­like “wandering cells” (also known as macrophages) he had been examining exhibited behavior that in principle could also help protect a host organism from infection: One day when the whole family had gone to a circus to see some extraordinary performing apes, I remained alone with my microscope, observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent star-­fish larva, when a new thought suddenly flashed across my brain. It



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struck me that similar cells might serve in the defense of the organism against intruders. Feeling that there was in this something of surpassing interest, I felt so excited that I began striding up and down the room and even went to the seashore in order to collect my thoughts. I said to myself that if my supposition was true, a splinter introduced into the body of a star-­fish larva, devoid of blood vessels or a nervous system, should soon be surrounded by mobile cells as is to be observed in a man who runs a splinter into his finger. This was no sooner said than done. . . . ​ That experiment formed the basis of the phagocyte theory, to the development of which I devoted the next twenty-­five years of my life.17

Set against the backdrop of an uncanny spectacle of performing apes, Metchnikoff’s investigation of these starfish cells inspired a set of anthropomorphic metaphors with far-­reaching implications for understanding the human body itself. Noting that the cells appear to literally ingest their targets, for instance, Metchnikoff dubbed them phagocytes—​from the Greek root phagein, meaning “to eat”—​a nd it was this process of cellular consumption that provided the inspiration for his discovery of the ability of the immune system’s white blood cells to recognize and consume harmful microbes. Metchnikoff’s recollection of his discovery of phagocytosis is similar to Lu Xun’s own retrospective account of the role of the execution slide in leading him to compose “Diary of a Madman.” In particular, Lu Xun traces his decision to become a “spiritual physician” back to his viewing of the execution slide and, specifically, his alienated response to what Roland Barthes would call the slide’s punctum, or an anomalous aspect of a photograph that jolts the viewer out of a transparent engagement with the image.18 For Lu Xun, however, this punctum was not so much a visible element of the slide but rather a structural faultline in his visual and affective relationship to the image. Like Metchnikoff’s phagocytic white blood cells, meanwhile, Lu Xun responded to this visual stimulus by figuratively consuming the alien and alienating dimension of the execution slide, thereby transforming it into an imaginary ground for his new self-­conception.

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To the extent that Lu Xun’s seminal viewing of the Japanese execution slide may be seen as an example of failed suture and the bacteriological images that preceded the execution slide exemplify a vision of a “body in pieces” (a body literally fractured into countless autonomous, microscopic elements), Lu Xun’s Call to Arms preface functions not so much as a conventional autobiographical narrative but rather as what John Coetzee would call an autre-­biography—​which is to say, a narrative of the subject as constitutively alienated, infected, and internally fractured. Like Lacan’s figure of the imago, however, it is precisely this external and alienated (self-­)image that provides the subject with a site of potential projective identification, a figurative mirror image against which the subject may identify himself or herself. Community

The themes of infection and split subjectivity that haunt Lu Xun’s viewing of the 1906 execution slide also inform his decision a decade later to compose “Diary of a Madman.” In the Call to Arms preface, for instance, Lu Xun recalls that by the time his friend Qian Xuantong convinced him to compose a story for New Youth,19 the earlier optimism he had enjoyed in Japan after abandoning his medical studies had already faded into a deep disillusionment with which he feared he might “infect” (chuanran) his readers. Lu Xun eventually acceded to Qian’s request, but specified that he was doing so not out of any internal conviction that his works would be able to have a productive impact on his readers but rather in accordance with what he called his “general’s orders.” By locating the moral impetus for his fiction outside of himself (and with the figurative “general” whom elsewhere he identifies as being “the revolutionary vanguard of the time”),20 Lu Xun was thereby implicitly positioning himself within a double vector of contagion—​attempting to quarantine his readers from his own underlying pessimism while at the same time providing a conduit through which a set of revolutionary ideals could be transmitted to those same readers. The result is a deeply fractured self-­perception, in that the author perceives himself to be contaminated with a potentially infectious pessimism while at the same time he is being asked to help convey to his readers an optimism that he himself does not share.



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The metaphor of ideological contagion to which Lu Xun appeals in this account of his decision to compose “Diary of a Madman” for New Youth builds on a set of microbiological metaphors that are at the heart of the latter journal’s own self-­conception. In 1915, for instance, the founding editor of New Youth, Chen Duxiu, opened the inaugural issue of the journal (which at that point was simply called Youth Magazine [Qingnian zazhi]) with a short manifesto entitled “Call to Youth” (Jinggao qingnian). In this essay, Chen proposed a detailed microbiological metaphor to explain his understanding of “youth”—​ with youth here referring to both the journal’s intended readership as well as to the journal itself.21 Chen begins the essay by comparing society’s youth to the cells in the human body: Youth have the same relationship to society that fresh and vital cells have to the human body. In the metabolic process, old and rotten cells are constantly being weeded out, thereby creating openings that are promptly filled with fresh and vital cells. If this metabolic process functions correctly, the organism will remain healthy, but if the old and rotten cells are allowed to accumulate, the organism will die. If this metabolic process functions properly at a societal level, society will flourish, but if the old and rotten elements are allowed to accumulate, society will perish.22

Chen argues that in a healthy society “fresh and vital” (xinxian huopo) elements are continually replacing “old and corrupt” (chenfu xiubai) ones, and he insists that China is doomed to perish due to the fact that most of its own “youth” are already mentally and physically “old.” He further contends that in order for the nation to eliminate this metaphorical “disease” (bing), it would be necessary for a couple of enlightened and motivated youth to “achieve self-­awareness and begin to struggle”—​further specifying that the youths’ self-­awareness requires that they “be conscious of the value and responsibility of their own freshness and vitality,” while their corresponding struggle requires that they “resolutely discard the old and the rotten.” The implication is that in order for society’s youth to address the metaphorical disease plaguing the nation, they must first learn to differentiate between “fresh and vital” and “old and rotten” agents in society, while simultaneously

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­ ifferentiating between the “fresh and vital” and “old and rotten” eled ments within themselves. In this way, Chen’s metaphor of cellular regeneration provides a basis for understanding not only the desired social function of society’s youth but also the processes of subject formation through which those same youth would come to recognize themselves and their designated role within society in the first place. Given that the purpose of this manifesto was to map out the desired function and objectives of the journal itself, what Chen was proposing here was in effect a sort of socioliterary mirror stage—​wherein the journal would function as a figurative imago of an idealized set of “new youth” against which the journal’s contemporary readers might then projectively identify themselves. The journal, in other words, was conceived not merely as a conduit for conveying progressive ideas to its youthful readership but also as a means of actively constituting the progressive readership it was ostensibly addressing in the first place. Chen Duxiu’s “call” (jinggao) to youth, therefore, had a perlocutionary force, interpellating his readership into a reformist ideology through a gesture of what Althusser calls “hailing.” A year later, Chen changed the title of his journal from Youth Magazine to New Youth and marked the occasion by publishing another short manifesto in which he explains that there exists a vast gulf between society’s bona fide “new youth” (xin qingnian) and what he calls “old youth” (jiu qingnian). He argues that even as youth mortality rates in many developed nations have declined dramatically, China’s “youth” nevertheless remain “weak and do not understand hygiene, and consequently their mortality rate from infectious disease continues to rise.” The key to a nation’s competitiveness, he concludes, may be found in the health and liveliness of its youth, and consequently it is precisely on account of the enfeebled state of China’s youth that “everyone calls China the sick man of Asia, and indeed there are hardly any of our youth who would not fall into the category of ‘sick men’.”23 For Chen Duxiu and other Chinese reformers, the familiar trope of China as the sick man of Asia had by this point come to function as a sort of inverse imago—​an external image against which the reformers were attempting to reinvent the Chinese nation. Chen, in turn, deploys



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this de-­idealized image to argue that the problems afflicting the nation’s youth are both a cause and a symptom of the nation’s figurative illness. He proposes that not only are China’s “old youth” themselves vulnerable to infectious disease on account of their ignorance of basic principles of health and hygiene; their literal sickness is simultaneously a symbol, a symptom, and a cause of an underlying national disease. Later in the same issue of the journal, Chen Duxiu develops a related commentary on the relationship between age and infection in a short overview of the life and work of Élie Metchnikoff. Chen begins by outlining the Russian scientist’s model of immune response, emphasizing the consumptive metaphor underlying his understanding of phagocytosis (Chen translates Metchnikoff’s neologism phagocyte into Chinese as shijun xibao, or literally “microbe-­eating cells”), and then draws on a set of martial metaphors to explain the immunological function of the body’s phagocytic white blood cells: When pathogens invade the body and the threat level is increased, white blood cells will array themselves in response. As the enemy forces increase, the white blood cells continue sending additional troops to fight to the death. As the battle unfolds, the body’s temperature rises and the battlefield can be clearly observed if the affected tissue is examined under a microscope. Metchnikoff was the first to understand this ability of white blood cells to control and suppress pathogenic microbes.24

This metaphor of white blood cells heroically defending the body from microbial invaders was initially proposed by Metchnikoff himself, and it continues to figure prominently in a wide range of discourses of immunological response to this day. The irony inherent in this use of military metaphors to describe immunological response, however, is that these tropes implicitly shift attention away from the organism that the immune system is ostensibly “defending” to the quasi-­ autonomous behavior of the immune system itself. In other words, this metaphorical model raises the possibility that, like soldiers in an army, the white blood cells and other elements that comprise an organism’s immune system are capable of acting in ways that may even undermine the well-­being of the organism itself.

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The possibility of internecine struggle implied by this military metaphor, meanwhile, has a very real correlate in the phenomenon of autoimmune reactions, wherein the immune system mistakenly targets the body’s own healthy tissue. As Chen notes, Metchnikoff emphasized the fact that there are many circumstances under which white blood cells may become pathogenic and turn against the body itself, and that this risk increases as the organism ages. For instance, there is a category of white blood cell, known as monocytes, that have the ability to differentiate into macrophages, or “wandering cells,” and circulate through the body, targeting both foreign pathogens and the body’s own diseased cells. As the organism ages, these macrophages become increasingly likely to attack the organism’s own healthy tissue, resulting in a process of internal cannibalism that becomes both a symptom and a cause of the aging process. Metchnikoff viewed old age as a sort of “chronic disease” caused by the body’s “overly active white blood cells” and concluded that “the aging of a person’s body may be attributed completely to the harm done by microbes, and is no different from the symptoms of a disease.”25 Given Metchnikoff’s interest in this ability of white blood cells to figuratively consume both foreign pathogens as well as the body’s own tissue, it is fitting that in the final years of his life Metchnikoff became increasingly fascinated with the relationship between the aging process and the human digestive system. Arguing that bacteria residing in the large intestine stimulate the differentiation of monocytes into macrophages, Metchnikoff contended that if only one could reduce or eliminate these gut flora it should then be possible to significantly decrease the number of these potentially destructive macrophages, which in turn could help extend the human lifespan by a century or more. He proposed that one solution would be to surgically remove the large intestine altogether, but that one might also obtain a similar benefit by regularly consuming fermented milk products containing bacteria that produce lactic acid as a byproduct. These bacteria would have the effect of raising the overall acidity of the inside of the intestine, thereby making it a more inhospitable environment for other bacteria that would otherwise contribute to the differentiation of monocytes into macrophages. The irony, however, is that the latter solution effectively inverts the conventional logic of the immune



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system itself—​in that foreign bacteria come to function as a sort of second-­order immune system, protecting the organism from the cannibalistic tendencies of its own immune system. In Chen Duxiu’s summary of Metchnikoff’s immunological model, we find a suggestive parallel to the vision of cellular regeneration Chen had sketched out in his earlier “new youth” manifestos. White blood cells identify and consume what Chen calls “old and rotten cells,” and in the process, they help the organism maintain its health and youth. To the extent that these same white blood cells may attack the body’s own healthy tissue, however, they thereby become equivalent to the pathogens that they were ostensibly targeting in the first place—​just as Chen’s “youth” may become “old youth” who exacerbate society’s backwardness. Chen summarizes the resulting tension between the body and its ostensible defenders with the observation that “although white blood cells may help defend the body, as the body ages they themselves become powerful enemies.” Although Chen Duxiu, in this essay, does not explicitly address the sociopolitical implications of Metchnikoff’s immune system model, he does broach a related issue in his discussion of Metchnikoff’s interest in the ethical ramifications of the model. Chen notes that Metchnikoff asked rhetorically whether the white blood cells’ attacks “are necessarily carried out for the purpose of protecting the body,” to which Metchnikoff himself replied that “no, the cells’ consumption of microbes is not a result of their attempts to protect the body, and instead is merely a function of their need to feed themselves.”26 More recently, historian of science Donna Haraway raises a similar question when she asks whether the immune system represents “the ultimate sign of altruistic evolution toward wholeness,” to which she similarly answers in the negative, contending that the role of the immune system is instead to actively constitute the organism as a unitary entity. Haraway argues that the immune system functions as a virtual reading machine that produces the organism as a fundamentally hybrid entity, and which may be compared to an internal mirror stage wherein the corporeal integrity of the organism is predicated on a continual process of misrecognition at the cellular level.27 In this postmodern reading of the body of immunological theory that developed out of Metchnikoff’s initial formulations, Haraway is

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merely elaborating a deconstructive logic that was already implicit in the theory itself. The immune system provisionally maintains the body’s health and integrity through a continual process of differentiation and recognition. Immunity, in other words, is understood to be a function of a process of figurative reading, which in turn is predicated on the necessary possibility of misreading. By this logic, therefore, even as Chen Duxiu was appropriating immunological models as metaphors for the dialectics of recognition and misrecognition that under­ ­lie the possibility of political reform, he was simultaneously offering a commentary on the dialectics of reading and misreading that characterize the process of hermeneutics itself. The audience to whom Chen Duxiu was presenting these microbiological models of political reform, meanwhile, included not only his youthful readers but also his fellow and future contributors to the journal itself. One contributor who appears to have taken Chen’s immune system metaphor to heart was Hu Shi. A leading figure in China’s early twentieth-­century New Culture Movement, Hu Shi was pursuing his doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University when Chen founded New Youth in 1915, but he subsequently became a frequent contributor to the journal after returning to Beijing in 1917. In July 1918, Hu Shi published an introductory essay to a special issue of New Youth devoted to the work of Henrik Ibsen, in which he presents an overview of Ibsen’s works and concludes with a detailed discussion of the play Enemy of the People. As Hu Shi explains, the work’s protagonist, Dr. Stockman, discovers that his town’s local hot springs may be used to create health-­restoring baths, and when the locals hear his proposal they decide it is feasible, and therefore proceed to raise funds to build several such baths. The fame of these baths spreads throughout the region, leading patients to come in from all over to treat their illnesses. As more and more visitors arrive, the local economy booms and Dr. Stockman establishes a hot bath medical clinic. Eventually, however, some of the patients begin falling ill, and Stockman suspects that they have contracted infections from the health-­restoring baths themselves. He sends a water sample to a university laboratory for analysis, which reveals that the baths’ pipes were not sealed tightly enough, thereby permitting the introduction of foreign contaminants.28



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The irony that these “hygienic baths” become breeding pools of infectious microbes is implicitly underscored, in Hu Shi’s Chinese-­language summary, by the homophonic resonances between the baths’ ostensible function in promoting public hygiene (weisheng, or literally “the defense of life”), and their actual role in transmitting harmful microbes (weishengwu, or literally “microscopic life”). Embedded within the concept of socio/corporeal “defense,” in other words, there lies the necessary possibility that these defensive agents may become threats in their own right. More dangerous than the infectious baths themselves, meanwhile, is the community’s defiant resistance to Stockman’s subsequent attempts to address the crisis. In Hu Shi’s words: Upon receiving this evidence of the baths’ contamination, Dr. Stockman releases a comprehensive announcement and asks the board of directors to address the health crisis by replacing all of the pipes to the baths. He doesn’t anticipate, however, just how expensive and time-­consuming this process will be. Given the harm that a two-­year closing of the baths would pose to the local economy, the townspeople are unanimous in their adamant opposition to Stockman’s recommendations, suggesting that they would prefer to have patients die of infection rather than endure the financial setback that the closure of the baths would entail. The community uses an authoritarian power to suppress the views of this truth-­telling doctor and prevent him from speaking. When Stockman writes a report, the local press refuses to publish it; and when he tries to publish it himself, the printer declines to accept it. When Stockman tries to convene a meeting to communicate his views, he finds that no one is willing to lend him a room; and after he does finally manage to find a venue, his audience chases him off the stage, unanimously declar­ ­ing him to be an enemy of the people.29

Even as Stockman is actively attempting to address the health crisis he helped create, the community identifies Stockman himself as the great­ e­ st threat to their collective interests, transforming the self-­appointed “defender” of society’s well-­being into the community’s own worst enemy. While Ibsen’s play clearly sympathizes with Stockman, the work’s title nevertheless reminds us that from the community’s perspective

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it is actually Stockman himself who is a dangerously destabilizing element—​a true “enemy of the people.” At one point in the original play, Stockman notes that the town’s public baths are conceived in explicitly corporeal terms, as “the ‘main artery of the town’s life-­blood,’ the ‘nerve-­center of the town,’ and the devil knows what else.”30 In his New Youth essay, meanwhile, Hu Shi proposes a different set of metaphors to describe the work’s organismic logic: It is as if [Ibsen] were saying, “People’s bodies all rely on the innumerable white blood cells in their bloodstream to be perpetually battling the harmful microbes that enter the body, and to make certain that they are all completely eliminated. Only then can the body be healthy and the spirit complete.” The health of the society and of the nation depend completely on these white blood cells, which are never satisfied, never content, and at every moment are battling the evil and the filthy elements in society. Only then can there be hope for social improvement and advancement.31

In this immunological reading of Ibsen’s play, Hu Shi compares Stockman’s efforts to renovate the infected baths to white blood cells’ response to foreign pathogens but then immediately translates this medical metaphor into a broader sociopolitical model for reformers’ efforts to eradicate the “evil and filthy elements in society.”32 To the extent that Metchnikoff’s original model of immune response suggests that white blood cells, in addition to protecting the body from infection, also have the capacity to devour it from within, Hu Shi’s own immunological metaphor for sociopolitical reform inadvertently brings out the moral ambiguity at the heart of Ibsen’s play itself—​ namely, the fact that Stockman and the townspeople have radically different perspectives on who is actually “defending” society and who is its true “enemy.” While Stockman sees himself as working indefatigably to eliminate the contaminants from the town’s water supply, the townspeople unite in their resistance to him, whom they view as posing a fundamental challenge to the town’s economic well-­being. Hu Shi’s immunological metaphor, therefore, is grounded on a couple of key paradoxes. His description of the body’s “innumerable white



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blood cells” would appear to correspond more to the townspeople’s response to Stockman’s actions than to the solitary crusade of Stockman himself (whose motto, after all, is that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone”).33 More generally, Hu Shi’s metaphor assumes that white blood cells will necessarily support the interests of the organism, while the crux of Ibsen’s play lies precisely in the fact that Stockman and the other townspeople disagree fundamentally over what the community’s true interests are in the first place. On one hand, Stockman sees himself as addressing a public health crisis, though from the townspeople’s perspective it is actually Stockman’s attempts to reform the town’s baths that constitute the most immediate threat to the community’s (economic) well-­being. On the other hand, although the townspeople regard Stockman as an “enemy of the people,” the play nevertheless suggests that it is precisely the town’s misdirected response to Stockman’s actions that constitutes the greatest threat to the community as a whole. The ultimate “enemy of the people,” under this latter reading, would actually be the people themselves. Even as Hu Shi’s interpretation of Enemy of the People suggests that society may misrecognize the true nature of a threat to its collective interests, his analysis simultaneously reflects the possibility that these immunological elements might similarly misrecognize their ostensible targets, implying that the very act of reading is itself predicated on the necessary possibility of misreading. In particular, the immunological model that Hu Shi deploys to explain the play’s reformist logic inadvertently illustrates the inverse possibility that a community might collectively target and “consume” the very same reformist elements that are attempting to help heal the community in the first place. This latter scenario, meanwhile, assumes either that the townspeople are misrecognizing their true interests or that they are in fact correct in targeting Stockman as a destabilizing threat—​which in turn would suggest that our sympathy for Stockman’s righteous and solitary crusade might actually be fundamentally ­misplaced. Even as Hu Shi’s analysis of Stockman’s play points to the possibility that political reform is necessarily grounded on a hermeneutic

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process whereby the potentially beneficial and destructive elements in society are recognized and differentiated, an important corollary is that this interpretation of the play is itself a product of an interpretive reading in its own right. Indeed, the specific immunological lens through which Hu Shi reinterprets the play had not even been developed when Ibsen wrote the original work (the play had its debut in 1882, which happened to be the same year that Metchnikoff performed the experiment with the starfish larva that ultimately led to his development of a model of immune system function), much less the specific set of May Fourth cultural and political debates with which Hu Shi was explicitly in dialogue. As a result, both Hu Shi and the readers of New Youth are thereby placed in a hermeneutic position analogous to that of Stockman himself, forced to ground their political goals and orientations on a necessarily fallible process of reading and interpretation. Coda: Of Cannibalism and Canons

Published in New Youth in May 1918, Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” develops many of the same issues that Hu Shi will foreground in his discussion of Enemy of the People a month later in the following issue of the journal. In particular, “Diary of a Madman” and Enemy of the People both revolve around a solitary individual who becomes aware of a pernicious threat to his community and consequently comes to be ostracized by that same community. While Lu Xun was presumably not directly influenced by Hu Shi’s Ibsen essay (which, after all, was published a month after his), both works were nevertheless located within the same immediate discursive environment, which included Chen Duxiu’s original explication of the intended function of the journal New Youth itself. I suggest that the psychoanalytic and immunological vision of fractured subjectivity implicit in Chen Duxiu’s microbiological essays finds its logical conclusion in both Hu Shi’s Ibsen essay (which explicitly cites Metchnikoff’s model of phagocytic white blood cells to describe a community that has turned in upon itself) and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (whose thematization of an epidemic of cannibalism concretizes not only the specter of infection underlying the immunological metaphor itself but also the necessary



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possibility of an autoimmune crisis, wherein the phagocytic white blood cells turn back upon the body [politic]). This sort of psychoimmunological reading of Lu Xun’s story, however, complicates the conventional understanding of the work’s status as an allegory of political reform. If the town’s epidemic of cannibalism is viewed as the specter of a “cannibalistic” autoimmune crisis, for instance, then the story becomes not so much an allegory of a reformist critique of regressive institutions and ideologies but rather a commentary on the structural limits of political reform itself. To the extent that reform is understood in quasi-­immunological terms as a process of recognition and consumption, in other words, it contains within itself the necessary possibility of misrecognition, resulting in an autoimmune attack on “healthy” elements of the body (politic). The story’s cannibalism, therefore, may be understood as not merely the object of reform, but also, and more importantly, the mirror image of reform itself. Distinguishing between progressive “immunological” reform and cannibalistic autoimmunological self-­destruction, moreover, is literally a question of hermeneutics—​a blurred line between recognition and misrecognition, and between reading and misreading. Viewed in these terms, the story implicitly raises the necessary possibility that the madman may be misinterpreting the significance of the “cannibalism” by which he perceives himself to be surrounded—​ suggesting that it may in fact be he himself who poses a threat to the status quo, and that society’s efforts to contain him are bona fide immunological responses to what Chen Duxiu might call an “old and corrupt” element that threatens the health of the body politic. This hermeneutic tension within the story is reinforced by the work’s two alternate endings. On one hand, the text proper famously concludes with the madman’s hopeful speculation that “perhaps there are still children who have not yet eaten men,” followed by his plea to “save the children!” Convinced that his own infection by the virus of cannibalism is already a foregone conclusion, the diarist nevertheless holds out hope that it might still be possible to save some of the children who have not yet been “infected,” which is to say fully interpolated into society’s cannibalistic ideology. This optimistic note at the end of the story, however, appears to be out of line with the work’s generally dark sensibility, and consequently may be seen as an example

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of the sort of “bent pen” (qubi) innuendoes that Lu Xun, in his preface to Call to Arms, notes he would frequently add to the end of his stories in order to help them conform to the optimistic expectations of what he calls his “general’s orders.”34 In particular, the narrator’s appeal to children’s redemptive potential resonates with Chen Duxiu’s insistence that the possibility of societal transformation lay in society’s “new youth.” On the other hand, a rather different conclusion to the story may be found in the story’s prologue. Written in classical Chinese and ostensibly composed some time after the events detailed in the diary proper, this short prologue observes that the “madman” has already recovered and “gone elsewhere to wait for an official post.” Given that the story implies that China’s pernicious cannibalistic culture is rooted in its Confucian ideology and bureaucratic structure, from the perspective of a reader critical of this traditional ideology and social structure the remark that the diarist is waiting for a position within the official bureaucracy suggests that he has, in effect, finally been reabsorbed by the same cannibalistic institutions he was originally trying to resist. From the perspective of mainstream society, however, the implication is presumably the reverse—​that the diarist is now waiting for a bureaucratic appointment would appear to indicate that the destabilizing threat he had previously posed has thereby been neutralized. If one reads the story through the lens of the diary itself, it is society that is dysfunctional and the diarist who is one of the few people capable of offering an alternative solution; but if we take the story’s prologue at face value, it is then the madman himself who is an unstable and disruptive element who must be controlled for the sake of the greater good. Like Ibsen’s Dr. Stockman, Lu Xun’s madman may be viewed as either a beneficial element that may help protect society from itself or as a destabilizing force that threatens to undermine society from within. Even as this reading of “Diary” complicates the canonical interpretation of the story as a straightforwardly reformist text, it simultaneously comments on the process by which texts (and their interpretations) may become canonical in the first place. The way in which social elements are collectively recognized to be either beneficial or harmful mirrors the way in which texts themselves are read



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and understood. The possibility that Lu Xun’s madman may have misinterpreted the significance of the ostensibly cannibalistic behavior of his family and neighbors, accordingly, directly mirrors the possibility that the story’s readers may have systematically misinterpreted the significance of the story’s own representation of cannibalism. Seen in these terms, the story’s presentation of cannibalism as a metaphor for a hegemonic force has not only sociopolitical implications (symbolizing a process by which societal elements that are perceived to be “foreign” are systematically reincorporated by either an existing or a new societal mainstream) but also hermeneutic ones (symbolizing a process by which textual readings that are perceived to be “foreign” are systematically reincorporated by either an existing or new canonical body of interpretation). The implication, in other words, is that the significance of a text like “Diary of a Madman” lies in its status as the product of a set of mutually contested readings and interpretations, just as the text’s position within the literary canon is a reflection not so much of the content of the work itself but rather of the ways it has been shaped by virtue of its position within a contested field of analysis and interpretation. Lu Xun presents an interesting commentary on these canon-­ making processes in a 1925 essay entitled “A Reading Canon for the Fourteenth Year [of the Republic]” (Shisi nian de dujing). The essay opens with a critique of a recent call for the development of a “reading canon” for contemporary China, claiming that the classical texts to be included in such a canon would inevitably be so ideologically tainted that “if we want China to improve, it would perhaps be best if everyone were illiterate; because once people are able to read, it is as though they thereby become contaminated by this disease of canonicity (dujing de binggen).”35 Just as Lu Xun’s madman believes the culture of cannibalism to be so pervasive that it is almost impossible to avoid being affected by it, Lu Xun himself suggests half-­satirically in this essay that the traditional ideologies that underlie China’s canonical texts are so pernicious that the mere condition of being literate virtually guarantees that one will become infected by them. Lu Xun returns to another version of this metaphorical “disease of canonicity” at the end of the essay, where he compares the destructive effects of traditional canons to the accumulation of waste elements in

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the body. He explains that the presence of these waste elements causes the body’s white blood cell monocytes to differentiate into macrophages, which may then begin “devouring [the body’s own] tissue (canshi ge zuzhi).” From this biomedical model, Lu Xun proposes a broader immunological metaphor for society: An old and feeble country probably cannot avoid this kind of phenomenon [of the pernicious effects of the canonical texts]. This situation is like that of an aging human body, in which waste material increases and mineral sediments accumulate in the tissue, rendering it rigid and susceptible to failure. The immune system’s “wandering cells” are gradually transformed and begin focusing only on themselves; and if there is the slightest opening, these cells will immediately rush in and devour the [body’s own] tissue—​laying the tissue to waste and making it susceptible to annihilation. The famous Russian doctor Elias Metschnikov [sic] gave these cells a new name: “Fresserzelle,” or macrophages [dajue xibao—​literally, “big chew­ ­ing cells”].

After identifying the potential threat of these metaphorical macrophages, Lu Xun suggests that the most straightforward remedy would be to simply eliminate them altogether: “It is said that it is necessary to first eliminate these cells in order for the body to avoid aging, and in order to do so it is necessary to take a daily dose of acid. [Metchnikoff] himself practiced this.” Here, Lu Xun takes Metchnikoff’s suggestion that foreign bacteria may be used as a second-­order immune system to protect the body from the cannibalistic tendencies of its own immunological white blood cells and turns it upon itself—​introducing Metchnikoff’s proposal as a distinctly alien element that may offer a cure for the infectious and cannibalistic tendencies that characterize China’s own literary and ideological canon. At the same time, the foreign—​and even alien—​connotations of Lu Xun’s invocation of Metchnikoff’s biomedical proposal that foreign bacteria be used for immunological purposes suggests a possible answer to our earlier question of how to interpret the trope of medicine, or yī, in “Diary of a Madman.” The answer, Lu Xun implies in his allusion to Metchnikoff at the end of the reading canon essay, is that the trope of “medicine” (yī 醫) in the work functions precisely as



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a node of “alterity” (yì 異)—​which is to say, as a foreign element that encourages a critical reappraisal of views and beliefs that would otherwise be perceived as familiar. The precise obverse of medicine itself, this latter node of alterity is a figure of the homesickness on which the individual’s and the community’s structural coherence and internal transformation are predicated.

2

Part II

1967 Pharmakons

On October 17, 1967, as the Cultural Revolution was raging in China, Pu Yi died as a result of a combination of ailments that included kidney cancer and heart disease. Although by this point China’s last emperor had become little more than a historical footnote, his demise nevertheless brought a formal close to a dynastic era that for all practical purposes had already concluded more than a half century earlier. Moreover, just as Pu Yi’s birth had anticipated the impending collapse of China’s dynastic system a few years later, his death came near the beginning of what would prove to be Mao Zedong’s last major political campaign before his own demise in 1976. Pu Yi’s life, then, figuratively bookends the conclusion both of China’s formal dynastic era and of the post-­dynastic high-­Maoist era. After having been literally the face of China’s Communist Party for more than two decades, Mao Zedong became increasingly concerned in the 1960s that his authority was under threat. This anxiety had a practical basis, in that Mao believed that the Party bureaucracy was attempting to wrest power away from him, but it also had a more abstract dimension, in that he became convinced that his entire environment was filled with malevolent forces. For instance, Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui recalled how in early 1966 Mao had complained about the Nanchang guesthouse where he was staying, remarking, “There’s something about the guesthouse. It’s poisonous. 123

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There’s something poisonous here. I can’t stay here any longer.” Li Zhisui interpreted Mao’s remarks as a symptom of his growing political paranoia, and noted that in this particular instance, “the only poison was political, the intrigue and backstabbing at the highest levels of communist power.”1 What Li Zhisui described as political paranoia was most clearly manifested in Mao’s fear that he was being edged aside within the Party itself, and it was in part to address these concerns that, in July 1966, Mao took a well-­publicized swim in the Yangtze River to demonstrate his continued physical—​and, by extension, political—​vitality. This famous swim marked the symbolic beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao appealed directly to his contemporary “new youth,” which is to say the Red Guards, to help carry out his political agenda. The Red Guards were young men and women who had been given unprecedented freedom to travel throughout the country and target individuals whom they deemed counterrevolutionaries and to destroy cultural artifacts perceived to be linked to the old society. These Red Guards usually ended up far from home, meaning that they were literally outsiders with respect to the communities in which they were operating. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to “destroy the old civilization in order to establish a new one,” though these Red Guards, like white blood cells that begin attacking healthy tissue, quickly became a destructive force in their own right. The violence and terror unleashed by the Red Guards eventually reached the point that, in 1969, Chairman Mao himself recognized that it was necessary to disband them in order to prevent further damage. Just as Mao attempted to use his Yangtze swim to telegraph his physical and political health to the rest of the country, his figurative plunge into the revolutionary fervor of the Red Guards had a similar effect of helping invigorate his public image, even as the violence unleashed by the Cultural Revolution simultaneously dramatized the ideological pollution the nation had suffered over the preceding seventeen years. Mao’s call for the youthful Red Guards to help carry out his revolutionary agenda mirrors Chen Duxiu’s earlier appeal to the nation’s “new youth” as a source of reform and change. Similarly, Mao’s injunction that the Red Guards seek out and destroy the so-­called Four



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Olds (i.e., old customs, old habits, old ideas, and old culture) mirrors Chen’s earlier characterization of the role of “fresh and lively” cells in identifying and eliminating old and rotten elements in society. Mao’s Destroy the Four Olds Movement, meanwhile, was preceded by the Four Cleanups Movement (also known as the Socialist Education Movement), which Mao launched in 1963 in an attempt to cleanse the nation’s politics, economy, organization, and ideology. The Four Cleanups Campaign featured compulsory Mao Thought study programs and class struggle sessions as well as attacks on community leaders and local officials, and while the campaign itself would be formally called off three years later, its perceived failure nevertheless helped provide the catalyst for the Cultural Revolution, which adopted some of its same techniques. One of the key theoretical elements underlying the Cultural Revolu­ t­ ion was Mao’s notion of a “continuous revolution” (jixu geming). This concept was first formally proposed in a 1967 editorial commemorat­ ­ing the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. It brought together quotes from Mao’s writings from the preceding decade,2 and an expanded version of the editorial was published two years later in an article titled “Chairman Mao on Continuing the Revolution under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” This theory of a continuous revolu­ ­tion echoed, and yet was conceptually distinct from, Trotsky’s earlier notion of a “permanent revolution” (which is conventionally translated into Chinese as “uninterrupted revolution” [buduan geming]), in that whereas Trotsky’s concept referred to a fundamental continuity between the democratic and socialist stages of the revolution, Mao’s notion instead underscored the need to continue maintaining a revolutionary orientation even after the socialist stage had already been achieved. Rather than seeing revolution as merely a means to an end, in other words, this new formulation instead viewed a neverending revolutionary movement as part of the desired end in itself.3 This concept of a continuous revolution is nicely illustrated in Mao’s own shifting attitude toward the classic Ming dynasty novel The Water Margin. Despite having long regarded The Water Margin as one of his favorite novels, in September 1975 Mao launched a major political campaign criticizing the work. Like Jin Shengtan three centuries earlier, Mao’s concerns with the novel centered around the fate

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of the rebels in the latter third of the original version of the work, although whereas Jin Shengtan had been troubled by the rebels’ alliance with the emperor because it suggested to him that their outlaw status had been symbolically redeemed, Mao was instead disturbed by this political realignment precisely because he would have preferred that the rebels instead retain their status as outlaws. For the early Mao, in other words, it was the rebels who occupied a position of political legitimacy in contrast to the Song emperor, whose authority had become deeply compromised. For the later Mao, however, part of the rebels’ interest is rooted precisely in their position at the margins of the sociopolitical establishment. Just as the observation that Lu Xun’s madman has been cured and is waiting for a government position suggests that he has already lost his former critical perspective, for Mao the suggestion that the Water Margin rebels have allied themselves with the imperial court indicates that they have necessarily sacrificed the oppositional positionality that had initially defined them. Mao’s Critique The Water Margin campaign attacked the rebel leader Song Jiang for having “capitulated” when he decided to join forces with the Song emperor. As a People’s Daily article published at the time made clear, however, the subtext of Mao’s criticism of Song Jiang’s alleged “capitulation” was actually an attempt “to critique the ‘capitulationists’ who repudiate the Cultural Revolution.”4 In the resulting campaign, an ailing Mao Zedong partially repudiated one of his favorite novels in order to preemptively attack those who he feared might attempt to disavow the historical legacy of the Cultural Revolu­ ­tion itself. In trying to rewrite future histories of the present, in other words, Mao was simultaneously rewriting his own past, with respect to his earlier interest in and commitment to one of his favorite works of literature. Below, I consider the simultaneously productive and destructive connotations of revolution that underlie Mao’s theory of a continuous revolution, focusing on the genre of wuxia film that flourished along the territorial margins of Mainland China during the mid-­century period. Paradigmatically associated with the space of the jianghu, the figure of the xia, or knight-­errant, is viewed as an independent entity positioned at the margins of existing social orthodoxies while at the same time possessing a sense of moral righteousness capable of



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offering a corrective to the necessary limitations of existing political regimes. To reassess the figure of the xia, I attend to what I call a thematics of du—​a Chinese term that is commonly used to mean “poison” but which, like the Greek term pharmakon, is actually a contronym, carrying mutually opposed meanings, and which may also be used to mean “treatment” (zhi). Du in this context represents the potential destructivity and productivity of the revolutionary initiatives that may emerge out of the margins of the orthodox political establishment. This figure of the pharmakon, or du, represents the structural obverse of what in the preceding chapter I called the phagocyte. Whereas the immune system’s phagocytotic white blood cells are conceived as constitutive elements of the body that may nevertheless end up attacking the body itself, a pharmakon is instead an element from outside the body (a poison) that may ultimately end up playing a beneficial role in helping cure an underlying illness (as a medicine). The xia, or knight-­errant, meanwhile, is a figure located at the margins of the social order, and it is this marginal position that makes it possible for the xia to play a salutary role in counteracting some of the potential excesses of the political establishment. Xia are conceived as alien elements that may play a productive role in society precisely on account of their independence from a political regime that may be corrupt or otherwise compromised. Accordingly, I examine how the xia functions as both a figurative antidote to the potential excesses of state-­sanctioned revolutionary fervor as well as a symbol of the ­necessary possibility of that revolutionary destructiveness in the first place. The mirror image of these idealized xia can be found in the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards. Like the xia, these Red Guards had a considerable degree of functional autonomy and frequently used violence to achieve their goals. In contrast to the conventional vision of the xia, which are generally regarded sympathetically, however, these Red Guards instead came to be viewed as a profoundly destructive influence, to the point that Mao himself ordered that they disband after only three years. Originally conceived as a force that would benefit society by promoting a continued revolutionary transformation, the Red Guards instead began ripping apart the very fabric of society itself.

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I focus in particular on King Hu’s classic wuxia film, Dragon Gate Inn (Longmen kezhan), which was released in Taiwan in 1967, shortly after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. I propose that the xia in the film mirror the structural position of Mao’s Red Guards, even as their resistance to the emperor’s secret forces offers an allegorical commentary on the parallel attempt to resist the destructive actions of the Red Guards themselves.

4 •

Revolution

In an early scene in King Hu’s classic 1967 wuxia film Dragon Gate Inn (Longmen kezhan), the protagonist Xiao Shaozi (played by Shih Chun) visits a remote inn located in China’s northern frontier. When he arrives, he finds that the innkeeper’s assistant appears oddly reluctant to let him enter. Xiao Shaozi nevertheless insists on going inside, where he proceeds to order a bowl of noodles and a carafe of wine. He downs several cups of wine in rapid succession, whereupon he suddenly stands up, staggers dramatically around the room, and then collapses facedown on the table. When one of the other men in the inn approaches, Xiao Shaozi abruptly stands up and spits the wine he has been holding in his mouth at the other man’s face. He then pours the remainder of the flask down the man’s throat, declaring indignantly, “You put poison in my drink!” It turns out that the inn has been commandeered by imperial secret agents, one of whom has secretly laced Xiao Shaozi’s wine with poison in an attempt to get him out of the way. Xiao Shaozi, however, realizes what is happening and gives the agent some of his own medicine, referring to the additive in his wine as dú 毒—​a character that is usually used to mean “poison” but which may also be used as a variant for the nearly homophonous character dū 督, which, like the verb zhi,

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carries a range of interrelated meanings including “to govern” (zhili) and “to treat” (zhiliao).1 This scene in King Hu’s film tacitly plays on these two contradictory meanings of du, and in taking the poisoned wine with which the secret agent had tried to kill him and redeploying it to his own advantage, Xiao Shaozi effectively transforms the poison into a beneficial agent that is then used to “treat” the malignant secret agent who deployed the poison in the first place. The film’s figure of the xia, or knight-­errant, meanwhile, embodies a political logic implicit in—​yet at the same time diametrically opposed to—​Mao Zedong’s concept of a continuous revolution. Mao’s notion of a continuous revolution was first formally proposed in 1967—​ which coincidentally was the same year that Dragon Gate Inn was released—​a nd it posits that structural contradictions within society will inevitably persist even after the successful establishment of a socialist state. The implication is that it will therefore be necessary to continue struggling against entrenched forces and social inequality even after the original revolution has theoretically already succeeded. Initiated in 1966, nearly two decades after the success of the Communist Revolution, the Cultural Revolution was driven by precisely this logic of the need for a continuous revolution. As a figure located at the very margins of the social establishment, meanwhile, the xia embodies this vision of a progressive struggle against corrupt and entrenched interests and, specifically, the need to continue fighting for the ideals on which society is grounded, even if it means challenging the existing establishment itself. At the same time, however, the xia also represents the converse possibility that these marginal elements, charged with continuing the revolution, may instead cannibalistically turn on the establishment itself. While revolution is frequently understood as an end-­oriented exercise aimed at overthrowing an existing regime and replacing it with another, the etymology of the Western-­language term connotes not a linear but rather a cyclical (“revolving”) process. In this respect, the perspective contained in Mao’s notion of a continuous revolution was arguably always already etymologically present in the Western concept of revolution. (The corresponding Chinese term, geming, does not explicitly carry these same connotations; however, given that the



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modern sense of geming as “revolution” was introduced in the late nineteenth century as a translation of the Western term, it could be argued that these etymological connotations are indirectly present in it as well). This cyclical quality, in turn, is captured by the traditional figure of the xia, whose identity is grounded not only on a loyalty to a set of ethical ideals but also on the xia’s potentially contentious and oppositional relationship to the existing political regime. Like the contronym du, accordingly, xia are figures who may carry mutually antithetical connotations, depending on their relationship to the regime whose authority they may be challenging, and it is precisely in this indeterminacy that they represent a node of instability that may drive (or undermine) the possibility of a revolutionary trans­ formation. In this chapter, I examine not only how King Hu’s film invokes this figure of the pharmakon but also how the work itself, particularly in its status as a paradigmatic exemplar of the wuxia genre, functions as a figurative pharmakon in its own right. Belonging to an exceedingly popular cultural genre that reflects explicitly on questions of political authority and dissent, the film may function either as an apolitical distraction or as a productive catalyst for a reimagination of existing sociopolitical regimes. Reading the work as a political allegory, accordingly, invites a reflection on the process of reading itself and, specifically, the way in which political communities are themselves products of a process of (mis)reading and (mis)recognition. Historical Reflections

As the narrative voice-­over of King Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn notes at the beginning of the film, the work is set in “China’s Ming dynasty, in the eighth year of the Jingtai reign, which is to say the year 1457 ad.” The voice-­over explains that the court’s eunuchs held considerable power during this period and controlled the court’s East Agency and the Imperial Guards. The prologue proceeds to introduce each of the main figures associated with the imperial forces, including Pi Shaotang (played by Miao Tien), the leader of the imperial guards, and Zhao Shaoqin (Bai Ying), the court’s Chief Eunuch. The voice-­over explains

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that General Yu Qian has been sentenced to death, and his children have been exiled to the northern frontier. Although the film proper does not specify why exactly General Yu Qian received his death sentence, the historical record reveals that his execution was rooted in a series of events that began to unfold eight years earlier. In 1449, in what would come to be known as the Battle of Tumu, the Ming court suffered its first decisive defeat by the Mongols. In this battle, which was part of the court’s larger campaign against the Mongolian Wala Clan, the Mongols not only defeated the Ming forces but they also managed to capture the twenty-­two-­year-­old Zhengtong Emperor, Zhu Qizhen, who had ridden into battle with his troops. In response to the emperor’s capture, however, the Ming court moved quickly to promote Zhu Qizhen’s younger brother, Zhu Qiyu, to the throne—​thereby undercutting Zhu Qizhen’s potential value to the Mongols as a hostage. As a result, when the Mongol leader attempted to use Zhu Qizhen to demand a ransom from the Ming court, the court’s Minister of the Board of War, General Yu Qian, simply refused to negotiate. Zhu Qizhen was released by the Mongols the following year and returned to the capital, whereupon Zhu Qiyu, unwilling to relinquish the throne he had inherited in Zhu Qizhen’s absence, promptly placed his elder brother under house arrest. Zhu Qizhen eventually managed to depose his brother in 1457, and one of his first acts upon regaining the throne was to order that General Yu Qian be executed for treason (for not having rescued the emperor when he was first captured).2 King Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn begins shortly after Zhu Qizhen regains power, though the film never actually mentions the emperor directly. In fact, due to a peculiarity in Chinese dating conventions (whereby a reign name technically remains operative until the end of the year, regardless of whether there has been a regime change in the interim), even the voice-­over’s initial specification of the reign year in which the work is set (“the eighth year of the Jingtai reign”) anachronistically references the reign of Zhu Qizhen’s younger brother, the already deposed Jingtai Emperor, rather than that of Zhu Qizhen himself (who was known as the Zhengtong Emperor before his capture, and as the Tianshun Emperor after being reinstated).3 In place of the absent emperor, accordingly, the locus of power in the film instead revolves



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around the emperor’s chief eunuch, Cao Shaoqin, who—​as the film’s prologue notes—​holds the real power in the court. When Chief Eunuch Cao first appears at the beginning of the film, he is being carried in a sedan chair to the field where General Yu Qian is about to be executed. As an extension of Yu Qian’s punishment, the general’s children have also been exiled to the northern frontier, though Chief Eunuch Cao fears that if the children are merely exiled they may subsequently return to the capital and attempt to avenge their father’s death. He therefore orders his secret agents to follow the prisoners and kill them before they reach their destination. After failing to apprehend their targets on the road, the agents decide instead to wait for them at the Dragon Gate Inn, which the military procession will pass on its way to the frontier, and it is here that the majority of the film’s action takes place. The film’s voice-­over specifies that Chief Eunuch Cao is in charge of the “two most powerful agencies, the East Agency and the Imperial Guards.” The prologue then points to a group within the East Agency known as fanzi, who are described as being “stone-­hearted and vicious,” and furthermore notes that “people were always petrified with fear whenever they heard they were coming.” The voice-­over further explains that the term fanzi means “special agents” (mitan), and that these particular agents have been sent by Chief Eunuch Cao to assassinate Yu Qian’s descendants. Although in the late imperial period the term fanzi began to be used to refer to yaman runners charged with arresting criminals, the term originally referred to individuals who are ethnically foreign. Coincidentally, two of the fanzi troops in the film turn out to be actual ethnic “foreigners”—​Turkic Tartars (Dada ren) working for the Ming court. These two fanzi subsequently reveal that they had previously served under General Yu Qian himself before he was accused of treason, and are now working as imperial agents only under duress. They eventually switch allegiances and join Xiao Shaozi and his companions in their resistance to the eunuch Cao. As secret agents, these imperial fanzi troops function as foreign entities who attempt to infiltrate their targets by assuming a cloak of familiarity, and it is by virtue of their ability to pass as virtual insiders that these fanzi are thereby able to carry out their assigned mission. This dialectics of familiarity and alienation, meanwhile, is also played out

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with respect to the relationship between the fanzi and the imperial court. As representatives of the court, the fanzi in theory would be viewed as paradigmatically orthodox, though King Hu’s film makes it clear that these particular agents are actually operating on behalf of Chief Eunuch Cao to target innocent victims. While these fanzi are agents of the court who have been charged with carrying out an illicit mission, their adversaries consist of a combination of former military officials associated with the executed general and itinerant swordsmen like Xiao Shaozi who are risking their lives to defend individuals targeted by the court. For instance, it turns out that the innkeeper, Wu Ming, was a former lieutenant under General Yu Qian, and it was he who originally summoned Xiao Shaozi to the inn for assistance. Two other itinerant swordsmen, a brother and sister team, arrive shortly afterward, and together the four of them proceed to do battle with the fanzi who have been sent to assassinate Yu Qian’s children. The fanzi and the xia, in these encounters, are presented as mirror images of one another, and they presumably each perceive the other as destructive agents who must be contained or destroyed. More generally, they emblematize the film’s fascination with double agents and political reversals. Dragon Gate Inn features imperial agents who are presented as murderous assassins, while the children of a man executed for treason are instead presented as innocent victims, and these overlapping reversals are captured metaphorically in the two terms that Xiao Shaozi uses to refer to the poison with which the secret agent laces his wine when he first arrives at the Dragon Gate Inn. Xiao Shaozi initially calls the additive a du, and then a few seconds later he refers to it again using the binome duyao. Both du and yao are contronyms that each carry mutually contradictory meanings. While du is usually used to refer to “poison” and yao is conventionally used to mean “medicine,” there are also circumstances in which yao can literally mean “poison” and du can refer to a “treatment.” While at a strictly literal level Xiao Shaozi is obviously using both du and duyao here to mean “poison,” the structural logic of this scene nevertheless revolves around a paradoxical reversal that mirrors the contradictory meanings latent in the terms du and yao themselves. That is to say,



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even as Xiao Shaozi is using du and duyao to refer to the poison in the wine, his subsequent use of the poison against the secret agent effectively transforms it into a figurative treatment to deal with the threat posed by the secret agent himself. Xiao Shaozi’s gesture of using the agent’s poison against him (or, as a well-­k nown Chinese aphorism puts it, yidu gongdu—​“using a poison to combat poison”) is an example of his trademark method: responding to attacks by seizing his opponents’ weapons and redeploying them against the opponents themselves—​stabbing his opponents with their own swords and hurling arrows and daggers back at their original owners. The only weapon that Xiao Shaozi carries is a sword inside a scabbard that doubles as an umbrella. Xiao rarely removes the sword from its sheath and instead frequently uses the scabbard either as an actual umbrella or as a shield to deflect attacks and redirect them back against the original attacker. While a sword is a paradigmatic weapon, Xiao Shaozi’s umbrella-­scabbard is an equally iconic symbol of protection, even as his use of the scabbard to deflect attacks back onto his attackers simultaneously transforms it into a virtual weapon in its own right. At the turn of the twentieth century, Liang Qichao famously applied a similar logic to cultural production itself, arguing that the potentially destabilizing force of popular literature could be transformed into a productive tool for political reform. In his 1902 essay “On the Relationship between Fiction and Government of the People,” Liang Qichao famously argues that “if one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.”4 Here, Liang coincidentally relies on a double use of the word du to refer to both a (metaphorical) poison as well as to palliative agent. More specifically, he details what he identifies as the four means by which literature may influence its readers—​namely, literature’s powers of thurification, immersion, stimulation, and lifting—​a nd concludes that “these four powers are capable of shaping the world as well as establishing and nurturing the various norms of society” (7/78). The Chinese word translated as “nurturing” in the preceding passage is du, which is being used here in its alternate sense meaning “to govern” or “to treat.” A couple of sentences later, however, Liang uses

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the same character in its negative sense of a metaphorical poison in describing the “harm” that might result from a misuse of fiction’s powers: One who possesses these four powers and uses them to promote what is good will bring benefit to millions of people. But if he uses these powers for evil, the harm [du] they cause will last for thousands of years. It is only through fiction that these four powers most readily exert their influence. How admirable is fiction! How frightening is fiction! (7/78).

Liang Qichao’s juxtaposition, in this passage, of the positive and negative meanings of du reflects his similarly conflicted attitudes toward popular literature itself. It is precisely because Liang believes literature has a unique ability to transform popular consciousness, in other words, that he therefore contends that it is capable of both great harm but also significant good. Literature’s power, in Liang’s view, lies in its ability to transform not only people’s understanding of their position within their respective communities but also the very structure of those communities themselves. It is for this reason that Liang advocates using literature to help promote a progressive agenda and shape people’s political attitudes and beliefs. Part of the reason for the contradictory potentialities that Liang Qichao attributes to literature is that literature is a cultural form capable of conveying multiple meanings. The significance of a literary work cannot be strictly controlled, and consequently literature is always potentially destabilizing. At the same time, it is this same indeterminacy that increases literature’s inherent appeal and, by exten­ ­sion, its impact on its readers, which is what makes the medium so attractive for a political reformer like Liang Qichao. Because literature is so volatile and difficult to control, it can have a wide variety of effects on its readers, ranging from reinforcing their preexisting beliefs to helping transform their views on politics and society. Liang Qichao’s 1902 essay articulated a logic that was implemented by a number of early twentieth-­century novels, including works like Travels of Lao Can and Flowers in a Sinful Sea, that attempted to use literature to help promote political reform. A couple of decades later, a similar rationale guided much of the literary production associated



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with the May Fourth Movement, as a new generation of reformers made a strategic decision to write in the vernacular in order to make their works accessible to a wider audience. Lu Xun was, of course, one of the leading figures in this latter movement, and one of his early works that was most explicitly concerned with responding to contemporary political concerns was his 1919 short story “Yao,” the title of which is usually translated as “medicine” but which in context could also be rendered as “poison.” In “Medicine,” a steamed bun that has been soaked in the blood of a recently executed man is used to treat a young boy suffering from tuberculosis—​on the apparent logic that the blood the tubercular patient coughs up can be counterbalanced by having him consume someone else’s. This treatment, needless to say, is ineffective, and the boy dies shortly afterward. At one level, the story may be read as a condemnation of traditional Chinese remedies, and the work’s detailed description of a flawed folk treatment for tuberculosis may be seen as an extension of Lu Xun’s well-­k nown critique, in his preface to Call to Arms, of the traditional treatments that he feels directly contributed to his father’s death. Another dimension of the story emerges, however, when it is revealed that the executed man from whom the blood has been obtained was actually not a common criminal but instead had been arrested and sentenced to death on account of his political sympathies and revolutionary activities. It is precisely due to the young man’s progressive attempts to reform society, accordingly, that the Qing government views him as a pernicious element that must be eliminated. On the other hand, the story reveals that other members of the young man’s community, and even his own family, fail to appreciate the significance of his actions and the cause for which he is fighting. In fact, it was one of his own relatives who turned him in to the authorities in the first place. The story concludes with the mother of the tubercular boy visiting the cemetery where her son has been buried. There, she happens to run into the mother of the executed man, whose son has been buried in another part of the same cemetery. It appears, though, that neither woman fully understands the reasons for which their respective sons died. In particular, they notice that on the grave of the executed man there is a wreath of flowers, which has evidently been left there by one or more of his supporters, though not

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only does the dead man’s mother not know who left the wreath, she does not even appear to grasp the wreath’s significance. This wreath is one of the two specific examples that Lu Xun, in his preface to Call to Arms, cites in his discussion of qubi (“bent pen”) innuendoes, or optimistic gestures that he would deliberately insert at the end of a generally bleak story. At the same time, however, the wreath’s precise implications remain ambiguous, and there is a sense in which the mother’s inability to recognize its significance merely reinforces the general pessimism of the story as a whole. In other words, while the implication of Lu Xun’s qubi discussion is that he has inserted the wreath in order to communicate an optimistic message to the story’s readers, its position within the story itself serves as an ominous reminder that even this optimistic message may be similarly misrecognized and misunderstood by the very readers whom it is intended to reassure. Lu Xun was notoriously pessimistic about the possibility of using literature to help bring about social change, and in the preface to his 1923 collection Call to Arms, he describes how it was only with considerable reluctance that he was ultimately convinced to begin composing literature intended to help “heal the people’s spirits.” The text of the story “Medicine,” meanwhile, illustrates one reason for this reluctance, as it makes clear that even the executed man’s own mother doesn’t seem to understand what he died for. By extension, the narrative simultaneously raises the possibility that the story’s own political subtext may itself be misinterpreted—​with the work’s readers finding themselves in the same position as its fictional characters, unable to grasp the significance and import of the events unfolding around them. This specter of hermeneutic failure suggests that the story could inadvertently exacerbate the very attitudes it was attempting to reform, meaning that the literary “medicine” with which Lu Xun was attempting to heal his countrymen’s spiritual illness could easily end up functioning as a virtual poison. Although the structural contradictions between processes of reform and destabilization noted by Liang Qichao and Lu Xun can be found in virtually all cultural works, they are particularly evident in the wuxia genre. Not only is wuxia virtually synonymous with



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Chinese popular culture, its focus on the position of the jianghu located at the margins of orthodox society makes it an especially good vehicle for commenting on contemporary sociopolitical concerns—​ including questions of identity, social justice, and political power. King Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn builds on these themes, offering an allegorical commentary not only on mid-­century political concerns but also on the more general implications of this process of using a cultural medium such as wuxia film for political ends. For instance, these twin questions of Dragon Gate Inn’s political implications and its status as an autonomous entertainment medium come together in the film’s thematization of decapitation. Just as Lu Xun traces his self-­conception as a cultural reformer back to a seminal depiction of beheading in the Japanese wartime lantern slide, King Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn is similarly framed by a pair of decapitations. The film opens with a short prologue that culminates with Yu Qian’s (unseen) execution, and it concludes with the defeat and beheading of Chief Eunuch Cao. Whereas the initial execution is in response to the sequence of events that resulted from the Zhengtong Emperor’s capture eight years earlier, the concluding execution marks the end of the chief eunuch’s own attempts to usurp the emperor’s power and authority following the emperor’s eventual reinstatement to the throne. Together, the two decapitations symbolize both the workings of political power as well as the inevitable blind spots within that same power. More abstractly, King Hu’s film also features a variety of symbolic beheadings. For instance, the first time Yu Qian’s relatives appear in the film, they are all wearing wide cangues around their necks. Each of these cangues consists of a flat, circular board with a round hole in the middle within which the prisoner’s neck is placed, thereby creating the illusion that the head has been severed from its body. The resulting image offers a tacit reminder of the decapitation of General Yu Qian, which resulted in the prisoners’ exile in the first place. A visual analogue to the cangues, meanwhile, can be found in the soldiers’ wide hats, each of which has a small hole in the middle through which the top of the wearer’s head pokes out—​similarly creating the appearance of a disembodied fragment of a head. In an early scene in

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the film, Pi Shaotang, the leader of the East Agency troops, picks up his hat and prepares to put it on. We see him peering down at it, ­followed by a point-­of-­view (POV) shot of the hat itself, whereupon the camera then pans down and through the hole in the center of the hat. The next shot shows Pi Shaotang again, but this time with the camera looking up through the same circular aperture it had just appeared to traverse. This sequence uses the hat’s hole to separate the agent’s presumptive gaze from his embodied look—​with the opening functioning as a visual analogue of the camera’s lens. At the same time, the shots immediately preceding and following this POV shot of Pi Shaotang’s hat are of the mountain pass the troops are about to traverse on their way to Dragon Gate Inn—​suggesting that the hole in the hat also functions as a metaphor for a sort of geopolitical decapitation, as the expedition party enters a remote frontier region outside the formal purview of the imperial “head” of the dynastic reign. In front of the inn, there is a fragment of a stone wall on which a large white circle has been drawn, and similar circles are also visible on each of the inn’s outer walls. While these circles are presumably auspicious signs to ward off evil spirits, their precise significance and function are never specified within the film itself. The markings, accordingly, serve as empty signifiers onto which viewers may project an array of different meanings. For instance, the visual resemblance between these circles and the circular hole in Pi Shaotang’s circular hat suggests that the wall circles may be viewed in the context of the film’s more general fascination with themes of holes and beheadings. Furthermore, just as the decapitation sequence at the beginning of the film symbolizes the strategic absence of imperial authority within the main body of the work, these white wall circles offer a visual emblem of the fact that the inn itself occupies a figurative blind spot, invisible to the emperor’s sovereign gaze—​becoming a space in which agents nominally overseen by the emperor instead pursue their own agendas, apparently without his knowledge. Transcending each of these various interpretations of the mysterious wall circles, moreover, is the status of the markings as symbols of both the hermeneutical process itself and of the ultimate impossibility of any unitary regime of interpretation. Just as the May Fourth reformers took inspiration from new immunological paradigms that



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suggest that the interior limits of the corporal body are produced by a continual process of (mis)recognition and (mis)reading, Dragon Gate Inn suggests that the political limits of the imperial body are similarly the product of a continual process of (mis)reading and (mis)recognition along geographic and ideological frontier zones, including the region where Dragon Gate Inn is itself located.5 These markings also represent in miniature the hermeneutical status of the film itself, insofar as it, like any cultural text, is necessarily open to a variety of different interpretations. Like the figures of the xia themselves, a wuxia text is fundamentally a cipher, in that it may carry very different significances depending on the broader cultural and sociopolitical environment within which it circulates and is consumed. Dragon Gate Inn concludes with a battle between Chief Eunuch Cao and Xiao Shaozi and their respective allies. Throughout the battle Xiao Shaozi infuriates Cao by repeatedly taunting him for being a eunuch, though in the end it is actually not Xiao Shaozi who succeeds in vanquishing the chief eunuch. Instead, after Cao has been disarmed and wounded, innkeeper Wu Ming deliberately runs his sword through his own body and into that of the eunuch, who at that point is standing directly behind him. After Wu Ming falls away, Chief Eunuch Cao is attacked by one of the two Tartar fanzi who had previously switched allegiances to join the resistance. Cao stabs the agent with Wu Ming’s sword, which remains impaled in Cao’s own abdomen, whereupon the agent then uses his own sword to slice off Cao’s head. The decapitation of Chief Eunuch Cao at the end of the film brings the work back to where it began, with the prologue’s allusion to General Yu Qian’s own decapitation in the opening prologue. Just as Yu Qian was executed by agents of the same court that he had once loyally served, it is fitting that in this final scene Cao is executed by a former fanzi who had previously worked under the chief eunuch’s own authority. Moreover, Wu Ming manages to fatally wound the eunuch by simultaneously impaling himself with his own sword, such that his sword becomes most useful precisely at a moment when it is most harmful to him. In this way, Wu Ming’s double-­edged sword succinctly captures the film’s emphasis on what I am calling a cultural logic of the pharmakon, or a mode of engagement based on a mobilization of elements with mutually opposed qualities.

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This cultural logic of the pharmakon, meanwhile, also applies to King Hu’s film itself. Simultaneously escapist fantasy and political allegory, Dragon Gate Inn uses a fictional frame in order to engage with a set of real-­world concerns. Like the xia featured in the film itself, the work’s socio-­political significance lies precisely in its nominal independence and autonomy. Coda: Loss and the Gaze

In 2003, thirty-­six years after the original Dragon Gate Inn, the Taiwan-­based director Tsai Ming-­liang released Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Busan). An homage to King Hu’s wuxia classic, Tsai Ming-­liang’s film is set in Taipei’s historic Fu-­ho Theater on the eve of its scheduled demolition. The new work revolves around a screening of King Hu’s original Dragon Gate Inn in a nearly empty auditorium containing only a handful of audience members—​including the actors Shih Chun and Miao Tien, who in King Hu’s original film had played Xiao Shaozi and Pi Shaotang, respectively. As King Hu’s classic film is being screened in the background, Tsai’s own camera follows the overlapping trajectories of the various audience members and theater employ­ ­ees as they circulate through the auditorium and other parts of the theater. In this way, the diasporic movement that provided the backdrop for King Hu’s original film is reenacted here, in Tsai’s contemporary homage, within the insular space of the soon-­to-­be-­destroyed Taipei theater. Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn opens with a screening of the prologue of King Hu’s Dragon Gate Inn. Tsai’s film begins with a blank screen, as the narrative voice-­over from the beginning of King Hu’s film is heard in the background. After about ninety seconds, the opening credits of Tsai’s own film begin appearing in white Chinese characters against a black background. As the voice-­over from the opening sequence of King Hu’s film describes the historical actors in his original work, Tsai’s own intertitle credits simultaneously introduce the key actors in his contemporary homage. Just after the voice-­over mentions Chief Eunuch Cao and the title Goodbye, Dragon Inn appears on screen, meanwhile, the opening credit sequence is replaced by a shot



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of King Hu’s original film being shown inside Taipei’s Fu-­ho Theater. The specific scene from King Hu’s film that is being screened here is the one in which Chief Eunuch Cao is being carried in his sedan chair to the execution grounds to observe Yu Qian’s execution. Cao gestures regally to his attendants, then dismounts from the sedan chair and proceeds toward his seat, which is adorned with a pair of banners that read “East Agency” and “Imperial Guards,” respectively. The same way that King Hu’s original film cuts away to the opening credits right before Yu Qian’s actual decapitation, Tsai Ming-­liang’s contemporary remake similarly cuts away from King Hu’s film itself at the precise moment that the voice-­over from the earlier work is about to utter Yu Qian’s name. In Tsai’s film, we hear the voice-­over from King Hu’s film intone, “. . . ​and the person to be executed is—​,” but just before the voice-­over pronounces Yu Qian’s name, Tsai’s homage abruptly jumps forward to the opening credits of King Hu’s film. More specifically, Tsai’s homage skips over the segment of the credits of King Hu’s film that identifies the title of the original work and acknowledges the producer and production supervisor, and instead, it proceeds directly to where the credits of the 1967 film begin introducing the work’s lead actors. This moment of doubled excision (in that King Hu’s film shows the events leading up to Yu Qian’s decapitation though not the execution itself, while Tsai Ming-­liang’s homage omits even the very reference to Yu Qian from its rescreening of King Hu’s classic work) coincides with a displaced reinsertion of another figure who has been strategically excised from virtually the entire film: Tsai Ming-­liang’s cinematic alter ego, Lee Kang-­sheng. Tsai famously “discovered” Lee working as a security guard in a Taipei video parlor in 1991. Despite the fact that Lee had no acting experience at the time, Tsai nevertheless invited him to appear in his television movie, Children (Haizi), and subsequently cast Lee in the lead role of his first feature film, Vive l’Amour (Aiqing wansui). Tsai has had Lee star in every feature-­length work he has ever directed, yielding a rich cinematic symbiosis spanning more than two decades. In these works, Lee plays a variety of interrelated characters who share a set of mannerisms inspired by the actor’s own, and to the extent that fictional characters Lee plays in the films are given explicit

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names, they are usually identified simply as Hsiao-­kang (Xiaokang, in Mandarin)—​a diminutive version of the actor’s own given name and which literally means “little health.” Unlike Tsai’s other films, in which Lee Kang-­sheng usually plays the most prominent character, in Goodbye, Dragon Inn his character remains virtually invisible throughout most of the work—​appearing primarily as an absent gaze that drives the film as a whole. Identified only as the projectionist, Lee’s character spends most of the film hidden in the projection booth in the soon-­to-­be-­demolished theater. In this respect, Hsiao-­kang’s position within Goodbye, Dragon Inn parallels that of the Zhengtong emperor in King Hu’s original film, in that both figures are positioned as an invisible (or nearly invisible) presence that functions as a key catalyst within the work. Tsai Ming-­ liang’s use of Hsiao-­kang’s gaze as a structuring device, meanwhile, resonates with the white wall circles in the original Dragon Gate Inn. Connoting decapitation and power vacuum in King Hu’s film, these same wall circles become symbols of an absent cinematic gaze in Tsai’s remake. In Tsai’s homage, in other words the circles come to symbolize an absent gaze not only of political authority but also of cinematic authority, whereby the absent presence of the emperor in original King Hu’s film is mirrored by the focus in Tsai’s adaptation on Hsiao-­kang’s invisible cinematic gaze. It is fitting that in Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Lee Kang-­sheng’s character occupies the status more of an absent gaze than of an actual embodied character, given that the film coincided with the release of Lee’s own directorial debut, The Missing (Bujian). Lee’s The Missing and Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn were initially conceived as a pair of approximately one-­hour short films that would be released together (the Chinese titles of the two films combine to form the aphorism bujian busan, which corresponds to the English expression “be there or be square”). Although each work ended up developing into a stand-­ alone feature-­length film in its own right, they nevertheless remained closely linked at the level of their respective topics and themes. In particular, while Goodbye, Dragon Inn focuses on the anticipated loss of a historic Taipei theater, The Missing depicts instead an increasingly desperate search for a pair of unrelated individuals who disappear within a few hours of each other.



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One of the missing individuals in The Missing is a young boy who is initially being watched by his grandmother while he plays outside in a public park. The grandmother suddenly begins to feel ill and needs to go inside to use the restroom, but leaves the boy playing in a playground. When she returns, she discovers that he has disappeared, and she spends the remainder of the film searching for him. The other missing character is an older man (played by Miao Tien), who in the prologue is seen preparing to leave his apartment. The elderly man’s grandson eventually notices his disappearance, but only after having spent much of the day playing video games and idly roaming the city. In fact, it is when the young man overhears the other grandmother looking for her grandson that he suddenly remembers his own grandfather and immediately rushes off in search of him. Although neither the grandmother nor the young man succeeds in finding their missing relatives, in the final portion of the film their respective searches ultimately converge with one another. There is a sequence in which the grandmother follows the young man as he runs through the city looking for his grandfather, and the two of them end up squatting next to a large pool of water surrounded by a circular fence. The camera gradually pulls back, revealing that on the other side of the fence—​ and outside the young man’s and the grandmother’s line of sight—​the missing grandfather is walking past, holding the hand of a small boy, who is presumably the missing grandson. The film then cuts to the final credits. The search for lost loved ones in Lee Kang-­sheng’s film is the precise inverse of the focus in Tsai Ming-­liang’s concurrent film on an attempt to preemptively preserve a memory of an overdetermined space that is itself on the verge of being lost. It is therefore fitting that the actor who plays the missing grandfather in Lee’s The Missing is none other than Miao Tien, who had played the key antagonist in King Hu’s original Dragon Gate Inn. While Miao Tien’s character represents an object of loss in Lee Kang-­sheng’s The Missing, in Tsai Ming­liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn he represents instead a figure of uncanny return—​appearing in the theater to watch the film in which the actor had himself starred more than forty years earlier. Viewed in the context of Tsai’s larger cinematic oeuvre, meanwhile, Miao Tien’s appearance in Goodbye, Dragon Inn connotes a more general sense of spectral

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return. The actor had played Hsiao-­kang’s father in four of Tsai Ming­liang’s first five films, with the plotline of the fifth work, What Time Is It There? (Ni nabian jidian), revolving around Hsiao-­kang’s attempts to come to terms with his father’s recent death.6 Given that in Tsai Ming-­liang’s works actors frequently play roles that resonate with ones they have played in Tsai’s other films, Miao Tien’s significance in Goodbye, Dragon Inn cannot but be informed by the fact that the actor’s appearance in Tsai’s preceding film was to play a character who dies at the beginning of the work (though it should be noted that in Goodbye, Dragon Inn Miao Tien appears not as Hsiao-­kang’s father, as in the other films, but rather as the actor himself). In other words, while Tsai’s 2001 film What Time Is It There? opens with the death of Miao Tien’s character and proceeds to focus on Hsiao-­kang’s attempts to come to terms with that death, in Tsai’s and Lee’s respective 2003 films Miao Tien symbolizes both a figure of loss as well as the spectral return of the elderly actor’s first major cinematic role. In fact, Goodbye, Dragon Inn and The Missing turned out to be Miao Tien’s final two appearances on the big screen; he died two years later. These themes of disappearance and death in Goodbye, Dragon Inn and The Missing also have a more specific corollary, in that both works were filmed and released in 2003, the same year that the SARS epidemic struck many communities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Although there is no direct reference to the epidemic in Tsai Ming-­ liang’s film, the prologue of Lee Kang-­sheng’s work contains a scene in which the grandfather character is seen ripping up a newspaper, and later there is a shot of his grandson leaving the apartment and noticing that their aquarium is now filled with strips of shredded newspaper, one of which contains a fragment of a headline that reads, “another plague” (you yichang wenbing)—​evidently a reference to SARS. After The Missing was released, an interviewer asked Lee Kang-­sheng to describe life in post-­SARS Taiwan, to which he replied, As for life in Taiwan after SARS, I don’t think anything has changed, unless of course you have a family member who was affected by the disease. But otherwise, people can forget things very quickly. Particularly considering the Taiwan news media, which always have some new strange, sensational story every day.7



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In his response, Lee tacitly points to one of the key paradoxes at the heart of his film. That is to say, even as The Missing suggests that it is only the immediate relatives of the missing individuals (i.e., the boy’s grandmother and the old man’s grandson) who are directly affected by the characters’ disappearance, the film nevertheless invites viewers to share this same sense of loss. The implication, in other words, is that this sense of loss itself is potentially infectious and may be mediated through cultural representations such as the film. In Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, meanwhile, the emphasis is not so much on loss itself but rather on a preemptive anticipation of loss. By attempting to memorialize the Fu-­ho Theater on the eve of its demolition, Tsai uses a focus on the theater’s virtual family (the projectionist, actors, and others who populate the nearly-­vacant building) to invite viewers to share the sense of melancholic loss that pervades the work itself. In this respect, Tsai’s contemporary film functions as a site of alterity and alienation that simultaneously offers a way of productively responding to the inevitable loss and destruction inherent in the historical process itself. Like the wall circles in King Hu’s original film, the thematics of loss in this pair of 2003 films functions as a figurative pharmakon, marking a space of absence that paradoxically becomes a palpable presence in its own right. Whether presented against the backdrop of an allusion to a deadly epidemic, as in the case of The Missing, or of a pattern of urban demolition, as in the case of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, this figure of absence marks a space of homesickness, and it is out of an attendant sense of loss and longing that new potentialities thereby become possible.

3

Part III

2006 Phantasms

I n May 2006, China’s state-­r un English-­language newspaper China Daily announced that the Yangtze River, in which Chairman Mao had enjoyed his famously rejuvenating swim four decades earlier, was now “cancerous” with pollution and in danger of becoming a “dead river.”1 Six months later, an article from the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that the Yellow River had similarly become “infected with a grave sickness” (shenran zhongbing), due to a combination of severe pollution and excessive diversion of water for irrigation and other purposes. The article went on to argue that while the resulting “sickness” (bing) is most clearly visible in the river itself, the “source of the sickness” (bingyuan) lies in a pernicious practice of sacrificing the environment for the sake of promoting economic development.2 It was also in 2006, meanwhile, that construction of the main body of the Three Gorges Dam was completed.3 The dam, currently the largest in the world, flooded China’s historic Three Gorges basin, inundating hundreds of archeological sites and requiring the relocation of more than a million residents. The dam has also had a significant environmental impact, contributing to numerous landslides and significantly decreasing the amount of silt carried by the Yangtze below the dam. In addition, the sheer weight of the water in the new reservoir triggered thousands of tremors in the region and was even rumored to have been responsible for the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.4 149

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One of the objectives of the Three Gorges Dam was to help reduce China’s reliance on fossil fuels and, by extension, limit its production of greenhouse gases. Coincidentally, 2006 also happened to be the year that China officially overtook the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the most consequential greenhouses gases.5 While CO2 itself is invisible, the same processes of industrialization and urbanization that have contributed to the rapid increase in China’s CO2 production have also helped produce the dense cloud of smog that currently blankets many of the nation’s major cities. The product of a constellation of factors, including a rapid increase in vehicular traffic, factory emissions, and a continuing reliance on coal burning, this smog has serious health and environmental consequences. It has been calculated that in China air pollution is currently responsible for more than a million premature deaths a year, and in North China, where the problem is most acute, the cumulative toll of the polluted air is estimated to cut about five and a half years from residents’ projected life expectancies.6 These concerns with China’s growing water, land, and air pollution, meanwhile, are mirrored by a parallel anxiety with the pernicious influence of Western culture, which the government has famously called “spiritual pollution” (jingshen wuran). In particular, the same Reform and Opening Up campaign that helped spur China’s rapid economic and industrial development in the post-­Mao era and which contributed to the abrupt increase in pollution over the same period, also encouraged a process of sociocultural liberalization, resulting in a dramatic increase in the importation of foreign cultural products. After several decades of cultural production that hewed closely to the conventions associated with socialist realism, the post-­ Maoist era witnessed a burgeoning of an eclectic array of different cultural forms, many of which were directly or indirectly inspired by foreign models. Although these new forms of cultural expression were celebrated by many observers, from the government’s perspective, they were viewed as symptoms of a potentially dangerous foreign influence Just as the mid-­1950s Hundred Flowers campaign, with its progressive call to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought



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contend,” was immediately followed by the repressive Anti-­R ightist campaign, the burgeoning of cultural and political liberalization at the beginning of the Reform Era was similarly followed by the repressive yet short-­lived Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign in the final months of 1983, which targeted expressions of humanism and what Deng Xiaoping has called “bourgeois liberalism.” The abruptness with which the latter campaign was terminated in January 1984, meanwhile, suggests that the attempt to control allegedly pernicious Western influences had come to be perceived as a destructive force in its own right. While the Maoist era was characterized by a seemingly endless string of short-­lived political campaigns, the post-­Mao era was instead marked by a series of similarly short-­lived cultural fads and trends. For instance, in the late 1980s there was a brief period of so-­called last emperor fever, marked by a cluster of works inspired by the life and times of China’s last emperor, Pu Yi, and released during a roughly two-­year period between 1986 and 1988. These included Li Han-­ Hsiang’s 1986 historical drama, The Last Emperor: Aisen Gioro Pu Yi’s Latter Life,7 and Chen Jialin and Su Qingguo’s 1987 biopic The Last Empress, which focused on Pu Yi’s first wife, Wan Rong. There was also a 28-­episode television miniseries based on the life of the last emperor, a miniseries based on the life of the last empress, as well as a 1988 biography entitled Pu Yi’s Latter Life, based on materials supplied by Pu Yi’s final wife, Li Shuxian.8 Of course, there was also Bernando Bertolucci’s 1987 blockbuster Hollywood hit, The Last Emperor, which though technically not a Chinese film was in fact filmed mostly in China and received significant attention there. A more fanciful take on some of these same issues, meanwhile, can be found in Hong Kong director Jacob Cheung’s film Lai Shi: China’s Last Eunuch. This 1988 comedy focuses on a peasant boy named Lai Shi (Lai Xi in Mandarin), whose father castrates him at a young age so that he might thereby be able to work in the Forbidden Palace as an imperial eunuch. Neither father nor son realize at the time, however, that at that very moment the Qing dynasty was in the process of being overthrown, thereby rendering Lai Shi’s intended occupation virtually obsolete. Just as Bertolucci’s film follows the historical Pu Yi’s trajectory “from emperor to citizen,”9

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Cheung’s comedy similarly traces the fictional Lai Shi’s trajectory “from eunuch to man,” as Lai Shi attempts to reimagine himself not as a vestigial remnant of an obsolete political system but rather as an autonomous subject in his own right. This late-­1980s fascination with the memory of China’s last emperor coincided almost precisely with a parallel pulse of interest in Friedrich Nietzsche.10 There had been several previous surges of attention to Nietzsche’s thought among Chinese intellectuals, but one of the things that particularly captured the public imagination in the late 1980s was Nietzsche’s famously nihilistic pronouncement—​ ventriloquized through the voice of a madman—​that “God is dead.”11 While Nietzsche, when he initially made this statement in the 1880s, had been referring to the waning influence of a Christian belief in God and its implications for an increasingly secular Western society, the fascination with the aphorism in China almost a century later follows on the heels of Mao’s efforts to abolish organized religion in the post-­ 1949 period, combined with his attempts to promote a “cult of Mao” wherein he himself would be treated as a nearly divine figure. This late-­1980s Chinese fascination with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” pronouncement, accordingly, reflects a collective attempt to reassess one’s belief and value system in a post-­religious and post-­Maoist era. It is fitting that the late-­1980s interest in Pu Yi and Nietzsche’s “God is dead” pronouncement also coincided with the beginning of a phenomenon that Geremie Barmé has dubbed “shades of Mao.” In 1988, a cluster of books on Mao were released in China—​including the memoir by Mao’s former physician Li Zhisui, discussed above—​ reflecting a resurgence of interest in the memory and continued relevance of the Great Helmsman in contemporary society. In the early 1990s, meanwhile, this flurry of textual production was followed by a veritable explosion of Maoist imagery and symbolism, includ­ ­ing Mao-­themed trinkets, such as cigarette lighters and watches, and ­laminated Mao portraits that drivers would hang from their rearview mirror as good luck charms.12 This fascination with Maoist icono­ graphy may be seen as a mediated return of repressed religiosity—​ with the contemporary icons ironically functioning as a stand-­in for the local deities that Mao himself had systematically attempted to ­suppress.



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Each of these three Reform-­era cultural trends reflects the influence both of the Maoist regime as well as of the dynastic tradition whose mantle Mao Zedong had been attempting to appropriate. The overlapping concerns with death, commemoration, and spectral returns that underlie each of these three trends are driven by a recognition that dynastic and communist political orders embodied by Pu Yi and Mao are now a thing of the past, though the legacies of these same orders continue to haunt the present. To the extent that any sociopolitical order emerges in response to, and in dialogue with, preceding and concurrent sociopolitical configurations, it inevitably bears the traces of those alternate configurations that helped shape it. Given the fascination with Pu Yi in the late 1980s, however, it is curious that there ended up being comparatively little interest in the centennial anniversary of Pu Yi’s birth a decade and a half later. Needless to say, it is certainly not the case that China is simply not interested in anniversaries. In fact, in 2009 the country celebrated with great fanfare both the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the ninetieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement (while at the same time being careful to suppress any observations of the equally significant twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square June Fourth crackdown and the fiftieth anniversary of the Tibetan Rebellion that same year). Why, then, was so little attention given to the centennial anniversary of Pu Yi’s birth in 2006, when there had been such a surge of interest in his legacy just fifteen years earlier? I would suggest that Pu Yi’s virtual absence from contemporary Chinese political discourse is symptomatic of a more general shift in attention from issues of political governance and governmentality to the structuring conditions of the economy and the market. While China’s political liberalization under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s was emblematized by the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, by the early 2000s protests typically tended to focus less on explicitly political concerns and instead on socioeconomic considerations such as food contamination, political corruption, working conditions, and environmental concerns. At the same time, however, earlier concerns with political governance continue to occupy a phantasmic presence in contemporary China, with contemporary socioeconomic protests

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offering a mediated commentary on an underlying set of political ­considerations. That is to say, while for the most part contemporary protests tend not to challenge China’s political establishment itself, their critique of existing social realities inevitably carry political implications in their own right. A similar logic may be observed with respect to contemporary Chinese discourses of disease. Although China is no longer perceived as “sick” in geopolitical terms, illness still provides a powerful metaphor for articulating a set of challenges that continues to haunt Chinese society, ranging from urban alienation to environmental degradation. In the following chapters, I examine several sets of works that each take the viral circulation of a specific illness, including SARS, HIV/AIDS, and even a fictional “Taiwan fever,” as a starting point from which to reflect on the circulation of labor, capital, and information within society. I argue there is a dialectical relationship between the establishment’s attempts to control and circumscribe each of these virtual economies, and the associative yet potentially destabilizing force that these virtual economies each represent. My approach in each case, however, is to focus not the circulation of these elements themselves but rather on the spectral traces they leave behind. In particular, I am interested in how they leave behind traces within the cultural domain, and how those cultural formations are frequently in dialogue with a parallel set of discourses of disease. I argue that it is precisely within a cultural domain that we can most clearly observe the simultaneously destructive and transformative potential of each of these virtual economies. Through a detailed analysis of various different discourses and cultural formations from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, the following chapters consider some of the logics that have shaped perceptions of disease in contemporary China. Each set of analyses underscores the necessary limits of any attempt to circumscribe these spheres of sociocultural production, as well as the inherent productivity of these circuits of cultural exchange and the alternative social formations they help engender. The infectious circulation of illnesses in these works tacitly challenges common assumptions about the coherence of the Chinese nation and corresponding social



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communities, even as it offers a model for understanding the forces that help constitute the national form itself. In each case, discourses of disease reflect a set of structural rifts within existing political, social, and economic orders—​rifts that are potentially destabilizing but which may also facilitate a process of structural transformation and reinvention.

5 •

Information

Hu Fayun’s 2006 novel [email protected] opens with a description of how the protagonist, Ruyan, receives two items from her son before he departs for Paris.1 One of the items is a small dog. The dog, it turns out, was a stray that Ruyan’s son had adopted while at college, and which his roommates proposed that he name Yang Yanping, after himself. The narrative explains that when Ruyan’s son was five, his father, who was frequently away on business, had given him a puppy to “to compensate for his own faults” (mibu ziji de quehan). When Yanping was in third grade, however, the dog was run over by a car. The accident had struck Ruyan as particularly inauspicious at the time, and, sure enough, her husband was later hit by a car and killed. To the extent that the original dog was presented as a substitute for Yanping’s frequently absent father, accordingly, the new dog functions as a substitute both for the original dog as well as for the father for whom the earlier dog was itself a stand-­in. Moreover, given that we are also told that Yanping was originally named by (though not after) his father, the fact that he is then encouraged by his classmates to name the second dog after himself suggests that the animal is thereby positioned as a doubly-­mediated displacement of the name of the father whose death the original dog had uncannily anticipated. In this

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respect, the dog simultaneously represents the legislative and prohibitive authority symbolically invested in the figure of the absent father, together with the new political potentialities that open up within that same space of absence. The dog that is introduced in the first line of the novel functions as a paradigmatic fetish—​standing in for both Ruyan’s dead husband and her departed son. Freud describes a fetish as a material substitute for something the subject either has lost or fears may be in danger of being lost. The fetish is a product of a process of disavowal, wherein the subject consciously knows that the fetish is not actually the original lost object itself yet nevertheless continues treating it as though it were.2 The fetish represents a disavowal of loss, but also a reminder of the reality, or the necessary possibility, of that same loss. After Yanping departs for France, meanwhile, Ruyan grows increasingly attached to the dog he has left her—​despite the fact that she previously had been so averse to physical contact that she couldn’t bear to touch animals and wasn’t even willing to shake hands with any man she didn’t already know very well. The relationship she develops with her son’s dog is therefore significantly more intimate than that which she had previously been able to tolerate with other men, and consequently comes to symbolize Ruyan’s ability to establish connections with virtual strangers that she otherwise might have had difficulty imagining. Even as [email protected] opens with a discussion of departure and death, the work’s afterword describes how the novel itself was composed against a similar backdrop of anticipatory loss and symbolic displacement. In particular, Hu Fayun reveals that his wife Li Hong was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the spring of 2001 and was told she had only about three years to live. Hu Fayun set aside virtually everything to help look after her. In December 2003, however, some journals and publishing houses contacted him asking for new material, so he began working on what would be his first full-­length novel: [email protected]. He completed it in about three months, and Li Hong helped him revise and edit it, remarking that she liked the novel but doubted that he would ever be able to get it published. She died less than a year later, and when Hu Fayun released the novel online in 2005 he dedicated it to her—​explaining that although the plot of the novel has nothing to do with her, the fictional protagonist was nevertheless



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directly inspired by her. In this respect, the text may be viewed as a virtual fetish in its own right—​an anticipatory substitute for a loved one whom the author is already fated to lose. [email protected] was composed against the backdrop not only of Li Hong’s terminal illness but also of the SARS epidemic that had temporarily thrown entire regions of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan into chaos. In addition to the spread of the SARS virus itself, however, Hu Fayun’s novel also reflects on the circulation of information about the epidemic, particularly over the Internet. Below, I examine the relationship between these overlapping circuits of infection and information, from which I consider the underlying cultural logics that help shape those circuits of information themselves. Footsteps on the Beach

In addition to the dog that bears his name, the other item that Yang Yanping leaves his mother before departing for Paris is a computer. He also helps her set up an Internet account and introduces her to several online chat groups—​including one called “Empty Nest,” for parents whose children have left home. Now living alone, Ruyan uses the chat group to develop a network of new friends, including a romance with a widower named Liang Jinsheng, who was the deputy mayor of the unnamed “City X” in northern China, where the novel is set. While the dog that Yang Yanping leaves his mother when he goes to Paris functions as a fetishistic replacement of both himself and of his deceased father, the computer that Yanping sets up for Ruyan before he departs represents instead the possibility of an array of new interpersonal attachments that she will be able to establish over the Internet, as well as a new set of political positions and orientations that she will proceed to adopt as a result of her new social connections. One of the people Ruyan meets through the Empty Nest site is an intellectual named Damo, who frequently writes and circulates essays critiquing contemporary Chinese social policies. Ruyan is also introduced to Damo’s mentor, Teacher Wei, who was a former Party official whose life was upended during the Maoist purges and the Cultural Revolution. Through observing Teacher Wei’s views on the Maoist period, together with Damo’s full-­throated critiques of the post-­Mao

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period, Ruyan gradually develops a critical perspective of her own as well as an an eagerness to express her views with her peers. In the opening pages of the novel, when Yang Yanping excitedly tells his mother about the dog he has adopted, she initially expresses skepticism about his ability to raise the animal, remarking that he is barely able to look after himself, much less a pet. Upon further consideration, she reflects that she knows she is unable to force him to do something he doesn’t want, since “the more you try to prohibit him, the more spirited he becomes” (ni yue jinzhi, ta yue laijin). Ruyan then reflects that a similar logic actually characterized her relationship with Yanping’s father, in that her interest in her future husband had been partially motivated by the fact that at the time Ruyan’s mother had been actively attempting to dissuade her from marrying him. Given Ruyan’s recognition of the degree to which this dialectics of prohibition and encouragement characterizes her relationship with both her son and her former husband, it is fitting that the social networks she joins by means of the computer that Yanping leaves her are also grounded very directly on a similar dialectics. Ruyan’s interest in participating in political discussions over the Internet is motivated in part by an awareness that some of this discussion is politically sensitive and either tacitly or actively discouraged. In particular, about halfway through the novel Ruyan begins hearing rumors of a frightening new illness spreading through southern China, and she learns that her own brother-­in-­law in Guangzhou has been infected with the virus and is being quarantined in a local hospital. Ruyan is surprised by this news, given that up to that point there has been no mention of the disease in the media. She begins looking into the issue and learns that the government has been systematically suppressing all public discussion of the outbreak. She finds, however, that there is considerable interest among fellow Internet users in finding ways to circumvent these restrictions, and soon she becomes actively involved in attempting to raise public awareness of the crisis. The SARS outbreak was not only a viral epidemic in its own right, it also involved the infectious circulation of a variety of information and misinformation about the disease. As communities around the world scrambled to address the outbreak, authorities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan responded by aggressively quarantining people who



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were either infected or suspected of being infected, while simultaneously attempting to enforce a virtual quarantine of public information about the epidemic itself. An example of this censorship process can be found in a sequence shortly after Ruyan learns of her brother-­in-­law’s illness. On Chinese New Year, which in 2003 fell on February 1, Ruyan informs her friend Damo that she intends to post on the Empty Nest discussion board an account of her brother-­in-­law’s experience, but notes that she is concerned that her essay will be removed by the authorities. Damo suggests that they agree on a precise time when Ruyan will upload her essay, so that he may then immediately copy and repost it to other sites. Ruyan uploads her essay, and Damo manages to forward it to several other forums before the original post is removed. In the process of forwarding Ruyan’s essay, however, Damo changes the title from “My Brother-­in-­Law” to the more sensational “Bizarre Illness! Another Doctor Falls Ill. . . .” He also adds a postscript of his own, in which he notes that plagues and epidemics are natural phenomena, and for millions of years they developed in lockstep with humanity itself. This is entirely natural. These current attempts to control the spread of information, however, have delayed the response to and treatment of the illness, producing a general panic that is even more terrifying than the ­original epidemic—​here we are no longer talking about a natural disaster. . . . ​(264)

Damo’s title and postscript take Ruyan’s personal account of her brother-­in-­law’s situation and reposition it within a broader historical context, arguing that the key issue is not so much the epidemic itself but rather the government’s response to it. In particular, he suggests that the government’s attempt to suppress information about the crisis has contributed to a sense of anxiety that is even more acute than the original illness. The point here is that information is not simply contrasted with an absence of information, but rather that there exists a continuum of different sorts of discursive formations surrounding any particular topic. An attempt to suppress one subset of these discourses may well spur the production of alternate discourses to fill the gap, just as the removal of one species from an ecosystem frequently results in a compensatory expansion of other species.

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A similar set of concerns comes up in a discussion Ruyan has with another friend from the Empty Nest site. The friend, Gu Hong, requests that in the future Ruyan refrain from similar posts, in light of the site’s restriction on writing about “contemporary political matters.” Ruyan, however, responds that she regards her essay as merely “a private account of a family matter” and wonders how anyone could possibly view it as being in any way political. She also asks Gu Hong where she can find a copy of the regulations outlining what kinds of postings are in fact permitted on the site, but he responds that these regulations are secret—​and adds that historically there have always been restrictions on writing about epidemics. Whereas Damo emphasized that there had always been epidemics but that the effort to ­control the dissemination of information about epidemics was new and “unnatural,” accordingly, Gu Hong instead argues that there have always been restrictions on writing about epidemics, and consequently the suppression of information about an epidemic should be viewed as an intrinsic part of the epidemic itself. In any event, Ruyan’s essay about her brother-­in-­law ends up spread­ ­ing infectiously from one website to another “like a self-­replicating monster in a horror movie,” though it quickly turns out that these latter repostings are not immune to the censorship policies that had led to the removal of the original post. As the narrator explains, This [tide of re-­postings] was then followed by a new tide of deletions. Postings were deleted, even as these deletions were followed in turn by new postings. As the tide washed up, those monster’s footprints on the beach were erased—​but as soon as it receded, the invisible monster would leave a new set of footprints. (265)

Illustrating a meme-­like behavior, the spontaneously self-­replicating nature of this “monstrous” specter of public information reflects not only the viral nature of these sorts of Internet postings but also a symbiotic relationship between censorship efforts and grassroots campaigns seeking to promote and disseminate censored information. As a result, even as the government’s attempts to suppress the dissemination of that same information may exacerbate the effects of the outbreak by undermining potential responses by the medical establishment, that same regime may also inadvertently encourage the generation and



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circulation of new information, as people come up with increasingly creative ways of circumventing the government’s censorship efforts. The resulting surge in new information, in turn, will likely drive the government to implement new censorship mechanisms, thereby starting the entire process all over again. Like the mutually opposed meanings contained in contronyms such as du and yao, the figure of the “self-­replicating monster” in the preceding passage similarly carries antithetical connotations of both harm and benefit. While a “monster” (guaiwu, or literally “strange object”) generally connotes an alien presence (SARS, in the novel, is frequently described as a “guaibing,” or literally “a strange [or monstrous] disease”), in context this metaphor is actually being used to describe not the epidemic itself but rather the public communications that attempt to combat the epidemic. To the extent that these public communications are indeed “monstrous,” meanwhile, they would have been so from the perspective of the governmental authorities attempting to suppress these public communications in the interest of maintaining public order. For the Chinese authorities, in other words, the spread of information about the disease is potentially even more threatening than the disease itself. In any event, the focus in this passage is not so much on these metaphorical monsters (the publicly-­ generated information about the epidemic) but rather on the figurative footprints they leave behind. These vestigial traces appear to replicate themselves autonomously and reflect the influence not only of the unseen entities that produced them but also the invisible forces responsible for their erasure. In this respect, these footprints stand not only as traces of censored public information about the epidemic but also as anticipatory replacements of the information that the authorities are simultaneously in the process of censoring and deleting. After emerging in southern China in late 2012, SARS came to be closely associated with Hong Kong, and most of the other significant outbreaks occurred in ethnically Chinese communities stretching from Taipei to Toronto’s Chinatown. This epidemiological distribution reinforced the perception that there was a close link between the virus and Chineseness, and there was even concern in Hong Kong that the disease’s English acronym, SARS (which is technically short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), reflected a link between the

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­ isease and Hong Kong—​which China, in 1997, had been officially d designated as a Special Administrative Region, or SAR.3 Needless to say, there was no necessary link between the SARS virus and Chineseness, though the widespread perception of such a link reflects a process by which notions of ethnonational identity persist even in an increasingly globalized environment. In particular, one often finds a somewhat paradoxical tendency to associate an infectious disease with a specific region or population. A good example of this phenomenon can be found in the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918. This epidemic is conventionally known as Spanish influenza, though not because it actually originated in Spain or because its impact was significantly greater there than elsewhere. Instead, the flu’s nickname is derived from the more practical fact that at the end of the First World War many nations were subject to restrictions on the circulation of potentially disruptive information. As a neutral country, however, Spain was immune to these restrictions, and consequently there was simply more information available regarding the virus’s impact in Spain as compared with other affected countries. With the 2003 SARS epidemic, meanwhile, governmental attempts to limit the circulation of information about the viral outbreak exacerbated the impact of the virus in the regions in question. The result was that, unlike the Spanish flu, where censorship regimes decreased the public’s tendency to associate the epidemic with the regions in question, with SARS these censorship efforts ultimately reinforced the public’s association of the disease with the corresponding Sinophone regions. Together, these two processes offer a useful model for understanding the relationship between political regimes and processes of community formation and perceptions of national identity. [email protected], accordingly, uses an attention to the SARS virus and the discourses surrounding it to consider how this infectious networks may potentially reinforce existing sociopolitical constellations, but alternatively they may also help generate new associative possibilities. Even as the government attempts to control both the epidemic and related discourses in the name of social stability, the disease nevertheless functions as a node of alterity with the potential to destabilize existing sociopolitical and discursive configurations and open the possibility for new ones. In particular, official efforts to restrict and



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quarantine information about the epidemic had the paradoxical effect of helping to stimulate a wide array of new discursive modes and social contacts. The novel’s focus on the circulation of information mirrors the work’s own status as an Internet novel. In particular, the dialectical relationship between the process of viral circulation and government censorship described in the novel is mirrored in the publication history of the work itself. Hu Fayun first released the novel as an online text in 2005, although, given the sensitive nature of the novel’s contents, the government forced the host website to shut down a few weeks later. An abridged version of the work was then published in the small regional journal Jiangnan in 2006, followed by a stand-­alone edition that was released both in print format and electronically over the popular Chinese Internet portal Sina.com. The work was named “the hottest novel of 2006,” though in early 2007 the government announced that it had been banned and was being pulled from the shelves. Even then, however, the novel remained easily accessible online, and in 2007 an uncensored edition was published in Hong Kong. These vicissitudes of the novel’s publication history illustrate a dialectics of dissemination and censorship similar to that which is described in the work itself. In particular, the government’s attempts to suppress the novel not only encouraged a strategic transformation of the actual work, they also contributed to a dramatic increase in attention to these censorship practices themselves. One result of this dialectics of censorship and dissemination has been that the novel’s publication history ended up mirroring the work’s own metaphor of the monster footprints on the beach. Just as the footprints in the sand are continually being washed away only to return in ever-­g reater numbers, each attempt to censor Hu Fayun’s novel was followed by a renewed interest in the work, which was made available in a variety of unofficial forums, despite its having been officially banned. In this respect, the novel represents a strategic disavowal of the nation’s censorship regime, while simultaneously serving as a reminder of the regime’s continued existence. The work, in other words, functions as a paradigmatic fetish—​a symbol of the censorship regime through which the Chinese government attempts to target and eliminate entire categories of public information—​but also as a displaced substitute of

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that same censored information itself. The novel does not merely ­represent contemporary China’s censorship practices, it simultaneously illustrates the contradictory logics on which those same practices are themselves predicated. In this respect, it not only constitutes a critical commentary on and target of government censorship, it could also be seen as a product of that same censorship regime itself. Golden Chicken

Like Hu Fayun’s novel, another work that was produced under the immediate shadow of the SARS crisis was Samson Chiu Leong Chun’s 2003 film Golden Chicken 2 The work was a sequel to the 2002 com­ ­edy Golden Chicken, about a happy-­go-­lucky Hong Kong sex worker named Ah Kum (played by Sandra Ng). Released in December 2002, Golden Chicken became the fourth-­highest grossing Hong Kong film of the year and won several major awards at Taipei’s prestigious Golden Horse film festival, including ones for Best Actress and Best Art Direction. In light of this success, work on a sequel began almost immediately, but the latter project took an unanticipated turn when the SARS outbreak paralyzed Hong Kong in early 2003. Luckily, director Chiu was able to turn on a dime and incorporate the outbreak into the film’s plot, and the result is a fascinating reflection on the effects of the epidemic on Hong Kong society and culture, refracted through a broader rumination on memory, amnesia, and processes of commoditization. While the original Golden Chicken movie features the protagonist in her physical prime in the early 2000s, the sequel instead opens in the year 2046, with Ah Kum now a remarkably well-­preserved octogenarian. In the prologue of the latter work, Ah Kum encounters a young man (played by Chapman To) who has resolved to take some memory­erasing pills to blunt his sorrow after having broken up with his girlfriend. In an attempt to lift the young man’s spirits, Ah Kum launches into an animated account of some of the highs and lows of her own life, to illustrate the principle that bad memories are useful in that they may help render good ones all the more memorable. Ah Kum’s resulting narrative then provides the basis for the main body of the



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film itself, as viewers are shown reenactments of the stories that Ah Kum tells the heartbroken young man. These flashbacks primarily refer back to 2003, the same year that the work was filmed and released, but they also look back to other periods starting from the early 1980s, when Ah Kum was still a schoolgirl. A theme running throughout many of these flashbacks involves Ah Kum’s relationship with a male cousin named Quincy (played by Jackie Cheung), who repeatedly shows up in her life, only to disappear again. Although they initially regard each other as virtual siblings, the two cousins subsequently become romantically attracted even as they remain wary of what implica­­tions this unconventional romance might have. In particular, for Ah Kum the romance offers a domestic alternative to the lucrative sex work that increasingly defines her identity, even as the incestuous resonances of the relationship offer a reminder of the kernel of alterity (the incest taboo) on which that ideal of domesticity is itself structurally grounded. The 2003 portion of the film features a sequence in which Ah Kum is visited by an old friend or client named Chow, who is the proprietor of a nearby diner. Chow and Ah Kum have a romantic dinner in Chow’s apartment, after which Chow asks Ah Kum to wear a gas mask while they engage in some kinky sex play. It turns out that Chow, depressed because business at his diner is not going well, has decided to commit suicide and, more specifically, has secretly arranged for his apartment to fill up with noxious fumes while he is having sex with Ah Kum (the gas mask is intended to keep her safe while he asphyxiates himself). As they are having sex, however, Ah Kum removes her mask and discovers that the apartment is full of smoke. After Chow confesses he had been trying to kill himself, Ah Kum offers to help him out by investing in his diner. Chow is delighted by this suggestion, and they proceed to engage in a bout of celebratory sex. Ironically, however, Chow dies seconds later (presumably as a result of the fumes to which he had already been exposed), and Ah Kum ends up acquiring the diner anyway. “Unfortunately,” Ah Kum’s voice-­over subsequently observes, “the first customer I served was SARS.” Not only is Ah Kum’s newly acquired diner faced with a sudden collapse in business as Hong Kongers begin assiduously avoiding all public spaces in response to the epidemic, the

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restaurant also provides a backdrop for some comically exaggerated reactions to the epidemic. For instance, convinced that body hair increases one’s risk of being infected by the virus, Ah Kum and her employees proceed to carefully shave their entire bodies. They do so, however, right in the middle of the diner itself, transforming their attempt to prevent infection into a strikingly unhygienic act in its own right. With its emphasis on the nude body, moreover, this public body­shaving performance simultaneously functions as a reminder of Ah Kum’s background, and continued involvement, in sex work. Food service and sex work, being two industries that depend on a particularly intimate relationship between the customer and the service provider, were very directly impacted by the threat of contagion that SARS represents, and Ah Kum is positioned at a figurative ground zero for both. Even after inheriting the diner, Ah Kum still retains her escort service, and her first customer following the beginning of the SARS outbreak is, literally, “SARS”—​which is to say, a goateed young man by the name of Chan Saasi (Ronald Cheng), whose given name, pronounced “shashi” in Mandarin, is one of several roughly homophonous terms used to refer to SARS in Chinese. Chan shows up at Ah Kum’s door asking simply, “Do you remember me?” Assuming he is a former customer, Ah Kum invites him in, and then takes elaborate hygienic precautions prior to having sex with him (including wearing a welder’s mask when they shower together and wrapping Chan’s entire body in cling-­wrap before they have sex). As the scene unfolds, moreover, it becomes apparent that Chan is primarily interested not in Ah Kum’s body per se, but rather in her body hair. When he discovers that she is completely clean shaven, he locks himself in her bathroom and begins frantically searching for any strand of her hair that might happen to remain on the floor or in the bathtub drain. Shortly afterward, Ah Kum observes in bewilderment as Chan, now topless, strikes a series of Bruce Lee poses before finally using a dagger to slice off one of his own nipple hairs. He then carefully removes another dark, curly strand of hair from a plastic bag and, holding the two strands up to each other, launches into a passionate oration in which he promises the two strands that they will be together for eternity. Chan’s fascination with these strands of hair is partially clarified a few scenes later, when he explains to Ah Kum that his wife abandoned



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him in order to become a prostitute, leaving behind only a single strand of her body hair. This strand functions, therefore, as a fetishistic substitute for Chan’s absent wife, and he is convinced that the key to locating his wife lies in finding a matching strand. Upon learning Chan’s story, Ah Kum becomes determined to help him, and to this end she organizes a citywide event in which she offers sex workers from throughout Hong Kong a bowl of soup in exchange for a strand of their body hair. Prostitutes line up for hours for the free soup as Chan uses a magnifying glass to inspect the hairs they have each brought. In a parodic inversion of the earlier scene in which Ah Kum and her employees shaved off all their body hair at the beginning of the SARS epidemic, in this scene Ah Kum offers Hong Kong sex workers free food on the condition that they publically share a strand of their body hair. The result is a moving affirmation of community identity and solidarity, set in a historical moment when the SARS epidemic had made many Hong Kong residents reluctant to venture out in public at all. Although Chan’s wife doesn’t show up in the soup line, she does come to Ah Kum’s apartment the next day of her own accord. She explains to Ah Kum that Chan’s story about her having become a prostitute is actually not true, and that Chan in fact suffers from a mental illness that renders him unable to recognize her. Chan has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, and while he periodically manages to escape to go search for his wife, each time she has to find him and return him to the hospital.4 In this way, Chan’s fascination with his wife’s body hair becomes not so much a product of his disavowal of her disappearance but rather an immediate catalyst of that same loss—​ insofar as the fetish is a symptom of the mental illness that renders him incapable of recognizing her, and which furthermore requires that he be institutionalized and physically separated from her. While Chan’s hair fetish is rooted most directly in his relation to his wife, it may also be viewed more generally as a symptom of Hong Kong’s obsession with public hygiene in the wake of the SARS epidemic. Chan’s conviction that a single strand of hair has the potential to lead him back to his wife stands as the precise inverse of the SARS­induced paranoia that any object might function as an invisible bridge for the virus to spread from one host to the next. The community-­ rending effects of this sort of infectious epidemic, in other words,

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mirror those of the processes of socialization on which the very possibility of community is grounded in the first place. Just as an epidemic is a product of the movement of infectious agents from host to host combined with a more general anxiety about the latent risk of infection, a national community is similarly a product of an array of immediate social bonds between different individuals combined with a fantasy about the possibility of sharing a meaningful connection with unknown others. In this respect, Chan’s status as a personification of the SARS epidemic, together with his amnesic and fetishistic relationship with his wife, makes him a compelling stand-­in for the forces underlying community identity, particularly at the level of “imagined communities” like the nation or paranational entities like contemporary Hong Kong.5 Golden Chicken II, as noted above, is narrated in the future anterior, anticipating how the present will be recalled several decades later. The film describes how a brokenhearted young man’s attempt to erase his memory functions as a catalyst for Ah Kum’s detailed narration of her own life story, and this linkage between an act of attempted amnesia and the resulting outpouring of narration, in turn, is mirrored by the relationship in the film between processes of commoditization and assertions of agency. While it may be true that a commodity is, as Marx argues in Capital, “in the first place, an object outside us,”6 processes of commoditization that provide the ground out of which modern notions of agency become possible. In Chiu’s film, Ah Kum gradually emerges as an autonomous agent despite—​or, perhaps, precisely because of—​her position within a monetized economy. This paradox is brought out most clearly in a sequence in which Ah Kum’s cousin Quincy suddenly announces that he wants to marry her. Although Ah Kum is initially skeptical, she and Quincy neverthe­ ­less proceed to have a whirlwind courtship, and when Quincy formally proposes a few a days later, Ah Kum enthusiastically accepts—​ whereupon Quincy immediately has a lawyer, who had been waiting in the hallway outside his apartment, come in and officiate the ceremony right then and there. The next morning, Quincy asks Ah Kum to sign some additional paperwork in English, which she is unable to read. After she does so, however, he informs her that the document she has just signed is actually a divorce agreement, meaning that the



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newlyweds are now officially divorced. As Ah Kum is still trying to grasp this rapid turn of events, the white-­collar crime division of the Hong Kong police arrive at the door and proceed to arrest Quincy for embezzlement. Distraught at having abruptly lost the husband for whom she had long yearned, Ah Kum begins pawning her own jewelry to help pay for a good lawyer who would hopefully be able to get Quincy released from jail. Whereas Ah Kum had previously accepted monetary compensation from her clients in return for sexual services, she now attempts to leverage those same assets in order to aid the man who had briefly been her new husband. There is a well-­recognized practice from late imperial China of courtesans being bought out of servitude, but in this case it is Ah Kum herself who is attempting to use her own financial assets to help her new husband escape his own legal predicament. In this way, Ah Kum is using her status as a sex worker to try to negotiate a future for herself outside of the institution of prostitution, suggesting that sex work functions not merely as a space of constraint and oppression but also as a potentially liberating force in its own right. One of the items Ah Kum decides to pawn is a large gold statue of a chicken she had purchased at the beginning of the film’s first flashback. This statue is not only a metonym of the considerable wealth that Ah Kum accrued while working as an escort, it also symbolizes Ah Kum herself (the Cantonese word kum in her name, which is pronounced jin in Mandarin, literally means “gold,” and the Chinese word for “chicken,” in both Cantonese and Mandarin, is a homophonous euphemism for “prostitute”).7 Just as Ah Kum’s decision to pawn a commoditized effigy of herself coincides with one of her most direct attempts to assert control over her own fate, the movie’s own use of the hypercommoditized figure of Ah Kum as a symbol of Hong Kong similarly symbolizes the former colony’s attempts to control its fate following the 1997 Handover. Even as Hong Kong finds itself (re)united with China as a result of a set of diplomatic decisions over which the colony had no direct control, Ah Kum seizes control of her own destiny by taking one of the qualities that originally defined her (specifically her status as a sex worker) and using it to try to reinvent herself in order to be able to be reunited with her new husband.

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The family structure Ah Kum is attempting to reclaim through the act of pawning an iconic symbol of herself, meanwhile, is one that is predicated not merely on conventional romantic intimacy but rather on a sort of hyperintimacy. That is to say, the film reveals early on that Quincy is actually Ah Kum’s cousin, and consequently by the film’s own logic their union is perceived as being quite scandalous. In one of the flashbacks from the early 1980s, for instance, Quincy visits Ah Kum at her parents’ home, where the two of them share a bunkbed like siblings. One thing leads to another, however, and one day Ah Kum’s father walks in on them and finds them passionately kissing. The father immediately informs Quincy that he must either move out immediately or else begin paying rent—​suggesting that the cousins have transgressed a critical boundary that thereby renders it impossible for Ah Kum’s father to continue treating Quincy as immediate kin. Ah Kum’s and Quincy’s short-­lived matrimony two decades later, accordingly, represents a specter of incestuous desire that functions as a limit point of kinship itself. Perhaps even more than cannibalism, incest is a social taboo with a nearly universal reach that shapes our understanding of ourselves and our relations to others in profound ways. In her influential “Traffic in Women” essay, for instance, Gayle Rubin observes that, The incest taboo should best be understood as a mechanism to insure that such exchanges take place between families and between groups. Since the existence of incest taboos is universal, but the content of their prohibitions variable, they cannot be explained as having the aim of preventing the occurrence of genetically close matings. Rather, the incest taboo imposes the social aim of exogamy and alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation.8

The prohibition on sleeping with one’s own kin is frequently assumed to be grounded on a biological imperative to limit harmful inbreed­ ­ing, but biology actually offers only an incomplete explanation for the prohibition. While it is true that children born from closely related parents face a somewhat increased risk of birth defects, for couples who are at most second-­degree relatives (e.g., first cousins) this risk is fairly minimal and comparable to that which results from other reproductive practices that are widely condoned, such as having children



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at a relatively advanced age. Instead, the incest taboo appears to be driven not by strictly biological considerations but rather by a set of structural imperatives, in that the prohibition on sleeping with one’s close kin drives a pattern of exogamic circulation that, in turn, generates and reinforces a set of social bonds between different families, clans, and communities. Just as the suppression of one type of information may encourage the production and circulation of alternate sets of discourses, the prohibition of one type of matrimonial union (between close kin) helps spur an array of other types of unions. In symbolically challenging this prohibition, then, Ah Kum tacitly invites a reassessment of the social formations with which the prohibition is linked. In particular, by pursuing a quasi-­incestuous marriage as an alternative to sex work, Ah Kum simultaneously reveals the degree to which the institution of marriage is itself inflected by these incestuous and commercialized unions against which it is structurally opposed. Ah Kum’s and Quincy’s quasi-­incestuous matrimony, meanwhile, constitutes both the structural negation of the sex work that has shaped Ah Kum’s life up to this point as well as a natural extension of it. Even as Ah Kum sees the marriage as an opportunity to extricate herself from the business of exchanging sex for monetary compensation, it turns out that Quincy arranged the matrimony in order to provide a way of transferring to Ah Kum the more than nine million Hong Kong dollars he has embezzled from his company, and for which he is about to be arrested. By divorcing Ah Kum immediately after the monetary transfer has been completed, Quincy evidently hopes to protect her (and what used to be his money) from the authorities. In this respect, their marriage marks an apotheosis of sex work, insofar as it functions primarily to permit the reassignment of financial assets under the guise of marital relations. Ironically, it is precisely in this hypercommodified arrangement that Ah Kum comes closest to attain­ ­ing the marital relationship to which she aspires. In fact, it is after Quincy’s arrest, when Ah Kum is tearfully bidding him farewell at the airport as he is on his way to prison, that she confesses to him that she has already borne his child—​a child he did not even realize that he had, and whom Ah Kum by that point has already put up for ­adoption.

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Even as Golden Chicken 2 reflects on the 2003 SARS epidemic in almost real time, the film simultaneously offers a tacit commentary on the historicity of its own medium. In particular, the movie incorporates several short segments from contemporary Hong Kong news broadcasts. This recycled news footage, however, appears artificially aged in the film, as though it were already several decades old. In this way, the film’s use of embedded footage invites the viewer to imagine how the SARS epidemic will be remembered after it has already become history. Indeed, the outer frame of the film is set in the year 2046, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Mainland control. When the Handover was initially negotiated in 1984, it had been agreed that Hong Kong would be permitted to retain its existing political, economic, and social system for at least the first fifty years following the 1997 Handover. The outer frame of Golden Chicken 2 coincides with this anniversary, and the film concludes with an announcement of the reelection of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong (played, in a cameo appearance, by Hong Kong Cantopop star Andy Lau), who reveals that the city’s economy is so strong that everyone will be exempt from taxation—​implying that after half a century of nominal Chinese control the former colony finds itself in an even more favorable position than it had been before the Handover. The film’s conclusion also reveals that the young man to whom the now-­elderly Ah Kum has just recounted the story of her life is actually her own grandson—​the son of the child she had with Quincy but subsequently put up for adoption years before. The grandson, accord­ ­ingly, literally embodies the sense of potentiality associated with Ah Kum’s semi-­transgressive relationship with her cousin, Quincy. It is upon noticing the young man’s wristwatch—​which is the same watch she had bought for Quincy many years earlier, but which he had subsequently returned to her—​that Ah Kum realizes that he is actually her grandson and, by extension, both an emblem of her future and a link to her past. In this way, a seminal moment of virtual incest provides the catalyst out of which the retrospective narrative that constitutes the film itself is generated. Ah Kum’s eventual recognition of her grandson in the film’s outer frame is mirrored by one of the work’s more emotionally resonant moments within the embedded flashbacks. In particular, during the



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SARS epidemic one of the few customers at the diner that Ah Kum inherits from Mr. Chow is a doctor, Dr. Chow (Leon Lai), who works in a hospital wing reserved SARS patients. When he stops at the diner one evening on his way home from work, Ah Kum finds that the other work­ ­ers in the diner refuse to allow him to come inside. She therefore serves him outside on the sidewalk, and befriends him. He returns to the diner several times, and each time Ah Kum treats him warmly despite the fact that the other employees insist that he keep a safe distance. Near the end of the film, Ah Kum is watching the news, and sees an announcement that the doctor has died from SARS. The broadcast shows a photo­ graph of the doctor but Ah Kum, in shock at the news of his death, appears initially unable to recognized him. Eventually, it is only after she holds up her hand to cover up the lower portion of his face on the television screen—​which had always been covered by a facemask whenever she saw him—​that she is finally able to fully recognize him. The poignant irony in this scene is that it is precisely the facemask, which the doctor had worn outside the hospital primarily to protect others from the risk of infection, which is not only responsible for the discrimination he suffers at the diner but also comes to serve as a locus of identity in Ah Kum’s eyes. Symbolizing the fight against SARS, the infectious threat of SARS, as well as his own eventual vulnerability to the disease, the doctor’s identity in the film is tightly bound up with his relationship to the illness. These connotations coalesce in the figure of the facemask, which becomes an extension of himself even as it partially compromises his public identity (in that it not only partially obscures his face, it also figuratively strips him of his humanity in the eyes of those who fear the infectious threat with which he is associated). For Ah Kum, however, it is precisely this supplemental figure of the mask that anchors her relationship to the doctor, and which grounds deeply empathetic reaction to the news of his death. Coda: Infection and Information

The biggest initial challenge faced by the international community in dealing with the SARS epidemic was arguably not medical as much as it was political. For several months, both the government of China and the local government of Hong Kong refused to even confirm the

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existence of an outbreak, much less release detailed information about its progress. In Hong Kong, one grassroots response to this news blackout was the establishment of the website sosick.org, which used crowd-­sourcing techniques to collect detailed documentation on hundreds of confirmed or suspected cases of SARS infection throughout Hong Kong island, Kowloon, and the New Territories, together with all public reports of locations visited by suspected SARS patients.9 For several weeks, the sosick.org site was the only place where this sort of epidemiological information was readily available, and it continued to be updated until late April 2002, when the Hong Kong government finally began releasing similar information of its own accord. At its height, the sosick.org site was being accessed by thousands of visitors a day and offered an instructive example of the ability of crowd-­sourcing initiatives to push back against governmental attempts to control the circulation of information. At the same time, however, the grassroots website also had potentially negative repercussions, in that the detailed information on schools, residences, and other locations where there had been documented outbreaks could easily exacerbate a paranoiac attitude that might in turn promote a pattern of discrimination and ostracism. That is to say, to the extent that one of the more counterproductive responses to the epidemic was an institutionalized process of compulsory quarantining of individuals who were either known to be or were at risk of being infected, a crowd-­ sourced site could encourage a similar set of paranoiac responses in a more decentered fashion. Beijing’s initial attempts to restrict the circulation of SARS-­related information, meanwhile, were part of a more general effort to regulate the dissemination over the Internet of material deemed by the government to be “sensitive.” China was first connected to the global Internet in 1994, the same year that the Ministry of Public Security created the National Crime Information Center, which would subsequently become the primary arm of the government’s Internet monitoring system. By 1998, the Ministry of Public Security began to implement a Golden Shield Project designed to monitor and selectively block Internet transmissions in China. The first phase of this system, which included the development of computer applications and the establishment of a set of standards and practices, was implemented between



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1999 and 2002, meaning that it had just been completed when the SARS crisis struck in early 2003. Often referred to colloquially as the Great Firewall of China, the Golden Shield Project actually only catches a fraction of targeted Inter­ ­net communications, and Internet users can sidestep the monitoring system by substituting various homophones and euphemisms for censored terms, or by using proxy servers to circumvent the firewall altogether. China’s Great Firewall, accordingly, is a blunt instrument whose significance is arguably more symbolic than practical. In fact, some analysts have suggested that the primary objective of the Golden Shield project is actually not to eliminate all material that is critical of the government, but rather to “reduce the probability of collective action by clipping social ties whenever any collective movements are in evidence or expected,”10 while others have noted that recent surveys reveal that nearly 85 percent of Chinese citizens think that the internet should be “controlled,” and specifically that the government should censor unwelcome content.11 One implication of these findings is that the government’s objective is not absolute control over the distribution of unwanted information but rather to create a continual reminder of the ever-­present possibility of government surveillance. The result may be described as a sort of “digital panopticon,” whose function is as much to encourage a practice of self-­censorship as it is to serve as an active censoring mechanism in its own right.12 Like the panopticon prison design famously proposed by Jeremy Bentham, which specified that individual prison cells be arranged around a central tower from which the guards could watch the convicts without the latter knowing when precisely they were or were not being watched, the hypervisibility of China’s Great Firewall similarly encourages China’s Internet users to internalize a system of self-­surveillance and self-­regulation.13 This pattern of self-­surveillance also extends to transnational Internet companies, many of which have voluntarily accommodated the Chinese government’s censorship policies in order to retain a foothold in the vast Chinese market. The Golden Shield Project was actually only one component of a larger set of “Golden Projects,” each of which consisted of an array of networked databases focusing on topics ranging from population management to criminal records, fugitives, stolen vehicles, national

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security, border control, and so forth.14 The government’s efforts to regulate the circulation of information over the Internet, accordingly, are part of a more ambitious attempt to formalize its handling of a variety of different archives, together with the populations and economies with which those archives are closely imbricated. The result was a broader attempt to “informatize” the public security apparatus or, as David Lyons succinctly puts it, “an effort to network the police, rather than police the network.”15 With respect to the Internet, then, the implication is that government’s primary objective is not to limit the public’s use of the Internet but rather to leverage it so that the information generated by and circulated over the Internet can be of maximum benefit to the government itself. Even as the government’s Golden Shield initiative was seeking to use the Internet to reinforce its oversight over different areas of society, the popularization of the Internet was simultaneously creating countless new opportunities for citizens to challenge the government’s attempts to control the public circulation of information. For instance, after a Jiangxi schoolhouse explosion on March 6, 2001, killed forty­two victims, many of them children, the Chinese official media initially insisted that the explosion was the work of a mentally ill individual, though a relentless barrage of Internet coverage eventually forced the authorities to acknowledge that the school was actually being used to manufacture fireworks that were responsible for the explosion. A similar public reversal took place in September 2002, after dozens of people, again including many school children, died after eating at a breakfast stall in Jiangsu province. Once again, the authorities initially attempted to keep the incident under wraps, though a wave of reports over the web eventually forced the government to publicly acknowledge the tragedy and offer an explanation—​ reporting that the owners of a rival breakfast stall had laced the food with poison as part of a private vendetta. Ironically, the initial blackout on information regarding the incident shifted attention from the tragedy itself to the government’s response, as reflected in the perception that the government’s failure to acknowledge the incident implies, as one anonymous commentator on the website of the party-­r un newspaper People’s Daily put it, “that it is time to talk about politics.”16



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The ability of ordinary citizens to use social media to mobilize against the government and other institutional authorities has increased exponentially with the explosive popularity of Chinese Twitter-­like microblogging sites like Sina Weibo. Established on August 14, 2009, Weibo gained more than 300 million registered users in less than two years, and by 2011 it had developed into a formidable political force in its own right. Although the majority of the posts circulated over microblogging services like Weibo contain little or no explicitly political content, these sites do nevertheless provide a forum where netizens may express grievances and critiques. For instance, when a high-­speed train collided with another outside the city of Wenzhou on July 23, 2011, forty people were killed and more than two hundred were injured. China, at the time, was aggressively push­ ­ing the development of high-­speed rail and was apparently concerned that the accident would exacerbate existing concerns about the technology’s safety. The government therefore imposed a virtual blackout on media coverage of the accident, and even took the unusual step of quickly burying the derailed cars before they could be examined—​ ostensibly in order to prevent valuable high-­speed rail technology from falling into the wrong hands. The government’s response was widely criticized over China’s social media and soon even the official media followed suit, until eventually the government issued a formal apology. One of the sources of Weibo’s appeal is the fact that most users—​ with the exception of celebrities and other public figures, who are required to confirm their identity if they wish to publish under their real names—​a re allowed to register for the service anonymously.17 Even though a regulation was passed in early 2012 requiring all users of Weibo and other Chinese microblogging sites to register under their real names by March 16, 2012, this new requirement was never systematically implemented or enforced. In fact, even after Beijing deleted thousands of posts and briefly shut down Weibo altogether after incendiary rumors of a government coup began circulating virally shortly after the original deadline for real-­name registrations by all Weibo users, anonymous postings nevertheless continued to be permitted once the service was reopened a few days later.

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It appears that the Chinese government has calculated that in the long run the strategic benefit of permitting anonymous postings on Chinese social media like Weibo will outweigh the risk those same postings might pose. The Chinese media critic Zhao Jing (also known as Michael Anti), for instance, argues that the government is using quasi-­independent social media such as Weibo as a figurative safety valve—​permitting social media sites to channel a certain amount of dissent precisely in order to help forestall the possibility that popular frustration might erupt in a more destabilizing fashion.18 The logic behind this sort of approach is the precise inverse of that of a traditional panopticon. Whereas a panopticon promotes a process of self-­ discipline by reminding subjects that they are always potentially being monitored, this latter sort of arrangement instead actively encourages Internet users to post freely under a presumption of anonymity. The result is a system wherein Internet users are simultaneously encouraged and discouraged from expressing dissent, with both strategies effectively quarantining information in ways that seek to reinforce the status quo. A similar pattern can be found in the international response to early reports of the 2003 SARS epidemic. In particular, one of the international community’s first hints of the outbreak of flu-­like infections that would develop into the SARS epidemic came in late November 2002, when Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), operating under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), downloaded several articles from the local media in Southern China reporting a sudden increase in patients suffering from flu-­related symptoms. Described as a “multilingual system [that] gathers and disseminates relevant information on disease outbreaks and other public health events by monitoring global media sources such as news wires and web sites,”19 the GPHIN began collecting the initial news articles on the outbreak as early as November 27, 2002, but it took another two months for the agency to translate the documents into English and generate a formal report. The Chinese government initially declined to comment on the reports, and it wasn’t until February 2013 that it officially confirmed the existence of the outbreak. The Canada-­based GPHIN collects and catalogues the digital detritus littered across the Internet, transforming it into something



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new. While the GPHIN focused rather narrowly on searching local media sources for reports of actual outbreaks of disease, the general methodology it employed could be easily modified to look at other categories of digital data, including ones designed to identify outbreaks before they had even fully materialized. In 2009, for instance, researchers working at Google and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published an article in Nature noting that traditional health surveillance systems have typically relied primarily on clinical data such as physician visits and hospitalizations, though more recently similar attempts have been made to catch outbreaks even earlier by monitoring metrics such as sales of over-­the-­counter drugs and calls to telephone triage advice lines in order to extrapolate information on patients’ behavior when they first begin to experience symptoms and before they have even visited an actual doctor. The Nature article, meanwhile, proposed an alternative system that focused on correlations between Google search queries and outbreaks of influenza-­like illnesses (ILIs). Using an automated selection process to produce search terms that corresponded to spikes in physician visits for ILIs, the research team generated a set of search queries from the period 2003– 2007, and then used them to analyze new data from the 2007–2008 influenza season. The researchers found that this method would have detected ILI outbreaks approximately two weeks earlier than the published CDC data for the same period, thereby offering the possibility of a more timely and effective public response to dangerous outbreaks. To the extent that Google’s proposed approach attempts to find ways of identifying influenza outbreaks before they become full-­fledged epidemics, it is fitting that the Nature article in which this approach was first reported unwittingly anticipated with almost uncanny precision a major pandemic that had not even begun. Published in February 2009, the Nature article opens by noting that “a new strain of influenza virus against which no prior immunity exists and that demonstrates human-­to-­human transmission could result in a pandemic with millions of fatalities.” In an unexpected twist of fate, less than two months later an unusually lethal outbreak of influenza was observed in Mexico, and from there it quickly spread to the southwestern United States and around the world. The virus, which was initially known as swine flu because it is a strain that is endemic in

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pigs, proved to be a highly pathogenic form of the influenza virus that included the H1N1 subtype that had been responsible for the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918, which at the time had infected about a half billion people around the world. On June 11, 2009, the WHO declared the contemporary H1N1 outbreak to be a global pandemic—​the first officially recognized influenza pandemic in more than forty years20 —​and the CDC estimates that between April 2009 and April 2010 between 150,000 and half a million people died from H1N1 around the world, including approximately 15,000 people in the United States alone.21 Although the young and the elderly are normally most susceptible to influenza outbreaks, one of the peculiarities of the 2009 pandemic was that octogenarians proved to be unexpectedly resistant to the disease—​apparently as a result of the fact that so many of them already had antibodies after having been exposed to the H1N1 virus during the 1918 outbreak. To the extent that this elderly cohort continues to be haunted by their exposure to the earlier epidemic, however, this turns out to be a beneficial haunting, providing them with potentially lifesaving antibodies that were still effective nearly a century later. Just as SARS continued to be discursively linked with China and Hong Kong even after it entered into global circulation, H1N1 similarly remained closely associated in the popular imagination with Mexico and Mexicans even after becoming a global pandemic. In China, for instance, officials preemptively quarantined all Mexican nationals residing in the country—​including not only visitors who had recently been in Mexico or other infected regions but even expats from Mexico who had been living in China continuously since before the beginning of the outbreak.22 The resulting policy parallels the ways in which many foreign governments and communities had discriminatively focused on ethnic Chinese as likely carriers of the SARS virus six years earlier, and is itself a precise inverse of the sorts of extended kinship bonds that are frequently imagined to underlie national identity. This response was particularly acute during the early years of the AIDS pandemic, as infected individuals frequently found themselves estranged from their own families and communities, even as sub-­ and transnational cohorts of otherwise unrelated individuals began to develop around a shared sense of discrimination



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and alienation. The same factors that often help marginalize these queer subjects within their national communities, accordingly, may also provide a salient bond linking them to other queer subjects around the world. These two inverse phenomena of imaginary ethnohereditary bonds informing perceptions of group identity by either outsiders or members of the groups themselves come together in the contemporary HIV/ AIDS pandemic. In particular, while one of the initial responses to the epidemic was a reductive stereotyping of gay men and other individuals in perceived high-­risk groups, over the longer term the pandemic has allowed AIDS activism groups to help raise awareness of gay and lesbian issues within the general population, while also generating a greater sense of cohesion within the transnational LGBT community itself. The result has been an extraordinarily rapid sea change in attitudes toward homosexuality, as indexed by the wave of legislative initiatives decriminalizing same-­sex practices in countries ranging from China (where homosexuality has been legal since 1997) to the United States (where it has officially been legal nationwide since 2003), followed by an even more dramatic wave of initiatives legalizing same­sex marriage. Although as recently as 2001 same-­sex marriage was not legal anywhere in the world, by August 2013 there were nearly 600 million people living in countries or jurisdictions where same-­sex marriage was permitted, with more than half of these legalizations having taken place in the twelve month span between August 2012 and August 2013.23 The pace of reform has only accelerated since then, with no less than twenty-four additional states in the US legalizing same-­sex marriage between August of 2013 and December 2014 (as this book goes to press). From same-­sex marriage to the transnational LGBT organizations that helped make these initiatives possible, the transnational queer communities that formed in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic are driven by assumptions about kinship and heredity that stand in stark contrast to the assumptions that underlie familiar understandings of social organization. In particular, these queer communities are predicated on a logic that is fundamentally distinct from the sorts of metaphorically familial relationships that are often assumed to provide the structural basis on which the national community itself is imagined.

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While nations are frequently conceived as imaginary extensions of heteronormative kinship structures, queer alliances and communities presuppose a very different understanding of social reproduction—​one wherein a social unit’s ability to reproduce itself is not perceived as a metaphorical extension of sexual reproduction (as is true of visions of national community that emphasize hereditary bloodlines) but rather is understood as a product of lateral alliances. Unlike opposite-­sex unions, same-­sex relationships are generally not presumed to take procreation as their primary raison d’être.24 This is not to say, of course, that same-­sex unions may not involve reproduction and child rearing, but rather that they do not straightforwardly reaffirm a set of normative assumptions about human reproduction and are often more open to exploring other models of affiliation and descent that do not take procreation as their conceptual starting point. A similar logic may be applied to the figure of Ruyan, in Hu Fayun’s novel. While it is true that Ruyan does not pursue same-­sex relationships per se, her position and social orientation may nevertheless be perceived as queer. Through the Empty Nest site, Ruyan develops an array of friendships and romantic attachments that are grounded not on concerns with sexual reproduction but rather on social reproduction and the circulation of information and ideas. These Internet-­based personal connections and political alliances encourage Ruyan to rethink her understanding not only of her family relations but also of the broader sociopolitical structures within which she is positioned. In this respect, the dog and the computer that Yang Yanping leaves his mother when he departs for Paris not only function as fetishistic substitutes for Ruyan’s missing loved ones (including Yanping himself), they also represent the possibility of new forms of interpersonal attachment and even political community. Many of the relationships that Ruyan forms in the novel begin as virtual relationships over the web, and the political alliances she establishes are similarly facilitated by the veil of anonymity that is provided by the Internet. The resulting matrix of interpersonal interaction and information invites a reexamination of the process of political transformation as well as of the very possibility of political community itself.

6 •

Capital

Yan Lianke’s 2006 novel Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuang meng) opens with the young narrator’s grandfather, Ding Shuiyang—​who is typically referred to in the novel as Teacher Ding, or simply Grandpa—​ returning to his rural Henan village after having attended a meeting with some local cadres in a nearby city. In the city, Teacher Ding had learned a number of things about the deadly disease that plagues his village. He learned that the fever is actually caused by a disease called AIDS, which originated abroad but was now endemic within China. He learned that people are usually infected with this disease after donating blood. He learned that the first symptom is typically a fever that lasts a couple of weeks, and while this initial fever eventually subsides, years later the patient will develop an array of other health complications. He learned that the disease is invariably fatal, and that there is no cure. As a result of this meeting with the cadres, Teacher Ding comes to realize that his own son, Ding Hui, bears a large measure of responsibility for the deadly epidemic that has devastated the surrounding region. Ding Hui was one of the region’s earliest and most successful blood heads, having helped recruit countless other villagers to sell their blood. As a result, many of the villagers became infected with

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the AIDS virus; but even as his fellow villagers were falling ill and dying, Ding Hui continued amassing a fortune from his role in coordinating the regional blood trade. He moved to a new street in the village where other families who had profited from the blood trade lived, and even there his house was larger and more impressive than all the others. Ding Hui’s was the only house with a third floor, and its design was modeled on that of the Western-­style homes he had seen in the city. He had the residence outfitted with all of the newest appliances, including a washing machine, refrigerator, freezer, and even an indoor toilet made of white porcelain. The narrator notes, however, that these modern appliances were actually all just for show, and that the family didn’t use any of them. In fact, they didn’t even use their new porcelain toilet and instead, out of habit, continued retreating to the traditional squat latrine behind the house. Teacher Ding is so horrified by what he learns about the disease that has been ravaging his village that he insists that his son Ding Hui publicly apologize to the other villagers for his role in the crisis. He even privately wishes that Ding Hui would then commit suicide to atone for his crimes. Ding Hui, however, is unrepentant, claiming that he was hardly the only one who profited from the blood selling. He points out that all of his neighbors on New Street have similarly made their fortunes from the blood-­selling trade, to which Teacher Ding responds that they were merely following Ding Hui’s lead. This confrontation escalates to the point that Ding Hui orders Teacher Ding out of his house, declaring that he no longer regards Teacher Ding as his father nor does he regard himself as Teacher Ding’s son. The irony, however, is that even as Teacher Ding claims that the other local blood heads were following in Ding Hui’s footsteps, there is nevertheless a sense in which Ding Hui was merely following his father’s own lead when he was first introduced to the blood-­selling business. That is to say, just as it is Teacher Ding who, at the beginning of the novel, meets with the county cadres and brings back information about the AIDS epidemic, it was also he whom the county’s Director of Education had sought out a decade earlier to help convince the villagers to begin selling their blood. The county, it turns out, was trying to meet regional quotas designed to encourage rural blood donation and consequently was recruiting local leaders to help spearhead



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these efforts. The county’s Director of Education convinced Teacher Ding to escort representatives from Ding Village to visit a nearby town that had become nationally recognized as a model blood-­selling center. The latter town had once been virtually destitute but subsequently became a model of wealth and profitability for the entire province. Teacher Ding agreed to help organize the trip, and one of the villagers who accompanied the delegation was Teacher Ding’s twenty­four-­year-­old son, Ding Hui. Inspired by this visit, Ding Hui proceeded to organize a region-­wide blood collection network that comes to play a critical role in driving the region’s subsequent AIDS epidemic. Through this focus on Ding Village’s blood selling and China’s rural AIDS crisis, Dream of Ding Village interrogates a Marxian logic of commodity fetishism. Understood as a strategic elision of a commodity’s relationship to the material labor and the social networks on which its production is predicated, commodity fetishism is a process whereby commodities are perceived, as Marx put it, as “autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own.”1 As a result, a commodity’s significance comes to reside in its status as both a material entity as well as a symbol of a peculiar form of structural amnesia. It is only through a systematic erasure of its own history that a material artifact comes to function as a commodity, even as that same process of erasure becomes a constitutive component of the commodity form itself. The twist that Dream of Ding Village introduces to this familiar notion of commodity fetishism, meanwhile, is that the preeminent commodity in the novel—​human blood—​is not so much a product of human labor as it is its very precondition. By extension, the systematic harvesting of human blood in rural China results not only in the dissolution of the social networks on which these communities are grounded (as family after family is torn apart by AIDS) but also in a potent affirmation of a parallel set of virtual networks (as the circulation of blood through the community parallels underlying networks of capital and labor). The commoditized blood in the novel, in other words, is both as a figure of internal alterity (in that the villagers come to view their own blood plasma as a valuable commodity in its own right) but also a vehicle of contagion (in that it functions as a vector for the infectious circulation of the AIDS). As such, this resulting process

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of self-­commodification embodies the two inverse qualities of internal alienation and infectious attachment that I argue lie at the heart of modern political communities—​suggesting that a state of self-­ alienation is both a necessary precondition of these forms of mediated attachment as well as one of its inevitable results. At the same time, the position of these AIDS villages at the margins of the nation’s medical establishment illustrates a key principle underlying the self-­constitution of the modern political community itself. As Michel Foucault and others have argued, the modern state derives its authority and legitimacy from its biopolitical relationship to its citizens—​a relationship that is predicated on the state’s ability to nurture life. Embedded within this biopolitical logic, however, is an inverse necropolitical one, in that the state’s ability to provide the conditions for nurturing life is inextricably intertwined with its parallel ability to withhold those same conditions. The AIDS village phenomenon that inspires Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village is a perfect example of this latter necropolitical logic, in that the epidemic is a direct result of the state’s efforts to capitalize on the economic desperation of some of its citizens in order to advance an agenda that is ostensibly intended to help benefit the nation’s population as a whole. Furthermore, during the 1980s and early 1990s the Chinese state focused its efforts on preventing HIV from entering the country, either via infected foreigners or contaminated blood products. Not only were these efforts ultimately unsuccessful, this focus on keeping HIV out of China prevented the government from effectively addressing the growing epidemic within its own borders. It was not until the mid-­ 1990s that the government publicly acknowledged that a large number of rural peasants in central China had been infected from selling blood, but even then the government lacked the resources necessary to assess the true scale of the epidemic.2 Beginning with Dream of Ding Village, this chapter uses several of Yan Lianke’s recent works to reflect on the relationship between processes of self-­commodification and intersecting concerns with infection, inheritance, and abjection. I argue that these processes of corporeal self-­commodification invite a critical reflection on the ­position of individuals within broader political economic structures, and specifically within a process of the subsumption of labor under



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c­ apital. In an unfinished draft of a chapter that was originally intended to be included in Capital, Marx distinguishes between what he calls formal and real subsumption, with the former referring to the process wherein precapitalist forms of production are assimilated into the circuits of capital, and the latter referring to a situation wherein processes of production are fundamentally transformed by capital to the point that labor become imbued by the workings of capital itself. In Yan Lianke’s novels, meanwhile, residents of remote central Chinese villages are encouraged to join contemporary capitalist systems not by integrating their labor into those systems but rather by literally commoditizing their own bodies. The result is a process wherein the individual’s relationship to the economic order is fundamentally transformed, as the subject’s own body becomes a commodity in its own right. Located at the interstices of the biopolitical and necropolitical dimensions of modern political regimes, this process of self-­ commodification marks a point at which labor is reduced to its bare economic value, while at the same time pointing to an inverse possibility wherein the subject is able to assert direct control over the forms of production within which he or she is embedded. I argue that processes of self-­commodification represent the ultimate negation of labor as such, while at the same time offering the possibility of reclaiming control over one’s labor in the shadow of capital. Roots

Yan Lianke, who is himself a native of Henan province, was introduced firsthand to China’s AIDS crisis by the noted medical activist Gao Yaojie. A fellow Henan native who had worked for years as a gynecologist and professor of medicine at Henan University, Gao Yaojie was one of the earliest and most influential health activists to take an interest in China’s rural AIDS epidemic. It was she who, in 1996, first told Yan about China’s rural AIDS crisis, and it was at her house that he first met an AIDS patient. Later that year, Yan Lianke and another HIV/AIDS expert, a medical anthropologist, visited several AIDS villages in eastern Henan, where Yan Lianke spoke to a number of victims of the disease.

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Yan became determined to write a novel inspired by this devastating health crisis, but he initially hesitated over what direction the work should take. On one hand, he considered writing a fantastic narrative describing a desperately poor country that implements a system of blood selling that eventually enables the nation to become a global superpower. On the other hand, he also wanted to write a hyperrealistic narrative that would incorporate some of the horrifying details he heard about during his visits to the region. As he recalls in an interview conducted in 2006, [A] blood head in real life told me that when they collected blood, they diluted it with beer to increase the volume. As another example, when this village originally began collecting blood, bottles were used. But since bottles cost too much, they later began using soy sauce and vinegar plastic bags. They used the same plastic bags over and over. There was a water pool about two mu in area, and every night he would wash out the blood plastic bags at this pool. After a while, the entire pool became red. Over by the pool, according to the AIDS patients themselves, the mosquitoes were especially large in size in recent years. 3

Torn between the possibility of writing a patently fantastic narrative and a hyperrealistic one, Yan Lianke instead wound up composing a novel that presents a generally realistic account of the impact of the epidemic on a remote village, recounted in the voice of a twelve-­year­old boy speaking from beyond the grave. Dream of Ding Village revolves around the family of the local blood head, Ding Hui, whose son Ding Qiang was poisoned by fellow villagers seeking retribution for Ding Hui’s role in contributing to the region’s AIDS epidemic. Since Ding Qiang was only twelve years old when he died, local custom dictated that he not be buried in his family’s ancestral plot but rather in a makeshift grave behind the village school. Trapped in this interstitial space between the worlds of the living and of the dead, Ding Qiang is denied the possibility of a proper burial and a communal commemoration, and consequently he stands as a potent symbol of the cloak of silence that shrouded China’s AIDS epidemic for so many years. Given that Ding Qiang was still a child



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when he was killed, his family placed a collection of textbooks, notebooks, and writing utensils in his provisional coffin, symbolizing the possibility that he might continue his education in the afterlife. These same writing implements, in turn, are theoretically used to compose the narrative at the heart of Dream of Ding Village—​with every other chapter of the novel narrated by Ding Qiang, speaking from a liminal zone between life and death. The premise that Yan Lianke’s novel is narrated from a region at the very margins of life mirrors the setting of the work, which locates Ding Village in a state of what might be called “borrowed time.”4 The temporality of the novel is “borrowed” in two respects. First, from the perspective of the infected patients, it is in the interim between their initial infection and their eventual death that they may find a unique opportunity to reassess their perspective on life. In his book At Odds with AIDS, Alexander García Düttmann notes that, with AIDS, a patient’s sense of being fated to “die before his time” may be transformed into its very opposite, as “AIDS becomes the paradigm of the time of living and dying, of the coherent life story that can be told and narrated.” AIDS, Düttmann concludes, functions as a “paradigm of the present”—​a radical negation of temporality, through which one may then begin constructively reassessing one’s own relationship to time itself.5 It is precisely in its negation of conventional assumptions about linear time, in other words, that AIDS simultaneously offers a potential rethinking of the subject’s understanding of time. Second, from the perspective of the nation, the epidemic unfolded just as China was transitioning from a Maoist state into a global superpower. Under the economic expansion that was catalyzed by Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 Reform and Opening Up campaign, China attempted to quickly open up to the West while at the same time limiting its exposure to potentially harmful elements. It was in the 1980s, during the first decade of the Reform Era, meanwhile, that HIV/AIDS emerged as a global health crisis. The viral disease quickly came to be perceived by Beijing as a paradigmatic example of the sorts of foreign elements that the government was attempting to keep out of China, even as the nation was simultaneously embracing many aspects of Western society and culture. In this way, the epidemic became a compelling

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symptom of the transitional moment in which China found itself at that time—​a symbol of the threat posed by globalization but also of its underlying promise. In 1988, in an effort to prevent HIV from entering the nation’s borders, Beijing implemented a policy of strictly restricting the importation of human blood products. Not only did this so-­called “Great Wall against AIDS” ultimately fail to prevent the entry of HIV, it even set in motion a series of developments that would significantly exacerbate the virus’s impact once it did succeed in gaining a foothold in China’s interior. In particular, one direct consequence of Beijing’s ban on imports of foreign blood products is that it increased the nation’s reliance on domestic sources of human blood, which in turn led to policies that strongly encouraged residents of rural China to sell their blood. In an attempt to minimize the impact of repeated donations on the donors’ health, moreover, it became common to pool the blood from multiple donors, separate out the valuable plasma, and then transfuse the remaining red blood cells back into the veins of the original donors. In this way, the blood-­selling practice created almost perfect conditions for the widespread dissemination of a blood-­borne virus like HIV, thereby enabling AIDS to spread quickly through rural China. Central China’s Henan province was most directly affected, with some rural communities having infection rates as high as 80 percent. Moreover, China’s rapid economic growth during this period was predicated on a process of strategically capitalizing on the nation’s vast rural population. As a result of vestigial Maoist-­era social policies such as the household registration (hukou) system, which was designed to limit internal population movement, China’s rural population remained at the outer margins of the nation’s economic engine, even as their cheap labor was increasingly viewed as a necessary precondition for that same continued economic expansion. China’s burgeoning blood-­purchasing regime in the 1980s and 1990s dramatically illustrated this structural contradiction, as rural residents were encouraged to sell their own blood—​and, as it turns out, sacrifice their health—​in order to benefit the broader national establishment. In Yan Lianke’s novel, meanwhile, the link between rural blood selling and central China’s AIDS epidemic is made very clear, though



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the work doesn’t go into specifics about blood pooling and retransfusion, and instead suggests that the problem involved contaminated equipment. In Yan’s work, moreover, this health crisis that rips families and entire communities apart also provides opportunities for new social affinities and alliances. Just as blood functions as a powerful metaphor for the kinship ties that help anchor both families as well as the larger communities within which they are positioned, the sale and circulation of blood in the novel encourage a converse reexamination of the imaginary bonds that hold these social units together in the first place. One of the central subplots of Dream of Ding Village, for instance, involves around a romance between the narrator’s uncle, Ding Liang, and the uncle’s sister-­in-­law, Xia Lingling. Both Ding Liang and Xia Lingling are already married at the time they become infected with AIDS, but after their illnesses become apparent their respective spouses, both of whom are still uninfected, refuse to allow themselves to even be touched. Like many of the other infected villagers, both Ding Liang and Xia Lingling end up being quarantined in the schoolhouse, where they become romantically involved. Their eventual decision to divorce their spouses and marry each other is driven by their desire both for physical intimacy while they are alive and for a burial companion after they are dead. The scandal of the affair and the double divorce is compounded, meanwhile, by the quasi-­incestuous nature of their relationship, given that Ding Liang and Lingling are already in-­ laws. In the context of a crisis wherein a community is being decimated by a blood-­borne virus, however, this sort of quasi-­incestuous union doesn’t undermine existing communal bonds as much as it reaffirms the forces of desire and attachment on which the very possibility community is grounded in the first place. Despite the taboo nature of this union, Ding Hui nevertheless tacitly expresses his support, and after Ding Liang and Xia Lingling die he provides them with a pair of expensive coffins made from the wood of the gingko tree. It turns out that after having inadvertently contributed to the initial spread of the AIDS virus in his village and the surrounding region through his promotion of rural blood selling, Ding Hui is subsequently appointed Vice Chairman of the County Com­ mission on AIDS—​thereby placing him in charge of the state’s local

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response to the epidemic that he himself had helped promote in the first place. One of the benefits of this new appointment is that it allows Ding Hui to commandeer the free coffins that have been supplied by the government for AIDS victims and sell them to the villagers for a hefty profit—​and it is with the money he earns from reselling these government-­issued coffins that Ding Hui is able to purchase the more expensive gingko coffins for his brother and sister-­in-­law. Not only are the coffins that Ding Hui prepares for Ding Liang and Xia Lingling made from high-­quality gingko wood, they are also engraved with an array of spectacular cityscapes depicting metropolises from throughout China and around the world. Upon seeing the two coffins, one villager remarks that they appear even more impressive than those used by China’s emperors, while another villager, care­­fully running his hand over the cityscape engraving on one of the coffins, observes that it is “as resplendent as the face of a new bride.” The narrator, Ding Qiang, notes that most importantly, on the planks over my uncle’s feet, there was an engraving of a building, on which appeared the words China People’s Bank. It was as if they were taking the wealth that the nation had created over the past several decades, and were burying it all with my uncle. All of the world’s wealth was being inserted into his coffin with him.

The irony, though, is that the wealth symbolically inscribed on the side of the coffin directly mirrors that which Ding Hui had been cannibalistically extracting from the community. The transformation of blood into monetary value is mirrored, and inverted, in this retransformation of material wealth into a symbol of itself. Ding Hui’s investment in his brother’s extravagant coffin represents not only a figurative sublimation of the actual wealth that Ding Hui derived from the region’s blood-­selling industry, but also a strategic disavowal of his own complicity in the epidemic that contributed to his brother’s death in the first place. In particular, after Ding Liang’s burial Ding Hui tells his father that now that he, Ding Hui, has figuratively made amends by paying for Ding Liang’s coffin and funeral, he expects that his father, Teacher Ding, will make no further



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mention of Ding Hui’s complicity in the region’s blood trade. Instead, he hopes his father will tell everyone that it was actually Ding Liang who had been the driving force behind the deadly epidemic. The villager’s comparison, in the passage cited above, of the cityscape engraved on Ding Liang’s coffin to the “face of a new bride,” meanwhile, unwittingly alludes to another venture that Ding Hui pursues in order to profit from the deadly disease. In particular, observing that the epidemic ends up killing many children before they have a chance to get married, Ding Hui decides to establish a postmortem matchmaking service to help families wed their recently deceased children, so that the children may then be reburied together and united in the afterlife. The boy’s family would typically pay the girl’s family a bride price, with the amount being determined by the perceived desirability of the bride and the social status of her family. Both families, meanwhile, would pay Ding Hui a fee in return for arranging the union, and in this way Ding Hui, who makes his first fortune coordinating the regional blood-­selling industry and his second fortune by confiscating and reselling the free coffins that the government has provided for the region’s rural AIDS victims, is thereby able to profit a third time from the deadly epidemic he himself has helped to unleash. Near the end of the novel, Ding Hui arranges a posthumous marriage for his deceased son, the narrator Ding Qiang, whom he marries to the deceased daughter of the county governor. The daughter had been crippled, which under other circumstances would have made the marriage less desirable (due to a traditional prejudice against the disabled), but Ding Hui notes that the girl’s father is politically powerful in the region. After the symbolic marriage, Ding Hui reburies his son in a new coffin that is even more extravagant than the ones he had provided for Ding Liang and Xia Lingling. The exterior of the boy’s coffin is covered with gold cityscapes of various metropolises, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, New York, Paris, and London, while the inside is engraved with a meticulously detailed scene containing a forest, river, and a Western-­style house with the words Ding Family Mansion carved on the roof. Through the doors and windows of this engraved house, one can see a variety of electrical appliances, walls full of hanging scrolls and musical instruments, and shelves full of

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books. The base of the coffin, meanwhile, is inscribed with images of various major Chinese banks, all carefully labeled: the Bank of China, the People’s Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the Agricultural Bank of China, China Urban Credit Union, China Rural Credit Union, China Everbright Bank, China Minsheng Bank, and so forth. All of China’s banks have a building here. They are all engraved on the baseboard of my coffin, as if all of China’s money—​a nd, indeed, all of the world’s money—​were sleeping beneath my body.

These engraved representations of worldly financial institutions reflect the fantasy that not only new wealth but also a new social order may emerge out of the devastation wrought by the epidemic. At the same time, the exorbitant nature of these same representations suggests an overcompensatory gesture, an implicit recognition that this fantasy of unimaginable wealth represents a short circuit of the mourning process. The implication, in other words, is that the coffin Ding Hui commissions for his son’s reinterment is actually a symptom of his own inability to come to terms with his complicity in his son’s death. Like the cityscapes themselves, these images of global financial institutions represent a fantasy of mimetic affinity, wherein the image of wealth comes to stand in for its actual referent. Just as this coffin scene uses burial and reinterment to reflect on a more general phenomenon of commodity fetishism, Yan Lianke’s novel similarly uses the nation’s rural AIDS epidemic to comment on a set of issues associated with a practice of rural blood selling that significantly antedate the AIDS crisis itself. For instance, China’s practice of rural blood selling also provides the backdrop for a similar interrogation of kinship and bloodlines in Yu Hua’s novel Chronicles of a Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan maixue ji).6 Published in 1995—​ before Yu Hua or virtually anyone else knew about China’s blood-­ borne rural AIDS epidemic—​Chronicles of a Blood Merchant was inspired not by the link between blood selling and AIDS but rather by the practice of rural blood selling itself.7 The novel opens in the late 1940s with the protagonist, a young man by the name of Xu Sanguan, being encouraged by his uncles to sell his blood. Xu Sanguan agrees, and after selling blood for the first time, he uses his payment to invite



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a village beauty, Xu Yulan, out for lunch. Afterwards, he informs her that, now that he has bought her a meal, they must therefore get married. Xu Yulan protests that she is already seeing another man by the name of He Xiaoyong, but Xu Sanguan assures her that he will convince her father to have her marry him instead. Xu Sanguan reasons that since Xu Yulan is an only child, if she were to marry He Xiaoyong their children would presumably be surnamed He, which would effectively mark the end of her father’s patriline. On the other hand, Xu Sanguan argues that given that Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan share the same surname, any children they might have could then be considered to belong to both his and Xu Yulan’s father’s patrilines—​meaning that Xu Yulan’s father would still have patrilineal descendants to perform the requisite commemorative rituals after he dies. Xu Yulan’s father finds this argument convincing and agrees to the marriage, despite Xu Yulan’s vehement protests. The same aspect of this reasoning that Xu Yulan’s father finds attractive, however, also renders it rather scandalous in a Chinese context, in that the union Xu Sanguan is proposing is technically incestuous, given the long-­ standing Chinese prohibition against same-­surname marriages. Moreover, the matrimony is directly enabled by a practice of blood selling that is similarly viewed as a transgression of the symbolic integrity of the patriline. As Xu Yulan explains to Xu Sanguan at one point, “My dad used to tell me when I was little that your blood is passed down from your ancestors. You can sell fried dough, sell a house, sell off your land, but you can never ever sell your blood. Better to sell your body than sell your blood! At least your body belongs to you. But selling your blood is like selling your ancestors.” (85)

Xu Sanguan’s marriage to Xu Yulan, accordingly, is not only directly facilitated by the practice of blood selling, it simultaneously functions as an apotheosis of the transgressive connotations that blood selling carries. Just as blood selling figuratively connotes a rift in an idealized vision of a traditional vision of kinship, it is appropriate that Xu Sanguan will spend the majority of the novel attempting to use blood selling to help heal a corresponding set of rifts within his own family.

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Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan proceed to have three sons in close succession, naming them Yile, Erle, and Sanle, respectively (literally, “first joy,” “second joy,” and “third joy”). Soon, however, rumors begin to circulate that Xu Sanguan’s eldest son doesn’t look much like him, and when Xu Sanguan confronts Xu Yulan about this, she eventually confesses that before she married Xu Sanguan she had sexual relations with He Xiaoyong on three separate occasions, meaning that He Xiaoyong could very well be Yile’s biological father. This knowledge drives Xu Sanguan to reassess his feelings toward Yile, and the implications of these questions of paternity become more concrete after Yile, in helping defend his younger brothers against a local bully, bashes another boy’s head with a brick. When the other boy’s father comes to demand that Yile’s family pay for his son’s medical expenses, Xu Sanguan refuses, arguing that He Xiaoyong is in fact Yile’s real father. He Xiaoyong, however, also declines to pay, on the grounds that there is actually no proof that Yile is actually his son. After the other boy’s father confiscates all of Xu Sanguan’s household belongings to pay for his son’s medical bills, Xu Sanguan is forced to resort to selling blood again in order to raise the necessary money and clear his debts. Xu Sanguan then proceeds to negotiate an awkward and paradoxical compromise, whereby he continues periodically selling his blood, creating literal blood ties with anonymous strangers, while at the same time partially disowning the son whom he has raised since birth and with whom he continues to share a home and family. In particular, after Xu Sanguan sells his blood to buy food for his family during the nationwide famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, he insists that Yile not be allowed to eat any of the special food that he purchases using the money from selling his own blood. An extension of the pork liver and rice wine to which Xu Sanguan would invariably treat himself each time he donated blood (ostensibly in order to help him recover his strength), these special meals he buys his family in the middle of the famine function as a form of strategic excess, an overcompensatory response to an environment of radical deprivation. In this context, his refusal to allow Yile to partake of these same meals functions as an inverse gesture, underscoring the perceived stress line



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within his family through a deliberately inequitable distribution of scarce resources. Over time, however, Xu Sanguan gradually comes to reaffirm his paternal ties to Yile, with the strength of this kinship bond ultimately being grounded on the fact that it is established voluntarily and is not dictated by preestablished blood ties. A pivotal turning point in the relationship occurs when He Xiaoyong is grievously injured in a car accident. After He Xiaoyong fails to respond to conventional medical intervention, a local faith healer in the village suggests that his son needs to climb up onto the rooftop and cry out for his father’s soul to return. He Xiaoyong’s wife initially rejects this recommendation by insisting that He Xiaoyong actually has no son, though other acquaintances promptly remind her that Xu Yile is said to be He Xiaoyong’s biological son. He Xiaoyong’s wife, therefore, asks Xu Sanguan to tell Yile to help save her husband’s life, despite the fact that Yile, who does not regard He Xiaoyong as his father, wants no part of this. Xu Sanguan eventually agrees and convinces the terrified boy to climb up on the roof and call out on He Xiaoyong’s behalf. Xu Sanguan is subsequently so proud of the sacrifice Yile makes that he immediately reclaims him as his son, loudly defying anyone to suggest otherwise. The irony, accordingly, is that it is precisely at the moment when Xu Sanguan demands that Yile publicly acknowledge the hereditary ties technically linking him to another man that Xu Sanguan simultaneously reaffirms the affect-­based kinship bonds that transcend those hereditary blood ties. In the final portion of the novel, Yile comes down with a severe case of hepatitis and needs to be taken to Shanghai for treatment. Xu Sanguan borrows all of the money he can to pay Yile’s medical bills but discovers that he is still somewhat short. He tries to sell blood again but finds that the local blood head won’t let him since he had just sold some a few days earlier. Xu Sanguan therefore embarks on a journey away from home in which he repeatedly sells blood at various different blood-­selling stations where no one will recognize him. In fact, at one point Xu Sanguan experiences a dangerous drop in blood pressure while donating blood, making it necessary for the hospital to reinfuse back into his veins the very same blood he has just donated,

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together with additional blood from other donors. When Xu Sanguan regains consciousness and realizes what has happened, he is furious and demands that the doctors immediately remove the supplementary blood from his veins—​which they of course refuse to do. Shortly after this incident, Xu Sanguan encounters a couple of younger men, and when he tells them what he is doing they decide to accompany him and begin selling their own blood as well. Xu Sanguan becomes close to the two men, who happen to be brothers, and at one point they devise a bizarre plan to have the two younger men sell their blood to Xu Sanguan, so that he might then sell more of his own blood—​their reasoning being that, since the brothers’ blood is thicker than that of Xu Sanguan, who by this point is virtually anemic from excessive blood loss, this process of double transfusion would allow them to extract greater profit from the blood than would have been possible otherwise. The irony, however, is that through his blood sell­ ­ing Xu Sanguan is creating literal blood ties with an array of virtual strangers in order to earn money to help cure the son with whom he shares no direct hereditary bonds. Yu Hua’s novel concludes many years later, at the height of the Reform Era. By this point, Xu Sanguan’s three sons have all gotten married and had children of their own. Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan are financially secure, and it has been more than fifteen years since Xu Sanguan has needed to sell his blood. Nevertheless, one day he suddenly develops a craving for the pork liver and rice wine that he used to always purchase after selling his blood. Because Xu Sanguan still associates this liver and wine with blood selling, he therefore develops an equally strong craving to donate his blood once again—​not because he needs the money but rather simply in order to enjoy the process of replenishing himself with pork liver and rice wine. After Xu Sanguan is told at the hospital that he is too old to donate blood anymore, Xu Yulan offers to buy him some pork liver and rice wine using their own household funds. Whereas previously Xu Sanguan would sell his blood to earn money, in this final scene we find him instead spending his family’s money in order to enjoy a pleasurable experience that he had previously associated with donating blood. In this way, the process of self-­commodification comes full circle, becoming transformed into its immediate correlate—​an act of self-­g ratification.



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Released a year before Yu Hua’s Chronicles of a Blood Merchant, Zhou Xiaowen’s 1994 film Ermo similarly focuses on issues of rural blood selling and reconfigurations of conventional views of kinship. The film’s title character is a rural woman who makes a living selling noodles and woven baskets and who dreams of one day being able to buy a large-­screen color television that could rival that of her neighbor and thereby help secure her position within the village’s social hierarchy. Ermo’s husband is the former village chief who is now physically incapacitated, and she develops a friendship with another neighbor, a young man named Xiazi, who offers to take her to the city where she can sell her baskets for a higher price than she would have been able to back in the village. Xiazi also helps Ermo find a job working in a restaurant in the city, where she is pleased to receive what she finds to be a surprisingly generous salary. One day, Ermo and her fellow workers are asked to donate blood for a coworker who has been severely injured in a workplace accident. This is Ermo’s first time giving blood, and while she is initially apprehensive about the process, she subsequently decides that selling blood would be an excellent way of earning extra money. She begins selling blood with increasing frequency, always drinking copious amounts of water beforehand to help dilute her blood and thereby minimize the physical effects of the blood loss. She saves up most of the money she earns from the blood selling but does permit herself to purchase some luxuries she associates with modern urban life, such as new clothing. Ermo’s relationship to Xiazi, meanwhile, becomes increasingly intimate, and eventually they begin having an affair. In one pivotal scene, Ermo meets Xiazi for a rendezvous in one of the city’s bathhouses. In the privacy of this rented room, Ermo shows Xiazi the face cream and bra she recently bought with her new earnings. She brags that the bra is “the kind that women in the city wear” and proceeds to smear the face cream on so thick that it becomes a grotesque parody of the beauty she is trying to emulate. It is during this encounter that Xiazi first notices the scars on Ermo’s arm from her repeated blood selling, and he furiously demands that she stop immediately. Ermo and Xiazi have an emotional confrontation that concludes with Xiazi angrily stalking out. Ermo is left alone in the room, her face still caked

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with moisturizing cream, staring miserably at her own reflection in the dirty, cracked mirror—​her distorted image mirroring her shifting and unstable sense of self. Xiazi’s anger upon realizing that Ermo has been selling her blood is inverted a few scenes later, when Ermo learns that Xiazi has been secretly giving her boss at the restaurant extra cash with which to supplement her salary. Dismayed by the discovery that she has been indirectly receiving cash payments from her new lover, Ermo feels as though she has been unwittingly prostituting herself. She responds by inviting Xiazi out to lunch and, in an act of conspicuous consumption, treats him to what by her normally frugal standards is an extravagant meal. Ermo then confronts Xiazi, demanding that he confirm that he has been secretly supplementing her salary, and when Xiazi acknowledges that he had in fact been trying to help her, Ermo immediately walks out on him, leaving him sitting alone at the table covered in steaming food. The parallel between this scene in the restaurant and the previous one in the bathhouse is quite precise, in that in both cases the couple has a confrontation over a revelation that Ermo has been selling herself (either wittingly or unwittingly), and both scenes conclude with one of the lovers left sitting alone and surrounded by an exorbitant display of consumption made possible by the profit derived from Ermo’s blood selling. The film ends on a similar note, with Ermo finally purchasing the color television she has long desired. In the final scene, we see Ermo, her husband, and several neighbors crowded into Ermo’s bedroom, watching the new television set that has been positioned awkwardly on the couple’s matrimonial bed. Ermo is staring vacantly at the giant screen, her face seemingly drained of emotion. It is almost as if the presence of the television set renders visible the processes of self­commoditization and self-­consumption that underlie the rural blood trade and which had made the purchase of the television possible in the first place. Not only is the television bought in part with money that Ermo has earned by selling her blood, it appears to embody the very animism of which she has been literally and figuratively vacated. Both Chronicles of a Blood Merchant and Ermo, accordingly, use a focus on blood-­selling in order to critically examine the social ramifications of the infectious circulation not of an actual virus, as in Dream



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of Ding Village, but rather of a set of consumerist attitudes. The protagonists of both works develop an almost visceral attachment to certain forms of consumption enabled by their blood-­selling, such that the desired commodities in question (the television set, and the pork liver and rice wine) come to function as extensions of the characters themselves—​compensatory supplements that underscore the degree to which the characters are effectively cannibalizing themselves through their blood-­selling. In presenting this link between processes of self-­ commoditization and consumption, both works suggest the possibility that the auto-­commoditized subject’s relationship to the commodity may be compared to a form of cannibalism or autophagy—​in that in consuming commodities purchased through the sale of one’s own blood, the subject is consuming objects that not only belong to the same category as oneself (i.e., commodities), but furthermore figuratively contain the blood that was used to purchase them. A similar implication, meanwhile, is suggested in a discussion near the end of Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village, concerning three pieces of ginseng that Teacher Ding gives to his nephew Jia Yuejin. Each piece of ginseng resembles a baby’s head and is covered with what looks like yellowish-­white fur and whiskers. This description of what is described as the ginseng’s “body” (shen) is reinforced by Yuejin’s relatives, who immediately exclaim, “Oh, yes, the ginseng does indeed look human. It looks just like a child.” These explicitly corporeal connotations reflect the perception that the root looks vaguely anthropomorphic, and these connotations are also reinforced by the Chinese name of the plant, renshen, which not only contains the character for “human” (ren) but furthermore is a close homophone for both a binome meaning “human body” (renshen) and for another meaning “human life” (rensheng). When Teacher Ding assures Yuejin’s family that the root has the ability to “refill your empty body” (bu ni de xu shenzi), accordingly, he is in effect describing a process of virtual cannibalism, in that the consumption of ginseng is regarded as equivalent to the consumption of human flesh and symbolically helps compensate the villagers for the blood they have lost as a result of excessive donations. The irony, of course, is that this discourse of corporeal replenishment is played out against the backdrop of a health crisis that has been caused by the villagers’ practice of systematically

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depleting their own bodies by selling their blood so that it may be used by others. We find a similar thematics of virtual cannibalism in the revelation, near the end of the novel, that some of the villagers have been plundering the school’s property for their own use. For instance, after Teacher Ding visits Jia Yuejin, he takes the remaining ginseng to his other nephew, Jia Genzhu, whose house turns out to be full of furniture and other valuable that have been looted from the school—​ including the schoolhouse bell that Teacher Ding had rung for half his life and which Teacher Ding now finds hidden in plain sight behind Genzhu’s front door. Genzhu’s theft of the bell that Teacher Ding had used to mark the beginning and end of each school day is symptomatic not only of a broader pattern of villagers appropriating public property but also of the degree to which the entire village exists in a state of “borrowed time”—​with the comparative prosperity the community was briefly able to enjoy as a result of their blood selling having been unwittingly mortgaged against the deadly epidemic that that same practice would produce. Unlike the other teachers in the school, who all receive a fixed monetary salary, Teacher Ding is instead paid with excrement from the school’s lavatories, which may then be used as fertilizer for growing crops. In this way, Teacher Ding is positioned within a cycle of production wherein organic waste provides the material conditions for new creation. This use of night soil as currency parallels the novel’s theme of the commoditization of human blood, with both excrement and blood being corporeal by-­products that may then be recycled for profit. At the same time, this structural link between pedagogy and human excrement suggests a vision of education as a transformation of the discarded remains of earlier eras into new, fresh, and vital elements that may provide the symbolic ground out of which future communities may subsequently emerge. The question of Teacher Ding’s significance within the community is brought most sharply into focus at the end of the novel. In a moment of fury, Teacher Ding strikes Ding Hui from behind and kills him. Teacher Ding is arrested and imprisoned, and when he eventually returns home after having been released he finds the village deserted, its inhabitants having all either died or moved away. He



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­ roceeds from house to house before ending up in the old schoolhouse, p where he falls asleep. He dreams that he returns to all of the sites he has ever visited and, in the process, discovers the entire region to be utterly barren. All of the people and animals have either died or departed, and even the trees have been cut down to make coffins. Teacher Ding then dreams that a rainstorm transforms the empty plain into an expanse of mud, whereupon he sees 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. (284–285/341)

Inspired by the Chinese legend of the goddess Nüwa, who is traditionally credited with having repaired the vault of heaven and created humanity out of yellow clay, Teacher Ding dreams that the entire region that has been left deserted by the AIDS epidemic and its aftermath may in fact be viewed as a “new world.” The implication is that the epidemic’s legacy of death and devastation may offer a space for innovation and social transformation. The epidemic, in other words, figuratively transforms the village into a functional equivalent of the night soil on which Teacher Ding relies for his livelihood. Like feces that have been excreted from the body as a by-­product of the digestive process, the village has been figuratively cast out to the margins of the nation-­state by a necropolitical logic of strategic neglect. In its status as a paradigmatically abject figure, however, the village represents both the antithesis of a community as conventionally understood as well as one of its conditions of possibility. Meanwhile, the goddess Nüwa, who appears in Teacher Ding’s dream, is explicitly associated with a fracturing of the conventional family structure. In many versions of the legend, Nüwa and her brother Fuxi survive a global flood that virtually wipes out the world’s population, whereupon the heavens permit the two siblings to marry each other. In order to speed up the process of repopulating the world Nüwa

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fashions human figures from yellow clay and grants them life, while Fuxi goes on to become the first of China’s legendary three sovereigns. According to this legend, therefore, at the origins of history lies a transgressive moment of incest, which provides the basis on which humanity itself is established. Concluding with this ironic juxtaposition of Teacher Ding’s act of filicide and the allusion to Nüwa’s figurative incest—​which is to say, two actions that challenge the ideals on which family and community are traditionally grounded—​Dream of Ding Village suggests that in the tragic aftermath of the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic one may find the possibility of a structural reconfiguration and even a new beginning. Like the AIDS virus itself, these acts of incest and filicide may be viewed as hyperbolic manifestations of the patterns of intimacy and violence on which communities are grounded in the first place. As such, they represent a limit point at which the community threatens to collapse in upon itself, while also opening the possibility for new social configurations. Lenin’s Kisses

Yan Lianke explores similar issues of abjection and self-­commodification in his 2004 novel Lenin’s Kisses (Shouhuo). Set in the latter half of 1998 and early 1999,8 the main plotline of Lenin’s Kisses revolves around a local Henan bureaucrat by the name of Liu Yingque and his ambitious plan to jumpstart his county’s economy. After hearing that Russia, in dire economic straits following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, may be unable to afford to continue maintaining Lenin’s preserved corpse on display in Moscow’s Red Square and consequently is considering cremating it, Liu Yingque resolves to purchase the corpse and bring it back to China. Inspired by the popularity of Chairman Mao’s embalmed remains on display in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, together with contemporary China’s more general interest in “Red Tourism” (in which tourists visit sites associated with the history of Chinese communism), Liu comes up with a plan to install Lenin’s preserved remains in a new Lenin Memorial Hall that he has proposed to build in his home county in Henan. Liu is confident that the corpse will draw so much tourist revenue that he will



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then be able to provide the residents of his county with everything they could conceivably desire. First, however, Liu Yingque must figure out a way to raise the vast sum of money with which to purchase the corpse, and the scheme he ultimately comes up with involves an unusual village known as Liven (Shouhuo zhuang), located in a remote corner of Henan province. Due to a peculiar set of historical circumstances, the vast majority of the residents of Liven are either blind, deaf, mute, missing a limb, or suffer from some other impairment such as partial paralysis or stunted growth. As a result of their physical disabilities, however, most of the villagers have acquired a corresponding “special skill”—such as hav­ ­ing an unusually acute sense of hearing to compensate for being blind or having a preternaturally strong left leg to compensate for having merely a stump in place of a right one. While the villagers normally only use these special skills to help them carry out their day-­to-­day tasks, they also have a tradition of performing these skills for each other’s entertainment during the village’s annual festival. It is during a visit to Liven that Chief Liu comes up with the idea of organizing some of the villagers into a performance troupe that would then tour the country performing their special skills in order to raise money for the county’s Lenin Fund (the village subsequently establishes a second troupe featuring not the villagers’ actual “special skills” but rather performances of a set of imaginary skills). While it might be assumed that Chief Liu is attracted to the possibility of purchasing Lenin’s corpse because it symbolizes the philosophical foundation on which China’s contemporary Communist regime is grounded, in reality his interest in the corpse is driven not by an ideological commitment to Lenin’s writings but rather by his conviction that he will be able to use the corpse to develop a profitable tourist industry. Compounding this irony that a paradigmatic socialist relic is desired for its ability to generate a vast profit, meanwhile, is the suggestion that Liu Yingque desires the tourism revenue not for its own sake but rather because it would permit him to satisfy more effectively the needs and desires of his county’s residents. He wants the corpse, in other words, precisely because it would allow him to provide his county with a degree of social support that would exceed even that which they received under communism. As a commoditized icon

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of the nation’s socialist heritage, therefore, the corpse is positioned at the hinge between communism and capitalism, underscoring the dialectical tensions implicit in each. Liven’s disabled villagers, meanwhile, may be regarded as paradigmatically subaltern figures whose debased position is strategically inverted once they begin publicly performing their disabilities to help raise money for the county’s Lenin Fund. This transformation of the villagers’ disabled bodies into cultural commodities speaks to the pervasive spread of a capitalist logic into even the most remote regions of rural China, and in this respect the villagers’ process of abject self-­ commodification symbolizes the socioeconomic contradictions that characterize China at this moment of transition from socialism to capitalism. Like contemporary China’s vast floating population of migrant workers, Liven’s disabled villagers constitute a key element in the county’s plans for economic growth, even as the villagers’ own (economic) value is directly tied up with their marginal and subaltern status. It turns out that the reason why the village matriarch Grandma Mao Zhi agrees to allow Liu Yingque to take the villagers on a performance tour in the first place is so that the village might then be permitted to return to the idyllic state it had enjoyed before becoming integrated into China’s socialist regime. Just as the utopian community in Tao Yuanming’s famous fifth-­century ce fable “Peach Blossom Spring” (Taohua yuan ji) is so geographically isolated that its residents don’t even know which dynasty is currently in power, Liven is similarly presented as having been so removed from the surrounding region that its residents remained blithely unaware of the historical developments transforming the rest of the country.9 When Grandma Mao Zhi belatedly realized that the rest of China had experienced a major regime change and was now being divided into communes and cooperative societies, she became determined to have Liven do the same—​a process that came to be known in Liven as “entering society” (rushe) and which became effectively synonymous with entering history itself. Grandma Mao Zhi’s first task in helping Liven enter society involved finding a county that would be willing to recognize the village as falling under its administrative jurisdiction. After discovering



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that none of the village’s three nearest counties even acknowledged Liven’s existence, Grandma Mao Zhi proceeded to visit each of the three county seats in turn, attempting to convince one of them to recognize Liven under its jurisdiction. Mao Zhi eventually finds a county chief who is willing to accept Liven, thereby permitting the village to be admitted into new China. A few years afterward, however, the nation was hit by a wave of famine and social instability as a result of the disruptions caused by the Great Leap Forward. Upon seeing her fellow villagers dying of hunger after having been forced to hand over their last grain reserves to refugees from neighboring counties, Grandma Mao Zhi comes to regret her original decision to have Liven “enter society” and instead vows to do everything in her power to help the village regain its former autonomy. After Liu Yingque revisits Liven at the beginning of the novel and comes up with the idea of having the villagers perform for a profit, therefore, Grandma Mao Zhi quickly seizes the opportunity to attempt to make good on her earlier promise. She grants Liu permission to use the villagers to help raise money for his Lenin Fund, but only on the condition that he then agree to permit the village to officially “withdraw from society” so that it might regain its former independence. Even as Liu Yingque’s attempts to purchase Lenin’s corpse gesture back to the philosophical and historical origins of Chinese communism while simultaneously looking forward to the capitalist wealth that the nation is striving to attain, for Liven itself the purchase of the corpse is tightly bound up with an attempt to capitalize on the nation’s recent economic growth in order to regain the idyllic, autonomous status that the village had previously enjoyed during the pre-­ Communist era. As the agreed-­upon date for the performance troupes’ disbandment and the village’s “withdrawal from society” approaches, however, many of the villagers become so seduced by the amount of money they find they are able to earn in the troupe that they begin to have second thoughts about the prospect of disbanding and having Liven sever its ties with the county. Both the purchase of Lenin’s corpse and the establishment of the special-­skills performance troupes, therefore, pivot on a fantasy of plentitude that had originally been the promise of communism as a political ideal but which is presented here as an alternative to the disasters suffered under China’s actually

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existing Communist regime. In both instances, a corporeal display offers the promise of almost unimaginable profit, which would then permit the corresponding society to obtain an ideal of independence and self-­sufficiency. Sandwiched between Liven’s memory of a pre-­Revolutionary era in which the villagers always had more than enough to meet their needs, on one hand, and Liu Yingque’s ambitious plan to use Lenin’s corpse to bring in enough tourism revenue to allow him to satisfy the county residents’ every desire, on the other, there were more than three decades of Maoist rule during which Liven suffered a devastating series of famines and political persecutions. One sequence in the novel, for instance, relates how at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution a local commune demanded that Liven classify its residents based on their sociopolitical status and periodically send a landlord or rich peasant to the commune to be “struggled against,” to use the political lingo of the time. The villagers initially resisted this demand, claiming that all of the residents of Liven had always been fundamentally equal, and therefore these proposed class-­based distinctions simply didn’t apply to them. The commune responded by issuing every household in the village a little black booklet, marking the household as being from a problematic class background, and demanding that every two weeks someone in the village be sent to the commune to be struggled against. Unable to partition the community along economic and ideological lines, in other words, the commune instead adopted a solution wherein every household—​and, by extension, every individual villager—​was viewed as embodying these same socio-­ideological tensions within themselves. The result is that an array of different Liven villagers were required to submit themselves to a ritual of public humiliation and corporeal desecration. One villager, for instance, was viciously beaten in one of these struggle sessions, but when his tormentors demanded that he hand over the grain his family had saved up, he replied that the family’s entire reserves had already been confiscated by other refugees who had come to the village in search of food. The people from the commune then proceeded to beat the villager even more savagely than before, with “their fists raining down on his nose, mouth, and eyes, and their clubs striking his head and legs. When they punched his



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nose, it started bleeding, and when they hit his mouth, his teeth were knocked loose” (369). This beating figuratively recapitulates the conditions of this particular villager’s original disability, in that the people from the commune struck his legs “so violently that he would have been left a cripple if he hadn’t already been one,” just as the villagers’ physical disabilities structurally mirror the abject status to which they find themselves relegated upon “entering society.” This Cultural Revolution scene rehearses a logic of corporeal desecration that lies at the heart of the collective identity of Liven itself. One local legend, for instance, contends that the village’s history can be traced back to the Ming dynasty, when three disabled peasants were permitted to drop out of a mass relocation procession and establish a village deep in the mountains. The resulting community ended up attracting disabled villagers from throughout the region. Even as the village became defined by its residents’ disabilities, the collaborative arrangements that the villagers adopted to compensate for their respective physical limitations helped make possible a utopian arrangement in which all of their basic needs were easily satisfied. The villagers’ disabilities, therefore, contributed not only to their community’s self-­imposed isolation but also to the idyllic existence that they were subsequently able to enjoy. Liven’s position at the margins of the Chinese body politic is underscored by the relationship between the bodies of the disabled villagers and those of their able-­bodied neighbors. The novel calls able-­bodied people quanren (literally, “wholers”) and refers to the disabled as canren—​using a term that is technically short for canji ren (“disabled person”), but which could also be translated more literally as “fractured or remnant person.” The villagers’ physically incomplete bodies, therefore, function as potent reminders of the ideological fissures that underlie the sociopolitical ground of the nation itself. A comparable supplemental logic, meanwhile, applies to the novel’s thematization of Lenin’s preserved corpse. The narrative consistently refers to Lenin’s corporeal remains as an yiti—​a term that literally means a “vestigial body” but which resonates with the term yimin, meaning “loyalists” or literally “vestigial people,” and which was traditionally used to refer to civil servants who continued to maintain loyalty to a fallen dynasty after it had been superseded by a new one. In Lenin’s Kisses,

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meanwhile, Lenin’s embalmed corpse symbolizes a comparable kind of loyalism—​wherein a strategic embrace of an iconic symbol of communism (Lenin’s remains) is used to promote a paradigmatically capitalist enterprise (tourism), though this is done precisely in order to enable a subsequent critical intervention into the nation’s capitalist logic of uneven development (as seen in Liu Yingque’s plans to redistribute the projected profits from his Lenin mausoleum tourism to all the residents of his county). As an yiti, therefore, Lenin’s corpse symbolizes a loyalty to the ideological origins of Chinese communism, while simultaneously offering a reminder of a set of structural tensions that haunts communism itself. In psychoanalytic terms, the supplementary status of the villagers’ disabled bodies and of Lenin’s embalmed corpse functions as a hybrid of what Julia Kristeva would call the abject and of what Jacques Lacan calls a partial object, or objet petit a. While Kristeva’s figure of the abject refers to a corporeal or imaginary element that must be ejected from the Self as part of a process of reaffirming an imaginary Self/ Other binary,10 Lacan’s inverse objet a refers instead to what he calls an “object-­cause of desire,” which is to say an imaginary element that has become separated from the Self and subsequently becomes an object not of disgust but rather of desire.11 Both the Kristevan abject and the Lacanian objet a, therefore, represent fundamentally separable elements of the Self, on which the Self relies for its own process of self­constitution—​though whereas the abject is viewed as an object of disgust, the objet a is instead conceived as an object of desire. Together, these complementary models present a vision wherein the imaginary coherence of the Self is a product of a dialectical engagement with corporeal or ideological fragments that function simultaneously as objects of disgust and desire. Kristeva argues that a sense of abjection is most apparent in elements associated with death, with “the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, [being] the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.”12 It is appropriate, therefore, that one of the most iconic of the villagers’ “special skills” routines is Grandma Mao Zhi’s own performance in which she plays the part of a superannuated woman who claims that her unusual longevity is made possible by her insistence on preemptively wearing her own future burial clothing day in



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and day out. In other words, it is precisely by embracing the possibility of death that Grandma Mao Zhi’s stage persona is allegedly able to forestall her actual demise—​and it is this same simultaneous embrace and rejection of death, in turn, that becomes the focal point of contem­ porary audiences’ fascination with the disabled performance troupe as whole. A similarly paradoxical logic, meanwhile, also applies to the figure of Lenin’s corpse. Just as a corpse is a paradigmatic symbol of both the reality of death itself as well as of the ability of society to commemorate the life and accomplishments of a deceased individual, Lenin’s embalmed remains signify not only the Russian theorist’s mortal demise but also his enduring legacy. It is, moreover, precisely the specter of potential loss of the preserved corpse (given that Russia may no longer be able to afford to maintain it) that inspires Liu Yingque to come up with his plan to grant it a new life by purchasing it and bringing it back to China. In both Lenin’s corpse and Liven’s special skills performances, what mediates between these inverse figures of the abject and the objet a is a logic of commodity fetishism. Not only are Lenin’s embalmed corpse and the villagers’ disabled bodies viewed as potential sources of immense profit, they illustrate a process wherein material commodities come to assume a mystical character that strategically occludes the human labor and social relations that are responsible for the commodities’ actual production. Whereas Marxian theory seeks to reaffirm the corporeal labor and social relations underlying a commodity’s production, in Lenin’s Kisses this critique is effectively turned on its head through an emphasis on the commodity status of the body itself—​ with both Lenin’s corpse and the villagers’ disabled bodies being ­reimagined as objects of fetishistic investment in their own right. Even as Dream of Ding Village thematizes a process of corporeal self­commodification, in Lenin’s Kisses what is being commoditized is quite literally the incomplete and fragmented quality of the villagers’ bodies. The subaltern abject in the novel, in other words, is transformed, through a process of self-­commodification, into an objet a of the contemporary capitalist economy. While Kristeva and Lacan argue that the imaginary constitution of the Self is predicated on a simultaneous rejection of and desire for imaginary bodily elements that have become symbolically separated

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from the Self, Lenin’s Kisses illustrates a comparable logic at a collective level, wherein the constitution of the Chinese nation is grounded in the simultaneous rejection of and desire for figures positioned at the symbolic margins of the body politic. Lenin’s corpse and Liven’s disabled villagers are both located in a paradigmatically peripheral position with respect to contemporary China, but in each case their perceived alterity is reinvented as an object of desire through a process of commodity fetishism. In other words, even as the materiality of Lenin’s embalmed corpse and the villagers’ disabled bodies in the novel functions as a reminder of the Marxian validation of the value of labor and the importance of an equitable distribution of wealth, the marginal status of both the corpse and the disabled villagers with respect to the nation emblematizes the degree to which contemporary China’s sociopolitical self-­conception is predicated on a strategic elision of these very same Marxian principles. In a sequence near the end of Lenin’s Kisses, the two “special skills” performance troupes have returned to Liven and are waiting for Liu Yingque to make good on his promise to grant the village its freedom. Unbeknownst to the villagers, however, Liu by this point has already been detained in the provincial seat—​where the provincial governor, upon belatedly learning of Liu’s plan to purchase Lenin’s corpse from Russia, has proceeded to remove Liu from office. After this news of Liu’s political downfall circulates through the community, some of the wholers who had been accompanying one of the Liven performance troupes lock up the villagers inside the building constructed to serve as the new Lenin memorial hall and confiscate all of the money the villagers had earned through their performances over the preceding six months. Convinced that the villagers must still have considerable cash hidden away on their persons and in their belongings, the wholers refuse to let them leave until they have handed over all of their remaining money. As the captive villagers become increasingly desperate after having been imprisoned for several days with little food and water, it occurs to one of them, a young man known as One-­Legged Monkey, to examine the area around the crystal coffin that had been prepared for Lenin’s corpse. To his surprise, he finds a second crystal coffin hidden



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beneath the one intended for Lenin’s corpse, with the words May Comrade Liu Yingque be Eternally Remembered by Posterity written in embossed gold characters on the lid. One-­Legged Monkey carefully pries off each of the embossed gold characters, and later, after the villagers are finally released and return to their village without a cent to their name, he uses these gold strips as start-­up capital with which to open a store and restaurant. One-­Legged Monkey’s attempts to recycle the gold characters that adorn Liu Yingque’s crystal coffin strategically invert not only Liu’s original attempt to use Lenin’s corpse to generate wealth for the county but also his subsequent secret plan to memorialize himself in the same memorial hall he has built for Lenin’s corpse. One-­Legged Monkey then uses these gold strips to start a business that he hopes will support him for the rest of his life. Liu Yingque, meanwhile, also embraces the remote village of Liven after his scheme to purchase Lenin’s corpse falls apart and Liu himself has been ignominiously removed from office. Liu’s final act in office is to make good on his earlier promise to Grandma Mao Zhi that he would release the village from the county’s jurisdictional authority, thereby permitting it to regain its original political autonomy. After having accomplished this, Liu Yingque steps in front of his own car—​allowing his driver to run him over and cripple him, so that he may then join Liven’s disabled community. In this way, Liu transforms and strategically inverts his previous relationship with the village, voluntarily joining the same community he had previously attempted to exploit. In deliberately crippling himself and thereby transforming himself into an abject figure, accordingly, Liu Yingque embraces the very same social marginality he had previously attempted to use to his own advantage. Furthermore, by removing himself from mainstream society and claiming a new position within the hyper-­marginalized community of Liven, he strategically affirms the village as a site of potential transformation and self-­reinvention comparable to the “new world” of which Teacher Ding dreams at the end of Dream of Ding Village. As was the case in Dream of Ding Village, the future trajectory of this process of reinvention is left unspecified, as it is relegated to the narrative margins of the text itself.

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The first full-­length novel Yan Lianke composed after first learning of China’s AIDS epidemic in 1996 was actually inspired not by AIDS but rather by a different rural health crisis and corresponding pattern of corporeal commodification. While Dream of Ding Village focuses on China’s AIDS villages and Lenin’s Kisses features a village whose residents are plagued by congenital deformities, Yan Lianke’s 1998 novel Time’s Passage (Riguang liunian) instead takes inspiration from what are now known as China’s cancer villages. These communities, which were already recognized anecdotally in the 1990s but which have begun to receive more attention in the years since Yan Lianke’s novel was published, are rural communities that suffer from unusually high rates of cancer, particularly lung and esophageal cancer, apparently as a result of elevated levels of industrial carcinogens in the environment.13 These cancer villages, like the country’s growing air pollution and other environmental problems, have been tacitly permitted by the government as a necessary sacrifice the nation must make in the interest of continued economic development. In Time’s Passage, Yan Lianke focuses on a fictionalized version of one such village, detailing its residents’ desperate efforts to find a way of addressing their endemic health problems. Time’s Passage is set in Sanxing cun (literally, “Three Surname Village”), in the same remote Balou mountain region of central China’s Henan province as Dream of Ding Village and Lenin’s Kisses, and for several generations its residents have suffered from an array of ailments that include darkened teeth, joint disease, skeletal deformities, and even paralysis. The novel explains that a team of investigators sent by the United Nations discovers that the region surrounding the village contains extraordinarily high levels of fluorine that appear to have been the cause of the villagers’ tooth mottling and bone degradation. At the time, the UN team also detects high concentrations of another unidentified contaminant, which is presumably responsible for the excruciating throat swelling that plagues the villagers during the period covered in the novel and which invariably kills them before they reach the age of forty. The narrative of Time’s Passage is organized in reverse chronological order, with each juan (or multichapter section) moving progressively



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backward in time—​the first juan describes the events leading up to the protagonist Sima Lan’s death, and the final juan describes the circumstances culminating in his birth. A central concern running through the work involves the village’s efforts to address the disease and, specifically, their decision to construct an aqueduct to pipe clean water into the village. In order to raise the large sum that the villagers will need to realize this expensive public works project, many of the village women prostitute themselves in the city while the men resort to selling strips of their own skin to a nearby hospital for burn victims. These two practices are mirror images of one another, insofar as they both involve a process of self-­commodification that uses an assertion of a symbolic bond with a larger anonymous community (though the selling of skin or sex to strangers) in order to affirm a practical connection with the more immediate community of the village itself. These parallel practices of selling sex and skin come together in the sequence at the end of the first juan of the novel, when Sima Lan’s mistress, Lan Sishi, is found dead, having violently sliced up her own genitals before her death. It is only at this point that Sima Lan belatedly realizes that Lan Sishi had contracted a venereal disease while working as a prostitute in the city. Her final act of cutting up her diseased genitals, accordingly, not only draws attention to her previously secret sex work, it also mirrors Sima Lan’s own practice of cutting and selling his own skin to the burn victim hospital. After finding Lan Sishi’s corpse, Sima Lan picks up her body and carries it to her bed and then lies down beside it. By the time Lan Sishi and Sima Lan are discovered by the other villagers, Sima Lan has already died as well—​ having expired precisely on the eve of his fortieth birthday. He is discovered in the arms of his mistress, whose name in Chinese literally means “Lan forty.” The couple’s double death, accordingly, instantiates the double curse under which the remote village finds itself—​as its residents are plagued first by the contaminant-­d riven cancer epidemic that kills them before they reach forty, and second by the consequences of the self-­destructive practices that pursue in an attempt to address the epidemic itself. The residents of Sanxing Village may be viewed as examples of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, or “bare life.” Taking inspiration from a provision in ancient Roman law that stipulates that citizens

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may be preemptively removed from the social order as sacrificial figures on which the law’s putative legitimacy is thereby theoretically grounded, Agamben describes this figure of the homo sacer as a paradigmatic example of “human life [that is] included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed).”14 Agamben argues that these subaltern figures not only mark the ideological limits of the polis, they also symbolize the grounds on which existing political regimes derive their authority. Working along similar lines, South African political philosopher Achille Mbembe extends Michel Foucault’s argument that modern biopolitical governance is predicated on the institutional regularization of life and instead emphasizes the importance of the state’s “power and capacity to determine who will live and who will die.”15 In the resulting necropolitical system, Mbembe argues, it is precisely from this power to apportion death and reduce individuals to the status of bare life that the modern state derives its power and political sovereignty. Although Yan Lianke does not specify what environmental contaminants are causing the deadly throat swellings that afflict all of the residents of Sanxing Village, the novel suggests that the villagers have been condemned to die as a result of a combination of necropolitical state policies and a neoliberal developmental logic that prioritizes industrial development at the expense of these sorts of “expendable” populations. The status of the Sanxing villages as “bare life” located at the outer margins of the juridical order, meanwhile, condemns them not only to die prematurely (from contaminant-­induced cancer), but also commoditize and figuratively cannibalize themselves while they are still alive (by selling their skin and their bodies in an attempt to improve their condition). The novel suggests, however, that it is precisely within this position of radical abjection and marginalization that the villagers are able to find new forms of self-­understanding and self-­expression. A similar logic of societal abjection and self-­exploitation is developed in Yan Lianke’s 2010 novel The Four Books (Sishu). Set during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), The Four Books focuses on a group of intellectuals who have been accused of being Rightists and sent to a remote re-­education (“Re-­Ed”) compound in rural Henan. The political



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criminals in this compound get roped into the nation’s hyperbolic enthusiasm for increased production that characterized the Great Leap Forward. Conceived as part of China’s second Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward sought to jumpstart the nation’s transition from an agrarian to a communist economy by promoting a process of rapid industrialization. The campaign, however, proved catastrophic, as pressure to meet unrealistic production quotas encouraged widespread fraud, leading to enormous economic and environmental devastation. In The Four Books, meanwhile, the significance of these initiatives lies not so much in their consequences for the nation’s economy but rather in how they are played out in this isolated community of political prisoners, many of whom come to view the incentive system that develops around the Great Leap Forward as representing their best hope for political reprieve and receiving permission to leave the Re-­Ed compound to return home. Mao Zedong hoped that the Great Leap Forward would enable China’s industrial capacity to overtake that of Great Britain within fifteen years, but instead the campaign had to be aborted after creating widespread chaos. In an effort to stimulate the nation’s steel production, for instance, communities throughout China were encouraged to donate all of their nonessential iron utensils so that they might be smelted into steel in makeshift backyard furnaces. Not only was the resulting steel frequently of such poor quality as to be virtually unusable, the people who had donated iron for the effort were often left without basic tools needed for essential activities such as farming and cooking. Similarly, in an attempt to meet impossibly high agricultural production targets, many communities not only falsified their reports, they even took counterproductive steps that resulted in systemic crop failures, which in turn contributed to a nationwide famine that claimed the lives of tens of millions of people. As such, what began as one of modern China’s most utopian visions was quickly transformed into its one of its most devastating national catastrophes. The Four Books presents a fictional exploration of China’s steel-­ smelting and grain-­production crises during the Great Leap Forward, describing how the Re-­Ed district systematically undercut its own livelihood in an attempt to meet production goals set by the state.

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This process of self-­sacrifice is illustrated most dramatically in a sequence in which the novel’s protagonist, who is known simply as “the Author,” goes into voluntary exile to a remote area on the outskirts of the compound. Tasked with finding a way to grow ears of wheat as large as ears of corn, the Author begins using blood from his own fingertips to irrigate the wheat sprouts, to give them added nutrients. Soon he is slicing open the veins in his arms and legs to feed the plants, and he ultimately succeeds in producing enormous ears of wheat, each of which has huge bright red grains that bear a distinctive smell and taste of human blood. This blood-­fed grain is a poignant illustration of the self-­destructive practices that were encouraged by Mao-­era political campaigns. During the Great Leap Forward, an exaggerated emphasis on economic development led to the systematic marginalization of entire communities and populations, and the Re-­Ed compounds that were established along the old course of the Yellow River are compelling examples of a necropolitical logic of social marginalization. Even within the novel’s primary Re-­Ed compound itself, there is a corresponding pattern of self-­exploitation as the accused rightists are encouraged to betray each other. This self-­cannibalistic logic is extended to the body, as the Author responds to this pattern of social marginalization by using his own blood to grow wheat that he and others would presumably then consume. It is precisely through this act of strategic self-­ exploitation that the Author is thereby able to lay bare the underlying socioeconomic logic on which the national community during that period was grounded. A similar pattern of self-­exploitation is thematized within the structure of the novel itself, in that the work is comprised of four interwoven texts that are presented as having been written by different characters in the work itself. One of these texts, titled Criminal Records, consists of a set of journals in which the Author records the illicit behaviors of the other accused Rightists in the compound with him. The leader of the compound—​a boy known simply as “the Child”—​instructs the Author to keep these journals and submit them regularly to him, the Child, in return for which the Author will be given permission to go home to his family. Just as the Author’s auto-­ cannibalistic wheat-­g rowing efforts are a response to the nationwide



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famine that resulted from the self-­consumptive excesses associated with the Great Leap Forward, his Criminal Records manuscript is sim­­ ilarly presented as a symptom of a political culture that encouraged residents of the Re-­Ed compound to “cannibalistically” inform on and betray one another. Moreover, given that this fictional journal is one of the four manuscripts that comprise Yan Lianke’s novel, it implicitly places the novel’s readers in the position of the Child for whom the journal is written, and the political authority that he represents. Even as the Author is keeping this journal to inform on his peers in the Re-­Ed compound, he is simultaneously and secretly compiling a second manuscript based on the same subject matter, which he hopes will provide the basis for his next major novel once he is released and allowed to return home. Not only is the latter work—​titled Old Course, and nominally named after the former course of the Yellow River—​a nother of the four texts that comprise Yan Lianke’s own novel, it can also be seen as a fictional correlate of the latter work itself. The implication, accordingly, is that within the generalized state of homesickness under which the fictional Criminal Records manuscript was compiled, we may also find the possibility of a self-­ reflective and politically transformative creation such as Yan Lianke’s own novel, The Four Books. The latter work uses a focus on societal disease precisely in order to bring critical attention to it—​thereby potentially transforming cannibalism from a symbol of self-­destruction into one of transformation and innovation. Coda: Thought Not Swerving

Yan Lianke’s The Four Books borrows its title from a set of canonical works known in Chinese as “the four books and five classics” (sishu wujing). Of these, the Four Books include the Confucian texts The Analects (Lunyu), Mencius (Mengzi), The Great Learning (Daxue), and The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong). The latter of these two texts are actually excerpted from the Book of Rites (Liji), which is traditionally recognized as one of the Five Classics, the other four of which are The Book of Odes (Shijing), The Book of History (Shangshu), The Book of Changes (Yijing), and The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu). Although none of these Confucian classics is explicitly

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mentioned in Yan’s novel, the latter work is nevertheless very much concerned with issues of tradition and canonicity that define this body of works themselves. One notable point of intersection between the Four Books and the Five Classics can be found in a famous line from The Analects, where Confucius references The Book of Odes, observing that “the three hundred odes in The Book of Odes can be summed up in a single phrase: Thought not swerving (shi sanbai yi yan yibi zhi: yue, si wuxie).” This concise assessment of The Book of Odes has subsequently become a central precept in Chinese poetic and literary theory, repeatedly cited and elaborated on by a wide array of commentators. Around 500 ce, for instance, Liu Xie, in his now-­canonical text The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong), uses another classic Chinese poetic dictum, “Poetry is the expression of intent” (shi yan zhi)—​which first appeared in the Classic of Books and was subsequently popularized in the influential “Mao preface” of The Book of Odes—​in order to introduce his characterization of China’s poetic tradition as having been shaped by a principle of “unswerving thought”: The Great Shun said, “Poetry expresses will, and songs are these expressions set to music.” Of this explanation, given by the sage, the meaning is clear. That which is the sentiment within the mind becomes poetry when expressed in words. It is here indeed that literary form unfurls itself to communicate reality. Poetry means discipline—​d isciplined human emotion. The single idea that runs through the three hundred odes in the Book of Odes is freedom from undisciplined (unswerving) thought (sanbai zhi zhi, wuxie suobi).16

Here, the original Book of Odes formula is adopted to affirm the structural constraints that help grant China’s poetic tradition its present form. For Liu Xie, the structural and institutional constraints under which the Chinese literary tradition has developed are fundamentally positive and productive, and it is precisely this freedom from “unswerv­ ­ing” thought that has permitted the Chinese literary tradition to develop and flourish. Some fifteen hundred years later, meanwhile, a young Lu Xun cited the same passage but drew from it an almost precisely inverse



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conclusion. In his 1907 essay “The Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluoshi li shuo), which Lu Xun wrote while studying in Japan, he argued that poetry cannot in fact be wiped out, so rules are devised to hold it captive. Take Chinese poetry, which Shun said expresses will; later worthies took the position that it manipulates human nature, that “not to swerve” gives the essence of the Three Hundred Odes. Since they express will, why say “manipulate”? Being forced not to stray is not free will. How can there be a promise of liberty under whips and halters? (qiang yi wuxie, ji fei ren zhi)17

While Liu Xie viewed the condition of being free from unswerving thought as the key to literary creativity, for Lu Xun this emphasis on thought “not swerving” was, instead, a symbol of the unproductive constraints under which Chinese culture had traditionally been forced to operate. In a preface commissioned for a 1996 volume featuring selections of her earlier work, meanwhile, the Taiwan author Chu T’ien-­wen took the opportunity to reflect on her prize-­winning 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man (Huangren shouji). Written in the voice of a Taiwanese gay man mourning a close friend’s recent death from complications relating to AIDS, the novel is a philosophical reflection on issues of life, death, community, and identity. Chu T’ien-­wen had already discussed on several occasions how her novel was directly inspired by her conversations with an unspecified gay Taiwanese man with whom she was acquainted. What Chu had not previously acknowledged, however, was that the novel also constituted an attempt on her part to work through her complicated relationship with her former tutor Hu Lancheng—​a n author, philosopher, and critic who had not only been the first husband of Eileen Chang (one of Chu T’ien-­wen’s most salient literary influences) but who furthermore had also notoriously been labeled a Japanese collaborator during the War of Japanese Resistance. In this 1996 essay, titled “A Flower Remembers its Previous Lives” (Huayi qianshen), Chu reflects for the first time on her relationship with Hu Lancheng. At one point in the essay, she describes how she and her sister Chu T’ien-­hsin each adopted different forms of address for their tutor:

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T’ien-­hsin called him Grandfather Hu, but I hesitated to do so, and in the end I decided to address him simply as Teacher Hu. This is because there was the risk that in calling him Grandfather Hu, the appellation might stick, and it would then become impossible for me to call him anything different. “Of the Odes there are three hundred—​thought without swerving.” As for me, however, mine is thought that swerves (shi sanbai pian, si wuxie, dan wo shi si youxie).18

Here, Chu T’ien-­wen is invoking Confucius’s “thought without swerving” aphorism but strategically inverts it, declaring that hers is actually “thought that swerves.” Ironically, it is precisely in affirming her desire to retain a certain situational flexibility, to have “thought that swerves,” that Chu T’ien-­wen affirms her decision to continue using the “Teacher Hu” address—​suggesting that it is precisely within a practice of citation and iteration that one thereby finds the possibility of figuratively “swerving.” Although The Analects is often regarded as the locus classicus of the “thought without swerving” phrase, the phrase is actually borrowed from one of the poems contained in The Book of Odes itself. Curiously, though, the original ode featuring the phrase is actually not about poetry or meaning but is rather about horses, and the quoted phrase is taken from the final line, which describes horses’ ability to run straight and sire: Stout and strong our stallions In the paddock meadows; Look, what strong ones! Grey and white, ruddy and white, White shank, wall-­eye, Powerful horses for the chariot. Oh [si], without slip; Oh [si], may these horses sire.19

In context, accordingly, it turns out that the two si’s in the final line of this stanza are not abstract nouns but rather rhetorical apostrophes—​ emotional ejaculations equivalent to “oh” in English and lacking any concrete semantic content.20 Although the si in the original Book of Odes poem is used as an apostrophe, the Confucian citation of this phrase in The Analects is



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invariably interpreted as using si in the sense of either “meaning” (yisi) or “thought” (sixiang)—​meaning that the key to The Book of Odes lies in the fact that its thought does not swerve (either in The Book of Odes itself or in the subsequent textual tradition that cites it).21 The irony, accordingly, is that one of the most influential affirmations of the underlying continuity of the Chinese literary tradition is itself a product of flagrant misreading and semantic swerving. That is to say, the principle of unswerving thought that Confucius contends lies at the heart of The Book of Odes is itself a product of a comparable process of translational swerving. In this respect, the si wuxie formula is a contronym, which contains within itself its own negation. Precisely for this reason, furthermore, the formula also concisely captures the necessary possibility of its own future transformation. In contrast to Lu Xun’s vision of the inherently conservative effects of the traditional canon, which he suggests is capable of “infecting” all readers who are exposed to it, this latter reinterpretation of the si wuxie formula suggests that the (Chinese) literary tradition is anchored by a viral element that promotes not only continuity but also a continual process of transformation and reinventions—​or “swerving.” This motif of swerving thought also describes quite aptly the narrative logic under which many of Yan Lianke’s works operate. Yan Lianke has noted that whenever he travels abroad, he is invariably introduced as “China’s most controversial and most censored author.”22 While the “most censored author” characterization might well be an exaggeration, it is true that Yan has had several books be banned or recalled, censored or self-­censored. For instance, following the publication of Lenin’s Kisses in 2004 Yan Lianke was dismissed from his position with the People’s Liberation Army, where he had been working for more than twenty years. In 2005, his novel Serve the People! (Wei renmin fuwu), which offers a parody of Maoist rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution, never got through the censors. Yan openly admits that he self-­censored Dream of Ding Village, from 2006, in order to increase its chances, but even then the novel was recalled shortly after publication (though booksellers were permitted to sell their remaining stock). When he working on The Four Books, meanwhile, he claims he made a point of simply writing the novel as he wanted, without trying to second-­g uess the censors. In the end, however, he was unable to find

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a Mainland Chinese publisher willing to take it on, though it did come out in Chinese-­language editions published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as numerous foreign-­language editions. A central concern that runs through much of Yan Lianke’s work at least since the late 1990s, accordingly, involves a recurrent struggle to reconcile his creative vision with the restrictions placed on his work by overlapping forces of censorship and self-­censorship—​a challenge that he compares to “performing in chains.”23 At the same time, however, it is precisely this condition of being forced not to swerve, as Lu Xun might have put it, that Yan Lianke consistently finds his greatest originality and creativity.

7 •

Labor

“I want 5,000 [ringgits]. . . . ​It’s for my trip back to my hometown,” an unidentified laborer informs a street hawker in one of the first scenes of Tsai Ming-­liang’s 2006 film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Hei yanquan). The laborer is attempting to buy lucky numbers with which he hopes to win enough money at the lottery to permit him to return to his homeland, and the man selling the numbers deliberately stokes those dreams. Speaking in Malay, he reassures the laborer and his companions, “Come back to me if you don’t win.” Then, referring to his previous customers, he adds, “They never come back to me. . . . ​ They all won and became rich.”1 When the hawker’s current batch of customers returns a little later to claim the numbers they purchased, however, the hawker notices a disheveled man silently offering him a blank sheet of paper. The hawker looks disdainfully at the man, and says, “Speak up! What race are you? Don’t you yourself even know? You must be Chinese.” He then demands money from the man and, given that he is uncertain of the man’s nationality, he hedges his bets by asking for the money in the currencies of various different Southeast Asian countries—​fi rst saying “money, money,” then specifying “baht” and “peso.” When the hawker still doesn’t get a response, he and his associates proceed to

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search the man themselves. “He doesn’t even understand Malay,” one of the associates complains. “[He has] nothing at all. Not a single cent!” At this point the camera cuts away, but the film reveals that the street hawker and his associates proceeded to savagely beat the silent man. A few scenes later, a pair of foreign guest workers are seen in a back alley late at night wrestling a mattress out of a dumpster and then dragging it through the streets of Kuala Lumpur. Several additional men join their entourage along the way, and as the group is crossing a multilane highway they stumble across the body of the man beaten by the street hawker and his associates. Realizing that the man is badly injured, the guest workers place him on their mattress and carry him back to their apartment, where they discuss what to do next. Concerned that their landlady will discover that they have brought back a stranger, a guest worker named Rawang (played by Norman Atun) takes both the injured man and the mattress to a room in an empty shell of a half­completed building located nearby. The abandoned building to which Rawang takes the injured man is located near Kuala Lumpur’s Padu jail, and the film’s production notes explain that construction on the building had begun in the 1990s, at a time when much of East and Southeast Asia was enjoying rapid economic growth. Malaysia, however, was one of the nations that was hardest hit by the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and this particular building was one of many projects that were abandoned when financing dried up in the wake of the crisis. Many of the foreign workers depicted in the film were presumably brought to Malaysia under the nation’s guest worker program in the 1990s to contribute to these sorts of construction projects, but they were subsequently left stranded when the projects for which they were hired were halted. In the film, accordingly, this unfinished building offers a window into the transnational flows of capital and labor against which the work’s plot unfolds. Hav­ ­ing only incomplete outer walls, this multistory structure is largely exposed to the elements, and in its center there is a large pool of accumulated rain water. Used as the backdrop for many key scenes in the film, this dark pool marks both the vestigial status of the abandoned building itself as well as its points of connection with the outside environment. This pool represents a site of mystery and indeterminacy,



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while at the same time providing the axis around which the work as a whole revolves. Tsai Ming-­liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone not only focuses on foreign guest workers in Malaysia attempting to return to their respective homelands, it also marks a figurative homecoming for the director himself. Having grown up as a member of the Chinese ethnic minority in Malaysia and then spent most of his adult life in Taiwan, Tsai has a rather complicated attitude toward the very concept of a homeland. He once observed that he feels he “belong[s] neither to Taiwan nor to Malaysia. . . . ​I can go anywhere I want and fit in, but I never feel that sense of belonging.”2 I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone was actually Tsai’s first work to be filmed and set in his Malaysian homeland after he had lived and worked in Taiwan for a decade and a half, though this figurative homecoming proved to be bittersweet, given that the film was initially banned in Malaysia on account of what was perceived to be its allegedly negative portrayal of the country.3 Through its focus on displaced labor, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone builds on a dialectics of desire and alienation that runs through Tsai Ming-­liang’s entire oeuvre. In Tsai’s works, feelings of alienation provide the enabling condition for a polymorphously perverse array of desires and libidinal attachments, even as those same desires bring the underlying condition of alienation into sharper focus. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, like all of Tsai’s other feature films, uses this dialectics of desire and alienation to explore displaced individuals’ relationship not only to each other but also to the communities they inhabit. It is through an interrogation of the familial relationships on which these imagined communities are modeled that Tsai Ming-­liang attempts to reassess the conceptual and emotional underpinning of these communities. A similar set of considerations also applies to the relationship between each of Tsai’s individual films and the collective oeuvre within which they are positioned. All of Tsai’s works are intricately interwoven with one another, with each featuring an overlapping set of actors, visual tropes, and conceptual concerns. For instance, not only does Lee Kang-­sheng star in every one of Tsai’s films, several other actors also repeatedly appear in similar roles, including Miao Tien and Lu Yi-­ching as Hsiao Kang’s parents, Yang Kuei-­mei and

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Chen Shiang-­chyi as his lovers, and Chen Chao-­jung as his male rival (these characters are often not named within Tsai’s films, and here I will follow the convention of referring to the characters using the given name of the actors who play them). Various visual and conceptual motifs also repeatedly recur through Tsai’s various films, including a focus on water, watermelons, and fish; alienation, displacement, and desire. The result is that none of his works can be considered a self-­contained entity in its own right, but rather they must all be approached as part of a larger collective. For viewers, accordingly, one of the key challenges lies in negotiating the relationship between each individual work and its position within the broader oeuvre. In the following discussion, I consider how Tsai Ming-­liang attempts to draw his viewers into the diegetic space of his films by underscoring the perspectival gap between the viewers and the images on screen. At the same time, I argue that this process of cinematic suture may be treated as a broader metaphor for the relationship between individual subjects and the communities within which they are positioned. To this end, I look at several of Tsai’s films, beginning with I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and then moving progressively backward in time to works released in 2005, 1998, and 1997, respectively. I discuss how each of these works reflects not only on the bonds that link individual characters to one another—​a nd which link the films’ viewers to the diegetic contents of the works themselves—​but also on the structural connections between each film and the broader sociocultural environment within which it is positioned. Each film is both an integral part of Tsai’s general oeuvre while also standing in subtle tension with his other works. Doubled Subjects

Just as it was during a 1996 trip to visit AIDS villages in his home province of Henan that Yan Lianke came up with the idea for Dream of Ding Village, it was similarly during a 1999 trip back to his Malaysian homeland that Tsai came up with the idea for what would eventually yield I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. At the time, Tsai initially wanted to make a film about exploited Southeast Asian guest workers in Taiwan, and although he didn’t end up producing a work



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precisely along these lines, in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone he nevertheless examines a similar phenomenon of foreign guest workers in Malaysia trying to return home. One of these foreign guest workers is the man who is badly beaten by the street hawker near the beginning of the film. This unnamed character appears to be ethnically Chinese and is played by Tsai Ming­liang’s long-­term collaborator, Lee Kang-­sheng. The street hawker’s annoyance at the Chinese man’s lack of response, meanwhile, is fitting, given that Tsai himself recalls how when he initially started working with Lee in the mid-­1980s, he found the young man’s “rhythm [to be] a little strange, just a little bit slower than everybody else’s.” In a 2002 interview, Tsai recalls that when he first started working with the novice actor, he found that when Lee interacts with another performer, it’s not as if he’s not reacting to what they do, but it just takes slightly longer for his reaction to ­register. . . . ​When I was pushing him to speed up the rhythm, [he] totally refused to take my direction, which shocked me, because I was the director, and no actor ever did anything contrary to my instructions. [But] here was this guy, coming from nowhere, saying, “That’s just the way I am. I’m not going to change.” [Laughs.]4

Initially perceived as a challenge to Tsai’s directorial authority, Lee’s laconic style and his refusal to “take . . . ​direction” functioned as an irritant that, like a grain of sand embedded in an oyster shell, helped generate a long and rich cinematic collaboration between the two artists. In other words, Lee, as an actor, represents a foreign element that initially lies outside of Tsai’s cinematic vision but which subsequently comes to constitute the conceptual and thematic core around which that vision develops. Tsai Ming-­liang began casting Lee Kang-­sheng in his teledramas in the late 1980s and went on to give Lee the lead role in his first feature-­length film, Rebels of the Neon God (Qingshaonian nezha, 1991). Tsai has prominently featured Lee in every film he has directed since, with the two artists engaging in an elaborate pas de deux in which Lee performs the roles that Tsai assigns him even as Tsai increasingly scripts those same roles around Lee’s distinctive acting style. In I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, meanwhile, Lee Kang-­sheng actually plays two parallel roles, appearing not only as the homeless man

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who is beaten at the beginning of the film but also as a bedridden man who remains in what appears to be an unresponsive catatonic state throughout the entire work. The film develops parallel narrative lines centered around both of Lee Kang-­sheng’s characters, with the first featuring the homeless man and his relationship with Rawang, while the second focuses on the unconscious man and his female caregivers. While the homeless man eventually recovers his health and returns to roaming the city, the unconscious man remains comatose throughout the entirety of the work. He never moves from the bed in which he appears at the beginning of the film, where he is attended by his mother (played by Pearlly Chua), who runs a coffee shop in the same building, and by a young woman (played by Chen Shiang-­chyi), who works as a waitress in the same coffee shop and helps the unconscious man’s mother care for him. The two characters played by Lee Kang-­sheng in the film never appear in each other’s immediate presence, though their experiences in the film suggestively mirror one another. In one scene, for instance, we see a pair of hands wearing latex gloves brusquely but efficiently brushing the unconscious man’s teeth, wiping his face, and reinserting his feeding tube, while in the very next scene we see Rawang tenderly caring for the homeless man and feeding him out of a liquid-­filled plastic bag. There is a similar parallel between the erotic undertones in the relationship between Lee’s two characters and those who care for them. We find repeated hints, for instance, that Rawang becomes increasingly attached to the stranger he has nursed back to health, though as soon as the homeless man has recuperated enough to be able to go out and explore his new neighborhood, he begins loitering outside the coffee shop where Shiang-­chyi and the unconscious man’s mother both work. The homeless man and Shiang-­chyi repeatedly run into each other in and around the coffee shop. At one point they are seen in the lobby of a cheap motel called Starlight Hotel—​which is evidently a “love hotel” where they are trying to secure a room for a few hours. Upon discovering that they would need a passport for identification, however, the homeless man leaves the hotel in frustration. Soon afterward, the unconscious man’s mother, who has repeatedly observed the home­­ less man loitering in front of the coffee shop looking for Shiang-­chyi,



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follows him into a back alley where they silently begin to make love while standing in the shadows. Later, the homeless man also develops a sexual relationship with Shiang-­chyi herself—​though that relationship, too, appears to be virtually wordless. Even as Shiang-­chyi and the unconscious man’s mother each pursue a sexual relationship with the homeless man, they are simultaneously pulled into a mediated erotic relationship with his doppelganger, the unconscious man. In one scene, for instance, the unconscious man’s mother is seen caressing his stomach with massage oil, as her hand repeatedly reaches down into his crotch. Shiang-­chyi, who is eating noodles in her bedroom located directly above his, at one point peers through a hole in the floorboards and glimpses the quasi-­incestuous scene unfolding below. There is a similar scene later in the film, in which Shiang-­chyi is in the unconscious man’s bedroom, where she is using massage oil to give the man’s mother a backrub. At one point the mother without a word suddenly begins applying the oil to Shiang­chyi’s hand, and then uses Shiang-­chyi’s hand to masturbate her son. In this provocatively incestuous scene, which is shot entirely through a reflection in a stained mirror in the unconscious man’s bedroom, Shiang-­chyi becomes an intermediary for the mother’s illicit sexual desire for her own son. Functioning literally as a copula within this incestuous scene, Shiang-­chyi is positioned as both a quintessential embodiment of the mother’s proscribed desire as well as its structural negation. Just as Shiang-­chyi is positioned, in this scene, as an intermediary between the unconscious man’s mother and the unconscious man himself, the film’s parallel plotlines centered around the homeless man and the unconscious man are anchored by the pair of mattresses that become the provisional resting places for Lee Kang-­sheng’s two characters. Like the two characters themselves, these mattresses are presented as mirror images of one another—​with the antiseptic sterility of the unconscious man’s mattress positioned as the precise inverse of the filth and mobility of the homeless man’s own mattress. The significance of the latter as the site on which the homeless man is nursed back to health is complicated, however, by the fact that it simultaneously symbolizes both infection and contamination. For instance, at one point they discover that the mattress is full of insects,

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but even after Rawang repeatedly scrubs the mattress with soap and water and sprays it with insecticide, it remains nearly as filthy as before. In this respect, the mattress may be seen as a virtual membrane, helping shield its users from the environment even as it remains contaminated by that same environment. At one point, Shiang-­chyi is listening to a radio broadcast in which the announcer offers advice on how to determine when it is time to change one’s mattress—​suggesting that if the mattress’s owner is no longer sleeping well, if the mattress begins to smell or becomes sunken, these might well be indications that the mattress needs to be replaced. This assertion of a capitalist logic of planned obsolescence, wherein a sense of finitude is built into the very perception of the commodity itself, stands in stark contrast to the way in which the homeless man’s mattress is used in the film. To the extent that a logic of planned obsolescence grants commodities a finite lifespan, the film uses the fragility of the discarded mattress to underscore the precarious mortality of the work’s peripatetic protagonists. As a mattress ages, it absorbs significant quantities of foreign matter, including bed bugs, lice, dust, mold, fungus, bacteria, and even dead skin cells from the people sleeping on it. The mattress functions, accordingly, as a material index of the individual’s relationship to his or her physical environment, yielding a tangible record of the microscopic matter that continually cycles back and forth between the body and its physical surroundings. Like the unconscious man’s discarded mattress, the air of Kuala Lumpur similarly emerges as a tangible symptom of people’s conflicted relationship to their environment. As the city’s atmosphere becomes increasingly foul in the latter half of the film, a radio broadcast is heard offering several hypotheses to explain the noxious haze that envelops the city—​suggesting that the smog might be the result either of underground fires started by illegal guest workers in Malaysia burning rubbish in the open or of forest fires in neighboring Sumatra. Whatever its source, this persistent smog is literally a foreign presence that threatens to insinuate itself deep into the (national) body. As the radio announcer is recommending that listeners wear facemasks to protect themselves from the smog, the camera shifts to the coffee shop, where most of the customers are wearing masks fashioned from



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debris such as plastic bags and polystyrene bowls. In another scene, Shiang-­chyi and the homeless man attempt to make love outside while wearing similar makeshift masks, and when they remove their masks to kiss, they immediately succumb to intense fits of coughing. Here, the facemask functions as a symbol of the gulf that separates the protagonists but also the way environmental shifts may create new possibilities for social contact and interaction. In recent years, facemasks have become increasingly visible in many East Asian regions, where they are used for protection from both infectious germs as well as polluted air. Nearly ubiquitous in Hong Kong and other affected areas during the 2003 SARS epidemic, facemasks have remained popular even after the threat of SARS subsided. These masks are frequently worn in public, not only to provide protection from airborne microbes but also to prevent the wearer from infecting others. In addition, the rapidly deteriorating air quality in many cities in China and surrounding regions has encouraged many people to wear face masks to help reduce the inhalation of particulate matter. Although the haze in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is apparently caused by fires rather than by industrial pollution per se, it nevertheless represents a foreign agent capable of traversing political and geographic borders. The sight of the film’s protagonists struggling to maintain their normal routines while confronted with an increasingly toxic atmosphere poignantly underscores their own complicated relationship with their environment. They struggle to protect themselves from the smog, even as it increasingly permeates their very being. Mattresses and facemasks provide a buffer between the individual and his or her external environment, helping protect the individual from outside contaminants. At the same time, however, both the abandoned mattress that the film’s guest workers find in a dumpster and the makeshift facemasks worn by Shiang-­chyi and the homeless man are literally made from rubbish and are saturated with the same contaminants against which the characters are trying to protect themselves in the first place. In this respect, the mattresses and facemasks mark a critical gap between the characters and their environment, while also representing the characters’ efforts to establish a meaningful connection with that same environment. To the extent that the risk of infectious germs or industrial pollutants represents a figurative

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wound separating the subject from his or environment, these masks and mattresses offer the possibility of provisionally bridging that resulting rift and thereby opening up a space of identification and desire—​functioning, in other words, as symbols of cinematic suture. While traditional cinematic suture describes a viewer’s attempt to bridge the figurative rift that opens up between him or her and the events that unfold on screen, the facemasks and mattresses in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone represent instead a critical gap between the individual and his or her environment. In helping protect the individual from the environment, however, these masks and mattresses simultaneously function as a reminder of the individual’s intimate imbrication with that same environment. As figurative membranes, the masks and mattresses bridge the gap between the individual and his or her environment, even as they structurally reaffirm the existence of that same gap. Moreover, the makeshift masks obscure the face, which is frequently the most salient marker of one’s identity, and specifically the mouth—​thereby inhabiting the characters’ ability not only to kiss, but even to speak. Given that, like most of Tsai’s films, I Don’t Wang to Sleep Alone features very little dialogue even when characters are not wearing masks, the masks in this instance offer a material correlate to that insistant silence, while at the same time functioning as a form of nonlinguistic communication in their own right. Just as Hong Kongers, during the SARS crisis, began using cleverly decorated facemasks not only for protection but also as a ironic fashion statements, the makeshift masks in Tsai’s film speak eloquently to the marginal and precarious position of its protagonists. Flood and Drought

Just as I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone revolves around a pair of characters (played by Lee Kang-­sheng) who may be seen as precise inverses of each other, two of Tsai Ming-­liang’s earlier films may similarly be viewed as mirror images of one another. The Wayward Cloud (Tianbian yi duo yun, 2005) unfolds during a pernicious drought and focuses on Taipei’s underground adult film industry, while The Hole (Dong, 1998) is set during a torrential downpour and depicts fin-­de-­siècle Taipei in the throes of a mysterious epidemic. Both works use an alienated



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setting to portray an unconventional and basically wordless romance between Hsiao-­kang and his corresponding female counterpart. Given that in Tsai’s films water is frequently deployed as a symbol of sexual desire—​and specifically of a polymorphously perverse desire that flows unpredictably between different human subjects and material objects—​the drought in The Wayward Cloud functions as a symbolic correlate of the affectless environment of the adult film industry that is the work’s ostensible focus, while also serving as an immediate catalyst for a new series of desires and attachments that develop as the work progresses. Despite the film’s explicit focus on pornography, for instance, the dominant sentiment of The Wayward Cloud is actually not erotic desire but rather a pervasive sense of alienation and disidentification. In scene after scene, Hsiao-­kang is observed acting in adult film shoots, his body mechanically going through the requisite motions of having sex, while his expression registers an attitude of stark disengagement from his surroundings. If a prolonged drought is one of the defining elements of The Wayward Cloud, meanwhile, its direct inverse can be found in the torrential downpour that inundates Taipei in The Hole. Commissioned by French television production company La Sept/ARTE for the collaborative international film project “2000: Seen By . . . ​,” The Hole is set in a Taipei that finds itself afflicted by a mysterious virus that reduces its victims to a cockroach-­like status, sending them scurrying around on their hands and knees in search of a dark hole in which to curl up. The city government is in the process of evacuating affected neighborhoods in an attempt to control the virus, while a handful of residents have chosen to defy the evacuation order and remain behind, including the film’s two protagonists—​Hsiao-­kang and a young woman (played by Yang Kuei-­mei) who lives in the apartment directly below him. Despite the physical proximity of their respective apartments, the two neighbors appear to be virtual strangers when the film begins, though as the work unfolds their lives become increasingly intertwined, the radical alienation associated with the epidemic providing an eerie backdrop for a highly unconventional romance. At the center of The Hole lies a physical hole—​one that has been dug in the middle of Hsiao-­kang’s living room by a plumber trying to trace the source of a leak in the ceiling of the apartment directly below.

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After exposing a water pipe under Hsiao-­kang’s floor, however, the plumber abruptly departs, leaving a gaping hole that extends straight through to the apartment beneath. Initially, this hole linking the two apartments functions as an extension of the various vectors of contagion that presumably facilitated the spread of the Taiwan Fever in the first place. Hsiao-­kang, for instance, returns home drunk one evening and throws up into the opening, covering Kuei-­mei’s furniture in the apartment below with vomit. Kuei-­mei, meanwhile, responds by spraying insecticide up through the same hole, filling Hsiao-­kang’s apartment with noxious fumes. Gradually, though, the hole morphs from a physical aperture into a symbolic conduit of desire and mediated attachment. Throughout most of the film, this state of mutual attraction that develops between the two neighbors is visible not so much in their daily encounters with one another—​which remain minimal and unremarkable—​but rather in a series of fantasy interludes in which one or both characters appear in short cabaret sequences, lip-­ synching to the songs of the popular mid-­century actress and singer Grace Chang. In these sequences, the two protagonists literally act out a complex array of emotions and sensibilities that they appear unable to articulate directly, with the animated roles they play in these interludes underscoring the comparative lack of affect in the primary diegetic plane of the film. The Wayward Cloud also alternates between a basically realistic primary narrative plane and a series of musical interludes that, like the ones in The Hole, use a fantasy realm to explore a set of emotions and desires that are foreclosed within the primary narrative. If the musical interludes in The Hole use covers of Grace Chang songs to explore issues of interpersonal attachment, however, the corresponding interludes in The Wayward Cloud focus more explicitly on sexual desire—​a nd specifically a perverse yet joyful sexuality that is notably lacking in the narrative line revolving around the porn industry. One early musical interlude, for instance, features several women dressed in bright red costumes dancing around an iron statue of Chiang Kai-­ shek, sensuously caressing his buttocks and crotch. Another fantasy sequence—​albeit not a musical interlude—​near the beginning of the film features Hsiao-­kang manually pleasuring a large and juicy half watermelon positioned between Shiang-­chyi’s legs, and she writhes



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with pleasure as he energetically fingers the juicy interior of the melon. Whereas in the masturbation scene from I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone Chen Shiang-­chyi’s character functions as a direct intermediary for Lee Kang-­sheng’s unconscious man and his mother, in this latter scene from the preceding year it is a succulent fruit that similarly functions as an intermediary between Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi herself. The Wayward Cloud concludes with a notorious sequence that revolves around a physical hole. At this point, Shiang-­chyi has followed Hsiao-­kang to an underground film set, where she observes him acting in a porn flick. In this particular scene, Hsiao-­kang is having sex with a woman who appears to be either unconscious or dead. Shiang­chyi is standing in an adjacent room, which is separated from the first by a partition wall with a large circular window. This outer room is empty except for life-­sized cardboard cutouts of a pair of China Airlines flight attendants, which are part of the Taiwan airline’s ubiquitous advertising campaign. The uniformed and impeccably groomed flight attendants with their professional smiles stand in stark contrast to Shiang-­chyi, who appears disheveled and has an expression of shocked disbelief as she stares at Hsiao-­kang through the window. Realizing for the first time that Hsiao-­kang works as a porn film actor, Shiang-­chyi watches the scene in astonishment through the ­circular window in the partition wall separating the two rooms. Even­ tually, Hsiao-­kang realizes that Shiang-­chyi is observing him and, while still mechanically having intercourse with the unconscious woman, he looks up at her through the circular window. Hsiao-­kang’s and Shiang-­chyi’s gazes meet, their mouths drop open, and their faces light up with expressions of what appears to be acute desire. As the camera zooms in on them, the rest of the crew working on the film set for the porn film disappear from view. Still naked, Hsiao-­kang gets up and walks over to the circular window, as Shiang-­chyi stands on the other side, her face pressed up against the window’s wooden grating and her mouth open. Hsiao-­kang proceeds to insert his erect penis into her mouth and begins fucking her, as she stands there with her eyes and mouth wide open and her hands hanging limply by her side. Eventually, Hsiao-­kang appears to ejaculate into Shiang-­chyi’s mouth, as a tear rolls down her cheek. While the precise emotional significance of this tear drop is uncertain—​it could represent sorrow, joy, or

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perhaps something else entirely—​at a purely visual level it resonates with the beads of sweat that can clearly be seen rolling down Hsiao-­ kang’s naked buttocks, as well as with the drop of ejaculate that he has presumably deposited in Shiang-­chyi’s mouth. Together, these three sets of bodily secretions symbolize the desire between Hsiao-­ kang and Shiang-­chyi, together with the horizon of possibility against which that desire unfolds. Like the juicy watermelon in the early watermelon scene, the drops of tears, sweat, and ejaculate in this final scene function as material supplements mediating between the two protagonists, while also functioning as a site of abjection that marks the limit-­point of their desire itself. The Hole similarly concludes with an ambiguous scene in which Kuei-­mei, who by this point has already succumbed to the Taiwan fever and is cowering in a corner of her apartment under mounds of paper towels, looks up and sees Hsiao-­kang’s arm—​bathed in bright light, as though emerging from a celestial sphere—​slowly reach down through the hole in the ceiling and offer Kuei-­mei a glass of water. Kuei-­mei accepts the glass, then reaches up and grabs the hand, letting it lift her up through the hole in her ceiling. Outside of the cabaret sequences, this is the first time in the film that Hsiao-­kang and Kuei­mei physically touch each other, and this contact through the hole in the ceiling clearly anticipates the final sequence of The Wayward Cloud a decade later, which also involves Hsiao-­kang reaching out to his female counterpart through an open hole. Like the corresponding sequence in The Wayward Cloud, moreover, the conclusion of The Hole is fundamentally ambiguous. On one hand, the final scene of The Hole may be viewed as a moment of salvation, a genuine rapprochement of the film’s two alienated protagonists. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a fantasy projection reminiscent of the cabaret sequences that punctuate the work. Under the latter interpretation, the connection between the two neighbors plays out along an imaginary plane, even as they become increasingly isolated as embodied individuals. From this perspective, the film’s final scene appears to represent the ultimate apotheosis of the film’s Taiwan fever, wherein the disease not only infects people’s bodies and shapes their physical environments, it also circulates from individual to individual



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in the form of shared fantasies that mask the realities of the epidemic itself. More generally, the film’s Kafkaesque Taiwan Fever functions as a figurative screen against which the work explores a broader array of sociocultural concerns. On one hand, the fictional disease may be interpreted as a localized backlash against the leveling forces of globalization, as infected victims experience an irrepressible urge to crawl into dark, damp recesses that symbolize a potential resistance to the hegemony of globalizing forces. On the other hand, the fever could also be seen as a symbol of globalization itself, insofar as the fever’s emergence on the eve of the new millennium suggests that it functions as an ironic mirror image of the so-­called Y2K bug that many feared could throw the world’s computer-­based infrastructure into chaos at the moment internal computer clocks that were only programmed to handle years with two digits tried to transition from the year 1999 to 2000. It is no coincidence that Tsai’s film was commissioned as part of an international film series seeking to examine how societies around the world were perceiving the turn of the millennium, and The Hole uses the fictional Taiwan Fever to reflect on global phenomena ranging from HIV/AIDS to the Y2K bug. The physical hole in the floor of Hsiao-­kang’s apartment and the mysterious Taiwan Fever represent inverse models for rethinking a process of cinematic suture, together with the broader possibilities of projective attachment that it represents. Like the hole in the floor of Hsiao-­kang’s apartment, the film’s Taiwan fever is initially presented as a figurative tear in the fabric of contemporary Taiwan society—​functioning as both a catalyst and as a symptom of the state of social disruption within which it is positioned. At the same time, however, this fictional virus offers the possibility of imagining a new nexus of social ties and connections, which in turn suggests the possibility of a radical reconceptualization of the social communities that one inhabits. In this respect, we find in the figure of the virus an alternate metaphorical model for approaching the process of cinematic suture. Whereas suture emphasizes a process of projective identification, this viral process we might call antisuture emphasizes instead a process of affective attachment that may prove simultaneously threatening and enabling.

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Similarly, the notorious final sequence of The Wayward Cloud invokes and simultaneously negates the very possibility of suture. The disruptive exchange of gazes between Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi causes Hsiao-­kang to abandon the (embedded) scene of the porn flick in which he is acting and approach Shiang-­chyi directly. Rather than pulling the embedded observer (in this case, Shiang-­chyi) into the scene that is in the course of being filmed, what we find instead is a process wherein Shiang-­chyi’s gaze pulls the actor (Hsiao-­kang) out of his original scene and into her own. Hsiao-­kang, of course, then goes even further and literally inserts himself into Shiang-­chyi’s open mouth, further dissolving the presumptive boundary between viewer and object. Simultaneously united and separated by the round hole in the wall, Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi in this final scene are positioned in a paradigmatically intimate yet profoundly alienated rela­­ tion­­ship. The result is a notoriously difficult scene that presents challenges for viewers, even as it offers a startlingly concrete model of visual spectatorship. The River

This theme of a mysterious disease with complex implications for processes of affective attachment is developed even more explicitly in The River (Heliu, 1996), which Tsai Ming-­liang released the year before The Hole. Widely regarded as a “very, very strange” work,5 The River features a family that—​as Tsai Ming-­liang himself has observed—​ “really should not exist.”6 The parents of the protagonist Hsiao-­kang are barely on speaking terms, as his mother (played by Lu Yi-­ching) carries on an extramarital affair with a porn film bootlegger, while his father (played by Miao Tien) periodically retreats to gay bathhouses for anonymous sexual intimacies with other men. Throughout most of the film, Hsiao-­kang himself suffers from a mysterious neck cramp, and his parents, in an increasingly desperate effort to help him, pursue a wide range of potential treatments—​including massages, injections, acupuncture, and even spirit divination. Although none of these remedies appears to be effective in curing Hsiao-­kang’s cramp, they do help illustrate the intertwined vectors of desire and alienation that run through the family itself.



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The River opens with a shot of an outdoor escalator leading from a subterranean passageway. Clearly visible at the top of the escalator is a large sign identifying the building as the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store and, though not specified in the film, the passageway out of which Hsiao-­kang emerges leads to an underground shopping area across from the Taipei railway station that happens to be located directly below a major thoroughfare called Zhongxiao xilu, or literally “West street of loyalty and filial piety”—​a name that ironically anticipates the film’s use of incest to interrogate conventional notions of filial piety. The escalator is initially empty, but after a few seconds a man and a woman appear at opposite ends. As Hsiao-­kang is riding the escalator down, he passes the young woman (played by Chen Shiang-­ chyi), who turns out to be an old acquaintance. They meet at the top and chat briefly, remarking that they haven’t seen each other for a couple of years. Then, Shiang-­chyi evidently invites Hsiao-­kang to visit a film shoot where she is working as an assistant, and he drives her there on his scooter. When Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi arrive at the site of the film shoot, which is located on the banks of the notoriously polluted Tamsui River, the film crew is in the process of trying to shoot a scene of a corpse floating down the river. The director (played in a cameo appearance by Hong Kong director Ann Hui) grows increasingly frustrated that the mannequin they are using to play the part of the corpse appears insufficiently realistic.7 Eventually, Ann Hui’s character suggests that everyone break for lunch, and over bento boxes she asks Hsiao-­kang if he would be willing to help out by playing the role of the corpse. Hsiao-­kang reluctantly agrees, and in the following scene he is seen wading gingerly into the middle of the river, where he proceeds to float facedown in the filthy water. After the film shoot, Shiang-­chyi takes Hsiao-­kang back to a hotel room to wash up. In the shower, he sniffs himself and appears to detect some foul-­smelling residue from the river, and therefore proceeds to use a toothbrush to carefully scrub the left side of his body—​including his left hip, left wrist, left forearm, left armpit, and left nipple. As he is doing so, he tilts his head awkwardly to the left in order to peer down at the suspect areas of his body. After Hsiao-­kang finishes his shower Shiang-­chyi returns to the hotel room, bringing a couple of

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cups of bubble tea and some snacks as a pretext to visit him. The camera then cuts to a scene of the two of them having sex while sitting naked on the floor of the hotel room. Shiang-­chyi is sitting in Hsiao-­kang’s lap, facing him, and throughout the entire scene the camera hovers over Hsiao-­kang’s right shoulder—​where Shiang-­chyi’s face is buried—​as Hsiao-­kang’s own head is tilted slightly to the left. The camera placement in this scene appears to mimic the familiar convention of the over-­the-­shoulder POV shot, which is frequently used to invite viewers to identify with the point of view of the character on-­screen. In this instance, however, the camera’s gaze doesn’t overlap with Hsiao-­kang’s, as one would normally expect, but instead focuses on the back of his shoulder—​which is to say, an area that is directly outside his own field of vision. This inversion of the familiar over-­the-­shoulder POV shot, accordingly, is used here to introduce not a specific point of view, but rather what one might call a point of blindness—​inviting the audience to look at what Hsiao-­kang himself is literally unable to see. Later, as Hsiao-­kang rides his scooter home from the hotel, his head is once again cocked awkwardly to the left—​leaving him in almost precisely the same posture that he had assumed a few hours earlier both while scrubbing himself in the shower and again while having sex with Shiang-­chyi. While in the earlier two instances there was an identifiable reason for why Hsiao-­kang’s head was leaning toward the left, in this latter scene on the scooter his neck appears to cramp up on its own accord, and it turns out that this is the first sign of the painful neck cramp that will afflict him throughout the remainder of the film. Given that the cramp develops just hours after Hsiao-­kang’s emersion into the polluted river, one may reasonably assume that it could be the result of some sort of environmental contaminant to which he was exposed in the water, though this connection between the river and the neck cramp is never confirmed within the film itself. If we view The River in the context of Tsai’s earlier oeuvre, however, a rather different set of potential explanations for Hsiao-­kang’s peculiar infirmity emerges. While Tsai was filming his debut television drama All the Corners of the World (Haijiao tianya, 1989), for instance, the actor Wang Youhui became violently ill after having



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been pushed into the Tamsui River, and three years later Lee Kang-­ sheng himself developed a debilitating neck cramp after filming Rebels of the Neon God.8 Although Tsai ended up cutting the scene containing Wang Youhui’s accident from All the Corners of the World and he had already finished filming Rebels of the Neon God before Lee Kang-­sheng’s own neck began cramping up, his subsequent thematization of Hsiao-­kang’s neck cramp in The River could be seen as an attempt to atone for his contribution to those earlier mishaps by reenacting them cinematically. Under this interpretation, Tsai’s memories of these incidents that took place under his directorial watch appear to cling to his psyche like the filth that taints Hsiao-­kang’s body following his ill-­fated plunge into the polluted Tamsui River, and consequently The River appears to have been partially motivated by a desire to expiate this symbolic guilt. The fictional character’s neck cramp, accordingly, may be viewed as a corporeal symptom of an earlier trauma that Tsai and Lee are collectively attempting to work through. To the extent that Lee Kang-­sheng’s real-­life neck cramp following the screening of Rebels of the Neon God is one of the factors that helped inspire Hsiao-­kang’s fictional neck cramp in The River, it is worth noting that Tsai Ming-­liang has proposed two rather different sets of explanations for the actor’s original symptom. First, Tsai claims at one point that the earlier cramp was a result of a porcelain shard that became embedded in Lee’s neck while he was filming an iconic scene in Tsai’s Rebels of the Neon God, in which Hsiao-­kang’s father (played, once again, by Miao Tien) hurls a bowl of rice at the wall above Hsiao-­kang’s head as the latter is dancing around spasmodically while pretending to be possessed by the Buddhist deity Nezha.9 Second, Tsai has also indicated that the cramp may be seen as a more general symptom of Lee’s inability “to adapt to the changes in his life, such as becoming involved in a filmmaking circle,”10 suggesting that the cause of the cramp was not in fact an alien object embedded in the actor’s neck but was rather Lee’s perception of himself as a foreign element within Tsai’s own “filmmaking circle.” By extension, Hsiao-­ kang’s neck cramp in The River is not only one of the film’s most distinctive visual motifs, it may also be seen as a symbol of a series of internal rifts that run through the work itself. Just as Tsai has shaped

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his cinematic oeuvre around Lee Kang-­sheng’s initial resistance to his directorial control, Hsiao-­kang’s neck cramp in The River functions as an indexical trace of the productive tension between actor and director on which the film itself is grounded. The hotel room sex scene discussed above marks the conclusion of the film’s eighteen-­minute prologue and is also Shiang-­chyi’s final appearance in the work. Immediately after Shiang-­chyi and Hsiao-­ kang reach sexual climax, the camera cuts from the dark hotel room to a similarly dark Taipei bathhouse, where a man is seen lying supine on a bench with his head and feet shrouded in darkness and an orange towel draped loosely over his waist. Another man emerges from the shadows and attempts to stroke the first man’s thigh, and the first man grunts softly but makes no discernible effort to move away. After this routine is repeated several more times, however, the second man loses interest and wanders off. Left alone in the room, the first man eventually sits up, and as he does so, his face finally moves into the light—​revealing him to be Hsiao-­kang’s father. In cinematographic terms, this encounter between the two men in the bathhouse closely resembles the preceding sexual encounter between Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi in the hotel room, in that both scenes are shot in a single long take in almost complete darkness and with no dialogue. In terms of their actual content, meanwhile, the two scenes initially appear to be almost precise inverses of one another. While in the hotel room scene Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi are presented as old acquaintances, in the bathhouse scene it is instead implied that the two men are complete strangers; and while in the hotel room we see a passionate heterosexual coupling, in the bathhouse we instead find a display of unconsummated homoerotic desire. These apparent contrasts, however, are actually not as straightforward as they might initially appear. Although the couple in the hotel room previously knew each other, for instance, they nevertheless seem to have little emotional connection to one another, and Tsai Ming-­liang himself has cited the fact that Hsiang-­chyi disappears from the film immediately following this particular scene as evidence of the emotional distance that separates her and Hsiao-­kang. Conversely, while anonymous contact appears to be one of the attractions of the encounter in the bathhouse, the remainder of the film suggests that Hsiao-­kang’s father



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is actually seeking a complicated form of emotional connection through these dark, faceless encounters. Even as the former acquaintances in the first scene appear to be using sex to seek a kind of anonymous interaction, accordingly, the two strangers in the second scene seem to be trying to find some sort of personal connection under the veil of anonymity. This latter bathhouse scene is the first of three homoerotic encounters between Hsiao-­kang’s father and a series of younger men that punctuate the remainder of the film at almost precisely forty-­minute intervals. While the first such scene involves an awkward and truncated encounter between Hsiao-­kang’s father and an unidentified man whom the father appears to be seeing for the first time, the second bathhouse scene features a more consensual interaction between the father and a different young man he picked up in front of a McDonald’s earlier that same evening. The third and final bathhouse scene depicts a tender and sensuous session between Hsiao-­kang’s father and a young man whom the father belatedly discovers to be Hsiao-­kang himself.11 This series of homoerotic encounters, accordingly, features a distinct progression from alienation to intimacy, and from anonymity to familiarity. In fact, the final encounter proves to be so intimate and so familiar that it is ultimately transformed into its precise opposite—​a quasi-­ incestuous episode that at first glance appears to be almost unthink­­ ably alienating, but which at the same time provides a lens through which the rest of the work may be viewed and understood. To appreciate the significance of the film’s incestuous encounter, it is useful to examine it in relation to this earlier series of bathhouse scenes, together with the contextual environment within which they are positioned. In particular, just as the first bathhouse scene, as discussed above, mirrors the hotel room sex scene that immediately precedes it, the second one is juxtaposed with a parallel sequence depicting the fractured domestic relationship between Hsiao-­kang’s parents. More specifically, the bathhouse encounter is mirrored by a preceding sequence in which Hsiao-­kang’s mother lends him her vibrator to massage his neck, and as the distinctive buzz of the device reverberates through the small apartment his father is seen lying in his dark bedroom. Clearly unnerved by the sound, the father eventually covers his face with a wet towel. The vibrator functions here as a figurative

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hinge between the mother’s unrequited passions and the father’s homo­­ erotic desires. It is immediately following the shot of the father lying in bed seemingly tormented by the sound of his wife’s vibrator as it resonates through the apartment, for instance, that we see him pick­ ­ing up a young man (played by Chen Chao-­jung) in front of a local McDonald’s. After a short interstitial shot of Hsiao-­kang back in the family kitchen shoveling rice into his mouth, there is another cut to Hsiao-­kang’s father and the unidentified younger man from the McDonald’s in a dark room in a bathhouse. The father is being masturbated by his new companion, but when he tries to pressure the younger man to perform oral sex on him, the latter abruptly gets up and walks out of the room. These juxtaposed shots of the privacy of Hsiao-­kang’s family home, on one hand, and of the public settings of the McDonald’s and the bathhouse, on the other, suggest not only a parallel between the sexual frustrations experienced by the mother (as represented by the vibrator she carries in her purse) and by the father (as represented by his repeated quests for anonymous same-­sex encounters), but also a tacit contrast between Hsiao-­kang’s own ravenous devouring of the rice and the anonymous young man’s refusal to performing oral sex on Hsiao-­kang’s father. As is true of many of Tsai’s other works, the characters’ relative silence in these scenes is displaced onto an almost festishistic fascination with mouths and orality—​with the non-­linguistic uses to which these mouths are put often speaking louder than words. The final bathhouse encounter featuring a quasi-­incestuous encounter between Hsiao-­kang and his father, meanwhile, represents what may be seen as a profound rift in the socioethical fabric of the film’s lived space, while at the same time marking a culmination of the quest for intimacy that Hsiao-­kang and his father have been pursuing throughout the work. This sexual encounter between father and son is, as Rey Chow has observed, an example of a scene that is “so challenging that it preempts one’s relationship to the entire film,”12 and virtually demands that the rest of the work be reassessed through the extremely peculiar lens it offers. Like the first two bathhouse encounters, this final scene is significant not only for its focus on sexual contact but also for the parallel set of shots with which the scene is directly juxtaposed. For instance,



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just as the father’s second bathhouse liaison is immediately preceded by a seemingly unrelated shot of Hsiao-­kang awkwardly eating rice at the family’s kitchen table, the third bathhouse meeting is interrupted by a cut back to the family’s apartment, where it is now Hsiao-­kang’s mother who is sitting at the kitchen table. After a pause, she begins devouring food from a take-­out box, whereupon she suddenly notices that a pool of water has formed under her feet. She traces the source to her husband’s bedroom, and when she opens the door she discovers sheets of water cascading down from the ceiling. She stares dumbfounded for several seconds and then abruptly slams the door. The next thing we see is Hsiao-­kang’s father, who has just turned on the light of the room in the bathhouse and is standing in the doorway, staring down in dismay at the son with whom he now realizes he has just inadvertently had intimate sexual contact. Like the film’s initial pair of hotel room and bathhouse sex scenes, these two juxtaposed shots of Hsiao-­kang’s mother and father standing in the doorways of their respective rooms are presented as mirror images of one another—​with the shot of Hsiao-­kang’s mother standing in the doorway of her husband’s bedroom and staring up at the water gushing down from the ceiling being precisely inverted in the following shot of Hsiao-­kang’s father standing in the doorway of the room in the bathhouse and staring down at his naked son lying at his feet. Moreover, while the first scene is structured as a conventional POV shot, with the camera positioned directly behind the mother’s right shoulder and oriented toward what she herself is seeing, the second mimics yet inverts the conventions of the over-­the-­shoulder POV shot—​with the father appearing as the object of a POV shot taken from Hsiao-­kang’s perspective. More specifically, the latter scene opens with Hsiao-­kang lying on the floor and outside the frame of the picture, and even after he sits up and moves in front of the stationary camera—​such that the camera is now positioned directly behind his right shoulder—​his body language nevertheless suggests that he doesn’t yet fully register the fact that the man standing over him is actually his father. The result is that the POV shot is used to show the audience a scene that Hsiao-­kang himself views but appears to be initially unable to comprehend. After a dramatic pause, the father steps forward and slaps Hsiao-­kang across

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the face, causing him to tumble backward and out of the frame. After several seconds, Hsiao-­kang clambers to his feet and rushes out the door, but even after he leaves the room the camera remains trained upward on his father, who is staring intently down at the spot on the floor where Hsiao-­kang had been lying—​a spot that has been left vacant except for the invisible presence of the camera itself. In this inversion of a conventional POV shot, the audience is implicitly encouraged to identify not with an embedded gaze within the film but rather with a site of absence that captures in miniature the film’s more general focus on conditions of loss and lack. It is precisely in the audience’s inability to projectively identify with the figure of Hsiao-­kang, accordingly, that a space opens up for them to productively reassess their relationship to the work as a whole. In the film’s final sequence, Hsiao-­kang and his father are in the room of a hotel where they are staying while Hsiao-­kang visits a doctor. They are lying silently back to back in the same bed, with what appear to be conflicted emotions on their faces. The next morn­ ­ing Hsiao-­kang’s father wakes up first, speaks briefly to someone on the phone, then leaves the room. After Hsiao-­kang gets up, he stretches and steps out onto a balcony overlooking the street, and as a medley of street sounds is heard off-­camera he stands on the sun­ ­lit balcony gently massaging his neck. He appears relaxed, almost peaceful. One of the most challenging aspects of The River involves the seemingly abrupt transition from the father and son’s mutual dismay in the final bathhouse sequence to Hsiao-­kang’s seemingly relaxed demeanor on the balcony in the final scene of the film. Some commentators have argued that the film actually concludes on an optimistic note. Rey Chow, for instance, describes the incest scene as a “rare instant of connectivity” resulting from a moment of “reciprocal tenderness”; Song Hwee Lim argues more broadly that “the ending of the film can only be read, however perversely, as hopeful—​and utopian”; and Fran Martin agrees that the work’s conclusion illustrates what she calls “paradoxically situated utopias . . . ​spaces of love reimagined.”13 Tsai Ming-­liang himself, viewing the film’s incest scene as if from the perspective of an outsider, reaches a similar conclusion:



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What I find very interesting is that after [the father and son have sex], it doesn’t seem so bad after all. When you see [them] embracing, you get the feeling that they have somehow found salvation, because they have probably never in their lives had the chance to embrace one another, hold hands, or even touch one another. But when they do so, I think you get a feeling of great calm, and warmth. I don’t know what it is, in the end [that they did].14

Placing himself in a position of alienated recognition similar to that which we find at the end of the bathhouse sequence itself, Tsai suggests here that what he sees in the “incestuous” encounter—​a nd, by extension, in the moment of mutual recognition at the conclusion of the scene—​is in fact a positive, liberating transformation of the father and son’s relationship. One way of assessing these various views of the film’s conclusion would be to consider the ways in which the work builds on and complicates the understanding of spectatorial dynamics developed in suture theory, which posits that the audience’s projective identification with the embedded gaze of film’s protagonists is often facilitated by the use of shot/reverse shots, over-­the-­shoulder shots, and other POV techniques.15 In The River, however, several key scenes invoke, yet strategically invert, these familiar cinematic techniques. In the hotel room scene at the end of the prologue, for instance, the over-­the­shoulder shot becomes instead an at-­the-­shoulder shot—​and rather than depicting what Hsiao-­kang actually sees, the camera lingers instead on what he literally cannot see. Similarly, in the final bathhouse scene, an over-­the-­shoulder POV shot is used to depict what Hsiao-­kang technically sees but initially appears unable to comprehend. After Hsiao-­kang leaves the room, meanwhile, this same modified POV shot comes to represent not Hsiao-­kang’s own gaze but rather the empty space he has just vacated. Even as both scenes implicitly invite viewers to projectively identify with an embedded gaze within the scene itself, they simultaneously present an alternative approach that could be regarded as a form of “antisuture,” wherein the audience does not simply identify with an embedded gaze within the work but rather it is invited to projectively identify with the structural independence of that same gaze. By

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rejecting the possibility of conventional suture, The River doesn’t preclude the possibility that viewers may establish a meaningful bond with the film’s contents but rather insists that this relationship will necessarily be decentered and multifaceted. Through a process of antisuture, the enters a cinematic space grounded on absence and erasure, and predicated on the intersection of a variety of disparate subject positions and embedded gazes. Whereas suture theory uses the metaphor of a wound to characterize the transition from a fantasy of an idealized connection between viewer and film to a subsequent realization of the fundamental gap that separates the two, what I am calling an antisuture model instead takes inspiration from a metaphor of infection to describe an inverse process whereby the viewer begins from a fundamentally alienated relationship to the cinematic work and then proceeds to reimagine his or her connection to the work in provocatively new ways. The same figure of disease and infection that helps render the body itself alien, accordingly, simultaneously offers the possibility of new forms of attachment with the broader community. These latter forms of attachment, meanwhile, are grounded not on a strategic negation of the original wound but rather on a calculated embrace of the figurative wound or illness, together with the conceptual possibilities that it represents. We find a glimpse of these new potentialities at the end of many of Tsai Ming-­liang’s films. Although the main body of each of the works discussed above revolves around an exploration of themes of alienation and social dislocation, each work nevertheless ends with an optimistic twist. From Kuei-­mei’s being lifted up through the hole in her ceiling in The Hole, to Hsiao-­kang and Shiang-­chyi’s union through the window opening in The Wayward Cloud, to Hsiao-­kang and his father’s oddly liberating bathhouse encounter in The River, each film concludes by alluding to new forms of contact that may, in turn, help generate new social configurations. These now configurations are deliberately left ambiguous and open-­ended, but in each case they derive from a node of internal alterity—​or what I have been calling homesickness. These thematics of homesickness, accordingly, opens up new perspectives on the space of the home itself, including not only the space of the family but also of the broader social configurations for which it stands.



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Coda: The Gaze

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is framed by two long takes of the unconscious man lying immobile in his bed. First, the film opens with a shot of him lying motionless in the bed that he will occupy throughout the entire film. His eyes are closed and his head is angled upwards, as a radio or tape player next to the window is playing the opening from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.16 In this particular aria, the protagonist Prince Tamino is given a portrait of the princess Pamina, and immediately falls in love with her, and this celebration of idealized desire begins with an emphasis on the ability of the portrait to present a vision of beauty “like no eye has ever beheld”: This image is enchantingly lovely, Like no eye has ever beheld! I feel it as this divine picture, Fills my heart with new emotion.

The remainder of the first act of Mozart’s opera describes Prince Tamino’s pursuit of Princess Pamina, while the second and final act describes a series of trials they must undergo in order to be together—​ throughout which Tamino remains bound by a vow of silence, unable to tell Pamina even why it is that he cannot speak to her. The portrait, accordingly, anticipates the male protagonist’s object of desire, and the ensuing romance may be seen as an extended fantasy projection inspired by his initial perception of the visual representation. Although it is unclear whether or not the unconscious man in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is capable of seeing anything at all, the mul­ ­tiple parallels between him and his apparent doppelganger, the homeless man, suggest the possibility that the entire subplot of the homeless man in the film may similarly be but a fantasy projection. As the unconscious man’s specular double, in other words, the homeless man appears to be living a life of which the unconscious man can only dream. This possibility that the film is structured around an embedded fantasy is suggested in a scene near the end of the work, in which the homeless man is seen holding a fishing rod and squatting next to the pool of water in the center of the abandoned building. A large butterfly alights on his shoulder, and he lets it perch on his finger for several

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seconds before it flies off again. This butterfly, which does not appear anywhere else in the film, may be an allusion to the well-­k nown story of the butterfly in the Zhuangzi, where Zhuangzi wakes up and wonders out loud whether it is he, Zhuangzi, who has just dreamed that he is a butterfly, or whether he is instead a butterfly dreaming that it is Zhuangzi. In the context of Tsai’s film, where one protagonist is in a state of permanent repose while his mirror image is in constant motion, the figure of the Zhuangzian butterfly invites the question of whether one character is the fantasy projection of the other, or vice versa. This question of the relationship between Lee Kang-­sheng’s two characters is also raised in the film’s final sequence. Shortly after the butterfly scene, Hsiang-­chyi and the homeless man have sex in the same abandoned building and then proceed to lug the mattress through the city streets and back up to Chyi’s bedroom. The homeless man falls asleep in Chyi’s bedroom and wakes up to discover Rawang sitting over him, holding the serrated edge of the lid of a metal can up to the homeless man’s throat. Although no words are exchanged between them, the implication is that Rawang feels betrayed by the homeless man’s intimacy with Hsiang-­chyi. In the following shot, the homeless man looks down through the cracks in the floorboard at the bedroom below, where the unconscious man is now lying on his back, presumably facing the same ceiling crack through which the homeless man is currently peering. While it remains unclear whether or not the unconscious man is capable of seeing anything at all, this virtual exchange of gazes is the closest that the two characters ever come to entering each other’s respective worlds. In this penultimate scene, the unconscious man is lying in the same bed as he was at the beginning of the film, though now the bed is draped in transparent plastic sheeting to protect against the smog. The unconscious man appears almost completely immobile throughout the entire thirty seconds of this shot, though in reality his brows are furrowing almost imperceptibly, as if he were registering surprise at what he is seeing.17 The camera then cuts not to a shot of Shiang-­ Chyi’s attic bedroom (as one would expect had this been a conventional POV shot from the perspective of the unconscious man) but rather to a nighttime shot of the pool of water in the abandoned



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building. For the first time in the film, the pool now fills the entire screen, but eventually this dark expanse is broken by the appearance of the same mattress that had been retrieved from the dumpster at the beginning of the film. The mattress slowly floats into the middle of the screen, with the homeless man lying in the center and Shiang-­chyi and Rawang sleeping on either side of him. The mattress—​both in this scene and throughout the film as a whole—​represents the work’s recurring concerns with issues of alienation, serendipitous encounter, and unrequited desire. It provides a site for the provisional union of three otherwise unrelated characters, despite the fact that the mattress is itself in a continual state of motion. Like Tsai, who describes himself as being able to fit in everywhere precisely because he feels that he doesn’t really belong anywhere, the mattress in the film is a symbol of a homesickness wherein one feels perpetually displaced and yet is able to declare almost any site a virtual home. After a long pause, a bright colorful object slowly drifts into the center of the screen. Shimmering in the darkness, this object is an ornamental bush made from multihued optical fibers—​a cheap trinket the homeless man had bought for Shiang-­chyi from a street vendor outside her coffee shop. Fiber-­optic communication is emblematic of the webs of information technology and finance capital that drive a contemporary process of globalization. In I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, however, this fiber-­optic bush functions not as a symbol of transnational networks of information and finance but rather as a decorative commodity positioned in the shadows of these same globalizing forces. More specifically, for Shiang-­chyi and the homeless man the significance of this bush lies not in its strictly monetary or decorative value but rather in its status as both a gift and an object of nostalgic investment. In this respect, the ornamental bush functions as a figurative beacon of light in a world in which conventional landmarks of progress and transformation are constantly in danger of being swallowed up in clouds of smog and haze. This focus, in the film’s final scene, on the discarded mattress float­ i­ ng in the dark pool underscores the degree to which both the pool and the mattress are composed of the vestigial traces of their environment and function as resting places for the film’s twin protagonists. These

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two membranous bodies parallel the figure of the eye itself, and it is suggested that the final image of the pool with the floating mattress represents not a real scene but rather a projection of vicarious fantasies in the mind’s eye of the unconscious man. The dark pool, under this interpretation, represents not the object of the unconscious man’s gaze but rather the imaginary surface of his eye itself, marking the overdetermined interstitial space through which he lives out an alternative life in the form of his specular double. The film’s final cut from the unconscious man staring up at the ceiling to the dark pool of water, meanwhile, invites a somewhat literal reading of the film’s Chinese title. While the work’s official English title, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, clearly resonates with the concluding shot of the three protagonists sleeping together on the floating mattress, the Chinese title, Heiyan quan, is a phrase that conventionally refers to the dark bags that develop under the eyes that result from a lack of sleep, but if read more literally, as “black eye circles,” the title could be seen as a reference to the dark pupil in the center of the eye—​or to the dark, circular pool in the center of the abandoned building. Under this reading, the pool—​a nd, indeed, the film as a whole—​is positioned as a correlate of the unconscious man’s dark, unseeing eyes, thereby offering a window into his soul.

8 •

Membranes

“Do you know what is the most immoral thing in the world?” the disenchanted Yu Baya, whose name literally means “Tooth-­Yanker Yu,” asks rhetorically at one point near the end of Yu Hua’s 2006 bestselling novel Brothers (Xiongdi). Answering his own question, he exclaims indignantly, “The human body is the most immoral thing!” Yanker Yu slapped the Human Anatomy volume in his hand, saying, “A healthy human body not only has so many organs, it has even more muscles, blood vessels, and nerves. I’m no longer young; how can I ever hope to learn them all? Do you not agree that this is truly immoral?”1

Faced with a new requirement that he must now pass a certification exam in order to continue working as a dentist—​despite having already spent most of his adult life practicing what the novel colloquially calls “tooth yanking”—​the fifty-­year-­old Yanker Yu decides to abandon the profession of dentistry altogether and, with the help of an unexpected windfall he has received from a timely investment, proceeds to travel the world. He soon grows bored with conventional tourism, however, and instead becomes increasingly fascinated with political activism, enthusiastically throwing himself into all of the

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protests and demonstrations he can find, regardless of their specific political orientation, policy objectives, or geographic location. Sharing a surname with Yu Hua, Yanker Yu could be seen as an ironic stand-­in for the author himself. Born in 1960 to a family of doctors, Yu Hua came of age during the Cultural Revolution and, like Yanker Yu, he worked as a dentist for a few years in the early 1980s before turning to literature. Owing perhaps to a combination of his medical training and his early exposure to the violent excesses that had characterized the Cultural Revolution, Yu Hua began his literary career with a series of experimental short stories featuring some of the most startling images of bodily desecration in modern Chinese literature. Human bodies, in these early works, are assaulted and defaced with impunity: repeatedly sliced, branded, castrated, eaten, and even reincarnated. In Yu Hua’s 1986 short story, “1986,” for instance, a history teacher from a small town disappears during the Cultural Revolution, and when he returns a decade later, he finds that his family and neighbors are all convinced he has already died. Unable to get the townspeople to acknowledge his existence, the former teacher goes to the center of the town where he imagines that he is enacting a version of each of ancient China’s traditional “five punishments” on the assembled townspeople. When the townspeople do not respond, the former teacher proceeds to carry out the same punishments on himself—​ including branding his own flesh, sawing off his own nose, attempting to chop off his own legs at the knee, and crushing his genitals with a large stone. Through these abject performances, the protagonist rehearses in symbolic form not only the destructive violence of the Cultural Revolution, but also contemporary Chinese society’s attempts to violently sever itself from its own past.2 Yu Hua’s story is structured around a set of semi-­legendary punishments that are said to have first appeared in the Zhou dynasty penal code. The specific punishments included in this list continued to evolve over time, with later regimes frequently substituting different punishments for the original ones, though continuing to refer collectively to the set as the “five punishments.” Some earlier scholars, meanwhile, pointed to the irony in the claim that the early Zhou,



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which was frequently held up as an ideal golden age in Chinese ­history, could have generated such a barbaric set of punitive practices. In an attempt to resolve this apparent paradox, these early scholars argued that the Zhou dynasty’s original punishments could not possibly have featured any actual corporal abuse but rather must have been purely symbolic performances of those same abuses.3 In particular, they posited that during this earlier period each of the five punishments started out as its own symbolic correlate, with castration, for instance, being represented by an official’s knee-­length apron with a piece cut off.4 However, the Warring States period philosopher Xunzi pointed out that this hypothetical golden age of symbolic punishment was almost certainly a retrospective projection invented by later commentators unwilling to believe that the Zhou dynasty could have generated such barbaric atrocities. Instead, Xunzi argues that these sorts of “symbolic punishments surely did not develop in well-­governed periods of antiquity, but arose rather out of the chaos of the present. The mode of order in antiquity was not at all like this.”5 In Yu Hua’s 1980s fiction, meanwhile, we similarly find a fascination with abstract violence that has its roots in what Xunzi, describing a much earlier historical moment, had called the “chaos of the present.” Like “1986,” many of Yu Hua’s short stories from the 1980s feature graphic descriptions of corporeal mutilation that attempt to reimagine the violent legacy of the Cultural Revolution and earlier eras from a new perspective. By sublimating the memory of that historical violence into a fictional form, these works offer a compelling perspective into how that earlier trauma continues to haunt the present. Just as corporal concerns continued to inform Yu Hua’s writings long after he abandoned his medical career, meanwhile, Yanker Yu’s own training in dentistry similarly shadows his subsequent transformation into a globetrotting political demonstrator. That is to say, Yanker Yu’s training in extracting teeth anticipates his subsequent fascination with the possibility of extracting from these demonstrations the political stimulation he desires, though without having to commit himself to any specific ideological position. In this sense, Yanker Yu represents the logical conclusion of the free-­floating political agent found in May Fourth immune system metaphors and mid-­century

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wuxia works. My own discussion of Yu Hua’s novel, however, focuses instead on the work’s thematization of symbolic barriers to this sort of sociopolitical movement, and specifically its fascination with hymens and their symbolic correlates. As a corporeal membrane, a hymen represents a paradigmatic bound­ a­ ry between a body and its external environment. A tiny fringe of tissue surrounding the vaginal opening, the hymen’s sociocultural importance vastly exceeds its strictly anatomical function. Hymens are regularly fetishized as symbols of corporeal integrity, even as the significance of that idealized integrity lies in the necessary possibility of its rupture. In Yu Hua’s novel, meanwhile, hymens are invested with an additional set of connotations, as they come to symbolize the borders of both the town in which the novel is set as well as of the Chinese nation itself. In this way, hymens in the novel are imagined as being both quintessentially intimate and personal but at the same time paradigmatically social and public. More abstractly, hymens are not only the product of a set of medical and sociopolitical discourses, they also mark a paradigmatic border region between the body and its environment, capturing the fundamentally indeterminate position of the body itself, as it can only be understood through the lens of constantly shifting cultural and epistemological paradigms. This border region is precisely a space of cultural production, wherein the relationship between reality and the conceptual models through which it is perceived is continually negotiated and renegotiated. The figure of the hymen, accordingly, is both a product of these discourses as well as an emblem of the cultural logic on which those same discourses are predicated. To put this another way, the hymen represents a space of homesick­ ­ness. Positioned at the margins of the body proper, the hymen is imagined as both helping guarantee the symbolic integrity of the body and its corresponding family structures, while at the same time offering a reminder of the processes of contamination and fragmentation on which the body’s imagined coherence is itself predicated. A kernel of internal alterity on which the coherence of the body, the family, and the national community is grounded, the hymen is a product of these processes of discursive and cultural production, and also a symbol of their conditions of possibility.



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Obscene Origins

The opening scene of Brothers is set roughly in the contemporary moment, with the protagonist Baldy Li sitting on a gold-­plated toilet seat and daydreaming about the possibility of purchasing a ride on a Russian Federation rocket and traveling into orbit. While this fantasy is initially presented as the apotheosis of the vast wealth Baldy Li has managed to acquire over the preceding two decades, the image is nevertheless bittersweet, as Baldy Li quickly realizes that the sight of the planet from space would merely cause him to “choke up on realizing that he had no family left down on Earth.” This poignant reminder of Baldy Li’s loved ones then inspires a double flashback—​with the narrative jumping back first to a day in 1972, when the young Baldy Li was nabbed while surreptitiously peeking at women’s bottoms in a public toilet, and then back again to another day fourteen years earlier, when his father had tried a similar stunt. While Baldy Li’s own attempt to glimpse the women’s posteriors concludes with him being apprehended and publicly shamed, his father’s earlier experiment ended with his father falling into the cesspool beneath the latrine and drowning. It was on that same day, and quite possibly as a result of the shock of seeing her husband die, meanwhile, that Baldy Li’s mother went into labor and gave birth to Baldy Li himself. From that fateful day in 1958 when Baldy Li’s father died and Baldy Li was born, Brothers proceeds to trace the lives of Baldy Li and his step-­brother Song Gong, whose father Baldy Li’s mother marries several years later. Over the next four decades—​through the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, the Reform Era in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally to the early twenty-­fi rst century—​the two stepbrothers struggle to adapt to the constantly shifting economic and political environment, with Baldy Li eventually becoming one of the richest businessmen in the region even as Song Gang is gradually reduced to a mere shadow of his former self. Through it all, however, the perverse conjunction of erotic and scatological concerns foregrounded in Baldy Li’s original act of peeping at women’s bottoms in the public toilet functions as a leitmotif to which the novel repeatedly returns.

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Of the five butts the young Baldy Li glimpsed that day in the outhouse, four are described as being comparatively unattractive, while the fifth belongs to a seventeen-­year-­old local beauty named Lin Hong. At the precise moment that Baldy Li’s gaze is creeping over Lin Hong’s tailbone toward her genitals, however, an older boy unceremoniously pulls him up by the scruff of the neck and proceeds to humiliate him by revealing his voyeurism to the entire town. Years later, after Baldy Li has been appointed director of a local factory for handicapped workers and begun to enjoy considerable success, the seed of desire planted by this transgressive glimpse makes an uncanny return when he becomes determined to seduce and marry Lin Hong. Baldy Li recruits his stepbrother Song Gang to assist him in carrying out one bizarre seduction stratagem after another, even as it becomes increasingly obvious that Lin Hong is utterly repulsed by him. At the same time, however, she grows quite fond of Song Gang, and it turns out that the feeling is mutual. Eventually, Song Gang makes the agonizing decision to sever his relationship with his brother so that he may pursue Lin Hong on his own. When Lin Hong and Song Gang subsequently get married, Baldy Li responds to the news by going to a doctor to demand a vasectomy—​ reasoning that if he cannot be with Lin Hong, then he has no intention of having children with anyone else either. The vasectomy renders Baldy Li sterile but not impotent, and he proceeds to maintain a very active sex life. More importantly, the operation marks the beginning of a process of sublimation that will ultimately yield him unimaginable wealth. First, Baldy Li works as the director of a factory staffed entirely by disabled workers, where he manages to engineer one economic miracle after another, thereby bringing the factory extraordinary profits. After a few years, he decides to quit his job at the factory in order to start a clothing business, but the latter venture fails spectacularly. Baldy Li then tries to be reappointed to his original position in the factory, and as he is protesting outside the county government building demanding his former job back, he begins collecting bottles and other discarded items, from which he begins to develop an extremely lucrative trash collection and recycling network.



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This new recycling enterprise earns Baldy Li a vast fortune and makes him a local celebrity. He continues promiscuously sleeping around until one day more than thirty women show up, claiming that he is the father of their children and demanding that he provide child support. Although Baldy Li doesn’t necessarily deny having had sexual relations with the women in question, he nevertheless insists that the children are definitely not his. The women spend a month demonstrating outside the main gate of Baldy Li’s recycling company and then proceed to file a lawsuit against him. In court, Baldy Li listens politely to the women’s demands for over two hours, but eventually he grows bored with the proceedings and pulls out his decade-­old vasectomy records, thereby presumably proving that he could not possibly have fathered any of the children in question. The courtroom is immediately thrown into an uproar by this revelation, whereupon Baldy Li proceeds to make emotional speech about how, despite his notorious promiscuity over the years, he has actually never truly been loved: “Today I have reached an epiphany and realized, to put it coarsely, that not until you’ve slept with a woman with her hymen intact can you say that you’ve really slept with a woman. Or, to put it more elegantly, it is only after you have slept with a woman who genuinely loves you that you can be said to have really slept with a woman. The sad truth of the matter is that there hasn’t been a single woman who has genuinely loved me. And so it doesn’t matter how many women I’ve slept with. I might as well have been sleeping with myself. . . .” (vol. 2, 290/453)

Baldy Li concludes by thanking the women who brought the suit against him and announcing that he will even pay each of them a thousand yuan to compensate them for the time they spent demonstrating outside of his company. One of the spectators present at the court proceedings is a man known as Writer Liu, who fancies himself one of the town’s two Men of Letters. Baldy Li’s emotional speech at the end of the trial inspires Writer Liu to write an article melodramatically describing Baldy Li’s lament that, despite his vast fortune, he has nevertheless been unable

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to find true love. In particular, Writer Liu claims that Baldy Li has thrown himself into several hundred romantic affairs in his quest for love, though without managing to find a single virgin. Writer Liu then reimagines the original scene of the young Baldy Li peeking at Lin Hong’s bottom, although in Liu’s version what actually happened was that as Baldy Li was squatting down to relieve himself a key accidentally slipped out of his pants pocket, and therefore it was actually as Baldy Li was leaning over to retrieve the key that he inadvertently happened to catch a glimpse of Lin Hong’s bare bottom. Writer Liu’s revisionist account spreads virally throughout the country, with the essay about Baldy Li’s search for virgin hymens coming to function as a kind of virtual hymen in its own right—​a figurative membrane mediating between the insular community of Liu Town and the rest of the nation. Writer Liu’s article stimulates a surge of media interest in Baldy Li, as reporters from around the country stream into Liu Town to interview him. Pleased with this response, Baldy Li appoints Writer Liu to serve as his personal PR agent. Ironically, Writer Liu’s article, together with the media interest it attracts, inspires a surge of love letters from self-­avowed virgins from around the country, and Writer Liu’s first task as Baldy Li’s PR person is to sort through the resulting mountain of mail. Writer Liu begins reading sections of the love letters out loud to Baldy Li, who quickly becomes so addicted to these missives that he needs to hear them all day long, as if they were a kind of “spiritual heroin.” In this way, Writer Liu comes to function as a boundary zone between Baldy Li and these “virgin letters” about pristine hymens. In fact, Baldy Li becomes so infatuated with this spiritual heroin that he begins metonymically addressing Writer Liu himself as “virgin letters”—​calling out plaintively, “Virgin letters, where are you? Where the fuck have you gone?” When the reporters who flocked to Liu Town following the publication of Writer Liu’s initial article eventually begin to lose interest and drift away, a distressed Baldy Li discusses the situation with Writer Liu, who suggests that the reporters “are like dogs, rushing to wherever there is a bone.” Baldy Li therefore becomes determined to make himself a “bone” in order to lure the reporters back, which is how he comes up with the idea of hosting a “National Hymen Olympic



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Competition.” Sure enough, the news of this proposed competition spreads like wildfire, attracting a frenzy of reporters who then mediate between Liu Town and the rest of the nation. Standing at the center of this double nexus of borders and boundary regions, meanwhile, is Baldy Li, who imagines himself as a figurative bone to be consumed quasi-­cannibalistically by the visiting reporters. Yu Hua apparently got the idea for this competition, which subsequently comes to be known as a National Virgin Beauty Contest, from the flurry of beauty pageants that had begun to sprout up around China just as he was writing the novel. After having been banned in China for more than half a century, beauty pageants returned with a vengeance in the early 2000s. China began sending representatives to compete in the Miss World pageant in 2001, the same year China joined the WTO, and just two years later, in September 2003, Hainan Island held a national beauty pageant as a prelude for hosting the nation’s first-­ever Miss World pageant in November of that same year. China went on to host five of the next ten Miss World pageants, in addition to a variety of regional, national, and international pageants—​ including a Tourism Queen International Pageant, a Top Model of the World competition, as well as a National Contest of the Beauty of the Gray-­headed, for contestants over the age of fifty-­five. There was even a Miss Artificial Beauty pageant for women who had received cosmetic surgery, wherein the focus of the pageant becomes not female beauty per se, but rather the construction of that same beauty. When a reporter in the novel asks why there is a need for the National Virgin Beauty Contest that Baldy Li has proposed, however, Writer Liu does not mention this surging popularity of pageants in China and instead explains more idealistically that his pageant will help “promote traditional Chinese culture; increase the self-­confidence and self-­esteem of today’s women; and also make them healthier and more hygienic.” The reporter then asks what precisely Liu means by more “hygienic,” and Liu explains that, “The hymen plays a very important role in preventing the invasion of foreign microbes, protecting the internal reproductive system, and preserving the body’s reproductive ability” (vol. 2, 316/477). Explicitly juxtaposed with a nation­ ­alistic concern with “promot[ing] traditional Chinese culture,” this latter emphasis on the “hygienic” properties of the hymen intertwines ­concerns

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with the health of women and the health of the nation. As with the early twentieth-­century immunological allegories developed by Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and others, the “foreign microbes” to which Writer Liu alludes here refer not only to actual sexually transmitted diseases but also more generally to the foreign influences that threaten the ostensible purity of the Chinese body politic. The irony, though, is that the institution of the modern beauty pageant that Baldy Li is proposing to use to help celebrate the importance of these hygienic hymens is itself a “foreign” import, and consequently may be seen as a symbol, in geopolitical terms, of the same metaphorical microbes against which the hymen is ostensibly helping protect the body in the first place. Despite the novel’s emphasis on the symbolic importance of hymens, however, it turns out that few if any of the women who come to compete in Baldy Li’s virgin beauty pageant are actual virgins, and instead many of them have had their hymens surgically reconstructed. With this thematization of hymen surgery, Yu Hua is clearly satirizing the increasing popularity in China of cosmetic surgical procedures, includ­ ­ing not only hymenoplasty (reconstructing one’s hymen) but also operations ranging from blepharoplasty (adding an extra fold to one’s eyelids) to osteodistraction (lengthening one’s legs). At the same time, however, Yu Hua’s satire also cuts deeper, articulating an incisive critique of China’s attempt to reposition itself within the international arena. One of the implicit targets of the latter critique may be found in the name Baldy Li originally offers for the competition: “National Hymen Olympic Competition,” suggesting that the fictional pageant functions as a commentary on Beijing’s preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games. More specifically, the novel’s emphasis on artificial hymens implies that Beijing’s own attempts to improve its public image in anticipation of hosting the Olympics amounts to merely a superficial, cosmetic adjustment of the nation’s appearance as opposed to a more fundamental transformation of the government’s core values. Even as these artificial hymens implicitly underscore the fundamentally artificial nature of the national form, they simultaneously reaffirm the symbolic boundaries on which a conventional vision of the nation is itself predicated. Not only do the hymens mirror contemporary China’s attempts to (re)construct an external veneer of political



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“purity” for the benefit of the international community, they simultaneously embody a dialectics of transnationalism and protectionism. This is particularly evident in the artificial hymens hawked in Liu Town by an itinerant salesman named Zhou You—​or literally “Wandering Zhou”—​who comes to Liu Town on the eve of the virgin beauty competition attempting to make a quick buck selling “health products.” Repeatedly identified in the novel as a charlatan, or more specifically as a “jianghu charlatan,” Zhou You arrives virtually penniless but full of tall tales about how many languages he can speak and how many countries he has visited. He also brings with him two large cardboard boxes full of artificial hymens, which he proceeds to sell to the town’s women and the visiting “virgins” as a cheaper alternative to hymen reconstruction surgery. Designed to be inserted into the woman’s vagina so that they would then rupture during sexual intercourse and release a blood-­like liquid, these artificial hymens create an illusion of virginity precisely at the moment when that same virginity is itself ostensibly in the process of being lost. Shortly before coming up with the idea for the virgin beauty competition, Baldy Li had a surreal vision of “all of the nation’s hymens lined up into a Great Wall, like so many troops standing at attention.” This symbolic association between women’s hymens and China’s most famous monument is reinforced by the fact that in addition to imported Joan of Arc hymens, the other brand of artificial hymens that Zhou brings with him are domestic Lady Meng Jiang ones, named after a Chinese folkloric figure closely associated with the Great Wall. There are many different versions of the Lady Meng Jiang legend, but most present Meng Jiang as a devoted wife determined to take some padded winter clothing to her husband, who is part of a work brigade that is helping build the Great Wall. Upon arriving at the Wall, however, Meng Jiang discovers that her husband has already died and been buried beneath the structure. She begins wailing inconsolably, and her tears convince heaven to destroy that particular section of the Wall, uncovering her husband’s bones. Legend holds that this section of the Wall was fated to never be whole again and instead would inevitably collapse again as soon as it was rebuilt. Viewed in contemporary political terms, accordingly, Meng Jiang symbolizes the sacrifices that China’s women have been expected to make for the nation, while her dead

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­ usband represents the marginalized populations that have been swept h aside in China’s current efforts to remake its public image. These parallels between hymens, Baldy Li’s virgin letters, and the national media underscore the significance of the act of reading as a means of negotiating the relationship between different sociocultural spheres. Just as the May Fourth New Youth texts used the metaphor of reading to describe the process by which the immune system differentiates between healthy tissue and harmful pathogens, Yu Hua’s Brothers similarly uses the figure of the hymen to examine bulwarks of individ­ ­ual and collective self-­identity. More specifically, even as it is the literal act of reading Baldy Li’s “virgin letters” and related media reports that enables Liu Town to reconnect to the national community, hymens sim­ ­ilarly represent a symbolically overdetermined space onto which Baldy Li and others may project a wide array of concerns with bodily and national integrity. These hymens represent not only an ideal of purity and coherence, but also the processes of rupture and contamination that the hymens themselves make possible. In other words, these hymens—​ together with the discourses within which they are embedded—​represent a space of homesickness, a kernel of alterity and instability at the heart not only of a set of corporeal and familial ideals, but also of a corresponding vision of community and the social imaginary. This spectacle of reconstructed hymens, meanwhile, can be traced back to Baldy Li’s vasectomy and to Writer Liu’s own revisionist account of Baldy Li’s childhood. On one hand, both the vasectomy and the hymen reconstruction surgeries are quintessentially private and invisible procedures that are subsequently made public, and which themselves have the effect of eliding traces of one’s sexual past (either by erasing the visible evidence of a torn hymen or by obviating the possibility that children might be used as evidence of a prior sexual encounter). On the other hand, the process of historical revisionism and amnesia connoted by the reconstructed hymens parallels quite precisely Writer Liu’s own revisionist account of Baldy Li’s childhood that led to the competition in the first place. In a curious way, therefore, the physical key that Writer Liu strategically inserts into Baldy Li’s outhouse narrative comes to function as a metaphorical key for rereading Baldy Li’s past. Introduced into Baldy Li’s story as a foreign, external element (one that is completed fabricated by Writer Liu) the



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key and its corresponding narrative quickly transforms Baldy Li’s public image, and even his own self-­perception. Yu Hua’s novel also gestures more generally to the role of memory and amnesia in the constitution of personal and collective histories. A memory typically involves the recognition of a causal chain linking together different events, and simultaneously requires the suppression of alternate causal chains. At a personal level, these processes may play themselves out through a pattern of repression, sublimation, and neurotic return, while at a national level they may manifest themselves through a strategic elision of alternative historical visions. In other words, in order to maintain some semblance of coherent identity, nations must rely, as Ernst Renan has famously argued, on a process of strategically “forgetting history”—​which is to say, forgetting alternate historical narratives that necessarily underlie any contemporary vision of the nation.6 These repressed alternate historical narratives, however, are arguably never truly forgotten, but rather continue to occupy a subterranean existence within the individual and collective psyche—​capable of resurfacing in unexpected ways. It is significant, for instance, that the obscene amount of wealth Baldy Li has managed to acquire by the time he hosts the virgin beauty pageant is itself predicated on a twin experience of loss and abjection. On one hand, Baldy Li’s new fortune is directly rooted in his earlier loss of Lin Hong to his brother Song Gang, just as the Virginal Beauty Competition is itself rooted in Writer Liu’s narrativization of that same loss in the article he wrote about Baldy Li’s court appearance. On the other hand, Baldy Li’s fortune is grounded on the scraps and debris that his fellow townspeople discard while he is petitioning in front of the county government building. Dressed in tattered clothes and carrying out a public protest that others can’t comprehend, Baldy Li presents an evocative parallel with the ghostly history teacher in Yu Hua’s short story “1986.” Whereas the history teacher is an embodiment of the townspeople’s systematic repression of their memories of the Cultural Revolution in their pursuit of economic development, Yu Hua’s scrap collection, by contrast, represents the dark underbelly of capitalist development itself. In transforming discarded trash into new wealth, Baldy Li functions here as an anthropomorphized version of the May Fourth era’s

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social metaphor of immunological white blood cells. At the same time, Baldy Li’s focus on recycling underscores the dialectical relationship between tradition and innovation, and between economic development and planned obsolescence. Economic development is contingent on a continual process of reappropriation and reinvention, and therefore it is fitting that it is precisely this new recycling venture which enables Baldy Li to go from abject poverty to vast wealth. Like the discarded scraps that Baldy Li collects and resells, he is thereby able to similarly reposition himself and give himself new value within the existing economy. Baldy Li’s spectacular success as a manager and entrepreneur stands in stark contrast to Song Gang’s own slide into increasingly degrading jobs. For instance, after Song Gang is laid off from his job at a state-­owned factory, he works for a while on a dock helping unload ships until he injures his back. Later, he does a stint in a cement factory until the cement dust nearly destroys his lungs. Eventually, he leaves Liu Town altogether, accompanying Zhou You to sell “health products” in southern China, and it is with Zhou You that Song Gang endures what the novel presents as the ultimate indignity in his quest for profit—​allowing himself to be given female breast implants so that he may serve as a walking billboard for Zhou’s spurious breast enlargement cream. Even as Baldy Li earns a fortune from a business predicated on transforming discarded commodities from one form to another, Song Gang’s slide into abjection is emblematically captured by his own process of self-­transformation into a virtual commodity. After spending more than a year wandering through what the novel calls the jianghu of southern China attempting to earn money on behalf of his wife, Lin Hong, Song Gang finally returns to Liu Town, where he discovers that while he was away Lin Hong entered into a torrid sexual affair with Song Gang’s brother, Baldy Li. After sleeping together for three months, Lin Hong and Baldy Li decided to travel to Shanghai to give Lin Hong hymen reconstruction surgery—​so that Baldy Li might thereby be able to realize his long-­standing obsession of having a “virginal” sexual encounter with Lin Hong before finally terminating their relationship. These elaborate preparations culminate in Baldy Li and Lin Hong enjoying a “first night” together in Liu



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Town after returning from Shanghai. As the adulterous couple is in the middle of their subsequent three-­day sexual marathon, however, they unexpectedly receive a phone call from Writer Liu informing them that for more than three hours Song Gang’s corpse has been lying in front of his and Lin Hong’s front door, where it was deposited after having been found on some nearby train tracks. It turns out that, after a week of meticulous preparations, Song Gang lay down across the train tracks and let an oncoming train to slice his body in half—​ dramatically symbolizing the degree to which throughout much of his adult life he had been relentlessly pulled in opposite directions by his family and loved ones. Song Gang’s suicide marks the end not only of Baldy Li’s romance with Lin Hong but also of the main narrative of the novel itself. The work then concludes with an extended epilogue that returns the narrative to where it began—​with Baldy Li sitting on the toilet and fantasizing about traveling into orbit aboard a Russian Federation spaceship, from which he imagines he would then peer down at the earth stretched out below him and wistfully recall his family and loved ones. Baldy Li’s dream of surveying his entire life from outer space mirrors the conflation of visual mastery and visual pleasure that runs through the work. From his paradigmatic act of peeping at women’s butts in the public toilet as a boy, he developed a fascination with hymens that becomes intricately intertwined with his obsession with visual mastery. When Baldy Li sleeps with two putative virgins who have come to town to compete in the virgin beauty competition, for instance, he comes to bed armed with a magnifying glass, a telescope, and a microscope he has borrowed from the local hospital; and the final time he sleeps with Lin Hong, he similarly arrives wearing a miner’s helmet with a mounted headlight, with which he hopes to examine Lin Hong’s surgically reconstructed hymen. In each instance, the jouissance associated with the sexual encounter is mediated and framed by an elaborate emphasis on scopic mastery. For Baldy Li, this scopophilia represents a desire for purity and control, while at the same time functioning as a reminder of the abject circumstances of his original voyeuristic episode as a boy in the public outhouse. Baldy Li’s fantasy of being able to view the earth from space resonates with what Martin Heidegger, in his seminal 1936 essay “The

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Age of the World Picture,” identifies as one of the defining qualities of the “modern age”: The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The world picture (Bild) now means the structured image (Gebild) that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets forth.7

Heidegger argues that this process of picturing the world constitutes not merely a straightforward act of representation but more importantly marks a transformation in how we conceive of the world in the first place. He argues that the “world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture.” The act of picturing the world, in other words, involves not merely the creation of a visual signifier but also a fundamental reimagining of what the world is in the first place. Heidegger concludes that this process of “modern representing” has equally important implications for the way in which people themselves come to be situated as modern subjects, and specifically how they understand their relationship to the world they inhabit. A concrete example of this understanding of the world picture—​ one that follows directly from Heidegger’s argument though which, in its particulars, Heidegger could hardly have directly anticipated when he composed his essay in 1936—​may be found in the later popularity of photographs of the earth taken from outer space. As early as 1948, the astronomer Fred Hoyle is reported to have foretold that “once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . ​a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”8 This prediction was dramatically realized twenty years later when, on Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 mission was completing its fourth orbit of the moon when they saw, suspended over the lunar horizon, the earth—​a vibrant, colorful orb starkly contrasted with the barren and lifeless surface of the moon in the foreground. The ship’s crew took several photographs of the scene, of which the now-­iconic Earthrise photograph was first published in January 1969 and is widely regarded as having played a critical role in helping catalyze the emerging environmental movement. For instance, it was in September 1969, just nine months after the photograph was first published, that John



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McConnell proposed to the UNESCO Conference on the Environment the idea of a global holiday promoting environmental concerns, and in April of the following year, the first Earth Day celebration was held. The Earthrise photograph and others like it played a key role in promoting environmental awareness by offering a tangible vision of the fundamentally bounded and fragile quality of the global ecosystem. In Brothers, meanwhile, Baldy Li’s fantasy of viewing the earth from space is linked to a reassessment not of environmental issues but rather of the interpersonal relationships that have shaped his life. Throughout the novel, Baldy Li appears to be continually seeking mean­ ­ingful connections with those around him, while at the same time acting in a way that leaves him increasingly isolated. These inverse tendencies converge in his scopic obsession, insofar as his desire to view Lin Hong’s reconstructed hymen symbolizes his long-­standing desire to connect with her in the most intimate way possible, while simultaneously transforming her into a depersonalized object of the gaze. Like the unconscious man’s gaze in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Baldy Li’s scopophilia in Brothers simultaneously links him to and distances him from his own social environment, while at the same time representing the very conditions of possibility on which that social environment is itself predicated. Through the act of viewing, Baldy Li not only incorporates his environment into his consciousness and psyche, he simultaneously helps frame how that same environment may be conceived and reimagined in the first place. The Seventh Day

Published in 2013, The Seventh Day (Di qi tian) was Yu Hua’s first novel since Brothers.9 Just as Brothers concludes with Baldy Li figuratively looking back over the preceding four decades of his life, The Seventh Day describes a recently deceased forty-­one-­year-­old protagonist, Yang Fei, revisiting and remembering key people and moments from when he was alive. From a liminal position at the outer margins of life itself, the novel reflects on the economies of information and affect that underlie modern society as we know it. The premise of Yu Hua’s new novel is that if people are left unburied when they die, they will be condemned to inhabit a penumbral region

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until their corpse is successfully interred. In this interstitial realm, they continue to occupy a spectral version of their original body, which is marked by the injury or disease that killed them and which gradually decays as an actual body would. The inhabitants of this netherworld do not appear to be particularly troubled by the condition of their bodies, and they remain able to move around and communicate with one another even after they have become reduced to mere skeletons. The characters’ alienated relationship to their bodies, meanwhile, mirrors their increasingly alienated relationship to their own emotions, and as they become distanced from the feelings they had when they were alive, they increasingly come to rely on stories and memories in order to vicariously experience a version of their former life. The novel alternates between descriptions of Yang Fei’s encounters with the spirits of others who have already died and his recollection of his experiences from when he was alive. For instance, the first chapter revolves around a description of Yang Fei’s experiences leading up to his death. We are told that a little over a year earlier, Yang Fei’s father had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, whereupon Yang Fei sold his house and quit his job in order to pay for his father’s treatment and look after him full time. One day, however, Yang Fei’s father left the hospital and disappeared into the city, apparently so that he would no longer be a burden on his son. Yang Fei was still searching for his father when a fire and explosion destroyed the restaurant where he happened to be having lunch. He dies on the scene, and one of his primary objectives upon reaching the netherworld is to try to track down his father’s specter (assuming that by this point his father may have already passed away as well). It turns out that the father who disappeared was actually not Yang Fei’s birth father but rather another man who took him in immediately after he was born. Yang Fei’s mother had been riding a train when she abruptly went into labor. Not realizing what exactly was happen­ing, she went to the train’s restroom and proceeded to give birth while sitting on the toilet. Given that toilets in Chinese trains at that time typically consisted merely of a hole in the floor, the newborn slipped right through the opening onto the tracks below. The train happened to be stopped at the time, and the baby was unharmed, though the mother—​who by this point was virtually incoherent from the shock—​



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was unable to explain to anyone what had just happened, and consequently the train departed the station and left the infant lying on the tracks. A man working at the station happened to find the infant and took it home, and when no news was immediately forthcoming regard­ ­ing the identity of the baby or its mother, the train station employee decided to raise the child himself. Yang Fei, however, came to regard this man as his real father. Even after Yang Fei’s biological mother finally succeeded in tracking him down many years later and took him back home with her, he found it difficult to adjust to living with his “real” family, and after only a few weeks he returned to the man he continues to regard as his real father. Rather than treating hereditary ties as a necessary basis for kinship, accordingly, The Seventh Day instead emphasizes the degree to which kinship is grounded on a set of fundamentally social relations. Just as Xu Sanguan, in Chronicles of a Blood Merchant, comes to affirm his relationship with Yile despite not being Yile’s biological father, and Baldy Li and Song Gang, in Brothers, treat each other as brothers despite not being biologically related, in The Seventh Day the social relationship between Yang Fei and his father trumps that which exists between Yang Fei and his biological mother. In this respect, the penumbral region in which Yang Fei finds himself after his death may be viewed as a crystalized instantiation of this phenomenon. Here, everyone appears not as biological organisms but rather as spectral figures, and as the virtual bodies of these spirits gradually decay the spirits themselves are left with nothing but the bare memories of the relationships they had when they were alive. The result is a situation in which death does not represent the antithesis of life but rather offers a ground for rethinking the social basis of life itself. Similarly, the netherworld that these spectral bodies inhabit comes to symbolize not only a space of radical alterity and self-­alienation, but also the possibility of imagining new forms of belonging. This netherworld, in other words, is a paradigmatic articulation of the condition of homesickness that has haunted Chinese cultural production throughout the long twentieth century. The Seventh Day incited a considerable amount of controversy when it was released in China, with many critics deploring what they perceived to be the vulgarity of its language and the derivative quality

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of its content. In particular, many readers criticized the novel for presenting merely recycled versions of the sorts of stories one frequently finds in the popular press.10 One could argue, however, that this is actually one of the work’s strengths, in that the narrative explicitly explores the role of the press and the media as conduits of information, affect, and cultural production. For instance, just before Yang Fei’s death in the restaurant explosion, he happened to be watching a television report about a couple buried alive when their house was demolished and reading a tabloid article about a women who slit her wrists after her lover, a government official, was indicted on charges of corruption. It turns out that Yang Fei had connections to each of these deceased figures—​in that the couple, before they died, had just hired him to tutor their young daughter, while the mistress of the corrupt official was actually Yang Fei’s ex-­wife. He runs into all three of the deceased in the netherworld, and their interactions evoke a complex amalgam of emotions including desire, regret, anxiety, longing, and apprehension—​emotions that are rendered all the more acute in that they appear in crystalized form, independent of the corporeal lives in which they were formerly anchored. In particular, the emotions that characterize these encounters are all partially rooted in the emotional affect generated by the news reports to which Yang Fei was exposed just before his death. The implication is that the novel treats these media reports not as second-­order copies of reality but rather as crucial elements in helping shape that same social reality in the first place. The irony, then, is that it is precisely in this imaginary penumbral region, where the only thing characters have available are mediated accounts of a prior and external social reality, that we find a crystalized vision of the conditions of possibility on which social reality itself is grounded. Just as the netherworld in which Yang Fei finds himself in The Seventh Day functions as an interstitial region between life and death, the media and the press represents an intermediary zone between public and private. To borrow Yu Hua’s metaphor from Brothers, the media here is imagined as a figurative hymen—​a liminal region wherein the relationships between Self and Other are continually negotiated. More generally, the novel’s netherworld is a zone between life and death, wherein deceased characters continue to retain many



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of the qualities they possessed when they were alive, though they are unable to carry out any of the actual corporeal processes. As a result, these deceased characters become parasitically dependent on their memories of their former lives. Unable to metabolize or reproduce themselves, these spectral figures are akin to biological viruses in that they lack many of the qualities that are conventionally viewed as essential for life, but at the same time they also exemplify a set of discursive and representational processes on which modern social life itself is predicated. Coda: A Touch of Sin

In 2013, the same year as The Seventh Day, Jia Zhangke released A Touch of Sin (Tianzhu ding), which uses a combination of documentary realism and fantasy to examine some of the structural imbalances confronting contemporary China. Like Yu Hua’s novel, Jia Zhangke’s film reflects on contemporary news media and is haunted by the specter of death—​but whereas Yu Hua’s work focuses on a group of displaced characters who have all recently died, Jia Zhangke’s film instead revolves around a set of similarly marginal figures who each erupt in a series of murderous and suicidal frenzies. In its combination of documentary-­realism and almost cartoonish violence, Jia’s film offers a provocative glimpse both of the conditions of precarity that haunt contemporary China as well of the ways in which that same reality is perceived and imagined. As such, the film instantiates the mutually constitutive zone where social reality and cultural representation abut violently unto one another. Born in 1970, Jia Zhangke began his directorial career with a series of underground works in the 1990s that were all produced and released without government approval. These early works include his first two feature-­length films, Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu, 1997) and Platform (Zhantai, 2000), both of which are set in his hometown of Fenyang, in Shanxi province, and which depict remote communities inexorably impacted by China’s rapid modernization. Xiao Wu revolves around the title character, “little Wu,” who is a pickpocket. Many of the other pickpockets with whom he once associated have gone on to become traders, and have distanced themselves from him. Xiao Wu appears lost and

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confused, as he tries to find a new position for himself. Near the end of the film he is arrested and is taken to the police station, where he is left in a room where a television program shows his fellow townspeople being asked how they feel about Xiao Wu’s arrest. After this somewhat surreal scene in which Xiao Wu observes himself being made into an object of representation by the state media, the film concludes with Xiao Wu handcuffed to a telephone pole as a crowd of spectators peer down at him as he looks helplessly back at them, and at the camera itself. Platform, meanwhile, features a youth performance troupe that goes from performing Maoist classics in the late 1970s to singing popular rock-­and-­roll songs in the 1980s and early 1990s. The film’s title song, “Platform,” offers the act of waiting at a train station (on a “platform”) as a metaphor for a more general sense of yearning and longing. The song appears once in the film, when it is heard (diegetically) in a pivotal scene in which the youngsters drive to a remote field in order to watch a train pass by, and as the train approaches they excitedly run over to greet it, only to watch silently as it hurtles past. The train, here, represents the community’s longing for modernity as well as the tensions and contradictions embedded within that desire. Both Xiao Wu and Platform use an almost cinéma vérité style to capture how a contemporary China’s socio-­economic transformations are perceived and imagined by a community located at the outer margins of those same transformations. Beginning with The World (Shijie, 2004) and Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006), Jia began directing films for which he sought and obtained government approval. Both of these latter works examine interrelated themes of social displacement and transformation, with The World focusing on a group of migrant laborers working in a Beijing theme park that features miniature replicas of various world landmarks, while Still Life is set in a village about to be destroyed by flooding from the Three Gorges Dam. Although both films employ a basically realistic documentary style, they feature a series of fantasy interludes that deliberately break from this realistic plane. The World, for instance, includes a series of animated sequences presented as though on a cell phone, while at the end of Still Life a hulking concrete building suddenly blasts off like a spaceship. Like the cabaret sequences in Tsai Ming-­liang’s The Hole and A Wayward Cloud, these



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fantasy interludes in Jia Zhangke’s films offer critical insight into the individual characters’ fears and desires as well as a broader set of sensibilities shared by the community as a whole. A Touch of Sin, meanwhile, is structured as a series of four vignettes, each of which revolves around sudden outbursts of violence. These outbursts may be viewed as symptoms of a set of structural imbalances and injustices in contemporary Chinese society. Combining documentary realism with an array of more fantastic representational conventions drawn from fictional genres ranging from Chinese wuxia films to spaghetti westerns, A Touch of Sin offers a suggestive glimpse into contemporary China’s collective unconscious. The protagonists of each vignette occupy a position at the margins of contemporary society, but it is precisely by virtue of this marginal position that they thereby become symptomatic of a set of structural imbalances at the heart of society itself. In this respect, each vignette thematizes a condition of homesickness, wherein underlying social tensions generate episodes of violence that, although not necessarily positive in their own right, may nevertheless help generate a series of productive transformations. Like Yu Hua’s The Seventh Day, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin takes inspiration from popular news items, and each of the film’s four vignettes is adapted from a different case that was widely covered in the Chinese press. The first vignette, for instance, was inspired by the case of Hu Wenhai, who allegedly slaughtered fourteen people in 2001 after attempting to report a case of alleged corruption, and the sec­ ­ond is based on a professional thief named Zhou Kehua, who is accused of having murdered at least nine people between 2004 and 2012 before being shot and killed by the police. The third vignette presents a version of the so-­called Deng Yujiao incident in 2009, in which a young beautician named Deng Yujiao fought off and killed a man who was demanding that she provide him with sexual services. She was subsequently arrested and charged with murder, but after an outpouring of popular support the charge was downgraded to “intentional assault.” Finally, the fourth vignette references a recent spate of suicides at the Foxconn factories in China, which led to widespread criticism of the poor working conditions in these factories (where electronics components for many high-­profile transnational corporations are manufactured,

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often for considerable profit). The killings that punctuate these four vignettes each take very different forms, but what unites them is that they all appear to be driven by desperation. While the precise motivations that motivate the killings are often left opaque, collectively they offer a compelling vision of the structural tensions that haunt contemporary China’s rapid development A Touch of Sin does not pretend to reprise these news items directly, but instead presents explicitly fictionalized versions of them. For instance, the fourth vignette revolves around a migrant worker who accidentally distracts a coworker at their garment factory with his smart phone, causing the coworker to accidentally slice his own hand open. Rather than pay the coworker’s medical expenses and lost wages, as their factory director demands, the protagonist instead flees. He eventually ends up in an electronics factory modeled on Foxconn, but remains haunted by the memory of the man he injured as well as by the demands of his family back home, who rely on him for money that he is momentarily unable to provide. One day, the former coworker, armed with a steel club and accompanied by several other young men, confronts the protagonist and appears determined to take revenge, though they ultimately depart without striking him. After this brush with death, the protagonist returns to his dormitory and, almost with­ ­out hesitation, throws himself off the roof. While this suicide clearly references the recent spate of Foxconn deaths, Jia Zhangke’s film presents this particular worker’s actions as being not a direct response to the working conditions in this particular factory but rather a symptom of the more general condition of extreme precarity that characterizes many of contemporary China’s migrant workers. Frequently working in a contingent capacity with few reliable protections from either their employer or the government, China’s floating population of more than a hundred and fifty million migrant workers are viewed as perpetual outsiders to the very cities that are structurally reliant on the cheap labor they provide. Similar questions of injustice and precarity are explored in the third vignette, in which the protagonist, Zheng Xiaoyu (played by Zhao Tao), is alone in a room during her rest break, whereupon two men barge in and insist that she offer them sexual services. She repeatedly refuses



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and pushes them out of the room, but they keep returning. Eventually, one of the men pins her down and begins slapping her face with a thick wad of bills. The woman lies petrified for a moment, then grabs a knife and stabs the man in the chest and abdomen. Upon realizing what she has done, the woman flees the building and wanders through the city with the knife in hand, looking like an itinerant female xia wandering through a modern-­day jianghu. This sequence—​which is where A Touch of Sin tropes most explicitly on its quasi-­namesake, King Hu’s 1971 wuxia classic, A Touch of Zen11—​presents the contemporary city as a paradigmatically liminal region. Here, a modern cityscape is superimposed onto a vision of the traditional jianghu, and Zheng Xiaoyu’s movement through this space mirrors the film’s own circulation through a contemporary transnational mediascape. That is to say, even as A Touch of Sin transforms real news into imaginary narratives, the film itself circulates through society and has generated considerable discussion and debate about those same social concerns. In this way, a work like Jia’s film may mediate between a social trauma and its aftermath, thereby helping generate a response to the very disease to which it is symptomatically giving expression. It is fitting, therefore, that Zheng Xiaoyu is the character in the film who comes closest to transcending the fictional structure of the work itself. After being featured in the third vignette, she reappears at the beginning of the film’s final sequence, in which she is seen applying for a job at with the corporation that runs the Foxconn-­inspired factory featured in the fourth vignette. When the interviewer asks her if there have been any incidents from her past that they should know about, she hesitates slightly before replying that there aren’t. The film then concludes with a scene in which she appears watching an outdoor performance of the opera Spring of the Jade Hall (Yutang chun), which also provided the inspiration for a 1964 film by King Hu. The opera revolves around a courtesan named Su San, who is falls in love with an official. The official’s wife tries to poison Su San, but accidentally ends up poisoning her own husband and then frames Su San for the murder. In the scene from the opera being performed at the end of Jia Zhangke’s film, Su San is being interrogated by a judge as to whether she committed the murder, and he repeatedly asks, “Do you

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understand your sin?” The camera alternates between the performance and a series of reaction shots of Zheng Xiaoyu, standing silently in the crowd. In an interview, Jia Zhangke notes that as he was writing the film’s script, he “began to think about the opera [Spring of the Jade Hall] repeatedly and about the notion of what a crime really is. And perhaps in China, not discussing, or choosing not to discuss, these crimes can also be crime within itself.”12 Jia Zhangke’s stress here on the importance of encouraging discussion of the violence and tensions hidden just below the surface of contemporary Chinese society functions as one of the defining characteristics of Touch of Sin as a whole. Sin, in the film, marks a site of alienation and instability within the Chinese body politic that can only be productively resolved through a process of discursive engagement. Jia’s film itself can be seen as an example of this sort of discursive engagement, as can all of the other cultural works examined in the pages above. In each instance, the work’s focus on a set of internal tensions invites a broader set of discursive engagements that may, in turn, help catalyze a process of structural transformation. An analysis of this condition of figurative homesickness, moreover, may also contribute to this pattern of discursive engagement itself.

Conclusion

In 2001, South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival commissioned the second of what has now become a series of annual omnibus films consisting of shorts by different directors. In 2001, the three directors who were invited to contribute were Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-­liang, together with the British filmmaker and writer John Akomfrah, who was born in Ghana but was raised in England. The three directors were free to film on any topic they wished, with the only restriction being that each work had to be under thirty minutes long and had to be shot in digital video (DV). Although not coordinated beforehand, the three shorts that comprised the festival’s 2001 omnibus nevertheless resonated suggestively with one another, collectively offering an intriguing reflection on ­processes of mediation and the limits of representation. Akomfrah’s contribution, Digitopia, for instance, features a man who attempts to trans­­form his online relationship with a prostitute into an actual one, and the result is a thoughtful examination of the interstices of the digital and analog worlds. Meanwhile, Tsai Ming-­liang’s film, A Con­ versation with God (Yu shen duihui, also known in English as Fish, Underground), was originally intended to feature a famous medium speaking with God. The medium, however, had declined to cooperate, on the grounds that “God does not like to be filmed,” and consequently the film ended up being about the director’s search for a viable substitute. While Akomfrah’s film examines a point of intersection between virtual and tangible reality, accordingly, Tsai’s film reflects instead on the relationship between the secular and the divine. Both works, however, are positioned at the interstices between cultural representation

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and its inherent limits, and suggest that it is precisely at this limit point of representability that new conceptions of reality become ­possible The third short in the 2001 omnibus, Jia Zhangke’s In Public (Gonggong changsuo), meanwhile, takes this interest in interstitial spaces and issues of representation, and grants it a more explicitly socio-­political valence. The latter work is set in and around a train station in the former mining town of Datung in Inner Mongolia, and records the comings and goings of the town’s anonymous residents. Consisting of thirty shots recorded over the course of forty-­five days, the film features a variety of passersby, first in the train station and then at several other locations including a bus retrofitted to serve as a restaurant as well as a local dance hall. Like the train in Jia’s film Platform from the previous year, the train station at the beginning of In Public symbolizes not only a spatial but also a temporal nexus—​in that it represents the point of contact between this relatively isolated community and the rest of the country, while at the same time functioning as a hinge between the community’s past and its potential future. In particular, Datung’s unprofitable mine was in the process of being closed, meaning that the community would need to find new ways of connecting with the national and global economy. Fittingly, the final third of the short consists of a ten-­minute sequence centered around a dance hall in which locals are seen dancing to the beat of Zhang Ye’s 1997 song “Marching into a New Era” (Zoujin xin shidai), which celebrates the third generation of communist leaders as well as “the laborious and courageous Chinese people, marching with vigor into a new era.” The song, which belongs to a genre of patriotic pop songs known as “Red songs” (hongse gequ), carries contradictory connotations in this scene, in that even as it celebrates the successes of the nation’s contemporary economic development, it nevertheless also offers a bittersweet reminder of the limited access that residents of marginal communities like Datung are likely to have to the opportunities resulting from that same development. It is appropriate that In Public concludes with this performance of “Marching into a New Era,” given that in December 2001, the same year the omnibus was released, China became the 143rd nation to be admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO), marking China’s



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symbolic entry into a “new era” of global capitalism. This would have significant implications not only for China’s position in the global economy but also for the nation’s understanding of its relationship to the rest of the world. The phrase marching into a new era (zoujin xin shidai) in Jia Zhangke’s film, moreover, closely resembles the phrase marching into the world (zouxiang shijie), which emerged as one of the most salient characterizations of China’s geopolitical strategy during the Reform Era. An early version of the latter formulation can be found in a publication series from the early 1980s in which editor Zhong Shuhua, between 1980 and 1986, compiled and published a collection of travel writings and diaries by late Qing diplomats and others travelling abroad. Titled Marching into the World (Zouxiang shijie), this publication series coined what would become a defining metaphor for China’s contemporary attempts to transition from a comparatively insular planned economy under Mao to a more market-­d riven and increasingly globalized one under Deng Xiaoping. In particular, the phrase marching into the world would subsequently become a popular meme symbolizing contemporary China’s attempts to reinvent itself by reassessing its relationship with the rest of the world. Coincidentally, it was also in 1986, the same year the Marching into the World publication series was completed, that China was granted observer status to the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). China subsequently began lobbying to be recognized as one of the founding members of the WTO when the latter was scheduled to replace GATT in 1995, although the United States and several other European nations insisted that it first make significant changes to its own economic policies, and particularly with respect to its position on tariffs and industrial policies. After a lengthy negotiation process, China was finally admitted into the WTO in December 2001, thus completing a pivotal symbolical stage in the nation’s march into the world and into the new era. Even as this 1980s publication series reflected on post-­Mao China’s determination to enter the global economy, it simultaneously reminded readers that this interest in globalization had already been anticipated more than a century earlier. Indeed, in a preface to a 1985 collection of essays published as part of Zhong Shuhua’s Marching into the World series, the eminent comparative literature scholar Qian Zhongshu asked ­rhetorically,

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Why does one need to speak of “marching into the world”? Is it even possible to not “march into” the world, and instead march out of it? Even if you were unwilling and your feet seem as though they are tied down with a ball and chain, you would I inevitably find yourself marching into the world. This is because even if your feet were to sprout wings, you would still find it impossible to march out of the world. Wherever people go, the world they find will thereby become the people’s world.1

Qian Zhongshu concludes that the observation that China is “marching into the world” is simply a different way of saying that “the world is marching into China,” and he posits that the nation’s proverbial entry into the world is actually just an artifact of the world’s having already entered the Chinese imagination. The “world,” Qian suggests, is a kernel of alterity that already haunts the Chinese imagination, and which functions as a catalyst for a pattern of outward movement and structural reconfiguration. By this logic, the nation’s outward march into the world was itself anticipated and driven by the world’s prior entry into the nation’s own self-­conception. Just as China’s entry into the WTO in December 2001 invited a reassessment of the nation’s position within an interlocking web of capital, labor, and information that comprises the global economy, a similar landmark event eleven months earlier invited a parallel reassessment of humanity’s position within the global ecosystem: In February 2001, the first complete draft of the human genome was published. The product of a spirited rivalry between a vast government-­ funded project and a nimble private company, the 1990s race to map the human genome was heralded in the press as a quest to decipher the proverbial Book of Life. There had been hopes that the genome mapping would make it possible to identify and even modify the genes responsible for dangerous hereditary conditions, and while the project may yet facilitate useful research along these lines, so far it has yielded relatively few direct identifications between specific genes and corresponding maladies. Instead, one of the most significant results of the project is arguably what the genome reveals about humanity’s relationship to its environment. In particular, one of the revelations of the Human Genome Project involved how much of the genome actually consists of DNA that does



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not directly encode proteins, or what is often colloquially called junk DNA. The human genome contains approximately 20,000 protein-­ coding genes—​which is roughly the same number as found in the roundworm genome, and significantly fewer than many scientists had expected—​while the remaining 98 percent of the genome consists of non-­coding genes. Although it had long been believed that these non-­ coding portions of the genome had no function, more recently evidence has begun to emerge that these non-­coding genes may in fact play an important role in the transcriptional and translational regulation of protein-­coding sequences. In an essay provocatively titled “Can Viruses Make us Human?”, microbiologist Luis Villarreal notes that the coding regions of the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are remarkably similar, with there being a 98.5 percent overlap between the two. The majority of the difference between the two genomes, meanwhile, lies in the non-­ coding regions of the genome. Villarreal observes that the same can be said of other mammalian species, with the primary point of divergence between their respective genomes occurring within non-­coding regions. At the same time, however, he notes that if the genomes of distantly related species are compared, it turns out that these same non-­coding portions are also more conserved than the corresponding coding ones. Villareal points out that this presents a rather curious situation: How can non-­coding sequences as a group be both more distinguishing, and more conserved, than coding sequences? All mammals have their own collection of such sequences. Yet all mammals have conserved old versions of such sequences. Thus, such sequences appear to have been acquired during species diversification. Yet all mammals also appear to conserve both the more recently acquired and the older non-­coding sequences. Why is this, and how can we understand this seemingly paradoxical behavior?2

The explanation behind this apparent paradox, Villareal suggests, lies in the viral origins of much of this non-­coding DNA. He argues that many of these non-­coding sequences are the product of genes introduced into the organism’s genome by viruses at an earlier evolutionary stage, some of which would have been bundled with coding DNA that

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may have had to the potential to impact the organism’s evolutionary trajectory. In fact, in some cases the coding sequences of the virally-­ introduced DNA may have helped catalyze genetic changes resulting in a process of species differentiation. As a result, this new bundle of virally-­introduced DNA (including both the coding and non-­coding sequences) would have become unique to the new species and its descendants, thereby making it highly distinguishing for the new species. At the same time, however, the non-­coding portion of this virally­introduced DNA would have remained comparatively impervious to further evolutionary pressures (since it does not affect the organism in a way that is receptive to selective pressures), and consequently it is likely to remain relatively unchanged during subsequent evolutionary transformations, thereby rendering it highly conserved in the ensuing gene pool. The key to this link between viral infection and species differentiation, Villareal contends, lies in the fact that viruses are able to reproduce very rapidly and generate an unusually high rate of genetic mutations, thereby making them “the leading edge of all evolving biological entities.” The result is that viruses function as virtual laboratories of genetic diversification, continually generating new genes and gene sequences, and under some circumstances it is even possible to “channel the tremendous genetic creativity of a viral entity into the evolution of its host.” Viruses may influence a host organism’s genome not only in cases where the host species and the corresponding virus coevolve, but also in situations where the virus is able to have an even more direct impact on the organism’s genome. In particular, RNA-­ based retroviruses reproduce by writing their genetic information onto their host’s own DNA, and if the retrovirus happens to infect the host’s stem cells, the virus’s genetic information may then be passed down to the host’s offspring, thereby potentially becoming a permanent and heritable part of the host’s own genome. In some instances, the sudden introduction of a comparatively large amount of foreign genetic material into the organism’s genome by a retrovirus may offer the host organism a distinct evolutionary advantage by enabling the development of complex interrelated systems that would have been difficult to achieve through a series of isolated mutations of individ­ ­ual genes.



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Villarreal argues that the evolution of many complex biological systems ranging from cell nuclei in eukaryotic organisms (cellular organisms with a distinct cell nucleus) to the uterus and placenta of viviparous placental mammals (mammals that give live birth) may have been catalyzed by this sort of viral infection. He observes, for instance, that a genetic analysis of a virus (the chlorella virus) known to infect micro algae—​which are themselves the earliest eukaryotic organisms in the fossil record—​indicates that the DNA polymerase found in this virus appear to be basal to the replicative DNA polymerases found in all eukaryotes. The implication is that a virus of this sort may have provided a catalyst for the evolution of the cell nucleus which, in turn, resulted in the differentiation of eukaryotic organisms from prokaryotic ones. Similarly, the genome of each lineage of placental mammals has its own distinctive set of genetic sequences originating from viruses (and specifically from endogenous retroviruses [ERVs]), suggesting that at the origin of each placental lineage there was a moment of viral colonization that not only provided the catalyst for the differentiation of the lineage but furthermore left permanent traces in the genome itself. Villareal notes that some of these ERV elements in the mammalian genome continue to express proteins, and that this phenomenon is most common in placental and other reproductive tissue. From this, he speculates that a similar moment of viral colonization may have been responsible for the evolutionary development of placental birth. If this is true, then it is fitting that gestation in viviparous mammals itself resembles state of parasitic colonization, wherein one organism is inhabited by another that competes with it for resources. The physical condition of pregnancy, in other words, appears to structurally mirror the evolutionary conditions out of which it evolved in the first place. Finally, Villarreal points out that much of the non-­coding DNA that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees is also retroviral in origin, suggesting that similar incidents of viral colonization may have helped catalyze the development of language and associative learning that distinguishes humans from their primate relatives. The implication of these findings is that viruses may well have played a critical role in the development not only of the cell nuclei that distinguish eukaryotic organisms from prokaryotic ones, as well as the

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­ lacental reproductive systems that distinguish viviparous mammals p from all other animals, but even the distinctive cognitive qualities that distinguish humans from our even our closest primate relatives. If this hypothesis is true, then it would mean that humanity, and even life as we know it, was made possible by parasitic viral elements that are arguably not even fully alive in their own right. These reflections on the potential productivity of these viral processes, in turn, come together in what is known as the RNA World hypothesis. Initially proposed in the 1970s by path-­breaking microbiologist Carl Woese—​and based on the same ribosomal RNA analysis techniques he used to discover the domain of Archaea, which, together with Bacteria and Eukarya, is third of the three domains into which all life on earth is classified—​the RNA World hypothesis posits that all life-­forms originally evolved out of a protean ocean consisting of self-­replicating RNA molecules capable of exchanging genetic material with one another in a quasi-­viral manner. In particular, prior to the development of proteinaceous cellular life there existed “an era of nucleic acid life” consisting of proto-­organisms consisting primarily of ribonucleic acids, and Woese argues that the critical innovation that permitted the emergence of cellular life took place when these nucleic acid compounds developed the ability to produce amino acid-­based polypeptide chains, which could then be folded into proteins. These proteins, in turn, made possible the development of cell walls, which in turn allowed the evolution of all cellular life. Although Woese’s nominal focus is on the evolutionary development of a specific set of organic compounds that subsequently became key building blocks of all life as we know it, his primary emphasis is ultimately not on microbiology as much as it is on processes of representation. The evolutionary development that made cellular life possible, Woese explains, introduces a process of symbolic representation wherein “nucleic acid sequences become symbolically representable in an amino acid ‘language.’ ” He compares this development to humans’ acquisition of language, and argues more generally that most major evolutionary advances have developed out of similar moments when “some existing biological entity (system) gains the capacity to represent itself (what it is and/or does) in some symbolic form.” The result, he concludes, is that this new capacity for self-­representation



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offers the possibility of a “New World” of evolutionary potential, and a “vast and qualitatively new phase space for evolution to explore and expand.”3 While Dawkins introduced the notion of a cultural meme as merely a spin-­off of his biologically grounded notion of a “selfish” gene, Woese—​in this more recent work that corroborates and extends the central presumption of Dawkins’s thesis—​effectively deconstructs this putative hierarchical relationship between science and culture by suggesting that evolution itself is predicated on the repeated development of a process of self-­representation. What Woese characterizes as the ability of a biological entity or system to “represent itself . . . ​in some symbolic form” includes not only human language but also a wide variety of other biological processes, including even DNA replication. What this means is that self-­representation is not a uniquely human cultural process, but instead is one of the constitutive conditions of life itself. One implication of this recent body of work in genetics and evolutionary biology, meanwhile, is that viruses and viral process have often been a crucial catalyst in the development of these new modes of self-­representation. From the primordial RNA lifeworld that preceded the development of cellular life to the current ubiquity of viruses positioned at the margins of life as conventionally understood, viral processes appear to have provided not only the necessary preconditions of life but also have continued to offer the necessary ground for its continued development and transformation. A similar set of observations may also be made with respect to an organism’s relationship to its natural environment. In The Extended Phenotype, the follow-­up to The Selfish Gene, Dawkins considers the relationship between genes, organisms, and their environment, arguing that an organism’s phenotype—​understood as the observable manifestation of the expression of the organism’s genes and their interaction with the environment—​extends beyond the organism’s immediate body to the environment it inhabits. Noting that the relationship between any gene complex and the phenotypic traits to which it corresponds is necessarily indirect and mediated—​in that the gene complex only codes for proteins that must interact in complex ways with other corporeal and environmental elements in order to produce the

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resulting phenotypic trait—​Dawkins argues that there is no qualitative difference between a phenotypic trait that is part of the organism’s body and one that is visible in the marks that an organism leaves on its immediate environment. For instance, Dawkins would argue that a tree’s extended phenotype includes not only the appearance of its branches and leaves, but also the quality of the soil at its base—​ given that the soil will be impacted by the decomposition of the fallen leaves and by the tree roots’ ability to limit erosion, as well as by the other flora and fauna that the tree may help attract. Beaver dams offer another useful illustration of this principle. Beavers have evolved elaborate dam-­building instincts, and given that that these instincts clearly have a genetic component the resulting dams may therefore be seen as part of the beaver’s phenotype in the same way that a snail’s shell is part of the snail’s phenotype. At the same time, however, these dams also have far-­reaching implications for the broader environment. Not only do the dams expand a stream’s footprint, over time they may affect everything from the vegetation growing along the bank to the sorts of wildlife that the area can support. In this respect, the beavers’ (extended) phenotype encompasses not only the dams themselves but also the entire local ecosystem. From this perspective, the beavers should be viewed not as organisms inhabiting an external environment but rather as an integral component of an environment that is literally an extension of themselves. What is true of beavers, meanwhile, is also true of all life on Earth. Even the simplest organisms interact with their environment in complex ways as they metabolize raw materials, release waste matter, and reproduce themselves. This is certainly the case with humanity. In fact, so extensive has humanity’s impact on the ecosystem been that many observers contend that the earth has entered a new geological era, dubbed the Anthropocene, which is defined by the indelible mark that humans have left and continue to leave on the environment. We currently find ourselves in a period of rapid ecological transformation, as global warming and climate change are contributing to a precipitous rise in sea levels and animal and plant species are going extinct in ever-­g reater numbers. To the extent that a wetland is part of a beaver’s extended phenotype, accordingly, the global ecosystem is similarly part of humanity’s own. The world, in other words, is not a space



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that we inhabit but rather it is in a very real sense a part of us, just as we are a part of it. To paraphrase Qian Zhongshu’s observation, the world into which we attempt to march is itself already a part of us. One result of this growing recognition of the interdependency between organisms and their environment has been a realization of the need to complement the study of individual genomes with what could be called ecogenomic analyses. Metagenomics, for instance, was first proposed in 1998 as an attempt to sequence the microbial genetic diversity in a particular ecosystem just as one would sequence an individual genome. Rather than isolating individual microorganisms and examining them independently, a metagenomic approach instead focuses on the broader genetic ecology within which those microbes are positioned. Conversely, the Human Microbiome Project was launched in 2008 to begin cataloguing the genetic diversity of the microbes that inhabit the human body, including microbes that have a benign or even beneficial relationship to their human host. Just as a metagenomic analysis looks at the genetic diversity of microbes in a particular ecosystem, a microbiomic analysis instead looks beyond an organism’s genome to assess the genetic diversity of the internal ecosystem found within the human body itself. Moreover, in contrast to genomic analysis, which is theoretically focused on the unitary relationship between a genome and a specific individual or species, metagenomic and microbiomic approaches are instead fundamentally environmental analyses concerned with the complex interrelationships between multitudes of different life forms. These latter post-­genomic approaches, meanwhile, also offer a useful entry point into a reassessment of an array of contemporary environmental concerns. One increasingly pressing challenge for the environmental movement involves not merely the status of the environment itself but more importantly the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Even as environmental activism seeks to draw attention to the environment’s rapid degradation, the possibility of radical environmental reform remains fleeting. Given existing sociopolitical configurations, it is comparatively easy to justify reform if it will generate tangible benefits on a relatively short time scale, but it is much harder to implement significant reforms whose primary benefits would not be felt for generations. What is needed, accordingly, is a

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fundamentally different way of understanding humanity’s relationship to the global ecosystem, and specifically the degree to which the ecosystem is not something that we inhabit but rather an extension of ourselves. If the global ecosystem were to conceived in this way—​as an intrinsic part of oneself and one’s community—​the impetus would increase for aggressively pursuing large-­scale structural reform. What is needed, however, is a way of reassessing one’s relationship to one’s environment, and for this we may return to the example of the beaver’s ability to build a dam that transforms a river or stream into a small lake. The human parallel to the beaver’s extended phenotype is not only the global ecosystem itself, but also the conceptual matrix that would permit us to view the ecosystem as an extension of ourselves in the first place. Borrowing from the terms of the preceding discussion, I would suggest that a good figure for this conceptual matrix is the space of the jianghu itself. This land of “rivers and lakes” has traditionally been imagined as a region at the outer margins of the political community and where new sociopolitical orientations may be cultivated, but equally importantly it also represents a realm of cultural production and imagination wherein sociopolitical concerns can be engaged and reimagined. Viewed as a space of cultural production, the jianghu offers a new terrain for collective self-­representation, including the possibility of a fundamental reassessment of humanity’s position in the natural world. Within this imaginary space of this global jianghu, accordingly, it becomes possible to formulate models of collective action that may transcend the immediate interests of individuals and their communities. Through this sort of speculative intervention, it may thereby become possible to develop a course of action that could productively address the relationship between the global ecosystem and its ultimate parasite—​humanity.

Postface

The key, in Li Ruzhen’s Flowers in the Mirror, to the unique linguistic skills of the residents of the Country of Forked-­Tongued People lies in their possession of a rhyme scheme. This scheme breaks up the Chinese language into its constituent phonemes, which the user may then reassemble in order to easily master any foreign tongue. It is through a process of making their own language alien (by fracturing it into meaningless phonemes), accordingly, that the Forked-­Tongued people are thereby able to render any foreign language familiar. The rhyme scheme itself, moreover, represents a kernel of internal alterity among the Forked-­Tongued themselves, and their laws strictly prohibit them from sharing the rhyme scheme with the same foreigners with whom the scheme allows them to communicate in the first place, and stipulate that anyone violating this prohibition will be sentenced to either exile, celibacy, or castration. The attempt to prevent the rhyme scheme from circulating beyond the nation’s borders, in other words, is displaced onto individuals themselves, who are threatened with either expulsion from the national and familial orders through exile or compulsory celibacy, or with self-mutilation through a process of physical castration. The novel’s fictional rhyme scheme captures a logic that applies more generally to all language and cultural production. Language, by definition, offers a means of communicating with outsiders, but its ability to do so is predicated on the fact that it originates from outside the self. The language we use is always the product of communal interactions, and consequently can never be “one’s own,” and a similar point may be made with respect to cultural production. The act of

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breaking up one’s “own” language into the smallest possible units and then using them to parse the language of the other, meanwhile, resembles not only a process of breaking down the human genome into its individual genes so as to better understand the (human or non-­human) genomic “other,” but also an attempt to break down bodies of cultural production into their smallest potential components so as to better understand the underlying logic of the cultural form itself as well as how it resembles the parallel logic of other epistemological domains. In the preceding pages, I have applied a rhyme scheme-­inspired memetic analysis to Chinese discourses of disease from the long twentieth century. In so doing, I have identified a persistent cultural logic linking concrete tropes of infection (and their correlates, including themes of incest and insurrection) with a set of abstract concerns with internal alterity, outward movement, and the possibility of structural transformation. I would also suggest that this memetic analysis itself may be analyzed in a similar way—​insofar as it yields potentially counter-­intuitive and defamiliarizing readings of familiar cultural texts, this rhyme scheme-­inspired methodology functions as a symptom, index, and catalyst for a process of self-­alienation and, hopefully, structural transformation.

Glossary Notes Acknowledgments Index

Chinese Glossary

All Chinese terms, phrases, titles, and proper names of real people are included. Place names and names of fictional characters are excluded. Spelling follows that which is used in the text, with pinyin being used as a default except for individuals who use alternate transliterations. Words and phrases appear in lower case, proper names in upper case, essays in quotes, and books and films appear in italics. Mainland and Taiwan films are listed under their mandarin titles, while Hong Kong films (many of which are not in mandarin to begin with) are listed under their official English titles (which are often not direct translations from the Chinese).

Aiqing wansui  愛情萬歲 Aisin-­Gioro Pu Yi  愛新覺羅·溥儀 Aiziyouzhe  愛自由著 Bai Ying  白鷹 banlun  半倫 biliang weichang, lingnüe zhisi  逼良為娼，淩虐至死 bing  病 bingfu  病夫 bingyuan  病原 bu ni de xu shenzi  補你的虛身子 Bu Can  補殘 buduan geming  不斷革命 Bujian  不見 bujian busan  不見不散 Busan  不散 “Caiyun hou qu”  彩雲後曲 canji ren  殘疾人 canren  殘人 canshi ge zuzhi  蠶食各組織 Cao Shaoqin  曹少欽

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Chan, Grace  葛蘭 Chang, Eileen  張愛玲 Chen Chao-­jung  陳昭榮 Chen Jialin  陳家林 Chen Shiang-­chyi  陳湘琪 chenfu xiubai  陳腐朽敗 Cheng, Ronald  鄭中基 Cheung, Jackie  張學友 Cheung, Jacob  張之亮 chi ren  吃人 Chiang Kai-­shek  蔣介石 Chiu, Samson Leong Chun  趙良駿 chong  蟲 Chu T’ien-hsin  朱天心 Chu T’ien-­wen  朱天文 Chua, Pearlly  蔡寶珠 chuanran  傳染 Chunqiu  春秋 cong zifengli kanchu zilai  從字縫里看出字來 Cixi  慈禧 Dada ren  鞑靼人 dajuexibao  大嚼细胞 Daxue  大學 Deng Xiaoping  鄧小平 Deng Yujiao  鄧玉嬌 di  帝 Di qi tian  第七天 Ding Ling  丁玲 dingxiang an  丁香案 Dingzhuang meng  丁庄夢 Dong  洞 dongya bingfu  東亞病夫 du  毒 dujing de binggen  讀經的病根 duyao  毒藥 Ermo  二嫫 fanzi  番子 Fan Zengxiang  樊增祥 Fang La  方臘 Feng Yuxiang  馮玉祥 Fu Lin  符霖 Fu Qing mie yang  扶清滅洋 Gao Yaojie  高耀潔



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ge  革 geming  革命 Golden Chicken, The  金雞 Golden Chicken 2, The  金雞 2 Gong Cheng  龚橙 Gong Zizhen  龔自珍 guaiwu  怪物 guaibing  怪病 Haiguo tuzhi  海國圖志 Haijiao tianya  海角天涯 Haizi  孩子 hanjian  漢奸 Hei yanquan  黑眼圈 Heliu  河流 Henhai  恨海 Hong Jun  洪鈞 Honglou meng  紅樓夢 hongse gequ  紅色歌曲 hongsi  紅絲 Hu Fayun  胡發雲 Hu, King  胡金銓 Hu Lancheng  胡蘭成 Hu Shi  胡適 Hu Wenhai  胡文海 hukou  戶口 Huang Di  黃帝 Huangdi neijing  黃帝內經 Huangren shouji  荒人手記 Huang Ruihe  黃瑞和 huang shuihe  黃水河 Huayi qianshen  花憶前身 Hui, Ann  許鞍華 ji  雞 Jia Rang  賈讓 Jia Zhangke  賈樟柯 jianghu  江湖 Jiangnan  江南 jin  金 Jin Shengtan  金聖嘆 Jin Tianhe  金天翮 jinggao  敬告 “Jinggao qingnian”  敬告青年 Jinghua yuan  鏡花緣

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jingshen wuran  精神污染 jiu qingnian  舊青年 Jiuwei gui  九尾龜 jixu geming  繼續革命 Kang Youwei  康有為 Kangde  康德 “Kebei”  刻背 “Kuangren riji”  狂人日記 kuhai  苦海 Lai, Leon  黎明 Lai Shi: China’s Last Emperor  中國最後一個太監 Lan Can  懶殘 Lao Can  老殘 Lao Can youji  老殘遊記 Lao She  老舍 The Last Emperor: Aisen Gioro Pu Yi’s Latter Life  火龍 The Last Empress  末代皇后 Lau, Andy  劉德華 Lee, Bruce  李小龍 Lee Kang-­sheng  李康生 Li Bi  李泌 Li Han-­hsiang  李翰祥 Li Hong  李虹 Li Ruzhen  李汝珍 Li Shuxian  李淑賢 Li Zhi  李贄 Li Zhisui  李志綏 Liang Qichao  梁啓超 Liu E  劉鶚 Liu Xie  劉勰 lixiang bing  離鄉病 Longmen kezhan  龍門客棧 Lu Yi-­ching  陸弈靜 Lu Xun  魯迅 Lunyu  論語 man  蠻 Mao Zedong  毛澤東 meijunxue  梅菌學 Mengzi  孟子 Miao Tien  苗天 mibu ziji de quehan  彌補自己的缺憾 mitan  密探 “Moluoshi li shuo”  摩羅詩力說



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Nahan  吶喊 Nezha  哪吒 Ng Kim Chew  黃錦樹 Ng, Sandra  吳君如 Ni nabian jidian  你那邊幾點 ni yue jinzhi, ta yue laijin  你越禁止，他越來勁 Nüjie zhong  女界鐘 Nüxia  女俠 paiman  排滿 pohaikuang  迫害狂 Pu Yi’s Latter Life  溥儀的後半生 “Qian Caiyun qu”  前彩雲曲 Qian Xuantong  錢玄同 Qian Zhongshu  錢鐘書 qiang yi wuxie, jie fei renzhi  强以無邪，即非人志 Qin hai shi  禽海石 Qingnian hui  青年會 Qingnian zazhi  青年雜誌 Qingshaonian nezha  青少年哪吒 Qipo  岐伯 quanren  全人 qubi  曲筆 ren  人 renshen  人身 rensheng  人生 renyi daode  仁義道德 Riguang liunian  日光流年 rushe  入社 [email protected]  如焉@sars.come Sai Jinhua  賽金花 sanbai zhi zhi, wuxie suobi  三百之旨，無邪所蔽 Sanxia haoren  三峡好人 Semu ren  色目人 Shangshu  尚書 Shasi  沙士 shen  身 Shen Congwen  沈從文 Shen Nong  神農 Shennong bencao jing  神農本草經 shenran zhongbing  身染重病 Shi sanbai pian, wi wuxie, dan wo shi si youxie  詩三百篇，思無邪， 但我是思有邪 shi sanbai yi yan yibi zhi: yue si wuxie  詩三百，一言以蔽之，曰思無邪

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shi yan zhi  詩言志 Shih Chun  石雋 shijie  世界 Shijie  世界 Shijing  詩經 shijun xibao  食菌細胞 “Shisi nian de dujing”  十四年的讀經 Shiwu bao  時務報 Shouhuo  受活 Shouhuo zhuang  受活庄 Shuihu zhuan  水滸傳 Shun  舜 si  思 Sima Chengzhen  司馬承禎 Sina Weibo  新浪微博 Sishu  四書 sishu wujing  四書五經 sixiang  思想 Sun Qingguo  孫情國 Tao Yuanming  陶淵明 Taohua yuan ji  桃花源記 ti  體 tian  天 Tianbian yi duo yun  天邊一朵雲 Tiandi hui  天地會 tianxia  天下 Tianzhu ding  天註定 To, Chapman  杜汶澤 Tsai Ming-­liang  蔡明亮 Wan Rong  婉容 Wang Jing  王景 Wang Yirong  王懿榮 Wang Youhui  王友輝 Wei Yuan  魏源 weisheng  衛生 weishengwu  微生物 weishengwu de xingzhuang  微生物的形狀 wen  文 wenruo  文弱 Wenxin diaolong  文心雕龍 woguo  我國 wu  武 wuxia  武俠



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Wu Jianren  吴趼人 Wu Zetian  武則天 xia  俠 xiao  孝 Xiao Wu  小武 Xiaokang  小康 Xiaoshuo lin  小說林 Xinmin shuo  新民說 xin qingnian  新青年 Xin qingnian  新青年 Xinsheng  新生 xinxian huopo  新鮮活潑 Xiongdi  兄弟 Xu niehaihua  續孽海花 Xu Sanguan maixue ji  許三觀賣血記 Xuantong  宣統 Yan Fu  嚴復 Yan Lianke  閻連科 Yang Kuei-­mei  楊貴媚 yao  藥 yí  夷 yi  醫 yì  異 yidu gongdu  以毒攻毒 yijia  醫家 Yijing  易經 yimin  遺民 yisi  意思 yiti  遺體 you yichang wenbing  又一場瘟病 Yu Dafu  郁達夫 Yu Hua  余華 Yu the Great  大禹 Yu shen duihua  與神對話 Yu Qian  于謙 “Yuhai”  魚骸 Yutang chun  玉堂春 Zeng Pu  曾樸 Zhang Chunfan  張春帆 Zhang Hong  張鴻 Zhang Zhidong  張之洞 Zhang Ye  張也 Zhantai  站台

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Zhao Jing  趙靜 Zhao Tao  趙濤 Zhengtong  正統 zhi  治 Zhibao  直報 zhiguo  治國 zhili  治理 zhiliao  治療 zhishen  治身 zhishui  治水 zhong  中 Zhong Shuhua  鐘書華 Zhongguo  中國 Zhongguo shiqing  中國實情 zhongti xiyong  中體西用 Zhongxiao xilu  忠孝西路 zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong  中學為體西學為用 Zhou Kehua  周克華 Zhou Shuren  周樹人 Zhou Xiaowen  周曉文 Zhu Qizhen  朱祁鎮 Zhu Qiyu  朱祁鈺 Zhuangzi  莊子 “Zoujin xin shidai”  走進新時代 zouxiang shijie  走向世界

Notes

Preface 1. Li Ruzhen, Jinghua yuan (Destiny of the flowers in the mirror) (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1994). An abridged English translation of this novel can be found in Li Ruzhen, Flowers in the Mirror, trans. Li Tai-­yi (London: Peter Owen, 1965). I discuss this work in more detail in The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard Asia Center, 2008).

Introduction 1. The poem circulated over the Internet in several different versions and under several different titles. Some sources claimed that the poem was originally composed in French, then translated into English, and finally into Chinese, but the Chinese-­language versions of the poem were by far the most common. It was initially rumored that the poem had been written by Duo-­Liang Lin, professor emeritus of physics at SUNY Buffalo, but he denied having any connection to the work. 2. The Chinese version of this poem has been archived on many sites on the Web, including http://bbs.tiexue.net/post_6961346_1.html and http://tieba .baidu.com/p/2646384706. The English translation here is my own. 3. Yan Fu, “Yuan qiang” (On the origin of strength), originally published in Zhibao (1895). Collected in Yan Fu, Yan Fu ji (Works of Yan Fu), Wang Shi, ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), vol. 1, 5–15. 4. The metaphor had been applied to Turkey as early as 1844, and in a letter to Lord John Russell in 1953, Sir G.  H. Seymour, the British envoy to St. Petersburg, quotes Tsar Nicholas I describing the Ottoman Empire as “a sick man—​a very sick man.” See Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War: 1854–1856 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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5. Published in Shiwu bao on December 15, 1896, and translated from an English-­language essay originally published in North China Daily Press on November 30, 1896. 6. M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Danger (London: Grant Richards, 1898). See also Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Fu Manchu (Wildside Press, 2003). 7. “Zhongguo shiqing” (China’s true condition), Zhang Kunde, trans., Shiwu bao (The Chinese progress), vol. 10 (Nov. 5, 1896) [date cited in the text as “the first day of the 10th month of Guangxu, year 22”]. The Chinese translation states that the original essay appeared in the North China Daily News (Zilin xibao) on October 17, 1896. While that particular year’s issues of North China Daily News are long extant, the same essay did appear in the North China Herald (the weekly version of the North China Daily) the previous day, on October 16. 8. Liang Qichao, Xinmin shuo (On the new citizen), in Liang Qichao, Liang Qichao quanji (Complete works of Liang Qichao), Zhang Pinxing, ed. (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1999), vol. 2, 655–735. 9. Liang Qichao, On the New Citizen. 10. See Richard Davis, Wind Against the Mountain: The Crisis of Politics and Culture in Thirteenth Century China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1996). 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufman, trans, (New York: Vintage, 1989), 170. Translation modified. 12. Shiyi changji yi zhiyi. The term yi, frequently translated as “barbarians,” was phased out of official discourse in the 1860s, after complaints that it carried pejorative connotations. 13. Zhang Zhidong, Quanxue pian (Exhortation to study),1898; in Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Wenxiang gong quanji (The complete works of the Honor­ able Zhang Wenxiang [Zhang Zhidong]) (Taipei: Wenhua chubanshe, 1963). 14. Yang Nianqun, Zaizao bingren: Zhongxi yi chongtu xia de kongjian zhengzhi (1832–1985) (Remaking the patient: Spatial politics under the conflict between Chinese and Western medicine) (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2006). 15. Kang Youwei presented this proposal in his book Da tongshu (The great unity), which was written between 1885 and 1890. While Great Unity was not published until 1935, Kang Youwei’s disciple Liang Qichao summarized the book’s proposals in his Kang nanhai zhuan (Biography of Kang Youwei), published in 1906. For a discussion of racial and social Darwinist theories in China during this period, see Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (C. Hurst and Co Publishers, 1992). For discussion of Japanese theories of eugenics during this period, see Yuehtsen Juliettte Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in a Translational Con­ text, 1896–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 16. Lu Xun, “Suigan lu 38” (Random thoughts #38), New Youth, 1918; in Lu Xun quanji, vol. 2, 389. Lin Yusheng, however, notes that there is evidence that this essay was actually authored not by Lu Xun, but rather by his brother Zhou Zuoren, who had claimed authorship in a private letter to a friend. However, as Lin also notes, Zhou Zuren did not deny that the views



17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 10 – 2 1

309

he had expressed were shared by Lu Xun, emphasizing only that there were minor stylistic differences in the essay that distinguished it from Lu Xun’s own work—​d ifferences that had gone unnoticed by the general readership. Despite these questions regarding the essay’s authorship, it continues to be included in Lu Xun’s collected works under his own name. See Lin Yusheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-­Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 116. Buddhism, however, was of course originally imported into China from South Asia. C. T. Hsia, “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,” A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 533–554. Huangdi neijing, chapter 8. For an English translation of this text, see Ilza Veith, trans. The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (University of California Press, 2002). Cited in Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (Berkeley: University California Press, 1993), 102. See Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text: Performance in Eighteenth-­Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 101. Plato, The Republic, particularly Books II-­I V. Aristotle, Politics I.ii.12–14, trans. Ernest Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone Books, 2002), 162. For a useful discussion of the “sick man” metaphor and related issues, see Larissa N. Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 2001). See also Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, vol. 1 and 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 2002) and George Williams, Adaption and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind,” in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, Bo Dalhbom, ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993). Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1. In 1892 the Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky using a filtration process to isolate the tobacco mosaic virus, and a few years later Martinus Beijerinck, Friedrich Loeffler and Paul Frosch repeated the process with this and other viruses. See C. H. Calisher and M. C. Horzinek, eds, 100 Years of Virology

310

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 1– 3 7 (New York: Springer-­Verlag, 1999); and Nathan Wolfe, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age (New York: Times Books, 2011). Oxford English Dictionary, entry on “Virus.” In 2013, it was announced that several dictionaries, including Merriam-­ Webster, Macmillan, and Google, had all added an alternate meaning to their respective entries for “literally,” acknowledging that it is common practice for people to use the term “to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis.” See http://www.prdaily.com/Main /Articles/15033.aspx# Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). The quotes from Austin are all cited in Derrida’s text, and originally appear in John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 21–22 [italicized words and phrases are as they appear in Austin’s original text]. Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Technically, it was in late 2010 that China’s economy overtook Japan’s, but it was not until 2011 that the data was processed and publically announced. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17: 217–56. Daly notes, for instance, that the yellow peril metaphor was originally a reference not to China but rather to Japan, but he nevertheless acknowl­­edges that the metaphor reflected a set of prejudicial racial stereotypes, as the poem implies. Daly’s response was posted on the blog associated with the web­ ­site “China Digital Times” (http://chinadigitaltimes.net/). While the original link is no longer operative, the entire post was copied into a comment thread on another blog, available here: http://home.wangjianshuo.com /archives/20080501_generalization_plays_the_trick.htm (accessed Jan. 7, 2013). These comments posted and circulated on May 1, 2, 5 and 6, 2008, on an academic listserv hosted by the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sym­ bolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 202. In his essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-­moral Sense,” Nietzsche famously described truth as being a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—​i n short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Viking Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann ed. and trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 46–7. Part 1 ▪ 1906: Phagocytes

1. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); see also



N o t e s t o P a g e s 41– 8 1

311

Angela Zito, Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-­Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). chapter 1 ▪ Reform

1. Liu E, Lao Can youji (Travels of Lao Can) (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 2004). English translation adapted from Liu T’ieh-­y ün [Liu E], The Travels of Lao Can, Harold Shadick, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). All citations from this work will be noted parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the Chinese edition followed by the page number of the English edition. 2. In reality, both of these texts were probably composed much later, during the early Han dynasty. 3. Huang Renrui shares the same surname as Huang Ruihe, the sick man introduced at the beginning of the novel, and the Rui in their names is also the same character. 4. For a discussion of Liu E’s role in the discovery of these oracle bones, see Li Ji, Anyang (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2007), 7–11. Liu E’s own 1903 collection of rubbings from these inscriptions can be found in Liu E, Tieyun canggui (Tieyun’s collection of plastrons) (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2000). 5. Ng Kim Chew, “Yuhai” (Fish bones), in Ng Kim Chew Wu an ming (Dark nights) (1997). For an English translation, see Ng Kim Chew, Slow Boat to China and Other Stories by Ng Kim Chew, Carlos Rojas, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 6. Ng Kim Chew, “Kebei” (Inscribed backs), in Ng Kim Chew, Youdao zhidao (From island to island) (Taipei: Rye Field Press, 2001). For an English translation, see Carlos Rojas, Slow Boat to China and Other Stories by Ng Kim Chew, Carlos Rojas, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). chapter 2 ▪ Rebellion

1. Luce Irigaray, “Woman on the Market,” in This Sex Which is Not One, Catherine Porter and Carolyne Burke, trans. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 2. For a detailed analysis of this motif of the scar, see David Der-­wei Wang, Fin-­de-­siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities in Late Qing Fiction, 1849– 1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 107–109. 3. Fu Lin, Qin hai shi (literally, “bird, sea, stone”) (Shanghai, Qun xue she yin hang, 1906). Translated as Stones in the Sea, in The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-­of-­the-­Century Chinese Romantic Novels, Patrick Hanan, trans. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). 4. Wu Jianren, Henhai (Sea of regret) (Project Gutenberg, 2007). Translated as The Sea of Regret, in The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-­of-­the-­Century Chinese Romantic Novels, Patrick Hanan, trans. 5. For further analysis of this story, see Xiaobing Tang, The Shanghai Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 6. See, for instance, Han-­Yi Feng, “The Chinese Kinship System,” The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1) (July, 1937): 141–275; Francis L.  K. Hsu,

312

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

Notes to Pages 8 3–97

“Observations on Cross-­Cousin Marriage in China,” American Anthro­ pologist 47 (1) (Jan.–Mar., 1945): 83–103. The translation of the title is borrowed from Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010). For a discussion of the novel, see Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion, chapter 8. See also David Wang, Fin-­de-­siècle Splendor, 81–89. What the novel calls the Youth Society was actually inspired by the Revive China Society (Xingzhong hui) that Sun Yat-­sen would establish three decades later, in 1896. See Li Han, “Problematizing Filial Piety, Ethnicity and Nation: The Narrative of the Lilac Affair in Niehai hua,” Asia Major 26.2, November 2013: 90–120. The Semu were one of four official ethnic groupings established under the Yuan dynasty, the other three being Northern Han, Southern Han, and Mongols. The Semu encompassed a number of peoples who today are divided into different ethnic groups. Jin Tianhe, Nüjie zhong (The morning bell) Nüjie zhong (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003). The title of this work has also been translated as A Tocsin for Women. A full translation by Michael Hill, under the title “The Women’s Bell,” can be found in Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 207–286. Citations from the work will be be noted parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the Chinese edition followed by the page number of the English edition. chapter 3 ▪ Rebirth

1. Lu Xun, “Nahan zixu” (Preface to Call to Arms), in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (Lu Xun collected works) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1996) 1:415–421. Translated as “Preface to Call to Arms, in Yang Hsien-­yi and Gladys Yang, trans. Lu Hsun: Selected Stories (New York: Norton, 1977). Subsequent citations of this essay will be noted parenthetically in the text. Lu Xun also described this same account in the essay “Tengye xiansheng” (Professor Fujino), in Lu Xun quanji 2:302–309. The term used for “slide” here, dianying, is currently used in modern Chinese to refer to movies, but in this context is clearly being used to refer to still transparencies. 2. See Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Voices in the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 3. Lu Xun “Kuangren riji” (Diary of a madman),” in Lu Xun quanji 1: 422–433, 422; translation adapted from Lu Hsun, Lu Hsun: Selected Stories, 7. Subsequent citations of this essay will be noted parenthetically in the text itself. 4. C. T. Hsia, “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,” in Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, third edition (Bloom­ ­ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 533. The essay appears in an appendix that was added to the second edition of the volume, published in 1971. 5. C. T. Hsia, “Obsession with China,” 46.



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6. Indeed, the story states that the Confucian “virtue and morality” phrase is not the actual text but rather is “scrawled over the text.” For a discussion of the relationship between literal and allegorical meaning in traditional “Confucian” texts, see Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 7. John Waller locates the “germ revolution” as having taking place during the twenty-­one years from 1879 to 1900. See Waller, The Discovery of the Germ: Twenty Years that Transformed the Way We Think About Disease (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). For a succinct discussion of the process by which these theories were introduced into China, see Bridie Andrews, “Tuberculosis and the Assimilation of Germ Theory in China, 1895–1937.” Journal of the History of Medicine 52 (1997): 114–157. It was also in this period that Sigmund Freud studied under the influential neurologist Jean-­Martin Charcot and then proceeded to establish the private medical practice where he developed the conceptual foundations of psychoanalysis. He began publishing his major psychoanalytic writings in the mid-­1890s. 8. David Der-­wei Wang, The Monster That Is History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 21. 9. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 63. 10. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contem­ ­porary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 4–8. 11. Lacan first presented this theory in 1936, which coincidentally was not only the year of publication of the two seminal essays by Benjamin and Heidegger on which Rey Chow draws in her own reading of this passage but was also the year of Lu Xun’s death. 12. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 2, 4. 13. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 80–81. 14. Jean-­Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Kari Hanet, trans. Screen 18 (1978). 15. Lu Xun, “Tengye xiansheng” (Professor Fujino), Lu Xun quanji, vol. 2, 306. 16. For an intellectual biography of Metchnikoff, see Alfred Tauber and Leon Chernyak, Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology: From Metaphor to Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). For further discussion of the sociocultural implications of the immunological theory he helped to develop, see Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (New York: Beacon Press, 1991), and Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 17. Olga Metchnikoff, Life of Elie Metchnikoff, 1845–1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 116–117. 18. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang. 1982), 41.

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19. In 1918, the year of Qian Xuantong’s visit, New Youth was placed under a rotating editorship of a committee of six that included the journal’s founding editor, Chen Duxiu, as well as Qian Xuantong and Hu Shi. 20. Lu Xun “Zixuanji zixu” (Preface to My Collected Works), in Lu Xun quanji, vol. 4, 455. Cited in Marston Anderson “The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story,” in Leo Ou-­fan Lee, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 39. 21. The journal’s title was changed from Qingnian zazhi (Youth magazine) to Xin qingnian (New youth) in its second year of publication. On the journal’s masthead, the title was also listed in French, as La jeunesse. 22. Chen Duxiu, “Jinggao qingnian” (Call to youth), in Qingnian zazhi (Youth magazine) (a.k.a., Xin qingnian) 1.1 (1915). For a translation of this essay, see Chen Tu-­hsiu, “Call to Youth,” in S.  Y. Teng and J.  K. Fairbank, China’s Responses to the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 240–243. 23. Chen Duxiu, “Xin qingnian” (New youth), in Xin qingnian 2.1 (1916). 24. Chen Duxiu, “Dangdai er da kexuejia de sixiang” (The thought of two contemporary scientists), in New Youth 2.1 (1916). 25. Paraphrased in Chen Duxiu, “The Thought of Two Contemporary Scientists.” 26. Chen Duxiu, “The Thought of Two Contemporary Scientists.” 27. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 219. 28. Hu Shi, “Ibusheng zhuyi” (Ibsenism), in Hu Shi zuopinji (Hu Shi’s selected works), vol. 6 (Taipei: Yuanliu chubanshe, 1986), 9–28. 29. Hu Shi “Ibsenism.” 30. Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (BiblioLife, 2008), 24. 31. Hu Shi, “Ibsenism.” 32. Although Hu Shi specifies that actual white blood cells target microbes “that enter the body,” he implies that political reformers instead elements that are already in society. 33. Emphasis added. 34. Lu Xun, “Preface” to Call to Arms. 35. Lu Xun, “Shisi nian de dujing” (Reading canon of the fourteenth year [of the Republic]), in Lu Xun quanji, vol. 3, 127–132. Part II ▪ 1967: Pharmakons

1. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1994), 443. 2. The editorial was entitled “Advance along the Road Opened Up by the October Socialist Revolution,” and was published on November 6, 1967, in the newspapers Red Flag (Hongqi), People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), and Liberation Army News (Jiefang ribao). 3. For a discussion of Mao’s notion of a continuous revolution, see John Bryan Starr, “Conceptual Foundations of Mao Tse-­Tung’s Theory of Continuous Revolution,” Asian Survey, 11:6 (June, 1971), 610–628.



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4. People’s Daily, Sept. 4, 1975, cited in Gucheng Li, A Glossary of Political Terms of the People’s Republic of China, 418. chapter 4 ▪ Revolution

1. See the entry for du 毒 in Luo Zhufeng, Hanyu dacidian (Comprehensive Chinese dictionary) (Shanghai: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 1986–1990), vol. 7, p.  823. The entry cites a Tang dynasty commentator, who writes, “du, zhiye” (毒，治也; or literally “du [poison] means zhi [treatment]”). 2. After his execution, however, Yu Qian’s official rank was posthumously restored. For a more detailed account of the historical incident, see Frederick W. Mote, “The T’u Mu Incident of 1449,” in Chinese Ways of Warfare, ed. Frank Kierman, Jr. and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 3. By convention, any given reign name continues to be used for the entirety of the current lunar calendar year. Given that the Zhengtong Emperor was reinstated earlier that same year in which King Hu’s film was set, the Jingtai reign designation would continue to be used until the following lunar new year. 4. Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” (On the relationship between fiction and the government of the people), in Liang Qichao’s Yinbingshi heji wenji (Collected Writings from the Ice-­Drinker’s Studio: Collected Essays) (Shanghai: China Books, 1936), 10: 6–10. An English translation of the essay may be found in Kirk Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ ver­­sity Press, 1996), 74–81. Subsequent citations from this work will be noted parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the Chinese edition followed by the page number of the English edition. 5. While King Hu’s film does not specify the precise location of this “Dragon Gate Inn,” it appears to be set somewhere in northern China. 6. Miao Tien plays Hsiao-­kang’s father in Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l’Amour (1994), The River (1996), and What Time Is It There? (2001), in which his character dies at the beginning of the film. 7. Charles Leary, “Interview: The Working Day of Lee Kang-­Sheng,” http: //www.fipresci.org/documents/archive/archive_2004/vienna/bujian _cleary.htm Part III ▪ 2006: Phantasms

1. “Yangtze River ‘Cancerous’ with Pollution,” China Daily, May 30, 2006. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006–05/30/content_604228.htm 2. Lin Wei and Yao Runfeng,“Huanghe zhi ‘bing’ jingshi qixing fazhang zhi you” (Worries about the developing deformities in the warning about the Yellow River’s ‘sickness’ ”) from Xinhua News 4 (Nov. 11, 2006). http://www .ha.xinhua.org/xhzt/2006-­11/09/content_8476801.htm 3. Construction on the dam had begun in 1994, and the dam was fully operational in 2012, when the final turbine went online.

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4. “Chinese Study Reveals Three Gorges Dam Triggered 3,000 Earthquakes, Numerous Landslides,” Probe International (June 1, 2011). http://journal .probeinternational.org/2011/06/01/chinese-­study-­reveals-­three-­gorges-­dam -­triggered-­3000-­earthquakes-­numerous-­landslides/ 5. See “China overtakes U.S. in Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” The New York Times, June, 20, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/business /worldbusiness/20iht-­emit.1.6227564.html 6. Yuyu Chen, Avraham Ebenstein, Michael Greenstone, and Hongbin Li, “Evidence on the Impact of Sustained Exposure to Air Pollution on Life Expectancy from China’s Huai River Policy” (June 30, 2013), MIT Depart­ ment of Economics Working Paper No. 13–15, available at SSRN: http://ssrn .com/abstract=2291154 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2291154. 7. Also known by its Chinese title, Huolong, or “Fire Dragon,” Li’s film actually marks the conclusion of trilogy on China’s last three emperors, having been preceded by the films Burning of the Imperial Palace and Reign behind a Curtain, both of which were released in 1983 and focused on Pu Yi’s immediate predecessors, the Tongzhi and Guangxu emperors, respectively. 8. Li Qingxiang, Pu Yi de houbansheng [Pu Yi’s latter life] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1988) (see particularly p. 596 of the “Afterword,” where Li Qingxiang discusses the “last emperor fever” phenomenon). Li Qingxiang was very prolific in the area of “last emperor studies,” having written seven other books on related topics, including The Last Empress and the Concubine [Modai huanghou he huangfei] (1984), which provided the inspiration for the 1987 film The Last Empress; as well as Pu Yi and I [Pu Yi yu wo] (1984), which provided the inspiration for Li Han-­hsiang’s 1986 film, Pu Yi’s Latter Life. 9. This is the title of the English-­language version of Pu Yi’s autobiography. See Pu Yi, From Emperor to Citizen—​The Autobiography of Aisin-­Gioro Pu Yi (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964). 10. For a discussion of the “Nietzsche fever” phenomenon, and specifically the sudden surge in interest in his pronouncement that “God is dead,” see Cheng Fang, Ni Cai zai Zhongguo [Nietzsche in China] (Nanjing: Nanjing chubanshe, 1993). 11. Versions of this phrase appear several times in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 12. Geremie Barmé, ed. Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (M. E. Sharpe, 1996). chapter 5 ▪ Information

1. Hu Fayun, [email protected] (Hong Kong: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2007). The novel is available in English translation under the title Such Is This World @ sars.come, translated by A.  E. Clark (Ragged Banner Press, 2011). All citations from the Hong Kong edition will be noted parenthetically in the text, and all translations are my own. 2. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” 1927, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Words of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, trans. vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 223–243



N o t e s t o P a g e s 16 4 –18 2

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3. See, for instance, a letter from a Hong Kong resident that is cited and discussed on the website sosick.org: http://www.sosick.org/new.html. 4. In this respect Leung’s film uncannily anticipates the central premise of the Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler vehicles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 50 First Dates (both of which were released in 2004, the year after Chiu’s Golden Chicken II, and which feature the repeated reuniting of lovers, one of whom suffer from short-­term memory loss). 5. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), 303. 7. In Mandarin, the characters for the terms “chicken” and “prostitute” are near homophones for one another (both are pronounced ji), differing only in tone, while in Cantonese the two characters also have similar pronunciations (pronounced gai and gei, respectively). 8. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Rayna Recter, ed, Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 173. 9. A version of the original website has been archived at: http://www.sosick .org/new.html. 10. Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” Amer­ ican Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (May): 1–18. Copy at  http://j.mp /LdVXqN 11. James Leibold, “Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion?” The Journal of Asian Studies 70:4 (November 2011), 1023–1041. 12. Yin Zhang, Internet Control in China: A Digital Panopticon (University of Alberta, M.A. thesis, 2004). 13. Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843), vol. 4. See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 14. Dave Lyons, “China’s Golden Shield Project: Myths, Realities and Context,” presented at the 7th Chinese Internet Research Conference, Philadelphia, Penn, May 27–29, 2009. 15. Dave Lyons, “China’s Golden Shield Project: Myths, Realities and Context.” 16. Quoted in Josephine Ma, “Deafening Silence Surrounds Outbreak,” South China Morning Post, Sept. 16, 2002, p.  7 (http://www.freerepublic.com /focus/f-­news/751533/posts). 17. In this respect, Weibo resembles the microblogging service Twitter. 18. Mary Kay Magistad, “Chinese Online Anger over Train Tragedy,” PRI’s The World (July 29, 2011) (http://www.theworld.org/2011/07/chinese-­online -­a nger-­over-­train-­tragedy/). 19. See the archived GPHIN website: http://www.hc-­sc.gc.ca/ahc-­asc/pubs /_intactiv/gphin-­r misp/index-­eng.php 20. The WHO defines a pandemic as being characterized by an “increased and sustained transmission [of an infectious pathogen] in general popula­­ tion.” The SARS outbreak fell short of this criterion, and the last official

318

21.

22.

23.

24.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 18 2 –19 1 influenza pandemic prior to the 2009 H1N1 epidemic was one that emerged out of Hong Kong in 1968. “First Global Estimates of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic Mortality Released by CDC-­Led Collaboration,” http://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-­global -­estimates.htm; and “Updated CDC Estimates of 2009 H1N1 Influenza Cases, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States, April 2009–April 2010, 2010” http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/estimates_2009_h1n1.htm See Marc Lacey and Andrew Jacobs, “Even as Fears of Flu Ebb, Mexicans Feel Stigma,” The New York Times May 4, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com /2009/05/05/world/asia/05china.html See Nate Silver, “Same-­Sex Marriage Availability Set to Double in One-­ Year Span,” New York Times, June 26, 2013 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs. nytimes.com/2013/06/26/same-­sex-­m arriage-­availability-­set-­to-­double-­i n -­one-­year-­span/ As recently as the landmark 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor, which examined the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that restricted marriage to heterosexual couples, one of the central arguments in support of the act involved the contention that one of the primary social functions of marriage is to promote a process of sexual reproduction. The implication was that since same-­sex couples are not capable of (unassisted) sexual reproduction, they are not entitled to the same rights and benefits as their opposite-­sex counterparts. This argument was found to be unpersuasive, and the federal DOMA act was dissolved. chapter 6 ▪ Capital

1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Ben Fowkes, trans. (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), 321. 2. Yan Lianke, Ding Zhuangmeng (Ding Village dream) (Taipei: Maitian, 2006). Translated as Yan Lianke, Dream of Ding Village, Cindy Carter, trans. (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2011). All citations from this work will be cited parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the Chinese edition followed by the page number for the English one. For background on rural China’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, see Bin Xue, “HIV/AIDS Policy and Policy Evolution in China, International Journal of STD & AIDS 12:7, 459–464; Edmund Settle, “AIDS in China: An Annotated Chronology: 1985–2003,” China AIDS Survey, 2003 AIDS in China: An Annotated Chronology 1985–2003 http:// portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/82b973698fcdf215528d63 d2b6796087AIDSchron_111603.pdf 3. See Zhang Ying, “Being Alive is Not Just an Instinct,” in Southern Weekend, cited and translated in ESWN Culture Blog http://www.zonaeuropa.com /culture/c20060327_1.htm Translation revised. 4. I borrow the phrase borrowed time from Paul Monette’s book, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (New York: Mariner Books, 1998). 5. Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking about a Virus, Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-­Curtis, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 14, 5.



N o t e s t o P a g e s 19 6 – 2 2 4

319

6. Yu Hua, Xu Sanguan maixueji (Chronicle of Xu Sanguan’s blood-­selling) (Nanjing: Nanjing wenyi chubanshe, 1995). Translated as Yu Hua, Chron­ icles of a Blood Merchant, Andrew Jones, trans. (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). 7. Yu Hua notes that he was motivated to write the novel by the fact that there were relatively few fictional reflections on Chinese rural blood selling, despite the practice’s long tradition. One notable precedent, however, can be found in Wu Zuxiang’s 1932 story, “Young Master Gets His Tonic” (Guanguan de bupin). 8. The opening of the Chinese edition of the novel specifies that the narrative begins in the sixth month of the gengchen year in the lunar calendar, which would correspond to the summer of 2000. Other dates in the narrative, however, make clear that this initial date should have been the sixth month of the wuyin year, or the summer of 1998. 9. For a discussion of Yan Lianke’s novel that draws on Tao Yuanming’s “Peach Blossom Spring” fable, see Jianmei Liu, “Joining the Commune or Withdrawing from the Commune: A Reading of Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 19:2 (Fall, 2007), 1–33. 10. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 11. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 112. 12. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3–4. 13. The problem of China’s cancer villagers has recently begun to receive greater attention, with a recent study identifying nearly 250 villages in eastern Jiangsu and central Henan provinces that have unusually high cancer rates. See Xu Chi, “China’s Mainland Home to 247 ‘Cancer Villages,’ ” Shanghai Daily (February 25, 2013). Archived at: http://www.china.org.cn/environment /2013-­02/25/content_28047976_2.htm 14. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12. 15. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” Public Culture Winter 2003 15(1): 11–40; emphasis added. 16. Liu Xie, The Literary Mind and Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong). Translation taken from Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Vincent Yu-chung Shih, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), IV: 32. 17. Lu Xun, “The Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluoshi li shuo), in Lu Xun quanji [Lu Xun complete works] (Beijing: People’s Literature Press, 1982), vol. 1, 63–115. English translation available as “The Power of Mara Poetry,” Shu-­ ying Tsau and Donald Holoch, trans., in Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 96–109. 18. Chu T’ien-­wen, Huayi qianshen [A flower remembers her previous lives] (Taipei: Maitian chuban gongsi, 1996). 19. English translation taken from Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 274–275.

320

Note s to P age s 2 2 4 –2 4 3

20. While some traditional commentaries (and contemporary translations) sometimes misinterpret this si as meaning “to think,” si is clearly being used here as an apostrophe to open a clause—​a usage of the character that can also be found in many of the other poems in The Book of Odes. 21. One sees this mistake, for instance, in James Legge’s early but influential translation of the Book of Odes, in The Chinese Classics, Vol. IV Part 2, The She King or The Book of Poetry (Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford, & C), 1871), 613, in which he renders the line in question as: His thoughts are without depravity;—​ He thinks of his horses, and thus serviceable are they. 22. Yan Lianke, Chenmo yu chuanxi (Silence and breath), (Taiwan: Linking, 2014). 23. See Yan Lianke, “Performing in Chains,” Carlos Rojas, trans., English PEN website, April 12th, 2012 http://www.englishpen.org/pen-­atlas/performing-­in -­chains/ chapter 7 ▪ Labor

1. Both translations (from Malay) are taken from the film’s English-­language subtitles. The ellipses in the first quote have been added, while those in the second are as they appear in the subtitles. 2. Andrew Huang, “Sense and Sensuality: Art-­House Master Tsai Ming-­liang Discusses His New Movie The Wayward Cloud and His Philosophies in a Moody, Existential Interview,” Taiwan News, February 18, 2005. 3. The film was eventually permitted to be released in Malaysia after Tsai made some obligatory cuts. See, “Tsai Ming-­Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone Banned, then Unbanned,” Twitch, March 11, 2007 http://twitchfilm. com/2007/03/tsai-­m ing-­l iangs-­i-­d ont-­want-­t o-­s leep-­a lone-­b anned-­t hen -­u nbanned.html 4. Scott Tobias, “Interview: Tsai Ming-­liang,” A.V. Club, February 27, 2002, retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.avclub.com/articles/tsai-­ mingliang,13756. 5. “The River is a strange film. Everyone—​i ncluding the crew, the actors, and the viewers—​found it to be very, very strange.” Chang Hsiao-­hung, “Guaitai jiating luomanshi: ‘Heliu’ zhong de yuwang changjing” (Queer family romance: The scene of desire in The River), in Guaitai jiating luomanshi (Queer family romance) (Taipei: Shibao, 2000), 113. 6. “The family we see in The River is one that really should not exist. The father is gay, but he has a family. A wife. A child. But we understand why he has a family. He has to have a family to be his front.” Quoted in Shujen Wang and Chris Fujiwara, “My Films Reflect My Living Situation: An Interview with Tsai Ming-­liang on Film Spaces, Audiences, and Distribu­ tion,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14.1 (2006): 223. 7. Tsai Ming-­liang has indicated in a discussion of The River that the fictional film crew is in the process of filming a scene for a commercial designed to promote environmental awareness.



Note s to P age s 2 4 5 –25 8

321

8. See Tsai’s discussion in Wen T’ien-­hsiang, Freeze-­Frame of Light and Image, 222; and in Peggy Chiao Hsiung-­ping and Tsai Ming-­liang, eds., Heliu (The river) (Taipei: Huangguang, 1997), 55; Tony Rayns, “Confrontation.” 9. See Tsai’s discussion in Wen Tianxiang, Freeze-­Frame of Light and Shadow, 222; and in Chiao and Tsai, eds., The River, 55; Tony Rayns, “Con­frontation.” 10. “An Interview with Tsai Ming-­liang,” interview by Samantha Culp and Tyler Coburn, trans. Ken Chen, Bingyi Huang, James Tweedie, and Susan Yu, Wake: A Journal of Contemporary Culture (Fall 2003), retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.yale.edu/wake/fall03/tsai.html. 11. The first bathhouse encounter begins in the seventeenth minute of the film, the second begins in the fifty-­seventh minute, and a pivotal moment in the third (when Hsiao-kang’s father turns on the bathhouse light) takes place in the ninety-­eighth minute. There is, therefore, almost precisely the same forty­minute gap between the beginning of each of these three pivotal scenes. 12. Rey Chow, “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema: Tsai Ming-­liang’s The River,” in New Centennial Review 4.1 (2004): 123. Chow points out that, strictly speaking, the scene in question does not necessarily even constitute an act of incest. That is to say, the extent that incest is understood as a violation of restrictions on which sorts of closely-­related kin are permitted to marry, father-­son intimacy cannot technically be considered incest in a sociopolitical context, like 1990s Taiwan, where same-­sex marriage is not even permitted in the first place. 13. Rey Chow, “A Pain in the Neck,” 132; Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 150; Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 180. 14. Tsai Ming-­liang, “Yuwang, yapo, bengjiede shengming” (Desire, repression, and a collapsed life), interview by Chen Baoxu, in Chiao and Tsai, The River, 61. 15. Jean-­Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 18 (Winter 1978); Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen 18 (Winter 1978). 16. The film was commissioned by Peter Sellers’s New Crowned Hope Festival, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. 17. This furrowing of the unconscious man’s brows is so subtle that it is virtually imperceptible under normal viewing conditions and becomes visible only when the work is watched at several times its normal speed. chapter 8 ▪ Membranes

1. Xiongdi (Brothers), two volumes (Taipei: Rye Field Press, 2005, 2006). Trans­ lated by Eileen Cheng-­yin Chow and Carlos Rojas as Brothers (New York: Pantheon, 2009). All citations from this work will be noted parenthetically in the text, with the page number of the Chinese edition followed by the page number of the English edition. 2. See Yu Hua, “1986,” in Yu Hua zuopinji 1 (Yu Hua’s collected works, vol. 1) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, 1994); translated by Andrew Jones as

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Note s to P age s 259–2 91

“1986,” in Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 62–113. For a succinct discussion of this issue, see Xu Jin, Gudai xingfa yu xingju (Ancient penal methods and penal instruments) (Shandong: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1989), 1–3. See Shenzi (The book of Master Shen) (dates unknown; probably between 200 and 800 ce) cited in Xu Jin, Ancient Penal Methods and Penal Instruments, 2. Xunzi, “Zhenglun” 18.4; for a translation and discussion of this text, see John Knoblock, ed., Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 3, books 17–32 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 24–25; 36–39. See Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation” (Qu’est-­ce qu’une nation?), lecture at Sorbonne, 11 March 1882. Published in Discours et Conferences (Paris: Caiman-­Levy, 1887), 277–310; translated as “What is a nation,” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, ed. Becoming National: A Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–55. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. and editor (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 115–154: 117. Fred Hoyle, quoted in Kevin Kelley, ed. The Home Planet (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1988), inside front cover. Yu Hua, Di qi tian (The seventh day) (Beijing: Xinxing chubanshe, 2013). There is a forthcoming English translation by Allan Barr, titled The Seventh Day (New York: Pantheon, 2015). See, for instance, Di Cunlei, “: Yu Hua de tingzhi yu pida” (The Seventh Day: Yu Hua’s stagnation and exhaustion), book review published on Sina.com: http://book.sina.com.cn/zl/shuping/2014-­05-­20/1047408 .shtml The Chinese titles of the two films, however, are unrelated to one another. King Hu’s title, Xia nü, literally means “female knight-­errant,” while Jia Zhangke’s title, Tianzhu ding, literally means “destined by heaven.” “Interview: Jia Zhang-­ke,” by Nicolas Rapold, in Film Comment, Oct. 2, 2013. http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/jia-­zhang-­ke-­i nterview-­a-­touch -­of-­sin

Conclusion 1. Qian Zhongshu, “Preface” (xu), in Zhong Shuhua, ed, Zouxiang shijie: jindai Zhongguo zhishifenzi kaocha xifang de lishi (Beijing: Zhonghu shuju, 1985), 1–2; emphases added. 2. Luis Villarreal, “Can Viruses Make Us Human?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 148, no. 3 (Sept. 2004), 296–323; and Villarreal, Viruses and the Evolution of Life (Washington DC: American Society for Microbiology, 2005). 3. Carl Woese, “On the Evolution of Cells,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (13) (2002), 8742–8747.

Acknowledgments

Homesickness builds in part on a workshop on “Viral Knowledge: Infection and Information in Modern China,” which I hosted at Duke in Spring of 2010, as well as on a special issue on “Discourses of Disease,” which I guest edited for the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC). I am very grateful to Andrea Bachner, Ari Heinrich, Li Jin, Feng Lan, Ying Qian, Andrew Schonebaum, Chien-­hsin Tsai, Xiaojue Wang, and Xin Yang for their enthusiastic contributions to the workshop and/or the special issue. Also, in Summer of 2013, as this volume was nearing completion, Haun Saussy and I jointly organized a panel on “Literature and the Life Sciences” for the triennial meeting of the International Comparative Literature Association, and I was energized by his comments on my paper, as well as by the presentations by the other panelists. Most of these contributors are also old friends, from whom I have learned a great deal over the years. Xiaojue Wang and a second anonymous reviewer for Harvard University Press each offered very helpful comments and erudite suggestions, and David Wang also read the complete manuscript and provided extremely useful feedback. I was not able to follow all of their suggestions, but did significantly restructure some parts of the volume in response to their collective advice. I am also grateful to Kirk Denton, the editor of MCLC, for making the special issue possible, and to the Chiang-­Ching Kuo Foundation Inter-­University Center for Sinology and various units at Duke for providing funding for the workshop. Chapter three of Homesickness is informed by themes presented in my essay for the special issue: “Of Canons and Cannibalism: A Psycho-­ immunological Reading of ‘Diary of a Madman,’ ” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Spring, 2011), 31–60. Chapter 7 builds in part on ideas I developed in “Along the Riverrun: Cinematic Encounters in the Work of Tsai Ming-­liang,” in Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-­yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford University Press, 2013), 626–646.

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A C KNOWLED G MENTS

I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to translate book-length volumes by Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, and Ng Kim Chew, each of whom I consider a friend and a source of inspiration. Their works have helped shape my thinking on the topic of homesickness, and are key components of this study. Like translation, the publication is a fundamentally collaborative effort, and I am once again indebted to my stalwart editor, Sharmila Sen, and the rest of her production team. Finally, I am beholden to Quince, Teo, and Luodan, for providing a continual source of amusement, diversion, and intellectual stimulation, as well to Eileen, who has served as a thoughtful and challenging sounding board for all of the ideas developed in this volume.

Index

“1986” See Yu Hua

autoimmune response, 38, 110, 117 autre-biography

abjection, 188, 106, 212, 218, 240, 269–270 AIDS See HIV/AIDS Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, 35–40, 123, 151–153 Akomfrah, John, 283 Digitopia, 283 All the Corners of the World (Haijiao tianya) See Tsai Ming-liang Althusser, Louis, 108 Analects, The (Lunyu), 221–222, 224 anemia, 200 anthrax, 104 Anti, Michael, 180 antidote, 58, 127 Anti-Rightist campaign, 150–151 Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign 150 antisuture, 28, 251–252 Archaea, 290 Aristotle, 12 arsphenamine, 10 Articles of Favorable Treatment, 36 Atun, Norman, 228 Austin, John, 22 autobiography, 98–99, 103–104, 106

bacteria, 9, 14, 104, 110–111, 120, 234 anthrax, 104 gut, 110 syphilis, 9 tuberculosis, 104 Bacteria (domain of), 290 bacteriology, 103 Bai Ying, 131 “barbarians”, 5–8 man, 5, 7 yi, 8 Barmé, Geremie, 152 “shades of Mao”, 152 Barthes, Roland, 105 Battle of Tumu, 132 Benjamin, Walter, 100 Bentham, Jeremy, 177 Bertolucci, Bernando, 151 Last Emperor, The, 151 biopolitical, 188–189, 218 body politic, 9–13, 38, 92, 117, 211, 214, 266, 282, 187 Book of Changes, The (Yijing), 221 Book of History, The (Shangshu), 56, 221 Book of Odes, The (Shijing), 221 Book of Rites, The (Liji), 221–225 “borrowed time”, 204

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326

Index

Bosse, Abraham Boxer Uprising, 23–25, 3d5, 37–39, 45, 59, 68–79, 83–84, 90 Boxer indemnity, 69 Boxer Protocol, 69–70 “Southern Boxers”, 50, 53–54 Brothers (Xiongdi) See Yu Hua Call to Arms (Nahan) See Lu Xun “Call to Youth” See Chen Duxiu cancer, 217–219 kidney, 123 lung and esophageal, 216 stomach, 158 as metaphor, 149 cannibalism, 98–99, 110, 116–117, 119, 172, 203–204 castration, 259, 295 CDC (Centers for Disease Control), 181–182 Chang, Grace, 238 Chen Chao-jung , 230, 248 Chen Duxiu, 107, 108–109, 111, 112, 116–118, 124, 126 “Call to Youth” (“Jinggao qingnian”), 107 Chen Jialin, 151 Chen Shiang-chyi, 230, 232, 240, 243 Cheng, Ronald, 168 Cheung, Jackie, 167 Cheung, Jacob, 151 Lai Shi: China’s Last Eunuch 151–152 Chiang Kai-shek, 238 Children (Haizi) See Tsai Ming-liang China Daily, 149 “China’s True Condition”, 4 Chiu, Samson Leong Chun, 166, 170 Golden Chicken, 166 Golden Chicken, 2, 166–175 Chow, Rey, 100, 248, 250 Chronicles of a Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan maixueji) See Yu Hua Chu T’ien-hsin, 223 Chu T’ien-wen, 223–224 “Flower Remembers if Previous Lives, A” (“Huayi qianshen”), 223–224

Notes of a Desolate Man (Huangren shouji), 223 Chua, Pearlly, 232 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 35–38, 59, 69 Coetzee, John, 105 cold, common, 20 “Condition of China, The”, 4–5 Confucius, 222, 224–225 contagion, 9, 27, 33, 90, 106–107, 168, 238 continuous revolution, 125–126, 130 Conversation with God, A (Yu shen duihua) See Tsai Ming-liang Critique The Water Margin Campaign, 125–126 Cultural Revolution, 26–27, 123–127, 130, 159, 210–211, 225, 258–259, 261, 269 Daly, Richard, 31–32 Dawkins, Richard, 16–20, 291–292 decapitation, 100, 139–144 Deng Xiaoping, 23, 27, 151, 153, 191, 285 See also, Reform and Opening Up Campaign Deng Yujiao, 279 Derrida, Jacques, 21–22 Destroy the Four Olds Movement, 125 “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji”) See Lu Xun Digitopia See Akomfrah, John Ding Ling, 10 disease, ix-x, 5, 7, 9–11, 14, 16, 27–29, 39, 41, 53–55, 59, 68, 90, 92, 104, 110, 119, 146, 154–155, 160, 163–164, 175, 180–182, 185–186, 189, 216–217, 221, 240–242, 252, 266, 274, , 281 discourses of, ix-x, 11, 15, 20, 23, 29–30, 33, 154, 296 heart, 123 infectious, 3, 13, , 96, 107–109 national, 3, 109 spiritual , 97 DNA, 22, 286–291 Doctrine of the Mean, The (Zhongyong), 221 Dragon Gate Inn (Longmen kezhan) See Hu, King Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuang meng) See Yan Lianke

Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), 63 Earth Day, 273 Earthrise photograph, 272 Eight Nation Alliance, 38, 69, 70, 84, 93 Enemy of the People, The See Ibsen, Henrik Ermo See Zhou Xiaowen Eukarya, 290 excrement, 204–205 exile viii-ix, 46, 132–133, 139, 220, 295 exogamy viii-ix, 71, 77, 94, 172–173 Fan Zengxiang, 83 “Former Song of Caiyun” (Qian Caiyun qu), 83 “Latter Song of Caiyun” (Caiyun houqu), 83 Feng Yuxiang, 36 fetish, 28–29, 260 Freudian, 28, 158–159, 165, 169, 170, 184 Marxian (commodity fetishism), 28, 187, 196, 212, 214 Field, Andrew, 31–32 filial piety (xiao), 87–89, 243 “Fish Bones” (“Yu hai”) See Ng Kim Chew Fish, Underground See Jia Zhangke; Conversation with God (Yushen duihua) flood control, 24, 42, 43, 46–47, 56, 59 Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Niehai hua) See Zeng Pu Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan) See Li Ruzhen Forbidden City, the, 35–36 Forest of Literature Press (Xiaoshuo lin), 67 Four Books, The (Sishu) See Yan Lianke Foucault, Michel, 13, 188, 218 Four Books, The (Sishu) See Yan Lianke Four Cleanups Movement Foxconn, 279–281 “free love”, 75, 80, 82 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 28, 74, 158

Index

327

Fu Lin, 75 Stones in the Sea (Qin hai shi) 75–90 Fu Manchu See Rohmer, Sax funeral, 85, 194 tablet, 88 Gallop, Jane, 101–102 Gao Yaojie, 189 García Düttmann, Alexander, 191 geming (revolution), 53, 86, 130 –131 See also continuous revolution; permanent revolution gene, 16–18, 286 germ revolution, 13–14, 313n7 GPHIN (Global Public Health Intelligence Network), 180 Golden Chicken See Chiu, Samson Leong Chun Golden Chicken 2 See Chiu, Samson Leong Chun Golden Shield Project, 176–178 Gong Cheng, 86 Gong Zizhen, 86–87 Goodbye Dragon Inn (Busan) See Tsai Ming-liang Google, 181 Great Leap Forward, 23, 198, 209, 218–221 Great Learning, The (Daxue), 221 Guangxu Emperor, 36 Han dynasty, 11, 41, 45, 47, 55, 311n2 Haraway, Donna, 111 Heath, Stephen, 102 Heidegger, Martin, 100, 271–272 hepatitis, 199 HIV/AIDS, 20, 27, 182–183, 185–196, 205–206, 216, 223, 241 AIDS villages , 27, 188–189, 216, 230 Hobbes, Thomas, 12 Hole, The (Dong) See Tsai Ming-liang homesickness vii-x, 1, 16, 25, 30, 59, 65, 82, 121, 147, 221, 252, 255, 260, 268, 275, 279, 282, 185, 195 Hong Jun, 25, 68, 72, 83 Hsia, C. T., 1011, 31–32, 96–97 Hu Fayun, 27, 157–159, 165–166, 184 [email protected], 27, 157–166

328

Index

Hu, King, 26, 127–128, 129–134, 139, 142–147, 281 Dragon Gate Inn (Longmen kezhan), 26, 129–142, 144, 145 Touch of Zen, A (Nüxia), 281 Hu Lancheng, 223 Hu Shi, 112–116, 226 Hu Wenhai, 279 hukou (household registration ­certificate), 192 Huang Di See Yellow Emperor Huang, Ray, 23 Human Genome Project, 286 Human Microbiome Project, 293 human rights, 30 Hundred Days’ Reform, 35, 52 hygiene, 9, 14, 96, 108–109, 113, 169 hymen, 29, 30, 260, 263, 265–273, 276 artificial, 266–267 Great Wall of, 29, 267–268 reconstruction surgery, 267–268, 270, 273 I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Heiyan quan) See Tsai Ming-liang Ibsen, Henrik, 112–116, 118 Enemy of the People, The, 112–116 imago See Lacan, Jacques immune response, 26, 38–39, 104, 105, 114 immune system viii-ix, 21, 26, 109–112, 116, 120, 127, 259, 268–170 immunity (metaphorical), 162, 164 incest, viii-ix, 33, 76–77, 81, 92, 167, 172–174, 193, 197, 206, 233, 243, 247–248, 250–252, 296, 321n12 incest taboo, viii, 81, 167, 172–173 infection, ix, 2, 9, 21, 27–28, 30, 33, 97, 104, 106, 109, 112–117, 159, 170, 175–176, , 180, 188, 191–192, 233, 252, 288–289, 296 Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing), 11, 41 “Inscribed Backs” (“Kebei”) See Ng Kim Chew insurrection, viii-ix, 33, 45, 296

Internet, the, 27, 30–32, 159–162, 165, 176–180, 184, 281, 294 Irigaray, Luce, 71 Jameson, Fredric, 32–33 Jia Rang, 47, 55 Jia Zhangke, 277–282, 283–285 Touch of Sin, A (Tianzhu ding), 277–282 Platform (Zhantai), 277, 278, 284 Public, In (Gonggong changsuo), 284–295 Still Life (Sanxia haoren), 278 World, The (Shijie), 278 Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu), 277 jianghu, 46, 50–51, 126, 128, 139, 267, 270, 281, 294 Jiangnan, 165 Jin dynasty, 6 Jin Shengtan, 46, 125–126 Jin Tianhe, 67, 90–94 Morning Bell, The (Nüjie zhong), 90–94 Jingtai Emperor, 132 See also Zhu Qiyu Jurchens, 5–6 Kang Youwei, 9 Kangde Emperor, 36 See Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi Khitans, 5, 46 “king’s two bodies”, 37 Koch, Robert, 104 Kristeva, Julia, 212–213 Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 13 Lacan, Jacques , 101–102, 106, 212 imago, 101, 106, 108 mirror stage, 101–102, 108, 111 objet petit a , 212–213 Laclau, Ernesto, 15 Lai Shi: China’s Last Eunuch See Cheung, Jacob Lan Can, 58 Lao She, 10 Last Emperor, The See Bertolucci, Bernando Last Emperor: Aisen Gioro Pu Yi’s Latter Life, The See Li Han-Hsiang Last Empress, The, 151



Index

Lau, Andy, 174 Lee, Bruce, 168 Lee Kang-sheng, 143–146, 229, 231–233, 236, 239, 245–246, 254 Missing, The (Bujian), 144–147 Lenin’s Kisses (Shouhuo) See Yan Lianke Li Bi, 58 Li Han-Hsiang, 151 Last Emperor: Aisen Gioro Pu Yi’s Latter Life, The, 151 Li Ruzhen vii, 64, 295 Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan), vii, 94, 295 Li Shuxian, 151 Li Zhi, 48 Li Zhisui, 123–124, 152 Liang Qichao, 5–7, 135–138 On the New Citizen (Xinmin shuo), 5–7 “On the Relationship between Fiction and Government of the People”, 135–138 Lilac Affair, the (dingxiang an), 87–90 Lim, Song Hwee, 250 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, The (Wenxin diaolong) See Liu Xie Liu E, 24, 41–48, 52, 57–60, 64, 65, 70, 73, 74 Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji), 24, 41–59, 64, 65, 67, 70, 73, 85, 136 Liu, Lydia, 100 Liu Xie, 222–223 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, The (Wenxin diaolong), 222–223 Loeffler, Friedrich, 104 Lu Xun, 10, 25–26, 95–107, 116–119, 137–138, 119–121 Call to Arms (Nahan), 99–103, 105–7 “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji”), 96–99, 103, 106–107, 116–119 “Medicine” (“Yao”), 137–138 “Random Thoughts #38” (“Suigan lu, 38”), 9–10 “Reading Canon of the Fourteenth Year [of the Republic]. The” (“Shisi nian de dujing”), 119–121

329

Lu Yi-ching, 229, 242 Lyons, David, 178 macrophage, 104, 110, 120 malaria, 59, 79 Mao Zedong , 27, 123–128, 130, 149, 152–153, 206, 219, 285 Great Leap Forward, launch of, 23 Maoism, 24, 19–192, 210, 220 “Marching into a New Era” (“Zoujin xin shidai”), 284–285 Marching into the World (Zouxiang shijie), 285–286 Martin, Fran, 250 Marx, Karl, 28, 170, 187, 189 masks gas masks, 167 welder’s mask, 168 facemasks, 175, 234–236 May Fourth, 32, 116, 259, 268–269 authors, 26 Movement , 96, 137, 153 reformers, 140 writings, 26 Mbembe, Achille, 218 McConnell, James, 272–273 measles, 19–20 medical humanities, x medicine, ix, 9, 26, 29–30, 42–43, 45, 79, 96–97, 120–122, 127, 129, 134, 137–138, 189 biomedicine, 9, 24, 30, 100 “Medicine” (Lu Xun story), see Lu Xun Nobel Prize for, 38 traditional Chinese, 41, 99, 100 Western, 100 meme, 16–23, 33, 162, 285, 291, 296 Mencius (Mengzi), 56, 75, 78, 221 metagenomics, 293 Metchnikoff, Élie, 38, 104–105, 109–111, 114, 116, 120 Miao Tien, 131, 142, 145–146, 229, 242, 245 microbes, 98, 103–105, 109–114, 235, 265–266, 293 Ming dynasty, 6, 26, 46, 48, 125, 131–133, 211 mirror stage See Lacan, Jacques misreading, 112, 115, 117, 225

330 misrecognition, 64, 98, 101, 103, 111–112, 117 Missing, The (Bujian) See Lee Kang-sheng Mongolian, 89 Mongols, 6, 132, 312n11 monocytes, 110, 120 Morning Bell, The (Nüjie zhong) See Jin Tianhe Mouffe, Chantal, 15 Mozart, Amadeus, 253 Magic Flute, The, 253 natural selection, 9, 16–17 Nature, 181 necropolitical, 28, 188–189, 205, 218, 220 New Citizen, On The (Xinmin shuo) See Liang Qichao New Youth (Xin qingnian), 97–98, 106–108, 112, 114, 116, 268 “new youth”, 108, 111, 118, 124 Ng Kim Chew, 62–64 “Fish Bones” (“Yu hai”), 62–63 “Inscribed Backs” (“Kebei”), 63–65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 33, 152. “God is dead”, 152 See also, ressentiment Nine-Tailed Turtle (Jiuwei gui) See Zhang Chunfan North China Daily Press, 3–4 Notes of a Desolate Man (Huangren shouji) See Chu T’ien-wen objet petit a See Lacan, Jacques “obsession with China” See Hsia, C. T. Olympic Games, Beijing, 1, 30, 266 opium, 1, 78–79, 85, 91 Opium War, First, 2, 8 Opium War, Second, 86 oracle bones, 59–65 Oudart, Jean Pierre, 102–103 Pasteur, Louis, 104 pathogen, ix-x, 10, 16, 26–27, 38–39, 109–111, 114, 182, 268, 318n20 patient, 9, 14, 21, 23, 41–42, 100, 112–113, 137, 175–176, 180–181, 185

Index “Peach Blossom Spring” (Taohao yuan ji) See Tao Yuanming permanent revolution, 125 phagocyte, 105, 109, 127 Platform (Zhantai) See Jia Zhangke Plato, 12 poison, 21, 57, 58, 87, 123–124, 127, 129–130, 134–138, 178, 190, 281 POV (point-of-view) shot, 140, 244, 249–251, 254 pregnancy viii-ix, 289 prostitution, 56–57, 71, 78, 80, 82, 85, 171 Public, In (Gonggong changsuo) See Jia Zhangke Qian Xuantong, 106 Qian Zhongshu, 285–286 Qing dynasty, 2, 5–10, 14, 23–24, 36–39, 42, 44, 52–53, 67–70, 76–77, 86, 89, 137, 151, 285 “Random Thoughts #38” (“Suigan lu, 38”) See Lu Xun “Reading Canon of the Fourteenth Year [of the Republic]. The” (“Shisi nian de dujing”) See Lu Xun Rebels of the Neon God (Qingshaonian nezha) See Tsai Ming-liang red blood cells, 192 Red Guards, 124, 127–128 “Red Tourism”, 206 Reform and Opening Up Campaign, 23, 27, 191 Reform Era, 24, 151, 153, 191, 200, 261, 285 Renan, Ernst, 269 ressentiment, 7, 31–32 retrovirus, 22, 288–289 River, The (Heliu) See Tsai Ming-liang RNA, 22, 288–290 RNA World hypothesis, 290 Rohmer, Sax, 3 Rubin, Gayle, 172 Russo-Japanese War, 95



Index

[email protected] See Hu Fayun Sai Jinhua, 25, 68–73, 83–90 SARS, ix, 27, 146, 154, 159, 160, 163–164, 166, 167–170, 174–177, 180, 182, 235–236 scar, 55–56, 73–74, 201 Sea of Regret (Henhai) See Wu Jianren Sequel to Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Xu Niehaihua) See Zhang Hong Serve the People ! (Wei renmin fuwu) See Yan Lianke Seventh Day, The (Di qi tian) See Yu Hua Shang dynasty, 60–61 Shen Congwen, 10 Shen Nong (Divine Farmer), 41 Shiel, M. P., 3 Shih Chun, 129, 142 Shiwu bao, 4 Shun, 42 Sichuan earthquake, 2008 , 149 sick man, x, 1–7, 13–14, 32, 67–68, 108, 307n4, 309n25, 311n3 Sick Man of Asia, ix, 1–3, 7, 66–68, 90, 108 Sick Man of Europe, 3 Sima Chengzhen, 11 Sina.com, 165 Sino-Japanese War (first), 2–4, 14, 24, 35 Social Darwinism, 9 Spanish influenza, 164 Spring and Autumn Annals, The (Chunqiu), 221 Still Life (Sanxia haoren) See Jia Zhangke Stones in the Sea (Qin hai shi) See Fu Lin Su Qingguo, 151 suicide, 59, 74, 85, 167, 186, 271, 279–280 Summer Palace, the See Yuanming yuan suture, 102–103, 106, 230, 236, 241–241, 251, 252 See also antisuture symptom vii-viii, 10, 15, 25, 40, 46, 53, 54, 74–75, 77–78, 82, 90, 96–98, 109–110, 124, 150, 169, 180–181,

331

185, 192, 196, 221, 234, 241, 245, 279–281, 296 syphilis, 9 Tao Yuanming, 208 “Peach Blossom Spring” (Taohao yuan ji), 208 “Tartars” Dada ren, 133 Semu ren, 89 Tianshun Emperor, 132 See also Zhu Qizhen Time’s Passage (Riguang liunian) See Yan Lianke To, Chapman, 166 “To the West” (Internet poem), 1–2, 31–32 Touch of Sin, A (Tianzhu ding) See Jia Zhangke Touch of Zen, A (Nüxia) See Hu, King trauma, 15, 35, 56, 63, 65, 67, 74, 78, 90, 245, 259, 281 Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji) See Liu E Trotsky, Leon, 125 Tsai Ming-liang, 28, 142, 227–230 All the Corners of the World (Haijiao tianya), 244 Children (Haizi), 143 Conversation with God, A (Yu shen duihua), 283 Goodbye Dragon Inn (Busan), 142–147 I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Heiyan quan), 28, 227–236 Hole, The (Dong), 236–242, 278 Rebels of the Neon God (Qingshaonian nezha), 231, 245 River, The (Heliu), 242–252 Vive l’Amour (Aiqing wansui), 143 Wayward Cloud, The (Tianbian yi duo yun), 236–242, 278 What Time is it There? (Ni nabian jidian), 146 tuberculosis, 104, 137 Ulysses, 63 uncanny, 25, 29, 39, 52, 56–58, 64, 68, 70–71, 105, 145, 181, 262 venereal disease, 217 Villarreal, Luis, 287–289

332

Index

virus, 14, 20–23, 27, 168–169, 192–193, 202, 241, 277, 287–291 AIDS, 20, 186, 192–193, 206 Cannibalism, 117 chlorella common cold, 20 etymology, 21 H1N1, 181–182 Influenza, 181–182 measles, 19 SARS, 27, 159–160, 163–164 Spanish influenza Taiwan fever, 237, 241 “Viruses of the Mind”, 19–20 See also retrovirus Vive l’Amour (Aiqing wansui) See Tsai Ming-liang Wade, Sir Thomas, 86–87 Waldersee, Alfred von, 25, 68, 73, 83–85, 87, 89–90 Wan Rong, 151 Wang, David Der-wei, 100 Wang Jing, 41 Wang Yirong, 59 Water Margin, The (Shuihu zhuan), 46 See also Critique The Water Margin Campaign Wayward Cloud, The (Tianbian yi duo yun) See Tsai Ming-liang Wei Yuan, 8 Weibo, 179–180 Western Learning Movement, 7–8 What Time is it There? (Ni nabian jidian) See Tsai Ming-liang white blood cells, 38, 105, 109–111, 114–117, 120, 124, 127, 270 WHO (World Health Organization), 180, 182 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 3 Woese, Carl, 290–291 World, The (Shijie) See Jia Zhangke “world picture”, 272–273 World War, I, 69, 164 World War, II , 36 WTO (World Trade Organization), 24, 265, 284, 286 Wu Jianren, 76 Sea of Regret (Henhai), 76–90 Wu Zetian, viii

xia (knights-errant), 126–127, 130–131, 134, 141–142 Xia dynasty, 42, 60 Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu) See Jia Zhangke Xinhai Revolution, 14, 52 Xinsheng (New life), 95–96 Xuantong Emperor, 36 See also Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi Xunzi, 259 Y2K bug, 42 Yan Fu, 2–3, 13 Yan Lianke, 27, 165, 188–192, 196, 203, 206, 216, 218, 221, 225–226, 230 Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuang meng), 27, 285–196, 203–206, 213–216, 225, 230 Four Books, The (Sishu), 218–226 Lenin’s Kisses (Shouhuo) , 206–216, 225 Time’s Passage (Riguang liunian), 216–221 Serve the People! (Wei renmin fuwu), 225 Yang Kuei-mei, 229, 237 Yellow Danger, The See Shiel, M. P. Yellow Emperor, 11, 41 Yellow Peril, 1–4, 310n38 yellow fever, 2 Yellow River, 42–43, 46–47, 50, 51, 55–56, 60, 149, 220–221 Yu, the Great, 41 Yu Dafu, 10 Yu Hua, 28–29, 196, 200–201, 257–260, 265–266, 268–269, 273 “1986”, 258–259, 269, 276–279 Brothers (Xiongdi), 28–29, 257–271 Chronicles of a Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan maixueji), 196–201 Seventh Day, The (Di qi tian), 273–277, 279 Yu Qian, General, 132–134, 139, 141, 143 Yuanming yuan (the Summer Palace), 36, 86–90 Zeng Pu, 24, 65, 66, 70–71, 774, 83, 86–88, 90 Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Niehai hua), 65, 66–74, 83–84, 86, 89, 90, 94, 136 Zhang Chunfan, 83, 86 Nine-Tailed Turtle (Jiuwei gui) 83–90



Index

Zhang Hong, 83 Sequel to Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Xu Niehaihua), 83 Zhang Hongtang, 84 Zhang Ye, 284 Zhang Zhidong, 8 Zhao Jing See Anti, Michael Zhao Tao, 280 Zhengtong Emperor, 132, 139, 144 See also Zhi Qizhen Zhenmeishan (Truth, beauty, and the good), 67

333

Zhibao, 2 Zhong Shuhua, 285 zhongti xiyong (“Chinese basis/Western use”), 8 Zhou dynasty, 61, 258–259 Zhou Kehua, 279 Zhou Shuren See Lu Xun Zhou Xiaowen, 201 Ermo, 201–203 Zhu Qiyu, 132 Zhu Qizhen, 132 Žižek, Slavoj, 15