2023 CEAS Magazine

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Three QuesTions wiTh ARTHUR MITCHELL author of Disruptions of Daily Life

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

One day, in the periodicals annex of the Waseda Library in Tokyo, Japan, I was scrolling through newspaper microfilm to research coverage of an earthquake that struck that city in 1923, when suddenly the library itself began to shake, setting my large monitor atremble. Reading those articles, I had transported back in time to relive the meanings of that disaster, how incommensurable it was, how sudden, how for many Tokyoites it signified the loss of thirty years of progress. It was funny and

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

Japan studies has grown into a big tent of creative scholarship and expansive critical scope. But I would like to see the further growth of critical race studies in this field. This is not just a call to interrogate the racial underpinnings of US academia’s study of Japan (which has been done to some extent), but to reverse the disassociation from race within Japan that helps to maintain its status as a nation “worth studying.” Japan is fascinating precisely because of the complexity it exhibits regarding

bizarre to be brought back from this trance into the present by the jostles of another earthquake.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

I wish I had known how to write a book. At least for this academic, writing a first book was the slow, laborious, uphill struggle of figuring out what a book was, groping in the dark to discover my idea, determine my values, and find my voice. In retrospect, writing this book seems to have been a tremendous act of blind faith. Those that aided along the way—friends, mentors, advisors, then readers and editors— helped to make a dream come true.

dynamics of race ideology. And studying Japan on these terms promises a more comprehensive view.

“I would like to see the further growth of critical race studies in this field.”

Three QuesTions wiTh JIANJUN HE author of Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

I cannot think of fun anecdote except that I mock at my own research as a “grassroots project.” That is, my university’s library collection on premodern China is probably fewer than what I have in my computer and it also does not have access to data base on Chinese academic journals. Since there is no handy resource from my own institution, I often have to mobilize my friends and colleagues in China to find secondary literature concerning the Wu Yue Chunqiu for me. I joke this as

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

I do wish translations will make more texts available for researchers and will attract more studies in the field of early China.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

I did not know that John Largerwey’s 1975 dissertation on the WuYue Chunqiu, including a partial translation of the text, is only available in the form of microform.

“grassroots movement” styled research.

“My university’s library collection on premodern China is probably fewer than what I have in my computer.”

THE EXCERPT

I Love Bill 我 爱 比 尔

A cypress tree appeared among the gently rolling hills ahead. It remained in view for a long time, for a while to the left, then to the right. Everything else was covered in fields of short tea shrubs, without a single person visible. The sky was vast, with only a few clouds. As the bus rumbled down the dirt road, Ah San looked at the cypress tree through the bars on the window and thought to herself: Actually, it all started with loving Bill.

That was ten years earlier, when Ah San was still a second-year art student in college. Back in those busy, vibrant days, Ah San and her classmates went to all sorts of exhibitions, concerts, and plays, from which they would draw fresh inspiration. They were always looking for a good time, wanting to see things for themselves, and possibly also try them. Ah San’s major was fine art, and she got together with some artists from outside the university to organize an exhibition. It was here that Bill appeared.

The two other artists involved were her former painting teacher and her doting older brother. Both were about ten years older than her and had grown up during the Cultural Revolution. A feeling of resentment

was unavoidable in their paintings, alongside a critical awareness. By contrast, people were drawn to Ah San’s carefree watercolors for their aesthetic character. During the discussion session, Ah San’s voice trembled as she explained that she painted simply out of happiness, which further intrigued people. She received quite a bit of attention. But of course, when the exhibition was over, it was all forgotten. The important part was Bill.

Bill was an American cultural attaché. The consulate always paid close attention to cultural events, so it was only natural that a young, energetic figure like Bill would turn up at Ah San’s tiny exhibition. With his chestnut-colored hair and cheerful eyes, dressed in jeans and a striped T-shirt, Bill was the typical image of an American youth from the movies. He introduced himself as Bi Herui. This was the name given to him by his Chinese teacher, and he was clearly very proud of it. He told Ah San that her paintings had an avant-garde character, which thrilled her. In clear and precise yet rudimentary Chinese, he said to her: Actually, we don’t need you to tell us anything; we saw what we needed, and that’s enough. Ah San replied: I also only want what I need. Bill’s eyes lit up, and he extended a finger and pointed forcefully, saying: That’s the thing—if you go after what you want, everybody wins.

With this brief exchange they were connected, and both felt very happy. Bill asked Ah San how she got her name.1 Ah San replied that she was the third child in her family, and she had been called that ever since she was little. Now, she adopted it as her pseudonym. Bill said he liked it. Ah San asked Bill the meaning behind “Bi Herui,” and he gave her a rigorous explanation: It’s an auspicious name, with the character “he” (和) coming from the phrase “may harmony be taken as the highest principle,” and the character “rui” (瑞) coming from the phrase “a timely snow promises a bountiful year.” Ah San laughed as she watched these set phrases come out of Bill’s mouth. Bill laughed, too, and added: I like this name. Ah San had the feeling this young diplomat was a little stupid—tease him, and he responds very earnestly; laugh, and he does too. She couldn’t believe how easygoing he was, as if he were always fine with everything. She could also see that he didn’t really want to be called Bill, yet she couldn’t bring herself to call him Bi Herui, which sounded too inflated. So she said

1. Literally, “Ah Three.”

to him: If you want me to use your Chinese name, then you have to call me by my English name. Bill asked what her English name was, so she quickly made one up: Susan. That’s no good, said Bill, there are too many of those. Why don’t I just call you Number Three? Ah San realized Bill wasn’t quite as naïve as he seemed.

Just as he loved his Chinese name, Bill loved China: Chinese food, Chinese characters, Chinese opera, Chinese faces. Like many Chinese people, he had a bike, which he would ride fully merged in the flow of traffic. Now, with Ah San beside him wearing a backpack and riding a women’s racing bike, it was as if she were following him to the ends of the earth. Actually, the two of them were riding so wildly it was as if they were racing. They ended up going to get a drink at a hotel café, the kind of place with a snobbish atmosphere. After a while, Bill went to the bathroom, leaving Ah San sitting there by herself. A woman approached her rather unwillingly with a drink menu and said: We only accept foreign exchange certificates.2 Ah San remained stoic and didn’t reply. After Bill returned and sat down across from her, the waitress returned but avoided Ah San’s eyes. Ah San found it laughable. After a while, a bubbly woman came by and struck up a lively conversation with Bill, casting Ah San aside. Once again, she found it laughable. As she listened to Bill continue to sing the praises of China, she thought to herself: Your China is not the same as my China. She never expressed this thought, though, and instead only continued to encourage Bill’s love for the country. She introduced Bill to some Chinese folk art, including local Shanghai opera and Jinshan peasant art. She took him to the island pavilion in the middle of the lake at the city god temple, and to Zhou Village to see the local dwellings dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Zhou Village really fascinated Bill. Under his large frame, the small stone bridges seemed like a miniature world. As he walked over them, he attracted several people who followed behind. One was an old woman, who tugged on Ah San’s sleeve and asked her knowingly: What country is he from? America, Ah San replied. The woman scrunched up her mouth and said, disapprovingly: A few days ago three British people were here,

2. Foreign exchange certificates were issued by the Bank of China from 1979 to 1995 and were the only form of currency foreigners in China were permitted to use.

and the camera they had was bigger than his; it was the kind you carry over the shoulder. At that point, Bill was chatting with two small children. They were telling him that the kitchen in the home of a certain local family had a river running through it, and boats could pass directly into it. Bill let them lead the way. The two small children walked in front, while some other children mocked them and threw rocks. Just as the pair were about to retreat, Bill took charge of the situation. He turned around and invited the other children to come along, which caused them to blush and then back off. After lunch, Bill and Ah San again appeared on Zhou Village’s famous twin bridges. By that point, people were already getting used to them, and one person even asked if they had eaten yet. Although they had originally only planned on a day trip, they lingered on in the peacefulness of the afternoon. As the sun began to set, casting a golden glow on both the water under the bridges and the smoke from cooking fires, Bill was even more reluctant to leave. He listened to the shepherds singing their evening songs.

They decided they would leave the next morning.

The Zhou Village inn also probably dated from the Ming or Qing dynasties. It was structured with wooden partitions, and when the secondfloor windows were opened, you could look down to see the street market along the river, much like the sprawling classical painting Riverside Scene during the Qingming Festival. Their rooms shared a partition, and they each stuck their heads out of their windows to chat and enjoy the view. The evening rays were very delicate, and the ripples on the water were evenly distributed in fine lines, like threads of silk. Bill recited “The Peach Blossom Spring,” but Ah San didn’t listen or offer a response. She was thinking of other things. Later, when the sky had become dark but the moon had not yet risen, and there was not even a glimmer of light, the two sat together for a while in one of their rooms. The mood turned gloomy, even tinged with a bit of regret. They each searched for topics of conversation in an effort to lighten the atmosphere, but, finding no success, they eventually went their separate ways to bed. Before turning out the lights, Ah San heard three knocks on the partition, so she responded in turn. This served as “goodnight,” and in that moment it produced a feeling of mutual intimacy. Ah San woke up sometime during the night to discover that her room was very light, and she raised her head to see the moon illuminating the sky over Zhou Village. Bill is just on the other

side of the partition, she quietly thought to herself. She could almost hear him breathing. But when she held her breath and listened carefully, all she could hear was the distant sound of a TV program. Only then did Ah San realize that it wasn’t actually very late. In the morning, she got up and wandered around by herself. After strolling for a bit, she saw a figure standing still in the morning fog. As she approached, the person turned around and smiled at her—it was Bill. They both felt that being apart for the night was like being separated for years.

The trip to Zhou Village drew Ah San and Bill closer and established the basis for a relationship. Previously, they had merely been like two professionals forming a friendship. Now, as they once again sat at a bar having a drink, each knew the mood had changed. At one point, Bill ordered something new, and he wanted Ah San to taste it. As he extended the glass toward her, Ah San stretched out her neck and puckered her lips to touch the edge of the glass. Suddenly she raised her eyes to meet Bill’s, and for an instant they both froze. In that moment, something important occurred.

Ah San had a pair of catlike eyes, which she would often squint to gaze out through thin little slits. Then, all of a sudden, she would open them, revealing them to be quite large and round. This allowed her to take on a sort of Oriental mystique. As her eyes now fixed upon Bill from behind her drapelike bangs, Bill’s heart skipped a beat, and he was seized by a feeling of tenderness. The first time he hugged her and felt her small, soft, seemingly boneless frame, he thought it was almost as if she had turned into a cat with nine lives. When he told this to Ah San, she merely asked: Why nine lives? In the West, said Bill, we say that cats can die nine times. Ah San replied: Dying once is enough for me. Hearing this, Bill went to kiss her. He discovered her lips and tongue also contained an element of mystery, as if they were at once both open and closed. It was difficult for Bill to suppress his excitement; he wasn’t sure how to handle Ah San. He had not expected that embracing this enigmatic body would be so tantalizing. Ultimately, though, he recalled the Chinese perspective on female chastity. He remembered a Chinese teacher who had once discussed the Biographies of Exemplary Women with his class, and it had left an awe-inspiring yet terrifying impression on him. As a result, he forced himself to calm down.

Ah San, who had gotten her hopes up, also calmed herself, but she felt uneasy. Had she done something wrong that made Bill lose interest?

Perhaps she had not taken enough initiative. They were both a bit withdrawn for the rest of the day, as if they each had something on their minds. When it came time for them to part, Bill rubbed Ah San’s head, giving her the sense that he still had feelings for her. When she returned to her campus dorm that day, she sat under the mosquito netting and closely examined her body. Her investigation did not reveal any problems. In the shadowy lamplight, she appeared flawless and pure. Yet this also involved a contradiction, as it clearly indicated her inexperience. Is this what had tamped down Bill’s excitement? At any rate, her body was eager to learn. She stretched out her legs, speaking to Bill in her heart.

The next day, Ah San got started on a new painting, which looked like a sketch of a mural. She drew a featureless woman with hair that covered her face and flowed down to become a lush cluster of small flowers, and a large pink flower assertively blooming from her private parts. Against a field of dreary, crablike bluish green, the pink flower appeared especially beautiful and tender. A week later she was finished with this new work, which she named Ah San’s Dreamland. On a weekend afternoon when everyone else had gone home, Ah San invited Bill over to her dorm to show it to him. After he had looked at it for a while, he asked her a question.

I understand this painting has to do with sex, he said, but where does your perspective on sex come from? Because I know that Chinese people don’t have this kind of attitude toward it. So it must be Western, but I know you’ve never been to the West, and I’m probably the first Westerner you’ve ever known. Ah San answered him: This painting isn’t about sex. Bill seemed unable to switch topics and continued down this dead end: Maybe you don’t think it is, he said, but in your subconscious, it definitely is. Ah San just laughed: You’ve got it backward—it’s consciously about sex, but subconsciously, it’s not. This answer confused Bill, and he forgot his original question. Then Ah San took a piece of silk clothing from the bed and used it to cover the white dress she was wearing. Let me demonstrate for you Chinese people’s idea of sex, she said. She proceeded to grab a nightgown from her classmate’s bed and use it to cover the silk garment, and then added a third item. Covered in these layers, all hanging at different lengths, she moved toward Bill and lifted her head to look him in the eyes: Now, she said, show me what sex is for a Westerner. Bill gazed at her for a bit and then went to remove her clothing, taking off everything

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

The Bandits’ Reception

The traditional long-form novel, as developed in late Ming China, could be endlessly reshaped and repackaged. Its text could be freely altered. Commentaries could be added to its chapters, whether at their beginnings, at their ends, or even interpolated into the text itself, in order to assist less-experienced readers or to provide interpretations. Prefaces could be appended in order to orient readers’ expectations and understandings from the outset. Illustrations could be added, whether to the chapters themselves or in a folio at the front of the work. Decisions about what shape the novel would take—its text, paratext, and physical form—were made by editors and publishers of print editions in anticipation of their target readerships’ needs and desires. As such, the Ming novel was a genre intimately tied to the medium of print.

shaping the novel

The novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), which appears to have been first printed in the early sixteenth century, exemplifies the relations between the genre and the dynamic print culture of the era. It was among the earliest such works, and among the most influential. It appeared—and continues to appear—in a wide range of forms, for

different readerships, with different implied meanings. It created a sensation among its earliest readers and was the inspiration for many works that followed. This book follows the transformations of the Ming novel genre in print by tracing print editions of The Water Margin, a pathbreaking example.

The process by which a novel such as The Water Margin could be reshaped by editor-publishers is perhaps best illustrated by a note included in the front matter of a commercial edition printed by the Fujian publisher Yu Xiangdou, one of the most renowned such editorpublishers of the Ming. In the note, Yu distinguished his edition of the novel from the many others available on the market. He warned potential customers of the many shortcomings of his competitors’ editions: many of them were only partially illustrated, or their texts lacked shi poems and ci lyrics and were therefore less suitable for recitation aloud. They were printed from woodblocks that had worn with age, creating images and text that were indistinct and difficult to make out. Only the edition of his own Shuangfeng tang publishing house, Yu declared, was fully illustrated and featured commentary in its margins. Yu went on to note that he had edited the text, removing all impediments to leisurely browsing and ensuring that all of the characters used were correct. “From front to back,” he concluded, “in all twenty volumes of the book, there is not a single mistake in a single sentence. Gentlemen customers can recognize the mark of the Shuangfeng tang house.”

It is apparent that, in shaping his edition, Yu took into account his potential readership. He calculated that they demanded texts that were clearly printed and easy to read, with illustrations and a mix of prose and verse of various kinds. He recognized that they had heard of The Water Margin before, and that they did not want to miss out on any of the features that the competition offered in their own editions. With these factors in mind, he crafted an edition of the novel and had it carved on wooden blocks. He, or his Shuangfeng tang firm, would have had to estimate the number of copies that the market could bear, purchase paper accordingly, and turn the visions into material reality through print. Since printers of novels in the Ming used woodblocks rather than moveable type, the calculations did not need to be exact; there was no need to tear down the page layout and recover the font after a run. An edition’s woodblocks could be kept indefinitely—or at least until they became blunt and blurry through repeated stamping. They could also be rented out or sold to other printing establishments, perhaps in different geographical areas, to further defray costs.

Other than the expectations and desires of their readerships, Ming editor-publishers like Yu were unimpeded in their ability to repackage and reshape the novel at will. In terms of legality, it almost goes without saying that there was no formal copyright system in place that would have prevented editor-publishers from altering the texts of novels as they saw fit. If anything, it was they and not any authors who could claim legal rights to the texts of their editions; there was a precedent of woodblock imprints containing warnings against unauthorized copying, and at least one publisher, as this book will show, made indignant assertions that his editing work was a form of intellectual labor from which he was entitled to profit. There are some parallels here with the development of the copyright system in Europe, wherein it was publishers who claimed that authors held the natural rights to their creations, and that those rights were transferred to them. Titles would be recorded in a central registry so that the publishers could prove that they held the rights to their texts and pursue action against “pirates” who appropriated them unlawfully. Despite the similarities between these claims of some publishers in the Ming and those in the Europe, the former did not enter claims of ownership in a registry or conceive of an exclusive right to a text.1

Moreover, an editor-publisher reshaping a novel for publication would not have felt any compulsion to be true to an author’s “original” text. The names of novelists were shadowy at best, and even when a name was closely associated with a work, that name rarely held much significance for how the novel was understood. In the case of The Water Margin, authorship was attributed to two names, Luo Guanzhong and Shi Nai’an, usually in some combination as author and editor or compiler. Yet next to nothing is known about either man, and the existing sources seem to indicate that they lived long before known editions of The Water Margin began to appear in the sixteenth century. The earliest available sources claim that Luo Guanzhong was a loner who took the sobriquet “Wanderer of the Lakes and Seas” (Huhai sanren) and lived sometime around the time of the Yuan-Ming transition. Various accounts claim he was from either Taiyuan, Qiantang, or Dongyuan. In addition to The Water Margin, Luo Guanzhong was also credited with the authorship of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and a handful of other works, including Record of the Sui and Tang (Sui Tang zhizhuan), The Three Sui Quash the Demons (San Sui pingyao zhuan), History of the Remnant Tang and Five Dynasties (Can Tang wudai shi), and The Rouge Chamber (Fenzhuang lou). However, judging from the various commentaries, prefaces, and

other writings, readers do not seem to have taken these works to form a consistent oeuvre, whether stylistically or thematically. As for Shi Nai’an, almost nothing is known of him; claims that he lived in the late Yuan or that he was a native of Qiantang appear to be based merely on the assumption that he worked in tandem with Luo.2 Whatever the case, editor-publishers would hardly have had to worry about someone like Luo Guanzhong or Shi Nai’an lodging a complaint about their treatment of their work. Nor, more important, would they have to worry about their readerships expecting a work to conform to a particular authorial style known from that author’s other works.

Finally, an editor-publisher would also not have felt any obligation to maintain fidelity to the moral character of an author. More culturally privileged forms of writing such as shi poetry were tightly bound to their authorial figures; there was an underlying assumption that, by reading the poem, one came to know its author. This close association would discourage overt textual meddling. With the nascent long-form novel genre of the Ming dynasty, there was no such hermeneutic of character to prevent editorial tampering.

In sum, the Ming novel was a highly flexible genre that could be reshaped endlessly in print by editor-publishers. Editor-publishers would shape editions with an eye to their anticipated readerships, not to an author or any other original stakeholder. Editor-publishers were free to modify a novel, add to it, or cut from it to suit the needs and desires of that readership, whether the goal was to express membership in a certain group, to create profit, to use it to circulate ideas or police interpretations, or any combination thereof.

editions

In the case of The Water Margin, the differences between editions were far from simple or cosmetic ones. Rather, they struck to the very heart of the work’s significance. The Water Margin is in essence a collection of intertwined stories telling of men such as Lu Zhishen, the “tattooed monk” who caused havoc in a monastery with his drunken brawling, or Wu Song, who battled a tiger to the death with only his bare hands. There is Song Jiang, the minor official who goes on the run after killing his adulterous wife and who becomes an underworld leader. And there is Li Kui, the “Black Whirlwind,” whose exaggerated fits of blind rage lend a comic edge to the proceedings. The novel moves from one story to the next, at times weaving them together as the men cross paths,

and in the denouement they all gather in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness in a lair beyond the watery marshes of the title. Yet through paratextual materials such as prefaces, “how-to-read” essays, and intertextual commentaries, the editions suggest to their readers widely disparate interpretations of the meaning of these intertwined tales. Some treat the rebellious content cautiously, while others unapologetically glorify these outlaws and suggest that they are paragons of virtue in an age of corruption.

The sheer variety of editions of The Water Margin that appeared in the Ming demonstrates this flexibility of the novel. In addition to the competing editions, now lost, of which Yu Xiangdou complained in the 1590s, there were others that had appeared at least fifty years earlier. Those editions, the earliest known, were not the products of for-profit publishers like Yu, but rather of the elite world around the Jiajing court. Both the Censorate bureau and the Marquis of Wuding, Guo Xun, produced editions. Another edition, published in the 1580s, purported to be based on the Wuding edition and featured a preface signed Tiandu waichen, believed to be a pen name of Wang Daokun. Within a decade after Yu Xiangdou’s edition, multiple editions featuring commentaries attributed to the noted iconoclast Li Zhi appeared in the marketplace. Then, on the eve of the Ming’s collapse, Jin Shengtan produced his severely truncated and reworked edition. A fragment of yet another edition, believed to be from the Jiajing or even the Zhengde reign and simply called Record of the Loyal and Righteous (Zhongyi zhuan), was discovered in the collection of the Shanghai Municipal Library in 1975. The main texts of the various editions are divided into two major recensions, the so-called simple recensions (jianben) and full recensions (fanben). These differ in both style and content, with the former narrating more episodes but in simpler language, and the latter narrating fewer events but using a more elaborate prose style.

These editions vary to such an extent that one might even ask whether it makes sense to speak of “the” Water Margin as a distinct novel at all, instead of simply regarding it as a family of related story cycles. But, in spite of the range of shapes that the novel took, there is still a commonality that sets it apart from the other narratives that relate stories of some of the same protagonists. The various editions of the novel all share a general outline of plot. The plot opens with an arrogant official of the Song Dynasty releasing thirty-six Heavenly Spirits (Tiangang) and seventy-two Earthly Demons (Disha) from a sealed chamber in a cave, despite all warnings. From there, the focus moves to the individual

Three QuesTions wiTh GLYNNE WALLEY author of Eight Dogs, or “Hakkenden”

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

I’d like to see translations taken more seriously. There was a time when I would have said I’d like to see “translation” taken more seriously, but by now Translation Studies is well established as a field of theoretical inquiry and pedagogical practice. Still, I’m not sure I see that translating (pun intended!) into a greater respect for translations themselves. Hiring committees and tenure committees are perfectly happy to see candidates writing about translation, but producing actual translations hoped it would be and much, much more.

I fell in love with this novel long before I read it. I remember finding an old edition of it in my university library and gazing, entranced, at the illustrations, which hinted at adventure and romance and magic. But it wasn’t translated, and while it’s mentioned in all the histories of Japanese literature, I could tell they hardly scratched the surface. My favorite moment was when, as a grad student, my language level reached the point where I could read it for myself. It turned out to be everything I’d

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

I started this translation as part of the research that led to my 2017 Cornell East Asia Series monograph (Good Dogs). I learned so much through translating that part of me wishes I could have finished the translation before writing the monograph; then again, everything I learned through writing the monograph informs my translation, so another part of me wishes I could have finished this book (Eight Dogs) first. I guess that’s a paradox, but it’s also an illustration of how translation itself is a form of scholarship, not an adjunct to it.

is still, all too often, seen as peripheral to scholarship. It’s not. It is, or can be, central.

“I fell in love with this novel long before I read it.”

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

The Shrew–New Woman Nexus

In 1992 the pop star Madonna claimed: “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.” Her remark challenged male privilege and the custom of containing powerful women through demeaning epithets. It demonstrated how women themselves could intervene, turning insults into badges of honor. Almost two decades after Madonna’s reshaping of “bitch,” the transnational “SlutWalk” movement shed critical light on the term “slut.” Protesters, both women and men, took pride in this word as a rhetorical weapon against gender shaming and regulation. In a similar vein, the writers and critics of various backgrounds examined in this book revalued the concept and label of the Chinese “shrew,” using it to describe newly desirable behaviors of Chinese women in the early and mid-twentieth-century environment.

This book examines the hitherto unresearched connections and continuities between the traditional shrew and the modern new woman in China. Public interest in the long-standing trope of the shrew did not disappear with the advent of modernity in the early twentieth century. Rather, this pejorative imagery presented itself in new contexts suited to the changing social milieu and evolved as part of an emancipatory process for women. Building on a corpus of repeated yet repurposed

vocabulary, imagery, and allusions, this book shows why and how the shrew archetype shook off its negative connotations and acquired value in the Republican and Communist eras.

shrew

“Shrew” is a day-to-day denigratory term, a social reality or historical agent, and a narrative trope resulting from male writers’ misogynistic anxiety. Shrew stories permeated literary and historical texts in premodern China and reached peak popularity during the seventeenth century with full-blown comedies, satires, and novels on this theme.1

The best-known shrews in Ming–Qing literature include Pan Jinlian in Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅), Xue Sujie in Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan 醒世姻緣傳), and Wang

Xifeng in Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢). These characters are all strong women who are textually discredited for their ambitions, desires, and cruelty. Their fierceness is represented in the texts as a foil for ideal womanly behaviors prescribed by the Confucian ethos.

Despite the shrew’s prevalence in late imperial literature, there is no single Chinese term that encompasses this very common character type. She is the unnamed inversion of the jiefu 節婦 (the chaste and virtuous woman), and traditional texts typically pair her with a “wifefearing” or henpecked ( junei 懼內; pa laopo 怕老婆) husband, keeping the focus on her male victims. The lack of a single native term to denote related characterizations of women gone rogue does not delegitimize the use of the English concept of the shrew as an analytic term. This book follows the current scholarly paradigm in using the term “shrew” as a shorthand way to refer to this disparaging type.2

On the basis of premodern writings, the Chinese shrew includes three main categories: pofu 潑婦, the unconstrained, transgressive, and polluting woman; yinfu 淫婦 (or dangfu 蕩婦), the promiscuous woman; and hanfu 悍婦, the violent woman. While pofu can be understood especially in terms of a woman’s “scattering” actions as indicated by the word po 潑 (to scatter, spill, or splash), it is often a broadly inclusive term used to refer to all types of shrews.3 Compared to the Western concept of the shrew, which is mainly used for comedic effect, the Chinese shrew is more threatening and culturally repulsive. Within the logic of neo-Confucianism—a medieval offshoot of classical Confucianism highlighting “a form of moral metaphysics” that prescribed Confucian

values as an instrument of social control—improper desires and behaviors open the door to disaster.4 The Chinese shrew, with her fearless defiance of all gender norms, is the foremost threat to Confucian social structures. She is the ambitious woman who desires to displace patriarchal authority and pursue her own interests; she is the jealous woman who wishes to control the men and female rivals in the family; she is the ruthless woman who schemes to overpower her opponents and opposes polygamy even if it means the extinction of her husband’s lineage; she is angry and abrasive, employing verbal and physical violence on a regular basis; she is lustful and sexually dangerous, knowingly using her attractiveness to seduce, dominate, and kill.

Scholars of Ming and Qing literature have written about “the demise of shrew literature” after its heyday in late imperial China.5 Calling attention to the unsuitability of the negative shrew character type given the new position of women and femininity in modern China, this argument creates a divide between tradition and modernity regarding their differences in coding feminine identity. It has also been widely perceived that the construction of a modern China at the turn of the twentieth century was largely contingent upon the elimination of the shrew. For example, in a 1906 article on building vocational training centers for female criminals, its author criticized the wicked aspects of women’s nature (e’gen xing 惡根性), including brazenness (hanxing 悍 性), jealousy (duxing 妒性), indolence (duoxing 惰性), and promiscuity (yinxing 淫性).6 In echoes of the discursive trend beginning in the 1890s with regard to the “woman question” (funü wenti 婦女問題), the article treats shrewish attributes as the root cause of the national decline, and thus a target for reform as well as the starting point for revolutionizing Chinese women and the state.7

Chinese male intellectuals and politicians have never ceased to censure women’s jealousy, violence, promiscuity, and other “vices” for the sake of their advancement. Yet it cannot be denied that they also tolerated and even encouraged, in quite open terms, conventionally demonized female qualities when navigating tumultuous modern changes. For many New Cultural figures, the shrew did not require discipline, and should even be held up as an iconoclastic force against tradition. Under the chaotic status quo of Republican society, reform-minded intellectuals and Communists recognized that Confucian modes of female virtue would never allow women to break out of their prescribed roles. They instead suggested that some degree of shrewish behavior

and discourse was needed for women to achieve substantial progress in social, cultural, and gender reform.

Shrewish traits were being seen in a new light in certain intellectual circles, reconfigured as symbols of the modern rebellious spirit. Even when male intellectuals formulated women’s unruliness as problematic to claim their roles as enlighteners and guardians of social order, they also urgently needed that disruptive energy for strengthening their revolutionary profile. The face of femininity was changing. According to the historian Henrietta Harrison: “By influencing and changing the norms which had been used to define elite status, the new ideal of citizenship came to affect the whole definition of femininity, and thus the construction of gender. In the past the delicacy and weakness of women had been their defining characteristic. Generations of young men sighed over such weak and sickly heroines as Lin Daiyu in the Dream of the Red Chamber.”8

Refined, vulnerable femininity gave way to fiery womanhood. Although Lin Daiyu might have still held strong appeal within male fantasies, critical discourses had set out to characterize her as a model of all that was wrong with traditional femininity.9 She was never referred to as an ideal for modern femininity, nor did writers ever mention her, even with nostalgia, when denouncing the vulgarity of the new woman. As David Strand points out, “Modern-minded Chinese were coming to expect that women, like men, would be physically more active, assertive, and even vulgar in the role of citizen.”10 Reformers valued the ability of women to defy norms, even if this required the appropriation of behaviors conventionally considered uncouth for women. The modern ladies wore immodest clothing, which in the past had been deemed “a mark of low status.” They “had natural feet” and made a “loud sound” when proudly walking in their high-heeled leather shoes. “Instead of sitting quietly at home, they were to be seen in schools and walking through the streets, even on occasion taking part in sports.”11 Some women made their way into male preserves and “brandished things that men tended to use, like revolvers and cigarettes.”12 The changing views on what constituted female vulgarity suggest how the modern construction of desirable femininity recuperated aspects of the shrew. While modern cultural figures claimed to invent their models of new womanhood as distinct from traditional female types, many of the constructions either were based on existing shrew figures in premodern texts or had integrated recognized qualities of this prototype.

The modern use of the term pola 潑辣 (sometimes written as 潑剌)— meaning feisty, pungent, and forceful—also indicates the change of attitude toward shrewish traits. In premodern texts po was widely used to describe a quality of unruliness. For example, the Monkey King in Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西遊記) is referred to as a pohou 潑猴 (wanton monkey). La (literally, hot, peppery) was associated with ruthless characters. When describing female figures, it predominantly concerns shrews known for their peppery personality, pungent language, and cruel behavior. By no means were po and la sanctioned as qualities of desired femininity. In Dream of the Red Chamber, the shrew Wang Xifeng is immediately introduced as a popi 潑皮 (ruffian, villain) and lazi 辣子 (hot pepper, peppercorn). When Daiyu first meets her, she is taken aback by her “brash and unmannerly” introduction.13 Xia Jingui, the shrewish wife of Xue Pan, is also described as pola (translated as “a spoilt shrew”).14

In the modern context, the pola model of womanly behavior came to take on positive meanings. In “A Woman from the Liu Village” (Liutun de 柳屯的; 1934) by Lao She (1899–1966), one character refers to the disruptive shrew in the story in relatively favorable terms as a pola woman who is good at household management.15 In “The Way of the Beast” (Shou dao 獸道; 1936), Sha Ting (1904–1992) depicted “a cursing shrew” whose tirade (pola de zhouma 潑辣的咒罵) is presented sympathetically as a woman’s last resort to survive wartime hardships.16 This treatment complicates female victimhood and creates a model of tough resiliency.

The quality of being pola was also linked with the Chinese Nora, or the leftist revolutionary woman who dares to be transgressive to empower herself. Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962) staged a pola protagonist in his new woman/Nora play The Shrew (Pofu 潑婦; 1925). Lan Ping, the stage name of Jiang Qing (1914–1991)—later famous as Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) wife and the figurehead of the Gang of Four—asserted herself as a pola female who was unwilling to diminish herself to please men. Mao Dun (1896–1981) in “The Road” (Lu 路; 1932) called upon the new woman to abandon shyness and adopt pola so as to merge into the masses (buyao haixiu, pola xie, zuandao qunzhong zhongjian qu 不要 害羞，潑辣些，鑽到群眾中間去).17 These modern texts reclaim the potential of pola strength and identify pola women as being unconstrained, independent, and willing to take on leadership roles—qualities that were expected for the new woman, who had to stand up to a society that was less enlightened than she.

Three QuesTions wiTh WILT L. IDEMA author of The Pitfalls of Piety for Married Women

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

The stories translated here are moving stories. That’s why they remained popular for centuries. Even after reading, translating, and rereading these texts, some scenes can still move me to tears.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

When you start out on a translation you have read the original repeatedly and you think you

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

One of my aims is to enhance our understanding of the full extent of the variety and richness of Chinese literature by drawing attention to the manifold traditions of verse narrative and prosimetric narrative. I believe that translation is one of the most suitable means to introduce Western readers to the thematic and formal diversity of these genres and that their contents confront us with aspects of Chinese culture in past and present that often remain untouched in male elite literature.

are prepared for the job, but doing the job you are time and again surprised by the limits of your knowledge as you are confronted by details that continue to elude you despite all modern reference works.

“When you start out on a translation you read the original repeatedly and you think you are prepared for the job.”

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