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The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren Sinica Leidensia The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren Sinica Leidensia Edited by Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel In co-operation with P.K. Bol, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski, W.L. Idema, and H.T. Zurndorfer VOLUME 120 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China By Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Portrait of Li Jieren in 1914. Courtesy of Li Jieren Memorial and Museum. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ng, Kenny Kwok-kwan. The lost geopoetic horizon of Li Jieren : the crisis of writing Chengdu in revolutionary China / by Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng. pages cm. — (Sinica Leidensia ; volume 120) Revision of the author’s dissertation (doctoral)—Harvard University, 2004. ISBN 978-90-04-29264-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29266-6 (e-book) 1. Li, Jieren, 1891–1962—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PL2877.C528Z785 2015 895.13’52—dc23 2015004115 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9563 isbn 978-90-04-29264-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29266-6 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. For Kalina, and Pollia, and Hermia ∵ If you keep going over the past, you’re going to end up with a thousand pasts with no future. Ricardo Morales, from The Secret in Their Eyes ∵ Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgements x 1 Introduction: The Man, The Place, The Novel 1 2 From Tianhui to Chengdu: Geopoetics and Historical Imagination 42 3 No Place for Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 96 4 Tempest in a Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 150 5 Love in the Time of Revolution 177 6 The Road to Perdition 210 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 249 Appendix: Translations by Li Jieren 263 Works Cited 265 Chinese Glossary 291 Index 301 List of Figures 1.1 Photo portrait of Li Jieren in 1914 40 1.2 Photo portrait of Li Jieren in 1929 40 1.3 Covers of Fengtu zazhi 40 1.4 Former residence of Li Jieren 41 2.1 The Qingyang Temple in Chengdu 92 2.2 Public market in the Qingyang Temple 92 2.3 The Christian church on Sishengci Street 93 2.4 Great East Street in downtown Chengdu 93 2.5–2.7 Tianhui Town 94–95 3.1 Printed representation of railroads, Dianshizhai huabao 143 3.2 Railroads ruining Chinese landscapes, Dianshizhai huabao 144 3.3 A fatal railway accident, Dianshizhai huabao 145 3.4 Headline news of the Chengdu crisis, New York Times 146 3.5 Pictorial illustration of the ‘Chengdu massacre’ 147 3.6 Photograph of the Imperial Palace in Chengdu 147 3.7 Site of the Sichuan Provincial Government in Chengdu 148 3.8 Duyuan Street 148 3.9 The obelisk in the People’s Park in Chengdu 149 5.1 ‘Overturning the World,’ Tongsu huabao 202 5.2 Violent abolition of the queue, Tongsu huabao 203 5.3 Demolition of a Confucian temple, Tongsu huabao 204 5.4 Worship of the ‘Living Buddha,’ Tongsu huabao 205 5.5 Satire of new social and military leaders, Tongsu huabao 206 5.6 Satire of new military leaders, Tongsu huabao 207 5.7 A historic teahouse in the People’s Park 208 5.8 The Du Fu Caotang Memorial in Chengdu 208 5.9 A 1911 street map of Chengdu 209 6.1 “The Ship of State in China” 247 6.2 Photograph of the Yangzi gorges 247 6.3 Photograph of Qutong Gorge 248 6.4 Advertisement for steamboat travel on the Yangzi 248 Acknowledgements As part of my research activities in Chengdu, I toured the historic city several times, taking photos of the sites and streets inscribed in Li Jieren’s novels. My experiences were at once intimate and disorienting, recalling Siegfried Kracauer’s spatial metaphor of a ‘journey’ to refer to the historian’s inquiry of the past. In his History: The Last Things before the Last, Kracauer remarked that historians are much in the position of ordinary tourists in a foreign place. As they encounter the past in sifting through materials, they resemble travelers shooting unseen objects with their cameras in a bid to retain the sights. A liter- ary and cultural critic by training, though, I find that Kracauer’s figure of the (lit- erary) historian as a ‘traveler’ and ‘stranger’ succinctly captures my experiences doing fieldwork in Chengdu and deciphering Li’s dense historical-fictional works about the city. This book is the outcome of a physical as well as mental journey that consisted of surprises, excitement, and anxieties in encountering and trying to overcome the foreignness of a past and a place. In my intellectual excursion I am indebted to a number of researchers and critics in Chengdu who have helped me to navigate the intricate contexts and texts of Li Jieren’s life and writing. I would like to thank particularly Ai Lu, Tan Xingguo, Wang Jialing, Zhang Zhiqiang, Wang Jinhou, and Yi Aidi for their assistance and interviews. They not only shared with me their local knowl- edge and prior studies of the author, but they also enlightened me with their affective bonding with the author and the place in which they live. Among the enthusiastic specialists in Chengdu, I was fortunate enough to have had close friendships with Zeng Zhizhong and Zhang Yiqi, who always introduced me to local intellectual circles, to various people and to their new studies on Chengdu and Li Jieren. It was through their warm hospitality that I came to appreciate the city’s daily lives and cultures, past and present, and so have learned to look into Li’s historical novels from an added but essentially ‘native,’ and down-to-earth, perspective. Several times Zhang Yiqi walked me through the old Chengdu city and its environs. We visited locales and landmarks depicted in Li’s fictions as well as places of the author’s activities—to be sure, they are mostly gone—and in this way my friend guided me through the maze of the urban and literary texts created by Li Jieren. My friends and their colleagues are mostly working outside academic institutions or universities without any salaries or research funds. In my observation their lifelong commitment to the study of Li Jieren and Chengdu is a labor of love. Their persistence is strong evidence of what Maurice Halbswachs has called ‘collective memory,’ in which diverse groups acknowledgements xi of researchers or followers have reconstructed alternative pasts by embracing the compelling literary symbols, words, and the life narratives of a charismatic local figure in their memories. This book is a sincere dedication to the unsung heroes who have striven to save forgotten cultural pasts from history against the current discourse of global China. Writing this book has been a journey full of detours and obstacles; along the way, I have met decent and goodhearted people and also have found astound- ing truths about humanity. John E. Knight kindly offered me all the digital prints of photographs taken by his great-great-uncle, Luther Knight (1879– 1913), an American Christian missionary who came to Chengdu as a foreign teacher in 1910–13. Thanks to John’s generosity, some of Luther Knight’s photo images appear in this book to support a visual-verbal correspondence in Li’s historical fictions. I was fortunate to come across John while internet surfing, and was amazed to find that he indeed had been living in Hong Kong much of the year doing missionary work. Regrettably, I missed the chance to interview Li Mei (1925–2007), the daugh- ter of Li Jieren, as she passed away a few years ago. For all its possible biases, a personal interview can make up for what cannot be said in a written memoir, especially in China. I have interviewed another important family descendent, Li Shihua, the granddaughter of Li Jieren. She told me more intimate stories about her grandfather, particularly about his later years when he was rewrit- ing The Great Wave. She was appalled to discover belatedly that Li’s family life was closely monitored by the state authority when he served as the vice-mayor of Chengdu during the 1950s and 60s. All their family letters were scrutinized and copied by the police before they were sent to the family members. The Li family had destroyed most of their correspondence during the Cultural Revolution. But a few years ago she was astonished to find that their family letters were all available for sale (possibly contributed by the police) in the flea market, as sought-after relics of a famed local figure. Her account validated my findings at the Sichuan Provincial Archives.
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