Matrimony Inn” and Eileen Chang’S Half a Lifelong Romance and “Love in a Fallen City”
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chapter 1 Fate and Destiny: Yuan as Ming in “Matrimony Inn” and Eileen Chang’s Half a Lifelong Romance and “Love in a Fallen City” Terry Siu-han Yip Fate is an important but complex concept in Chinese culture as it often takes on multiple levels of meaning and manifests itself in myriad forms in literat- ure and folklore. In ancient Chinese philosophy, the concept of “ming” 命 is derived from “Dao” 道, the Way, and it refers to the general principle all things, including human beings, under Heaven follow in their genesis and develop- ment. As defined in Yi Jing 易經, the Book of Changes, “Dao” entails the concept of patterns in development, and when applied to human life it gives rise to the belief that there is “ming” that will point to a certain direction or course in life. However, “ming” can change as people cultivate themselves, or experience cer- tain encounters that change the course of their lives. Under the influence of Buddhism, such an understanding of fate as “ming” that can change is further expanded to include “karma” in people’s present life or previous life.The course of life with encounters un-predetermined is often referred to as “yun” 運. Thus, the most common concepts associated with fate are “ming” 命, “yun” 運 and “ming yun” 命運, each of which is distinguished by its connotative meaning. The concept of “ming” 命, or sometimes referred to as Blind Fate, is comparable to the Western notion of Fate. It is generally understood as “an independent force determining man’s destiny,” and that force often remains unknown and mysterious.1 The concept of “yun” 運, on the other hand, refers more specific- ally to a person’s luck, chance, encounter, serendipity, or circumstance, which may bring about a turn or change of fortune in a person’s life. When “ming” and “yun” are put together to become a compound noun, “ming yun” 命運 takes on a new meaning, which is generally understood as destiny or predestination in the Western sense. It is interesting to note that the Chinese notion of Fate when applied to human relationships, especially to lovers’ or marital relationships, generates 1 Ning Chen, “The Genesis of the Concept of Blind Fate in Ancient China,” Journal of Chinese Religions 25.1 (1997): 157. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427570_003 18 yip another set of related concepts such as “yuan” 緣 (fate to meet), “fen” 份 (right to stay together), and “yuan fen” 緣份 (fate to stay together), or fated love, or “indi- vidual allotment from Heaven,” as “yuanfen” is generally understood and trans- lated in English.2 This chapter will begin by examining the intricate interplay between the philosophical or cosmic concepts of “ming,” “yun” and “mingyun” on the one hand and their relations to human understanding of “yuan” and “yuanfen” and the human subject on the other as elucidated in the well-known ancient folktale “Matrimony Inn” 定婚店 (Dinghun dian), which has exerted great influence on the general Chinese view on and approach to love and marriage. Collected in the Taiping Imperial Encyclopedia 太平廣記 (Taiping guangji), this classical tale narrates a young man’s incessant quest for his mar- ital partner and his open defiance against the God of Matrimony’s prediction of his fated love, or “individual allotment from Heaven” with a young girl. Through the young man Wei Gu’s conscious struggle against his fate of marrying late and his predestined marriage partner who is poor, such traditional notions of “ming” and “mingyun,” or fate and destiny, are widely recognized, endorsed, reinforced and contextualized throughout the centuries. The popular Chinese belief that marriage is predestined is also a concept established since the Tang Dynasty and has been considered as part of “ming” (fate) since then. As the pop- ular Chinese proverb goes, “Man has a human destiny (just as) places an earthly destiny” 人有人運, 地有地運 (ren you renyun, di you diyun). Hence, using the classic tale “Matrimony Inn” as the point of departure, this chapter explores how such traditional notions of “ming” and “ming yun,” or fate and destiny, have taken on a new dimension and become even more complex when such notions were scrutinized under the critical lens of a modern Chinese woman writer Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995), who presents a tragic view of fate through her delineation of the predicaments of modern Chinese women in love and marriage in her fiction. A close analysis of how Zhang Ailing, or Eileen Chang as she is often known in the English-speaking world, deals with women’s struggles against their “ming” and “ming yun” reveals a modern woman writer’s perspective of women’s predestined fate, which is governed not so much by a mysterious unknown cosmic force as in the case of Wei Gu in “Matrimony Inn,” as by a prevailing, but often times powerful and invisible, patriarchal order under which women either passively accept their predestined state as their fate or actively rebel against any form of prescriptive mode of existence. Her world-renowned novella “Love in a Fallen City” 傾城之戀 (Qingcheng zhi lian) 2 Richard J. Smith. Fortune-Tellers and Philosophers: Divination in Traditional Chinese Society (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, Inc., 1991), 173..