Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890–1937

Yun Zhu

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Printed in the United States of America Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Gender, Nation, Subjectivities, and the Discourse on Sisterhood in Modern China ix

1 The Emergence of the “Women’s Sphere” and the Promotion of Sisterhood in the Late Qing 1 2 From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers: The Feminist-Nationalist Spectrum of Sisterhood in Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Chivalric Beauties 35 3 Is Blood Always Thicker than Water?: Rival Sisters and the Tensions of Modernity 73 4 Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness in Lin Loon Magazine (1931–1937) 113 5 Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” as a Feminist Intervention 149

Conclusion 183 Bibliography 187 Index 205 About the Author 217

Acknowledgments

This book has been developed from my PhD dissertation, which I completed in 2012 at the University of South Carolina. I have received enormous help from many generous and insightful people both during my dissertation research and during the revision and expansion of it, and I would like to acknowledge my earnest gratitude to them, if only with a list that is far from complete. To my co-chairs of the dissertation committee, Dr. Meili Steele and Dr. Jie Guo, I would like to express my deepest gratitude for their scholarly guidance and endless support at every stage of my academic development. To Dr. Michael Gibbs Hill, my sincerest gratitude for his inspiring comments and generous advice, including suggestions about the book’s title. To Dr. Tan Ye and Dr. Mark Garrett Cooper, I greatly appreciate their kind encouragement and patient help with the shaping and development of my arguments. To Dr. Alexander Beecroft, I am gratefully indebted to his perceptive comment on the comparison between sisterhood and brotherhood with reference to the Confucian conception of the five basic human relations. To Dr. Krista Van Fleit Hang, Dr. Susan Courtney, and Dr. Jeanne Garane, my deepest thanks for their help in broadening my understanding of fields related to my project. To my former fellow students and friends at the University of South Carolina, my genuine appreciation for their warm friendship and knowledge- able insights. To Dr. Barbara Thornbury, Dr. Louis Mangione, and my other colleagues at Temple University, my immense gratitude for their intellectual support, kind encouragement, and miscellaneous help with all aspects of my development as a junior faculty member. To Temple, my great thanks for a sabbati- cal year early in my career, which made it possible for me to focus on this book project and make progress in a (more or less) timely manner.

vii viii Acknowledgments

To my anonymous reader, my sincere appreciation for the thought- provoking and extremely helpful remarks. To my editor Lindsey Porambo, many thanks for all of the valuable assistance in the publication process. My gratitude also goes to the Carroll T. and Edward B. Cantey, Jr., Bicentennial Fellowship in Liberal Arts (University of South Carolina) and The Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT) Faculty Fellowship for supporting and facilitating my research. Finally, I want to thank my loving family. Without their infinite tolerance and boundless encouragement, this book would never have been possible. Introduction

Gender, Nation, Subjectivities, and the Discourse on Sisterhood in Modern China

“All of you are my dearest elder sisters and younger sisters,” thus begins “To All My Sisters” (Jinggao zimeimen 敬告姊妹們) by the pioneering feminist and Chinese nationalist revolutionary Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907).1 Published in the first issue of Chinese Women’s Journal (Zhongguo nübao 中國女報, 1907), this seminal article called on Chinese women to fight collectively against traditional gender norms and to strive for independence and gender equality in order to bring not only themselves but also the whole Chinese nation into a “new civilized world.”2 The term zimei 姊妹 and its (subsequently more popular) alternative jiemei 姐妹, both meaning “sisters,” were of course anything but neologisms; even the metaphorical usage—referring to non-biological sisterly bonding—had often occurred in both everyday and literary discourses in premodern China. Qiu Jin’s use of the word in an open call to a newly imagined community made up of all female Chinese nationals—addressed as “200,000,000 female compatriots” (erwanwan nütongbao 二萬萬女同胞)3—however, was a rather recent usage that went well beyond its conventional denotation of familial and personal connections. It endowed the term with fresh meaning and a potent significance that has been vital to understanding the so-called “woman question” (funü wenti 婦女問題) in China and, in no lesser degree, the construction of Chi- nese modernity at large. A look at Chinese women’s periodicals—edited and published by both men and women—in the transitional and transformational late Qing and early to mid-Republican era reveals that “sisters” (either as jiemei or zimei) was one of the most often employed catchphrases for feminist advocacy, especially when used in the metaphorical manner of Qiu Jin’s. ix x Introduction

In terms of both its conceptual extension and its elevation of the importance of women’s issues, Qiu Jin’s application of the sisterhood metaphor reflected a dramatic transformation in the Chinese imaginary concerning women’s societal roles and relationships to each other as much as to the nation. Unlike brotherhood, which had long been included in the “five relationships” (wulun 五倫) of the Confucian tradition,4 sisterhood had never before occupied a central position in the Confucian social and moral order, which defined the (male) self through a series of concentric circles—the family, the nation, and the world. In fact, no type of female-female relationship was considered important in this concentric world order. Instead, the gendered doctrine of the inner/outer boundary led women’s identities to be defined first and foremost, if not exclusively, by their roles in the patriarchal family, that is, as men’s daughters, wives, and mothers. The expansion of the connotations of sisterhood toward a newly imagined “women’s sphere” in the last couple of decades of the Qing took place largely against the emergence of a novel background language that considered female subjects as an important half of a prospective modern Chinese “imagined community.” The broadly defined female-female tie that the new sisterhood discourse established thus constituted an essential conjoining of feminist emancipation on the one hand and national liberty and modernization on the other. Despite their many confinements and limitations, these conceptual changes broke through the old view of female existence as being only meaningful when situated within the boundary and context of the patriarchal family and, subsequently, opened up fresh possibilities for redefining female subjectivities and intersubjectivities in the following decades. Yet the proliferating literary and cultural representations of biological as well as metaphorical sisters arose not only from the changed meaning and usage of the word but also from the tremendous anxieties and the many diversified responses they aroused, from both male and female subjects. In addition, like the modern conception of the “Chinese nation,” the imagined community of Chinese “sisters” was almost always envisioned against the background of China struggling to catch up with an evolving modern world. Therefore, as old and new sisterhood narratives flourished in all kinds of literary and cultural texts, they constituted an important part of the contested construction of modern Chinese female identities and gender relations by presenting “sisters” in a variety of ways—as co-sufferers of gender biases and national crises, as feminist compatriots or patriotic feminists, as bearers of sociocultural challenges and changes, as romantic competitors, as fellow consuming subjects, as empathetic female-female lovers, and so on. In this way, the characteristically elastic notion of sisterhood became a phenomenal nodal point to process and negotiate different yet entangled leitmotifs of sociocultural transformation from the individual to the national and even transnational levels. Introduction xi

There is a growing body of Chinese- and English-language scholarship on writings by and about women in China’s turbulent twentieth century, and special attention has been given to the relationship between gender and nation. For instance, in her genealogical study of the discourse around “women” in modern China, Tani E. Barlow has argued that, while the dominant “catachreses”5 funü 婦女 (women) used between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries “signified the collectivity of kinswomen in the semiotics of Confucian family doctrine,” the use of the word nü 女 (female) in the early twentieth century served as “a trope or symbol of nationalist universality in masculinist discourse,” and the modern term nüxing 女性 (female gender/ sex) “constituted a discursive sign and a subject position in the larger frames of anti-Confucian discourse” reflecting “the rhetoric of global sex and eugenics theory.”6 In a related but different vein, Amy Dooling’s Women’s Liter- ary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China provides an exploration of the emerging feminist ideologies articulated by “new women” (xin nüxing 新女性) writers, who intervened in the dominantly nationalist discourse with female experiences and perspectives. 7 Also rejecting the reduction of women to merely passive objects during the rise of Chinese nationalism, Joan Judge has turned to a group of female Chinese students studying in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, who were “the first Chinese women to address the issue of nationalism directly” in a time when “[t]he Chinese nation and the Chinese national subject were still in the process of being invented,” and pointed out that these women exercised their agency by appropriating nationalism to “cut out new subjectivities.”8 In contrast to the emphasis on such key terms as “women,” “women’s rights,” and “new women,” however, there seems to be an imbalance between the noticeable profusion of narratives and images about sisterhood and the scarcity of systematic attention it has so far attracted. Few academic books in English on China studies published in recent decades have under- scored “sister” in the title; one exception is Emily Honig’s Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949, a historical- sociological study of sisterhood among female workers in the textile industry of Republican Shanghai.9 Nevertheless, the importance of sisterhood in Chi- nese women’s literary traditions and social history has already been evidenced in such works as Hu Siao-chen’s Talented Women Burning the Mid- night Oil: The Rise of Female Narrative in Early Modern China, which has revealed the importance of textual sisterhood in women’s tanci novels (tanci xiaoshuo 彈詞小說) in the Ming and Qing dynasties, mostly targeted at a female readership made up of the writers’ relatives and friends in gentry families.10 Feminist sisterhood has also been touched upon, though not focused on, in Zheng Wang’s historical portrait of Chinese women activists in the May Fourth era (roughly mid-1910s to mid-1920s), Women in the Chi- nese Enlightenment, in which Wang’s demonstration of the vigorous role xii Introduction played by women in China’s nationalist/feminist enlightenment disrupted the previous popular belief that women did not exercise much agency themselves and were merely liberated by male-led revolutions. 11 As a pioneering examination of the literary and cultural discourses of female same-sex love in modern China and Taiwan, Tze-lan D. Sang’s The Emerging Lesbian: Fe- male Same-Sex Desire in Modern China has brought to light the discursive emergence of lesbian sisterhood, its literary representations and social reception, and lesbian activism under contemporary conditions. 12 Given the respective foci of Honig’s, Hu’s, Wang’s, and Sang’s books, there remain many interesting and important unanswered questions about the rich connotations of the term “sisterhood” and its derivative images in the late Qing and early to mid-Republican discourses. For example, how did the apparent but problematic symbiosis between nationalist sisterhood and feminist sisterhood in the late Qing “women’s sphere” narratives affect later feminist quests and endeavors? With the elasticity of sisterhood encompassing a range of bonds—from familial ties to socially and intellectually bonded friendships, nationalist and/or feminist associations, and even broader transhistorical and translocal identifications—how did the narratives and images of “sisters” and “sisterhood” interact with the changing ideas about the self, the family, the nation, and the world? How did the newly expanded and more metaphorical ways of imagining sisterhood influence the ways in which women as individuals and as a group were portrayed henceforth? Indeed, as I hope this book will show, the transforming and proliferating sisterhood narratives in the last two decades of Qing rule and the early to mid-Republican era is significantly revealing as to the complicated relationship between women and Chinese modernity in at least three aspects. First, “sisterhood,” originally a kinship term, is rooted in biological ties and familial relationships. The emergence and popularity of its newly developed, broader, and more flexible framework provided a unique angle to look at how the perception of women’s identities and roles on the one hand and a restructured understanding of the relationships among the self, the family, the nation, and the world on the other mutually redefined each other in modern Chinese history. As in the case of the mother, which Sally Taylor Lieberman has found as “a crucial sign profoundly and intricately implicated in the discursive battles of China’s modern period,”13 writing and rhetoric about sisters and sisterhood carried many divergent (sometimes paradoxical or contradictory) messages and images. A careful examination of these narratives may shed further light on the subtle shades of meaning of such important and related terms as funü, nü, nüxing, and xin nüxing, all of which, despite their very different approaches, considered the relationship between women and the family as a key reference point in the discourse on gender. Second, instead of presenting polemic oppositions between nationalism and feminism or between individual female subjects and women as one col- Introduction xiii lective subject, sisterhood narratives mediated a spectrum of subject positions and negotiated not only female subjectivities but also gendered intersubjectivities. Hence, while constituting an important part of the overall cultural discourse on the “woman question,” they provided a more heterogeneous picture of what Joan Judge has termed as the “historically unstable nature of the relationship between women and the nation.”14 At the same time, they encouraged a dialogical, rather than monological approach, which may help to reveal dynamic dialectics of cohesion and fragmentation within and with regard to the emerging “new women.” As negotiations arose as to the com- monalities and differences among modern Chinese female subjects, the inclusion/exclusion of sisterhood became an indicator for the sharing/non- sharing of identities and mentalities. Third, the gendered nature of sisterhood and an ensuing feminine or feminized thematic focus often led to a feminized positioning that added nuances to such binary paradigms as China/West and traditional/modern. As in the case of Qiu Jin’s article, for instance, a master-slave view of the existing gender hierarchy, where “men always occupy the position of masters, and women are reduced to the status of slaves,”15 added another layer to an otherwise commonly interpreted linear perception of nationalist revolution and social evolution. At the same time, Qiu’s advocacy for publications by and for women as the cornerstone of an enlightened “Chinese women’s sphere” (Zhongguo nüjie 中國女界)16 complicated the strata of this imagined community of the “nation,” which, according to Benedict Anderson, “is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship,” a “fraternity that makes it possible . . . for so many millions of people . . . willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (italics mine).17 That is, what happens if we com- pare the Andersonian model of an “imagined community” with Qiu Jin’s “women’s sphere,” where “comradeship” is made less “horizontal” because of gender differences and a gendered elite-subaltern spectrum, and where “fraternity” is replaced by “sisterhood”? This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, I combine an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exam- xiv Introduction ines the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” While being keenly aware of the appropriation of sisterhood rhetoric in China’s nation-building project, my approach avoids anything similar to the type of neat “repressive hypothesis” that Foucault has argued against 18 and, instead, suggests a more complex reading of the relationship among gender, sexuality, and nation. Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, I conduct a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities, and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.” The first chapter traces the politicized notion of a nationwide sisterhood to the discussions of the “women’s sphere” by reformist and feminist intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century. It reveals how the discursive construction of this gendered sphere provided new vocabulary and a (re-)invented language for sisterhood beyond the limit of the household and how such nationalist sisterhood interacted with the construction of an Ander- sonian “imagined community.” Reading “sisters” in the late Qing discourse as an elastic and fluid category situated at the intersection of feminist and nationalist causes, I maintain that this newly imagined sphere of 200,000,000 sisters—half of the estimated Chinese population at the time—served as a preliminary but contested “imagined community,” where female subjectivities were perceived as largely based upon national enlightenment. As such, it thematically and stylistically impacted the literary and cultural representations of gender, nation, and modernity in later decades, which are discussed in the following chapters. Diverging from the historical approach employed in the first chapter, the second chapter adopts an interpretative approach toward the depiction of sisterhood in two politically charged novels written by representative late Qing women writers in response to reformist intellectuals’ call for “new fiction” (xin xiaoshuo 新小說).19 My reading of Qiu Jin’s Stones of the Jingwei Bird (Jingwei shi 精衛石, 1905–1907) and Shao Zhenhua’s (邵振華, ca. 1882–?) Chivalric Beauties (Xiayi jiaren 俠義佳人, 1909–1911) pays much attention to their reinvention of literary sisterhood of the earlier guixiu 閨秀 (educated genteel women) tradition by promoting feminist awareness and adjusting it to the overwhelmingly nationalistic intellectual discourse. Whereas their advocacy for an extensive feminist union profoundly embraced the nationalist agenda of the “women’s sphere,” their respective renderings of this gendered community as a stratified, rather than homogenous, entity informed by an enlightenment-based vision also indicated potential divergences beneath a shared yearning for a modernized womanhood. Introduction xv

Continuing with the issue of heterogeneity within sisterhood narratives with reference to the complexity and multiplicity of modernity/modernities, chapter 3 proceeds to explore the portrayals of competing sisters—as rivals in love relations or as embodiments of contrasting mentalities—in Li Han- qiu’s 李涵秋 (1874–1923) novel Two Flowery Sisters (Zimei huagu 姊妹花骨, 1910), Bai Wei’s 白薇 (1893–1987) novel A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird (Zhadan yu zhengniao 炸彈與徵鳥, 1928), and Zheng Zhengqiu’s 郑正秋 (1888–1935) film Twin Sisters (Zimei hua 姊妹花, 1933). The competition between the juxtaposed sisters, I contend, symbolized what seemed to be a compulsory choice between the traditional and the modern modes of womanhood as each was respectively imagined (for instance, as rural versus urban, indigenous versus cosmopolitan, conservative versus revolutionary, passive versus active, weak versus strong, or dependent versus independent). While usually the textual fates of the rival sisters—either the failure of the premodern archetype and the victory of the modern one or a progressive reformation of the sisterly tie per se—well accorded with the then prevalent belief in social Darwinism and linear modernity, the sentimental potentialities behind the apparently rationalized choice often reflected pain, bewilderment, fragmentation, and ambiguities. As the tensions among these fictional sisters allegorized social and ideological dissonances and the different emotional responses they prompted, sisterhood became a vivid trope to epitomize, in a gendered manner, the oscillations between cohesion and fragmentation within the conceived Chinese modernity. The fourth chapter is a case study of the cosmopolitan bourgeois sisterhood constructed by and around Lin Loon Ladies’ Magazine (Linglong funü zazhi 玲瓏婦女雜誌), one of the most popular and influential women’s magazines of 1930s Shanghai. Examining the magazine’s cultivation of a sizable female readership via sisterhood narratives side by side with the ambiguities of its self-claimed female-centeredness, I investigate the shifting boundary between the private and the public with reference to reiterations of female subject positions. The magazine’s encyclopedic coverage of cosmopolitan modern life, “polyphonic”20 treatments of women’s social positioning, and an intrinsic entertaining overtone, I argue, constituted a gendered prism of urban consumer culture and allowed some alternative ways to reimagine female subjectivities and intersubjectivities beyond the nationalist framework. On the other hand, while facilitating a feminine public space between the individual and the state that departed from mainstream intellectual discourse, the magazine’s overlapping dualistic foci on women and entertainment also often made female subjects vulnerable to voyeurism, objectification, and exploitation. The sisterhood among Lin Loon girls embodied new gender-informed, self-reflexive (albeit self-questioning) ways of identification among modern Chinese women as empathetic participants in not only the public cultural discourse but also the consumptive dimension of a semi- xvi Introduction colonial, cosmopolitan modern life. The ambivalence of the magazine’s female-centeredness and feminist potential, in this way, correlated with various dilemmas of the Chinese “New Woman” in her simultaneous fights against traditional patriarchal gender biases, the ongoing colonial imperialist threats, and the modern voyeuristic and misogynist commodity culture. The last chapter looks into four stories by three representative women writers of the 1920s and the 1930s on the subject of female-female love among students and teachers in the new-style girls’ school—Lu Yin’s 廬隱 (1898–1934) “Lishi’s Diary” (Lishi de riji 麗石的日記, 1923) and “Old Friends by the Sea” (Haibin guren 海濱故人, 1923), Ling Shuhua’s 凌叔華 (1900–1990) “It Is Said That Something Like This Happened” (Shuo you zheme yi hui shi 說有這麼一回事, 1926), and Ding Ling’s 丁玲 (1904–1986) “In the Summer Vacation” (Shujia zhong 暑假中, 1928). It discusses how the writers’ respective delineations of female-female love in the heterotopic space of the girls’ school engaged with alternative possibilities of envisioning female subject positions. The utopian/dystopian dimensions of these stories demonstrated how young educated women were both empowered and confined at one and the same time by mainstream enlightenment ideals. In this way, they questioned the implicit but dominant patriarchal-nationalist tendencies in the embedding May Fourth discourses on women’s psyches, bodies, and sexualities. The challenges and frustrations facing the sisterly lovers, who were so often caught in a dilemma of rebel- liousness, escapism, and disillusionment all mixed together, self-reflectively problematized a gender paradox in the legacy of the iconoclastic New Cul- ture Movement of the mid-1910s through the 1920s, which, in turn, could be traced back to the earlier problematic symbiosis between nationalism and feminism in the late Qing discursive construction and promotion of the “women’s sphere.” In the conclusion, I summarize the significance of sisterhood in the modern Chinese imaginary, which lies not only in its positioning at the confluence of many important leitmotifs in literary and cultural discourses but also in its innate complexity, elasticity, and fluidity. As such, sisterhood imaginings constantly, dynamically, and dialectically interacted with various sociocultural transformations in an emphatically gendered manner. An examination of women and Chinese modernity through the lens of sisterhood may thus open up alternative understandings to the gendered master narratives of enlightenment, national salvation, and modernization.

NOTES

1. Qiu Jin, Selected Works of Qiu Jin, ed. Guo Yanli (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004), 12. 2. Ibid., 13. Introduction xvii

3. Similar references can also be found in Qiu Jin’s other works, e.g., her 1904 essay “To My 200,000,000 Female Chinese Compatriots” (Jinggao Zhongguo erwanwan nütongbao 敬告中國二萬萬女同胞). See Qiu Jin, Collected Works of Qiu Jin (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1991), 4–7. 4. According to The Book of Rites (Liji 礼记), the five most important relationships are: that between ruler and court officials, that between father and son, that between husband and wife, brotherhood, and (male) friendship; see James Legge, trans., Li Chi: Book of Rites, an Encyclopedia of Ancient Ceremonial Usages, Religious Creeds, and Social Institutions (New York: University Books, 1967), vol. 2, 313. See also Wei-Ming Tu, “Probing the ‘Three Bonds’ and ‘Five Relationships’ in Confucian Humanism,” in Confucianism and the Family, ed. Walter H. Slote and George A. De Vos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 121–36. 5. Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2004), 37. Here, Barlow’s use of the term draws upon Spivak, who defines a catachresis as a “concept-metaphor without an adequate referent.” See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 60. 6. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 37, 52. 7. Amy D. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 8. Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalism and Female Subjectiv- ities in Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106.3 (2001): 766. 9. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). 10. Hu Siao-chen, Talented Women Burning the Midnight Oil (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2008). 11. Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berke- ley: California University Press, 1999). 12. Tze-lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 13. Sally Taylor Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (Char- lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 4. 14. Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 801. 15. Qiu, Collected Works of Qiu Jin, 14. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 7. 18. Contrary to the common belief that the rise of the bourgeois class and capitalism led Western industrial societies to suppress sexual pleasure as a waste of energy and, consequently, to silence the discourse on sexuality, Foucault argues that the discourse on sexuality actually proliferated, rather than become eliminated, as a result of the “polymorphous techniques of power”; see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 11. 19. The term “new fiction” is often associated with late Qing reformist leader Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929), who called out for a revolution in fiction writing that could help to reform the mentality of Chinese readers and bring about “new people” (xinmin 新民). While Liang’s establishment of the literary journal New Fiction (xin xiaoshuo 新小說) in Yokohama in 1902 and his own 1903 novel The Future of New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中國未來記) had a great impact upon the rise of modern Chinese fiction, his advocacy was influenced both by earlier Chinese literary traditions and by the promotion for fiction with social purposes made by the English missionary and publisher John Fryer (aka Fu Lanya 傅蘭雅, 1839–1928). For more on John Fryer’s influence on the new fiction, see Patrick Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 124–43. 20. Barbara Mittler, “In Spite of Gentility: Women and Men in Linglong (Elegance), a 1930s Women’s Magazine,” in The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, eds. Daria Berg and Chloë Starr (New York: Routledge, 2007), 209. Like Mittler, xviii Introduction who has drawn from Bakhtin’s theory of “heteroglossia” and “the dialogic aspect of discourse,” Yunxiang Gao has used a similar phrase, “multivocal space,” to describe the incongruity of Lin Loon; see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 270 and 273, and Yunxiang Gao, Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China’s National Crisis, 1931–45 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 61. Chapter One

The Emergence of the “Women’s Sphere” and the Promotion of Sisterhood in the Late Qing

The most significant change in the discourse on sisterhood in turn-of-the- twentieth-century China was its dramatic expansion from the family to a much broader societal role. Such a transformation, paradoxically, was both promoted and restricted by the construction of another “-hood”—nationhood, which, in many ways, still overshadows the language and vocabulary of sisterhood in contemporary China. At the same time, because of China’s uneasy encounters with Western powers at the time, the new conceptions of nationhood1 and sisterhood almost always involved dynamic and multifaceted negotiations between indigenous traditions and subjectivities and transnational visions and impacts. For example, in “Ode to a Women’s China” (Nü Zhonghua ge 女中華歌) published in a 1904 issue of Women’s World (Nüzi shijie 女子世界, 1904–1907), the pro-feminist male writer Gao Xie 高燮 (1878–1958, pen-named Chuiwan 吹萬) described the relationship between a sphere for enlightened Chinese “sisters” and the quest for national liberty (both from Manchurian rule and from Western imperialist threat) as such: “Now our female compatriots of the twentieth century / become fervent about saving the nation, holding high aims. / . . . / Our Chinese men are so spineless / that they cringe and fawn in front of power. / Numerous flowery sisters from the inner chambers / come onto the stage, hand in hand.”2 This chapter attempts a historical examination of the promotion of “sisterhood” in the discursive construction of the “women’s sphere” in the last two decades of the Qing dynasty and argues that such an imagined sphere of “200,000,000 sisters”—half of the estimated Chinese population at the time—served as a preliminary but contested form of the “imagined commu-

1 2 Chapter 1 nity” of the modern Chinese nation-state. In this process, which involved perspectives on women and gender from voices of both sexes, the “women’s sphere” became an important discursive pivot between the new modes of identity and the new ways of identification enabled by an extended sisterhood. Such a sisterhood was informed by several entangled influences, namely, the emerging nationalist imagination, an evolving awareness of gender equality, and the reformist project of restrengthening China. By concentrating on sisterhood instead of individual female subjects, I intend to focus more on the intricate and complex nature of such identification, rather than on the female identity per se. Even the term “woman” itself was, and is, never a stable category, especially during the sociopolitical and cultural-historical turbulence in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If, as Barlow has argued, such identifying and categorizing terms as nüxing and funü (both often translated as “woman” or “women”) are actually pivotal “catachreses,”3 a study on the identification—in this case, through sisterhood—among these inadequately and inaccurately defined female subjects should shed light on how and why such identification embodied subtle and complicated oscillations between cohesion and fragmentation. On the one hand, the discursive emergence of the “women’s sphere” constituted an initial and essential stage in the formation of a new means of national identification, though it often featured an instrumentalization of women, which Prasenjit Duara has keenly summarized as “embodiments of authenticity” used by elitist intellectuals to negotiate a partial and ambiguous conser- vation of the nation’s past and traditions during its modernization process. 4 On the other hand, the gendered imprint of this female sphere and its sisterhood rhetoric, albeit obviously appropriated, allowed nuanced departures from the master narrative of nation-building and accommodated alternative renderings of identities and subjectivities that were gendered and national- ized at one and the same time but not necessarily along the same lines.

THE PROTOTYPE OF “HALF THE SKY”: FROM NÜERGUO TO NÜJIE

In its March 2011 issue, the Beijing-based, English-language monthly Wom- en of China (Zhongguo funü 中國婦女), which is sponsored by the state-run All-China Women’s Federation (Zhonghua quanguo funü lianhehui 中華全國婦女聯合會), celebrated “A Hundred Years of Women’s Movement in China” on its front cover in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD) and introduced a new pictorial album compiled by the same federation, A Hundred Years of Women’s Movement in China, 1910–2010 (Zhongguo funü yundong bainian, 1910–2010 中國婦女運動百年, 1910–2010). IWD, whose establishment can be traced back to the Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 3 socialist Second International in Copenhagen in 1910, was initially inspired by women’s activist movements in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially the celebration of National Wom- en’s Day by the Socialist Party of America on February 28, 1909.5 Despite the magazine’s, or rather the Federation’s, effort to highlight the socialist- inspired holiday as the most important origin of Chinese women’s movement, however, the magazine’s front cover also featured an image of the male feminist Jin Yi’s 金一 (aka Jin Tianhe 金天翮, 1873–1947) 1903 book A Bell to the Women’s Sphere (Nüjie zhong 女界鍾),6 which actually came out seven years before IWD was initiated. While providing a vivid example of the status competition among various sources of inspiration during the early Chinese women’s movement in the narratives and memories of later eras, the selection of A Bell to the Women’s Sphere as the centerpiece of this commemoration proves the special significance of both this book and the iconic phrase “women’s sphere” in the entangled discourses on women, nation, and state in modern China, which, as is indicated by the state-sponsored narratives of “half the sky” (banbiantian 半邊天),7 has continued to accumulate layers of implications from the late Qing until today. In addition to its seminal role as the “first full-length tract on women’s rights in Chinese,”8 A Bell to the Women’s Sphere greatly contributed to the discursive popularity of its titular catchphrase, while also criticizing the unfair treatment of women in China and arguing that the oppression of Chinese women was a major cause of the country’s backwardness and repeated defeats by foreign powers. Publications bearing the term “women’s sphere” in their titles flourished soon afterwards; the subject matter ranged from politically charged essays to popular vernacular fiction. Examples include Liu Yazi’s 柳亞子 (1887–1958) influential 1904 article “A Lament to the Wom- en’s Sphere” (Ai nüjie 哀女界), the Magazine of the New Chinese Women’s Sphere (Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國新女界雜誌, 1907–1908) established by a female Chinese overseas student named Yan Bin 燕斌 (1869–?), He Damiu’s 何大謬 (years of birth and death unknown) 1908 pamphlet Tears of the Women’s Sphere (Nüjie lei 女界淚), and Cuotuozi’s 蹉跎子 (years of birth and death unknown) 1909 novel The Newest Report of a Ghostly Field in the Women’s Sphere (Zuixin nüjie guiyu ji 最新女界鬼域記). As a result, “women’s sphere” became part of the key vocabulary in public discussions about Chinese women and their positions, responsibilities, and futures in relation to China’s ongoing crises. In spite of the obvious appropriation 9 and assimilation10 of women’s issues in the nation-building project, such a public enthusiasm about the “women’s sphere” provides an interesting angle from which to examine the changing background language for women’s subjectivities and intersubjectivities from a broader historical view. 4 Chapter 1

In more ways than one, the discursive emergence of the “women’s sphere,” or of the synonymous “women’s world,” epitomized the entangled relationship between the redefinition of women’s roles beyond the traditional Confucian patriarchal family and the construction of China as a modern “imagined community.” Although it is difficult to accurately identify its earliest employment, the notion of an exclusively female sphere or a female-dominated world could be traced back to the centuries-long Chinese literary and cultural narratives about the “kingdom of women” (nüerguo 女兒國), which, interestingly, often involve Chinese travelers’ adventurous encounters with exotic foreign lands. Early references to this include the matriarchal “Eastern Kingdom of Women” (Dongnü guo 東女國) recorded in the Sui dynasty collection An Illustrated Account of the Western Regions (Xiyu tuji 西域圖記) by Pei Ju 裴矩 (ca. 547–627) and the seventh-century travel narrative Records of the Western Regions in the Great Tang Dynasty (Da Tang xiyu ji 大唐西域記) by the famous Buddhist master Xuanzang 玄奘 (602–664).11 Yet its most popular fictional rendering occurred in the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West (Xi you ji 西遊記) by Wu Cheng’en 吳承恩 (ca. 1500–ca. 1580).12 In a more recent and pro-feminist manner, Li Ruzhen 李汝珍 (1763–1830) included a “Kingdom of Women” in his famous fantasy novel Romance of Flowers in the Mirror (Jing hua yuan 鏡花緣, 1827), in which the real gender hierarchy is turned exactly upside down, with women managing public affairs and men subordinating to their female “husbands” and taking care of the household.13 Because of its subversion of imposed gender norms and vivid criticism of sexist oppression, with Li’s male protagonist receiving firsthand experiences as a member of the second sex in this foreign kingdom, the novel was often cited and commended in speeches and writings about women’s movements in the twentieth century. Liu-Wang Liming 劉王立明 (1896–1970), the founder and leader of the Chinese Women’s Abstinence Society (Zhonghua funü jiezhihui 中華婦女節制會), for instance, considered it to be a pioneering source of inspiration for the women’s movement in her own time.14 Unlike the exotic imagining about the “kingdom of women” or the social, economic, and political management of the “women’s camp” (nü ying 女營) during the short-lived Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping tianguo 太平天國, 1851–1864),15 the conceptions of the “women’s sphere” in the late Qing, as evidenced by Qiu Jin’s and Jin Yi’s respective treatments, were heavily invested with anxieties about China’s survival as a failing nation. Therefore, in contrast to the Confucian doctrine that centered on the household as “part of a broader schema” to “separate people into their respective social categories” and “protect patriline,”16 this new gendered division focused on the attainment of national strength and was often associated with reformist economic agendas. The late Qing reformist approach toward women as a separ- Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 5 ate category from men was perhaps best summarized in Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) distinction of “wealth-producers” (shenglizhe 生利者) and “wealth-consumers” (fenlizhe 分利者) in two of his seminal essays about the reformation of Chinese womanhood, “On Women’s Learning” (Lun nüxue 論女學, 1897) and “On Wealth Production and Wealth Consumption” (Lun shengli fenli 論生利分利, 1902). According to Liang’s classification, the majority, if not all, of Chinese women belonged to the category of wealth- consumers and, therefore, were the most urgently targeted objects to be transformed. In “On Women’s Learning,” which was originally a part of the series “A General Discussion of Reform” (Bianfa tongyi 變法通譯) published in the Shanghai-based Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao 時務報) prior to the 1898 reform movement,17 Liang lamented that “all of the two hundred million Chinese women are wealth-consumers . . . unable to support themselves and therefore have to depend on others,” which, he believed, was one of the major reasons of women’s social inferiority to men, and of China’s backwardness as well.18 In “On Wealth Production and Wealth Consumption,” which was first published as part of the series “On the New People” (Xinmin shuo 新民說) in Liang’s own Japan-based New People Miscellany (Xinmin congbao 新民叢報, 1902–1907), Liang revised his previous statement, pointing out that family duties and household responsibilities should also be considered as forms of wealth-production. However, when comparing house- bound Chinese women to their professional Western counterparts, he insisted that the former group were not yet working to their full capacity, which made the whole group end up having 60 to 70 percent of its members as wealth- consumers.19 It is worth noting that Liang’s reformist perception of the division between wealth-production and wealth-consumption was, for the most part, not an indigenous idea but a good example of the importation and appropriation of Western knowledge by late Qing intelligentsia. The conception of the binary could be traced back to the British missionary Timothy Richard’s (better known to his Chinese readers as Li Timotai 李提摩太, 1845–1919) article “On the Distinction between Wealth-Production and Wealth-Consumption” (Lun shengli fenli zhi bie 論生利分利之別), published in 1893 in the 52nd issue of Review of the Times (Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報, 1874–1883, 1889–1907) and collected (with a slightly revised title) in Works on Western Governance (Xizheng congshu 西政叢書) compiled by Liang Qichao.20 However, in Liang’s analysis, the original distinction defined in economic terms clearly added a new gendered layer to the construct, and the rhetoric was widely adopted in discussions on both broad and specific issues about women. For example, in the reformist advocacy for the unbinding of women’s feet and for women’s education, it was argued that these causes had to be pursued because women with bound feet and women with- 6 Chapter 1 out professional knowledge, with obvious overlap in between, were two large groups too useless to serve as wealth-producers. This gendered conception of economic production, somewhat paradoxically, reflected and informed two popular yet contrasting views of the “women’s sphere”: either as a backward and depressing world filled with power- less (if not useless) non-agents or as a promising community whose enlightenment could lead to a national revival. Here, the meaning of the feminine, as Ping Zhu has put it, was divided into “good” and “bad” terms,21 bringing about double-edged consequences. On the one hand, the incorporation of women’s issues into the reformist project improved women’s chances to be educated and to escape the confinement of the household. On the other hand, as Liu Huiying has pointed out, such “a gendered stance” tended to ignore women’s tremendous contribution throughout history and label them as responsible for the backwardness of the nation.22 In the latter sense, the reformists’ gendered interpretation of “wealth” and “production” could also be seen as an indication of a traditional-modern transition that commodified labor and emphasized its exchange value. 23 At the same time, with the declining legitimacy of “wen, Confucian high culture,” which, as Susan Mann has pointed out, once empowered educated gentry women “to create an identity that was both morally and humanly intelligible” in the High Qing, the sociocultural agency of elite women also had to be “repositioned,” “recover[ed],” and “rema[d]e.”24 Instead of remaining “symbolic capital of elite families” and “part of a genealogy of . . . ‘family learning,’ or jia xue [家學],”25 women’s intellectual and cultural capabilities came to be seen as holding essential nationalist significance. As more girl students and career women (usually educators, feminist activists, or writers for female-targeted print products) gradually appeared, enthusiastic reformists saw this newly emerged group of educated and enlightened women as a sign of China’s significant progress in trying to catch up with global modernity. For example, in a November 1906 article titled “The New Phe- nomenon in the Eastern Women’s Sphere” (Dongfang nüjie zhi xin xianxiang 東方女界之新現象) in Review of the Times,26 the American missionary Young John Allen (better known to his Chinese readers as Lin Lezhi 林樂知, 1836–1907) and his Chinese collaborator Fan Yi 範禕 (1866–1939) begin with the following observation: “The most exciting, unprecedented phenomenon that has recently occurred is the [emergence of the] women’s sphere.”27 Comparing Europe and America, where “women have already exhibited their capabilities as teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, accountants, and have become the majority in various professions,” against Turkey, where “women are assigned the lowest and humblest status in the world,” the article inter- prets the difference as a gap along a scale of “civilization and evolution” and claims that “the maltreatment of women was merely a habitual practice of the barbarian times.”28 In fact, such a view of an enlightened “women’s sphere” Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 7 as a measurement of a nation’s progress among the world’s civilizations is the key argument Allen and his Chinese assistant Yin Pao-lu (aka Ren Bao- luo 任保羅, birth and death years unknown) made in Women in All Lands (Quandi wudazhou nüsu tongkao 全地五大洲女俗通考), a 21-volume collection that ranked as one of the most popular publications by the Society for the Diffusion of Christianity and General Knowledge among the Chinese (Guang xue hui 廣學會) at the time and that served as an influential reference for early Chinese feminists. Like Liang Qichao’s adoption of newly imported economic terminology, Allen’s endeavors to use women’s status “to demonstrate an altogether different vision [from the traditional Chinese one] of the ‘correct’ cosmic order”29 redefined gender roles in a binary fashion, where a globalized vision of “civilization and evolution” proposed “new” and “correct” traditions as opposed to the “old,” “ancient,” “barbarian” traditions. Ironically, the two sides of the binary divide converged on the issue of women: it was exactly because Chinese women as a group were considered the worst symptom of the nation’s failure that women’s issues occupied a central position in public discussions of national issues. Consequently, it was none other than this problematic centrality that legitimized the rise of the “women’s sphere” despite a generally patriarchal social imaginary. Thus, built upon the various unbalanced relationships between China and the West, between the traditional and the modern, and between men and women, the novel conception of the “women’s sphere” became instrumental- ized as a pivotal point for national revival. Subsequently, pioneering Chinese feminists, both male and female, started to envision a new female tradition in sociopolitical life. In A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, Jin Yi referred to women as “mothers of national subjects” (guomin zhi mu 國民之母) and argued for their principal position and responsibilities concerning the elevation of China to an advantageous position on the “stage of global competition.”30 Although Chinese women were not yet enlightened, claimed Jin Yi, they had more potential to excel than their male peers, both owing to women’s natural advantages over men and because of the global embrace of “an age of feminist revolution” (nüquan geming zhi shidai 女權革命之時代).31 One journal that focused on women’s issues served as a representative textual embodiment of the “women’s sphere”: Women’s World (Nüzi shijie 女子世界, 1904–1907),32 launched by several male feminists, including Ding Chuwo 丁初我 (aka Ding Zuyin 丁祖荫, 1871–1930), Jin Yi, and Zeng Pu 曾樸 (aka Zeng Pengpu 曾孟樸, 1872–1935),33 a year after A Bell to the Women’s Sphere came out. Although its publication was less than regular and lasted only three years, Women’s World constituted a pioneering feminist voice and an important milestone in the history of modern Chinese women’s periodicals. In addition to Ding and Jin, the magazine’s most favored authors included the novelist and translator Xu Nianci 徐念慈 (1875–1908), the poet 8 Chapter 1 and politician-to-be Liu Yazi, the writer and translator Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967), and the philosopher and educator Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873–1958). Notably, alongside these male intellectuals, the magazine also invited female participation, for example, from the feminist revolutionist Qiu Jin, whose calligraphy was featured on the cover of the final issue. Corre- spondence between Qiu Jin and Chen Zhiqun 陳志群 (1889–1962), the magazine’s last editor-in-chief, also indicated planned cooperation, unfortunately ruined by Qiu Jin’s execution.34 With the enlightenment of the “women’s sphere” seen as the first and foremost stage of the restrengthening of the Chinese nation, “women’s rights” (nüquan 女權) and “civil rights” (minquan 民權) became two major issues that were often brought together, furthering the overlap between feminist revolution and nationalist revolution. For example, in the fourth issue of the journal Jiangsu 江蘇 (1903–1904), a Tokyo-based journal established by overseas Chinese intellectuals, an author named Gong Yuanchang 龔圓常 proposed that these two kinds of rights should be promoted simultaneously. 35 Ma Junwu 馬君武 (1881–1940), who translated Herbert Spencer’s writing on women’s rights into Chinese in 1902,36 and who introduced John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women via a series of articles in New People Mis- cellany in 1903,37 argued that the European model of the republican polity was based upon the combined efforts to fight for both civil rights and women’s rights.38 Jin Yi, in a similar vein, proposed a two-stage goal for the nationalist revolution in A Bell to the Women’s Sphere by claiming that “If the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were times of revolution to over- throw the monarchy, then the twentieth century is an age of feminist revolution.”39 According to this formula of linear progress, a feminist “women’s sphere” would be an essential stage via which China would finally join the modern world as an equal to its Western rivals. Despite the rather radical advocacy for feminist revolution at the time, many of these late Qing conceptions of an enlightened “women’s sphere” maintained cultural ties with indigenous memories and traditions for validity and inspiration. In his “Inaugural Statement of Women’s World” (Nüzi shijie fakanci 女子世界發刊詞), Jin Yi not only credited the “wise mothers and wives” (xianmu xianqi 賢母賢妻) of great men for China’s premodern pros- perity but also offered a list of famous women from history and legend as pioneering examples, including talented scholars and poets (e.g., Ban Zhao 班昭, Fu Nü 伏女, Zuo Fen 左芬, Xie Daoyun 謝道韞, Su Hui 蘇蕙, Xue Yuan 薛瑗, and Cai Yan 蔡琰), moral paragons (e.g., Chunyu Tiying 淳于緹縈 and Pang Eqin 龐娥親), and heroic warriors (e.g., Hua Mulan 花木蘭, Liang Hongyu 梁紅玉, and Qin Liangyu 秦良玉).40 Similarly, in his “Eulo- gy to Women’s World” (Nüzi shijie songci 女子世界頌詞), Ding Chuwo traced back his conceptualization of a “women’s world” to the sociocultural Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 9 legacy of “national essence” (guocui 國粹) and cited a list of exceptional premodern women that largely overlapped with Jin’s.41 Such efforts to define and promote an outstanding “women’s sphere” and to rationalize it against a larger transnational background exerted a strong and lasting impact upon feminist reappraisals and re-appropriations of the nationalist project in the following decades. In The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌, 1915–1931), an influential periodical in the early to mid- Republican period,42 we can frequently find articles that situated, just as Ding Chuwo’s and Jin Yi’s did, the reformation of Chinese womanhood and the (re-)construction of a new Chinese “women’s sphere” into a much longer and broader female tradition, one that was viewed as self-renewable despite the many ongoing social changes. In the 1915 article “On the Origin of the Women’s Sphere” (Nüjie yuanqi 女界緣起), Wu Zenglan 吳曾蘭, the wife of the famous scholar and writer Wu Yu 吳虞 (1872–1949),43 borrowed the reformist expression “women as mothers of future citizens” and employed it to justify the cause of “women’s learning”; at the same time, however, she criticized the reformist exemplary model of “wise mother and good wife” (xianmu liangqi 賢母良妻)44 as insufficient to mobilize Chinese women in their struggle to catch up with American women. 45 According to Wu, the illumination of the rising Chinese “women’s sphere” would help to “revive” (guangfu 光復) women’s rights, so that women in contemporary China could finally share the glory of their domestic and foreign predecessors who had successfully exemplified female liberty and heroism. 46 Wu’s account continued Jin Yi and Ding Chuwo’s reinvention of a Chinese female tradition and further reoriented the gendered “women’s sphere” with a revivalist agenda as well as an even more rebellious perspective.

CONSTRUCTING THE “WOMEN’S SPHERE” AS A PRELIMINARY “IMAGINED COMMUNITY”

The proliferating references to the term “women’s sphere” in late Qing public discourse indicated a significant change in the background language behind such a gendered imagination, where the premodern mode of exotic “kingdoms of women” was replaced by a nationwide community consisting of all of China’s female subjects. The nationalist symbolism was further reflected by the term’s interchangeability with “women’s world,” “Chinese women,” “two hundred million sisters,” and “all female compatriots.” On the intellectual-cultural level, as Ying Hu and Liu Jen-peng have respectively pointed out, this newly conceived mass of two hundred million women— often contrasted with an equally constructed image of “Western women” (xifu 西婦) or “Western beauties” (xifang meiren 西方美人)—was less a concrete image than a subtle projection of the frustrations of Chinese male 10 Chapter 1 intellectuals.47 In the preface to his groundbreaking pamphlet, Jin Yi also made it clear that the Chinese “women’s sphere” was urgently in need of an enlightening wake-up call exactly because its lack of potency kept both Chi- na and Chinese men from becoming equals to their Western counterparts. “Staying in a cramped attic room in an enormous Eastern Asian country which is not yet free,” writes Jin, “I imagine how a white European man at this time is proudly walking along the broad streets in London, Paris, or Washington, with cigarette in mouth, walking stick in hand, wife alongside, and kids all around. How happy they are! How free they are! What a pity that I cannot join them! I only know of their world indirectly.”48 In the meantime, China’s “Gutenberg revolution”49 and the accompanying coming-of-age modern print culture also played remarkable roles in the reshaping of textual relationships among the reading and writing subjects of publications on women’s issues, particularly through women’s own participation in publication activities. In spring 1898, Qiu Yufang 裘毓芳 (1871–1904) and her uncle Qiu Tingliang 裘廷梁 (1857–1943) established The Vernacular Newspaper of Wuxi (Wuxi baihua bao 無錫白話報).50 Al- though the newspaper was not devoted entirely to a female readership, it contributed significantly to the promotion of reformist thought, including the red-hot issue of the advocacy of women’s education. Three months later, Chinese Girl’s Progress (Nüxue bao 女學報, literally “a newspaper about women’s learning”; aka The Mandarin Newspaper of Women’s Education, or Guanhua nüxue bao 官話女學報, 1898–1899) was founded in Shanghai at the height of the Hundred Days’ Reform (June 11th–September 21st, 1898) and became the first Chinese newspaper to claim that its purpose was exclusively to “promote the information-sharing among women and to enhance universal love [among them].”51 Numerous women-targeted periodicals, as will be discussed below, sprang up in the following decades. Four interesting facts about Chinese Girl’s Progress may well demonstrate the entanglements between the construction of a “women’s sphere” and the formation of a modern Chinese “imagined community” via modern print media. First, the periodical was influenced by reformist activists such as Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao. With Kang’s daughter, Kang Tongwei 康同薇 (1879–1974), and Liang’s wife, Li Huixian 李惠仙 (1869–1924), participating as editors, the reformist-nationalist agenda was more than obvious. Second, according to a list published in the periodical’s first issue, all of its major editors were female elites, including Kang, Li, and Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911). Even if male reformists loomed in the background, the periodical provided a forum for women to discuss women’s issues—in other words, both a public platform and the embodiment of a new “women’s sphere” run by women themselves. Third, it required the use of mandarin (guanhua 官話) in the writing of the essays so that it could be accessible to an audience broader than the speakers of any particular Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 11 regional dialect. In this way, it broke through familial and regional boundaries and, as Dooling has argued, “foster[ed] the development of a national language, a common language which would serve . . . as a unifying force among the nüjie.”52 Fourth, the English title of the paper, “Chinese Girl’s Progress,” highlighted a nationalist overtone that was not there in its Chinese title, reflecting the restructuring of a female “imagined community.”53 With the thriving of women’s periodicals and the bourgeoning of women’s participation in the dissemination of reformist and feminist views, the term “sister” not only rose to immense discursive popularity but also acquired new meanings beyond its traditional usages in addressing female relatives and friends of the same generation. 54 As Charlotte L. Beahan has keenly noted, it became a unifying appellation for female readers of the women’s press “with emphasis on their common bond of Chinese womanhood.”55 Consequently, with women’s issues increasingly seen both as a crystallization of China’s problems and as a key threshold to their solutions, the new nationalist tone of sisterhood narratives and their emphasis on women’s intersubjectivities via gender- and nation-based ties provided a hybrid language of two enlightenments simultaneously taking place on different but related fronts, namely, restrengthening China and awakening its female subjects. As Zhang Yunxiang 張筠薌 (birth and death years unknown), the woman publisher of the earliest women’s daily newspaper in China—Beijing Women’s Newspaper (Beijing nübao 北京女報, 1905–1909)—argued in an announcement on the establishment of the paper, the significance of women’s education via their own newspapers and schools was not limited to women themselves; rather, it was key to the elevation of China’s position in the world, because women’s rights and learning played an important role in global competition.56 Here, the incorporation of feminist agendas into the dominant public discourse on national survival and competition, as Joan Judge has described in the case of early female Chinese overseas students’ appropriation of nationalism for their own gender-conscious purposes, “provide[d] a social, political, and cultural context beyond the self within which subjectivities can develop” while also inevitably “constrain[ing] the conditions of possibility for subjective development.”57 Via the textual as well as the social platforms provided by the emerging women’s press for the construction of a more broadly defined sisterhood, especially in the feminist and nationalist senses, women publishers and readers envisioned a new “horizontal”—in the Andersonian sense—means of identification and mutual encouragement. The fourth issue (1903) of the Tokyo-based Journal of Women’s Studies (Nüxue bao 女學報) featured a letter by a “Madame Shuxian” to a “Madame Chen Banxian.” Addressing the latter as “elder sister” and herself as “younger sister,” Shuxian reported to Chen that she had finally made up her mind to let loose her bound feet. Crediting both her enlightened female friends and the few well-known wom- 12 Chapter 1 en authors in feminist journals for inspiring and encouraging her to make the decision, she stated:

The reason why China is so weak is that we women did not consider ourselves as national citizens. Now we have among our compatriot sisters [pioneers like] Ms. Kang, Ms. Shi, Ms. Xiefen, Ms. Qingchi, Ms. Zhujun, Ms. Qingyun, Ms. Jinqin, and you, elder sister, as well as elder sister Ruonan and elder sister Yanan, all determined to save our two hundred million women. Both women’s journals and women’s societies for learning have been established, and there are more and more girls’ schools. As far as I, your younger sister, can see, if we join our hearts and hands together and continue our efforts, Chinese women will finally enjoy liberty and equal rights. 58

In the same vein as Shuxian’s optimistic praise of a new enlightened and enlightening sisterhood, another reader identified as “Madame Zeng Yunlan from Huayang” also applauded the efforts of the journal’s female founder Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬 (1883–1923)—addressed as “my sister”—to “enable women in our country to acquire wisdom.”59 Seeing the women’s press as a fledgling but potentially powerful means to reframe women’s positions in, and relations to, their parents’ and husbands’ families, Zeng suggested that the journal should eagerly pursue a series of proposals ranging from domestic to public issues, including, for example, the abolition of foot-binding, the reformation of dowry practices, and the promotion of female education. 60 For male feminists, the significances of enlightening Chinese women seemed more instrumental, yet they still vigorously interacted with the transforming social imaginary about women’s familial and national roles. Rather explicitly, Jin Yi admitted in his preface to A Bell to the Women’s Sphere that his call for an awakening of Chinese women was not just for women but was relevant to “400 million Chinese subjects in general.”61 In the “Inaugural Statement of Women’s World,” Jin addressed the close link between the establishment of a new women’s world and the rejuvenation of the entire nation: “Women are the mothers of national subjects. In order to reform China, we have to reform [Chinese] women; in order to strengthen China, we have to strengthen [Chinese] women; in order to make China a civilized country, we have to bring our women to civilization; in order to save China, we have to, first of all, save our women.”62 Believing that “the denial of women’s rights leads to the deprivation of civil rights, and hence the loss of sovereign rights,” Jin considered the establishment of an enlightened and liberated “women’s world” as an essential part of bringing China back to the center of the world and called on Chinese women to transform themselves into qualified “female citizens of the twentieth century” (ershi shiji nü guomin 二十世紀女國民).63 When examining the introduction and adaptation of biographies of Western heroines into the Chinese social imaginary at the turn of the twentieth century, Joan Judge has Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 13 pointed out that such a slogan as “female citizens” indicated an approach, which she defines as “presentist,” to “establish a direct relationship between women and the polity unmediated by the family” (italics mine), as in contrast to the “archeomodernist” promotion of “mothers of citizens.”64 Echoing Jin, Ding Chuwo proposed in “Eulogy to Women’s World” that the transformation of China from a “men’s world”—a country that prioritizes men’s rights over women’s—into a “women’s world” would mark a divide between a new twentieth-century China and an old pre-twentieth-century China, where not only Chinese women were like slaves to Chinese men but Chinese men were also subject to slavery at the hands of the Manchurian rulers and other foreign powers.65 Once enlightened, argued Ding, his “two hundred million female compatriots” would bring about “a new world in China’s three-thousand-year-long history,” namely, a “female China” (nü Zhongguo 女中國).66 The three salutes with which the eulogy concluded— “Long live the women’s world! Long live female citizens! Long live the female China!”67—further confirmed the nationalist embedding of the “women’s world” Ding imagined. The sentiment was also echoed by Liu Yazi who, under the pen name Yalu 亞盧, claimed in “A Lament to the Women’s Sphere” that the conservatives who obstructed and demolished the cause of women’s education were “direct enemies of the women’s sphere, and indirect enemies of our mother nation.”68 Thus, in a way that resembled how middle-class elites in nineteenth- century India first imagined the nation into being in a cultural-spiritual domain, as Partha Chatterjee examined in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colo- nial and Postcolonial Histories,69 these Chinese elitists’ description of female Chinese subjects as “two million compatriot sisters” (erbaizhao tongbao zimei 二百兆同胞姊妹), a counterpart for another “two million compatriot brothers” (erwanwan tongbao xiongdi 二萬萬同胞兄弟),70 directly pointed to a new mode of conceiving communal ties among the nation’s subjects that predated the formal establishment of a modern Chinese nation- state. It helped to accommodate and instigate an Andersonian transition from a “centripetal and hierarchical” conceptualization to a “boundary-oriented and horizontal” one.71 In this sense, the “women’s sphere” actually served as a preliminary “imagined community,” establishing identification not merely among female subjects but also among national subjects in general. Despite such horizontality, however, the integrations of the nationalist perspective and the feminist perspective by many male and female intellectuals of the time did not necessarily result in either a homogeneous vision of the “women’s sphere” or identical sisterhood narratives. Rather, as Barbara Mittler has shown through her examination of Shenbao 申報 (aka Shun Pao or Shanghai News, 1872–1912),72 the influences of print media on the formation of nationalism could be much more complicated than a neat and simplified Andersonian paradigm would suggest. 73 In fact, even though late 14 Chapter 1

Qing discourse on the “women’s sphere” and the accompanying sisterhood rhetoric were informed by the reformist project of restrengthening the nation, the communal ties constructed through the promotion of a nationwide enlightenment of women in print products often seemed a mixture of both horizontal and hierarchical natures, rather than a replacement of the latter by the former. They were horizontal in the sense that the construction and reformation of the “women’s sphere” was conceived as equally relevant to all subjects of the nation, males and females; but they were also hierarchical in the sense that an elite/subaltern divide was almost always detectable, which defined the different groups of enlighteners, the enlightened, and the unenlightened in this modern national community under construction. If the late Qing periodical press, as Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan have pointed out, featured a “gap between populist ideologies and popular practices,”74 the elite-subaltern spectrum was both more visible and more nuanced in the cases of publications on women, targeted at women, and contributed to by women, echoing what Gail Hershatter has called “the possibility of multiple, relational degrees of subalternity” in semicolonial Shang- hai.75 If women came to be considered as a targeted group in need of urgent reformation because they were traditionally marginalized and deprived of education, it was, rather ironically, for the very same reason that the “women’s sphere” was considered more hopeful than the world outside it—that is, the sphere of Chinese men—since women were seen as less corrupted than men by backward traditional customs. Therefore, it might not be surprising, for example, for the readers of Women’s World to find such severe critiques as Ding Chuwo’s “On Female Evils” (Shuo Nümo 說女魔) (in the second issue) and “Strange Phenomena in the Women’s Sphere” (Nüjie zhi guai xianxiang 女界之怪現象) (in the tenth issue) side by side with such optimistic eulogies as the fictional “Romance of a Women’s China” (Nü Zhonghua chuanqi 女中華傳奇) by a certain Daxiong 大雄 (in the fifth issue), which was selected from a literary contest launched by the journal on the theme of “Women’s China.”76 Such a good/bad dichotomy can also be easily found in other publications. On the one hand, there occurred quite a few stories of women who were capable, educated, and mentally—if not financially—independent, such as the 1905 novel Huang Xiuqiu 黃繡球77 by Yisuo 頤瑣 (birth and death years unknown)78 and the two novels by female writers that will be examined in the next chapter. On the other hand, critical or cynical representations of the present conditions of the “women’s sphere” could also be found in such novels as The Tragic Women’s Sphere (Can nüjie 慘女界, 1908) by Lü Xiaren 呂俠人, A Dirty History of the Women’s Sphere (Nüjie lanwu shi 女界爛污史, 1910) by Wang Junqing 王浚卿 (aka Wang Lang from Babao 八寶王朗),79 and Exposure of Today’s Women’s Sphere (Zuijin nüjie xianxing Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 15 ji 最近女界現形記, 1909–1910) by “Madame Huizhu from Nanpu” (Nanpu Huizhu nüshi 南浦蕙珠女士).80 Among them, Cuotuozi’s 1909 novel The Newest Report of a Ghostly Field in the Women’s Sphere is a good example of how a liberated “women’s sphere” could be imagined as more scandalous than inspiring, and, consequently, sisterhood as more threateningly deviant and morally corrupting than socioeconomically constructive or productive. Purportedly intended to urge “those corrupt members among our female compatriots to reform themselves” and encourage “those civilized ones to progress even faster,”81 the novel presents the reader with a group of frivolous students at a girls’ school in Shanghai, which itself was established by the courtesan-turned-concubine of a late government official. Easily distracted by the pleasures and excite- ments in the bustling port city, these young women take advantage of the freedom from parental control but pay very little attention to their studies. While enthusiastic about such new ideas as women’s professional education and political participation, their ambitions far outrun their capabilities. Final- ly, at the disappointment of their poor academic records as well as of the government’s refusal to grant them scholarly honors (gongming 功名), they decide to found a girls’ school of their own and become women educators, believing that this will provide them a shortcut to social recognition. In this satirical story, the girls have been informed by such new rhetoric as “four hundred million compatriots as sisters and brothers” (zimei dikun, siwanwan tongbao 姊妹弟昆，四萬萬同胞) but only use it for vulgar purposes—for example, to justify their fun-seeking activities with their male teachers. This supposedly unexpected side effect caused by the release of women and sisterhood from patrilineal kinship, ironically, mirrors the misogynistic paranoia and anxiety concerning the changed and changing roles and positions of women in the family and the nation. Further adding to the complexity and heterogeneity of the “women’s sphere” were the gendered agencies behind the production and dissemination of women’s periodicals and other women-targeted publications. 82 In particular, a thorny irony existed in the field of early Chinese women’s publications, which arose from an overwhelming imbalance between the number of male authors concerned with women’s issues and the number of female authors who were able and willing to make their own voices and opinions known to a nationwide public. Although some publications—like the above-mentioned Chinese Girls’ Progress, Chen Xiefen’s Women’s Journal (Nü bao 女報, sporadically published in 1899 and 1902) and Journal of Women’s Studies (Nüxue bao 女學報, 1903–1904), and Qiu Jin’s Chinese Women’s Journal— had female chief editors, most were run by crews of male editors and featured articles written mainly by male authors (although often with female- sounding bylines).83 Though apparently resulting from the low rate of female literacy in China at the time and the insufficient number of women writers, 16 Chapter 1 the phenomenon mirrored the situation in early feminist movements elsewhere, in both Western and non-Western contexts, where men often arrogat- ed the roles of enlighteners to themselves while bemoaning the scarcity of enlightened female counterparts.84 In this sense, the discursive promotion of “sisterhood” was as fundamentally gendered as the (self-)proclaimed positions of the promoters themselves. Women’s World, for example, was founded, edited, and run by a group of mostly male feminists despite its status as the most influential and longest- running women-oriented magazine before the 1911 Revolution. Even when The Ladies’ Journal was established in 1915—four years after the founding of the new republic and two decades after late Qing reformists started to promote women’s education on a national scale—a gender imbalance between the purported aim of such a women’s journal and its authorship in reality still largely remained. 85 In addition, as Bao Tianxiao 包天笑 (1876–1973), the editor of Women’s Times (Funü shibao 婦女時報, 1911–1917), later recalled, because “women’s learning was still in the em- bryonic stage,” even the few existing female authors of such women’s periodicals were, contrary to the common assumption, more closely related to the traditional category of guixiu (educated elite women) than to the type of independent, professional “new women” proposed by reformists themselves.86 No wonder that the well-known feminist anarchist He Zhen 何震 (birth and death years unknown), wife of historian Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884–1919), would later protest that it was men, instead of women, who dominated the women’s movements in the first decade of the twentieth century. The overpowering of female voices by male authors and editors inevitably led to some paradoxical ambiguities concerning the agency behind the construction of the “women’s sphere” and the nature of the textual “sisterhood” embodied therein. Nevertheless, it also further proved the extensive significance of this supposedly gender-based sphere in the overall nationalist project. If women’s own voices were not the loudest in early Chinese women’s periodicals, they were nonetheless the most revealing of the potentially contested confluence of nationalist and feminist agendas. Quite a few influential women writers and publishers like Chen Xiefen, the founding editor of the Shanghai-based Women’s Journal and the eldest daughter of the official turned reformist publisher Chen Fan 陳範 (1860–1913), tended to interpret the ties among the subjects of the Chinese “women’s sphere” as nation-based and gender-based at one and the same time. In a 1904 article titled “On the Precariousness of the Women’s Sphere” (Nüjie zhi kewei 女界之可危) in the Hong Kong–based China Daily 中國日報 (1900–1913), Chen defined the “women’s sphere” as half of the Chinese population and, as Jin Yi did, used the term “compatriots” to refer to its members.87 Similarly, He Xiangning 何香凝 (1808–1972) wrote in her 1903 article “A Respectful Note to My Com- Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 17 patriot Sisters” (Jinggao wo tongbao zimei 敬告我同胞姊妹) in the fourth issue of Jiangsu, “a society cannot take form if there are no individuals, and I hope that my compatriot sisters will all [devote themselves to the strengthening of the nation].”88 As the discussions increasingly deepened, there also occurred more and more subversively female-centered or female-prioritized views, but they still largely drew from the nationalist background language. For instance, in a 1907 article entitled “On Women’s Rights” (Nüquan pingyi 女權平議) in Journal of the New Women’s Sphere in China, the author Yan Bin—under the pen name Lianshi 煉石—argued that, in order to comprehend the rules of women’s rights, one should first understand the history of the “women’s sphere” and realize that the naming of “men” and “women” was intrinsically arbitrary:

Back in ancient times, when there were no books and people used knots to record their daily affairs, men did not know that they should be named “men”; neither did women know that they should be named “women.” Since they had no knowledge of their “proper names,” they could by all means have been named otherwise: if men had been named “women,” and women “men,” or men and women altogether named with other terms, those names after a long time of practice would have been working so far. If the names could have been changed and implemented as such, then the naming of “husband” and “wife,” the rules about marriage, the suppositions about men’s masculinity and women’s femininity, about men’s superiority and women’s inferiority, about the gender-based inner/outer boundary, and all the unfair and immoral man-made norms could all have been reversed at the moment when the rules were first defined. . . . In that case, the so-called “men” would stay in the status where women now stand on an everyday basis . . . And the so-called “men’s world” at present would have been turned into a “women’s world.”89

Judging from the historical milieu of Yan Bin’s essay, even though we may trace the challenges of the naming of “women” to the Confucian tradition of “rectification of names” (zheng ming 正名), as Rebecca Karl has suggested,90 we may still find her argument about the constructedness of gender roles quite ahead of her time. Paradoxically, however, such an emphasis on the arbitrariness of naming implied a contention that gender hierarchy was unfair because women’s and men’s roles could actually be interchangeable. In other words, the author seemed to have to play down gender differences in order to argue for gender equality, which the essay repeatedly defined as part of a more universal “humanity” (rendao 人道).91 In a way, this probably foreshadowed a tendency toward the defeminization of women, which seemed rather typical of first-wave feminists elsewhere as well 92 and which would later become rather dominant in the Chinese literature and culture of the Maoist era. 18 Chapter 1

As constructionist as Yan Bin was on the issue of gender, she did not seem to apply a similar critical approach to the issue of nationalism. In a later issue of the same journal published the following year and again under the pen name Lianshi, she wrote another article titled “The Relationship between the Women’s Sphere and the State” (Nüjie yu guojia zhi guanxi 女界與國家之關係), which begins as follows:

The aggregation of people leads to the establishment of families; and the aggregation of families leads to the establishment of states. This is why the term “state” stands for the entirety of its members, whereas the term “family” stands for part of [the states’] members. Who are these members? People. Who are these people? [Men from] the men’s sphere and [women from] the women’s sphere. . . . Strangely enough, the close relationship between the women’s sphere and the state has to this day not yet been recognized by the public. 93

In this conceptualization of hierarchical strata, which resembled the Confu- cian concentric view of order from the family to the state to the entire world, women were proposed as equals to men in a larger, homogenous community made up of national subjects. The legitimacy and significance of the revival of the Chinese “women’s sphere,” correspondingly, lay in the fact that the oppression of women meant none other than squandering of the nation’s human resources. According to Yan Bin, the backward practices imposed upon Chinese women—foot-binding, for instance—were both the direct cause of the miserable sufferings of two hundred million Chinese women and the ultimate cause for the physical weakness of the entire Chinese race, which was summarized by the humiliating label the “sick man of the East” (dongfang bingfu 東方病夫).94 In Teachers of the Inner Chambers, Dorothy Ko has described how the literate gentry women in the seventeenth-century Jiangnan area managed to build up transitory but meaningful communal ties among them through the sharing of their literary or other kinds of cultural interests. 95 Ko identifies three kinds of women’s cultural communities: domestic, social, and public. While women’s social and public communities were less bounded by familial ties, they remained dependent to a large extent on the familial networks and the social status of the female members’ male kin and consequently were still substantially subject to familial and regional constraints. In contrast, as feminist writers of both sexes made use of the modern print industry “to promote sisterhood among women”96 in the last decade of Qing rule, a nationwide community of reading and writing “sisters,” together with their male sympathizers, gradually took form. If these early women’s journals and other forms of modern print products promoted a novel means of group identification, this newly constructed collective identification was both symbolized and initially implemented by the “women’s sphere,” where two pairs of hierarchical power relations—the imminent threats from Western Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 19 imperial powers facing the Chinese nation and the unfair treatment of Chi- nese women in patriarchal sociocultural practices—became mutually referential. At the same time, because of the education- and sex-based stratification among the writers and readers of women’s issues, this imagined community itself became an active arena featuring various layers of consciousness and led to a multilevel spectrum of enlightenment centering on women and nation. As will be discussed in the next chapter, such a feminist-nationalist spectrum of sisterhood had a remarkable impact upon women’s fiction writing of the late Qing.

SISTERHOOD THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSHISTORICAL LENSES

As part of a newly emerging nationalist imagination interacting with knowledge and ideas about the West, the proposed revival of the “women’s sphere” required and invited new ways to look at women and their positions not only in China but also from a global perspective, both diachronically and syn- chronically. With various rationales and purposes of their own, quite a few intellectuals, authors, and translators of both sexes participated in the introduction of transnational and transhistorical “sisters” into the imagined “women’s sphere.” One highly noticeable phenomenon was a sudden bourgeoning of information and stories about women in foreign countries. Many of them appeared as articles in periodicals published by Western missionaries, Chinese modernizers, and feminist activists. 97 In the literary field, biographical sketches or novels about famous Western women became very popular. At the same time, there also occurred an enthusiasm for retelling stories about heroic women from premodern China, which, in contrast to the Confucian- ism-oriented tradition set by Liu Xiang’s (劉向, ca. 77–6 BC) Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳), emphasized women’s outstanding valiance and military capabilities over family-based female virtues. The moments of confluences, fissures, and negotiations between the indigenous and the transnational searches for inspirations not only often led to hybridized and comparative approaches but also well illustrated the heterogeneity within the process of reimagining subjecthood in an unbalanced system of global knowledge and with an equally unbalanced view about traditionality and modernity. One publication that played a milestone role in the transnationalization of sisterhood imaginations was the above-mentioned 21-volume collection Women in All Lands by Young John Allen. Believing that “the literati and the women of China” constituted “two large groups upon whom the missionary should concentrate his efforts,”98 Allen mixed Western knowledge with 20 Chapter 1

Christian teachings and used a humanitarian treatment of women as a measurement of civilization for the different nations of the world. Along a hierarchical line, his collection divided human civilizations into three levels according to the status of their women: the “uncivilized” (weijioahua 未教化), the “civilized” (youjiaohua 有教化) and the most “enlightened” (jiaohua wenming 教化文明).99 While China seemed like a “civilized” nation because of its great cultural achievements, Allen argued, this qualification was undermined by its subjects’ practice of many false social customs that, while including idol worship, were especially exemplified by the suppression of women.100 Therefore, only when Chinese women were freed from the maltreatment by men would the nation as a whole reach the most civilized level. Both Allen’s comparative approach and his use of women’s status as a marker of rank among world civilizations influenced and reflected the new ways in which women and nation came to be connected in the late Qing context of global hierarchies. For instance, although we are not sure whether she was directly referring to this very collection, Chen Xiefen strongly echoed Allen’s viewpoint when she wrote her 1903 article “The Future of Chinese Women” (Zhongguo nüzi zhi qiantu 中國女子之前途) in the Jour- nal of Women Studies. Under the pen name “A Woman from Southern Chu” (Chunan nüzi 楚南女子), Chen claimed that “a survey of the countries in all five lands shows that they previously also had practices that oppressed women, but none of them is like China, which has been exercising such practices without any reform for thousands of years.”101 For Chinese reformists looking beyond national boundaries for new ideas and solutions, the knowledge of educated and independent women in foreign countries was an important part of “Western learning” (xixue 西學) in general. The domestication of such foreign knowledge, as Ying Hu has pointed out in Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918, involved much innovation, transformation, and creativity. Liang Qichao, again, played a seminal role in the introduction of foreign role models into the imagination of the Chinese “women’s sphere.” Translat- ed and adapted from a chapter in the Japanese writer Roka Tokutomi’s (1868–1927) The World’s Famous Women, Past and Present,102 Liang’s “Biography of Madame Roland, the Foremost Heroine of Modern Times” (Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen zhuan 近世第一女傑羅蘭夫人傳) introduced the titular French woman as a metaphorical mother not only for later male political leaders such as Napoleon (1769–1821) and Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) but also for the French Revolution and all the great achievements of nineteenth-century Europe. The versatile and capable heroine depicted by Liang was not only a “peerless beauty” (juedai jiaren 絕代佳人), a “loving” (duoqing 多情) wife, and a “caring” (ciai 慈愛) mother but also the real leader of the Girondists, of which her husband was only nominally in charge.103 This reimagined heroine occurred time and again in writings about Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 21 women’s issues, albeit often by men, and contributed to an intertextuality about women and their traditions in a transnational context, examples of which included Ding Chuwo’s essay “Strange Phenomena in the Women’s Sphere,” Yisuo’s novel Huang Xiuqiu, and the “Biographies of Women War- riors” (Nüjunren zhuan 女軍人傳) series in Women’s World by a certain Zhigong 職公. In this way, the incorporation of foreign exemplary women expanded the canon of role models in the Chinese “women’s sphere,” and the identification between Western heroines and their Chinese emulators helped to relocate imagined sisterhood among Chinese women into a globalized, modern perspective. A 1907 article titled “Recent Events in the Women’s Sphere” (Nüjie jinshi ji 女界近事記) in Natural Justice (Tianyi 天義, 1907–1908), for instance, recorded a series of women’s political movements that took place in Ireland, Germany, Italy, America, and Russia. 104 Similarly, a 1908 article in Shuntian Times (Shuntian shibao 順天時報, 1905–1930) titled “British Women Arrested in Demonstration for Voting Rights” (Ying nü zheng xuanjuquan zhi beibu 英女爭選舉權之被捕) employed the term “British women’s sphere” (Yingguo nüjie 英國女界),105 which, by juxtapos- ing “women’s spheres” of different national origins, both hinted at the Chi- neseness of the indigenous imagined female community and opened up its possibilities with inspirations offered by its foreign others. With its overseas location and translocal perspective, the Tokyo-based Magazine of the New Chinese Women’s Sphere established by Yan Bin with support of fellow female Chinese students in Japan was probably the best example of transnationalism in the reimagining of sisterhood by way of the “women’s sphere.” Reflecting the unbalanced geopolitical relationships among China, Japan, and the West, the journal featured an evolutionary view of progress, which was made clear in Yan Bin’s (pen name Lianshi) “Inaugu- ral Statement” (Fakanci 發刊詞). Comparing “women’s spheres of the East and of the West” (dong xi nüjie 東西女界), the statement proposed “new moralities” (xin daode 新道德) and “new thought” (xin sixiang 新思想) as an effective means to enable Chinese women to “compete with Europe and America” (yu Oumei zhengheng 與歐美爭衡).106 Among the five principles Yan Bin later listed for the journal, “the importation of new knowledge about the civilized ‘women’s spheres’ of other countries” immediately followed the journal’s top priority, namely, “the invention of the newest theories about the ‘women’s sphere.’”107 Such a comparative approach was also reflected by the journal’s inclusion of both a “Domestic Part” (guonei zhi bu 國內之部) and a “Foreign Part” (guowai zhi bu 國外之部) in the “Recording of News” (jizai 記載) section. Even when reporting domestic news, it still encouraged its readers to acquire a global vision. For instance, while celebrating the establishment of the Women’s Association of China (Zhongguo furen hui 中國婦人會) as a long-awaited end to a thousands-of-years-long absence of 22 Chapter 1 organization in the Chinese women’s sphere, the editorial commentary re- gretfully acknowledged that it was much less mature than the Japanese “La- dies’ Patriotic Association,” which, with more than 600,000 members, was well enough developed to represent all Japanese women in its cooperation with its foreign counterparts.108 In addition to the useful information drawn from foreign knowledge and experience, these transnational perspectives on the “women’s sphere” also helped to argue for a central position for women in the cultivation and development of this imagined community, even if sometimes such voices were still conveyed by male editors and authors. An 1899 issue of the Yokohama- based reformist journal The China Discussion (Qingyi bao 清議報, 1898–1901), for example, included an article titled “To Women of Our Country” (Gao hainei nüzi 告海內女子), translated from the Japanese magazine Current Events (Jiji shimpō 時事新報). Through the voice of an alleged “old woman,” it contended that “we women should take women’s education as women’s great responsibility, which has been assigned by natural justice, and which should not be interfered with by men.”109 While the targeted readership—“women of our country,” as indicated by the title—originally referred to Japanese women, a citation of the article in a Chinese journal, interestingly, transplanted the view into the Chinese context and implicitly enlarged the “women’s society” (furen shehui 婦人社會) discussed in the article.110 As more foreign role models were introduced, an obvious question seemed to beg an answer: “Were there any extraordinary figures in our women’s sphere in Chinese history prior to the nineteenth century?”111 And indeed this was the question posited by Chen Xiefen in “The Future of Chinese Women.” After immediately answering in the affirmative, the author cited as an example the legendary heroine Hua Mulan, a girl of the Southern and Northern dynasties who cross-dressed as a male warrior and fought bravely and victoriously in her father’s place. Noticeably, after locating this ancient example, Chen deliberately skipped over her own time—obviously a dark phase judging by the tone of the article—and continued to talk about “the Chinese women’s sphere after the twentieth century,” which she believed would not only outperform the Chinese men’s sphere but would “sur- pass European and American women” as well, as long as her “two hundred million [female] compatriots . . . [would] take up the responsibility.”112 Moreover, as the author turned to the famous woman warrior to legitimize a cultural legacy created, embodied, and maintained by women themselves, she tactfully re-rendered Mulan’s heroism with an emphasis on her competi- tiveness with men—rather than on her filial piety, which was often emphasized in traditional texts—and used it as an indication of the potential com- petitiveness hidden in the Chinese “women’s sphere,” which would finally enable the entire nation to catch up with the more advanced West. Like Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 23

Mulan, several other mythical and historical female figures from China’s indigenous history and memory were also repeatedly cited and reinvented. In “A Brief Biography of Chunyu Tiying, a Chivalric and Brave Chinese Hero- ine” (Zhongguo nüjie da yiyongjia Chunyu Tiying xiaozhuan 中國女傑大義勇家淳于緹縈小傳) published in March 1907 in Shuntian Times, the anonymous author explicitly broke the gender boundary and recast the Western Han dynasty heroine, who wisely and courageously saved her father from a cruel punishment, as a hopeful model not only for women but for the entire nation, including “our Chinese men’s sphere” (italics mine).113 Although the relationship between China and the West was anything but balanced, the search for indigenous and global inspiration often simultaneously embraced and utilized transhistorical and transnational resources. A look at the general design of the thoughtfully diversified content of the Wom- en’s World may well prove this hybridity. Despite some adjustments and changes that took place over the course of its publication, the journal usually included the following sections: photos or drawings featuring outstanding women (e.g., female elites, girls’ school students, or exemplary figures from history or fiction); essays (including speeches) and commentaries on current affairs as well as reportage of Western knowledge; “Biographies” (initially as zhuanji 傳記 and later as shizhan 史傳) of exemplary women from both China and the West; two literature sections respectively devoted to “Fiction” (xiaoshuo 小說) and poetry and songs (under the title of “Literary Writings,” wenyuan 文苑), which were later combined into “Literature and Art” (wenyi 文藝); a “Translations” section (first as yilin 譯林 and later as yilun 譯論) that was included in some of the issues; and some miscellaneous letters and other writings. The “Biographies,” in particular, provided a list of Chinese and foreign stories114 that exhibited all four prominent paradigmatic approaches that Joan Judge has summarized in The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China as to the turn-of-the- twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals’ treatment of competing concepts and values from indigenous traditions and newly imported Western thought: eternalist, meliorist, archeomodernist, and presentist. 115 The gathering of these diversified role models forged various kinds of bonds among the authors, the readers, and the texts, dynamically reshaping the imagination about women and their traditions. In the “Biographies of Women Warriors” series, the author Zhigong wrote about the death of Shen Yunying 沈雲英, a late-Ming loyalist female general: “Although Yunying is dead, the female spirit has been carried on ceaselessly. Therefore, it is as if Yunying were still living.”116 In the following episode, which tells about another female loyalist Qin Liangyu, the author turned to the “heroines of the White race”—the French politician Madame Roland, the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the French heroine Jeanne d’Arc, among others—for a comparison and concluded that Qin’s heroic deeds should make 24 Chapter 1

Chinese historians proud.117 In a more radical manner, Liu Yazi, under the pen name “Ms. Pan Xiaohuang from Songling” (Songling nüzi Pan Xiao- huang 松陵女子潘小璜), defined Liang Hongyu 梁紅玉, a Song dynasty female general and wife of a loyalist court official, as a “Chinese nationalist woman warrior” and compared her to the wife of the Italian nationalist politician Giuseppe Garibaldi,118 who was featured as a patriotic heroine in Liang Qichao’s unfinished novel A Chivalric Romance (Xia qing ji chuanqi 俠情記傳奇, 1902) and Zhao Bizhen’s 趙必振 (1873–1956) 1903 translation of Twelve World Heroines (the Chinese title being Shijie shier nüjie 世界十二女傑) from Japanese. In this way, the “women’s sphere” became a gendered spatio-temporal relay point between indigenous traditions and the modern global world, and a restructured transnational, transhistorical sisterhood further undermined the already shaken Confucian paradigm, in which women’s interrelationships were foremost defined and bounded by the patriarchal family. Engaging in the dual reformist themes of gender and nation, Xue Shaohui’s eight-volume Biographies of Exemplary Foreign Women (Waiguo lienü zhuan 外國列女傳, 1906), written in cooperation with her husband and translator Chen Shou- peng 陳壽彭 (1857–1928?),119 tactfully and artfully negotiated new legacies in the “women’s sphere” with an aim to, as claimed in its preface, “use [foreign role models] as mirrors and candles to reflect on our own civilization” (jie qi jing zhu, xian wo wenming 借其鏡燭，顯我文明). As a response to the reformists’ “reinterpretation of the saying of ‘equal status between husband and wife’ in their promotion of ‘equal rights between men and women’” (ben fufu diti zhi shuo, yan nannü pingquan zhi wen 本夫婦敵體之說，演男女平權之文),120 Xue’s project reflected the layered construction of Chinese women’s traditions. Its emphatically female-centered perspective, echoing Nanxiu Qian’s argument about female elitists’ motivation for participating in the 1898 Reform, seemed intended “more to fulfill women’s cultural ambition than to redeem men’s political humiliation after the Sino-Japanese War.”121 For example, the episode “Zhu Nang” 朱囊, which compares Juno of Roman mythology to a female president, seems to pay tributes both to the traditional Chinese leitmotif of the women’s kingdom and to the modern political notion of republicanism. 122 In “Adventures of an Old Courtesan” (Lao ji xing 老妓行), one of her own posthumously collected poems, Xue not only reinvented the traditional narrative of sisterhood as kinship but also reuttered the reformist call for redeeming the failing Chinese “women’s sphere” by assigning considerable textual agency to her protagonist, Fu Caiyun 傅彩雲 (aka Sai Jinhua 賽金花), a famous courtesan in the late Qing who became the concubine of the diplomat Hong Jun 洪鈞 (1839–1893) and accompanied him during his diplomatic posting in Europe. In Xue’s narration, Fu Caiyun’s linguistic talents and helpful assistance to her husband’s diplomatic duties result in an intimate Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 25 friendship with the German queen, who treats her “as if they were biological sisters” (yanru jiemei shuang tongbao 儼如姐妹雙同胞).123 Not only was this portrayal of a Chinese woman’s encounter with a Western counterpart in sharp contrast to Jin Yi’s self-humiliation and self-pity when imagining his European male other in A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, but the expansion of sisterhood to a transnational level also seemed to delineate an alternative possibility for Chinese women’s relationships to other global female traditions beyond a China-versus-the-West paradigm. Like the reformists’ contrasting views of the “women’s sphere” both as the key and as the solution to China’s problem, however, it is ironic that what made this gendered global bonding possible lay in the feminine and less dominant nature on the part of the Chinese “sister.”124

CONCLUSION

The “image” in each particular historical “now,” according to Walter Benja- min, is “that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” and, therefore, “dialectics at a standstill.”125 Emerging at a transitional time and as a significant part of a transformative imaginary, the late Qing discourse on the “women’s sphere” and its revision of the connotations of sisterhood crystalized, indeed dialectically, a development both of and beyond the current temporality of indigenous women’s traditions. These traditions themselves, meanwhile, constituted part of what Anderson has referred to as “the larger cultural systems that preceded [nationalism], out of which—as well as against which—[nationalism] came into being.”126 In a similar dialectical vein, Barlow has coined the term “colonial modernity” to argue for “modernity’s essential doubleness”: the construction of modern, enlightened subjects in the milieu of colonial dissemination. 127 Be- cause of the hierarchies of both gender and elite-subaltern relations (with apparent overlapping in between), the already double-sided subject-object spectrum of the semicolonial enlightenment project gained further layers and nuances. In a sense, the tricky interconnections between the national aspect and the feminist aspect of the discursive emergence of the “women’s sphere” and the promotion of a new gender-based nationwide sisterhood in the late Qing reflected a problematic but probably inevitable symbiosis between national salvation and feminist movements in a non-Western, semicolonial setting, where the two not only simultaneously took place but also often mutually legitimated and defined each other. Despite what seemed like a nation- and modernity-oriented confluence of narratives about Chinese women’s enlightenment, however, contestations were never resolved as to the complicated and multifaceted relationships between the “women’s sphere” and its own various sources of reference. As 26 Chapter 1 a result, the “women’s sphere” and its accompanying sisterhood imaginations became very complex entities, at times even appearing to be rather paradoxical. On the one hand, they constituted a gendered metaphor for a new mode of nationalist identification and were envisioned as an essential part of a national revival against Western powers. On the other hand, the irony between their feminized stance and apparent (and problematic) discursive centrality accommodated alternative perspectives and more mixed sentiments. Therefore, the gendered vision of an “imagined community” induced via such convolutions became a lively but ambiguous site, which mediated diversified interpretations of and responses to the new national and gender identities in the making. As will be shown in later chapters, such competing imaginations would have much impact on the representations of women, nation, and modernity in literary and cultural works.

NOTES

1. The present-day notion of the Chinese nation, scholars have pointed out, first took form under the influences of such Western ideas as the Hegelian view of history, social Darwinism, and the Enlightenment. According to Kai-Wing Chow, for example, the conception of the “Han nationality” in the late Qing—Han being the largest Chinese ethnic group—was an “invention” under the influence of Western ideas about “race” and the “nation-state,” which “were introduced to the Chinese as scientific knowledge and as a progressive form of government”; See Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture,” in Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, eds. Kai-Wing Chow et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 47. 2. Chuiwan, “Ode to a Women’s China,” Women’s World 4 (1904): 55–56. 3. Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2004), 1, 30–36. 4. Prasenjit Duara, “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China,” in Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, eds. Kai-Wing Chow et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 359. 5. See Beverley Perel, “International Women’s Day,” in Routledge International Encyclo- pedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge, eds. Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender (New York: Routledge, 2000), vol. 3, 1153–54. 6. Among the various English translations of the original Chinese title, Women’s Bell might be the most popular one, although it, probably for the sake of clarity and simplicity, substitutes the direct reference to “women’s sphere” with the more universal word “women.” In order to facilitate the following discussion on the “women’s sphere,” however, I use the more literal translation of the title, A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, in this book. 7. In contemporary People’s Republic of China, the phrase “half the sky” is often used, especially in state-run media, to refer to Chinese women as a whole, who, as the term indicates, supposedly enjoy equality with men. For more discussions on “half the sky,” see Mayfair Mei- hui Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China,” in Space of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35–67. 8. Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 117. 9. For example, Zheng Wang, Dorothy Ko, and Lydia Liu have pointed out that the implicit agenda of Jin Yi’s book was to soothe male intellectuals’ anxieties about their own painful encounter with Western modernity by means of advocating the emancipation and reformation of Chinese women; see Wang, Ko, and Liu, “From Women’s Bell to ‘Men’s Bell’: Male Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 27

Subject, Nationalism and Modernity,” in Research on 100 Years of Feminist Thought in China, eds. Wang Zheng and Chen Yan (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2005), 1–36. 10. See Amy Dooling and Kristina Torgeson’s introduction to their coedited volume Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women’s Literature from the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 11. See Ji Xianlin et al., eds., A Contemporary Translation of Records of the Western Regions in the Great Tang Dynasty (Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1985), 146–47 and Ren Naiqiang, Collected Essays on Ethnic Studies by Ren Naiqiang (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 1990), 213–35. 12. Featuring Xuanzang as one of its protagonists, the novel presents an all-female kingdom called the “Women’s Kingdom of Xiliang” (Xiliang nüguo 西梁女國), where its subjects get pregnant by drinking the water from a special river; see Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1999), 691–729. Luo Maodeng 羅懋登 (birth and death years unknown) also included a similar story in his own novel Popular Romance of Eunuch Sanbao’s Journey to the West by Ship (Sanbao taijian xiyang ji tongsu yanyi 三寶太監西洋記通俗演義), which was completed and published in the late 1590s. For more, see Luo Maodeng, Popular Romance of Eunuch Sanbao’s Journey to the West by Ship (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985), 589–652 and Wang Chiung-Ling, Four Prominent “Scholarly Novels” of the Qing Dynasty (Taipei: The Commercial Press, 1997), 580–81. 13. See Li Ruzhen, Romance of Flowers in the Mirror (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1987), vol.1, 227–65. 14. See Liu-Wang Liming, Chinese Women’s Movement (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934), 27. 15. Under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (1814–1864), the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom notoriously carried out an arbitrary and brutal policy to manage women’s bodies, labor, and sexuality through the organization of the “women’s camp” as a separated counterpart of the “men’s camp” (nan ying 男營). See Kazuko Ono, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 1–22. See also excerpts from Xie Xingyao’s 謝興堯 (1906–?) The Social and Political Thought of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping tianguo de shehui zhengzhi sixiang 太平天國的社會政治思想), Wang Zuhua’s 汪祖華 The Greatness of Women (Nüxing de weida 女性的偉大), and Yang Jisun’s 楊績蓀 (1891–1965) Records of Chinese Women’s Movement (Zhongguo funü huodong ji 中國婦女活動記), which are collected in Li Yu-ning and Chang Yu-fa, eds., Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911 (Taipei: Long- wen chubanshe, 1995), vol. 2, 721–31. 16. Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 105–6. 17. Also known as the “Hundred Days’ Reform,” the 1898 reform movement was an effort made by the young Guangxu Emperor and his literati supporters to bring about institutional changes and strengthen China’s national power. Though short-lived because of a court coup led by the Empress Dowager Cixi, the 1898 reform marked, as Charlotte Furth has described, one of the “two watersheds in the history of China’s intellectual break with the values of Confucian civilization” (the other being the 1919 May Fourth movement); see Furth, “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895–1920,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, eds. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13. 18. Liang Qichao, The Complete Works of Liang Qichao (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1999), vol. 1, 30. 19. Ibid., vol. 3, 698. 20. See Li Timotai “The Distinction between Wealth-Production and Wealth-Consump- tion,” trans. Cai Erkang, in Works on Western Governance, ed. Qiuziqiangzhai Zhuren (Shang- hai: Shanghai shuju, 1897), 1–4. See also Xia Xiaohong, Late Qing Literati’s View of Women (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1995), 16–17. According to Liu Huiying, Timothy Richard’s article was probably itself an appropriation of Adam Smith’s theory on the “productive labor” and the “improductive labor” for the purpose of facilitating Richard’s elaboration of “wealth” 利 (li) as part of the “universal axiom” 公理 (gongli); see Liu, “The Origin of ‘The Theory of 28 Chapter 1

Wealth Production’ and Its Influence on Women’s Issues,” Nankai Academic Journal (Philoso- phy and Social Sciences) 6 (2009): 1–8. 21. Ping Zhu, Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4. 22. Liu Huiying, “The Origin of ‘The Theory of Wealth Production’ and Its Influence on Women’s Issues,” 5. 23. In “Engels Revisited,” Karen Sacks argues that private property drastically “transformed the relations between men and women within the household,” because it gave rise to “a surplus of goods for exchange” and “[a]s production of exchange eclipsed production for use, it changed the nature of the household, the significance of women’s work within it, and consequently women’s position in society”; see Sacks, “Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 216–17. Drawing upon Sacks’ anthropological study of the biased evaluation of household labor, Liu Huiying argues that if Liang’s classification of housewives as wealth-consumers was based upon a presumption that household labor was not productive labor, such a gendered perspective actually was conceptualized through a limited “modern” view, where only the production of commodities for the purpose of exchange is regarded as “real” production; see Liu, “The Origin of ‘The Theory of Wealth Production’ and Its Influence on Women’s Issues,” 5. 24. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 226. 25. Ibid., 206. 26. The Shanghai-based Review of the Times was an influential Chinese-language periodical edited and published by foreign missionaries. The predecessor of the Review was Chinese Church News 中國教會新報 (Zhongguo jiaohui xin bao), which ran between 1868 and 1874 but was renamed as Church News 教會新報 (Jiaohui xin bao) in 1872. 27. See Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 428. See also Lu Mingyu, “On the Relationship between the Freeing of Women and the Strengthening of the Nation from the Perspectives of Western Missionaries and Chinese Nationals in the Late Qing,” Jianghan Tribune 3 (2014): 140. 28. Ibid., 428–29. 29. Ying Hu, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2. 30. Jin Yi, A Bell to the Women’s Sphere (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003), 4–5. 31. Ibid., 46. 32. There were two entirely unrelated monthly journals bearing the title Women’s World. This earlier one established by Ding Chuwo and his fellow feminists was far more feminist- oriented and was the first women’s journal to adopt the vernacular language (baihua 白話). In contrast, the later one, running from December 1914 through July 1915 and under the tutelage of editor-in-chief Chen Diexian 陳蝶仙 (1879–1940), was mostly oriented toward Shanghai’s consumer and leisure culture of the following decade. See Dong Zhiying, “Two Kinds of Women’s World in Modern China,” Journal of East China Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 38.6 (2006): 33–34. 33. As a novelist, Zeng was best known, under his pen name “Sick Man of East Asia” (Dongya bingfu 東亞病夫), as the author of Flower in a Sea of Retribution (Niehaihua 孽海花, 1904–1905). 34. Xia Xiaohong, Late Qing Women and Modern China (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004), 102–104. 35. Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 404. 36. According to Mizuyo Sudo, Ma probably “transpose[d] the Japanese term joken into its Chinese reading nüquan” when he translated the title of chapter 16 of Spencer’s 1851 treatise Social Statics; see Sudo, “Concepts of Women’s Rights in Modern China,” trans. Michael G. Hill, Gender & History 18.3 (2006): 476. 37. Liu Huiying, “Patriotic Female Characters in the Feminist Enlightenment of Early Twentieth-Century China,” Modern Chinese Literature Studies 2 (2002): 156. Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 29

38. Ma Junwu, Collected Works of Ma Junwu, ed. Mo Shixiang (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1991), 142–45. 39. Jin Yi, A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, 46. 40. Jin Yi, “Inaugural Statement of Women’s World,” Women’s World 1.1 (1904): 1–2. 41. Ding Chuwo, “Eulogy to Women’s World,” Women’s World 1.1 (1904): 6. 42. In her research on the Ladies’ Journal, Li Xiaohong has pointed out that, as the journal spanned over 17 years, its editorship and management also underwent several notable turns. Its employment of Zhu-Hu Binxia 朱胡彬夏 (1888–1931), a female women’s rights activist with almost one decade’s overseas educational experience, as its chief editor in 1916 was a rather remarkable moment in that it allowed women’s voices to enter a more central position. See Li Xiaohong, Women’s Voices: Educated Women and Mass Media in Republican Shanghai (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2008), 48–96. 43. Originally named Zeng Lan 曾蘭, the writer adopted the last name Wu 吳 from her husband, Wu Yu, who later played a prominent role in the New Culture Movement 新文化運動 of the mid-1910s through the 1920s. While Wu Zenglan was an active writer in the feminist discourse, it is also known that some of the articles published under her name—”A Discussion on Women’s Rights” 女權平議 (Nüquan pingyi), for instance—were actually written by Wu Yu. See Liu Jen-peng, Feminist Discourses in Modern China: Nation, Translation and Gender Politics (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 2000), 78. 44. In her study of the exemplary Western women introduced in late Qing women’s periodicals, Xia Xiaohong has pointed out a strong influence from Meiji Japan, which valued women’s education and social contribution as mothers of the nation’s subjects; see Xia, “Western Exem- plary Women in Late Qing Women’s Periodicals,” Journal of Chinese Humanities 4 (2012): 20–34. With the Meiji values and ideals about “good wives and wise mothers” themselves being a reworking of the earlier Confucian traditions, the proposed transformation of the Chinese womanhood thus gained even more dimensions. 45. Wu Zenglan, “On the Origin of the Women’s Sphere,” The Ladies’ Journal 1.11 (1915): 11. 46. Ibid., 12. 47. See Ying Hu, Tales of Translation, 8–12; and Liu Jen-peng, Feminist Discourses in Modern China, 129–97. 48. Jin Yi, A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, 1. 49. See Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 50. See Fang Hanqi, The History of Modern Chinese Newspapers and Magazines (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1981), vol. 2, 558. 51. Ibid., 559. There were two different periodicals in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century China that were both titled Nüxue bao 女學報. The one mentioned here, whose English title was Chinese Girl’s Progress, was briefly run in 1898 and 1899. The later one, which is translated as Journal of Women’s Studies and will be mentioned below, was edited and managed by Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬 (1883–1923) and published in 1903 and 1904 as a continuation of Women’s Journal (Nü bao 女報), which ran intermittently in 1899 and 1902. Shortly after adopting its new title in 1903, the journal was moved from Shanghai to Tokyo as a result of the disturbances caused by the Qing court’s purging of revolutionist contributors to the periodical Su bao 蘇報, which was published by Chen Xiefen’s father Chen Fan 陳範 (1860–1913). The later Journal of Women’s Studies is generally considered more radical than the earlier Chinese Girl’s Progress. See Nanxiu Qian, “The Mother Nü Xuebao and the Daughter Nü Xuebao: Generational Differences between 1898 and 1902 Women Reformers,” in Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China, eds. Nanxiu Qian et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 257–91, and Xia Xiaohong, “Two Nüxue bao in Late Qing,” Journal of Modern Chinese Studies 16 (2012): 25–33. 52. Amy D. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46. 53. For more on Chinese Girl’s Progress, see Xia Xiaohong, “Two Nüxue bao in Late Qing,” 25–33, and Liu Renfeng, A Study of the History of Chinese Women’s Periodical (Bei- jing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2012), 25–27. 30 Chapter 1

54. The term was also adopted by Western missionaries in their preaching, but in general intellectual discussions of the late Qing, the connotations of the word usually were more nationalistic than religious. 55. Charlotte L. Beahan, “Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press, 1902–1911,” Modern China 1.4 (1975): 382. 56. Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 2, 770–71. 57. Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalism and Female Subjectiv- ities in Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106.3 (2001): 801. 58. Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 577–80. 59. Ibid, vol. 1, 390. 60. Ibid., vol. 1, 392. 61. Jin Yi, A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, 4. 62. Jin Yi, “Inaugural Statement of Women’s World,” 1. 63. Ibid., 1–2. 64. Joan Judge, “A Translocal Technology of the Self: Biographies of World Heroines and the Chinese Woman Question,” Journal of Women’s History 21.4 (2009): 60–61. 65. Ding Chuwo, “Eulogy to Women’s World,” 5. 66. Ibid., 4. 67. Ibid. 68. Yalu, “A Lament to the Women’s Sphere,” Women’s World 1.9 (1904): 5. 69. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 70. Jin Yi, A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, 2. Like the redefined extension of zimei or jiemei to cover a nationwide sisterhood, the term tongbao 同胞, which was normally used to refer to siblings in classical Chinese texts, was here endowed with a strong nationalist implication. 71. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 15. 72. First established by the British businessman Ernest Major (1842–1908) in Shanghai in April 1872, this originally foreign-managed Chinese-language newspaper actively drew on indigenous practices and gradually transformed itself into a national periodical. In spite of much sociopolitical turbulence and several reorganizations, it was published until May 1949 and is therefore considered as the longest-running and the most influential newspaper in modern China. 73. See Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shang- hai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). 74. Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, “The Beginning of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction in the Late Ch’ing and Beyond,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, eds. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1985), 392. 75. Gail Hershatter, “The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chi- nese History,” Positions 1.1 (1993): 111. 76. Daxiong 大雄, “Romance of a Women’s China,” Women’s World 1.9 (1904): 53–56. 77. For more on Huang Xiuqiu, see Ying Hu, Tales of Translation, 153–96. 78. According to Guo Changhai, Yisuo was the art name (hao 號) of Tang Baorong 湯寶榮, an educated man from Suzhou who was born around the year of 1860; see Guo, “A Research of Yisuo, the Author of Huang Xiuqiu,” Social Sciences Front 4 (1993): 241–42. 79. For more on Wang Lang and his A Dirty History of the Women’s Sphere, see A Ying, Casual Discussions on Fiction (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1958), 103–105. 80. See A Ying, A History of Late Qing Fiction (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2009), 117. 81. Cuotuozi, “The Newest Report of a Ghostly Field in the Women’s Sphere,” in A Com- pendium of Rare Fiction in Modern China (Hohhot: Neimenggu renmin chubanshe, 1998), vol. 7, 539. Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 31

82. In Women Journalists and Feminism in China, 1898–1937 (Amherst: Cambia Press, 2010), Yuxin Ma has examined the collective emergence of women journalists at the turn of the twentieth century. The book discusses the contrast between traditional literary women and modern, professional women journalists and how the latter managed to interpret the nationalist agenda for the advancement of the feminist movement. 83. It is already known that many male feminist activists in turn-of-the-twentieth-century China and a few male writers of the Republican period often used female-sounding pen names: Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) as “Madame Pingyun” (Pingyun nüshi 萍雲女士) and “Madame Biluo” (Biluo nüshi 碧羅女士), Liu Yazi as “Madame Pan Xiaohuang from Song- ling” (Songling nüzi Pan Xiaohuang 松陵女子潘小璜), Liu Bannong 劉半農 (1891–1934) as “Madame Fan Nudong” (Fan Nudong nüshi 範奴冬女士), Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) as “Anna” 安娜, Mao Dun 茅盾 (1896–1981) as “Madame Feng Xu” (Feng Xu nüshi 馮虛女士), Zhao Jingshen 趙景深 (1902–1985) as “Madame Luming” (Luming nüshi 露明女士) and “Madame Aisi” (Aisi nüshi 愛絲女士), and Liu Dajie 劉大傑 (1904–1977) as “Madame Xue- rong” (Xuerong nüshi 雪容女士), just to name a few. 84. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. 85. Despite its claimed mission of “collecting women’s works” (yi zhengji funü zuopin wei zongzhi 以徵集婦女作品為宗旨), the names that most frequently occurred in the journal in its initial stage were still all male: Wang Yunzhang 王蘊章 (1884–1942), Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之 (1896–1986), Hu Jichen 胡寄塵 (1886–1938), Shao Piaoping 邵飄萍 (1886–1926), among others. 86. Bao Tianxiao, Memoirs of the Bracelet Shadow Chamber (Taipei: Longwen, 1990), 591. 87. Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 416. 88. Ibid., vol. 1, 404. 89. Lianshi, “On Women’s Rights,” Journal of the New Women’s Sphere in China 1.1 (1907): 4. 90. Rebecca Karl, “The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China,” in Everyday Modernity in China, eds. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 70. 91. Lianshi, “On Women’s Rights,” 4. 92. In Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Joan Wallach Scott examines how French feminist activists confronted the dilemma between, on the one hand, rejecting sexual differences to protesting the exclusion of women from citizenship and, on the other hand, acting on behalf of women and thus (re-)introducing sexual differences into the discourse, which resulted in a “politics of undecidability”; see Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), x–xi. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that such paradoxes were a rather universal phenomenon in first-wave feminist movements and theories around the world and for suggesting the French case as an example. 93. Lianshi, “The Relationship between the Women’s Sphere and the State,” Journal of the New Women’s Sphere in China 1.2 (1907): 1. 94. Ibid. 95. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in the Seventeenth- Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 96. Beahan, “Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press, 1902–1911,” 382. 97. Examples for the first category include Monthly Educator (Yizhi xinlu 益智新錄, 1876–1878) and Review of the Times; the second, The China Reformer (Zhixin bao 知新報, 1897–1901), Journal in Beijing Dialect (Jinghua bao 京話報, 1900), Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌, 1904–1948), Zhejiang Tides (Zhejiang chao 浙江潮, 1903–1904); and the third, Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s World, the Journal of the New Women’s Sphere in China, and Natural Justice (Tianyi 天義, 1907–1908). 98. Adrian Arthur Bennett, Missionary Journalist in China, Young J. Allen and His Maga- zines, 1860–1883 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 55. 99. Young John Allen and Pao-Lu Yin, Women in All Lands, or China’s Place among the Nations: A Philosophic Study of Comparative Civilizations, Ancient and Modern (Shanghai: 32 Chapter 1

Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese and the Methodist Publishing House, 1903–1905), vol. 1, 16. 100. Ibid., 15. 101. See Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 394. 102. See Xia Xiaohong, “The World’s Famous Women, Past and Present and Biographies of Exemplary Foreign Women in Late Qing,” Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 46.2 (2009): 37–38. 103. Liang, The Complete Works of Liang Qichao, 856, 862–63. For a thorough examination of Liang’s “Biography of Madame Roland” and its influence on the proto-image of the Chinese “New Woman,” see Ying Hu, Tales of Translation, 153–96. 104. See Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 303. 105. Ibid. 106. Lianshi, “Inauguration Statement,” Magazine of the New Chinese Women’s Sphere 1.1 (1907): 1–3. 107. Lianshi, “A Speech on the Five Principles of This Journal,” Magazine of the New Chinese Women’s Sphere 1.2 (1907): 13. 108. Anonymous, “Constitution of the Women’s Association of China (with Commentary),” Magazine of the New Chinese Women’s Sphere 1.3 (1907): 114. 109. See Li and Chang, Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Women’s Movement, 1842–1911, vol. 1, 369. 110. Ibid., vol. 1, 368. 111. Ibid., vol. 1, 393. 112. Ibid., vol. 1, 395. 113. Ibid., vol. 1, 167. 114. Some of the heroines featured included, on the Chinese side, Hongxian 紅線 and Nie Yinniang 聶隱娘 (two legendary female assassins featured in some Tang dynasty tales), Nüwa 女媧 (a female goddess who, as is told in Chinese mythology, created the humankind and saved it by mending the sky), Li Suzhen 李素貞 (a Qing dynasty female general who fought against and was killed by the Taiping rebels); and on the foreign side, Florence Nightingale (an Italian- born British social reformer and the founder of modern nursing), Mary Carpenter (British philanthropist and social activist), Margaret Roper (the learned and filial daughter of the be- headed Thomas More), Frances Willard (an American woman suffragist), Harriet Beecher Stowe (an American abolitionist and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and Charlotte Corday (a female assassin in the French Revolution). 115. Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 116. Zhigong, “Biographies of Women Warriors [I],” Women’s World 1.1 (1904), 23. 117. Zhigong, “Biographies of Women Warriors [II],” Women’s World 1.2 (1904), 19–20. 118. Pan Xiaohuang (aka Liu Yazi), “The Biography of Liang Hongyu, a Chinese Nationalist Woman Warrior,” Women’s World 1.7 (1904): 19, 25. 119. As Xue Shaohui did not know English, she had to depend on her husband’s oral translation of the stories when writing the book. This kind of cooperative translation, termed in Chinese as duiyi 對譯, was a popular practice among Chinese translators at the turn of the century. See Nanxiu Qian, “Paralleling the West with China,” in Anthology of the International Conference on Chinese Classics , ed. Cheng Zhangcan (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2006), 591. 120. Xue Shaohui and Chen Shoupeng, Biographies of Exemplary Foreign Women (Nanjing: Jinling Jiangchu bianyi guanshu zongju, 1906), vol. 1, “Preface” [with no page number]. 121. Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reform,” Modern China 29.4 (2003): 401. 122. See Xue and Chen, Biographies of Exemplary Foreign Women, vol. 8, 13a-13b. See also Nanxiu Qian, “Late Qing Woman Writer Xue Shaohui and Her Biographies of Exemplary Foreign Women,” in Studies of Literature and Gender in Ming and Qing, ed. Zhang Hongsheng (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 2002), 948–49. Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” and Promotion of Sisterhood in Late Qing 33

123. Xue Shaohui, Posthumously Collected Poems and Other Writings of the Daiyun Cham- ber (Fujian: Chenshi jiakanben, 1914), poem collection vol. 2, 6b–8b. See also Nanxiu Qian, “Late Qing Poetess Xue Shaohui and the 1898 Reform,” in Late Ming and Late Qing: Histori- cal Inheritance and Cultural Innovation, eds. Chen Pingyuan and David Der-Wei Wang (Wu- han: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 362–63. 124. When discussing Luo Pu’s 羅普 (1876–1949) unfinished novel The Woman Hero from Eastern Europe (Dong’ou nü haojie 東歐女豪傑, 1902–1093), Ying Hu has also noticed another comparable case, where the Chinese protagonist Hua Mingqing, an overseas student in Switzerland, enjoys “a kind of international sisterhood with Russian anarchists”; see Ying Hu, Tales of Translation, 10. 125. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 463. 126. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12. 127. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 7.

Chapter Two

From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers

The Feminist-Nationalist Spectrum of Sisterhood in Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Chivalric Beauties

As the previous chapter has shown, the promotion of the “women’s sphere” and the reimagining of sisterhood was profoundly important to the construction of modern China as an “imagined community.” At the conjunction of gender and nation, the new sisterhood-themed narratives constituted an important discursive category and provided a dynamic arena for the accommodation and processing of the miscellaneous sociocultural transformations at individual, national, and transnational levels. This chapter examines the motif of sisterhood in two late Qing novels by women writers—Qiu Jin’s Stones of the Jingwei Bird (1905–1907) and Shao Zhenhua’s Chivalric Beauties (1909–1911), paying particular attention to their reinvention of the sisterhood narrative in Chinese women’s literature. Most remarkably, the feminist- nationalist spectrum of sisterhood represented in the two novels revealingly reflects the weakening of the Confucian paradigm of family-defined womanhood in last decade of the Qing, a time that, as Qiu Jin writes at the beginning of her novel’s preface, was indeed “an era of transition.”1 Inspired by the newly conceptualized nation- and gender-based mode of sisterhood, pioneering female feminists like Qiu, Shao, and their fictional heroines felt an urgent responsibility not only to “thro[w] off the yokes of the past” on their own behalf but also to “enable [their fellow Chinese sisters] to leave the darkness behind and ascend to the civilized realm.”2 As Ellen Widmer has described in her examination of three late Qing new guixiu writers’ fictional and nonfictional works, these texts “present a picture of how one segment of society and of writing strained to accommodate themselves to a changing world.”3 At the same time, Qiu’s and Shao’s novels also exemplify how the works of 35 36 Chapter 2 female authors expanded their communal imagination and embraced a much broader mode of collective identification. Devoted to the experiences and perspectives of the “women’s sphere,” late Qing women writers’ female-centered stances constituted an interesting site of alternative imaginations not only about women’s new roles and identities within the context of Chinese modernity but about the overarching conceptual framework of modernity per se. For example, the “utopian literary fantasies of female liberation” in Qiu Jin’s Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Wang Miaoru’s 王妙如 (1877?–1903) A Flower of the Women’s Prison (Nüyuhua 女獄花), as Amy D. Dooling has argued, “endeavored to defamil- iarize traditional gender boundaries and to construct for their readers a fresh vantage point from which to perceive women’s roles in society.”4 For Huang Jin-Zhu, the portrayals of traveling females, like Qiu’s and Shao’s respective heroines, by late Qing women novelists indicated women’s subversive entrance into the public space outside the patriarchal household, thus constituting a revolutionary change that resembled what Mary Daly describes as the “exorcism”—rejecting the male-centered spatial-temporal and social orders and replacing them with new female-centered ones—during the third and last stage of radical feminism.5 In the meantime, however, the women writers’ restructuring of sisterhood imaginations also exhibited its own “transitional” features, which embodied further paradoxes in arguing for female subjectivities and intersubjectivities in a still predominantly patriarchal social imaginary. On the one hand, by focusing on the “women’s sphere” and giving more textual authority to women as a collective, Qiu’s and Shao’s thematic and stylistic innovations enthusiastically embraced the new and largely horizontal mode of group identification among all the textual and extratextual Chinese “sisters.” On the other hand, with explicit or implicit presumptions about the elite/subaltern divide, best represented by the centrifugal manners in which enlightening ideals were disseminated among female subjects, the elasticity of sisterhood in these stories mirrored a manifestation of female capacity that, despite its apparent coherence, was not necessarily homogeneous. Rather, while providing an intervening means of bonding among female subjects dually enlightened with feminist and nationalist causes, such sisterhood imaginings revolved around a problematic symbiosis between the construction of modern China and the making of the modern Chinese “women’s sphere,” where the authority of the nation, defined in highly gendered terms, replaced that of the Confucian patriarchal family. From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 37 ESCAPING “A WORLD OF DARKNESS”: SISTERHOOD IN TRANSITION IN STONES OF THE JINGWEI BIRD

Stones of the Jingwei Bird is an unfinished tanci novel and the only known fictional work by Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist-nationalist writer and activist at the turn of the twentieth century. Tanci 彈詞, literally meaning “verses for picking,”6 is a traditional Chinese oral narrative genre. With the text usually composed in alternate prose and verse, recitation is often accompanied by string instruments. As the genre became popular among gentry women in Southern China in the late Ming, especially in the Yangzi Delta area, it gradually bifurcated into two subcategories: oral performance to be watched and listened to and printed literature to be read. Because of its less elitist subject matters and style, as compared with the writings of mainstream male literati, the tanci novel came to be loved by educated gentry women confined to the inner quarters of their homes. These women used the writing and reading of tanci as a means both to fantasize about alternative life possibilities and to communicate with their female relatives and friends. 7 However, as indicated by Qiu Jin’s adoption of the more widely accessible Northern mandarin, rather than the Zhejiang and Hunan dialects she was more familiar with because of her Southern upbringing and marriage, the writing of Stones was obviously much more widely aimed at the national enlightenment of the author’s female compatriots. In fact, Qiu Jin was not at all alone in viewing this particular feminine “vernacular” (su 俗) genre as a most effective artistic means to spread new ideas among a national female readership that was being (re-)constructed and expanded. For instance, in the preface to his own tanci novel, The Torch of Civilization for a Twentieth- Century Women’s Sphere (Ershi shiji nüjie wenmingdeng tanci 二十世紀女界文明燈彈詞, 1911), Zhong Xinqing 鐘心青8 described the genre as “eve- rybody’s favorite in today’s world” and proposed that a reformed version of it—after careful selection and improvement of stock themes and plots— could be employed as “textbooks for women’s learning.”9 Like many earlier women’s tanci novels, Stones of the Jingwei Bird draws heavily upon its author’s own life experiences, including her gentry background, an unsatisfactory arranged marriage, intimate female-female friendships, and efforts to transcend patriarchal familial constraints and enter into a liberated “women’s sphere.” Born in 1877 in Xiamen, located in the southeastern province of Fujian, Qiu Jin was the daughter of Qiu Shounan 秋寿南 (1850–1901), a literati official originally from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, where Qiu Jin spent some of her adolescence and was ultimately executed. As her father took various government positions in central and southern China, the young girl traveled with him to quite a few different places. When her father was stationed in Hunan, he arranged a marriage for his then-18- year-old daughter to a rich local family “against [Qiu Jin’s] own will.”10 38 Chapter 2

Though the couple had two children, Qiu Jin lamented the dandyish lifestyle and lack of interest in political revolution of her husband, Wang Zifang 王子芳 (1879–1909). In contrast to Qiu Jin’s disappointing married life, sisterhood, both in the form of extratextual social bonding and as a thematic pivot in her essays and in her unfinished tanci novel, provided an alternative and empowering means to fulfill her personal and political aspirations. While accompanying Wang to Beijing, where he was taking up a recently purchased position, Qiu Jin made friends with Wu Zhiying 吳芝瑛 (1867–1934), a well-educated gentry poet and calligrapher, niece of the famous Tongcheng School scholar Wu Rulun 吳汝倫 (1840–1903) and wife of a literati official named Lian Quan 廉泉 (1868–1932). Sharing similar literary tastes and political interests, the two women soon became sworn sisters. Also during her stay in Beijing, Qiu Jin had greater access to reformist publications such as Liang Qichao’s “Biogra- phy of Madame Roland, the Foremost Heroine of Modern Times” and Luo Pu’s 羅普 (1876–1949) unfinished novel The Woman Hero from Eastern Europe (Dong’ou nü haojie 東歐女豪傑, published under the pen name “Madame Yuyi from Lingnan,” or Lingnan yuyi nüshi 嶺南羽衣女士, 1902–1093). In a letter to her younger sister, Qiu Jin praised the female role models introduced in Liang’s New People Miscellany as “exemplary figures for the women’s sphere.”11 While sisterly bonding had been both a popular leitmotif in previous women’s tanci novels and a common phenomenon among small circles of reading and writing female elitists, Qiu Jin advocated a much more radical interpretation. For her, a sisterly bond was based on gender awareness, including the courage to transcend feminine stereotypes, as much as on a collective female participation in national politics that was equal to the participation of their male counterparts. Not only did she deliberately appear in men’s attire in several of her best known photos, Qiu Jin also practiced martial arts and learned how to make explosives—skills rather unimaginable for traditional gentry women. In addition to providing her much consolation in an unhappy marriage, her sisterhood with Wu and another sworn sister Xu Zihua 徐自華 (1873–1935), a gentry poet that she met in 1906 when teaching at a girls’ school in Zhejiang, constituted an essential source of support for her dangerous revolutionary cause. In turn, Qiu Jin’s own unprecedented subversiveness in her pursuit of overseas studies and revolutionary activities despite strong family resistance 12 established her as a new archetype—the inspiring “sister” and a momentous figure of transition. As Ying Hu has insightfully summarized, “So much symbolic significance is invested in the singular figure of Qiu Jin that in historical accounts of Chinese women’s progress, she often functions as a ‘transitional figure’ par excellence: a history of women of traditional China typically ends with her while a study of modern women begins with her.”13 From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 39

Qiu Jin’s endeavors to establish stronger, broader ties among women that could intervene in the existing gender order ranged widely from writing and publishing to political activism. In this way, her re-imaginings of sisterhood not only helped female subjects to “disidentify”—to borrow from Jessica Benjamin14—with their traditional roles defined by the patriarchal family but also transformed the means of such re-imaginings into a more versatile mode. During her stay in Japan in 1904 and 1905, she established the Ver- nacular Journal (Baihua bao 白話報), wrote several seminal articles, and cofounded a female Chinese overseas student organization called “The Soci- ety to Realize Universal Love” (Shixing gong’ai hui 實行共愛會). When her colleague Chen Xiefen was faced with an arranged marriage, Qiu Jin called for an intervention from their fellow female Chinese students, which finally forced Chen’s father to give up the plan.15 Reaching beyond the “women’s sphere” with nationalist enthusiasm, she joined the anti-Qing Three Harmo- nies Society (Sanhe hui 三合會) and the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui 同盟會) and participated in a demonstration against the Japanese government’s issue of a discriminatory law against Chinese and Korean students, which had led to the suicide protest of Chen Tianhua 陳天華 (1875–1905). After leaving Japan in a collective boycott, Qiu Jin returned to China and became busily engaged in teaching, writing, public speaking, and, on top of all these, planning an armed uprising against the Manchu court. In 1907, she established the Chinese Women’s Journal, which, unfortunately, was short- lived. The exposure of her political plotting and her subsequent execution put an end to the publication after its second issue. Qiu Jin, however, seemed to have anticipated her heroic death, expecting it to set a new milestone in women’s movements. In a letter to her friend and subsequent biographer Wang Shize 王時澤 (1885–1962), she spoke of how significant it would be if a female revolutionary like herself would die for the good of the nation: “Since Tang Caichang [唐才常 (1867–1900)], there have been plenty of cases where male [revolutionaries] die for the restoration [of Han rule] . . . but we have not yet heard about a woman [martyr]. This is a humiliation to our women’s sphere.”16 A few days before her arrest, she also expressed a similar readiness to sacrifice her life in a letter to Xu Yunhua 徐蘊華 (1884–1962), Xu Zihua’s younger sister, in which she described such a death as of transcendental importance: “Even if I will be dead, it is as if I would continue to live. I will sacrifice [my life] to accomplish my duty.”17 In Qiu Jin’s tanci novel, sisterhood broadly and elastically accommodates, mediates, and justifies both feminist and nationalist quests, just as it did in her own life. Such a dual agenda, in addition to its manifestation in the author’s carefully selected pen name—“The Chivalric Daughter of the Han Race”—is also made clear in the preface, which declares that the novel is intended to arouse consciousness in her “sister compatriots [who] remain in a World of Darkness.”18 Because of their “blindness” and “ignorance,” Qiu Jin 40 Chapter 2 laments, unenlightened Chinese women serve as men’s “slaves” and even collaborate with them to reinforce this gender-based slave system. 19 Worse still, rule by the alien Manchu court and threats from foreign imperialists force the Han race, which makes up of the majority of the Chinese population, into slavery in nationalist terms as well. 20 In this way, like Chen Xie- fen’s reference to Chinese women as the slaves of the slaves to an alien race in her aforementioned “On the Precariousness of the Women’s Sphere,”21 Qiu Jin’s women-as-dual-slaves narrative makes women’s issues more relevant and describable in the male-dominant public discourse. Yet the potential slippage between the feminist interpretation and the nationalist interpretation of “slavery” and its accompanying subject-object relationships is more than palpable, reflecting Rebecca Karl’s findings on “the flexible origins of slavery as a discourse of gendered political positioning in the uneven late Qing global context of imperialist modernity” (emphasis in the original).22 Corresponding to such slippage and flexibility, sisterhood in Stones of the Jingwei Bird is endowed with a transforming capacity both to transcend familial boundaries and to connect the female characters’ quest for individual freedom to nationalist revolution. If the novel can be read as a female Bil- dungsroman on both individual and collective levels, feminist-nationalist sisterhood serves as an important catalyst and an indispensable signifier for the characters’ dual coming of age. Set in the metaphorical “Slumberland,” which apparently refers to late Qing China amid domestic and national crises, the novel tells how, with the support and company of her “sisterly”23 friends, Huang Jurui 黃鞠瑞,24 a girl born in a traditional gentry family, escapes from her arranged marriage, pursues new-style education in Japan and becomes a devoted revolutionist. Together, Huang and her sworn sisters, mostly young girls with similar family backgrounds and life experiences, participate in a series of political ac- tions: opening schools and factories, advocating women’s rights, enlisting and training women soldiers, and financially supporting the revolutionary cause. Finally, the imperial court is toppled and a new republic established. 25 From the perspective of literary traditions, Qiu Jin’s deployment of sisterhood itself suggests important transitions in imagining women’s roles and their relationships with one another. For one thing, this thematic focus challenges the authority of familial lineage by shifting away from mother- daughter ties, which constituted an important trajectory of “cultural production through bio-social reproduction”26 in late imperial China and which was a prominent motif in women’s tanci novels,27 to a more “horizontal”—to borrow from Anderson—mode of identification among young liberty-seeking girls. For another, the transformation which such sisterhood undergoes— from a family- and class-based framework to a nationalist-feminist one—not only resonates with the transitional nature of the historical era but also high- From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 41 lights female agency and subjectivities in carrying out social changes on a broad geopolitical scale. At the birth of the heroine Huang Jurui, the novel tells us, her motherland is under the reign of a fatuous usurper, who is the illegitimate and racially impure son of a prostitute favored by the late emperor. Impotent and corrupt, the royal court is merely interested in killing its own insightful citizens while paying no attention to the foreign powers that keep seizing its territory. Moreover, what adds to the political disaster is the thousand-year-long tradition of gender inequality, which imposes such cruel practices as foot-binding upon women. In this context, it is relatively fortuitous for the protagonist to have been born into a gentry family that is obviously more open-minded than the average household. Though embracing traditional gender biases and taking in concubines himself, her father, Prefect Huang, is neither too stubborn nor too heartless to deny her a decent education. Nor does her mother, who appears dependent, timid, and old-fashioned, forbid her from socializing with other gentry girls. Most fortunately, she has an enlightened and enlightening family tutor, who introduces her to modern knowledge and encourages her to pursue independence and gender equality. Like such late Qing reformists as Liang Qichao, Tutor Yu believes that “women are the mothers of civilization, and family education in the home depends on women.”28 Under his influence, Jurui aspires to end the dual slavery imposed on Chinese women, a longing that later serves as the ideological foundation of the sisterhood among Jurui and the other girls who share a similar feminist-nationalist vision. The first sisterly bond Jurui makes is with Little Jade (Xiaoyu 小玉), the daughter of a concubine in the Liang family, who constantly witnesses the bullying of her mother by her father’s main wife and who is herself subject to maltreatments from Lady Liang and her son (also Jade’s half-brother). Jade’s resentment of polygamy is echoed by Jurui, who always finds it painful to see her own mother being tormented by the two powerful concubines of the Huang family, despite the fact that she is the first wife. In turn, Jurui’s sharp criticism of the gender-based injustice behind all this suffering, her yearning desire to become independent and to receive an education, and her heroic ambitions to “escape these slavish confines” all resonate deeply with Jade, who suggests that the two become “sworn sisters,” believing that, in this way, “they could rely on each other in times of trouble.”29 Jurui warmly welcomes the suggestion, and Jade’s prediction about mutual reliance among female subjects—instead of upon their patriarchal families—becomes a reality as the story unfolds. As the sisterly circle gradually expands, it repeatedly takes advantage of familial connections and then overrides them. The next “sister” to takes the stage is Unity (Aiqun 愛群) from the Bao family, whose mother is Lady Liang’s biological sister but who is much kinder and much more open- 42 Chapter 2 minded than Lady Liang. In addition to sharing many views, hobbies, and life experiences with Jade (and therefore with Jurui as well), the “exceedingly well-educated” Unity also volunteers to tutor Jade.30 Her recognition of Jade’s talents is much more indicative of feminist empathy than their remote and unbalanced kinship connections. Two more female characters follow Unity into the story and the sworn sisterhood—Unity’s cousin Awaken (Xin- ghua 醒華, literally meaning “Awaken China”) and the latter’s friend Vital- ity (Zhenhua 振華, literally meaning “Vitalize China”). Both are beautiful, talented, and enlightened members of the gentry. Unlike earlier women’s tanci novels, in which sisterhood carries little cost in terms of familial ties—if not even further strengthening them, Stones of the Jingwei Bird presents its feminism-inspired sworn sisterhood as ideologically rebellious against, and incompatible with, the patriarchal family, which is depicted as the origin of Chinese women’s dual slavery. When news comes that a badly matched marriage has been arranged for Jurui, the other girls are disheartened at the thought of losing this sister to an unwanted husband and a dishonest man from a rich family. Jurui, ultimately, decides not to submit, finding that “what is truly intolerable [about her arranged marriage] is accepting this engagement and being treated like a slave.”31 Having learned about “the right to liberty” (ziyou quan 自由權) and the equality between men and women from books of Western learning, she decides to flee to Japan to pursue her studies. She also invites the other girls to go along with her, and the plan is warmly received. 32 Together, they discuss such practical issues as raising funds and unbinding their feet, while dreaming of becoming independent and able to devote themselves to the blossoming of “liberty flowers” (ziyou hua 自由花).33 It is through another heroic and sisterly deed that the group realizes their planned escape from their patriarchal families, only this time sisterhood seems more performative and less definitive. Realizing a common identity among “all heroic young girls,” Madame Bao’s maid Hibiscus (Xiurong 秀蓉) considers it her responsibility to assist these female “compatriots of the same race” (tongbao tongzhong 同胞同種).34 After failing to persuade Ma- dame Bao to allow Unity to study abroad, she steals some money from her mistress and gives it to the girls. Instead of inviting the maid to join the group on the spot, however, Jurui seems willing only to maintain her earlier promise, namely that, if Jurui manages to escape her family and acquire freedom, she will come back to rescue Hibiscus, swear sisterhood with her, and help her achieve her own liberty. 35 The delayed recognition of Hibiscus as a member of the sisterly group leaves her status ambivalent and reflects the “transitional” character of the era. That is, the new model of sisterhood advocated by the author seems to presume a “dual identification” among its members both “as subordinated [as women] and [as] elite at the same time.”36 Despite a gender-based mutual recognition with the young gentry From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 43 girls, Hibiscus, being a maid and in this sense probably a “triple slave,” is at least temporarily beyond the transcendental and unifying capacity of sisterhood. In the unfinished sixth chapter, the changed geo-cultural milieu allows the sworn sisters to pursue new learning in Japan. Soon after, they become involved in political activism and are invited by some male Chinese overseas students to join the Restoration Society (Guangfu hui 光復會),37 an organization that intends to save China from being “lost to the northern barbar- ians” (wang yu hu 亡於胡) and from being reduced to “slaves of the white race” (baizhong zhi nu 白種之奴).38 Here, the reference to the ongoing anti- Manchurian movements incorporates the liberation and self-enlightenment of women into the larger political background, adding racial, nationalist, and anti-imperialist touches to the issue of gender equality and thereby making women’s political activism a more viable means to establish and exercise a collective female subjectivity. As the remaining chapter titles suggest, Qiu Jin had intended to have the sworn sisters set up schools and factories in their motherland, advocate new ideas, hold political meetings, raise funds, fight wars, restore the reign of the Han race over the country, and establish a republican polity. In particular, the title of the last chapter—“Applause and Songs to Happily Welcome the Recovery of Sovereignty; United Hearts for Political Reform and Construction of a Republic” (paishou kaige zhong gongxin guangfu, tongxin ge bizheng dajian gonghe 拍手凱歌中共欣光復同心革弊政大建共和)—indicates a triumphant ending for the girls, who finally manage to free themselves from dual slavery and become heroic subjects with full liberty. The dual coming-of-age of the sisters invites an allegorical reading, especially via the multilayered imagery of the Jingwei Bird, which poignantly embodies the entanglements between “women” and “nation.” By imbuing the traditional legend of female heroism with contemporary messages of women’s liberation and national revolution, Qiu Jin’s reinvented imagery of Jingwei transforms a mythical tale of one exceptional girl into a more realistic and relevant picture of collective female power. Sisterhood, consequently, acquires an elastic spectrum along which a female character’s newly awak- ened feminist-nationalist awareness is recognized and sublimated. In the Chinese literary history, this bird myth was first recorded in Classic of the Mountains and the Seas (Shan hai jing 山海經) by Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–342) of the Eastern Jin dynasty39 and then retold in other mythological collections including Ren Fang’s 任昉 (460–508) Records of the Strange (Shu yi ji 述異記).40 According to the legend, Emperor Yan’s daughter is reincarnated as a bird named Jingwei after drowning in the East Sea at a young age. Determined to take her revenge, she relentlessly tries to fill the East Sea with stones and twigs. Long regarded as an embodiment of resolution, valor, and the spirit of accomplishing the impossible, the mythological 44 Chapter 2 bird was popular among patriotic Han loyalists. The late Ming scholar Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (aka Gu Tinglin 顧亭林, 1613–1682), for example, once wrote a poem entitled “Jingwei” and compared his own anti-Manchu struggles to the bird’s challenging task.41 Similarly, the late Qing poet Zhao Tieqing 趙鐵卿 (aka Zhao Zongbian 赵宗抃, 1874–1947) once dedicated a poem to Jingwei, which reads:

Blood comes out of the mouth of the elegant Jingwei Bird Who keeps working day and night as long as she is still alive. . . . People all sigh when hearing your chirping sounds But hardly anybody knows that your spirit soars high into the sky.42

In a vein more closely related to the late Qing reformist movement, the scholar-official Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) dedicated a series of six poems to his friend Liang Qichao shortly before the “Hundred Days’ Reform” in 1898. One of them cited Jingwei’s story to express the poet’s own resolution to devote himself heart and soul to the salvation of the nation and its people.43 While continuing to embody exceptional courage, the celebration of Jing- wei’s spirit through Qiu Jin’s pen lays much emphasis on the gender aspect of her heroism and challenges the conventional assumptions about the gender hierarchy. In her preface, Qiu Jin explicitly calls upon her female compatriots to break their bonds of slavery and become “excellent females” (nü jie 女傑), “female heroes” (nü yingxiong/ci ying 女英雄/雌英), and “outstanding heroines” (nü haojie 女豪傑).44 This reflects the author’s own adoption of her heroic nomenclature after arriving in Japan, when she started to call herself the “Heroine of Lake Jian” (Jianhu nüxia 鉴湖女俠). These epithets, which often combine the word “female” (nü/ci 女/雌) with words related to “heroism” or “excellence,” indicate a wish to rewrite femininity by integrating it with qualities that are conventionally considered masculine. Similar to Lian- shi’s constructionist view discussed earlier, Qiu Jin’s heroines repeatedly affirm that women are men’s equals by nature but are subordinated to them by nurture. After the girls arrive in Japan, Jurui changes her name to Hanxi- ong 漢雄 (literally, “the hero of the Han race”) to manifest her contempt for gender bias and signal her dual ambitions. The planned title for the unwritten Chapter 11 suggests another change of her name to Jingxiong 竞雄 (literally, “competing with males”),45 which, in fact, was a “nickname” (hao 號 or biehao 别號) that the author made up for herself. If the “women-as-slaves” narratives, as Rebecca Karl has put it, “reflected and gave voice to both the promise and the anxiety over possibilities for transformation in late Qing China,”46 the allegorical anecdote of the heroic Jingwei enabled Qiu Jin to forcefully stress women’s subjective status in the anticipated sociopolitical From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 45 transformation. Remarkably, the novel went so far as to envision its heroines themselves as the founders of the future republic—rather than as the mothers or wives of male founders, as was often the case with male nationalist reformists’ narratives. In this celebration of heroic female agency, Stones of the Jingwei Bird reinvented the tradition of sisterhood in women’s tanci novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties with an emphatically radical critique of conventional, passive femininity, even though its occasional ambiguous combinations of traditional clichés and modernized feminist mentalities reflected the hybridity of influences shaping the double vision of the “women’s sphere” mentioned earlier. Such reinventions, as Joan Judge has described, “were not exclusively the product of new nationalist discourses but also of the articulation between these new discourses and existing cultural forms.”47 For example, while following her predecessors in treating the girls’ mutual recognition of female beauty in each other as an essential contributing factor in the establishment of their sisterly bond, Qiu Jin redefines the exterior splendor as a revelation of their exceptional interior heroism strengthened through learning. Moreover, while maintaining some established standards in her portrayal of the sisterly heroines’ appearances, like delicate countenances and fine- looking figures, the novel eliminates the elements that keep women from taking part in the feminist-nationalist revolution—bound feet, for instance. When first introducing Jurui, the narrator speaks of her beauty as a transcendental quality that not only is indicative of divine favor 48 but also accords with the feminist-nationalist touches of militarized heroism: “It is said that Jurui had been heroic since her birth, and despite her youth, she was resolute by nature. Her face had a chivalric aura about it and because she was independent, she disliked dressing up according to the decadent fashions of the boudoir.”49 At the same time, as the story shifts the basis of sisterhood from biological and familial realms to a feminist-nationalist spectrum, it puts much emphasis on these moments of mutual recognition and the accompanying celebration of female intersubjectivity. During the initial encounter between Ju- rui and Hibiscus, the latter finds the former “exceedingly noble”: “Her eyes were beautiful but dignified, her brows were slender but full of heroic spirit. Her manner was forthright and direct, her figure sturdy”; and simultaneously, Jurui also immediately sees beauty in the maid: “a face like a hibiscus flower, a willow-like waist, slender shoulders, a cherry mouth, . . . kingfisher brows,” and pretty and courageous eyes.50 As is suggested by the phrase “four beauties sharing sorrows together” in the title of chapter 4, the shared embrace of a redefined female heroic beauty constitutes part of the collective identity of this community constructed upon sisterhood. Most importantly, the main characters’ brilliant appearances are by no means only relevant to the way they look; rather, they are externalization of 46 Chapter 2 the girls’ wisdom and enlightened views, which bring them together for academic and political pursuits. In this way, the novel challenges the Confu- cian teaching that “women’s virtue consists in their lack of talent” (nüzi wu cai bian shi de 女子無才便是德), which had been emphasized by mainstream exegesis since the late Ming. Occasionally, Confucian scholars like Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801) encouraged female literacy and “women’s learning” (fuxue 婦學) as a means to restore gender propriety as prescribed in classical Confucian works. 51 Qiu Jin, however, aims at quite a different goal: the transformation of Chinese womanhood from the traditional to the modern, as exemplified by the changing status of women in the Western world. Apart from the female exceptionalism on a collective level, Qiu Jin also hints at a sense of individual heroism, which is latent in the original legend about the Jingwei Bird and manifest in Gu Yanwu’s and Zhao Tieqing’s poems. The expression “one woman alone managing the enormous task” (yi nüzi du jian juren 一女子獨肩巨任) in the planned title of Chapter 10 shows that Jurui will take up the most challenging responsibility as an extraordinary leader in the revolutionary project. In this sense, the novel does not presume a collective/individual divide but, rather, perceives the collective cause of the sisterly heroines as compatible with their individual quests and ambitions. This compatibility corresponds to the flexibility of the sisterly characters’ stances along a nationalist-feminist spectrum, bringing further dimensions in the re-rendering of sisterhood. Hence, with the newly defined sisterhood bonded by a collective pursuit of national sovereignty and gender equality, which encompasses women’s individual freedom, “liberty flowers” symbolically stand for the heroines’ dual ultimate goal. In fact, as such, the term enjoyed much popularity in the late Qing and early Republican discourse. For instance, it was under the pen name “Ms. Liberty Flower of Cathay” (Zhendan nüshi Ziyouhua 震旦女士自由花) that Zhang Zhaotong 張肇桐 (1880/1881–1938), a male overseas student in Japan, published a widely circulated (but unfinished) novel Free- dom of Marriage (Ziyou jiehun 自由結婚, 1903), which, interestingly, shares the themes of racial slavery and nationalist revolt with Stones of the Jingwei Bird.52 In order to cultivate the blooming of “liberty flowers” in their native Slumberland, Qiu Jin’s sworn sisters have to enlighten the local residents sleeping in ignorance. These efforts, however, are met with a response reflective of the many selfish birds in Gu Yanwu’s poem, who are too busy “making their own nests” (zi cheng ke 自成窠) to care about public issues,53 or like the superficial people in Zhao Tieqing’s poem, who fail to understand, much less to follow, the heroic example. Like the many women-targeted periodicals of the period discussed in chapter 1, the novel turns to a transhistorical, transnational list of exceptional women that provides more role models for its female readers, thereby expanding the literary repertoire for the sisterhood tradition in women’s tanci novels. From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 47

As a coda, it is worth noting that the story about Qiu Jin and her textual and extratextual sisters did not end even with her death. When Qiu Jin’s elder brother encountered political opposition to giving her a proper burial, it was her sworn sisters who managed to purchase a plot of land for her grave by the scenic West Lake in Hangzhou—a site that Qiu had once spoken of as an ideal eternal resting place—and to hold a grand memorial event for her. Wu Zhiying also published a series of memorial articles, including “A Biography of Madame Qiu” (Qiu nüshi zhuan 秋女士傳) in the Eastern Times (Shibao 時報, 1904–1939) and “In Memory of the Late Madame Qiu” (Ji Qiu nüshi yishi 記秋女士遺事) in the Daily News (Xinwen bao 新聞報, 1893–1949).54 In order to make Qiu Jin’s political endeavors seem less radical and more acceptable to the general public, Wu defined them as focusing on equal rights between men and women, rather than the overturning of the Qing government. In this sense, Wu and many other supporters argued, Qiu Jin was comparable to such exemplary women as Sophia Perofskaya and Madame Roland. Before long, Qiu Jin’s feminist quests also became subject matter for a number of literary works and theatrical performances, including the play The Injustice of Xuanting (Xuanting yuan 軒亭冤, 1907) by a certain Xian- glingzi 湘靈子 and the novel Frost in Midsummer (Liuyue shuang 六月霜, 1911) by a certain Jingguanzi 靜觀子.55 No matter how they evaluated the late feminist revolutionary, these works attracted more female readers into an imaginary world centering on this exceptional woman and the new mode of sisterhood she proposed.

INSTITUTIONAL SISTERHOOD AND THE SOCIAL WEBBING OF THE “WOMEN’S SPHERE” IN CHIVALRIC BEAUTIES

Compared with Qiu Jin, much less is known about the late Qing woman writer Shao Zhenhua, who wrote Chivalric Beauties in the traditional “chapter novel” (zhanghui xiaoshuo 章回小說) form under the pen name of “Ms. Asking-the-Fisherman” (Wenyu nüshi 問漁女史).56 Born in Anhui to a progressive literati-official named Shao Banqing 邵班卿 (1851–1898) and later married to Lao Anwen 勞闇文 from the nearby country of Tongxiang, Shao became familiar with both traditional Chinese classics and newly imported Western knowledge at a young age.57 Though apparently planned as a three- volume novel, Chivalric Beauties was left unfinished with only two volumes published in 1909 and 1911 respectively, probably because of the social instability after the 1911 Revolution. Among the many resemblances it bears to Qiu Jin’s tanci novel, Shao’s story expresses a similar potency of feminist motivation, which is made clear in the preface: 48 Chapter 2

Among my various feelings [that have stimulated me to write this novel], the strongest is about the darkness of our women’s sphere. I was unfortunate enough to be born as a woman, subject to all kinds of oppressions. As I have perceived, women are as smart and wise as men, but all our freedom and rights are placed in the controlling hands of men. What can be more unfair than this? . . . For one thing, men think that women are as timid as mice, so no matter how much abuse we suffer, we will never rise up and expose it. For another, we women tend to be as lazy as cats and depend too much on men, so even when we are abused by men we dare not strive for justice. . . . Hence the darkness of the women’s sphere we have today. Although men have been doing the utmost wrong, do we women really have nothing to be blamed for? . . . If our women could achieve the same level of civilization and nobility as Western women have done, . . . would men still dare to impose their despotic rule upon us? Dumb as I am, I cannot write a great treatise to awaken our women . . . Therefore, I just write this novel to record what I see and hear in my daily life and add to it my own opinions. . . . My personal wish, more or less, is that we women will long for civilization when aware of the darkness and will be triggered to think about self-strengthening when witnessing the brutal violence against us. That is what has led me to write Chivalric Beauties.58

While not directly adopting Qiu Jin’s allegorical transition from dual slaves to liberty flowers, Shao nonetheless reconstructed a similar pathway toward female enlightenment. Like Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Chivalric Beauties was written in a less elitist literary form—compared with the sophistication of contemporary political commentary. With an evocative emphasis on female-female identification via a restructured sisterhood, it features the social webbing of a mostly female-exclusive59 organization and the institutionalized endeavors of its members to fight against the immense darkness that permeates all aspects and areas of the “women’s sphere.” In this way, like Stones of the Jingwei Bird, the novel extends the imaginary scope of an enlightened sisterhood across class and regional boundaries and calls for a more horizontal, gender- and nation-based mode of feminist bonding. Whereas Qiu Jin’s story attempts to invoke a new and younger “women’s sphere” ahead of her own times, Shao’s, on the other hand, seems inclined to a less utopian and more realistic literary approach. Exhibiting a social fabric that is richer and more complicated than Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Chival- ric Beauties presents both the “women’s sphere” and its challenges in a way that resembles the unfolding of a traditional scroll painting. As the heroines’ occasional sojourns to the residences of their parents, friends, and relatives and the visits from outsiders keep introducing anecdotes and gossips that reveal familial and social problems faced by women, they also experience a series of cycles of disruption and recuperation of their institutionalized sisterhood. Their feminist organization named “Society of Enlightenment” (Xiao- guang hui 曉光會) expands as it struggles against one obstacle after another, From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 49 welcoming new members along the way. Through their struggles, the Soci- ety’s members and their associates deepen their understanding of women’s issues and their encompassing social realities, including conflicts in patriarchal families and the threats brought by social discrimination and misogyny at large. Structurally and stylistically speaking, such a panoramic depiction of the interactions between women and a changing society reflects what Chen Pingyuan has described as the combined influences from Western fiction and the earlier indigenous tradition of “historical writings” (shizhuan 史傳) in late Qing and early Republican fiction, which often attempted to construct a “social history” through literary imagination.60 Yet in terms of the gendered construction of the “women’s sphere,” Shao’s writing can also be seen as a form of creating history—or rather, herstory—with a particular emphasis on the cultivation and expansion of reformist-feminist sisterhood. Shao’s narrative begins in a fictional inland village in Shandong, which epitomizes the lives of common rural women in the last decade of Qing rule. Its critical exposure of social ills and afflictions clearly resonate with John Fryer’s (aka Fu Lanya 傅蘭雅, 1839–1928) and Liang Qichao’s respective advocacy for the use of literature for social interventions. Like the unenlightened minds in Stones of the Jingwei Bird’s Slumberland, the residents of Gold Village—a sarcastic reference to their excessive lust for money—are too numb to realize the enormous changes going on in the nation and the world and, as a result, cling to such backward traditions as foot-binding, arranged marriages, and superstitious rituals, with women often unselfcon- sciously contributing to their own suffering. A group of female visitors led by Hua Jianquan 華澗泉 and Meng Yaqing 孟亞卿 from the Shanghai-based Society of Enlightenment, however, temporarily breaks the stagnancy of village life. Equipped with Western knowledge and donning Western attire, Jianquan and Yaqing are on a speaking tour intended to bring illuminating knowledge to unenlightened women, especially those in rural areas. Because of their very different educational levels and backgrounds, the self-appointed enlighteners and their target audience encounter some communication bar- riers. For example, when Jianquan and Yaqing attempt to explain the idea of “darkness” to a village woman, the latter fails to comprehend the metaphorical use of the word and, taking it literally, claims that the room they are in is already well-lit.61 Notwithstanding such occasional bewilderment, Jianquan and Yaqing manage to attract a number of local women to come to town and attend their public speeches. Hua Jianquan’s first encounter with Xiao Zhifen 蕭芷芬 and Zhifen’s subsequent introduction of Gao Jianchen 高劍塵62 to the Society of Enlight- enment provide exemplary cases of how, through sisterly empathy and com- passion, the members of the feminist organization weave, strengthen, and grow their web of social connections, even if they may still hold nuanced views of womanhood. Though apparently an eloquent and confident speaker 50 Chapter 2 when talking to her rural illiterate audiences, the naively iconoclastic Jian- quan soon encounters a much more competent rival, Zhifen, who embodies a well-balanced mixture of indigenous traditions, including a good training in the Chinese classics, and modern Western knowledge, which has been acquired from her travels across the country with her open-minded literati- official father and overseas studies in Japan and America. According to Zhifen, the Society should get more deeply involved in practical work, such as setting up schools and factories for women, beyond empty talk. Failing to refute Zhifen’s critical suggestions but impressed by her knowledge and wisdom as much as by her shared concern for women’s issues, Jianquan recommends Zhifen to Meng Dimin 孟迪民,63 the female founder of the Society. As Zhifen has already left for another trip to America, she recommends Jianchen to Dimin in her stead, before finally joining the Society after her return. Like Zhifen, Jianchen is endowed with both traditional female gentility and a modern, independent mentality. In addition, by taking pride in being a caring mother and a loving wife, she rejects the idea of an abrupt break from women’s familial roles. While presenting the Society’s institutional sisterhood as the emotional and the social twin pillars of a female-centered community, very much akin to the description of sworn sisterhood in Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Chival- ric Beauties infuses women’s social webbing with more flexibility and hybridity, allowing it to reach far beyond the limited bonds of gentry-girls- turned-students and accommodating challenges as part of the building of an enlightened but not necessarily homogenized female sphere. In pursuing sisterhood and liberation, Qiu Jin’s heroines abandon their families physically as well as spiritually; Shao Zhenhua’s protagonists, in contrast, expand their life possibilities via feminist-reformist societies and networks while maintaining familial ties. In this sense, Shao’s approach seems a little closer to the approach taken by the then-influential Japanese woman educator Shimoda Utako (1854–1936), with whom Qiu Jin briefly studied but later clashed intellectually.64 As the founder of the Jissen Women’s School, Shimoda laid much emphasis on the cultivation of domestic virtues and skills and saw them as essential to “creating a pan-Asian modernity.”65 In Jianchen’s case, in addition to her selective embrace of both traditional and modern cultural elements, her arranged—rather than free—marriage to a husband returning from overseas and her maternal duty to care for her two young children also enrich the novel’s delineation of an enlightened womanhood. Interestingly, while playing a central role in the Society, Jianchen does not formally join the organization, claiming that, as a conscientious “housewife” (zhufu 主婦),66 she can only spare part of her time and energies to work together with Zhifen.67 Her equal attention to feminist-nationalist causes and her own familial and motherly responsibilities seems to suggest that the enlightenment From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 51 of the female sphere does not necessarily mean an abrupt rejection of all aspects of conventional womanhood. Compared with Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Shao’s story is in many ways the less radical of the two, where the social institutionalization of sisterhood is more a much needed reformation than as an abrupt abandonment of biological and familial ties. While also turning to modern Western knowledge as a source of inspiration to rebuild an enlightened Chinese “women’s sphere,” Shao confronts traditional familial relationships in a much less direct manner than Qiu Jin and keeps a cautious distance from an overall Westernization. Reflecting the reformist agenda to transform women from wealth-consumers into wealth-producers, the novel’s female enlighteners address women’s issues not only ideologically but also through concrete social participation, including setting up women’s factories and women’s schools and providing training and working opportunities via a female network. Like the Society, these institutions help to free women from their patriarchal families, equip them with productive skills, and build up a system of mutual support. When implementing this rather pragmatic reformist approach, the female leaders of the Society and its sisterly institutions do not seem to assume a neatly linear transition of the “women’s sphere.” During her debate with Yaqing, for instance, Zhifen refers to herself as “a humble person who does not know what new learning is and what old learning is” and contends, “All that I know is one should emulate whatever is suitable and abandon whatever is not.”68 In a debate with Mu Benshi 木本時,69 Dimin’s secretary Tian Rongsheng 田蓉生 points out that many self-described followers of the “new” school of thought have literally no understanding of what new thought exactly is. She also applies this criticism to the issue of the freedom of marriage, which, as she sees it, is often used by fake reformists as an excuse for their own moral corruption. In addition, a theft incident and a group suicide at some other girls’ schools described in chapters 37 and 38 reveal that not all teachers at these new-style women’s institutions are qualified and responsible educators. Some cling to outdated ideals and practices themselves, and there are others who take advantage of their students to make profits. In this light, even sisterhood-based entities like the Society of En- lightenment are hardly pure embodiments of feminist-reformist ideals. A similar eclectic hybridity is also reinforced by the novel’s title, where the term “chivalric” (xiayi 俠義) hints at a comparable quality between Shao’s heroines with modernized mentalities and the classical female knight- errant (xianü 俠女) archetype. The latter, traditionally, lays much emphasis on heroic women’s loyalty to their families or lords. The word “beauties” (jiaren 佳人), furthermore, not only pays vague tribute to the traditional “scholar and beauty” type of fiction (caizi jiaren xiaoshuo 才子佳人小說) but also alludes to a partial maintenance of femininity in the referential framework of an enlightened womanhood. In the portrayals of its two impor- 52 Chapter 2 tant characters, Gao Jianchen and her husband, Lin Feibai 林飛白, the novel sometimes even hints at the couple’s resemblance to the “scholar and beauty” model, as, for example, is shown in the praise for Feibai’s abilities and Jianchen’s beauty in chapters 21 and 22. As the central character, Jianchen is a resolute supporter of the Confucian teaching that “men and women are different” (nannü youbie 男女有別), even though she defines the differences in a much more liberal manner.70 As if to prove this, the female reformists in the novel owe part of their achievements to the masculine support from open-minded men, which fact makes the Society of Enlightenment and its sisterly organizations less of an exclusively female realm and more of a female-centered institution maintaining connections with society in general. In contrast to Qiu Jin’s portrayal of the patrilineal family foremost as a burden, Shao Zhenhua’s sisterly characters often benefit from the help of their male family members. For instance, it is initially with the financial support from Meng Dimin’s rich and enlightened uncle-turned-adoptive-father that the Society sets up several girls’ schools in Shanghai. When faced with challenges that have to be handled diplomatically and in cooperation with government officials, Jianchen’s husband regularly acts as a heroic rescuer. Aside from helping with a couple of other minor incidents, he saves Bai Huiqin’s 白慧琴 Qihuang Girls’ School 啟黃女學校 (literally, “girls’ school for the enlightenment of the yellow race”) from harassment by male students from a neighboring school and from legal trouble when a student commits suicide after gambling with, and losing money to, her teacher. Such collaboration between the two sexes, to some extent, replaces a monolithic conception of the “women’s sphere” with a more complicated picture—one in which the significance of the new mode of sisterhood is stratified along the lines of feminist movement and of nationalist community building. When developing and expanding their institutionalized sisterhood, Gao Jianchen and her sisterly colleagues constantly restructure their relationships with other women, whose inclusion and exclusion reinforce the imagined community of the “women’s sphere.” A challenge to the group’s harmony arises with the arrival of Mu Benshi, a newly hired consultant to the Society. Mu turns out to be a female villain: not only does she lie about her professional background but she also schemes to help two gangsters blackmail Meng Dimin and Tian Rongsheng. With the help of Rongsheng’s sworn sister’s husband, Dimin and Rongsheng manage to outwit Mu and banish her from the Society. Taking pity on Mu, whom she views as both sufferer and collaborator of the “the darkness facing Chinese women,”71 Dimin treats her mercifully and supplies her with a generous severance payment. Another example concerns Liu Feiqiong 柳飛瓊, the sister of one of Dimin’s students. After being seduced into a polygamous marriage and then abandoned by her dissolute husband, Feiqiong and her baby son fall into the abusive From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 53 hands of the man’s mother and main wife. Fortunately, the Society comes to the rescue and Feiqiong becomes a kindergarten teacher at one of Dimin’s girls’ schools. Such collective and heroic overcoming of difficulties on the part of the chivalric sisters is, simultaneously, subversive and constructive: subversive in its confrontation with both male oppressors and disqualified female members; and constructive in its implementation of new social relationships and practices, which further strengthens the sense of sisterly bonding. Adding to the unbalanced moral and mental conditions within the “women’s sphere” are geographical differences. For example, when setting up her own girls’ school in Jiangyin County, a more conservative social environment in comparison with the cosmopolitan setting of Shanghai, where Di- min’s schools are located, Huiqin finds it challenging to recruit competent teachers. Scouring the county, she meets inept candidates of all types: a lady too undereducated to teach any level above kindergarten, a selfish housewife who does not care at all about the future of the nation, an old granny who is only familiar with outdated traditional doctrines, a stubborn gentry woman who knows nothing about new terms and ideas, and the sloppy wife of a country teacher who rejects all Western knowledge. When the desperate Huiqin takes Jianchen’s advice to ask for help from a Western missionary family, she finds out that, despite the mother and the daughter’s satisfactory mastery of knowledge and skills, their manners seem off-putting to Chinese sensibilities. This prolonged search well illustrates Ying Hu’s view that the discursive configuration of the Chinese New Woman involves various appropriations of her “significant others” (emphasis in the original), including both traditional Chinese women and Western women. 72 Viewed in a slightly different light, these inclusions and exclusions also seem to continue revolving around what Dorothy Ko has summarized as “the very operating principle of the Confucian gender system” in premodern Chi- na—a “twin deployment of ‘women-as-same’ and ‘women-as-different.’”73 The construction of institutional sisterhood as part and parcel of the feminist- nationalist enlightenment of a nationwide “women’s sphere,” however, introduces new criteria for the definition of sameness and difference among women. While still occasionally resorting to gentry or gentry-capitalist familial ties for financial and social aid, the female-centered community made up of Shao’s sisterly characters is broader than traditional familial and local ties, extending far beyond the class limits within which a few exceptionally talented and privileged female literates established their bonds. The incorporation of such a sisterhood in the prevailing enlightenment rhetoric also enables it to overcome the “transitory”74 nature of the extra-familial female communities temporarily formed by gentry women and female entertainers in earlier times. 54 Chapter 2

In its collectively designed blueprint, the Society of Enlightenment advocates a principle of equality regardless of class or ranking and seeks to establish a “nationwide network that can reach every corner of the country” (buman Zhongguo 佈滿中國).75 The teachers and the students at the Society- founded girls’ school treat one another “as if they were sisters,” so much so that the wicked and conservative Mu Benshi criticizes the practice for dis- rupting hierarchical disciplinary order. 76 Although the novel’s depictions of various female characters at different stages of enlightenment still indicate some binary assumptions—urban versus rural, elites versus peasants, masters versus servants, this utopian and egalitarian imagination itself subversively denies the validity of various arbitrary segmentations within the imagined community of enlightened women nationwide. With a looming vision of the “nation” in the making and the nation-based “women’s sphere” as two further institutional frameworks for the new sisterhood imagination, the significance of the Society sometimes tends to be more instrumental than self-contained. That is, just as the sisterhood between Tian Rongsheng and her sworn sister contributes to the construction and protection of institutional sisterhood embodied by the Society, the Society-based sisterhood, in turn, ultimately serves the purpose of establishing an enlightened national community. These different levels or stages of sisterhood potentially form concentric circles around the female self, in a way that resembles the concentric circles in the Confucian world view defined mostly, if not exclusively, from a male perspective. These circles, as Wei-ming Tu has described, “define the self in terms of family, community, country, and the world.”77 The gendered perspective enabled and embodied by sisterhood, however, points toward new developments and alternative approaches in the transforming social imaginary of the late Qing, particularly those made viable by the flexibility, elasticity, and nuances between the feminist and the nationalist ends of the sisterhood spectrum.

REVISING THE SPECTRUM OF SISTERHOOD IN LATE QING WOMEN’S FICTION WRITING

A significant theme in the tradition of Chinese women’s literature, sisterhood was actively reinvented by late Qing women writers like Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua. In the examples set out by the two novels under discussion, the conception and connotation of sisterhood extended beyond its original biological and familial realm to reflect and participate in the newly emerged discourse on the “women’s sphere” against the background of a transitional historical milieu. Fluctuating between the two ends of the feminist-nationalist spectrum of this new mode of sisterhood to constantly negotiate female subject positions and intersubjectivities, the two novels also introduced nu- From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 55 ances into the relationships between women and nation, where the traditionally dominant framework of family-defined women’s roles lost ground and gave in to alternative, overlapping, and contesting reformulations. The self-conscious textual reconstruction and promotion of female- female ties by means of the “women’s sphere” imagination, to begin with, unprecedentedly elevated both the visibility of women as a collective power and the sociopolitical significance of women’s writing in a long male-centered social imaginary and its corresponding male-dominated cultural realm. Although sporadic texts by and about female writing could be found in ancient Chinese literary classics as early as the sixth century BC Book of Odes (Shi jing 詩經),78 the rise of an indigenous women’s literature on a broader scale emerged only in the late Ming, when an economic boom and an accompanying rapid development of the commercial publishing industry, especially in the Yangzi delta region, led to “a craze for works by women and about women.”79 Following the examples of exceptional and usually elitist female poets and scholars of earlier times, whose small literary societies shaped not only their own life experiences but also the nature and appearance of women’s culture in general, more women novelists emerged in the Qing dynasty and manifestly contributed to a women’s fictional narrative tradition of their own.80 Their joint presence in the literary field, though still very limited, led to structural transformations in women’s literary practices and textual communities.81 In Qiu’s and Shao’s novels, the sisterly bond among the enlightened members of the “women’s sphere,” who often actively participate in public speeches and writings, further expanded such female-female ties in a much broader and more horizontal manner that dialectically interacted with, and was empowered by, nationalist agendas. In the context of the rise of late Qing “new fiction,” or xin xiaoshuo 新小說, women authors’ restructuring of sisterhood indicated an increasingly influential female participation in the more and more entangled relationship between literature and politics, or more specifically, between writing and nation-building. Drawing upon both the Confucian tradition of seeing literature as a vehicle for the Dao (wen yi zai dao 文以載道) and the promotion of fiction for social purposes by the English missionary and publisher John Fryer, Liang Qichao advocated for a new, politicized way of writing fiction that was intended to reform the mentality of Chinese readers and lead to the cultivation of “new people” (xinmin 新民). In 1902, Liang established the journal New Fiction (xin xiaoshuo 新小說) in Yokohama, Japan, and published in its first issue his pivotal article on the instrumental use of literature, “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People” (Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi 論小說與群治之關係), which elevated fiction from a traditionally marginal status to a place of central prominence and proposed a “revolution in fiction” (xiaoshuojie geming 小說界革命).82 This reformist emphasis on “the educational values of fiction,”83 as Amy 56 Chapter 2

Dooling has keenly observed, happened to correspond with “the didactic Confucian literature for women of earlier periods”84 and hence facilitated women’s participation in such literary interventions, which were, by nature and definition, both political and aesthetic. Reflecting the changes concerning female-female relationships beyond the patrilineal family, literary sisterhood in Qiu Jin’s and Shao Zhenhua’s novels both crystallized the new ideals about modern Chinese womanhood and embodied a feasible textual means to coordinate between the subjects and the objects of this enlightenment project. Because of the gendered inner/ outer boundary, women in premodern China had their roles, identities, and relationships mostly defined by their patriarchal familial institutions, even though this did not mean that there was absolutely no way to circumvent or undermine the rules. In literary and artistic narratives, familial ties also served as an institutional means to facilitate sisterly bonding in traditional tanci novels, for example, Sun Deying’s 孫德英 (ca. 1841–?) The Goldfish Romance (Jinyu yuan 金魚緣).85 While obviously drawing upon earlier sisterhood representations, the politically charged women’s fictional works of the late Qing, whose heroic characters and implied readers were both enthusiastically involved in a nationwide reformation of womanhood, shifted the defining framework of sisterhood from biological/familial kinship to the newly imagined “women’s sphere.” Regarding the plotlines, biological sisterhood is quite prominently undermined in both Qiu’s and Shao’s novels, giving way to empathetic and ideological identification among female feminist activists who are biologically unconnected. In Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Huang Jurui’s biological sister Shuren 淑仁, though only a couple of years younger than her elder sister and sleeping in a bedroom right next to Jurui’s, is barely mentioned in the story, except for reference to her “gentle disposition.”86 Likewise, the biological sisterhood between Lady Liang and Madame Bao is also overshadowed by the sharp contrast between their personalities and demeanors—the former is depicted as jealous, irritable, and mean, the latter as kind and good-tempered. In Chivalric Beauties, Dimin has an under-educated and ill-tempered biological sister Zhimin 智民,87 who, as a jealous wife of a lascivious and useless man, seems much more mentally distant from Dimin than the latter’s strong- willed and enlightened female colleagues. Also absent in these two novels is another mode of sisterhood often seen in traditional Chinese literature both by male and by female writers alike, namely, the sisterly bonding between wives and concubines, which depends as much on the patriarchal family as does biological sisterhood, only with the patriarchal role of the father replaced by that of the husband’s. In Chen Duansheng’s Love Reincarnated, for instance, Meng Lijun 孟麗君 and her wet nurse’s daughter Su Yingxue 蘇映雪 grow up like two sisters and are ultimately married to the same husband. Similarly, the two female protago- From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 57 nists in Li Yu’s (李漁, 1610–1680) play Women in Love (Lian xiang ban 憐香伴) choose to marry the same husband so that they can maintain their intimate sisterhood after marriage, a dream that Fan Shiyiniang 范十一娘 also holds but fails to realize in “Feng Sanniang” 封三娘 of Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 (1640–1775) Strange Tales from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異).88 Because of their strong opposition to polygamous marriages, both Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Chivalric Beauties, in contrast, dismiss marrying the same man as a means of sisterly bonding. The relationship between the wife and the concubine, as represented in the families of Jurui, Jade, and Zhimin, is always full of rivalry, jealousy, and tension. In these representations, the polygamous family no longer serves as an institutional agent to realize or reconfirm sisterly bonding but, instead, constitutes a major obstacle in the construction of enlightened feminist sisterhood. The trope of sisterhood between wives and concubines of the same husband in the fiction of Ming and Qing dynasties, as Tze-lan Deborah Sang has pointed out, often ambiguously hints at female-female erotic love as a mim- icry of the heterosexual marriage model. 89 In Qiu’s and Shao’s novels, in contrast, sisterhood is based upon shared ideologies and ambitions rather than any erotic ties. In addition, unlike the female-female (fake-)couples in earlier tanci novels—Meng Lijun and Su Yingxue in Love Reincarnated and Li Yu’e 李玉娥 and Qian Shurong 錢淑容 in The Goldfish Romance, for instance—the bonding among Qiu Jin’s and Shao Zhenhua’s sisterly characters does not employ the transgender practice summarized in the idiomatic expression “simulated love union between a woman and her cross-dressed female companion” (jia feng xu huang 假鳳虛凰). Instead of resorting to a temporary masculine pretense for justification of women’s heroic adventures, both novels directly eulogize female heroism. When their feminist heroines with unbound feet occasionally choose to wear men’s shoes, as does Hua Jianquan in Chivalric Beauties,90 the texts’ emphasis is on the sisterly figures’ attempts to redefine women’s roles rather than performing men’s roles through cross-dressing per se.91 Interestingly, in contrast to some of Qiu Jin’s real-life practices, in which she was not only brave enough to wear men’s clothes—as well as such marks of manhood as a sword, which she wears in one of her widely circulated photos—but was also sometimes addressed in masculine terms, 92 such gender subversiveness in Stones of the Jingwei Bird is mostly conducted through an embrace and celebration of female heroic excellence, instead of a cross-dressed performance of masculinity. These challenges to conventional passive femininity, which recall Qiu’s narrator’s comment that “the division between men and women are being broken down and women have risen to the stage where they rouse the world,”93 resemble what Jessica Benjamin has termed the “ability to disidentify.”94 This ability, contends Benjamin, “is decisive for the reflexive process that makes ideals and identities separable and fluid rather than 58 Chapter 2 compulsory and coercive.”95 In Qiu’s and Shao’s novels, such fluidity, in turn, further undermines the Confucian gender roles by separating female- female bonding from the conventional, family-defined paradigm and empha- sizing women’s intersubjective sociality and agency that transcends familial boundaries. More broadly speaking, the textual reconstruction of sisterhood dialectically interacted with the transformations in the social structure of women’s reading and writing communities, leading to new forms of extratextual sisterhood that finally reached a scope somewhat comparable, but by no means equal, to metaphorical brotherhood. As can be seen from the saying in the ancient Confucian classic The Analects (Lunyu 論語), that “Within the four seas, all men are brothers” (Sihai zhi nei, jie xiongdi ye 四海之內，皆兄弟也),96 brotherhood has long been a primary connector of male subjects across familial and social boundaries. Women’s circles, on the other hand, were foremost defined by kinship and seldom reached the inclusive scope of brotherhood. Even when elitist guixiu women97 occasionally formed their own literary societies and social ties, often by exchanging writings, such networks remained limited and often largely dependent on familial connections. With the escalating dissemination of feminist works by women writers, like that of Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua, in the late Qing amid a burgeoning modern print culture, female-centered modes of language and knowledge were increasingly transmitted beyond family- and class-based communities, with authors and readers sharing quite rebellious attitudes toward existing gender biases and paving the way for more iconoclastic feminists and “new women” in the later Republican era. On the part of women novelists themselves, writing always provided a way to construct and perform gendered subjectivities, with the possibilities of extending agency beyond the textual level to intervene in the social realities faced by them and their female readers. In this process, sisterhood was both a much favored subject matter and a metaphorical theme mirroring the sense of bonding between the author and her implied reader. This is probably why sisterhood was so important for women tanci novelists and their readers in late imperial China, a time when, as Hu Siao-chen has pointed out in Talented Women Burning the Midnight Oil, the sisterly figures in these authors’ families often served both as their first readers and as the major source of inspiration for their writing. For the late Qing promoters of “new fiction,” which was defined much more by its strong political agenda than by a set of shared artistic features, female authorship was often considered to be the most effective means of disseminating new ideas in the “women’s sphere,” in spite of the fact that female novelists were still largely outnumbered by their male peers, as was the case of early women’s magazines. Collectively, the “new fiction” that targeted at female readers faced the same challenge, as did popular newspapers like Shenbao, namely, how to evolve from “talking From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 59 about women to talking to women” (emphasis in the original).98 In his book Blood of Liberty (Ziyou xue 自由血), a collection of translations and articles about the history of Russian anarchism, the male feminist Jin Yi writes, “it is more effective and powerful for a woman to make her voice heard in society than for a hundred men to shout at the top of their voices before an audience of ten thousand.”99 In late Qing women’s fictional writing like Qiu Jin’s and Shao Zhenhua’s, female authorial voices not only reinforced the central position of sisterhood in the relationships among the author, the reader, and the text, making it into a much richer and more active site, but also publicized the female—but not necessarily feminine—focus of the “women’s sphere” as a source of women’s social and political agency. 100 Like the targeting of a female audience in print products examined in the previous chapter, as well as “the female gendering of the implied reader” Barbara Mittler has found in the commercial advertising in Shenbao,101 these stories embraced both a rising awareness of a growing mass female readership and an instrumental agenda to educate them. In Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Nancy Armstrong has discussed the formation of “the masculine and feminine spheres” in the case of the British novel, in which “a modern, gendered form of subjectivity developed first as a feminine discourse in certain literature for women before it provided the semiotic of nineteenth century poetry and psychological theory.”102 In semicolonial China at the turn of the twentieth century, the discursive emergence of the “women’s sphere” also embodied “a modern gendered form of subjectivity,” albeit in very different ways and along a very different trajectory. 103 Both the employment of autobiographical 104 elements in Qiu’s and Shao’s novels and the intrusive presence of authorial power help the interpel- lation of female subjectivity to reach beyond the textual level and to invite the implied female reader’s responses in the social realm. In Stones of the Jingwei Bird, Qiu Jin often brings in her personal voice through verse, which, being traditionally sung by the performer to introduce the following storytelling parts in prose and to make extradiegetic references and comments, is a “main engine of narration” unique to tanci novels.105 In the lines of verse at the beginning of the second chapter, for instance, Qiu Jin writes:

A brisk wind accompanies the winter season, and the Japanese landscape evokes a thousand emotions. I contemplate the crisis now facing China and how hopeless the situation is without any heroes to come to the rescue. My emotions overwhelm me, making it impossible to study, so I sit here before the lamp and continue to write our story.106

Unlike the English translation, the flexible syntax of the Chinese language actually allows the original text to make no mention of “I” / “my” / “our” 60 Chapter 2 when dealing with such an apparently personalized passage. The narrator’s reference to overseas study in Japan, however, well matches Qiu Jin’s own life experience, in the same way as the sisterly bonding among her female protagonists resembles the relationship between Qiu Jin and her sisterly friends, such as her sworn sisters Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, as well as her friend and fellow female poet Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1884–1943). Occasionally, Qiu Jin even more directly addresses her audience, inviting them to identify with the female characters in the novel and their shared independent spirit. In the verse part at the beginning of the fifth chapter, for instance, the narrator notes:

I imagine that readers who learned of what the girls discussed in the previous section were pained. . . . Speaking of all the ways in which women suffer, how can I, the author, prevent my tears from flowing? But I pray that my readers ponder these words and that they don’t treat this book like any ordinary novel. . . . I only hope that every one of my sisters can find a way to become independent and stop relying on men.107

In such direct addresses, which read much like the nonfictional writings and speeches of the author and her feminist activist colleagues, the narrator mixes the textual and the extratextual constructions of female subjectivities and passes on both the authorial authority and the textual agency of the characters to her readers. Similarly, though in a less intrusive manner, the narrator’s voice in Chiv- alric Beauties can be directly heard when introducing Dimin’s Society of Enlightenment, a passage in which she refers to herself as the “story-teller” (shuoshuren 說書人) and comments on Dimin’s “excessive kindness” and occasional irresolution when faced with bad people. 108 In Chapter 39, the novel makes a brief reference to “the author” (zhuzhe 著者) as the extradiegetic provider of background information of Jianchen’s cousin-in-law Tie Shuangying 鐵霜英.109 Elsewhere, “notes” (an 按) are occasionally inserted—for instance, after narrating the suicide of a wronged girl student in Chapter 38110—that make authoritative comments on the plots and characters. Moreover, with its characterization of the major heroines often mirroring the author’s personal life, particularly her liberal gentry family background, and its direct articulation of support for reformist ideals of womanhood through the speeches and conversations of the fictional feminist enlighteners, the novel features an intervening didacticism that echoes not only Liang Qichao’s argument on fiction as a political instrument but also the writing style of Liang’s own political novel The Future of a New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中國未來記). At the initial meeting between Gao Jian- chen and Meng Dimin, for instance, the author includes a long conversation between the two on issues concerning women’s education and profession. From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 61

These passages are obviously designed more to educate the implied reader than to entertain her. Like many other self-assumed cultural reformers of the late Qing and beyond, Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua were well aware of the stratification of their imagined readership, a situation similar to a conflict Leo Lee and An- drew Nathan have described as being “between the ‘elevation’ of taste and content . . . and the need to accommodate . . . existing popular tastes and values in order to achieve a wide audience” from the late Qing through the early Maoist period.111 In Qiu’s and Shao’s novels, sisterhood and women’s own cultural traditions served as an effective textual and extratextual means of identification to shorten the distance between the diametrically opposed poles of the elitist and the subaltern in the “women’s sphere.” At the same time, the two authors obviously took into consideration the varied reading habits, tastes, and concerns among their imagined readers and mediated their feminist-nationalist messages in a manner with the intent of appealing to as wide an audience as possible. In her 1907 article “To All My Sisters,” Qiu Jin complained about the abstruse language found in the influential journal Women’s World and claimed that the goal of her own periodical, Chinese Women’s Journal, was to deliver enlightening messages to semiliterate women—a group, according to the author’s estimate, that included 80 to 90 percent of the Chinese population at the time. 112 Both Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Chivalric Beauties employed much plainer language in order to reach a much broader female readership. While “the cultural construction of subjectivity,” as Catherine Belsey has described, is “[o]ne of the central issues of feminism,”113 neither women writers like Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua nor their heroic female characters were entirely autonomous agents. As Dorothy Ko and Zheng Wang have pointed out, even some of the vocabulary employed by early Chinese feminists, such as the term “women’s rights,” was “a by-product of China’s emulating a Western-style nation state in order to resist Western imperialism” that caused “the feminist project [to be] implicated in a problematic nationalist scheme from the start.”114 Yet on the other hand, as Joan Judge has put it, the female writers were by no means “completely conditioned by a nationalist discourse that left them without agency or intentionality” either.115 Rather, in either literary or metaphorical terms, female authorship is the product of “a multiplicity of social and cultural forces,”116 with subjectivities “structured by the symbolic codes of existing narratives.”117 If the “new fiction,” as Liang Qichao and other reformists advocated, was purposed to bring about a modernized mode of subjectivity among a national readership, especially women and the lesser-educated, female participation in this literary category became particularly significant. An ambiguous instability between the feminist end and the nationalist end, as embodied by the newly reconstructed and much expanded sisterhood spectrum in Qiu Jin’s and Shao 62 Chapter 2

Zhenhua’s novels, however, also led to the elasticity and fluidity of such sisterhood imaginations, which correlated with “the historically unstable nature of the relationship between women and the nation.”118 Since language plays a decisive role in the construction of subjectivity, 119 we may as well consider the struggle to come up with a self-conscious feminist language around the central notion of sisterhood the essential core of the transforming and transformative literary practices concerning late Qing women’s fiction writing. Having challenged the patriarchal hierarchical sociocultural relations through which women used to be defined, the sisterhood imaginations in Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Chivalric Beauties provide a much larger and more flexible space for female subject positions by frequently turning to a rather unstable intersection between nationalist patriotism and women’s cultural traditions, especially the heroism of exemplary women in history. Describing women’s collective coming-of-age, the two novels involve various dimensions of enlightenment, which are constantly justified, but not necessarily always contained, by the nationalist master narrative. For example, when Jianchen recommends a foreign missionary to Huiqin as a candidate for teaching at the latter’s girls’ school in Chivalric Sisters, Huiqin insists that the foreign teacher not “interfere with [the school’s] sovereignty [zhuquan 主權].”120 Given China’s ongoing national crises at the time, the mention of “sovereignty” here obviously has nationalist connotations, but it also self-reflexively points to a stance of indigenous female subjectivity. Amid dramatic sociocultural transformations in which course women’s traditions, like many other indigenous traditions, were often overwhelmingly negatively evaluated, the “sovereign” perspective led to an ambiguous sense of continuity beyond historical periodization. Despite its obvious limitations and problematic implications of women as embodiments of national essence, such continuity is effectively rendered as an empowering source for women’s collective and transhistorical agency. This transcendence seems, in a way, to parallel the sisterly characters’ transcendence from a dual slavery or gendered “darkness,” with both prioritizing Chinese women’s own self-conscious awareness of their subjecthood. In this sense, Qiu’s and Shao’s sisterhood narratives invite a reading of women’s participation in late Qing feminist-nationalist movements from a special “third” position, which, as Cheryl Walker has suggested, “does not naively assert that the writer is an originating genius, creating aesthetic objects outside of history, but does not diminish the importance of difference and agency in the responses of women writers to historical formations.”121 When represented in a hybridized framework situated in a grey area between the “old” and the “new,” such subjectivities may be more easily relatable to the implied female reader. One such example is Qiu Jin’s employment, at the beginning of her novel, of the Queen Mother in Heaven (Yaochi Wangmu 瑤池王母) as a supernatural agent used to instigate feminist- From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 63 nationalist struggles. Concerned with the painful sufferings of the people of Slumberland under the reign of the usurper emperor, especially the unfair and painful treatment of women there, the Queen Mother calls for a meeting of historical and legendary figures122 who have become immortal because of their heroic—oftentimes patriotic—deeds and dispatches them to descend to the human world to fulfill two tasks: overthrowing the racially suspect emperor and implementing equality between men and women. Aware that such an employment of supernatural power, a sort of deus ex machina, does not accord with her advocacy for modern mentality, the narrator explains that her intention is not to encourage superstition, which she views as a prominent aspect of women’s lack of knowledge, but to promote the spirits of those chosen heroic figures. Interestingly, although the plot about divine intervention is apparently underdeveloped in the following chapters, it is still hinted at occasionally, especially as an implicit suggestion for sisterhood. When Jurui and Little Jade first meet, for instance, they both feel that “they ha[ve] known each other before,” which leads to Jurui’s comment, “Sister! Were we not destined to meet today!”123 For a reader familiar with the trope of divine intervention in earlier women’s tanci novels, the indication that Qiu Jin’s revolutionary characters are actually incarnations of those immortals helps to legitimize and reinforce their stances, arguments, and emotions. If the textual sisterhood shared by Qiu’s and Shao’s feminist-nationalist characters serves as an instrumental means to instigate a similar transformation among their female readers, it does so in particular by way of emulation and exclusion, two behavioral modes that, according to Joan Judge, are “crucial to the constitution of new female subjectivities in the early twentieth century.”124 The judgment, in turn, is made with regard to the acquisition of modern mentality—most notably, independence and knowledge of enlightenment. On the positive side, the novels provide their readers with role models like Jurui and Jianchen; on the negative side, they also present cases where sisterhood is not yet fully formed and where unqualified figures are refused or expelled from the circle of sisters. In the latter vein, the expulsion of Mu Benshi and her recommender in Chivalric Beauties obviously denotes the abandonment—not without sympathy, though—of certain backward features of the women’s sphere. Such self-conscious regulations of the female institution and community, to borrow from Jessica Benjamin’s psychological theorization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, manifest a symbolic “authorship” of the subjective “intention.”125 Jurui’s delay in Stones of the Jingwei Bird in taking her admiration for Hibiscus further into sworn sisterhood, on the other hand, provides a more nuanced, if not paradoxical, case about the conditions and limitations of sisterly bonding within the “women’s sphere.” While Hibiscus has partly acquired a modernized female mentality, she still needs to be freed from her social role as a maid to become a qualified “sister.” Apparently, Jurui’s 64 Chapter 2 decision seems less an indicator of her, or the author’s, social bias against lower class women than a sign of her emphasis on women’s independence, of which Hibiscus is deprived when being a servant. Not only does Jurui claim that she finds “no difference between high and low” and treat the maid as an equal by asking her to sit down and talk face to face with Jurui, but the more egalitarian Little Jade even believes that, in some sense, women of the lower class enjoy more freedom than women of the upper class, because they “can always go out to work as a servant to make a living,” whereas gentry women like herself cannot.126 Nevertheless, with the often gendered understanding of independence, like Liang Qichao’s gendered interpretation of “wealth production” and women’s economic independence, or their lack of it, Jurui’s temporary delay in officially recognizing Hibiscus as a sworn sister implies a potential discord within the dual slavery narrative, where a shared suffering of social inferiors is supposed to serve as a means to facilitate collective identification among all Chinese women rather than acting as a divisive factor. In this light, the story seems reminiscent of the old Confucian gender paradigm that features a “twin deployment of ‘women-as-same’ and ‘women-as-different.’”127

CONCLUSION

Women’s culture and self-imagining, as Dorothy Ko has pointed out, “is born not only of individual women’s self-perceptions, but also of their evolving relationships with other women, with the world of men, and with the imaginative terrains peopled by literary characters, historical figures, and legendary heroes.”128 The two works examined in this chapter well illustrate the mutual interactions between, on the one hand, women’s own inner perspectives about female roles, identities, and subjectivities and, on the other hand, their responses to the public discourse on the reformation of Chinese womanhood. As part of this hermeneutic process, the reinvention of literary sisterhood and its extratextual application in the social realm echoed the nationalist construction of the “women’s sphere” but re-shaped it into a much stronger and more self-conscious feminist stance. In particular, by introducing a feminist-nationalist spectrum of sisterhood into women’s literary imagination and combining it with women’s collective pursuit of liberty and enlightenment, Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua expanded the ways in which female- female ties could be imagined and represented; they also restructured the relationships among female authorship, women’s literature, its female readership, and an imagined nationwide, female-centered community as embodied by the “women’s sphere.” Because of their ideological innovations concerning the reformation of traditional Chinese womanhood and thematic focus on the “women’s From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 65 sphere,” Stones of the Jingwei Bird and Chivalric Beauties may serve as two important cases at the intersection of “new fiction” and “fiction of the women’s sphere” (nüjie xiaoshuo 女界小說), showing the close but also contested relationship between politics and literature, especially on the subjects of gender and nation. The “fiction of the women’s sphere” was, of course, itself a product of the discursive popularity of the “women’s sphere” and seminal feminist books such as Jin Yi’s A Bell to the Women’s Sphere. In her preface to a work by another woman writer, Wang Miaoru’s A Flower of the Women’s Prison, which was marketed as representative of this new literary category, a critic named “Yu Peilan from Qiantang” (Qiantang Yu Peilan 錢塘俞佩蘭) defined this gendered generic label as “fiction concerning women’s rights and women’s learning” (jiang nüquan nüxue zhi xiaoshuo 講女權女學之小說) and praised Wang’s novel for contributing to the promising future of the “women’s sphere.”129 Ironically, while Yu Peilan’s definition can be appropriately applied to Qiu Jin’s and Shao Zhenhua’s novels, and probably even the works of some male writers such as Zhong Xinqing’s The Torch of Civilization for a Twenti- eth-Century Women’s Sphere, some other literary works bearing similar la- bels, like Cuotuozi’s The Newest Report of a Ghostly Field in the Women’s Sphere, espoused quite opposite aims. Instead of attacking the old customs in the “women’s sphere,” they aimed at exposing the new practices that cultural conservatives at the time saw as morally corrupt or inappropriate. Even more interestingly, because of the burgeoning public attention paid to women and women’s issues, the term “women’s sphere” was also appropriated at times as a selling point. For example, Wang Lang’s A Dirty History of the Wom- en’s Sphere was at least partially a commercial advertisement for its so- called “publisher,” the Qiangxuan Book and Medicine Company (Qiangxuan shuyaoju 強軒書藥局).130 These different approaches obviously illustrate the divergent attitudes toward the emerging “women’s sphere” and the accompanying new modes of female subjectivities and intersubjectivities presented in sisterhood narratives, which, as is shown in Qiu’s and Shao’s works, often stretch beyond the traditional Confucian familial paradigm and exhibit a subtle flexibility between the feminist and the nationalist ends of the new sisterhood spectrum. As a result, the contesting literary manifestations may be read as a tale of two sisterhoods, a topic that will be discussed in the following chapter.

NOTES

1. Qiu Jin, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” trans. Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson, in Writing Women in Modern China, eds. Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 43. In this chapter, some of the citations from Stones of the Jingwei Bird are quoted from Dooling and Torgeson’s translation—marked as being cited from “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird.” Others are my 66 Chapter 2 own—marked as directly cited from Stones of the Jingwei Bird (Taipei: Zhongguo Guomin- dang zhongyang weiyuanhui dangshi weiyuanhui, 1982). 2. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 43–44. 3. Ellen Widmer, “Gentility in Transition: Travels, Novels, and the New Guixiu,” in The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, eds. Daria Berg & Chloë Starr (New York: Routledge, 2007), 22. 4. Amy D. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 30. 5. See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1990), 313–424 and Huang Jin-Zhu, “Women’s Travels in the Fiction by Late Qing Female Writers: The Cases of Gu Taiqing, Wang Miaoru, Shao Zhenhua, and Huang Cuining,” Litera- ture and Philosophy 22 (2013): 447. 6. Wilt Idema and Lloyd Haft, A Guide to Chinese Literature (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997), 234. 7. For book-length scholarly manuscripts on tanci novels authored by and targeted at literate gentry women in late imperial China, see Hu Siao-chen, Talented Women Burning the Midnight Oil (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2008); Bao Zhenpei, Research on Tanci Novels Written by Women Writers in the Qing Dynasty (Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2008); and Li Guo, Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2015). 8. So far little has been known about Zhong, except that he was also the author of the 1907 political novel New Camellias (Xin chahua 新茶花). For more on The Torch of Civilization for a Twentieth- Century Women’s Sphere, see Li Guo, Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China, 10–11; for more on New Camellias, see Chen Pingyuan, The Starting Point of Modern Chinese Fiction (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005), 218. 9. See A Ying, Casual Discussions on Fiction, Part Two (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1958), 170. 10. See Guo Yanli, “A Brief Chronicle of Qiu Jin’s Life,” in Research Materials on Qiu Jin, ed. Guo Yanli (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987), 18. 11. Ibid., 25. 12. In her conversations with her friends and her letters to her elder brother, Qiu Jin complained about the lack of support from her husband. It was also known that Qiu Jin paid her tuition and living costs in Japan with her own dowry, instead of money from her husband or his family. See ibid., 26–27. However, according to a memoir of Qiu Jin’s Japanese friend Shigeko Hattori, who had met Wang Zifang in person, Wang had a gentle manner and even asked Hattori to take care of his wife. See Xia Xiaohong, “Qiu Jin during Her Beijing Period,” Tribune of Social Sciences 7 (2012): 87–88. 13. Ying Hu, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning,” Late Imperial China 25.2 (2004): 119. 14. See Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psycho- analysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), 106–7. 15. See Haiping Yan, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–1948 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 52. 16. See Guo Yanli, “A Brief Chronicle of Qiu Jin’s Life,” 53. 17. Ibid., 51. 18. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 43. Here Dooling and Torgeson’s translation takes some liberties in rendering the original nütongbao 女同胞 or “female compatriots” (Qiu, Stones of the Jingwei Bird, 63) into “sister compatriots” at no cost of accuracy, because the author uses these terms interchangeably throughout the novel. Another example is “two hundred million sisters” (erwanwan zimei 二萬萬姊妹). 19. Ibid., 43–44. 20. Despite Qiu Jin’s explicit anti-Manchu political agenda, when focusing on the issue of gender oppression, her reference to Han women and to Chinese women in general are almost interchangeable. It is probably because, as Mary Backus Rankin has remarked, in Qiu Jin’s feminist-nationalist project, her “traditional xenophobic roots” were overwhelmed by her acceptance of “the quasi-Social Darwinist analysis that China was on the verge of extinction in a From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 67 struggle for survival against the more vigorous imperialist West”; see Rankin, “The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch’ing,” in Women in Chinese Society, eds. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 18. 21. Li Yu-ning and Chang Yu-fa, eds., Historical Materials on the Modern Chinese Wom- en’s Movement, 1842–1911 (Taipei: Longwen chubanshe, 1995), vol. 1, 417. 22. Rebecca Karl, “‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China’s Global Con- text,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, eds. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 244. 23. As will be discussed later, it is worth noting that the word “sister” is used in the novel not only by the major female characters to address each other but also by the narrator to address her female audience. 24. The characters’ names in this novel often have implications relevant to its theme. The family name Huang, for instance, means “yellow” and hints at the overwhelming public concern about the survival of the yellow Chinese race. This particular family name was also adopted by quite a few other fictional works of the time, e.g., Yisuo’s Huang Xiuqiu. 25. Despite Qiu Jin’s original 20-chapter plan, the writing of this tanci novel was interrupted by her revolutionary activities. While the author worked out the titles for the individual chapters, she finished writing only six chapters before she was executed, with two serialized in her short-lived Chinese Women’s Journal. The preface, six chapters, and the titles of the remaining 14 chapters, however, offer the reader a rough outline of the whole story. 26. Ping-chen Hsiung, “Female Gentility in Transition and Transmission: Mother-Daughter Ties in Ming/Qing China,” in The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, eds. Daria Berg and Chloë Starr (New York: Routledge, 2007), 98. 27. For example, in Chen Duansheng’s 陳端生 (1751–ca. 1796) unfinished Love Reincar- nated (Zaisheng yuan 再生緣), one of the most influential tanci novels in Qing dynasty, it is the inseparable mother-daughter tie that finally pressures the female protagonist Meng Lijun into acknowledging her real identity. See Chen Duansheng, Love Reincarnated (Beijing: Huax- ia chubanshe, 2000). For more about Love Reincarnated, which was later completed by Liang Desheng 梁德繩 (1771–1847) and edited, revised, and re-titled by Hou Zhi 侯芝 (aka Hou Xiangye 侯香葉, ca. 1768–ca. 1830), see Bao Zhenpei, Research on Tanci Novels Written by Women Writers in the Qing Dynasty, 221–27 and Hu Siao-chen, Talented Women Burning the Midnight Oil, 71–77, 100–139. 28. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 51. 29. Ibid., 55–56. 30. Ibid., 58. 31. Ibid., 71. 32. Ibid., 71–72. 33. Qiu, Stones of the Jingwei Bird, 102. 34. Ibid., 104. 35. Ibid., 87. 36. Karl, “‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China’s Global Context,” 222. 37. There was in reality an influential revolutionary organization called “Restoration Soci- ety” between 1904 and 1912, of which Qiu Jin was an active member. Some of its other prominent participants included Tao Chengzhang 陶成章 (1878–1912), Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1869–1936), and Xu Xilin 徐錫麟 (1873–1907). There were also two sisters who were Qiu Jin’s students and followers, Yin Ruizhi 尹銳志 (1891–1948) and Yin Weijun 尹維峻 (1896–1919). For more on the Yin sisters, see Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 48 and Zhou Jinsan, “Yin Ruizhi and Zhou Yawei,” in Recollections of the 1911 Revolution in Zhejiang, ed. Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Zhej- iang Committee, Historical Materials Research Committee (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1981), 110–19. 38. Qiu, Stones of the Jingwei Bird, 106. 39. Guo Pu, Classic of the Mountains and the Seas, anno. Yuan Ke (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980), 92–93. 68 Chapter 2

40. Ren Fang, Records of the Strange, reprinted in The Selected Essence of the Four Branches of Learning: The Zi Branch (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1963), vol. 1, 2. 41. Gu Tinglin, Selected Poems and Articles of Gu Tinglin (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 279. 42. Zhao Tieqing, “To the Portrait of Jingwei Filling up the Sea,” in Collected Poems by Forty Late Qing Poets, ed. Wu Kaisheng (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 2006), 188. 43. See Huang Zunxian, “To Liang Renfu, Who Passed the Civil Service Examination in the Same Year as I Did,” in The Annotated Collected Poems of Huang Zunxian, anno. Liu Shinan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 62–63. 44. Qiu, Stones of the Jingwei Bird, 64–65. 45. Ibid., 66. 46. Karl, “‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China’s Global Context,” 243. 47. Earlier in the same article, Judge explains that she adopts the distinction made by Chandra Talpade Mohanty between “Woman” and “women,” with the former referring to a “cultural and ideological composite Other constructed through diverse representational discourses” and the latter referring to “women as real material subjects of their collective histories”; see Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalism and Female Sub- jectivities in Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106.3 (2001): 765, 768. Also see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 53. 48. As will be discussed later, the trope of divine power was a generic tradition of women’s tanci novels in imperial times. 49. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 49. 50. Ibid., 61. 51. For more on Zhang Xuecheng’s promotion of “women’s learning,” see Susan Mann, “‘Fuxue’ [women’s learning] by Zhang Xuecheng (1728–1801): China’s First History of Women’s Culture,” Late Imperial China 13.1 (1992): 40–62. 52. Though he actually wrote the story by himself, Zhang claimed that it was a translation from a work by a “Diasporic Jew named ‘Endless Sorrows’” (Youtai yimin Wanguhen 猶太移民萬古恨). See Ziyou Feng, An Informal History of Revolution (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 3, 67–68. For more on Freedom of Marriage, see A Ying, History of Late Qing Fiction (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2009), 90–96. For a contemporary edition, see Wanguhen and Ziyouhua, “Freedom of Marriage,” in Compendium of Late Imperial Chinese Fiction: The Woman Hero from Eastern Europe, Freedom of Marriage, A Prophecy on the Tragic Dissection of China, A Tale of Revenge, The Stone of Goddess Nüwa, How Many Heads, The Soul of Rousseau, (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1991), 103–286. 53. Gu Tinglin, Selected Poems and Articles of Gu Tinglin, 279. 54. See Xia Xiaohong, “The Death of Qiu Jin and the ‘Qiu Jin Literature’ in Late Qing,” Journal of Shanxi University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 27.2 (2004): 2. 55. See ibid. and also Xia Xiaohong, Late Qing Women and Modern China (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004), 286–314. 56. The origin of the phrase “asking the fisherman” is probably associated with the ancient melody “A Dialogue between a Fisherman and a Woodcutter” (Yu qiao wen da 漁樵問答), which features a reclusive spirit and encourages a free and easy attitude toward secular interests. As the following discussion will show, while advocating a feminist-reformist enlightenment, Shao was less radically subversive than Qiu Jin and somewhat more tolerant toward the traditional gentry-literati culture. 57. For more about the Shao and the Lao families, see Huang Jin-Zhu, “Shao Zhenhua and Her Chivalric Beauties,” Late Qing Fiction 30 (2007): 132–43. 58. Shao Zhenhua, Chivalric Beauties, in Compendium of Late Imperial Chinese Fiction: Women’s Rights, Chivalric Beauties, and A Flower of the Women’s Prison (Nanchang: Baihua- zhou wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 85–86. 59. While all the leaders and major members of the Society of Enlightenment are women, the financial sponsor is Meng Dimin’s childless uncle; in addition, Dimin has also hires several male employees, such as the Society’s accountant. From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 69

60. See Chen Pingyuan, The Transformation of the Narrative Modes of Chinese Fiction (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2003), 221. 61. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 122. 62. The given name Jianchen literally means “sword dust” and indicates the same kind of female heroism highlighted in Stones of the Jingwei Bird. 63. The given name Dimin literally means “inspiring people.” 64. In Joan Judge’s reading, the tensions and conflicts between Utako Shimoda and Qiu Jin revealed contradictions between a more conservative nationalist approach toward women, which advocated for the preservation of feminine virtues, and a more radical nationalist stand, which emphasized women’s political and social subjectivities; see Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 765–803. 65. Prasenjit Duara, The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation (New York: Routledge, 2009), 120–21. For more on Qiu Jin and Shimoda, see also Yan, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–1948, 26, 52–54. 66. Here Jianchen’s use of term “housewife” is very modern, especially when compared with another word she employs earlier in the same conversation, “a man’s wife” (renfu 人婦), which refers to the Confucian teachings about the “trice following” (san cong 三從), including a wife’s following of her husband. On the other hand, it also stands in sharp contrast to the Socialist-nationalist implications of “housewife” in the Maoist discourse. For more on the “trice following,” see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in the Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 6–7. For the Maoist interpretation of “housewife” or zhufu, see Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 58–59. 67. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 177. 68. Ibid., 39. 69. Like many other names in the novel, this one might be implicitly suggestive as well: the family name Mu literally means “wood” and the given name can be translated as “original time,” both indicating a sense of stubborn conservatism; or, even more probably, the full name phonetically sounds similar to “useless” (mei benshi 沒本事), especially when uttered with Shao’s own native Wu 吳 accent. When Mu Benshi is caught red-handed trying to implicate the innocent Dimin and Rongsheng in Chapter 11, the narrator, indeed, describes her as “really useless now” (zhenshi mei benshi le 真是沒本事了); see Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 211. 70. For the original mention of the phrase in the Confucian classic The Book of Rites, see Wang Pinzhen, Annotated Elder Dai’s Book of Rites (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 144. For an example of Jianchen’s views, see her approving comment in Chapter 39 on an incident where the administrators of a girls’ school prohibit their faculty and students to attend a graduation ceremony of a men-only military school; see Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 675. 71. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 209. 72. Ying Hu, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 6. 73. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 252. 74. Ibid., pp. 251–93. 75. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 165. 76. Ibid., 187. 77. Wei-ming Tu, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 57. 78. See Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3. 79. Daria Berg, Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 13. See also Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 72. 80. Important Qing women novelists included Chen Duansheng, Liang Desheng, Hou Zhi, Zhu Suxian 朱素仙 (birth and death years unknown, her novel Linked Rings of Jade published in 1805), Wang Duan 汪端 (1793–1838, niece of Liang Desheng), Gu Taiqing 顧太清 (1799–1877), Qiu Xinru 邱心如 (ca. 1805?–ca. 1873), Zheng Zhenhua 鄭貞華 (aka Zheng Danruo 鄭澹若, 1811–1860), Zhou Yingfang 周穎芳 (?–1895, daughter of Zheng Zhenhua), Sun Deying 孫德英 (ca. 1841–?), Chen Yichen 陳義臣 (1873–1890), 程惠英 (birth and death 70 Chapter 2 years unknown; her novel Flying Phoenix Pair was published in 1899), Wang Miaoru 王妙如 (ca. 1877–ca. 1903), Shao Zhenhua, Huang Cuining 黃翠凝 (1875–?), and Qiu Jin. For more, see Xue Haiyan, “On the Rise of Chinese Women’s Fiction,” Journal of Eastern Studies 1 (2000): 34–39; Ellen Widmer, “Honglou meng ying and Three ‘Women’s Novels’ of Late Qing,” in The Sound of Silence (III): Women and Culture in Modern China, 1600–1950, eds. Lo Jiu-jung and Lu Miaw-fen (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003), 301–26; and Li Guo, Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China. 81. For information about female communities built up by women’s poetic writing and criticism in late imperial China, see Grace F. Fong, Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), especially chapter 4. 82. Liang Qichao, The Complete Works of Liang Qichao (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1999), vol. 4, 884, 886. 83. C.T. Hsia, C.T. Hsia on Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 241. 84. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China, 30. 85. See Hu Siao-chen, Talented Women Burning the Midnight Oil, 170–71. 86. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 48. 87. The given name, ironically, means “making people wise.” 88. From the angle of female-female erotic love, Tze-lan Sang has offered an insightful comparative close reading of the two stories; see Tze-lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 49–51, 69–86. 89. Ibid., 62–63. In a related vein, Dorothy Ko has described the “friendship-love continuum” between gentry wives and courtesans as “part of the larger discourse of love, sex, and beauty” in late imperial Chinese women’s culture; see Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 266. 90. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 117. 91. In Chapter 40 of Chivalric Beauties, there is a mention of two cases of cross-dressing on an everyday basis, both of which are considered as scandalous by the conversers. In one case, a girl’s cross-dressing even results in the suicide of her friend, an innocent wife mistakenly accused of adultery by her husband. See ibid., 690–92. 92. As Wang Shize recalled, his niece called Qiu “uncle” 伯伯 (bobo) instead of “aunt,” although the latter would have been more conventional; see Wang, “Memories of Qiu Jin,” in Historical Records of Qiu Jin, eds. Zhou Feitang et al. (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1981), 126. In some local dialects—for instance, the Suzhou dialect—there are practices that use “uncle” instead of “aunt” to address women of one’s parents’ generation or seniority. However, neither Qiu Jin nor the Hunan-born Wang Shize was from such regions. Moreover, in his memoir, Wang clearly relates this unusual means of address to Qiu Jin’s courageous challenging of gender norms. 93. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 69–70. 94. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, 106. 95. Ibid. 96. See Yang Bojun, An Annotated Translation of The Analects (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 124–25. 97. The term, as Dorothy Ko has explained, literally means “‘elegance from the inner quarters,’ [which] was commonly used . . . to denote a gentry woman with artistic talent”; see Ko, “The Written Word and the Bound Foot: A History of the Courtesan’s Aura,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, eds. Ellen Widmer and Kang-I Sun Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 80. 98. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 307. 99. Cited from Liu Huiying, “Patriotic Female Characters in the Feminist Enlightenment of Early Twentieth-Century China,” Modern Chinese Literature Researches Series 2 (2002): 157. From Dual Slaves to Liberty Flowers 71

100. For instance, in her examination of Wang Miaoru’s A Flower of the Women’s Prison, Widmer has noticed that the novel “advertises Wang’s feminine gender as an encouragement to female readers, and female readers were imagined as this novel’s primary readership”; see Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 253–54. 101. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 263. 102. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 14. 103. When examining another late imperial Chinese woman novelist Gu Taiqing and her Shadows of the Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng ying 紅樓夢影), Widmer has keenly reminded us that although the novel exhibited “the seminal quality that Watt and Armstrong ascribe to works by Richardson and Austen” by “provok[ing] a sense of identification among women (and other) readers” and “creat[ing] a new kind of ‘feminine sensibility,’ or at least of sensitivity to women,” such “sensibility had nothing to do with the middle class, domesticity, or social control, and its ‘authority’ was not truly ‘feminine’ in the sense that Armstrong means”; see Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 284. 104. Drawing upon Felicity A. Nussbaum’s argument that autobiographical writings of the eighteenth-century England played an important role in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity, Lingzhen Wang has convincingly pointed out that women’s autobiographical practice in modern China “is a way of self-and-life negotiation,” which forms a “metonymical relationship” between the author and her writing; see Wang, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobio- graphical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 11. See also Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth- Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Women’s autobiographical writing will be discussed further in chapter 5. 105. Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 287. 106. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 46. 107. Ibid., 70. 108. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 164. 109. Literally meaning “iron frosty heroism,” the name suggests a heroic but stubborn personality described as “eccentric” (guaipi 乖僻) by “the author”; see ibid., 668. 110. Ibid., 655. 111. Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, “The Beginning of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction in the Late Ch’ing and Beyond,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, eds. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1985), 395. 112. Qiu Jin, Selected Works of Qiu Jin, ed. Guo Yanli (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004), 14–15. 113. Catherine Belsey, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in Feminism Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 164. 114. Dorothy Ko and Zheng Wang, “Introduction: Translating Feminism in China,” in Trans- lating Feminism in China, eds. Dorothy Ko and Zheng Wang (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 4. 115. Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 802. 116. Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 91. 117. Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 802. 118. Ibid., 801. 119. For example, Jessica Benjamin has summarized such a view as follows: “the subject is a position produced in language, not a signifier that refers to the actual mind of a person”; see Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, 81. 120. Shao, Chivalric Beauties, 298. 121. Cheryl Walker, “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author,” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 560. 122. Not surprisingly, the list resonates with those popular heroines often cited in speeches and writings about the revitalization of the women’s sphere: Hua Mulan, Qin Liangyu, Mrs. Zhuge (wife of the super-wise Three-Kingdom strategist Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮), the talented 72 Chapter 2 poet Xie Daoyun 謝道韞 (birth and death years unknown, active in late fourth century) of the Jin dynasty; it does, nonetheless, also include a couple of male role models such as the loyal military general Yue Fei 岳飛 (1103–1142) of the Song dynasty and the patriotic martyr Shi Kefa 史可法 (1602–1645) of the Ming dynasty. 123. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 53. 124. Her use of the term “exclusion,” Judge explains, draws upon Judith Butler’s argument that “the subjects are constituted through exclusion, that is, through the creation of a domain of deauthorized subjects, presubjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view”; see Judge “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” 799 and Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Femi- nism and the Question of Postmodernism,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Ex- change, eds. Seyla Benhabib et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 46. 125. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, xvii. 126. Qiu, “Excerpts from Stones of the Jingwei Bird,” 61, 67. 127. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 252. 128. Ibid., 15. 129. Miaoru Wang 王妙如, A Flower of the Women’s Prison [Nüyuhua 女獄花], reprinted in Compendium of Late Imperial Chinese Fiction: Women’s Rights, Chivalric Beauties, and A Flower of the Women’s Prison [Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi: Nüzi quan, Xiayi jiaren, Nüyuhua 中國近代小說大系：女子權，俠義佳人，女獄花], 701–60 (Nanchang: Baihua- zhou wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 705. 130. See A Ying, Casual Discussions on Fiction, 104–5. Chapter Three

Is Blood Always Thicker than Water?

Rival Sisters and the Tensions of Modernity

As the previous two chapters have shown, the discursive emergence of “the women’s sphere” and its accompanying feminist-nationalist sisterhood imaginations enabled a new language and vocabulary for Chinese female subjects to challenge or subvert the traditional inner/outer boundary and to re-envision their roles in the family, the nation, and the world. On the other hand, however, with female agency and intersubjectivity becoming more and more visibly important, such breakthroughs also inevitably aroused various forms of anxieties and concerns. Often entangled with the impact of, and responses to, ongoing national crises, these anxieties further complicated the “woman question” (aka the “woman problem”). In the literary and cultural discourse of modernity, which, as Rita Felski has put it, is saturated with “metaphors of masculinity and femininity,”1 the “New Woman,” often considered as “a centerpiece of the [new] polity,”2 and her two “others”—the traditional woman and the modern girl—emerged as three different yet entwined archetypes. Female characters with supposedly contrasting modes of mentality, including rivaling biological sisters, were frequently portrayed as competitors in the quest of modernity. They became a favored and richly layered trope symbolizing and mediating the multiple sociocultural transitions and counter-transitions that simultaneously took place on individual, familial, social, national, and transnational levels. This chapter investigates three stories of sisterly rivalry, in which the social, cultural, and political challenges of the female protagonists’ biological ties reflect, through gendered perspectives, the changing structural relationships among the individual, the family, and the nation in the Chinese worldview. As part of what Rey Chow has described as “conscientious in-

73 74 Chapter 3 ventions and elaborations” of “women” as one of the “‘new’ areas of interest” in the rise of Chinese modernity and modernism, 3 these sisterhood stories reveal explicit and implicit tensions and paradoxes, especially the problematically gendered construction of subjectivities in semicolonial China.

TWO FLOWERY SISTERS AND THE DILEMMA OF MASCULINE SUBJECTIVITY IN SEMICOLONIAL MODERNITY

There had long been a gendered imbalance between the conceptions of brotherhood and sisterhood in the Confucian tradition. Whereas brotherhood was emphasized as one of the “five relationships” of essential importance— namely, the relationships between ruler and court officials, father and son, husband and wife, brothers, and (male) friends—sisterhood, or any other female-female relationship, never occupied a central position in either the patriarchal familial structure or the dominant Confucian worldview in imperial China. Until such confinements were challenged in the late Qing both by the burgeoning reformist discourse on women’s education and professionalization and by the feminist advocacy for women’s sociopolitical unity and participation, women’s physical mobility was usually limited by the patriarchal households into which they were born or married,4 and their roles inside the family were also “locked into a complementary relationship to men’s” outside it.5 Sisterhood in indigenous narratives prior to the turn of the twentieth century, consequently, was usually institutionally defined first by the parental family and then—and more conclusively—by marriage into a husband’s family.6 At this later stage, as has been mentioned in chapter 2, a sisterly relationship between women—either biological sisters or intimate peers—married to the same husband under the traditional polygynous system constituted a common model, which can be traced back to an ancient legend about Emperor Yao 堯, who married both of his daughters, Ehuang 娥皇 and Nüying 女英, to his potential successor Shun 舜. Similar plot structures were especially popular in the vernacular literature of the Ming and the Qing dynasties. For instance, in Wu Jingsuo’s 吳敬所 (Ming dynasty, birth and death years unknown) three erotic novellas, “Random Notes about Two Sisters” (Shuang- qing biji 雙卿筆記), “Elegant Notes on Flower Seeking” (Xunfang yaji 尋芳雅集), and “Story of the Three Flower Goddesses” (Huashen san miao zhuan 花神三妙傳), Li Yu’s aforementioned Women in Love, and Wen Kang’s 文康 wuxia novel A Tale of Heroic Sons and Daughters (Ernü yingxiong zhuan 兒女英雄傳, 1878).7 In Chen Duansheng’s Love Reincarnated, it is through marrying the same husband that the heroine Meng Lijun and her sisterly maid finally stabilize their cordial bond. Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 75

The dominant role of the patriarchal family in all these earlier modes of sisterhood, however, met with severe challenges when the late Qing discourse on the “women’s sphere,” in addition to justifying women’s social positions and connections outside the household, associated such new positions and connections with the mental modernization of China. At the same time, polygamy, as Qiu Jin fervently criticized in Stones of the Jingwei Bird, came to be increasingly seen as a problem that had contributed to China’s backwardness and that needed to be urgently eradicated. A sweeping iconoclastic critique of the traditional family system would not occur until the May Fourth Movement in 1919, yet when Li Hanqiu’s novel Two Flowery Sisters was serialized in the Hankou-based Chu Post (Chu bao 楚報) in 1910,8 the issue had already gained some popularity, and, together with such other hot issues as women’s financial independence and the regendering of social space, clearly informed the story’s main plot line. Following a popular practice of making stories appeal to readers’ curiosity about the Western world, Li set his novel in England—a modern, foreign land that allowed for freedom of love and marriage. 9 The plot, on the other hand, remains keenly relevant to the author’s own native China, which is portrayed both as an unenlightened “other” and as an ambiguous sentimental haven that the allegedly British narrator-protagonist occasionally, and paradoxically, invites his implied Chinese reader—addressed as one of “those who read my book” (dushu zhujun 讀書諸君)10—to identify with. In this sense, the ways in which the tragic sisterhood in this triangular love story embodies frustrations and dilemmas caused by sociocultural transformations also resonate with the gendered imbalances between China and the West, in a similar fashion to Jin Yi’s A Bell to the Women’s Sphere. It all starts with the accidental rescue of a gentle beauty, Linna, by a young aristocrat, George Smith, who has resettled in a remote place called “Jade Town,” located far from his London-based family, where he intends to pursue a reclusive life devoted to reading and learning. Despite the novel’s obvious imitation of the sensational crime fiction newly imported from the West,11 the literary arrangement apparently recalls the traditional “scholar and beauty” romances. After managing to save Linna from being drowned by her wicked stepmother, George is faced with a series of crises that are rooted in, according to the narrator, the conflicts between the two sisters’ “passionate bodies” (you qing zhi shen 有情之身) and their “passionate hearts” (you qing zhi xin 有情之心).12 At the core of the problem is an irreconcilable incompatibility between a desire-ridden George, who is simultaneously attracted to the two sisters, and the story’s supposedly modern, Western milieu, which rules out the practice of polygamy as a possible solution. In the meantime, the contrasting modes of womanhood respectively embodied by the more (Confucian) tradition- oriented Linna and the more modern-oriented Yingna endows George’s di- 76 Chapter 3 lemma with a symbolic and profound significance. After it is revealed that the gentle and virtuous Linna is actually the daughter of a late friend of his father’s, George marries her with his parents’ approval in a way that somewhat resembles a traditional Chinese arranged marriage. The Smith family also decides to give up Linna’s dowry, so that she can transfer her inheritance to Yingna and make peace with her stepmother, only to find out that the evil woman has already abruptly died. What would have been a classical Chinese “grand reunion” (datuanyuan 大團圓), however, is disturbed by the two sisters’ mutual love and respective insistence on the other’s keeping their father’s property. The strong-willed Yingna even goes as far as attempting to shoot herself at Linna’s wedding to demonstrate her resolution. As a temporary compromise, George and Linna agree to keep the dowry but offer to provide for Yingna’s education in return, hence introducing yet another pair of divergent roles for the two half-sisters—one being a dependent wife who appears “tender and delicate, not at all like our British women”13 and the other as a mentally and intellectually independent girl student resembling the “New Woman.” As if following the trope of sisterhood between the wife and the concubine in classical Chinese literature, the gentle-hearted Linna, who becomes aware of George’s growing affection for her vigorous sister, proposes to Yingna that they both serve as spouses for George. Though also falling for George, Yingna refuses and leaves the couple’s residence. Unaware of this, Linna, nonetheless, carries out a suicidal plan by deliberately catching a cold, which rapidly deteriorates into a serious illness. These dramatic misunder- standings and miscalculations, all in the name of love, cause George to lose both of his lovers—Linna dies; Yingna marries herself to a businessman in Scotland. The last round of twists and turns takes place when Yingna visits George with her husband and her rekindled love for her brother-in-law clashes with the cold-hearted British legal system. Shocked to learn of her sister’s death and touched by George’s love for her, Yingna sends her husband away and stays with George in an intimate but ambiguous relationship, while insisting that she has to preserve her physical chastity for her husband. At this point, Yingna seems to become a more paradoxical embodiment of conflicting ideals for women. After being sued by her husband, who previously agreed only to let her stay with George for a limited time in exchange for her late father’s property, Yingna is sentenced to a short prison term. In order not to be bothered by her husband again, Yingna commits suicide right before her release, which, again, anachronistically as well as transculturally resembles a strange combination of the “chaste maiden” (zhennü 貞女) and the “martyred widow” (liefu 烈婦) in imperial China,14 despite the fact that Yingna’s love is devoted to her brother-in-law, rather than to her husband. In his final and most desperate attempt to symbolically maintain his possession of both sis- Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 77 ters, George preserves the two dead bodies with the help of modern chemis- try and keeps them by his side as permanent companions in his now “deserted cottage” (huang lu 荒廬).15 One particular aspect that makes Two Flowery Sisters an especially interesting case lies in its restructuring of sisterhood as a crystallized embodiment of the contestations between “passion” (qing 情) and “universal principles” (gongli 公理).16 Introduced at the beginning of the novel, the British world is depicted as a representative of the “the present world” (jin shijie 今世界), which, with its people following “universal principles,” is implicitly contrasted with a backward China, referred to as Zhina 支那.17 Like the imbalanced geopolitical relationship between Britain and China and the apparent hierarchy between the present and the past, the love triangle among the three young characters is caught in a dilemma between “the lure of the modern”—to borrow from Shu-mei Shih18—and a nostalgic gaze toward indigenous traditions. In Li’s novel, the elimination of the possibility for Linna and Yingna to transform their biological sisterhood into a new—and stronger and more stable, as it used to be presented in classical narratives—bond via the sharing of the same husband constitutes an unassailable reality that, nevertheless, gives rise to sentimental undercurrents of passion. Passion, indeed, is the most essential element, both thematically and stylistically speaking, of the “tragic love fiction” (aiqing xiaoshuo 哀情小說),19 which Two Flowery Sis- ters was marketed as. An important source of indigenous influence on the “tragic love fiction” can be traced back to the erotic fiction of the Ming dynasty, in which, according to Richard G. Wang, “passion or qing and sexual desire constitute the key indices to our understanding of these works.”20 As a novelist, Li Hanqiu exhibited an enthusiastic interest in triangular courtship and love, which is evident in his 1906 novel Mrs. Yaose (Yaose furen 瑤瑟夫人) and 1910 novel A Bloody Tragedy of a Pair of Cuckoos (Shuang juan xue 雙鵑血), among other works.21 Such thematic preferences were part of the reason why he was often labeled as a representative of the so-called “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” school, which was often characterized as providing “superficial popular entertainment of the sentimental love story or adventure type for an urban audience that needed distraction in its leisure hours” and regarded as a rearguard literary and cultural group. 22 In recent decades, however, scholars like Fan Boqun, Perry Link, and Denise Gimpel have argued that the judgment is “unjustified”23 and pointed out that these popular stories often provide vivid delineations about the social environment of the time, particularly “the confrontation between Chinese customs and Western influences and the subtle changes taking place during the process,”24 and imply “feelings of bitterness and insecurity” within their “merrymaking” plots.25 Like quite a few of his literary peers, Li Hanqiu was 78 Chapter 3 highly sensitive to the social changes taking place in this milieu. According to critic Fan Yanqiao, most of the thirty-three novels and novellas Li wrote can be defined as “social novels.”26 Among them, the best-known novel Tides of Guangling (Guangling chao 廣陵潮, 1909–1919), also known as A Mirror of Transitions (Guodu jing 過渡鏡), presents such a vivid “multilevel portrait of Yangchow society”27 between the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the 1910s that even the “May Fourth” leader Hu Shi 胡適 (aka Hu Shih, 1891–1962) recognized it as a “novel about social problems” (shehui wenti de xiaoshuo 社會問題的小說).28 At the intersection between love tragedies and social concerns, Li’s thematic emphasis on “passion” and stylistic reliance upon sentimentality display an interesting overlap between the entertaining and the instrumental functions of literature. After all, yiqing 移情 (empathy), the term often adopted by late Qing reformists when promoting “new fiction” for educational purposes, shares the same character qing 情 with “tragic love” (aiqing 哀情).29 In the novel, Li makes intrusive and self-reflexive comments from time to time to invite his readers to identify or sympathize with the narrator- protagonist, George. At one moment when lamenting Linna’s death and Yingna’s absence, the supposedly British protagonist purportedly quotes a nostalgic poem by the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 (ca. 813–ca. 858), instead of an old English poem, to make his sadness more relatable to readers.30 In terms of reinforcing the empathetic quality of George’s sentimental experiences, the dual enchantment embodied by the two sisters and their subsequent double deaths play an essential and symbolic role in connecting George’s suffering and loss with a traditional/modern transition. Though both take place rather abruptly, the suicides of the two sisters, who are repeatedly referred to as a pair of “jade-like beauties” (yu ren 玉人),31 have been well indicated by the name of the rural village—“Jade Town”—where they reside.32 The jade reference is significant in that the material traditionally symbolizes unworldly beauty and spiritual integrity. As is suggested by the centuries-old Chinese proverb, “It is better to be shattered jade than a whole piece of earthenware” (Ning wei yu sui, bu wei wa quan 寧為玉碎，不為瓦全), the two sisters sacrifice their lives to achieve something noble and sublime—in this case two kinds of conflicting “passion,” that of sisterhood and that of romantic love for the same man. Whereas polygamy used to provide a solution in traditional narratives, the modern-ness of the setting of Li’s story indicates that the conflicts are no longer resolvable. Therefore, allegorically, the sisters’ tragic deaths serve as an elegiac gesture at the entrance to modernity featuring the elimination of the possibility of a polygynous utopia, which, as Keith McMahon has pointed out, also signifies “a type of cultural identity faced with extinction” in late Qing fiction.33 Inevitable as the transformation into “postpolygynist subjects” is,34 it Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 79 has to be conducted with nostalgic sentiments and cathartic mourning. As George puts it, although his love for Yingna is “extremely incompatible with universal principles,” his resistance is made on behalf of “the heart.”35 Such a stance resembles some popular late Ming writers’ “use of passion to resist rationality” (yi qing kang li 以情抗理), as in the case of Tang Xianzu’s 湯顯祖 (1550–1616) classic play The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), only that “passion” now seems to be in a much more vulnerable position, faced with the overwhelming power of modern “universal principles.”36 If, as Rey Chow has argued, the sentimental stories of the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” were actually “part and parcel of the new cultural conditions” and thus should be read “not as a mere document of, but in itself a mediated response to, the changes taking place in China around the turn of the [twentieth] century,”37 the structural changes in the sisterhood imagination in Li’s novel and the intrusive first-person narrator’s own sentimental interpretations of it, constitute paradoxically crafted representations of a fragmented subject position to embrace all these sociocultural changes. In this light, Linna and Yingna’s sisterly rivalry can be read on different allegorical scales: on the individual level, the rivalry portrays a frustrated pursuit of the sisters’ dual temptations and the rivaling mentalities they each embody; on the national level—though presented in a foreignized manner—the rivalry reveals the tensions between the apparent invincibility of the Western world, especially after China’s recent military defeats, and the resulting anxieties over the indigenous (masculine) subjectivity; and, in terms of the construction of an imagined global modernity, it manifests an imbalanced semicolonial imaginary featuring complicated contestations between “passion” and “universal principles.” As George’s romantic predicament of loving the two “jade-like” sisters spans all these different levels, the symbolic, posthumous reunion of Linna’s and Yingna’s remains with their beloved man seems to present an ambivalent and compromised solution. That is, whereas the triangular love cannot be allowed or recognized in mundane and legal senses, its emotional sublimity signified by jade enables a transcendental fulfillment, where the previous conflicts between the “passionate body” and the “passionate heart” are partially resolved. In particular, this forced split between the body and the heart in the two sisters’ lives and the symbolic reunion of the love triangle only after the women’s deaths provides a parallel, albeit different, example of what Partha Chatterjee has described as a division between a material domain and a spiritual domain, through which anti-colonial nationalist elites of India envisioned their own cultural sovereignty as separated from “the economy and . . . state-craft, . . . science and technology, . . . where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed.”38 For George, Western modernity plays a double-edged role in the two domains: while its socio- legal system deprives him of his utopian fantasy to marry both sisters at the 80 Chapter 3 same time, its science and technology helps him to materially preserve and possess the sisters’ “flowery remains” (huagu 花骨), as is described in the novel’s title. If, as Prasenjit Duara has argued, “The split or aporia in linear history . . . between evolution and progressive mastery of the future, on the one hand, and the unchanging essence of the past, on the other, is a problem that is structurally distinctive to it,”39 the separation and reunion of the two sisters in Li’s novel attests to both the irreconcilability between the two sides and a wishful willingness to weld them together. To borrow from Charles Taylor’s distinction between a “cultural” approach toward modernity, which takes into consideration sociocultural traditions and practices as a nuanced background, and an “acultural” approach, which views the replacement of a traditional society by a modern one as a linear development, 40 we may well read the sisterly bond and rivalry depicted by Li as a mixed and paradoxical crystallization of these two visions. That is, as the novel’s imagined British modern setting predetermines the future of the presently backward China along the “acultural” line, the emotional attachments to the past in the “cultural” sense can only take form of sentimental tears or posthumously preserved “flowery bones.” Corresponding to the thematic elasticity of Linna and Yingna’s sisterhood, which ranges from identification, sympathy, and mutual love to rivalry and (involuntary) opposition, Li’s novel also presents a stylistic elasticity resulting from the hybridization of Chinese literary traditions (such as chivalric fiction and oral storytelling) and newly imported Western fiction (for example, detective and suspense stories). In addition to linguistically incorporating both classical and vernacular Chinese, as did many other “new fiction writers” (xin xiaoshuojia 新小說家) at the time,41 the novel has its self-identified “author” (zhuzhe 著者) jump in from time to time and add extradiegetic comments on the plot and the characters. 42 In contrast to the narrator’s supposed British-ness, the “author” expresses his views mostly from a Chinese standpoint shared with the implied reader. For instance, when mocking at George’s boasting of his own physical attractiveness, the “author” refers to an anecdote about Zou Ji 鄒忌 of the Warring States period (475–221 BC) as a case in the classic books of “our country” (wuguo 吾國) to share with his reader.43 Moreover, though mostly character-bound, Li’s narrator also often steps out of the story to address the reader and make comments, as traditional Chinese storytellers might do during their performances. For example, when describing how he asks Linna for her name after rescuing her, George—as narrator—adds, as if talking to his implied (Chi- nese) reader, that “Western social customs forbid asking for a lady’s name.”44 Occasionally, the narrator also self-identifies as the author, as in the case of the first encounter between George and Yingna, when the first-person narration (referring to himself as “I,” or yu 余) shifts freely from the perspec- Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 81 tive of the protagonist-character to that of a person extratextually responsible for the “whole book.”45 There is even an occasion in which “Hanqiu,” the author’s real name, is abruptly inserted to introduce a comment. 46 These intrusive remarks, just like George’s occasional self-revelations of his ego- tism and inappropriate desires, once described as “indecent” (wuliang 無良),47 further complicate the nexus of disrupted binaries embodied by Linna and Yingna’s sisterly rivalry—the Chinese versus the Western, the traditional versus the modern, and the past versus the future—and lead to a paradoxical, slippery, and fragmented subject position in the semicolonial Chinese imaginary.

A BOMB AND AN EXPEDITIONARY BIRD AND DISSOCIATIVE FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE QUEST FOR “HERSTORY”

Both as a rebellious “New Woman” herself and as a writer enthusiastic about portraying such characters, Bai Wei (aka Pe Wei, born Huang Bizhu 黃碧珠, aka Huang Zhang 黃彰) showed a similar interest in a plotline of two sisters tragically falling in love with the same man. In contrast to Li Hanqiu’s narrative and thematic focus on the man’s dilemma, suffering, and losses, however, Bai Wei’s stories conduct in-depth explorations of the female psyche and, by so doing, represent rival sisters in romantic triangles not as passive love-objects but as self-conscious and self-reflective subjects. In Bai Wei’s early three-act poetic play Linli (aka Miss Linglee, Linli 琳麗, 1925), the eponymous heroine falls in love with an attractive man, Qinlan 琴瀾, but her obviously more energetic and more modern-oriented younger sister Lili 璃麗 becomes a romantic rival. Though not as pliable to the man’s wishes as Linna is in Li Hanqiu’s novel, Linli becomes desperate and finally drowns herself after finding out that Lili has given birth to a child fathered by Qinlan. Compared with Li’s self-sacrificial Linna and Yingna, Bai’s tragic female protagonist is more self-aware and vengefully destructive. This is manifested by Linli’s singing at the beginning of the play, which, as Ping Zhu has noted, “eventually evolves into an ecstatic celebration of destruction, turning a love story into a story of massacre.”48 And the destructiveness is reconfirmed in the final scene when Qinlan comes back to bid farewell to Linli’s deceased body but is violently killed by apes. The dramatic deaths of Linli and Qinlan reflect a “dark side” of the female author’s own traumatic life experiences, including her ill-matched and abusive arranged marriage and her equally excruciating on-and-off romantic relationship with the writer Yang Sao 楊騷 (1900–1957).49 The thematic tensions between darkness and destruction on the one hand and excessive passion and emotions on the other contribute to a stylistic hysteria that questions the representational possibilities of authentic female experiences and subjectivities in a male-dominated 82 Chapter 3 discourse. In this way, as Jianmei Liu has argued, not only do Bai Wei’s female-centered stories break through formulaic literary patterns and “contribute [women’s writers’] interpretations of gender within the matrix of power,” but her characteristically hysterical style transcends the dominant masculine language, “blurs affirmation and negation,” “question[s] their liberation and emancipation and thus mak[es] the subversion of the ideology possible.”50 For David Wang, such hysteria, which often led the author to be criticized by her contemporary male writers and critics, constitutes a special mode of “realism,” which “may point to a narrative stance . . . twice removed from the position occupied by her male colleagues.”51 “The hysteric,” according to Patricia Elliot, “produces knowledge that doesn’t know itself and sense that cannot be articulated”; in other words, “the repressed object of desire . . . can ‘speak’ only symptomatically through the unconscious subject”.52 In Bai Wei’s writing, female hysteria on the part of the “New Woman” is both rooted in, and symptomatic of, a gendered awareness struggling to be articulated as to the “truth” that “In this dying society, an evil society significantly marked with male-centeredness, there is no truth about women,” as the author puts it in the preface to her autobiographic novel A Tragic Life (Beiju shengya 悲劇生涯, 1936).53 This revelation, despite the very different sociocultural milieu from Western traditions, resonates with what Luce Irigaray has identified as the “impossib[ility]” and “unrealizab[ility] to “describe the being of woman” (emphasis in the original)54 in a context where “all the social regimes of ‘History’ are based upon the exploitation of . . . women” as commodity-objects deprived of a subject position.55 Bai Wei’s effort to “seek self-representation beyond the realm of language” out of a “recognition of her symbolic absence,”56 in this sense, may well be read as a female-focused literary experiment to rewrite the intrinsically gendered “History” and “His story” and to make sense of being “Woman.” In Bai’s debut novel A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird published between 1928 and 1929,57 the quest for “Herstory” features an ambiguous dialectic between female consciousness and female hysteria embodied in Yu Yue 余玥 and Yu Bin’s 余彬 sisterly rivalry, as the two, each in her own way, conduct a dual quest for love and freedom to reject the fate of objectification but end up equally disillusioned. Upon their first appearances, where Yue rescues Bin from a mob attacking the latter for her supposedly scandalous behavior of playing tennis with a young man, the two sisters immediately remind us of the contrasting yet mutually loving Linna and Yingna in Two Flowery Sisters. As her nickname, “Bomb,” suggests, the younger Bin is a daring freedom-seeker loaded with the author’s self-imagination. Apparently enjoying more parental love and less familial obligations than Yue, she seems both reminiscent of late Qing feminist anarchists and reflecting a prominent influence from the New Cul- Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 83 ture Movement between the mid-1910s and the mid-1920s. The elder sister, on the other hand, is more introverted and less resolute, which leads her to yield to, after unsuccessfully fighting against, the imposition of an ill- matched arranged marriage, an experience reflecting the author’s own life.58 As Yue’s and Bin’s life trajectories gradually unfold, however, they seem more and more like, as David Der-wei Wang has written about the two sisters in Linli, “a double projection of a Bai Wei torn between conflicting virtue and desire,”59 or rather, a pair of split selves experiencing and experimenting with the possibilities and limitations of female subjectivity during the historical momentum of Nationalist revolution between 1926 and 1928. When competing against each other for their father’s affection, for the same lover Shaofang 韶舫, and for self-realization in the revolutionary cause, Yue and Bin constantly use the other sister as a mirrored self to invigorate their own endeavors. After hearing Bin’s iconoclastic denouncement of gender biases after the aforementioned mob attack, for example, Yue becomes confused about her own feelings, unsure “whether she is filled with jealousy or admiration”: “The more attention she pays to Bin’s proud facial expressions, the more ill at ease her heart is. She also feels that, when standing in front of the ‘Bomb,’ she seems extremely fragile. The only way to get rid of such unease and shame is to destroy herself and put an end to all her human obligations. Otherwise, she has to be a bomb herself!”60 Later in the novel, Yue also reminds herself of Bin’s “speed and power of a bomb” so as to empower herself and redirect her energies away from romantic distractions and back toward the revolutionary cause.61 Through the parallel themes of rivalry and empathy, Bai Wei’s characterizations of the two sisters present a dialogical narrative about the difficult, sometimes paradoxical, quest for freedom and self-realization of the “New Woman.” Unlike the objectification and fetishization of Linna and Yingna resulting from male desires in Li Hanqiu’s novel, both Yue and Bin are endowed with subjective visions and desires, particularly through their self- conscious, albeit unsuccessful, attempts at self-rescue and self-liberation. Even the more traditionally minded Yue is not at all a member of what E. M. Forster called “flat characters,”62 but a subject with sophistication and agency, who saves herself from being reduced to a tragic “sacrifice of the old ethics”63 by running away from her arranged husband’s house. In this way, Bai Wei’s novel departs from what Ming-Bao Yue has described as a general tendency in “the rhetoric of revolution” in the early years of modern Chinese fiction to “rejoi[n] many conventionalized figures of femininity in such a way as to displace, rather than to overcome, the silence” (emphasis in the original).64 Embracing the political fervor of the New Culture period, which continued to entwine women’s reformation and emancipation with nationalism and patriotism, Yue decides to pursue a career by joining the Nationalist military campaign for China’s unification. Her self-chosen nickname, “Expe- 84 Chapter 3 ditionary Bird,” reflects this vision65 and resonates with the Ibsenian Nora figure popular at the time.66 Like two Noras with different personalities but similar dreams of personal independence, romantic love, and national revolution, Yue and Bin set off on their respective but intersecting journeys. The parallels between their stories transform the self-enclosed monologue of a modern female intellectual into an empathetic dialogue, which is verbally manifested through their conversations with and letters to each other. At the same time, by injecting a strong sense of self-awareness into the two sisters’ experiences of being female, the novel problematizes the structural trope of the “History” of revolution and enlightenment. Yue first goes to Guangzhou, the center of the First United Front (1924–1927), a temporary alliance between the Nationalists and the Commu- nists that allowed them to turn their efforts against a common enemy, the Northern warlords. Though failing to land a job in any of the government agencies there, Yue expands her vocabulary of political catchphrases, such as “worker and peasant masses” (gongnong qunzhong 工農群眾)67 and rein- forces her faith in revolution, despite—and at the cost of—her romantic involvement with Shaofang, a guest at her uncle’s house. Seeing revolution and love as two rival objectives in a win-lose competition, Yue repeatedly falls into cycles of temporary surrender and painful self-questioning, until she finally—at the point of her first sexual consummation with Shaofang— decides to fully concentrate on her political cause. At this sexual-cum- political climax, Yue feels as if she has been struck by “a lightening,” a jolt that drives her to compete with her sister in their political cause. 68 Her decision reflects the proposal made by Hong Ruizhao 洪瑞釗 (1906–1996) in his pamphlet Revolution and Love (Geming yu lian’ai 革命與戀愛, 1928), which called for a sublimation of libidinal love into revolutionary energy. 69 Treating the nickname “Expeditionary Bird” as a symbolic love souvenir, Yue asks Shaofang to share the nickname with her, hinting at a hope that their mutual love will resemble the companionship between a pair of such birds, as is famously and beautifully depicted by the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) in his narrative poem Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chang hen ge 長恨歌). Then, referring to revolution as her “other love,”70 Yue departs for Wuhan, another important political center in the Nationalist revolution, which briefly served as a national capital in 1927 and where she reunites with her sister Bin, the “Bomb.” Having arrived in Wuhan earlier, Bin has a much easier time landing a job with the Nationalist government, a fact that seems to confirm Yue’s accusa- tion of the biases against married women even among the self-proclaimed revolutionary Nationalists. Yet, Bin also becomes disappointed and disillusioned after finding out that women’s rights are considered as at best secondary among her colleagues’ revolutionary priorities. With the realization that Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 85 she and her sister actually share the same fate—the fate of being a woman— and that even joining the revolutionary cause cannot help her evade such a fate, Bin dismissively and cynically describes herself as a “broken copper gong of the new era”71 and indulges in love affairs. Such parallel depictions of Yue’s and Bin’s frustrations, akin to what Xiaobing Tang has observed in Ding Ling’s early fiction about young female intellectuals, “refus[es] to alle- gorize”72 women’s transitions from the traditional patriarchal family to the bourgeoning Nationalist revolution as a liberation story. Instead, just as Yi- tsi M. Feuerwerker has found in Ding Ling’s stories, Bin’s “self-exploration” is marked with “sexual libertarianism,” which enables a subtle perspective toward “the resulting mixture with a degree of critical awareness” concerning female subjectivity.73 Bin’s paradox between female subjectification through romantic domination over men and female self-objectification and self-anni- hilation for so doing leads to her nuanced definition of a dual goal: becoming a successful “female social butterfly” (jiaoji hua 交際花) while still maintaining her own subjective pleasures as a “flower of love” (lian’ai hua 戀愛花).74 At this point, Shaofang, who has now put on a new identity by adopting a similar-sounding name Shifu 诗茀, becomes one of Bin’s lovers without telling her about either his past or his real identity. The sisters’ love for the same man, interestingly, seems to suggest a reversal, no matter how fragile and temporary it is, of the pattern of “the exchange of women” described by Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin75 and reconfirm both women as desiring subjects. The dialogical relationship between the two sisters’ entangled pursuits of self-identity and self-realization poses a rather ambiguous response to the then heated discussions over “revolution plus love” (geming jia lianai 革命加戀愛), both as a social phenomenon and as a literary formula. On the one hand, like the dual pursuits of erotic passion and revolutionary zeal in such left-wing works as Jiang Guangci’s 蔣光慈 (1901–1931) “Memorial Service in the Wilderness” (Ye ji 野祭, 1927) and Hong Lingfei’s 洪靈菲 (1902–1934) Front Line (Qianxian 前線, 1928),76 Yue’s and Bin’s self- construction as subjects of desires engages with a confluence of sexual and political libidos. On the other hand, in contrast to Jiang’s and Hong’s formu- las of sublimating male desires by means of allegorized female bodies, the two sisters’ stories, especially the twists and turns in their respective relationships with Shaofang, substantiate frustrated female desires via the traumatized female body and explores the possibility of its redemption through the conquering of the male body. In more ways than one, Yue’s relationship with the beautiful, melancholy, and masochistic Shaofang seems like a reversal of her previous marriage with a physically repulsive and sexually sadistic husband. Not only does she identify Shaofang as a fellow victim of her cousin’s wife, who despises Yue for her poverty and attempts to seduce Shaofang against his will, but Shao- 86 Chapter 3 fang’s desperate begging for Yue’s love also contributes to her sense of agency in life’s choices, no matter how temporary. In their first intimate encounter, Yue envisions Shaofang as the beautiful Goddess of the River Luo portrayed by the poet Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232),77 noticeably reversing the gender roles of the viewer and the viewee in the original setting. Similar- ly, in her later contemplations and hallucinations, he appears as a character in dramatic scripts or film clips, as if a male version of the femme fatale. 78 At the same time, however, Yue’s haunting guilt over her forced loss of virginity during the arranged marriage leads to a sense of imperfection and emotional fragmentation that prohibits her from feeling equal to Shaofang. Ven- erating his physical attractiveness and self-claimed virginity, Yue compares Shaofang to “a delicate flower of the garden of youth.”79 Yet when associat- ing the image of the “flower” with herself, Yue feels confident to employ it only to describe her revolutionary enthusiasm, which, unlike her physical body, “has so far never been hurt” and is earnestly awaiting “guidance,” “power,” and “light” from “real revolutionaries.”80 The comparability between Shaofang’s supposed physical innocence and that of Yue’s political innocence, in this way, enables an implicit channelization between the female character’s erotic objectification of her male admirer and her own narcissistic self-reconstruction and self-realization embedded in the fantasies about revolution. In Bin’s case, her expectation for the handsome Shifu, who is no longer the effeminate man previously known to Yue but a supposedly “important Nationalist official with revolutionary thought,”81 to help lift her out of her present corrupted life revises the stereotypical images of male saviors of victimized women with a touch of female manipulation of male desires. Unfortunately, her calculation turns into an increasingly bitter irony. First, Bin is heartbroken at Yue’s revelation of her own relationship with the man, though Yue painfully promises to give up her lover, both for her younger sister’s sake and for her own pursuit of the revolutionary cause. Then, after Shifu leaves for the battlefield, Bin cannot help but fall into another short- lived love affair with one of their common friends, all of which feeds rumors about her corrupted private life. To make things worse, it is later revealed that Shifu is actually a spy working for counter-revolutionaries. 82 The sophisticated and hysterical triangular love relationship brings to the forefront the multifaceted dynamics of Yue and Bin’s sisterhood, which tortuously reflect the “truth” about female desires and experiences. With Shao- fang/Shifu’s malleable physical and personal attractiveness serving as a politically charged enticement for the two freedom-seeking “New Woman” sisters, the latter’s libidinal desires present a “plastic[ity],” as Freud has termed it, of sexual impulses, which “exhibit a large capacity for changing their object, for taking another in its place—and one, therefore, that is more easily attainable” (emphasis in the original).83 Yue’s dreamed self-realization Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 87 takes the form of libidinal “sublimation,” which, according to Freud, “consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a component or reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must be described as social.”84 Bin’s deliberate self-depravation, on the other hand, seems to be a response to the frustration of being “deprived of the possibility of satisfying [her] libido,”85 both in her disappointing romantic relationships and in her disillusioned pursuit of libidinal sublimation via revolution. In this way, the two sisters’ fluctuations between revolution and love, from mutually complementary perspectives, question the attainability of either goal. Echoing Yu Dafu’s famous conclusion that “the greatest success of the May Fourth movement lay, first of all, in the discovery of the individual,”86 Yue and Bin set off as rivals in search of their individual dreams. Their shared gender-based disappointments and disillusionments, however, reconfirm their bond in a more empathetically manner, not only as siblings but also as women, echoing what Louise Edwards has pointed out as “a consciousness of women’s different political interests from men as a group . . . based on women’s common disadvantaged status relative to men” that arose from the “dramatic intellectual shifts” of the New Culture discourse.87 As a prece- dent to Bai Wei’s autobiographical A Tragic Life, which, as Jing M. Wang has summarized, “us[es] the sexual [female] body against feudal abuse of women’s biology” and “harbors serious concerns about sexuality due to its disastrous effect on [the author’s] career and its frustration of her ambition,”88 the novel correlates the female characters’ fragmented selves with their embodied experiences in escaping from the patriarchal household, during which they become trapped by the implicitly and innately patriarchal and misogynist grand discourse of revolution and enlightenment. Toward the end of the first part of the novel and throughout the second part, the two sisters’ life paths bifurcate again, both toward traumatic ends. Though still longing for Shaofang and quite disillusioned by the hypocrisy of her revolutionary colleagues, Yue accepts a new lover, a radical revolutionary of the self-identified “Assassination Party,” and is persuaded by him to agree to seduce and spy on a Nationalist government official for her lover’s political cause. As predicted by Bin, Yue eventually becomes a sacrificial object, albeit not for the old Confucian traditions but for the vaguely defined cause of “revolution.” In her later pursuit of the revolutionary cause, she is sexually assaulted, first by the official and then by one of Bin’s former suitors, and is finally put into jail in exchange for the release of a leader of the “Assassination Party.” As the second part of the novel closes, Wuhan becomes a bloody political mess with Nationalists purging Communists and moving their headquarters to Nanjing; Yue, nevertheless, is left to linger in prison, apparently forgotten by her fellow revolutionaries. 88 Chapter 3

Bin, in the meantime, continues to lead a high-profile life, first as a glamorous stage actress, later as Shifu’s scandalous girlfriend, and then— after abandoning Shifu for another painful romantic adventure—as a notori- ous seductress. The destructive power of the “Bomb,” after all, seems more damaging to herself than to the patriarchal sociocultural order she was so determined to destroy. In fact, even her so-called “desires” are more akin to what Lacan has labeled as “the hysteric’s desire[, which] is not the desire for an object, but the desire for a desire, an effort to maintain oneself in front of this point . . . where the desire of the Other is.”89 In a sudden plot twist, however, she experiences an “awakening” (juewu 覺悟) that drives her toward the frontlines of the ongoing war and prompts her to start a new life, despite the lingering sadness from her unrequited love for Shifu and “the melancholy resulting from [the repression of] sexual desires.”90 Her last letter to Yue seems to confirm that her new life has started in earnest, only in a self-diminishing manner. Now in love with a senior Nationalist officer much older than herself, who “neither understands women’s hearts nor cher- ishes women as precious beings,”91 Bin disguises herself as a male soldier and serves as a Nationalist flag-bearer on the military frontlines of the North- ern Expedition, in the hope that her father will one day be proud of her feat and approve her future marriage with the officer. Bin thus engineers something of a self-renewal, transforming herself into a type of “Expeditionary Bird,” her sister’s old dream. In the end, however, she is left with physical battle wounds, psychological traumas, and, more importantly, an increasingly dissolved female self. As the unfinished novel leaves off, her future appears as gloomy as Yue’s. If Li Hanqiu appropriates the disruption and recovery of Linna and Ying- na’s sisterhood to express mixed feelings about the encounter between the traditional Chinese polygamous familial system with its modern Western counterpart, Bai Wei’s delineation of Yue and Bin’s sisterhood—rooted in blood ties but increasingly imbued with a shared female consciousness— questions the implicit gender logic and the very viability of a female subject position in the sexual and political discourses on revolution and enlightenment. Like Irigaray’s summary of women’s “social roles” in a patriarchal social order as “mother, virgin, prostitute,” with “the properties of a woman’s body hav[ing] to be suppressed and subordinated to the exigencies of its transformation into an object of circulation among men,”92 there is no escape for either sister from the matrix of gendered objectification. Indeed, Yue’s roles throughout the story are limited to an arranged virgin-wife, a self- sacrificing mother-like lover, 93 and, finally, to acting as a seductive spy who trades her body for information not unlike a prostitute trading her body for money. In spite of all her youthful energies, Bin also fails to escape from these limitations. As a metaphorical “social butterfly,” she is implicitly associated with the moral corruption embodied by prostitution. As a “flower of Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 89 love,” she sacrifices her virginity to Shifu, only to come to be known as an infamous woman rumored to have become pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s child.94 She eventually transforms into an almost unrecognizable woman devoid of self-identity. It is with such irony that the sisters’ initially different responses to “a degenerate political campaign and a degenerate love game,” as David Wang has put it, “lead to the same outcome.”95 The division and confluence of the two sisters’ stories in Bai Wei’s novel—as if reflecting dissociative or, indeed, “schizophrenic”96 personalities— disclose the gendered paradox of revolution both thematically and stylistically. In her research on women’s roles in the French Revolution, Joan B. Landes has revealed that “from the standpoint of women and their interests, enlightenment looks suspiciously like counter-enlightenment and revolution like counter-revolution.”97 By breaking the myth of the “New Woman,” who was widely expected to “solve the problem of the woman question,”98 Yue’s and Bin’s shared fate echoes Irigaray’s argument about the impossibility to find a “meta-language” and that “The Other has no Other.”99 The hysterical and dissociative subjectivity embodied by the innate doubleness of the two sisters, in other words, indicates not only the symptoms of the Chinese New Women’s “discourse of despair,” as Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan has put it,100 but also the only—albeit tortuous and unstable—means to address the otherwise evasive “truth” about Herstory in the construction and articulation of modern Chinese subjectivity.

TWIN SISTERS AND THE TRANSFERABILITY OF BIOLOGICAL-VISUAL IDENTICALNESS INTO A GENDERED SOCIAL EMPATHY

Unlike Two Flowery Sisters and A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird, both of which present sisters rivaling for love, Zheng Zhengqiu’s 1933 film Twin Sisters, which was produced by the Shanghai-based Star Motion Pictures Company (Mingxing yingpian gongsi 明星影片公司), presents the rivalry between twin sisters through an ideologically charged thematic question: how can a rich, spoiled concubine of a powerful warlord and an impoverished and jailed peasant wife be identical twins from the same family? By structuring sisterly rivalry as social conflicts, the film reflects what Zhen Zhang has described as the “transformation of a thoroughly commercialized film industry into an increasingly politicized enterprise, especially in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the bombing of Shanghai on January 28, 1932.”101 With the glamorous movie star Hu Die 胡蝶 (1907–1989) playing dual roles—both as the elder sister Dabao 大寶 and as the younger sister Erbao 二寶—on the silver screen, the film’s politicized reunification between the two forcibly and socioeconomically separat- 90 Chapter 3 ed sisters provides a richly layered left-wing reinterpretation of the nature- versus-nurture narrative on women’s issues.102 By means of the visual doubleness of, and the emotional empathy between, the identical twins, it spec- tacularizes the self-awakening of a working woman vis-à-vis the ideological rectification of her (self-)misidentified Other. In so doing, biological sisterhood, class consciousness, and gender consciousness become three kinds of interchangeable bonds. The twin sisters Dabao and Erbao have been separated since early childhood, when their father, then a trader of illegal weapons, takes Erbao with him to seek better luck in the opportunity-rich metropolis of Shanghai. Da- bao and his deserted wife are left behind in their native village. As is usually suggested by the trope of urban-rural divide,103 the sisters grow into two very different adults with contrasting socioeconomic statuses. Married to her neighbor and childhood sweetheart, Taoge 桃哥, Dabao lives a materially poor but idyllic life. Erbao, on the other hand, grows into a beautiful but vain and materialistic girl and is married off as a concubine to a warlord in Shandong in exchange for a governmental position for her father. The two sisters’ lives thus run on entirely different paths, until the epidemic of foreign-made or foreign-inspired guns (yangqiang 洋槍) causes severe social turmoil in Dabao’s village and leads to the death of her father-in-law, forcing the young couple and Dabao’s mother to flee the chaos. After drifting into a city in Shandong and giving birth to her second child, Dabao decides to take some financial burden off her overworked and increasingly debilitated husband by serving as a wet-nurse. During the first week at her new job, Taoge is seriously injured at work but the family has no money to pay for medical treatment. Dabao begs her mistress to pay her some of her wages in advance, only to be coldly rejected with a slap in the face. The distraught Dabao then tries to steal a gold necklace from the baby she is nursing but is discovered by the warlord’s sister. In an effort to run away, Dabao pushes the girl and accidentally knocks over a vase, which falls onto the girl’s head and kills her. Enraged and attempting to have Dabao executed, the warlord falsely accuses her of affiliations with political rebels and sends her to a military prison. When Dabao’s mother pleads for mercy to the chief of the military justice department, she is astonished to discover that the man is none other than her husband, and that Dabao’s mistress is actually Erbao. Afraid that his disrepu- table past will be exposed, the girls’ father arranges a secret meeting of the four members of his former family. After being told the truth, Erbao agrees to help secure the release of her elder sister. The embedding of the disruption and recovery of Dabao and Erbao’s sisterhood into narratives of national and social upheaval reflects the lifelong, socially oriented artistic commitment of its director, Zheng Zhengqiu, a pioneering founder of Chinese cinema and the codirector (with Zhang Shich- uan 張石川, 1890–1954) of the nation’s first-ever narrative film, The Diffi- Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 91 cult Couple (Nanfu nanqi 難夫難妻, 1913). Zheng’s works of the 1920s, as Yingjin Zhang has pointed out, demonstrated “an allegorical structure where- by family dramas were eventually made to play out the overarching theme of ‘national salvation.’”104 As such, they played a significant role in the establishment of the generic mode of Chinese “family ethics film” (jiating lunli pian 家庭倫理片), a socially oriented indigenous counterpart to Western melodrama that reflects the impact of the New Culture and May Fourth movements.105 In terms of its basic plot structure—the separation and reunion of two sisters during a time of sociopolitical turbulence—Twin Sisters somewhat resembles D.W. Griffith’s (1875–1948) 1921 film Orphans of the Storm (translated into Chinese as Luanshi guchu 亂世孤雛 or Er gunü 二孤女), which, together with Intolerance (1916, translated as Dang tong fa yi 黨同伐異), Broken Blossoms (1919, translated as Can hua lei 殘花淚), Way Down East (1920, translated as Lai hun 賴婚), and several other works by the same director, caused a Griffith craze in early 1920s Shanghai. 106 When Zhang Shichuan’s film The Blind Orphan Girl (Mang gunü 盲孤女), for which Zheng Zhengqiu wrote the script, was issued by Star Motion Pictures in 1925, a critic immediately noticed the influence of Griffith’s characterization of Louise (played by Dorothy Gish) in Orphans of the Storm.107 As a director, Zheng himself also specifically cited the emphasis on excitement in Orphans of the Storm to defend criticisms about his own employment of sensational plot elements in The Last Trace of Conscience (Zuihou zhi liang- xin 最後之良心, 1925).108 While it is unclear whether there is any further connection between the Orphans of the Storm and Twin Sisters,109 Jianhua Chen’s study of Griffith’s influence on the rise of Chinese cinema provides very helpful background analysis, to which Zheng’s film can be related. Drawing upon Miriam Hansen’s theory of “vernacular modernism,” which highlights the role of classical Hollywood cinema in the mediation of the indigenous public’s experiences of modernity in other parts of the world, Chen describes how the local responses to, and appropriations of, Griffith’s films “ramified into nationalist, cosmopolitan, and metropolitan trends,” including a “feminist mobilization toward publicness, indebted not only to Griffith but to Lillian Gish, the leading actress.”110 In Twin Sisters, these ramified cultural, political, and emotional undercurrents are all crystallized in the distinctive characterizations of Dabao and Erbao and the repeated reshaping of their sisterhood. Not coincidentally, the historical significance of the year 1924, in which the film starts, was its proximity to the highpoint of the Nationalist revolution (the same one Yue and Bin enthusiastically embrace in Bai Wei’s novel), which occurred only two years later. Rather, the deteriorating situation in the twin sisters’ native village, as is manifested by the worries of Dabao’s father- in-law when he first learns about her pregnancy, is a microcosm representa- 92 Chapter 3 tive of the bankruptcy of China’s rural economy at the time and a favorite subject matter widely depicted in left-wing literature of the 1920s and the 1930s. Mao Dun’s 茅盾 (aka Shen Dehong 沈德鴻 or Shen Yanbing 沈雁冰, 1896–1981) famous short story “Spring Silkworm” (Chun can 春蠶, 1932), which appeared one year before Twin Sisters and was made into a film of the same name by Cheng Bugao in 1933, for example, tells a story of how Western and Japanese imperialist aggression and the pouring in of mass- produced foreign goods led an industrious peasant family in the Yangtze Delta region to end up with even more debt after a season’s toilsome work. In Twin Sisters, similar concerns about foreign threats and social and national crises are imbricated with the rural/urban divide and the contrast between “the noble and the criminal” (guiren yu fanren 貴人與犯人)—to borrow from the title of Zheng’s original “civilized play” (wenmingxi 文明戲), from which the film’s script was adapted—that are imposed upon the biological twins along their separate life paths. 111, 112 The dislocation of Dabao’s family and their struggles at the bottom of the urban social strata epitomize the grief and travails of many poor Chinese peasants “forced to leave village miseries to endure city miseries,” a popular theme of “crucial” importance to left- wing filmmakers, who considered it their mission to educate their “intellectual or proletarian” audience in urban cities on “peasant problems.”113 In the director’s own summary, what he envisioned as an ideal ideological approach to filmmaking should follow a tripartite nationalist agenda of “anti- imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-feudalism” (fandi-fanzi-fanfeng 反帝- 反資-反封建).114 With Dabao and Erbao’s paralleled first appearances, the film establishes a contrast between the original-authentic and the artificial-superficial modes of life,115 manifesting, as Hansen has found in Sun Yu’s 孫瑜 (1900–1990) 1934 film Queen of Sports (Tiyu huanghou 體育皇后), “the clash between traditional Chinese values and contemporary fashionable femininity.”116 At the same time, the alternating narration of the two sides clearly resonates with Cheng Bugao’s earlier praise of Griffith’s innovative uses of nonlinear narrations, montages of comic and tragic elements, fade-ins and fade-outs, and lighting effects in “The History of Griffith’s Successes.”117 When the sisters respectively welcome their husbands home, one is presented as a plain-looking peasant woman dressed in curveless and heavily patched clothes, who lovingly fulfills her familial roles as docile and industrious wife, filial daughter and daughter-in-law, and innocent mother-to-be; the other, in contrast, is captured on camera as a sensual modern figure defined by her Western-style clothes, makeup, hair-style, and luxuriously embel- lished mansion, a living embodiment of the vain and illusive “pink dream” criticized by leftist intellectuals. 118 Whereas the elder sister shares the good news of her pregnancy with Taoge, the younger sister bickers with her warlord husband over his disloyalty and, empowered by the fact that she has Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 93 recently given birth to his son, manipulates him into a reconciliation. As these comparisons visually position the two sisters as separated by an old- versus-new (otherwise traditional-versus-modern or Chinese-versus-West- ernized) divide, they also invoke ethical and emotional re-evaluations of the divide itself. The typical Chinese audience of the time, being “specifically urban, and predominantly in cities . . . that were the centers . . . of Western trading,”119 was thus caught between an admiration of Erbao’s splendid body and modern bourgeois lifestyle and a nostalgic sympathy for Dabao’s moral integrity and authenticity. In the later parts of the film, similar contrasts continue to be highlighted through the editing. In the scene where Erbao interviews Dabao for a job as a wet nurse, a series of shot/reverse shots amazingly, and convincingly, present the same actress playing two different roles. The scene is followed by a long shot that frames the two sisters on opposite sides, with an obedient Dabao standing with fear and nervousness in her patched clothes and an arrogant Erbao sitting on the sofa surrounded by her servants and her sister-in-law. An even more explicit representation of the class-informed differences between the sisters can be found in the scene after Taoge’s accident. When Dabao goes to Erbao to beg for a wage advance to save Taoge’s life, the two sisters are framed in a two-shot, forming an intensive visualization of a “city/country antithesis.”120 As they stand, again, on the two ends of the screen, one pleads in tears while the other indifferently and impatiently rejects the begging. If these visual compositions reveal a marked imbalance in the twin sisters’ social statuses, their apparent physical “sameness,” on the other hand, provides an ironic critique of the unfair bifurcation. In any case, the separation and all the ensuing differences, as is shown in the flashback of Dabao’s mother’s memory, are more the result of the father’s abandoning the family’s rural home than the natural outcome of circumstances. On a deeper level, the forced separation of the twins is foremost rooted in the desperate economic plight of the rural village brought about both by foreign aggression and by domestic turmoil, circumstances which motivate the father to participate in the illegal but highly lucrative arms trade. The evil business then proceeds in a vicious circle, helping the morally corrupt father climb up the social ladder on the one hand, and leaving innocent peasants and fishermen behind in worsened local conditions. The violent death of Dabao’s father-in-law, a former home-school teacher who has lost all his students because of the economic situation, marks a dramatic and tragic closure of Dabao’s idyllic life featured in the opening scene and symbolizes the destruction of the traditional sociocultural order, in which teachers and scholars were once venerated. Erbao’s luxurious life, therefore, has been based on a fundamental moral compromise hidden behind the splendid curtain of semicolonial cosmopolitan modernity. 94 Chapter 3

In their new urban environment, the blood ties between the sisters, just like the unity of Dabao’s family and of the entire Chinese nation, are severely challenged by a new sociopolitical logic defined by power and capital. Be- fore the revelation of the family secret, their shared blood type only guaran- tees the salability of Dabao’s milk to Erbao, which leads to a harsh contract that forges a temporary and commoditized relationship between the biological twins. Moreover, the agreement also physically alienates Dabao from her husband and her own children, depriving her of the ability to remain a good wife and wise mother, a role model that emerged from the late Qing reformist discourse and, though hotly debated during the May Fourth era, remained very influential. At the same time, the contractual relationship between the two reconfirms Erbao’s deviation from the same ideal model of womanhood, presenting her as an irresponsible new mother, who devotes most of her attention not to her baby but to the fight for her husband’s favor against his other wives and mistresses. Although acute enough to see through her husband’s lies, Erbao does not realize the health issues of the previous wet nurse until she is told about them by her sister-in-law. The sister-in-law, as if a false substitute for Dabao, not only is introduced to the audience with Erbao addressing her as a “younger sister,” but also sits side by side with Erbao, wearing exactly a same dress and a similar hair-style, during the interview for a new wet nurse. It is of particular interest, therefore, that the reunification between the twins is achieved at the cost of the life of this fake “sister” of Erbao’s. On the other hand, in social and gender terms, the authentic blood ties among the three female members of the former family are mediated through the sharing of physical scars on the arms of both the mother and Erbao. Just like Qiu Jin and her fellow late Qing feminists’ use of the bound foot as an embodied epitome of the oppression of women, the morally and politically charged visual presentation of the scars as physical records of the father’s abuse materializes the two female characters’ common sufferings in bodily terms and leads Erbao to recognize her mother and her sister. After the blood kinship triumphs over the otherwise apparently impass- able socioeconomic gap between an “official’s wife” and an “impoverished mother,” in the words of the mother, the narrative focus is tactfully transferred from the recognition of biological ties to the ideological domain. Trac- ing the split of the family back to a conflict between a wicked arms trafficker and his innocent and kind-hearted wife, and aligning the moral contrast between the two sides along class lines, the mother further explains that the father picked Erbao as his companion not because of his love for her but because of his selfish calculations. That is, because of the family’s financial pressures, Dabao started to help work in the fields at a young age, thereby developing the worn and darkened skin of a laborer. In her father’s estima- tion, this made Erbao the only socially promising daughter, who was then Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 95 cultivated as the family beauty so that he could exploit her marriage prospects for his own profit. The patriarchal father’s unethical separation of the twins, in this interpretation, comes to embody an arbitrary social hierarchy that ignores the fundamental commonness—and interchangeability—between the sisters. In the film’s most famous medium shot, the identical twins sit on the two sides of a table, separated by their mother, who is seated between them. The composition forms an image that is both visually shock- ing—resonant of what Zhen Zhang has described as “the sorcery of tricky photography” in early Chinese cinema 121—and ideologically enlightening. Through this triple-layered denouncement of the imposition of the physical, social, and moral gaps between the two sisters, their identical twinhood is elastically mediated along a continuum of female victimhood—caused by the violence and exploitation of men—and proletariat victimhood—caused by the destruction of the rural economy. Realizing that the identical twins’ contrasting life trajectories have initially been caused by the divide between work and nonwork, Dabao indignantly argues—by talking into the camera, the perspective of which is supposed to be identified with Erbao’s vision— that, with their sameness and interchangeability, the sisters’ present conditions could have been reversed if Dabao had not labored in the fields. In addition to criticizing Erbao’s arrogance and cold-bloodedness toward the poor, Dabao warns her of the inauthenticity, and hence the insecurity, of her bond with rich and powerful men like her father and her husband; just as their father calculatedly “sold” her to the warlord as a concubine, her husband cares only about her youthful body and will undoubtedly abandon her when she ages. Noticeably, the implied sameness and interchangeability between the twins also facilitates Dabao’s empathetic transformation of her “self-pity” to her “sympathy for the younger sister,” as she describes it; in return, Erbao responds with an equal measure of empathy. Specifically, it is Dabao’s conclusion that “it is always the poor that suffer; and it is always we women that suffer”—which Yiman Wang has termed as a “gender-class analogy”122— that finally spurs Erbao to pursue justice on her sister’s behalf. Having shed her arrogance, layer by layer, while listening to her mother and her sister, Erbao eventually identifies herself as Dabao’s fellow victim—when also talking directly to the camera—with a dawning realization of her father’s manipulation and exploitation of her marriage at the expense of her own happiness with a true lover. The twins discuss the successive revelations of their father’s immoral deeds face to face, seated opposite each other, as if experiencing a socially reinterpreted form of a mirrored reality. Meanwhile, what Laura Mulvey has described as “the cinema[’s] structure of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego” and its “production of ego ideals” facilitated by the stardom of actors and actresses123—in this case, Hu Die—further invite a corresponding 96 Chapter 3 transformation in the audience from superficially enjoying the visual pleasures of the film to reflecting upon its ideological messages with a revised sense of selfhood equipped with social consciousness. Compared with the reader of a literary text, whose knowledge of the story depends only on written words, a film audience can gain extra information via audiovisual means. Therefore, while Dabao and Erbao’s twin sisterhood is only fully revealed at the meeting of the former family members, a sophisticated viewer might have figured it out much earlier from Hu Die’s dual roles. The audience’s interest in the film, therefore, lies not so much in the revelation on the plot level as in how such a revelation is conducted in cinematic presentation. As can be seen from the posters and advertisements of Twin Sisters, Hu Die’s stardom and her ability to perform dual roles were expected, and indeed later proved, to be one of the biggest selling points of the film.124 As the truth of their shared blood ties, early childhood experiences, and gendered oppression gradually unfolds at the meeting, Dabao’s emotions run the gamut from desperation to relief by way of doubtfulness, shock, hysteria, confusion, indignation, and sadness; and Erbao, from haugh- ty chilliness to enthusiastic sympathy by way of skepticism, hesitation, self- guilt, heartache, epiphany, resentment, and resoluteness. Hu Die’s rich facial expressions for the two respective roles, many of which are featured in medium close-up shots,125 not only reflect an effective emulation of Lillian Gish126 but also resonate with Erbao’s feminist-ish declaration made during her quarrel with her husband, namely that “Not all women are to be bullied by you men for their entire lives.” In the meantime, recuperated and reconstructed, the ideologically charged twin sisterhood replaces the father-daughter bond as the most important biological-familial tie for Erbao. This leads to the further exclusion of the father, who refuses to risk his position by releasing Dabao, from the circle of the three reunited women. In the last scene, cheerful music plays in the background while the three women leave the father behind, help one another get into Erbao’s car, and set off together to negotiate with the warlord. At this point, the camera frames a reunion that is defined both in biological terms and in the sense of class and gender consciousness. The only lingering irony, that their quest for justice still seems to depend upon the mercy of another rich and powerful man, is to be solved in the film’s much less successful sequel, Flowers Reborn (Zaishenghua 再生花, 1934, dir. Zheng Zhengqiu), in which the Nationalist revolution deprives the warlord of power, ultimately sets both sisters free, and reunites them respectively with Taoge and Erbao’s revolutionist boyfriend.127 In a 1925 essay, Zheng Zhengqiu described his approach to filmmaking and scriptwriting as one focusing on “social education” (shehui jiaoyu 社會教育), rather than sophisticated art. 128 In the left-wing cinema circles of the 1930s, where Griffith’s Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm were read Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 97 as stories about “the pains suffered by semi-feudal women seeking for the freedom to love,” as Zheng Junli 鄭君里 (1911–1969) wrote,129 the instrumental function of cinema received even more attention. In this vein, Twin Sisters has clear didactic messages about moral virtues and social justice, and the apparently harmonious reunion among the mother and her daughters at the end continues with the “ethical humanism and progressive attributes”130 in the director’s previous works, as is the case, for example, with the scripts he wrote for Zhang Shichuan’s An Orphan Rescues His Grandpa (Gu’er jiu zu ji 孤兒救祖記, 1923) and Zhang and Xu Hu’s 徐琥 (birth and death years unknown) The Spirit of the Jade Pear (Yuli hun 玉梨魂, 1924).131 Overall, Twin Sisters literally covers all the distinct thematic features Yingjin Zhang has summarized for the Chinese left-wing cinema between 1933 and 1937, including national salvation, class conflicts, and encouragement for collective efforts to improve social realities. 132 Yet its resemblance to the old- styled “grand reunion” commonly found in traditional Chinese stories and plays133 also made the film subject to criticisms from more radical leftists for a lack of political courage. Tian Han 田漢 (1898–1968), who wrote under the pen name of Bohong 伯鴻, for example, regarded the film as a representative of “feudalistic sentimentalism” (fengjian de ganshangzhuyi 封建的感傷主義).134 For the film critic Tang Na 唐納 (aka Ma Jiliang 馬季良, 1914–1988), a vehement critic of the entertainment-oriented “soft films” (ruanxing dianying 軟性電影),135 “Dabao’s compromise” with the ruling class merely deceitfully appealed to the “eclectic fantasies held by the backward petty urbanites.”136 Amid these debates, nevertheless, Twin Sisters was Star Motion Pictures’ biggest financial success137 and gained wide recognition by winning a national award sponsored by the Republican government.138 Its effective transference of challenged sisterhood from the domestic domain to the public domain also left a lasting influence on Chinese cinematic imaginary and practices, inspiring such later works as Xie Jin’s 謝晉 (1923–2008) Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei 舞台姐妹, 1965) and Zhang Zheng’s 張錚 (1916–2007) Sisters in a Mountainous Village (Shancun jiemei 山村姐妹, 1965).139 On the other hand, however, such an instrumental melodramatic trope inevitably undermines the truths about female experiences and appropriates Woman as “a multiple signifier”140 to address national crises and sociopolitical catastrophes. In this sense, except for its happy ending, the diegesis of Twin Sisters is actually not very different from that of Two Flow- ery Sisters. In both cases, the separation and reunion (in either physical or symbolic terms) between two biological sisters allegorically capture the mixed anxieties engendered by the falling apart of the traditional (and largely rural) Chinese familial and social systems and the unbalanced construction of semicolonial cosmopolitan modernity. At the same time, if the film’s replacement of the patriarchal father as the central role with a more horizon- 98 Chapter 3 tal unity among the three women is reminiscent of the late Qing feminist- nationalist advocacies for the “women’s sphere,” Dabao’s retrieval of her sister from Erbao’s sister-in-law ambiguously implies a prioritization of authentic blood ties over acquired sisterhood. In this sense, the allegorization of the twins’ biological-visual identicalness as a bridge between the rural- traditional and the urban-cosmopolitan leads to yet another slippery metaphor of sisterhood.

IS BLOOD ALWAYS THICKER THAN WATER? NARRATIVES OF BIOLOGICAL SISTERHOOD IN FAMILIAL AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS

With the significant revisions and reconstructions of both the female social sphere and women’s interpersonal relationships in China since the turn of the twentieth century, the challenges of biological sisterhood in Li’s, Bai’s, and Zheng’s stories all exceed the private realm and become public matters, reflecting the changing structural relationships among the individual, the family, the nation, and the world. In particular, the three texts’ respective treatments of the elastic bonds of sisterhood between the private and the public domains indicate many richly gendered nuances about women and Chinese modernity, where such blood ties are, at one and the same time, competitive and empathetic, vulnerable and self-recuperative, restrictive and invigorating. With an original Chinese title literally meaning “The Flowery Bones of Two Sisters,” the obsessive nostalgia in Li’s novel is foremost embodied by George’s preservation of the two sisters’ “flowery bones.” The word “bone” (gu 骨) is also used, following the conventional Chinese expression of “bones and flesh” (gurou 骨肉), to describe Linna and Yingna’s sibling bond, which is otherwise referred to as “arms and legs of the same body” (shouzu 手足).141 These wordings hint at an orthodox Confucian worldview that sees the “bones and flesh” connections among members of the patriarchal family142 as the starting point for the self to make sense of his or her relationships to others in bifurcated ways along gender lines. In this tradition, as Confucius repeatedly emphasizes in The Analects, the father-son relationship is considered as the symbolic foundation of the entire moral-political system, extending from the familial to the social domain. 143 A woman’s role, on the other hand, is mostly limited to the household and successively defined by her subservience to a succession of men—first to her father before marriage, then to her husband after marriage, and finally to her son when widowed. Women’s relationships with other female family members, including sisterhood, are thus correspondingly regulated by the patriarchal household they currently belong to. In the Tang dynasty The Book of Filial Piety Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 99 for Women (Nü xiao jing 女孝經) written by the wife of a governmental official named Houmochen Miao 侯莫陳邈 (birth and death years unknown), the didactic female historian Ban Zhao is quoted for having said that, after getting married, a woman should “transfer” her filial service to her parents to her parents-in-law, just as she should “transfer” her service to her sisters to sisters-in-law; then, and only then, will she be recognized for virtu- ously maintaining the proper familial relations. 144 Such transformability and transferability of sisterhood also underpinned the logic of the aforementioned premodern Chinese stories about sisterly characters happily marrying the same husband. Li’s foreignized setting, however, deprives Linna and Ying- na’s sisterhood of the possibility of transforming into a wife-concubine bond and, in its stead, redefines the biological blood tie in a broader empathetic sense—as a mutual “passion” that is excessive and self-sacrificing. Being such, when successively challenged by the sisters’ conflicting property rights and rivaling love for the same man, their sisterhood is always reconfirmed through acts of self-denial and self-destruction. For Li’s narrator, the tragic transformation of two beautiful women connected by “bones and flesh” into two dead bodies of “flowery bones” is not simply an accidental case; rather, he warns the novel’s imagined readers, who were living through the transition from the crumbling Qing empire to a nascent Republic, that the tragic failure of the triangular love relationship indicates the potential danger of the Western practice of “freedom of marriage.”145 In contrast to the aforementioned 1903 novel Freedom of Mar- riage by Zhang Zhaotong, which associates such freedom in private matters with national independence at large, 146 Li depicts this modern practice as a gendered inductive force that results in the irresolvable conflicts between a woman’s “passionate body” and her “passionate heart”147 and leads to self-destruction as the only means to maintain the sisters’ “jade-like” virtues. As Linna’s and Yingna’s self-denial of what is largely seen as a blessing to modern Western women undermines the validity of the novel’s imagined Western modernity, their tenacious mutual love circuitously echoes the male narrator-protagonist’s own nostalgic elegy of a Confucian patriarchal- polygamous utopia and its gender and sexual moralities, which used to keep sisterhood “safely” in the domestic sphere and under the polygamous system. Blood-based and family-defined sisterhood continued to be challenged during the New Culture movement of the mid-1910s through the 1920s, when the traditional Confucian emphases on patriarchal blood ties were attacked vehemently. In Lu Xun’s 魯迅 (aka Zhou Shuren 周樹人, 1881–1936) 1918 story “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji 狂人日記), considered the first modern Chinese short story written in the vernacular, the Confucian familial and social hierarchies are depicted as a “vicious circle of cannibalism.”148 As in the late Qing reformist and revolutionist discourses, the condemnation of backward familial and national traditions was often 100 Chapter 3 conducted through narratives of female suffering. Represented by Lu Xun’s characterization of Xianglin’s wife in his 1924 short story “New Year’s Sacrifice” (Zhufu 祝福), the May Fourth literary tradition created an archetype of passive and silent female victims as “jettisoned object[s],” as Sally Taylor Lieberman has described it.149 In this literary formula and echoing a popular intellectual belief in social evolution, age differences among female characters frequently served as metaphors for the chasm between traditional and modern mentalities. In Xie Bingying’s 謝冰瑩 (1906–2000) short story “Elder Sister” (Jiejie 姊姊, 1942), for example, the titular protagonist yields to an arranged marriage, endures poverty and family burdens, forgoes a profession, and has to rely upon the aid from her working siblings.150 When she finally passes away, her younger sister is relieved, since she believes that the escalating Second Sino- Japanese War would only cause her further suffering. In the eye of the younger sister, the elder sister’s unfulfilled life is little more than “a sacrifice to the old society,”151 and is only meaningful as a lesson for younger genera- tions of women in how not to live. However, as Yue’s and Bin’s respective frustrations in A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird suggest, the acquisition of female subjectivity and freedom was a difficult, complicated, and nonlinear progression. The spatial- temporal locale—a school’s athletic field “in the [capital city of] Beijing during a dark political situation”152—provides the setting for Yue’s rescue of Bin from mob attacks at the beginning of the novel, a scene which underscores the ironic correlations between two kinds of gender oppression that are apparently contrasting but fundamentally related. That is, in spite of their Westernized education and the impending arrival of the National Revolution- ary Army, one sister is a victim of old-style parental tyranny and an arranged marriage, and the other a victim of malicious rumors and public violence targeted at modern “New Women.” Like Jurui and her sworn sisters in Qiu Jin’s Stones of the Jingwei Bird yet colored with a streak of May Fourth individualism, both Yue and Bin decide to leave their patriarchal families behind to join the nationalist project, hoping that they can realize aspirations for personal liberty while fighting for the collective revolution. The parallels between the sisters’ individual quests and their political pursuits, which also keep reinventing their sisterhood, are made explicit through the respective geographic paths they take while chas- ing the momentum of the Nationalist revolution from one political center to another. In Yue’s case, it is the “Southern atmosphere” of the revolutionary center in Guangzhou that “enables her to set herself free layer by layer”153 and empowers her as a subject of desire in the relationship with Shaofang. Correspondingly, it is in Wuhan, where the new Nationalist government headquarters were seated, that she secures a divorce with the help of her superiors. Meanwhile, the fragmented political landscape of metropolitan Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 101

Wuhan—rife with foreign-occupied concessions, capitalist materialism, and complicated political factionalism—leads the self-named “Expeditionary Bird” to increasingly embrace radical progressiveness and ultimately to side with the “Assassination Party.” In Bin’s case, her journey from Beijing to Wuhan and, eventually, to the military front of the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition also follows the geographical course of the revolutionary military campaign, which resonates with her own energetic libido as a “Bomb.” Yet, compared with the confluence of feminism and nationalism in the politically charged novels by late Qing women writers, such dual quests in the fiction of “New Women” writers of the 1920s and the 1930s seem more convoluted and disappointing. Unlike the finality of the abandonment of the patriarchal household in Stones of the Jingwei Bird and the celebration of the institutional construction of female sphere in Chivalric Beauties, Yue and Bin face much more fragmented and labyrinthine routes, along which the supposed boundary between an oppressive patriarchal household and a liberating Nationalist revolution is surprisingly and disturbingly blurred. Even after settling down in Wuhan, Yue is still repeatedly brought back to the haunting condition of physical confinement, first by her superior—ostensibly to protect her but ultimately causing an attack of “hysteria”154—and then in a Nationalist prison. After all her efforts to escape a life of forced sacrifice to the old patriarchal traditions, Yue ends up sacrificing herself to the factionalism of revolutionary politics, about which she has, in fact, always been quite cynical. Similarly, Bin’s hasty relationship with a senior Nationalist officer not only seems to be driven by her affection for her father, 155 whose recognition and love constitutes another source of the two sisters’ rivalry, but also reveals the limitations of the Nationalist revolution as a feminist undertaking. In both cases, the sisters’ doomed fates, as a “sacrifice” and a “broken copper gong,” indicate a dead-end situation, rather than a promising progressive narrative. Therefore, if the two sisters’ divergent personalities and life choices place them on two apparently different locations along the spectrum of the “New Woman” figure, who, as Felski has pointed out, serves as “a resonant symbol of emancipation,”156 Bai Wei’s splitting female subjectivity between the two empathetic rivals questions the gendered realities of such a neatly defined “emancipation.” While constantly competing against each other, Yue and Bin grow psychologically and emotionally closer as their parallel failures and shared sufferings rewrite their biological sisterhood into a more elastic and more fundamentally gender-based mode of identification. It is their victimized status as detested daughters, as deceived lovers, and as disappointed female revolutionaries, that continuously smoothes over the stresses and fissures caused by their rivalry. One climatic reunion, for example, occurs when Yue discloses to Bin Shaofang’s past relationship with her: “Both of them are grieved by the evil prank. . . . The woeful souls of the two pitiful girls, 102 Chapter 3 hurt, cannot help but tightly hug each other, letting their running tears flow into each other’s path.”157 After the two sisters confess that they have both had an intimate sexual relationship with the same man, Yue decides to give up her own romantic desires and sublimate her victimhood into a triumph of sibling love, only to be haunted by her sorrowful loss throughout the rest of the story. In this way, unlike Li Hanqiu’s allegorization of a man’s mourning for his women during the traditional-modern transition, Bai Wei’s depiction of Yue’s self-sacrifice in the name of sisterhood substantiates the decision with traumatic details provided from a female-centered perspective, which questions the logic of female sacrifice embedded in the master narrative of revolution. In Twin Sisters, a shared sense of victimhood also enables Dabao and Erbao to recover their sisterhood and reconstruct their rivalry—first for the opportunity to be taken to the city by their father and then for justice after the warlord’s sister’s death—into a gendered social empathy. At the same time, the sisters’ contrasting features—personalities, ways of life, social statuses— highlight traditional-modern tensions, like those found in Li Hanqiu’s and Bai Wei’s novels, yet with a much stronger emphasis on class conflict, which, in turn, is profoundly affected by the national crisis of semicolonial China. The sisters’ forced separation and subsequent estrangement reflect the damage inflicted on rural lower-class families both by imperialist foreign powers and by opportunistic Chinese merchants and warlords. Their coinci- dental encounter in Erbao’s luxurious urban mansion, on the other hand, exposes the arbitrariness and unfairness in the social stratification residing beneath the superficial glamour of the modern city. Along with the urban/rural divide, with which the sisters’ class differences are prominently associated, biological ties are ambivalently defined both as a genuine facilitator of a gendered class-consciousness on the rural side (for the twins and their mother) and as a cause of socio-legal injustice on the urban side, as embodied by the father’s “selling” Erbao for his own good and by the warlord’s framing of Dabao as retribution for his sister’s accidental death. As such different validities of familial bonds might appeal to the nostalgic fantasies of a burgeoning urban audience, the biological-visual identicalness between the twins may have also helped to redirect such sentiments from the mournful memories of a traditional agricultural-rural idyll to an ideological invocation of social protests against the surrounding realities. In addition to Twin Sisters, several other Chinese films made in the 1930s also saw the disruption and recovery of biological sisterhood as intriguingly analogous to the challenges simultaneously taking place on familial and national levels because of the ongoing sociopolitical turbulence. Two good examples are Wang Naiding’s 王乃鼎 (birth and death years unknown) Two Orphaned Girls (Er gunü 二孤女, 1931) and Ma-Xu Weibang’s 馬徐維邦 (1905–1961) Pear Blossoms in the Storm (Baoyu lihua 暴雨梨花, 1934). Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 103

Both bore even closer resemblances to Orphans of the Storm than Twin Sisters; neither, however, was as influential as Twin Sisters. In Wang’s film, two loving sisters are separated during the revolution, and the elder one blinds herself to prevent a warlord from taking her as his concubine. The sisters endure tremendous difficulties to be reunited, but, just as in Li Han- qiu’s Two Flowery Sisters, the younger sister falls in love with the elder sister’s fiancé, a fervent revolutionary, and ends up leaving the couple on their wedding night.158 In Ma-Xu’s film, which resembles Zheng Zhengqiu’s dichotomy of the “good poor” and the “bad rich,” an innocent blind girl and her pretty but gullible younger sister are forced to take different life paths after the blind sister is injured in a car accident. Tempted by the luxurious ways of the car driver’s playboy fiancé, the younger sister yields to his seduction despite the elder sister’s opposition. In the end, the younger sister dies alone, after being abandoned; meanwhile, the elder sister also loses her fiancé, a good-hearted factory worker, to a work accident.159 Like Twin Sisters, these two films depict, each in its own way, the falling apart of the family and the nation via narratives of the arbitrary separation of sisters. In addition, they also negotiate the prospects of overcoming such social ruptures by means of biological authenticity, empathetic elasticity, and ideological transferability of sisterhood.

CONCLUSION

Despite the nationwide enthusiasm for discussion of the “women’s sphere” and the “woman question” in late Qing and Republican China, the ideals of the “modern,” such as national independence, sociopolitical revolution, and self-reflexive reasoning, have been “grounded in fraternity”—as Felski has pointed out160—much more than in relationships among women. The marginalized status of women’s relationships, however, enriches potential for alternative narratives and interpretations, especially as regards the gendered and “inherently double-edged” politics behind the common understanding of the “modern” as “the repudiation of the past and a commitment to change and the values of the future.”161 In all the three texts examined in this chapter, the significance of biological sisterhood is restructured, in different ways, by a confluence of individual desires and the ideologies of progress—be it “universal principles,” or revolution, or justice. Compared with the joint promotion of nationalist sisterhood and feminist sisterhood discussed in the previous two chapters, the divergent ways—the tragic-sentimental, the hysterical-realistic, and the cosmopolitan- melodramatic—in which the stories of Li Hanqiu, Bai Wei, and Zheng Zhengqiu embed sisterly rivalry into the backdrop of the perceived traditional-modern transition exhibit more dimensions of complexities, hybridiza- 104 Chapter 3 tions, and contestations. While the elastic extension of sisterhood across domestic and public boundaries continues to weave female-female ties into the fabric of nationhood and what Lydia Liu has termed as China’s “translated modernity,”162 the separations and competitions between rival sisters not only reflect sociocultural conflicts but also project the often emotionally nonhomogeneous—and at times dilemmatic—interpretations and embrace of modernity. These diversified and proliferated sisterhood narratives thus offer many gendered textual and sociocultural “details,”163 which, according to Rey Chow, serve not only as “the vital joints . . . at which the coherence of certain modes of narration can be united” but also “as a point of inquiry in the conflicted affective structures that underlie approaches to ‘history’ in modern Chinese narratives.”164

NOTES

1. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1. 2. Susan Mann, “Why Women Were Not a Problem in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Thought,” in Windows on the Chinese World: Reflections by Five Historians, ed. Clara Wang- chung Ho (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 113. 3. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 86. 4. There were, however, occasional exceptions for some female literates, who served as private tutors for gentry girls, as well as for some wives of government officials, who could travel with their husbands to the latter’s appointed locations. See Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in the Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and Yanning Wang, Reverie and Reality: Poetry on Travel by Late Imperial Chinese Women (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 5. Mann, “Why Women Were Not a Problem in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Thought,” 124. 6. One type of rare exception was the courtesan, whose social marginalization, ironically, allowed her some flexibility in circumventing conventional restrictions. For example, in Guan Hanqing’s 關漢卿 (ca. 1230–ca. 1310) variety play Zhao Pan’er Rescuing One of Her Fellow Girls of Pleasure Quarters (Zhao Pan’er fengyue jiu fengchen 趙盼兒風月救風塵), the witty and heroic female protagonist saves her sworn sister from the latter’s abusive husband. See Stephen Owen, ed. and trans., “Variety Plays: Guan Han-qing, Rescuing One of the Girls (Jiu feng-chen),” in An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911, ed. and trans. Stephen Owen (New York: Norton, 1997), 44–70. 7. For more on the trope of polygamy in Qing fiction, see Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). 8. Ten years later, the novel was also serialized in the Shanghai-based Shenzhou Daily (Shenzhou ribao 神州日報). Besides, in 1919 and 1923 respectively, it was published in book form both by Weiwen Book Store (Weiwen shuju 蔚文書局) and by Zhenya Book Store (Zhenya tushuju 震亞圖書局). 9. The employment of foreign settings was, at the time, a rather common literary practice among Chinese writers of popular fiction. Li adopted the same trick in two other 1906 novels, Mrs. Yaose (Yaose furen 瑤瑟夫人) and Shadow of a Female Butterfly (Cidie ying 雌蝶影). For an example of more explicit cases of pseudotranslation, see Pan Shaw-Yu “Imagining the West: Zhou Shoujuan’s ‘Pseudotranslations,’” Compilation and Translation Review 4.2 (2011): 1–23. Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 105

10. For example, see Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters (Shanghai: Zhenya tushuju, 1933), 18, 25, and 47. 11. For more on the translation of crime fiction in the late Qing, see A Ying, A History of Late Qing Fiction (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2009), 190. 12. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 1. 13. Ibid., 71. 14. Earlier in the story, Yingna’s attempted suicide at Linna’s wedding is also appraised by the narrator with a Confucian label, “a heroically chaste woman” (jielie zhi nü 節烈之女)”; see ibid., 44. For more on women’s suicides in imperial China, see Paul S. Ropp et al., eds., Passionate Women: Female Suicide in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 15. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 128. 16. “Universal principles,” a popular catchphrase in the late Qing wave of Western learning, is repeatedly referred to in Li’s novel as the characters’ behavioral and moral codes of conduct. For example, during George’s rescue of Linna, there is a brief moment when he hides himself and observes Yingna, trying to figure out the latter’s relationship with the victim. Realizing that his hiding may delay the resolution of Yingna’s anxiety, George describes his original plan as “not compatible with universal principles” and calls out to the younger sister. Likewise, when George finds his passion for Yingna growing stronger as she stays with the newlywed couple, he admits that it is “absolutely against universal principles.” See Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 11, 50. 17. For examples of references to China as Zhina, a term that first occasionally occurred in the Tang dynasty as a retranslation of the Sanskrit word “Cina” and that became widely adopted in Japanese texts in the nineteenth century, see Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 5, 55, 81–82. Unlike the derogatory connotations the term was frequently associated with in the 1920s and 1930s, its usage in Li Hanqiu’s novel seems more like a reflection of the influence of Japanese texts in the late Qing. For more on Zhina, see Huang Xingtao, “On ‘Zhina’: Research on the Origins of New Terms in Modern Chinese History (II),” Chinese Literature and History 5 (1999): 54–61. 18. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 19. Though not under direct influence of the eighteenth century sentimental novel in Eu- rope, the Chinese “aiqing xiaoshuo” of the late Qing and early Republican period was closely related to the introduction of Western (including Japanese) knowledge at the turn of the century. One prominent example is Lin Shu 林紓 and Wei Yi’s 魏易 (1880–1930) translation of Better Go Home (Buru gui 不如歸, 1908) based on Sakae Shioya and E. F. Edgett’s 1905 English translation—entitled Nami-ko: A Realistic Novel—of Kenjirō Tokutomi’s (1868–1927) Japanese novel The Cuckoo (Hototogisu, 1898–1900). 20. Richard G. Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption and Religiosity in Cultu- ral Practice (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011), 119. 21. For more on Li’s other fictional works, see Wu Dafu, A Study of the Literary Works by Li Hanqiu, a Talented Writer from Yang Zhou (Taiyuan: Shanxi Renmin chubanshe, 2010). 22. Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 3. 23. Ibid. 24. Fan Boqun, “Defining Chinese Popular Literature in Modern and Contemporary Peri- ods,” in Li Hanqiu: The Leading Figure of Yangzhou-Based Fiction, ed. Rui Heshi (Nanjing: Nanjing chubanshe, 1994), 7. 25. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Centu- ry Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 11. 26. Fan Yanqiao, “Li Hanqiu and his Tides of Guangling,” in Li Hanqiu, Tides of Guangling (Taipei: Heluo tushu chubanshe, 1980), vol.2, 1425. 27. Perry Link, “Traditional-Style Popular Urban Fiction in the Teens and Twenties,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 333. 28. Hu Shih, Chinese Literature of the Past Fifty Years (Taipei: Yuan-Liou, 1986), 118. 106 Chapter 3

29. For an example of late Qing reformists’ reference to “empathy” as an instrumental means to cultivate new mentality among Chinese readers, see the first of the “Ten Poems Dedicated to the First Issue of New Fiction” by an anonymous author, in the fifth issue of the New Fiction journal, 175. For more on “empathy” in late Qing literature, see Ye Yi, “On Artistic Empathy in the Theory of Fiction in Late Qing,” in Collected Papers on Aesthetics and Arts in Ancient China, ed. Jiang Kongyang (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 372–86. 30. See Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 92. 31. For example, see ibid., 46, 128. 32. According to the novel, the town got the name “Jade Town” from its jadestones, “just as those Chinese ‘dragon pits’ are so named because there used to be dragons there”; see ibid., 5. 33. McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion, 3. 34. Ibid., 138. 35. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 122. 36. For more on Tang Xianzu’s approach to passion, see Zuo Dongling, Wang Yangming Studies and the Mentality of the Literati of the Mid- to Late-Ming Dynasty (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), 602–55; for more on the influence and legacy of the so-called “cult of qing” (qing jiao 情教), see Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 37. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 37, 39. 38. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 39. Prasenjit Duara, “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China,” in Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, eds. Kai-Wing Chow et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 362. 40. See Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” The Hastings Center Report 25.2 (1995): 24–33. 41. For more on the mixed use of the classical-language and the vernacular in “new fiction” writing, see Chen Pingyuan, The Starting Point of Modern Chinese Fiction (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005), 163–98. 42. For example, see Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 48. For examples of inserted commentaries in translated works in turn-of-the-twentieth-century China, see Leo Tak-hung Chan, “Liberal Versions: Late Qing Approaches to Translating Aesop’s Fables,” in Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918, ed. David E. Pollard (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1998), 70–71, and Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 105–109. 43. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 107. 44. Ibid, 17. 45. Ibid., 12. 46. Ibid., 25. 47. Ibid. 101. 48. Ping Zhu, Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 139. 49. David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 94. 50. Jianmei Liu, Revolution plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 105, 117. 51. David Wang, The Monster That Is History, 98. 52. Patricia Elliot, From Mastery to Analysis: Theories of Gender in Psychoanalytic Femi- nism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 18. 53. Bai Wei, Selected Works of Bai Wei (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985), 15–16. For extensive studies on women’s autobiographical writings in twentieth-century Chi- na, see Lingzhen Wang, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth- Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), and Jing M. Wang, When “I” Was Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 107

Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 54. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 21. 55. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 173. In a related vein and drawing on Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin has pointed out that the exchange of women between men serves as a means to create and normalize an asymmetric sex/gender system, where “men have been sexual subjects . . . and women sexual semi-objects . . . for much of human history”; see Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 176. 56. Ping Zhu, Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture, 139. 57. The novel was first serialized between November 1928 and August 1929 in The Current (Benliu 奔流), a short-lived journal founded and edited by Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936, born Zhou Shuren 周樹人), a central literary figure of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, and Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896–1945), another prominent writer of the time best known for his sentimental confessional fictional style and decadent aesthetics. The progressive political stance of the journal led it to be closed down by the Nationalist government in 1929, which not only caused Bai Wei’s manuscript for the second part of the novel to be missing but also ruined her plan to write a third part. The first part of this work, nevertheless, managed to be published in book form in the same year by Beixin Publishing Company, with whom Lu Xun and his younger brother Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) were both closely connected. For more on the publication background of the novel, see Bai Shurong and He You, A Critical Biography of Bai Wei (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1983), 97. 58. Both Yue’s traumatic loss of virginity to her arranged husband, which initially prevents her from staying with Shaofang, and Bin’s bad physical and psychological conditions, which keep her from starting a new life, may exactly remind the reader of the author’s own life experiences, first as a feeble overseas student struggling with poverty, bad health, and academic studies, and then as a “female revolutionar[y who] was perpetually disrupted and disqualified by her own body, infected as it was with venereal disease” passed to her by her lover Yang Sao; see Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 109. See also Amy Dooling, “Desire and Disease: Bai Wei and the Literary Left of the 1930s,” in Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature, ed. Charles A. Laughlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 51–60. In the second part of the novel, Yue’s arranged husband is also described as a patient of syphilis, just like Yang Sao; see Bai Wei, “A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird (21–23),” The Current 2.3 (1929): 460. 59. David Wang, The Monster That Is History, 97. In Linli, the eponymous heroine is endowed with life experiences like the author’s own, such as an arranged marriage, bad health, overseas studies, and financial difficulties, whereas the younger sister is a more idealized “Goddess of Spring” exuberating “youthful charm”; see Bai Wei, Linli (Shanghai: The Com- mercial Press, 1926), 80–81, 91. 60. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 23. 61. Ibid., 86. 62. According to Forster, “flat characters” are “constructed round a single idea or quality” and therefore “easily recognized whenever they come in”; see E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), 103–5. 63. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 44. 64. Ming-Bao Yue, “Gendering the Origins of Modern Chinese Fiction,” in Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society, ed. Tongling Lu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 48. 65. In classical Chinese literature, the image of the “expeditionary bird” often has military connotations. For instance, in his exegesis on “The Rites of Twelve Months” (Yue ling 月令) in the Confucian classic Book of Rites (Li ji 禮記), the Tang dynasty scholar Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648) explains that “expeditionary birds” refer to such fierce predatory birds as eagles and falcons; see Zheng Xuan and Kong Yingda, Expositions of the Book of Rites (Taipei: Kwang- wen, 1971), 153–54. 108 Chapter 3

66. In her 1934 essay “My Initial Motivations for Entering the Literary Circle” (Wo toudao wenxuequan li de chuzhong 我投到文學圈裡的初衷), Bai Wei recalls how her former English teacher, the famous writer Tian Han 田漢 (1898–1968), first introduced her into the world of literature with an English translation of A Doll’s House. See Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 4. 67. Ibid., 71. 68. Ibid., 86. 69. Hong Ruizhao, Revolution and Love (Shanghai: Minzhi shuju, 1928). See also Yang Lianfen, “Women and Revolution in the 1927 National Revolution and Its Related Literature,” Social Sciences in Guizhou 214 (2007): 94–95, and David Wang, The Monster That Is History, 90–91. 70. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 86. 71. Ibid., 44. Though probably not directly related, Bin’s self-identification as a “broken copper gong” may arouse a sense of irony when compared with an article written at the turn of the year 1927–1928 by Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (under the pen name Mai Ke’ang 麥克昂), a leading May Fourth intellectual who converted to Communism around the mid-1920s, in which he urges “individualist” (gerenzhuyi 個人主義) writers “not to messily blow [their] trumpets, [but to] perform like a gramophone for the time being” (buyao luan chui nimen de po laba, zanshi dang yige liushengji ba 不要亂吹你們的破喇叭，暫時當一個留聲機罷)—that is, to follow the guidance of progressive “cultural fighters” (wenyi doushi 文藝鬥士); see Mai Ke’ang, “Tree of Heroism,” Creation Monthly 1.8 (1928): 2–3. 72. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2000), 98. 73. Yi-tsi M. Feuerwerker, “The Changing Relationship between Literature and Life: As- pects of the Writer’s Role in Ding Ling,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 296. 74. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 90–91. 75. See Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” 158–160, 173–77. 76. For more on Jiang Guangci, Hong Lingfei, and their fiction, see Jianmei Liu, Revolution plus Love. 77. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 69. 78. Ibid., 79–80. For more on the connections among women writers’ life experiences, their feminist literary fiction, and their engagements with theatre, especially in the cases of Bai Wei and another “New Woman” writer Yuan Changying 袁昌英 (1894–1973), see Haiping Yan, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–1948 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 118–34. 79. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 85. 80. Ibid., 68–69. 81. Ibid., 108. 82. Ibid., 199. 83. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 345. 84. Ibid., 344–45. 85. Ibid., 344. 86. Yu Dafu, “Introduction to the Modern Prose II,” in Collected Introductions to the Com- pendium of Modern Chinese Literature, eds. Cai Yuanpei et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai liangyoufuxing tushu yinshua gongsi, 1940), 205. 87. Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 139. 88. Jing Wang, When “I” Was Born, 162. 89. Cited from Dany Nobus, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 30. 90. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 183, 187. 91. Bai Wei, “A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird (24–26),” The Current 2.4 (1929): 677. 92. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 184–87. 93. In the novel, one of Yue’s female colleagues specifically tells her that Shaofang has referred to his feeling for Yue as one for “his mother”; see Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 199. Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 109

94. As Sally Taylor Lieberman and Amy Dooling have respectively pointed out, ill-timed pregnancy is often depicted as one important form of the gendered traumatic experiences for deserted women in female writings of the Republican period. See Sally Taylor Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 134–55 and Dooling, “Introduction,” in Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolu- tionary Years, 1936–1976, ed. Amy D Dooling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 6. 95. David Wang, The Monster That Is History, 98. 96. Ibid., 113. 97. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 204. 98. Mann “Why Women Were Not a Problem in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Thought,” 113. 99. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 101. 100. Quoted from David Wang, The Monster That Is History, 98. 101. Zhen Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 246. 102. For more on the rise of the left-wing cinema, see Vivian Shen, The Origins of Leftwing Cinema in China, 1932–37 (New York: Routledge, 2005). 103. For Miriam Hansen, such a “city/country antithesis,” which “has a persistent currency in the cultural imagination of modern China well into the present,” is one prominent example of how early Chinese films “respond to the pressures of modernity in their thematic concerns”; see Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Films as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54.1 (2000): 14–15. 104. Yingjin Zhang, “From ‘Minority Film’ to ‘Minority Discourse’: Questions of Nation- hood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nation- hood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 86. 105. See Paul G. Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation and the ‘May Fourth’ Tradition of Chinese Cinema,” From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, eds. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 295–326. 106. In a 1919 series of essays written for the Shenbao 申報, Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鵑 (1895–1968), a popular writer of the so-called “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” school, enthusiastically praised Griffith’s masterful narrative style and emphasis on morality; see Jianhua Chen, “D.W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, eds. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2013), 25. For film director and critic Gu Kenfu 顧肯夫 (?-1932), Griffith was the leading figure of American cinema; see Gu, “The Origin of the Motion Picture,” The Motion Picture Review 1.1 (1921): 13. Cheng Bugao 程步高 (1898–1966), Zheng Zhengqiu’s fellow filmmaker and another major contributor to the rise of the Chinese left-wing cinema in the 1930s, also published a series titled “The History of Griffith’s Successes” (Gelifeisi chenggong shi 葛禮斐斯成功史) in 1924 and 1925 in the Film Journal (Dianying zazhi 電影雜誌). The series can be found in the issues one to seven, and nine, of the first volume of Film Journal, collected in Jiang Yasha et al., eds., Selected Periodicals of Early Chinese Cinema (Beijing: Zhonghua quanguo tushuguan wenxian weisuo fuzhi zhongxin, 2004), vols. 1 and 2. 107. See Li Daoxin, “The Fine Narrative Tradition of Early Chinese Cinema,” Film Art 4 (2006): 46, 50. 108. See Zheng Zhengqiu, “On the Selection of Materials for Chinese Films,” in Chinese Silent Cinema, ed. China Film Archive (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 291. 109. According to Zheng, he invented the plot himself for the play The Noble and the Criminal (guiren yu fanren 貴人與犯人), before revising it into the film script for Twin Sisters with the assistance of Shen Xiling 沈西苓 (1904–1940), Zheng’s fellow left-wing dramatist and filmmaker. See Tan Chunfa, Breaking a New Path: Zheng Zhengqiu, the Father of Chinese Cinema (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1992), 435. 110. Jianhua Chen, “D.W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shang- hai,” 24. See also Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons.” 110 Chapter 3

111. Zheng Zhengqiu’s involvement in the “civilized play” had such a strong influence on his filmmaking that his cinematic works have been described by some later critics as “films by theatre people”; see Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 54. 112. Earlier in 1914, the Spring Willow Drama Society (Chunliu she 春柳社), which was founded by Lu Jingruo 陸鏡若 (1885–1915), a returnee from overseas studies in Japan, put on another “civilized play” that shares the same title as Zheng’s film but tells a very different story tortuously inspired by the British novelist Bertha M. Clay’s (1836–1884) Dora Thorne by way of Japanese and Chinese literary and theatrical adaptations. See Yutori Iizuka, “Another Twin Sisters,” trans. Zhao Hui, in Studies of Chinese Spoken Drama, vol. 11, ed. Tian Benxiang and Dong Jian (Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxue chubanshe, 2008), 7–21, and Pan Shaw-Yu, “Literary Genealogy and Cultural Adaptations of the Victorian Dream of the Red Chamber: Late Qing Translated Novel Shadow of Red Tears,” Bulletin of the Department of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University 39 (2012): 247–94. 113. Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1942), 79. 114. Zheng Zhengqiu, “How to Embark on a Progressive Path,” in Selected Works of One Hundred Years of Chinese Film Theory, vol. 1, ed. Ding Yaping (Beijing: Wenhuayishu chubanshe, 2005), 130. 115. Prasenjit Duara has keenly noted that women, alongside children and aborigines, are often discursively chosen as ideal “living embodiment[s]” of “the simulated authenticity of the nation,” because they are both “productive of deep affect” and “denied agency in the public realm”; see Duara, “The Regime of Authenticity,” 367. 116. Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons,” 17. 117. See Jiang Yasha et al., eds., Selected Periodicals of Early Chinese Cinema, vol. 1, 524–26. 118. For an example of such criticism in left-wing cinema, see Cai Chusheng’s 蔡楚生 (1906–1968) 1932 film Pink Dream (Fenhongse de meng 粉紅色的夢). Zhen Zhang offers a detailed analysis of the film and its engagement with the ongoing debates about the modern girl in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, 258–61. An example of the use of the term “pink dream” in literary works can be found in Mao Dun’s 1941 novel Corrosion (Fushi 腐蝕); see Mao Dun, Corrosion (Shanghai: Zhishi chubanshe, 1946), 197. 119. William Rothman, “The Goddess: Reflections on Melodrama East and West,” in Melo- drama and Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60. 120. Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons,” 14. 121. See Zhen Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, 161–69. The film’s director Zheng Zhengqiu was also well-known known for his curious experiments of special photo- graphic effects, such as superimposing photos on top of each other; see Tan Chunfa, Breaking a New Path, 450. 122. Yiman Wang, Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 53. 123. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, fifth edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 836. 124. For an example, see Anonymous, “The Dual Roles of Hu Die: One Person Playing Twin Sisters,” Movie Tone Weekly 601 (1934): 26. 125. In his influential 1924–1925 series “The History of Griffith’s Successes,” Cheng Bugao especially praised the American director’s innovative uses of close-ups to vividly show the facial expressions of actors and actresses. See Jiang Yasha et al., eds., Selected Periodicals of Early Chinese Cinema, vol. 1, 431. 126. However, compared with her fellow film star Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉 (1910–1935), who was more often praised as a Chinese counterpart to Gish, Hu Die tended to be considered by her contemporary critics as not exhibiting as much tragic eroticism. For an example, see the comments made by Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗 (1905–1940) cited in Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 107. Is Blood Always Thicker than Water? 111

127. Flowers Reborn, which Zheng made shortly before his death, fell far short of what Twin Sisters achieved, both financially and critically. A review in Movie Tone Weekly (Diansheng zhoukan 電聲周刊, 1934–1941) referred to it as “adding legs when painting a snake” (hua she tian zu 畫蛇添足); see Anonymous, “On Flowers Reborn,” Movie Tone Weekly 654 (1935): 85. Even for left-wing film critic Ling He 凌鶴 (aka Shi Lianxue 石聯學, 1906–1995), the “awkward revolutionary heroes” and heavy “revolutionary didactics” made the film unattrac- tive and unreal; see Zhang Zhihua and Shi Keyang, Debates in Chinese Cinematic History (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 2007), 38. 128. Zheng Zhengqiu, “What I Expect from the Audience,” in Selected Essays on Film Theories of Twentieth-Century China, vol. 1, ed. Luo Yijun (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2003), 67. 129. Zheng Junli, “A History of Modern Chinese Cinema,” in A History of Modern Chinese Art, eds. Li Puyuan et al. (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1936), 39. 130. Zhen Zhang, “Transplanting Melodrama: Observations on the Emergence of Early Chi- nese Narrative Film,” in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Malden: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 29. 131. That The Spirit of the Jade Pear was adapted from the “Mandarin Ducks and Butter- flies” writer Xu Zhenya’s 徐枕亞 (1889–1937) homonymous tragic love novel published in 1912 indicates a rather complicated relationship among the supposedly traditionally oriented literary school, their iconoclastic May Fourth rivals, and the left-wing melodrama that was heavily influenced by the May Fourth tradition. 132. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 79. 133. Similar happy turning points are often found at the ends of Zheng’s other films as well, which, as Qin Xiqing has pointed out, indicates some influence from traditional Chinese hu- aben fiction and theatrical plays; see Qin, European and American Cinema and Early Chinese Cinema, 1920–1930, (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2008), 82. 134. Quoted from Zhang Zhihua and Shi Keyang, Debates in Chinese Cinematic History, 41. 135. On a more personal level, Tang is probably best-known for his short-lived marriage with the actress Lan Ping 藍萍 (aka Jiang Qing 江青, 1914–1991), who later became the fourth and last wife of Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976), the founding Chairman of the People’s Repub- lic of China. 136. Tang Na, “Several Tendencies in Current Chinese Cinema,” in Chinese Silent Cinema, ed. China Film Archive (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 1052–3. For critics opposing Tang’s view, however, the film’s accessibility and appeal to petite urbanites was considered a major merit and a key to its box-office success. For an example, see Anonymous, “Twin Sisters Set a New Box-Office Record,” Lin Loon 134 (1934): 574. 137. See Xuan Jinglin (the actress who played the twins’ mother in the film), “My Life on the Silver Screen,” in Chinese Silent Cinema, ed. China Film Archive (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 1487 and Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 77. 138. The Republican government, ironically, was and still is largely perceived as a monolithic enemy of the left-wing cinema. See Zhiwei Xiao, “The Myth of the ‘Left-Wing Cinema’ of the 1930s,” Twenty-First Century 103 (2007): 47. 139. Interestingly, like Twin Sisters, both Xie’s and Zhang’s films feature a progressive and didactic elder sister vis-à-vis a spoiled but still teachable younger sister. For more on Two Stage Sisters, see Yiman Wang, Remaking Chinese Cinema, 56–59, and Gina Marchetti, “Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 59–80. 140. Shuqin Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 24. 141. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 12, 46. 142. See Huang Guangguo, Confucian Conception of Relationships (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2005), 211, 431. 143. See Yang Bojun, An Annotated Translation of The Analects (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 128. See also Wei-Ming Tu, “Probing the ‘Three Bonds’ and ‘Five Relationships’ in 112 Chapter 3

Confucian Humanism,” in Confucianism and the Family, ed. Walter H. Slote and George A. De Vos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 121–36. 144. See Patricia Buckley Ebrey, trans., “The Book of Filial Piety for Women Attributed to a Woman Née Zheng (ca. 730),” in Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, eds. Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 61. For the original Chinese version, see Wu Yong, ed., An Addition to The Sea of Learning from One Hundred Rivers (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1970), 2764. 145. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 1. 146. For example, in the first chapter of Freedom of Marriage, the fictional narrator-author, a “diasporic Jew named ‘Endless Sorrows,’” makes a speech at a Jewish school on a Pacific island named “Freeland,” encouraging the students to “love all kinds of freedom as much as you do the freedom of marriage, so that our motherland will surely be freed”; see Wanguhen and Ziyouhua, “Freedom of Marriage,” in Compendium of Late Imperial Chinese Fiction: The Woman Hero from Eastern Europe, Freedom of Marriage, A Prophecy on the Tragic Dissec- tion of China, A Tale of Revenge, The Stone of Goddess Nüwa, How Many Heads, The Soul of Rousseau (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1991), 115. 147. Li Hanqiu, Two Flowery Sisters, 1. 148. Yü-Sheng Lin, “The Morality of Mind,” in Lu Xun and His Legacy, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 111. See also David Wang, The Monster That Is History, 52. 149. Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China, 200. 150. In her autobiography A Woman Soldier’s Own Story (Yige nübing de zizhuan 一個女兵的自傳, 1936), Xie also portrays her elder sister and herself as the contrasting examples of a traditional woman and an enlightened and self-willed modern professional girl. See Xie, A Woman Soldier’s Own Story (Taipei: Dongda tushugongsi, 1980). 151. Xie Bingying, Selected Works of Xie Bingying (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985), 705. 152. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 19. 153. Ibid., 44. 154. Bai, “A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird (21–23),” 453–54. 155. For Jung, the daughter’s “affection for the father . . . with a correspondingly jealous attitude toward the mother” can be defined as the Electra complex, a feminine counterpart to the Oedipus complex; see C. G. Jung, The Theory of Psychoanalysis (New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1915), 69. 156. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 14. 157. Bai, Selected Works of Bai Wei, 140–41. 158. For a more detailed synopsis of Two Orphaned Girls, see Zheng Peiwei and Liu Guiq- ing, eds., Scripts of Chinese Silent Films (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 2091–93. 159. For a more detailed synopsis of Pear Blossoms in the Storm, see ibid., 2734–36. 160. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 14. 161. Ibid., 13–14. 162. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 163. In Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Naomi Schor particularly associates the “detail” with gender: “To focus on the detail and more particularly on the detail as negativ- ity is to become aware . . . of its participation in a larger semantic network, bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women” (emphasis in the original); see Schor, Reading in Detail (New York: Routledge, 2007), xlii. 164. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 85. Chapter Four

Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness in Lin Loon Magazine (1931–1937)

Initially launched as Linloon Pictorial Magazine (“Linglong” tuhua zazhi “玲瓏”圖畫雜誌)1 by the versatile entrepreneur Lin Zecang 林澤蒼 (aka T.T. Ling, 1903–1961), this very popular Shanghai-based women’s weekly journal was published in the socioculturally transformative period between March 1931 and August 1937 by the publishing department of Lin’s San Ho Company (Huashang sanhe gongsi 華商三和公司).2 With most of its articles and pictures devoted to the introduction and promotion of a cosmopolitan bourgeois lifestyle and its distribution reaching other major cities across the country, the magazine was popular with young, educated female urbanites, generating impressive readership numbers. 3 This helped to form a collective identity among its readers, often referred to as Lin Loon sisters in the magazine. Not only did its readers learn how to live a “modern” life from the magazine but some of them also became contributors, making it an interac- tive public platform for the exchange of experiences and opinions. As the popular writer Eileen Chang (aka Zhang Ailing 張愛玲, 1920–1995) recalled in her 1944 essay “About Women” (Tan nüren 談女人), almost every female student in the 1930s Shanghai had in hand an issue of Lin Loon, which “both disclosed the beauty secrets of movie stars and taught ‘beautified’ women how to defend themselves against men’s advances.”4 Situating Lin Loon against the background of Shanghai’s nascent cosmopolitan bourgeois culture of the 1930s, this chapter investigates the textual and extratextual sisterhood constructed by and centering on the magazine.

113 114 Chapter 4

Instead of falling back on assumed binaries between the traditional and the modern, the domestic and the public, or between feminism and nationalism, I read Lin Loon’s sisterhood narratives as a gendered platform of encyclopedic knowledge about cosmopolitan life and contested public opinions about women’s roles both as individuals and as national subjects. By complicating, and at times challenging, the dominantly male-centered metanarratives about China’s progress toward modernity and modernization, this platform constituted a feminine proto-public space between the state and its petty urbanite readers, even though, ironically, it was not as exclusively female-centered as it claimed.

FROM A “PICTORIAL MAGAZINE” TO A “LADIES’ JOURNAL”: THE CONSTRUCTION OF LIN LOON SISTERHOOD

In the flourishing commercial culture of Republican Shanghai, a pictorial periodical targeting a female readership seemed both fashionable and lucrative. Lin Loon’s parent company, San Ho, also published several other popular pictorial magazines that appealed to the tastes of petty urbanite readers and their interest in cosmopolitan culture. These included Pictorial Weekly (Huabao 畫報, later renamed Sheying huabao 攝影畫報, 1925–1937),5 which was associated with the “Chinese Photography Association” (Zhong- guo sheying xiehui 中國攝影協會) founded by Lin Zecang, and the Movie Tone Daily (Diansheng ribao 電聲日報, 1932–1934), which featured news on the world of the cinema and which was later published under the title Movie Tone Weekly (Diansheng zhoukan 電聲周刊, 1934–1941).6 With a title literally meaning “exquisite”—a term which is often associated with a sense of compactness as in such an idiomatic expression as “small and exquisite” (xiaoqiao linglong 小巧玲瓏)—Lin Loon was designed as a pocket-size product with a particular appeal to women readers and was intended to com- plement San Ho’s other publications. In an advertisement in a 1934 issue of Movie Tone Weekly for four different San Ho publications, it was promoted as an ideal New Year’s gift for “female friends”—along with Pictorial Week- ly for “male friends,” Movie Tone Daily for general “friends,” and Broad- casting Weekly (Boyin zhoubao 播音週報, 1933–?)7 for “senior family members.”8 In terms of its editorial management, Lin Loon’s gendered orientation was made clear by the designation of a so-called “Madame Chen Zhenling” (Chen Zhenling nüshi 陳珍玲女士), a highly mythical and very probably fabricated figure whose biographical information was never revealed in the magazine or elsewhere, first as the editor responsible for its “Women” (Funü 婦女) section and then as a general editor for the entire magazine. The “Women” section, the biggest and obviously the most important of the three Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 115 sections found in the early issues of the magazine, mostly consisted of essays credited to female authors, including readers-turned-authors, often accompanied by Chen Zhenling’s comments and sometimes by the authors’ own photos. The other two sections, “Photography” (Sheying 攝影) and “Enter- tainment” (Yule 娛樂), which also exhibited a keen focus on women and their leisure interests, were respectively under the charge of Lin Zemin 林澤民, the younger brother of Lin Zecang’s, and Zhou Shixun 周世勳, a male film critic. The fourth issue saw the addition of an “Everyday Knowledge” (Changshi 常識) section, which used to be an independent print product of San Ho’s.9 Throughout its seven-year history, Lin Loon underwent quite a few editorial modifications—reorganizations of sections and segments, an increase of textual contents to replace images of foreign movie stars, and changes in the list of editors—but Chen Zhenling served quite consistently as a general editor. Even in the 5th to the 21st issues (April 15th to August 5th, 1931), in which Zhou Shixun was listed as the only text editor on the copyright page, the “Women” section still labeled itself as “edited by Chen Zhen- ling” and credited the editor’s comments to her. In several issues of late 1932, Chen was listed as the sole text editor. Between March 1933 and August 1934, she was usually referred to on the contents page as the editor- in-chief for the entire magazine, rather than just the editor of the “Women” section; in later issues, she was once again listed simply as the primary text editor. It was not until February 1935 that Chen’s name was moved back to the second place next to that of the male editor and translator Peng Zhaoliang 彭兆良 (1901–1963) on the masthead. Along with these changes, Lin Loon’s Chinese title (which varied from the abbreviated handwritten version 玲瓏 usually featured on the front cover) and its accompanying English translation underwent several subtle but interesting revisions on the copyright page, which seem to indicate its publishers and editors’ dilemma between the journal’s dual foci on visual entertainment (like Pictorial Weekly) and on women’s issues. Just six months after its launch, the 26th to the 29th issues changed the original English title, “Lin- loon Magazine,” into “Ladies’ Magazine,” which clearly echoed the many women-targeted periodicals of the previous two to three decades, especially the influential The Ladies’ Journal published by the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館).10 For these issues, the Chinese title “‘Linglong’ tuhua zazhi” “玲瓏”圖畫雜誌 remained the same, however. After some back and forth between “Lin Loon Magazine”11 and “Ladies’ Magazine,” it adopted the title “Lin Loon Magazine, the Ladies’ Journal” in the 63rd issue in 1932, which was shortened into “Lin Loon Ladies’ Maga- zine” in 1933. On the front cover of the 69th issue, the Chinese title was changed to “Linglong” funü tuhua zazhi 玲瓏婦女圖畫雜誌 (“‘Lin Loon’ Ladies’ Pictorial Magazine”), which was used quite consistently on the contents page in most subsequent issues and was adopted on the copyright page 116 Chapter 4 in August 1933. In the last two years of its publication, the Chinese title dropped “pictorial” in favor of the simpler “Linglong” funü zazhi 玲瓏婦女雜誌 (“‘Lin Loon’ Ladies’ Journal”). The change also reflected the fact that, by this point, the articles in the magazine had grown longer, with the text exceeding the space devoted to photos, comics, and other visual elements. As for the contents of the magazine, its female orientation was manifested by a catchy description of Lin Loon as “the only mouthpiece for all our female compatriots,” which initially occurred in Zhenling’s note to readers in the inaugural edition, titled “To Sisters” (Gei zimeimen 給姊妹們),12 and was then frequently repeated in editorial notes, advertisements, and articles. Similar expressions also appeared in the advertisements for a derivative publication San Ho developed, the Women’s Daily (Funü ribao 婦女日報), which claimed Chen Zhenling as its editor-in-chief as well. 13 On the front cover of the 104th issue, Lin Loon labeled itself as “the only weekly periodical for women in China.” As if to further prove the magazine’s loyal commitment to this goal, an editorial message in the 63rd issue claimed that the editors had been receiving complaints from men about Lin Loon’s “excessive partiality towards women”; the editors, on the other hand, expressed their determination to stick to the magazine’s principle of “all for the enhancement of women’s happiness,” because “anyway, there is nothing about men that deserves our praises.”14 As the following discussion will show, Lin Loon’s self-identification as a public forum on women’s issues and its broad constellation of interests in cosmopolitan urban life were two defining factors that shaped the textual and extratextual sisterhood among its contributors and readers. This was reflected by the dual principles the magazine set for itself at the very beginning— embodied in the slogan “cultivate elegant lifestyles for ‘Women’ and promote noble ‘Entertainment’ in society” (zengjin “Fumü” youmei shenghuo, tichang shehui gaoshang “Yule” 增進”婦女”優美生活，提倡社會高尚”娛樂”). Although it listed the “Entertainment” section before “Women” on the copyright page for the first four issues, the magazine’s focus was ostensibly geared toward “Women.” One “Editorial Message” in the 127th issue put forward two goals: to expand the “Women” section and make Lin Loon a “pure women’s magazine”; and to improve the quality of the “Movies” and the “Literature” (Wenyi 文藝) sections,15 which occupied less space and provided content intended to appeal to female readers, such as beauty, fashion, and love relationships. As in the pioneering women’s publications of the late Qing discussed in the first chapter, “sister” was a key word in Lin Loon. Zhenling’s use of the term “sisters” in her editor’s note “To Sisters” in the inaugural issue obviously drew upon this terminology common in the writings of women journalists and novelists at the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, compared with the small number of literate women in the previous decades, 1930s Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 117

Shanghai—as well as such other major cities as Guangzhou and Suzhou where the magazine was distributed—provided a much larger pool of potential female contributors with a much wider diversity of interests. Therefore, in terms of the cultivation of sisterhood, Lin Loon subtly departed from late Qing women’s publications by focusing not on nationalist-feminist activism but the everyday life of educated urban women. In Lin Loon’s first issue, all nine essays in the “Women” section were credited to female contributors. As if to give evidence that the authors were actually women at a time when it was still quite common for men to publish under feminine pen names to appeal to female readers, all of the essays were accompanied by short but impressive author’s bios, usually including the names of the schools that they had attended. Six of the essays even included the authors’ photos. Among the contributors, Zhang Pinhui 張品惠 (1902–1971), the author of “If a Husband Has an Affair” (Zhangfu you waiyu 丈夫有外遇), held a master’s degree from the famous Yenching University, later married Watchman Nee (aka Ni Tuosheng 倪柝聲, 1903–1972), an influential Chinese Christian minister, and assisted him in church activities. Li Cuizhen 李翠珍 (1910–1966), the author of “Women and Music” (Nüzi yu yinyue 女子與音樂), was an aspiring young pianist who later became a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.16 Liang Xueqing 梁雪清 (1890–1970), the author of “The Necessary Reforms in Modern Household Furnishing” (Xiandai jiating chenshe yingyou zhi gaige 現代家庭陳設應有之改革), was a painter and an editor of the Wenhua Pictorial (Wenhua huabao 文華畫報).17 The other six authors, who wrote on subjects ranging from dancing and socialization to female celibacy, were either identified as outstanding students from girls’ schools or described as famous socialites. 18 Except for a certain Beila 蓓拉, whose bio was short and whose photo not provided, all the others continued to contribute articles or photos later. Subsequent issues of the magazine focused less on celebrity than the inaugural issue but continued to feature practical discussions of issues pertinent to the daily lives of cosmopolitan bourgeois women and exhibited an encyclopedic range of topics, from career choices and legal information to fashion and relationship advice. Chen Mei’er’s 陳美珥 “Searching for a Way out on Behalf of Our Sisters” (Wei zimeimen mou chulu 為姊妹們謀出路) in the 7th issue, for instance, recommended typewriting and shorthand as opti- mal choices during the early stages of a woman’s professional development. Essays like “The Modern Foot” (Modeng de jiao 摩登的腳) by Yao Xiafen 姚霞芬 and “Summer Styles for Sisters in Suzhou” (Suzhou zimei de xiazhu- ang 蘇州姊妹的夏裝) by Gu Zenghua 顧曾華 in the 17th issue, on the other hand, provided their readers with concrete suggestions on fashion and body care. The most popular subject, it turned out, was male-female relationships, as reflected by article titles like “When a Husband Has an Affair,” “On Man” 118 Chapter 4

(Nanxing guan 男性觀, in issues 1 and 2), “How to Deal with Your Fiancé” (Ruhe duifu weihunfu 如何對付未婚夫, in issues 2 and 3), “From Public Socialization to the Evil of Men” (Cong shejiao gongkai shuodao nanzi de zui’e 從社交公開說到男子的罪惡, in issues 10 and 11), “Ideal Men: To Those Sisters Who Are Going to Get Married” (Lixiang zhong de nanzi: gei jiangyao jiehun de zimeimen 理想中的男子—給將要結婚的姊妹們, in issue 63), and “Manifestations of Men’s Deep-Rooted Bad Habits” (Nanzi liegenxing de biaoxian 男子劣根性的表現, in issue 82), to name a few examples. Because of the often found criticism of, or cynicism toward, gender hierarchy, some articles seemed so sarcastic about men as to present, as Barbara Mittler has maintained, a picture of “misandria,” which could be seen as a responsive “counterpoint” to the ongoing trend of “a deeper-lying suspicion against and fear of the more ‘masculine’ or ‘feminist’ new woman, a fear which was based on old and new forms of misogyny.”19 Not only did this shared repulsion further consolidate the sense of a female community among the Lin Loon sisters, but the magazine itself also used similar rhetoric to solicit submissions. For example, in another “To Sisters” note, Zhenling wrote: “This magazine is the only mouthpiece of yours. . . . May our sisters please send us stories about your sadness and worries, or the facts of your being cheated by men? This magazine can serve as an outlet for you, because our submission process is entirely open to the public.”20 These solicitations of articles on men inflicting pain and suffering upon women may remind us of the unfolding and strengthening of sisterhood in A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird and Twin Sisters. As with the spread of the catchphrase “women’s sphere” in late Qing women’s publications, the term “mouthpiece” (houshe 喉舌 or houlong 喉嚨), which highlighted Lin Loon’s role as a public forum for women, was soon adopted by readers turned contributors. It occurred, for instance, in Liao Yinghua’s 廖英華 “My Expectations for Our Sisters Who Have Graduated” (Wo duiyu biye zimei de xiwang 我對於畢業姊妹的希望) in the 59th issue; a short poem dedicated to the magazine in the 26th issue by “Madame Saili” (Saili nüshi 賽麗女士); and a signed message from Ma Ji 馬驥, a national champion in discus throw- ing, in the 128th issue. Through such sharing of vocabulary and the embrace- ment of the societal messages it delivered, the Lin Loon girls reinforced their public sisterhood. Aside from the solicitation and submission of personal stories, several correspondence columns also contributed to the strengthening of the communal ties among the Lin Loon sisters. Over the years, the magazine welcomed questions from its readers and provided responses; the subject matter included everything from love problems, family conflicts, and sexual hygiene to business ideas and political affairs. The handling of the “Tough Q&As” (Jieda yinan 解答疑難) segment and for a later segment, “Lin Loon Mail- box” (Linglong xinxiang 玲瓏信箱),21 was attributed to Zhenling, except for Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 119 occasional responses made by “journalists” (jizhe 記者). Such columns as “Mailbox for Young Girls” (Shaonü de xinxiang 少女的信箱), “Beauty Con- sultations” (Meirong guwen 美容顧問), “Consultations about Everyday Knowledge” (Changshi guwen 常識顧問), and “Legal Consultations” (Falü guwen 法律顧問) were often taken care of anonymously. Another two platforms for the cultivation of sisterhood among Lin Loon girls, which will be further explored later in this chapter, were the section publishing personal photos of the magazine’s readers-cum-contributors and the advertisements for female-oriented products. Both contributed to a feminine proto-public space between the individual and the state.

THE MYTH OF CHEN ZHENLING, MALE CONTRIBUTORS TO LIN LOON, AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF THE MAGAZINE’S “FEMALE-CENTEREDNESS”

Despite the elevation of Chen Zhenling to a central role in the construction of sisterhood in the Lin Loon community, recent scholarly research conducted by Gary Wang, Li-ying Sun, and Pui-lam Cheung has revealed that Chen was very likely a fabricated figure. After pointing out that, in contrast to the many photos of the magazine’s contributors, no image of Chen ever appeared, Gary Wang goes on to suggest that the editor’s name might have been invented as a homophonic construction reflecting the magazine’s goal of teaching its readers to “become preciously elegant.”22 Li-ying Sun, on the other hand, points to Chen’s failure to show up in court when called to defend Lin Loon against an obscenity charge in 193623 as evidence that Chen Zhenling was indeed a fabricated moniker. Sun also suggests that Chen’s name was probably a play on words stemming from Lin Zecang’s own name in combination with feminizing elements, which sounds close to “hiding the real Ling.”24 According to Pui-lam Cheung, an editor named Chen Xia 陳霞 was probably one of the male editors writing under Chen’s name in Lin Loon’s early days, while Peng Zhaoliang, who edited the Pictorial Weekly and whose name was featured on top of Lin Loon’s list of editors from the 240th to the final 298th issues, assumed the role in the last stage of the magazine’s history.25 Also pointing out the overlap of the management and marketing of Lin Loon and the Pictorial Weekly, Li-ying Sun has made an interesting discovery about Liang Xinxi 梁心璽, who was briefly listed as a co-editor together with Chen Lingzhen between December 1932 to February 1933, namely that she was actually Lin’s wife, Liang Aibao 梁愛寶/梁愛保 (1908–?).26 As Liang Ai- bao, Lin’s wife contributed an expository article titled “A Corner Dressing Table” (Shiyu de yizhuangtai 室隅的衣裝台) in the 30th issue of Lin Loon and her photos appeared in the 30th and the 77th issues. As Liang Xinxi, she served as the first editor-in-chief for Lin’s Movie Tone without having her 120 Chapter 4 gender identity revealed. The invention of the mythical female editor Chen Zhenling and the concealment of Liang Xinxi’s female gender, as Sun has pointed out, indicated differently gendered marketing strategies tailored for San Ho’s two major periodicals and contributed to the company’s effort to use “Lin Loon” as an umbrella brand for various female-targeted products. The scholarship of Wang, Sun, and Cheung helps position Lin Loon as a gendered text at a nodal point among: first, a still very much male-dominated field27 of print culture; second, Republican Shanghai’s commercial atmosphere; and third, Lin Zecang’s familial, social, and business networks.28 Notwithstanding Lin Loon’s self-conscious female-centeredness, its editorship, authorship, and readership was never exclusively constructed by female actors. In this sense, the situation resonated with male involvement in the discourse on the “women’s sphere” at the turn of the twentieth century. The myth of Chen Zhenling aside, it is worth pointing out that several regular editors of Lin Loon were male. Among them, Zhou Shixun, who served as the editor of the “Entertainment” section for the first four issues and then as the sole text editor for the 5th to the 21st issues, played an important role in establishing the magazine’s tastes and interests in the diverse leisure activities in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Before joining Lin Loon, Zhou had worked as a scriptwriter, a film critic, a deputy manager for the Olympic Theatre (Xialingpeike yingyuan 夏令配克影戲院), and an editor for the pioneering but short-lived film journal Movie Weekly (Yingxi chunqiu 影戲春秋, March 1st to May 16th, 1925). He was a co-founder, with Zhu Shouzhu 朱瘦竹 (1897–?), of The Robinhood (Luobinhan 羅賓漢, 1926–1949), a famous “tabloid” (xiaobao 小報)29 focusing on both traditional Chinese theatre and contemporary film news. 30 These experiences in and connections with literary, theatrical, and film circles were a wellspring for Zhou’s sophistication and perhaps gave him the confidence to make the kind of bold statement in his “Editorial Message” (Bianjizhe yan 編輯者言) in the first issue: “Despite the small size of our magazine, it offers comprehensive coverage. Moreover, all the contributors are established experts.”31 It is noteworthy that the cartoon image accompanying Zhou’s message on its left side featured an obviously male editor casually resting his feet on a desk. This also occurred alongside Zhou’s messages in several later issues. Even after Zhou’s name ceased to appear in the magazine, the image itself continued to be used for entertainment-related editorial messages until it was changed into a fashionable and graceful female figure in the 42nd issue. The existence of this revealing image contrasted with all other female illustrations that accompanied Zhenling’s messages or essays penned under female- sounding names. This self-identified “ladies’ journal,” after all, did not mind occasionally revealing that men also contributed content, especially when the contributors were, as Zhou had boasted, established professionals in a certain field. This might help explain why an image of Gao Weixiang 高維祥, Lin Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 121

Zecang’s male cousin and an expert in photography, was included in the first issue and why a photo of the male novelist Jin Mancheng 金滿成 (1900–1971) was featured in the 47th issue.32 In Jin’s case, Lin Loon staged the serialization (from the 41st to the 49th issues) of his “A Girl’s First Love” (Shaonü de chulian 少女的初戀), which told about an impoverished male writer’s successive romantic failures with two bourgeois sisters. In the 40th issue’s advertisement for the upcoming serialization, the author was introduced as “an established writer in literary circles,”33 a description that cropped up frequently in subsequent issues. “Editorial Messages” in the 41st and the 43rd issues also mentioned Jin and his story; the first encouraged the magazine’s readers to keep following the story, and the second suggested that the magazine’s publication of it was an earnest response to the readers’ requests for more literary substance. In addition, an editorial comment from Zhenling in the 42nd issue not only praised Jin as a prominent writer “especially good at depicting women” but also quoted a sentence from his story to illustrate its intrigue. 34 Later, an essay by Jin titled “Political Measures in Love Relationships” (Aiqing zhong de zhengzhi shouwan 愛情中的政治手腕), which taught about different attitudes between men and women toward being punctual for dates, was published in the 62nd and 63rd issues. As in “A Girl’s First Love,” the essay adopted an obviously male perspective. Moreover, it even jokingly imagined a male reader, a fellow sufferer of women’s habitual lack of punc- tuality who was in urgent need of the author’s advice. Placed right after the first part of this essay in the 62nd issue, ironically, was an “Editorial Mes- sage” accompanied by a cartoon image of a female editor. Claiming to have seen through some recent articles submitted under fake feminine names, the editor denounced the fake articles’ humiliating tones about women and contrasted these supposedly rejected articles against Jin’s writings, not only recalling the warm reception of “A Girl’s First Love” but also laying a particular emphasis on the “costly acquisition” of Jin’s new essay.35 This enthusiastic inclusion of Jin Mancheng as one of Lin Loon’s authors is especially revealing of the ambiguities of the magazine’s female-centeredness. Although probably not much better off socially or financially than the first-person protagonist in “A Girl’s First Love,” Jin had nonetheless made something of a name for himself in literary and cultural circles as the editor- in-chief for The Gourd (Hulu 葫蘆, 1929–1933), an affiliated journal of the Nanjing-based New People News (Xinmin bao 新民報, 1929–1948). Aside from his romantic fiction,36 however, Jin’s most prominent role in the intellectual and cultural discussions on women and gender was made through his contribution, under the pen name of Jiang Ping 江平, to the sociologist and eugenicist Zhang Jingsheng’s 張競生 (1888–1970) controversial Sex Histo- ries (Xing shi 性史, 1926), a collection of personal narratives of sexual experiences with Zhang’s own comments.37 Like Zhang, Jin had studied in 122 Chapter 4

France, albeit much more briefly, and been influenced by Western sociology, philosophy, and sexology. On the other hand, as Jin sarcastically confessed in his essay collection Extremely Ugly, Evil, and Disgusting (Chou e chou tou 醜惡臭透, 1927), both his thematic preference for romantic affairs and “sex-related stories” and his stylistic inclination toward comic burlesques were also heavily motivated by financial calculations. 38 In fact, some interesting connections among Jin Mancheng, Zhang Jing- sheng, and Peng Zhaoliang—who once worked as an editor for the short- lived Beautiful Bookstore (Meide shudian 美的書店, 1927–1929), which also published books, and edited Lin Loon from 1935 till its end in 1937— might provide an important clue to the multiple meanings of “female-centeredness” of and beyond the magazine in its own historical, cultural context. Zhang, who associated sex with aesthetics and social reform, 39 was the key figure of a “new theory of gynocentrism” (xin nüxingzhongxin lun 新女性中心論), which proposed that a sexual revolution could enable a liberation of subjectivity and, ultimately, lead to a “beautiful society” (meide shehui 美的社會). In his books A Beautiful View of Life (Meide renshengguan 美的人生觀, 1925) and The Organization of a Beautiful Society (Meide shehui zuzhifa 美的社會組織法, 1926), Zhang prioritized (feminine) sentimentality over (masculine) rationality, a view that was later echoed in the 197th issue of Lin Loon by an editorial comment on Madame Yibo’s (Yibo nüshi 一波女士) “The Gynocentric Matriarchal System in Tibet” (Xizang zhi nüxing zhongxin jiazhangzhi 西藏之女性中心家長制).40 An admirer and follower of Zhang’s, Jin Mancheng developed his own 1928 book In Support of a Revo- lutionary Lover-ship System (Yonghu geming de qingrenzhi 擁護革命的情人制)41 directly from a subsection tilted “Lover-ship System” in the first chapter of Zhang’s The Organization of a Beautiful Society, 42 which advocated for the replacement of monogamous marriage with a much more flexible mechanism of romantic partnership purely based on love and sexual attraction. Not only was Jin’s book prefaced and edited by Zhang himself, but it was also published by Zhang’s Beautiful Bookstore, where Peng Zhao- liang was an editor. In this light, Jin Mancheng’s embrace of a utopian idealization of feminine beauty in resonance with Zhang’s “beautiful society” in “A Girl’s First Love” through its characterization of the two pretty sisters, especially the innocent and more romantically affectionate younger sister, indicated one possible approach taken by Lin Loon’s male contributors toward the magazine’s self-claimed female-centeredness, where issues of women and gender were not necessarily addressed exclusively from female perspectives or for women’s own sake. This was also reflected in Peng Zhaoliang’s contribution to Lin Loon. Before being credited as an editor of the magazine in late 1934, Peng’s name first appeared with his translations of several tales by Hans Christian Ander- sen (1805–1875). Soon afterwards, however, Peng was fashioned into a sex- Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 123 ologist and love expert under the combined influence of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), two Western theorists Zhang Jingsheng and his Beautiful Bookstore had helped to introduce to Chinese readers. Peng’s essay “A Psychoanalysis of Li Lingdi, ‘The Strange Fish of the Ball Room’” (“Wuchang guaiyu” Li Lingdi de xinli jiepou “舞場怪魚”李玲棣的心理解剖) in the 171st issue was a response to an essay Li, a famous socialite, published elsewhere about her melancholia and cynicism after unsuccessful quests for love. Obviously drawing upon, albeit in a less scholarly manner, the Freudian approach and the analytic style employed in the 1920s by the sociologist Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 (1899–1967) in his famous case study of the legendary Ming dynasty female poet Feng Xiaoqing 馮小青,43 Peng read Li’s “strangeness”—as indicated by her nickname—as a symptom of “hysteria” caused by sexual oppression.44 In a jocular tone, Peng parodied Pan’s view of the hysterical libido as a typical characteristic of Chinese women writers45 and suggested Li turn to literary and academic careers. 46 Li Lingdi, it turned out, had actually been a contributor to Lin Loon as well. Her essay “I: A Confession from a Weak-Willed Person Seen as an Eccentric in the Ball Room” (Wo—Yige bei muwei wuchang guaijie de yizhi- boruozhe de zibai 我——一個被目為舞場怪傑的意志薄弱者的自白), which seemed to pay homage to such popular May Fourth confessional fiction as Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” (Chenlun 沉淪, 1921), was published in the 169th issue. In addition, a glamorous photo of her was also featured on the inside of the back cover of the same issue. When Li’s named occurred again in the magazine’s 173rd issue, however, it was in a news item—amid other entertainment news—about her sudden marriage to Gui Zhongshu 桂中樞 (aka Chung-shu Kwei, 1897–1987), a US-educated cultural and business elite who co-founded the English-language The China Critic (Zhongguo pin- glun zhoubao 中國評論週報, 1928–1946) with several other overseas re- turnees, including the aforementioned Pan Guangdan. 47 Sensationally titling it “Li Lingdi, ‘The Strange Fish of the Ball Room,’ Marries Gui Zhongshu” (“Wuchang guaiyu” Li Lingdi xiajia Gui Zhongshu “舞場怪魚”李玲棣下嫁桂中樞), the author of the news story, Xiaogong 笑公,48 considered the marriage a perfect match but went on to recall earlier tabloid stories about Li’s allegedly haunted house and her scandalous love affairs. Immediately after this, the next issue of Lin Loon reprinted an article Li had published in Evening News (Da wanbao 大晚報, 1932–1949). Titled “Those Women Who Sell Their Souls” (Chumai linghun de nüzi zhongzhong 出賣靈魂的女子種種), it was highly critical of the superficiality and vanity of some modern girls and, in a tone often found among elite intellectuals, called upon them to resist patriarchal pressure and transform themselves into “real daughters of our times.”49 Such mobile positioning of Li Lingdi—as a controversial yet celebrated contributor, as an intriguing case study of the mysterious female psyche, and 124 Chapter 4 as a subject of sensational news stories—indicates a calculated combination of several different layers of “female-centeredness”: first, the selection of topics focusing on women’s lives in a modern cosmopolitan sociocultural milieu that would appeal to the magazine’s dominantly female readership; second, the adoption of new feminist, quasifeminist, or at least women- centered language and vocabulary, which often turned to fashionable knowledge and ideals for a symbolic intellectual aura or cultural legitimacy; and, third, a pursuit of entertaining effects—by way of women-related issues—in accordance with the magazine’s populist marketing strategy, which actually did not exclude potential male readers. In a similar manner, Peng Zhaoliang’s other writings in Lin Loon also often treated women-related issues of popular interest in a lighthearted and amateurish scientific tone. In “Split Personality: A Psychoanalytical Expla- nation for a Recent Real Case” (Erchong renge: Yijian shishi zhi xinli de jieshi 二重人格：一件時事之心理的解釋), for example, he applied Freu- dian theories to demystify unenlightened superstitions about “being witched.”50 In “Beard and Marriage: Thoughts on the Marriage between Xiong and Mao” (Xu yu jiehun: dui Xiong Mao jiehun de ganxiang 鬚與結婚：對熊毛結婚的感想), he used anecdotal news about the ex-premiere Xiong Xiling’s beard to introduce the ideas of “sexual characteristics” (xing- zheng 性徵)51 and sexual appeal.52 An imitation of Pan Guangdan’s study of Feng Xiaoqing, Peng’s “Sexual Depictions in Erotic Ci-Poetry” (Yanci zhong de xingyu miaoxie 艷詞中的性慾描寫) in the 222nd issue embraced Zhang Jingsheng’s celebration of female sexual desires. His “Nudity and Clothes” (Luoti yu fushi 裸體與服飾) in the 225th issue, in a related vein, echoed Zhang’s advocacy for natural feminine beauty. As Peng’s name moved up Lin Loon’s masthead, he also came to present himself more and more as an expert on love relationships. In 1936, Peng published a series of stories under the heading “Feature Shots of Romantic Love” (Lian’ai texie 戀愛特寫) in the 251st through the 254th issues, which featured lovers’ psychological and sexual desires and were positioned in the “Women’s Life” (Funü shenghuo 婦女生活) section.53 Under the alleged co-editorship of Peng Zhaoliang and Chen Zhenling, Lin Loon seemed to lean more toward intellectual interests. For instance, a new section named “Social Commentaries” (Sheping 社評), launched in May 1935, quite closely resembled the intellectual writings in the earlier The Ladies’ Journal. In his editorial announcement “The First Call after the Expansion of Our Magazine” (Benzhi kuoda diyi sheng 本誌擴大第一聲), Peng summarized the current conditions and challenges faced by “sisters of our times,” re-emphasized the magazine’s goal of “serving the women’s sphere” (fuwu nüjie 服務女界), and explained that this new section had to be added because there was literally too much pain for women and more space was needed to accommodate critical discussions. 54 After some revisions, Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 125 renaming, and a temporary disappearance, the section eventually appeared as a regular feature under the heading “Women’s Commentaries” (Funü ping- lun 婦女評論) starting in 1936. Placed at the beginning of each following issue, it often contained anonymous but apparently authoritative articles on hot social issues in the women’s sphere, such as female suicide, ban of concubinage, and the public’s attitudes toward professional women. In addition to contributions from male authors and anonymously published writings, the frequent use of pen names also contributed to questions about Lin Loon’s female-centeredness, at least in terms of authorship. Not- withstanding its celebrity-studded inaugural issue, the magazine relied more heavily on submissions from average urban readers. Probably because of this, the practice of providing the authors’ bios gradually faded away within the first year of publication. Moreover, the sensitive, private, or embarrassing nature of some of the topics also led to reservations about revealing the authors’ personal information. In the 3rd issue, for example, a certain “Hun- gry Cat” (Emao 餓貓) published a short essay titled “A Men’s Game” (Nanzi de wanyi’r 男子的玩意兒), which complained of male predators. While introducing Emao as a student from a well-known girls’ school, the editor Zhenling issued a note explaining that the magazine respected the author’s wish not to identify her real name and would continue to publish more essays submitted under pen names.55 Although Emao was later revealed to be Xie Manying 謝曼影 in the 5th issue when her photo was published, most of the other pen-named authors were untraceable. On the entertaining side, pen names also facilitated the magazine’s inclusion of exotically or bizarrely erotic materials, obviously for lucrative purposes. After the 173rd issue openly published a call for submissions about women’s “romantic and erotic anecdotes” (xiangyan mishi 香艷秘事),56 the next issue launched a new section called “Contemporary Romantic and Erotic News” (Jindai yanwen 今代艷聞), which was soon renamed “Romantic and Erotic Anecdotes of All Times” (Gujin yanwen 古今艷聞) and lasted for about a year. Similar content also appeared elsewhere in the magazine. Most of the sensationally vulgar writings in this category were published under obviously fake pen names. As with the fabrication of Chen Lingzhen, such anonymous authorship and uses of pen names very probably allowed for more male participation beyond what the magazine explicitly admitted, especially given the knowledge that it was a common practice in magazine publishing at the time for editors to ghostwrite for their own products.57 Nevertheless, Lin Loon’s diversified coverage and strong interest in women’s everyday life experiences helped it to remain, at least partially, as a competitor to the male-dominated intellectual-cultural discourse of the day, which was increasingly focused on national crisis and the impending Japanese invasion. For example, the “Women’s Commentaries” of the 268th issue published at the beginning of 126 Chapter 4

1937 featured a list of suggestions for the Lin Loon sisters, which included supporting national defense, participating in social activities, and carrying on the May Fourth virtues of liberty and equality. In contrast to the heavy didacticism of this commentary, however, the same issue also featured a variety of lighthearted items: an entertaining biographical sketch of Wallis Simpson (1896–1986), the central figure of the Edward VIII abdication crisis; photos of New Year celebrations and fashionable clothes; an introduction to exotic wedding customs in inland China; the recent hiring of female bus conductors in Japan; readers’ exchanges with Zhenling on love problems; questions and answers on female sexual and reproductive health; comic photos of a foreign man with a turkey; advice on skincare and the prevention of carbon monoxide poisoning; an article on child education; a translated detective story; photos of the Hollywood child star Shirley Temple (1928–2014); a tabloid news item about a female swindler in Henan; reportage of the training of female waitresses in Zhejiang and an elderly American lady teaching in Jiangsu; and an anecdote about “A Woman Married to another Woman” (Nüren yu nüren jiehun 女人與女人結婚) in Britain.58 Through this disparate collection, the magazine’s entertaining features and thematic focus on women disrupted the potential dominance of (masculine) intellectual authority at the center of public discourse. At the same time, like Jin Mancheng and Peng Zhaoliang’s writings published in Lin Loon, articles obviously written by men were usually purposefully shaped and arranged to reflect the magazine’s female focus. This was also especially common with the magazine’s comic sketches and illustrations, which were often provided by such well-known male cartoonists as Huang Shiying 黃士英 (birth and death years unknown), the founding editor of Cartoon Life (Manhua shenghuo 漫畫生活, 1934–1935); Zhang Ying- chao 張英超 (1912–1977), a major contributor to Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua 時代漫畫, 1934–1937); and Ye Qianyu 葉淺予 (1907–1995), an editor of Shanghai Sketch (Shanghai manhua 上海漫畫, 1928–1930) and the creator of the popular characters “Mr. Wang” (Wang xiansheng 王先生) and “Little Chen” (Xiao Chen 小陳).59 The magazine also featured illustrations taken from foreign sources or adapted from Western print products. The range of subject matter in the visual sections mirrored the variety of topics covered in the written text. Some illustrations, for example, provided commentary on current political issues and served up caricatures of news from the society pages, both being popular themes for illustrated journals of the 1930s; others humorously portrayed love and married life, often featuring rivalries between men and women. While the magazine was far from immune to the erotic trend that Yingjin Zhang has found in the pictorials and cartoons of Republican Shanghai, 60 quite a few images in Lin Loon, as Barbara Mittler has pointed out, contributed to a current of misandria that proved appealing to Lin Loon’s modern Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 127 girl readers.61 For instance, “Who Is Whose Plaything” (Shui wannong shui 誰玩弄誰) in the 78th issue by Chen Qiunong 陳秋農, a Sichuan-born intellectual who studied at Fudan University in Shanghai, 62 depicted a charming girl effortlessly lifting her miniature male admirer into the air. The man— bald, old, and apparently rich—licentiously keeps his hands on the woman’s curvy hips, providing an image that accommodates, at one and the same time, a satirical critique of men’s fetishistic objectification of women and an inten- tional appeal to erotic voyeurism. 63 In a sense, the ways in which the male cartoonist “performed” misandria here were quite similar to what the aforementioned male editor Chen Xia recalled about his work at Lin Loon, namely, piecing together articles that either praised men or detested men to appeal to the “unreasonably eccentric” tastes of his female readers.64 Like San Ho’s initial dual identification of Lin Loon (as an entertaining pictorial and as a female-centered ladies’ journal) and Jin Mancheng and Peng Zhaoliang’s respective layered embrace of “gynocentrism,” such male performances of misandria added to the complex, at times ironic, ambiguities of Lin Loon’s female-centeredness.

“OUTDOOR SISTERS,” CONSUMING SUBJECTS, AND REDEFINED SOCIOPOLITICAL AGENCY FOR COSMOPOLITAN BOURGEOIS WOMEN

In the sociocultural context of 1930s China in the midst of changing perceptions of the individual, the family, the nation, and the world, the “heteroglossia”65 in Lin Loon provided a sophisticated microcosm of the contested ways in which cosmopolitan bourgeois women positioned themselves in relation to a gendered family/nation analogy. Amid the heated discussions on gender politics in the Lin Loon community, sisterhood narratives that stretched from the biological-familial side to the social-feminist side reoriented and redefined female agency in more open and diversified ways. Among them, three categories of texts are worth special attention: first, the photos of “outdoor sisters” (huwai de zimeimen 戶外的姊妹們); second, the essays, images, and advertisements about consumer goods that redefined female consumers as the nation’s contributing subjects; and third, the textual exchanges over state affairs that somewhat deviated—because of the magazine’s female focus and intention to entertain—from both the state-sponsored Nationalist rhetoric and the masculine intellectual authority in its contemporary public discourse. Intended from the outset as a major part of the magazine’s design, photo- graphs in Lin Loon played an important role in bringing its sisterhood imaginations into public view and presenting socially bonded women as subjective agents participating in public life. For one thing, interacting with the vibrant commercial and social milieu of the pre-1937 Republican urban landscape 128 Chapter 4 alongside attractive female images in promotional posters and calendar pictures of the time, the photos of modern girls in Lin Loon served as emblems of what Leo Lee has described as the exciting and “kaleidoscopic” cosmopolitan culture embodied by 1930s and 1940s Shanghai.66 For another, in the light of Roland Barthes’ description of the “three practices”—or “three emotions” or “three intentions”—in the making of a photograph, which are respectively conducted by the photographer, the spectator, and the spectacle and which constitute a triangular relationship destabilizing the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity,67 these photos contributed to a layered understanding of the ways in which Lin Loon sisters identified with, emulat- ed, and responded to one another. Alongside the magazine’s use of stylish urban women, including foreign celebrities and film stars, as fashion inspirations,68 the photos of “outdoor sisters” played a particularly important role in bridging women’s everyday, often domestic, experiences and public social life as well as in mediating the complex relationships among women, nation, and modernity. Going “outdoors” was a popular topic among advocates for women’s physical education and the discussions of eugenics and child education during the Republican era. Even at its earliest stage, Lin Loon published quite a few images of women posing in open air, either as stand-alone images or as illustrations for the printed text. The frequent depictions of female athletes, as Yunxiang Gao has pointed out, subverted conventional femininity and promoted jianmei 健美, or robust and healthy beauty, as a new bodily aesthetics for the Chinese “New Woman.”69 At a time that was witnessing enormous sociocultural transformation, this new aesthetics was often endowed with further significance. A photo of women swimmers in the 23rd issue, for instance, was accompanied by a message encouraging Chinese women to participate in similar “outdoor exercise” (huwai yundong 戶外運動), which could help them overcome the physical weakness typically found in traditional gentry women confined to the inner household. 70 Positioned next to a French artistic work that presented nude female bodies, the photo and its accompanying message introduced going “outdoors” as a gateway to modern cosmopolitan life. Over the years, the calls for “outdoor-ness” continued to be prominently featured, with the keyword appearing in such titles as “Outdoor Sisters”—for a group of photos featuring girl students in the 113th issue—and “Outdoor Sightseeing” (Huwai youlan 戶外遊覽), for another group of photos in the 120th issue. The 232nd issue even carried a note “Soliciting Submissions of Outdoor Photos from Our Sisters” (Zhengqiu zimeimen huwai shenghuo zhaopian 徵求姊妹們戶外生活照片).71 Women, it appears, responded to the call; the following issues quite consistently included personal and group photos depicting young women in the open air— taking care of their younger family members, going to and from school, visiting parks, or taking field trips to the countryside. Echoing the advocacy Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 129 for women’s physical education, the 278th issue published a cluster of photos titled “Dance Games” (Wudao youxi 舞蹈遊戲), which featured female students exercising on a school playground. As a further development of the late Qing conceptualization of the “women’s sphere,” a term that was frequently employed by the magazine’s editors and contributors, these images of “outdoor sisters” affirmed women’s presence and agency in public social space through a much more diversified approach. When late Qing reformists like Liang Qichao reimagined Chinese women as “wealth-consumers” that needed to be transformed into “wealth- producers,” they reflected a biased evaluation of household labor and legitimized the viability of women’s social participation only in nationalist and economic terms. Outside this particular arena, as Rey Chow has argued, the dominant cultural discourse did not depart much from “a world where [women were] supposed to live by hiding not only their minds, but also their bodies . . . , a world in which their public, positive appearances are often concomitant with their own physical absence or destruction.”72 Even in the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s, such biased views of female visibility in the public remained prevalent. One illustrative case was the suicide of the famous film actress Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉 (1910–1935), who chose to kill herself rather than put up with the relentless tabloid gossip about her private life.73 In the collective sense, such public “sisterhood” exemplified by group photos also subverted the old view of the women’s realm—the household spaces—as isolated, rather than integrated. In the traditional Confucian framework, sisterhood—or other female-female ties—beyond familial connections were generally considered a violation of female virtue. According to Ban Zhao’s first-century classic Admonitions for Women (Nü Jie 女誡), for example, “Women should not group together by themselves” (wu juhui qun- bei 無聚會群輩).74 Yet in Lin Loon, as well as in the pages of a few of its peer pictorial magazines, the collective public presence of “New Women” was not only a symbol of the emerging cosmopolitan modernity but also a desired form of sociopolitical participation. On September 9, 1933, the China Aviation Association held a naming ceremony for five new aircraft donated to the Nationalist air force by the businesses and residents of Shanghai. In the 110th issue published four days later, Lin Loon presented a series of photos taken by Lin Zecang and others. Except for one long-shot overview, the rest all featured stylish female guests at the center. Gathered under the title of “Sisters in Shanghai’s Naming Ceremony for Five Aircraft” (Shanghai wu ji mingmingli zhong de zimeimen 上海五機命名禮中的姊妹們)75 and positioned with other photos of modern urban girls typically seen in the magazine, they tactfully combined patriotism and fashion. From a more intimate perspective, a wide array of photos in Lin Loon—in both indoor and outdoor settings—presented various female-female relation- 130 Chapter 4 ships that ranged from biological sisterhood to some vague, sometimes ambiguous, relationships. Alongside such photos as “The Three Xia Sisters Attending a Tea Party” (Xiashi san jiemei canyu mou chahui 夏氏三姐妹參與某茶會)76 and “The Xu Sisters at Peking No. 1 Girls’ Middle School Dressed as Skating Sprights” (Pingshi nüyizhong huazhuang liubingzhuang xianzi zhi Xushi jiemei 平市女一中化裝溜冰裝仙子之徐氏姐妹),77 many others, like “Young Ladies Reveling in a Water Town” (Chenzui zai shuixi- ang li de xiaojiemen 沉醉在水鄉裡的小姐們),78 which presented three cud- dling girls standing in water in swimsuits, did not explicitly reveal the relationships among them. Some, like “Two Sisters amid Flowers” (Huacong li de yidui jiemeihua 花叢裏的一對姐妹花) on the inside front cover of the 88th issue, presented intimate young women, often in pairs, whose relationships were left open to interpretation by the reader. These photos were not necessarily reflective of the burgeoning psychological and sexological discussions at the time, which were heavily influenced by nationalist narratives about eugenics and national salvation. In the booming commercial culture of 1930s Shanghai, which has been referred to as a “Chinese Jazz age” by Andrew F. Jones,79 these exhibitions of female bodies staged a gendered spectacle-spectatorship that could fall anywhere in a multidimensional matrix with contesting strains of voyeurism, fetishization, and feminism. As with the magazine’s double-edged female- centeredness in editorial, authorial, thematic and stylistic matters, the discussions over the public visibility of female bodies bifurcated within the Lin Loon community, where manifestos on the liberation of women’s bodies and sexual self-consciousness coexisted with critiques of male-centered voyeurism. The 243rd issue provided a relevant example. As a special issue on swimming, it contained quite a few photos of female swimmers, often in swim suits. On the front and inside front covers, it featured Li Lili 黎莉莉 (1915–2005), the leading actress of Sun Yu’s 1934 popular film Queen of Sports, who was considered an embodiment of “robust and healthy beauty.” Featured on the back cover was the famous athlete Yang Xiuqiong 楊秀瓊 (1918–1982), a national champion and a member of the Chinese delegation to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. More photos of Yang and her elder sister, who was also a swimmer and therefore featured on the inner back cover, were included in the magazine’s pages. The same issue, however, also included an article denouncing voyeurism titled “After Watching Yang Xiuqiong’s Per- formance” (Guan Yang Xiuqiong biaoyan hou 觀楊秀瓊表演後). Vehement- ly condemning the male voyeuristic gaze that Yang’s performance had attracted,80 the author Jingzi 靜子 warned both Yang and the magazine’s female readers of “men’s disgusting mentality” (nanzi de choutai 男子的醜態) 81 in a misandrist tone that seemed typically Lin Loon-ish: Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 131

In a male-centered society, lascivious men behave like cannibalistic beasts when they meet young women with fame and popularity. Unmarried girls, in particular, are consciously seen as their potential prey. Female movie stars, beautiful traditional opera singers, and pretty dancing girls all attract considerable attention in this contaminated spiritual realm. Poor Yang Xiuqiong! In this society known for erotomaniacs and desires to “see young girls bathing,” the sweeping popularity she enjoys across the entire city every time she per- forms in a swimming pool is none other than a manifestation of such mentality. Consider this for a moment: almost all newspapers have vied to publish Yang Xiuqiong’s photos, as if fearing that publishers and readers will otherwise fail to feast their eyes. Doesn’t this reveal the disgusting mentality of men? . . . As women being defined by female bodies, if we want to get rid of male oppression and build a bright society based on gender equality, we have to raise our arms to fight against beast-like men, as well as against those women who let themselves be degraded as the playthings of men’s. We hope that, in addition to her industrious efforts to improve her swimming skills, Yang Xiuqiong will also develop her intellectual strengths. More importantly, she should be aware of the situation faced by the New Woman . . . and devote herself to all the oppressed women in this country, to this oppressed nation, so as to avoid descent into ruin!82

Much as this final analogy between women’s war against men and China’s national struggles against foreign imperialist threats echoed the writings of many late Qing feminist nationalists, it is worth noting that the confluence of the two agendas in Lin Loon were comparatively looser and more flexible, especially in the early years of the magazine. As was indicated by the word- ing in Jin Mancheng’s essay title, “Political Measures in Love Relation- ships,” some of Lin Loon’s early “political” references tended to lean more toward gender politics than state politics. Compared with the mainstream intellectual publications in the May Fourth enlightenment tradition, Lin Loon also exhibited a more tortuous continuum between women’s liberation and China’s national survival, often mediated by depictions of gender wars. In the 24th issue, an author pen-named Xia 霞 sent out a message written in a tone quite similar to Jingzi’s. Titled “Sisters, Watch Out!!” (Zimeimen, dangxin weixian!! 姊妹們，當心危險！！), it warned readers against a malicious men’s group called “Beauty- Hunters” (Lieyan tuan 獵豔團) in Shanghai.83 In the following year, the 48th and 49th issues published a very short fictional story by the same author titled “Sacrifice” (Xisheng 犧牲), which featured an innocent village girl being raped by a group of invading Japanese soldiers. While the author’s depictions of the prosperous but dangerous metropolis of Shanghai and the occupied countryside were in sharp contrast with each other, the characterizations of men as abusive hunters and women as their prey were similar. Like Jingzi’s proposed rejection of men’s spectatorial objectification of 132 Chapter 4 women, Xia’s depictions of threatening evils in Chinese urban and rural life employed a female lens to address social and national issues. Although, ironically, just as the gender identities of both Jingzi and Xia might have been faked, the construction of this female lens was not necessarily limited to female agents. Also through a female or feminine lens, Lin Loon presented numerous articles about fashion trends and modern household equipment, as well as many advertisements for female-targeted commodities, even though there were occasionally critical essays and images denouncing superficial materialism alongside.84 Enthusiastically informing the magazine’s female readers—as consuming subjects—of the new knowledge about how to take care of their family members and how to make themselves charmingly present- able, these texts constituted a potentially critical response to Liang Qichao’s dismissive delineation of Chinese women as useless wealth-consumers. While this certainly reflected the influence of the state-sponsored “New Life Movement” (Xin shenghuo yundong 新生活運動)85 and its accompanying “discourses of domesticity” during the mid-Republican period, which, as Karl Gerth has pointed out, attempted to “persuade [women] to participate in public life in a certain way” (italics in the original) in their positions within the household,86 the magazine provided a new, self-affirming, and confident manner of re-imagining female consuming subjects and redefined the social significance of female consumption. In addition to envisioning women as a collective body of active consumers participating in social and public life, the frequent employment of sisterhood rhetoric in these advertisements helped to consolidate the mutual empathy and mutual empowerment in the imagined Lin Loon community. For instance, an advertisement for Meiling Powder (Meiling fen 玫玲粉), a health supplement for women produced by the magazine’s own parent company San Ho, took the form of a submitted letter that resembled the typical style of Lin Loon articles and adopted the trope of shared victimhood in its title, “The Chronic Pain That Often Bothers Our Sisters” (Zimeimen chang shou de yintong 姊妹們常受的隱痛).87 Also in a peer-like tone, another advertisement suggested that “fashion-seeking sisters” should not miss the Collected Photos of Gentle Girls (Guixiu yingji 閨秀影集) published by San Ho.88 As the national crisis worsened militarily and economically, female consumption was increasingly redefined as a form of political agency. Shuxian’s 淑嫻 “Three Golden Principles for Our Sisters” (Zimeimen de santiao jinlü 姊妹們的三條金律), which appeared in the 66th issue, for example, recommended “not buying products made by our enemies” (bu mai chouhuo 不買仇貨) and solely depending on “national products” (guohuo 國貨).89 After the Nationalist government launched the “National Product Year” (Guohuo nian 國貨年) campaign in 1933, the 99th issue included two photos of the Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 133 film actresses Hu Die and Zhu Qiuhen 朱秋痕 (1915–?) under the title “Stars Wearing Domestic Fashions” (Mingxing guohuo shizhuang 明星國貨時裝), and the 109th issue proposed “Several Suggestions for the Promotion of National Products” (Tichang guohuo de ji dian 提倡國貨的幾點).90 Record trade deficit, even after the “National Product Year” campaign, prompted the government to launch the “Women’s Year of National Prod- ucts” (Funü guohuo nian 婦女國貨年) movement in 1934, and some Lin Loon contributors incorporated their antisexist agendas in their responses. Yingsi’s 影絲 article “A Little Encouragement for a Women’s Year of Na- tional Products” (Funü guohuo nian dui zimeimen yidian mianli 婦女國貨年對姊妹們一點勉勵), for instance, called for more enthusiastic participation, not only for nationalist purposes but also to “overturn all the existing stereotypes men have invented to humiliate and discriminate against women.”91 Despite such advocacy for domestically made goods, however, the “polyphonic”92 Lin Loon also kept running advertisements for imported products, such as Kodak film (for which, admittedly, there was no domestic substitute) and Doan’s pills and ointment. The advertisements of the latter, ironically, often emphasized the importance of healthy citizens to the well-being of the nation. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Pierre Bour- dieu claims that “social space is to the practical space of everyday life . . . what geometrical space is to the ‘travelling space’ . . . of ordinary experience, with its gaps and discontinuities.”93 As Lin Loon’s comprehensive guidance on modern tastes—not only for cosmetics, fashion clothing, household commodities, and Western movies, but also for new ways of life and new forms of female participation—reshaped the “fields of stylistic possibilities,” it also revised the ways in which these female agents viewed social space according to “their own position in it.”94 Just as the magazine’s advocacy for “outside sisters” led to new perceptions of women’s spatial mobility, social visibility, and interpersonal bonds, its emphatic redefinition of women as active and productive consuming subjects suggested a new and everyday form of sociopolitical agency for its cosmopolitan bourgeois readers, and its characteristic “female-centeredness,” despite its ambiguities, facilitated lively discussions of social and public issues with frequent reference to gender politics.

SISTERHOOD AS A MEDIATING PRISM BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE: A FEMININE PROTO-PUBLIC SPACE

As can be seen from the varied discussions in Lin Loon on women’s social presence through outdoor activities and commodity consumption, the magazine elastically connected the public and the private domains through a femi- 134 Chapter 4 nine prism. By so doing, it also created an intermediary space between the individual and the state in which to envision the cosmopolitan bourgeois sisterhood in the Lin Loon community. The construction of this interesting middle ground was facilitated by two factors. First, despite having readers and contributors from major urban cities across the country, Lin Loon was defined, most of all, by the cosmopolitan commercial culture of Shanghai, a central hub city for China’s modern print industry and cultural activities that was some distance away from such political centers as Beijing and Nanjing. Second, while often incorporating political discussions, the magazine’s kaleidoscopic coverage of all aspects of modern urban life, especially from women’s perspectives, often subtly deviated from the state-sponsored nationalist discourse. In the preface to his milestone work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas makes it clear that the concept of the bourgeois “public sphere” was historically and culturally specific: “It cannot be abstracted from the unique developmental history of that ‘civil society’ (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) originating in the European High Middle Ages; nor can it be transferred, idealtypically generalized, to any number of historical situations that represent formally similar constellations.”95 In the field of China studies, while the term gonggong lingyu 公共領域 has largely been treated as “a functional equivalent” to the “public sphere” in describing the open exchange of opinion in the burgeoning modern print culture and the dissemination of cultural critiques in public spaces in the late imperial and early to mid-Republican periods, scholars like Wang Hui, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Michael M. J. Fischer have also pointed out that “it might also be argued that because no public sphere has had a chance to develop, because the structural historical conditions for a public sphere have not existed, the whole idea of a public sphere is untranslatable into Chinese.”96 Despite such lingering questions about (un)translatability, researchers have been ardently examining possible counterparts or comparable notions in the Chinese context. For William Rowe, among the many similarities “of social and institutional developments . . . in late imperial China and early modern Europe,” there was “a remarkable resonance of language-use, specifically in the parallel histories of the English word ‘public’ (and its cognates in other European languages) and its closest Chinese counterpart, ‘gong’ [公],” with the meaning of gong gradually shifting from “not private” in third century BC to “of the imperial-bureaucratic state” around tenth century AD, and to competing references to the central state government, the local extra- bureaucratic collective, and the “public” (as in such terms as “public opinion,” or gonglun 公論) in the nineteenth century.97 For women in late imperial China, however, the supposed divide between the “public” and the “private” could be in some sense ambiguously blurry because of, as Susan Mann has pointed out, the “long history of moral philosophy placing women and Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 135 the family at the center of political order,” which led such elite scholars as Zhang Xuecheng, the High Qing promoter of women’s Confucian learning, to “acknowledg[e] the dependence of public man on cloistered woman by noting that her words, too, could be ‘everyone’s’ (gong).”98 While agreeing with scholars like Keith Schoppa 99 on the shrinking of the “public” caused by the expansion of the central state power in twentieth-century China, Rowe suggests that some intermediate space between state and society may still exist. For Wang, Lee, and Fischer, who define gong’s historical semantics as “a fourfold conception” of “cosmological,” “moral,” “imperial,” and “patri- monial” orders, “the urban intellectuals of 1880–1917 and their independent newspapers” might form an “appropriate analogue” to the Habermasian notion, only that “public space” (gonggong kongjian 公共空間, as Leo Lee has put it) or “proto-public sphere” seem to be descriptions that more accurately indicate its limitedness. 100 For Mayfair Yang, who draws upon Miriam Han- sen’s observation that the Habermasian conception etymologically contains more subtle nuances than the English translation “public sphere,” especially in terms of the rendering of “openness,”101 gonggong kongjian actually does a better job conveying the sense of “openness” than its English counterpart.102 Given the relatively low literacy rate and limited participation in public debates among Chinese women in the early twentieth century, it is not surprising that male participation has so far received much more scholarly attention concerning the Chinese public sphere than female participation. Yet, as such public spaces as salons, coffeehouses, bookstores, and cultural societies continued to develop in the Republican era, most prominently in Shanghai in the 1920s and the 1930s, women’s roles also became more and more publicly visible. A few popular magazines like Lin Loon and The Young Companion (Liangyou 良友, 1926–1945), as Keqiang Li has contended, created a gendered “public sphere” for modern cosmopolitan bourgeois girls by disseminating new knowledge about women and their lives and re-presenting women’s bodies and lives in ways that tore down the previous inner-outer boundary.103 In her “Introduction” to the edited volume Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, which investigates “the struggles surrounding the coming-into-being of a collective body of women- identified subjects, voices, and visions in different sites of ‘public sphere’ and ‘public space’ across ‘transnational China’ at the turn of the twentieth century to the twenty-first,” Mayfair Yang has argued that the introduction of “public sphere considerations into conceptualizations of [women’s] literal and metaphorical space” offers an insightful “gender analysis” missed in Habermas’ original model.104 If the main cause for the limitedness of the public space in Republican Shanghai was the Nationalist government’s increasingly strict censorship policies, it is worth noting that non-elite women’s magazines like Lin Loon 136 Chapter 4 were usually not as heavily affected as influential (and male-dominated) intellectual publications like Shenbao, at least not in terms of political content. In this sense, Lin Loon probably enjoyed more potential to exercise “openness”—a quality emphasized in Zhenling’s “To Sisters” messages—in the exchange of opinions, owing to its relatively more marginalized status. Moreover, if, as Wang, Lee, and Fischer have proposed, one major distinction between the old-fashioned Chinese pubic space (such as teahouses) and the modern Western public sphere is whether “one can avoid the traditional meaning of public as hierarchical order,”105 the relatively more horizontal textual sisterhood in the Lin Loon community could be considered closer to the modern model. Through the magazine’s female lens, the most active exchanges between the individual and the state revolved around the social positioning of the Lin Loon sisters. Drawing heavily upon the “women’s sphere” and occasionally taking a more radical (sometimes entertainingly so) turn toward misandria, the magazine’s sisterhood narratives mediated open discussions on various issues in personal, familial, and national terms. Its “popular and marginalized status”—or rather, “a feminized position,” to borrow from Rey Chow’s discussion on “Butterfly Literature”106—gave rise to alternative voices and constituted a gendered public space not always congruent with either state-sponsored Nationalist media or elite intellectual publications. Following late Qing nationalist feminists, some essays in Lin Loon continued to imagine a collective enlightenment project for Chinese women, but with a stronger emphasis on female-centeredness in its realization. In the 177th issue, for example, Zhang Mojun 張默君 (1884–1965), a fellow female revolutionary of Qiu Jin’s in the 1910s and a Columbia University- educated feminist activist, began her “Thoughts on the International Wom- en’s Day” (Sanbajie ganyan 三八節感言) with the statement that “We women are the center of the education of human beings both in the family and in society.”107 Similarly, an article credited to Lina 麗娜 in the 130th issue argued, in its title, that “Women Are More Important than Men in Political Activities!” (Funü zai zhengzhi gongzuo jiao nanzi gengwei zhongyao! 婦女在政治工作較男子更為重要！).108 In another article titled “Our Sisters’ Responsibility: To Go to the Countryside” (Zimeimen de zeren: dao minjian qu 姊妹們的責任：到民間去), the author Pei 裴 called on her urban readers to expand the dissemination of feminist enlightenment to rural areas—in a way that resembled the travelling feminist speakers in Shao Zhenhua’s novel. Yet, in contrast to Shao’s constant reference to nationalist reformation as a means to invigorate her feminist agenda, Pei directly and vigorously targeted at China’s old-fashioned “patrilineal society” (zongfa shehui 宗法社會) and called for the incorporation of rural women, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the nation’s female population, as a decisive force for the advancement of women’s movement.109 Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 137

In a more radical vein, celebrations of female exclusiveness and female singlehood in Lin Loon disrupted the influential narrative about “good wives and wise mothers” (xianqi liangmu 賢妻良母), which often assimilated gender politics into the nationalist discourse by way of references to eugenics. In the inaugural issue, Yang Yizhu 楊一珠 advocated “Not-Marrying-Men- Ism” (Bujia zhuyi 不嫁主義), arguing that such a choice would protect oneself against being cheated by men or becoming overwhelmingly burdened with household chores.110 This stance was later repeated both by Yang herself in an article titled “Women Who Refuse to Be Married Can also Be Happy” (Bujia de nüzi ye kuaile 不嫁的女子也快樂) and by “The Happiness in Not Getting Married” (Bujia zhi le 不嫁之樂), an anonymously compiled translation of excerpts from foreign magazines. 111 Not only were such rejec- tions of the heteronormative marriage imperative in sharp contrast to the magazine’s otherwise quite overwhelming flow of advice teaching its readers how to find their Mr. Rights, but their emphatically individualistic reasoning also departed from the common justification of female celibacy—especially in the cases of professional women devoted to public services—as a kind of sublimated motherhood for the future citizens of the entire nation. In his essay “Why Does Ellen Key, a Eulogist for Motherhood, Remain Single” (Chang muxingzunzhonglun de Ailunkai nüshi weishenme dushen 唱母性尊重論的愛倫凱女士為什麼獨身), published in a 1922 issue of the Ladies’ Journal, for example, Youtong 幼彤112 described the Swedish feminist and educator as “a mother for all the people of the world” (shijie wanmin de muqin 世界萬民的母親).113 In contrast, adopting an anthropological approach, “The Sisterhood Society on the Hainan Island” (Hainandao de zimeihui 海南島的姊妹會), published in the 128th issue of Lin Loon, introduced a local custom of forming societies of mutual aid exclusively among unmarried young women.114 Although the article’s ending made it clear that member- ship in this society would naturally expire upon the birth of one’s first child, its exotic and utopian overtone resembled the notion of gynocentrism proposed by Zhang Jingsheng. There were, unsurprisingly, plenty of opposing voices in the magazine as well. In the editor’s comment on Fei Sai’s 菲賽 “Girl Students Determined to Remain Single” (Nüxuesheng bao dushen zhuyi 女學生抱獨身主義), for example, female singlehood was labeled “abnormal” (biantai 變態).115 In Zhenlin’s reply to a reader’s letter about “Distressful Problems with Single- hood and Sex” (Dushen yu xing de fanmen 獨身與性的煩悶), it was also defined as an “immense mistake” (jida de cuowu 極大的錯誤).116 Yet even among these criticisms, some form of female-centeredness still often seemed more than palpable. In “Why Don’t Women Get Married?” (Heyi nüzi bujia 何以女子不嫁), published in the 32nd and the 33rd issues, a certain “Ma- dame Meijuan” (Meijuan nüshi 美娟女士) told about how a girl missed her potential Mr. Right and got stuck in singlehood. While blaming the woman 138 Chapter 4 for being too “cold” and “antique,” the author encouraged her female readers to actively manage their own lives, rather than let “fate” make decisions for them.117 Marriage, contended the author, does not necessarily mean the loss of freedom for women; rather, it all “depends on your own tactics.”118 A more vehemently contested issue associated with female singlehood and a controversial form of sisterhood was often defined by the newly imported term “same-sex love” (tongxing’ai 同性愛 or tongxinglian 同性戀), as can be found in Aiqing’s 愛卿 “Singlehood and Same-Sex Love” (Du- shenzhuyi yu tongxing’ai 獨身主義與同性愛) and Fei’s 菲 “Two Female Same-Sex Lovers Reject Marriage with Men” (Tongxing’ai liang nü bujia 同性愛兩女不嫁).119 While the next chapter is devoted to the representations of female same-sex love, there are two aspects of Lin Loon’s treatment of the subject that deserve particular attention here, as they tended to facilitate alternative perspectives other than the state-sponsored nationalist discourse that attempted to regulate women’s bodies and sexualities for the sake of wifehood and motherhood. First, a large percentage of the magazine’s readership was made up of young educated women who had studied at girls’ schools, and such schools were considered the most common locus for female same-sex love. Second, the magazine’s questionable female-centeredness—a kaleidoscopic approach toward cosmopolitan female experiences combined with a lighthearted tone—enabled a juxtaposition of, as Gary Wang has described, “discordant voices and sensibilities” side by side with “valorization of opposite-sex love and marriage.”120 Therefore, on the one hand, there were a number of essays that resonated with Havelock Ellis’ stigmatization of homosexuality and considered same-sex love as either “harmful” (youhai 有害) or “perverted” (biantai 變態)—two descriptions that Fei and Aiqing applied in their essays. In this vein, same-sex love was usually marginalized as being temporary and situational. 121 On the other hand, there were also various supporting voices for female-female love. In the 8th issue, an author pen-named Xiaoyan 小雁 anecdotally cited a case of “Feminized ‘Same-Sex Love among Male Students’” (Nüxinghua de “Nan- sheng tongxing lian’ai” 女性化的“男生同性戀愛”). While describing same-sex love as generally more playful than serious, the author referred to it as a common—and seemingly more acceptable—practice in girls’ schools, in contrast to the “surprising and laughable” cases in boys’ schools that she was writing about.122 In a very different manner, Zhuo Yijing 卓意靜, a self- proclaimed married woman, considered female-female love as more reliable and less burdensome than heterosexual love in “Same-Sex Love Surpasses Opposite-Sex Love” (Tongxing’ai yuguo yixing’ai 同性愛逾過異性愛).123 Given the stage practice of cross-dressing that often took place at men- only or women-only schools, there were also submissions like “A Party at Peking No. 1 Girls’ Middle School” (Beiping nüyizhong tonglehui 北平女一中同樂會), published in the 131st issue, which included two photos of a Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 139 cross-dressed actress with her fellow female students. In one of them, the cross-dresser, wearing a suit, stood close to a girl dressed in a woman’s fur coat, as if they were a couple.124 With even more intimate poses, “All Are Faked Couples” (Doushi jia qingren 都是假情人), which appeared in the 280th issue, presented three similar photos of paired girl students from the Shanghai-based Liangjiang Women’s Athletic School (Liangjiang nüzi tiyu zhuanmen xuexiao 兩江女子體育專門學校), an institution that itself indicated the new concept of “robust and healthy beauty,” with one of the fake male lovers photographed wearing the school uniform. 125 Together with the above-mentioned images of “outdoor sisters,” such ambiguous photos played with the boundaries separating different interpretations of sisterhood: the conventional understanding of biological sisterhood, the feminist sisterhood among “New Women” collectively rising and fighting against misogyny and other gender biases, and the unconventional female-female erotic love. In the last vein, there seemed to be resonances with the British sociologist Edward Carpenter’s (1844–1929) advocacy for tolerance toward students’ same-sex friendships in school life in the fourth chapter of his 1912 book The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women, which Shen Zemin (1900–1933) 沈澤民 translated and published in the August 1923 issue of The Chinese Educational Review (Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌).126 Yet Lin Loon’s renditions sometimes embodied more twists and turns. The photo “Kiss” (Wen 吻), appearing in the 38th issue, for instance, celebrated the bond between a “good couple” of young women with a caption pointing out that both girls had respectively found their Mr. Right and gotten married. 127 The statement, with yet another twist, was soon undermined by a series of lingering questions: “May we ask, which is more interesting? The same-sex kiss between Liang and Tang or a kiss between a man and a woman? Or, are there any differences?”128 Just like Lin Loon’s mingling of didacticism, entertainment, and advertising via a feminine lens, its approaches to bodily politics and state politics also exhibited similar hybridizations and unsteady fluctuations, where cosmopolitan bourgeois sisterhood seemed to constitute an ambiguous middle ground between the individual and the state. With the Japanese invasion of Northeast China increasingly threatening the sovereignty of the nation,129 the patriotic tone of Lin Loon’s sisterhood narratives became stronger and stronger. In “A Role Model For Sisters” (Zimeimen de kaimo 姊妹們的楷模), which appeared in the 68th issue, for instance, the magazine called upon its readers to follow the footsteps of Yao Ruifang 姚瑞芳, a former student from the Liangjiang Athletic School for Girls who went to Northeast China to join the volunteer army fighting the Japanese.130 Articles with a strong editorial tone, such as “The Three Funda- mental Steps to Train Our Sisters during the National Crisis” (Guonanqi zhong zimeimen de san da xunlian 國難期中姊妹的三大訓練) and “New 140 Chapter 4

Expectations for Our Sisters in the Year 1933” (Yijiusansan nian dui zimeimen de xiwang 一九三三年對姊妹們的希望), instructed readers to develop their political sensitivity and devote themselves to practical work. 131 In “The New Attitude of Chinese Women” (Zhongguo funü de xin zitai 中國婦女的新姿態), the magazine responded to the Nationalist government’s recently launched “New Life Movement,” particularly the call for the “militarization of life” (shenghuo junshihua 生活軍事化)132 and encouraged women to participate in military training and to pursue unconventional careers such as piloting aircraft.133 In the meantime, however, the magazine’s interests in women’s everyday experiences always accommodated some less mainstream opinions and attitudes. An anonymous report on “The Political Tendencies of German Kids” (Deguo ertong zhi zhengzhi qingxiang 德國兒童之政治傾向), for example, expressed subtle doubts about the state-sponsored politicization of everyday life by asking, via the voices of mothers, whether it was good for children to be involved in political conflicts at early ages. 134 Even at the height of “New Life Movement” in 1936, the 221st issue contained an editorial titled “The Abolishment of Women’s Fashions” (Qudi funü shimao fuzhuang 取締婦女時髦服裝), which adopted a tone of biting sarcasm about some of the government’s new policies, proposing that the government should instead redirect its efforts to enlighten average Chinese citizens. 135 In another example, an article discussing the Italian government’s regulation of citizens’ sexual reproduction through taxes, “Taxes for Being Single” (Dushen shui 獨身稅) in the 249th edition, envisioned, instead of uniform patriotism, a conflicting zone between an aggressively imperialist state and its people. 136 Unfortunately, the impending outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War pushed the sisterhood discourse in Lin Loon—as it did with the general public discourse—more and more unequivocally toward the nationalist end of the spectrum. The opening editorial essay, “Sisters of the Entire Nation, Arise!” (Quanguo zimeimen qilai ba 全國姊妹們起來吧), which appeared in the magazine’s 298th and last issue (August 12, 1937) and was published on the eve of the Battle of Shanghai, invoked the late Qing catchphrase of “two hundred million women” and, in a way that very much resembled Qiu Jin’s call to mobilize her contemporary female compatriots, attached the fates of Lin Loon sisters with “the survival of the nation” (minzu shengsi cunwang 民族生死存亡).137 Yet, even in this same issue, the magazine still featured women enjoying leisure time in swimsuits on its covers and on pages within, in addition to other entertainment content such as exotic wedding customs and a detective story. Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 141 CONCLUSION

The polyphonic nature of the Lin Loon narratives facilitated a gendered and somewhat flexible space within the tripartite state-public-private division. Its female focus, albeit one involving male participation and probably embracing consumerism much more than feminism, led to a richly ambiguous site of heterogeneous knowledge and experiences of modern urban women. The mutually empowering cosmopolitan bourgeois sisterhood 138 cultivated by the magazine enabled a multitude of interpretative possibilities about the transforming relationships among women, nation, society, and modernity. Most remarkably, through a gendered prism of everyday modern urban life, consumer culture, and cosmopolitan sisterhood, female subjectivities and intersubjectivities were envisioned, constructed, and recognized in more ways beyond the confining lens of nationhood. Despite its vulnerability to male voyeurism and commercial exploitation, as much as its obvious instability under the pressure of the all-encompassing national crisis, such a gendered accommodation of diversified views of the private-public dichotomy contributed to “a multiplicity of publics,” which, as Nancy Fraser has put it, is democratically “preferable to a single public sphere.”139 If, as Lydia Liu has argued, “the violence of China’s encounter with the West forces nationhood upon selfhood, and vice versa,”140 such elastically constructed modern sisterhood imaginations, as the next chapter will continue to show, provided a potentially alternative “hood” to rethink the relationship between the self and the nation. At the same time, the many implicit and explicit contestations within Lin Loon’s sisterly community, just like those in the representations of modern girls and “New Women” by Chinese women writers of the 1920s and the 1930s, indicated not only self-reflexive but also self-questioning modes of identification among modern Chinese female subjects and the difficulties of feminist transcendence.

NOTES

1. All the quotations from Lin Loon in this book have been originally cited from the online collection of the magazine provided by the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/linglong/index.html), and I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the curators of the collection. I am also very grateful to Heidelberg University’s “Chinese Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period” database (http://kjc-sv013.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/frauenzeitschriften/index.php), which provides a search function for part of the existing data. All the English translations are mine. 2. For more on Lin Zecang and the San Ho Company, see Ling-Jr Kung, Building an Image for the Modern Woman of the 1930s Shanghai (Taipei: Daw Shiang Publishing, 2011), 18–33 and Li-ying Sun, “From Pictorial Weekly to Linloon Magazine: The Periodical Produc- tion and the Publishing Strategies of the San Ho Company, 1920s–1930s,” Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 23 (2014): 127–81. 3. See Pui-lam Cheung, “Sexual Culture and Periodical Publication: A Case Study of Ling Long, 1931–1937,” Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 25 (2015): 130. 142 Chapter 4

4. Eileen Chang, A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang, ed. Lai Fengyi (Hang- zhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992), 66. 5. For more on Pictorial Weekly, see Zheng Yimei, Stories about Old Books and Periodi- cals (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005), 265–66. 6. For more on Movie Tone Daily and Movie Tone Weekly, see Zhang Wei, A Pamphlet of Collected Essays on Cinema (Taipei: Showwe, 2009), 211–22. 7. For more on Broadcasting Weekly, see Cheung, “Sexual Culture and Periodical Publica- tion,” 129. 8. Movie Tone Weekly 3.48 (1934): 35. 9. For more on Everyday Knowledge as an independent product, see Sun, “From Pictorial Weekly to Linloon Magazine,” 152–53. 10. For more on The Ladies’ Journal, see Jin Jungwon, “Of Women, by Women, or for Women?—Rewriting a Brief History of The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), 1915–1931),” Re- search on Women in Modern Chinese History 12 (2004): 1–38, and Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: California University Press, 1999), 67–116. 11. From the 30th issue on, the original “Linloon” was always split into “Lin Loon” whenever the English translation occurred in the magazine. 12. Lin Loon 1.1 (1931): 5. 13. The label “the only” was also emphasized in the advertisements for San Ho’s other print products, such as Pictorial Weekly, the self-claimed “first and only weekly in China on photo- graphic studies” and Movie Tone Daily, the self-described “only entertainment daily in China.” Even the “Movie” (Muwei 幕味) section in Lin Loon promoted itself as “the only movie weekly in China.” Just like the interdependence and shared references among San Ho’s publications, such uniform labeling was part of its major marketing strategies as well. 14. Lin Loon 2.63 (1932): 613. 15. Lin Loon 4.127 (1934): 101. 16. For more on Li Cuizhen, see Ye Yonglie, The Tragic Clouds of History (Xining: Qing- hai renmin chubanshe, 1995), 115–34. 17. For more on Liang Xueqing and her family, see Victoria Yung-Chih Lu, History of (Contemporary) Women’s Arts in Taiwan, 1945–2002 (Taipei: Yishujia chubanshe, 2002), 71–74. 18. The social networks of the magazine’s editors may have played a role in the solicitation of such submissions. For example, after advertising it in advance, issues 36 to 40 serialized “A One-Woman Trip to Europe” (Danshen nüzi fu Ou jingguo 單身女子赴歐經過) by Luo Chihui 羅遲慧 (1901–2000), the first female graduate from Soochow University. At the beginning of the article, Luo told her readers that the article was written at the request of her friend Lin Zeren 林澤人, the younger brother of Lin Loon’s owner. See Lin Loon 1.36 (1931): 1387. 19. Barbara Mittler, “In Spite of Gentility: Women and Men in Linglong (Elegance), a 1930s Women’s Magazine,” in The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, eds. Daria Berg and Chloë Starr (New York: Routledge, 2007), 208–10. 20. Lin Loon 1.7 (1931): 219. 21. Almost all of the letters submitted to this section were claimed to have been submitted by the magazine’s female readers, but there were also rare cases, as in the 197th issue, which included a letter from a self-identified male reader seeking for advice about how to stop his addiction to masturbation. 22. Gary Wang, “Making ‘Opposite-sex Love’ in Print: Discourse and Discord in Linglong Women’s Pictorial Magazine, 1931–1937,” Nan Nü 13 (2011): 246–47. 23. According to the news in the January 28th issue of Shenbao (申報, 1872–1949) referred to by Sun, Lin Loon was sued by the Municipal Council (Gongbuju 工部局) because of obscene content in its news reportage “A Lady Petitioned for a Ban of Male Doctors in the Physical Exams of Female Applicants” (Mou nüshi qing jin nanyi jianyan nükaoyuan tige 某女士請禁男醫檢驗女考員體格) in the 217th issue. 24. Sun, From Pictorial Weekly to Linloon Magazine,” 158. 25. Cheung, “Sexual Culture and Periodical Publication,” 128, 144–45. 26. Sun, “From Pictorial Weekly to Linloon Magazine,” 141–43 and 154–56. Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 143

27. Here I am using the word “field” following Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of it as “a field of forces within which the agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position-takings being aimed either at conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field”; see Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 30. 28. Lin Zecang himself was listed first as the “publisher” (zhuganzhe 主幹者) and then as the “founder” (chuangbanzhe 創辦者) of the magazine. His younger brothers Lin Zemin and Lin Zeren respectively took up the editorship for the “Photography” section and the later “Everyday Knowledge” section, in addition to a variety of other submissions. The Lin brothers’ cousin Gao Weixiang 高維祥 also occasionally submitted articles. 29. For more on tabloids in Republican Shanghai, which, as Catherine Vance Yeh has pointed out, “mark[ed] an important step in the development and diversification of China’s public sphere,” see Yeh, “Shanghai Leisure, Print Entertainment, and the Tabloids, xiaobao 小報,” in Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910, ed. Rudolf G. Wagner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 227. 30. For more on Movie Weekly, see Wu Yigong et al., Chronicle of Cinema in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai shehuikexueyuan chubanshe, 1999), 26; for more on The Robinhood, see Jia Shumei et al., Chronicle of News Publication in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai shehuikexueyuan chubanshe, 2000), 194–95, and Meng Zhaochen, A History of Tabloids in Modern China (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2005), 50–54. 31. Lin Loon 1.1 (1931): 34. 32. Lin Loon 1.1 (1931): 26 and 2.27 (1932): 1927. 33. Lin Loon 1.40 (1931): 1557. 34. Lin Loon 2.42 (1932): 1686. 35. Lin Loon 2.62 (1932): 569. 36. Some of Jin’s novels include: My Friend’s Wife (Youren zhi qi 友人之妻, 1936), My Girl Friends (Wo de nüpengyoumen 我的女朋友們, 1937), and Hua Liu, A Girl Nicknamed Sick Spring (Hua Liu bing chun 花柳病春, 1937). Jin also translated several French novels into Chinese, including The School for Wives (1929) by André Gide (1869–1951). 37. For more on Zhang Jingsheng, see Charles Leland Leary, “Sexual Modernism in China: Zhang Jingsheng and the 1920’s Urban Culture” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1994) and Peng Hsiao-yen, “Zhang Jingsheng’s Utopia of Sexual Aesthetics: Affective Education and Governance by Women, “ in Literature, Culture, and Historical Changes, ed. Lee Fong-mao (Taipei: The Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 2002), 561–87. 38. Jin Mancheng, Extremely Ugly, Evil, and Disgusting (Shanghai: Jin Mancheng, 1927), 4. 39. For the criticisms of Zhang by such May Fourth intellectuals as Zhou Zuoren, Zhou Jianren 周建人 (1888–1984), Zhang Xichen 章錫琛 (1889–1969), and Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 (1899–1967), see Leary, “Sexual Modernism in China,” 236–76. See also Wendy Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 31–75. 40. Both Zhang and Madame Yibo may have been directly or indirectly influenced by such translated works as Li Da’s 李達 (1890–1966) re-rendering of an excerpt from the American sociologist Lester F. Ward’s (1841–1913) Pure Sociology via Toshihiko Sakai’s (1870–1933) Japanese version. Sakai replaced Ward’s original chapter title “The Phylogenetic Forces” with A Theory of Gynocentrism (Nüxingzhongxin shuo 女性中心說) as his book title, which was maintained by Li when the Commercial Press published the Chinese translation in 1922. See Peng Hsiao-yen, “Beauty Rules: Zhang Jingsheng’s Gynocentrism and Darwin’s Sexual Selec- tion,” Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 4 (2014): 66–70. 41. Jin Mancheng, In Support of a Revolutionary Lover-ship System (Shanghai: Meide shudian, 1928). 42. Zhang Jingsheng, The Organization of a Beautiful Society (Beijing: Beixin shuju, 1926). 43. For more on Feng Xiaoqing and her legacy in Chinese literature, see Ellen Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy,” Late Imperial China 13.1 (1992): 111–55; for more on the legacy of Pan’s case study, see Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 192–99. 144 Chapter 4

44. Lin Loon 5.171 (1935): 261–62. 45. See Pan Guangdan, “Feng Xiaoqing: A Case Study of Narcissism,” reprinted in Pan Guangdan, Collected Works of Pan Guangdan, vol. 1 (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1993), 45–66. 46. Lin Loon 5.171 (1935): 265. 47. For more on Gui Zhongshu, see Zhou Shao, “Yao Ke and the T’ien Hsia Monthly,” Reading 2 (1993): 95–97. 48. Given Pui-lam Cheung’s discovery that Peng Zhaoliang used Hong Xiaosheng 紅笑生 as one of his pen names (“Sexual Culture and Periodical Publication,” 148), this Xiaogong might have been Peng as well. 49. Lin Loon 5.174 (1935): 459. 50. Lin Loon 5.172 (1935): 328–31. 51. For an example of Chinese translation and introduction of Western theories about “sexual characteristics” in the 1920s and 1930s, see Fei Yunhe, A Study of Male and Female Capabilities (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1926), a translation of Havelock Ellis’ Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary and Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. See also Lü Wenhao, Development of and Reflection on May Fourth Enlightenment Thoughts: A Study of Pan Guangdan’s Social Thought (Taipei: Showwe, 2012), 237–94. 52. Lin Loon 5.173 (1935): 389–91. 53. An announcement in the 55th issue stated that “Women’s Life” originally started as a column in Everyday Knowledge (Changshi 常識) before the latter was merged into Lin Loon, see Lin Loon 2.55 (1932): 228. 54. Lin Loon 5.181 (1935): 831–33. 55. Lin Loon 1.3 (1931): 78. 56. Lin Loon 5.173 (1935): 402. 57. When Zhou Shixun 周世勳, another above-mentioned male editor of Lin Loon, worked for The Robinhood, for instance, it was openly known that he often used his own writings under various fake names in case of insufficient submissions. See Meng, A History of Tabloids in Modern China, 52–53. 58. As will be discussed later, especially in the next chapter, same-sex love was a newly constructed concept and a popular and controversial topic in Republican China. 59. Advertisements for collections titled Lin Loon Cartoons (Linglong manhua 玲瓏漫畫) provided the lists of artists who contributed to the magazine. For example, see Lin Loon 2.69 (1932): 899 and 7.298 (1937): 2469. 60. See Yingjin Zhang, “The Corporeality of Erotic Imagination: A Study of Pictorials and Cartoons in Republican China,” in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed. John A Lent (Richmond: Curzon, 20011), 21–36. For Pui-lam Cheung, the inclusion of erotic cartoons in Lin Loon indicated its marketing strategy to appeal to male readers; see Cheung, “Sexual Culture and Periodical Publication,” 133. 61. Mittler, “In Spite of Gentility,” 218–25. 62. In the early to mid-1930s, Chen sporadically wrote for such periodicals as The Litera- ture Journal (Wenxue qikan 文學期刊, 1934–1935) and the Eastern Miscellany. For more about Chen Qiunong and The Literature Magazine, see Liu Zengren et al., Historical Studies of Modern Chinese Literary Periodicals (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2005), 354. 63. A similar ambiguous case can be found in the juxtaposition of Peng Zhaoliang’s “Foot Fetishism” (Baizukuang 拜足狂) side by side with a photo featuring the “Beautiful Feet” (Meizu 美足) of an American female model in the 246th issue. Whereas the former, calling on “[our] sisters to wake up” and fight against gender inequality, criticized the phenomenon as a form of men’s “perverted sexuality” (biantai xingyu 變態性慾) that had caused the cruel foot- binding practice imposed upon Chinese women, the latter celebrated the American girl’s cham- pionship at a “contest for beautiful feet” (meizu bicai 美足比賽). See Lin Loon 6.246 (1936): 2142–46. 64. Cited from Cheung, “Sexual Culture and Periodical Publication,” 144–45. 65. Yunxiang Gao, Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during Chi- na’s National Crisis, 1931–45 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 61. Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 145

66. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 86–89. 67. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 9–15. 68. The 18th issue, for example, published a photo of the American actress Gloria Swanson (1899–1983) and suggested the “fashion-seeking sisters” use it for reference when changing their own hairstyles; see Lin Loon 1.18 (1931): 628. 69. See Gao, Sporting Gender, particularly Chapter 2, “Nationalist and Feminist Discourses on Jianmei (Robust and Healthy Beauty).” 70. Lin Loon 1.23 (1931): 846. 71. Lin Loon 6.232 (1936): 1073. 72. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 51. 73. The incident was also featured in the 177th issue of Lin Loon, with a lengthy article on “The Details of Ruan Lingyu’s Suicide” (Ruan Lingyu zisha xiangqing 阮玲玉自殺詳情) and a series of photos taken at her funeral. For more on Ruan Lingyu’s death and its cultural-political impact and legacy, see Kristine Harris, “The New Woman Incident,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1997), 277–302. 74. Anonymous, Annotated Admonitions for Women (Shanghai: Yixue shuju, 1916), 11. 75. Lin Loon 3.110 (1933): 1617–19. 76. Lin Loon 2.53 (1932): 98. 77. Lin Loon 4.134 (1934): 543. 78. Lin Loon 7.296 (1937): 2242. 79. See Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 80. For more on the social “paradigm of man-as-gaze and woman-as-sex-object,” see Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 164. 81. The quoted expression had previously served as the title of a pamphlet listing essays collected from the magazine, which was published in 1934 as an item of the “Lin Loon series” (Linglong congshu 玲瓏叢書). 82. Lin Loon 6.243 (1936): 1889–91. 83. Lin Loon 1.24 (1931): 866. Similar depictions of dangerous womanizers were quite common in the magazine. For another example, see Huang Guixiang’s 黃桂香 article “To My Youthful Sisters” (Gao qingchun de zimeimen 告青春的姊妹們), which warned its young women readers of the deceptiveness of men, claiming that “there are virtually too few men with kind hearts,” in Lin Loon 5. 183 (1935): 982. 84. For an example, see “A Few Sentences Dedicated to Our Sisters” (Gongxian gei zimeimen de ji ju hua 貢獻給姊妹們的幾句話) by “Madame Wei Guiyu” (Wei Guiyu nüshi 魏圭玉女士) in Lin Loon 1.12 (1931): 399–400. 85. Initiated by the Nationalist government in 1934 in the hope of restoring social order, promoting cultural etiquette, and, most importantly, uniting the country both under the rule of the Nationalists and against the Japanese invaders, the “New Life Movement” called on Chi- nese people to revive traditional Confucian values while transforming themselves into modernized and militarized citizens. 86. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 299. 87. Lin Loon 3.96 (1933): 740. 88. Lin Loon 2.56 (1932): 245. 89. Lin Loon 2.66 (1932): 723. 90. Lin Loon 3.99 (1933): 906, and 3.109 (1933): 1530. 91. Lin Loon 4.139 (1934): 836. “The Women’s Year of National Products,” unfortunately, was also a fiasco, which led to the launch of yet another campaign, the “Students’ Year of National Products” (Xuesheng guohuo nian 學生國貨年) in 1935; see Gerth, China Made, 286. 92. Mittler, “In Spite of Gentility,” 209. 146 Chapter 4

93. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 169. 94. Ibid., 226, 169. 95. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), xvii. 96. Wang Hui, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Michael M. J. Fischer, “Is the Public Sphere Unspeak- able in Chinese?,” Public Culture 6.3 (1994): 598–99. 97. William T. Rowe, “The Public Sphere in Modern China,” Modern China 16.3 (1990): 315–18. 98. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 223. 99. See Keith Schoppa, Chinese Elites and Political Change: Zhejiang Province in the Early Twentieth Century and Xiang Lake: Nine Centuries of Chinese Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 100. Wang, Leo, and Fischer, “Is the Public Sphere Unspeakable in Chinese?,” 600–601. 101. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Foreword,” in Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analy- sis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, eds. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix. 102. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Introduction,” in Space of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 2, 17. 103. See Li Keqiang, “The Modern Woman Image Constructed by the Lin Loon Magazine,” Twenty-First Century 60 (2000): 92–98. 104. Mayfair Yang, “Introduction,” 5–6. 105. Wang, Leo, and Fischer, “Is the Public Sphere Unspeakable in Chinese?,” 602. 106. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 54–55. 107. Lin Loon, 5.177 (1935): 650. 108. Lin Loon 4. 130 (1934): 262. 109. Lin Loon 2.72 (1932): 1017. 110. Lin Loon 1.1 (1931): 12–13. 111. Lin Loon 1.8 (1931): 261–62, and 7.284 (1937): 1288–89. 112. According to Jin Jungwon, Youtong was probably a pen name used by Zhang Xichen, one of the male editors-in-chief of The Ladies’ Journal; see Jin, “Of Women, by Women, or for Women?,” 16. 113. Youtong, “Why Does Ellen Key, a Eulogist for Motherhood, Remain Single,” The Ladies’ Journal 8.10 (1922): 15. According to Youtong, the essay was translated from a Japanese text written by Harada Minoru. 114. For another example of a similar form of mutual aid societies among women, see Emily Honig’s Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), which investigates the “sisterhoods” (zimeihui 姊妹會 or jiemeihui 姐妹會) among women workers in Shanghai’s textile industry of the Republican period. 115. Lin Loon 2.74 (1932): 1137. As a neologism imported into the Chinese discourse in the 1920s from Japanese, the nuances of biantai in sexological discussions of the Republican period could range from “anomaly” to “perversion,” depending on the user’s understanding of and attitude toward the norms of sexuality. 116. Lin Loon 3.95 (1933): 647. 117. Lin Loon 1.32 (1931): 1228 and 1.33 (1931): 1281. 118. Lin Loon 1.33 (1931): 1282. 119. Lin Loon 2.77 (1932): 1253, and 4.128 (1934): 175–76. 120. Gary Wang, “Making ‘Opposite-sex Love’ in Print,” 343–44. 121. For example, in a reply to a reader’s question, the editor Zhenling dismissed same-sex love as a scandalously popular “fashion” (feng 風) in girls’ schools. The 246th issue reprinted a report elsewhere about a speech Bing Xin 冰心 (aka Xie Wanying 謝婉瑩, 1900–1999) gave at a girls’ school, in which the established woman writer shared her memories about her own Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Sisterhood and the Ambiguities of Female-Centeredness 147 school days. Sensationally titled “A Report on Bing Xin’s Speech about Same-Sex Love” (Bing Xin yanjiang tongxing’ai ji 冰心演講同性愛記), the Lin Loon piece, credited to a certain Yuhu 玉壺, focused on the speaker’s criticism of female-female love in girls’ schools as a corrupt and short-lived practice. See Lin Loon 6.232 (1936): 1047, and 6.246 (1936): 2131–35. 122. Lin Loon 1.8 (1931): 260. 123. Lin Loon 2.47 (1932): 1895. 124. Lin Loon 4.313 (1934): 340. 125. Lin Loon 7.280 (1937): 1000–1001. In another case that playfully associated female athletes with temporary performances of masculinity, Qian Xingsu 錢行素 (1915–1968), a famous short-distance runner, was referred to as a “masculine woman” (nüxing zhong de xiongzhe 女性中的雄者) in a text next to a photo that captured her wearing a beautiful qipao dress and a fashionable feminine hairstyle; see Lin Loon 5.177 (1935): 662. 126. Based upon the fourth chapter, “Affection in Education,” of Carpenter’s book, Shen’s translation was titled “Same-Sex Love and Education” (Tongxing’ai yu jiaoyu 同性愛與教育) and included in an issue entirely devoted to the subject matter of “sex education” (xing jiaoyu 性教育); see Shen, “Same-Sex Love and Education,” The Chinese Educational Review 15.8 (1923): 1–10. 127. Lin Loon 1.38 (1931): 1485. 128. Ibid. A similar vagueness can be found in the magazine’s reportage of the China tour of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), a German physician and open advocate for homosexual and transgender rights, with whom Ellis disagreed. “A Brief Reportage of a Speech by Doctor of Sexuality” (Xingxue boshi yanjiang suji 性學博士演講速記) recorded Hirschfeld’s talk, “Study of Sexuality” (Xingxue 性學), for the Chinese Women’s Society (Zhonghua funü hui 中華婦女會). While acknowledging the study of sexuality as a “new knowledge” worth promotion, the article made no mention of homosexuality at all and merely focused on the supervising role of the mother in the three stages of her child’s sexual education, which were respectively conducted by the mother, the school, and a professional sexologist; see Lin Loon 1.10 (1931): 331, and 1.11 (1931): 370. 129. The Mukden Incident, which marked Japanese invasion of Manchuria, broke out on September 18, 1931, only six months after the launch of Lin Loon, which continued to publish until it was finally brought to an end by the Battle of Shanghai in 1937. 130. Lin Loon 2. 68 (1932): 862. 131. Lin Loon 2.80 (1932): 1395–96, and 3.82 (1933): 51–52. 132. The other two important aspects of the Movement were “making life artistic” (shenghuo yishuhua 生活藝術化) and “making life productive” (shenghuo shengchanhua 生活生產化). 133. Lin Loon 6.243 (1936): 1885–87. 134. Lin Loon 2.72 (1932): 1039. 135. Lin Loon 6.221 (1936): 157–58. 136. Lin Loon 6.249 (1936): 2365–67. 137. Lin Loon 7.298 (1937): 2405. 138. In his study of the representation of sisters in British paintings and novels, Michael Cohen, upon finding that “a rescue of one sister by another is the subject of a surprising number of nineteenth-century works,” argues that “in them sisterhood is a synecdoche for all relationships among women”; see Cohen, Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-century British Novels and Paintings (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1995), 9. 139. Nancy Fraser. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 77. 140. Lydia H. Liu, “Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 91.

Chapter Five

Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” as a Feminist Intervention

Representations of female-female intimacy in 1920s and 1930s China, as can be found in many photos and writings in Lin Loon, further expanded the ways in which sisterhood could be imagined and manifested. At a time of national crises and familial transformation, female-female love among educated young women became important subject matter in womsen’s fiction of the early to mid-Republican period. Drawing upon both indigenous literary traditions and new narrative patterns and imaginaries, these stories about sisterly lovers interacted with the changing discourse on women’s bodies and sexuality at a nodal point of the legacy of late Qing thought on the “women’s sphere,” the recent rise of May Fourth individualism, and a more subversive feminist approach toward women’s love and marriage choices. In her pioneering book The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, Tze-lan D. Sang has thoroughly investigated the shifting representations of female-female love and eroticism in the construction of China’s “translated modernity”—the aforementioned notion termed by Lydia Liu—and the changing background language that keeps redefining such relationships and the receptions of them. In premodern China, especially under the patriarchal familial system with separate spaces for men and women, female-female intimacy was largely ignored, trivialized, and marginalized. 1 As both the term and notion of “homosexuality” were imported into Chinese from Western sexological texts—often by way of Japanese re-renderings—in the early twentieth century, however, it became an increasingly sensitive public issue and was simultaneously incorporated into nationalist, feminist, sexual-scientific, eugenic, misandrist, misogynist, as well as consumerist dis-

149 150 Chapter 5 courses. Among various entanglements and contestations, female same-sex love came to be, rather paradoxically, “associated with feminism, on the one hand, and psychobiological abnormality, on the other.”2 Focusing on the feminist potentialities and dilemmas of female-female love, this chapter examines four representative stories about sisterly lovers written during the 1920s by three well-known women writers of the May Fourth generation3—Lu Yin’s “Lishi’s Diary” and “Old Friends by the Sea,” Ling Shuhua’s “It Is Said That Something Like This Happened,” and Ding Ling’s “In the Summer Vacation.”4 Chronologically speaking, these stories were published several years prior to the launch of Lin Loon; ideologically and intellectually speaking, however, they constructed and advanced even more subversive sisterhood narratives. In particular, by depicting the new- style girls’ school, which serves as the locale of these initially empowering but ultimately frustrated love experiences, as a limited heterotopic space in which feminist transcendence is attempted, the stories shed more light on the complicated and gendered negotiations among the individualistic, feminist, and nationalist layers of this ambiguously defined erotic branch of sisterhood. On the one hand, its elastic spectrum, which spans the peer-inspired rejection of the heterosexual marriage imperative and the celebration of lesbianism, invites a more nuanced perspective on the trajectory of feminist thought and development through the lens of sisterhood. On the other hand, its apparently doomed future also reveals the inevitable situatedness of such new sisterhood imaginations within the structured relationships among the individual, the family, and the state. As a result, the characteristic of “nondevelopment,” which was often observed by literary critics in these women writers’ works and employed in psychoanalytic and sexological explanations of female-female love, becomes a paradoxical embodiment of both the potential and the difficulties of a feminist intervention.

THE NEW-STYLE GIRLS’ SCHOOL AS A HETEROTOPIC SPACE AND FEMALE-FEMALE LOVE AS FEMINIST RESISTANCE

Owing to the promotion of women’s education since the late Qing, educated women made their collective emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most of these modernized female “wealth-producers” and “new citizens,” who became prominent embodiments of China’s modernization, nation-strengthening, and feminist awakening, were products of new-style girls’ schools, many of which were boarding schools. Coeducation, which had sporadically occurred in missionary schools in the nineteenth century, 5 was first adopted by the Qing government at the elementary level in the last couple of years of its rule and then expanded to secondary and higher education after the founding of the Republic in 1912. 6 Girls’ schools, however, Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 151 maintained their presence and popularity among the shifting educational landscape. Some of them, especially those originally established by foreign missionaries in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, had acquired elite status over the years and attracted many students from Westernized gentry and urban bourgeois families. Like the aforementioned Lin Loon contributor Zhang Mojun, who served in the 1920s as the principal of the Jiangsu No. 1 Provincial Women’s Normal School (Jiangsu shengli diyi nüzi shifan xuexiao 江蘇省立第一女子師範學校),7 a number of girls’ school graduates later became teachers at similar institutions. By relocating female students and teachers outside the traditional patriarchal household, the new-style girls’ school freed them from the gender-based prescription about the inner-outer boundary and fundamentally unsettled what Susan Mann has described as the “tight interlocking of men’s and women’s roles” in the traditional Chinese family system. 8 This led to a redefinition of women’s spatial-temporal roles and the opening of new possibilities for their interpersonal relationships, enabling stronger feminist yearnings, both individually and collectively. For women teachers and female professionals-to-be, the physical and financial independence from their families, or the prospect of it, helped them to further reject the Confucian doctrines that subjected women to dominations by male authorities—fathers, husbands, and sons. Yet, on the other hand, the public visibility of these educated women also resulted in their being subjected to voyeuristic curiosity and malicious suspi- cions. Just as in Shao Zhenhua’s Chivalric Beauties, the increasing conven- ience of social contacts with men, real or imagined, often led to concerns about the possibility of inappropriate sexual encounters. In response, some girls’ schools implemented strict rules about the comings and goings of students on campus.9 Furthermore, the emergence of more financially and intellectually independent female professionals in the Republican era tended to be perceived as a growing threat to male authority. Thus, “new forms of misogyny” were added to the old,10 leading to caricatures and the “condemnation of the ‘undisciplined’ and ‘arrogant’ behavior of female students”11 in many popular print products. Both as a response to such criticism and as a manifestation of self- defense, some female writers who were themselves products of new-style girls’ schools openly expressed concerns about the students and proposed improvements in their conduct. For example, just four months after the start of the “May Fourth Movement” in 1919, during which student demonstrators denounced the Chinese governments’ ineffective representation at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated for cultural reinvigoration through the adoption of modern knowledge and democratic ideals, the Beijing-based Morning Post (Chen bao 晨報) published an essay titled “Girl Students of the ‘Subversion and Construction Period’” (“Pohuai yu jianshe shidai” de 152 Chapter 5 nüxuesheng 破壞與建設時代的女學生). Written by the future “New Wom- an” writer Xie Wanying 謝婉瑩 (aka Bing Xin 冰心, 1900–1999), then a student at the North China Union Women’s College (Huabei xiehe nüzi daxue 華北協和女子大學), the essay divided the changing attitudes toward girl students into three periods.12 Initially, according to Xie, when Chinese girl students collectively emerged at the turn of the century, their emulation of Western suffragists, use of new terms, and advocacy for such new ideas as gender equality inspired the public and were received with much admiration. Nevertheless, because of their increasingly stale hyperbole and some scandalous behaviors, girl students soon encountered disappointment and detesta- tion; as a result, the image of girl students entered a different phase. Viewing the rise of a new generation as a perfect opportunity to restore their good name, Xie suggested that her fellow girl students adopt a more prudent and practical approach toward women’s issues—such as household management, child care, and women’s professionalization—and exhibit a more serious commitment to social improvement. Notwithstanding the self-affirmative agenda of the May Fourth generation, Xie’s stance reflected the self- conscious struggles of the Chinese “New Women” against old and new social pressures. Hence, at the conjunction of personal development, feminist enlightenment, and nationalist modernization, the institutional space of the new-style girls’ school resembled, in more ways than one, an example of what Michel Foucault has termed “heterotopias,” which “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”13 The nineteenth-century male boarding school, for instance, can be seen as a “crisis heterotopi[a]” for young men, “as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place ‘elsewhere’ than at home.”14 In the modern era, according to Foucault, the “heterotopias of crisis” have been gradually replaced by “heterotopias of deviation,” such as rest homes and mental hospitals, where “individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.”15 Ironically, in the case of the new-style girls’ school in Republican China, its heterotopic nature seemed rather double-edged. That is, by repositioning young women out of their private (largely patriarchal) households and into a social institution that taught new visions of women’s roles and life’s possibilities (no matter in which vein they were interpreted), this space both facilitated a kind of “crisis”—including but not limited to puberty and sexual matu- ration—and accommodated some form of “deviation.” With horizontal and gender-conscious peer ties among the students temporarily replacing patriarchal-familial obligations, female subjectivities and intersubjectivities took shape and were strengthened along with personal and intellectual growth, in Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 153 a manner related to, and potentially challenging, conventional familial and social relationships. Particularly, as female sexuality became a popular topic in public discourse under the overlapping influences of Western sexology, nationalistic eugenics, and voyeuristic commodity culture, girl students’ coming of age in their self-enclosed, female-exclusive schools attracted various forms of attention. With some girl students and young female educators seeking freedom and subjectivity by rejecting the heterosexual marriage imperative 16 (especially that imposed through arranged marriages) and replacing it with intimate female-female relationships, 17 the girls’ school became both a favored locale in literary writings for what Tze-lan Sang has termed “the female homoerotic school romance”18 and a suspicious or scandalous place that was frequently mentioned in condemnations of female same-sex love. In this sense, this perceived “deviation” also manifested a feminist awakening and a rebellion against traditional patriarchal values and practices. As Lu Yin’s character Zongying 宗瑩 explains in “Old Friends by the Sea,” it was her experiences at school that inspired her to painfully fight against an arranged marriage planned by her parents and relatives:

If I have to, after all, sacrifice myself for the sake of my parents, why should I have entered school? I should have just kept my old way of life as a young gentry lady . . . I would have embraced . . . the ideas of ‘trice following and four virtues’ and followed my parents’ orders and the matchmaker’s suggestions without any distress! Now that I have entered school and gained knowledge, how can I submit myself to such stubbornly outdated authoritarian coer- cions?19

Even after winning her fight and gaining the freedom to marry her own love- choice, Zongying still does not give up her dream of a female utopia, in which she and her girlfriends can fully enjoy idyllic companionship and pure love,20 in contrast to a mundane married life. In the case of the namesake protagonist of “Lishi’s Diary,” who dies heartbroken after her female lover—a fellow girl student—gets married, the contrast between the inevitable hierarchy in heterosexual love relationships and the mutual empowerment in female-female love is further illuminated:

Since I fell sick, I have not exchanged letters with Guisheng—actually we are just ordinary friends. I do not want to seek comfort from the opposite sex, because I always feel deprived of freedom in my relationships with them. Yuanqing has shown me enormous sympathy, so our friendship has changed into a same-sex love.21

All heterotopias, according to Foucault, “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.”22 The fe- 154 Chapter 5 male-female love accommodated by the girls’ school was, therefore, informed not only by the subjects’ growing gender and sexual consciousness but also by this ambivalent doubleness of spatial-temporal 23 isolation and penetrability. For most young students, life at school was only temporary and so was its already flimsy protection of their female-female intimacy. Even for supporters of female same-sex love, such practices were often seen as a developmental stage to be grown out of in due course. For example, in 1925, The Ladies’ Journal devoted its June issue entirely to the topic of “female students.” Among the articles was “The New Significance of Same-Sex Love in Women’s Education” (Tongxing’ai zai nüzi jiaoyu shang de xin yiyi 同性愛在女子教育上的新意義), an essay translated by Weisheng 薇生 from the Japanese original written by the feminist educator Furuya Toyoko, which divided same-sex love practices into three historical types: first, those found in feudal times, which usually took place between a lord and his servants, between young male soldiers, between maids in the royal court, or between nuns in Buddhist temples; second, those in modern boarding schools and factory dorms; and third, those in contemporary girls’ schools.24 While condemning the first two types as morally corrupt quests motivated merely by bodily desires, the article eulogized the last type as pure and sublime spiritual love, which could facilitate women’s education without interfering with a student’s future heteronormative marriage and family life. As the following discussion will reveal, such an expected, if not prescribed, temporariness and instability in the bond between sisterly lovers often constituted an ambiguous core in their attempted feminist transcendence from the conventional heterosexual marriage imperative and its accompanying patriarchal familial obligations.

SISTERLY LOVE AND THE QUEST FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE IN LU YIN’S “LISHI’S DIARY” AND “OLD FRIENDS BY THE SEA”

At the time when “Lishi’s Diary” and “Old Friends by the Sea” were successively published in the Short Story Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報) in 1923,25 Lu Yin (born Huang Shuyi 黃淑儀, aka Huang Ying 黃英) was a 25- year-old, recent graduate of Peking Women’s College of Education (Beijing nüzi gaodeng shifan xuexiao 北京女子高等師範學校). Just as with the author’s first and never-published fictional project “The Story of Yinniang” (Yinniang xiaozhuan 隱娘小傳),26 these two stories reflect the author’s own experiences and quest for the meaning of life. In particular, Lusha 露沙 in the “Old Friends by the Sea” is heavily autobiographical and shares with the author similar personality traits, educational and familial background, and life experiences, including estrangement from her parents during childhood, intimate female-female ties with fellow schoolmates, and a painful love rela- Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 155 tionship with a married man.27 As with the literary and intellectual companionship Qiu Jin enjoyed with Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, Lu Yin’s intimate friendships with “New Women” writers Shi Pingmei 石評梅 (1902–1928) and Lu Jingqing 陸晶清 (1907–1993) provided both emotional comfort and artistic inspirations; at least until Shi’s tragic early death from meningitis. Lu Yin’s novella “Ivory Ring” (Xiangya jiezhi 象牙戒指, 1931–1934) was inspired by Shi Pingmei’s relationship with her revolutionary lover Gao Junyu 高君宇 (1896–1925). The short story “Lishi’s Diary” recounts the unsuccessful pursuit of female same-sex love by its titular protagonist. Studying away from home at a new-style girls’ school, Lishi finds her life monotonous and devoid of meaning. After seeing the women around her fall sick, exhausted physically and emotionally after getting married, she turns to diary writing for comfort and exchanges letters with friends, both male and female, to combat her loneliness and melancholy. In Yuanqing 沅青, a fellow female student who sym- pathizes with Lishi’s view that female-female bonding is a more liberating alternative to oppressive heterosexual love and marriage, she finds her greatest source of empathy and consolation. The two even start to talk about a “life together,” which, Lishi imagines, might transcend banality and promise a bright future.28 Yuanqing, however, is relentlessly pressured by her family to marry her cousin, who offers a future free of financial worry. Finally, she yields to her mother’s marriage plans and informs Lishi of her decision, explaining that she has now realized that same-sex love is only “a childish thought . . . never to be accepted by society.”29 Worse still, in an effort to comfort Lishi, Yuanqing sends her an “especially masculine” man as a surro- gate lover,30 but the gesture only causes Lishi a heartbreak that is ultimately fatal. Shifting the focus from a paired couple to a group of five girl students, 31 the novella “Old Friends by the Sea” portrays the complicated social and emotional relationships among like-minded girl students. As the young women “enter the world of adults,”32 in which they seem destined for heterosexual love and marriage, their youthful innocence and carefree existence comes to a jarring end, and their intimate group is gradually dispersed. Shortly after, Lusha and Lingyu 玲玉, two members of the group, each falls in love with a married man. While Lingyu’s lover fails to divorce his arranged wife because of familial and social pressure, Lusha persuades her lover, Ziqing 梓青, not to do so to avoid ruining another woman’s life. Two other former classmates, Yunqing 雲青 and Zongying 宗瑩, on the other hand, find men they like but their relationships are met with parental disapproval. Whereas Zongying manages to wed her sweetheart after a devastating battle to resist an apparently more lucrative arranged marriage, Yunqing decides to sacrifice herself for the sake of her family and buries her love in the writing of fiction. At the wedding of another former classmate, Lianshang 蓮裳, who is now working 156 Chapter 5 in a different city, the other girls lament that their friend has become “a trophy of [another] winner, who has stolen her away from the intimate circle.”33 Lusha feels even more depressed when she witnesses Zongying becoming increasingly trapped by her wifely and motherly duties and Yunqing immersing herself in Buddhist studies to try, unsuccessfully, to escape from her distressing loss of love. Finally, she decides to pursue a future with Ziqing, even though Ziqing’s marriage and vicious gossip about them remain seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In order to commemorate the companionship among the circle of girlfriends, Lusha builds a small cottage, a “souvenir” that can “compensate for the dullness of life,” near an idyllic seaside village once visited by the group during a summer vacation. 34 If she fails in her endeavor, Lusha tells the girls in a note, she will commit suicide with Ziqing. For the young female intellectuals in these two stories, sisterly love is less an isolated pursuit than a means of dealing with all life’s conundrums. The centralization of “human” (ren 人) and “life” (rensheng 人生) in the stories echoes themes popular among the members of the Literary Research Associ- ation (Wenxue yanjiuhui 文學研究會), of which Lu Yin was one of its best- known female members (along with Bing Xin). 35 The Short Story Monthly, in which Lu Yin published these stories, was also closely related to the Literary Research Association. Originally a periodical much in the vein of the so-called “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” literature, the Monthly was thematically and stylistically reconstituted between 1921 and 1923 into a major advocate for realist fiction under the chief-editorship of Mao Dun, a co-founder of the Association.36 In “Comments on Treatments of Old and New Literatures” (Xin jiu wenxue pingyi zhi pingyi 新舊文學平議之評議) and “The Relationship between Literature and Human Beings and the Mis- understanding of Writers’ Identities since Ancient China” (Wenxue he ren de guanxi ji Zhongguo gulai duiyu wenxuezhe shenfen de wuren 文學和人的關係及中國古來對於文學者身份的誤認), articles published under the names, respectively, of Bing 冰 and Shen Yanbing 沈雁冰 in the January 1920 issue and the December 1921 issue of the Short Story Monthly, Mao Dun defines “new literature” as an “evolutionary literature,” which serves people of all classes and attempts to provide essential guidance in life; as such, Mao Dun contends, literature is “the only means through which human beings communicate with one another and voice their opinions.”37 Communication, indeed, is an important theme in Lu Yin’s writings. In- stead of embracing Mao Dun’s optimistic evolutionism, however, Lu Yin tends to focus more on the lack or difficulties of effective communication, especially when it concerns women’s inquiries into the meaning of life and when the (mis)communication involves opposite sexes. In addition, rather than tightly binding the individual quest for the meaning of life with social criticism and activism, as Mao Dun suggests, Lu Yin focuses more on the Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 157 inner struggles of her female characters. Even in the 1921 story “Can Souls Be Sold?” (Linghun keyi mai me? 靈魂可以賣麼？), the protagonist, a working-class girl, is frustrated by her feelings of spiritual alienation caused by the monotony of factory work, even more than by economic exploitation or physical exhaustion. For Lishi, to yield to heteronormative marriage is to give up the female self, just as to be deprived of her love with Yuanqing means to be denied any possible meaning in life, which equals death. There- fore, not only does she see Yuanqing’s final acceptance of her arranged marriage as “self-degradation,” but she also considers Yuanqing’s attempt to compensate her with a potential male lover as the “degradation of other people.”38 In a later article titled “The Way Out for Women from Now On” (Jinhou funü de chulu 今後婦女的出路), Lu Yin provides her own answer to life’s essential questions, stating that women should “break through the limitations imposed upon them by their families and participate in social activities,” so that they can finally enjoy “a well-deserved human life.”39 Written during the writer’s honeymoon in Tokyo in 1930, the article, interestingly, refers to Ibsen’s self-emancipating Nora and proposes the mobility between domestic and public spaces as a crucial prerequisite for women to find meaning in life. The goal, unfortunately, proves so elusive for Lishi, Lusha, and the other women in the two stories that they tend to either give in to the conventionally prescribed domestic roles (as devoted daughters, wives, and mothers) or become “detesters of life” (sheng de yanfanzhe 生的厭煩者), as do Lishi, her friends Hailan 海兰 and Wenwei 雯薇, and probably Lusha as well.40 The tragic portrayals of the women who surrender to patriarchal oppression obviously overlap with the May Fourth generation’s favorite critique of the traditional family. Yet for Lu Yin’s female characters, the ultimate frustration, as the increasingly melancholy and feeble Wenwei bemoans to Lishi, lies in losing any meaningful role beyond a wife or a mother once they have departed from their school and entered the supposed adult world. 41 In this sense, these female intellectuals do not differ greatly from the factory girl in “Can Souls Be Sold?,” and Lu Yin’s inquiry about the “way out” for women not only seeks to overcome women’s imposed physical immobility and social limitations but also probes the fundamental questions about life from a woman’s stance and point of view.

REWRITING FEMALE INTIMACY AND (IN)SANITY: FROM “WHY DID SHE SUDDENLY GO INSANE” TO “IT IS SAID THAT SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPENED”

“It is such a meaningless life that I am living!” Cries Yunluo 雲羅 in Ling Shuhua’s “It Is Said That Something Like This Happened,” as she laments 158 Chapter 5 that she cannot stay with her female soul mate, Yingman 影曼, forever. A reworking of Yang Zhensheng’s 楊振聲 (1890–1956) “Why Did She Sud- denly Go Insane?” (Ta weishenme huran fafeng le 她為甚麼忽然發瘋了？, 1926), Ling Shuhua’s short story delineates how Yingman, a student actress who cross-dresses as Romeo in a performance of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, falls in love with the actress playing Juliet, Yunluo, but later loses her to an arranged marriage. Upon overhearing news of Yunluo’s marriage, Ying- man suffers a breakdown and hallucinates that Yunluo is alternately smiling and crying in front of her eyes. Around the time when Yang Zhensheng published his original story, female-female love also occurred in the fictional writings of other male authors. As Ta-wei Chi has pointed out, even some romantic stories centering on heterosexual love and marriage, like Xu Zhenya’s 徐枕亞 (1889–1937) 1912 sentimental novel The Spirit of the Jade Pear (Yuli hun 玉梨魂), sometimes “accommodate and even capitalize on [female] same-sex desire.”42 In a 1927 article titled “New Literature in China and Psychoanalysis” (Zhongguo xin wenyi yu jingshen fenxi 中國新文藝與精神分析), the translator and critic Zhao Jingshen (趙景深, 1902–1985) offered a brief list of recent stories which he felt lent themselves to psychoanalytical reading. In terms of Chi- nese literary representations of female same-sex love, Zhao’s list included only one work by a woman writer (“Lishi’s Diary”) but three by male writers, namely, Ye Shaojun’s 葉紹鈞 (aka Ye Shengtao 葉聖陶, 1894–1988) “The Forgotten” (Bei wangque de 被忘卻的, 1922), Zhang Yiping’s 章衣萍 (1902–1947) “At the Foot of the Songluo Mountain” (Songluoshan xia 松羅山下, 1926), and Zhang Ziping’s 張資平 (1893–1959) novella Flying Catkin (Fei xu 飛絮, 1926).43 In comparison with male authors’ tendencies to hint at some kind of psychological dysfunction on the part of female-female lovers and to incorporate exotic or voyeuristic touches, stories by women writers like Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua provide much deeper and more sympathetic portrayals of such female characters. Both Yang’s and Ling’s stories were published in 1926 in the Morning Post Supplement (Chenbao fukan 晨報副刊), respectively in the January 11th and the May 3rd issues. In a short note preceding Ling’s story, Yang confessed that he invited Ling to rewrite the story because his original version, written on short notice at the request of his editor friend Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897–1931), failed to work out a logical storyline for Yingman’s “insanity” and had therefore received many complaints, including Ling’s. Appar- ently pleased with the revised version, he praised Ling for its delicate, elab- orate, and easy-going style.44 The changes brought about by Ling’s rewriting, nevertheless, were by no means merely stylistic. The new version, in addition to adding length and improving the plausibility of the storyline, abandons Yang’s attribution of Yingman’s “insanity” to her excessive im- mersion in the role of Romeo and the ensuing misidentification. Instead, it Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 159 rationalizes the female-female relationship between the two protagonists as a natural outcome of their prolonged physical intimacy and mutual understanding. In Yang’s brief story, same-sex love is portrayed as the result of the conflict between the restrictive milieu of the girls’ school and its students’ growing sexual maturity. Situated in “a country that values proper rites and rituals,” explains Yang’s third-person omniscient narrator, the school allows its students “no opportunity to socialize with men in a normal manner” and leaves them no other choice but to turn to “love between members of the same sex.”45 As a result, the affection between the two female protagonists is, in its essence, an unsuccessful imitation of a heterosexual relationship. Yingman, as characterized by Yang, “is courageous and straightforward by nature, exhibiting some sense of masculinity”; Yunluo, on the other hand, is a typical feminine representative of “those 18 or 19 year-old girls craving for love.”46 Entirely dependent on language used for heterosexual love, Yang’s Yingman regrets that she is not a “man” in reality and thus cannot truly “enjoy” (xiaoshou 消受) Yunluo, and she jokingly and self-effacingly ac- knowledges that she knows Yunluo actually longs for a male companion, not a female substitute.47 Even when she learns of Yunluo’s engagement, the heartbroken Yingman fails to say a word of her own. Instead, she again buries herself in the role of Romeo and recites his last lines before his suicide, producing a dramatic response that seems entirely unintelligible to her fellow students; and hence the title of the story. Born to a father who was a literati-official-turned-Republican-politician and having studied at a new-style girls’ school—the Hebei No. 1 Provincial Women’s Normal School (Hebei shengli diyi nüzi shifan xuexiao 河北省立第一女子師範學校)—herself,48 Ling Shuhua showed considerable understanding and sympathy for the two girls and for their shared awakening to sexual desires against the background of the unfair gender hierarchy still prevalent in social imaginaries and practices. Under her pen, the two girls remain fully aware of their female identities at all times. Even the physically tall Yingman, whose northern disposition supposedly indicates a masculine inclination, feels no qualms about her gender identity. More importantly, the girls in the school share a common resentment of the male-subject/female- object paradigm and exhibit a deep sympathy for female-female love. While laughing at a voyeuristic male audience fascinated by a kissing scene on the silver screen, they “proudly” wander around on campus in pairs “hand in hand and shoulder by shoulder.”49 Encouraged by her warm-hearted roommates, Yunluo decides to share her bed with Yingman in a scene that is jokingly compared to both the Shakespearean play the two perform in and the Chinese classic The Romance of the Western Chamber (Xixiang ji 西廂記), written by the Yuan dynasty playwright Wang Shifu 王實甫 (ca. 1260–ca. 1336). Later, when fretting about the prospect of an arranged mar- 160 Chapter 5 riage, Yunluo bemoans that her lover “is not a man,” to which Yingman asks, “Do I have to be a man to listen to what’s on your mind?”50 And when Yunluo remarks that two women will not be allowed to stay together forever, Yingman counters with the example of two of their female teachers who “have lived together for five or six years.”51 In this way, Ling Shuhua’s departure from Yang Zhensheng’s presumptions about Yingman’s mistaken gender identity and Yunluo’s confused transfer of erotic interest opens up the possibility of self-reflexive subjectivities on the part of the female-female lovers. In the case of Yingman, female- female love is not only a self-conscious preference but an aid to her personal and emotional growth—precisely the intended outcome of the education she and her fellow students receive at the girls’ school. This progress in maturity is reflected in the joking tease she receives when she visits her family, that she seems to have “found a soul mate and become less naughty and more focused.”52 Through Ling Shuhua’s rationalization and justification, female-female love ceases to be a cause, or a symptom, of insanity. Instead, it becomes a double-edged endeavor, pitting the pursuit of an independent female existence against the control of the patriarchal family—double-edged not because of Yingman’s madness but because of the impossibility for the female characters to permanently transcend the matrix of patriarchal language and power. In this light, Yingman’s breakdown upon hearing of Yunluo’s marriage seems much more like the tragic consequence of a developing female self being traumatized by exterior forces than a psychosexual disorder resulting from pathological misidentification. In other words, the story, rather than describing a case of female insanity, provides insight into the discursive construction of sanity/insanity per se. If, as Rey Chow puts it, there is a “vicious circle of women being blamed for precisely the mental states to which they have been reduced by the structure of social organization,”53 then Ling’s story speaks not only to the blame but to the circle as well.

THE UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN DIMENSIONS OF FEMALE- FEMALE LOVE IN DING LING’S “IN THE SUMMER VACATION”

Like Lu Yin, Ding Ling (born Jiang Wei 蔣偉, aka Jiang Bingzhi 蔣冰之) received much of her education from new-style women’s schools, including the Hunan No. 2 Provincial Women’s Normal School (Hunan shengli di’er nüzi shifan xuexiao 湖南省立第二女子師範學校), the private Zhounan Women’s Middle School (Zhounan nüzi zhongxue 周南女子中學), and the Shanghai Pingmin Women’s School (Shanghai pingmin nüxiao 上海平民女校) founded by the Communists. Born in a rural village in the inland province of Hunan, Ding Ling lost her father at the age of three and was brought Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 161 up by her strong-willed and independent mother, who herself was a pioneer in seeking and promoting women’s education. After rejecting a marriage arranged by her grandmother, she left for the metropolis of Shanghai to continue with her education and traveled to several other major cities. At one point in Shanghai, she briefly took up acting but was quickly disillusioned by the vulgarity of the film industry. After her leftist lover Hu Xiepin 胡也頻 (1903–1931), a writer who later joined the Communist Party, introduced her to literary circles, Ding Ling began her fruitful but calamity-filled, six- decade writing career. Her short story “In the Summer Vacation,” which was first published in the May 1928 issue of the Short Story Monthly, depicts a group of young women teachers working and living in an isolated girls’ school in a small inland town who pursue female-female love with their colleagues and treat their partners like spouses. In a panoramic manner, the story depicts an array of motivations for the teachers’ female-female love. In addition to their physical intimacy in the school dormitory and mutual attractions grown through such coworking and coliving, these include refusals to live the unfulfilling life of a dependent housewife, lack of marriage opportunities resulting from their (self-)enclosure in an isolated location, the fear of becoming the objects of male desire, and the need for comradery in resisting the lustful, hostile gazes from the general public toward the newly emerged “New Women.” Despite occasional bickering, the teachers find much comfort in their mutual companionship. The long summer vacation of the title, however, leads to a temporary break from their work—which provides, at least partly, meaning for their lives— and regular routines. Consequently, discontent and conflict begin to boil over, so much so that the love relationships become more fragile than ever and the sisterly community begins to disintegrate. One teacher gets married. Her former partner, now on her own, moves to another school in search of a new female lover. Another couple breaks up after a string of capricious quarrels, one of them engaging in another female-female relationship and the other on the verge of quitting her job. In the end, the sisterly group is only saved by the timely return of the school principal and the impending arrival of the new semester. While the young female intellectuals’ love bonds help crystallize their growing consciousness of the female self as a desiring subject and their resistance to being objectified by men, the identification-eroticism spectrum within the female community in “In the Summer Vacation” seems vulnerable from within. In contrast to the coercive parental or familial interferences that directly and tragically ruin Lisha and Yingman’s desire to stay with their female lovers, it is the trivial quarrels and dramatic fits of pique between the female-female lovers themselves that reflect the penetrating power of the hierarchical gender relations outside the sisterly community and the female subjects’ difficulty in wriggling free of it. In this way, Ding Ling’s revelation 162 Chapter 5 about the interior fragility of female-female love complicates the utopian expectations Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua’s sisterly lovers project onto female- female bonds with another nuanced layer of uncertainty. With the women’s promises to remain exclusively devoted to their female lovers being repeatedly contaminated by jealousy and boredom, a sense of purposelessness in life spreads through the sisterly community and undermines its members’ faith in their bonds. Such vulnerability and uncertainty, in a way, is embodied by the spatial- temporal conditions of the particular locale where sisterly love is cultivated and accommodated. The new-style school where the teachers work and live, interestingly, has only been recently and incompletely converted from a di- lapidated Buddhist temple. The awkward transition from a self-enclosed temple to a modern educational institution occasionally makes one of its current residents feel as if she were a nun. At the same time, its geographical location in a small inland town far from major metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai further indicates a sociocultural stagnation, which makes the New Women’s battles against their voyeuristic and misogynist milieu even more strenuous than those of their cosmopolitan peers. Defined by “decaying beams and columns, gloomy sanctuaries, and ragged roof tiles,”54 the campus both functions and dysfunctions as a hybridized space for (private) living, (public) working, and limited socialization with other women teachers, leaving them little privacy yet too much loneliness and a foreboding sense of alienation. As financially independent professional women, they are endowed with the physical mobility to venture outside. However, often being embarrassed by the lewd stares at their bodies, especially when they wear skirts in the summer, the teachers voluntarily enclose themselves inside the school. On special social occasions such as at theatrical performances or at a colleague’s wedding, they are treated by men as, simultaneously, exciting spectacles, objectified prey, and targets of misogynist ridicule. The temple-turned-school setting, therefore, becomes a paradoxical combination of a utopian haven and a disappointing illusion, where female same- sex love seems to be encouraged and discouraged at one and the same time. On the one hand, physically and mentally estranged from their patriarchal homes, the teachers rely upon their lovers for erotic pleasures and for reassu- rance of the livability of their daily lives. Just as the narrator comments, some teachers are “intensely in love” because “they cannot afford not to be.”55 For Zhiqing 志清, who has decided not to get married but has failed to find a female lover, the only alternative path to security is money. Although she manages to increase her savings through living frugally and collecting interest on loans, both she and her colleagues detest such a way of life. It is only after she wins Chengshu 承淑 from Jiaying 嘉瑛, her romantic rival, that she starts to see some real hope. On the other hand, while looking for a meaningful and “correct path of life,” as Chengshu terms it,56 Ding Ling’s Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 163 main characters constantly question the validity of their choices, not only in terms of love and marriage but also in terms of career paths. A resulting cynicism seems to be universally applied both to individual agendas and to various lofty slogans that attempt to assimilate women’s lived struggles into certain pretentiously defined “isms” such as “singlehood-ism” (dushenzhuyi 獨身主義)57 or dedication to education. Whereas the new social expectations about women’s bodies and mentalities seem to be embodied by the name of the institution where these young women teach, “Independence Girls’ School” (Zili nüxue 自立女學), the monotonous (self-)enclosed life within the school leads only to an array of ambiguities and ironies on the women’s “independence,” or rather, codependency.

THE ELASTICITY OF FEMALE-FEMALE LOVE AND THE SHIFTING MATRIX OF SUBJECT POSITIONS

Given the specificities of the social, cultural, political, and sexual connotations of the word “lesbian” per se, we have to be very careful when comparing these female same-sex love relationships among young women intellectuals of the 1920s and the 1930s with the present-day definition of “lesbianism.” It is also worth noting that, contrary to the emotional intensity common in the stories about female-female love by the three women writers under discussion, the terming of such relationships was much less consistent and at times quite vague. While Lu Yin directly employed “same-sex love” (tongxing de ailian 同性的愛戀 or tongxing de ai 同性的愛) in “Lishi’s Diary” and “Old Friends by the Sea,”58 Ling Shuhua turned to more descriptive approaches toward the mannerism of the intimate female lovers, and Ding Ling used rather general terms like “friend” (pengyou 朋友) and “love” (ai 愛).59 Such ambiguities, while reflecting the new prescriptive discourse on female sexuality that emerged during the May Fourth period, also allowed more flexibility and the inclusion of a wider range of female interpersonal relationships with nuances that, for example, were accommodated in Ling Shuhua’s rewriting but were not found in Yang Zhensheng’s original story. In the writings of mainstream May Fourth intellectuals, as Tze-lan Sang has pointed out, female-female love tended to be depicted “as a ‘fashion’ [among young school girls] that might be ‘extinguished’ and ‘prevented.’”60 In a 1929 issue of The Short Story Monthly, where Lu Yin and Ding Ling had previously published their stories about female-female love, there appeared an article titled “The Banning of a Novel about Same-Sex Love” (Tongxing lian’ai xiaoshuo de chajin 同性戀愛小說的查禁) by Zhao Jingshen. In- cluded in a section called “Anecdotes about the Modern Literary Arena” (Xiandai wentan zahua 現代文壇雜話), it reported on the heated debates going on in the Anglo-American world over the 1928 British lesbian novel 164 Chapter 5

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. While sympathizing with British writers, who were portrayed as “oppressed by the government,” Zhao quoted different opinions about the official banning of the novel, with some express- ing moral concerns and others defending the novel as a semi-scientific case study.61 The controversy, he concluded, was caused by the still unanswered questions about “the relationship between literature and morality.”62 Along the fissures between literature and modern sexology and with their sympathetic, flexible, and richly nuanced depictions of sisterly lovers, Lu Yin, Ling Shuhua, and Ding Ling broke down the assumed boundaries within the prescriptive May Fourth “sexual-enlightenment discourse,” which usually “acknowledged spiritual love between women as love,” “frowned on caresses and kisses between young girls,” and “flatly rejected orgasmic sex between women.”63 In their stead, the stories presented more complicated and interwoven relationships among gender, kinship, and sexuality—concepts that, according to Sharon Marcus, “cannot be fully understood if we define them only in terms of two related oppositions: men versus women, and homosexuality versus heterosexuality”64—in the coming of age of educated “New Women.” In terms of the individual psyche, female same-sex love was often interpreted as a form of development of narcissism (often translated as ziwolian 自我戀 or zilian 自戀) in the psychoanalytical and sexological discourses of the Republican era. Despite the May Fourth movement’s celebration of individualism, narcissism was widely considered a pathological symptom. On the other hand, however, in the theorization of women’s literary writing, the introspection associated with narcissism was also believed to be a major contributing factor to artistic inspirations. 65 In the opening sentence of a 1935 article titled “The Phenomenon of Narcissism” (Ziwolian de xianxiang 自我戀的現象), published in the 197th and the 198th issues of Lin Loon, Peng Zhaoliang attempted to describe the dividing line between this perceived psychological “perversion” and the “admirable” quality of “self- love.”66 In Pan Guangdan’s psychoanalysis of Feng Xiaoqing, women’s psychological-sexual development was divided into three stages, which were affected by their opportunities for social contact with men and other women. According to Pan, who mainly drew from the theories of Sigmund Freud and the American psychologist Trigant Burrow (1875–1950), girls who were kept in the inner quarters during puberty had an inclination toward narcissism; when they were allowed to attend girls’ schools and make female friends, they often turned to same-sex love; and, given the opportunity to socialize with men, they developed heterosexual love and shifted from “anomaly” (biantai 變態) to “normality” (changtai 常態).67 Following Freud’s theorization of the causal relationship between libidinal desires and literary writing, Pan Guangdan viewed Xiaoqing’s introspective self-consciousness both as a result of the social oppression of women in traditional Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 165

Confucian society and as an important source of literary creativity. 68, 69 At the end of his 1927 analysis, Pan purposefully added three appendixes, with one listing Xiaoqing’s works, another analyzing the connection between “Women’s Writing and Melancholy” (Nüzi zuopin yu jingshen yujie 女子作品與精神鬱結), and the third one applying his findings to another female poet.70 For Chinese women writers of the Republican era, the introspective perspective served as a significant means of constructing female subjectivities and self-identities, especially in the form of autobiographical writing, although their use and treatment of autobiographical elements, as Amy Dool- ing has reminded us, should be read “as rhetorical strategies that consciously aimed at creating the effect of personal disclosure rather than as markers of personal disclosure per se.”71 In her investigation of eighteenth-century Brit- ish literature, Felicity Nussbaum has proposed that women’s autobiographical writing—or rather, “self-writing”—constitutes a form of “the individual’s translation” of “the cultural constructions of the female,” which “ventrilo- quates male ideologies of gender” but “allows alternative discourses of ‘experience’ to erupt at the margins of meanings.”72 Similarly, at the intersection of textual and extratextual domains, self-writing and the quest for female selfhood often became one dialectical whole for educated Chinese “New Women.” A good example can be found in “Lishi’s Diary.” With the first- person narrator—a close female friend of Lishi’s—announcing her existence only at the beginning and the end, the story is mostly told directly through the heroine’s voice. If the “personal” in women’s autobiographical writing, as Lingzhen Wang has argued, is itself a feminist concept that helps female subjects to negotiate their lives among the “dominant discourses and practices of Chinese modernity,”73 Lishi’s personal narrative in diary form and her self-conscious disillusionment reveal a dual-layered self-awareness, consisting of not only a gender-conscious quest for freedom and love but also a critical perception of its apparent infeasibility. Whereas Yuanqing considers her abandonment of female-female love as maturing out of childish thinking, Lishi’s retelling of it in her own diary juxtaposes her disagreement with Yuanqing’s opinion and implicitly questions the latter’s internalization of, and subjection to, patriarchal social norms. To Jin Feng, this enclosure of an autobiographical narrative between “a prologue and a postscript by a fictional edito[r] indicat[es] an afterlife of the diary that survives the death of its own author,”74 that is, a transcendental existence of female authorship and female agency. As part of the female intellectuals’ gendered dilemma, however, their individualistic sense of the self occasionally becomes an obstacle in their interpersonal bonds. In “Old Friends by the Sea,” Lusha revealingly confess- es to Lingyu during their light bickering, “I don’t even have enough time to love myself; how can I spare any love for other people?”75 Even when 166 Chapter 5

“sharing a same life experience,” Ding Ling’s female teachers in “In the Summer Vacation” still preserve their “different hearts,”76 which are overwhelmed by their personal traumas and frustrations, such as Chengshu’s tragic loss of her father in a village massacre and Zhiqing’s repeated failures at attracting her own sisterly lover. After enthusiastically and competitively preparing for and participating in a performance event, all that lingers on each person’s mind is “the most outstanding moment of her own performance” (italics mine).77 Here, the sisterly lovers’ self-obstruction of their relationships—through an excessive emphasis on the self—produces a self- reflexive parody of the popular view among (male) literary critics of narcissism as a universal symptom in women’s writing, rewriting it with an ironic revelation that female narcissism is socially structured as the only way to exercise female self-consciousness. Or, as Simone de Beauvoir has put it, women—more than men—are led into narcissism by social “conditions,” where “[t]he reality of man is in the houses he builds, the forests he clears, the maladies he cures; but woman, not being able to fulfill herself through projects and objectives, is forced to find her reality in the immanence of her person.”78 On the familial level, in addition to being physically distanced from their parental homes, quite a few female characters in these stories are either motherless or estranged from their mothers,79 and the longing for the lost mother-daughter bond often mingles with their pursuits of female-female love. In “Old Friends by the Sea,” Lusha is considered as an inauspicious child who brings back luck to her family and sent away to the countryside by her mother when she is little. Soon after she returns home, she is sent out again to a missionary boarding school, where her only emotional comfort comes from a fellow girl student, the same kind of companionship that helps her to live through adolescence. Even more sadly, not long after the mother- daughter bond is recovered in adulthood, her mother dies, bringing her further sorrow. For Chengshu in “In the Summer Vacation,” the loss of her mother not only deprives her of the redemptive maternal love that she longs for, which is projected as “even more benevolent than the Buddha,”80 but also dismisses her hopes of being married to her cousin. This haunting sense of lack always casts a shadow over her rather possessive relationship with Jiaying. According to Sally Taylor Lieberman, the motherless female characters in Yu Lin’s works provides a self-reflexive description about the female author’s own struggles, which, by “point[ing] to mother deprivation as an exis- tential feminine condition,” questions the “contradictions inherent in women’s entry into a male world of letters and ideas” and “underscores the partial and conditional nature of women’s access to symbol-formation processes.”81 This gendered predicament about female authorship is especially obvious in the case of Lusha, who takes her classmates as prototypes of literary charac- Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 167 ters, stays in the library for hours trying to transform her observations into stories, and experiences catharsis in the writing process. When nicknamed “Writer” (zhuzuojia 著作家), however, she denies her ambition by acknowledging the difficulty of becoming a writer (for a woman). 82 When mothers do exist in these stories, they often fail to provide effective guidance or comforting relief. Being themselves subject to the male power of the husband, the adult son, or the male clan elder if widowed and sonless, they tend to be pathetically self-effaced and accepting the familial pressure on the daughters, often urging the young girls to give up their freedom and accept arranged marriages. Therefore, in contrast to what Pan Guangdan has found as the motivation for Feng Xiaoqing’s homoerotic love for her friend Mrs. Yang, namely, a pathological “transference” of sexual desire onto a motherly figure,83 the female-female love among the enlightened, modern young women in these twentieth-century stories embodies deeper gender and ideological identifications as a replacement for the dysfunctional mother- daughter bond. Similar to what Jessica Benjamin has described as the child’s confronting the mother’s independence from her, the awakening of the Chi- nese “New Women” to their spiritual and ideological differences from their mothers symbolizes a “paradox of recognition,”84 which is marked not only by intersubjective tensions but also by perceived conflicts between tradition and modernity. As for the romantic aspect of these female-female love relationships, the stories occasionally make analogical reference to the heterosexual counterparts of such relationships, similar to the premodern trope of simulated love unions between a woman and her cross-dressed female companion mentioned in the second chapter. Nevertheless, like Qiu Jin’s well-known photos in which she wore men’s clothes, such parodies seem more informed by a strong sense of self-conscious rebellion against gender hierarchy than by the enactment of transgender or cross-gender performances. As an admirer of Qiu Jin, Lu Yin wrote a story about her in 1927 and titled it with the heroine’s famous last words, “Autumn Wind and Autumn Rain Make One Gloomy” (Qiu feng qiu yu chou sha ren 秋風秋雨愁煞人). In her autobiography, Lu Yin self-reflexively described her own Qin Jin-like subversiveness by jokingly referring to herself as an “abnormally developed human being,” a “masculine-ish” (fuyu nanxing sediao 富於男性色調) tomboy who “love[d] charming men and women” alike.85 Likewise, in her memoir, Ancient Melo- dies, which was written in English upon the encouragement of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and published in 1953, Ling Shuhua expressed her own youthful yearning to transcend gender hierarchy: that is, to be allowed, as a male scholar would be in imperial times, to take the Civil Service Exam and prove her intellectual excellence, so that she could bring glory to her sonless mother.86 In the case of Ding Ling, her later photos taken at the Communist base in Yan’an, in which the writer was dressed in defeminized military 168 Chapter 5 uniforms, also seem to pay homage to Qiu Jin’s famous cross-dressed photos. Except during theatrical performances, male or masculine roles are not performed in the sisterly lovers’ intimate relationships in these four stories, which, instead, reconfirm female identities on both sides of the love bond. In this aspect, they stand in sharp contrast to the characterization of the “mannish lesbian” in Yu Dafu’s 1932 novella “She Is a Weak Woman” (Ta shi yige ruo nüzi 她是一個弱女子). Recounting a young girl student’s sexual abuse by a fellow girl student who is rich, brawny, vulgar, and violent, Yu’s story, as Fran Martin has put it, exhibits a hybridized “phobic literary prototype” partly drawing on “the sexological theory of Krafft-Ebing” and partly on “local folk beliefs about feminine sexual deficiency.”87 In the four women writers’ stories, on the other hand, the young female intellectuals endeavor, though unsuccessfully, to ignore, rather than to reverse, gender prescriptions. In “Old Friends by the Sea,” Lingyu and Zongying both believe that “same- sex love is no different from opposite-sex love,”88 a fantasy that Lusha first dismisses in her conversation with Yunqing but then rekindles by carrying out Zongying’s utopian idea of building a reclusive retreat for the sisterly lovers. In “Lishi’s Diary,” the only time Yuanqing regrets that Lishi is not a man is when she is pressed by her mother for a date with her cousin, because Lishi would then be able to propose to marry her instead. 89 Likewise, when Yunluo, upset by her arranged marriage, bemoans that Yingman is not a man and cannot officially marry her, Yingman, instead of refuting her female gender identity, suggests that they follow the example of two female teachers living together. At both moments, the real focus of the grief lies not on Lishi’s or Yingman’s failure to perform a male or masculine role, but on the unfair gender norms and hierarchy that deprive Yuanqing and Yunluo of the choices to reject arranged marriages. Put into a larger sociohistorical context, the attempts to challenge and reject the heterosexual marriage imperative made by the women intellectuals in these stories can be traced back to the practices of spinster sisterhood and delayed-transfer marriages that had been traditionally or regionally accepted.90 Similar practices were not uncommon among late Qing feminist activists, who often associated female celibacy with self-dedication to both female independence and the nation-building project. For example, in Chiv- alric Beauties examined in chapter 2, Tian Rongsheng declares that she is “determined to remain single” so that she can take care of her mother and “fervently avoid being cheated by men, the most heartless people in the world.”91 A comparable spiritual motivation comes from religious influences, as is mentioned by Zhou Jianren in “The Awakening of Chinese Women and the Issue of Singlehood” (Zhongguo nüzi de juexing yu dushen 中國女子的覺醒與獨身) in the October 1922 issue of The Ladies’ Journal. In his 1947 sociological monograph Rural China (Xiangtu Zhongguo 鄉土中 Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 169

國), Fei Xiaotong 費孝通 (1910–2005) contends that both the separate spaces for men and women and the traditional practices of sworn brotherhood and sisterhood in rural China encourage a homosocial dimension among interpersonal relationships.92 In addition, as Yu Chien-ming has pointed out, given the enthusiastic yearning among Chinese intellectuals for Western knowledge since the late Qing, the foreign origin of the neologism “singlehood” or 獨身主義 dunshenzhuyi itself might have won for the practice some modern attractiveness as well. 93 By no means, however, do these various sociocultural factors exclude homoeroticism and bodily intimacy. Even when the stories seem to prioritize emotional and spiritual companionship over bodily closeness, the two sides are better understood as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. In a way, such a bodily-spiritual continuum of female same-sex love is reflected in Lu Yin’s treatment of Lishi’s death, which, according to the doctor, has been caused by “heart disease” (xinzang bing 心臟病), but which, the narrator suspects, is actually due to “sadness in the heart” (xinbing 心病).94 As Sharon Marcus has observed of Victorian Britain, where “[f]emale friendship allowed middle-class women to enjoy another privilege that scholars have assumed only men could indulge—the opportunity to display affection and experience pleasurable physical contact outside marriage without any loss of respectabil- ity,”95 the heterotopic girls’ school also provides a convenient space for experimenting and experiencing various kinds of female-female intimacy without serious reputational risks, so long, that is, as the intimacy remains spatially and temporally confined. In Ling Shuhua’s story, Yingman and Yunluo’s physical closeness plays an important role in their awakening of gender and sexual consciousness. As Yingman acquiesces to Yunluo’s roommates’ encouragement to stay in their dormitory and share a bed with Yunluo, the latter enjoys both bodily pleasure from Yingman’s embraces and emotional relief from the emptiness she generally feels at night. This depiction of physical pleasure breaks the boundary of Platonic love, to which Yang Zhensheng’s original story is mostly limited. Both Yingman’s claim that she loves Yunluo “more deeply than any man does, and for longer time as well” (italics mine) and Yunluo’s dreaming of “staying together [with Yingman] for a lifelong time”96 are motivated by their subjective desires. This, in contrast to the male-subject/female-object heterosexual model, contributes to a mutually recognizing and empowering bond between two equal female subjects, one that resembles the “intersubjective” model Jessica Benjamin proposes, where “the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully experience his or her subjectivity in the other’s presence.”97 In Ding Ling’s story, the paired female “friends” not only rely upon each other for encouragement and companionship to pursue singlehood together, but also openly exchange kisses, hugs, and erotic gazes. In Zhiqing’s descrip- 170 Chapter 5 tion, some couples perform in a way that is “not at all different from what newly-wed [heterosexual] couples do.”98 After attending a theatrical performance, which disrupts the monotony of summer life, the exhilarated couples discharge their excitement through kisses and hugs while sharing beds. Prais- ing Jiaying for being as beautiful as the role she plays, namely the heroine Du Liniang 杜丽娘 in the classic romantic play The Peony Pavilion by the Ming dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu, Chengshu kisses her lover and enjoys the latter’s fragrant breaths. Chengshu’s erotic gaze directed at Jiaying, just like Yingman’s toward Yunluo, positions femininity as an object of female desire and, by so doing, engages with a “hyperfeminine discourse” akin to what Marcus has discovered in association with fashion and dolls in Victorian culture.99 On the other hand, just as Lydia Liu has observed about Ding Ling’s arguably most famous female protagonist in her 1927 story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi de riji 莎菲女士的日記),100 Characters like Jiaying are “capable of desiring women as well as men.”101 In the case of Jiaying, she specifies that she “only likes those young lads at eighteen or nineteen years old, who have not yet grown moustaches, resemble her in age, and match her in personality.”102 This female erotic aspiration for androgynous male beauty is subversive on at least three levels. First, it disrupts the conventional equi- librium between the male subjective desire and the female as object of desire and constructs the woman as a desiring subject. Second, it challenges the perceived stereotypes of gender and sexual orientations and opens up alternative possibilities for imagining and representing female erotic subjectivity. Third, it blurs the supposed developmental boundary between narcissistic self-love and heterosexual other-love, upon which many May Fourth criticisms of women’s literature were based. “[T]he female subject,” writes Teresa de Lauretis, “is a site of differences . . . often enough at odds with one another.”103 For Chinese women writers of the 1920s and the 1930s, who themselves often “found heterosexual relations, or the joining of men and women in the family, to be the material conditions of their inability to write,”104 the thematic elasticity of female- female love across the spectrum of reflective self-love to female homoerotic, homosexual, and homosocial bonds constituted a matrix of possible subject positions that departed from canonical May Fourth representational models about love relationships. The canonical models, as Ching-kiu Stephen Chan has summarized, usually featured a “textual organization of the (male) intellectual ‘self’ in relation to the (female) emotional ‘other.’”105 While still presenting a “relational aspect of women’s lives,” which was considered “an advantage” for premodern Chinese women writers to achieve “emotional depth and introspection,”106 the three women writers’ stories of female-female love taking place in girls’ schools abandoned the old Confucian restric- Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 171 tion of women to the inner chamber and redefined this relational aspect through new sisterhood imaginations.

THE POTENTIAL OF “NONDEVELOPMENT” AS A FEMINIST INTERVENTION

In the four stories discussed in this chapter, female-female love in the sisterly community of the new-style girls’ school provides enlightened students and women teachers with an alternative means to envision and cultivate their individual identities and subjective desires beyond the constraints of the patriarchal family and the prescribed structure of gender antithesis. Such an empathetic female-exclusive community resembles what Julia Kristeva has described as “‘female society’ . . . constituted as a sort of alter ego of the official society, in which all real or fantasized possibilities for jouissance take refuge,” although the original context for Kristeva’s observation is the Western world of the 1970s (emphasis in the original). 107 In the sociocultural milieu of early to mid-Republican China, such utopian feminist imaginations drew upon both the premodern literary trope of the kingdom of women and the late Qing conception of a gendered “women’s sphere,” only in a more individualistic sense. Taking refuge in the new-style girls’ school, the female-female lovers redefine the educational institution as an alternative space to pursue their gendered Bildung. In contrast to the female-female sexuality explicitly structured by money, power, and violence in Yu Dafu’s “She Is a Weak Woman,” the sisterly love in the three women writers’ stories is based on gendered empathy and mutual attraction. Notwithstanding their lack of success, the alternative nature of such conceptions of female subjectivities and intersubjectivities subversively challenges the structural paradigm of womanhood as wifehood and motherhood. Moreover, in contrast to what Rey Chow has found in Mao Dun’s Rainbow (Hong 虹, 1929) to be a “gap between ‘woman’ as reflexive ‘mind’ and ‘woman’ as sexual ‘body’,”108 here we find an integration of the intellectual mind, which self- consciously seeks for identity and freedom, with the desiring and desired body, albeit only in spatially-temporarily limited terms. On the other hand, respectively ending with Lish’s death, Lusha’s setting off on an obscure journey with a married man, Yingman’s traumatic shock, and the teachers of the Independence School cyclically returning to their regular way of life for another unpromising semester, the four sisterly love stories also acknowledge the potency of the socially expected norms about women’s bodies, minds, and familial as well as social roles. As Ding Ling’s story suggests, consistent disruptions are hardly possible even within the community of sisterly lovers inside the heterotopic girls’ school. By so doing, the four gloomy stories reveal a gendered self-awareness of the possibil- 172 Chapter 5 ities and limitations that result from the slippage between a dominantly patriarchal discourse and the feminine experiences that do not exactly fit into its prescribed paradigms. Heterotopias, as Foucault has pointed out, are often not merely other spaces but other times as well.109 In this light, the young female intellectuals’ mutual bonds enabled and defined by the school can also be read as a form of resistance to assimilation into the socially gendered and prescribed mode of temporality. Drawing from Nietzsche’s distinction between “cursive time” and “monumental time,” Kristeva points out in her 1979 essay “Women’s Time” that female subjectivity, which is defined more in terms of “the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history,” especially when related to maternity, “becomes a problem with respect to . . . the time of [linear] history,” which “is readily labeled masculine and . . . is at once both civilizational and obsessional.”110 While replacing the maternal with horizontally empathetic and intersubjective female-female bonds (in contrast to the hierarchical-patriarchal heterosexual relationship), the sisterly love stories examined here also depict an alternative mode of temporality of female existence that deviates from linear or developmental trajectories. Such deviations, more than anything else, lead to what Yang Zhensheng referred to as “insanity” in the title of his original story. Yet, as Foucault has demonstrated in Madness and Civilization, insanity itself has always been discursively defined and managed. 111 In the feminist vein, Elaine Showalter has challenged the gendering of sanity/insanity and pointed out that “within our dualistic system of language and representation,” “women . . . are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body” and “men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind.”112 In socioculturally transforming semicolonial China, where national crises and social problems dominated public concerns, and where theories of social evolution were widely embraced, “sanity” was not the only measurement to gauge women’s mental and social behaviors. Rather, notions more closely reflecting the yearning for modernity, such as “development” and “progress,” often seemed to be even more pertinent. The temple-turned-new-style “Independence School” in Ding Ling’s story may serve as a good metaphor here for the predicament of being female during the sociocultural transformation. Despite its reflection of the master narratives of revolution and progress in the nation’s imaginary—hence the return to a feminist-nationalist leitmotif at the end of the story, with the teachers redirecting their energies back to the education of future female national citizens—the slippage between nationalist consciousness and female or feminist consciousness remains palpable. Therefore, unlike Huang Jurui’s enthusiastic embrace of nationalist revolution in Qiu Jin’s Stones of the Jing- wei Bird, Ding Ling’s women teachers find insufficient comfort and reassu- Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 173 rance in their “superficially lofty” (guanmian 冠冕) careers.113 In her exchange of letters with her former classmate, who is now a married housewife, Zhiqing even fails to “find a suitable language to express her thoughts” when she wants to complain that the teaching life of a celibate woman can be even more disappointing than that of a daughter-in-law in a patriarchal family. 114 Extratextually, women writers themselves were also faced with similar struggles against old and new forms of gendered pressures in life and in literary writing. Whereas late Qing feminist writers like Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua subverted the traditionally gendered boundaries among women, (public) literary writing, and social participation by means of hybridized sisterhood narratives combining feminist emancipation and nationalist salvation, the more individualistic inclination of the May Fourth generation led to new definitions of gendered spheres and subjectivities. The re-evaluation of the so-called “funü wenxue” 婦女文學, or “women’s literature” in the 1920s and the 1930s, as Wendy Larson has pointed out, reflected a collective intellectual effort to construct “a new ideology” that could replace the previous “gendered discourse of moral virtue[, which] contained an antiliterary bias” toward women.115 For example, in his famous 1926 article “Moral Double Standards” (Erchong daode 二重道德), Zhou Jianren’s delineated the different social expectations on men’s and women’s moralities and traced them back to physiological, anthropological, cultural-historical, and economic factors.116 In typical May Fourth manner, Zhou proposed a series of modern reforms to emancipate women and enhance gender equality. Ironically, however, while criticizing the old gender-based double standards, the May Fourth generation also set up their own gendered double standards in literary criticism and cultural politics, namely, as Jin Feng has termed, “politics of emo- tionality,” which was often utilized to accuse women writers of “feminine emotionalism.”117 In this light, we may find the parallels and similarities between two particular literary and cultural strands of the May Fourth period especially revealing. One was the psychoanalytic-sexological labeling of female same- sex love as a symptom of “regression” (huiliu 回流) and “developmental stagnation” (fayu zhongzhi 發育中滯)—ideas Pan Guangdan, drawing upon Burrow and Freud, applied to the legendary Ming dynasty poet Feng Xiao- qing.118 The other was a commonly seen double association, the first between female writing and introspective sentimentalism and the second between introspective sentimentalism and nondevelopment or nonprogressive- ness. For example, in a 1934 article “On Lu Yin” (Lu Yin lun 盧隱論) published in Literature (Wenxue 文學) under his pen name Weiming 未明, Mao Dun credited the recently deceased writer as “the very first woman writer of the May Fourth period to pay attention to revolutionary issues and social problems”; despite this, lamented Mao Dun, Lu Yin stopped her “development” and remained “stagnant” because she dwelled in “fantasies” and 174 Chapter 5

“melancholy” and engaged in insufficient sociopolitical participation. 119 In his 1931 collection Modern Chinese Women Writers (Xiandai Zhongguo nüzuojia 現代中國女作家), A Ying 阿英 (born Qian Defu 錢德富, aka Qian Xingcun 錢杏村, 1900–1977) criticized, among others, Bing Xin for failing “to overcome the incorrect inclination towards sentimentalism,” Lu Yin for “a tendency towards sentimentalism and pessimism,” and Bai Wei for stick- ing to “Bourgeois idealis[m]” and “romantic . . . sentimentalism.”120 For A Ying, just as Lu Yin’s egotistical pessimism and limiting focus on romantic love prevented her from becoming a “really accomplished writer,” the female characters in Ding Ling’s early works, such as “In the Summer Vacation,” lingered in a “half-dead condition” because of the author’s confinement in a world of “subjective wishes” and “neglect of objective social reality.”121 In the case of Ling Shuhua, whose skill in delineating bourgeois family life earned her wide acclaim and recognition as a representative of the “new gentry lady school” (Xin guixiu pai 新閨秀派), she was also often blamed for focusing only on trivialities. In his 1936 Modern Chinese Women Writers (Zhongguo xiandai nüzuojia 中國現代女作家), He Yubo 賀玉波 (aka He Jiachun 賀家春, 1906–1982) criticized “It Is Said That Something Like This Happened” both for writing about such insignificant subject matter as female same-sex love and for “an extreme lack of mental depth.”122 In his 1922 article “Women and Literature” (Nüzi yu wenxue 女子與文學), Zhou Zuoren argued that new literature should be conceptualized upon a dual basis of “individualism” (gerenzhuyi 個人主義) and “humanitarian- ism” (rendaozhuyi 人道主義); he lamented that the Chinese “women’s sphere” fell far short of this ideal model and had so far only achieved “self- consciousness as national citizens” (guomin de zijue 國民的自覺) in a collective humanitarian sense but not “self-consciousness as individuals” (geren de zijue 個人的自覺).123 The solution, proposed Zhou, was for women writers to cultivate an “evolutionary view of life” (jinhua de renshengguan 進化的人生觀) rejecting old, biased views of women’s bodily desires and their social relationship to men, so that they could overcome escapist and pessi- mistic tendencies.124 While setting emancipation as the ultimate goal, Zhou’s vision of evolution implied a fundamentally problematic prescription, one that equated literary value with linear progressiveness. If, as Amy Dooling has pointed out, “the May Fourth discourse relied on, but in the process also constructed, a highly problematic opposition between tradition and modernity, past and present, silence and expression” (emphasis in the original),125 the enthusiasm shared by Zhou and others about the developmental transition from tradition to modernity also paradoxically created an obstacle to “expression” when the expression was about supposedly nondevelopmental subjects. Indeed, for the female-female lovers in the stories by Lu Yin, Ling Shu- hua, and Ding Ling, maintaining their heteroscopic sisterly space is the opti- mal way to perform their subjectivities; to “grow out of” the supposedly Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 175 temporary stage of girlish same-sex love, on the other hand, means that they have to repress their individualistic self-consciousness. In this sense, rejecting the expected evolutionary “development” constitutes a form of resistance to a linear, monolithic vision of history and modernity. As the girl students in “Old Friends by the Sea” are frustrated by losing their utopian female community to the so-called “adult world,”126 Lishi self-consciously prefers death to having to live without Yuanqing in a prescribed way that she detests. In this way, Lu Yin’s depiction of sisterly love, as Jin Feng has pointed out, “privileg[es] a unique kind of internal time over external time.”127 A similar observation can be made about Ding Ling’s “In the Summer Vacation,” in which the story’s characterization of the temple-turned-girls’-school and the paradoxical codependent “independence” of the women teachers further disrupts a linear narrative of female Bildung. By so doing, it self-reflexively reveals a gender-specific aspect of the “severance from the verbal and conceptual resources deep-rooted within [the writers’] cultural tradition,” which, for Yi-tsi Feuerwerker, “left a vacuum that could not be adequately filled by hastily imported Western literary doctrines and models.”128 In her epistemological investigation of the female homoerotic imaginary in contemporary Chinese cultures, Fran Martin summarizes a “common memorial narrative” and traces it back to tragic romance in the Chinese literary tradition.129 To Martin, Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua’s schoolgirl romance dem- onstrates a thematic and structural resemblance to the popular tragic-love fiction. In this light, the young educated women’ preference for female- female love examined in this chapter bears subtle similarities to Linna and Yingna’s suicides in Two Flowery Sisters discussed in chapter 3. That is, the sisterly lovers’ refusal to “grow up” can be read as a gendered version of, to borrow from Charles Taylor’s two theories of modernity again, a cultural stance—in this case with particular roots in female experiences—in resistance to the acultural perception of modernity that was increasingly dominant. Therefore, as with the sisterly lovers’ simultaneous resistance to old and new gender-based social prescriptions, the potential of “nondevelopment” as a feminist intervention also resists positioning along a one-dimen- sional linear paradigm. The later literary trajectories of the three women writers under discussion reflected similar tensions with the often simplified notions of “development” and “progress.” Having started her literary career writing for Mao Dun’s The Short Story Monthly, Lu Yin experimented with working-class stories from time to time. However, none of these stories reached the literary achievement of “Old Friends by the Sea.” In addition, as the author’s friend and fellow woman writer Su Xuelin 蘇雪林 (1897–1999) recalled shortly after Lu’s early death, Lu herself “seemed to disagree with a then popular [leftist] political view among young people concerning the only way out of the crisis for China” when the two met in 1932.130 Ling Shuhua, whose fictional writ- 176 Chapter 5 ings, as Lu Xun has summarized, focused on “gentle ladies in old-fashioned families,”131 published little after the 1930s, except for the aforementioned memoir Ancient Melodies, which was written in English after she moved to Europe with her husband Chen Yuan 陳源 (aka Chen Xiying 陳西瀅, 1896–1970). Like in her earlier writings, the memoir reflects a modern female subject’s nuanced gaze toward the less modern. Of the three, Ding Ling was the only one who kept writing and publishing for almost six decades. Like her fictional character Chengshu, Ding Ling also longed for a “correct path of life.”132 In contrast with Chengshu’s general pessimism in seeking progressive changes, however, the author enthusiastically embraced the changing spirit of the times throughout her life, both in writing and in lived experiences. Unfortunately, only four years after the publication of Ding Ling’s first story “Mengke” 夢珂 in 1927 and only three months after the birth of their son, her husband Hu Yepin, a Communist, was executed by the Nationalist government. In the decades after Hu’s death, Ding Ling joined the Communist Party, was abducted and jailed by the Nationalists, escaped to the Communist base in Shaanxi, remarried, lived through dramatic ups and downs, and endured several rounds of political persecution. Most importantly of all, she kept writing. Her works, however, often received mixed criticisms, especially with reference to “development” and “progress,” as each was defined in divergent ways during different historical periods.133 As with her writings, Ding Ling’s own life and literary career raised so many questions about female subjectivities, women’s writing, the time of linear history, and the possibilities of feminist interventions and transcendence.

CONCLUSION

The female-female love stories by the three women writers of the May Fourth generation reflect many gendered undercurrents in the era’s master narrative of enlightenment and the responding changes in literary writing. As in the other types of sisterhood imaginations examined in previous chapters, the shifting boundary between the public and the private after the disruption of the old inner-outer dichotomy brought about contested revisions of women’s identities, positions, roles, and relationships to men and other women. In particular, the new-style girls’ school constitutes a special heterotopic space for the cultivation of female subjectivities and intersubjectivities. Featuring empathetic and mutually empowering female-female bonds, the elasticity of which undermines conventional gender norms and the male-subject/female- object paradigm, these female-female love stories depict women’s subjective desires, engage with new utopian feminist imaginations, and manifest resistance against hierarchical patriarchal culture and its prescription of the Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 177 heteronormative marriage imperative. Through the various ruptures between the old and the new, they also experiment with a shifting matrix of subject positions and alternative modes of (self-)representation. On the other hand, however, as with the restructuring of the relationships among the individual self, the family, and the nation in the modern Chinese discourse, the re-theorization of the female psyche and the female body was highly contested. While being structurally influenced by these old and new double standards toward gender and subjectivity, the utopian and dystopian dimensions of sisterly love stories, through their own dilemmatic situations, pose self-reflective questions on the validity of such gendered notions as development, progress, and modernity.

NOTES

1. Male homoeroticism, on the other hand, while not a rare practice in royal courts and among political and cultural elites historically speaking, was often perceived as corrupting— especially when associated with prostitution and sexual violence—by orthodox moral values. In Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (New York: Routledge, 2004), Cuncun Wu has argued that male homoerotic relationships, which were structured in relation to power and social status, played an important role in male literati culture in the Ming and Qing dynasties. For the “official intolerance and legal condemnation . . . of sodomy and pederasty” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 137–38. 2. Tze-lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7. 3. It is important and productive to remember that, despite the apparently universal description of the May Fourth as an enlightenment, the period, as Ying-shih Yu has warned us, “can be characterized . . . with a great variety of possible combinations” of ideological influences and is foremost “an age of cultural contradictions”; see Yu, “Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment: A Historian’s Reflections on the May Fourth Movement,” in The Appropria- tion of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, eds. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 319. 4. A portion of the discussion on “In the Summer Vacation” has been developed from my previous article titled “Subjectification of the Female Body in Ding Ling’s ‘In the Summer Vacation,’” published in Intertexts: A Journal of Comparative and Theoretical Reflection 15.1 (2011): 39–59. 5. See Zhu Feng, Christianity and Women’s Higher Education in China: A Comparative Study of Ginling College and Hwa Nan College (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), 365. 6. See Liao Hsiu-chen, “The Evolution of Educational System in Late Qing Women’s Schools and the Development of Female Elementary Education, 1897–1911,” in Collected Research Papers on the History of Women in China, eds. Li Yu-ning and Chang Yu-fa (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1988), vol. 2, 238–40. 7. The school was first established by the Canadian medical missionary William Edward Macklin (1860–1947) in 1899. 8. Susan Mann, “Why Women Were Not a Problem in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Thought,” in Windows on the Chinese World: Reflections by Five Historians, ed. Clara Wang- chung Ho (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 124. 9. Chen Pingyuan, Images and History of the Introduction of Western Learning into China: A Study of Late Qing Illustrated Periodicals (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2008), 171–238. 178 Chapter 5

10. Barbara Mittler, “In Spite of Gentility: Women and Men in Linglong (Elegance), a 1930s Women’s Magazine,” in The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, eds. Daria Berg and Chloë Starr (New York: Routledge, 2007), 208. 11. Paul J. Bailey, Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women’s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2007), 116. 12. Bing Xin, The Complete Works of Bing Xin (Fuzhou: Haixia wenyi chubanshe, 1994), vol. 1, 5–10. 13. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 24. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 25. 16. It is worth noting that the “heterosexual” element of the marriage imperative was of a rather recent and “modern” nature. As Tze-lan D. Sang has pointed out, “the marriage imperative in late-imperial Chin[a] . . . is related to but differs significantly from compulsory heterosexuality,” in that, unlike the latter, it is little concerned with a woman’s natural inclination or fulfillment”; see Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 92. 17. While the newly emerging women factory workers constituted another group where female-female bonding was common, such relationships seldom found their way into the literary works of the 1920s and the 1930s by women writers. For more about sisterhood practices and sisterhood societies among factory workers, see Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). In a different vein, sworn spinsterhood may also occur as a social practice in some ethnic or regional communities. For an example, see Janice E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 70–133. 18. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 129. 19. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1997), 75. 20. Ibid., 88. 21. Ibid., 50. 22. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. 23. For Foucault, “[h]eterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed . . . heterochronies”; see ibid. 24. Furuya Toyoko, “The New Significance of Same-Sex Love in Women’s Education,” trans. Weisheng, Ladies’ Journal 11.6 (1925): 32–37. 25. Lu Yin started her literary career with Short Story Monthly, which published her first fictional work “A Writer” (Yige zhuzuojia 一個著作家) in February 1921. 26. The manuscript of this autobiographical story, which was influenced by Xu Zhenya’s tragic-love novel The Spirit of the Jade Pear and was written in the classical Chinese language, was eventually burned by the author after being revised on and off for a decade. See Lu Yin, Essays by Lu Yin, eds. Fan Qiao and Ye Zi (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbodianshi chubanshe, 1993), 501. 27. For more about Lu Yin’s life experiences, see the excerpts from Autobiography of Lu Yin, which was first published in 1934 under the author’s real name Huang Ying, in Lu Yin, Essays by Lu Yin, 459–530. 28. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 51. 29. Ibid., 54. 30. Ibid. 31. In the author’s autobiography, she recalls being a member of similar intimate female groups both during her days at a women’s normal school and when she studied at Peking Women’s College of Education, see Lu Yin, Essays by Lu Yin, 478–80, 494–99. 32. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 77. 33. Ibid., 87. 34. Ibid., 108. 35. See Jia Zhifang et al., eds., Materials on the Literary Research Association (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1985), vol. 1, 27, 38. Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 179

36. For more on the Association, see Michel Hockx, “The Chinese Literary Association (Wenxue yanjiu hui),” in Literary Societies of Republican China, eds. Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hocks (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 79–102. 37. Jia Zhifang et al., ed., Materials on the Literary Research Association, vol. 1, 53–58. In his 1935 “Introduction” (Daoyan 導言) to the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature: Fiction (I) (Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi xiaoshuo yiji 中國新文學大系小說一集), however, Mao Dun provided a more ambivalent explanation toward the label of “School of Life” (Ren- sheng pai 人生派), which was often used to describe the Association. On the one hand, Mao Dun denied that the Association itself had ever included “life” in its propositions; on the other hand, he admitted that many writings of its central members did center around this subject matter. See Mao Dun, “Introduction,” in Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature: Fiction (I), ed. Zhao Jiabi (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935), 18. 38. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 55. 39. Lu Yin, Sketches from Tokyo (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1936), 280. 40. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 49. 41. Ibid., 48. 42. Ta-wei Chi, “In the Name of Enlightenment: Pedagogy and the Uses of Same-Sex Desire in Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17.2 (2005): 171. 43. Zhao Jingshen, Lectures on Literature (Shanghai: Zhongguo wenhua fuwushe, 1936), 24. 44. Ling Shuhua, The Temple of Flowers (Shanghai: Xinyue shudian, 1928), 140. 45. Yang Zhensheng, “Why Did She Suddenly Go Insane?,” Morning Post Supplement January 11, 1926: 13. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ling later graduated from the Beijing-based, missionary-founded, and coeducational Yenching University. 49. Ling Shuhua, The Temple of Flowers, 158. 50. Ibid., 151. 51. Ibid., 153. 52. Ibid. 155. 53. Rey Chow, “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua,” Modern Chinese Literature 4.1–2 (1998): 91. 54. Ding Ling, In the Darkness (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), 104. 55. Ibid., 99. 56. Ibid., 107. 57. Ibid., 85, 109. 58. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 50, 88. 59. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 84, 89. 60. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 109. 61. Zhao Jingshen, “The Banning of a Novel about Same-Sex Love,” The Short Story Monthly 20.3 (1929): 611–12. 62. Ibid. 63. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 132. 64. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian Eng- land (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1. 65. As a mode of representation, introspection often reflects entanglements and contestations between the traditional and the modern literary traditions. In his comparative examination of Yu Dafu and Mao Dun, for instance, Jaroslav Průšek associated Yu’s introspective tendencies with the influences from the premodern Chinese literati tradition, arguing that his “subjec- tivism” and “introspection” distinguish him from Mao Dun, whose “works are determined primarily by his attitude to reality and not by his attitude to the preceding literary tradition,” despite the fact that both writers focused on “man’s inner life”; see Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1980), 142–44. 180 Chapter 5

66. Peng Zhaoliang, “The Phenomenon of Narcissism,” Lin Loon 5.197 (1935): 2003. 67. Pan Guangdan, “Feng Xiaoqing: A Case Study of Narcissism,” reprinted in Pan Guang- dan, Collected Works of Pan Guangdan, vol. 1 (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1993), 41. 68. Pan’s view of a causal relationship between social oppression and feminine sensitivity on the one hand and women’s literary creation on the other was quite representative of the understanding of women’s literature among Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth tradition. For example, in her 1933 book Chinese Women and Literature (Zhongguo funü yu wenxue 中國婦女與文學), Tao Qiuying 陶秋英 (1909–1986), a female masters’ degree holder from Yenching University, argued that premodern Chinese women writers turned to literary writing essentially as a means to relieve their otherwise silenced grief. For more on Tao’s book, see Wendy Larson, “The End of ‘Funü Wenxue’: Women’s Literature from 1925 to 1935,” Modern Chinese Literature 4 (1988): 42–45. 69. Another theoretical influence prevalent at the time was from the Japanese literary critic Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923), who was first introduced into China in the early 1910s and became especially popular in the mid-1920s. In 1925, Feng Zikai 豐子愷 (1898–1975) and Lu Xun both published their translations of Symbols of Agony (Kumen de xiangzheng 苦悶的象徵). In addition, (Fan 樊) Zhongyun 仲雲 (1901–1990) also translated several articles, which were published in Literature Weekly (Wenxue zhoubao 文學週報) and Short Story Monthly between 1923 and 1925. See Lu Xun, Supplements to a Collection of Uncollected Essays (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1960), 132–133 and Jingyuan Zhang, Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919–1949 (Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992), 57–68. 70. Pan Guangdan, “Feng Xiaoqing: A Case Study of Narcissism,” 45–66. 71. Amy D. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 83–84. 72. Felicity Nussbaum, “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 149. 73. Lingzhen Wang, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth- Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1. 74. Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press),143. 75. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 76. 76. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 88. 77. Ibid., 95. 78. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vin- tage, 1952), 699–700. 79. The personal memories of their mothers were an important source of literary inspiration for all the three writers. While Lu Yin’s female characters often woefully lament either the unrequited desire for motherly love or the heartbreaking losses of their mothers, Ling Shuhua nostalgically recalls her mother’s childhood, marriage, and uneasy life as a sonless concubine living in a large polygamous family in her 1953 memoir written in English, Ancient Melodies. Ding Ling’s unfinished novel Mother (Muqin 母親), based on the real life experiences of Ding’s mother, features a widowed rural woman’s courageous endeavors to seek education and independence. 80. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 105. 81. Sally Taylor Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (Char- lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 112–13. 82. As Wendy Larson has pointed out, in Lu Yin’s first published story, which was indeed titled “A Writer,” the author characterizes the titular protagonist as a male, rather than a female; see Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 149. 83. Pan Guangdan, “Feng Xiaoqing: A Case Study of Narcissism,” 36. 84. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Dif- ference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 37–38. 85. Lu Yin, Essays by Lu Yin, 522. Sisterly Lovers in Women’s Fiction and the Potential of “Nondevelopment” 181

86. See Su Hua Ling Chen, Ancient Melodies (New York: Universe Books, 1988), 151. 87. Fran Martin, Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 45. 88. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 88. 89. Ibid., 53. 90. For more on the practice of the delayed-transfer marriage and sworn spinsterhood, see Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta, 1–30, 70–89. 91. Shao Zhenhua, Chivalric Beauties, in Compendium of Late Imperial Chinese Fiction: Women’s Rights, Chivalric Beauties, and A Flower of the Women’s Prison (Nanchang: Baihua- zhou wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 214. 92. Fei Xiaotong, Rural China (Shanghai: Guanchashe, 1948), 49–50. 93. Yu Chien-ming, “All Alone Am I? A Study of Commentaries on Female Celibacy in Early 20th Century China,” Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 9 (2001): 182. 94. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 45. 95. Marcus, Between Women, 57. 96. Ling Shuhua, The Temple of Flowers, 152–53. 97. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 30. 98. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 85. 99. Marcus, Between Women, 3. 100. Ding Ling, “Miss Sophia’s Diary,” in I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, eds. Tani E. Barlow and Gary J. Bjorge (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 49–81. 101. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Mod- ernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 172. 102. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 115. 103. Teresa de Lauretis, “Feminist Studies / Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts,” in Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 14. 104. Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China, 132. 105. Ching-kiu Stephen Chan, “The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the ‘New Women’ by May Fourth Writers,” Modern Chinese Literature 4.1&2 (1988): 23. 106. Larson. Women and Writing in Modern China, 142. Here Larson’s analysis of the “relational aspect of women’s lives” draws upon Kaja Silverman’s argument that the “‘dominant fiction’ or ideological ‘reality’ [in post-WWII America] solicits our faith above all else in the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject”; see Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–16. 107. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7.1 (1981): 27. 108. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 107. 109. See Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. 110. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 14–18. 111. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books), 1988. 112. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin, 1987), 3f. 113. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 110. 114. Ibid. 115. Larson, Women and Writing in M odern China, 133–34. 116. Zhou Jianren, Selected Works of Zhou Jianren (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1988), 182–90. 117. Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, 6. 118. Pan Guangdan, “Feng Xiaoqing: A Case Study of Narcissism,” 19, 21. 119. Mao Dun (aka Weiming), “On Lu Yin,” in Selected Works of Lu Yin, eds. Xu Chensi and Ye Wangyou (Shanghai: Wanxiang shuwu, 1936), 1–3. 120. A Ying, Complete Works of A Ying (Hebei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), vol. 2, 276, 306, 377. 182 Chapter 5

121. Ibid., vol. 2, 323, 382. 122. He Yubo, Modern Chinese Women Writers (Shanghai: Fuxing shuju, 1936), 76. 123. Zhou Zuoren, “Women and Literature,” The Ladies’ Journal 8.8 (1922): 7. 124. Ibid. 125. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China, 79. 126. Lu Yin, The Complete Fictional Works by Lu Yin, 77. 127. Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, 144. 128. Yi-tsi M. Feuerwerker, “Women as Writers in the 1920’s and 1930’s,” in Women in Chinese Society, eds. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 166. From another perspective, when examining two contemporary women writers’ stories about female-female relationships, Jiang Zidan’s 蔣子丹 “Waiting for the Twilight” (Dengdai huanghun 等待黃昏, 1990) and Wang Anyi’s 王安憶 “Brothers” (Dixiongmen 弟兄們, 1989), Zhong Xueping has pointed out that, even in Chinese women’s literature, the conceptualization of a free female self is still largely “modeled on the patriarchal myth of a free man, which creates a desire in women that is both real and problematic. . . . The bond among women to quest for such a self, then, becomes a paradox. . . . And the existence of a sisterhood based on such a desire becomes too contingent to claim its ground”; see Zhong, “Sisterhood? Representations of Women’s Relationships in Two Contemporary Chinese Texts,” in Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society, ed. Tonglin Lu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 171–72. 129. Martin, Backward Glances, 7. 130. Su Xuelin, “Memories about Lu Yin,” in Lu Yin, Selected Works of Lu Yin (Tainan: Dafu shuju, 1979), 6. 131. Lu Xun, “Introduction,” in Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature: Fiction (II), ed. Lu Xun (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935), 11. 132. Ding Ling, In the Darkness, 107. 133. For investigations of Ding Ling’s later literary career, see Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Charles J. Alber, Enduring the Revolution: Ding Ling and the Politics of Literature in Guomindang China (Westport: Praeger, 2002) and Embracing the Lie: Ding Ling and the Politics of Literature in the People’s Republic of China (Westport: Praeger, 2004). See also Tani E. Barlow’s “Introduction,” in I Myself Am a Women: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, eds. Tani E. Barlow and Gary J. Bjorge (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 1–45. Conclusion

As a thematic category in Chinese literature and culture, sisterhood was not an invention dating from the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the disruption of the traditional inner-outer boundary amid China’s national crises and the quest for modernity loosened the previous definition of sisterhood, which was mostly defined by way of the patriarchal household. Such new sociocultural conditions brought about structural changes in the ways of imagining sisterhood. Hence the emergence of the “women’s sphere” or nüjie as a new historical category. The feminist-nationalist redefinition and promotion of sisterhood in the late Qing, most prominently through modern print products, played a significant role in the gendered construction of modern China as an imagined community. The class, educational, and geopolitical stratifications within the “women’s sphere” and the problematic symbiosis between the feminist and the nationalist agendas, however, also added to the already contested “background” language, or the “social imaginary” as Charles Taylor has termed,1 in the making of Chinese modernity, which itself involved sophisticated sociocultural translation, adaptation, and transformation. These contestations, while somewhat overwhelmed by the political urgency of national salvation both at the end of Qing rule and before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, continuously but heterogeneous- ly played out in the intervening years and became even more hotly contested when faced with the rise of May Fourth individualism. Thus, the dynamics of sisterhood imaginations between the 1890s and 1937 dialectically interacted with many dramatic transformations in the private and the public domains, exhibiting various fluctuations between cohesion and fragmentation in literary, intellectual, and cultural discourses. Par- ticularly, as sisterhood narratives elastically spanned biological, familial, social, nationalistic, feminist, and cosmopolitan realms, they were often simul-

183 184 Conclusion taneously woven into other divergent stories, both large and small. In the meantime, the feminine stance of this subject matter tended to embrace, encourage, and enable parodic alternative undercurrents and countercurrents alongside dominant views and voices concerning the centralized “woman question.” An ensemble of sisterhood narratives, in this sense, constitutes a multifaceted cosmos that invites investigation from different angles. The complexities and rich nuances embodied in the textual representations examined in this book, I hope, can shed new light on the understanding of women and nation in modern China—a topic which has been, and still is, expressly mediated through sisterhood imaginations. Ironically, like the discursive emergence of the “women’s sphere,” the construction of the modern Chinese female subject was never a “no man’s land,” to borrow from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s book title;2 nor were the many other sisterhood narratives examined in this book. Given the relatively low female literacy rates as well as the limited literary and intellectual participation of women at the turn of the twentieth century, the hermeneutic circles around sisterhood were still highly reliant on participation by male agents, who continued to occupy center stage in the literary, intellectual, and political fields, as well as in the publishing industry, in the following decades, despite the steadily growing number of educated and professional women. In some cases, such as Li Hanqiu’s Two Flowery Sisters and Zheng Zhengqiu’s Twin Sisters, I have examined how the projected images of sisters mediated gendered desires and anxieties in face of China’s semicolonial modernity essentially from the perspectives of male writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals. Yet, even these tended to reflect the wide, enthusiastic, and diversified public interest in women’s issues cultivated by a new urban readership/audience. In this way, the thematic employment of and textual emphasis on sisterhood provided a special feminine lens—often deviating from mainstream intellectual discourse—through which public issues were viewed. Embedded in the nascent cosmopolitan vernacular culture of Shang- hai, where female readers made up a significant portion of the reading public and often actively interacted with female-targeted popular periodicals, Lin Loon exhibited a complicatedly layered female-centeredness that negotiated a middle ground between the individual and the state. Combining interpretative and historical approaches, I have paid particular attention to the shifting ways of imagining female subjectivities and intersubjectivities by means of sisterhood imaginations. Within the field of women’s writing, despite assimilations and appropriations, female writers continued to, like their predecessors in earlier times, experiment with textual and extratextual agencies, reinvent their own literary and cultural traditions, and challenge the physical and symbolic limitations imposed upon women. In particular, the elastic and fluid nature of sisterhood as a thematic leitmotif allowed a matrix of female subject positions from which to rebel against, or escape Conclusion 185 from, patriarchal gender norms, although the overlapping discourses of female subjectivities and of female writing were often as problematically gendered as the master narratives about enlightenment and (linear) progress. While Qiu Jin’s liberty-seeking female characters battled against the dual slavery imposed upon Chinese women, the supposedly liberated “New Women,” in the writings of Bai Wei, Lu Yin, and Ding Ling, were faced with the equally frustrating predicament of being female, not only because of the old and new forms of gender hierarchy but also because of the problematic gendering of the language that defined their freedom and subjectivities. The various dimensions (emancipating, utopian, and dystopian) of sisterhood stories by women writers, therefore, self-reflexively engaged with the predicament of being female in individualistic and collective senses and posed lingering questions about the complexity along the spectrum. While this book focuses on the last two decades of Qing rule and the early to mid-Republican period, reverberations of the issues it examines are widely found in contemporary Chinese literary and cultural texts, where sisterhood continues to embody and negotiate various identities, subjectivities, and gendered modes of being.

NOTES

1. See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 24. 2. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of Women Writers in the Twentieth Century (New Have: Yale University Press, 1988–1994).

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A Ying, 173 99–100. See also Confucianism; advertisements, 65, 96, 114, 116, 119, 121, domesticity 127, 132, 133, 142n13, 144n59. See Bai, Juyi, Song of Everlasting Sorrow, 84 also consumer culture Bai, Wei: as a rebellious “New Woman,” Allen, Young John (aka Lin Lezhi): on the 81, 82; hysteria portrayed in her emergence of the “women’s sphere” in writing, 81–82; Linli, 81, 107n59; self- China, 6; transnationalization of conscious and self-reflective qualities sisterhood imaginations promoted by of her female subjects, 81, 107n59; A his Women in All Lands, 19–20 Tragic Life, 82, 87 Anderson, Benedict: horizontal Bai, Wei—A Bomb and an Expeditionary comradeship of, xiii, 11, 13, 40; on Bird, 82; rivals sisters Yu Yue and Yu larger cultural systems that preceded Bin, compulsory choice between nationalism, 25; model of “imagined traditional and modern modes of community,” xiii womanhood symbolized by, xv Armstrong, Nancy, 59, 71n103 Bakhtin, M. M., xviin20 autobiographical writing: Ling Shuhua’s Bao, Tianxiao, 16 Ancient Melodies, 167, 175, 180n79; by Barlow, Tani E.: on “colonial modernity,” Lu Yin under her real name of Huang 25; on funü (women) as a “catachreses” Ying, 178n27, 178n31; the “personal” in the semiotics of Confucian family as a feminist concept in, 165; rhetorical doctrine, xi, xviin5, 2 strategies that create the effect of Barthes, Roland, 127 personal disclosure, 165; Xie Bingying, Beahan, Charlotte L., 11 A Woman Soldier’s Own Story, Belsey, Catherine, 61 112n150. See also Lu Yin—“Lishi’s Benjamin, Jessica: on disidentification, 39, Diary” 57; “intersubjective” model proposed by, 169 backward familial and national traditions: Benjamin, Walter, 25 British world contrasted with in Two Bing Xin, memoirs of her school days, Flower Sisters, 77; footbinding, 5, 146n121 11–12, 18, 41, 42, 45, 49, 57, 107n63; birds: A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird. and narratives of female suffering, See Bai Wei—A Bomb and an

205 206 Index

Expeditionary Bird: “expeditionary Chow, Rey: on blaming women for their birds,” military connotations of, mental states, 129, 160; on Mao Dun’s 107n65; pairs of, Bai Juyi, Song of Rainbow, 171; on sentimental stories of Everlasting Sorrow, 84 the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” Bourdieu, Pierre: definition of a field, school, 79; on textual and sociocultural 143n27; on social space, 115 “details” of gender, 104 Britain: adaptation of Bertha M. Clay’s Chuiwan, “Ode to a Women’s China,” 1 Dora Thorne by Lu Jingruo, 110n112; “civilized plays”: Twin Sister by Lu anecdotal reportage of a woman Jingruo, 110n112; Zheng Zhengqiu’s married to another woman, 125; British involvement in, 91, 110n111 missionary Timothy Richard, 5, 27n20; Cohen, Michael, 147n138 “British women’s sphere,” 21; Confucianism: The Analects, 58, 98; The emergence of modern gendered form of Book of Filial Piety for Women, 98; subjectivity in literature for women, 59; “bones and flesh” connections among England as the setting of Li Hanqiu’s members of patriarchal-polygamous Two Flowery Sisters, 75–77, 78, 80; system, 98; brotherhood and not female-female intimacy in, 169; sisterhood as one of the “five representations of sisters in British relationships,” x, 74, 98; empowerment painting and novels, 147n138; Virginia of educated gentry women, 6; “five Woolf’s encouragement of Ling relationships” of, xviin4; literature seen Shuhua’s English writing of Ancient as a vehicle for the Dao, 55; Liu Melodies, 167; The Well of Loneliness Xiang’s Biographies of Exemplary by Radclyffe Hall (British lesbian Women, 19; patriarchal-polygamous novel), 163 system of, 99; patriarchal-polygamous Butler, Judith, on the subjectivity of system’s encounter with the modern “exclusion,” 72n124 West in Li Hanqiu’s “social novels,” 78, 88; Qiu Jin’s and Shao Zhenhua’s Carpenter, Edward, 139 opposition to patriarchal-polygamous Chan, Ching-kiu Stephen, 89, 170 system, 56; the “rectification of Chang, Eileen, 113 names,” 17; reforms directed at and Chatterjee, Partha, 13, 79 challenges to. See Confucianism, Chen, Duansheng, Love Reincarnated, 56, challenges to; Hundred Days’ Reform; 67n27, 74 May Fourth Movement; New Culture Chen, Pingyuan, 49 Movement; sisterhood between wives Chen, Xiefen: founding of Journal of and concubines, 56–57, 70n89, 74; Women’s Studies, 12, 16, 29n51; “On stages of feminist sisterhood in the Precariousness of the Women’s Chivalric Beauties compared with the Sphere,” 39; pen name “A Woman “five relationships,” 54; teaching that from Southern Chu,” 20; Qiu Jin’s “men and women are different,” 52; intervention in preventing her arranged twin deployment of “women-as-same” marriage, 39; “The Future of Chinese and “women-as-different,” 53, 63; wen Women,” 20, 22 (Confucian high culture). See also Cheung, Pui-lam, 119, 144n48, 144n60 guixiu (educated genteel women); Chinese Girl’s Progress, 10 “women’s learning” encouraged as a Chinese Women’s Journal: Qiu Jin’s means to restore gender propriety, 45, establishment of, 39; Qiu Jin’s “To All 134 My Sisters” published in the first issue Confucianism, challenges to: discursive of, ix emergence of the “women’s sphere,” 4; Chow, Kai-Wing, 26n1 new-style girls’ schools, 150–153, 170; Index 207

stories about women in foreign on ill-timed pregnancy as a form of countries, 19; tearing down of the gendered traumatic experience, 109n94; inner-outer boundary of the traditional on May Fourth discourse, 174; on patriarchal household, 135, 151, 176, rhetorical strategies used by 183; textual reconstructions of Republican-era women writers, 165; on sisterhood, xiv, 35, 56–58, 64–65, 75 utopian literary fantasies of female consumer culture: exchange of women as liberation by Qiu Jin and Wang Miaoru, commodity objects, 82, 107n55; Lin 36 Loon’s gendered prism of, xv, 113, Duara, Prasenjit, 2, 80, 110n115 122–128, 129–130, 132–133, 141; suggested reversal of women as Edwards, Louise, 87 commodities in Bai Wei’s A Bomb and elasticity: of female-female love, 150, 170, and Expeditionary Bird, 84 176; feminist-nationalist awareness of cross-dressing: avoided as scandalous, Qiu Jin’s female characters, 43; 70n91; Ding Ling dressed in hybridization of Chinese literary defeminized military uniforms, 167; by traditions and newly imported Western Hua Mulan, 22; in Ling Shuhua’s “It Is fiction, 80; of sisterhood in Chinese Said That Something like This films made in the 1930s, 102; of Happened,” 157; and the phrase sisterhood in late Qing “women’s “simulated love union between a sphere” narratives, x, xii, xiii–xiv, 36, woman and her cross-dressed female 54, 61, 183–185; thematic elasticity of companion,” 57; Qiu Jin’s wearing of Li Hanqiu’s Two Flowery Sisters, 80 men’s clothes, 57, 167; staged at men- Elliot, Patricia, 82 only or women-only schools, 138 Ellis, Havelock, 122, 138, 144n51, Cuotuozi, The Newest Report of a Ghostly 147n128 Field in the Women’s Sphere, 3, 15, 65 Fan, Boqun, 77 Daly, Mary, 36 Fan, Yanqiao, 77 de Beuvoir, Simone, 165 Felski, Rita, 73, 101, 103 de Lauretis, Teresa, 170 female authorship: as a product of a Ding, Chuwo, on women as dual slaves, 13 multiplicity of social and cultural Ding, Ling: biographical details, 176; “In forces, 61; and the challenges of their the Summer Vacation,” xvi, 150, entry into a male world of letters and 160–163, 166, 174, 175; “Miss ideas, 166; disadvantaged status relative Sophia’s Diary,” 170; photographed to men, 87; imbalance of male and dressed in defeminized military female authors concerned with uniforms, 167; unfinished novel women’s issues, 15–16 Mother, 180n79 female-female bonding: among female domesticity: associated with creating a factory workers, 178n17; dismissed as a pan-Asian modernity by Shimoda scandalous popular “fashion” in girls’ Utako, 50; “housewives” (zhufu) in schools, 138, 146n121; as feminist Maoist discourse, 69n66; Jianchen’s resistance, 155, 161, 172, 174–175, depiction of “housewives” (zhufu), 50, 176; narcissism associated with, 164 53, 69n66; narcissism associated with feminist and nationalist agendas: girls kept in the inner quarters, 164. See challenges confronted by first-wave also backward familial and national feminist activists, 17, 31n92; and traditions; Confucianism China’s uneasy encounters with Dooling, Amy D.: on feminist ideologies Western powers, 1, 26n1, 66n20; articulated by “new women” writers, xi; combined efforts to fight for “women’s 208 Index

rights” and “civil rights,” 8; sisterhood and Yan Bin’s Magazine of hybridizations in Lin Loon, 139–141; in the New Chinese Women’s Sphere, 21; Lin Loon, 131; of the New Culture transnational perspective on the period, xvi, 83, 87, 90, 99 “women’s sphere” facilitated by, feminist-nationalist spectrum of 19–21, 23–24; and the vocabulary of sisterhood: elasticity of sisterhood in early Chinese feminists, 61; and Women late Qing “women’s sphere” narratives, in All Lands by Young John Allen, 6, x, xii, xiii–xiv, 36, 54, 61, 183–185; 19–20; Xue Shaohui’s Biographies of impact on women’s literary Exemplary Foreign Women, 24; Zhao imagination, 18, 35, 61, 64 Jingshen’s report on the British lesbian feminist transcendence: of gender novel The Well of Loneliness by hierarchy, 57, 62, 81, 141, 150, 153; in Radclyffe Hall, 163 women’s lives and literary careers, Forster, E. M., 83, 107n62 37–38, 167, 172–176. See also Foucault, Michel: on heterotopias, 152, sisterhood, transcendental and unifying 153, 172, 178n23; on insanity, 172; capacity of “repressive hypothesis” argued against, Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi M., 84, 174 xiii, xviin18 “fiction of the women’s sphere”: as a Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis: discursive product of the “women’s influence on Pan Guandgan’s sphere,” 64; Wang Miaoru’s A Flower psychoanalysis of Feng Xiaoqing, 164; of the Women’s Prison as representative on libidinal “sublimation,” 87. See also of, 64 hysteria and hysterics Fischer, Michael M. J., 134, 135 Fryer, John (aka Fu Lanya), xviin19, 49, 55 footbinding, 5, 11–12, 18, 41, 42, 45, 49, funü (women): as “catachreses” in the 57, 107n63 semiotics of Confucian family doctrine, foreign role models: autobiographical xi, xviin5, 2; as a key term in discourses writings by eighteenth-century English on gender, xii, 2 women, 71n104, 165; canon of role “funü wenxue” (“women’s literature”), re- models expanded by transnational evaluation of in the 1920s and the perspective, 21–22; exemplary women 1930s, 173 featured in Women’s World, 32n114; Furth, Charlotte, 27n17 featured in “Biographies” in Women’s World, 23, 32n114; Gloria Swanson Gao, Yunxiang, xviin20, 128 (film star), 147n128; hybridization of gentry-literati culture: female literates as Chinese literary traditions and newly tutors for gentry girls, 104n4; Shao imported Western fiction, 80; Ibsen’s Zhenhua’s tolerant attitude toward, self-emancipating Nora in A Doll’s 68n56; wen (Confucian high culture), 6 House, 83–84, 108n66, 157; Liang gentry women: popularity of tanci among, Qichao’s seminal role in introducing xi, 37; sisterhood fostered by literary them into the imagination of the and cultural interests, 18; and wen Chinese “women’s sphere,” 4, 20; (Confucian high culture), 6. See also Lillian Gish’s performance in Griffith’s guixiu (educated genteel women) Way Down East, 91, 110n126; Meiji Gerth, Karl, 132 values and ideals about “good wives Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, 184 and wise mothers,” 29n44; search for Gimpel, Denise, 77 pre-nineteenth-century extraordinary gonggong kongjian (“public space”), 134 Chinese women stimulated by, 22; gongli (universal principles): contestation translocal perspective of sisterhood with qing (passion) in Two Flowery offered by, xii; translocal perspective of Sisters, 77; Timothy Richard’s Index 209

elaboration of “wealth” as part of, hysteria and hysterics: in Bai Wei’s 27n20 writing, 81–82; hysterical libido Griffith, D. W.: film Orphans of the Storm, associated with Chinese women writers 91, 96; film Way Down East, 91, 96; by Pan Guangdan, 122; unconscious Zhou Shoujuan’s praise of his narrative subjectivity of, 82; Yue’s experience of, style, 109n106 in A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird, Gu, Taiqing, 71n104 101 Gu, Yanwu, poem “Jingwei,” 43–44 guixiu (educated genteel women): Dorothy International Women’s Day: 100th Ko’s explanation of, 70n97; reinvention anniversary of, 2; Zhang Mojun’s in fiction by Qiu Jin and Shao Zhenhua, “Thoughts on the International xiv, 35, 58 Women’s Day,” 136 Guo, Moruo, 31n83, 108n71 Irigaray, Luce: argument that “The Other has no Other,” 89; summary of Habermas, Jürgen, 134–135 women’s social roles in patriarchal “half the sky” (banbiantian), 3, 26n7 social order, 88; on women as Hansen, Miriam Bratu: on public sphere, commodity-objects deprived of a 134; theory of “vernacular modernism,” subject position, 82 91, 109n103 He, Yubo, Modern Chinese Women Japan: First Sino-Japanese War Writers, 173 (1894–1895), 24; Meiji values and He, Zhen, 16 ideals about “good wives and wise Hershatter, Gail, 13 mothers,” 29n44; occupation of herstory: quest for in Bai Wei’s A Bomb Manchuria, 1, 13, 89, 139, 147n129; and an Expeditionary Bird, 82, 89; Second Sino-Japanese War Shao Zhenhua’s writing as a form of, (1937–1945), xiii, 100, 140, 183 48 Jin, Mancheng, 126; contributions to Lin homosexuality: as a term and notion Loon, 121–122 imported into Chinese from Western Jin, Yi: and the discursive popularity of the sexological texts, 144n51, 149; male term “women’s sphere,” 3; featured on homoeroticism in royal courts, 177n1; the cover of A Hundred Years of reportage of Magnus Hirschfield’s Women’s Movement in China, China tour in Lin Loon, 147n128. See 1910–2010, 2; soothing male also female-female bonding; lesbianism intellectuals’ anxieties as the implicit Hong, Ruizhao, 84 agenda of A Bell to the Women’s Honig, Emily, on sisterhood practices and Sphere, 26n9 societies among female factory Jingwei Bird: entanglements between workers, xi, xii, 146n114, 178n17 “women” and “nation” in imagery of, Hu, Die: dual roles in Twin Sisters, 89, 96; 43; myth of, popularity among Han emulation of Lillian Gish, 91, 110n126; loyalists, 43; in the title of Qiu Jin’s featured in national products promotion novel. See Qiu Jin—Stones of the in Lin Loon, 132 Jingwei Bird Hu, Shi, 77 Judge, Joan: on the agency of Chinese Hundred Days’ Reform (1898), 10, 27n17; female writers, xi, 61; on the distinction Huang Zunxian’s poems written for between “Woman” and “women,” Liang Qichao shortly before, 44 68n47; on emulation and exclusion, 63, Hu, Siao-chen, xi, 58 72n124; eternalist, meliorist, Hu, Ying, 20, 33n124 archeomodernist, and presentist approaches identified by, 23; and 210 Index

“female citizens,” 12; on women and “mannish lesbian” in Yu Dafu’s “She Is the nation, 11; and the tensions and a Weak Woman,” 168, 171; Tze-lan D. conflicts between Utako Shimoda and Sang on the discursive emergence of Qiu Jin, 69n64 lesbian sisterhood, xi, 151. See also Jung, C. G., 112n155 homosexuality Li, Hanqiu: depiction of rival sisters Linna Karl, Rebecca, 17, 40, 44 and Yingna. See Li Hanqiu—Two kingdom of women: premodern literary Flowery Sisters: love tragedies and trope of, 4; Qing conceptions of a social concerns featured in novels by, gendered “women’s sphere” contrasted 77–78 with, 4 Li, Hanqiu—Two Flowery Sisters: Bai Ko, Dorothy: on communal ties among Wei’s Yu Yue and Yu Bin contrasted gentry women fostered by literary and with Linna and Yingna, 82–83; cultural interests, 18; on friendship-love compulsory choice between traditional continuum between gentry wives and and modern modes of womanhood courtesans, 70n89; on guixiu women, symbolized by Linna and Yingna’s 70n97; on soothing male intellectuals’ sisterhood, xv; contestations between anxieties as the implicit agenda of Jin “passion” and “universal principles” Yi’s A Bell to the Women’s Sphere, embodied in Linna and Yingna’s 26n9; on the “twin deployment of sisterhood, 77; Lu Yin’s and Ling ‘women-as-same’ and ‘women-as- Shuhu’s schoolgirl romance compared different’” in the Confucian gender with, 175; thematic elasticity of Linna system, 53; on the vocabulary of early and Yingna’s sisterhood, 80 Chinese feminists, 61; on women’s Li, Lingdi: contribution to Lin Loon, 123; culture and self-imagining, 64 marriage to Gui Zhongshu, 123; Peng Kristeva, Julia, 171, 172 Zhaoliang’s psychoanalysis of, 122 Li, Ruzhen, “Kingdom of Women” in his The Ladies’ Journal: female-female Romance of Flowers in the Mirror, 4 intimacy of female students, 153; Li, Yu, Women in Love, 56, 74 imbalance of male and female editors Liang, Qichao: classification of domestic on the staff of, 16; and the title of Lin women as wealth-consumers, 28n23, Loon Ladies’s Magazine, 115; Wu 129, 132; division between wealth- Zenglan’s “On the Origin of the production and wealth-consumption, Women’s Sphere” in, 9; Zhou Jianren’s 63; on fiction as a political instrument “The Awakening of Chinese Women echoed in Chivalric Beauties, 60; and the Issue of Singlehood” in, 168 Huang Zunxian’s poems written for, 44; Larson, Wendy, 173, 180n82, 181n106 “new fiction” advocated as means for Lee, Leo Ou-fan: on cosmopolitan culture social intervention, xviin19, 49, 55, 61; in Republican Shanghai, 127; on the New People Miscellany, 5, 8, 38; “gap between populist ideologies and seminal role in introducing foreign role popular practices” in the late Qing, 13, models into the imagination of the 61; on public sphere, 134 Chinese “women’s sphere,” 4, 20; lesbianism: “developmental stagnation” Tutor Yu (Qiu Jin’s fictional character) associated with, 173, 175; female- compared with, 41; wife Li Huixian, 10 female love depicted in Ding Ling’s “In Lieberman, Sally Taylor, xii, 99, 109n94, the Summer Vacation,” 160–161; 166 female same-sex love relationships in linear progress: of China’s joining the Republican China distinguished from modern world, 80; deviation of female present-day definition of, 163; temporality from, 172; and notions of Index 211

Social Darwinism, xv of individualism between China and the Ling, Shuhua: depictions of female-female West, 141; on soothing male bonds compared with Lu Yin’s and intellectuals’ anxieties as the implicit Ding Ling’s depictions of, 161, 163, agenda of Jin Yi’s A Bell to the 164, 169; “It Is Said That Something Women’s Sphere, 26n9; on “translated Like This Happened,” xvi, 150, modernity,” 103, 149 157–160; recollection of her mother, Liu, Yazi: “A Lament to the Women’s 180n79; subject matter of female same- Sphere,” 3, 13; pen names “Madame sex love dismissed as insignificant (“It Pan Xiaohuanag from Songling” and Is Said That Something Like This Yalu, 23, 31n83; writing for Women’s Happened”), 174 World, 7 Link, Perry, 77 Lu, Jingruo, “civilized play” Twin Sister, Lin Loon Ladies’ Magazine: 110n112 advertisements for print products of San Lu, Xun: as a central literary figure in the Ho Company, 132, 142n13; as a May Fourth Movement, 107n57, 173; gendered prism of urban consumer “Diary of a Madman,” 99; “New Year’s culture, xv, 119, 127, 132, 133–135, Sacrifice,” 99 140, 145n68; Chen Xia (editorial staff), Lu, Yin: autobiographical writing, 178n27, 119, 127; Chen Zhenling (editor-in- 178n31, 180n79; “Lishi’s Diary,” xvi, chief), 114, 116, 119, 124; comic 150, 153, 155, 157, 158, 163, 165, 168, sketches and illustration, 126; female 169, 175; “Old Friends by the Sea,” xvi, exclusiveness and female singlehood 150, 153, 155–156, 157, 163, 165–166, celebrated in, xv, 119–120, 125, 168, 175 137–139; feminist and nationalist Luo, Pu, The Woman Hero from Eastern continuum, 131; Liang Aibao (Lin Europe, 33n124, 38 Zecang’s wife, aka Liang Xinxi) (editorial staff), 119–120; misandria of, Ma, Junwu: on the combined efforts to 117, 126, 136; parent company San Ho fight “women’s rights” and “civil Company, 113, 114, 116, 120, 126; rights,” 8; Herbert Spencer’s writing on Peng Zhaoliang (editorial staff), 114, women’s rights translated into Chinese 119, 122, 124; “sister” as a key word in, by, 8, 28n36 xv, 116; Zhou Shixun (editorial staff), McMahon, Keith, 78 114, 120, 144n57 Magazine of the New Chinese Women’s Lin, Zecang: brother Lin Zemin, 114, Sphere, 3, 21 143n28; founding of San Ho Company, male feminists: female-sounding pen 113, 114; Lin Loon’s featuring of names used by, 31n83; imbalance of photos taken by, 129; popular pictorial male and female authors concerned magazines published by, 114 with women’s issues, 15–16; Women’s Li, Timotai (aka Timothy Richard), 5, World launched by, 7. See also Jin Yi; 27n20 Liu Yazi; Ma Junwu Liu, Huiying: on gendered conceptions of “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” school, economic production, 6; on Liang 77, 79, 156 Qichao’s classification of domestic Mann, Susan, on the gender-based women as wealth-consumers, 28n23; on prescription of the traditional Chinese Timothy Richard’s elaboration of family system, 151 wealth production, 27n20 Mao, Dun, 178n27; on developmental Liu, Jianmei, 82 stagnation of Lu Yin, 173; as editor-in- Liu, Lydia H.: on Ding Ling’s “Miss chief of Short Story Monthly, 156; pen Sophia’s Diary,” 170; on the discourse name “Madame Feng Xu,” 31n83; 212 Index

Rainbow, 171; “Spring Silkworm,” 91 difficulties of a feminist intervention Marcus, Sharon, 164, 169 embodied by, 150; female same-sex Martin, Fran, 168, 175 love labeled as a symptom of May Fourth Movement, 27n17, 177n3; “developmental stagnation,” 164, 173; celebration of individualism, 87, stagnation associated with female 108n71, 149, 151, 164; iconoclastic writing, 173 critique of the traditional family system, Nussbaum, Felicity A., 71n104, 165 75; literary tradition of. See Bai Wei; Ding Ling; Guo Moruo; Hu Shi; Ling Pan, Guangdan: hysterical libido Shuhua; Lu Xun; Lu Yin; Yu Dafu; associated with Chinese women writers Zhou Jianren; Zhou Zuoren; by, 122; Peng Zhaoliang’s imitation of, patriarchal-nationalist tendencies in 124; psychoanalysis of Feng Xiaoqing, discourses on women’s psyches, 164, 173 bodies, and sexualities, xvi, 173–174; passion. See qing (passion) representational models about love patrilineal kinship: attacked by the New relationships, 164, 170 Culture Movement, 83, 87, 90, 99; misogyny: and the public visibility of challenged by late Qing discourse on educated women, 151, 162; and the “women’s sphere,” 75; targeted in representations of female-female love, an essay by author Pei in Lin Loon, 136. 149; resisted by “New Women,” xvi, See also Confucianism, patriarchal- 139 polygamous system of Mittler, Barbara, 13, 59, 117, 126 Pei, Ju, Illustrated Account of the Western Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 68n47 Regions, 4 Mulvey, Laura, 95 Peng, Zhaoliang: as an editor for Lin Loon, 114, 119, 122, 124; “The Phenomenon narcissism: female same-sex love of Narcissism” (Lin Loon), 164; interpreted as, 164; Pan Guangdan’s writings on women-related issues of psychoanalysis of Feng Xiaoqing, 164; popular interest in Lin Loon, 124; pen Peng Zhaoliang’s article “The name Hong Xiosheng used by, 144n48; Phenomenon of Narcissism” in Lin psychoanalysis of Li Lingdi, 122 Loon Ladies’ Magazine, 164; women’s print industry: efforts to elevate readership writing associated with, 164–165, 170; taste, 61; formation of nationalism, 13; of Yu Yue (fictional character of Bai the gap between populist ideologies and Wei), 85 popular practices of periodical presses, Nathan, Andrew J., 13, 61 13; journals. See Chinese Girl’s New Culture Movement: gender paradox Progress; Chinese Women’s Journal; in the legacy of, xvi, 87; women’s Journal of Women’s Studies; The reformation and emancipation entwined Ladies’ Journal; Lin Loon Ladies’ with nationalism and patriotism, 83, 99 Magazine; Women’s Times; Women’s New People Miscellany, 4, 8, 38 World; and the promotion of sisterhood, “New Women”: celebrated in Lin Loon. xiii, 11, 58–59; publishers; Lin Zecang See Lin Loon Ladies’ Magazine: and psychoanalysis: Jung’s definition of the dysfunctional mother-daughter bonds, Electra complex, 112n155; pathological 167; misogyny and other gender biases “transference” of sexual desire, 167; fought by, 139, 162; self-reflexive and stories identified by Zhao Jingshen for self-questioning modes of identification psychoanalytical reading, 158. See also of, 141, 177 Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis; nondevelopment: as a form of resistance, narcissism 174–175; both the potential and the Index 213

Qian, Nanxiu, 24 Sang, Tze-lan D.: on compulsory qing (passion): contestation with gongli heterosexuality, 178n16; on the (universal principles), 77; and erotic depiction of female-female love, 70n88, fiction of the Ming dynasty, 77; 149, 153, 163; on the discursive intersection between love tragedies and emergence of lesbian sisterhood, xi, social concerns, 78 151; and the trope of sisterhood Qing women writers, 69n80; rejection of between wives and concubines, 57 male-centered spatial-temporal and Schor, Naomi, 112n163 social orders, 36. See also Chen Scott, Joan Wallach, 31n92 Duansheng; Gu Taiqing; Qiu Jin; Shao Shao, Zhenhua: and “fiction of the Zhenhua; Wang Miaoru women’s sphere,” 64–65; Shimoda Qiu, Jin: adoption of the epithet “Heroine Utako’s approach to sisterhood and of Lake Jian,” 44; advocacy for liberation compared with, 50; use of publications by and for women, xiii; emulation and exclusion with feminist- anti-Manchu political agenda of, 39, 43, nationalist characters, 63 66n20; challenging of gender norms, Shao, Zhenhua—Chivalric Beauties: cross- 70n92; heroic death anticipated by, 39; dressing in, 57, 70n91; danger of the husband Wang Zifang, 38, 66n12; public visibility of educated women, journal established by. See Chinese 151; didacticism that echoes Liang Women’s Journal; men’s clothes worn Qichao, 60; gender- and nation-based by, 57, 167; novel; Qiu Jin—Stones of mode of feminist bonding, 48, 50, the Jingwei Bird; and the “Restoration 51–54 Society,” 43, 67n37; textual and Shenbao: commercial advertising in, 59; D. extratextual sisters of, 38, 47, 59, 154; W. Griffith’s praised in, 109n106 travel to Japan, 39, 66n12 Shih, Shu-mei, 77 Qiu, Jin—Stones of the Jingwei Bird: dual- Shimoda, Utako, 50, 69n64 slavery battled by liberty-seeking Showalter, Elaine, 172 female characters, 39, 44, 184; and the Silvermn, Kaja, 181n106 “fiction of the women’s sphere,” 64–65; sisterhood: as a thematic category in gendered community rendered as Chinese literature and culture, 183; stratified, rather than homogenous, by, elasticity of. See elasticity; found in xiii, xiv; reflected in the author’s pen Chivalric Sisters, 62; found in Stones of name “The Chivalric Daughter of the the Jingwei Bird, 37, 40, 41–42, 45, 57, Han Race,” 39; use of emulation and 62; gendered nature of, xiii; “sister” exclusion, 63, 72n124 was a key word in Lin Loon, xv, 116; textual and sociocultural “details” of, Rankin, Mary Backus, 66n20 104, 112n163; transcendental and rival sisters: and beliefs in social unifying capacity of, 153; Darwinism, xv; compulsory choice transhistorical identifications of, 19, 24. between traditional and modern modes See also feminist-nationalist spectrum of womanhood symbolized by, xv; of sisterhood; rival sisters narratives about. See Bai Wei—A Bomb sisterhoods (zimeihui or jiemeihui): among and an Expeditionary Bird; Li women workers in Shanghai’s textile Hanqiu—Two Flowery Sisters; Zheng industry, 146n115; mutual aid among Zhengqiu—film Twin Sisters unmarried young women in “Sisterhood Rowe, William T., 134 Society on the Hainan Island,” 137; Ruan, Lingyu, 110n126, 129, 145n73 spinster sisterhood, 168, 178n17 Rubin, Gayle, 85, 107n55 slavery: Chen Xiefen on Chinese women as the slaves of the slaves to an alien 214 Index

race, 39; and gender-based injustice male intellectual anxieties as the depicted in Stones of the Jingwei Bird, implicit agenda of Jin Yi’s A Bell to the 41; gendered political positioning in the Women’s Sphere, 26n9; on the discourse on, 39; women-as-dual-slaves vocabulary of early Chinese feminists, narrative of Qiu Jin’s tanci novel, 39, 61 43, 44, 184; women-as-dual-slaves Wen, Kang, A tale of Heroic Sons and proposed by Ding Chuwo, 13 Daughters, 74 social Darwinism: and the textual fates of Widmer, Ellen, 35, 71n100 rival sisters, xv; and views about Women of China, 2 China’s struggle with the imperialist Women’s Journal. See Journal of Women’s West, 26n1, 66n20 Studies Sudo, Mizuyuo, 28n36 “women’s sphere”: and the construction of Sun, Li-ying, 119–120 China as a modern “imagined community,” xiv, 4, 7, 9–19, 13, 25; Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, “women’s cynical representations of divergent camp,” 4, 27n15 attitudes, 14–15; divergent attitudes tanci novels: authored by and target at toward, 14, 65; dominant role of the literate gentry women, 66n7; earlier Confucian patriarchal family forms of female-female friendships in, challenged by, 4, 75; “fiction of the 37, 42, 57; earlier forms of trope of women’s sphere” as a discursive divine intervention, 62; importance of product of, 64; and the premodern textual sisterhood in, xi, 58; mother- literary trope of the “kingdom of daughter ties as a thematic focus of, 40; women,” 4, 171; revivalist agenda and popularity among gentry women, xi, rebellious perspective proposed by Wu 37; as a traditional Chinese oral Zenglan, 9. See also foreign role narrative genre, 37 models; “women’s sphere” and the Tang, Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion, 78, 169 confluence of feminist and nationalist Taylor, Charles: on cultural versus agendas acultural approaches toward modernity, “women’s sphere” and the confluence of 80, 175; “social imaginary” termed by, feminist and nationalist agendas: as a 183 problematic symbiosis, xvi, 16–18; and temporality: alternative modes of female combined efforts to fight “women’s existence, 172. See also linear progress; rights” and “civil rights,” 8; new nondevelopment criteria for the definition of sameness transcendence. See feminist transcendence; and difference among women sisterhood, transcendental and unifying introduced by, 53–54; in Qiu Jin’s capacity of Stones of the Jingwei Bird, 35, 37, 40, Tu, Weiming, 54 41, 43, 45–46, 55, 61–65, 66n18, 66n20; in Shao Zhenhua’s Chivalric Wang, David Der-wei, 81, 82, 88 Beauties, 35, 50, 52, 55, 61–62, 63, Wang, Gary, 119–120, 138 64–65 Wang, Hui, 134 Women’s Times, 16 Wang, Junqing, A Dirty History of the Women’s World: established by Ding Women’s Sphere, 14, 65 Chuwo, 7, 28n32; male feminist editors Wang, Miaoru, A Flower of the Women’s on the staff of, 1, 15; unrelated monthly Prison, 36, 71n100 journals with the same name Wang, Richard G., 77 established by Chen Diexian, 28n32 Wang, Zheng: on Chinese women activists Wu, Cheng’en, Journey to the West, 4 in the May Fourth era, xi; on soothing Wu, Jingsuo, 74 Index 215

Wu, Yu, 9, 29n43 122; echoes of his ideas in Jin Wu, Zenglan, 9, 29n43 Mancheng’s In Support of a Revolutionary Lover-ship System, 122; Xia, Xiaohong, 29n44 echoes of his ideas in Lin Loon, 124, Xie, Bingying: autobiography A Woman 137; Jin Mancheng’s contribution to his Soldier’s Own Story, 112n150; short Sex Histories, 121; “new theory of story “Elder Sister,” 100 gynocentrism,” 122, 137, 143n40 Xu, Zhihua: and Qiu Jin, 38, 59, 154; sister Zhang, Mojun: as an exemplary graduate Xu Yunhua, 39 of a girls’ school, 151; “Thoughts on Xuanzang: as a protagonist in Wu the International Women’s Day,” 136 Cheng’en, Journey to the West, 27n12; Zhang, Xicheng, Youtong identified as a Records of the Western Regions in the pen name used by, 146n112 Great Tang Dynasty, 4, 27n12 Zhang, Xuecheng, 46, 135 Xue, Shaohui: Biographies of Exemplary Zhao, Jingshen: pen names “Madame Foreign Women, 24; reinvention of Fu Luming” and “Madame Aisi,” 31n83; Caiyun in her “Adventures of an Old on stories identified for Courtesan,” 24 psychoanalytical reading, 158; “The Banning of a Novel about Same-Sex Yalu. See Liu Yazi Love” by, 163 Yan, Bin: founding of Magazine of the Zhao, Tieqing, poem dedicated to Jingwei, New Chinese Women’s Sphere, 3, 21; 43, 45–46 constructivist view on the issue of Zheng, Zhengqiu, “civilized plays,” 91, gender, 17–18 110n111; “family ethics film,” 91 Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, 134, 135 Zheng, Zhengqiu—film Twin Sisters: Yang, Zhensheng, “Why Did She compulsory choice between traditional Suddenly Go Insane?,” 157–158, 160, and modern modes of womanhood 163, 169, 172 symbolized by rival sisters Dabao and Yeh, Catherine Vance, 143n29 Erbao, xv; Hu Die’s dual roles in, 89, Yisuo: Huang Xiuqiu, 14, 20; identified as 96; ideologically charged thematic the art name (hao) of Tang Baorong, question of, 89 30n78; and the use of the family name Zhigong, “Biographies of Women Huang in fictional works, 67n24 Warriors,” 20, 23 Youtong: on Ellen Key, 133, 146n113; Zhong, Xinqing, The Torch of Civilization identified as a pen name used by Zhang for a Twentieth-Century Women’s Xicheng, 146n112 Sphere, 37, 65 Yu, Dafu: on the May Fourth Movements’ Zhong, Xueping, 182n128 discovery of the individual, 87; “She Is Zhou, Jianren, “Moral Double Standards,” a Weak Woman,” 168, 171 173 Yu, Peilan, 65 Zhou, Zuoren: “Women and Literature,” Yue, Ming-Bao, 83 174; pen name “Madame Pingyun,” Yu, Ying-shih, 177n3 31n83 Zhu, Ping, 6, 81 Zhang, Jingshen: Beautiful Bookstore, 122; connection with Peng Zhaoliang,

About the Author

Yun Zhu is assistant professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Temple University. Her research interests focus on Chinese literature and culture from the late Qing to the contemporary period and women’s literature and film. She has published scholarly articles in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Kodex, the Yearbook of the International Book Society, and Inter- texts: A Journal of Comparative and Theoretical Reflection. She has co- authored, with Tan Ye, Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema (2012).

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