On Their Dress They Wore a Body. Fashion and Identity in Late Qing

On Their Dress They Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai

Paola Zamperini

Going Somatic And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed ﬁg leaves together, and made themselves aprons. —Genesis, 3.7

One needs a semiotics of bodily adornment and personal accessory in order to know people: what Balzac calls “la vestignomie” has become “almost a branch of the art created by Gall and Lavater.”—Peter Brooks, Body Work

In many cultures undressing—oneself and others—is considered a very erotic and enticing activity. The present essay, however, argues that leav- ing someone’s clothes on can be just as interesting and titillating—at least within the context of academic research.1 Thus it is centered on ﬁctional representations of clothed bodies and fashion in Shanghai within the realm of late Qing literary production.2 As it will become clear from the following

discussion, in vernacular novels written between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, clothes do much more than simply cover fictional bodies. They also constitute their social, gender, national, and racial identities. Focusing on the dialectic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity will help us to unravel the imaginary of a very interesting group of writers in one of the most fascinating junctures in Chinese literature and history.3 In the past twenty years, the scholarship produced about fashion and the body in many different fields has shown that in any given culture, fabricating a dress and wearing it simultaneously define the body as a cultural artifact.4 In other words, we cannot think about clothes without thinking about the body underneath, and we cannot see the body without thinking about the clothes. This finding becomes particularly relevant when we look at late Qing novels. Who (man, woman, Chinese, foreigner, young, old, rich, poor, and so on) gets to wear what, how, at what price, where, and why are issues that seem to weigh on the minds of the writers of this period. Thus, in the present investigation we will “go somatic,” meaning that we will look at the guises in which writers clothe their characters and the types of social and bodily knowledge they engender and mirror, as well as the emotional and cultural investments of the society that produced them. Within the context of Chinese tradition, clothing is the marker not of sin, as the above quote from the Bible illustrates, but of “Civilization.” It is what distinguishes man from beast, Chinese from barbarian.5 Thus the moral implications in the Chinese case are just as urgent but of a degree different from the case of the Bible. The body must be covered not to prevent it from sinning but in order to reveal its “Chineseness,” ergo, its superiority vis-à-vis the outsiders. What is at stake is not just the moral status of an individual, marked in any event in his or her flesh by the original sin, but rather the collective superiority of the Chinese nation as embodied in the clothed appearance of one of its citizens. This concern with bodily surfaces and their meanings is echoed in traditional medical conceptions of the body. In The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, Shigeisa Kuriyama shows how traditional Chinese medicine, from very early on, mapped the body as spatial layering. In other words, the medical view of the body was structured by the logic of depth.6 That adds Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 303

importance to clothes; almost before one’s skin, they constitute the first level of a layered body. Given that for many a century the basic shape of Chinese clothing did not change in any significant way, the way one’s dress or clothing was worn could reveal important details about a person. To borrow Erasmus’s words, indeed clothing was “the body’s body,” and from it one might infer the state of a person’s character.7 Thus it is no surprise that most Chinese fiction writers took pains to pro- vide their readers with detailed descriptions of their characters’ clothing and apparel. There is no question that one of their primary intents was to present to their readers a clearer picture of the characters’ physical appearance. But they also clearly believed in the power of clothes to reveal moral orienta- tion and cultivation (or lack thereof ), besides social status, gender, and class. From a close study of the Ming and Qing vernacular sources, it becomes apparent that an interesting change occurs in the literary production of the second half of the nineteenth century, change that makes it significant to separate these sources from earlier ones.8 Late Qing authors still invested the body and its clothes with many of its previous meanings (such as that of being a microcosm that must be in accordance with the macrocosm, whose clothing must match status and gender, and so on). Yet they also make it more problematic. Clothes start marking the time of the body and of the society in which it operates. For the first time in Chinese fiction, dresses reveal the time and the space in which the characters move. Fashion(s) and clothing thus become one of the sites where a new problematic social identity and its “discontents” are displayed and negotiated. Also, for the first time we see characters discarding Chinese clothing to wear Western clothes; the implications of this act will be elaborated upon presently.9 The background of this sartorial web of desire, consumption, and passion is, again for the first time, Shanghai. The treaty port where East met West on a daily basis, fictional Shanghai is depicted as a veritable modern metropolis, with its fast vehicles, its electric lights, its foreign crowds, and its movie theaters and cinemas. All these real-life innovations produce the “shop-window effect” that makes Shanghai immensely “storied” and thus the ideal arena for novelistic plots. Late Qing Shanghai may not be the political and administrative capital of the empire, but in the novels of the period it is the capital of fashion, the Paris of the East, where looks matter more than positions 11:2 Fall 2003 304

substance. Both in real life and in fiction, Shanghai is where the trendiest tailors open up shop and looks are created. In particular, the “Shanghai look” circulates as an object of desire as well as of ridicule through the pages of these texts.10 Late Qing writers, innovative as they are in making their novels contemporary, are even more so in introducing the notion of fashion as intrinsic to many of their characters’ identity. In fictional Shanghai, one’s look matters— first and foremost, for the pleasure of the reader, who, not unlike Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, can stroll alongside the characters, window-shopping, as it were, their lifestyles, their attires, and their stories. Novels help readers in the whole of China to catch a literary glimpse of a world that, at the time, is for many Chinese just a futuristic vision or a metropolitan nightmare. But there is more at stake. In Shanghai, where the booming leisure culture keeps creating new jobs and new social rituals, looking trendy is often the key to one’s survival. This is clearly illustrated in the case of courtesans, Shanghai’s “working girls,” who, as the trendsetters, compete to be innovative and original in fashion (fig. 1).11 In Jiuweihu,HuBaoyu is a good example of the importance of fashion and clothing for courtesans.12 Portrayed as a nymphomaniac who consumes one man after another, and by no means the most beautiful courtesan of Shanghai, she owes her success to the fact that she always knows how to make clothes work for her.13 For instance, intrigued by the idea of having a foreign lover, Hu Baoyu enlists the help of the “salt water sisters.”14 She copies their unusual hairdos, and soon everybody in Shanghai is sporting Hu Baoyu’s “new” hairstyle, from the hottest courtesans in town to women of good households. The foreign look includes her learning some English, changing all her furniture, and buying only foreign things.15 When we are given descriptions of her dresses, we see how her sartorial practices reveal not only her physical charms but also her market strategy: “Hu Baoyu’s dress this evening was different from those of the other prostitutes. Her whole body was sheathed in bright red satin embroidered with golden flowers inlaid with small crystal mirrors.”16 In other words, her attire is blinding, beautiful, and exotic all at once. The author tells us that she chooses this very fashionable dress because she wants to catch the eye (and the purse) of a very powerful and rich man who is there. Thus she uses Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 305

Figure 1 Late Qing courtesan. Collection of Paola Zamperini

clothing not only as a marker of her profession but also as an ad, and by so doing she wears her body—her wares—on her dress. The importance of the “Shanghai look” as a “tool of the trade” for the courtesan becomes even more apparent when Hu Baoyu goes to Beijing to improve her ﬁnancial situation. Clothes like hers, in the latest style from Shanghai, have never been seen on the streets of Beijing, so when she goes by, everybody notices her and cheers her as if they were watching a play.17 Indeed, when Hu Baoyu enters the positions 11:2 Fall 2003 306

theater, people stop watching the play and look at her. She and her attire become the spectacle, and the audience is completely starstruck.18 Fashion, however, is a tough mistress and requires its sacriﬁces. For example, in the same novel, a charming young woman wears a hat when it is still too hot so that she can show off a beautiful brooch. In Haishang fanhuameng, a “fast girl” has gold inlaid in her teeth to look more fashionable.19 And in order not to miss taking part in Shanghai’s New Year parade downtown, showing off the newest and most unusual attires, those courtesans who do not have money borrow clothes for this occasion.20 Yet time is of the essence in deﬁning both the sartorial persona and the career of the courtesan. Hu Baoyu’s clothes may be described for a while as shimaode (trendy) and shishi (in). But clothes and people eventually go out of fashion. They are both goods that have expiration dates. Hu Baoyu, forever ingenious, resorts to cross-dressing to attract attention and to overcome the loss of popularity due to her old age (forty years!). But even resourcefulness can take a smart dresser only so far. Eventually Hu Baoyu opens a brothel to make ends meet, and when Master Huang, a customer of one of Hu Baoyu’s girls, meets her, he is smitten by her but decides against getting involved with her because she is now guoshihuo (expired merchandise). As she is no longer xinshi (new), Mas- ter Huang, ever the fashion-conscious Shanghainese, worries that having an affair with such an “obsolete” woman would make him look bad.21 Thus we see that looks matter not just for Shanghai’s working girls. People in Shanghai go to great lengths to be “read” as fashionable—and we could even say cool. The wealthy residents and sojourners, along with their spouses, are important parts of the equation. As the customers of courtesans and the “in-crowd,” they have to enter the circuit of visual and sumptuary consumption. Rich people in the United States have to go to Paris at least twice a year. People in Shanghai, on the other hand, to keep their reputations as “hip,” have to show up at the Zhang gardens at least twice a week. And they had better look good if they do not want to become the laughingstock of the Shanghai that matters.22 Side by side with the courtesans and the well-off dandies, on the streets of Shanghaionecanalsomeetmenwho,justlikethecourtesans,usefashionable clothes to seduce courtesans and women of respectable families. Pan Shao’an, for example, is portrayed as the veritable “Gigolo of Shanghai.”23 Handsome Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 307

and young, he owes his success to the fancy clothes and the perfume he wears. Thanks to his dashing looks and a sound investment at the tailor shop, he manages to keep many of Shanghai’s women romantically aroused and sexually satisfied. All his lovers give him money and their hearts and are willing to take him back no matter what he does to them.24 Amore farcical and less successful type of gigolo is Zhou Celiu, a con man of limited talents who decides to increase his meager income by putting himself on the market for rich prostitutes.25 Indeed he strives to become a “call boy” for wealthy female prostitutes by wearing gorgeous clothes and dousing himself with perfume. He wears flowers in his buttonhole and sports long bangs and hair gel. Spotlessly clean from head to toe, he sucks mints to have fresh breath and smokes foreign cigarettes to look cool. As expected, his look attracts the attention of lascivious prostitutes, none of whom, however, is rich enough to keep him. Eventually one of his friends teases him out of his travesty by telling him that he looks like a huatou,aplayboy/gigolo, and that is no way to swindle respectable people. “If what you are after is sex,” his friend Xiaolong says, “then by all means, keep this look, but if you want to con people, you have to look respectable!”26 So after a trip to the clothing store and to the barber, he becomes a proper-looking gentleman, wearing a long gown and a traditional queue, and can go on to swindle respectable people. Once more here and elsewhere in Chinese fiction, cloth makes the man (and the woman). As the Chinese proverb says, when dressed up as a dragon, you will look like one, and when attired as a tiger...27 I hope I have amply illustrated how the authors of fictional sources of this period considered clothing and its “seasons” as essential to drawing up their characters. We have also seen how closely they tied Shanghai to being fashion conscious. According to the novels and as we can see from pictures and illustrations of the period, the shimao look in Shanghai was a sort of hybrid Western look (figs. 2 and 3). Both men and women could choose to wear Western clothing from head to toe or to “accessorize,” adopting one or two Western items, such as sunglasses, a hairdo, or an umbrella, with a long gown or silk trousers and jacket. Women, and especially prostitutes, enjoyed cross- dressing in both Chinese and Western garb and often produced stronger effects on the observers.28 positions 11:2 Fall 2003 308

Figure 2 Fashionable man dressed in Western coat and Chinese gown. Collection of Paola Zamperini

Our purpose, however, is not simply to point out the greater attention writers of the time devoted to fashion. Keeping true to our purpose to “go somatic,” now that we have individuated the clothes, we have to read them in order to understand the meanings of the bodies they deﬁne. A very simple observation could be that writers thought wearing perfume and bodily hygiene a novelty for a man. This points to interesting changes in Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 309

Figure 3 Late Qing courtesan in Chinese dress and with Western accessories. Collection of Paola Zamperini

bodily practices and aesthetic standards, very likely due to the fact that by the late Qing in many houses of foreign concessions in Shanghai residents could have access to running water.29 Yetbydevoting so much attention to clothes and the way they deﬁne their characters’ social identity, late Qing writers are not simply mirroring changes taking place in the society around them. They are interpreting them, both for themselves and for their readers. They are making fun of their fashionable characters, whose attire must have been well known to their readers, if not from ﬁrsthand experience, at least through the pictorials widely circulating in China at the time. They are also laughing at the people who are so fashion conscious that they judge people positions 11:2 Fall 2003 310

only by their covers, as it were. Thus we often find men and women who are swindled by shady characters like Pan Shao’an and Zhou Celiu. But behind the laughter late Qing novelists elicit, we also see looming larger anxieties and preoccupations. Clearly, it is not only sartorial codes that are in disarray in a city where a swindler looks just like a man of letters and a gigolo is mistaken for a scion of a noble family. What does it mean that in Shanghai, beggars dress as officials and officials as beggars, and respectable women deck themselves up as whores while harlots ride about looking like noblewomen? Nothing is what it seems anymore. What then?

The Schizophrenic Body Everyone is at pains to appear that which he is not and no-one endeavours to be seen as he is. A man acts the prince with his clothes alone, I mean without possessing the merit, the title or the income, and in his borrowed ﬁnery seeks mirrors everywhere to make love to himself.—Puget de La Serre, L’Entretien des bons esprits sur les vanités du monde (1631)

Clothes made the man and man made the clothes, what then was the man who wore the clothes of another?—Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing

While in late Qing novels courtesans, gigolos, and wealthy youth and sojourners adopt without a second thought the Westernized Shanghai look to participate in the leisure economy of Shanghai, their authors, along with a handful of their characters, are much more troubled by these sartorial transformations. The extravagant mixture of Chinese and Western styles sported by women on the streets of Shanghai causes great preoccupation in the Western-educated doctor Minshi, returned to Shanghai after a ten-year sojourn abroad: As for the attire of men and women, the majority of the men wore leather shoes and straw hats, looking neither Chinese nor foreign. Most of the women wore queues and gold-rimmed glasses, masquerading as students. Their faces were smeared with make-up, like freaks that looked neither male nor female. Minshi was very surprised and thought to himself: If Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 311

China continues to be so chaotic, and its superﬁcial knowledge of civilization (wenming) still so haphazard, we will make fools of ourselves in front of the foreigners. Our level of civilization is still thousands of miles apart from theirs, and who knows what world ours will become!30 Shanghai has become a city where prostitutes dressed as men hold ban- quets where they summon other prostitutes to entertain them.31 What are we to make of courtesans riding about in their chariots dressed as foreign Western men, not to mention those female students who have natural feet and wear their hair in a braid like Chinese men had done since the Manchu conquest?32 It is true that, in many late Qing novels, dressing up as a female student, a Chinese dame aux camelias,oranaspiring Farinelli can be a very effective way to seduce men, who often are shown as intrigued by the erotic novelty of these transgressive looks.33 But clearly, not everybody buys into them. When a group of friends discusses a rumor about stolen queues, one of them suggests that it is a way to scare off the girl students who are wearing such masculine hairdos.34 We are not surprised when such attacks on the new looks of young people come from the older generation. In Haishang fanhuameng,DuShaomu is a Suzhou youth who, at his ﬁrst visit to Shanghai, gets seduced by the city’s lifestyle and adopts it wholeheartedly. One day he runs into an old-fashioned friend of his father and gets a good scolding for wearing a foreign undershirt. The older man asks him what he, a proper Chinese, is doing wearing such a useless piece of clothing. Du Shaomu mutters some excuses and leaves as fast as he can, cursing him as a pompous and obsolete person.35 But what if the critique comes from another youth? Minshi is not an old fogy. He, on the contrary, is a young intellectual who, worried about his country’s future, decides to go overseas to study, à la Lu Xun, both Chinese and Western medicine. This is an important factor indicating that we need to explore the matter further. For centuries in Chinese literature and culture, fashion had been used as a principle for reading the world and the body. Accordingly, the rapid and confusing changes in late Qing Shanghai fashion reveal and uncover the social chaos that is spreading throughout Chinese society. If clothes and attire prevent the eye of the beholder from reading a body as female any longer, is that not chaos? And is it not chaos if the very respectable Mrs. Jiang (whose positions 11:2 Fall 2003 312

only fault is a penchant for gambling and gaudy makeup and flashy dresses) is arrested because policemen mistake her for a streetwalker while she is riding in a chariot in broad daylight in the company of her husband?36 One could then argue that these representations reflect anxiety vis-à-vis consumerism and Shanghai women’s increasing visibility in public places. This would be no surprise, as already in Ming times, members of the elite worried about the expansion of the consumer market in relation to fashion, across both class and gender divides.37 Yet here we are not dealing with concerns expressed by representatives of the gentry worried about their priv- ileges. For one thing, the satire and the criticism attached to spending money on clothes are part and parcel of the attack on the consumerist lifestyle that by the end of the nineteenth century had become associated with Shanghai.38 Participating in the fashion game of Shanghai also uncovers one’s ability to gain access to a circuit of consumption whose purpose is to satisfy one’s most narcissistic drives. In traditional Chinese fiction, there is a cost attached to any kind of pleasure. Consequently, in late Qing Shanghai, the capital of leisure culture, where pleasures and the venues to get them multiply daily, price tags start showing everywhere and writers are quick to point them out to their readers. Pursuing leisure is expensive financially, emotionally, and physically, and many are the men and the women who lose everything, from their wealth to their lives, in the pursuit of pleasure. We shall explore this aspect further in the concluding remarks. Being satirized in contemporary novels is not, after all, such a high price to pay for being trendy. But by running after the ephemeral goddess of fashion, These people are losing something more important than individual wealth. They are losing their national and cultural bodies. Who wears what and why is used to show how Shanghai is inhabited by a group of impostors: women who look like men, men who look like foreigners, and foreigners who look like Chinese. Clothes do not match a person and one’s status and inner world any longer. They do not match one’s race or gender any more. Minshi uses a very important term in his reflection quoted above. He worries about the fact that foreigners will find China lacking in wenming. This is a problematic term. Both noun and adjective, it is usually translated into English as civilization/civilized, modernity/modern, and at times even enlightenment/enlightened.Yet it is essential to understand the culture of the Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 313

period under study here. In premodern times, the term referred to the golden times of the san dai, the three dynasties of yore, seen as the apex of Chinese civilization, and indicated longing for it.39 By the later half of the nineteenth century, it also came to mean civilization in the Western sense, involving movement, change, modernization, and progress, vis-à-vis a tradition that was seen as its static, uncivilized antagonist, a residue of a backward society that had to be discarded.40 These two conﬂicting meanings of wenming, longing for Chineseness and Western enlightenment, coexisted for a while at the turn of the twentieth century, and this tension between nostalgia for the past and longing for the future is clearly expressed in late Qing ﬁction.41 WhatworriesMinshiisthatpeopleinShanghai,byadoptingthe“wenming look” to please their narcissistic selves, are missing the point. Even worse, they are embracing a travesty of civilization, not its essence. For example, for a young Chinese girl, going to school is important not because it entails, among other things, wearing her hair in a certain fashion. Her education is meant to create a new breed of women who will help China become a strong nation, women who will be able to live up to the standards of civilization, here equated with the West, and not to spread among the female population new and offensive hairdos. The same holds true for men: wearing Western clothing should be indicative of a person who has studied Western learning abroad and thus is able to bring about the technological and political reforms China as a nation needs to become a global power. According to the tradition, these new clothes should match and be harmonious with the wearer’s inner world. Wearing foreign clothes should make of each girl a proper, enlightened creature and of each man an evolved, open-minded reformer. But late Qing authors do not seem to see much progress and civilization on the streets of Shanghai. Lu Shi’e, an old Shanghainese writer, echoes, in amuch more ironic fashion, Minshi’s preoccupations: Civilized, you say? Of course Shanghai is civilized, Shanghai people are able to do what no one else could, they are as civilized as it gets! And if you talk about being uncivilized, well, of course Shanghai is uncivilized.42 Shanghai people are able to achieve what other people could not; they are even more uncivilized than the barbarians are! In other places, “civilized” positions 11:2 Fall 2003 314

and “uncivilized” are opposites. If you are civilized, you are not uncivilized. If you are uncivilized, you are not civilized. But that is not the way things work in Shanghai. Here uncivilized people can become all of a sudden civilized, and civilized people can suddenly become uncivilized. It is uncivilized people who commit civilized deeds; and these civilized people are the ones who commit uncivilized acts. If they were not extremely civilized people, they would not be able to commit extremely uncivilized actions!43 We see here how wenming,asalook, a behavior, and an identity closely associated with Shanghai, is problematic to say the least. In its intersection with fashion and the body, it entails a highly unstable metamorphosis that destabilizes gender as well as bodily, national, and social identities, especially when we are talking about men. In real life, the first people to sport Western-style clothing were students returning from Japan and other foreign countries. Thus the expectation that such an attire engendered in the viewers would be one of someone educated, fluent in at least a couple of foreign languages, and endowed with a good level of “civilization.” But this is not the way most returned students are portrayed. Liu Dong, a returned student from Japan, sports a fashionable Panama hat and addresses his friends as “Mister this ” and “Mister that,” but that is as far as his acquisition of Western wenming,which could rescue China from its fall precisely vis-à-vis the West, goes.44 In the same novel, we find another of these impostors, whose name, appropriately, is Jia Yangren (homophone with three characters that mean “fake foreigner”). He goes even further by posing as a foreigner to avoid paying his whoring bills.45 In Xin Shanghai, Lu Shi’e gives a totally new interpretation of the sick man of Asia when he writes about Chinese students in Japan. According to him, they are all scoundrels who waste the nation’s money in whoring and engaging in illicit activities, like the one who makes a deal with the doctors to squeeze money out of the Chinese patients. On top of that, the Japanese nurses make a living as prostitutes, so when summer comes, the Chinese students go en masse to stay in the hospital and waste the government’s money on the nurses. “So it is no wonder that people say our China is a sick country; it is all thanks to Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 315

the arduous efforts of our exchange students!” is the comment of one of the characters regarding such a scandalous state of affairs.46 But there are worse kinds of impostors. Jia Weixin (Jia Reform, a pun that can also mean “fake reform”) is introduced to the readers as a typical representative of those Chinese men who imitate exchange students to get by in Shanghai. He does not speak any foreign language and has never been abroad, yet he ﬁlls his mouth with words like equality, freedom, and revolution,without having any concrete plan to save China.47 Jia Weixin befriends a violent Western merchant whose main activity is getting drunk and trash- ing restaurants and brothels while the powerless and scared Chinese owners look on. Taking advantage of this connection and of the fact that people mistake him for a foreigner because of his clothes, Jia Weixin does not miss a chance to bully his fellow citizens. This is possible because people are quite scared of foreigners and are usually unable to stand up to them. For example, inside the Chinese city a very thick crowd of people bumping carelessly into one another parts to let two Westerners go through, and one of the characters comments that this is typical of Chinese people, to treat their compatriots badly while treating foreigners very well.48 Reading late Qing authors makes one realize that the writers of this period could lay a big claim to Ah Q’s paternity. No matter what the actual moral, social, or physical status of a Chinese man, his masculinity often comes away bruised and threatened from a brush with Western men.49 Physically stronger, better educated, wealthy, politically powerful and invincible, and often linguistically and culturally unreadable, Western men are the new looking glass in which late Qing male characters are forced to mirror themselves. And it is a quite problematic mirroring. As the examples above show, wearing the costume of the Western man does not equate with acquiring his desirable qualities. In chapter 8 of Wenming xiaoshi, the young Liu has escaped from the city after his friends have been arrested for revolutionary activities.50 He takes refuge in a temple adjacent to the house of foreign missionaries. Eventually Liu befriends one of the missionaries and tells him the truth about his predicament. The missionary promises to help him by going to the city to rescue his friends, as it were, from the law. He decides that it is best for Liu to wear Western-style clothes so that the Chinese will not bother him. After positions 11:2 Fall 2003 316

the student has worn the clothes, he is left with the surplus of the queue, which does not ﬁt his new attire. The missionary makes him roll it up, and voilà, he has become a jiawai waiguoren,afalse foreigner.51 When Liu looks at himself in the mirror, he feels ridiculous. What is even funnier, at least in the eyes of the writer, is when the two of them go out on the street and are walking side by side, “a foreigner dressed up as a fake Chinese, and a Chinese dressed up as a fake foreigner.”52 The missionary in question has adopted Chinese dress; he even shaves his head and grows a queue. He and his fellow missionaries study and copy Chinese people in every little thing, and it is only because of a couple of physical differences (nose and eyes) that people recognize them as foreigners. But they can speak Chinese, and they are knowledgeable in Chinese culture. When it comes to power, however, the difference between a fake foreigner and a real one, even one looking like a fake Chinese, becomes obvious. The fake foreigner has to borrow it, and often he abuses it, as we have seen. Even foreigners feel sorry for China as a nation when they have to deal with people like Jia Weixin and his associates, who just “talk the talk and do not walk the walk.” It is clear that adopting the wenming look can confer a limited and often dubious prestige. But it does not solve the problems of the body underneath, whose level of “civilization” is barely skin-deep. Another character in Wen- ming xiaoshi admits he has adopted foreign clothing because he could not afford Chinese-style clothing, which needs to be changed at least four times a year according to the seasons. Western dress, being black, is more practical, as it does not show as much dirt and stains. He says that since he switched to foreign clothes, he has tried to adopt the style of life of foreigners. But showering and changing clothes every day proved too much for him.53 In other words, underneath the emperor’s new clothes, he is just as dirty and as lice-ridden as he ever was. And where Western men stride with conﬁdence, stealing even the hearts of Chinese women, Chinese men stumble and falter in a daze of opium smoke. We are dealing in these texts with much more than fragments of a fashionable discourse. If Chinese men are forced to come to terms with the new model of masculinity proposed by the West, they also have to deal with their own tradition. That can be just as traumatic, as we have seen with Liu’s encounter with his new Westernized self. At a gathering in Shanghai, the Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 317

already mentioned Minshi meets some old-fashioned literati, portrayed as ridiculous readers of “dead books.” This gives him an opportunity to think about the lousy educational system of traditional China, sick with a disease that cannot be cured. Shortly after this reflection, he and his friend watch a show by a Western man, miraculously strong and powerful. This causes another series of considerations about the importance of physical exercise for Chinese people and the necessity of creating a physical education structure.54 The author establishes a clear equation between Chinese male identity as embodied by the “readers of dead books” and being outdated, weak, and sick. Western masculinity, on the other hand, is depicted as progressive, powerful, and healthy. Yetifthe Western mirror of masculinity can be alienating and disorienting, the traditional one is cracked. In other words, if Chinese men often look and at times feel ridiculous when masquerading in new clothes, it is not that easy anymore for them to look good wearing traditional garb. This is very well illustrated in the case of clothes of rank. Though the “old-style” official robes still retain at this point some of the aura of prestige they once possessed, Shanghai men have forgotten how to wear them. Even worse, the men who should be wearing them are not wearing them anymore, and vice versa. Two friends on a New Year’s morning encounter a beggar who, in order to attract his patrons’ goodwill, is dressed as an official. The author comments that everybody is an official in Shanghai, not only those who belong to the gentry or to the merchant class, but also prostitutes and the like, because as soon as they have some money, they buy a title so that they can parade around the street in official gown and hat.55 Everything is on sale in Shanghai, and why should badges of honor not enter the market of consumption? In the marketplace of Shanghai, one buyer is as good as another. Or is he? Mrs. Wang’s doltish husband may have the money to buy himself a title, but his travesty is exposed when it becomes clear that not only does he not know how to wear official robes, but he does not even understand their meaning. The badge of rank is sewn upside down on his gown, and the insignia that belongs on the wife’s garment has been sewed onto the husband’s.56 Wearing official clothes implies a ritual knowledge that is by now lost. The male body thus becomes doubly ridiculous; he cannot wear the old clothes and he cannot wear the new ones. positions 11:2 Fall 2003 318

The late Qing author’s uneasy satire, his self-mocking laughter, points at the man who cannot recognize himself in his fathers, the weak readers of dead books, or in his sons, the opium-smoking dandies. One should mention that women appear to enjoy themselves much more in “going wenming.” Not only do they get to unbind their feet, choose their lovers, and go to school; they get to like what they see when they look at themselves in the mirror. When Fu Caiyun is trying to decide what to wear for her visit to the empress, in her search for something new, striking, or out of the ordinary, she chooses a foreign dress: All of a sudden she thought about the elegant European dress she had recently purchased and ordered her maid to take it out. She walked slowly to her dresser and facing the mirror she proceeded to brush, wash, and put on her makeup. She coiled her hair in a large bun, tied on a rustling skirt that brushed the ground, draped a velvet scarf around her neck, and threw a sable cloak on her shoulders. On her head she had put a hat with padded flowers and snow-white feathers. At her feet she was sporting black shining leather shoes; on her trembling and lofty breast was pinned abouquet of flowers; on her fingers was a shining diamond: indeed the portrait of the Maiden of the Red Roses, she had transformed herself into the Lady of the Camellias.57 Fu Caiyun has fun getting dressed in foreign clothes and even finds herself lovely.58 The enjoyment of her own beauty reveals a narcissism that could exclude the male reader for whom the image is created. The woman-object- of-desire herself, thanks to her new attire, seems to have become more of an independent subject of desire. But it is just a trick to make her more alluring, like the pose of the courtesan in figure 1. Her role is still subordinated to the pleasure of the male viewer. In the end, woman’s body is plunged feet first into fictional narratives that cruelly liberate it just to make it sexier and more user friendly. One could be tempted to see these late Qing fictional characters and their masquerades as those of the body snatchers, temporary inhabitants of temporary spaces and temporary bodies. Or one could say it differently, calling late Qing bodies schizophrenic. Schizophrenic here refers to the fact that both male and female bodies appear to have more than one identity Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 319

and personality, and yet they are not comfortable with any. In the novels mentionedsofarwehaveseenhowthemalebodyistornbetweenhisChinese self, weakened by opium addiction and years spent bent over a book to study useless canons, and the model of iron-pumping and militarily enhanced Western manhood. But the female body is no better off. In Hualiu shenqing zhuan,wesee equally clearly illustrated the predicaments of late Qing male and female bodies.59 This novel was written for a contest launched by John Fryer to depict the social evils of China, and in particular to decry the evils of opium smoking and foot binding. Accordingly, the opium addict ends up living in piss and foul odors to satisfy his addiction, and he loses his fortune, his masculinity, and his pride in all sorts of disgusting, tragic, and pitiful situations.60 He can be saved only through a retraining in Western learning. By the same token, the novel shows the physical advantages of a woman whose feet are unfettered by bindings. Standing strong on her natural feet, she can ward off rapists and escape the brutalities suffered by—in what must be one of the most gruesome scenes in late Qing fiction—a bound-foot woman at the hands of the Taipings because her crippled feet prevented her from fleeing.61 By the end of the novel, the writer has convinced his reader that having natural feet also makes it easier to get pregnant, to make money for the family, to aid one’s husband’s family fortunes, and so on. This reading is very seductive, and it seems to be supported by early Republican images such as figure 4, where we encounter such a “modern and civilized” woman. Though very likely still a courtesan, she has gone a long way from perhaps even just twenty years earlier, when another courtesan had been photographed next to a mirror. That earlier picture (fig. 1) made her into a traditional object of desire whose eyes were diverted from the viewer and thus invited him into a penetration that was not threatening but submissive. This is the same pose that Fu Caiyun strikes in the passage quoted above, even in her new set of clothes. On the contrary, the woman here is facing her viewer without fear, standing tall on her natural feet, and sporting a long queue; clearly feminine, she is not afraid of the gaze of the viewer. But in the late Qing period the metamorphosis of the female body is still very much in process. Thus, in Hualiu shenqing zhuan,while depicting the practice of foot binding in a negative way, the author is also indulging in positions 11:2 Fall 2003 320

Figure 4 Early Republican woman in qipao.CollectionofPaola Zamperini

accurately describing the various types, forms, and guises of bound feet in away that falls short of being fetishist. The rhetoric deployed here is still that of patriarchy. Indeed, the achievements of women with natural feet are good because they aid the patriarchal family and its survival in the turbulent landscape of the end of the Qing dynasty. The author seems to be saying that unbinding women’s feet is a way to have more efﬁcient maids. Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 321

We cannot blame the male writers for creating such contradictory and schizophrenic characters and for sending such mixed messages to their (mostly male) readers. Late Qing Chinese, both within and outside the novels, are left alone to sail through the stormy seas of a confusing and messy Westernized modernity. The riddle posed to Chinese masculinity and femininity by Shanghai is solved through a complex balance of a bodily and mental knowledge that the Chinese forefathers do not possess. Chinese men and women have to retrain their bodies and learn how to orient themselves in the constantly changing urban landscape. Theirs are new bodies, shaped by the often dangerous new knowledge that come from the West, that must be cautiously approached and selected. So it is not surprising that both male and female bodies, weakened to begin with—the male by opium, the female by centuries of foot binding—should miss the point of Western wenming and become schizophrenic, unreadable, and ridiculous. The late Qing body discovers consumption without discov- ering how not to be consumed by it (though one could argue that the latter is one of the main appeals of consumption). It can aspire to break free from traditional technologies of bodily behavior in relationship to clothing and social performance, and yet it is still trapped by centuries of bodily discipline. The body here, in other words, is weighed down by its historical memories. Fictional bodies have always been ambivalent, polymorphous, and pro- tean. Otherwise they would not be ﬁctionally interesting. But in the end, what is the tense of late Qing bodies? The present entails dramatic identity struggles; the past cannot be forgotten, and yet it becomes more and more humiliating; and given the way things are going, late Qing writers clearly indicate, it is doubtful that Chinese people will make it to the future if they do not “become civilized.” So we could say that the body’s tense is here a “present perfect.” Because of their new clothes and the new movements and spaces they create and mirror, Chinese bodies emerge on the surface as both historical and futuristic. The late Qing body remembers its past glories, its swaying movements, and its pride in its brocade robes, and it is shamed by its incoherent travesty, its cropped hair. The tighter clothes on the women seen in the streets are alluring, but centuries of fetish for small feet and a mincing gait are not easily forgotten. positions 11:2 Fall 2003 322

Becoming wenming is by no means an easy, painless process. It clearly entails a cultural, physical, and emotional alienation that the writers of this period so compellingly describe. They and their readers lived daily in a very complex reality that included Western technology, global trade, foreign presence, drugs, sex, and a constant reconﬁguring of moral, gender, and social boundaries. How to solve its predicaments?

Death’s Century Madam Fashion: We can truly say: indeed this is Death’s century.—Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali (1824)

Giacomo Leopardi imagined, between 15 and 18 February 1824, a conversation between Madam Death and Madam Fashion on how best to send the whole world to a quick and early demise. Madam Fashion says that she and her sister have to collaborate in order to achieve their common goal more efﬁciently. In Leopardi’s allegory, Death and Fashion are condemned to perpetual motion, so the dialogue unfolds as the two are running side by side. Fashion:IamFashion, your sister. Death:Mysister? Fashion:That’s right! Don’t you remember we were both born from Caducity? Death:What do I, the enemy of memory, have to remember? Fashion:Oh, but Iremember it well, and know that we both aim to unravel and constantly alter the way things are in the world, even though we go about it in different ways.62 In Leopardi’s vision, Fashion and Death, forever on the move, both aim to destroy the world. Similarly, we have seen in late Qing novels that indeed the identity shaped by clothes and sartorial deadlines keeps dying. We have pointed out how even a trendsetter like Hu Baoyu has to retire. Others exit the arena of fashion in more tragic ways. Yan Ruyu, once one of Shanghai’s most beautiful and desirable courtesans, loses her mind and runs naked in the street, followed and jeered on by children. Totally insane, her body Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 323

devastated by syphilis, she parades one last time on the avenues that had seen her former glory.63 Similarly Chunyun, another former beauty reduced to begging, dies of exposure, frozen to death.64 Her dead body, once clad in foreign silks, is displayed to public view in rags, unveiling the ephemeral nature of the new look she had so passionately embraced. Chinese women, plunged into Westernized modernity, are not protected in the least by their new boots and capes from sickness, poverty, and death. Fashion and Death, indeed, go hand in hand. The male characters experience an even more problematic death of identity and selfhood. As I already pointed out, the father figure of male ancestry disappears in Shanghai. These men are not standing anymore in their ancestors’ shadow but are not yet in their own.65 The few fictional characters who manage not to lose their fortunes and/or their lives in Shanghai are “Confucian superheroes” like Minshi, who can adopt the garb of foreign modernity—in Minshu’s case by becoming a doctor—while holding on to their Chinese values, such as family, attachment to learning, and loyalty. But people like him are few. The late Qing body is both in and out of time, fragmented, and its connection with the past is lost forever. If we can talk about modernity in connection to fashion and the body, late Qing fiction becomes “modern” because of the messy and painful alienation most people experience in Shanghai, a condi- tion so often associated with modernity in many cultures. One could see these representations in a more positive light, perhaps, as the “growing pains” of a new Chinese self at a moment when change or death was the only possible solution for China as a nation. The old body has to die to let the new one emerge. The space of this birth in these novels is Shanghai, the arena in which the male self wages his battle to fulfill the pursuit of pleasure that will help him to become a subject while retaining his masculinity. The erotic component of his pursuit is embodied and simultaneously challenged by prostitutes, female students, and fashion-crazy housewives who both fulfill and somehow dominate the male, thanks to their new but unstable and precarious agency. But this reading is just as problematic because it reduces this tangled web of representations to teleological Western modernity as the manifested destiny of China. Perhaps we should see what late Qing writers represent positions 11:2 Fall 2003 324

as coming to terms with a new identity, which consists of the impossibility of permanence in terms of subject fabrication and which is shaped by the constantly frustrated desire of a subject position entailing power and control over one’s identity.66 In other words, these writers should be located at the end of a long line of Chinese intellectuals who, in various historical junctures, from at least the Tang dynasty onward, had to redeﬁne their own sense of self and belonging against the changing landscapes of their times.67 At the same time, it is important to point out that one of the main facets of this new self, and the one aspect that perhaps most brutally sets it apart from its predecessors, is its multiplicity. We are not dealing just with one or two characters that suffer from “Shanghai-induced wenming traumatic disorder.” All male and female characters, from all social classes, suffer from this “disease” in various degrees, as well as from its narcissistic drive to pleasure itself regardless of the consequences. At odds with Confucian precepts that entail erasure of the self and its pleasure, the individual, driven by his or her desire to obtain permanent jouissance through the expensive lifestyle of Shanghai, expends all his or her energy in trying to gain a foothold in a new and disorienting space. In this arena subjects are at once invisible, because they are away from their family and land of origin (in Shanghai, everyone is a stranger), and yet visible as never before because it is the eyes of others that validate them as individuals. Thus this new identity, regardless of whether we call it wenming or modern, is at once a quest and a state of being, static and in motion, and it constantly negotiates between inner and outer, self and others, past and present, individual and society, in a constant state of ﬂux. The geographies of desire mapped by the pursuit of selfhood and pleasure in Shanghai, the subject positions it allows and destroys, the histories it erases and the new ones it invents—all these can be read on the bodies and the clothes worn by late Qing characters.

Notes

The research for this article was carried out thanks to a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, 2000–2001. My gratitude goes to all the researchers there and in other institutes for their help and guidance, in particular to Liu Yuan-ju and Wu Renshu. I thank Tani Barlow, Claudia Brown, Antonia Finnane, Aileen Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 325

Lau, Valerie Steele, and Yeh Wen-hsin for their support, feedback, and encouragement. Antonio, John, Meimei, and Regina Llamas Kieschnick enhanced in indescribable fashions my stay in Taipei.I also want to thank Davide Cucino and Nicoletta Sileno for their assistance in Beijing. Last but not least, I thank Tina Mai Chen, who made this whole enterprise a reality. 1AsGail Hershatter so aptly put it, “The question of who’s dressing Hu Baoyu [a Shanghai courtesan often represented in fiction; see below] is more important than who is undressing her” (Gail Hershatter, private conversation, August 2001). 2This article deals with fictional representations of clothing and their possible meanings; thus it is not an article about the history of fashion and/or the clothing industry in the late Qing period. There are many books and studies dealing with this topic and with the issue of historical changes in male and female clothing during the late imperial and Republican Chinese periods, and it would take too much space to list them all here. See, just to mention afew, Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren, eds., Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture (Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999); Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols, China, 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Luo Suwen, Nuxing yu jindaizhongguo shehui [Women in modern Chinese society] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1996), 168–204; Luo, “Qingmo Shanghai dushi nuzhuangde yanbian (1880–1910)” [Evolution in women’s urban clothing in late Qing Shanghai] (paper presented at the symposium on Chinese women’s history, Academia Sinica, 23–25 August 2001); Claire Roberts, ed., Evolution and Revolution: Chinese Dress, 1700s–1900s (Sydney: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 1997); Valerie Steele and John Major, eds., China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). 3The main primary sources for the present article are Chen Sen, Pinhua baojian [A precious mirror for ranking flowers] (1849; rpt., Xi’an: Xibei daxue chubanshe, 1993); Han Ziyun, Haishanghua [Flowers of Shanghai] (1894; rpt., Taipei: Huanggua zazhishe, 1983); Han- shang Mengren, Fengyue meng [A dream of romance] (1848; rpt., Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1989); Li Boyuan, Haitian hongxueji [Lonely goose deserted by the world] (1904; rpt., Nanjing: Jiangsu gujichubanshe, 1997); Li,Wenming xiaoshi [A brief history of enlightenment] (1903; rpt., Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1989); Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai [New Shanghai] (1909; rpt., Shanghai: Shanghai gujichubanshe 1997); Lu Shi’e, Shi wei gui [The ten-tailed turtle] (1911; rpt., Shenyang: Chunfen wenyi chubanshe, 1994); Luyixuan Zhuren, Hualiu shenqing zhuan [A tale of deep passion] (1895; rpt., Beijing: Shifan daxue chuban she, 1992); Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu [The nine-tailed fox] (1910; rpt., Taipei: Guanya chuban, 1984); Sun Jiazhen, Haishang fanhuameng [Shanghai’s lavish dreams] (1903; rpt., Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 1991); Wu Jianren, Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang [Bizarre events eyewitnessed over the past twenty years] (1910; rept., Nanjing: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1988); Wu, Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu [The wonderful book of the four guardian gods of Shanghai’s courtesans] (1898; rpt., Harbin: Beifang wenyi chubanshe, 1998); Yu Da, positions 11:2 Fall 2003 326

Qinglou meng [A dream of blue pavilions] (1878; rpt., Taipei: Baihua Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo daxi, 1980); Zeng Pu, Niehaihua [A flower in an ocean of sin] (1905; rpt., Taipei: Wenhua tushu gongsi, 1990); Zhang Chunfan, Jiuweigui [The nine-tailed turtle] (1910; rpt., Beijing: Renmin Zhongguo chubanshe, 1993). However, the analysis presented here draws extensively on the whole body of late Qing fiction. 4Itwould amount to virtual insanity to try to list all the texts that have been published in the past twenty years about the body and fashion. Thus I will limit myself here to list those that have been most meaningful to the present article: R. Barnes and J. B. Eicher, Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (New York: Berg, 1992); Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (New York: Routledge, 1994); Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Brian S. Turner, eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991); Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaf and Nadia Tazi,eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989); Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 1990); Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Ann Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Kodansha International, 1994); Marilyn J. Horn and Lois M. Gurel, eds., The Second Skin: An Interdisciplinary Study of Clothing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981); Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the “Ancien Regime” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 145–147; Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For an exhaustive and updated bibliography about body and fashion, see Entwistle, Fashioned Body, 240. 5Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 190. 6 Shigeisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), esp. 166–167. 7Desiderius Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (Froben Bale, 1530), trans. B. McGregor, in Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 25 of Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Jesse Kelley Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 269. Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 327

8For the main characteristics of late Qing novels see Ah Ying, Wan Qingxiaoshuo shi [History of the late Qing novel] (Bejing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980); Chen Pingyuan, Ershiji Zhongguo xiaoshuoshi [History of the Chinese novel in the twentieth century] (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1989); S. H. L. Cheng, “‘Flowers of Shanghai’ and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan Novel” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1980); Alexander Des Forges’s groundbreaking work on the Shanghai novel, “Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from ‘Lives of Shanghai Flowers’ (1892) to ‘Midnight’ (1933)” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univer- sity, 1998), and his “Opium/Leisure/Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wak- abayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press), 167–185; Milena Dolezoleva-Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Patrick Hanan, “The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60, no. 2 (2000): 413; Hanan, “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” in Shib- ianyuweixin: Wan Ming yu Wan Qingdewenxueyishu [Change and reform: The legacy of late Ming and Late Qing literature] (Taipei: Wenzhesuo chubanshe, 2001); Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe [A brief history of Chinese fiction], in Lu Xun Quanji [in Collected works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), vol. 9; David Der-Wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Henry Y. H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 9 See Paola Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter: Fashioning Modernity in Late Qing Novels,” Fashion Theory 5, no. 2 (June 2001): 203, for a discussion of representations of Western clothing in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Chinese fiction. 10 For the role played by Shanghai as a fundamental “chronotope” in late Qing fiction, see Cheng, “‘Flowers of Shanghai’ and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan Novel”; Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 180–181. For a brilliant discussion of Shanghai as a literary trope and as a modern metropolis, see Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories,” esp. 8–70. 11 Lu Shi’e, Shi wei gui, 340. This little-known novel is an amusing spoof of the more famous Jiuweigui, but written in vernacular Chinese. 12 For more information about Hu Baoyu, a real historical figure, see Gail Hershatter,Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 176, and Paola Zamperini, “Lost Bodies: Representing Prostitution in Late Qing Fiction” (manuscript), 29–46. 13 Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu, 107. For the commercialization of the fictional relationships between late Qing courtesans and their patrons, see Zamperini, “Lost Bodies,” 82–116. positions 11:2 Fall 2003 328

14 The “salt water sisters” were Cantonese prostitutes who specialized in providing sexual services to foreign customers. 15 For the foreign look of Chinese courtesans, see also Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter,” 203–204. 16 Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu, 315. 17 Ibid., 377. 18 Ibid., 378. 19 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 1276. 20 Ibid., 759. 21 Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu, 493. 22 Lu Shi’e, Shi wei gui, 339–340. 23 Pan An was a man from ancient times renowned for his beauty. Pan Shao’an’s name, literally, the Lesser Pan An, makes clear his inferiority in comparison with the “original model.” 24 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 443. 25 Ibid., 808. 26 Ibid., 822. 27 Ibid., 823. 28 Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter,” 203–204. 29 See Liu Shangling, Xiyang faming zai zhongguo [Western inventions in China] (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 2001). 30 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 1162. 31 Ibid., 1021. 32 Ibid., 1025. 33 Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai, 166. 34 Ibid., 127. 35 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 193. 36 Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai, 168. 37 See Antonia Finnane, “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity’: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in this issue of positions;WuRenshu, “Mingdai pingmin fushideliux- ingfengshangyushidafudefanying”[Popularsartorialtrendsandcustomsandeliteopposition in the Ming dynasty], Xinshixue [New history], September 1999, 55–109. 38 See Des Forges, “Opium/Leisure/Shanghai.” 39 For the history and meanings of the term wenming in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, see Fang Weigui, “Jinxiandai Zhingguo ‘wenming,’ ‘wenhua,’ guan” [Perspectives on “civilization” and “culture” in modern and contemporary China], www.gwdg.de/˜oas/ wsc/wenming.htm, 11. I am indebted to Eugenio Menegon for directing me to this very useful article. 40 Ibid., 2–3. The compound wenming was already used in texts such as the Yi Jing [Classic of changes] and the Shu Jing [Classic of history]. Lydia Liu describes wenming in its new Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 329

nineteenth-century usage as a “return-graphic loan,” a kanji term derived from classical Chinese—in other words, a classical Chinese compound that Japanese translators, at the turn of the nineteenth century, used to translate new Western concepts. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 308–309. 41 In my previous study of the relationship between clothing and identity in late Qing fiction, I connected this schizophrenic longing to the emergence of a problematic “modern” identity, tormenting for men and superficial for women. I still think that we can use the words modern and modernity—meant not as aesthetic value but as marker of innovation and change— within this context. But I now believe that it is more meaningful to investigate which fictional horizons the semantic field of wenming maps out, and its connection with clothes and the body. See Zamperini, “Clothes That Matter.” For an excellent discussion of the relationship established by many recent scholars between late Qing fiction and modernity, see Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories,” esp. 234–239. 42 Wenming here is clearly the antonym of yeman,uncivilized, barbaric, foreign. 43 Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai,1. 44 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 1162. 45 Ibid., 1379. 46 Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai, 216–217. 47 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 783. 48 Ibid., 793. 49 Late Qing novels portray Western men in often contradictory fashions. At times we see them depicted as tyrannical drunks; at others, as intelligent and sensitive people who speak Chinese and understand China’s predicament. These conflicting representations clearly speak of the ambiguous relationship Chinese writers at this time felt toward the West. 50 Li, Wenming xiaoshi,66–67. One could say that Li had an eye for fashion. In another of his novels, Haitian hongxueji,heoften seemed to delight in describing accurately how male and female characters are dressed. 51 Li, Wenming xiaoshi, 67. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 129. 54 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 1645–1647. 55 Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai, 191. 56 Ibid., 201–202. 57 Zeng, Niehaihua, 108. 58 Ibid., 346. 59 Luyixuan, Hualiu shenqing zhuan,isthe ideal text for studying the schizophrenic body of the late Qing period, both male and female. It was published in 1895 and then in 1908. See also Hanan, “Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China,” 413. positions 11:2 Fall 2003 330

60 Luyixuan, Hualiu shenqing zhuan, 19. 61 Ibid., 31, 45. 62 Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali (1824; rpt., Milan: Garzanti, 1982), 44. The translation is my own. 63 See Paola Zamperini, The Secret des Fleurs: Love, Death, and Syphilis (Leiden: Brill, forthcom- ing), for a study of representations of death and syphilis in late Qing novels about Shanghai. 64 Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 1136 and 1138, respectively. 65 See Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Kinship, Personality, and Social Mobility in Village China (New York: Anchor, 1967); Liu Xin, The Otherness of Self: A Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 66 See Leo Oufan Lee, “The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations,” 31–61, for the relationship between popular press and modernity inShanghai,andYehWen-hsin,“Introduction:InterpretingChineseModernity,1900–1950,” 1–28, for an interesting discussion of the stakes involved in discussing Chinese modernity, both in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Yeh Wen-hsin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 67 See, for example, Bai Juyi’s poem attacking the women of his time who adopted West- ern fashions: Bai Juyi, “Shishizhuang” [Modern clothes], in Dianziban Bai Juyi shi quanji [Collected poems of Bai Juyi on the Web], vol. 4, at www.bigchalk.com/cgibin/WebObjects/ WOPortal.woa/wa/HWCDA/file?fileid=171853& flt=High_School& pathTitles=/Poetry_ of_Tang_Dynasty/Bai_Ju_Yi_(772_-_846_A_D_)/All_Works_by_Bai_. See also Suzanne E. Cahill, “‘Our Women Are Acting Like Foreigners’ Wives!’: Western Influences on Tang Dynasty Women’s Fashion,” in Steele and Major, China Chic, 103.