China’s Literary Cosmopolitans Sinica Leidensia

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The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl China’s Literary Cosmopolitans

Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters

Edited by

Christopher Rea

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China’s literary cosmopolitans : Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the world of letters / edited by Christopher Rea. pages cm. — (Sinica Leidensia ; Volume 125) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29996-2 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29997-9 (e-book) 1. Qian, Zhongshu, 1910-1998—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Yang, Jiang, 1911—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Rea, Christopher G., editor.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Acknowledgements vii About the Contributors ix

Introduction: All the World’s a Book 1 Christopher Rea

1 Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies; Or, The Serious Business of Marriage 14 Amy D. Dooling

2 “Passing Handan without Dreaming”: Passion and Restraint in the Poetry and Poetics of Qian Zhongshu 41 Yugen Wang

3 Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 65 Judith M. Amory

4 How to Do Things with Words: Yang Jiang and the Politics of Translation 87 Carlos Rojas

5 Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 109 Ronald Egan

6 The Pleasures of Lying Low: Yang Jiang and Chinese Revolutionary Culture 133 Wendy Larson

7 The Institutional Mindset: Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang on Marriage and the Academy 157 Christopher Rea

8 “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three”: Yang Jiang’s New Intimate Public 179 Jesse Field vi contents

9 The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Qian Zhongshu and “World Literature” 210 Theodore Huters

Epilogue: All Will Come Out in the Washing 227 Christopher Rea

Appendix: Works in English by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang 233

Bibliography 238 Index 252 Acknowledgements

Those who have already had the pleasure of reading Qian Zhongshu’s and Yang Jiang’s literary works—and those who will—now have, in this volume, sev- eral excellent reading companions. Amy Dooling, Yugen Wang, Judith Amory, Carlos Rojas, Ronald Egan, Wendy Larson, Jesse Field, and Theodore Huters shed new light on the artistic and cultural importance of these two writers. My first thanks is to them for contributing their essays, which offer revelations for specialists as well as background information essential to new readers. A list of works by Qian and Yang currently available in English appears in the appendix. This book has its origins in an academic workshop hosted in December of 2010 by the Department of Asian Studies of the University of British Columbia, entitled “Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: A Centennial Perspective.” I would like to thank the scholars who participated in that event, including Alexa Huang, Ji Jin, Tiziana Lioi, Yaohua Shi, Wang Yao, John Benjamin Weinstein, Zhang Enhua, and my eight fellow co-authors. Their expertise has enriched this project in many ways. In conjunction with the workshop, UBC hosted a public event to mark the centenary anniversary of both writers’ births: “Celebrating 100 Years of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang.” Two highlights of the evening were the keynote address by Professor Theodore Huters (a revised version of which appears as chapter nine) and a performance of two scenes from Yang Jiang’s 1943 comedy of manners Heart’s Desire by students from my fourth-year Chinese course at UBC. Special thanks to Ted for his talk, to Dean of Arts Gage Averill for his opening remarks, and to the players: Evgenia Stroganova, William Darlington, Robert Connolly, Adele Kurek, Andrew Zeller, and Xenia Chiu. Generous grant funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, as well as co-sponsorship by UBC’s Dean of Arts, Department of Asian Studies, Institute of Asian Research, Department of English, Centre for Chinese Studies, and Department of Women and Gender Studies, made these gatherings possible. I would also like to thank Stacy Barber, Edward Barss, Lonnie Chase, Xenia Chiu, Ross King, Alice Lam, Maija Norman, Evgenia Stroganova, and Stephanie Yu for their support of and assistance with both events. One of the first tangible products to emerge from the UBC workshop was an issue of the translation journal Renditions (no. 76, Autumn 2011) commemorat- ing Yang Jiang’s one hundredth birthday. My thanks again to Ted Huters, its Chief Editor, for inviting me to edit that special issue, and to Judith Amory, Yaohua Shi, and Jesse Field for their translations. viii acknowledgements

Qin Higley at Brill was enthusiastic about this book from the beginning and has been a pleasure to work with. My thanks to her, and to her fellow editor Karen Cullen, for their help in making this book a reality.

Christopher Rea Taipei, January 2015 About the Contributors

Judith M. Amory is co-translator of Baptism by Yang Jiang (HKUP, 2007).

Amy D. Dooling is associate professor of Chinese at Connecticut College. She is author of Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China (Palgrave, 2005) and editor of two anthologies on Writing Women in Modern China (Columbia, 1998, 2005).

Ronald Egan is professor and chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. He is translator of Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters by Qian Zhongshu (Harvard, 1998) and author of The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge, 1985, 2009), Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Harvard, 1994), Qian Zhongshu’s Reading of the Classics: An Analysis of the Underlying Principles of Guanzhuibian (bilingual ed.) (National Tsing Hua, 1998), The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (2006), and The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (Harvard, 2014).

Jesse Field is translator of several works by Yang Jiang (Renditions, 2011) and author of the dissertation “Writing Lives in China: The Case of Yang Jiang” (Minnesota, 2012).

Theodore Huters is professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles and chief editor of the journal Renditions. He is author of Qian Zhongshu (Twain, 1982) and Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Hawai‘i, 2005) and editor of several works, including China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition by Wang Hui (Harvard, 2006).

Wendy Larson is professor of modern Chinese literature and film and vice provost for Portland programs at the University of Oregon. She is author of Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography (Duke, 1991), Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford, 1998), From Ah Q to Lei Feng: x about the contributors

Freud and the Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (Stanford, 2009), and a forthcoming study of Zhang Yimou.

Christopher Rea is associate professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65 (UBC Press and HKUP, 2015), and edi- tor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu (Columbia, 2011).

Carlos Rojas is associate professor of Chinese cultural studies, women’s studies, and arts of the moving image at Duke University. He is author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard, 2008), The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard, 2010), and Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Reform in Modern China (Harvard, 2015). He is co-editor of, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford, 2013) and Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge, 2009), and, with David Der-wei Wang, Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke, 2007). He is also translator of The Four Books (Grove/Atlantic, 2015) and Lenin’s Kisses (Grove/Atlantic, 2012) by Yan Lianke and, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, Brothers: A Novel by Yu Hua (Pantheon, 2009).

Yugen Wang is associate professor of Chinese at the University of Oregon. He is author of Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song (Harvard, 2011) and translator of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Sanlian, 1999). Introduction: All the World’s a Book

Christopher Rea

But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s posi- tion in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemo- rial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory1

“Chinese cosmopolitanism” may sound somewhat paradoxical. “Chinese” suggests a national, cultural, or ethnic exclusivism incompatible with the worldliness of a true cosmopolitan sensibility. This problem diminishes if we allow that cosmopolitanism, as an aspiration and behavior, may coexist with local affiliations, identities, and cultural expressions. Yet friction remains. Cosmopolitanism, like its various cognates, has long conjured up a hypotheti- cal ideal of perfect global humanism. In the 1820s, the essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830) wrote that:

Those who on pure cosmopolite principles, or on the ground of abstract humanity affect an extraordinary regard for the Turks and Tartars, have been accused of neglecting their duties to their friends and next-door neighbours. Well, then, what is the state of the question here? One human being is, no doubt, as much worth in himself, independently of the circumstances of time or place, as another; but he is not of so much value to us and our affections. Could our imagination take wing (with our speculative faculties) to the other side of the globe or to the ends of the universe, could our eyes behold whatever our reason teaches us to be possible, could our hands reach as far as our thoughts or wishes, we might then busy ourselves to advantage with the Hottentots, or hold intimate converse with the inhabitants of the Moon; but being as we are, our feelings evaporate in so large a space—we must draw the circle of our affections and duties somewhat closer—the heart hovers and fixes nearer home.2

1 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 169. 2 This essay about the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was anthologized in Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, or: Contemporary Portraits (1825).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_002 2 Rea

“Cosmopolite principles,” as Hazlitt sees it, founder on the reality that we care most about those physically closest to us. Those who adopt cosmopolitan- ism as a worldview or guide to living fail to see that their politics defy innate human impulses. But even as Hazlitt rejects “pure” cosmopolitanism as wrong- headed and unworkable, he acknowledges that if we let “our imagination take wing . . . we might then busy ourselves to advantage” with those on the other side of the globe. Moral and ethical concerns continue to dominate philosophical discus- sions of cosmopolitanism. Kwame Anthony Appiah identifies two strands of thought: “the idea that we have obligations to others” beyond family and tribe, and the idea that “we take seriously the value not just of human life but of par- ticular human lives” and the belief systems that shape them.3 A decade before Appiah, Jacques Derrida assessed cosmopolitanism in terms of the ethics of granting asylum to people who have committed inhumane acts. Derrida was motivated to find moral justification and institutional mechanisms for helping societies overcome bloody trauma. Cosmopolitanism, to him, meant not just being at home in the world (a metaphor that Timothy Brennan has charac- terized as boosterish and self-indulgent) but being forgiving, hospitable and welcoming to others.4 Other critics have focused on cosmopolitan power rela- tions, particularly in post-colonial societies.5 This book’s concerns are primarily literary. It focuses on two writers, Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910–1998) and Yang Jiang 楊絳 (b. 1911), husband and wife, whose careers as authors and literary scholars spanned most of the twentieth century. It offers a detailed look at their sustained engagement with the world of letters, focusing on matters of literary and critical style. Its main goal is to offer a comprehensive appraisal of their literary accomplishment (though not their scholarship, as I explain below). In this introduction, I argue that the cases of Qian and Yang, both individually and as a pair, also offer some answers to the question of why cosmopolitanism matters in the realm of modern Chinese letters. These two writers, well-versed in Euro-American literatures, wrote most of their works in China and in Chinese. This book thus introduces examples of literary cosmopolitanism that might be called Chinese-centric. Literary cosmopolitanism, as I use the term here, refers to the activity of circulating rhetoric and ideas through literary texts across borders and among languages, as well as to the disposition motivating such activity. Rhetoric and

3 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xv. 4 See Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness; Brennan, At Home in the World. 5 See, for example, the essays in Breckenbridge et al., Cosmopolitanism. Introduction 3 ideas, of course, are not are not subject to the same constraints as affection. Words may resonate on intellectual grounds, and distance might even amplify their resonance. The concerns of literary cosmopolitanism are not just ethical, moral or emotional, but also intellectual and stylistic. The focus here, then, is on a type of virtual sociability: converse between writers conducted through the medium of literary texts. A related goal is to keep theoretical discussions grounded—not just in texts and intertexts, but in historical circumstance. To begin with, in the Chinas that Qian and Yang lived in, to “hold intimate con- verse with the inhabitants of [far-off lands]” was not a farfetched ideal but a cultural imperative.

Chinese Cosmopolitanisms

Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang’s lives spanned multiple ages of Chinese cos- mopolitanism. Here I mention a few, which historians may parse even more finely. Both were born at the turn of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, when China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), was overthrown and replaced with a republi- can government. This was the culmination of several decades of what might be called the internationalization of Chinese political thought. Reformist think- ers, inspired by both Chinese and foreign models, had put forward utopian models such as Kang Youwei’s 康有爲 (1858–1927) Grand Unity (datong 大同), which sought to integrate China and its people with the races, nations, and civ- ilizations of the world. Chinese emperors had long referred to their empires as All Under Heaven (tianxia 天下).6 Now, the Republic of China (est. 1912) was but one member of an international community of nation-states. The republi- can moment symbolized, for China, a new era of relational thinking. The weakness of China’s membership in this community was exposed at the end of World War I, when the Western powers who negotiated the Treaty of Versailles granted to Japan, over the Chinese delegation’s objections, German concessions in Shandong province. The May Fourth Movement, named after protests that occurred in Beijing on May 4, 1919, hastened an international- ist turn in Chinese literary culture that had been going on for decades. At the turn of the century, translators like Lin Shu 林紓 and writers like Liang Qichao 梁啓超 and Wu Jianren 吳趼人 produced hundreds of fictional works inspired by Dickens, Dumas, Bellamy, Hugo, and Wells. In the 1910s and 1920s

6 Chinese cultural cosmopolitanism did not begin in the post-dynastic modern era. See, for example, Mark Edward Lewis’s study of the Tang dynasty (618–907), Lewis, China’s Cosmo- politan Empire. Kang Youwei first formulated his ideas about the Grand Unity in the 1880s. 4 Rea

Gogol, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, and a host of other foreign writers became new touchstones in a Chinese cultural quest for new ideas, a new morality, and a new language for China’s future. The immense variety of international literary and intellectual influences on late Qing and early Republican literature needs no rehearsing here. The Nanjing decade (1928–37) was the next important period of Chinese literary cosmopolitanism. The Nationalist government under the Kuomintang achieved a measure of stability and set about building national institutions, as well as expanding its international representation. Literary magazines, film companies, and other cultural institutions flourished, even under unremitting censorship. It was during this era that both Yang and Qian began their literary careers and travelled to Europe. This period of cultural experimentation and institution-building was brought to an abrupt halt by the War of Resistance against Japan, which broke out in 1937. Shortly thereafter, in 1940, Japan began promoting a politically-motivated ideology it dubbed the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai-tō-a kyōeiken 大東亜共栄圏).7 This cosmopolitan- ism proposed to unite China, Japan, the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo (est. 1932), and other Asian regions under a sphere of Japanese influence. The “co-prosperity” phrase denoted an imperialist vision of cosmopolitanism. Its pan-Asianism claimed to be an alternative to and a bulwark against western colonial hegemony, and promised an economic and cultural utopia. Though widely recognized as thin rhetorical cover for Japanese territorial ambitions, these aspirations had real-world consequences. The Communist victory in the civil war over the Nationalists ushered in a radi- cally different form of cultural cosmopolitanism. Inspired by Soviet models, the Chinese Communist Party spent the 1950s suppressing private enterprise and consolidating all forms of cultural production and distribution—publishing, radio, cinema, performing arts—within the new bureaucracy. Party-state cultural policy promoted outreach to parts of the world that embraced the Communist ethos: the Soviet Union (patron of the People’s Republic for much of the 1950s), members of the Eastern European bloc, and later Left-leaning countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Chinese cinemas screened North Korean films. Performing arts troupes visited from India and the Soviet Union. Magazines like Translations (Yiwen 譯文, 1953–58), later retitled World Literature (Shijie wenxue 世界文學, 1959–64), translated writers from around the world, including representatives not only of other socialist or developing

7 As Shuang Shen notes, Axis powers sponsored a variety of literary institutions and products to support this vision, such as the English-language Shanghai-based magazine, XX Century. See Shen, Cosmopolitan Publics, ch. 4. Introduction 5 nations, but also Leftist authors of first-world capitalist countries like England, France, and the United States.8 Few Chinese citizens were permitted to travel abroad, but their reading habits were supposed to reflect the international ori- entations of the socialist Party-state. During the Mao years, Qian and Yang were employed as researchers at a government-sponsored research institution, the predecessor of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Yang Jiang spent much of those years translat- ing European literary classics into Chinese. Qian Zhongshu, in addition to his research on Western literature traditional Chinese literature, was commis- sioned to help translate Mao’s Selected Works into English. At the behest of state employers, both writers participated, in other words, in an era of pre- scriptive literary cosmopolitanism. This came at a terrible cost: in their late thirties, Qian and Yang, like their peers on the mainland, had suddenly lost the freedom to write as they pleased. Political campaigns, prescriptive cultural policies, and bureaucratic imperatives severely constrained their choices during prime work years. Qian’s voluminous reading notes from that era, as well as Yang’s memoirs, testify to some foregone projects; others will never be known. Their published works reveal literary sensibilities at odds with the cultural climate of the Mao era. Most notable is Guanzhui bian 管錐編, also known as Limited Views, which Qian wrote in classical Chinese—the literary language once used to unite All Under Heaven, and an idiom far removed from much Maoist rhetoric. Yang’s works of the post-1978 reform period, especially her memoir Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liu ji 干校六記) and her novel Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡, translated as Baptism), depicted, in a ret- rospective mode, a culture clash between collectivist, revolutionary impera- tives and individual literary lives. While Qian focused on revising On the Art of Poetry (Tan yi lu 談藝錄) and Guanzhui bian in the 1980s, Yang wrote new works, participating more actively in the newly open literary economy. Then Qian Zhongshu, and their daughter, Qian Yuan 錢瑗 (1937–1997), fell termi- nally ill. Yang’s dramatic return to the literary scene as a nonagenarian, begin- ning with her retranslation of Plato’s Phaedo, is one of the remarkable stories told in this book.

8 My thanks to Nicolai Volland for permission to draw on findings from his forthcoming mono- graph in this paragraph. See Volland, Cold War Cosmopolitanism, Introduction and ch. 6. 6 Rea

Literary and Lifestyle Cosmopolitanisms

Qian’s and Yang’s literary careers highlight differences and intersections between literary cosmopolitanism and what might be called lifestyle cosmo- politanism. Appiah deplores the smug self-superiority of the “Comme des Garçons-clad sophisticate with a platinum frequent-flyer card regarding, with kindly condescension, a ruddy-faced farmer in workman’s overalls.”9 The cos- mopolitan lifestyle may also be mediated by print. Cosmopolitan, originally a magazine for families, was first published in the United States in 1886 and now boasts over sixty international editions in over thirty languages that are distrib- uted in over a hundred countries. General interest periodicals and newspapers, from the New York World (est. 1860) to Paris’s Le Monde (est. 1944), have also appealed to readers’ desire for the global perspective, making cosmopolitan knowledge accessible to a wider population than ever before. Some of China’s literary cosmopolitans have been consumers as conspicu- ous as Appiah’s hypothetical example. High-fliers of urban modernism during the Nanjing era, such as Liu Na’ou 劉呐歐, Mu Shiying 穆時英, Shi Zhecun 施蟄存, and Dai Wangshu 戴望舒, for example, were among the Shanghai writers who built literary auras tied to their public personae as dandified men-about-town. The Nanjing decade, when Qian and Yang published their first literary works, saw an unprecedented degree of institutional support for the publi- cations and social organizations that supported these lifestyles. T.K. Chuan 全增嘏, Quentin Pan 潘光旦, Lin Yutang 林語堂, Wen Yuanning 溫源寧, and dozens of others wrote for Anglophone journals like The China Critic (Zhongguo pinglun zhoubao 中國評論週報, 1928–40, 1945) and T’ien Hsia Monthly (Tianxia yuekan 天下月刊, 1935–41), as well as Chinese-language sister publications like The Analects Fortnightly (Lunyu banyuekan 論語半月 刊, 1932–37, 1946–49), with which they shared content and contributors. While advocating Chinese interests, they promoted individualism over blind nation- alism. In 1930, the Critic’s editors even proposed a Liberal Cosmopolitan club to seek “intellectual warmth” amidst a “frigid intellectual atmosphere.”10

9 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xiii. 10 Their 1930 editorial said the Club would bring together “internationally minded people” who are “more interested in the examination of ideas than in national glorification, more in the common problems of modern life than in any patriotic propaganda.” The Club was indeed established and served as something of a public extension of its founders’ private social networks. See: “Proposal for a Liberal Cosmopolitan Club in Shanghai,” Introduction 7

These writers—mostly male—saw themselves as citizens of the world and promoted their own vision of literary and cultural egalitarianism.11 Most had lived and studied abroad. Liu Na’ou was born and raised in colonial Taiwan, stud- ied in Shanghai, and translated Japanese literature. Poet Dai Wangshu studied in Paris. T.K. Chuan and Quentin Pan both studied in the United States, as did Lin Yutang, who took an M.A. at Harvard and a doctorate at the University of Leipzig. Wen Yuanning, who edited T’ien Hsia, was born in Indonesia and stud- ied in Singapore and London before taking a degree at Cambridge, and then moving to Peking to teach English literature at various universities. The poet and playboy Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei 邵洵美), another Cambridge graduate, hosted a cultural salon of writers, cartoonists, politicians, and cultural figures both Chinese and foreign. Among its few female members was the American Emily Hahn, who wrote for The China Critic and T’ien Hsia, and used Zau, her lover, as the basis for a series of “Mr. Pan” stories for The New Yorker. Many of these writers shared what literary historian Shuang Shen calls “common characteristics that can be roughly described as cosmopolitan: the experience of exile, the practice of translation, the use of a foreign language, and the borrowing of foreign cultures.”12 Shanghai also offered an interna- tional experience to those who never went abroad. Shi Zhecun wrote of taking foreign women to the cinema, and Mu Shiying of the black and Filipino jazz musicians and white Russian dancers he encountered in nightclubs. They and their fellow modernists’ stylistic innovations were influenced by Japanese Shinkankakuha 新感覚派 (new sensationalist) writers like Yokomitsu Riichi 横光利一(1898–1947). But their staging and characterization were to a large degree projections of their own experiences of city street and nightclub. Flâneurs, flappers, alcohol, foreign women, and the vertiginous pace of urban life dominate their imagery. Their literary worlds tantalized with the sugges- tion of autobiographical detail, and they signalled their cosmopolitanism through conspicuous foreign symbolism. Yet cosmopolitan literary works, as Rebecca Walkowitz points out, are not merely “international in their themes and traditions and origins;”13 they make comparisons without depicting the objects of comparison as immutable.

The China Critic III.46 (Nov. 13, 1930): 1085–86. See also Qian, Liberal Cosmopolitan, 1–2, 93. 11 Yang Jiang’s early accomplishments are all the more extraordinary for the general sexism of the Republican literary sphere. The China Critic’s envisioned cosmopolitan club, for instance, was to be a “club of men.” 12 Shen, Cosmopolitan Publics, 158. 13 Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 7. 8 Rea

Qian Zhongshu famously took exception to what he saw as the facile compari- son of East and West so popular among Republican era intellectuals, some of whom he had encountered at Tsinghua or in the 1930s when he wrote for The China Critic and T’ien Hsia.14 His literary sensibilities, and Yang’s, were influ- enced by Republican China’s cosmopolitan set, as well as their three years studying abroad in England and France.15 Yet they spent less time abroad than they could have.16 Their globe-trotting was primarily literary. Shen points out that “different groups of people in the same locality can have very different ideas about cosmopolitanism.”17 These ideas can differ even within one household, as we will see in following discussions of how Qian and Yang expressed cosmopolitanism stylistically. Walkowitz describes cosmopoli- tan literary style as marked by an interest in “representing patterns or fictions of affiliation, in rejecting fixed conceptions of the local, or in comparing the uses and histories of global thinking.”18 Qian and Yang’s writings evince all of these patterns. Cosmopolitanism was also, I would argue, part of what Michel Hockx calls their “personality in style,” a literary quality whereby the text embodies the personality and moral qualities of the author.19 One sustained literary interest, for example, is the moral virtue of master- ing languages and texts. The heroine of Taking a Bath is a young librarian who understands world literary classics better than boorish faculty members of

14 See, for example, Qian’s sarcastic discussion of East-West comparisons in the stories “Cat” and “Inspiration,” which appear in the collection, Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts. 15 Qian Zhongshu, for example, had a missionary education in Jiangsu province and studied English literature under Wen Yuanning at Tsinghua University. It was likely on Wen’s introduction that Qian contributed English essays to The China Critic in the mid-1930s and later to T’ien Hsia. Qian’s early writings, and Yang’s later memoirs, attest to their familiarity with the Tsinghua circle (including Wang Wenxian 王文顯, Ye Gongchao 葉公超, Cao Yu 曹禺, and many others), the China Critic crowd, as well as Francophiles such as the playwright Li Jianwu 李健吾 and translator Fu Lei 傅雷. A full account of the couple’s involvement in these social circles has yet to be written. 16 On the eve of the Communist victory in the Civil War, Qian reportedly had multiple academic job offers in Europe and Asia, but he turned them down to remain in China. After the end of the Mao era, he travelled twice to Italy and made a brief tour of American universities; Yang travelled to Spain to receive an award for her translation of Don Quixote and to visit their daughter studying in England. Qian received fellowship offers from Princeton and other universities, but he declined them and chose to stay in China. 17 Shen, Cosmopolitan Publics, 159. 18 Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 7. 19 See chapter six of Hockx’s study, Questions of Style, in which he analyzes modern examples of a long-standing idea in Chinese literary thought, namely “that reading literature is not just reading texts, but getting to know the author of those texts” (186). Introduction 9 the Literary Research Institute, like Nina Shi, who have actually been abroad. Conscientious reading, in Yang’s novel, is not just a means to an end; it is an index to a person’s quality of character. Self-refinement through reading reemerged as a central focus of Yang’s writings following the deaths of her daughter and her husband. Forced to confront anew who she was as an indi- vidual, she sought answers by revisiting a variety of classical philosophical sources, from Plato to Confucius. Qian’s preface to his first book, Written in the Margins of Life (Xie zai ren­sheng bianshang 寫在人生邊上, 1941), was prescient about what was to become his lifelong project of interpreting life through books, and of comparing written ideas. As the expression of an open-ended attitude toward reading and criti- cism, it is worth quoting in full:

Life, it’s been said, is one big book. Should life indeed be so, most of us writers can only claim to be book critics. Possessing the book critic’s skill, we need not read more than a few pages to churn out a pile of commentary and wrap up a book review in no time. Yet, another type of person exists in this world. These people believe that the purpose of reading a book is not actually to write a criticism or an introduction. Possessing the casualness and nonchalance of spare- time diversion seekers, they browse at their own leisurely pace. When an opinion strikes them, they jot down a few notes or write a question mark or exclamation mark in the blank margins of the book, akin to “eyebrow comments” in the top margins of old Chinese books or marginalia in for- eign books. These piecemeal, spontaneous impressions do not constitute their verdict on the entire book, and having been written in passing they may contradict one another or go overboard. But the authors don’t bother about this. After all, for them it’s a diversion, unlike the book critic, who shoulders the weighty tasks of guiding the reader and chiding the author. Who has the ability and patience for such things? If life is a big book, then the essays that follow can only be regarded as having been written in the margins of life. What a big book! It’s hard to read all at once, and even if the margins have been written on, there’s still plenty of blank space left.20

20 Translation from Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts. For more on Qian’s idea of life as a book, in relation to the notion of literary cosmopolitanism, see my introduction to that volume. Zhang Longxi notes that in a 1962 essay Qian reaffirmed his strong belief “that critical insights and brilliant ideas contained in short phrases and fragmented 10 Rea

Qian’s reading notes from the 1930s through the 1990s, just now being pub- lished in facsimile (see epilogue), reveal that this image of the literary critic as a jotter in the margins was no mere pose. Entries in multiple languages jostle for space all over the page, new entries and emendations nudging in on the margins. This was how Qian spent much of his life. It might thus be more accurate to say that Qian and Yang did not eschew lifestyle cosmopolitanism for literary cosmopolitanism, but rather that, for them, the latter subsumed the former. They lived for, and through, the lan- guages and ideas to be found in the world of letters. We need not romanticize their reading and writing careers to see that books were central to their own lifestyle choices. Wen 文, a Chinese term often used to signify literature, more broadly denotes patterns (wen 紋) of scripts, writing, ideas, cultures, even civilizations. Qian’s career helps us to see the trope as signifying the fabric of broad read- ing, writing, and thinking. The criss-crossing languages, genres, and ideas in Qian’s notebooks represent a fundamental belief in the comparability of ideas irrespective of origin. In this sense, wen supplies an alternative metaphor to literary cosmopolitanism, one not limited to literature-proper. Qian’s focus on specific utterances and discrete ideas and images, emphasizing “a gram of worth” over “a ton of verbiage,”21 as he put it, is a reminder that theories about “cosmopolitanism” must prove their value through evidence.

Re-introducing Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang

This book’s primary goal is to bring English-language scholarship on Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang’s literary accomplishment up to date. (It deals only partially with their scholarship, for reasons discussed in the epilogue.) It is the first book in English to discuss Yang Jiang’s literary oeuvre in its entirety, from her earliest published story to her most recent book, published at the age of 103, After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou 洗澡之後, 2014). It draws on Wu Xuezhao’s 2008 oral history-cum-biography of Yang; Jesse Field’s ground-breaking 2012 doc- toral dissertation about Yang Jiang’s prose writings and reception in contem- porary China; shorter studies by overseas scholars such as Duncan Campbell,

expressions, undeveloped systematically as they are, may just be as valuable as tomes of systematic theoretical articulation.” See Zhang Longxi, “Introduction,” in Qian, Patchwork, 3. 21 Qian, Patchwork, 80. Introduction 11

Michael Friedrich, Margo Gewurtz, Liu Meizhu, Monika Motsch, and Zhang Longxi; and the opinions of a variety of contemporary Chinese readers. Here one will find a complete overview of Yang’s fiction (by Judith Amory), as well as the first dedicated studies in English of Qian Zhongshu’s poetry (by Yugen Wang) and Yang Jiang’s translations (by Carlos Rojas). Chapters by Amy Dooling and Ronald Egan re-interpret literary milestones of both writ- ers in light of their context of authorship: namely, the comic stage plays Yang wrote during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and Guanzhui bian, which Qian wrote during the Cultural Revolution. Jesse Field’s chapter reveals how Yang Jiang’s recent essays and memoirs have connected with new generations of Chinese readers since the deaths of her daughter and husband, bringing them into a “new intimate public.” These chapters make important parts of Yang’s and Qian’s oeuvres newly accessible. (Alternating chapters on each author are arranged roughly chronologically.) They examine, for example, Yang’s daring stylistic choices in translating Don Quixote; her experimen- tation with a variety of fictional genres, including romance, thrillers, and ghost stories; and the poetics that influenced much of Qian’s career as a literary critic. Several chapters address the theme of cosmopolitanism explicitly. Wendy Larson argues that two of Yang Jiang’s most important creative works, Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School and Taking a Bath “present the ideal of a detached, cosmopolitan, and universal creative intellectual who imagines himself or herself not so much part of political society as floating in . . . the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic sphere’.” Cosmopolitanism, in this vision, is a strategy for resisting co-optation by Maoism (and, by implication, the con- sumerist culture that was emerging when Yang was writing in the 1980s) by remaining disengaged and focusing on the pleasures of solo intellectual work. Yet, as Larson points out, Yang’s aloof mode accommodates rather than resists contemporary culture, and refuses to engage with its intellectual possibilities. I argue in chapter seven that Qian and Yang shared an interest in explor- ing how intellectual agendas fare under the institutional demands of mar- riage and the academy. In those spheres, individuals are judged by criteria of authenticity, independence, and devotion. Intellectuals of cosmopolitan ambition (or pretension) find themselves challenged by institutional pres- sures of entrapment, occupation, and ideological constraint. Those who fail these tests end up losing their will, their love, or their sense of self and becom- ing a negative archetype of the domesticated intellectual. Fang Hongjian and Zhu Qianli are two novelistic examples. Yet we also find—notably in Yang’s 12 Rea autobiographical works—a positive archetype of the broad-minded person (or couple) who finds a degree of security, support, and intellectual freedom in the institutional fold. Theodore Huters’ chapter uses Qian’s novel Fortress Besieged as an entry point into questions of aesthetic value and intellectual orientation that con- tinue to plague modern Chinese thinkers. Huters focuses in particular on what he calls “the cosmopolitan imperative”—the ongoing search for “a genuinely ‘Chinese voice’ that represents the particulars of the Chinese situation, with all its internal tensions and complexities, while attaining universal aesthetic validity.” He argues for the cultural significance of Fortress Besieged and points out that many of its conflicts center on matters of taste. Ultimately, the vari- ous aesthetic choices that Fang Hongjian, Tang Xiaofu, and other protago- nists face prove unattractive to them, and they end up isolated. This isolation, Huters argues, resonates with the novel’s own status as a singular work of art. He calls Fortress Besieged a “self-consuming artifact” (Stanley Fish’s term)—an aesthetically-oriented novel that undermines its own assumptions by refusing to define, once and for all, its grounds for judging value. Qian’s attitude toward his own literary cosmopolitanism, in that sense, was somewhat evasive.22 Yet as a literary critic his style was precise and textually- grounded. In one essay, for instance, his five-page discussion of whether writers make good critics includes verbatim quotes from Cao Pi, Cao Zhi, Xunzi, Zhang Jiucheng, Huang Kan, The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, The Madhyamika Sutra, Lu Zhaolin, Wang Shizhen, Tu Long, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Goethe, Grillparzer, H.C. Robinson, Sainte-Beuve, Alexander Pope, and Horace.23 Nabokov likened the poet to the nucleus of “an instantaneous and transpar- ent organism of events” and poetry to a type of writing that attains “cosmic synchronization.”24 Qian’s work of “striking connections” (datong 打通) between Chinese and foreign letters and ideas was, if anything, even more ambitious, spanning not just one moment in time across space, but a literary cosmos that spans the ages. The title of this book is not China’s Only Literary Cosmopolitans. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang are not the only Chinese writers who deserve to be

22 See my comments on the evasiveness of the Menippean satirist and Walkowitz’s interpretation of evasion as a type of cosmopolitan literary style. Christopher G. Rea, “Introduction,” in Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 1–19; Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, ch. 3: “Woolf ’s Evasion.” 23 Qian, Limited Views, 61–66. 24 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 169. Nabokov credits the term to the philosopher Vivian Bloodmark. Introduction 13 recognized as cosmopolitan. Nor is “cosmopolitan,” here, a label of sunny (and trendy) approbation. Qian and Yang have not always been as open-minded toward immediate peers as they have toward the ideas of distant writers. If the couple drew “the circle of [their] affections and duties” close, their turn toward the world of letters may well have been partly in response to their distaste for their immediate environment. The studies here reappraise their literary accomplishments, the historical circumstances that shaped them, and current developments in scholarship on Qian and Yang that may yet pry further open the book of their literary careers. Chapter 1 Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies; Or, The Serious Business of Marriage

Amy D. Dooling

In 2007, when Yang Jiang’s wartime comedy Forging the Truth (Nongzhen chengjia 弄真成假, 1943) was revived as part of the centenary celebration of the birth of modern spoken drama (huaju 話劇) in China, the director, Yang Xinwei 楊昕巍, remarked upon the unexpected resonance of Yang Jiang’s work in the post-Mao present.1 In particular, he pointed to Zhou Dazhang, the tragicomic con man at the center of the play: “I am surprised to find so many similarities between Zhou and today’s young people, especially their attitudes towards marriage and money. They dream of becoming rich over- night, and some of them are even more than willing to trade love for money.”2 On the one hand, this comment pays tribute to the timeless quality of Yang Jiang’s literary and scholarly oeuvre in general. In a modern literary culture characterized by overt topicality, Yang’s work stands out for its ability to tran- scend the immediate historical circumstances of its creation; representative are her two extant comedies, both of which eschew explicit reference to the contemporary trauma of Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the 1940s. Edward Gunn, one of the earliest scholars to draw critical attention to Yang’s wartime plays, aptly describes them in terms of their “comments on human nature and sallies at literary stereotypes.”3 Yet, if young Chinese urbanites’ alleged preoccupation with money in matters of marriage reflects particular histori- cal conditions, Yang Xinwei’s comments also beg the question: to what extent might Zhou Dazhang, and the whole cast of money-grubbing characters that

1 My thanks to Christopher Rea for his suggestions on this chapter. Forging the Truth was co-produced by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and the Shanghai Farce Troupe in 2007, and directed by Yang Xinwei. Yang’s first play, Heart’s Desire (Chenxin ruyi 稱心如意) was also restaged in Beijing the same year by students of the Central Academy of Drama (Zhongyang xiju xueyuan 中央戲劇學院), under the direction of Wang Lina, as part of the centenary celebrations. For another press report on the revival of Yang’s wartime comedies, see “Nongzhen chengjia jiuxi chongpai: Yang Jiang huaju chongxian Shanghai.” 2 Zhang, “Revival of 40s Comedy.” 3 Gunn, Unwelcome Muse, 52.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_003 Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 15 populate Yang’s 1940s comedies, be symptomatic of a unique moment in mod- ern Chinese society? Put slightly differently, how might Yang Jiang’s themati- zation of marriage, money, and marriage for money be understood as timely themes embedded in the contemporary realities of wartime Shanghai? In this chapter, I place Yang’s occupation-period comedies back in the moment of their original production in order to consider more critically what she was investigating and why her dramatic works resonated so deeply with wartime Shanghai’s theater-goers. This contextual reading complicates the apparent disjunction between the conspicuous political disengagement of her work and the larger historical saga of national conflict and foreign occupa- tion. Both plays are set in modern-day Shanghai, but the exact dates are left deliberately vague and the dramatic action unfolds almost exclusively within lavish interior spaces, such that the occupied urban landscape is left unrep- resented. Furthermore, the plays are concerned with seemingly frivolous domestic matters of romance and family relations—a far cry from the urgent political themes that consumed contemporary playwrights in the interior who deployed theater as a vehicle for anti-Japanese propaganda. Yet Yang’s com- edies of manners can be read as wry commentaries on the moral challenges of urban existence during the war. For Shanghai audiences living under extreme conditions of economic volatility and material deprivation, her comic portray- als of pretentious elites and would-be elites touched on concerns of immediate topical relevance: the elevation of material desires over all other forms of per- sonal motivation and the corrosive power of money on human relations; the decline of idealism and moral principles in desperate times; and the impulse toward self-preservation. Their humor, in other words, tapped into their audi- ences’ immediate concerns and anxieties about basic survival.

Contextualizing Yang Jiang’s Comedies

By 1943, when Yang Jiang had finished her first two plays, the grim realities of Japan’s full-scale military occupation of Shanghai had taken hold. Having returned from Europe to be with family when hostilities first broke out, Yang Jiang had initially found refuge in the French concession, a relatively safe enclave during the early years of the war. In December 1941, on the day after Pearl Harbor, however, the Japanese took possession of all of Shanghai’s for- eign concessions, and daily life for Yang, as for most ordinary inhabitants of the city, became markedly more precarious. Military barricades and checkpoints were erected throughout the city, and whole neighborhoods were periodically sealed off to intimidate and assert 16 Dooling authority over the urban population. Violence, in the form of bombings, arson, assassinations and kidnapping, became commonplace, while rumors of arrests and brutal interrogations added to the pervasive atmosphere of fear and inse- curity. Severe economic disruptions hit average residents hard: much of the industrial sector remained idle after 1941 due to acute shortages of fuel and raw materials, resulting in widespread unemployment. Meanwhile the cost of liv- ing skyrocketed, as the scarcity of consumer goods and the increasingly erratic availability of food gave way to hyperinflation. The price of rice, like that of many other basic necessities, soared from 12 yuan per dan 擔 (approximately 133 lbs) in 1937 to 426 yuan per dan in 1942 to a staggering 11,155 yuan in 1944.4 Emaciated corpses became a common sight on the streets, even in the for- merly upscale and prosperous French Concession.5 Amid pervasive depriva- tion and suffering, however, the war economy brought increased prosperity to a privileged few with money, connections, or the opportunity and willingness to exploit others’ misfortune. Undeterred by rampant destitution and ubiqui- tous lines for basic food rations, Shanghai elites are said to have indulged in a frenzy of conspicuous consumption throughout the war, even as conditions deteriorated after 1941.6 Luxury department stores like Wing On on Nanjing Road did a booming business (despite occasional blockades) while expensive new restaurants sprang up to cater to wealthy patrons. For war-weary urban- ites with less disposable income, a multitude of bars, nightclubs, gambling parlors, dance halls, brothels, and theaters offered cheaper forms of popular entertainment for escaping the everyday tensions and chaos of the occupa- tion. In a city not only controlled by enemy forces and a collaborator regime but also overrun by con men, scam artists, rice smugglers, and outright gang- sters looking for ways to make a fast buck, moral disorder came to characterize quotidian existence. Maintaining basic everyday needs became an increasing struggle for Yang Jiang after the fall of the foreign concessions, certainly a far cry from the care- free lifestyle she and Qian Zhongshu had enjoyed at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Qian had, by 1941, finally returned to Shanghai, having spent the years prior teaching in the interior, first at Southwest United University (Xinan lianda 西南聯大) in Kunming and later at Lantian National Teachers College in Hunan, while Yang Jiang had stayed in Shanghai to take care of their infant

4 See Henriot, “Rice, Power, People.” 5 Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 155. 6 Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, 47–48; 125. See also Fredrick Wakeman, Jr., “Urban Controls in Wartime Shanghai,” in Yeh, Wartime Shanghai, 140. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 17 daughter, her recently widowed father, and other displaced family members.7 During that early period of the war, Yang Jiang shuttled back and forth between the cramped living quarters of her own family and that of her in-laws. Once the couple was reunited, the acute housing shortage in the overcrowded city forced them to make do with squeezing into the downstairs parlor of the Qian residence on Rue Lafeyette for the duration of the war. Yang Jiang had also been forced to change jobs. She had been serving as principal of her alma mater, the Zhenhua Girl’s Academy, which had opened a temporary branch in the city to accommodate students whose families had fled to Shanghai, but the school was forced to suspend operation after Pearl Harbor. Luckily, Yang managed to secure new work as a private tutor in the household of an affluent Cantonese family and later as a part-time teacher at a small primary school, though neither position was particularly desirable. The school was located some distance away from the former French Concession, and Yang’s long com- mute to work each day took her through several military check points. On one occasion, in 1942, her insufficient display of deference to a Japanese sentry who had come aboard the tram she was riding to inspect identification papers led to a tense exchange that very nearly ended in her arrest.8 Yang Jiang was willing to risk the hazards of the occupied urban landscape and to endure the drudgery of the lowly teaching position, however, in exchange for the three dou 斗 (roughly one peck) of rice she received from the school each month. In her memoir We Three (Women sa 我們仨, 2003), hunger and rice loom large in her memories of her wartime experience. She writes:

As for the occupation of Shanghai, the hardest days were in the wake of Pearl Harbor and before the defeat of Japan. In addition to teaching at the missionary college, Zhongshu had taken on two more private stu- dents. . . . but still our life got ever more difficult. Fuel and rice alone were a big deal. The flour that the Japanese rationed to citizens was black and all sorts of stuff came out when it was sifted and even then it was still mostly bran, while the rice rations were just rice husks, mixed in with white, yellow and black grit. The black grit was easy to pick out. But the white and yellow grit had to be removed with tweezers. Whenever you

7 Yang Jiang’s mother died after contracting malaria amidst fighting in Suzhou and the surrounding region. And in January of 1938, an aunt was shot in cold blood by Japanese soldiers. See Luo, Yang Jiang zhuan, 111–14. 8 Kong, Yang Jiang pingzhuan, 63–64. 18 Dooling

heard someone peddling rice on the street,9 no matter how expensive it was, you’d rush out to buy some . . . I taught elementary school and wrote plays all for fuel and for rice.10 (my emphasis)

Yang Jiang and Shanghai Wartime Theater

For intellectuals and artists who found themselves stranded (and often unem- ployed or underemployed) in Shanghai during the war, working in commercial theater was one way to make ends meet. In his study of occupation-period culture, Poshek Fu notes that an important factor in the rise of drama in these years was the disruption of the popular film industry:

Already a highly profitable venture because of the prevailing escapist mood, show business became even more profitable when the Japanese centralized the Shanghai film industry under their direct control in 1943. Some cinema owners, for both commercial and political reasons, con- verted their properties into live theatres and organized drama companies themselves. Meanwhile, many movie people took up huaju. All these fac- tors combined to produce a flourishing theater in occupied Shanghai.11

Adaptations of foreign plays were particularly prevalent (partly because they provided cover from the censors) but demand for well-crafted original scripts also grew steadily after 1937, as professional drama troupes vied for commer- cially viable scripts to stay in business. As schools, publishing houses, and established newspapers and periodicals folded after 1941, many out-of-work literary intellectuals turned to the theater for their livelihood. Between 1942–1946, Yang Jiang herself wrote a total of four full-length plays. Her first, the four-act parlor drama Heart’s Desire (Chenxin ruyi 稱心如意), was completed in the winter of 1942 and staged the following spring by the Shanghai United Arts Theatre group, to wide critical acclaim. British-trained dramatist Huang Zuolin 黃佐臨 (1906–1994) directed the production and Li Jianwu 李健吾 (1906–1982), an academic turned dramatist, played one of the male leads. The play opened at the stylish Golden Capital Theatre on Avenue

9 This kind of trade was strictly illegal, and rice peddlers could be arrested if their smuggling activities were detected by the authorities. See Frederic Wakeman, “Shanghai Smuggling.” In Henriot and Yeh, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun, 116–53. 10 Yang, Women sa, 115–16. 11 Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, 98. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 19

Foch, a venue owned by movie tycoons Liu Zhonghao and Liu Zhongliang. Its success inspired Yang to quickly turn out a second comedy, Forging the Truth, staged by the Tongmao theater troupe in 1943. The play was greeted with even stronger critical accolades, with some reviewers praising it as a milestone in theatrical comedy and drawing favorable comparisons to Ding Xilin and Lu Xun.12 A third comedy Sporting with the World (Youxi renjian) was staged by Huang Zuolin’s Kugan drama troupe in 1944 under the direction of Yao Ke. It debuted at the elegant Paris Theater on Avenue Joffre, and apparently was well-received during its three week run in August; the script is no longer extant, however, and Yang Jiang has (in interviews with scholars as well as in her memoirs) maintained silence as to the play’s content. Yang Jiang’s fourth, and final play, the melodrama Windswept Blossoms (Fengxu), appeared in print in Renaissance (Wenyi fuxing, 1946–1947) the year after Japan’s defeat but never made it to the stage.13 In her preface to the first published edition of Heart’s Desire (1944), Yang Jiang recalls how a casual meal with friends over grilled lamb kebabs and ses- ame flatbread led unexpectedly to her foray into the theater establishment. I quote here in full:

Last winter, Mr. Chen Linrui treated me to a dinner of barbecued lamb at a restaurant. Mr. Li Jianwu was also present. Gathered around a pine wood fire, the three of us used long chopsticks to pluck pieces of lamb from the flames to eat between pieces of flatbread. I had heard that this is how the Mongols ate, and I thought of the Mongolian princes in Rosy Clouds of Dawn14 and the King’s father in Evening Banquet.15 Mr. Li and Mr. Chen jokingly suggested to me: “Why don’t you write a play too?” At the time the idea struck me as far-fetched, as I’d never paid any attention to the theater. But the flavor of barbecued lamb is hard to for- get, and the question kept nagging at me. By the end of the year, I had

12 See, for instance, Mai Ye, “Shiyue yingju zongping.” In this review, Mai Ye also identifies flaws in Yang’s comedies: in his estimation, the structure of Forging the Truth is excessively loose and episodic, while the lead characters of Heart’s Desire are tragic figures. 13 This is the same publication in which Qian Zhongshu’s novel Fortress Besieged appeared. 14 Yun cai xia 雲彩霞 is Li Jianwu’s adaption of French dramatist Augustin Eugène Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur (1849). The original play is a fictionalized account of the suicide of the famous French actress, who takes her life when her lover abandons her for a princess. Scribe is often credited with developing the formulas of the well-made play. 15 Wanyan is Shi Huafu’s adaption of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s co-written three- act comedy Dinner at Eight (1932). The original play involves New York high society during the Great Depression. 20 Dooling

written a trial version of Heart’s Desire in my free time, and sent it first to Mr. Chen, who lived nearby, to look over. Having received his earnest cri- tique, I rewrote it, and the revised script passed into the hands of Mr. Li. Suddenly Mr. Li called to say that they were going to begin rehearsing the play immediately and that Mr. Huang Zuolin was to be the director. Mr. Li himself even planned to take the stage in the role of Xu Langzhai. This truly was one’s heart’s desire! That said, I was quite unsatisfied with the script, which was rushed onto the stage before I had had a chance to revise it properly. Only when World Books asked to include it in their series did I give it another look over and make some significant alterations to the first and fourth acts. With the body already fully formed, however, cosmetic alterations and adornments could only be superficial, not fundamental. The best way to remedy old works is to write new ones. With the publication of this script, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share the story of its genesis and thank my friends for their enthusias- tic encouragement.16

This informal gathering, the account of which Yang’s biographers have tended to take at face value, may well have taken place, as Chen Linrui 陳麟瑞 (1905– 1969), a colleague of Qian Zhongshu’s at Aurora Women’s College, happened to live down the street from them at the time. Li Jianwu, a fellow Tsinghua University alumnus, also lived nearby, on Rue Ratard, having moved there with his family when Jinan University relocated to the French Concession from Zhenru district after the Sino-Japanese war broke out. Both Chen and Li were involved in the Shanghai theater world in the early 1940s: Chen, writ- ing under the penname Shi Huafu 石華父, had seen his play Evening Banquet (Wanyan 晚宴), an adaptation of George Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s melo- dramatic comedy Dinner at Eight, staged in 1942 (his repertoire would soon be expanded to include adaptations of farces by Pinero and Labiche), while Li Jianwu had also built a reputation for himself with a steady stream of origi- nal scripts as well as adaptations of European drama. With a wife and young children to support, the pressure to write (as well as to direct and on occa- sion even perform onstage) had grown particularly acute for Li after 1941, when Jinan University moved yet again, to Fujian province, leaving theater as his sole source of income.

16 Preface is dated November 23, 1943. Translation is Christopher Rea’s. See: Yang, “Heart’s Desire: Act I,” 15–16. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 21

For obvious reasons, Yang Jiang makes no mention in her preface that Li Jianwu was also well-known to insiders for his efforts in the development of the unique mode of resistance drama that emerged within Shanghai’s com- mercial theater industry in the post-1941 occupation period. While the results proved uneven, Li, like other patriotic playwrights committed to the ideal of cultural resistance in Shanghai, consciously sought to appeal to the tastes of a broad urban audience through popular forms and formulas while at the same time using ostensibly apolitical genres to camouflage covert messages of con- temporary moral and political import. Plays such as Jin Xiaoyu 金小玉 (1945), his adaptation of Sardou’s La Tosca, for instance, riveted audiences through colorful depictions of Republican-era warlords and opera singers but beneath the surface also contained subtle commentaries (or what Poshek Fu refers to as “hidden transcripts”) about current political repression.17 Yang Jiang’s preface, too, contains more than meets the eye, not least the author’s self-deprecating explanation of what launched her (brief ) career as a playwright. Though Yang claimed to have “never paid much attention to drama,” her decision to try her hand at playwriting was less coincidental than she makes out. Among her former graduate school professors in the Department of Foreign Literatures at Tsinghua University was the British-educated theater scholar Wang Wenxian 王文顯 (a.k.a. Quincy Wong, 1886–1968), who taught Shakespeare and European drama and who was a respected dramatist in his own right. A remarkable number of Wang’s students went on to achieve promi- nence in the world of modern theater, among them Hong Shen 洪深 (1894– 1955), Cao Yu 曹禺 (1910–1996), Zhang Junxiang 張駿祥 (1910–1996), and Yang Jiang’s dinner companions Li Jianwu and Chen Linrui. A voracious reader of European and American literature, Yang was moreover well-versed in western drama traditions and her own work clearly takes inspiration from the modern comedies of manners popularized by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.18 Yang Jiang’s casual disavowal of serious intention—aesthetic, political or otherwise—thus carries the distinct tone of ironic understatement (one of her soon-to-be signature literary traits), and invites a closer look at what is going on beneath the surface of her theatrical writings.

17 Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, 99. For an extended analysis of Li’s theatre activities during this period, see pages 68–109. 18 For a discussion of Yang’s literary influences, which included Shakespeare, and Moliere, and ancient Greek drama, see Kong, Yang Jiang pingzhuan, 28–34; 43–46. In her essay “Remembering Shi Huafu” (“Huainian Shi Huafu,” 1985) Yang Jiang mentions that she borrowed French and British works on humor and drama from Chen Linrui around the time she was writing her own plays. See Yang Jiang zuopinji, vol. 2, 347–49. 22 Dooling

Before turning to the plays, though, we should remember the particular activity from which Yang claimed her interest in playwriting sprung—sharing a delicious meal with friends. As she put it, “the flavor of barbecued lamb is hard to forget, and the question kept nagging at me. By the end of the year, I had written a trial version of Heart’s Desire in my free time.” The connection Yang draws between food and her first play obliquely alludes to a moment when many intellectuals in Shanghai found themselves engaged in artistic creation to keep their families from starving. For the previous generation of Chinese literary intellectuals, literature was often imagined as a kind of spiritual nour- ishment: the noble writer engages in creative pursuits in order to fortify and sustain the modern self and the body politic.19 What Yang Jiang presents, by contrast, is a far less lofty vision, wherein literature has been brought down to the mundane plane of everyday living. The authorial self-image here is not of a righteous hero feeding words to the masses in order to radically alter the course of national history, but rather of an ordinary individual writing to sate her own appetite and physical needs. This theme of “self-centeredness” is one that Yang would return to repeatedly in her later writings.20 Yang Jiang’s tongue-in-cheek reference to food and writing (and writing for food) does not lament a lost aesthetic ideal, then, so much as hint at what Edward Gunn has termed an “anti-romantic” conception of literature itself. Here, as well as over the course of her long literary career, there is a humorous downplaying of profound intent, or at least of the lofty sense of purpose typi- cally claimed by modern Chinese literary intellectuals. In Yang Jiang’s writing, seemingly innocuous subjects often belie more substantive concerns, and bar- becued lamb is no exception. Indeed, we might go even further in appreciat- ing Yang Jiang’s invocation of food by recalling that from 1942–1944—a period that coincided almost exactly with the creation and staging of her comedies— Shanghai experienced acute food shortages. The crisis was in no small mea- sure the product of Japanese military control: after 1941, the occupiers imposed what Frederic Wakeman refers to as an “alimentary stranglehold” on the city, having seized control of the transport, sale, and distribution of rice, wheat, and other basic staples.21 Rampant speculative hoarding and black market

19 See, for instance, Cheng Fangwu’s “The Mission of New Literature,” Nicolas A. Kaldis trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 247–54. 20 Perhaps the most notable example is Yang’s valorization in Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School of taking pleasure in one’s own experiences and accomplishments, a theme analyzed in Wendy Larson’s chapter in this book. See also the discussion on Yang Jiang’s high regard for the individual’s self-loyalty in Rea, “ ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’.” 21 Wakeman, “Shanghai Smuggling,” 112. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 23 profiteering within the local merchant community also exacerbated the sit- uation to the point of crisis. Caught between the meager rations allotted by the authorities and the exorbitant price of food on the black market, ordinary urbanites confronted a perpetual state of hunger. Once mundane routines of everyday life, procuring food and eating became acts of tremendous political and moral significance, as well as physical activities that Shanghai residents waged as part of an ongoing battle for self-survival. In this context, the scene of carefree consumption that Yang Jiang nonchalantly conjures up is significant for what is so conspicuously left unsaid. I would suggest that in so doing Yang Jiang tacitly links her plays to the deprivations of a morally fraught present, deprivations that go to the core of Shanghai’s wartime experience.

Heart’s Desire and Forging the Truth

Yang Jiang’s own practical preoccupation with “fuel and rice” prompted her to turn to a theatrical form that had already proven its commercial viability in Shanghai’s entertainment market: comedy. Even before the annexation of the foreign concessions and the onset of full Japanese occupation in 1941, heavy handed plays with overt and sober messages had not fared particularly well at the box office, a case in point being the lukewarm reception of patriotic productions of the Shanghai Theater Arts Society (Shanghai juyishe 上海劇 藝社). Founded in 1938, this troupe was comprised of a group of dramatists and directors (including Yu Ling, Li Jianwu, Zhu Duanjun, and Huang Zuolin) who sought to revive the industry after the exodus of theater veterans from Shanghai when the war first broke out. The group managed to circumvent interference by the occupation authorities by registering for permission to stage productions (initially amateur and, eventually, professional) in the French Concession. By the early 1940s, not only had the politically repressive atmosphere precluded all but the (seemingly) most innocuous forms of cultural expression, but the public itself had lost its appetite for intellectually and politi- cally weighty fare and began to favor spectacular costume dramas and theatrical­ comedies.22 In Yang’s case, box-office success no doubt stemmed from the playwright’s craft: adopting the style of the “well-made play,” a form that had been recently popularized through adaptations of French drama by Li Jianwu and others, her plays feature artfully-developed dialogue spiced with wit and well-timed

22 For more on the development of commercial theater in Shanghai during the war, see Gunn, Unwelcome Muse, ch. 3. 24 Dooling lines, as well as tightly-structured plots that take unexpected twists and turns, and tie up multiple strands of plot for a tidy climactic (or anti-climactic) finale. The plays also succeed as comedies thanks to Yang’s satire of the pursuit of self-interest and the corrosive impact of money on family life in contemporary society.23 If, as Edward Gunn suggests, commercial theater offered Shanghai audiences an escape from the daily pressures and privations of wartime exis- tence, Yang Jiang elicited laughter by tapping into pervasive contemporary anx- ieties about self-preservation. Her plays humorously depict a world steeped in obsessive materialism, and populated by unscrupulous financiers, bourgeois housewives, and con artists. This world is devoid of lofty political, ethical, or romantic ideals, and the power of money saturates quotidian existence. In this context, the domestic arena is a stage for selfish maneuvering as characters seek to attain or protect their own financial advantage and material comfort. Both plays explore the material obsessions of contemporary society through characters who treat marriage as a fundamentally economic venture. Heart’s Desire, for instance, begins with a recently orphaned young woman, Li Junyu, returning to Shanghai from Beiping to live with wealthy maternal relatives. Years earlier, her mother had been disinherited for defying her upper-class family and eloping with her lover, a struggling painter with neither family pedi- gree nor fortune. Beyond this, the play is conspicuously reticent about the back story, as if to underscore the complete irrelevance of such romantic gestures in contemporary times—indeed, all that is left to show for the May Fourth-style self-liberation of Junyu’s mother is a stack of her husband’s western-style nude paintings that Junyu tries, to no avail, to bestow upon her shallow and unap- preciative relatives. The paintings accompany Junyu throughout the play as she is bounced from one household to the next, a symbol of how little currency such romantic ideals retain in the present. The visual motif is repeated in each act, becoming a running joke. Despite their ostensible charity, the young heroine soon discovers that her well-heeled Shanghai aunts and uncles have their own selfish designs as to how she can best serve them. Rather than help Junyu resume her college stud- ies, each household tasks her with a litany of chores, from secretarial work in First Uncle’s bank, to home tutor, typist, and personal assistant. The bogus nature of these assignments underscore the self-serving motives of the smug relatives. The self-effacing Junyu takes her proliferating assignments in stride, knowing perfectly well that she’s being taken advantage of. When her privi- leged cousin Jingsun asks why she puts up with it, she quips, “Spoken like a true

23 Another likely factor in Yang Jiang’s early success is the patronage of theater celebrities like Li Jianwu, Chen Linrui, or Huang Zuolin (not to mention the casting of star actresses). Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 25 man of leisure. Having a job is always better than not having one!”24 Junyu’s journey, in other words, is the comic reversal of her mother’s: whereas her mother idealistically abandoned the material security of her affluent family to follow a lover to Beijing, only to die in poverty, Junyu comes back to Shanghai (with Binru, her eager suitor, in tow) in a pragmatic attempt to secure a roof over her head. This unromantic vision of marriage as an institution of economic necessity is at the comedy’s core. Each act finds Li Junyu unwittingly embroiled in mari- tal maneuvering for money and power, beginning with the first, which quickly establishes that her First Aunt, Lady Zuyin’s, ulterior motive in taking in the poor girl was her desire to replace her husband’s competent but all-too-lovely young secretary, Miss Lu, whom she jealously refers to as his “office wife.” But it turns out that the insincere Lady Zuyin has no intention of having her déclassé niece move in and deftly shunts her off to Second Uncle’s. Second and Third Aunt meanwhile selfishly conspire to promote the betrothal of their respective children, Jingsun and Lingxian, a match they covet for the financial rewards it will bring both families. At stake is the sizable fortune of Great Uncle Xu Langzhai, the miserly, childless patriarch of the family who, according to their greedy calculations, is ready to name his heirs. When, in Act II, Jingsun unex- pectedly becomes smitten with the charming Junyu, the aunts fear their plan may be in jeopardy and Junyu is again immediately sent away. The hopelessly self-satisfied Jingsun continues to pursue his courtship, despite Junyu’s efforts to dissuade him, but Yang Jiang rejects what might have been a romantic sub- plot whereby the young master lifts the orphaned heroine from her social marginalization and poverty. Instead, she subverts convention by exposing the affair to be little more than a forestalled egocentric male fantasy: Junyu not only does not return Jingsun’s affections, but playfully mocks them, to the delight of the audience and the puzzlement of the self-absorbed Jingsun. In Act III, Junyu finds herself ensconced in the modern home of Fourth Uncle and his wife Lady Mao, a caricature of a new woman (xin nüxing 新女性) who spends her days “going to charities, doing relief work, contributing money, and giving speeches.”25 Other writers of the period figured the emanci- pated new woman as the alternative to the bourgeois housewife taitai 太太; Ding Ling’s novella “Shanghai Spring 1930” (1930), for instance, charts the metamorphosis of Meilin, the pampered and complacent wife of a liter- ary celebrity, into a political activist. Yang Jiang, by contrast, satirizes Lady Mao’s activist stance, depicting her as every bit as petty and hypocritical as

24 Yang, Yang Jiang zuopin ji, vol. 3, 277. 25 Ibid., vol. 3, 295. 26 Dooling the other conniving aunts. Among other things, Lady Mao keeps a running tab of her philanthropic and shopping expenses and regularly bills her husband. And when her expenditures leave him hard up for cash, she loans him money back, plus interest. A complex subplot involving a fictitious mistress and out- of-wedlock son, whom Fourth Uncle and Junyu invent to preempt Fourth Aunt from adopting a foundling, provides some of the play’s more comic moments of misunderstanding and misrecognition; as the play’s third triangular rela- tionship, it again underscores the material considerations that, in Yang’s vision, are at the heart of middle-class marriage. Ultimately the play concludes on an upbeat note: the youthful heroine rejects Jingsun’s marriage proposal but, having won the affections of Xu Langzhai (who insists she call him “grandfather”), now stands poised to inherit his great wealth. This comic reversal of fortune, as Gunn aptly puts it “is not the result of any voice of reason, nor the impact of revolution, nor the deeds of heroism.”26 In keeping with Yang Jiang’s cynical vision of human affairs, an ironic series of coincidences (Lady’s Mao inadvertent aid in introducing Great Uncle to the daughter of his favorite niece; First Aunt’s hand in reuniting Junyu with her actual boyfriend Binru, and so on) cause the stars to align for Junyu. This turn of events, in other words, is the result of pure chance rather than of any inten- tional action on the part of the female protagonist. Through this happy deus ex machina resolution, Yang extracts comic justice on the greedy and snobbish Shanghai elites whose selfish machinations to safeguard their own privilege and power ultimately prove self-defeating. Yang Jiang goes even further in deploying the marriage plot to explore the fiscal obsessions of contemporary Shanghai in her second play Forging the Truth, which incorporates more pointed allusions to the pervasive economic uncertainties and survival demands of early 1940s Shanghai. Characters in this play engage in real estate speculation, obsess over the high cost of food, dream up get-rich-quick schemes, marvel at the booming banking industry, and dis- cuss profiteering and hyperinflation. The darker of Yang’s two comedies, the main plot concerns a fortune-hunter who seeks to con his way into a life of financial comfort by courting the vacuous, pampered daughter of a wealthy business tycoon. Meanwhile, an ambitious new woman, Yanhua (a poor rela- tion who, like Junyu, occupies a marginal existence amid the wealth and privi- lege of stuck-up relatives), sets her sights on the con man, mistaking him for the real deal, and eventually tricks him into marrying her instead. Like Heart’s Desire, Forging the Truth presents Shanghai society as a world in which money trumps all—where the pursuit of economic advantage lies at

26 Gunn, Unwelcome Muse, 233. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 27 the very core of human motivation and desire. And again, the domestic realm in which the action unfolds is conjured up as an arena steeped in the finan- cial logic of profit and loss, competition, and, above all, market manipulation and scheming for the upper hand. Such a vision, it is important to point out, implicitly rejects the popular discourse of placid domesticity that circulated widely in Shanghai print culture at the time. Ladies’ home journals published during the occupation, such as Happy Home Monthly ( Jiating yuekan 家庭 月刊, 1936–1945) and Healthy Home Monthly ( Jiankang jiating yuekan 健康家 庭月刊, 1939–1944), were dominated by articles and stories on such mundane topics as housekeeping, home decorating, fashion, and familial bliss while, in Susan Glosser’s words, “ignoring the political chaos and material want that tested the survival skills of most of Shanghai’s population.”27 The opening scene of the play, significantly, finds the privileged young lady, Zhang Wanru, idly flipping through just such a pictorial magazine, as if to invoke precisely the fanciful image of leisurely domesticity the play will go on to overturn. The other principal comic characters each represent complementary fac- ets of this money-driven world. Zhang Xiangfu, Wanru’s father, represents the attitude of those who have made a fortune on wartime speculation. A pomp- ous financier who makes easy money in real estate, Xiangfu takes center stage in the first act, set in the lavishly appointed parlor of his private residence, as he takes it upon himself to deal with the business of his daughter’s marriage. Xiangfu’s obvious prosperity and his involvement in the lucrative real estate business (we learn that he’s just closed a 2 million yuan deal on a small prop- erty) immediately mark him as a character of dubious moral stature. Money dominates Xiangfu’s exchange with his wife, which overflows with economic metaphors. Likening matrimony to a financial transaction, he disapproves of their daughter’s budding romance with the dashing young suitor Zhou Dazhang on grounds that it is tantamount to reckless speculation, deploying metaphors from commercial advertising to the lottery to shopping sprees to make his point that the risks of such a match are simply too high. Instead, he proceeds to promote the virtues of their nephew, Feng Guangzi, a known quantity and

27 Susan Glosser, “Women’s Culture of Resistance,” in Henriot and Yeh, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun, 303. Nicole Huang, in her essay on women’s print culture in wartime Shanghai, advances a more sympathetic argument about the centrality of this discourse of blissful domesticity, which she interprets as symptomatic of the wartime context: “the experience of the domestic and the everyday is intensified precisely due to the threatening intrusion of war” (337). See her chapter in the same collection, “Fashioning Public Intellectuals: Women’s Print Culture in Occupied Shanghai,” in Henriot and Yeh, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun, 325–45. 28 Dooling thus wiser “investment.” To convince his wife of the urgency of acting swiftly to seal the deal he invokes the laws of the market: “When you take a fancy to some product that’s a sure money maker, before you can bat an eyelid you’ve got to snatch it up. In today’s market, how many girls are there waiting to get mar- ried? But how scarce quality sons-in-law are!”28 When Madame Zhang demurs, ostensibly on grounds that the object of Feng’s affection is in fact their niece Yanhua (though really because he’s a penniless pedant), the patriarch likens the decision to that of a smoker offered a choice of two types of cigarettes: “If he fancies Yanhua, how can he not fancy Wanru? Does a man who smokes My Dear brand cigarettes complain that Three Forts lack flavor? No problem!” The remark makes sense on a number of levels: for the contemporary urban theater-goer the literal point of the reference to these brands would have been immediately apparent: My Dear cigarettes were a cheap local brand while the imported British-American Three Forts was the significantly more luxurious and, thus, desirable brand.29 But the comment is also revealing for what it conveys about the speaker: like brand-name commodities, the relative valua- tion of the two young women is, for Xiangfu, measured in financial terms. The poor Yanhua, despite considerable personal attractions, is of limited means and thus worth little on the marriage market, while high-born Wanru, with her sizable dowry, commands high value. Nor is his analogy between women and cigarettes entirely coincidental, as the commercial marketing of tobacco prod- ucts, whether in print ads, calendar posters, or on product packaging itself, almost always featured images of young, attractive (and often provocatively sensual) modern women.30 Here the reference gives added texture (and comic effect) to Yang Jiang’s satirical commentary on a culture so steeped in materi- alism that human relations themselves are commodified. The stereotypically crass business man, Zhang reduces his own daughter to desirable merchandise to be consumed by the appropriately discerning buyer.

28 Direct quotations here and below are taken from my translation of “Forging the Truth” in Dooling, Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 114–77. 29 This also happens to be a very topical reference—My Dear brand (Meili pai 美麗牌) cigarettes were produced by the Huacheng Corporation, whose factories in Shanghai had only just started up production again in 1942, after having shut down at the outbreak of the war. 30 As earlier scholars have noted, this advertizing practice not only helped to rapidly popularize cigarettes among male consumers but exerted influence over contemporary perceptions of women’s gendered and sexual identities. See, for instance, Laing, Selling Happiness. This motif is revisited later in the play, in Act V, Zhou Dazhang’s mother also compares herself to beauty on a cigarette box. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 29

The satirical figure of the smug capitalist epitomizes the callous financial logic and narrow self-interest of contemporary Shanghai elites. The daughter’s charming suitor, Zhou Dazhang, on the other hand, is Yang’s vehicle to comi- cally explore the single-minded pursuit of money and materialistic goals of the underclass. Upon first encounter, in Act I, Dazhang appears to be the per- fect foil to the profit-minded Zhang Xiangfu: presenting himself as a man of high principle, Dazhang proclaims a noble indifference to matters of wealth and social status. As he declares to Madame Zhang, who is clearly bedazzled by his apparent fortune and accomplishments, for instance: “Had I wanted a career for purely selfish gain, I could have become an official and made a for- tune. Even before returning from overseas, my friends in Nanjing sent me a letter urging me to come back home. Had I wanted to be an official, would I still be waiting around today?”31 The rapid profusion of denials in this scene as Dazhang converses with his would-be in-laws– his disinterest in running a business; his distaste for banquets, his disdain for relying on his family’s illus- trious past—however, eventually seem to belie a concealment of desire and provides an early hint that our hero may not be what he seems. And indeed, the play soon reveals Dazhang to be a fast-talking rogue set on cheating his way into the Zhang family for purely materialistic motives. The con man archetype helps Yang explore the moral ambiguities of a war- time society in which money is paramount, albeit for vastly different reasons depending on one’s place on the economic ladder. Economic ambitions, not lofty ideals, spur Dazhang’s courtship of Wanru, a silly rich girl whose privi- leged insulation from reality is symbolized through her association with popu- lar magazines and movies, is nothing but a scheme of self-enrichment. Even before Dazhang’s true identity has been disclosed to the audience Yang uses the character’s dialogue to suggest that romance is merely a rhetorical cover for ulterior motives. In Act I, for instance, as Dazhang goes through the obliga- tory motions of courtship, including getting down on one knee to propose, one detects that his true love interest is money. The exchange between the two ‘sweethearts’ underscores not so much the hero’s deeply amorous feelings but his acute desire to win her father’s consent, without which, he fears, her hefty fortune is unlikely to materialize:

DAZHANG: It sounds as though you enjoy the fact that your father disap- proves of me. If we were to get married, would we have to hide it from your father and do it in secret?

31 This is a surprisingly sharp jab at the pro-Japanese Wang Jingwei regime on Yang Jiang’s part. 30 Dooling

WANRU (laughing): Why not? It’ll be just like the movies, we can secretly slip away and elope! DAZHANG: And before you know it, your father will disown you and won’t give you a dime. Then what will you do? WANRU: What’s there to be scared of? You have money, I have money. DAZHANG: Your entire inheritance is in your father’s hands, and he could refuse to give it you. WANRU: He gave it to me ages ago when he put all the documents in my name. DAZHANG: What about cash?

Zhou Dazhang ultimately succeeds in charming Wanru and her mother (but not the savvy patriarch) into believing he is “the scion of an old-fashioned family and the young master of a rich household,” to borrow Madame Zhang’s glowing description, and therefore a proper match. Act II, however, finds the character in a shabby attic room, the humble lodgings he shares with his illiterate, widowed mother. The juxtaposition of the austerity of this impov- erished domestic setting and the luxurious interior space showcased in the previous act underscores a stark disparity between society’s haves and have- nots. The contrast is also a source of comic irony for the remainder of the play, as the audience is now fully aware that Dazhang’s seemingly impeccable cre- dentials are fraudulent.32 As he strips off his smart western suit and changes back into his old clothes, Dazhang’s true identity as an impecunious social climber is literally uncovered. Yet Yang’s complex sympathy for the character begins to come through, as throughout Act II she shares details that under- score the family’s straightened circumstances. Whereas the decadent chatter within the Zhang household dwelt on excess and abundance (huge profits, lei- sure time, left-over snacks, and so forth), much of the dialogue in the Zhou household revolves around questions of food and money, and the lack thereof. Here the conversation moves from unpaid grocery bills, to pawnshops, out- standing debts and meager salaries, to lack of rice, rancid flour, and the pro- hibitive price of food. The revelation of the Zhous’ deprivation helps explain Dazhang’s duplicity—all he has, Yang seems to suggest, is words, which he des- perately hopes to leverage into something more substantial. There’s an unmis- takable element of self-delusion, however, in the character’s surfeit of words, and this diminishes our sympathy for him. As if to compensate for his material lack, he is given to incessant exaggeration and tall tales even in the company

32 It is also, no doubt, an allusion to the grim realities of wartime Shanghai, in which extreme squalor and glamour co-existed side by side. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 31 of his own family, about lucrative job prospects, offers of marriage, extravagant meals and fancy restaurants. Once, as Dazhang sits down with his mother for a meager bowl of “fish-shaped” noodles (an example of Yang Jiang’s comic touch, given yu’s symbolic association with notions of wealth and abundance),33 he boasts about a sumptuous meal he’s supposedly consumed, almost imme- diately getting carried away by the fantasy himself as he reels off the list of mouthwatering dishes:

DAZHANG: I’m not very hungry yet—today I dined at the Zhang’s place—just a simple meal of six dishes: fried shrimp, braised chicken, crispy duck, glazed fish, sautéed “three winters”, buttered cabbage, shrimp, sea cucumbers. . . . MOTHER: That’s seven! DAZHANG: Seven! Well, then, there must have been seven.

Continuing with this vein of wishful thinking and imagined luxury, he goes on to mention that he had also been invited to dine out with friends at Meilongzhen and D.D.s. Yang’s audiences would have recognized the names of these expensive dining establishments, both of which had opened for business during the occu- pation era—Meilongzhen an upscale restaurant established in 1938, known for its Shanghai-style cuisine, and D.D.s an American chain popular with afflu- ent urban patrons.34 The character’s evident inability to partake in the kind of lavish meals such eateries offered—except perhaps in his imagination—is a subtle reminder of stark inequities of hunger in wartime society. The play’s economic plot takes a further comic turn with the introduction of a third character, the cunning female trickster Yanhua. Portrayed as an intel- ligent and ambitious single young woman, Yanhua exhibits many attributes of the familiar literary trope of the New Woman. She knows exactly what she wants, has no qualms about pursuing it, and is completely undaunted by mas- culine authority. Yet, in Yang’s portrait, her independent spirit is impeded by a lack of financial autonomy: despite the fact that she works for a living, it is implied that she still cannot afford a room of her own and thus has no choice but to reside in the home of her insufferable relatives as a dependent. (Yang Jiang herself, the reader might recall, spent part of the war living under the same roof as her in-laws). At a moment when dire employment conditions meant that many working women were barely able to eke out a living during

33 Many poor people, according to Henriot, were reduced to flour diets during this period in Shanghai. See “Rice, Power, People,” 45. 34 Both restaurants, interestingly, have reopened as nostalgia restaurants in Shanghai. 32 Dooling the occupation, the predicament of this otherwise self-sufficient character would have been all-too-familiar.35 The predicament of the New Woman is a key comedic focus from the very start of the play, when the patriarchal Zhang Xiangfu, pontificates to his wife (with hilariously convoluted reasoning) on the economics of marriage:

These days, insisting on all that female equality rigmarole doesn’t pay off even for girls themselves. Before, it was just rhetoric: “emancipated” and “equal” women like you in fact did nothing more than sit in your parlors being housewives, while the ones out earning a living were still us men. But nowadays, people take it seriously. Girls are expected to be just like men and go out and earn a living too.

Now that female liberation has evolved beyond rhetoric to reality and women actually have to work for a living, he continues, women would be better off reverting to the traditional practice of arranged marriage:

If I were a woman, I’d happily be one of those old-fashioned girls who didn’t have to worry about dating and finding a husband but instead sim- ply let her parents marry her off. If I weren’t satisfied with the match, I could then blame it on my parents and lament my bitter fate. If your hus- band turns out bad, who can you blame for having fallen blindly in love? If he breaks your tooth you might as well swallow it! As for freedom—I’m more concerned about financial security.

Yanhua is hardly in need of anyone to tell her what to do and the plot is pro- pelled by her aggressive attempts to shape her own destiny. Yet unlike the New Woman of May Fourth-era literature, who was driven by lofty ideals such as romantic love and individual freedom, Yanhua is motivated by mate- rial desires. Ironically, then, she reaches the same conclusion as the patriarch

35 Scholarly accounts of women’s economic activities in Shanghai during the occupation period remain scarce, although evidence does (not surprisingly) point to overall dire work conditions. In her analysis of Shanghai funü (Shanghai Woman), one of the few women’s magazines at the time that went beyond the light fare of fashion, recipes, and domestic advice, Susan Glosser notes that it often contained reports about refugee and poor women forced into sex work, and it also reported on widespread middle-class unemployment. As Glosser points out, achieving financial independence was difficult for urban women, especially educated middle-class women, even before the war, but that the realities of occupation further exacerbated these challenges. See her essay, “Women’s Culture of Resistance.” Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 33

Zhang Xiangfu, viewing marriage primarily as the key to acquiring financial security. Note her distinctly unsentimental take on love in a scene in which she rejects the awkward Feng Guangzu’s offer of marriage:

YANHUA: Since heaven bullies me, I have to look after myself all the more! Since heaven doesn’t love me, should I not love myself? Why should Wanru be the only one who gets a good husband, a rich husband? Why should her husband be the only one who is able and handsome . . . Dear Guangzu, I beg you to forgive me, it’s not that I look down on you . . . GUANGZU: Don’t worry about it. YANHUA: But, I. . . . I . . . GUANGZU: You love his wealth, and his ability, his looks. . . . YANHUA: Well, of course. Whatever it is they call unconditional love, I don’t believe in it.

Importantly, Yanhua doesn’t deny the role of feelings altogether (and indeed, the play provides ample evidence of mutual affection between her and Dazhang), but she is depicted as being savvy (or cynical) enough to view mar- riage as far more than a romantic venture. As with the imposter Zhou Dazhang, Yanhua’s initiative and cunning are tinged by an angry desperation. When Feng praises Yanhua’s intelligence and looks as superior to her rich cousin, for instance, she explodes in a furious rant that registers her frustration at what she perceives as her unfair disadvantage in competing in a marriage market in which financial assets are the primary measure of female worth:

What good is that? This world belongs to her; she has a mother and father who dote on her, while all I have are people who loathe me. She gets whatever she wants, I get nothing. She needn’t care about whether she has money or not, yet I have to sell myself, piece by piece, in order to earn a few lousy yuan. Isn’t that so—I won’t live for long, since there are only 365 days in a year and each day I sell a little of myself to the office. In the blink of an eye, I’ll be old, and what will I have achieved? What’s the use of being clever? What’s the use of being beautiful? She doesn’t have to be clever and people say she’s clever. She doesn’t have to be beautiful, since as long as a young woman isn’t too ugly she can dress up and she’ll look beautiful . . . . .”

In the scenes that follow, Yanhua undertakes a series of crafty maneuvers to manipulate the marriage market as it were in order to secure an advantageous 34 Dooling alliance. First, she schemes to get her oblivious rival sent out of town. Then, devising a clever ruse to make it seem as though Wanru has gone off to be wed (to none other than the buffoonish scholar), she tricks the dashing Dazhang into an elopement. But ultimately the joke is on her, as the dramatic irony of Act II has foreshadowed: her mischievous actions have all the while been lead- ing to her own undoing, for the man she has “outwitted” is himself a fraud. No sooner do the young lovers depart than they are obliged, for lack of funds, to return home. By foregrounding financial considerations, the conventional ending of the May Fourth-era narrative paradigm in which the heroine breaks ties with her family in a defiant act of self-emancipation, is given an amusingly ironic new twist.36 The play’s final scene, set once again in the squalid interior of the Zhou’s attic apartment, turns the classic comic dénouement of the “grand finale” (da tuanyuan 大團圓) on its head: rather than a joyful wedding symbolizing the resolution of conflict and restoration of social order, Yang Jiang depicts a hast- ily arranged ceremony in which the two as yet unsuspecting main characters are tricked into going through the motions of a traditional Confucian matrimo- nial ritual, in the presence of both the Zhou and Zhang families. This final con has been masterminded by the patriarch Zhang Xiangfu, to protect the family’s reputation and his own daughter’s chances of securing a suitable match. True to character, Xiangfu treats the scandal as though he were managing financial assets: “when you write a bad check, you immediately send in some money to make up for the difference.” The sheer absurdity of the scene (which highlights the utter disconnect between the festive occasion and the painful reality of the misalliance) provokes laughter but is clearly anything but a happy ending. Note the exchange:

36 As I have argued elsewhere, this paradigm owes much to Ibsen’s celebrated play A Doll House, which was first translated into Chinese 1918. Countless works of Chinese drama and fiction over the next decade appropriate Nora as a figure of female emancipation. Hu Shi’s one-act play “The Greatest Event in Life” (1919), in which the heroine Yamei defies her tradition-bound parents and elopes with her modern lover, is a typical early example. Work by May Fourth women writers such as Feng Yuanjun (1900–1974), Lu Yin (1898–1934), and Xie Bingying, also often centered on new women characters who have broken from their families to pursue an independent lifestyle. See, for instance, Feng’s “Separation”(1923); Lu Yin’s “After Victory” (1925) and Xie Bingying’s A Woman Soldier’s Own Story (1936). The individualistic model of women’s emancipation also had its critics, including most famously Lu Xun who highlights the economic impediments to women’s pursuit of personal autonomy in his widely printed lecture “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home? (1923). Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 35

YANHUA: Dazhang, what just happened? DAZHANG: I don’t know either. YANHUA: It wasn’t a dream? DAZHANG: It sure seemed like a play. YANHUA: This . . . is your home? DAZHANG: Our home!

The hapless young newlyweds’ grim awareness that their respective schemes to gain access to the privileged enclave of wealth and status have backfired injects a decidedly sober tone to the final scene, and though the two vow to persevere in their struggle to make a better life for themselves, their prospects seem dim. In all their moral ambiguity, Zhou Dazhang and Zhang Yanhua are unheroic in any conventional sense—shrewd, but also manipulative and self- serving tricksters who pursue self-preservation by relying on their own wits and duplicitous schemes. Their ultimate failure to alter their circumstances underscores the play’s bleak vision of the helplessness of individuals in the face of an overwhelming status quo. Undeserving elites retain their privileged lifestyles while would-be interlopers are kept safely at bay. Yet we may also be inclined to forgive the two failed tricksters for their underhanded tactics and lies because we understand them to be acts of survival. Through this topi- cal motif of survival, Yang Jiang raises questions of immediate relevance to an audience immersed in their own daily predicaments: to what lengths should a person go to protect their own welfare under conditions of extreme depriva- tion? Do the challenges of survival in an unjust and amoral world justify ethical compromise? And what are the costs to social relations (including, especially, marriage) when economic considerations prevail?

Windswept Blossoms

How and to what extent Yang Jiang pursued such questions further in her next comedy, Sporting with the World (1944), is not clear because, as mentioned, the script does not survive. Billed as a three-act farce (naoju), the play was directed by Yao Ke and debuted at the Paris Theater in the summer of 1944. According to Wu Xuezhao, Yang’s authorized biographer, the plot involved the cynical young social climber Wang Tingbi who responds to a newspaper ad placed by a rich woman looking for a husband.37 Yang Jiang’s fourth and final play, Windswept Blossoms, was completed at the war’s end, a period of further belt-tightening

37 See Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 189–90. 36 Dooling for the family as Qian Zhongshu cut back on his teaching hours in order to devote attention to his now-renowned comedy of manners, the satirical novel Fortress Besieged. As Yang often liked to point out, it was her willingness to shoulder the lion’s share of domestic responsibilities when the family maid was let go that made such an arrangement feasible. Even still, Yang managed to produce this one last dramatic work, though preparations to stage the play, according to Wu Xuezhao, were abandoned amid post-war uncertainties.38 Commercial theater in general, having flourished briefly in Shanghai due to the unique circumstances of occupation culture, now entered a period of decline as cinema and other competing cultural forms made their revival after 1945. Contemporary fans were nevertheless able to enjoy the work in print, when it was serialized in 1946 in the literary journal Renaissance, which was edited by Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 (1898–1958) and Yang Jiang’s longtime supporter Li Jianwu, and the following year when it was reissued as a book in a series compiled by same journal. Compared with her first three plays, Windswept Blossoms is decidedly somber in tone, with little trace of the playful banter, visual humor, or, as I’ve focused on here, thematic satire that infuse her comedies of manners. Though originally advertised as a “tragedy” (beiju 悲劇),39 the play contains several ele- ments that would support its classification as melodrama. Yang Jiang herself is said to have referred to the play as a potboiler, alluding perhaps to its use of well-worn tropes and formulae—a doomed love triangle and the heroine’s suicide in the climactic final scene, for instance—that played to popular audi- ences. Yet this is not to say the work lacks creative vision; like her comedies, Windswept Blossoms grapples with perennial themes of selfishness, hypocrisy and the seeming futility of romantic striving. Whereas the earlier plays feature comic pragmatists consumed by desperate desires for either self-preservation or self-enrichment against a backdrop of urban capitalism, this work centers on idealists who have eschewed personal material considerations altogether in the name of social justice. Their modus operandi has little to do either money or basic physical needs/wants but, rather, is anchored in lofty visions of free- dom and revolution. Yet true to the author’s anti-romantic vision, the play does

38 Wu Xuezhao, “Yang Jiang de xiju shuangbi.” Wu writes that the play was completed in the summer of 1945 and was to be staged by the Kugan Theater troupe (with Huang Zuolin’s wife and well-known actress Dan Ni 丹尼 [stage name of Jin Yunzhi 金韵之, 1912–1995] in the lead role) but abandoned the plans when the Pacific war came to an end. 39 See: Wenyi fuxing 文藝復興 (Renaissance) 1:3 (1 April 1946), 256. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 37 not ultimately celebrate the nobility of such idealistic pursuits; here, grand schemes are revealed to be selfish delusions that are not only vain and futile but in fact lead to devastating personal consequences. A brief synopsis will suffice. The play is set in an unspecified year of the Republic. Having forsaken her affluent urban lifestyle in the name of love and revolution and settled in a poor village in the countryside to promote rural edu- cation, Shen Huilian’s faith in the cause of agrarian reform, along with feelings for her activist husband, Fang Jingshan, have greatly diminished. At the play’s open, we find her in a dilapidated temple-cum-schoolhouse listlessly awaiting his return home from prison, where he has been languishing since his arrest on false charges the year before. Even prior to Fang’s first appearance on stage, the emotional chasm between the two is palpable: hardened by the setbacks and everyday frustrations of the past year (which run the gamut from local indiffer- ence to reform to paying the rent to an ailing mother-in-law), Huilian’s adora- tion for her husband has given way to contempt: as she vents to Tang Shuyuan, the sensible lawyer who has labored tirelessly for Fang’s release, “He can have his blind determination. What he ought to realize is that he’s not the world’s indispensable great man, shouldering some great mission to save the people.”40 The reunion between husband and wife is predictably strained, as Huilian visibly recoils from her husband’s apparently undiminished zeal to save the Chinese peasantry. To the disenchanted heroine, whose youthful aspirations and joie de vivre have been crushed by the harsh realities of everyday life, Fang now comes across as a pathetic narcissist, so caught up in delusions of gran- deur that he is oblivious to the social environment he inhabits. Adding another layer to the plot, Huilian has, in her husband’s long absence, grown close to Tang. Dialogue early on suggests that the feelings between the two are mutual, though out of fraternal loyalty to his friend, Tang refrains from openly declaring his true feelings—until, of course, it is too late. The self-effacing Tang Shuyuan (along with Nanny Wang, the faithful family servant who accompanied Huilian to the countryside) serves as a foil to the figure of the romantic individualist, and through him Yang Jiang throws into relief the self-absorbed idealism Fang embodies: thus contrasting his own humble career to Fang’s heroic endeavors, he asserts simply “My burden, my responsibilities to my family—they’re too heavy and too demanding. I can’t have ideals.”41 Although Windswept Blossoms has generally been viewed less favorably than Yang’s comic dramas within mainstream literary history, it has also been hailed

40 Edward Gunn’s translation of the entire 1946 version of the play appears in Gunn, Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama, 228–75. This line appears on page 235. 41 Ibid., 248. 38 Dooling as her strongest work in terms of its exploration of female consciousness.42 The complex and contradictory tangle of emotions the heroine voices in the first act—her cynicism over her troubled marriage versus her reignited yet unrequited romantic longings; her desire to pursue personal independence versus her longing to be taken care of; her seething resentment at Fang for her present predicament versus her regretful awareness of her own misguided choices, and so forth—remain the central focus throughout the play. Indeed, Shen is a rich psychological study of the New Woman who struggles internally with the painful realization that her defiant assertion of autonomy has not brought true self-fulfillment; on the contrary, as she now begins to grasp, she has merely been carrying out the priorities and dreams of a self-absorbed man. Thus in one embittered outburst, the character gives voice to her disenchant- ment with “liberated” existence: “His projects! His projects! I’m his cushion, so he’ll have something comfortable to sit on, I’m his walking stick, so he’ll have something to prop himself up when he walks down the road. He is a great pil- lar, and I am the mud supporting his base. He’s a huge machine, and I’m the coal he burns! Am I not human? I’m not human! My whole life I’m to be a foil, a backdrop for him!”43 In contrast to Huilian’s tragic self-awareness, Fang clings to his egotistical fantasies. Even after Huilian finally walks out on him (at the end of Act II) and the villagers drive him from the school, the selfish romantic fails to grasp the truth. His expressions of wounded pride and jealous rage reveal that he barely fathoms the reasons why he has been rejected by both his wife and the local people. In the high-pitched emotional climax in the last act, the suicidal Fang threatens to kill Huilian as punishment for her “affair” (in fact, Tang has only just openly declared his love, in the mistaken belief that Fang has drowned himself in the lake); in the hysteria of the moment, Huilian seizes his pistol and fatally shoots herself. The play’s relentless critique of romantic idealism, and in particular its pes- simistic vision of the futility of individual ambition, reveals continuity with her earlier dramas, as critics have noted. One might also point out that in its indictment of the imagined self-importance of the modern male intellectual, and the gaping divide that separates the country’s educated elites and rural masses, the play also anticipates some of the key motifs of Yang Jiang’s post- 1949 work, most notably narrative works such as Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liuji 干校六記, 1981) and Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡, 1987, translated as Baptism). Yet, given the (tragic)comic sensibility that critics now

42 Sheng, Zhongguo nüxing wenxue xintan, 166. 43 Gunn, Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama, 250. Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies 39 commonly see as the signature feature of Yang Jiang’s creative oeuvre, it is hard not to be struck by the anomalous absence of laughter in the work: instead of the detached, picaresque spirit that persists, despite the cruel absurdities of life, in Yang Jiang’s most acclaimed works, Windswept Blossoms leaves us with a bleak scene of self-destruction as its main characters succumb to despair and morose self-pity in the wake of lost ideals. Yang Jiang, who in her twilight years has devoted considerable energy to controlling the shape of her literary legacy (and that of her late husband), seems to have concluded that the work fell short, and even after revising the work more than a half a century later, ultimately omitted the play from her Works (Yang Jiang zuopin ji, 1993) and the more expanded Collected Works (Yang Jiang wenji, 2004) altogether.44

Conclusion

In spite of her widely acknowledged accomplishments as a playwright dur- ing the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, both by critics then and today, Yang Jiang has never come back to drama as a medium of creative expression. Even in a dramatic tradition not known for the longevity of playwriting careers, that she wrote just four huaju is cause for lament.45 It is not entirely surpris- ing, however, given the particular politicization of the performing arts after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. As was the case during the war, Yang continued to pursued literary endeavors as a refuge from (rather than a site for engaging with) turbulent times, and she has sought cover in a variety of different textual modes over the course her lengthy career as a writer—as changing circumstances, both political and personal, have called for. What has remained constant are certain rhetorical elements, strategies, and philosophi- cal questions now regarded as the hallmark of Yang Jiang’s creative oeuvre, glimpses of which are already present in her plays of the 1940s: her adept use of humor to confront the absurdities and cruelties of society; her abiding interest in ordinary existence rather than epic scenarios; her privileging of the figure of the trickster who acts out self-preservation as opposed to heroic motives; a refusal to sacrifice the complexities and pleasures of creative expression for the sake of a utilitarian political or patriotic message, to name a few. These elements, as other chapters in this book affirm, infuse her approach to literary

44 Yang Jiang did publish a substantially revised version of the play in 1987 in the first issue of the journal Huaren shijie 華人世界 (World of Chinese, est. 1987) but that appears to be the last time she allowed the work to be published. 45 Weinstein, “Baptism as Dramatic Novel,” 1. 40 Dooling translation, fictional narrative, and most recently personal memoir. In its totality, Yang Jiang’s extensive oeuvre, spanning many tumultuous periods in Chinese cultural history and multiple genres, offers a rich trove of material for exploring the intricate relationship between human adversity, survival, and creative expression, a transhistorical topic pertinent to grasping modern China and the modern world. Chapter 2 “Passing Handan without Dreaming”: Passion and Restraint in the Poetry and Poetics of Qian Zhongshu

Yugen Wang

This chapter examines three of Qian Zhongshu’s works directly related to his composition of traditional-style Chinese poetry ( jiuti shi 舊體詩) and scholar- ship on traditional Chinese verse: Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral Life (Huaiju shicun 槐聚詩存, 1994), Poems of the Song: An Annotated Selection (Songshi xuanzhu 宋詩選注, 1958), and On the Art of Poetry (Tan yi lu 談藝錄, 1948; rev. 1984). The first is a collection of Qian’s own poems written in the tradi- tional style over half a century (1934 to 1991), and compiled by Qian himself.1 The second was finished during the Mao period and remains one of the most influential anthologies of Song Dynasty (960–1279) poetry. The third is a work of criticism on traditional Chinese poetry spanning the Tang Dynasty (618– 907) to Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), first published in Civil War-era Shanghai and substantially revised and enlarged in 1984. These three works provided a nice tripartite overview of Qian’s formidable talents in the art of poetry and criticism and, because of their broad generic and temporal coverage, provide a solid framework for exploring his views and thoughts on the subject. My dis- cussion, however, is by no means a comprehensive introduction to these three complex works or to Qian’s poetry and poetic criticism. Instead, by focusing on a few telling examples from each of the three works, I try to identify a unified vision or motivating force running through them. My general argument is that Qian’s tremendous erudition and the density and intensity of his writing style oftentimes conceal a fundamental feature of both his creative and scholarly works. Beneath an exquisitely crafted and formidable textual surface, which often consists of layers upon layers of ref- erence to the received literary tradition, we find that sustaining his long and prolific career as both a poet and a critic was an enduring passion for the art

1 The collection includes 173 titles (281 poems), of which 136 titles (203 poems) date from between 1934 and 1949, and 37 titles (78 poems) from between 1950 and 1991. I use the Qian Zhongshu ji edition (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2002) in this chapter. For the meaning of the title, see Section 3.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_004 42 Wang of classical poetry. “I yield to none in my enthusiasm for our old literature,” he wrote at age twenty-five,2 and, indeed, the intensity of his passion was unsur- passed in modern times. This passion gave rise to a unique feature of his critical mode: though Qian tends to be cautious in offering conclusions, in presenting evidence he endeavors to be exhaustive, sometimes citing dozens of literary passages to illustrate a single point. This dual drive, toward exhaustiveness in material and restraint in argumentation, I argue, is the expression of a passion- ate yet methodical mind intent on unlocking an abundance of new creative and analytic possibilities from China’s rich literary tradition. In trying to understand these intellectual and emotional dynamics, I will sit- uate Qian’s poetry and criticism in two broad historical contexts. First, I discuss the immediate success of On the Art of Poetry in the late 1940s and the explo- sion of interest generated by the revised and expanded version issued in the 1980s in relation to the paradigmatic shift to modernity of the Chinese culture and society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process saw ancient modes and genres of literary expression, including classical poetry and poetic criticism, blamed for China’s cultural backwardness and replaced with new forms and genres introduced from the West. Qian’s career demonstrates that he embraced the fresh possibilities this new culture opened up for cre- ative writing and literary criticism. Like many outstanding cultural figures of the Republican era, he received a Western-style education, majored in foreign languages and literature at college, and studied overseas. While in step with the cultural trend of Westernization, however, Qian had also received strict and substantial home tutoring in classical Chinese literature as a youth, and its constant pull would become part of his critical temperament. The tremen- dous fame he earned from a lifetime of accomplishments in traditional poetry and poetic criticism nonetheless obscures just how radical those accomplish- ments were. Qian earned acclaim not only for having mastered both old and new tools and genres of literary and scholarly expression but also, and more significantly, for having mastered them equally well. It is here that we need to bring in a sec- ond historical context. Qian’s achievements in classical poetry and criticism need to be understood in relation to not only the literary and intellectual con- text of the twentieth century but also, I argue, the history of classical Chinese poetry and poetic criticism. Viewed in the longue durée, Qian’s works were a natural extension of a particular poetic theory and practice that had its origins in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and that saw a brilliant post-Song resurgence

2 Ch’ien Chung-shu, “Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama,” T’ien Hsia Monthly I (1935), 37–46; reprinted in Qian, A Collection of Qian Zhongshu’s English Essays, 54. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 43 in the late Qing and early Republican period, a period that played a formative role in Qian’s own poetic learning.3 Some of Qian’s compositions rival the best of the Song masters he so admired; his poetic criticism was thus not only a nat- ural extension of that late classical tradition, but also its refinement. Although Qian himself objected to his poems being labeled “Song Dynasty style poetry” (songshi 宋詩),4 his profound knowledge of and immersion in that tradition and his heavy reliance upon its theory, techniques, and terminology made him undeniably the most important modern embodiment of its cherished values. The three sections that follow each deal with one of Qian’s three works mentioned above, paying particular attention to these two broad historical trends as I delve into textual details. An additional argument of this chapter is that Qian’s successful efforts illustrate the continuing validity and relevance of the old poetic tradition, a point Qian never made explicitly himself 5 but is well demonstrated by his writings. The argument of relevance, I further propose, is destined to figure more prominently as contemporary Chinese culture and scholarly discourse begin to cast a more constructive look back toward its rich but much-criticized past.

“Passing Handan without Dreaming”

Yang Jiang once used the phrase “worrying about the world and lamenting life” ( youshi shangsheng 憂世傷生) to characterize the Qian Zhongshu one finds in Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral Life.6 In these poems, Qian assumes the emotional profile of the traditional Chinese poet profoundly concerned with articulating his feeling about the particular time and space in which he lodges his ephemeral human existence. The quality of a poet’s work hinges on how he

3 Both Qian and his father, Qian Jibo 錢基博 (1887–1957), were closely affiliated with the Song poetry revival movement in the late Qing and early Republican period. On the movement and its major figures, see Kowallis, The Subtle Revolution, 153–231. 4 See note 17 below. 5 The nearest point Qian makes is in an essay entitled “On ‘Old Chinese Poetry,’ ” in which he argues that “Old” Chinese poetry has its own merits and should be appreciated in its own terms. See Ch’ien Chung-shu, “On ‘Old Chinese Poetry,’ ” The China Critic VI.50 (14 Dec. 1933); reprinted in Qian, A Collection of Qian Zhongshu’s English Essays, 12–22. I thank Christopher Rea for bringing this essay to my attention. 6 Yang Jiang, “Xie Weicheng de Qian Zhongshu” 寫《圍城》的錢鍾書 (The Qian Zhongshu who wrote Fortress Besieged), in Tian, et al., Qian Zhongshu Yang Jiang yanjiu ziliao (hereafter cited as YJZL), 63. Jesse Field’s translation of the complete essay, of which this is Part 2, appears as “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged” in Renditions 76 (Autumn 2011), 68–97. 44 Wang positions his personal experience in relation to eternal nature and the shifting affairs of the world. His response to nature and to worldly affairs, however, is not a direct one; it is highly stylized, governed by conventions developed over hundreds of years and mediated by a generic framework within which the poet has only limited autonomy. Because of this stylized mode of expression, it is sometimes difficult to sense the real human experience in the exquisitely crafted work of a traditional Chinese poet, although this does not mean that the buried experience is altogether undiscoverable. Qian is a master of this traditional mode of expression, and some of his poems match the best of the classical period. One example is the conventionally- titled “Autumn Meditations” (“Qiuhuai” 秋懷), a seven-syllable regulated verse (qiyan lüshi 七言律詩) written in 1947 upon the completion of On the Art of Poetry:

啼聲漸緊草根蟲 Insect calls crescendo at the roots of the grasses; 似絮停雲抹暮空 Cotton-like halting clouds paint the evening sky like brushes. 疏落看憐秋後葉 So sparse on the branches are the autumn leaves, merely looking at them makes me sad; 高寒坐怯晚來風 So cold and high are the evening winds, their encroachment makes me frightened. 身名試與權輕重 Weighty or light, try taking the measure of your body and fame; 文字徒勞計拙工 Skillful or not, your efforts to craft your writings will all be in vain. 容易一年真可嘆 One more year quickly slips by—how truly regrettable! 猶將有限事無窮 Still, I will commit this limited life to serving the unlimited.7

The second half of the poem expresses an enduring sentiment in classical Chinese poetry: that every human endeavor, however determined and heroic, will vanish in the shifting, incessant flow of worldly events, just as the human body will eventually be exterminated. The act of comparing and measuring, no matter its objects—be they personal reputation or literary works—are ultimately rendered meaningless. As the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi 莊子 famously put it:

7 Qian, Huaiju shicun, 102. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 45

Human life has limits, but knowledge has none. To chase what is limitless with that which is limited is perilous.

吾生也有涯，而知也無涯。以有涯隨無涯，殆已。 8

The last line of the poem alludes vaguely to this saying, but unlike Zhuangzi, Qian here does not consider the pursuit of limitless knowledge to be mean- ingless. The line expresses a reluctant but firm recognition, reinforced by the use of the word “still” ( you 猶), that serving the unlimited world with one’s limited life is all that one can—and must—do. Qian’s message, in other words, defies the traditionally passive and gloomy moral-emotional framework of the “autumn meditations” genre, reasserting his willingness to forge on in face of an overwhelming sense of vainness and ephemerality. That sense of vainness and ephemerality is expressed in the first half of the poem through a set of conventional yet vivid images detailing the reactions of both the animal and the human world to the relentless encroach of autumn. The increasingly desperate shrieks of the autumn insects, the tumbling leaves in the chilly wind, the halting clouds over the evening sky represent the sen- tient physical world in which the poet’s sentiments unfold and take root. Qian’s poem is a fine specimen in a long tradition of expressing one’s thoughts and emotions through the keen observation of seasonal changes in nature; autumn being one of the most favored seasons by Chinese poets because its sad and contemplative landscape offers a most felicitous medium to express the poet’s mental agitation. In adapting this traditional mode, Qian, unlike many modern writers of traditional poetry, avoids inserting an inflated sense of modernity. This last point deserves further comment. The poem conveys the image of a deeply traditional poet whose action, writing style, and emotional response all conform to long-established poetic conventions. This conventionalized mode of expression makes it hard to detect the poet’s individuality because the feel- ings and emotions expressed are severely mediated by tradition and genre. This, however, does not necessarily mean that the poem lacks any reference to its author or historical moment of creation. As mentioned earlier, the poem was occasioned by Qian’s completion of On the Art of Poetry, his first serious attempt to continue and perfect the old poetic critical tradition. The time was 1947, and China was in the midst of a civil war, with the historic change- over from Nationalist to Communist rule on the mainland two years away. While it is dangerous to read these unfolding historical events neatly into the metaphorical landscape of the poem, the ominous imagery of the crescendoing

8 Guo, Zhuangzi jishi (Collected Exegeses to Zhuangzi), 115. 46 Wang calls of autumn insects, the high and chilly winds sweeping the evening sky, and the intense concern over the vainness and uncertainty of the human realm nonetheless resonate with the moment of national turmoil. The highly suggestive images of the poem register not only the poet’s personal feelings at this particular moment in his life, commemorating the completion of an important work in poetic criticism, but also a collective sense of the imminent change in the larger historical and political theater. If a profound concern with national affairs is only obliquely suggested in the highly conventionalized mode of expression of the “autumn meditations” genre, in the next two poems, the reference to contemporary culture and pol- itics is much more straightforward. Ten years after the writing of the above poem, the People’s Republic had long been established and, in the spring of 1957, Qian was on his way from Beijing, where he had a job as a researcher on classical Chinese literature in the newly established Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to Hubei to visit his seriously ill father, who was to die later that year. He composed five quatrains to commemorate the occasion and titled them collectively “On the Way to Hubei” (“Fu E daozhong” 赴鄂道中). The last one reads:

駐車清曠小徘徊 Halting my cart in a clear and open space, I take a moment’s rest, pacing back and forth; 隱隱遙空碾懣雷 From distant skies comes the muffled roll of thunder. 脫葉猶飛風不定 Falling leaves tumble about in the air: the winds gusting every which way; 啼鳩忽噤雨將來 Cooing mountain doves suddenly fall silent: the storm approaches.9

Rumbling thunder in the distance; leaves carried about by shifting winds; coo- ing doves frightened into silence by the imminent storm: the quiet moment of reprieve from a journey’s hardships is filled instead with anxiety, fear, and a sense of impending disaster. At that moment, a storm was gathering momen- tum not just in the natural world, but also in the political and intellectual world. The cultural liberalization of the 1957 Hundred Flowers Movement, which gave intellectuals the opportunity to vent their complaints against the Party and the government, was soon to come to a violent end with the Anti-Rightist Movement. That large-scale persecution of intellectuals, which

9 Qian, Huaiju shicun, 119. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 47 reached its peak in 1958, would devastate the lives of tens of thousands as their criticisms became evidence of their alleged crimes. The image of the mountain doves frightened by an imminent storm serves as a symbol of intellectuals’ vulnerability in the face of political movements: their harmless calls are no match for the intensity and sheer force of the storm. By evoking this lyrical, innocuous image, Qian self-identifies with the bird, sug- gesting its affinity with the man of letters singing his songs of praise or criti- cism, vulnerable to external circumstances. The dove’s habitat, furthermore, is peripheral—it resides in the areas between cultivated land and uncultivated wilderness, plain and mountain—an apt metaphor for the marginal status of the traditional poet in modern society. To push the analogy further, the meta- phor symbolizes the inherent tension between the pull of tradition and the allure of modernity that is ever-present in Qian’s works of creative writing and scholarship. This last point brings us to two other poems in the series. In 1957, Qian was not only on his way to visit his ailing father but also at another important moment in his scholarly life: just as the “autumn meditations” poem marked the completion of On the Art of Poetry, the second poem in the “On the Way to Hubei” series commemorated the completion of his annotated anthology Poems of the Song. As we will see in the next section, in completing this work, Qian basically followed his conscience and did not bend himself to suit the political imperatives of the time. The imminent danger of the doves thus also suggests his anticipation that disaster would befall himself in the immediate future. The poet’s “stopping his cart” in the middle of his journey to reflect on his recent labors also demonstrates his calm resolve to accept what awaits him. Despite the palpable sense of anxiety, the poem betrays no regret. The tone is of acceptance and appreciation, not resentment or victimization. This equa- nimity is even clearer in the fourth poem in the series:

弈棋轉燭事多端 Like a game of chess or a candle flickering in the wind,10 human affairs have myriad outcomes; 飲水差知等暖寒 In drinking water, one can more or less know its warmth or coldness.

10 The “flickering candle” metaphor is used in earlier poems, including in the Tang poet Du Fu’s (712–770) “Fair Lady” (“Jiaren” 佳人), to describe the unpredictable turns of events of the human world, whose directions flicker to and fro uncertainly like the flame of a candle turned in the wind. For the Du Fu poem, see Du, Dushi xiangzhu, 553. 48 Wang

如膜妄心應褪淨 Delusions of the mind, wrapped in layers of mem- brane, all must be shed;11 夜來無夢過邯鄲 At night, without a dream, I pass Handan.12

Handan 邯鄲 is a city of historically strategic importance located in the south of present-day Hebei province. The city has long served as a transit and cul- tural hub linking the North China Plain and the lower Yellow River region and was presumably on the route of Qian’s trip from Beijing to Hubei. According to a famous story by the eighth-century Tang Dynasty (618–907) writer Shen Jiji 沈既濟 (and retold many times by later writers in various forms, including drama), a young man, downtrodden and frustrated, was one day passing by this city and by chance met a Daoist master, who enlightened him about the illusory nature of the world. Through an induced dream the young man expe- riences all possible human successes and glories, only to find himself, upon waking, in the same shabby status as before.13 Handan thus came to be the pro- verbial ideal place for bold dreaming and ultimate enlightenment. In saying that he has passed Handan without dreaming, Qian expresses a complicated sentiment. He suggests, for one thing, that he has passed the age of the young man in Shen’s story and therefore has stopped desiring worldly attainment. This state of undesiring, however, is not the absolute stillness supposedly achieved by Zhuangzi’s “true men of the past” (gu zhi zhenren 古之真人), who “did not dream while sleeping, did not worry when awake” (qi qin bu meng, qi jue wu you 其寢不夢，其覺無憂).14 It is, rather, a giving up based on resolu- tion and choice: that all the heart’s desires should ( ying 應) be shed does not necessarily mean that they already ( yi 已) have, or that the poet is able or will- ing to shed them. Despite the indeterminacy of human affairs, the poet assures us, there is always something—even as quotidian an experience as drinking water—that can provide us with the solace of something to grasp onto. No matter how unpredictable the world may be, “In drinking water, one can more or less know its warmth or coldness.”

11 The Northern Song poet Su Shi (1037–1101) in a poem to his brother compared delusions in the human mind to layered membranes that cannot be completely shed: with every layer removed, a new layer grows back. For the poem, “Ciyun da Ziyou” 次韻答子由 (In Reply to Ziyou, Matching His Rhymes), see Su, Su Shi shiji (Collected Poems of Su Shi), 1056. 12 Qian, Huaiju shicun, 119. 13 This is the “Zhenzhong ji” 枕中記. See Bruce J. Knickerbocker, trans., “Record within a Pillow,” in Nienhauser, Tang Dynasty Tales, 73–129. 14 Guo, Zhuangzi jishi, 228. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 49

Putting this conviction of the ultimate comprehensibility of human experi- ence back into the emotional equation of the poem, we find that Qian’s com- pilation of an annotated anthology of Song Dynasty poetry, one of his beloved topics, provided him personal solace and anchorage in the volatile political environment of the late 1950s. Yang Jiang says that the poem “lodges Qian’s feelings about the political situation of the time.”15 The feelings expressed here, I would argue, following Wu Zhongkuang 吳忠匡, also apply to Qian as a person and scholar, as “a true portrait of his personality and interest in life and in scholarship.”16

“A Blurry Mirror”

When asked by Wu Zhongkuang how he felt about his poems being called “Song Dynasty style poetry” (songshi), Qian shrugged off the label but did not deny the deep influence Song Dynasty poetry had on him, at the same time emphasizing that it was only one source of inspiration.17 Qian’s admiring but sometimes critical attitude toward Song Dynasty poetry can serve as a guide for understanding his views on classical Chinese poetry in general. Qian had been asked to prepare a Song poetry anthology in the first place because of his close ties to the late Qing and early Republican period Song poetry revival and his own writing style’s affinity to his Song predecessors’. The work took him two years to complete. The second poem in the series recording his trip to Hubei talks directly about the work:

晨書暝寫細評論 From morning till dusk, I wrote and commented with great care; 詩律傷嚴敢市恩 Strictest standards were applied: how dare I pur- chase favor otherwise? 碧海掣鯨閒此手 As for catching whales in the deep blue sea, I stayed my hand;

15 Yang Jiang, “Xie Weicheng de Qian Zhongshu,” in YJZL, 64; see also Yang, “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged,” 94. 16 Wu Zhongkuang, “Ji Qian Zhongshu xiansheng” 記錢鍾書先生 (On Mr. Qian Zhongshu), in YJZL, 65. 17 Ibid., 74. 50 Wang

只教疏鑿別清渾 I only wanted to be a dredger and tunneler, to dis- tinguish between muddy and clear.18

The second line of the poem is borrowed from the Northern Song poet Tang Geng 唐庚 (1071–1121). Tang was a minor figure in the Song but was neverthe- less famous for his promotion of strict rules for poetic composition, a key con- cern in Song poetic criticism. Qian included as many as five poems by Tang in the anthology (out of a total of less than 300 extant pieces), evidence of his form-focused principles of selection.19 In interpreting Tang Geng’s famous line “Strictest standards were applied, with no room for leniency” (shilü shang- yan si gua’en 詩律傷嚴似寡恩), the twelfth-century Neo-Confucian philoso- pher Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) vividly compared Tang’s methods to “a ruthless clerk conducting a legal inquisition” (kuli zhiyu 酷吏治獄) who “applies the law harshly and is completely lacking in sympathy” ( yongfa shenke, dou mei renqing 用法深刻，都沒人情).20 In borrowing Tang Geng’s line, Qian gives it an important twist and brings to it an added level of complexity. By saying “how dare I purchase favor otherwise,” he reconfirms his belief in strict rules as the ultimate standard of poetic excellence, which, he was fully aware, would not only not bring benefit for him but would actually incur harm, because he was writing in a hostile environment in which ideological content, rather than sophisticated form, was the primary criterion for appraising literary works. His privileging of form and rules does not mean, however, that he whole- heartedly agreed with the poetic visions of his Song predecessors. Overall, Qian adopted a critical and syncretic approach to the core values of Song Dynasty poetry, especially the theory and practice of Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1101), its most illustrative representative. One essential characteristic of Huang’s poetry is his elaborate use of figurative language and allusions. The most extreme of these would push the objects or things being described three or four times removed from the original referent, the general belief being that the greater the distance between the two, the more skilled the poet. The game for the reader was to unscramble this tangled metaphorical thicket to reach the center, wherein lay the meaning of the poem. Qian criticizes this heav- ily allusive style, comparing the experience of reading Huang’s poems to, bor-

18 Qian, Huaiju shicun, 119. For the references and allusions used in the last two lines, see the next section. 19 By comparison, only five poems by Huang Tingjian (1045–1101) were included. Huang was the designated “patriarch” and founding father of the Jiangxi School of Poetry, the most important poetic school of the Song Dynasty. For more discussions of Huang, see below. 20 Quoted in Qian, Songshi xuanzhu, 91. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 51 rowing an expression coined by Huang himself, “listening to someone playing zither from behind the screen” (gelian ting pipa 隔簾聽琵琶),21 or, “listening to people from distant places speaking their home dialect” (ting yixiangren jiang tamen de fangyan 聽異鄉人講他們的方言).22 For an eleventh-century reader sympathetic with Huang’s approaches or a twentieth-century Western reader immersed in modern literary theory alike, the ability to create or appre- ciate a sophisticatedly constructed “screen” that prevents the “listener” from directly seeing the face of the zither player lies at the heart of the whole liter- ary enterprise. For an inhabitant of 1950s mainland China whose aesthetic and interpretive horizon were heavily shaped by Socialist Realism and for whom the supremacy of content over form was an absolute and inviolable rule, that linguistic screen, however wondrously made, would not only not enhance their aesthetic experience or sense of excitement; it would represent an obstacle to be smashed. By criticizing Huang Tingjian’s resort to excessive allusion and by advocat- ing a theory of meaning that values direct expression, Qian was in general accord with the prevailing official literary theory of the 1950s. He tries to main- tain a delicate balance between the prosody-focused formal standard so close to his heart and the collective post-1949 desire for authentic meaning and an unobstructed path to literary meaning. He tries hard to be fair and true to the writers and the period covered, and to himself, but at the same time does not challenge the dominant interpretive framework of the time. This compromise is apparent everywhere in Poems of the Song. He gives, for example, the largest space to the Southern Song poet Lu You 陸游 (1125–1210),23 the most favored writer of the 1950s in official literary narrative; he is especially generous to poets whose works are supposedly concerned with the plight of the common people. His willingness to compromise is amply demonstrated in his long pref- ace to the original 1958 edition of the anthology. In this preface, Qian criticizes Song poets for their shabby habit and collec- tive “fondness of reasoning and of discursive argumentation” (ai jiang daoli, fa yilun 愛講道理、發議論).24 He quotes with apparent enthusiasm and approval25 Chairman Mao’s widely propagated opinion that Song Dynasty

21 Ibid., 97. 22 Ibid., 102. 23 Altogether twenty-seven poems of Lu You are selected, more than any other poet and more than five times the number for Huang Tingjian. 24 Qian, Songshi xuanzhu, “Preface,” 7. 25 I agree in general with C.T. Hsia that Qian was in a way “under the obligation” to cite Mao in the preface, but it is also apparent that there is a high level of agreement on the part of 52 Wang poetry lacks “imagistic thinking” (xingxiang siwei 形象思維), a notion con- secrated in the post-1949 mainland, which Mao argues can be found in the fresh and emotionally genuine poetry of the Tang Dynasty.26 Qian criticizes the heavy reliance of Song poets on book learning as source of inspiration, endorsing the dominant view, also articulated by Mao in a famous talk on lit- erary and artistic policy in the revolutionary base of Yan’an in 1942, that the common people’s lives should be “the only source” (weiyi de yuanquan 唯一的 源泉) of literary writing.27 Qian spends quite some time elaborating this last point, giving the impression that he is not simply paying lip service to the tenet but is in genuine agreement with it. His major criticism of Song poetry’s heavy allusiveness is that rooting one’s poetic compositions narrowly in the works of past writers constrains the expressive potential of the creative mind and is thus tantamount to an act of self-imprisonment. He gives the example of a poem by the twelfth-century Southern Song poet Chen Yuan 陳淵. Like many of his contemporaries, Chen deeply admired the early medieval Chinese poet Tao Qian 陶潛 (365?–427), whose “fields and gardens” (tianyuan 田園) poetry were considered to perfectly embody the cherished poetic values of simplicity and genuine feeling. In one of his travel poems, Chen wrote,

我行田野間 Traveling through the fields, wherever I set my eyes, 舉目輒相遇 An encounter [with Tao] would inevitably occur.

Chen’s depiction of seeing nothing but the scenes already depicted by Tao Qian expresses the premodern literati aspiration to reach the ideal world of the ancients through their literary style and lifestyle. For writers and scholars like Qian Zhongshu whose aesthetic horizon had been substantially recon- figured by the modern concept of progressive change, however, this “seeing nothing but Tao Qian” mentality and expressive mode is alarming, because, as Qian puts it, this does “not necessarily prove that Tao Qian covered all the ground in describing the scenes; it perhaps only means that Chen’s mind and eyes were severely constrained by Tao.”28 This example shows that what Qian Zhongshu truly admires is the untiring efforts on the part of Song poets to find the most appropriate words and means to describe the world they saw and felt,

Qian regarding this particular point about “imagistic thinking.” For C.T. Hsia’s comment, see Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 433. I thank Christopher Rea for bringing Hsia’s comment to my attention. 26 Qian, Songshi xuanzhu, “Preface,” 7–8. 27 Ibid., 12. 28 Ibid., 14. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 53 their striving for perfection in poetic expression, and their sophisticated poetic craft, not the values, ways, and vision expressed in their individual works. This is not only his attitude toward Song poetry, but his overall judgment of classical Chinese poetry. To him, this is “the biggest lesson that can be learned from the evolution and development of the entire classical poetic tradition.”29 Despite Qian’s efforts to strike a balance between the classical tradition and an official literary theory informed by modern evolutionism, his Poems of the Song was harshly criticized upon its publication. The target of criticism, not unexpectedly, was his favoring form over content, especially his use of poetic prosody as an important measurement of poetic quality. Yet it also received high praise. Xia Chengtao 夏承燾 (1900–1986), for one, considered it to be a breakthrough in many areas, such as its selection of material and its concise and insightful commentary on individual poems.30 The Japanese Sinologist and scholar of Song Dynasty poetry Ogawa Tamaki 小川環樹 (1910–1993) commented immediately after its publication in China that the anthology would force a rewriting of Song literary history.31 Looking back at the work in 1981, Qian Zhongshu himself admitted that the anthology was the product of “compromise and concession” (qianjiu he tuoxie 遷就和妥協), because “for various reasons, those I thought should have been included were often unable to get in, while those I considered should not have been there were chosen.”32 In his 1988 preface to a Hong Kong edition, Qian said that the anthology nei- ther reflected the “correct” guiding principles of the time nor represented his true personal likes and dislikes. He explained the dilemma he had faced: “In the oppressive academic atmosphere of the time, I attempted to act wise and follow the accepted standards but at the same time could not help but try to be clever and do things slightly differently.”33 He used an unconventional mir- ror metaphor to describe the compromised nature and ambiguous status of the book: “If literature can be considered a mirror for the spirit of the time and the thought of the author, then this book cannot be compared to a clear, shiny modern glass mirror, but a blurry, murky bronze mirror [mohu andan

29 Ibid., 19. 30 See Xia Chengtao, “Ruhe pingjia Songshi xuanzhu” 如何評價《宋詩選注》(How to Evaluate Poems of the Song: An Annotated Selection), Guangming ribao 光明日報, 2 August 1959, in YJZL, 362–66. 31 Quoted by Qian himself in his 1981 interview with Yan Huo 彥火, “Qian Zhongshu fangwen ji” 錢鍾書訪問記 (An Interview with Qian Zhongshu), in YJZL, 40. See also the account by Uchiyama Seiya 内山精也 in his dialogue with Wang Shuizhao 王水照, in YJZL, 374. 32 Quoted in Yan Huo, “Qian Zhongshu fangwen ji,” in YJZL, 40. 33 Qian Zhongshu, “Mohu de tongjing” 模糊的銅鏡 (A Blurry Bronze Mirror), in YJZL, 110. 54 Wang de tongjing 模糊暗淡的銅鏡] of ancient times.”34 Qian’s point may be not merely self-mockery or self-consolation. In its function to engage the world, lit- erature should perhaps not strive to be a perfectly reflective glass mirror in the first place, but remain a blurred or mediated representation. In other words, the very “bronze-ness” of the mirror has a value, just as the sophisticatedly pat- terned screen separating the proverbial zither player from the audience has its own useful function.

“Concrete Criticism”

Despite its modest tone, by bringing together the works of two most important critics in the “poems on poetry” (lunshi shi 論詩詩) tradition—Du Fu 杜甫 and Yuan Haowen 元好問 (1190–1257)—the second couplet in the second poem of the “On the Way to Hubei” series effectively puts Qian in the vantage position as the grand modern bearer of that tradition, suggesting that he is finishing the job Du and Yuan had begun but left uncompleted.35 If in Poems of the Song this self-confidence is only indirectly transmitted through the annota- tions and comments on individual poets and individual works, in On the Art of Poetry that voice is much more focused, assertive, and uncompromising. One important difference between the two is that On the Art of Poetry deals with classical poetry in general, and not merely Song poetry. Qian’s general poetics, however, as I will show below, was heavily influenced by Song poetic theory and practice.

34 Ibid., 109. 35 The first line of Qian’s couplet, “As for catching whales in the deep blue sea, I stayed my hand”, alludes to the fourth of Du Fu’s famous “Xi wei liu jueju” 戲為六絕句 (Six Poems on Poetry), where the grand style of “whales in the deep blue sea” ( jingyu bihai 鯨魚碧海) is compared with the aesthetically alluring and delicate style of “kingfishers on orchid branches” ( feicui lantiao 翡翠蘭苕). The second line, “I only wanted to be a dredger and tunneler, to distinguish between muddy and clear”, alludes to a couplet in the opening piece in Yuan Haowen’s famous “Lunshi sanshi shou” 論詩三十首 (Thirty Poems on Poetry): 誰是詩中疏鑿手 Who is there to rechannel the poetic tradition, 暫教涇渭各清渾 And clearly separate the pure Wei and muddy Jing streams? For Du Fu’s poem and its reception in later periods, see Yang, Du Fu Xi wei liu jueju yanjiu (A Study of Du Fu’s “Six Poems on Poetry”), 276–284. For Yuan Haowen’s poem and its reception, see Fang, Yuan Haowen lunshi sanshi shou yanjiu (A Study of Yuan Haowen’s “Thirty Poems on Poetry”), 155–61. English translation of Yuan’s couplet is modified from John Timothy Wixted’s Poems on Poetry, 26. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 55

Qian reiterated on many occasions that what he was interested in doing was not the construction of complete systems, but “concrete literary and artistic criticism and appreciation.”36 On the Art of Poetry (as well as Guanzhui bian) conveys this interest in exquisite appreciation and differentiation of minute details. The book consists of ninety-one sections, discussing a wide range of topics related to classical poetry and poetic criticism from the Tang to the late Qing period. Since the 1980s scholars have tried to abstract a hidden “theo- retical system” (lilun tixi 理論體系) from the seemingly fragmentary and ran- dom discussions that characterize this work and Qian’s other writings. Zheng Chaozong 鄭朝宗, for example, concludes that Qian resorts to excessive quo- tation as a means to find “unassailable and unbreakable artistic rules.”37 Chen Ziqian summarizes Qian’s methodology as “constructing emptiness through substantiality” ( yi shi han xu 以實涵虛).38 These formulations, however, are, on the whole, unsatisfying. Any reader of On the Art of Poetry will be enthralled by Qian’s detailed and sophisticated discussion of particular examples and for- get about the “theoretical system” or “artistic rules” those examples are sup- posed to collectively constitute. In terms of methodology, however, in On the Art of Poetry Qian relies heavily upon a classic form of poetic criticism that has a history going back to the eleventh century. “Remarks on poetry” (shihua 詩話), the critical genre of choice for poetry scholars since the Song, is par- ticularly interested in the technical details of poetic composition. By their very formal structure, which focuses on individual examples, and theoretical out- look, such remarks on poetry are innately incompatible with modern system- atic theorizing.39 Qian chose this form advisedly. In his existent scholarly writings, only the seven critical essays that comprise his collection Patchwork (Qi zhui ji 七綴集, 1985) show some effort to treat a topic systematically, and even there, his inter- est in concrete criticism is obvious. He explicitly explains that what will be left of systematic theories in the end is “only some fragmentary thoughts” (zhi shi

36 See, for example, Zheng Chaozong’s 鄭朝宗 (1912–1998) article, “Dan kai fengqi bu wei shi” 但開風氣不為師 (A Trendsetter but Never a Self-claimed Teacher), in YJZL, 47. 37 Ibid., 46. 38 See Chen Ziqian 陳子謙, “Lun Qian Zhongshu yi shi han xu de wenyi piping” 論錢鍾 書以實涵虛的文藝批評 (On Qian Zhongshu’s “Constructing Emptiness Through Substantiality” Method of Literary and Artistic Criticism), in YJZL, 317–34. 39 For a recent English-language work on the emergence of the shihua in the late eleventh- century intellectual and literary context, see Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 60–108. 56 Wang yi xie pianduan sixiang 只是一些片斷思想).40 These fragmentary thoughts, however, he writes, “often unconsciously express a well-thought idea in just a few words” (wangwang wuyizhong sanyan liangyu, shuochu le jingpi de jianjie 往往無意中三言兩語，說出了精辟的見解).41 In the preface to his essay collection Written in the Margins of Life (Xie zai rensheng bianshang 寫在人 生邊上, 1941) he compares this kind of random thoughts to marginalia, or, “ ‘eyebrow comments’ [meipi 眉批] in the top margins of old Chinese books.”42 For him, the entire enterprise of literature and literary criticism is no more than random comments written on the margins of the big book that is human life. This tacit recognition of the ephemeral nature of human existence is pithily expressed in the title he gave to his collected poems, Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral Life (Huaiju shicun). Huaiju 槐聚, literally, “a gathering under the locust tree,” refers to a famous Tang Dynasty tale about a man who, in a drunken late afternoon dream, experienced all the wealth and glories of a successful official’s life, only to wake up and find that the dreamed world of grandeur and glory was located in an ant-filled hole beneath the roots of a big locust tree in his courtyard.43 For Qian, these fragmentary and random notes and comments do not depend upon or point to a bigger design or purpose to make sense; they, like illusions in a dream, have a value and life of their own, and should be appreciated as such. On the Art of Poetry can be considered the result of several dozen such bril- liant flashes of insightful moments in Qian’s scholarly and critical life as he uses his unique “marginalia” style to comment on the poetic arts he so loved. Its completion, from its inception in the 1930s to the expanded and amended edition in 1984, spanned over half a century. The work covers a wide range of topics but its focus is the historical development and evolution of the art and techniques of classical poetry, particularly in the late imperial period. On the Art of Poetry does not cover the pre-Tang period; for the Tang Dynasty, it focuses on a few writers such as Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), Meng Jiao 孟郊 (751– 814), Li He 李賀 (790–816), and Li Shangyin 李商隱 (813–858). The list of writ- ers discussed in the book from the periods after the Tang Dynasty, however, is extensive, including: Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 (1002–1060), Ouyang Xiu 歐陽 修 (1007–1072), Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), Su Shi 蘇軾, Huang Tingjian,

40 Qian, Qi zhui ji, 34. 41 Ibid., 33. 42 Translation is Christopher Rea’s from Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 31. 43 This is the “Nanke Taishou zhuan” 南柯太守傳 by Li Gongzuo 李公佐 (c. 778–848). See William H. Nienhauser, Jr., trans., “An Account of the Governor of the Southern Branch,” in Nienhauser, Tang Dynasty Tales, 131–87. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 57

Chen Shidao 陳師道 (1053–1101), Chen Yuyi 陳與義 (1090–1139), Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1206), Lu You, Yuan Haowen, Fang Hui 方回 (1227–1307), Zhong Xing 鍾惺 (1574–1624), Tan Yuanchun 譚元春 (1586–1637), Wang Shizhen 王 士禎 (1634–1711), Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–1797), Zhao Yi 趙翼 (1727–1814), Jiang Shiquan 蔣士銓 (1725–1784), and Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 (1792–1841). Zheng Chaozong avers that the rationale or guiding principle behind the selections is that these are all people who “more or less contributed, in their own composi- tions or critical works, to the development of the art of classical poetry and added to the arsenal of poetic techniques.”44 In other words, Qian not only made these selections, but imposed upon them a progressive historical frame- work that we have already seen in Poems of the Song. In this sense, despite its traditional look, On the Art of Poetry in essence is not a traditional remarks on poetry type of criticism; it represents Qian’s new take on the form in a much changed modern context. Taking one step further, we find that among the writers and critics featured in On the Art of Poetry, there is still an inner focus, which is a particular type of poetry and poetic criticism the Song Dynasty was known, and blamed for, in later periods, especially the Jiangxi School of Poetry and its most acclaimed representative, the poet and theorist Huang Tingjian. On the Art of Poetry opens with a section on the hotly debated issue of the differences between Tang and Song poetry. Qian writes:

The difference between Tang Dynasty and Song Dynasty poetry is not merely that they came from two different dynasties; it is also a difference in form and temperament. There are two different kinds of people in the world and their poetry can accordingly be divided into two types. Tang Dynasty poetry distinguishes itself by its charming beauty and its fresh and genuine emotions; Song Dynasty poetry excels in solid structure and rational reflection.

唐詩，宋詩，亦非僅朝代之別，乃體格性分之殊。天下有兩種 人，斯分兩種詩。唐詩多以風神情韻擅長，宋詩多以筋骨思理 見勝。 45

44 Zheng Chaozong, “Zailun wenyi piping de yizhong fangfa: Du Tan yi lu (budingben)” 再論文藝批評的一種方法—讀《談藝錄》（補訂本）(A Further Discussion of Qian Zhongshu’s Method of Literary and Artistic Criticism: Reading the Expanded and Amended Edition of On the Art of Poetry), in YJZL, 447. The account given here is also based on Zheng’s article. 45 Qian, Tan yi lu, expanded and amended edition (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 2. 58 Wang

By putting Song poetry on an equal footing with its Tang counterpart, given the deep-rooted bias against the former in late imperial poetic criticism, Qian’s remark effectively reaffirms the value of the poetic style of the Song, especially its excellence in the area of “solid structure and rational reflection” ( jingu sili 筋骨思理). The passage sets the tone and agenda for the whole of On the Art of Poetry, which can be read as Qian’s extended effort to prove the case that Song poetry should be appreciated on its own terms, not against evaluative standards defined by poetic values of the Tang. Sections 42, 44, and 45 are devoted to revealing that although Ming and Qing scholars criticized Song poetry, they were nevertheless deeply impacted by it; that this reaction was oftentimes unconscious only illustrates the depth of that influence. Much Ming and Qing criticism of Song poetic theory and practice, especially its emphasis on book learning and poetic craftsmanship, was launched within a critical framework put forward by the thirteenth- century scholar and critic Yan Yu 嚴羽, who famously claimed that poetry has a “distinct interest” (biequ 別趣) and a “distinct material” (biecai 別材) that have nothing to do with book learning and strenuous crafting. Yan used the term “wondrous enlightenment” (miaowu 妙悟) borrowed from Chan Buddhism to describe the distinct spontaneous process of poetic composition.46 Yan’s theory of enlightenment and spontaneity provided the conceptual basis for many similar theories from later periods, for example, the “divine resonance” (shenyun 神韻) theory of Wang Shizhen and the “natural temperament” (xingling 性靈) theory of Yuan Mei, both from the Qing Dynasty. In Section 28, Qian endeavors to show that enlightenment and effort (gongfu 工夫) do not contradict each other, considering “wondrous enlightenment” as an out- come, not antithesis, of effort. He quotes a famous passage by the seventeenth- century scholar Lu Futing 陸桴亭 (1611–1672) to emphasize the point:

Enlightenment is inherent in human nature. One, however, needs to exert one’s effort continuously in order to bring it out. This is like that fire is inherent in stone but you must knock the stone ceaselessly in order for the sparks to appear. Obtaining fire, however, is not the difficult part; after obtaining it, you have to sustain it with mugwort and feed it with oil so that the fire will not extinguish. Therefore enlightenment must be sustained by strenuous effort and hard learning.

46 See Yan Yu, Canglang shihua 滄浪詩話 (Canglang’s Remarks on Poetry), in Guo, Canglang shihua jiaoshi (Canglang’s Remarks on Poetry Collated and Annotated), 26. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 59

人性中皆有悟，必工夫不斷，悟頭始出。如石中皆有火，必敲 擊不已，火光始現。然得火不難，得火之後，須承之以艾，繼 之以油，然後火可不滅。故悟亦必繼之以躬行力學。 47

Of the ninety-one sections of the book, a total of twenty-seven, or almost a third, are devoted to the eighteenth-century scholar Yuan Mei and his influen- tial work of poetic criticism, the Master Suiyuan’s Remarks on Poetry (Suiyuan shihua 隨園詩話). This unusually generous treatment, however, as Zheng Chaozong has pointed out, does not indicate Qian’s endorsement of or fond- ness for Yuan Mei and his work. On the contrary, Qian explicitly expresses his dislike of Yuan and the Master Suiyuan’s Remarks on Poetry. Rather, Qian’s purpose was to expose and thereby eliminate Yuan’s bad influence on poetic criticism.48 Qian thus questions Yuan Mei’s overemphasis on talent and the spontaneous expression of innate feelings:

Freely expressing one’s innate feelings is no easy task. If the feelings are not innate, what can free expression do about it? Even if one is endowed with abundant innate feelings and favorably positioned at the auspi- cious moment when one’s brilliance just shines through unhindered and one’s mind’s flowers are in full bloom, can the process of articulation from mind to mouth and from mouth to hand really go without the help of the carpenter’s marking lines and chopping axes?

夫直寫性靈，初非易事。性之不靈，何貴直寫。即其由虛生 白，神光頓朗，心葩忽發，而由心至口，出口入手，其果能不 煩絲毫繩削而自合乎？ 49

The carpenter’s marking lines and chopping axes (shengxue 繩削) is a con- ventional metaphor pair Huang Tingjian used frequently to refer to the tools and processes of poetic crafting, which for Huang are essential to poetic suc- cess. By evoking this idea in a passage aimed to criticize the shortcomings of the “wondrous enlightenment” theory, Qian reveals the conceptual framework against which his criticism is launched. On the Art of Poetry also gives spacious treatment to Huang Tingjian, but unlike in Yuan Mei’s case, Huang is presented as a positive model. As the putative founding father of the influential Jiangxi

47 Qian, Tan yi lu, 99. 48 See Zheng, “Zai lun wenyin piping de yizhong fangfa,” 452. The statistics given here are Zheng’s. For Yuan Mei’s poetry and poetic criticism, see Schmidt, Harmony Garden. 49 Qian, Tan yi lu, 205–06. 60 Wang

School of Poetry, Huang was the main figure responsible for establishing a unique Song style of poetry and has been dubbed the “poetic patriarch” (shizu 詩祖) of the dynasty. As the Southern Song literary critic Liu Kezhuang 劉克 莊 (1187–1269) remarked, Huang achieved this status because his poetry was the result of strenuous crafting rather than the spontaneous flow of talent that characterized the works of his predecessors.50 The result of this strenuous crafting, however, as I mentioned earlier, was a product that posed tremendous comprehension problems for the reader. The screen Qian talks about separat- ing the reader from the meaning of Huang’s poetry turns out not a transparent crystal screen, but one made of iron. This is an important reason why Huang’s poetry required extensive annotation, even for Huang’s contemporaries. Such annotation was conveniently provided by the Southern Song scholars Ren Yuan 任淵 and Shi Rong 史容, which was so thorough and became so authoritative that up until Qian’s time, theirs remained the only substantive commentary on Huang Tingjian’s poetry. Immediately following the opening section in On the Art of Poetry that attempts to establish and argue for the equal value of Song poetry is a lengthy section consisting of fifty-nine substantive entries of annotation or commentary intended to amend Ren and Shi’s origi- nal work. The 1984 amended edition added another forty entries. This, in itself, is a remarkable feat. If nothing else, On the Art of Poetry is a work that provides the most substantial contribution to textual scholarship on Huang’s poetry since Huang’s own times—over nine hundred years. In an elaborate narrative discussion of his motives and methodology attached to the end of the added entries in the 1984 edition, Qian mentions that at the beginning of the project he was not especially fond of Huang’s poetry. This fortuitous encounter, how- ever, led to a lifetime addiction to Huang’s work that significantly influenced Qian’s own poetic and critical style. Qian’s account of his involvement with Huang’s poetry is a story of youthful enthusiasm leading to unalloyed devotion.51 He begins by saying that while majoring in Western languages and literature in college, he found himself with “plenty of disposable time” (shang duo xiari 尚多暇日) and therefore “selected and made a careful study of poetry collections with annotations and commentaries by famous scholars.” Those included Ren Yuan and Shi Rong’s commentaries on Huang Tingjian and Chen Shidao’s poetry. Why did he want to read the poems together with their commentaries? Because, Qian

50 See Liu Kezhuang, “Jiangxi Shipai xiaoxu” 江西詩派小序 (Brief Prefaces to the Works of the Jiangxi School of Poetry), in Liu, Houcun ji (Collected Works of Liu Kezhuang), 24.12a. For details of Huang Tingjian’s poetry and poetic criticism, see my book, Ten Thousand Scrolls. 51 See Qian, Tan yi lu, 346. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 61 tells us, he wanted not only to appreciate the poems but also to familiarize himself with the critical and exegetical tradition associated with them. Later on, he continues, on his way back by sea from Europe—apparently another leisurely moment—he met and befriended a young man named Mao Jingfan 冒景璠 (1909–1988). The encounter later led him to a work by Mao’s father Mao Jiuzhai 冒疚齋 (1873–1959) entitled An Amendment to Ren Yuan’s Commentary on Chen Shidao’s Poems (Houshan shi Tianshe zhu bujian 後山詩天社注補 箋), which was the elder Mao’s attempt to amend the original commentary on Chen Shidao’s poetry by Ren Yuan, the same scholar who also annotated and commented on Huang Tingjian’s poetry, through the traditional jian 箋 amended or sub-commentary. In the Chinese exegetical tradition, the jian is secondary to the zhu, the original and usually more comprehensive com- mentary on a work, and its purpose is to provide additional information or to clarify points unclear in the original commentary. At this moment, Qian asked a question that perhaps only a young man could have the courage to ask: “I said that doing the jian commentary is really nice, but why not go ahead and supplement the zhu 注 commentary instead?” His friend laughed and replied: “Easier said than done” (tan he rongyi 談何容易)! The suspicion in Qian’s friend’s reply was palpable and fully justified: that was a task that had not been successfully accomplished in the past six or seven hundred years. And this friendly nudge, Qian says, was all it took to launch him onto a journey of almost half a century. “I was at the time young and proud and therefore in my leisure moments I just picked Ren Yuan’s commentary to Huang Tingjian’s poetry and amended it for fun.” Qian was not only doing it but doing it the hard way: he chose the more difficult of the two poets Ren Yuan had commented upon—Huang Tingjian rather than Chen Shidao. Qian attributed the launch- ing of the project to his youthful “impulse to show off my skills” ( yishi jiyang 一 時技癢). The project’s success, however, derived ultimately from his profound knowledge and deep understanding, which was only strengthened in the pro- cess, of Huang Tingjian’s poetry and the classical poetic tradition in general. One example will suffice to demonstrate the depth of Qian’s understanding of and his ability to bring the subtleties of Huang’s sophisticated poetic tech- niques to light. As mentioned earlier, Qian thought that despite the density of Huang’s allusions, the “authentic meaning” of his poems could be reached if the reader broke through the multiple metaphorical layers that might frus- trate the uninitiated. Qian succinctly summarizes one of Huang’s typical methods of creating such metaphorical mazes as follows:

Create new meaning on the basis of the face value of the word; that is, take the literal meaning of a word unsuspectingly as if it were the real 62 Wang

meaning, and then commit fully to this meaning and use it as a path to reach the intended real meaning.

就現成典故比喻字面上，更生新意；將錯而遂認真，坐實以爲 鑿空。 52

Qian then gives a series of examples; here I discuss only two. The first is a cou- plet from Huang’s poem to thank a friend for bequeathing him a rare wine:

攻許愁城終不開 The long-besieged melancholy city had not been forced open; 青州從事斬關來 Along came the young general from Qingzhou, hav- ing smashed through all passes along the way.53

On first reading, we might be tempted to take the couplet at face value, think- ing it describes a gallant young general successfully lifting the siege of a long- besieged city. When we know that the couplet has nothing to do with battles or generals and that its topic is the power of wine, we may be pleasantly con- fused, but only for a short while. Because once this key barrier is broken, once the “screen” that blocks the view of the zither player is lifted up, we immedi- ately smile at our comprehension of the poet’s skillful use of the metaphor. The first hint is provided by the title of the poem, which is “Traveling Through Wu Mountain, Song Maozong Dispatched a Rider to Bequeath a Rare Wine” (“Xingci Wushan Song Maozong qian qi song zhehua chuyun” 行次巫山宋 楙宗遣騎送折花厨醖), and Huang’s contemporary readers knew all too well that the “young general from Qingzhou” (Qingzhou congshi 青州從事) in the couplet was a stock phrase for good wine. Another hint can be found in the first line of the couplet itself, which clearly states that this is no ordinary city but a “city of melancholy” (chou cheng 愁城). After this realization, the meaning of the couplet becomes rather simple and straightforward: the wine sent by the friend smashed all the melancholy and worries away. What Qian calls “take the literal meaning of a word unsuspectingly as if it were the real meaning” ( jiang cuo er sui ren zhen 將錯而遂認真) is that the poet treats the personified wine metaphor, Qingzhou congshi, as if it were a real person (this reading or mis-reading is much strengthened by the fact that there is an actual rider coming all the way bringing the wine to him). And once this is achieved,

52 Ibid., 22. 53 Huang Tingjian, “Xingci Wushan Song Maozong qian qi song zhehua chuyun” (Traveling Through Wu Mountain, Song Maozong Dispatched a Rider to Bequeath a Rare Wine), in Liu, Huang Tingjian shiji zhu, 426. “Passing Handan without Dreaming” 63 he commits himself to it fully, hence the following description of the general as “smashing through all passes along the way.” On the other hand, what Qian means by “commit[ting] fully to this [literal] meaning and then use it as a path to reach the intended real meaning” (zuo shi yi wei zao kong 坐實以爲鑿空) is the possibility of writing of wine as a person depends ultimately on the overall metaphorical framework in which the description operates, of which the title and the word of “chou” 愁 (melancholy) in the opening line is a crucial part. In other words, just as the reader begins to engage with the “literal” sense of the couplet, seeing in his or her mind’s eye the image of a dashing young general bravely coming to the rescue of the besieged city, the scene is all of a sudden rendered an illusion by the inevitable realization that it is nothing more than a figure for wine, the real object of the poem. Another example describes the monks’ rooms in a mountain monastery:

蜂房各自開戶牖 The cells of the beehive each opens its doors and windows; 處處煮茶藤一枝 Everywhere tea is brewing: a single branch of vine.54

If the reader figures out that Huang is comparing the clusters of rooms in the monastery to the cells of a beehive, the meaning of the first line becomes immediately apparent (the following line, which also ends the poem, depicts an idyllic picture of the peaceful life in the monastery; the vine branch is sup- posed to be used as firewood for the tea brewing). Only that in this case the boundaries between the imagined beehive and the real monks’ rooms are treated as one unified entity in the framework of the poem.

Crossing the Boundaries

In the above preliminary thoughts on Qian Zhongshu’s Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral Life, Poems of the Song: An Annotated Selection, and On the Art of Poetry I have focused on the question of what ultimately motivated and sus- tained Qian’s passion for the poetic arts. In doing so, I have left the other char- acteristics of his poetics virtually untouched. One that deserves mention here is his effort to break down boundaries and barriers of all types—between East and West, past and present, and various disciplines. This is illustrated not only in grand projects such as the Guanzhui bian and On the Art of Poetry, but also in less ambitious undertakings such as his article on the phenomenon of

54 Huang Tingjian, “Ti Luoxing si” 題落星寺 (On Star Falling Temple), in Liu, Huang Tingjian shiji zhu, 1044. 64 Wang

“synaesthesia,” which he translates as tonggan 通感, or “cross-boundary sen- sation.” In it, Qian discusses the interrelationships between and union of the senses in our literary and aesthetic experience. For example, the word “noisy” (nao 閙) in a famous line by the Northern Song poet and lyricist Song Qi 宋祁 (998–1061)—“Red apricot blossoms get noisy on the branches” (hongxing zhi- tou chunyi nao 紅杏枝頭春意閙)—had been appreciated by generations of readers as a marvelous encapsulation of the joyous disturbances of the luxuri- ant red apricot flowers in bright spring weather. But as to why it is so good no one had yet provided a convincing explanation. Qian considers this a prime example of “synaesthesia” and explains it thus: “The word describes the sound- less form of an object as if having sound-like vibrations, letting the reader experience sounds in an otherwise purely visual experience.”55 Another point worth reiterating is that my goal in this chapter has not been a comprehensive introduction to Qian’s poetry and poetics, but rather an illustration of one of its key aspects through select examples. My overarch- ing argument is that what motivated and sustained Qian’s life’s work as a poet and poetry critic was his boundless passion for and confidence in his ability to continue the classical tradition in the modern era. The desire to cross the boundaries between the past and the present, tradition and modernity lies at the very center of Qian’s pursuit as a literary cosmopolite. As Christopher Rea points out in his introduction to this volume, cosmopolitanism was virtually a “cultural imperative” for Qian and his early twentieth-century contemporaries. Qian forcefully asserted, through his poetic practice and criticism, the contin- ued relevance of the classical tradition in the modern world. He believed in the perseverance and vitality of that classical tradition; for him, and for this reader of his works, the key classical poetic premise of self-centeredness and modern cosmopolitanism are not mutually opposed. Instead, Qian shows us how far the modern cosmopolitan drive can go. The overwhelmingly positive reception of Qian’s works in the Chinese-speaking world since the 1980s was to a large extent a product of the particular circumstances of a radically chang- ing Chinese culture and society; that era’s thirst for knowledge of the past, however, forces us to rethink cosmopolitanism’s key terms of operation. The complicated relationships between personal beliefs, the literary tradition, and the pressing intellectual and political norms of the time we observe in Qian’s works on and of poetry provide us with an avenue to better understand the ongoing grand transformation of a China entering into yet another mode of radical change and desperately seeking models.

55 Qian Zhongshu, “Tonggan” (Synaesthesia), in Qian, Qi zhui ji, 63. Chapter 3 Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction

Judith M. Amory

As late as 1983, Howard Goldblatt could write that Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang had a “tacitly understood division of labor,”1 with Qian writing fiction and general literary criticism, while Yang specialized in drama, translation, and critical essays on specific authors. Yang was seventy-two when Goldblatt wrote those words, so he could be excused for assuming that the situation would not change greatly. But in fact, a thirty-year career in fiction and memoir still lay ahead for Yang, while after 1949, Qian never again wrote fiction. Since each author published only one novel, and both works describe the travails of Chinese intellectuals, it has always been tempting to see them as “sister works” ( jiemei pian 姐妹篇).2 It has even been said that Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡, 1987) could be viewed as a sort of sequel to Fortress Besieged (Weicheng 圍城, serialized 1946–1947), suggesting the possible fates of Qian’s characters after 1949.3 But such observations elide the salient stylistic differ- ences between the two writers’ oeuvres, and also fail to address their thematic common ground. Striking in the fictional works of both writers—from their earliest stories to the novel Yang published at age seventy-five—is their affinity for the con- ventions of the British eighteenth-century novel. By this I mean that they share the conviction that the purposes of prose fiction are to show the world as it is, to unveil human follies, deceptions and self-deceptions, and, by holding up a mirror to these defects, to encourage self-examination and self-reform. Qian’s fictions dwell most on the exposure phase, while Yang, especially in her later works, came to concentrate more and more on the individual’s capacity for self-refinement—the only thing, she claims in her preface to the second

1 Howard Goldblatt, “Introduction,” in Yang, Six Chapters from my Life ‘Downunder’, xii. 2 An interpretation put forward by, among others, Yang’s authorized biographer, Wu Xuezhao, although she rightly points out the discrepancies. See: Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 358. 3 See, Kong, Qian Zhongshu yu Yang Jiang, 319.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_005 66 Amory edition of Taking a Bath, that separates human beings from beasts.4 And since this self-refinement is meaningless if not voluntary, politically-coerced intro- spection is only a parody of the genuine article. The differences in the two writers’ fictional oeuvre may be partly attributed to the very chronological fissure that deceived Goldblatt. Qian’s fictions are a young man’s work, with a dazzling surface of wit and satire. He does not attempt to penetrate his characters’ souls, nor does he show much sympathy for any of them, though it could be argued that the closing chapters of Fortress Besieged pre-shadow a change in perspective to a darker and more psychologi- cal approach. We cannot know what types of fiction he might have written in later years. Yang Jiang’s most successful works of fiction, on the other hand, were written late in life. Maturity and experience may have inspired the com- passion with which she balances her ever-present satire. In this chapter, I first discuss Yang Jiang’s perception of eighteenth-century British theories of fiction, and then, following a survey of her early stories, ana- lyze how she applied those principles in her later works, especially the novel Taking a Bath. I also examine how Yang incorporated the highly politicized environment in which she lived and wrote into her works, most notably Taking a Bath and Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liu ji 干校六記, 1981), and consider how she viewed those experiences in the light of her liter- ary principles. Yang Jiang’s affinity for the eighteenth century is clear both from the authors she chose to study as an academic researcher and from her own literary works, with their cool eye for human foibles and deceit, their admiration for judg- ment and honesty, their goals of self-reform through self-knowledge. Several of the critical essays Yang Jiang published in 1979 and 1986, particularly those on Fielding and Austen, provide insights into her views on the purpose and accomplishments of fiction. “Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction”5 was first published in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Movement, a brief period during which the Communist Party relaxed its cultural policies to allow a greater variety of expression. Although Yang mentions in the first few lines that Marx liked Fielding’s novels, her essay makes no further nod to socialist realism. She ignores the perennial themes of

4 Yaohua Shi and I translated the title of the novel as Baptism. Yang, Baptism, xiii. Unless otherwise noted, all page references are to this edition. 5 Yang Jiang, “Fei’erding guanyu xiaoshuo de lilun” 菲爾丁關於小說的理論 (Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction), in YJWJ, vol. 4, 236–266. Originally published as: “Fei’erding zai xiaoshuo fangmian de lilun he shijian” 菲爾丁在小說方面的理論和實踐 (Theory and Practice in Henry Fielding’s Fiction), in Wenxue yanjiu 文學研究 (Literary Research) 2 (1957), 107–47. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 67

Russian-inspired literary criticism, such as class consciousness, class struggle, and the economic base and superstructure of society. Yang Jiang was soon to be heavily criticized and virtually silenced by the Communist party-state for these deficiencies.6 Since Fielding wrote no works of literary criticism, Yang attempts to derive his theory of fiction from his prefaces, and from the authorial asides that gen- erally constitute the first chapter of each book in his major novels. (What fol- lows is Yang’s summary of Fielding’s ideas and methods, not my own reading of his works.) She first considers Fielding’s models, surveying theories of genre from Aristotle through the seventeenth century (citing Le Bossu, Milton, and Boileau, among others), and then examines how Fielding diverged from these models. The heroic epic had been considered the highest genre of literature from antiquity through the 17th century. Fielding, however, offers the novel as a comic epic, distinguished by its use of prose rather than poetry and characters who are ordinary people rather than heroes or aristocrats, and who speak in everyday diction.7 The novel should copy nature, avoiding the impossible or improbable, and using the individual traits of its characters to illustrate gen- eral human nature. Indeed, the subject of the novel is always human nature. Its goal, however, is not mere representation, but through entertainment to provide instruc- tion. The novelist does not seek to produce emotional catharsis, as Aristotle decreed. Rather, he must show the reader a picture that will persuade her and move her to virtue. Yang concludes that “Fielding’s mandate for the novel was to be both entertainment and instruction, evoking laughter to warn against evil and encourage virtue.”8 Fielding explains what he means by “the comic”: primarily the unveiling of sham and hypocrisy. Yang Jiang notes that he follows Cicero, who character- ized the role of comic drama as imitation of nature, and a mirror to mankind. The comic tradition was primarily a dramatic one, before Fielding’s day, and most of the theorists of the comic that he discusses wrote about comic drama. Fielding too had been a popular comic dramatist, before government objec- tions to his satire produced new legislation that drove him from the stage.

6 Yang Jiang was harshly criticized for the Fielding essay. Although she wrote some criticism in the following year, from 1958 on she worked entirely on translation, until the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 282, 286–87. 7 Fielding’s clearest exposition of this view appears in the preface to Joseph Andrews; however, Yang Jiang develops the argument further with references to other parts of his works. 8 Ibid., 258. 68 Amory

Fielding’s characterization of the novel as a “comic epic” sat well with Yang Jiang’s own skills and inclination. In her successful career as dramatist in the 1940s (discussed in chapter one), Yang had already updated the eighteenth- century comedy of manners to address twentieth-century problems.9 Yang never lost her taste for the comedy of Fielding’s era. In a 2002 essay on her career as translator, she reveals that she very much wanted to translate Oliver Goldsmith’s (1730–1774) She Stoops to Conquer (1773), but found the gulf between Chinese and British customs to be unbridgeable.10 The same comparison of novel and comic drama informs Yang Jiang’s 1982 essay on Jane Austen.11 Written a quarter of a century after the Fielding essay, this study addresses the question of how to decide if a novel is good. The choices that Yang discerns in Austen’s fiction are the choices she herself would make a few years later in Taking a Bath. Once again, what follows is a summary of Yang’s essay, not direct criticism of Austen. Austen’s novels, Yang says, are comedies of manners. Although Aristotle con- sidered comedy to be good only for entertainment, Plato and Cicero claimed that it could also serve as a mirror and a whip to expose vice and encourage vir- tue. Horace Walpole (1717–1797) once said that the world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel; Austen always privileged thought and judgment over emotion, even in choosing a mate, and therefore opted to write comedy. Austen’s novels resemble plays not only in their choice of subject, but in their tight construction, constrained settings, and limited number of characters. Like Fielding, Austen believes that fiction should reflect nature. The restricted scope of rural society makes it possible for characters to meet and interact without the plot seeming contrived—an effect Yang Jiang also achieves in the story “What a Joke” and the novel Taking a Bath through the restricted setting of an academic research institute. This tight plotting, small cast, and limited physical space remind Yang Jiang of a detective story. But it is not only the externalities of Austen’s novel that resemble detective fiction. The central problem of the novel is how to deduce character from external speech and actions. Yang compares Elizabeth and Jane

9 This point is clearly made in Amy Dooling’s Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth- century China, 144 ff. 10 Yang Jiang, “Ji wo de fanyi” 記我的翻譯, in YJWJ, vol. 2, 498. Her first literary translation, in the 1940’s, was also an excerpt from Goldsmith. 11 Yang Jiang, “You shenmo hao? Du Aosiding de Aoman yu pianjian” 有什麼好？—讀奧 斯丁的《傲慢與偏見》 (“What’s so good about it? Reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), in YJWJ, 327–45. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 69

Bennet to Holmes and Watson trying to work out what is true and what is false. (The comparison appears again in Taking a Bath where Yao Mi and her mother play a game of Holmes and Watson.) Austen forces her reader to join in the detective work too, since she uses only dialogue and action to reveal character, never long-winded explication. The evidence the reader has is the same evi- dence that Jane and Elizabeth must use. Traditionally, in comic drama, the characters are abstractions, like Tartuffe and Alceste. That works on the stage, since the abstractions are embodied in flesh and blood actors. In prose fiction, the characters must be more individu- alized, as Fielding also asserted. But even with their strong individual person- alities, the characters still represent general traits—women like Lady de Burgh can be found as easily in an African village as in Regency England.12 Austen directs her satirical eye not only at the stupid and venal (like Mr. Collins, or Mrs. Bennet), but also at the intelligent. Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice against Darcy, and Darcy the pride that keeps him from revealing his love, only at the end of the novel.13 The story of how the two principal char- acters fail in self-knowledge, and how they gain it, is the real subject of Pride and Prejudice, as indeed it is the subject of Taking a Bath. Yang Jiang’s published fiction consists of the novel, Taking a Bath, seven short stories, and the novella After the Bath. In addition, several of her short memoir pieces are composed in narrative form, either in her own voice or that of another person telling his or her story. The second section of her memoir We Three (Women sa, 2003),14 also uses an allegorical, dreamlike narrative to describe the deaths of Qian Zhongshu and their daughter Qian Yuan. One of the most striking attributes of this oeuvre is its variety. While some of her stories could be taken as companion pieces to Qian Zhongshu’s fic- tion, Yang experiments widely with genre and, unlike her husband, moves far from the world of scholars, students, and pseudo-intellectuals. Yang’s first published story, “Don’t Worry, Lulu!” (“Lulu, bu yong chou!” 璐璐，不用愁！ ) was originally written as a classroom exercise when she was a graduate stu- dent at Qinghua in 1934. Her professor submitted it, without her knowledge, to the literary supplement of the Tianjin newspaper L’Impartial (Dagong bao 大公報); later it appeared in a collection of short stories from the supplement. It is a light-hearted romantic tale of a female student pursued by two suitors.

12 YJWJ, vol. 4, 342, quoting George Watson, The Story of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979), 11. 13 Ibid., 333. 14 Yang, Women sa, 15–53. Jesse Field’s translation of Parts I and II of We Three appears in Renditions 76 (Autumn 2011), 104–29. 70 Amory

Her family favors one, but she prefers the other. Her attempts to keep the two of them on a string backfire, and she loses both. But just at that point, a let- ter arrives informing her that she has received a scholarship to study abroad, so she’s happy to be free of encumbrance. This story, with a few adjustments, could have appeared in a contemporary American magazine for girls, like Seventeen. Yang Jiang never wrote anything like it again. “ROMANESQUE,” published in the Shanghai literary magazine Renaissance (Wenyi fuxing 文藝復興) in 1946,15 is a condensed thriller, in which a young man from Shanghai’s middle class encounters a very different level of society. Ye Pengnian is the victim of a scam, and finds himself drugged in a pitch-black room with no obvious means of exit. He is rescued by a mysterious woman who then meets him disguised as a schoolgirl. Even the books she carries are fakes. When Ye learns that she is being courted by the gang leader and wants to escape, he vows to help her. But when he goes to meet her at the railway sta- tion, she never shows up. This is the only fiction by either Yang or Qian that deals with crime or the underworld. It is an interesting experiment, but the plot is both rushed and inconclusive, and the characterization is superficial. The themes of deception (the girl’s disguises), and self-deception (Ye’s conviction that he can rescue her) appear briefly, but the characters are not developed and do not learn or change. The third and last story Yang published during the Republican period (1911– 1949), “Indian Summer” (“Xiao yangchun” 小陽春, 1946),16 marks a shift to the more subdued and ironic narrative style that she was to use in her later fic- tion. Professor Yu Bin is approaching middle age. It is autumn, but there is a touch of spring in the air, and Yu also feels his own springtime is not quite over. He attempts to flirt with his wife, Huifang, but she is not interested. Rebuffed, he shifts his attentions to one of his students, Hu Ruoqu, who seems to return his sentiments. Yu begins to meet Ruoqu frequently, telling his wife that he is going to the library. But alas, one day he arrives to find Ruoqu on the sofa in a compromising position with one of his male students. He excuses himself awkwardly, saying the flowers he is carrying are for his wife’s birthday. The narrative then switches to Huifang’s point of view. She has not been without suspicion, and takes the flowers as an expression of remorse. She is

15 Wenyi fuxing (Renaissance), vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1946). 16 Published in Wenyi fuxing, vol. 2, no. 1 (1946). An English translation by Judith M. Amory and Yaohua Shi, edited by Christopher Rea, appeared in 2014, and is available as a web publication at the MCLC Resource Center: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/ indian-summer/. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 71 eager to walk with him in the park, not knowing that he has an appointment to meet Ruoqu there. When they see Ruoqu walking alone, Huifang feels vin- dicated and happy. Later, however, she finds Ruoqu’s letters to her husband in his shirt pocket. She soaks the shirt in dirty wash water until the letters turn to mush, then goes out by herself to eat lunch and see a play. But she can think of no further plan, and comes home to find her husband drenched by the rain. He suggests to her that they take a trip to Hangzhou. “With whom?” she asks, suggesting he wants to drag her along on his honeymoon with Ruoqu. “Don’t worry about her, she’s engaged!” Yu replies. Huifang reluctantly agrees to the trip, but she knows it will never take place. “Because, after all, it was already late autumn. October’s Indian summer had passed in a flash. Time refuses to grow old without a struggle. Like the dying flash at sunset, it had eked out a few last spring-like days. But after all, it wasn’t springtime.” This story, written in the same decade as Yang Jiang’s stage comedies, has the structure of a three-act play: the autumn of discontent and estrangement, lead- ing to the extramarital flirtation; the fraught period of entanglement and con- flict; and, finally, the couple’s reconciliation, with the regretful realization that Indian summer doesn’t last long. Yang’s choice of prose fiction for her medium, however, enables her to explore characters’ psychology from different points of view, and to examine their thoughts as well as their speech and actions. Both Yu Bin and Huifang are driven by unhappiness to examine lives they had hith- erto taken for granted. Yu Bin is chastened and gives up a romanticized vision of himself. The passages describing Huifang’s thoughts are especially fine, as she passes from suspicious jealousy through temporary triumph to heartbro- ken despair, and back again to acceptance and resignation. She has examined uncomfortable questions about the purpose of her life and reached unwel- come but penetrating conclusions. The writing here fore­shadows the charac- ters of Wanying and Du Lilin in Taking a Bath. The psychology of the betrayed wife is a theme to which Yang Jiang returns again and again. After “Indian Summer,” Yang did not publish fiction again for over thirty years. During the first decades of the People’s Republic, writers in general learned to become, in the words of Yang’s biographer, “as silent as crickets in the winter” ( jin ruo hanchan 噤若寒蟬).17 During these years Yang Jiang devoted herself to translation (discussed in chapter four), with a few dangerous forays into literary criticism. The end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 allowed her to release a veritable flood of publications in several genres. As the atmosphere of repression began to lift, Yang’s first response was to publish a volume of criti- cal essays, Spring Mud (Chunni ji, 1979), that includes her essay on Fielding.

17 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 249. 72 Amory

A second collection, On Fiction (Guanyu xiaoshuo 關於小説, 1986) contains her essay on Austen. Yang’s most surprising move came in 1981, when, after thirty years of avoiding any remotely political topic, she published her Cultural Revolution memoir, Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School, in Hong Kong, fol- lowed by a Beijing edition two months later. At first in mainland China, the book could only be sold from behind the counter.18 Nevertheless, it was soon recognized as a work of both true witness and literary value, and translated into several languages. That same year, also in Hong Kong, Yang Jiang pub- lished Upside-down Reflections (Daoying ji 倒影集), a collection of short sto- ries that included “Don’t Worry, Lulu!” and four new pieces.19 Although the four new stories, “What a Joke” (“Da xiaohua” 大笑話), “Jade Lady” (“Yuren” 玉人), “Ghost” (“Gui” 鬼), and “Life’s Work” (“Shiye” 事業) were written in the 1970’s, they are all set in the Republican period. In 1977 it was still a bold choice to publish fiction with no political overtones, overt social com- ment, or reference to class struggle. Yang Jiang did not avoid the history of her tumultuous era; she confronted it openly in Six Chapters and her many subse- quent memoirs. It also provides the background for her novel, Taking a Bath. But her short fiction deals only with issues of individual character and choices. “What a Joke,” Qian Zhongshu’s favorite among his wife’s short fictions,20 can be read in some ways as a trial run for Taking a Bath. The plot of “What a Joke” is too complicated to summarize briefly in this chapter, but it is worth noting several points that prefigure Taking a Bath. Like the novel, it is set in a research institute in Beijing where the petty jealousies of the intelligentsia are magnified by close contact and isolation from the outside world. Yang noted in her analysis of Pride and Prejudice that the restricted setting of a rural village allowed the characters to meet frequently, and the novelist to use coincidence, without the plot seeming too contrived.21 In “What a Joke,” as in Taking a Bath, Yang uses the small literary institute to this effect. Again, as in Taking a Bath, the main characters are an unhappily mar- ried man and a lonely young woman who has had a difficult life. The woman in question, Chen Qian, is described in terms that will be used for Yao Mi in Taking a Bath. The institute wives find her plain, but Lin Ziyu, the man who falls in love with her, notices that she becomes beautiful when she flushes and her eyes flash, just as Xu Yancheng’s attention is caught by Yao Mi’s eyes when

18 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 328. 19 Daoying ji appeared in Hong Kong in 1981 and was republished in Beijing the following year by the People’s Literature Publishing House (Renmin wenxue chubanshe). 20 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 324. 21 Yang, “You shenmo hao? Du Aosiding de Aoman yu pianjian,” 338. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 73 they flash in anger.22 Finally, the romance is limited to a few short and furtive meetings, and ends in heartbreak. There is much clandestine plotting among the institute wives, and two of them have been involved in love affairs with a young doctor whom they hope to match with Chen Qian. She, of course, is deceived about the minefield through which she must tread. Eventually she learns about the joke to which she served as a punchline. Lin Ziyu has also undergone a painful enlightenment, seeing his hollow marriage with new eyes and realizing that he has missed the oppor- tunity for a different sort of love. What a Joke reminds readers of Qian Zhongshu’s short story “Cat,” which also details jealousies and intrigue among Republic-era intelligentsia.23 “Cat,” however, is a roman à clef, in which part of the fun for readers is identifying the well-known figures behind Qian’s fictional characters. Qian’s tone is also entirely satirical, without the obvious sympathy Yang evokes for Lin Ziyu and especially for Chen Qian. Like the child Little Li in Taking a Bath, who is dressed partly as a girl and partly as a boy, “What a Joke” combines fierce satire with compassion. In the fictional works that succeed this novella, Yang’s satire softens and the psychological interiority of “Indian Summer” becomes more prominent. “Jade Lady” is set in 1943, in occupied Shanghai. Hao Zhijie, a high school teacher, has plans to move his family to the unoccupied part of China where he’s been offered a university teaching post. But on the way to the train station he has a bicycle accident and breaks his leg. When he comes home from the hospital, it is too late to leave and he joins his wife and children in a hastily rented apartment. Zhijie is a man who feels he’s missed his chance in life and become an ox plowing the same furrow over and over, like his father before him. He is haunted by the memory of a beautiful girl he had met in his student days while visiting a friend in Suzhou. Her parents later invited him to accompany their daugh- ter to Europe but he modestly declined, wrongly expecting to be asked again.

22 In “Da xiaohua,” “yanli tian le guangliang 眼裡添了光亮. Her eyes grew bright.” (YJWJ, vol. 1, 73). In Xizao, “Yao Mi de yanjing liang le yi liang, hao xiang leiyu zhi xi, leisheng wei xiang, dianguang zhao tou le wuyun 姚宓的眼睛亮了一亮，好像雷雨之夕，雷聲 未響，電光先照透了烏雲. Yao Mi’s eyes shone like an evening thunderstorm, when the lightning pierces the black clouds before the thunder sounds.” (Yang Jiang, Xizao, in YJWJ, vol. 1, 245; Baptism, 45). Because of the comparison to lightning, Yaohua Shi and I wanted to translate this as “her eyes flashed,” but Yang Jiang objected to the verb “flash,” considering it out of character for Yao Mi’s gentle and reserved nature, so we changed it to “shone.” 23 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 324. 74 Amory

The girl and the missed opportunity subsequently grew to mythic proportions in his mind; he even wrote a poem to his lost “jade lady”—a poem which his wife found, and which has poisoned their relationship ever since. Life in the tiny rented room is miserable, all the more so because the coarse landlady, a gambling and opium addict, is trying to drive them out so that she can sell the house. There is a toilet supposedly for the Hao family’s use, but the landlady has copied the keys and insists that her servants should use it. Since Zhijie’s broken leg inhibits his ability to resolve the situation, his wife sets him by the window to watch and alert her if the landlady attempts to encroach. But when the landlady does appear, she recognizes him—she is the lost “jade lady.” This unexpected meeting changes Zhijie’s thinking. He gives up his quest for the lost job opportunity, and decides that plowing the same furrow is, after all, not such a terrible fate. Rather than try to reach the university in the interior, he accepts the offer of a room at his old high school and takes his old job back. His wife, however, believes that he has never really forsaken his dream of the jade lady—“It’s like the moon reflected in the water; if you shatter the image, it still forms itself anew.” “Jade Lady” revisits several themes of “Indian Summer”: the frustrated teacher who feels his youth is passing, his attempt to seize a last chance at a fuller life, the hurt and anxiety of his more practical wife; and finally the acceptance that his fantasies were foolish and that life is to be lived in the present. Here, the point of view is consistently that of the husband, who really does reach a kind of enlightenment that will allow him a more satisfying (if less ambitious) future. The motif of the reflection in the water that shatters and forms anew recurs in Taking a Bath, to describe the love that Yao Mi tries to banish from her thoughts, only to find it again distracting her from the book she is attempting to read.24 Yang Jiang’s next short story, “Ghost,” is very different in plot and atmosphere. Its setting and suspense recall the traditional Chinese ghost story. Many of the characters fit standard roles in classical Chinese fiction and drama: the poor student, the dissipated young master, the childless wife, the young concubine, the old nurse. Yang Jiang even evokes Pu Songling’s classic seventeenth century collection of ghost stories, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,25 in case any reader misses the point.

24 Yang, Baptism, 96. 25 “Ta jiu xiang Liaozhai li de shusheng yiyang, ba gui yong ru zhang zhong” 他就像‘聊 齋’裡的書生一樣，把鬼擁入帳中. “Like the student in Liaozhai, he welcomed the ghost within his bed curtains.” (YJWJ, vol. 4, 141). Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 75

Although the story is set in 1932, it takes place in a large mansion of the Qing era. Hu Yan, an unemployed recent graduate, is hired to tutor the only son of a rich woman. The Young Master, or shaoye 少爺, turns out to be in his thirties and married, and has no interest in lessons. Hu thus spends most of his time alone in his room. The room faces a deserted courtyard. Upon inquiry, Hu learns that the next courtyard beyond houses the family’s ancestral temple. On the night after the mid-autumn festival, Hu looks out over the empty courtyard, and sees the ghostly figure of a woman float toward his window. She is dressed in old- fashioned clothing, with a white face and cherry lips. But when he touches her, she seems to be flesh and blood. In the morning she disappears, telling him, “I will follow you. Wait for me and I will come back to see you soon. I can pass through walls—no one can stop me.” He finds a note under the bed: “When the moon shines over the western corridor, I will come through the north window.” But Hu Yan leaves the mansion the next day upon learning that the shaoye had been feigning illness and going out to meet his friends at teahouses. Years later, he tells his wife about the ghost, and she suggests that perhaps it was not a ghost. Hu is indignant, but his wife is correct. We now learn the back-story, which is quite free of the supernatural. After shaoye had been married ten years without producing a son, his mother sug- gested that he take a concubine. His wife knows that he is impotent, but she goes along with the plan. The chosen girl, Miss Zhen, is willing to do anything to escape her unpleasant brother and sister-in-law. But once she enters the mansion, she finds that shaoye seldom visits her, and she can hear him laugh- ing with his wife about her sallow complexion. Her dreams settle on Hu Yan. She is sure she is just the girl for him, and since her marriage has never been consummated, she can leave if she chooses. When she steals into his room at night, she has no idea she looks like a ghost— she is just trying to cover up her yellow complexion with the crude makeup available to her. Later, when she learns he has left, she believes he must have gone home to tell his family about her and announce his intentions. But he never returns, and she finds that she is pregnant. Shaoye’s wife and mother hatch a plan. The wife pretends she is pregnant, while Zhen is whisked away to the countryside, returning just in time to give birth. The wife is enjoying the enforced rest of the new mother when she unex- pectedly dies of what everyone assumes must be childbed fever. (She is so used to pretending that she only pretends to take the medicine the doctor gives her.) Zhen takes over the care of the new baby, and shaoye admires her love for the child he thinks is not hers. Believing his wife to have died because she met a ghost, shaoye sells the mansion and the family land and moves the family to 76 Amory

Shanghai. He turns out to be much shrewder than people thought, and does well out of the transaction. Zhen, meanwhile, is happy that she has inherited the dead wife’s jewels, and that her son will grow up to be a master. Almost everyone in this story is deceived, or deceives himself or herself. Hu Yan believes that he saw a ghost; shaoye believes that his house is haunted, and that his wife bore him a son; his mother believes that the baby is her grandson; Miss Zhen first deceives herself that Hu Yan loves her, and later mistakenly believes him to be a villain who deserted her—she never learns that he thought she was a ghost. Huai guitai 懷鬼胎, literally “to be pregnant with a ghost child,” actually means to conceive mischief or harbor evil in one’s heart. In this story, both meanings apply. “Ghost” is a clever and entertaining yarn with little psychological complexity or moral agenda. It is an amusing landscape of self- deception, one of the major concerns of Yang Jiang’s later fiction. None of the characters, however, awakens from deception to true understanding. Yang’s last short story, “Life’s Work,” was again a new departure, the portrait of a headmistress who devoted herself to her profession and renounced pri- vate life. It is the only piece of fiction Yang wrote that is based on a real person and real events close to her own life experience. Zhou Mojun, or Madam Mo, is based on Yang Jiang’s own headmistress Wang Jiyu who led the Zhenhua Girls’ School in Suzhou.26 The story is told primarily from the viewpoints of Madam Mo’s students, from their adolescence through their adult years. They struggle to understand their headmistress. Why did she never marry? She’s pretty enough. Why does she sacrifice everything for the school and demand they follow her example? They resent the pressure, and the main character, Chen Yiyun (whose expe- riences mirror Yang Jiang’s) particularly resents the devious manipulation Madam Mo exerts in order to get her own way. In the end, Madam Mo explains to Yiyun that she is devious when deviousness seems useful, and straightfor- ward when straightforwardness works best. What had seemed a mystery to the girls turns out to be Madam Mo’s clear understanding of her own goals and abilities. She recommends that Yiyun follow her example. “Look to your life’s work!” (qiao ni de shiye ba 瞧你的事業吧) is her parting advice. Yang Jiang followed this advice. Already in her sixties when the enforced thirty-year suspension in her creative writing career came to an end, she rap- idly recovered her momentum, testing the variety of genres and approaches we have seen above. It is as if she were preparing herself for the two works she

26 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 326. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 77 herself considered her best,27 the memoir Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (1981) and the novel Taking a Bath (1986). In Taking a Bath, Yang follows Qian’s example in Fortress Besieged, of adopt- ing the aims and some of the methods of eighteenth century English fiction. They reveal the follies, self-deceptions, and evasions of their characters not merely to incite ridicule, but to encourage virtue. Reason and common sense are prized above emotion and “enthusiasm” (in the pejorative eighteenth- century sense of that word). With this cool, comedic view of life, both novels decline to exhibit the political commitment that was virtually obligatory in serious Chinese fiction, both before and after 1949. Taking a Bath is structured like a three-act play. The set is a “Literary Research Institute” in Beijing, newly fashioned in 1949 from an older institute for the study of national culture. In the first part, the characters are introduced one by one as they “come onstage” (chu chang 出場), as Yang Jiang says in her intro- duction to the second edition. The longer second part allows the characters to reveal their self-deceptions, ambitions, complacencies, resentments, and dreams. In this constricted social setting, as in the institute of “What a Joke” or a small Austen village, illicit romances develop, as do cabals and bitter rivalries. But in Part Three, the world of private travails is shattered by the intrusion of a greater upheaval, as the first mass campaign of the post-Revolution area to target intellectuals arrives at the institute. As part of the Three Antis Campaign, each professor is required to perform a public self-criticism, to “take a public bath,”28 a meaning hinted at in the book’s Chinese title. The original descrip- tion of the movement was “to pull down the pants and cut off the tail,” but as Yang Jiang says, the intellectuals had delicate ears and were not used to such talk, so for them it was softened into “taking a bath.” Rather, she adds, like what westerners call “brainwashing.”29 A superficial reading of Taking a Bath would produce the impression that it is merely a political novel about the sufferings of intellectuals caused by the Communist Party. Although some of the characters do indeed suffer, a politi- cal reading would be reductive. Rather, the self-criticism and harsh exami- nation imposed from above is a metaphor for the task of self-examination and self-reform required of any human being who is not “content with being

27 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 327. 28 Geremie Barmé suggests that the title Xizao could be translated as “Washing in Public,” in An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai, 292. In this work, Barmé translates a few pages of the novel to illustrate the intellectuals’ experience during the Three Antis Campaign. 29 Yang, Baptism, xiv. 78 Amory like the birds and the beasts.”30 It is only a metaphor. The self-examination required by the Party is not voluntary, and so cannot have the desired effect. Nevertheless, the ordeal lays bare the deceptions and falsehoods that have been hidden beneath the surface of fine writing and lofty thinking. Just as Jane Austen’s novel was about pride and prejudice, Yang Jiang’s is about falsehood and honesty, about self-deception and self-refinement. Before examining how the struggle between truth and falsehood plays out in the lives of Taking a Bath’s dramatis personae, it is worth taking a moment to consider how Yang deals with intellectuals and national politics, both in this book and in her memoirs. I have said that Qian and Yang refused to be co-opted by any party, but this does not mean that Yang avoided writing about the politi- cal upheavals she experienced. (To my knowledge, Qian wrote no new fiction after 1949, and only scattered fragments of personal history in prefaces and works of criticism.) Besides Taking a Bath and Six Chapters, Yang published at least three other accounts of her experiences with movements directed at intellectuals. 1966 and 1967: Dark Clouds and Silver Linings (Bingwu dingwei nian jishi—wuyun yu jinbian 丙午丁未年紀事—烏雲與金邊, 1986)31 recounts her experiences during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution; “The Denunciation Meeting” (“Kongsu da hui” 控訴大會, 1988) describes attacks she suffered during the Three Antis Campaign while teaching at Qinghua; and “My First Time in the Countryside” (“Diyi ci xia xiang” 第一次下鄉, 1991) is an account of her first sojourn among peasants in 1954.32 Large passages of her 2003 memoir We Three also describe her family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. These works share several characteristics. They are narrated in a calm, almost distant voice, relating what happened to Yang and her family without delving into the wider political or social implications of events. They focus on the concrete and the particular, right down to the mud that almost entraps Yang in Six Chapters. Without sentimentalizing peasants, students, or offi- cials, Yang judges the people she meets as individuals rather than as group representatives, and finds some of them sympathetic when the reader would

30 Ibid., xiii. 31 First published in 1987 in Jiang yin cha (Toward Oblivion). The years bingwu and dingwei occur consecutively once per sixty-year cycle and are traditionally thought to be accom- panied by war or other disasters. In the title of Yang’s memoirs, they refer to the first two years of the Cultural Revolution. A literal translation of the subtitle would be “black clouds and golden linings.” 32 Both were published in 1992 in Zayi yu zaxie (Random Recollections and Random Writings). Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 79 least expect it. Surely she is the only writer of a Cultural Revolution memoir to describe some of her jailers as “sheep in wolf’s clothing” (pizhe langpi de yang 披著狼皮的羊)!33 Most striking in these memoirs is Yang’s concentration on how she herself behaved during these trials, what she learned, and whether she was changed by them. At the end of 1966 and 1967, she hazards that the silver lining in that black cloud was perhaps the understanding and sympathy she learned to feel for those who suffered with her.34 Describing her denunciation during the Three-Anti campaign in “The Denunciation Meeting” (“Kongsu dahui”), she expresses gratitude for this early experience, which enabled her to withstand more difficult trials in later years.35 But it is at the end of Six Chapters that she reaches the conclusion Taking a Bath dramatizes in fictional form:

I now understood something more clearly than ever: after undergoing more than ten years of reform, plus two years at the cadre school, not only had I not reached the plateau of progressive thinking that everyone sought, I was nearly as selfish now as I had been in the beginning. I was still the same old me.36

True change must be self-imposed; the mass efforts at coerced reform were thus doomed to failure. Taking a Bath begins and ends with questions of truth and falsehood. Yu Nan is a consummate deceiver—as the Civil War is drawing to a close, he deceives both his wife and his girlfriend, who in turn double-crosses him by marrying another man. She takes with her the overseas post he had hoped would enable him to escape the Communists. Having previously ignored a job offer from a literary research institute in Beijing, he now contacts them and pretends he had accepted the offer via a telegram, which, of course, he had never sent. The ruse works, and even his honest wife, Wanying, cannot suppress a sneaking admiration for his ingenuity. By the end of the novel, he thoroughly believes the lies he tells at the beginning. Two of Yu Nan’s new colleagues at the institute, Xu Yancheng and Du Lilin, bring with them a marriage founded on unspoken bad faith. Lilin believes Yancheng loves her, and he allows her to harbor that illusion, despite her one request of him: “Promise me one thing, Yancheng. I only want you to be honest

33 See: “Bingwu dingwei nianji shi,” in YJWJ, vol. 1, 78. 34 Ibid., 83. 35 “Kongsu da hui,” in YJWJ, vol. 1, 344. 36 Yang, Six Chapters, 98. 80 Amory with me always, always tell me the truth” (37). In fact, Yancheng consistently applies his original tactic; he avoids telling direct lies to Lilin, but he tells the truth only technically. Lies of omission become more frequent after they arrive at the institute and grows close to the librarian Yao Mi. When Lilin questions him about his trip to the Fragrant Hills with Yao Mi, he responds, “I was going to see a friend . . . I never went to the mountains with anyone else” (150ff ). Lilin knows that he is concealing the truth, but cannot prove the essential point. She describes her unhappy situation obliquely to Zhu Qianli, an elderly colleague whose wife constantly suspects him of unfaithfulness, “Professor Zhu, prob- ably you haven’t been totally honest with your wife, so she’s stopped believing you” (165). If Yancheng tries to maintain a technical honesty with Lilin, he makes no such attempt with his mother. She constantly nagged him to produce a son, so he sent her letters from abroad announcing the birth of one male child after another. Of course, on his return to China, he cannot produce them, and it is Lilin who saves him by telling her mother-in-law that Yancheng was fated never to have a son. The episode is treated comically, but it ends with Lilin’s permanent estrangement from her daughter, whom the mother keeps with her in Tianjin. Yancheng is indifferent to this situation. The romance between Yancheng and Yao Mi, one of the novel’s main dramatic threads, is also, of necessity, based on deception. Not only is Lilin betrayed, but Yao Mi must lie to her mother, to whom she has always been completely honest in the past. Her deception makes her “ashamed and wor- ried” (170), but in the end “this mother who liked to play at Sherlock Holmes, was she really fooled? Not entirely, it seemed” (282). In their clandestine correspondence, Yancheng and Yao Mi grapple with the issue of truth-telling. Yancheng writes,

I don’t know yet if Lilin would agree to divorce. You probably know that she was the one who proposed to me. I didn’t follow the script and say “I love you” because I never had that feeling. And she didn’t try to force me, just asked me always to be faithful and always to tell her the truth. So shouldn’t I be honest with her and tell her the truth now? If I don’t tell her, is that good faith? But if I do tell her the truth, is she likely to feel I’ve been faithful?

Yao Mi replies,

At first glance it seems that the question of truth-telling is an impasse. But in fact, it is no longer a question. Professor Du simply asks you to be Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 81

faithful to her. You are already unfaithful to her. Moreover, judging from what she said to Professor Zhu that day, she no long believes anything you say. (174–175)

In fact, no matter how they squirm there is no honorable way out of their pre- dicament without either renouncing their love or marrying. And since they are unwilling to do either, they continue living a lie. These deceptions on the part of the principal characters are by no means the only untruths. The novel is full of them. Luo Hou’s scheme to move Yao Mi’s father’s books surreptitiously to an outside library; Nina Shi’s lesbian relationship37 with Taotao conducted under cover of their sham marriages; the conspiracy by Yu Nan, Nina, Taotao, and Jiang Min to steal Yao Mi’s manu- scripts and publish an attack on them under a pseudonym; Zhu Qianli’s fal- sification of his qualifications—these are only a few of many. By the end of Part Two, every character believes that he or she has found a way to get ahead or to get by at the Institute—even Yancheng and Yao Mi, with their unrealis- tic theories of platonic romance. In Part Three, the advent of the Three Antis Campaign shatters these illusions, and the passage of each character through the “public bath” reveals his or her true qualities. Whereas Ding Baogui and Zhu Qianli search frantically for a perfunctory way to “get by,” Xu Yancheng and Du Lilin grapple seriously with the meaning of the exercise and whether it is really possible to examine and transform oneself. Yu Nan, meanwhile, as he has done from the beginning, plans his charade with some relish—and suc- ceeds. Although things do not go as smoothly as he had anticipated, when it is over he felt “like a piece of gold that had been refined in a blazing fire. All the dross had been melted away and the entire ingot was bright and shining” (266). The campaign descends like a catastrophe of nature on the little world of illusions which the characters have constructed for themselves in Part II. The reader sees the events of 1951 entirely through the eyes of the institute pro- fessors as each undergoes his or her “bath.” There is no examination of the moral or political roots of the campaign, and no judgment of the Party and its actions—just as in a story about a small group of people who survive a hur- ricane or an avalanche, the meteorological origins of the disaster are beside the point.

37 Never spelled out in so many words, of course, but clearly implied from their first appearance with Taotao sitting sideways as if squeezed into Nina’s embrace (23); or later when Nina ends a meeting “with one hand holding a cigarette, and the other draped around Taotao” (93). There are many similar descriptions. 82 Amory

The trials of Ding Baogui and Zhu Qianli are presented as comedy, though there is pathos enough in their stories. Ding, the classical scholar, is terrified but strives to understand and provide exactly what his interrogators want. Had he been a generation older, we are told, he would have prepared his “eight- legged essay” for the civil service examinations just as he prepared his speech at his “bath”—the speech has four points rather than eight, but it is just as carefully calculated to fulfill a mysterious but all-powerful mandate.38 And indeed, his satisfaction after passing is just what he would have felt during the Qing Dynasty: “He felt as if he had taken first place in the imperial civil service examinations, and right after that had been chosen by a beautiful young lady. Half in a dream and half awake he walked home as if floating on air” (254). The Gallicized Zhu Qianli, with his beret, pipe, and flirtatious ways, feels differently. He approaches the examination as a performance in which he will surely excel: “a few tricks would get him past the trial” (224). Unfortunately, his strategy is to inflate everything, his sins as well as his accomplishments, and dur- ing his first attempt, his self-abasement is so over the top that he is accused of mocking the masses. During a second attempt, he gets angry when pressed by “the masses” (as his audience is anonymously identified) on the matter of his sincerity:

“No need for laments, Professor Zhu. We’re just asking if you’ve told us the absolute truth, or if it’s all complete lies.” “I’ve described the situation exactly as it was. That’s the absolute truth, isn’t it?” “All you’re doing is explaining why you lied.” “What lies!” Zhu Qianli was enraged. “And you’re trying to turn your lies into truth!” “If you can’t tell the difference between truth and lies, what do you want me to say?” (245)

This show of anger results in Zhu being chased from the podium. He goes home and tries to commit suicide, but even that is an abject failure. Eventually, he manages to pass on a third try. In the final chapter, Ding and Zhu are still calculating how to survive in the future. Ding thinks that, having passed, they will not be disturbed again. Zhu has heard otherwise, but surmises that future

38 Yang Jiang makes a similar, if subtler, comparison in a later essay in which she ascribes her writers block after publishing her Fielding essay to an inability to produce the “new eight- legged essay” (xin bagu). See Yang, “Ji wo de fanyi” (My Translations), YJWJ, vol. 1, 496. My and Yaohua Shi’s translation of this essay appears in Renditions 76 (Autumn 2011), 98–103. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 83 baths will be mild, like washing one’s face every morning. Both, of course, are mistaken. In New China, Yang’s narrator tells us, people are judged by how well they give a speech, a culture of obligatory oration that promoted new dimensions of deception and self-deception. The glib-tongued Yu Nan is confident he will pass on the first try. “He believed he had a better nose for political currents than other people, and that he had attained a higher-than average political standard. At every study session, he was either the first to speak out and set the tone, or else he gave the final summary” (229). Unlike the terrified Ding Baogui and the flamboyant Zhu Qianli, Yu has prepared a polished dramatic performance, but he discovers to his dismay that “the masses” have been tipped off about his pre-“Liberation” plotting by his daughter and her soldier boyfriend, Shanbao. This revelation causes Yu to realize that he is not as politi- cally advanced or united with “the masses” as he had thought. Before his second try, Yu Nan constructs a narrative about his past that includes enough facts to be plausible. His wife, upset that some of his tale shows her in an unflattering light, tells him, “You’re good at cooking up sto- ries! You can turn fact into fiction and fiction into fact. So why not cook up some plausible essay about yourself?” Yu protests that he must be honest with the masses, to which Wanying replies, “But everything you say is false!” Yu explains patiently, “Wanying, you don’t understand. There’s appearance. Then there’s essence. The truth isn’t in the outward details but in the essence of the matter.” (260–261) Yu presents his second dramatic monologue, fiction laced with enough fact to seem plausible. But by this time Yu is thoroughly convinced that his tale is the truth, that he is a loving and concerned husband, and that he had probed deeply into the filth of his bourgeois past and reformed himself. Although he loses weight and some of his confidence, he is still the only professor to receive a raise in salary, which he thinks he deserves “based on his political charac- ter, his academic abilities, his qualifications and his experience” (273). Zhu Qianli remarks bitterly, “After all that scrubbing, he’s still the one who smells sweetest!” (275) Xu Yancheng, in contrast, faces his trial knowing that public speaking is his weak point. “I can’t speak smoothly like the rest of you. All I can do is stutter— I’m sure to stutter!” (255) Du Lilin is more confident and frankly addresses her wealthy bourgeois background. Later, she gives up makeup, cuts her hair, and starts wearing pre-washed uniforms. In her speech, she condemns her upbring- ing, lays bare the selfish ambition which motivated her academic accomplish- ments, and places particular emphasis on her mistaken belief in the bourgeois ideology of “love above all.” Yancheng, listening, knows that there is a special 84 Amory message of reproof for him in these words, but also knows that she is speak- ing from the heart, although he feels her level of political consciousness is still quite low. Yancheng finds it harder to follow the behests of the campaign, because he sees that only voluntary self-examination can lead to true change, and these confessions are made under compulsion. His words to Lilin in private seem to express Yang Jiang’s own views:

It’s extremely painful to recognize anything in yourself that isn’t good. I think that’s why saints have to amend and refine themselves through suffering. Only someone who takes pains to cultivate his moral charac- ter and strive for good can see the evil in himself. And it’s only when he feels shame that he can repent and mend his ways. Even so, repentance doesn’t necessarily lead to reformation. If you work hard at it and never slack off, maybe you can change yourself a tiny bit. (256)

In the end, he surprises Lilin by undergoing his “bath” quickly and easily, speak- ing without a stutter, and immediately passing. But behind every word of Yancheng’s and Lilin’s discussions about the cam- paign is the subtext of their marital problems and Yancheng’s love for Yao Mi. Any mention of honesty arouses Lilin’s bitterness about Yancheng’s failure to be truthful, and the conversation quickly degenerates. To Yancheng’s appeal, “If you speak what’s in your heart, I will too,” Lilin retorts, “Look and see which one of us is honest” (235)! There are also practical worries: Yancheng fears that Lilin might expose his relationship with Yao Mi when she makes her confes- sion. Lilin, meanwhile, worries that the interrogators might have extracted a confession from Yao Mi and already know that Yancheng is being dishonest. In her introduction to the second edition, Yang says that in Taking a Bath “only one or two people voluntarily try to transcend themselves. Readers, because they like them, tend to see them as the main characters” (xiii). These charac- ters are Xu Yancheng and Yao Mi, but perhaps only Yao Mi makes the grade. Yancheng does try to transcend himself, but he never achieves real honesty. And what of Yao Mi? Like the other characters, she responds to the Campaign according to her own nature: reserved, cautious, “hiding behind the mist she had created for her own protection.” (58) As a student, Yao Mi does not have to make a public self-examination, but she does not escape the condemnation of her rival, Jiang Min, who, in an internal meeting following the Campaign, comments, “Some people were just bystanders throughout the Campaign and never took an active part. Does this suggest a problem in their political view- points? Does it indicate whether or not they have good moral character?” (274) Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge in Yang Jiang’s Fiction 85

Jiang Min’s resentment of Yao Mi originally sprang from her thwarted desire to have Yao Mi as a friend, and her bitter words seem designed less to get Yao Mi into trouble than to evoke some kind of emotional response from her. In this too, she is frustrated. We may surmise from Jiang Min’s attack that Yao Mi, like the other characters, responded to the Campaign according to her own nature. In her case this nature was cool and reserved, “hiding behind the mist she had created for her own protection.”39 Her attitude could be summed up in a quatrain by Walter Savage Landor that was very dear to Yang Jiang:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and next to nature, art. I warmed my hands before the fire of life. It sinks, and I am ready to depart.40

In this respect, Yao Mi reflects her creator’s attitude toward the political upheavals of her lifetime. She avoided strife as well as she could, enduring the criticisms of Jiang Mins who found her politically wanting, and, later, of those who felt she had been insufficiently dissident.41 Though declining to engage with the political directives of the campaigns she endured, Yang Jiang takes their demands at face value: examine your- self, expose the rotten sores, reform yourself. In Taking a Bath, she contrasts the mechanical, fear-driven, and hypocritical self-examination coerced by the campaigns with the painful and voluntary self-refinement of the honorable individual. To varying degrees Du Lilin, Xu Yancheng and Yao Mi approach this accomplishment. They fall short, as Yang Jiang felt she herself did during her Cultural Revolution “re-education,” but they have a lifetime to keep trying. Yang Jiang was never moved to deviate from these aims. As for those who criticized her political detachment, well, in her view, they just weren’t worth her strife.

39 Yang, Baptism, 58. 40 Yang Jiang quoted the last two lines of this couplet in her introduction to her essay collection, Zayi yu zaxie. Wu Xuezhao, who sees this primarily as a reference to Yang Jiang’s advanced age, quotes Yang’s translation of the entire poem. See: Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 346. 41 Perhaps the most egregious example of the criticism Yang Jiang received for not being sufficiently committed to Communism is the criticism of her Fielding essay by Yang Yaomin: “Pipan Yang Jiang Xiansheng de ‘Fei’erding zai xiaoshuo fangmian de lilun he shijian’ ” (A Critique of Ms. Yang Jiang’s “Theory and Practice in the Fiction of Henry Fielding”). For an example of criticism of Yang Jiang for not being “dissident” enough, see Sun, “Yang Jiang Women sa suo toulu de jingming” (The Shrewdness of Yang Jiang’s We Three). 86 Amory

In 2010 the rumor circulated that Yang Jiang had written a sequel to Taking a Bath. Nothing appeared, however, which did not seem surprising, given the author’s advanced age. But in 2014, People’s Literature Publishing House received the novella-length manuscript of After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou 洗澡之後). The continuation is a much lighter, and very different sort of fiction from the main work. In her introduction, Yang Jiang reminds the reader that she intended her novel to have no principal characters, but that readers saw it differently and went on to provide future lives for the characters they liked. Unsurprisingly, the centenarian author was taken aback by the pheonomenon of fanfic, and especially by the propensity of millennials to supply sex lives for Yang Jiang’s creations—sex lives that were very different from her own inten- tions. In this sequel, she proposes to preempt such interference, and to supply her readers a satisfying ending. She does at least supply a “happy” ending. By 1958, when the piece ends, the only major character to suffer from the Anti-Rightist Campaign has been Du Lilin, who was sent into rural exile. She falls in love with a fellow exile, returns with him to Beijing, and declares their intention to marry. Divorce frees Xu Yancheng to marry Yao Mi. An appropriate match is also found for Luo Hou. Offstage, Yu Nan continues to bloviate and Zhu Qianli’s encounter with anti- rightist investigators ends humorously. Jiang Min has committed suicide, but that merits only a fleeting mention. It is hard for a reader today not to perceive the profound irony of this rosy conclusion. Yet Yang Jiang apparently does not expect or intend the fanfic gen- eration to notice the implausibility of her characters’ bright futures. Several references are made to Luo Hou’s bright future as an entrepreneur. Du Lilin and her new husband weigh opening a photography studio. Mrs. Yao regains the title to her husband’s old courtyard house. After the wedding feast, we are told that the Yaos and Xu Yancheng live happily ever after (kuai kuai huo huo guo rizi 快快活活過日子). But readers familiar with the history of Mao’s China know that the fate of this collection of scholars, property owners, pro- fessors, and entrepreneurs will be no fairy tale in the decade to come. The metaphor of washing, and its ability or inability to change what lies beneath the skin, reappears several times. Xu Yancheng’s aunt remarks that Lilin is vulgar on the inside—even boiling water could never wash it away. Just before leaving forever the apartment he had shared with Lilin, Yancheng takes a long, hot shower. “It was as if he scrubbed away all of the past, down to the bare skin.” When Mrs. Yao asks him to take a ritual bath before the wedding, as Yao Mi is doing, Yancheng explains that this shower can take its place. As in Taking a Bath, the reader may well wonder if lives can be transformed that easily. Chapter 4 How to Do Things with Words: Yang Jiang and the Politics of Translation

Carlos Rojas

It seems to me that translation from one language into another, if it be not from the queens of languages, Greek and Latin, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the reverse side. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote1

“I don’t have to translate them,” Luo Hou happily informs his colleague Yao Mi in Yang Jiang’s 1987 quasi-autobiographical novel Taking a Bath (Xizao, translated as Baptism). Luo is referring to a translation of some French docu- ments he had been working on, and he further explains that “the originals are extremely valuable. They’re the secret notebooks the old guy brought back from France. He won’t even let them out of his hands for me to use. . . . He reads them out loud in Chinese and I write down what he says, and that counts as a joint translation.”2 The process of “joint translation” (liangren heyi 兩人合譯) that Yang Jiang describes here is reminiscent of the pioneering turn-of-the-century “dual translations” (duiyi 對譯) by Lin Shu 林紓 (1852–1924)—who knew no foreign languages and instead relied on collaborators’ oral interpretations of foreign language novels, which he would then transpose into elegant clas- sical Chinese prose. Lin had turned to translation following the death of his wife in 1897, when friends encouraged him to find an activity to distract him from his grief. His first project was Alexander Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias, which describes an illicit love affair with a courtesan that con- cludes with her tragic death. The resulting translation, therefore, constitutes a displaced expression of Lin Shu’s mourning for his wife and a reaffirmation of the marital life he had shared with her, even as the passionate love affair at the heart of the work mirrors the intensely collaborative process by which Lin and his collaborators produced the translation itself.

1 Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. John Ormsby, trans. (1885), www.feedbooks.com (accessed 5/20/2012). 2 Modified from: Yang, Baptism, 141.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_006 88 Rojas

While Lin Shu’s translations were immensely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, he did not receive much scholarly attention until nearly four decades after his death, when Qian Zhongshu published his influential essay “Lin Shu’s Translations” (“Lin Shu de fanyi” 林紓的翻譯, 1963), in which he enthusiastically defends Lin Shu’s collaborative translations. Qian opens his essay by citing several Chinese etymological sources to conclude that

the interconnected and semantically interrelated characters yi 譯 [“trans- lation”], you 誘 [“seduction”], mei 媒 [matchmaker], e 訛 [“error”], and hua 化 [“transformation”] constitute what scholars who study poetic lan- guage might call a “manifold meaning” [xuhan shuyi 虛涵數意], which appears to reveal not only what translation can accomplish, but also its almost inevitable mistakes, together with the highest order toward which it may aspire. The highest standard of literary translation is none other than hua 化 [“transformation”].3

To illustrate one of the implications of this “manifold” approach to translation, Qian cites a remark by the Song dynasty Buddhist monk Zan Ning 贊寧 (919– 1002) comparing translation ( fan 翻, literally “to turn over”) to the act of turn- ing over a piece of silk brocade, wherein “the back is full of patterns, though they are all reversed.”4 Qian then juxtaposes this tenth century Buddhist meta- phor with Don Quixote’s strikingly similar comparison of translation to the act of “looking at Flemish tapestries from the back,” such that the images from the front remain visible although they are now “full of threads that make them indistinct, and do not possess the smoothness and brightness that character- ize the images on the front.”5 Whereas Don Quixote offers the latter tapestry metaphor to critique the limits of translation, Qian Zhongshu, conversely, cites

3 Qian Zhongshu, “Lin Shu de fanyi” (Lin Shu’s translations), in Qi zhui ji (Patchwork). Cita- tions in this chapter are from the 2002 Beijing edition. “譯”、“誘”、“媒”、“訛”、( “化”這些一脉通連、彼此呼應的意義，組成了研究詩歌語言的人，所謂“虛涵 數意”(manifold meaning), 把翻譯能起的作用、難於避免的毛病、所向往的最高 境界，仿佛一一透示出来了。文學翻譯的最高標准是“化”。) 4 Zan Ning, “Yijing pian.” (翻也者，如翻錦綺，背面俱花，但其花有左右不同耳). 5 Cervantes, Don Quixote, John Ormsby, trans. (1885), www.feedbooks.com, 850; Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Francisco Rico, ed. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001), 1144. Ormsby’s classic 1885 English translation of Cervantes’s novel is one of the ones that Yang Jiang consulted while doing her own translation. Here and throughout this chapter, I have silently modified Ormsby’s translation to draw out my comparative points. The original Spanish text of this passage is: Es como quien mira los tápices flamencos por el revés. . . . aunque se veen las figuras, son llenas de hilos que las escurecen, y no se veen con la lisura y tez de la haz.” How to do Things with Words 89 it precisely in order to praise the productive “errors” that inevitably arise out of the translational process, on the grounds that “a complete and absolute ‘trans- formation’ (hua 化) is merely an impossible ideal, and consequently a certain degree of ‘error’ (e 訛) is unavoidable.”6 By the time Qian published his Lin Shu essay in 1963, Yang Jiang had already been working as a full-time translator for more than a decade. She had already translated two full-length novels into Chinese and was well into her third—Don Quixote. Unlike Lin Shu, who never learned a foreign language, Yang Jiang had studied in both London and Paris, and was quite fluent in both English and French. Since returning from overseas, she had even taught her- self Spanish in order to translate Cervantes’s novel. Yang’s multiliteracy conse- quently marks a fundamental difference between the nature of her translation and that of Lin Shu, whereby the dialogic encounter between “translator” and collaborator that we saw in Lin’s case transforms, in Yang’s translations, into one between translator and the original text. Yang Jiang’s own remarks on translation appear, at least at first glance, to bemoan rather than celebrate the inevitable “errors” that result from the trans- formative process of translation. In a 1982 talk, for instance, she cites the same “Flemish tapestry” passage that Qian Zhongshu had referenced two decades earlier, but appears to have drawn rather different conclusions from it. The original passage describes Don Quixote’s arrival at a print shop, where he is introduced to a man who has just translated an Italian book into Spanish. Quixote is openly dismissive of the man’s profession, proclaiming that, unless one is translating from the “queens of languages,” Greek and Latin, translation amounts to little more than merely “transcribing or copying out one document from another.” In her speech, Yang Jiang notes that when she herself was trans- lating Cervantes’s novel, she found the process to be

not nearly as straightforward as what Don Quixote describes as “trans- lation from similar languages,” and a far cry from simply “translation as transcription or copying out one document from another.” I am cer- tain that the distance between Spanish and Chinese is even greater than that between Spanish and either Greek or Latin. Cervantes did not have a great respect for translation, and through the voice of Don Quixote he said, “It’s not that I don’t give any credit to translation, for there are certainly some professions that are even more demeaning and poorly

6 Qian Zhongshu, “Lin Shu de fanyi” 林紓的翻譯 (Lin Shu’s translations), in Qi zhui ji (Patchwork). (徹底和全部的‘化’是不可實現的理想，某些方面、某些程度的‘訛’又是 不能避免的毛病). 90 Rojas

compensated.” He believed that ordinary translation was like looking at the reverse side of a Flemish tapestry, where although the patterns remain visible, they are nevertheless duller, and the brilliance of the obverse side can no longer be seen.

Following these quotes and paraphrases from Cervantes’s novel, Yang then con- cludes in her own voice, “It is certainly true that a translation cannot help but lose some of the brilliance of the original. Moreover, as a result of the Cultural Revolution China’s printing industry has deteriorated to the point that all of our foreign language publications contain countless spelling and punctuation mistakes. I merely hope that our translation will be a little bit better than our printing.”7 In this self-effacing description of her own work, Yang Jiang presents a view of translation that might appear to be the direct inverse of Qian Zhongshu’s. While Qian celebrated the inevitable errors that arise from the process of lit- erary “transformation,” Yang Jiang instead modestly regrets the inevitable loss of some of the “brilliance” of the original in translation. Her seemingly digressive remark about the poor quality of China’s printing industry following the Cultural Revolution, however, suggests a somewhat different view. Taken at face value, Yang’s reference to China’s printing industry responds to Don Quixote’s assertion that translation is akin to merely “transcribing or copying out one document from another” with the suggestion that if the act of literally copying or printing a foreign-language work already yields so many mistakes, then a translation, its myriad limitations notwithstanding, cannot help but be an improvement. Reading between the lines, however, we can interpret this allusion to the devastation that the Cultural Revolution wrought on China’s domestic printing industry as an allusion to the inhospitable political back- drop against which she had completed all of her literary translations. Yang began her first literary translation shortly after the founding of the PRC in 1949 and concluded her last one just months after Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Her translation of Don Quixote, meanwhile, was framed by two of the most notorious and destructive political campaigns of Maoist China, as she had begun studying Spanish in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and finished her translation of Don Quixote immediately following the official end of the Cultural Revolution. Her career as

7 Yang Jiang, “‘Tianshang yiri, renjian yinian’” 天上一日，人間一年 (A day in heaven is a year on earth), in YJWJ, vol. 4, 203–204. The embedded quotes are all from chapter 62 of vol. 2 of Don Quixote; my English translation is based on Yang Jiang’s Chinese translation, which deviates at points from the original Spanish text. How to do Things with Words 91 a literary translator had coincided almost precisely with Mao Zedong’s twenty- seven year reign as the de facto leader of the People’s Republic of China. Read against a political context in which one’s own words could be and were eas- ily turned against oneself, Yang’s decision to focus her intellectual energies on transposing other people’s words into Chinese was, to all appearances, a strategic response to the political exigencies of the time. At the same time, however, even as her literary translations constitute a detour away from the political, the act of translation itself comes to have distinct political implica- tions, and the gaps, or “errors,” that inevitably arise between the source and tar- get text may become a space of creative articulation and critical intervention. In the following discussion, I begin with a general overview of Yang Jiang’s translation work, and then proceed to a selective textual analysis of her trans- lation of Don Quixote—arguing that the subtle gaps that arise between the Spanish and Chinese texts contain a self-referential commentary on the trans- lation process, and particularly its function as a perlocutionary speech act. I conclude with a brief consideration of Yang’s final translation project, Plato’s Phaedo, suggesting that it provides a personal grounding to the dialogic sensi- bility that characterizes all of her Maoist-era translational work, while at the same time making the political and critical implications of those earlier proj- ects more explicit.

“Is Translation Inevitable?”

But it was not “bound to come” in any strict sense of the words. Between that kind of “necessity” and the “necessity” of individual death or of the sun rising to-morrow morning there is an infinite gradation of possibilities. F.S. Marvin, “Is Communism Inevitable?”

While Yang Jiang didn’t begin her literary translations until after 1949, she composed and published her first non-literary translation in 1933, while still a graduate student at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Professor of English Ye Gongchao 葉公超 (George Yeh, 1904–1981) gave her a recent English-language essay by R.S. Marvin entitled “Is Communism Inevitable?”, and asked her to translate it into Chinese.8 Yang Jiang recalls that she found the essay rather the- oretical, and parts of it were so abstruse that she wasn’t even sure she under- stood them. Half suspecting that her professor had given her this assignment

8 Marvin, “Is Communism Inevitable?”, 1. 92 Rojas merely to test the language abilities of the fiancée of the already-legendary Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang agreed to do the translation, and the result was published in June 1933 in the journal Crescent Moon Monthly (Xinyue yuekan 新月月刊, 1928–1933).9 The question posed in the title of Marvin’s essay is rhetorical. He argues that the global spread of Communism is actually far from inevitable, and that between the “necessity” of Communism and the “ ‘necessity’ of individual death,” there exists “an infinite gradation of possibilities.” When Yang Jiang was asked to translate this essay in 1933, the fate of Communism in China was still very much in question, and even after the Communists won the Civil War and Mao Zedong founded the PRC in 1949, Yang Jiang found ways to work around the political and historical exigencies of the period, occupying a space of “infi- nite gradation of possibilities” between the putative necessity of Communism and the inevitability of human mortality. Notwithstanding Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu’s joint decision to remain in China in 1949, when they presumably could easily have moved abroad, their scholarly and creative activity during the post-1949 period differed markedly from that of the 1940s. Qian Zhongshu, for instance, published several essays, short stories, and an influential novel in the 1940s, but after 1949 he stopped writing creatively altogether, focusing instead on esoteric literary scholarship. Qian’s primary publication from this post-1949 period is the monumental and notoriously dense multi-volume study Guanzhui bian 管錐編 (literally, “The tube and the awl collection,” trans- lated as Limited Views), which he completed in the 1970s but must have been working on for years.10 Similarly, Yang Jiang was quite active in the 1940s as a creative writer, authoring four plays and three short stories, but after 1949 she essentially stopped writing creatively and instead devoted her intellectual energy to translating three major works: the anonymous The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and His Fortunes and Adversities (published in 1950), Alain-René Lesage’s The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (published in 1956), and Miguel

9 Yang Jikang 杨季康 [a.k.a. Yang Jiang], trans., “Gongchanzhuyi shi buke bimiande me 共 產主義是不可避免的麽 (Is Communism inevitable?), by F.S. Marvin, in Xinyue yuekan 新月月刊 (Crescent Moon Monthly), 4.2, (June, 1933). For a discussion of this translation, see Yang Jiang, “Ji wo de fanyi” (My translations), in YJWJ, vol. 3, 67–73; English translation: “My Translations,” Judith M. Amory and Yaohua Shi, trans., Renditions 76 (Autumn 2011), 98–103. 10 Qian Zhongshu sent the final manuscript of Limited Views to the publisher in 1977, and it was published in multiple volumes in 1979–1980. How to do Things with Words 93 de Cervantes’s The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (completed in November of 1976, and published in 1978).11 Although Qian Zhongshu never resumed the creative writing career he had begun in the 1940s, Yang Jiang did start writing creatively again after Mao’s death, and with a vengeance. Already in her late sixties, Yang re-ignited her creative writing career in the late 1970s with the short story “What a Joke” (“Da xiaohua” 大笑話, ca. 1977), and over the following three decades she pro- ceeded to (re)establish herself as a remarkably prolific and successful author, producing several critically acclaimed and best-selling works in a variety of genres. During this post-1976 period, she published not only several short sto- ries, but also her first novel, Baptism, together with three best-selling books— Six Chapters from a Cadre School (Ganxiao liuji 干校六記, 1981), We Three (Women sa 我們仨, 2003), and Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions (Zou dao rensheng bianshang: ziwen zida 走到人生邊上：自 問自答, 2007), the last of which she published when she was ninety-six. Her only major translation project after 1976, meanwhile, was not of a literary work per se, but rather a philosophical text: Plato’s Phaedo (2000). Given the close correlation between Mao Zedong’s leadership of the PRC and Yang Jiang’s own shifts from creative writing to literary translation and back again, it is difficult not to conclude that Yang’s turn to literary transla- tion between 1949 and 1976 was anything but an attempt to help shield herself from the political storms that successively rocked China under Mao’s reign. Her husband’s decision to stop writing creatively during that time and focus instead on his literary scholarship could similarly be seen as an act of political self-preservation. Ronald Egan’s chapter in this book takes this conclusion a step further and argues that Limited Views—with its strategic omissions, subtle literary allusions, and the sheer breadth of scholarship—not only constitutes a deliberate retreat from the highly politicized cultural atmosphere of Maoist China, but even contains an implicit critique of the Cultural Revolution’s destructive iconoclasm. Egan concludes that the project stands as Qian’s “sober and undaunted response to the political debacle that swirled around him.” Along similar lines, I suggest that Yang Jiang’s literary translations of the Mao period constituted not merely a strategic retreat from political volatil- ity, but also an implicit commentary on the political environment of their composition. In particular, Yang Jiang was attentive to the liminal space that exists between an original text and its translation, and, by extension, between a rigidly literal translation and a rhetorically true one. In this sense, Yang’s

11 Many of the preceding dates are provided by Yang Jiang in “Yang Jiang shengping yu chuangzuo dashi ji” 楊絳生平與創作大事記 (A chronology of Yang Jiang’s life and works), in YJWJ, vol. 8, 378–403. 94 Rojas twenty-seven year career as a literary translator leading up to Mao’s death in 1976 is politically symbolic. As a translator making choices about textual ren- derings, Yang was faced with an “infinite gradation of possibilities” between the rigid determinism of literal translation and political orthodoxy, and the more creative realm of interpretive translation and political autonomy. Yang Jiang’s first literary translation was of Lazarillo de Tormes, which she recalls having read with pleasure in English translation in the early 1930s while still a graduate student at Tsinghua. When she subsequently decided to trans- late the novel into Chinese she worked from the English translation, since at the time she didn’t yet know Spanish. Shortly after publishing the resulting work in 1950, she translated the novel again from a French translation. Yang Jiang’s initial reliance on English and French translations for her work on the novel is ironic, meanwhile, given the critical role that translation had played in the novel’s earlier history. Originally published in 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes features an anti-clerical stance, which is one of the reasons its author released it anonymously and why the Spanish Crown included the work on a list of proscribed texts of the on-going Spanish Inquisition. While the Spanish Crown did, in 1573, permit the publication of an abridged version of the work that excised the objectionable sections, translations of the original unabridged novel continued to circulate throughout Europe. In this peculiar situation, the translations were, in a very real sense, more accurate and complete than the version available in the original Spanish. Given that Yang Jiang’s turn to trans- lation was partly inspired by the precarious political climate in China follow- ing the 1949 transition, it is oddly appropriate that the first work she translated was a novel that had been banned and censored, and which for a long time had been available in its uncensored form only in foreign translation. Yang Jiang’s next translation project was Gil Blas, which she translated from the original French. She later recalled a period when, every night after dinner, Qian Zhongshu would “read” Lesange’s novel to their daughter, Qian Yuan— presumably translating the French into Chinese on the fly. Although Yang Jiang was generally too busy with housework and other responsibilities to listen in, her curiosity was nevertheless piqued by the enjoyment that her husband and daughter clearly derived from their nightly sessions. Shortly after finishing her re-translation of Lazarillo de Tormes from French she decided to translate the much longer Gil Blas to help maintain her French. Though she initially began the latter project as a purely private endeavor, her work unit leader one day asked her what she was working on, and when she told him her private project became her official one. The resulting translation was published in 1956.12

12 Yang, “Ji wode fanyi,” 69. How to do Things with Words 95

Although it was Qian Zhongshu’s habit of reading Gil Blas to Qian Yuan that had inspired Yang to translate the novel in the first place, when Qian Yuan subsequently read her mother’s translation, she remarked with surprise that it was “completely different from the stories Papa used to tell me.”13 This revelation that Qian Zhongshu had simply been inventing stories while pre- tending to read the French novel suggests that the “original” text that had pro- vided the inspiration for Yang Jiang’s translation was, in a sense, non-existent. Like the collaborative translation process Lin Shu practiced at the turn of the century, or the one which Yang Jiang describes in Baptism, in which the Luo Hou doesn’t even have direct access to the “secret” and “extremely valu- able” texts of the works he is translating, Yang’s Chinese version of Gil Blas was the product of a dialogic exchange wherein the “original” French text that inspired her translation (namely, the one she thought she had overheard Qian Zhongshu reading to Qian Yuan) remains, in a sense, inaccessible. Yang Jiang’s translation of Gil Blas was well received, and the following year the editorial board of a publication series of foreign literary classics invited her to translate Don Quixote. She accepted the assignment and was informed that she could work from either an English or French translation of the Spanish novel. She therefore collected two French translations and three English ones (by John Ormsby, Samuel Putnam, and J.M. Cohen, respectively), but upon comparing them discovered that each of the texts differed markedly not only in tone, but even in meaning. She decided that, if she was going to do a responsible job of translating the novel, she would first need to teach her- self Spanish. Yang Jiang was sent down to the countryside for “reeducation” in October of 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, and when she returned to Beijing in December she purchased a Spanish textbook and began teach- ing herself Spanish. Having acquired reading proficiency in the language, she began translating Cervantes’s novel, and worked on it steadily for the next sev- eral years. She finished the first of the novel’s two volumes in early 1965, and by the time the Cultural Revolution broke out in May of 1966 she had completed approximately three quarters of the second. In the early months of the Cultural Revolution, however, Red Guards came to her home and confiscated the entire manuscript, and she wasn’t able to retrieve it until 1970. She ultimately com- pleted the final revisions of both volumes in November of 1976. Given the political backdrop against which Yang Jiang turned to literary translation, it is significant that each of the three novels she translated dur- ing this period either belong to, or are closely related to, the genre of the picaresque. A satirical and latently subversive genre that flourished in early

13 Ibid., 70. 96 Rojas modern Europe, the picaresque celebrates the figure of a low-class picaro, or rogue, who relies on his wits to survive within a corrupt society, underscor- ing the ability of individuals to challenge and even undermine a flawed hege- monic social order. The anonymous mid-sixteenth century work Lazarillo de Tormes, for instance, is considered the first major picaresque novel,14 Alain- René Lesage’s early eighteenth century Gil Blas is regarded as a masterpiece of the genre, and while the early seventeenth century Don Quixote is perhaps not technically an example of the picaresque per se, it nevertheless is closely indebted to the genre.15 Noting similarities between these three works, some critics have speculated that, as David Pollard suggests, “it does not seem acci- dental that Yang Jiang should have translated Gil Blas and Don Quixote, for the spirit of mischief that pervades both novels is present in her own nature.”16 Without speculating about Yang Jiang’s “nature,” however, we may observe that the tacitly counter-hegemonic ethos that characterizes the picaresque maps closely onto the political wariness and latent critique that presumably had drawn Yang to literary translation during this period in the first place. In this sense, Yang Jiang herself could well be seen as a literary picara, and her translations, by their very existence, as an indirect and critical response to the political orthodoxies against which they were composed. In 1977, as Yang Jiang was sending the manuscript of her Don Quixote trans- lation to the publisher, she bookended her quarter-century career as a literary translator by returning one final time to Lazarillo de Tormes. Having already re- translated the text once from English and again from French, she now worked directly from the original Spanish. This new translation was published in 1978. Having produced three different translations of the novel from three different languages, Yang Jiang concluded that “it is less circuitous to translate directly from the original language. It not only is easier; it also helps prevent unnec- essary mistakes.”17 The irony of this remark is that Yang’s entire venture into literary translation in the post-1949 period could itself be seen as a “circuitous” detour away from the pressing politic exigencies of the time. The primary sig- nificance of her literary translations lies not only in their ability to faithfully

14 See, for instance, Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance. 15 In one scene in chapter 22 of Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote encounters a gypsy pretending to be an author, and who claims to be writing an autobiography that is so good that it would put to shame “Lazarillo de Tormes, and all of that kind that have been written, or shall be written compared with it.” 16 Pollard, The Chinese Essay, 260. 17 Yang, “Ji wode fanyi,” 68. How to do Things with Words 97 capture the meaning of the original texts (though this was undoubtedly one of her objectives), but also in how they carry traces of the political climate that engendered them, together with echoes of the foreclosed creative endeavors that that it had suppressed. To the extent that translation is inherently a sort of “circuitous” mediation between disparate linguistic orders, the “mistakes” (cuowu 錯誤) that Yang Jiang claims she is trying to avoid may be compared to the sorts of productive “errors” (e 訛) that Qian Zhongshu, in his Lin Shu essay, contends are a neces- sary and inevitable result of the translation process. In Yang Jiang’s case, these sorts of “errors” may be understood as indexical traces not only of a linguistic transposition from one language to another, but also of a political displacement from one socio-political domain to another. In the following section, I will look more closely at one of Yang Jiang’s translations, focusing in particular on how the text thematizes and reflects on the productivity of these inevitable “errors.”

Perlocutionary Permutations

A performative utterance will, for example be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. John Austin, How to do Things with Words

Don Quixote is Yang Jiang’s third—and, by far her most famous—literary trans- lation. The novel is also the most explicitly meta-textual, describing a protago- nist who effectively “translates” himself into the genre of chivalric fiction he has read obsessively for years. The novel begins with Don Quixote’s decision that he is a knight-errant, and he proceeds to remake himself to conform to his mental image of what a knight should be, outfitting himself with an old suit of armor, naming himself and his horse, and making passionate declarations of his devotion to an imaginary lady-love, a local farm girl he dubs Dulcinea del Toboso, a name whose significance I will return to later. Having completed these initial preparations, however, he realizes that he has not yet been for- mally knighted. Upon arriving at a small inn he believes to be a magnificent castle, therefore, he bows down and begs the bewildered innkeeper to knight him the next morning. Perceiving that his guest may not be in complete pos- session of his faculties, the innkeeper decides to play along. When the time comes, the innkeeper approaches Don Quixote with a book- let used to record the cost of the provisions he provides for his guests, and, 98 Rojas

reading from his account-book as if he were repeating some devout prayer, in the middle of his delivery he raised his hand and gave [Don Quixote] a sturdy blow on the neck, and then, with his own sword, a smart slap on the shoulder, all the while muttering between his teeth as if he was saying his prayers.18

Given that Don Quixote’s self-image as an itinerant knight appears to have been the product of his over-enthusiastic identification with the chivalric fic- tion genre, it is fitting that his symbolic entry into the order of knighthood involves a deliberate and performative misreading of a text. At the heart of this misreading, furthermore, is a temporal inversion: the text is transformed from a symbol of the past (the account-book signifying the inn keeper’s debts) into a symbol of the future (the “prayers” that enable Don Quixote to assume his new identity as a knight). Although the “prayers” that the innkeeper pretends to read aloud are not transcribed directly within Cervantes’s text but merely described as such, it is nevertheless these same “prayers” that (Don Quixote believes) are capable of symbolically transforming him into an actual knight. Just as the innkeeper’s (mis)reading of his account-book as though it were a devotional scripture may be taken as a metaphor for Don Quixote’s (mis) reading of chivalric novels as though they were actual histories, Yang Jiang’s rendering of this passage can be taken as a metaphor for the process of transla- tion. Yang characterizes the innkeeper’s recitation from the account-book not as a “prayer” per se, but rather as an act of nianjing 念經, or “reading from the scriptures”:

店主彷彿念經似的對著賬簿念念有詞，一面舉手在堂吉訶德頸 窩上狠狠打一掌，接著堂吉訶德自己的劍在他肩膀上使勁拍一 下， 齒縫裡嘟嘟囔囔， 好像在念經。 19

The inn keeper read aloud from the account book as though he were reading from the scriptures (nianjing). He then raised his hand and fiercely struck Don Quixote on the back on the neck and, with his own sword, struck him on the shoulder, while continuing to mutter through his teeth, as though he were reading the scriptures (nianjing).

18 . . . leyendo en su manual (como que decía alguna devota oración), en mitad de la leyenda also la mano y diole sobre el cuello un buen golpe, y tras él, con su mesma espada, un gentil espaldarazo (siempre murmurando entre dientes, como que rezaba). 19 Yang Jiang, trans., Tang Jihede 堂吉訶德 (Don Quixote), in YJWJ, vol. 5. Emphases added. Subsequent citations from this text will be noted parenthetically. How to do Things with Words 99

The double use of nianjing in Yang’s version of this passage corresponds to the phrasing of the original Spanish, which has the innkeeper “reciting a devoted prayer” [d[iciendo] alguna devota oración] and then “saying his prayers” [reza[ndo]]. Yet Yang’s use of nianjing introduces a crucial transformation into the text: while the content of the innkeeper’s “prayers” in the Spanish novel is ostensibly Christian, nianjing conventionally refers to the act of reading from Buddhist scriptures. Yang’s transposition of the cultural-religious connotations of the term nianjing, therefore, mirrors quite precisely the innkeeper’s own transposition of the secular account book into an imaginary devotional text. In Chinese, the character jing 經 could refer not only to Buddhist scriptures but also to canonical Confucian texts, or even to the abstract notion of the “proper” or the “orthodox.” Its polysemous quality is underscored by Yang’s use of the same character in describing the attitude of one of the female guests at the inn, as she is recruited by the innkeeper to gird Don Quixote with his own sword:

她幹事非常正經，也非常沈著；要不然那麼正經沈著，舉行這 套儀式隨時都保不住失聲大笑了。

. . . which she did with great self-possession and gravity, and not a little was required to prevent a burst of laughter at each stage of the ceremony.20

Cervantes’s narrator describes the woman struggling to maintain her “self- possession” [desenvoltura] while carrying out this fake ceremony, so that her mirth might not fracture the illusion of the performance. Yang renders this quality of “self-possession” as zhengjing 正經—a binome containing the same character jing 經 and which could be translated as “decent,” “proper,” or “serious.” Yang’s use of this term, however, introduces an irony, as it explicitly contrasts the woman’s attempt to maintain a sense of decorum and propri- ety throughout this imaginary ceremony with the fundamental impropriety of the ceremony itself. In Yang’s translation, the description of this (semblance of ) propriety as zhengjing resonates semantically with the preceding descrip- tion of the innkeeper’s act of nianjing, in that both jings allude to the symbolic ground upon which Don Quixote’s self-transformation is predicated (in that they provide the basis on which Don Quixote’s ritualistic knighting is legiti- mated), even as they themselves oscillate between Christianity and Buddhism, propriety and impropriety.

20 . . . lo cual lo hizo con mucha desenvoltura y discreción, porque no fue menester poca para no reventar de risa a cada punto de las ceremonias. 100 Rojas

Embedded within Yang’s translation, meanwhile, is an interesting com- mentary on the process of translation. Translation involves using language not merely to convey information, but also to transform one text into another, a performative use that linguists call a perlocutionary speech act, or a linguistic utterance that does not merely communicate information but rather has prac- tical ramifications. John Austin, in How to do Things with Words, argues that in order for language to preserve its performative function, it must be “felici- tous,” and “it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate.” He therefore excludes from consideration instances in which language is used “on stage,” “in a poem,” or “in soliloquy,” on the grounds that language in such situations is “used not seriously, but in many ways parasitic upon its normal use.”21 In the case of Don Quixote’s knighting ceremony, however, it is precisely the infelicity of the speech act that grants it its (imaginary) perlocutionary force. The woman at the inn struggles to maintain her composure, or propriety [zhengjing], in order to preserve a semblance of “appropriateness.” Contra Austin’s insistence that a necessary precondition for a felicitous perlocutionary utterance is that it be presented “seriously,” however, it is precisely the woman’s semblance of propriety (zhengjing) that helps corroborate the effectiveness of the knighting ceremony itself. A paradigmatic example of a perlocutionary speech act is the gesture of naming someone or something, because the very act of verbally assigning a name is what establishes the link between the name and its intended refer- ent. At the beginning of Cervantes’s novel, the narrator describes how Don Quixote, in reinventing himself as a knight-errant, first appropriates armor that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and then turns his attention to his mount, which he characterizes as having “more quartos than a real” (más cuar- tos que un real), a phrase Yang renders as:

蹄子上的裂紋比一個瑞爾所兌換的銅錢還多幾文

As Yang explains in a footnote, Cervantes is punning here on two distinct meanings of the term cuarto:

一指牧畜蹄上的裂紋，一是貨幣名，一個瑞爾可兌八文。原文 說，蹄上的夸阿多，比一個瑞爾裡的夸阿多還要多。

21 Austin, How to do Things with Words, 21–22. See, also, Derrida, Limited Inc, 16ff. How to do Things with Words 101

[the term may] refer to [a disease that produces] fissures in the hoofs of domestic livestock, or it may refer to a kind of coin equal to one eighth of a real. The original text reads: The cuartos on its hoofs were even more numerous than the number of cuartos in a real.

The abundance of “cuartos” in the horse’s hoofs, in other words, is indicative both of the animal’s diseased state and of Don Quixote’s perception of its underlying value—suggesting that, while outside observers would perceive his mount as a worthless nag, in Don Quixote’s eyes it is a priceless steed. The pun on cuartos, meanwhile, is itself anchored in an appeal to the real—a term which may refer either to a unit of currency or to the underlying symbolic real- ity (in Spanish, real may also carry the same meaning as the English word with the same spelling) within which the horse’s significance is grounded in the first place. In parsing Cervantes’s wordplay in Chinese, Yang Jiang introduces a paral- lel pun of her own. Suggesting that the term cuartos could refer either to the liewen 裂紋 (“fissures”) on a horse’s hooves or to the number of (wen 文) coins in a silver real, Yang juxtaposes two terms that are not merely homophonous, but furthermore both carry connotations of textuality. The character wen 文— used here as a measure word for counting coins—is conventionally used to mean “text” or “writing”; while the variant wen 紋—used here to refer to the cracks in the horse’s hoofs—is typically used to refer to pre- or a-textual mark- ings, as in the “markings of animals and birds” (niaoshou zhi wen 鳥獸之文 [紋]) that legend claims inspired the Yellow Emperor’s minister, Cang Jie 倉頡, to invent the Chinese writing system in the first place.22 The implicit allusion to textuality in this pair of homophonic terms is further reinforced, in Yang Jiang’s footnote, by her explicit reference to Cervantes’s “original text” ( yuan- wen 原文): “The original text ( yuanwen) reads: The cuartos (liewen) on its hoofs were even more numerous than the number of (wen) cuartos in a real.” Yang Jiang’s use of this meta-textual pun on wen in her explication of Cervantes’s original pun on the term cuarto offers a new perspective on trans- lation as a practice whose “currency” derives not merely from its relationship to the original text ( yuanwen 原文), but also from being a figurative coin (wen 文) of exchange inscribed with prototextual markings (liewen 裂紋). Just as commodities, as Marx argues, derive their exchange value through the very

22 For a classic version of this legend, see the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explaining simple and analyzing complex characters, ca. 100 CE). This text actually uses wen 文 to refer to the “markings” left behind by the birds and beasts, though subsequently the wen 紋 version of the character came to be used in place of wen 文 in this sort of context. 102 Rojas process (or prospect) of exchange, so the meaning of a translated text gains currency from its circulation through a socio-semiotic space comprised of dif- ferent languages, readers, and cultural referents. Given the impossibility of a precise correspondence between original and target language, the translation process inevitably introduces many contingent prototextual elements that may subsequently become meaningful in their own right. The resulting mean- ing of the translation, therefore, is not inherent in the original text, but rather is a product of the process of transformation. After making his initial appraisal of his mount’s value and significance, Don Quixote decides that the horse must be given a suitable name. Yang’s translation reads:

他費了四天多功夫給它取名字，心想：它主人是大名鼎鼎的騎 士，它本身又是好一匹駿馬，沒有出色的名字說不過去。他要 想個名字，既能表明它在主人成為游俠騎士之前的身價，又能 表明它現在的身價：它主人今非昔比了，它當然也該另取個顯 赫又響亮的名字才配得過它主人得新聲價得職業。他心裡打著 稿子，似出了好些名字，又撇開不要，又添擬，又取消，又重 擬。最後決定為它取名“駑騂難得”，覺得這名字高貴，而且 表明它從前是一匹駑馬，現在卻希世難得。

Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself ) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon call- ing him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and signifi- cant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.23

23 Cuatro días se le pasaron en imaginar qué nombre le pondría; porque (según se deía él a si mismo) no era razón que caballo de caballero tan famoso, y tan bueno él por sí, estuviese sin nombre conocio; y así procuraba acomodársele de manera que declarase quién había sido antes que fuese de caballero andante, y lo que era entonces; pues estaba muy puesto en razón que, mudando su señor estado, mudase él también el nombre, y [le] cobrase famoso How to do Things with Words 103

The logic underlying this gesture of identification resembles that of Lacan’s mirror stage.24 That is to say, before Don Quixote has even selected a name for himself, he sees in his mount a reflection of the external image against which he is in the process of attempting to model himself. He recognizes himself within the simultaneously idealized and de-idealized image of his horse, and his act of naming his steed functions as a necessary precondition for his own subsequent attempt to name himself. This ritualistic act of naming, therefore, symbolizes a process of anticipatory and projective self-recognition—in that Don Quixote is projecting onto the horse the very qualities that he is in the process of claiming for himself, while at the same time modeling himself on that same chivalric ideal. Cervantes’s description of the process of having “composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names” aptly describes not only the original name Rocinante, but also the Chinese equivalent Yang Jiang uses here, nuxing nande 駑騂難得, which may be translated literally as “bay nag, difficult to obtain.” In Spanish, the name Rocinante is the product of a pun. As Yang Jiang explains in a footnote,

原文 Rocinante, 分析開來, rocin 指駑馬; ante 是 antes 的古寫，指 “以前”，也指“在前列”，“第一”。

In the original text, the name Rocinante could be analyzed as follows: rocin means “steed,” while ante is an archaic way of writing antes, which may mean either “formerly” or “foremost.”

That is to say, the ante pun in the horse’s name suggests that the neologistic name alludes simultaneously to the fact that the horse was formerly a mere nag, while now it has become the foremost specimen of its species. As with her treatment of Cervantes’s pun on cuartos, Yang Jiang here adds another level of meaning to Cervantes’s wordplay. In particular, her gloss on the Spanish term ante pivots on a parallel pun in Chinese on the character qian 前, which Yang

y de estruendo, como convenía a la nueva orden y al nuevo ejercicio que ya profesaba; y así, después de muchos nombres que formó, borró y quitó, añadió, dishizo y tornó a hacer en su memoria e imaginación, al fin le vino a llamar Rocinante, nombre, a su aparecer, alto, sonoro, y significativo de lo que ahora era, que era antes y primero de todos los rocines del mundo. 24 See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Lacan, Écrits, 1–7. For a useful discussion of the model’s treatment of temporality, see Gallop, Reading Lacan, 80–81. 104 Rojas uses here to mean both “formerly” ( yiqian 以前) and “foremost” (qianlie 前列). In her rendering of the horse’s name in her translation of the main text, how- ever, she drops the pun on qian that she introduces in the footnote, and instead twice uses the binome nande 難得—reflecting not only the pronunciation of the latter half of the original name in Spanish ([n]ante) but also, at a semantic level, the Chinese phrase xishi nande 希世難得 (extraordinarily rare and dif- ficult to obtain). A similarly intricate focus on the process of transformation may be found in Yang’s treatment of a scene near the end of chapter three, when Don Quixote, now knighted and girded, turns to the woman who has just anointed him with his own sword and asks her name:

讓他知道自己是受了誰的恩，將來憑力氣贏得榮譽，可以分一 給她。她很謙虛地說，她名叫托夢沙，父親是托雷都的鞋匠， 住在桑丘· 卞那牙那些小店附近；還說她無論在哪裡，都願意伺 候他，把他奉為主顧。

. . . in order that he might from that time forward know to whom he was beholden for the favor he had received, as he meant to confer upon her some portion of the honor he acquired by the might of his arm. She answered with great humility that she was called la Tolosa, and that she was the daughter of a cobbler of Toledo who lived in the stalls of Sancho Bienaya, and that wherever she might be she would serve and esteem his as her lord.25

In the original Spanish, there is a deliberate homophonic resonance between the name la Tolosa and the name of her father’s hometown of Toledo. In her Chinese translation, however, Yang Jiang blurs this parallel by following standard practice in translating the “le” in Toledo as lei (Tuoleidou 托雷都), but unexpectedly rendering the parallel “lo” in Tolosa as meng (Tuomengsha 托夢沙). This idiosyncratic rendering of the second syllable of la Tolosa’s name shifts attention from the name’s strictly phonetic value, to its seman- tic value. In particular, the character Yang uses for meng, 夢, literally means “dream,” and when combined with the first syllable of the transliterated name,

25 . . . . porque él supiese de allí adelante a quién quedaba obligado por la merced recibida, porque pensaba darle alguna parte de la honra que alcanzase por el valor de su brazo. Ella respondió con mucha humilidad que se llamaba la Tolosa, y que era hija de un remendón natural de Toledo, y que vivía a las tendillas de Sancho Bienaya, y que dondequiera que ella estuviese le serviría y le tendría por señor. How to do Things with Words 105 tuo 托, it forms a binome, tuomeng 托夢, that refers to the process by which a spirit appears in someone’s dream with a message from the underworld. One of the best-known literary examples of the tuomeng phenomenon occurs in Tang Xianzu’s 湯顯祖 (1550–1616) celebrated opera, The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭, ca. late 16th c.), which was first performed only six years before the publication of the first volume of Don Quixote. The Peony Pavilion is Tang’s most influential work, and its status within the Chinese liter- ary tradition approximates that of Don Quixote within the Spanish tradition, or of some of Shakespeare’s best plays within the English-language tradition.26 Tang Xianzu’s opera revolves around a young woman, Du Liniang 杜麗娘, who is brought back from the underworld by a young man who had previ- ously encountered her in a dream. In a pivotal scene in near the end of the work, the resurrected Du Liniang reencounters her mother for the first time, and explains that she has returned from the grave thanks to a goddess who “gave a young scholar, in his dream [tuomeng], instructions to open my tomb,”27 and it is this gesture of being summoned in a dream (tuomeng) that provides the operative conceit upon which the entire opera is then predicated. Yang Jiang’s use of the phrase tuomeng to transliterate the name la Tolosa, therefore, underscores the role of the latter figure in mediating between the “real” world and Don Quixote’s “dream” world. Indeed, the figure of la Tolosa, introduced in chapter three, closely mirrors the similarly-named Dulcinea del Toboso— the farm girl whom Don Quixote, at the end of chapter one, decides will be the “Lady of his Thoughts,” and in whose name he will carry out his adven- tures. Just as la Tolosa literally grants Don Quixote his name and identity, it is Dulcinea del Toboso who provides a catalyst for the translation, or transforma- tion, of Don Quixote’s “dream world” into lived reality. More generally, the allusion to the tuomeng embedded within Yang Jiang’s transliteration of la Tolosa’s name may also be seen as a reminder of the role of translation in bringing the imaginary world of a literary text to life. In a 1986 essay, Yang offers a detailed discussion of her translational practice, explaining that she conceives of translation as a progression from what she calls “dead translation” (siyi 死譯), meaning a clause-by-clause mapping of the original text into the target language, to “hard translation” ( yingyi 硬譯), or a trans- lation that is technically accurate but comparatively wooden, and finally to

26 By an uncanny coincidence, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Tang Xianzu all passed away within four months of one another in the spring and summer of 1616. 27 Tang, The Peony Pavilion, 278. 106 Rojas

“direct translation” (zhiyi 直譯), or an optimal melding of form and meaning.28 Drawing primarily from her own translation of Don Quixote, Yang provides numerous examples that juxtapose three different translations of the same passage, explaining in detail how she systematically reinvested the initial “dead” translations with linguistic fidelity and literary vitality. Although Yang’s essay schematically breaks up her translational process into three distinct stages (“dead,” “hard,” and “direct”), in practice her liter- ary translations occupy all three stages at once. They repeatedly highlight translation’s inevitable limitations and failures while optimistically gestur- ing toward the ideal of a perfect, transparent translation to which they are striving. To the extent that Yang’s entire career as a literary translator was a cir- cuitous detour around a set of political exigencies, moreover, her translations stand as mediations between an imperfect reality and an idealized possibility of social transformation.

Coda

This metaphorical link between translation and mortality came to assume a per- sonal significance for Yang Jiang following the nearly contemporaneous deaths of her daughter and husband in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Like Lin Shu almost a century earlier, Yang Jiang turned to translation to assuage her grief over the loss of loved ones. More specifically, she undertook a re-translation (from the English) of Plato’s Phaedo, which she completed in 1999 and published in 2000. Phaedo, the seventh and final dialogue in Plato’s cycle of seminars, concludes with the death of Socrates and is primarily focused on Socrates’s reflections on the nature of the afterlife. Given the timing of her translation, Yang Jiang was presumably using the text not only in order to engage with issues of death and mortality, but also to use the act of translation to mediate between the worlds of the living and the dead. Though working from an English translation of Phaedo, Yang neverthe- less gave careful attention to issues of linguistic fidelity. In an afterword, she explains that she relied primarily from Harold Fowler’s translation in the Harvard Loeb Classics series, and when she encountered portions of the text that she found problematic, she would consult a variety of secondary sources:

28 Yang Jiang, “Shibai de jingyan: shitan fanyi” (The experience of failure: discussing translation), in Yang Jiang zuopinji (Yang Jiang’s selected works), vol. 3, 228–244. This essay was subsequently revised and republished under the title “Fanyi de jiqiao” (The technique of translation), in YJWJ, vol. 4, 346–63. How to do Things with Words 107

The amusing thing is, whenever I arrived at a sentence where I couldn’t make heads or tails of the English, I would look up the corresponding passage in the Harvard Classics Collector’s Edition, and discover that, although the latter translation was quite fluent, it was nevertheless very different from the translation that I had been using. I would then consult various annotated editions, and would inevitably discover that the line in question was precisely one that even experts found to be particularly difficult to interpret. Based on the different explanations offered in the annotations, I would then return again to the original translation, and would find that I could then translate it in an intelligible manner. I gradu- ally discovered that all of the sentences I had found challenging were ones that required annotation. From this I concluded that the English translation I was working from had used a literal word-for-word and sentence-by-sentence rendition of the original text. Following my cus- tomary practice, I similarly produced a literal word-by-word translation of the [English] translation, which I then strove to render intelligible and fluent (emphasis added).29

Working from an English translation rather than the original Greek, in other words, only made Yang that much more attentive to the ambiguities and com- plexities of the original text. Rather than aspiring to an impossible ideal of absolute transparency, Yang Jiang instead openly grapples with the underlying­ semantic indeterminacy with which her translation must necessarily come to terms. In this description of her translational method, Yang explains that her goal was first to produce a “literal” Chinese rendition of the “literal” English translation from which she was working. The term I have translated here as “literal” is actually siding 死盯, or “dead gaze.” This distinctive term is reminis- cent of Yang’s earlier description of how, when translating, she moves from an initial “dead translation” to a “hard translation” and then to a more fluid and nuanced “direct translation.” If one takes Yang’s metaphors of the “dead gaze” and “dead translation” at face value, the approach she describes in this after- word is one of tuomeng, or figuratively attempting to bring the dead back to life. Just as Yang Jiang’s third and final retranslation of Lazarillo into Chinese in 1977 figuratively bookended her first rendition of the novel in 1950, her 1999 rendition of Phaedo marks a figurative return to her first published transla- tion more than a half century earlier. As her first translation of an explicitly

29 Yang Jiang, “Yi hou ji” (Translator’s postscript), in YJWJ, vol. 8, 375. 108 Rojas political text since Marvin’s “Is Communism Inevitable?,”30 Yang Jiang’s ren- dering of the Phaedo not only reflects a personal concern with the death of her loved ones, but at the same time underscores the latent political implications of all of her literary translations. That is to say, both Marvin’s and Plato’s works use the “necessity” of individual death as a backdrop against which to empha- size the ability of individual subjects to help shape their political fate, just as Yang Jiang was implicitly doing with her Maoist era translational work.

30 Her only other philosophical translation from this period is of Aristotle’s Poetics (a re-translation from English), which she says she completed around 1956. Unfortunately, this manuscript was subsequently lost. See “Yang Jiang shengping yu chuangzuo dashi ji,” 389. Chapter 5 Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution

Ronald Egan

Guanzhui bian 管錐編, first published in four sizable volumes in 1979, is Qian Zhongshu’s most ambitious scholarly work, the culmination of a lifetime of reading in Chinese literature and philosophy and their counterparts in the Western tradition. The work consists of hundreds of short essays or reading notes, filling over 1500 pages, keyed first to ancient Chinese classics like the Classic of Changes and Classic of Poetry, and second to more miscellaneous compendia such as a voluminous tenth-century collection of marvel tales and the “complete” collection of pre-Tang prose that was put together in the Qing dynasty. The essays are short, typically just one to three pages long. Each begins with a snippet of text from the classic or other composition under consider- ation, then proceeds to explore parallel or divergent treatments of the same image, metaphor, motif, or thought in later Chinese writings. In exploring these later writings, Qian casts his net wide. There is hardly any type of writing that he overlooks: poetry, literary prose, literary criticism, histories, biographi- cal collections, local gazetteers, philosophy, anecdote collections, drama, and novels—all are amply represented among the sources he draws upon. Having reviewed comparable Chinese statements, Qian then typically moves on to Western parallels, in history, philosophy, and literature, citing everything from classical Greek and Roman writings, to medieval literature and religious texts, to pre-modern and modern works in European languages. His purview includes modern scholarly works and criticism in these languages as well as primary literary and philosophical texts. The title of Guanzhui bian (literally, “tube and awl collection”) alludes to an early Daoist parable about a fool who tries to survey the heavenly bodies at night while looking through a tube or straw and attempts to measure the depth of the earth by poking an awl into the ground. The title thus self-deprecatingly refers to the focus of the essays on minuscule passages lifted out of great works, implying that they are completely inadequate for taking the measure of the great writings in which they are embedded. As the same time, the title reminds us that Qian is thinking of what is grand and overarching even as his approach to it is through the immediate and finite. Qian’s own English translation of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_007 110 Egan title is “Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters,” which I have used in my selected English translation of the work.1 One can readily discern connections between Guanzhui bian and Qian Zhongshu’s previous scholarly writings. Certain subjects treated in essays Qian wrote decades earlier (e.g., on synesthesia, the shared aesthetics of paint- ing and poetry, the expression of sorrow in poetry, and so on),2 reappear mul- tiple times in the voluminous 1979 work. The earlier work that most resembles Guanzhui bian is Qian’s Tanyi lu (On the art of poetry, 1948; rev. 1984), a collec- tion of essays on Chinese poetry and poetry criticism, that similarly resorts to using a sometimes bewildering pastiche of quotations from primary and sec- ondary sources to make its arguments. Even in Qian’s copious annotations to his anthology, Songshi xuanzhu 宋詩選注 (Poems of the Song: an annotated selection, 1958), one can see similarities to the learning and scholarly style of Guanzhui bian. Still, in scope and intent, Guanzhui bian goes beyond anything that Qian Zhongshu had previously produced. It is far more intellectually ambitious than On the Art of Poetry in extending its inquiry beyond poetics into aesthetics, the psychology of perception, language, other literary genres, and intellectual history. Although it may be faulted for its disjointedness and particularity, Guanzhui bian at the same time may be considered more sus- tained and systematic than the earlier collections of essays, for in it Qian is exploring nearly the entire corpus of the Chinese “classics,” using them as grist for his mill, to reflect on hundreds of themes and issues they raise, rather than writing on just a few selected topics. In the thirty years since its publication, Guanzhui bian has come to be recognized as the capstone of Qian Zhongshu’s scholarly work, and a long list of interpretive studies, indices, and other aids in Chinese has been pro- duced to help guide readers through it. Guanzhui bian has also cemented Qian Zhongshu’s reputation as one of the pioneers of the study of comparative lit- erature in China, an accolade that he did not relish, given his low opinion of scholarship in that discipline. Yet even for scholars and Qian Zhongshu spe- cialists, not to mention the general academic reader, questions linger about the work. What exactly was Qian Zhongshu trying to accomplish? Why did he write it in Literary Chinese (wenyan 文言)? What is the purpose of juxtaposing all the Western citations with the Chinese ones? Such questions are difficult to answer, even today. In the body of the work itself, Qian Zhongshu never sets

1 Qian, Limited Views. 2 These essays appear in Jiuwen sipian 舊文四篇 (Four Old Essays, 1979) and half of the text of the Yeshiji 也是集 (This Also Collection, 1984); all of the former and half of the latter are anthologized in the collection Qi zhui ji 七綴集 (Patchwork). Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 111 forth his aims and aspirations. And the brief preface that he wrote, dense with literary allusions to the point of opaqueness, is strikingly unenlightening on these matters. In what follows I propose some possible answers to these questions, first by considering the role of the Western citations in Guanzhui bian and then by thinking of the work in the context of the Cultural Revolution, during whose years it was put in the form we have it today. My discussion here is intended to supplement what I have already written about the work in the introduction to my selective translation.3 Guanzhui bian is packed, as we know, with quotations and citations of Western works. Thousands of citations from hundreds of works of European and American poetry, fiction, literary criticism, aesthetics, history, and philos- ophy fill the pages and footnotes of Qian’s work. The languages Qian quotes from are seven: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, as well as Greek in English translation. Taken together, these citations attest to a breadth and depth of learning in these languages and their literatures that is nothing short of astonishing. These Western citations are a hallmark of Qian’s writing, one that has given rise to admiration, acclaim, intimidation, and censure (from those who accuse him of using them to grandstand his erudition). While I do not intend to deny a degree of validity to all of these reactions, including the last one, I do want to offer here some other ways of thinking about Qian’s use of Western materials in Guanzhui bian. Here I begin with a survey of the uses to which Qian puts Western sources in Guanzhui bian, examining them from the standpoint of how he compares Chinese and Western expression. I will look at four types of comparisons Qian is most interested in: those involving figures of speech, poetic devices or tech- niques, literary motifs, and ideas or enduring issues in literary, aesthetic, and philosophical thought. Although this list of topics might readily be expanded or further subdivided, these four areas are clearly central to Qian’s interest as a comparativist in Guanzhui bian. Next, I will step back a few steps from the particulars of Guanzhui bian to reflect on how the distinctive traits of the work, including the prominence of Western citations, may be understood in the con- text of when it was largely written and assumed its present form, that is, dur- ing the waning years and immediate aftermath of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

3 Ronald Egan, “Introduction,” in Qian, Limited Views, 1–26. 112 Egan

Figurative Language

One of Qian’s most persistent interests in Guanzhui bian is in the poetic uses of language and especially in all manner of figures of speech, including met- aphor, hyperbole, symbolism, synesthesia, and oaths. His interest in these figures really goes beyond language itself. As he explores the ways writers have used and exploited these devices he is really probing issues of human perception and imagination. And he consistently offers up parallels between Chinese figurative language and those found in Western literature. Discussing “Synesthesia” (“Tonggan” 通感), for example, he offers up this comparison of the acoustic being perceived as the olfactory:

In another composition, Lu Ji puts it more clearly: “The beautiful woman strums the zither / Her delicate fingers pure and leisurely. / The fragrant tune forms on the wind that carries it, / The sorrowful reverberations are as pungent as orchids.”4 Is this not a case of “smelling without using her nose”? It is comparable to Shakespeare’s lines, “ . . . lifted up their noses, / As they smelt musicke.”5

In one of his several entries on symbolism, Qian takes up the use of symbols to convey a meaning or message that is the opposite of the most logical and transparent one. Qian calls this “reverse symbolism” and has found passages in two letters, a Chinese one from the second century BCE and one written by the eighteenth century British novelist Laurence Sterne, that are a particularly good match:

Anecdotes from the Western Capital records a letter that Zou Changqian sent to Gongsun Hong, which says, “A ‘break-when-full’ [i.e., a vessel like a piggy bank] is a type of pottery container made to hold coins. It has a slit that permits coins to be dropped in, but they cannot be taken out. When the container is full, it is broken to recover the coins. . . . A man who hoards money and cannot bring himself to spend any will eventu- ally suffer the same fate as a ‘break-when-full.’ Does not this implement

4 Lu Ji 陸機, “Ni xibei you gao lou shi” 擬西北有高樓 (Imitating “In the northwest there is a tall tower”), Jinshi (Jin Dynasty Poetry), juan 5, 688–89. 5 Shakespeare, The Tempest 4.1:201–02. Guanzhui bian, rev. ed. (1990) 2:484; trans. from Qian, Limited Views, 157. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 113

convey a warning? That is why I am giving you one of them.”6 If the giver had not thus explained the implicit meaning of his gift, so that the recipi- ent mistook the warning for an encouragement to be more parsimonious, the gift would have made things even worse! The British writer Laurence Sterne once sent his ladyfriend a letter in which he said that he might be forced to resort to a similar method to change her disposition towards him: “for if you do [grow sour] I shall send you a pot of Pickles (by way of contraries) to sweeten you.”7

In might be easy to overlook the neatness of the parallel that Qian has pre- sented. Both passages occur in letters to friends, both concern actual or hypo- thetical gifts involving “reverse symbolism,” and in both cases the letter writer and gift-giver goes out of his way to explain to the recipient the reverse mean- ing of the gift. And yet in time, place, and circumstance, the two examples could hardly be further removed from each other. A somewhat more complicated comparison is found in the following pas- sage from Qian’s entry entitled “Metaphors Have Two Handles and Several Sides” (“Biyu you liang bing yi you duo bian” 比喻有兩柄亦有多邊):

Different generations or countries are likewise apt to grasp onto opposite “handles” of the same metaphor. For example, in both Italian and English there is the saying that a person’s looks “can stop the hands of a clock,” but the import of the metaphor differs from one language to the other. A work of Italian fiction says, “This woman could make the hands of a clock stand still” (Quel pezzo di donna che fa fermare gli orologi), exclaiming over the beauty of her face.8 This is similar to Song Zhiwen’s (d. 712) poem that celebrates the “alluring beauty” of Xi Shi’s “powdered face”: seeing her, “Startled birds fly into the net of pines, / Frightened fish dive under the lotus blossoms,” or to the description in The Story of the Stone of the “girls in their brilliant summer dresses, beside which the most vivid hues of plant and plumage became faint with envy. . . .”9 On the other hand,

6 Liu Xin, attrib., Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital), juan B, p. 10a. 7 Sterne, Letters of Laurence Sterne, 83 (to Catherine Fourmantel). Guanzhui bian 1:30; trans. Qian, Limited Views, 146. 8 Vitalina Brancati, Don Giovanni in Sicilia, quoted in Provenzal, Dizionario delle Immagini, 93. 9 Song Zhiwen, “Wansha pian zeng Lu shangren,” in Quan Tang shi (Compete Tang Dynasty Poetry), juan 50, 619; and Cao Xueqin, Honglou meng 27.402, trans. David Hawkes, The Story of the Stone 2:24. 114 Egan

when mocking two women’s vulgar appearance, the English playwright J.B. Priestly wrote, “But then there’s one or two faces ’ere that ’ud stop a clock.”10 This is like the village wife in the Ming dynasty play The Aunt, who describes her own ugliness this way: “The donkey that sees me is startled, the horse gallops away, and the camel does somersaults!”11

Here, it is not just that a Western parallel or parallels are cited to complement the Chinese. Rather, it is that the two “handles” of the face-as-clock metaphor, both found in Chinese sources, are correlated with a preference for differ- ent “handles” used in competing European literatures. One wonders if other examples could not be found in Italian and English literature to contradict Qian’s suggestion that Italian and English writers choose different “handles.” Regardless, as it stands the effect of the parallel citations is implicitly to point to the richness of Chinese letters, in which both choices may be found.

Poetic Techniques

Another area of common ground between Chinese and Western writings that Qian explores is poetic devices. Just as language itself in its many figurations displays common traits that link Chinese with Western forms, the ways that writers use language for poetic effect are sometimes shared. The entry on “using sound to emphasize silence” ( yi shengyin hongtuo jijing 以聲音烘托 寂靜) is an example, as we see in this excerpt:

Xie Zhen (fl. 574) had first written: “The wind abates yet blossoms still fall/ Birds call out, the mountain becomes more deserted.”12 Du Fu wrote, “The clink-clink of the woodsman’s ax makes the mountain more deserted.”13 Shelley’s poem says, “That even the busy woodpecker / Made stiller with her

10 J.B. Priestley, When We Are Married, in Priestly, The Plays of J.B. Priestley 2:3.214. 11 Nü gugu shuofa shengtang ji 女姑姑說法升堂記 (Auntie Preaches the Dharma and Ascends the Hall), in Maiwang guan chaojiao ben gujin zaju 脈望館鈔校本古今 雜劇 (Dramas of ancient and recent times, copied and collated at Maiwang Hall) 2.58b. Guanzhui bian 1:38–39; trans. Qian, Limited Views, 124. 12 Qian seems to have misremembered that only the first of the two lines was written by Xie Zhen. The second line, originally by Wang Ji (6th c.), was ingeniously paired with the first by Wang Anshi (11th c.). See Chen shu, juan 33, 426 and Shen, Mengxi bitan, juan 14, 115. 13 Du Fu, “Ti Zhangshi yinju ershou” 題張氏隱居二首, no. 1, Dushi xiangzhu, juan 1, 8. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 115

sound / the inviolable quietness.”14 Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the same technique in descriptions of natural scenery in The American Notebooks: “a solitary man, paddling himself down the river in a small canoe, the light lonely touch of his paddle in the water making the silence appear deeper”; “[the crows] loud clamor added to the quiet of the scene, instead of disturbing it.”15

Qian Zhongshu had been reading William James’ Principles of Psychology when he wrote this, for he goes on to explain the effect as an instance of James’ “phenomenon of simultaneous contrast.” Qian continues: “Sight, hearing, and the other senses are all subject to this principle. Poets, in their descriptions of things, understood it from early on.” It is evident that Qian is positing a uni- versal poetic device, which follows from a universal principle of human per- ception. Qian is not making a point about Chinese poetics alone, but about poetics generally. Other entries that take up similar of universal poetic tech- niques include those on chiasmus, the domesticating metaphor, and exploit- ing, usually for comic effect, the discrepancy between a name and the reality it denotes (e.g., “a pin has a head, but has no hair”).

Literary Motifs

Qian Zhongshu extends his attention to parallels between Chinese classics and Western writings to literary motifs as well. By “motif” I mean an image or thought that is widespread within one national literature in that it recurs in works by different authors in different times within that literature. An example of Qian’s attention to the commonality of motifs in separate literatures is the opening of his entry on a verse from poem no. 129 in the Classic of Poetry:

He whom I love Must be somewhere along this river. I went up the river to look for him, But the way was difficult and long. I went down the stream to look for him,

14 Shelley, “To Jane: The Recollection,” Shelley, Shelley: Poetical Works, 669. Cf. Qian’s earlier treatment of “using sound to emphasize silence” in his essay “Yige pianjian” 一個偏見 (“A prejudice,” 1941), translated in Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 62–65. 15 Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, 13, 159–60. Guanzhui bian 1:138 and 5:16 (it is in this addenda that the Hawthorne passage appears); trans. Limited Views, 187. 116 Egan

And there in mid-water Sure enough, it was he.16

Mao’s commentary (3rd c. BCE) says, “ ‘Somewhere’ means it will be dif- ficult to reach him.” The lines may be read together with those in poem no. 9:

Beyond the Han a lady walks; One cannot reach her. Oh, the Han it is so broad. One cannot swim it, And the Jiang, it is so rough, One cannot boat it.17

Commenting on these lines, Chen Qiyuan (fl. 1687) observes, “By men- tioning it he shows that he certain desires to reach the lady. He can see her but he cannot reach her. This makes him desire her even more.” What the two songs describe resembles the “yearning” for the unat- tainable (Sehnsucht), which is so prominent in Western Romanticism. An early antecedent of this motif in the West is Virgil’s well-known lines about the multitude of spirits who, pleading to be ferried across the deep pools of Cocytus, “stretched out their hands in yearning for the farther shore” (tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore).18 Like-minded poets of later times used the same image to describe chosen destinations that could never be reached and objects of desire that remained elusive. Early German folksongs regularly use the image of separation across deep waters in treatments of the theme of lovers’ frustrations (so sind zwei tiefe Wasser / Wohl zwischen dir und mir; Sie konnten zusammen nicht kommen, / Das Wasser war viel zu tief (But two deep waters/ Are between you and me; They could not come together/ The water was too deep.)19 Dante’s Divine Comedy likewise couches subtle meaning in the image of a beauti- ful lady (Matelda) smiling from the opposite bank of a streamlet in Eden (Ella ridea dall’altra riva dritta); her remove from the poet of a mere three

16 Waley, trans. The Book of Songs, 42, modified. 17 Waley, trans., The Book of Songs, 82, modified. 18 Virgil, Aeneid 6.314 (1:528). 19 The quotations are from the anonymous folksongs “Tiefe Wasser” (15th–16th c.) and “Es waren zwei Königskinder” (17th–18th c.), in Fielder, ed., The Oxford Book of German Verse, 10 and 44. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 117

paces (Tre passi ci fecea il fiume lontani) may as well be as wide as an ocean.20 A recent Italian poet [D’Annunzio] has even asserted that hap- piness always lies on the opposite bank of the river (La gioia è sempre all’altra riva).21 The image of a dividing river that functions as a sexual barrier also occurs in Western fiction, as Northrop Frye has discussed.22

Having pointed out these parallels, Qian goes on to discuss the recurrence of the motif of “the other shore” (zai shui yifang 在水一方) in later Chinese poetry and tales. He shows that motif is not restricted to expressions of romantic longing, and cites examples where it is invoked as despair for a fallen dynasty, rendered irrecoverable. He also mentions a religious use: the yearning for the “other shore” (bi’an 彼岸) of enlightenment in Buddhism.

Ideas

The most abstract category of comparisons that Qian makes is that involving perennial ideas and issues in literary expression and literary theory. This is a particularly rich vein that Qian mines throughout Guanzhui bian. By doing so he makes contributions not only to comparative literature but equally also to the comparative history of ideas, aesthetics, and philosophical thought. A clus- ter of entries is focused on the relationship between the divine (or supernatu- ral) and the worldly. Qian shows how, for example, the question of how time might be experienced in Heaven (and Hell) has occupied thinkers in China and the West alike.23 He likewise shows that hostility toward poets and their poetic license has earned them condemnation and their imagined banishment to Hell in the afterlife, both in Chinese and Western writings.24 Other entries take up comparative studies of the relationship between gods and demons, and the frequent blurring of distinctions between the two.25 The nature of Heaven is also treated, specifically, the age-old conflict between beliefs in fate

20 Dante, Purgatorio 28.67–70, in The Divine Comedy 2.1:306. 21 D’Annunzio, “Bocca de Serchia” (from Alcione), in D’Annunzio, Tutto D’Annunzio, 338. 22 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 200. Guanzhui bian 1:123–24; trans. Limited Views, 189–90. 23 Guanzhui bian 2:670–73; trans. Limited Views, 339–43. The relativity of time in Heaven, on Earth, and in Hell is a subject Qian earlier discussed in his essay “Lun kuaile” 論快樂 (“On Happiness,” 1941), translated in Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 43–46. 24 Guanzhui bian 2:687–88; trans. Limited Views, 358–60. 25 Guanzhui bian 1:181–87; trans. Limited Views, 316–24. 118 Egan versus divine justice.26 An entry on “born from a brush and killed by a paint- ing” (miaohua tongling 妙畫通靈) explores the issue of the complex relation- ship between artistic creativity and biological procreation, as treated in diverse literatures, as well as the recurrent thought that artistic representation, like some forms of magic, may deprive a living creature of its life-spirit.27 In such essays, Qian shows that for all the cultural divergences between China and European traditions, there remains a diverse body of thought and speculation particularly concerning the divine and the mundane that is common to them, if not universal to all cultures. A set of problems that Qian Zhongshu is especially interested in concerns the relationships between writing and author as well as that between writing and the world. Specific issues he treats include the relationship between the biography of the writer and his literary output; personal hardship and literary creativity; personal conduct and literary style; literary landscapes and nature; and artistic “truth” compared with objective fact.28 In these entries Qian dem- onstrates that admiration of the creative powers of poets and biases against them as untrustworthy are shared by China and the West. Collectively, these entries establish a broad range of challenges that have been raised, across cultures, to the validity and legitimacy of literary and artistic expression, as well as the common ground in defenses that have been mustered on behalf of the arts.

Meanings of the Western Citations

Having looked at the types of comparisons Qian uses Western citations to make, I would like now to reflect on their larger significance in Guanzhui bian. As I have discussed elsewhere, one way of thinking about Guanzhui bian is to see as being in the tradition of the great Qing dynasty collections of “read- ing notes” (duji 讀記, zhaji 札記) on the classics.29 The giants of Qing dynasty scholarship, such men as Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582–1664), Gu Yanwu 顧炎武

26 Guanzhui bian 1:306–08 and 5:156; trans. Limited Views, 311–14. 27 Guanzhui bian 2:715–18 and 5:59, 189–90; trans. Limited Views, 353–56. These ideas form part of the basic fictional conceit of Qian’s short story, “Linggan” (“Inspiration,” 1946), translated in Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 153–76. 28 Guanzhui bian 3:936–38; 4:1387–91; 1:88–91; and 2:586–88; trans. Limited Views, 35–39, 41–46, 48-53, and 56–59. 29 See my “Tuotai huangu: Guanzhui bian dui Qingru de chengji yu chaoyue” 脫胎換 骨－《管錐編》對清儒的承繼與超越 (Stealing away the embryo and changing the bones: Guanzhui bian’s continuities and improvements on Qing scholarship), Qian Zhongshu shiwen congshuo 錢鍾書詩文叢說 (Collected interpretations of Qian Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 119

(1613–1682), Wang Niansun 王念孫 (1744–1832), Ling Tingkan 凌廷堪 (1757– 1809) produced massive collections of learned “notes” on the classics and his- tories from China’s literary past, applying to them new standards of erudition, philological expertise, and “evidential” argumentation. Even in its organiza- tion, Guanzhui bian follows the lead of that body of Qing scholarship. It too consists of hundreds of independent entries on the classics, without any inter- nal structure or order, each one reacting in its own way to some new point of interest encountered as the classical text is digested, line by line and page by page. Indeed, Qian Zhongshu refers frequently to the reading notes left by the Qing scholars, most often to take exception to their views and findings. It is a complicated relationship, that between Qian Zhongshu and his Qing scholarly predecessors. On the one hand, Qian certainly respects their learn- ing and mastery of Chinese sources. But he disagrees with the Qing scholars on many points, especially on key issues pertaining to the nature of literature and its interpretation. Qian is impatient with their tendency to conflate liter- ary writing with history, to equate poetry with biography, to fail to appreciate the independent existence and “truth” of aesthetic expression, and even with a certain blindness he discerns in their devotion to “philology.”30 On such mat- ters, Qian Zhongshu is nothing if not harsh in his criticism of the Qing masters. Qian frequently draws upon his wit and ingenuity to expose the shortcomings of his predecessors on these issues with withering sarcasm. A key weapon in Qian Zhongshu’s arsenal for this duel is his command of Western literature, philosophy, and psychology. The Qing scholars might have been Qian Zhongshu’s match in terms of their mastery of earlier Chinese sources, but they did not know foreign languages, much less foreign literatures. Qian exploits his advantage over them on this score, frequently taking recourse to Western literary parallels or Western critical concepts in order to break out of the vortex of Qing scholarly discourse. He draws upon non-Chinese expression and ideas to shine a light on the shortsightedness of Qing thinking. Guanzhui bian is peppered with entries that do this, including some of the most effective essays such as those on the hermeneutic circle (Hegel), the corruption of con- sciousness (Collingwood), the slip of the tongue (Freud), concealment in the arts (Heidegger), conceptions of the divine (Otto), and the crucial distinction between the persona poetica and the persona pratica (Croce).

Zhongshu’s proetry and prose), ed. Wang Rongzu 汪榮祖, 2111–225; also “Introduction,” Limited Views, 19–22. 30 A similar point is found in Qian’s essay “Explaining ‘Literary Blindness’ ”: “Exegetical studies and phonology are extremely useful and interesting fields. Our only fear is that these scholars’ brains are relics from the ‘plain study’ [puxue] period of the Qing dynasy . . .” (Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 67). 120 Egan

Guanzhui bian in the Context of the Cultural Revolution

Here, I want to take up another way of thinking about the presence of ref- erences to Western writings in Guanzhui bian, one I have not discussed previously. That is, to think of them against the background of the Cultural Revolution in China. We know that Guanzhui bian was completed in the years immediately after Qian Zhongshu returned to Beijing in 1971, after he and Yang Jiang had been “sent down” to the countryside for “reeducation” in rural Henan in 1969.31 When they first returned, they found that their residence in Beijing was being occupied by strangers with a less problematic political background than theirs, and, in the climate of the time, they were powerless to dislodge the other people. Qian and Yang took up residence in an office in the Institute of Literature, Qian’s official work unit, remaining there for three years until they could move back into their home. It was during these years and on into the mid 1970s that Qian worked on Guanzhui bian. Naturally, given the nature of the work, we can safely assume that Qian Zhongshu did not compose it from scratch during the 1970s; he must have made use of a lifetime of reading notes that he had at his disposal. The crucial point, however, is that it was during the early 1970s that Qian set to work to put his mass of notes and jottings into publishable form. Why had he not done this before, and why did he choose to do it then? It is highly likely that the experi- ence of the Cultural Revolution played some part in his decision. There is no explicit indication within Guanzhui bian that the Cultural Revolution had anything to do with the production of the work. Yet so total is the absence of reference in the sprawling work to anything in post-1949 P.R.C. history, and largely to anything post-Qing, that the absence becomes highly suggestive. Consider what is present and what is missing. The entirety of pre-modern Chinese classics, histories, and philosophy, wenyan poetry and prose, supernatural tales, literary criticism, Yuan-Ming-Qing drama and fic- tion, travelogues, diaries, and the like are all richly represented in the pages of Guanzhui bian. But there is virtually no reference to any Chinese writing from the May Fourth era down to the 1970s. With works in Western languages, Qian Zhongshu does not shy away from twentieth century poets, novelists, and literary critics. They are abundantly present among his quotations and cita- tions, including Northrop Frye, James Joyce, Arthur Koestler, Susanne Langer, C.S. Lewis, Norman Mailer, I.A. Richards, and Max Wehrli, to name a few.

31 On the chronology of the writing of Guanzhui bian, see my introduction to Limited Views, 24, n. 15. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 121

Viewed in this light, the silence regarding twentieth-century Chinese writers, critics, and thinkers is particularly noticeable and ominous. It has often been said that Qian Zhongshu’s decision to compose Guanzhui bian in Classical Chinese was politically motivated. The difficult and allu- sive language that he opted for, rather than the more transparent medium of Modern Chinese, is a screen he deliberately erected between himself and potential political enemies. As we will see below, Qian himself has said as much. The Red Guards and other perpetrators of the violence of the Cultural Revolution era were not classically educated. They would hardly have been able to read Qian Zhongshu’s prose, much less to make sense of all the learned allusions and references. Also significant is the treatment one encounters here and there in Guanzhui bian of issues in ancient texts that resonate with certain of the travesties of the Cultural Revolution period. One section of the work that stands out in this regard is the entries on Laozi (vol. 2, pp. 401–465). There is a harshness of tone that runs through this section, not in every entry, to be sure, but one that keeps resurfacing that sets it apart. Qian’s discussion of the strategies used in Laozi and by mystics throughout history to refute common sense and logic, to insist that “right words look like contradictions” (zhengyan ruo fan 正言若反), to cel- ebrate ignorance and blindness, and to assert that “going against” (or “reversal,” “being contrary”) is the way the Dao acts may call to mind the rhetoric about “contradictions” and “contention” and “struggle” of the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the valuation then of so-called proletarian culture. Qian is particularly impatient with what he considers the deceptiveness of Laozi’s use of language, which, as he points out, takes frequent recourse to paradox (“the great note is rarefied in sound, the greatest image has no shape”) and oxymo- ron (“the highest Power has no Power”). Qian goes on, “This, nevertheless, is just to describe the skin of Laozi’s word. If one would lay bare the bones of his method and investigate its fundamental principle, it amounts to nothing more than negating a negation.”

For example, Chapter 7 says, “Heaven and earth do not give themselves life, therefore they are able to be long-lived.” . . . Here, “to give them- selves life” is the underlying assertion, to “not give themselves life” is the contradiction, and “therefore they are long-lived” is a contradiction of the contradiction that leads back to assertion.32

32 Guanzhui bian 2:464; trans. Limited Views, 305. 122 Egan

Qian reserves his harshest criticisms for the Daoist or mystic Sage who manip- ulates and hoodwinks unsuspecting people with disingenuous and self-serving teachings. Qian takes issue with the notion that since Heaven is thought to be “inhuman” (buren 不仁, i.e., that it is aloof and does not favor some people over others), the ideal for the sage-ruler is to model himself on this aspect of Heaven’s behavior. To say that Heaven is “inhuman,” Qian notes is simply to “describe things as they are.” To say that the sage is “inhuman” is to advo- cate a particular type of behavior, to make a partisan choice of a particular philosophical school.33 And Qian worries about the consequences of drawing this parallel:

When men seek to “unite” with the “inhuman” Power of Heaven and earth, those who are ambitious will end up being cruel and ruthless, while those who are weak will be slickly ingratiating and shameless. In practice, Huang-Lao doctrines developed into the harsh Legalism of Han Fei, just as Christian mysticism led to the political intrigues of Père Joseph. . . . The biography of Han Fei in Records of the Grand Historian observed long ago that “[Han Fei’s] extreme cold-heartedness and pitilessness derived entirely from Laozi’s doctrine of the Way and Power.”34

Qian comes back to this same sinister connection between mystical aloofness, negation of natural human perceptions, cynical manipulation, and totalitar- ian rule in another of his Laozi entries, which is inspired by this Laozi passage: “All the world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is the bad”:

Now, to preserve the body and to express what one understands, these are sincere urges and pragmatic conduct. To leave one’s body behind and refrain from speaking, these are arcane ideas and rarefied doctrines. Unable to free itself from what is sincere and pragmatic, Laozi is yet unwilling to relinquish its arcane ideas or rarefied doctrines. Left with no alternative, it intertwines the two and embellishes them. Words that were originally without substance are applied to human conduct, mak- ing them seem discriminating yet hard to pin down. And conduct that was at first quite ordinary is ornamented with words until it become a pretense that yet appears resolute. Consequently, while “not speaking”

33 Guanzhui bian 2:422; trans. Limited Views, 272. Cf. Guanzhui bian 2:420; trans. Limited Views, 271. 34 Guanzhui bian 2:421–22; trans. Limited Views, 272. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 123

the sage-philosopher is able to speak in weighty phrases, speak with hid- den meanings, speak in unprincipled language tailored to the occasion, and speak all manner of groundless, irresponsible words. While “having no body,” he is able to ingratiate himself with slick ploys, to maneuver for advantage in the world, to preserve his body and protect himself, and to prolong his span in this life. Doing Nothing permits him to do every- thing, and not to have anything to which he will not stoop. The purity and quietude of Huang-Lao Daoists thus in practice became the coldhearted attitude of the Legalist philosophy of Shen Buhai and Han Fei.35

It does not take much imagination to discern a connection between such pas- sages in Guanzhui bian and such Cultural Revolution phenomena as the cult of Chairman Mao, the cynical manipulation of the masses by aloof political rulers, the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of so many, and the insensitivity to human suffering that was to become the hallmark of the era. Chinese-language scholarship on Guanzhui bian has generally not explored this aspect of the work, but a recent article by Hu Fanzhu and Chen Jiaxuan (published after this chapter was drafted) does pursue this line of inquiry. Hu and Chen adduce sev- eral other passages in which they find indirect expression of “social criticism” of doctrines and practices widespread during the Cultural Revolution.36 It is interesting, in this connection, to think of the difference in coverage between Guanzhui bian and Qian’s earlier collection of reading notes on pre- modern Chinese literature, On the Art of Poetry. The earlier work, as its title suggests, is considerably more finite and focused. On the Art of Poetry consists entirely of comments on poetry and poetry criticism. Most of the work is given to Tang and Song poetry, including many entries on the poetry of Li He 李賀 (790–816), Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), and Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105). But Ming-Qing poetry and poetry criticism also receive a good deal of atten- tion, especially the literary criticism of Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–1798) and Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1634–1711), and the poetry of Qian Zai 錢載 (1708–1793). Throughout, entries on individual poets alternate with topical essays on issues in poetics, such as the use of Chan concepts to discuss poetry, imitations of Song poetic style in later dynasties, the use of colloquialisms, the relationship between poetry and song, and so on.37

35 Guanzhui bian 2:413–14; trans. Limited Views, 266. 36 Hu Fanzhu 胡范鑄 and Chen Jiaxuan 陳佳璇, “Guanzhui bian suo yunhan de shehui pipan yishi” 《管錐編》所蘊涵的社會批判意識 (Social criticism consciousness in Guanzhui bian), 61–76. 37 Huters devotes a whole chapter to discussing the work in his Qian Zhongshu, 37–69. 124 Egan

The coverage and scope of Guanzhui bian are very different. In Guanzhui bian Qian moves far beyond the confines he set for himself in the earlier work. First he tackles the key classics of the Confucian canon, early history, phi- losophy, and early literature, including the Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經), Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經), Zuo Commentary (Zuo zhuan 左傳), Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記), Laozi 老子, Liezi 列子, and Songs of the South (Chuci 楚辭). Then he steps away from top-tier canonical texts to take up the vast collection of marvel tales that is Extended Compilation of the Taiping Reign Period (Taiping guangji 太平廣記, ca. 985), to which he devotes nearly three hundred entries. This takes us to the end of the second volume of Guanzhui bian. In volumes 3 and 4 Qian takes up a single huge compendium, the Complete Pre-Tang Prose (Quan shanggu sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen 全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文, 1836), and works his way methodically through it, producing a total of 638 entries on as many different passages that, for one reason or another, catch his eye. When Qian makes the classics the object of his attention, and sets about to write his notes on passages in them, he is working in the tradition of the great Qing scholars mentioned earlier. But when he applies the same methodology to the Extended Compilation of the Taiping Reign Period and the Complete Pre-Tang Prose he is doing something very different and utterly new. He is casting his net far more widely than any Qing scholar ever did. On these two works, which had never been subjected to such intense investigation and reflection, Qian writes over 900 entries. It is, in effect, the entirety of the universe of Chinese writing that Qian now takes as his field of purview. No scholar had ever been so all-inclusive and pored over so much non-canonical text. In his essay on reading Gotthold Lessing’s Laokoön (1962), Qian had argued against giving attention, when studying the history of literary thought, only to canonical works of criticism, eloquently advocating instead a more exhaustive (and exhausting) approach that takes account of lesser-known works and even fragmentary passages embedded in all manner of texts, including “lowly” ones:

By contrast, in poetry, song lyrics, random notes, fiction, and drama, and even in popular sayings and classical commentaries, a few short phrases jotted down carelessly often convey a refined and original insight that truly enhances understanding. The act of culling out and developing such passages may be a real contribution to theories of the arts.38

38 Qian Zhongshu, “Du La’ao kong” 讀拉奧孔 (“Reading Laokoön,” 1962), reprinted in Qi zhui ji (1994 Shanghai ed.), 33–34; Limited Views, 11. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 125

What Qian Zhongshu does in Guanzhui bian, throughout the work, in fact, but especially in volumes 3 and 4, is very much in the spirit of what he advocated in his earlier essay. We should also understand the difference between the use of Western sources in Guanzhui bian and On the Art of Poetry. There are, to be sure, many citations of Western literature, philosophy, and criticism in the earlier work. Yet the regularity and range of such citations pale in comparison to what we find in Guanzhui bian. There are long sections in On the Art of Poetry in which one finds no Western citations whatsoever, as Qian is wholly occupied with his Chinese sources. This is not true of Guanzhui bian. The Guanzhui bian essays follow a consistent pattern: Qian begins with some snippet of text from the text or compendium under consideration and launches into a wide-ranging discus- sion of its ideas or images, bringing in a host of comparable Chinese passages from later texts. Then he introduces parallels from Western sources, or diver- gent treatments of the idea or image found in Western sources, before bring- ing his discussion to a conclusion. Of course he never starts with a Western source, and he usually only gets to them after spending a good amount of time exploring Chinese texts. But once he does get to them, the Western quotations are made to become an integral part of the entry. They extend it and amplify it, before Qian brings his discussion to a close. In On the Art of Poetry, by con- trast, not only are there many entries that make no reference to Western writ- ings, there are also many in which the Western citations only appear as an afterthought: they are contained in “Addenda” ( fushuo 附說) sections. In other words, they are not integral components of the original entry. These two features of Guanzhui bian—the unprecedented range and scope of the Chinese material being scrutinized, which extend far beyond any listing of what is “canonical,” and the determination with which Western comparisons are brought into the discussion—take on new significance when we think of the work as one produced during the years that the Cultural Revolution was still raging. It is too easy to think of Qian Zhongshu’s project, to which he devoted himself immediately after returning from being “sent down” for political reeducation, as a scholarly withdrawal from the turmoil of the times, an effort to lose himself in writings from the past because the realities of the present were too painful to witness. Yet there is another way of think- ing of the relationship between his project and what was going on around him. What was going on, of course, was a public denunciation of virtually every- thing from China’s cultural past, accompanied by the physical destruction of its remnants, including temples, shrines, tombs, libraries, musical instru- ments, and calligraphy inscriptions, carried out on a horrendous and horrific scale. In this moment, Qian Zhongshu, just back from his “reeducation” in the 126 Egan countryside, turns to books from China’s incomparable tradition of letters, to explore and reflect on them in all their richness and variety. The breadth of his investigations—that is, his decision not to limit himself to canonical works, to be all-inclusive in his enterprise—becomes indicative of a commitment to valorize the written past in its entirety. There is nothing selective about his attention to the literary tradition. It all becomes the object of his scrutiny because all of it has interest. Flashes of insight are as likely to be found in a ninth-century supernatural tale as they are in the Classic of Changes; instances of acuity may as well be uncovered in an obscure fifth-century memorial as in the Classic of Poetry. All-inclusive was the Cultural Revolution’s rejection of the literary and intellectual past; all-inclusive too was Qian Zhongshu’s engage- ment with and affirmation of that past. The Western references may also be seen in a new light. Qian frequently uses them, as discussed earlier, to help him make points about deficiencies not in Chinese literature but in the way literature has been, in his view, mistreated in native scholarship and criticism. But in addition to that use, Qian’s tireless citation of Western parallels and comparisons also has the effect of establish- ing a larger context for traditional Chinese expression. It puts Chinese letters on an equal footing with the great literary and intellectual traditions outside of China, especially those of England, Italy, France, Germany and Spain. Qian’s is a demonstration that there is hardly an image, motif, or thought found in Chinese writings that does not have its counterpart in the literatures of Europe. In that sense his work “strikes a connection” (datong 打通) between Chinese and Western writing.39 For a Chinese tradition that was just then being attacked and repudiated, this too is an affirmation of intrinsic value. No one in China or in the West had ever provided such a compelling and detailed illustration of a rich common ground in lyrical and intellectual expression. Qian’s readers should be persuaded that China’s ancient poetry and prose does not stand by itself. There is too much that is universally human in the tradition of Chinese letters for it to be dismissed as “feudal” and worthless. Years before, when he wrote the preface to On the Art of Poetry, Qian explic- itly connected that scholarly project to the chaos and suffering occasioned by Sino-Japanese war. “Although On the Art of Poetry,” the preface begins, “is a work of literary appreciation, actually it is a book borne of sadness and worry” (Tanyi lu yi juan, sui shangxi zhi zuo, er shi youhuan zhi shu ye 談藝錄 一卷，雖賞析之作，而實憂患之書也).40 Writing in the summer of 1942, he goes on to explain how he and his family have been uprooted by the war,

39 On Qian’s concept of datong, see my “Introduction,” Limited Views, 15–20. 40 Qian Zhongshu, “Xu” 序 (“Preface”), Tanyi lu 談藝錄 (On the art of poetry), rev. ed., i. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 127 and he has turned to ancient poetics in his despair to give him something sane to focus on.

Then the waters of the seas were dashed into the sky, so that fishes rot- ted on the banks of the Song River. I was filled with apprehensions for my family as we clung to life in the gaps between weapons. We were like swallows nesting in precarious eaves, or ants burrowed in a dead locust tree. Fearing that the sky was about to fall, there was nowhere to avoid calamity. I wished to “go westward out the door and laugh,” but I did not dare. To dispel my sadness and ease my anger, I began to write about the past and reflect upon the future. I relied upon my useless words to while away my limited days. Using Kuang Ding’s comments on poetry to bring smiles to people’s faces, I made it my aim to bring order to my distraught mind, as Zhao Qi had done.

既而海水群飛，淞濱魚爛。予侍親率眷，兵罅偷生。如危幕之 燕巢，同枯槐之蟻聚。憂天將壓，避地無之，雖欲出門西向 笑而不敢也。銷愁舒憤，述往思來。托無能之詞，遣有涯之 日。以匡鼎之說詩解頤，為趙岐之亂思系志。

Kuang Ding was a Former Han scholar who is said to have been able to make people smile with his explanations of the Classic of Poetry. Zhao Qi (d. 201) is famous for his commentary on Mencius, which he tells us he wrote under great duress.41 During one period of his life, Zhao Qi had to hide from his politi- cal enemies, and he spent three years sequestered between double walls in a friend’s house.42 It is sometimes said that Zhao composed his commentary during this confinement. The preface that Qian Zhongshu wrote exactly thirty years later, in 1972, to Guanzhui bian (some years before he finished the project) is very different. It is, first of all, extremely short. The preface to On the Art of Poetry fills an entire page. The preface to Guanzhui bian is barely one quarter of a page. Here it is in its entirety:

41 Zhao Qi, “Mengzi zhushu tici jie” (A concordance to the Mencius and commentaries), Mengzi zhushu (Mencius with commentaries), in Shisan jing zhushu fu jiaokan ji (The Thirteen Classics with commentaries, collation notes appended), 9a. On the meaning of luansi 亂思 (“distraught mind”), see Rong, “Tanyi lu jiedu suixiang zhi ‘Zhao Qi zhi luansi” (Explanatory note and reflections on “Zhao Qis understanding of luansi” in On the Art of Poetry). 42 See his biography in Hou Hanshu, juan 64, 2122. 128 Egan

瞥觀疏記，識小積多。學焉未能，老之已至！遂料簡其較易理 董者，錐指管窺，先成一輯。假吾歲月，尚欲賡揚。又於西 方典籍，褚小有懷，綆短試汲，頗嘗評泊考鏡，原以西文屬 草，亦思寫定，聊當外篇。敝帚之享，野芹之獻，其資於用 也，能如豕苓桔梗乎哉？或庶幾比木屑竹頭爾。命筆之時，數 請益於周君振甫，小叩輒發大鳴，實歸不負虛往，良朋嘉惠，并 志簡端。 一九七二年八月43

An English translation of this text, together with a detailed identification and discussion of its numerous literary allusions, which runs to thirteen pages, has been done by Michael Friedrich.44 What I wish to stress is that in this preface Qian makes no direct reference to national or personal circumstances at all. Of course we understand his silence. All we need to do is remind ourselves of the dangers that intellectuals faced during the Cultural Revolution to account for Qian’s reticence. The complete absence in this pithy and densely allusive preface to contemporary circumstances suggests how much they weighed on Qian Zhongshu’s mind. Another point is that the preface does refer indirectly to the “sickness” of the time, although the reference is buried in literary allusions and obscured by the tone of self-abnegation that permeates the prose. The key passage is this:

The villager values his worn-out broom, and the peasant offers up a piece of celery, but how can such items perform the functions of shiling mush- rooms or kikio root? More likely, they will turn out to be like sawdust and bamboo ends.

敝帚之享，野芹之獻，其資於用也，能如豕苓桔梗乎哉？或庶 幾比木屑竹頭爾。

The worn-out broom and the piece of celery, because of literary allusions, are items that seem precious to their lowly possessor, but which in fact are

43 Qian Zhongshu, “Xu” 序 (“Preface”), Guanzhui bian 1:1. 44 Michael Friedrich, “Notes on Qian Zhongshu’s Foreword to Guanzhui bian,” 449–464. For a critique of Friedrich’s translation, which correctly identifies several errors, see the anonymous posting “Zhuizhi guankui” 錐指管窺《管錐编序》 (A closer examination of the preface to Guanzhui bian) in the blog entitled “Weidu zhuqiu” 微覩著秋: http:// paths.blog.163.com/blog/static/29135688201041665946793/. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 129 worthless.45 Shiling 豕苓, or “hog” mushrooms (also zhuling 豬苓: polyporus umbellatus) and kikio root are widely used as herbal medicines, to treat a range of conditions. By referring to these medicines, Qian is implying that there is a “sickness” that needs to be treated. Since there is no particular subject under discussion, it is sensible to conclude that Qian is thinking of a general malady of the times.46 The identity of that malady (in 1972) would have been all too obvious to anyone who was erudite enough to read Qian’s preface. Of course, Qian says that his work will not be the medicine that heals the times, but men- tion of the issue reveals his assessment of the age. The “sawdust and bamboo ends” of the next sentence are not quite the use- less items they first sound like. The phrase comes from the biography of Tao Kan 陶侃 (259–334) in the Jinshu 晉書 (History of the Jin dynasty), where it is recorded that once when Tao was supervising the construction of ships, he ordered the builders to save all the sawdust and sawed off ends of bamboo used in the construction. At the time, no one understood why he wanted these by-products saved. It was only years later that they proved to be useful. The sawdust was spread over melting snow to make the ground suitable for a court ceremony to be performed, and the bamboo ends were used as nails in the building of another naval armada.47 In this sentence Qian is suggesting that his apparently “worthless” work might serve some humble purpose after all. The second preface Qian wrote to Guanzhui bian, six years later, is also revealing:

Originally I planned to include in this work discussions of Complete Tang Prose and five other titles. But because of poor health and weari- ness of mind I have been unable to complete the task in a timely fashion. In the texts of what I now present, here and there I give cross-references to the other unfinished entries. I am keeping those cross-references in the text, not excising them, as something I hope to attend to some future day.

45 The high valuation of a worn-out broom, as an analogy for lack of self-awareness in writers, is from Cao Pi’s 曹丕 (CE 187–226) “Dianlun lunwen” 典論論文 (On classics: discourse on refined literature), Wenxuan 文選 (Selections of refined literature), ed. Hu Kejia 胡克家, 52.6b. The peasant’s overestimate of the deliciousness of his celery, which leads him to offer it to his superior, is from Xi Kang’s 嵇康 (CE 224–263) letter terminating relations with Shan Tao 山濤 (CE 205–283), “Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu” 與山巨源絕 交書 (Letter breaking off relations with Shan Juyuan), Wenxuan 43.7b, where it, in turn, alludes to a parable in Liezi; see Liezi zhuzi suoyin 7/44/1–2. 46 This point is also made by Michael Friedrich, “Notes,” 460. 47 Jinshu, juan 66, 1774. 130 Egan

初計此輯尚有論《全唐文》等書五種，而多病意倦，不能 急就。已寫定各卷中偶道及“參觀”語，存而未削，聊為異日 之券。 一九七八年一月又記48

As grand as is the scope of Guanzhui bian in its present form, we see that Qian had an even more ambitious plan for the work originally. I believe we also see, from the phrase buneng jijiu 不能急就, how much importance Qian assigned to his task. He had all he could do, in the six years between the two prefaces, to finalize the present contents of the work for publication. This was not a project that he would rush through. The most revealing document concerning Qian’s aims and methods in Guanzhui bian in this context is, however, a short text he wrote years later. This is the foreword that Qian Zhongshu wrote in 1993 to Monika Motsch’s German study of his work, Mit Bambusrohr und Ahle; Von Qian Zhongshus Guanzhuibian zu einer Neubetrachtung Du Fus (With tube and awl: from Qian Zhongshu’s Guanzhui bian to a new view of Du Fu). In this foreword, the nexus of sev- eral issues we have been discussing appears, including Qian’s use of Western texts, the obscurity of Guanzhui bian’s language, subversive activity, and veiled expression that alludes to politically sensitive issues. Here is the relevant sec- tion of Qian’s foreword:

In China means of transportation are becoming more developed all the time, the tourist industry is getting more and more prosperous, and what is known as “comparative literature” has virtually become a by-product of these developments. Challenging impediments of distinct languages and scripts seem to be disappearing together with the barriers of mountains and rivers. If “thirty years amounts to a generation,” as the saying goes, then what happened more than forty years ago seems to be a few generations ago. At that time, people who were interested in comparative literature belonged to the category of “passportless cultural tramps,” as imperially decreed by Andrei Zhdanov. The most they could do was work underground, and they lacked the tools and convenience of scholarly research. Guanzhui bian itself is a kind of “smuggled goods”; it is written in classical liter- ary style, which serves as circuitous and veiled “Aesopian language.” This intention has not escaped Dr. Motsch’s penetrating eye.

48 Qian Zhongshu, “Xu” (Preface), Guanzhui bian 1:i. Guanzhui bian, Western Citations, and the Cultural Revolution 131

在中國，交通工具日漸發達，旅遊事業就愈來愈興旺，所 謂“比較文學”也幾乎變成了它的副產品。語言文字的挑釁性 的障礙仿佛隨著山川陵谷的阻隔一起消失了。 “三十年為一世”，四十多年前真如隔了幾世。那時候，對比 較文學有些興趣的 人屬於蘇聯日丹諾夫欽定的範疇：“沒有國 籍護照的文化流浪漢”(passportless cultural tramps)。他們至多只 能做些地下工作，缺乏研究的工具和方便。《管錐編》 就是一種“私貨”；它採用了典雅的文言，也正是迂迴隱晦 的“伊索式語言” (Aesopian language)。這個用意逃不出莫芝博士 的慧眼。 49

Andrei Zhdanov (Ridan Nuofu 日丹諾夫, 1896–1948) was Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia from 1938–1947 and a major player in the Stalinist era and its Great Terror. The Zhdanov Doctrine that he promulgated forced Soviet artists, writers, and intellectuals to follow the Communist Party teach- ings in their writings and creative works. The doctrine was frequently used to denounce Soviet writers and artists who expressed their admiration for for- eign literature, music, and art, attacking them for their “bourgeois” tastes and disloyalty to their homeland. Accordingly, in 1948 Anatolii Fadeev, chairman of the powerful Writers Union, denounced the Jewish scholar Issac Nusinov as a “passportless wanderer in humanity” for his book Pushkin and World Literature.50 The ideological hostility toward foreign art and literature in Mao’s Cultural Revolution bears the stamp of Zhdanovist thought. Comparative literary study is here explicitly linked to what Communist doctrine, in Stalinist Soviet Union and during China’s Cultural Revolution, denounced as “bourgeois.” Moreover, Guanzhui bian is characterized by its author as intent upon circumventing Marxist-Maoist teaching by indirec- tion and covert expression. Obviously, by 1993 Qian Zhongshu felt he could be more forthcoming about his methods and purposes in Guanzhui bian than he allowed himself to be twenty years before, when he wrote the work’s pref- ace. By pointing to this foreword of 1993 and its linkage of Guanzhui bian with Soviet political repression of comparative literature, I do not mean to sug- gest that the entirety of Guanzhui bian can be read as a veiled protest against the anti-intellectualism of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Guanzhui bian is too sweeping in its scope and multivalent in its analysis of literature and phi- losophy to allow wholesale interpretation from this or any other single view- point. Nevertheless, Qian Zhongshu’s way of characterizing his work deserves to be taken into account in any attempt to understand Guanzhui bian. It is

49 Qian Zhongshu, untitled foreword, in Motsch, Mit Bambusrohr und Ahle, vi. 50 Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 152. 132 Egan particularly revealing that Qian would write this way about his work only when writing for a publication that would appear outside of China. There was at least one occasion on which Qian Zhongshu wrote at some length about the Cultural Revolution, and that, as we know, was in his fore- word to Yang Jiang’s Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liuji 干校 六記).51 He speaks there about the political “struggles” that he, his wife, and others in his group of “sent down” academics and intellectuals were subjected to as a “recurrent malaria” in the two years they lived in the countryside cadre school. He leaves no doubt about his contempt for the experience, observing that the non-political and mundane day-to-day events that Yang Jiang wrote about, so effectively, in Six Chapters were “mere adornments to this larger backdrop, minor incidents in a major story.”52 Qian observes that Yang Jiang’s book should have one additional chapter, which would be entitled “A Sense of Shame” (“Ji kui” 記愧). He then describes three different types of persons who emerged during the political campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Those who were unjustly accused and “struggled against;” those who went along with the campaign as “passive” participants, because they lacked the courage to protest what they believed to be unjust; and, lastly, the flag-wavers and hit-men who took the lead in attacking others, people who in fact have no sense of shame. Qian places himself in the second category, people who “felt ashamed of their own cowardice.” Qian is being unnecessarily harsh upon himself here. We all know that there was no choice but to passively participate if one hoped to get through the period alive. To my mind, in fact, the writing of Guanzhui bian in the years immediately after being “sent down” was an act of great courage and integ- rity. It was courageous not simply in the sense that to devote oneself that way to Chinese classics and Western parallels was still politically risky, but also in the sense that Qian was being true to himself—his lifelong education, back- ground, intellectual values, and principles—when he did this. Guanzhui bian stands as an affirmation of what Qian Zhongshu was, before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. Aside from its intrinsic interest and value, the work may also be viewed as one man’s sober and undaunted response to the politi- cal debacle that swirled around him. It shows that he did not compromise his learning or his principles. It also shows that he kept his faith in the value of the Chinese written record, during a dark hour, and was determined to continue to probe its richness and demonstrate its commonality with other national litera- tures for anyone who cared to notice.

51 Qian Zhongshu, “Xiaoyin” 小引 (“Foreword”), in Yang, Ganxiao liuji, i–iii. 52 Translation is Howard Goldblatt’s, from Yang, Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder,” 1. CHAPTER 6 The Pleasures of Lying Low: Yang Jiang and Chinese Revolutionary Culture

Wendy Larson

The social role of intellectuals has long been an issue for the Communist Party. After 1949, the Party directed a series of movements, culminating in the Cultural Revolution, aimed at altering the definition, self-conception, iden- tity, and social role of artists, writers, scholars, professors, scientists, and oth- ers who worked in the intellectual realm. These movements constitute the political backdrop of two of Yang Jiang’s most famous works. Yang’s 1987 novel Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡; translated as Baptism) takes place at the begin- ning of the 1950s and is set before and during the early post-1949 campaigns targeted at intellectuals, the Three-Antis and Five-Antis campaigns (sanfan wufan yundong 三反五反運動) of 1951–1952.1 Her 1981 memoir, Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liuji 干校六記), is set during the Cultural Revolution when the near-60-year-old Yang and her husband, Qian Zhongshu, were sent to the countryside in Henan to do manual labor for two years, Qian a few months before Yang. Although Taking a Bath is a fictional work, some aspects are closely linked to the experiences of Yang and her husband, who, like the characters in the novel, were faculty members in a literary research institute for much of the 1950s.2 Following a three-year stint teaching English literature at Tsinghua University beginning in 1949, Yang devoted the next two and a half decades to scholarship and translation, culminating in the publica- tion of her translation of Don Quixote in 1978.3

1 The Three-Antis fought corruption, waste, and bureaucracy among Communist party work- ers; the Five-Antis aimed at bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, cheating on govern- ment contracts, and theft of economic information, focusing on private businesses. 2 From 1949 to 1952, both had taught as professors (Yang as an adjunct) in their alma mater, Tsinghua University’s, Department of Foreign Languages before being transferred to a literary research unit at Peking University. In 1952, following the Three-Antis (1951) and Five- Antis (1952) campaigns, this research unit was incorporated into Social Sciences division of the newly-established Academy of Sciences. From 1950 onward, Qian also worked as part of an elite group tasked with translating Mao Zedong’s poetry into English. 3 Yang’s translation was among some twenty on the market before Dong Yansheng, a professor of Spanish at Beijing Foreign Studies University, published his new translation in 1995, which won him Spain’s “Order of Arts and Letters” award in 2009. Dong sharply criticized Yang’s

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_008 134 Larson

Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese critics have castigated those writers, artists, scholars and scientists who had refused to fight against extremist revolutionary practices and instead preferred to immerse them- selves in non-political work. Besides judging individuals, these critics have attacked the entire apparatus of creating revolutionary subjectivity, with its techniques of self and public criticism, often led by peasants or workers. This system attempted to construct revolutionary identity by making the re-mold- ing of thought and behavior a part of daily life, particularly in the workplace. Extreme (though not uncommon) practices included physical intimidation and torture, sometimes resulting in death. As mentioned in the previous chap- ter, Qian Zhongshu refers directly to the failure of intellectuals to stand up to such institutionalized maltreatment in his preface to Cadre School, where he notes the absence of a chapter on shame—referring to the many intellectu- als, including himself and Yang, who kept their heads down during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s rather than risk their work and families to confront the abuses of revolutionary culture. Set at the founding of the People’s Republic, Taking a Bath features literary scholars who are feeling their way in the new China. Yang shows us would-be revolutionaries innocently hoping to work for the people as the new culture demands, even as their more bourgeois colleagues, with an eye to self-benefit, rapidly learn how to spout revolutionary ideology to gain position and power. The idealists tumble into revolutionary China still burdened by May Fourth baggage stuffed with strong beliefs in the power, autonomy, and universal value of art and scholarship. The opportunists, meanwhile, make the social cli- mate downright comical, their interactions marked by petty intrigue, gossip, corruption, and pandering to authority. When this motley group runs into the revolutionary machinery and is forced to undergo self-criticism one by one, they all interpret the event as little more than a performance, a test to see who is clever enough to pass. The 1950s intellectuals that Yang Jiang creates in the mid-1980s view the process of changing the way one thinks as a requirement of idiotic times. None—not even the most honorable among them—regard it as an obstacle to their lives or work. It is above all an occasion for the laziest and most opportunistic researchers to master social and oratory tools that will help further their careers. By contrast, in Cadre School, published six years earlier, Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu are already beaten down, bereft of humor, and voiceless in protest

work, which contained many inaccuracies and simple errors, he claimed, as well as misinter- pretations, and was himself attacked for this criticism. See Xing, “Don Quixote dreaming.” On Yang’s translations, see Carlos Rojas’s chapter in this volume. The Pleasures of Lying Low 135 as they are sent off to the countryside to work in the fields. Yet it is precisely because the possibility of remonstrance has disappeared that Yang’s memoir is generally read as such a strong condemnation of the waste and inanity of revolutionary culture at its most extreme. Cadre School is admired more for what it does not directly approach than for what it does. Yang’s calm depiction of a seemingly normal life of small pleasures under the demands of a labor both useless and unappreciated—and, by extension, of the invisible political bureaucracy behind them—is thus often read as a stark and stunning censure. By the time Yang wrote Cadre School it was common knowledge that various kinds of physical and emotional torture were directed at intellectuals and oth- ers during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, and that many intellectu- als participated in grueling and demeaning political criticism and discussion sessions. Cadre School’s pointed refusal to represent and address these experi- ences only served to foreground them in the collective memory. Examining the novel and the memoir together provides a starting point for tracing Yang’s ideal of intellectual work and the role of the literary intellec- tual in Chinese society. Both works are concerned with the range of thinking and behavior, from resistance to collaboration, that characterizes populations under occupation. In this sense, they represent a literary analogue to the work of Philippe Burrin, whose 1995 study of France under Nazi control exploded the post-war myth of a general resistance that ignored the murkier and nuanced reality of accommodation that involved intellectuals, writers, and artists. While China’s “occupation” after 1949 was by a new domestic regime, rather than a foreign power, it had a similarly repressive effect on intellectual circles. Intellectuals found themselves increasingly under duress, often sharply disagreeing with the government about the nature of their work. Taking a Bath and Cadre School could be said to bookend the Mao era’s efforts to remold intellectuals, set during the post-1949 initial moments and waning heyday of Maoism, respectively. Written in a China that was rapidly moving away from revolutionary into consumer culture, both present the ideal of a detached, cos- mopolitan, and universal creative intellectual who imagines himself or her- self not so much part of political society as floating in what Jürgen Habermas called the “autonomy of the aesthetic sphere.”4 Modern art, which dominated the 20th century, granted the aesthetic a position that separated it from daily life and distanced the artist or writer, implying a superior position from which he or she could see life in a way unavailable to others:

4 Habermas, “Modernity—an Incomplete Project,” 10. As the title of the piece indicates, Habermas is referring to various aspects of modernity, not to modernism in its narrower meaning of a specific literary technique. 136 Larson

A relation of opposites had come into being; art had become a critical mirror, showing the irreconcilable nature of the aesthetic and the social worlds. This modernist transformation was all the more painfully real- ized, the more art alienated itself from life and withdrew into the untouchableness of complete autonomy.5

In these two works by Yang Jiang, as well as in plays such as Heart’s Desire (Chenxin ruyi 稱心如意, 1943) and Forging the Truth (Nongzhen chengjia 弄真成假, 1944), Yang’s perspective is to some degree a continuation of the May Fourth enlightenment notion that was inflected by European concepts of the modern. Within this modern structure, creative work and intellectual activ- ity were autonomous, universal, and free “from all specific historical ties.”6 The special, detached position that creative and intellectual work held followed from the development, beginning in 18th century Europe, of three autono- mous spheres of science, morality, and art out of the unitary world vision of religion and metaphysics. In this conception, each sphere produces its own experts and distances itself from general public authority, while simultane- ously providing intellectual rationales and aesthetic principles that organize and rationalize the lives of commoners. In literature, the connection between a text and the life of an ordinary person occurred through various narrative strategies, which often appeared in other popular forms including sermons, education, and oral stories. For example, plots that featured a central charac- ter whose complex personality riveted the reader’s attention could highlight autonomous individualism, the importance of subjectivity, and the depth of the human mind. The character’s journey through difficulties could readily pro- mote industry, progress, universality, and rationality.7 Yang’s vision of the intel- lectual also seems to be influenced by Confucian humanistic strains of thought of the 20th century, which emerged as a force aiming to unify and represent the past and conceptualize a powerful alternative to the models provided by the West.8 While a complex set of ideas, Confucian humanism complements

5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 As Geoff Boucher explains, the domains of science, law/morals, and aesthetics “develop expert knowledge about the objective, social, and subjective worlds (respectively). Ideally, this flows back into the lifeworld of modern individuals through processes of translation, resulting in the release of rational potentials into cultural knowledge, social integration, and socialised personalities.” See Boucher, “The Politics of Aesthetic Affect,” 69. 8 Jesse Field argues that Yang Jiang’s writing often returns to “discourses of self, identity, sub- jectivity, and social value entwined around traditional Confucian personhood—especially qing, the sublime connection between persons based on feeling.” See Field, “Writing Lives in The Pleasures of Lying Low 137

Enlightenment instrumental rationalism, individualism, and independence with emphasis on social and familial relations and communal values.9 Rather than elevating individual subjectivity as important, this approach centers on the way in which people function as elements within social groups that are sustained by their participation and understanding. The Chinese Communist Party-state’s vision of creative work and the role of the intellectual, originating in the 1920s and given theoretical exposition in Mao Zedong’s 1942 talks at the Yan’an Forum, however, was very different from either the Habermasian or Confucian humanist model. Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Art and Literature” laid out a critique of Enlightenment values, which Mao considered bourgeois and self-indulgent. Literature under socialism would be concerned with the well-being of the population at large and cultivation of progressive social values such as equal- ity and equal opportunity. Furthermore, it would be embodied through revo- lutionary spirit, which recognized not only social values, but their passionate and holistic embrace within the person.10 Taking a Bath and Cadre School place an intellectual culture that Yang posits as universal, transcendent, and unchanging within a Maoist society that values the locally-engaged intellec- tual motivated by political ideals. In both, Yang’s model intellectual is based on a consistent set of moral and intellectual qualities: independence, discern- ment, honor, aloofness, purity, and cosmopolitan taste. The intellectual valued by the Communist Party, in contrast, is self-sacrificing, passionate, engaged, and committed to a unified vision of the political and cultural goals of the nation.

China,” iv. Yang has stated that she believes Western and Eastern humanism to be identi- cal. See Liu, “Interviews with Yang Jiang.” 9 In the 1920s and 1930s, the New Humanism movement was initiated by Mei Guangdi 梅 光迪 (1890–1945), Hu Xiansu 胡先驌 (1894–1968), Wu Mi 吳宓 (1894–1978), and Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 (1903–87), all disciples of Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). Li Tonglu argues that the New Humanists “opposed the Darwinian, linear progressivism of the New Cultural Movement” and “contended that in the humanities lay the timeless truths.” See Li, “New Humanism,” 65. The group sought to locate an alternative set of universal principles out of the Chinese tradition. More recently, Tu Weiming 杜維明 (b. 1940) has promoted Confucian humanism as an alternative to the values of western modernity, opposing “undue emphasis on materialism, instrumentalism, technology, and pragmatism” with a model based on “harmony between individual and society, human being and nature, and human hard-mind and the Way of Heaven” the important principles of relationality as opposed to individual autonomy. See Yu and Lu, “Confucianism and Modernity,” 381, 384. 10 Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 79. 138 Larson

One striking and ubiquitous aspect of Yang’s vision is her emphasis on plea- sure as fundamental to the nature of intellectual work. In Taking a Bath we see this in the dispassionate delight of the best researchers, in Cadre School in the limited but engrossing enjoyment of daily routines. The genre of Taking a Bath, the comedy of manners, further, elicits readers’ pleasure by cutting down the hypocritical and false, and by bringing out the connection between plea- sure and purity—namely, the moral purity of a few self-possessed individuals within a group of conniving intellectuals. The style of Yang’s memoirs is lyrical and sparse, referencing this unadorned self-possession and purity, and elicit- ing praise from readers. While Yang writes from a post-revolutionary perspective, she places her vision of intellectual value’s essential connection to pleasure firmly within the context of the revolutionary culture of the 1950s and 60s. In Taking a Bath, she reveals the “revolutionary culture” of the academy to be one in which self- criticisms and informant tendencies promoted by activist cadres demoralize and frighten researchers and professors. In Cadre School, well-educated schol- ars are sent to the countryside to do manual labor supervised by once-lowly workers, making a mockery of intellectual knowledge. Although Taking a Bath shows some value in revolutionary ideology’s attack on class privilege and political detachment, this perspective is absent in Cadre School, in which Yang finds nothing to admire in political policy or its underlying ideals. Yang’s emphasis on pleasure expresses a moral rather than hedonistic vision in which the intellectual who is fundamentally good is rewarded with the experience of a pure and unique form of pleasure. The comedy of manners is a perfect genre for the purpose of shining a light on purity hidden within a social environment of falseness and hypocrisy. It is not, however, a genre that can adequately address competing models of what constitutes the ideal of intel- lectual work and its relationship to political ideology. Even without consider- ing content, Yang’s choice of the comedy of manners eliminates the possibility of a serious evaluation of the ideals of revolutionary intellectual work, instead throwing her weight behind the literary cosmopolitan as a universal type and ultimate aspiration. In what follows, I analyze Taking a Bath and Cadre School to show how Yang develops this ideal, and compare her work with that of Wang Xiaobo, a writer who, despite differences in style and content, also creates a form of resistance to excessive political control by means of a detached, pleasure-seeking charac- ter. The comparison helps explain one criticism of Yang’s vision, which focuses on her apparent justification of the reclusive, bookish, unengaged intellectual. This perspective is only enhanced by After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou 洗澡之後, The Pleasures of Lying Low 139

2014), her sequel to Taking a Bath, which clearly lays out the moral vision of intellectual work that drives Yang’s fiction.

Taking a Bath: A Clash of Cultures

In Yang Jiang’s work we commonly see a desire to push the fog of history and reality aside and return to the truth of original life or the impulse of the basic life source. Exploring carefully and reaching into the core reali- ties of history and the individual has become a latent thread in the essays and fiction of her creative work in the new era. I believe that the silence, emptiness, and rupture between Yang Jiang’s early and later works, torn apart by “history,” is the only thing that caused her to move away from the dance of the vacuous “drama” of her early years and plunge into powerful memories illuminated by realistic human life. It is precisely under the challenge and baptism of “revolution” that Yang Jiang finally became self- aware of the ambiguity and circumvention of her role as one of China’s intellectual “royalty,” in which she had consistently played the “enlight- ener.” From that time on, she assumed the role of narrator of the people and turned ordinary life and fate into the sole reality of her writing. —Zhang Lixin, 200711

The Chinese Communist Party considered intellectuals dangerous for several reasons: they were perceived to be pro-American and anti-Soviet Union, to look down on workers and peasants, to have supported the Nationalist Party, and to hold bourgeois ideas on the autonomy, independence, and loftiness of creative and intellectual work. They were also seen as having bourgeois work habits, a tendency to seek pleasure, and a lack of professional dedication.12

11 Zhang, “Liuluo minjian de ‘guizu’,” 102. 12 Chen, “The Thought Reform of Intellectuals,” 83–84; U, “The Making of Chinese Intellectuals,” 977–8. U argues that zhishifenzi 知識分子 “became a dominant term of social classifica- tion only during Thought Reform.” Although zhishifenzi was in use in the 1920s, terms such as zhishi jieji 知識階級 (intellectual class) were more popular in leftist journals, and only with Thought Reform did the Communist Party push the term zhishifenzi into the popular consciousness. By the time the movement came to a peak in 1952, “almost 800 articles incorporated the phrase, often repeatedly.” Furthermore, the “reification of zhishifenzi has been a central feature of CCP rule.” See U, “The Making of Chinese Intellectuals,” 973, 976, 987. 140 Larson

Detaching intellectual work from politics was a persistent problem in the view of the Party, which extended study sessions and self-criticisms aimed at cor- recting these vices widely across various sectors. Culture and education, how- ever, came in for special attention after 1949, for a number of reasons. For one, those areas had become refuges for ideologically-suspect employees who had already been purged from government organizations. Additionally, the CCP was anxious to mobilize a “cultural army” (wenhua jundui 文化軍隊) to carry out the all-important ideological work that could only be accomplished with proper socialist thinking and behavior.13 The CCP specially targeted faculty and staff who had formerly been with the Nationalist Party as well as those known for “womanizing, gambling and other forms of ‘hedonism’ and ‘decadence’.”14 The focus on university-level professors and researchers began in September of 1951, when 3,000 faculty members from Beijing and Tianjin were brought together for four months of intensive study. As is reflected in Taking a Bath, they were told to analyze their past for “errors” and write out their self-con- fessions, recognizing their mistakes. As the “bearers of bourgeois ideology,” the intellectuals went through humiliating and frightening self-criticisms that were designed to humiliate them and rid them of pride.15 In the early 1950s no one understood that the decade would become a terrifying time for intellectu- als, beginning with the Land Reform Campaign (tudi gaige yundong 土地改革 運動, 1947–53), in which many intellectuals were required to work in the countryside and change their thinking, to the campaign against the Hu Feng clique (Hu Feng fan geming jituan 胡風反革命集團, 1950), the Resist the US, Help North Korea Campaign (kang-Mei yuan-Chao yundong 抗美援朝運動, 1950), the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries (zhenya fangem- ing yundong 鎮壓反革命運動, 1950), the Three-Antis and the Five-Antis campaigns (1951–52), the campaign against the film The Biography of Wu Xun (Wu Xun zhuan 武訓傳, 1951), the Thought Reform Campaign (sixiang gaizao yundong 思想改造運動, 1951–52), the criticism of Liang Shuming 梁淑溟 (1953), the criticism of Yu Pingbo 俞平伯 and his research on the Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) (1954) and the criticism of Hu Shi 胡適 (1955), culminating in the Anti-Rightist Campaign ( fanyou yundong 反右運動) of 1957.16

13 U, “The Making of Chinese Intellectuals,” 979–80. 14 Ibid., 984. 15 Chen, “The Thought Reform of Intellectuals,” 84. 16 Chen, “The Thought Reform of Intellectuals”; Zhang, “Jianguo chuqi zhishifenzi yu sixi- ang gaizao yundong.” The Pleasures of Lying Low 141

Current research on the Thought Reform Campaign, which was quickly followed by the Three-Antis and Five-Antis campaigns and largely directed at government officials and business people, recognizes that although some intellectuals believed that change was necessary and supported the study ses- sions, many did not agree at the outset with the need for a campaign.17 As the campaign gained momentum, some professors became increasingly fright- ened by the vulgarity of the self-criticism process and suspicious of the new political alliances and continual struggles that grew out of the movement. At Beijing University and Tsinghua University, self-criticism toppled famous pro- fessors such as Ye Qisun 葉企孫 (1898–1977), Lu Zhiwei 陸志韋 (1894–1970), and Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 (Quentin Pan, 1899–1967), all branded “idols of the capitalist class.”18 Some intellectuals, such as Hu Xiansu 胡先驌 (1894–1968), Jia Zhifang 賈植芳 (1916–2004), and Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) directly opposed the campaigns, refusing to take notes or participate in the criticism sessions.19 At Fudan University, the campaign resulted in chaos in the class- room and a general lowering of professors’ prestige and authority, with students grumbling about professors behind their backs and attaching pejorative labels to them. The negative consequences were especially severe in the humanities. As the movement centered on the notion that “everyone must pass,” profes- sors became disillusioned with the face-to-face criticism.20 Many professors nationwide nevertheless joined the Party after the campaign concluded. This is the ideological and cultural context of Taking a Bath, which centers on the growing romance between Yao Mi, a self-trained literary scholar taking care of her mother in Beijing while working as a librarian, and Xu Yancheng, a professor of foreign literature married to a beautiful woman he does not love. In Yang Jiang’s portrayal, Yao and Xu are the most upright and honest of the group of scheming literary intellectuals working at the Literary Research

17 U, “The Making of Chinese Intellectuals,” 972, 980. 18 Zhang, “Jianguo chuqi zhishifenzi yu sixiang gaizao yundong,” 60. 19 Ye Qisun founded the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University and moved to Beijing University in 1952, where he became embroiled in a case involving a student. Lu Zhiwei, a psychologist and linguist, taught at Yanjing University and after 1949, became a researcher at the Academy of Science. Pan Guangdan was a famous sociologist and a mentor of Fei Xiaotong. Hu Xiansu was a botanist who was critical of Lysenko’s anti-Mendelian theories in genetics and agriculture. Jia Zhifang was a fiction writer and literature professor at Fudan University and part of the Hu Feng group. He was imprisoned from 1955 to 1978. Mentored by Hu Shi, Gu Jiegang was a historian who promoted a non-political approach to history and focused on the salient role of the intellectual in Chinese history. 20 Zhang, “Jianguo chuqi zhishifenzi yu sixiang gaizao yundong,” 61. 142 Larson

Institute (LRI). The LRI used to be the National Culture Research Institute, but saw its mission broadened and modernized under the People’s Republic with a new name and an implied global approach. Despite the LRI’s grandiose mis- sion, its researchers find themselves limited to research on official-approved authors: Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë. The researchers privately express discomfort at the exclusion of many famous authors as well as Soviet literature, which, according to the politics of the day, was supposed to provide a model and generate guidelines about proper thought. They never- theless quickly divide themselves into groups, mostly not by expertise but by personal affinity or for calculated relationship-building—displaying, in other words, the same cliquish behavior of the old intellectual class that the social- ist regime was trying to eradicate. Indeed, the gossip, shirking of real work, jealousy, brown-nosing, hypocrisy, selfishness, grand-standing, romantic flirt- ing, and lack of true expertise among the worst of the researchers makes it appear as if Yang Jiang believes that the rectifications of revolutionary culture were badly needed. When the third part of the novel begins and the research- ers must construct and deliver their self-criticisms, they reflexively regard the exercise as little more than an unpleasant test that must be passed and can be dispensed with if one simply masters its process and technique. It also is an occasion for the more opportunistic among them to hone their techniques of appearing before the “masses,” and insert themselves into the new revolution- ary hierarchy. Only after the researchers slowly understand that not passing the test has serious consequences does fear set in. Although Xu and Yao are involved in a relationship at the expense of Xu’s wife, Du Lilin, Yang Jiang nonetheless portrays them as upright and honest, because the affection between them is genuine and stems from intellectual and emotional affinity rather than sexual attraction or clawing for social posi- tioning. Yao’s earlier fiancé, by contrast, was a money-and-status grubber who cast her aside after learning that she had become impoverished, and did not respect her desire to stay in China and care for her invalid mother. Contrasting with this sympathetic portrait is the back-story of Du Lilin, a “famous beauty” who courted her husband-to-be as a game in which the difficult-to-catch man was more desirable than those who aggressively sought her attention. Xu takes up Du’s proposal rather than go home to the arranged marriage his family is pushing on him. They both travel to the United States for further study, and Xu on to England. But the shy young man who placidly followed his wife’s lead develops a backbone when it comes to the new nation. He insists on return- ing but does not insist that she accompany him, a perceived slap in the face that further strains their marriage. Because Xu and Du have little in common, The Pleasures of Lying Low 143

Xu builds a friendship with the honest and direct Yao Mi, and the friendship develops towards romance. In staging these characters’ interactions, Yang Jiang revives and transplants into the fiction form the genre she had adopted in her early plays (discussed in chapter one of this book): the comedy of manners. The comedy of manners, most often associated with the early English Restoration (1660–1710), followed an 18-year Puritan ban on public theater performances, taking as its subject “the way people behave, the manners they employ in a social context. An early focus on sexual explicitness, which was encouraged by Richard II, was quickly mixed with equal emphasis on money, and the themes of sex and money were expanded into related areas of marriage, friendship, and, of course, taste.21 Although the comedy of manners continued to develop with a variety of foci, often “the conventional moral standards are superseded by the criterion of taste” wherein everyone follows the unwritten rules that govern propriety.”22 However, the comedy of manners does not support the proprieties of behav- ior, but subverts them, revealing and attacking social hypocrisy and absurdity. Changing over time, the comedy of manners flourished in the 20th century, in Noel Coward’s (1899–1973) work becoming a “comedy of bad manners” that disclosed the acting and posing of the wealthy or wannabe wealthy; through Harold Pinter’s (1930–2008) emphasis on ambiguity and certain ways of speak- ing behind which hide deep emotions; in John Osborne’s (1929–1994) subtle sexual intrigues and the conflict between passion and codes of behavior; and in Joe Orton’s (1933–1967) farce and allusions to serious sexual perversion and depravity.23 The lightness or weightiness, cruelty or light-heartedness of the exposé as “the mask of decorum, of games playing, of social ritual” also has varied over time, and American playwrights have altered the awareness of class—or attention to rank and breeding “as defined by style”—that is com- mon to English comedies of manners.24 Some popular television sitcoms, such as Seinfield (1990–98), are also thought to be modern comedies of manners, where the characters form a “sitcom group” that functions like an “egalitarian social class that both forces its members to conform as well as providing them with their social identities.”25

21 Hirst, Comedy of Manners, 1–2. 22 Ibid., 2, 3. 23 Ibid., 60; 58–110. 24 Ibid., 116. 25 Pierson, “A Show about Nothing,” 50. 144 Larson

Yang’s plays, “by avoiding explicit reference to the war, the Japanese occupa- tion, or social crisis . . . seem to offer a detached, almost disinterested, vision of contemporary society.”26 By contrast, Taking a Bath brings out the actual envi- ronment of intellectual work under the changing conditions of revolutionary culture. Writing in the late 1980s with the benefit of post-revolutionary hind- sight, Yang found fertile ground for a new comedy of manners in the social hierarchies of the supposedly-egalitarian 1950s. After the establishment of the new People’s Republic, China’s social categories were in transition, as the new social rules were not well understood and new alliances were possible. In that respect, revolutionary culture offers rich fodder for the comedy of man- ners. A common genre trope—as in Jane Austen’s Emma—is the newcomer “attempting to assimilate into upper-class society.”27 Virtually everyone was a newcomer in New China to some degree. With the strategies of inclusion and exclusion powerfully at work, intellectuals had to carefully evaluate changing social conditions and position themselves within the emerging social groups. Yang sustains a comedy of manners throughout the first two of Taking a Bath’s three parts. These sections take literary intellectuals to task for their petty intrigues and romantic dilly-dallying while acknowledging that a minority possess admirable qualities, which are concentrated in the idealized charac- ters of Yao Mi and, especially, Xu Yancheng. Just as many of its genre predecessors satirize the implicit social standards and morés through the language and actions of stock character types such as the schemer, the jealous spouse, the old moralist, and the hypocrite, Taking a Bath enumerates the personality traits of many unappealing characters. Common themes of seduction, infidelity, changing fortunes, and social rever- sal bring out the contemporary attitudes of intellectuals in their milieu. As a comedy of manners that “acknowledges that all human social behavior is socially structured through societal social manners and customs,”28 Taking a

26 Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China, 145. Amy D. Dooling’s work on literary feminism includes a chapter on Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing where she focuses on the comic strategies that, she argues, outwit patriarchy not through the “tearful realism” of the May Fourth era, but through satire and irony. Dooling points out that Yang’s early plays were comedies of manner. Set in the drawing rooms of wealthy Shanghai families, the plays are a “mild form of amusing entertainment that preserved rather than challenged the status quo.” However, Dooling argues that the plays are actu- ally parodies of comedies of manner that stage a confrontation of both social classes and of old and new gender roles, inventing a feminist comedy of manners. See esp. pages 140, 145, 146. 27 Pierson, “A Show about Nothing,” 50. 28 Ibid., 54. The Pleasures of Lying Low 145

Bath is based on the premise that early 1950s revolutionary society structures human social behavior through a hierarchical system that, like all other sys- tems, can be used and abused. Yet the first two parts’ mockery and satire directed at the social climbers, opportunists, self-inflators, hypocrites and others falls flat in part three as Yang attempts to make light of the absurdities and abuses of revolutionary culture while simultaneously addressing the emotional turmoil and fear that the demand for self-criticism engenders in the literary researchers. The bourgeois world of self-importance and pretension so often parodied in the comedy of manners meets the lofty moral and deadly serious themes of socialism. When the researchers are put to the test of self-criticism in front of the masses in part three, they find themselves anxious to hit the right tone. As those who have yet to undergo criticism listen to the attempts of their colleagues, they take notes and plot their own presentation. One by one, the researchers and professors fall into depression and despair, in one case even attempting suicide, as their self-criticisms are rejected by the masses.29 The genuine friendship and collegiality between Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng, as well as their simple and honest approach toward life and work, stands in opposition to a multitude of hypocrisies, and anchors the themes of appear- ance vs. reality, surface vs. depth that are characteristic of the comedy of man- ners. Although most evident in the first two parts of the novel, Yang attempts to extend the relationship between Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng into the third part, in which Du Lilin uses her self-criticism to voice accusations against her hus- band in public. When Du’s self-criticism unexpectedly succeeds wildly with the masses, she confidently turns her attention to Xu Yancheng, pressing him to prepare for his own self-criticism by addressing the revolutionary demand for full disclosure and honesty in admitting his “affair” with Yao Mi. But the stakes are suddenly different and the relationship of the married couple, once threatened by the conventional betrayals of extra-marital relationships, flirt- ing, and other sexual indiscretions, is now challenged by a bigger threat: the

29 Pierson relates an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry’s apartment is occupied by his par- ents and his girlfriend is still living with her own parents, so there is no spot for “intimate relations.” Thus made desperate, the couple goes to the theater and kisses and gropes while Schindler’s List is on the screen. Betrayed by a neighbor who sees them there, the couple is chastised by both sets of parents, since their behavior “violates social decorum in doing it during a film portraying such a grim subject matter as the Holocaust” (Pierson, “A Show about Nothing,” 55). Although only one episode rather than an entire social con- text, the scene illustrates the difficulty of pairing the humor and wit of the comedy of manners against a violent and serious historical issue, even if it is only being shown on a screen. 146 Larson recruitment of individuals by the state against their spouses, who can provide private details about their spouse’s “anti-revolutionary” thoughts, language, and actions. The comedy of manners’ “show about nothing,” in which “witty dialogue, false deception, and desires” are played out in social blunders by actors watching themselves perform, meets head-to-head with the threatened disintegration of family relationships, job security, and social stability, not to mention emotional and physical violence.30 In the third part of Taking a Bath, we make our way through a wrenching modal switch from a light comedy of manners to the serious class confronta- tion mentioned by Zhang Lixin in the epigraph to this section. Zhang claims that it was her encounter with the revolution that forced Yang to leave behind her tendency to focus on comedies about trivial issues, and pushed her to move away from pretense and closer to the real, actual lives of common peo- ple. It was the “baptism” of revolution and her forced labor cleaning toilets, Zhang argues, that perversely freed Yang from her detached perspective. When she realized that she was not being treated humanely, Yang slowly turned her attention to the real world around her. Having once diminished the weighty in favor of the trivial and intentionally downplayed the suffering and horrors of the world, Yang’s writings now conveyed genuine concern for the ordinary lives of the people, her perspective realigned to “the position of the people” (min- jian lichang 民間立場). As the revolution increasingly deprived intellectuals such as Yang of their lofty traditional status as those who tell others how to think, and “peeled away intellectuals’ face, respect, fame, and position,” Zhang argues, they began to doubt themselves and went through phases, giving up and then looking for new inspiration in the lives of others.31 If Zhang is right, even though Taking a Bath was written well after Cadre School, it could indicate the early stage of Yang’s metamorphosis into a vision grounded in a confrontation with the violence of reality. In that case, the first two parts of the novel, all about “manners over morals,” set up the trans- formations of the third, in which socialist ideology dismantles the coreless, value-free triviality that preceded it. Such an interpretation, however, would not recognize the central role of pleasure in Yang’s moral vision. The humor and wit of the comedy of manners bring pleasure to readers as they witness Yang’s exposure of human society and its foibles because it is predicated on the knowledge that no one is immune from the pretensions of social posi- tion. Characters who live up to the ideals of their roles, meanwhile, derive

30 Pierson, “A Show about Nothing,” 49. 31 Zhang, “Jianguo chuqi zhishifenzi yu sixiang gaizao yundong,” 103. The Pleasures of Lying Low 147 pleasure and contentment from both their innate goodness—their honestly, integrity, and work ethic—and their intellectual labor. Yet the conditions of part three turn the novel into a text that no longer extracts pleasure from human interactions, or highlights human morality and happiness. The reader of the comedy of manners, who joins the author’s laugh- ter at the pathetic if amusing jockeying of social players, is replaced by the pas- sionate reader of 1950s epic novels such as Yang Mo’s 楊沫 The Song of Youth (Qingqun zhi ge 青春之歌, 1958), Liu Qing’s 柳青 The Builders (Chuangye shi 創業史, 1959), and Luo Guangbin 羅廣斌 and Yang Yiyan’s 楊益言 Red Crag (Hongyan 紅岩, 1960). These massive tomes charged the spiritual transfor- mation of the population and infused it with a revolutionary optimism that offered a way forward, in the wrenching realignment of property and the per- sistent struggle against class enemies, as well as in a radically new subjectivity. The literary scholar who demands from intellectual work a nuanced pleasure of the text also has no footing in the new culture, since literature’s only mean- ingful utility is its empowerment of the masses. The pleasures and purities of an honest intellectual life expressed through the Western classical music in which Xu Yancheng indulges at the Yao home, literary research for its own sake, and the avoidance of disputes and intrigues can clearly represent the good and the pure. The comedy of manners directs us to notice the few exemplars who stand out in a field of hypocrisy, vanity, and social climbing. But when the new intellectual—enlightened through self-criticism, impassioned through the rec- ognition of injustice, and forced to recognize the value of the non-intellectual classes—becomes the norm, Yang’s comedy comes to an end. It is no coin- cidence that Yang exempts Yao Mi from the test of self-criticism or that Xu Yancheng manages to pass despite his awkwardness. The essential goodness of the ideal intellectual, exhibited by these two characters, seems to come to their rescue, and they hover relatively unscathed above the absurdity and horror of the confrontations. Taking a Bath thus exposes not just the unseemly side of the intellectual class but the limits of the comedy of manners itself in a revolutionary con- text. A genre that focuses on social pretenses rather than moral or philosophi- cal issues is ill equipped to deal with the very real fear that the intellectuals experience when they belatedly realize that the self-criticism sessions are no passing game. Nor is it a genre that can evaluate the ideals of revolutionary cul- ture or its violent tactics. Yang’s choice of the comedy of manners as her mode (in parts one and two) for staging a confrontation between intellectuals and revolutionary culture leads us to at least two possible interpretations. First, Yang could purposely be setting up a shock for readers by confronting them with the contrast between the relatively harmless world of social manners and 148 Larson the subsequent persecution of intellectuals of the 1950s. Yang, then, would be mixing genres in order to stun the reader into profound revelations about how the Maoist critique of modern creativity, knowledge, and intellectual life back- fired. Second, Yang might have made the choice unaware of any inherent genre conflict. This possibility would indicate how deeply enmeshed Yang is within her vision of creative writing, in which the most important job—to which the comedy of manners is well-suited—is to expose the shallow hypocrite and promote the cosmopolitan intellectual. My analysis of Taking a Bath makes it clear that I side with the second inter- pretation. When Taking a Bath is juxtaposed with Cadre School, Yang’s ded- ication to a pleasure-based vision of creativity and intellectual work comes into even sharper relief. The non-hedonistic and dispassionate pleasure that structures and defines honorable intellectual life in Taking a Bath is even more obvious in her memoir, which positions the intellectual within a revolution- ary environment at a very different historical moment. In contrast to Zhang Lixin, I find that, like Taking a Bath, Cadre School is based on the search for and highlighting of pleasure, if shrunken and deformed by Maoism. The delights of the countryside are different from those sought by Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng in Taking a Bath, yet the protagonist-intellectuals in both cases reject confronta- tion with power or suffering. Cadre School, therefore, abandons the conven- tions of normative comedy while retaining Yang’s pleasure-based vision of the intellectual.

Cadre School: When All is Lost

In order to test Zhang Lixin’s contention that Yang transformed herself from a bourgeois intellectual into one with true affection for the people who is inter- ested in their daily existence, we must turn to Yang’s memoir of her life in the countryside, which was published in 1981, six years before Taking a Bath. It is set during the period in which Yang and Qian Zhongshu were sent to the Henan countryside, from 1969 to 1972. Branded an “ox-ghost snake-spirit” (niu- gui sheshen 牛鬼蛇神) in 1967, in July, 1969, Yang endured study sessions and low-level manual labor designed to reform her thinking. Her assignment in Beijing was to clean the women’s toilets, which she did not find onerous:

The work assigned to me was not difficult, it was to clean and organize the two small women’s toilets. This originally was the work of Xiao Liu of the Literature Institute. She was a temporary worker who had the lowest salary—fifteen yuan a month. I had the highest salary among the women. The Pleasures of Lying Low 149

The revolutionary masses told me to do Xiao Liu’s work, while Xiao Liu was put in charge of supervising all of the “ox-ghost snake-spirits” of the Literature Institute. This is called turning things upside down.32

Chinese intellectuals have been characterized as having “a deeply rooted Confucian cultural preference for the ‘truth’ or substance of historical nar- rative as opposed to xiao shuo or ‘small talk’,”33 though this generalization is belied by the pettiness of New China intellectuals on display in Taking a Bath. As many critics have pointed out, Cadre School tends to focus on the small and unremarkable while eliding direct representation of weightier issues. With its six “records” of departure for and life in the countryside, Cadre School revolves around “trivial affairs such as clothing, eating, living, walking, the friendship of comrades, the affection between the couple and so on.”34 And yet, although “the people are real people, the dog is a real dog, the events are real events, the talk is real talk, all of it is the actual recording of real things, there is not a trace of exposure or critique of the dominant culture.”35 Yang Jiang’s style is to stand back and coolly examine what her actions, thoughts, and feelings were in any given period, without the storm and stress characteristic of the literature of the wounded. The book ends with Yang’s claim that the remolding of revolu- tionary culture ultimately failed to change her. In the final chapter of Cadre School, Yang learns, in March 1972, that her name as well as Qian’s is on a list of old, weak, sick, and infirm people who would be sent back to Beijing. “Secretly pleased” to find herself on an early list, Yang participates in a farewell dinner hosted by the comrades staying behind, many of whom also are old and in bad health. As Yang describes it,

neither the guilt nor the gratitude I felt could suppress the selfish joy that filled my heart. I now understood something more clearly than ever: after undergoing more than ten years of reform, plus two years at the cadre school, not only had I not reached the plateau of progressive thinking that everyone sought, I was nearly as selfish now as I had been in the beginning. I was still the same old me.36

32 Yang, “Bingwu dingwei nian jishi,” 162. 33 Gewurtz, “The Afterlife of Memory in China,” 30. 34 Wang and Ding, “Ganxiao liuji wenben xidu,” 38. 35 Ibid., 38. 36 Yang, Six Chapters 98. 150 Larson

Like Amy Dooling in her analysis of Yang Jiang’s early plays, Margo Gewurtz argues that in Cadre School, Yang’s intent is subversion through an ironic mode. This subversion begins with Yang’s title, which refers to Shen Fu’s 沈復 (1763–1826) Six Chapters of a Floating Life (Fusheng liuji 浮生六記, 1808): “Like [Shen], she subverts the patriarchal and authoritarian substance of her society, but in a way that enables her to continue living and working under the same system”37 (my italics). The oblique irony that many find in Yang’s memoir implies at best an indirect criticism of the policies of the Cultural Revolution, even though it was written fifteen years after its end, well into a time when harsh critiques were not uncommon. Gewurtz quotes Yang to confirm her interpretation that although a “sense of waste, futility and loss pervades the book, and builds through small but telling details a devastating critique of the system that unleashed this cruelty, loss of life and waste of human talents,” the sense of “class solidarity” of Cadre School is not with the peas- ants or the masses, but with fellow sent-down intellectuals, whom the local people consistently viewed as useless outsiders.38 Thus Gewurtz does not find in Cadre School the identification with commoners that Zhang Lixin lauds. Rather, Cadre School maintains the detached and distant tone of the com- edy of manners, while abandoning most of its wit and humor. Wang Xueli and Ding Bangyong note Yang Jiang’s dispassionate description of an historical period marked by strong emotions and violence:

In Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School, Yang Jiang uses a cool and calm tone to discuss past affairs of a time that many people cannot bear to recall, and bearing wrongdoing with equanimity, the history of a period which the majority of people see as having only bitterness and pain under her Yang Jiang’s pen finds the six fond memories of departure, labor, leisure, feelings, luck, and being wronged. In the terrible tragedy of the “Cultural Revolution,” although there was no absence of clear-headed critics and thinkers, the vast majority of intellectuals who went through repeated government movements suddenly faced the reality of the times and found themselves too busy to engage in overarching reflection. Only a small minority actually criticized society.39

Although this paragraph is followed by lines indicating the authors’ admira- tion for Cadre School, Yang’s noble sentiments, and the unbending character of

37 Gewurtz, “The Afterlife of Memory in China,” 33. 38 Gewurtz, “The Afterlife of Memory in China,” 37. 39 Wang and Ding, “Ganxiao liuji wenben xidu,” 40. The Pleasures of Lying Low 151 the intellectual, I read against the grain of their argument. Whereas Wang and Ding recognize and applaud the qualities of distance (“cool and calm tone”) and pleasure-seeking (“fond memories”), I see them as indications of Yang’s ideology of detached intellectual work. In Taking a Bath and Cadre School, these qualities are characteristics of both the intellectuals portrayed and the author’s approach in her writing. In zeroing in on small joys under the terrible conditions of political vic- timization, Cadre School elides direct confrontation with power and violence, insisting instead on an oblique dialectic that foregrounds separation from poli- tics and pleasure in intellectual work and the text. In this regard, Yang’s writing has similarities to that of Wang Xiaobo 王小波 (1952–1997), whose ubiqui- tous hero, Wang Er 王二 (Wang Two), experiences the Cultural Revolution through a habitus of detachment and pleasure. A fictional clone of the author (as his name implies), Wang Er, like the Yang Jiang of Cadre School, seeks plea- sure over confrontation. Wang Xiaobo’s most famous novel, The Golden Years (Huangjin shidai 黃金時代, 1992), is also a treatise on the transcendent value of a detached, autonomous intellectual continuing to exist within revolution- ary culture, albeit in a somewhat contradictory ribald mode. A story about a young man’s life as a sent-down youth in the countryside, the book is also a fic- tionalized memoir. Yet the meaning of pleasure for Wang Er in The Golden Years is has implications that are different from those of the character Yang Jiang in Cadre School. While both characters refer to an ethos of apolitical value and the universal good, Wang Er’s relentless hedonism shifts his temporal perspec- tive into the immediate present, directing his critique at fundamental ways of being specific to revolutionary culture. By contrast, Yang Jiang constructs a timeless and universal intellectual who keeps aloof from history, not deigning to comment on what she views as a temporary blip, or a historical anomaly.

The Golden Years and Cadre School: Two Ways of Being Sent Down

Wang Er, the main character of The Golden Years, is a sent-down youth who for the most part avoids getting drawn into political drama, instead immersing himself in a sexual relationship with a married and slightly older doctor, Chen Qingyang, who is also a sent-down youth. Although as a sent-down youth, Wang Er is too young to be a professor or practicing intellectual, his parents most likely are “mind workers” rather than manual laborers. His relationship with Chen is discovered by the authorities, who demand a self-confession that becomes farcical when they begin to enjoy rather than condemn the lurid descrip- tion. Wang Xiaobo’s literary alter ego, like Yang’s, is an intellectual who seeks 152 Larson pleasure in daily life, although his focus is on sex and his attitude toward politi- cal authority is more flippant. Two of the novel’s key accomplishments are temporal, in casting off the stri- dent cadences of socialist progress, and ontological, removing from the coun- tryside its Maoist designation as the site of the real, under which it flourished within the romantic-heroic idiom of revolutionary romanticism. The temporal innovation is largely a function of Wang’s idiosyncratic narrative style, which combines with Wang Er’s humorous logic to evoke an “okay, whatever” low- down style of resistance to revolutionary optimism and political earnestness. Ontologically, Wang Xiaobo complicates the logic of revolutionary conscious- ness through his radical revision of the countryside, as well as through the narrative’s relationship between understanding and action and its refusal of common categories of historical understanding and personal behavior.40 In The Golden Years, Wang Xiaobo writes from an intellectual perspective and with an eye to pleasure, working, as I have written elsewhere,

at the intersection of time and consciousness, evoking a novel temporal sense that both softens and philosophizes the revolutionary time of polit- ical movements, with their characteristic expressions of passionate loy- alty and historical innocence. The sense of time that becomes Wang’s deconstructive tool eats away at the immediacy, fervent and deeply held emotion, clear-cut expression of position, optimism, and drive toward progress that make up the revolutionary spirit.41

Wang Er is an endearingly human blend of quirkiness, escapism, and pleasure- seeking tendencies, all presented with unapologetic nonchalance. In his sense of self-possession and integrity, Wang Er shares similarities with the much older intellectuals—Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu—of Cadre School, and even with Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng of Taking a Bath. Cadre School depicts Yang Jiang as tuning out politics to pry out the small pleasures of life in the coun- tryside, much as Wang Er rejects ideological engagement in favor of a quest to fulfill his oddly unlustful but enjoyable sexual desire. All three books present intellectuals as completely unmoved by socialist ideals, the policies of which serve only to hamper or propel their own individualized pursuits of pleasure. They also critique the political environment as excessive and hypocritical. Yang Jiang and Wang Xiaobo nevertheless differ in their goals and beliefs, and we can detect these differences in both their prose style and in the

40 Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 135–36. 41 Ibid., 119. The Pleasures of Lying Low 153 qualities they invest in their intellectual protagonists. The idiosyncratic Wang Er, for example, projects a gentle philosophical perspective that looks not to the past but to the present, transforming time into something porous and unorganized. Progress, self-improvement, and self-sacrifice, the pillars of revo- lutionary temporality, collapse in Wang Xiaobo’s vision, which also rejects the high emotional passion of serving the people. Even the sexual desire flaunted in the novel is not expressed as lust or love, which distinguishes Wang Xiaobo’s vision from that of the more direct replacement of revolutionary passion with sexual passion that is common in post-Mao fiction. This, too, connects him to Yang’s pursuit of intellectual pleasures.42 And while his novel shares the same brutal historical backdrop as Yang’s memoir, “Wang Xiaobo’s time is a slow-moving, little-changing flow that is tamed by a sense of melancholy and fate . . . for Wang Xiaobo, the real is nothing other than the body moving through a time that hardly changes, or the passage of time mapped onto the body that does change.”43 Yang Jiang’s intellectual also exists as an aloof specialist in his or her field, relying on objectivism and detachment. Some critics have attacked this histor- ical orientation as a passivity characteristic of Chinese intellectuals. Arguing that “‘avoidance’ (duobi 躲避) is a typical Eastern attitude toward life,” the literary critic Yu Jie interprets Yang Jiang’s admiration for the “spiritual love” of Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng as yet another example of her reluctance to turn “knowing” into “acting.”44 The general tendency of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to embrace knowing at the expense of acting is reflected in the choices made by Yao Mi, whom Yu Jie identifies with the author:

If we say that the avoidance of love by Yao and Xu only creates their own misery, then we can say that the avoidance of social responsibility by all intellectuals will make this calamity-ridden people have even more calamities and difficulties . . . in a century full of crises, working with pure knowledge can be the choice of only a minority of intellectuals, and can- not become that class’s excuse for shirking their responsibilities.45

42 The most well-known example is the work of Jia Pingwa 賈平凹, whose 1993 novel Abandoned Capitol (Feidu 廢都) presented a shocking picture of debauchery. 43 Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 151–52. 44 Yu, “Zhi, xing, you de zhixing xianshi,” 41–42. The most common criticism of the intellectu- als in Taking a Bath in the Chinese articles is their failure to act: wenren wuxing 文人無行. Tang Ren’s analysis of Taking a Bath revolves around this depiction of intellectuals, and faults the novel for lacking any resolution. See Tang, “Gengyun zhishi fenzi de ‘fang cun di’.” 45 Yu, “Zhi, xing, you de zhixing xianshi,” 41. 154 Larson

While Yu Jie and others fault Yang for affirming passivity in even the finest intellectuals, others praise Yang’s detachment as a mark of integrity. They fur- ther admire her move away from a narrow ethnic focus on Chinese qualities and toward a universal emphasis on humanity in general, and away from poli- tics toward art.46 Admirers, in sum, commend Yang as an upright and universal intellectual who refuses to cast blame, while detractors condemn her action- averse characters as onlookers who refuse to confront the abuse of power and have no passion to seek happiness and justice. While the work of both Yang Jiang and Wang Xiaobo projects a sense of cerebral detachment and rejects the politicization of life, the source of their characters’ pleasure helps explain why critics find that Yang Jiang’s intellec- tuals could be viewed as shirking their responsibilities. Carefully shielding his characters from the excessive hedonism that would indicate debauchery, Wang Xiaobo nonetheless uses sexual desire as an allegory for an imaginary future freedom not based on political coercion. His choice of sexual desire as an important element of Wang Er’s anti-political perspective is edgy enough to erase moral purity as a possible rationale for the character’s actions, there- fore refusing to imply that all that is needed are some good people. By contrast, Yang Jiang’s characters find pleasure in typical Confucian intellectual pursuits: the joy of textual work, and the pursuit of lofty moral integrity. Reading her work, it would be rational to assume that if society were run by good people, the political excess would not occur. Despite similarities, therefore, Yang’s work opens the door to the criticism that she supports the return of the old intellectual, detached from political life and standing apart from the turbu- lence of social life. In the next section, I investigate the characteristics of this kind of intellectual.

The Occupied Intellectual

Beginning with Cadre School, Yang Jiang presents an intellectual whose mental and physical environment has contracted. This condensed intellectual none- theless organizes her small world according to what small pleasures can be recognized and grasped. By the time they are sent down to the countryside, Yang and Qian have little ability to think about, analyze, or defy the forces pushing them around. Even so, in representing that vulnerability, the text pres- ents a model for resisting cooptation by an all-encompassing Maoist society and for living under duress. Unwilling to engage critically with revolutionary

46 Ye, “Yang Jiang sanwen,” 40. The Pleasures of Lying Low 155 ideology, let alone to protest the brutal degradation of simple ideals of straight- forwardness, honesty, and concern, Yang expands her shrunken world into a lyrical story that brings out a basic humanity. The sharp contrast between this depiction of the most ordinary aspects of life and the run-of-the-mill exposés of Cultural Revolution violence and victimization underpins the success of Yang’s memoir as a compelling narrative. In her later novel Taking a Bath, Yang, with the benefit of over thirty years of historical distance, places her model intellectuals into the hands of a state that identifies them as powerful adversaries. With this work, Yang backs up in time, as if to investigate what happened before she was beaten down and reduced to the constrained mental and physical environment that we see in Cadre School. Despite this laudable attempt, her choice of genre, the comedy of manners, and her thematic focus on the developing romantic relationship between Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng indicate that she has no intention of seriously investigat- ing any benefit that could arise from socialist transformation within the sphere of intellectual work. The most positive intellectuals of Taking a Bath already are crippled by passivity, distance, and the lack of courage to seek even their own happiness, let alone engage in any way with the ideals of revolutionary China. The intellectual Yang Jiang portrays is, then, in many ways similar to the accomodationists of Vichy France described by Philippe Burrin. Although not working under foreign occupation, Chinese intellectuals’ responses to revolu- tionary culture run the gamut: they resist and they collaborate, but mostly they accommodate. One of Burrin’s major contributions is to show that like others in society, intellectuals’ response to occupation is often based on their individual situation and more often than not, on their perception of how, under the new circumstances, they can best move ahead with their work, even if they must make ethical compromises to do so. A counterpoint to Yang’s positive portrayal of the accommodating intellectual can be found in’s Ba Jin 巴金 (1904–2005) Random Thoughts (Suixiang lu 隨想錄) (published in Hong Kong as a series from 1978 to 1986), which reflected on the Cultural Revolution with incisive introspection.47 The most sympathetic interpretation of Yang’s emphasis on the transcendent pleasures of intellectual work and the small pleasures of daily life is that they constitute a rebuke to an ideology that undermines the autonomy of the intellectual. This interpretation is possible for Cadre School, in which Yang strives to sustain her optimism and self-respect in the face of a revolutionary machine that demolishes anyone who does not keep her head down. However, in Taking a Bath, although Yang forces a clash between

47 For an English translation, see Ba Jin, Random Thoughts. 156 Larson revolutionary culture and her ideal intellectual, her insistence on using the comedy of manners betrays her unquestioned embrace of the detached and objective literary cosmopolitan ideal. Even though she situates her characters within the frothy 1950s, when revolutionary culture is under construction and debate, Yang does not take revolutionary culture seriously. Neither does she wish to directly argue her opposition, preferring instead to let a genre that is narrowly circumscribed in its approach to representation do the heavy lifting. Her use of the comedy of manners proclaims Yang’s refusal to participate in the critique of the bourgeois intellectual that revolutionary culture carried out, whether from a critical or affirming perspective. In this novel we can see that even well after the Cultural Revolution, Yang defends those who lay low, turn- ing their passive accommodation into eternal qualities of detachment, disen- gagement, and the seeking of small pleasures. According to the author’s preface, dated 2010, Yang wrote After the Bath to counter lurid interpretations of the relationship between Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng. Yang had been disturbed by rumors of fans writing sequels and insisted on having the final say. Her postscript to the novella concludes with the line: “As for anyone who still might want to write a sequel, the door is shut!” The sequel itself makes it clear that although Xu and Yao are attracted to each other, their integrity will not allow them to act on that desire so long as Xu remains married. Though deeply unhappy, Xu will not “abandon” his wife. The dilemma is solved by having Du Lilin fall in love with a fellow political pris- oner at a labor camp during the Anti-Rightist Campaign; when the pair returns to Beijing, she asks for a divorce. Xu Yancheng is thus freed to marry Yao Mi, and they live together happily in the courtyard house, recently regained, that once belonged to the Yao family. Yao Mi is also off the hook from the general understanding of her mother and others that she’ll marry Luo Hou. Yao Mi’s roommate, Xiao Li, turns out to be Luo’s perfect match. After the Bath intensifies the sense that Yang’s stories valorize filial piety and moral purity. Yet again, Yang reasserts the superiority of the old-style intellec- tual, so satirized in May Fourth literature, who focuses on self-cultivation. If relationships are correct and minds are pure, Yang implies, society would be a much better place. CHAPTER 7 The Institutional Mindset: Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang on Marriage and the Academy

Christopher Rea

A lecturer is like a maid, a professor is like a wife, and as for an associate professor, he’s no more than a concubine. . . . For a maid to become a con- cubine is quite common . . . but for a concubine to gain legitimate status as a wife goes against all moral principles and obligations. It just can’t be done. —Qian Zhongshu, Fortress Besieged1

If, for most of us, marriage is supposed to be a “fortress besieged”—a battle of conflicting impulses to conquer and to flee—the same is rarely said of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, whose marriage lasted sixty-three years, from 1935 until Qian’s death in 1998. Since then, Yang has actively managed Qian’s literary estate and continued to write about their life together, and, to a lesser extent, with their daughter Qian Yuan, who died in 1997. Qian Zhongshu mostly let his writings speak for themselves; Yang Jiang, in contrast, has made extensive efforts to place her and her husband’s within a context different from solo creative and academic labor: quotidian family life. Yang’s story of her marriage with Qian is of a harmonious, affectionate, and even romantic intellectual partnership. Her biographical and autobiographical writings could be said to have retroactively domesticated the famous couple, making their private life public, and in doing so dramatically re-shaping public appreciation of them and their works.2

1 Qian, Fortress Besieged, 267. Page numbers for subsequent quotations appear in-text. A similar comment appears earlier in the narrative. When Fang Hongjian and his compan- ions reach Sanlü University, they discover that chairmanship of the Department of Chinese Literature, which had been promised to Li Meiting, has been snatched away by an earlier arrival. The narrator comments: “Being a department chairman is just like getting married: ‘The one installed three days earlier becomes the wife.’ The [welcoming] party for Li turned out to be more like the new concubine’s First Meeting ceremony than a reception” (196). 2 For a genealogy of women’s autobiographical writing and the problematic of gendered sub- jectivity in twentieth-century China’s literary field see especially Wendy Larson’s Women and Writing in Modern China, Jing Wang’s When “I” Was Born, Lingzhen Wang’s Personal Matters,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_009 158 Rea

Marriage and the academy loom large in Qian’s and Yang’s writings as inter- twined institutions. The academy, in a general sense, refers to the workspace of the intellectual, the place of scholarship, research, and teaching. In physi- cal terms, it comprises such socially-acknowledged sources and seats of learn- ing as schools, universities, research institutes, libraries, and archives. But the academy is also an institution in that, like marriage, it operates according to conventions, habits, and expected patterns of behavior. As an institution, each represents both a set of material realities and a theoretical or imaginary construct. In this chapter I analyze Yang and Qian as a pair, rather than as individual creative forces or auteurs. Biographers have, inevitably, written of the pair as being “inseparable.”3 Critics have also noted similarities between their works, not least the humorous and satirical skepticism with which they appraise their fellow human beings—intellectuals in particular. Below, I examine how the style and themes of their writings bears upon their claims—both implicit and implicit—of literary values. I identify and analyze a quality endemic to their works that I call an “institutional mindset.” Qian and Yang were both inter- ested in, even obsessed with, how being a member of a marriage or an aca- demic organization impacts the individual. They also wrote much about the idea of marriage and the academy as objects of desire, fear, admiration, and loathing; and as institutions of refuge and entrapment. They share a fascina- tion with the problems of these institutions as constructs of human society. This, I argue, represents one way that these two writers avoided falling prey to the “obsession with China” that ensnared so many of their peers.4 The domes- ticated intellectual, who struggles with and sometimes succumbs to the twin pressures of these institutions, I further argue, is emblematic of their vision of cosmopolitanism and its limits. Marriage and the academy are both institutions in that they are governed by societal expectations, or norms. Biographically and literarily, they are perhaps

and the works of Tani Barlow and Amy D. Dooling. For earlier antecedents, see especially the studies of Ellen Widmer and Grace S. Fong, which are not cited here individually. 3 This claim appears, for example, in the last line of Wu Xuezhao’s biography of Yang: Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi. Several joint biographies of the couple also exist. 4 The latter phrase refers to C.T. Hsia’s famous diagnosis of a common obsession with the fate of the nation shared by many modern Chinese writers of the first half of the twentieth cen- tury. While Hsia makes only passing mention of Yang Jiang in his book, Qian Zhongshu, along with Eileen Chang, is one of his most notable examples of a writer who bucked this trend. The Institutional Mindset 159 the two essential institutions linking these two writers. For much of their mar- ried life Qian and Yang were either students or academics, and they defined themselves and their work both by and against the standards of both institu- tions. Chinese academia in the twentieth century has been partial to “-isms” and theories. Qian flouted this convention in his scholarly essays, in which he favored linking together discrete observations in a jottings (suibi 隨筆) style over building toward architectonic comprehensive conclusions (tonglun 通論). Yang’s memoirs present their marriage as a relationship that endured and strengthened despite the political pressures on the academy. In their vari- ous encounters in the academy, from study abroad though over four decades in a research institute, they “did not fit in with the group” (bu hequn 不合群).5 Despite such protestations, they have become icons of conventional scholarly and matrimonial ideals. Marital conventions in China changed dramatically in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the late Qing, social progressives called for the out- lawing of polygamy, as well as other institutions seen as harmful to women, such as footbinding. “Free marriage” and equality of the sexes, Western-inspired notions introduced during the late Qing period, remained foci of intense pub- lic discourse into the Republic, inspiring the full range of reactions from con- demnation to reflection to endorsement. Leading writers of the May Fourth generation, such as Hu Shi and Lu Xun, wrote from personal experience about the miseries of arranged marriage. (Lu Xun later took a common law wife.) Mutual affection, or lack thereof, became more of a deciding factor in marital decisions than ever before. Between the 1920s and 1940s, ethical dramas focus- ing on the family, and particularly marital strife, inspired writers of all political stripes, including, to name a few, Lao She, Zhang Tianyi, Yu Dafu, Eileen Chang, Su Qing, as well as Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. Yet not until 1950, when the new Communist government enacted the New Marriage Law, did the law catch up with the rhetoric. Divorce, though still socially stigmatized, become easier to obtain—on paper at least—giving a new option to aggrieved or dissatisfied spouses.6 The twentieth-century Chinese academy also underwent major changes, from the introduction of Western-style schools in the late Qing; to the wide- spread establishment of public schools and national universities during the

5 Yang, Women sa, 92. 6 For an overview history of the institution of marriage in modern China and its representa- tion in popular narratives, see: Xiao, Family Revolution, esp. 3–26. 160 Rea

Republic;7 to the expansion of public libraries and research institutions under the People’s Republic. As with marriage and courtship norms, changes in the structure of the academy were neither consistent, continuous, nor uniformly progressive. Under the Beiyang government, professors were paid irregularly. During the Anti-Japanese War, entire universities relocated inland and oper- ated in straightened circumstances. As Yang’s Taking a Bath and Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liu ji 干校六記, 1981) testify, academics dur- ing the Mao era suffered from political campaigns that invaded institutions and disrupted work. Intellectuals with political ideas deemed dangerous or controversial became lightning rods for state-sponsored attacks. For decades, professorial appointments were governed by ideology as much as scholarship. Sinologist Perry Link remembers meeting Qian Zhongshu in 1979 as a member of an academic delegation, and Qian asking him, in the presence of two fellow delegates-cum-minders, “So, have you met any real scholars yet?”8 Marriage and the academy frequently intersect in the couple’s fiction and stage plays, which are concerned with the manners and ethics of China’s edu- cated classes. The relationship between the two realms, moreover, is often causal. In Qian’s novel Fortress Besieged (Weicheng 圍城, serialized 1946–1947), Fang Hongjian “escapes” from three almost-marriages (to a dead fiancée, a pursuer, and a pursuee) into a teaching position at Sanlü University, a dys- functional academy that he later leaves upon embarking on a dysfunctional marriage with a colleague.9 Yang’s Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡, 1987; translated as Baptism) concerns the behavior of intellectuals during the first “thought reform” campaigns of New China, known as the Three-Antis (1951) and Five- Antis (1952). The novel opens several years before the purge with Yu Nan bluffing his way into a job at a research institute after he is jilted by the girl- friend with whom he had planned to flee the country (and his marriage) on the eve of the 1949 communist takeover. The person who suggests that he bluff his way into the new academy, notably, is Yu Nan’s long-suffering wife. In Fortress Besieged, too, spouses assist in credential fraud.

7 On the Chinese education system during the Republican period, see Culp, Articulating Citizenship (2007) and Lanza, Behind the Gate (2010). 8  Perry Link, personal communication, November 19, 2010. 9 Fang Hongjian’s earlier involvements include the deceased Miss Zhou Shuying, his erstwhile fiancée; Miss Su Wenwan, his pursuer; and Miss Tang Xiaofu, the object of his affection. Miss Bao, his earlier lover, has her own fiancé and is never a marital prospect. Hongjian’s depar- ture from Sanlü is also sped by the loss of his patron and friend, Zhao Xinmei, who has been caught in a compromising position with a colleague’s wife. The Institutional Mindset 161

In their fictional works, characters’ identities as professor, scholar, and stu- dent, spouse and lover, are continually in flux, drawing the stability of those very categories into question. Yang’s life writings, in contrast, have continually reaffirmed the constancy of her and Qian’s intellectual and marital partner- ship. In them, more is at stake than just documenting facts about what Yang called an “ordinary” family.10 Like their fiction, these works use marriage and the academy as testing grounds for humanistic ideals of authenticity, indepen- dence, and commitment. Coming from a couple that has come to epitomize scholarly achievement and marital fidelity, these value judgments project a compelling vision of what it means to be a modern Chinese intellectual.

Authenticity

In Qian’s and Yang’s creative works, the academy is a repository of failures and pretenders, and marriages founder due to spousal insincerity. Those who do inadequate due diligence on potential spouses or colleagues are duly pun- ished. In Yang’s play Forging the Truth (Nongzhen chengjia 弄真成假, 1944), Zhou Dazhang pursues the spoiled daughter of a rich Shanghai business- man by passing himself off as a rich and well-connected young man who has “returned from overseas.” Back at the shabby apartment he shares with his mother, however, he reveals to an uncle that after a year and a half of scraping by in Europe on a loan “forget about an M.A. or a Ph.D., I didn’t even manage to get a high school diploma out of it.”11 Taken in by his returned-student aura, the businessman’s niece, Zhang Yanhua, connives to marry herself to a fraud. Conversely, a dubious marriage may indicate bogus academic credentials. In Fortress Besieged, one of Fang Hongjian’s competitors for an English teach- ing job at Sanlü is the White Russian wife of the History Department chair, Han Xueyu, whom the couple has been trying to pass off as American. Her suitability to teach English are as doubtful as the academic qualifications of her husband, who is a “graduate” of the same paper mill from which Hongjian purchased his bogus Ph.D. degree. When Hongjian is dismissed from Sanlü on a pretext, Han and his wife host an American Independence Day party to cel- ebrate the departure of the man who could expose them both. After all, “if the wife’s nationality were real, could the husband’s academic credentials then be fake” (277)?

10 Yang, Women sa, in JYWJ, vol. 3, 175. 11 Yang, Forging the Truth, 145. 162 Rea

Even more notable is the case of Zhu Qianli, an elderly scholar at the Literary Research Institute who is a frequent butt of narratorial jokes in Taking a Bath. Zhu, who lived for many years in France, is cast as a stereotypical roué: “Chewing on his pipe, with a roguish expression on his face, he often aired a few French phrases while taking liberties.”12 Said to have previously been mar- ried to a French woman, Zhu is now married to a young woman who suspects him of maintaining yet another wife in the countryside. During his public self- criticism he confesses of his “French wife” that: “We were never legally mar- ried! It was just a short-term affair. But actually it wasn’t me, it was someone else. I was just jealous” (243). Nor, it turns out, does he have a French doctorate, as he had led his colleagues to believe: “All I said was that I regretted not having a French doctorat d’état. I also said I despised the university doctorate. Maybe people heard me say that and jumped to the conclusion that I had a university doctorate and was disappointed with it” (244). He nevertheless claims to have earned a Ph.D. by having ghost-written dissertations for other foreign students. Zhu, in short, is a triple fraud as a husband (indeed, one with the virile aura of a polygamist), an academic, and an abettor of other academic pretenders. The few characters who succeed in the treacherous world of academia are those who remain true to themselves. The young librarian Yao Mi, is a for- midable autodidact. Prevented by family circumstances from studying for a degree, she overawes the credentialed faculty member Xu Yancheng with her self-learning. Like Yang Jiang herself, Yao Mi is “by nature a modest and retir- ing person,”13 yet one who is self-confident and comfortable in her own skin. She conceals her beauty in modest dress and is content in obscurity among books. Though her talents are eventually recognized and she is appointed a researcher, she prefers her own private home library, far from the politics of the Institute. Yao is also a woman of genuine feeling who offers to become Xu Yancheng’s lover, defying societal norms, to prove her love.14 Yang and Qian measure authenticity through not only emplotment but also a bookish style involving what might be called textual authentication. This

12 Yang, Baptism, 54. Page numbers for subsequent direct quotations appear in-text. 13 Howard Goldblatt makes this appraisal of Yang in “About the Author,” in Yang, Six Chapters, ix. In the epilogue of Taking a Bath, Yao Mi considers working in translation, the same unobtrusive field of individual labor to which Yang Jiang devoted much of the Mao years. 14 Xu Yancheng receives the news that she is willing to be his lover as being “more sincere than if she had pulled it out of her own heart” (177). When a colleague later discovers their love letters, Yao Mi responds by asserting her principles: “a woman ought to have as much backbone as a man and take the consequences of her actions” (200). The Institutional Mindset 163 can be seen in the dialectic of speech versus the written word. Taking a Bath, for example, expresses skepticism about the reliability of the spoken word. Before the first meeting of the newly established Literary Research Institute, the narrator comments that whereas in the past one’s moral character was judged by one’s calligraphy, “In New China, the equivalent is public speaking. When you give a speech, those who listen decide what you are worth” (27).15 Xu Yancheng, a sympathetic if naïve character, echoes this sentiment at the end of the novel, when he complains to his wife Du Lilin, “I just don’t approve of empty words. . . . Everyone is judged on speechmaking and appearances” (270). The courtship between Yancheng and Yao Mi intensifies when it becomes a written exchange. Unable to speak in person, they reveal their true thoughts and feelings through notes left in books in Mi’s secret home study. Even if lov- ers’ confessions cannot be taken at face value, in this story they represent a text-based form of emotional authenticity amidst a world of self-serving verbal performance. Texts are also Qian’s touchstones in conveying truths, truisms, and stereo- types about marital and scholarly norms. Chapter two of Fortress Besieged, for example, offers a satirical take on a merchant family’s vulgar and pragmatic approach to courtship and marriage. Fang Hongjian, the prospective son-in- law of the bourgeois comprador Jimmy Zhang, is amused to find the title How to Gain a Husband and Keep Him on the family bookshelf, and laughs to him- self that “Husbands are women’s careers.” His mahjong winnings that evening enable him to buy a fur coat he had had his eyes on, and a literary quip crosses Hongjian’s mind at his moment of triumph: “A wife is like a suit of clothes” (45–47)—an object of comfort that can be changed at will. Such literary musings are characteristic of Menippean satire, a mode in which an author ridicules characters using his or her superior schol- arly knowledge. Hongjian’s reinterpretation of the line from Romance of the Three Kingdoms mocks the Zhangs with their self-help book sensibilities. The incident also typifies a double standard in the novel’s narration. Hongjian’s

15 In one scene in Forging the Truth, Feng Guangzu, a university student pursuing Zhang Yanhua, outlines his intentions in bullet-point format, leading Yanhua to complain that she is listening to “Professor Feng’s Marriage Proposal Method!” Feng protests that he is at least being sincere in not wooing by the book “with all that nauseating talk” (154). After their shotgun wedding, the smooth-talking and insincere Dazhang advises Yanhua, disin- genuously, that, “Nothing that comes out of the mouth is dependable, so from now on we must watch out, since the world belongs to us!” (177) Fang Hongjian reflects that a Ph.D. diploma is an intellectual “fig leaf,” but it is at least a falsifiable piece of evidence. 164 Rea triumphs exalting in his superior intellect tend to be illusory or otherwise short-lived. Unwilling to be Miss Zhang’s “rice bowl,” Hongjian ends up with a wife whose career is more stable and lucrative than his, which becomes a cause of marital tension. But Qian’s omniscient third-person narrator, who makes similar judgments as Hongjian from outside the frame of the story, is immune to retaliation. Qian’s narrator also uses the Menippean mode to evaluate, for example, the self-styled intellectual “in terms of [his] occupational approach to life as distinct from [his] social behavior.”16 We learn of the pseudo- philosopher Zhu Shengming, whom Fang Hongjiang meets at a dinner party that:

Though he loathed women and could smell them three doors away, he desired them, which was why his nose was so sharp. His mind was filled with them. If he came upon the expression a posteriori in mathematical logic, he would think of ‘posterior,’ and when he came across the mark ‘X’ he would think of a kiss. Luckily he had never made a careful study of Plato’s dialogues with Timaeus; otherwise he would be dazed by every ‘X’ mark. (84)

Qian’s narrator reveals Zhu’s quest for scholarly knowledge actually to be a quest for carnal knowledge and further degrades Zhu’s scholarship by pointing out his ignorance of a philosophical classic. Several years before Qian wrote Fortress Besieged, Yang Jiang caricatured the occupational approach to courtship of another Shanghai businessman, also surnamed Zhang, in Forging the Truth. The chauvinistic patriarch Zhang Xiangfu is a wealthy capitalist who treats his daughter’s marriage as a busi- ness transaction. He expresses his fear of “losing his capital” to an unworthy suitor (whom he calls “a bad piece of goods”), while promoting his own choice for a son-in-law as “a good product at the right price.”17 Both fictional Zhang families—Yang’s and Qian’s—share a vocational approach to marriage that is anathema to the notion of marriage as being founded on genuine emotional attachment. The Zhangs, like Zhu Shengming, are authentic only in the sense of being true to their own vulgar sensibilities.

16 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1973 ed.), 309. For more on Qian and Menippean satire, see my introduction in Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, esp. 8–12. 17 A similar type of linguistic conceit based on occupational mindset appears in Yang’s first published story, “Don’t Worry, Lulu!,” in which students tease classmates suffering from the “sour” feeling of romantic jealousy by asking “Going to study up on C6H12O2 [acid]?” See: YJWJ, vol. 1, 9. The Institutional Mindset 165

Independence

A key challenge for modern Chinese academics has been to maintain one’s intellectual independence under the pressure of contemporary political imperatives. Independence manifestos are scattered throughout Qian and Yang’s literary works. The preface to Qian’s 1941 essay collection, Written in the Margins of Life (Xie zai rensheng bianshang 寫在人生邊上), quoted in the introduction to this book, extols the virtues of the “margins” as a space for hon- est, personal expression. In the essay “A Prejudice” (“Yige pianjian” 一個偏見, 1941 [first published in 1939]), Qian cites Schopenhauer’s notion that a thinker should be deaf, since the din of the outside world causes “prejudice [to] take the place of impartiality.”18 After the Mao period, Yang Jiang wrote of wishing she had a “cloak of invisibility” that would allow her to roam unfettered, to observe and explore without societal interference.19 This desire for invisibil- ity was motivated, in part, by a real institutional context in which individuals were subject to surveillance, invasion of privacy, and the arbitrary demands of authorities. To be noticed brings at best inconvenience and at worst disaster. Yang alludes to fear of institutions even in works set after the Mao era. In her novella-cum-memoir We Three (Women sa 我們仨, 2003), Yang relates a dream in which the family is sharing a laugh at home after dinner when the phone rings. Yang picks it up to hear an anonymous voice brusquely summon her ailing, eighty-four-year old husband to a meeting. (Qian was born in 1910, so the year would be 1994.) The next morning a black car arrives and whisks Qian off to an undisclosed location. Yang feels panic: she does not know who has abducted her husband or how long he’ll be gone. The passage intimates authoritarian state violence: in this system, nameless functionaries show up and take loved ones away. Yang’s dream-narrative is one of constant separation anxiety, which may be read as an allegory for the ultimate separation, death. But it begins with the type of mundane incident that Qian, who served as a deputy head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the 1980s, might encounter as a prominent member of socialist China’s academic bureaucracy. It conveys unease at the power of the institution over the family man and the thinker. As Jesse Field notes in chapter eight, the passage recalls the Platonic dialogue Phaedo, which Yang translated in 1999. Qian’s departure is a result of a summons by “the same sort of implacable power that ended Socrates’ life.” Yang and Qian also wrote about the question of how to achieve and main- tain intellectual independence within a marriage or a romantic relationship.

18 Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 65. 19 See: Yang, “Yinshenyi,” YJWJ, vol. 2, 192–96. 166 Rea

As spouses, Qian and Yang have a reputation for having respected each other’s intellectual autonomy. The relationship between Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng in Taking a Bath represents a fictionalized version of this ideal, if one that devi- ates in some particulars. Xu Yancheng has a foreign degree but is humble about it; Yao Mi is self-taught and self-effacing. They bond over shared interests in books and ideas. Yancheng is an aloof and inattentive husband to Du Linlin, but she is overbearing. She tries “to take absolute possession of him and not allow him even a single secret, a single shred of independence” (153).20 Yao Mi, in contrast, maintains a collegial distance from Xu even as their relationship intensifies into a chaste but passionate romance. Du is the wife in name, but Yao, by virtue of her reserve, has a better moral claim to Xu’s affections. Qian’s 1946 story “Cat” (“Mao” 貓) also conducts a psychological exploration of a marriage rent by a struggle for possession and autonomy. Aimo, a young and modish wife, hosts a salon of Beiping intellectuals. Having been educated at a “fashionable girl’s school run by Americans” she “not only was unsubmis- sive to her husband but even felt that he by himself did not suffice to wait on her.”21 Her affable and obedient husband, Jianhou, comes to chafe at his domestic subservience attempts to make a name for himself by writing a book. Jianhou has traveled—if not actually studied—abroad and decides to write a travelogue as proof of his worldliness. Intellectual labor (mostly done by his assistant), he believes, is his ticket to gaining equal footing in his marriage and the respect of the intellectuals in their social circle. Soon, however, spousal competition over Jianhou’s assistant leads to a chain of spiteful actions that endanger the marriage. Marriage also appears as a metaphor for the social intimacy of academic institutions. Members of the Literary Research Institute’s Foreign Languages Department in Taking a Bath joke that their organization is a “conjugal group” (188), but the atmosphere turns out to be one of claustrophobia and social surveillance. In Fortress Besieged, soon after their arrival at Sanlü, Sun Roujia remarks that “This school is like a big family. Unless you live off campus you can’t keep anything secret. And there’s so much bickering going on” (204). Indeed, far from being a refuge from marriage, the academy is a hive of gossips, sexual predators, and romantic entanglements. The administration

20 Qian Zhongshu alludes to the opposite extreme of this behavior in his description of Fu Juqing, a character in his story “Cat”: “In Britain, he had learned how to keep a straight face and look indifferent. Therefore, at public gatherings, if a man were beside him, strangers would assume that he was his brother and if it were a woman, that she must be his wife; otherwise he wouldn’t be so indifferent.” Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 126. 21 Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 111. The Institutional Mindset 167 and professoriate of Sanlü University, for instance, despite their exaggerated shows of propriety are inordinaely interested in relations between the sexes. The lecherous Dean of Students, Li Meiting decrees that unmarried male pro- fessors may not tutor female students, and even recommends that male and female faculty members avoid socializing. Eventually, this pressure closes in on Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia, and they get engaged to be married as if this will protect them against the onslaught of gossip. An even more gothic sense of claustrophobia permeates Yang’s short story “What a Joke” (“Da xiaohua” 大笑話, ca. 1977).22 It is the Republican era, and residents of the Pingdan Institute campus on the outskirts of Beijing are antic- ipating the arrival of the wife of a recently-deceased colleague. For the bet- ter part of a decade Wang Shijun spoke of the beautiful wife he had left in Shanghai, but Chen Qian never visited. Now all that is left for her up north is the task of disposing of her late husband’s possessions. It turns out, how- ever, that Chen’s summons to Beijing originated with Zhou Yiqun, the wife of a faculty member, who wants to use Chen to separate Zhou’s former paramour from his new lover in the Institute. But during her few days on campus Chen Qian becomes close to Zhou’s husband, Lin Ziyu, derailing Zhou’s plan and incurring the jealousy of one of the Institute’s lesser beauties, who contrives to make it appear that Chen and Lin are having an affair. Chen takes the next train home, leaving the Institute wives to laugh about “what a joke” it is that Zhou tried to drive away a lover and ended up losing her husband.23 Divided into acts spread over a few days, the story compresses the time and space of the action to dramatic effect. The social atmosphere of the academy, even more so than in Taking a Bath, is thick with meddling and intrigue. “What a Joke” presents a case study of human behavior within a campus (located on the site of an old graveyard) whose inhabitants “like maggots boring into cheese, tend to bore in for life and forget the outside world.”24 Yang Jiang does

22 Dating from Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 321–32. My translation of this story appears in Renditions 76; for the original, see: YJWJ, vol. 1, 106. 23 Typical of Yang Jiang’s creative works, women are the chief instigators and the chief los- ers in these machinations: Zhou is humiliated, and Chen is forced to part from the one person who has shown her genuine solicitude. Like a Lu Xun story, “What a Joke” con- cludes with an ironic shift in focus to the ensemble, reinforcing the power of the crowd over private individuals. Gossip is inescapable, as we are told at the outset, and the “joke” outlasts even the life of the Institute itself. A literal translation of the story title would be “A Big Joke,” but the current rendering both conveys the tone of contempt with which the phrase is used in the story, and rings better as a sonic motif at story’s end: “The wheels of the entire train sang out in rhythmic unison: ‘What a joke! What a joke! What a joke!’” 24 YJWJ, vol. 1, 58. 168 Rea not indicate whether their mutual antagonism is produced or merely magni- fied by confinement, but she leaves no doubt that this institutional mindset is the norm. The academy thus functions as a motif of human entrapment similar to the marital simile that looms over Qian’s novel: “Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those on the outside want to get in, and those on the inside want to get out.” At its best, it insulates individuals and couples from the social and political pressures of modern life, allowing the quiet contemplation necessary to intel- lectual labor. At its worst, it is a claustrophobic dystopia that only exacerbates human inclinations to conflict and petty self-interest. If Yang Jiang never felt confined in her marriage, as a widow she has become its sole living insider voice and has used this voice to exercise what might be called the independence of the bereft. Her writings since 1998 affirm her intel- lectual and emotional kinship with Qian Zhongshu, while also asserting her autonomy from his outsized reputation. Wu Xuezhao reminds us in her biog- raphy that Yang’s fame, from her success as a playwright in 1940s Shanghai, preceded Qian’s.25 And whereas Qian was incapacitated by illness before his death and left no last words, Yang’s longevity has enabled her to complete a pair of philosophical works concerning death and the afterlife: her translation of Phaedo, and Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions (Zou dao rensheng bian shang: ziwen zida 走到人生邊上：自問自答, 2007). The main text of Arriving at the Margins of Life uses a dialogic form, trac- ing Yang’s personal train of thoughts about life and death toward a conclu- sion about “The Value of Human Life” (“Rensheng de jiazhi” 人生的價值). The appendix (which comprises half the book) contains a collection of “Notes” (“Zhushi” 注釋), including personal anecdotes, reading notes, and transcribed oral stories. The main text’s style of cumulative argumentation differs starkly from Qian Zhongshu’s fondness for piecemeal and fragmentary criticism. The “Notes” exhibit more comfort with loose ends and discrete observations. In this, as in its title, the book harkens back to Yang’s first book-length collabora- tion with Qian Zhongshu: Written in the Margins of Life (Xie zai rensheng bian- shang 寫在人生邊上, 1941), a collection of essays that Yang during the war compiled and for her husband and gave a title. Arriving at the Margins of Life in its very title offers a tidy symmetry, link- ing the end of Yang’s writing career to the beginning of her husband’s. Yang’s advanced authorial age (over ninety-four), her accumulated life experience and writings, now endow her with the philosophical stature of a sage. The

25 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 349. The Institutional Mindset 169 questions and answers are her own. Whether or not readers agree with her philosophy, this twilight work affirms Yang’s autonomy as a writer and thinker.

Devotion

Devotion is the inverse of institutional entrapment in Qian’s and Yang’s fiction, in which character is often tested in terms of commitment. Fang Hongjian’s peripatetic lifestyle, for example, is symptomatic of his lack of devotion to any vocation or individual, including himself. Qian’s and Yang’s stories pres- ent love and learning, in large part, as a function of intellectual devotion to scholarship or emotional devotion to a spouse or romantic interest. Again and again, characters’ commitment is measured and found wanting. Yang’s short story “Indian Summer” (“Xiao yangchun” 小陽春, 1947) con- cerns a marriage which could be said to be suffering from one partner’s exces- sive devotion.26 Professor Yu Bin has been feeling old and faults his wife, Huifang, for putting too much into her role as wife, at the expense of romance. He becomes infatuated with a flirtatious female student, Miss Hu, and experi- ences an “Indian summer” of rejuvenation when an accidental kiss leads to an exchange of love letters and visits. His reverie ends when he encounters another caller at Miss Hu’s apartment, and in a flash of inspiration he gives the candy and flowers he had planned to give to her to his wife instead. The focus of the narrative, however, is not the love affair but the existential crisis it precipitates for Huifang about her role as a wife. Early on, Huifang is mocked as a symbol of women’s pettiness and capacity for self-deception. In jealousy, she dolls herself up and flaunts her and Yu’s marital bliss to spite her perceived competitor.27 Yet she becomes a pathetic figure when she discov- ers love letters in her husband’s pocket. In revenge, she washes the garment with the letters inside, pulping them into mush. Huifang breaks from her daily routine to seek temporary distraction, but at the end of the day she has no recourse but to walk home alone in the rain. The marriage is “saved” when Miss Hu becomes engaged to her classmate, and Professor Yu laughs at his wife’s

26 Judith Amory and Yaohua Shi’s translation of this story appears online at the MCLC Resource Center: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/indian-summer/.  27 Yang’s narrator cites Huifang as a typical example of female stupidity for accepting her husband’s re-gifting of the chocolates and flowers. Having “eaten lover’s candy,” she then inadvertently thwarts his rendezvous with his erstwhile lover by bounding out of bed and accompanying him on a walk in the park. The student, Miss Hu 胡 is also slightly carica- tured, her name being a homophone for “fox” (hu 狐), meaning “seductress.” 170 Rea misplaced fear, claiming to have warded off Miss Hu’s puppy love by arrang- ing the match himself. Huifang is not fooled, however, into thinking that her husband’s suggestion of an impromptu excursion to Hangzhou will happen— the Indian summer has passed and the chill of old age has set in. The ironic reconciliation comes about not because of their devotion to each other, but simply for lack of an alternative to their indifferent marriage. In Yang’s “Jade Lady” (“Yuren” 玉人, ca. 1970s), a middle-school teacher in wartime Shanghai plans to uproot his family to take up a teaching position at a university in the interior, but his plans are thwarted by a broken leg. His wife, meanwhile, grows distant after discovering an old poem of his addressed to a “jade lady’s,” which makes her suspect that she was his second choice. While he is recuperating in hospital, she feuds with the landlady over responsibility for and rights to the outhouse near their new apartment—Who gets to use it, and who has to pay for the waste to be removed? Enlisting her husband to expose the landlady’s duplicity in an outhouse stakeout, both are shocked to discover that the landlady happens to be the poem’s inspiration. In this story, however, the wife finds satisfaction, coming to believe that she had in fact stolen the “jade-like beauty’s” husband away, reducing her to a miserable and petty life, while the husband curbs his professional ambitions—to upgrade from high school teacher to university lecturer—for the sake of marital harmony. In Qian’s story “God’s Dream” (“Shangdi de meng” 上帝的夢, 1946), the Creator himself finds himself in an existential predicament. The story pres- ents a divine twist on fraught domesticity, in which God becomes the “obtuse angle” in a love triangle with Woman and Man. The story of the Creator (who is repeatedly likened to a writer)28 is not of an author’s devotion to his work, but rather of an artist who demands that his works be devoted to him. In this cos- mic joke about the “utility” of art,29 the Creator loses control over his creation. Like Du Linlin in Taking a Bath, God demands absolute possession of them and behaves like a petulant lover when he is jilted. Having created Man and Woman to flatter his own vanity, he is chagrined to find them shutting him out, and in a spiteful attempt to make them suffer and run back to beg forgiveness, he inadvertently kills them. Even in the mundane realm, characters are punished for not performing their social roles to peers’ satisfaction. Fang Hongjian’s downfall is sped by his glib commentaries on social institutions and his sarcastic deviations from

28 For a detailed analysis of how God is likened to a writer, see: Chang, “Reading Qian Zhongshu’s ‘God’s Dream’ as a Postmodern Text.” 29 For more on Qian’s antagonism to this notion, see his essay “Eating” (“Chifan” 吃飯), in Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 50. The Institutional Mindset 171 social convention. In the company of self-styled poets he mocks a plagiarized poem of Su Wenwan’s, rather than duly praising it, and having led her to the brink of a marriage proposal, he then responds to her moonlit advance with the most perfunctory of kisses.30 Later, at Sanlü University, his refusal to flat- ter his superiors like the thriving scoundrel Li Meiting hastens the end of his tenure. In both cases, Hongjian suffers for his inability or unwillingness to act the part of the adoring lover or the deferential junior professor. His complaints about this double standard—the imperative to be a sincere individual but also to fit oneself into a pre-determined role—only further estrange him from those around him.31 Such negative fictional examples of insufficient or excessive devotion contrast with the picture of devoted scholars and spouses we find in Yang’s life-writings.32 Howard Goldblatt calls the “devotion between husband and wife . . . perhaps the most touching theme of all” in Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School.33 Yang’s memoirs often note that for most of their lives they stayed together in one place. In the 1980s, she took it upon herself to defend Qian from the besiegement of fans. Shortly after the republication Fortress Besieged, Yang felt compelled to write an essay, “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged” (“Ji Qian Zhongshu yu Weicheng” 記錢鍾書與圍城, 1985), to rebut the notion that Fang Hongjian was an incarnation of Qian himself. Since Qian Zhongshu’s death, Yang Jiang’s writings have testified to her continued devotion to her spouse.

30 When Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia inadvertently become engaged under pressure from colleagues at Sanlü, Hongjian again fails to fulfill his role as an engaged man. “Miss Sun was silent for a long while, then said, ‘I hope you won’t ever regret it,’ and lifted her face as though expecting him to kiss her, but he forgot about kissing her and said only, ‘I hope you don’t regret it’” (276). 31 In a moment of cynical candor, Hongjian remarks to his wife Roujia that he feels he’s been duped by the whole institution of courtship and marriage: “The fact is, no matter whom you marry, after you’re married, you’ll find it’s not the same person but someone else. If people knew that before marriage they could skip all that stuff about courtship, romance, and so on” (344). 32 In a more ironic example from Taking a Bath, during his public self-criticism, Yu Nan blames his earlier philandering on his excessive devotion to his academic specialty of Western literature: “Almost all of the poems, plays and novels that he studied were about love, and inevitably love had a great influence on him” (262). The comment seems to allude to the aborted extramarital affair of the romantic poet Wu Mi, Qian Zhongshu’s mentor and teacher at Tsinghua, with which Qian had a field day in the 1930s. See my essay “The Critic Eye (批眼).” 33 Howard Goldblatt, “Translator’s Afterword,” in Yang, Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder,” 101. 172 Rea

Yang’s memoirs detail the personal and environmental circumstances surrounding their cultural production, including the conditions in which they completed monumental works such as Fortress Besieged, Don Quixote, and Limited Views. They also focus on Qian Zhongshu the man. While Yang’s accounts of her relationship with her daughter betray ambivalence and a degree of estrangement, her image of Qian Zhongshu’s is overwhelmingly positive. She documents meticulously his disdain for title, honor, status, and financial gain, portraying him as a considerate husband who always praises his wife’s cooking.34 Yang’s retrospective accounts allow readers an intimate view of a pair of writers who otherwise held themselves aloof. They also make a spousal claim of exclusive ownership over the story of their lives and marriage. “No matter how much literary talent someone else might have, your wife or husband is solely your topic,” Qian’s narrator remarks in Fortress Besieged, “It’s a topic with a registered patent on it.”35 Stark examples of Yang making this claim occur in the authorized biography of Yang Jiang written by Wu Xuezhao. Dedicated to the memory of Qian Zhongshu on the tenth anniversary of his death, the book is really a family biography. Though Wu is credited as the sole author, the book is more akin to a co-authored oral history.36 Wu’s third-person voice shields Yang from charges of immodesty. Yang nevertheless signals her central role in the project in a preface, in which she categorically discounts all other biographies, past and future, on the grounds that Wu’s is the only one written with her permission.37 The format and style of Yang’s non-fictional writings are also noteworthy. At the beginning of her essay on Qian and Fortress Besieged, she states that as Qian’s first reader she is the most qualified person (besides Qian himself) to

34 To cite just two examples of the former: Yang told Wu Xuezhao that after his 1979–1980 trip abroad, Qian declined honorary doctorates from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, as well as visiting fellowships at various U.S. institutions. Qian was also reportedly persuaded to accept appointment as deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences after the director agreed to make concessions to Qian’s dedication to scholarship and distaste for administrative work. See: Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 335, 336. Qian did, however, apply unsuccessfully for a lectureship at Oxford in 1937. See: Cairncross and Chen, “Qian Zhongshu and Oxford University,” n.p. 35 Qian, Fortress Besieged, 232–33. 36 Wu relies primarily on the “intentional sources” of Yang Jiang’s and Qian Zhongshu’s own words, but she synthesizes a variety of material, including published works, papers and photographs from Yang Jiang’s private collection, and in-person interviews. 37 Yang Jiang, “Xu” 序 (Preface). In Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 1–2. The Institutional Mindset 173

“annotate” (zhushu 注疏) his work.38 To annotate is to assert scholarly author- ity. Yang’s memoirs combine this academic mode with at least two others. Psychoanalysis, for example, figures in her 1980s essay on Qian and his novel, in which she explains his eccentric, even childish “foolishness” (chiqi 癡氣), as well as in her dream-work in We Three. We Three concludes with a family scrapbook of calligraphy, letters, drawings, photographs, and other mementos from Yang’s life with Qian Zhongshu and Qian Yuan. The display of calligraphy throughout the book is a type of literati-style authentication: Yang’s handwrit- ing is a mark of personal involvement that distinguishes her books from those written or edited by others. The display of deceased family members’ hand- writing testifies to her proprietary access to a personal archive. This work con- tinued with her editing of a follow-up book dedicated to Qian Yuan.39 Yang and Qian were well aware of the prejudicial nature of much bio- graphical and autobiographical writing. In the short story, “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu” (“Mogui yefang Qian Zhongshu xian­ sheng” 魔鬼夜訪錢鍾書先生, 1941), the Devil advises Qian that:

Writing biographies about others is also a type of self-expression, so there’s no reason not to insert your own views or write about others as a way of showing yourself off. Conversely, autobiographers invariably don’t have much of a “self” to write about. . . . So if you want to learn about a person, you should read biographies he has written of others, and if you

38 See: YJWJ, vol. 2, 135. Qian is said to have reciprocated as the first reader of Baptism. See: Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 349. Yang is also quoted as having opposed the transla- tion of her essay for inclusion in a Chinese-English bilingual edition of Fortress Besieged because it would confuse foreigners who are entirely ignorant of Chinese culture and customs. See: Ibid., 343. 39 Our Qian Yuan (Women de Qian Yuan 我們的錢瑗, 2005), a collective work with twenty- seven named authors comprised of individual recollections and more archival materials related to Qian Yuan, was published on the eighth anniversary of her death. Like We Three, it is an expression of devotion to the deceased, and the primary materials reproduced in both volumes are captioned and annotated in Yang Jiang’s own hand. Also a collective tribute to the living mother, the book is a measure of Yang’s influence as a cultural figure. Yang, et al. Women de Qian Yuan (Our Qian Yuan). An “Editor’s Afterword” (“Bianhou” 編後, dated August 15, 2005) notes that an educational scholarship has been established in Qian Yuan’s name, and that the current book came about thanks to a flood of new contributions after the magazine Hong Kong Literature (Xianggang wenxue 香港文學) published a “Qian Yuan” special issue. 174 Rea

want to learn about other people, you should read his autobiography. Autobiography is biography.40

Yang cites this story in the preface to her account of how Qian Zhongshu wrote Fortress Besieged, acknowledging the risk of self-parody and explicitly rec- ognizing that her account could be taken to be like an “elegy for a deceased husband.”41 In any case, Yang’s writings since 1998 leave little doubt as to the extent of her spousal devotion.

The Domesticated Intellectual

Mrs. Premise: (on the phone, to Mrs. Jean-Paul Sartre) “Well, when will he be free? Oh, pardon! Quand sera-t-il libre? [pause] Oooooh! Ha ha ha ha! (to friend, Mrs. Conclusion) She says he’s spent the last sixty years trying to work that one out! Ooooh! Ha ha ha ha!” —Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 2742

Chatting in a Laundromat, British housewives Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion decide to pay a visit to Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris to settle their debate about whether or not his masterwork Roads to Freedom is “an allegory of man’s search for commitment.” In Paris, Mrs. Sartre complains to them about her husband being “in one of his bleeding moods” and threatens to “revolutionary leaflet him” if he doesn’t start cleaning up after himself. In Fortress Besieged, the narra- tor observes that “great philosophers have never had good wives. Socrates’ wife was a shrew . . . Aristotle’s mistress rode on him like a horse . . . Marcus Aurelius’ wife was an adulteress, and even . . . Bertrand Russell had been divorced several times” (91–92). The Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming, we’re told later, was also henpecked. The big joke on philosophers is that they tend to be thoroughly domesticated, their existential musings deflated by the mundane negotiations of married life. The flip side of the Python joke, of course, is the presumption that marriage is not a place for intellectualism, but for doing the laundry. This “institutional mindset,” I’ve argued, is more than a thematic interest for Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, since in so much of their writings character is defined in relation to marriage and/or the academy. A successful marriage is an emblem of virtue rooted in mutual devotion; a dysfunctional or sham marriage

40 Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 34. 41 Yang’s words are wangfu xingshu 亡夫行述. See: YJWJ, vol. 2, 134. 42 French is as it appears in the original dialogue of the skit. The Institutional Mindset 175 is a symptom of flaws of character or just of human nature. The academy is the hallowed realm within which Qian and Yang built much of their intellectual prestige, drawing on its resources and cultural capital, while distancing them- selves from its corrupted elements. The Year of Divorce, as the Chinese press dubbed 2004, saw a twenty-one percent year-on-year increase in failed marriages in China. A “new divorce cul- ture” has emerged since the market liberalizations of the 1990s, scholar Hui Faye Xiao writes, a national obsession with marital strife that has been chronicled and embellished in dozens of television shows and films.43 Pervasive Chinese academic fraud has in the past decade become a matter not just of domes- tic concern, but of international alarm. In Fortress Besieged, Fang Hongjian was able to purchase a Ph.D. diploma in the mail; nowadays one need only call a toll-free number (and pay a hefty fee) to buy an academic paper with your name on it and the promise of publication in a prestigious international journal.44 The sense of crisis that pervades popular discourse about marriage and the academy helps to explain why the institutional mindset that Yang and Qian embody resonates so strongly in today’s China. Since Qian’s death, Yang’s cul- tural production has blended individual expression with the fulfillment of idealized social roles. Her late-life persona has been a potent combination of “virtuous wife” (xianqi 賢妻)45 and “person of letters” (wenren 文人). In “God’s Dream” Man and Woman inadvertently realize “the vow that all lovers share to ‘die on the same day of the same month of the same year;’” as a widow, Yang revealed to her biographer that when Qian was sick she wished to realize the wifely ideal of living only one year longer than her husband.46 Yang’s wid- owhood lent new weight to her words. The terse opening section of We Three (“We Two Grow Old”) is devastating because Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu appear not as self-assured scholars but as a old couple plagued by recurring nightmares about losing each other. We sense Yang’s vulnerability, and we know that Qian will predecease her.

43 Xiao, Family Revolution, 3, 177–83. 44 For representative news media reports, see “Looks Good on Paper”; Clark, “China’s Academic Scandal.” On publishing fraud in the sciences, including the toll-free hotline, see: Hvistendahl, “China’s Publication Bazaar.” At least six articles on academic fraud and misconduct in China appeared in the journal Nature between 2010 and 2014. On publish- ing fraud in the humanities, see: Liu, “How is Research on Academic Plagiarism in China Conducted?” 45 Wu Xuezhao uses this term in chapter 17, which is entitled: “A most virtuous wife, a most talented daughter.” 46 Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 105; Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 384. 176 Rea

Biographers writing well of friends and spouses is nothing new, of course, and Yang’s post-1998 writings may well be regarded simply as grieving “self- consolations.”47 Yang’s defining style in writing about personal suffering has been the power of understatement. During the outpouring of “scar literature” after the Cultural Revolution, Yang’s Six Chapters of Life from a Cadre School recorded the couple’s hardship in a denuded linguistic style that completely elides hyperbolic emoting and graphic imagery. Taking a Bath, to the poet Shi Zhecun 施蟄存, was written in a “fluid and pure vernacular” (yuwen liuli chun- jie 語文流利純潔).48 Unadorned prose has widely been taken as a reflection of Yang’s personal diffidence, following the enduringly popular, if clichéd, truism that “as one writes, so one lives” (ren ru qi wen 人如其文). Wu Xuezhao writes that Yang “refuses to stand out” and “is utterly content always being a zero.” Yang, who in the 1980s wished for a “cloak of invisibility” has in the latter part of her career been conspicuously inconspicuous.49 Mustering skills developed in the acad- emy, she has reconstructed for the public a marriage and a family separated by death. The shift from “we” to “me” forced Yang Jiang to re-think an existential question: “Who am I?” Her answer has been manifold: widow, bereft mother, scholar, writer, thinker. This private-as-public persona, as Jesse Field discusses in the following chapter, has made her an object of veneration among Chinese readers. Insofar as literature is a vehicle for projecting human desires and anxieties, the stark contrast between Qian’s and Yang’s fictional and (auto)biographical treatment of the twinned institutions of marriage and the academy suggests a politics of personal exceptionalism. Fang Hongjian and Sun Roujia, both uni- versity teachers, could have been a happy couple as husband and wife, but Qian denies them this opportunity. Yang made a different decision. In After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou 洗澡之後), her 2014 sequel to Taking a Bath, she arranges for Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng to marry. In the end, Yang, unlike her husband, gave her fictional couple happiness and closure. To be domesticated is to be subject to the limited ideological and moral vision of institutional imperatives. It’s hard to think big thoughts when there’s

47 See: Hsia, “A Yuan huiqu le.” 48 Shi, “Du Yang Jiang Xizao.” We Three, as Jesse Field notes in the next chapter, does employ graphic images of suffering. 49 Wu’s words are: jue bu chutou 絕不出頭 and zijue ziyuan shizhong zuoling 自覺自願始 終做零. See: Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wangshi, 336. I made several of the points in this paragraph earlier in my essay, “Yang Jiang’s 楊絳 Conspicuous Inconspicuousness.” The Institutional Mindset 177 laundry to be done—or colleagues to mind. Marriage and the academy, in this sense, stand in for a larger problem of intellectual provincialism, one that critic C.T. Hsia called an “obsession with China.” How can one think big thoughts when there is a nation to save? Or a party-state, for that matter? The Chinese Communist Party’s bureaucratization of intellectual labor through govern- ment schools and institutes, which began in the 1950s, continues today. Along with state censorship, this institutional structure remains the Achilles heel of intellectual life in China. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, to some degree, bucked the trend and refused to “run with the herd” of establishment intel- lectuals. But little could be more “establishment” than to translate Chairman Mao’s Selected Works or his poetry, as Qian was recruited to do in the 1950s and 1960s.50 The same could be said for Yang’s flaunting, in We Three, of the couple’s close relationship with powerful cadres like Hu Qiaomu 胡喬木 (1912–1992), the wordsmith behind some of Mao’s most infamous declarations who became president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where they worked.51 Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang are extraordinary representatives of a dying breed of modern Chinese intellectuals. Their writing careers, long but stunted by politics, beg a question that will remain relevant for the foreseeable future: how are mainland Chinese writers influenced by the institutions they inhabit? Marriage and the academy, in the works of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, are institutional touchstones to their shared insistence that self-possession

50 According to Yang, Qian was recruited into a group to translate Mao’s Selected Works after his first year teaching at Tsinghua (around 1950). A year in, the group consisted only of him and several assistants and work was temporarily suspended in 1954. He completed translation of Selected Works in 1963 and was appointed to a five-person group to translate Mao’s poetry in 1964. That work was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. The group was reinstated after Qian’s return to Beijng from the countryside “cadre school” and he completed his portion of the work in a cramped and cluttered room in 1975. Yang, Women sa, 124, 126–27, 141, 151–52. 51 Hu Qiaomu was President of CASS from 1977–1982 and again from 1985–1988. In We Three (Women sa, 156–159), Yang describes Hu suddenly coming to their home to pay Qian a visit, the first of many, in October 1977. Qian, she says, came to Hu’s attention for hav- ing the temerity to point out an error in one of Mao Zedong’s poems, which Qian was translating. Yang emphasizes that Hu sought them out and not the other way around, and that the couple remained conscious of their place respective to this powerful cadre, even as they became familiar. Yang mentions a photograph of Hu laughing uproariously at something Qian said; the photo is reprinted in Wu Xuezhao’s biography of Yang. Hu nominated Qian to be one of four vice-president of CASS in 1983. On these appointments, and Hu Qiaomu’s purge of humanist intellectuals in 1983–1984, see Sleeboom-Faulkner, The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), 73–75. 178 Rea is pre-requisite to critical and moral integrity. Yet the domesticated intellec- tual, a familiar Cold War specter, still shadows the mainland Chinese writer on the international stage. When Mo Yan 莫言, an establishment writer of high standing China’s cultural bureaucracy, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, the perennial question made headlines again: “When will he be free?” CHAPTER 8 “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three”: Yang Jiang’s New Intimate Public

Jesse Field

Reading books can help one understand life circumstances different from one’s own. Anyone reading of the life trajectories in We Three will be deeply touched, and perhaps even moved to tears. —Literary critic Cao Wuwei, 20041

Liu Meizhu: What kind of people do you like best? Yang Jiang: All people, whatever their age or social position. All people are kind. Liu: And which do you hate the most? Yang: Those who hate me. I hate them too. —Yang Jiang, interviewed by Liu Meizhu, 20052

At the beginning of the 21st century, Yang Jiang was already well known for her varied literary career. She had been a playwright in the 1940s, a translator and essayist during the Mao years, an author of fiction and memoirs through the 1980s. But in 2003, her fame escalated to a new level with her bestselling memoir We Three (Women sa 我們仨).3 The book chronicles her life with her husband and daughter and the experience of losing them to illness in 1998 and 1997. At one point in her reconstruction of their life together she states:

“We Three” were in truth most ordinary. What family does not have a hus- band, a wife, and children? At the very least there is the husband and the wife—add on the children, and it becomes “we three” or “four” or “five,” and so on. It’s just a matter of each family having its own way, that’s all. This family of ours was very plain. We three were very pure. We weren’t ambitious, and we weren’t competitive. All we wanted was to stay together, and to protect each other, each working according to his or her

1 Cao, “Du Women sa” (On We Three). 2 Liu, “Interviews with Yang Jiang.” 3 Yang, Women sa (We Three), in JYWJ, vol. 3, 115–261.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_010 180 Field

abilities. When we met with hard times, Zhongshu and faced it together, and then hard times weren’t hard. And with Ah Yuan there as our help and our companion, no matter how terrible things got, they would always be fine again.4

Yang Jiang’s voice in this and other writings from the latest, ongoing period of her career makes a direct appeal to her audience that constitutes an intimate public in the sense that Lauren Berlant has defined the term to track a phe- nomenon in American culture:

What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consum- ers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience. A certain circularity structures an intimate public, therefore: its consumer participants are perceived to be marked by a commonly lived history; its narratives and things are deemed expressive of that his- tory while also shaping its conventions of belonging; and expressing the sensational, embodied experience of living as a certain kind of being in the world, it promises also to provide a better experience of social belonging—partly through participation in the relevant commodity cul- ture, and partly because of its revelations about how people can live.5

As Berlant goes on to say, these revelations amount to emotional contact, “of a sort.” What interests Berlant is what she calls the “juxtapolitical” nature of public intimacy, the manifestation of a literary and cultural style that “thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but most often not, acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and recalibra- tion as achievement enough.” (9) In what follows, I will argue that Yang Jiang’s post-1999 life writing—only this relatively new term can encompass the broad array of memoir, autobiography, letters, essays and ephemera centered on her family’s life—suggests the existence of an intimate public centered on China’s literary cosmopolitans. Accounts of how intellectuals like Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang lived, loved and struggled through the years of the revolution have gradually become common ground for a wide variety of Chinese readers seek- ing a way to be Chinese through a sensual and emotional experience of the history of the revolution. In Yang Jiang’s hands, the life of Qian Zhongshu in

4 Ibid., 175. 5 Berlant, The Female Complaint, 6-7. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 181 particular demonstrates at once the cosmopolitanism implied by her strong sense of universal values, as well as the pride in a Chinese approach to that cosmopolitanism called forth by remembering Qian Zhongshu’s upbringing and early career in Republican-era China. The memoirs and essays of this late period also “occasionally” do some politics, wresting control over authoritarian leaders like Hu Qiaomu 胡喬木, and remembering the experiences of unfair- ness during tumultuous political movements. And yet, more often, Yang Jiang is focused not on what went wrong about Chinese history or even what went right, but rather in meditating on the possibility of a contemplative, spiri- tual, and stoic (what Berlant might call “recalibrated”) subject. This subject, possessed of a fraught, difficult relationship with the political, is Yang Jiang’s intended legacy.

The Public Consolation of Philosophy

Qian Zhongshu died in December of 1998; the following December, Yang Jiang published a new translation of Plato’s Phaedo.6 With this text, Yang Jiang initi- ated a new public. In the next few years she wrote two books, We Three (2003) and Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions (Zou dao rensheng bianshang: ziwen zida 走到人生邊上：自問自答, 2007), which attracted new attention to her husband, her daughter, and most of all to Yang Jiang herself as the chronicler of their life together. Yang Jiang’s relationship with her readers was deeply affective, often seeming more intimate than one between strangers. Readers knew of Yang’s loss, sympathized with her; they understood her translation of Phaedo to be a kind of self-consolation. But Yang Jiang’s Phaedo was also a call to remember and preserve “the philosophic life” in the model of Socrates—a very public way of living. In Phaedo, Socrates is preparing to die. Yet far from decrying the injustice of the Athenians who condemned him, or expressing pain and sorrow at having to separate from his family, he maintains a philosophical placidity. The phi- losopher, possessed of a special consciousness of the soul, remains aloof to pleasure and pain alike and focuses on the divine, the invisible, and the pure.7 He reasons that the soul is an immaterial and indestructible counterpart to the body and therefore better suited for continued existence after death. Though lesser people might consider death to be a great evil, Socrates points out that, in its attentiveness to the soul, all philosophy is practice for death.

6 Plato, Feiduo. 7 See: Plato, Phaedo, section 30. 182 Field

Socrates shares his philosophy, one borne of the privileged perspective of one approaching death, with a mixed public of Athenian friends and strang- ers. By the end of the dialogue, all, including the executioner, have become his friends. Phaedo then travels from Athens to Phlius and relates these events to Echecrates and other listeners at their request: “I have nothing to do, and will try to gratify your wish. For to me, too, there is no greater pleasure than to have Socrates brought to my recollection, whether I speak myself or hear another speak of him.”8 Phaedo, in other words, responds to demands by a public, with the personal stories they want to hear, but including, as readers soon find, many lessons about how best to live. In translating Phaedo, Yang Jiang has already taken on something resembling Phaedo’s persona: she serves as a calm witness to death, turning it into an opportunity for instruction in the philosophic life. That there was pain, that translation was a philosophical act of transcending pain, is hinted at in Yang Jiang’s “Translator’s Afterword.” In this short text, Yang Jiang expresses her hope that readers will take her translation seriously despite her lack of knowledge of Greek; she translated from multiple English versions to create a smooth, readable Chinese version. “I was just trying to do some- thing beyond my own ability, [something] into which I could pour my entire heart and soul, and thus forget about myself” (wang diao ziji 忘掉自己).9 In later comments to her authorized biographer Wu Xuezhao, Yang explains that this was a technique of care for the self:

Qian Zhongshu had fled, and I wanted to flee as well, but where could I flee to? I never was able to flee, but just had to remain in this human world to clean things up, to give my utmost to my utmost responsibili- ties. . . . Zhongshu’s library wasn’t large. At home, I picked through several bookcases in search of a book that could give me some consolation, a book that could guide me, but most of all a book into which I could escape the pain by burrowing in headfirst and thus forget about myself completely. To forget about myself was to escape.10

Looking back at the year 1999, Yang Jiang pairs a deeply personal need to man- age her own pain by “fleeing” (taobi 逃避) with perception of a new responsi- bility to “clean up” the manuscripts, notes, and ephemera of Qian’s life. Phaedo serves both needs. Although not a book authored by Qian Zhongshu, it is of his library and symbolizes the philosophic life he led. Yang’s discovery hints that

8  Plato, Phaedo, 65. 9  Plato, Feiduo, 102. 10 Wu, Ting Yang Jiang tan wang shi, 390. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 183

Socrates’ attitude toward his fate was one that Qian shared. The implication is that Qian would have approved of his death being used to draw out life lessons from someone who prized knowledge over experience and the soul over the body. The narration of a death to elucidate the philosophic life is a characteris- tic that Phaedo shares with We Three, the memoir that Yang Jiang would pub- lish three years later. In the first two parts of We Three, Yang imagines Qian Zhongshu’s illness as the same sort of implacable bureaucratic power that ended Socrates’ life. This a feature of daily life in the Yang and Qian household, a general affliction of the Mao era, is reimagined as an anonymous summons:

I didn’t quite catch who was calling, only that they were summoning Qian Zhongshu to a meeting. I hastened to respond, “Qian Zhongshu is still ill. I’m his wife, and I request leave on his behalf.” The person on the other end ignored me, and instead only ordered: “Report tomorrow. Don’t bring any bags or notebooks. A car will pick him up at 9.00 a.m.” (107)

In this opening to the drama of We Three, Yang Jiang appears as the kind of pro- testing wife who makes a brief appearance at the beginning of Phaedo, before Socrates has her carried away. Qian Zhongshu appears kinder than Socrates, but in the end no less aloof:

Without a word, he got up, went into our room, opened the wardrobe, and began to take out his clothes for going out. Hanging them on a clothes-rack, he then took out a clean handkerchief and put it in one of the pockets. He was prepared to go himself, and didn’t need me to go for him—perhaps he knew that I couldn’t go for him. (107)

The fictional Yang’s flustered response to a faceless threat amplifies the virtue of calm, collected decision-making. The impersonal nature of that threat, mean- while, makes the individuals that Yang Jiang sees in her later text appear all the more sympathetic as human beings struggling with similar circumstances. The fictional drama of an embattled Yang Jiang struggling against an imper- sonal adversary resonates with Yang Jiang’s real-life efforts between 2000 and 2003 to manage Qian Zhongshu’s posthumous public image. Qian’s reputa- tion rose quickly following the reprint of his novel Fortress Besieged in 1980. A vast array of biographies, reminiscences, interviews, and feature articles followed.11 Many of these works exuded a strong sense of renewed national

11 Yang Jiang was mindful of her husband’s public dislike for literary biography, recorded most famously in his 1941 essay “The Devil Pays a Visit to Qian Zhongshu.” See Qian, 184 Field pride in the wake of major post-Mao reforms. They also offered new perspec- tives on the Republican era. Qian’s accomplishments were a glimpse into the aborted Republican-era project of producing intellectuals equal to their Western counterparts. Qian’s body of work thus had significant political impli- cations. These biographies collectively created a monumental life story for Qian, as exemplified by one book’s title, A Cultural Mount Everest.12 Yang’s efforts to take Qian down off this pedestal are represented in her Collected Writings.13 Texts documenting them appear conspicuously in the section of the anthology preceding We Three. These reveal a power struggle between these attempts to make Qian Zhongshu a cultural hero and Yang Jiang’s counterproposition that her husband was not superhuman but “ordinary.” As early as 1941, Qian Zhongshu had satirized the mass market production of both biography and autobiography. In his essay “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu,” a humorously sardonic Satan explains that to write a biography of someone else was simply to write about oneself, while to write about oneself was no more than to create a persona that didn’t actually resem- ble the writing subject. “So if you want to learn about a person, you should read biographies of others, and if you want to learn about other people, you should read his autobiography. Autobiography is biography.”14 Though the mode of this piece was humorous, Qian Zhongshu seems to have been serious about preventing himself from being the subject of a biography. As Yang Jiang reports in her 1984 account, “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged”:

Ever since 1980, when Fortress Besieged was reprinted in China, I regularly saw Zhongshu offer his apologies to readers who wrote letters or came to our door. Sometimes, he would advise them quite earnestly not to make a study of Fortress Besieged. Other times, he would put them off with a courteous, “I have nothing to say.” And sometimes, he would refuse in a way that was not only rude, but unreasonable. Once, I heard him say on the phone to an English woman who wanted to meet him, “Suppose you

Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 33–38. That Qian assails biography implies in Yang Jiang’s project a tension between what her husband would have wanted her to do and what liter- ary publics she wished to cultivate. 12 See Zhang Wenjiang’s Wenhua Kunlun (1993). Other biographies of Qian Zhongshu include Qian Zhongshu zhuan (1992), Qian Zhongshu yu Yang Jiang (1997), Yang Jiang pingzhuan (1998), and Danguitang qian: Qian Zhongshu jia zu wen hua shi (2000), all by Kong Qingmao. 13 YJWJ, vol. 3, 1–65. 14 Translation from: Qian, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, 34. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 185

liked the taste of an egg; would you really need to get to know the hen that laid it?” I was always afraid of him giving offence. (80)15

Thus Yang Jiang defies the fictional Satan’s warning to create a public image for Qian Zhongshu. She did this to satisfy Qian’s many curious readers, but also to correct what she perceived as a persistent tendency to conflate Qian Zhongshu with his protagonist, Fang Hongjian, and to read Fortress Besieged as autobiog- raphy. “However much it reads like a true story with real people,” she writes, “in actuality, it is entirely made up” (70). In contrast to the self-absorbed and dull Fang Hongjian, Qian Zhongshu is man imbued with foolishness, chiqi 癡氣, a term which encompasses foolishness, clumsiness, irreverence, inattentiveness, creativity, and iconoclasm. This earlier account helps us to appreciate the distinctiveness of Yang Jiang’s post-2000 life writing about Qian Zhongshu. In 1984, Yang Jiang made no attempt to portray her husband as “ordinary” in the sense of “conventional.” Instead, she gave an evocative account of a “foolish boy” who both exemplified the values of, yet never quite fit in with, his conservative intellectual family of the Jiangnan region, an historical center of Chinese high culture. Her goal was to supplement and correct a public image that scholars and newspaper accounts were creating in the absence of an authoritative account. After 2000, Yang Jiang returned to this mode of caretaker for a public image. She placed new emphasis on Qian as an “ordinary man,” again opposing misimpressions that appeared following his death. One major effort was to overturn gossip related to Qian’s brief career at National Southwestern Associated University, including his abrupt departure in 1941.16 She also opposed her husband being touted as a cultural hero who symbolized China’s triumph as a fast-developing nation in the 21st century. These efforts peaked in 2001. That year, she fought successfully to remove exhibitions dedicated to Qian Zhongshu in the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature in Beijing. Later in the year, though, she began an unsuc- cessful battle to prevent the Wuxi municipal government from turning her husband’s childhood home into a museum. In a short essay dated January 15, 2002, she laments the construction of the museum against her husband’s wishes. People ought to have a basic right to privacy, she reasons, and if their last wish is not to be made the theme of a municipal museum in their home- town, then that wish should be respected.

15 Page numbers cited are from my translation published in Renditions 76. 16 I won’t discuss this controversy in detail here, but Yang Jiang’s final word on the matter seems to be in “Qian Zhongshu likai Xinan daxue de shiqing” 錢鍾書離開西南大學的 實情, YJWJ, vol. 3, 28–31. 186 Field

Figure 8.1 Interior of the Qian Zhongshu Historic Home, a museum operated by the Wuxi Municipal Government. (Image courtesy of the Wuxi Municipal Culture and Arts Management Center. source: http://wgzx.wuxi.gov.cn/ggfw/whcgdh/2527722.shtml)

His life was ordinary [pingchang 平常], and his career was a part of that life; nothing in it is worth making into an exhibition. He once saw an account of his life assembled into a “Biographical Outline.” “What non- sense,” he muttered, and sighed deeply at the discovery that he was being spuriously redefined. “I’ve become a piece of rancid meat, into which the flies are now depositing their maggots!” These were anguished words. He exhorted me in all earnestness not to hold any memorial service after his death. He also told me explicitly, “I am not to be entered into the modern literature museum.” . . . Qian Zhongshu was a man whose deeds matched his words. He had no desire for reputation or profit. . . . To contravene his steadfast wish not to be memorialized is inappropriate.17

The letter is the angriest writing Yang Jiang was ever to publish. Later in the year, she softened her tone considerably in a letter to another biographer, Tang Yan. Tang Yan had emigrated to America from Taiwan and met Qian Zhongshu at Columbia University in 1979, when the two were introduced by the literary

17 “Wei Wuxi xiufu Qian shi guju shi, xiang lingdao chen qing” 爲無錫修復錢氏故居事， 向領導陳情 YJWJ, vol. 3, 49–51. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 187 critic C.T. Hsia. Tang was so impressed with Qian’s charisma and erudition that he became a self-styled “fan.” When Tang asked Yang Jiang to write a preface for his new biography of Qian Zhongshu, Yang declined. Instead, she wrote an open letter that is surprising given her stance towards the Wuxi museum:

When Poems of the Song: An Annotated Selection was criticized [after 1958], Qian Zhongshu was certainly not “hurt in both mind and spirit.” He knew that he was an “old intellectual” [jiu zhishifenzi 舊知識分子], and he completed his work to the best of his abilities with no expectation of praise. Praise might bring criticism, and criticism was mostly a waste of words. But a waste of words needn’t mean his accomplishment was a waste. So he remained very calm, and simply continued his work supple- menting the History of Song Poetry and Poets (Song shi ji shi) . . . It is cer- tainly true that Qian Zhongshu never was able to develop his talent for creative writing. Yet phrases like “sparse of hair but rich in mind,” and “an affair to cause sorrow for a thousand generations” describe something more than just Qian Zhongshu’s work. Your hypothesis is romantic (lang- man pai 浪漫派), mine is more realistic. In any case, both are merely hypotheses and nothing more. I’m quite old now, and I apologize for not having the energy to write a preface to your book. I can only write this letter to thank you for thinking so highly of Qian Zhongshu, and for your confidence in me. I hope your book has many, many readers. (113–114)

Yang Jiang is making a point specifically about Qian Zhongshu’s response to criticism of his work in the wake of the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign, and the beginning of a series of political movements that made it impossible for Qian and many other like-minded scholars to work freely—in short, at stake here is Qian’s response to the beginning of very constrained conditions for cultural production. Tang Yan, Yang felt, grasped that Qian’s career was a tragedy as much as a story of adversity overcome—imagine what he could have accom- plished with greater freedom! Yet Tang’s biography exaggerates the indignation that Qian must have felt when his intellectual labors were not welcomed. In Yang Jiang’s eyes, Qian lived an unflappable life and simply persevered with honest work. This self-possession is reminiscent of the aloof philosophical life detailed in Phaedo. Socrates uses “purity” in the sense of the purification of the soul, which requires purging strong emotions associated with pain, pleasure, and physical or material desires. This notion resonates with Yang’s claim in We Three that “This family of ours was very plain. We three were very pure.” Yang Jiang’s autobiographical essays of this period also anticipate the moral sensibility of We Three. In these Yang derives general propositions from her own experience and recollections. In doing so, she is less like Phaedo, 188 Field commenting on her witnessing of a philosophic life, and more like Socrates, drawing on personal memory to develop a philosophical vision. These essays built on the 1981 prose work that brought Yang to prominence in the post-Mao period: Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School (Ganxiao liuji). That book, a tightly constructed set of memories about her experiences “sent down” to a rural part of China for “re-education through labor” from 1970 to 1971, launched Yang’s distinguished career as a late-life essayist. Several long essays about family members and a series of shorter personal vignettes followed—of friendships made and broken, and of epiphanic moments in her life. Many shorter pieces were collected in Miscellaneous Thoughts and Miscellaneous Writings (Zayi yu zaxie 雜憶與雜寫, 1991). One of them, “I Start School at Qiming” (“Wo zai Qiming shangxue” 我在清明上學) conveys a nostalgic tone similar to We Three, which appeared shortly thereafter. It is a self-portrait of the author as a child attending Qiming Catholic School in Wuxi from 1920 to 1923. Anecdotes about the school grounds (a mix of Chinese and European architecture) and her fellow classmates (a mix of girls with and without bound feet, some vastly wealthier than others), evoke the sense of a new world opening up to a curious and compassionate girl. Its most moving moment involves the departure of Mister Zou, who taught the Confucian classics and poetry composition. One day Mister Zou comes to school injured, and Yang Jiang hears him mutter “My son is unworthy” (99– 100). Shortly thereafter, Mister Zou is replaced. Yang Jiang remembers the last time she saw him:

Once, as I was going home with my two older sisters for our monthly vacation day and we passed a cart by the side of the road, I saw Mister Zou standing in front of a water chestnut vendor, munching away. Little pieces of water chestnut clung to his white beard. I felt saddened, and thought Mister Zou was so pitiful. What was so pitiful about eating water chestnuts? Probably because he wasn’t sitting down as he ate, and he wasn’t eating with anyone else. He was just munching away, all alone, braving the wind and rain, almost as if he had stolen the food. Whenever I think of Mister Zou, it’s always this scene, and I think again of how piti- ful he was. (100)

Mister Zou here symbolizes the humanist values of the Mencius (a text Yang Jiang learned in Zou’s class), especially the injunction to produce a commu- nity to care for the elderly and not abandon them. A pencil illustration of the scene by Gao Mang, included in Yang’s Collected Writings, captures its iconic value. The old man eats, a gesture of holding on to life and nurturing the self. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 189

The little girl looks on, sympathetic and worried about his fate. This scene is a variation of the public witnessing that occurs in Phaedo, in which friends and foes alike observe how Socrates faces his fate. The child represents Yang’s ideal reader: young, compassionate, and willing to learn from the teacher. Mister Zou is a version of the philosophic elder that Yang Jiang herself now hopes to embody—surviving, uncomplaining, selfless, and public-spirited. These three projects—the Phaedo translation, work on Qian Zhongshu’s legacy, and Yang Jiang’s autobiographical work—all come together in We Three. By thinking of the book as a layered consideration of humanistic values, of a Chinese cultural icon, and as a personal expression of memories, one begins to understand how the book becomes such an effective model for how to have lived as an intellectual in the Chinese twentieth century. Alone among writings on Chinese intellectuals, We Three embeds Qian Zhongshu’s life into both a family and a universal space of thoughtful living. Yang Jiang also designed the book to make an intimate connection with her readers. We see direct evidence for this in a telephone interview she granted to a reporter from the Xinhua News Agency (whom she refused to see in per- son) as part of the advance publicity for We Three. The reporter began by asking about genre, and she replied that the book was part memoir. She nev- ertheless refused to talk about the book’s memorial function and claimed that she was not qualified to appraise Qian Zhongshu’s work in relation to other major Chinese writers. Her reserve dissolved when asked about her health. “I’m keeping it together. When you’re over ninety, you’re never exactly not sick, are you?” She then asked the reporter to convey a message to readers: don’t call, and don’t visit.

Think about it. If you all came, and all spoke with me for one day, so what? We couldn’t possibly become friends on the strength of one day’s conversation, right? So please, let me have the time to myself. That way, I’ll write a little. And when you all see it, you have every right to treat it as a letter from me, addressed to you all.

In addressing her readers, Yang expresses her wish that they will substitute her writing for the friendship and intimacy they crave. The structure of the book also reflects this intention: three numbered parts and a scrapbook sec- tion. Such a scrapbook section is relatively common among life writing about famous Chinese intellectuals, but a further distinction of two very different prose styles in the numbered sections seems practically unique, and works even more effectively to bring readers into the emotional experience of her own life. As Yang Jiang describes it: 190 Field

The first part uses the form of a dreamscape to narrate the emotional experience of our last years as a family and how we three depended on each other. The second part records traces the 63 years of our lives from 1935 when I went with Qian Zhongshu to study in England, where I gave birth to Qian Yuan, until 1998 when Qian Zhongshu passed away.18

The first part is written in a surreal and lyrical style; the second is authoritative and opinionated. Tragic pathos is condensed into the first, while most of the happy memories appear in the second. The second part of the book is thus an elegiac memory of the loved ones lost in the first part. But within each part there is a constant shuttling between the need for fortitude and the freedom to indulge, yielding a vibrant sense of a tightly-knit family unit that functioned well amidst a chaotic world. Compared to her writings from the three preceding years, We Three contains more intense emotions, both negative and positive. The careful structuring of this affective intensity likely contributed to the book’s commercial success: tears in part one give way later to relief, joy and contentment. The affective reversal replicates the “emptiness-to-fullness” (xu shi 虛實) stylistic reversal commonly used in traditional Chinese poetry and poetics.19 The surreal, alle- gorical writing of the first two parts is “empty,” while the third part is a realist, documentarian application of the “full” style. The narrative proper, we remember, begins with a scene at home, where Qian Zhongshu is playing with Qian Yuan. Yet even this seemingly ordinary scene is somewhat odd. Qian is over eighty years old and his daughter is in her mid-50s, yet the two play like children. Their game is an old one they called “laying the minefield,” in which Qian Zhongshu goes into his daughter’s room, gathers up her possessions, and arranges them on her bed as a practical joke:

Several large dictionaries were stacked on the pillows at the head of the bed and on top of those was a little stool with its four legs pointing upward. Two dusty shoes—apparently the shoes Ah Yuan had just taken off after returning home—were carefully placed on the legs. One shoe was stuffed with a pen jar filled with Ah Yuan’s calligraphy brushes, paint- brushes, pencils, and ballpoint pens. The other was stuffed with a little whisk-broom for brushing the bed clean. Alongside the pillow rested the

18 Li, “Zhuan fang Yang Jiang.” 19 On the “empty” quality of the prose style of this section, see Motsch, “Qian Zhongshu yu Yang Jiang er san shi,” 165; and the overview in Ling, “Juanjuan xiliu zhong gui hai.” “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 191

large book bag Ah Yuan had brought home, next to which were strewn several books of varying sizes. In the back was the long shoehorn I had given Ah Yuan—this must be the tail. Ah Yuan stood in the narrow space between the bed and the desk, trapping Papa between the desk and the piano. “Caught red-handed!” she declared, smugly. (106)

The catalog of objects is a ghostly portrait of Qian Yuan constructed of mark- ers of her various identities: student, teacher, daughter. The playful teasing of father and daughter is a timeless, utopian image of the nuclear family. This scene gives way immediately to the anonymous telephone call summoning Qian Zhongshu to an official meeting at an undisclosed location. Yang Jiang calls her narration of her loved ones’ deaths as “a ‘dream ten thou- sand miles long’. In this dream everything seems real, and when I wake up, it’s as if I’m still in the dream. But a dream is after all just a dream, from beginning to end” (106). Yang had used the motif of dreams and dreaming before. The preface to her essay collection Toward Oblivion (Jiang yin cha 將飲茶, 1987) begins with a dream sequence in which she imagines her own death and prog- ress towards the underworld. The dream motif creates a space to consider the reality of her loss behind the curtain of imagistic rhetoric, some derived from classical Chinese poetry. Having been called away, Qian Zhongshu boards a boat that travels a little further away from Yang Jiang each day. She is able to visit him every day by walking “an old post road” (gu yidao 古驛道) through a grove of willow trees and vines that parallels the river carrying Qian’s boat. Each night she stays in one of a chain of riverside inns. C.T. Hsia attributes “the mysterious feel- ing in the dream sequences” to two ci-style lyric poems attributed to Li Bai, known by their tune titles: “Boddhisattva Barbarian” (“Pusaman” 菩薩蠻) and “Remembering Qin’e” (“Yi Qin’e” 憶秦娥), respectively. The first poem con- tains several motifs similar to those Yang Jiang uses in the allegorical section of her memoir:

平林漠漠煙如織， A stretch of level woods, brocaded with fog, 寒山一带傷心碧。 A belt of cold mountains, more jaded each second. 暝色入高樓， Down stream dusky rays, into the tower; 有人樓上愁。 There is a person up in this tower, in sorrow. 玉階空佇立， For nothing, she stands there on the jade terrace, 宿鳥歸飛急。 Don’t birds on the wing fly home fast? 何處是歸程， Which is the way back home? 長亭更短亭。 Long stays, and short stays, and long stays . . . 192 Field

The image of the worried wife waiting alone at home, while the husband trav- els through the forests, stopping at a seemingly endless series of inns, is cer- tainly called to mind in both this poem and in Yang Jiang’s allegorical elegy to her husband. The second poem Hsia mentions begins with the famous line “No ancients before me, no followers behind,” and goes on to imagine the Old Post Road that once lead to Xianyang, the great capital of the Qin and Han dynasties, but which now covered in dust and line with wilting willows. Culturally literate readers may well associate these images, which Yang Jiang associates with her husband’s passing away, with a more universal Chinese sense of remembrance present in such a nostalgic paean to the decline of empire. Besides these classical allusions, the melancholic note of the allegorical portion also uses grotesque bodily imagery to represent intense sorrow. When Yang Jiang learns that her daughter has passed away, for example:

I saved myself from falling with one hand on the willow tree beside me. I looked all around, calling in a whisper, “Yuan Yuan, Ah Yuan, take care. Go, with Mama and Papa’s blessing.” My heart was covered with eyes full of hot tears, which now all gushed forth at once. With my hands propped against the tree, and my head against my hands, the hot tears in my bosom forced their way up, until they reached my throat. I swallowed hard, choking them back, but I forced them too hard, and my chest, filled with hot tears, ripped open. I heard a thud, and onto the stone-slab ground fell an indistinct lump of blood and flesh. Cold wind poured into the cavity of my chest. The pain was intolerable; quickly I squatted down and picked up that ball of blood and flesh and squeezed it back in through the hole in my chest; it was good that there was so much blood to wash clean the dirt and filth. I clenched the wound tight with one hand, and pressed the other protectively on top of it; I felt nauseated and dizzy. I was mortally afraid to fall on the post road, so I staggered forward, made it back to the inn, and crossed the threshold just as the innkeeper was setting the bolt. (126)

In this passage, suggestive of magical realism, Yang Jiang makes literal the idi- omatic phrase “tears my heart and rips my lungs” (si xin lie fei 撕心裂肺). This bodily imagery, alien to the traditional Chinese lyric, which focuses on natural scenery, represents the trauma of losing her daughter as a physical as well as emotional climax. The concluding passage of this allegorical section returns to the use of clas- sical allusions—this time from her husband’s poetry. From the inn, Yang ven- tures out again one for final visit with Qian Zhongshu on the boat, and then “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 193 sees off his spirit from the top of a rocky mountain. As Qian drifts away, she remains, steadfast as the mountain she has just climbed. Years earlier, in “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged,” Yang Jiang quoted a poem that Qian Zhongshu had written in a letter to her on the topic of traveling in China’s interior while she remained with Qian Yuan in Shanghai; he compared himself to a “waterfall” that “never quits,” but “flows day and night.” (77) In contrast to the water, the mountain remains “so ancient, so still,” making their occasional meetings, however brief, “joy.” In her choice of figures to express how she said goodbye to Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang mimics her husband’s technique of per- forming intimacy within married love using the language of Chinese poetry. By connecting a broad cultural domain with her most personal experiences, Yang Jiang is thus able to lodge within a wide variety of readers the kind of deep affective response also illustrated by the bodily imagery. And this entire sequence leads, in the end, once again to a reflection on her status as someone old, alone, and so living in a uniquely philosophical mode:

Before I reached the inn, a whirlwind lifted me up into the sky. Swirling in the air, I became so dizzy I had to shut my eyes. When I opened them again, I was where I had so often passed the night as a dream—my bed in Sanlihe. But my home at Sanlihe was no longer a home. It was only an inn.

Part of this denouement reflects a continuing reflection on a deeply liminal state between life and death—in We Three, Yang Jiang’s narrates much of the allegorical section from the perspective of a soul that has wandered out of its body, reminiscent of Qu Yuan’s spirit journeys in one of the most ancient Chinese poems, the Li sao 離騷. But once again a cultural feature is pushed towards a kind of positive value by its appropriation as a deeply personal trait. Yang Jiang had reflected on her own experiences of divided selfhood in an ear- lier short essay, “On What Seem Like Dreams But Are Not” (“Si meng fei meng” 似夢非夢, 1993), in which she speculates that, being a light sleeper with a sen- sitive soul, she can enter into an out-of-body perceptive state between sleep and wakefulness. These motifs intensify the affective quality of Yang Jiang’s loss while avoid- ing some actual circumstances of her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, both of which involved long hospital stays. The mode of address is at once personal and impersonal, relating the most personal of life events—death—using cli- chéd terms that nevertheless invite puzzle-solving curiosity. Part III is comprised of sixteen short essays arranged in chronological order and covering the years between 1935, when the couple studied abroad, and the 194 Field early 1990s, when they retired. It leads up, in other words, to the setting of Parts I and II. This section shifts from an “empty” to “full” writing style, implying that for Yang, now alone in her “inn,” recollection has become more real to her than her recent loss. Memorable passages conjure up the world of England and France in the 1930s. Yang looks back with fresh eyes on a way of living that changed radically with World War II. Crisp, detailed observations relate the daily habits that a foreigner must cultivate to adapt to life in a new society:

At the grocers, the first thing we did was place orders for fresh bread and milk. The milk was delivered every day; it was placed right outside the door. Bread, fresh from the oven, was delivered to our home by a delivery boy at lunch time. Eggs, tea, butter, prepared foods like sausage and ham, and also chicken, duck, fish, fruits and vegetables were all there for the buying. We just went and made our selections at the store. A boy was in charge of deliveries, and he put the groceries into a wooden box and delivered them to our door. The empty box was taken away at the next delivery. There was no need to pay up front as the storekeeper recorded everything on a small account sheet billed to us every two weeks. If we happened to pass the store on our way to the library, or else on one of our out-of-door “explorations,” we’d stop to place an order. Whenever the sent us the bill, we paid it immediately; we never fell behind. The owner came to treat us as regulars—if we ordered something that was past its prime, he’d say, “These are old, wait a day or two for fresh ones to arrive and I’ll send them over straight away.” When new products arrived, he’d let us know. A poem that Zhongshu wrote for me in 1959 that appears in Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral Life has the line “Measuring out the rice and fuel, she learns to make a home” [liaoliang chaimi xue dangjia 料量柴米 學當家]. It just means coming up with a budget and going to the store to order groceries.

These mundane details of domesticity impress the twenty-first-century reader with the spirit of trust of this bygone British way of life. The couple cultivated trust with their new neighbors, and they worked to create a space that is more like home. By recording all these very specific details, Yang Jiang is projecting a particular form of cosmopolitanism, one that attempts to formulate a uniquely Chinese perspective on British living to suggest what values—trust, home— are shared. The sense of recombination is particularly vivid when it comes to the subject of food, which Yang Jiang also records in detail: “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 195

The new flat we rented from Dolly came with its own kitchen. Zhongshu had a hankering for pork braised in soy sauce [hongshao rou 紅燒肉], but neither Yu Dazhen, Dayin Jiemei, nor any of the other male class- mates had culinary expertise, and even they probably knew more than I did. They taught us to cook the meat a bit, then pour off the water and add fresh ginger, soy sauce and other seasonings. Fresh ginger and soy sauce were both imported from China, and at Oxford both counted as specialty products; moreover the soy sauce was not fresh, but salty and bitter. Our utensils were “quite inadequate.” We had to use big shears to cut our purchased meat into cubes. Then we cooked it as they had taught us. The two of us stood over the little electric stove cooking laboriously— which is to say, turning the heat up enough and adding water as the broth boiled away. I don’t remember how that stubborn first pot of meat turned out. Later, I suddenly remember how my mother used to stew orange peel jam with gentle (wen 文, civilized) heating. Of course! There was more power to civility than to force—our primitive knowledge of science, not to mention “civility” (wen 文), proved that. The next time, we bought a bottle of sherry to use in place of rice wine and stewed the meat over gentle heat. We skimmed the broth but learned not to pour any out. In the end, our hongshao rou wasn’t bad. Zhongshu ate it and was happy. Moving meant taking a risk. Cooking for ourselves was also a risk. But eating hongshao rou meant that the risk had paid off. That single recipe multiplied a hundredfold: with chicken, pork or lamb, stew over a gentle heat. No need to “red cook;” plain water worked just as well. I would cut soft lamb meat into thin strips, and then we’d stand by the stove eating it hot-pot style. I recalled having seen stir-frying once before, so I learned that, too. Vegetables were much better stir-fried than they were boiled.

Contentment is the primary affect in Part III. Having earlier brought her read- ers to tears, Yang Jiang now reverts to vignettes of cozy domesticity. Hers is a didactic, yet playful cosmopolitanism that adopts a traditional Chinese ethos—civility over strength—to adapt to a new land. Her prose is restrained and plain-spoken (pusu 樸素), a stylistic quality that many approving readers consider emblematic of Yang’s pure, unadorned lifestyle.20

20 Major positive evaluations include Ling, “Juan juan xi liu zhong gui hai,” and Cao, “Du Women sa.” At least one reader found these portraits idealized and unrealistic, and depressing because out of reach: big_colour_wolf, “Wo du Yang Jiang Women sa.” 196 Field

At the same time as she expresses contentment with their togetherness, her text builds tension by describing exemplary values as “ordinary.” In emphasiz- ing the strong bonds between family members she idealizes them as anything but ordinary. Later on, she shows how family kinship even overcame the dis- ruptive force of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which forced Qian Yuan to make a difficult choice:

In August, Zhongshu and I were “hauled in,” one after the other, by the revolutionary masses. We were now “ox demons and snake spirits.” Ah Yuan hurried home to take care of us even though she was one of the “revolutionary masses.” To get home, she had to walk past the hard stares of the entire compound. First, she drew up a big character poster drawing a clear line between herself and her “ox demons, snake spirit” parents, and put it on the wall of the building below. Then she came into the house and told us she had put up a poster “drawing a line”—she stressed that this was only an “ideological line-drawing”! Without saying another word, she pressed close to me. Out of her bag she pulled some unfinished needlework and began to stitch. She had purchased a length of synthetic cotton and had cut and sewed it herself into a pair of pajamas for her mother. To make sure she fitted it correctly, she had left several parts of it unfinished. When she sewed these up, she folded the top and pants and placed them on me. Then she took out a large bag of the candies with chewy filling that Papa loved to eat. She found a glass vase and unwrapped the candies one by one. She put the candies in the glass and then neatly folded the wrappers together and put them back in her bag—this way the revolutionary masses would not find the wrappers in the trash. She said that she would save a portion of her salary every month to support our expenses. As both of us were now “ox demons, and snake spirits,” we were allowed only a pittance for living expenses and our accounts had been frozen. Our living expenses were tight indeed. Even though Ah Yuan did not allow tears to fall, I could see her crying on the inside. It really hurt us to see Ah Yuan like this.21

This anecdote illustrates the high premium Yang Jiang puts on the tight bonds of the family from another perspective—the forces of political change that threatened to drive them apart. And yet, this idealized family portrait, as we shall see, left many readers unsatisfied and so helped to spawn a counterpublic. It nevertheless is representative of Yang’s tendency, since translating Phaedo,

21 YJWJ, vol. 3, 241–42. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 197 to use personal recollections to create general ethical propositions about the care of the self and address them to the public. One reader, Duan Yinghong, detected an “internal relation” (neizai guanxi 内在關係) between Phaedo and We Three: a calm and unflappable attitude towards death.22 During 2005, in the wake of We Three’s success, Yang Jiang was interviewed by Liu Meizhu, a graduate student who had chosen Yang Jiang as her disserta- tion subject. The interview reveals that Yang considered scenes in her book illustrative of a basic vision of human nature. For the first time since her 1950s critical writings on work by Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, Yang Jiang returned to the idea that “adversity makes one strong”:

Liu: Do you have any religious beliefs? Yang: I do not practice any religion, but I am not wholly an atheist. I believe in God and in Man, in his ability to do good. Liu: My impression is that in your work you are mainly concerned with exploring Man and human morality, rather than in criticizing society, politics or the system. Is that so? Yang Jiang: Yes. Liu: You do not delight in heroism or idealism, but at the same time you do believe in the power of Man. And that power lies not in convincing others, or in changing the world, but rather in adapting oneself to people and to situations (in particular unfavorable situations), in order to live better and to serve society as best one can. Am I right? Yang Jiang: Yes. But the most important thing is not to adapt to the demands of society, but to excel oneself. Difficulties reveal one’s true character; “adversity” makes one strong. Liu Meizhu: The expression “Western humanism” appears in at least two of your essays. What, in your opinion, distinguishes “Western humanism” from “Eastern humanism?” Yang Jiang: They are identical.

Yang Jiang was then already at work on her next book, Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions (2007). In a series of short essays, it pres- ents a set of philosophical arguments and personal reflections; at their core is the notion that no matter what the circumstances, decisions are ultimately made by individuals. For example, remembering the time back in Shanghai in the 1940s that she quit a job as a school principal, Yang Jiang concludes:

22 Duan, “Du Women sa he Feiduo”. 198 Field

The fact that I quit was, no matter how we put it, not a matter of fate, but my choice. Perhaps we could say that in my life I was fated to be a school principal for two years. When we think back on our life experiences, it always seems that they were dictated by circumstances at the time and that we were not our- selves masters of the situation. But at the key moments, the master is still the self. (83–84)23

The book is something of a companion volume to Phaedo; both share a deep interest in the soul. Its first eleven essays build a theory of the value of human life that is not to be measured by money, fame or the individual’s contribu- tion to civilization. The value of human life is instead created through the indi- vidual’s lifelong cultivation of a decision-making capacity. Yang identifies its mechanisms as the “conscience” (liangxin 良心) and “soul” (linghun 靈魂). Socrates and a wide array of other Western texts appear occasionally to sup- port her points; more often, she quotes from the Confucian classics, especially the Confucian Analects (Lunyu 論語). Yang Jiang affirms Confucius’ theory of the goodness of human nature, but insists, as does Socrates in Phaedo, that human goodness is adulterated with greed and other baser instincts. Her maxim is that “Humanity requires exercise.” As such, the elevated portion of human nature struggles constantly with the lower, physical instincts. The duty of the individual is to “exercise” the soul and thereby to elevate it. Fourteen memoir-like “annotations” (zhushi 注釋) illustrate how these principles work in real life settings. In the longest, Yang Jiang records the oral history of a maid she had once employed who had migrated to Beijing to work to support her family, only to become alienated from them in the end. “For money, I suffered; now I have money, and it’s of no use to me. What has my whole life been for?” (219) In these pieces, Yang Jiang uses a combination of narrative and discussion to inculcate values like faith, honesty, hard work, strong family bonds, and love of literature and the arts. Arriving at the Margins of Life shows that Yang Jiang’s sense of her reading public strengthened considerably since Phaedo in 1999. She repeatedly emphasizes her seniority using phrases such as “old schoolmis- tress” (lao xiansheng 老先生) and the self-deprecating “relic of the late Qing” (wan Qing de yilao 晚清的遺老) (25). She often addresses her readers directly as “young people” (nianqing ren 年輕人):

23 Citations in this chapter are from the Taipei edition of Zou dao rensheng bianshang published by Shibao chubanshe 時報出版社 in 2007. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 199

In this slim volume, I ask a series of questions and answer them myself. I do so without recourse to theory or great learning. I speak using straight from the heart using ordinary household speech, as if addressing the peo- ple closest to me. As to whether or not what I say makes sense, and whether it is correct or incorrect, I request the criticism and instruction of my dearest readers.24

Speaking as one who was recently ill, and conscious of her arrival “at the mar- gins of life,” Yang Jiang is keenly aware that, at age 96 in 2007, she has come to wield greater influence than at any earlier point in her career, and she seems determined to make the most of it.

“Malleable Material”: Qian Yuan

Writing about her daughter, Qian Yuan, presented a thorny problem. She had died young, childless, and seemingly without having fulfilled her potential. Her first marriage had ended in tragedy when her husband committed suicide, and the nature of her second remains something of a mystery. According to We Three, Qian Yuan spent the weekends at her husband’s family home, but on school nights she stayed in her parents home, in the room she had since 1978. This life at home seems to factor in Yang Jiang’s presentation, in We Three, of Qian Yuan as an iconically child-like figure, forever incomplete:

Ah Yuan was my life’s master work; she was Zhongshu’s “malleable mate- rial” (kezao zhi cai 可造之材); she was old father-in-law’s beloved “book seed” (shu zhongzi 書種子). Yet she started high school by carrying toi- lets, and in her university years she was sent down to work in factories and fields. After graduation there was the Four Clean-ups. These nine tri- als by steam and by fire left her, to the very end, only a seed, only ever able to sprout just a little. Being her parents meant never being able to have peace of mind about this.25

Qian Yuan was “malleable,” but never properly molded. Unlike her well-read and intellectually cosmopolitan parents she remained forever a “seed,” a sym- bol of the tragic failure of the People’s Republic to nurture its best talent.

24 Yang, Zou dao rensheng bianshang, Taiwan edition frontispiece: “Dearest readers of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.” 25 YJWJ, vol. 3, 260. 200 Field

In We Three, Qian Yuan appears only in brief flashes: the sickly but obe- dient child of the war era, the “model soldier” (jian bing 尖兵) of the 1950s and 1960s period of high Maoism—Yang Jiang appears to use this term, imbued as it is with socialist values that were passé by the time of We Three’s publication, with a mixture of pride and bitter irony. The central ten- sion in the Qian Yuan passages is between her two personae: “Ah Yuan” or “Yuan Yuan,” the devoted daughter, and “Qian Yuan,” the public servant and teacher. “Yuan Yuan” was the sickly little girl (she had survived a tuberculosis and other ailments as a child in occupied Shanghai) who grew up to care for her sickly old parents. “Qian Yuan” was the independent thinker who made attachments with other young people and learned that the proper goal for a young lady growing up in the early People’s Republic was to become a “model soldier.” This tension mounts during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Qian Yuan’s success at fitting in highlights the growing instability in her parents’ political status. The climax is the scene in which Qian Yuan draws an ideologi- cal line from her parents while pledging her filial piety. C.T. Hsia finds in the drama of Qian Yuan a political critique strengthened by intimate truth.26 Her crisis, to Hsia, illustrates that the Chinese Communist Party strangles institutions of intimacy. He laments Qian Yuan’s marriages— first to a factory worker who was “good and loyal,” the second to a son offered up in gratitude from a woman Qian Yuan had helped—as being stunted in comparison to what her parents had. Neither shows any signs of genuine romance. Unable to inherit her parents’ virtues, Qian Yuan is inevitably a sym- bol of regret. For Hsia, Qian Yuan’s life implies a condemnation of how political movements stifled life, but it simply is not stark enough for him. But even Hsia wants to know more about Qian Yuan: who was her second husband, surnamed Tang? Was he really not permitted to see Qian Zhongshu in hospital after 1994, and why? What was the nature of the relationship between the Qian family and Tang family? Mainland readers, too, wanted Qian Yuan to mean something more than regret. One of Qian Yuan’s former students donated one million yuan to create the Qian Yuan Education Foundation, ded- icated to the cultivation of top-notch teachers. One of that former student’s friends, an editor, suggested a sequel volume to We Three that would memorial- ize Qian Yuan with contributions from her students, classmates, and intimates such as her adopted daughter.

26 Hsia, “Hsia Zhiqing ping Women sa ji wangyou dui Xia wen de pinglun” (C.T. Hsia’s review of We Three and netizens’ responses) [www.douban.com/group/topic/10842322/] (accessed 18 January 2012). “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 201

The resulting volume, Our Qian Yuan (Women de Qian Yuan 我們的錢瑗), presents commemorative essays and collectively-donated memorabilia dedi- cated to model citizen and educator. But amidst happy group photos and inspir- ing memories of Professor Qian, Yang Jiang’s dedicatory preface restates her pride that Qian Yuan was a “model worker” and laments again a life unfulfilled.

The Making of a Cultural Icon

From the late summer of 2003 to the end of the year, We Three sold over 200,000 copies.27 The work was also a major hit with critics—the CNKI Chinese aca- demic journals database had over 100 entries of critical literature about We Three by 2008. New and extensive entries in online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and Baidupedia also appeared, and amateur reviews proliferated on blogs and in online reading communities like Douban.com. Yang Jiang’s late-life writings set in motion two major public responses, nei- ther of which she sought. First is the creation of the counterpublic of reader- responses, culminating in the volume Our Qian Yuan. This public is “counter” in that a group rendered invisible wishes to make itself known in response to the dominant public by constituting itself in a very different way. The second is the approbation of the Party-state, as reflected in mainstream media dis- course. Yang Jiang habitually envisions her family as being made invisible by the Chinese state. Yet the state has played a role in making Yang Jiang one of its most visible cultural icons in post-revolutionary China, one that clashes with her rhetoric of individualism. Within a few years of the publication of We Three, Yang Jiang’s ordinary family was officially exemplary. A section of the People’s Daily website called the “Hall of Famous Cultural Figures” includes Yang Jiang along with forty-one other writers and artists, each with a photograph and a brief notice of their chief claims to importance.28 Yang Jiang appears between Zhou Youguang, “the father of Hanyu Pinyin,” and Huang Miaozi, who, along with Yu Feng, is called one of the “twin stars” of Chinese art. Yang Jiang is distinguished within this set of icons by her great age and her espousal of individualism:

As an intellectual of her generation, Yang Jiang has her own answers. Her voice is clear and calm; her gaze shines bright and pure, deep and insight-

27 Cao, “Du Women sa.” 28 “Wenhua mingren ku” (Archive of Famous Cultural Figures),” online at: http://culture .people.com.cn/ (This version archived November 29, 2010). 202 Field

Figure 8.2 Yang Jiang (center) in the “Hall of Famous Cultural Figures” on the website of People’s Daily.

ful. Under her guidance, we glimpse a crisp and open view of human life and a more penetrating knowledge of the worlds of matter and life.

Each cultural figure has dedicated web pages behind the link. These do not include original biographies, but rather archived news articles, reviews, and work excerpts bundled by topic; Yang Jiang’s archive includes three: “The Story of We Three,” “Explorer of the End of Life,” and a section on recent news. The focus is on Yang Jiang as an old-age memoirist for her family, philosopher of life, and embodiment of the cosmopolitanism of the pre-revolutionary past. Articles in the “recent news” section laud the writer’s continuing career and good health. Their theme is the plainspoken (pusu) style shared by We Three and Yang Jiang alike, advancing the values of “quietude, peace, wisdom, and purity.”29 They identify an everyday-ness in pusu writing. Since the family was perfectly ordinary, the writing becomes even more exemplary.30 Some reviewers allude

29 Yang, “Ningjing, pinghe, zhihui, qingjie . . . Yang Jiang zhi mei.” 30 See the review by Wan Ling, “Daizhe ai, chen ru huiyi: Du Yang Jiang Women sa.” “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 203 to the family’s suffering in the Mao era only obliquely; one comments only that pain strengthens memory and clarifies universal human feeling.31 What are the implications of this embrace of Yang Jiang by the state? The Yang Jiang who appears in her celebrated 1981 memoir Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School embodied the tension between expressing and repressing political grievance; as the new moral exemplar of the 2000s in official websites and popular biographies, she is stripped of most political critique. The politi- cal inhibition of Qian Zhongshu’s career, the allegory of death as an official summons, and so on, are mere sentimental ornaments to the portrait of an essentially successful person. Many iterations of the Yang Jiang story render it a basic set of common sense values: family harmony, frugality, talent, retire- ment, and humanistic wisdom attained by elders in a cosmopolitan literary sphere now imagined to have always existed in China. In a rare negative review, one blogger, posting as big_colour_wolf, expresses suspicion about We Three: “Perhaps she is telling the truth, but there are cer- tainly things that she is not writing down.”32 One thing left unwritten, says big_ colour_wolf, is the possibility that Qian Zhongshu’s habitual condescension toward others helped to isolate the family. Instead of trying to change the situ- ation, the family simply clustered tightly together into their own little world of three, the better to flee the mundane social world. This formation of a public is a kind of poetic world-making.33 In Yang Jiang’s memoirs and essays set during the Mao era, the public is conspicuous mostly from its peripheral relation to family life. Only husband, daughter, colleagues, a few friends, maids, and Yang herself appear within the frame. Yang Jiang offers a new chapter in the evolution of women’s autobiographi- cal discourse. In the 1990s, one consequence of rapid marketization of all media was a sharp increase in the propensity of women’s cultural products to proffer sensations and emotions, including sexually explicit confessional narratives.34 Literary scholar Wang Lingzhen notes a “privacy fever” in work of this period by Lin Bai, Chen Ran and Wang Anyi, all of whom write narra- tives of overcoming shame to achieve more direct expressions of women as bodily, sexual beings.35 In Yang Jiang’s story, women as bodily, aging beings hold as much interest to Chinese readers as does sex. Ideology is at work here too: whereas the 1990s

31 Ibid. 32 big_colour_wolf, “Wo du Yang Jiang, Women sa.” 33 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 82. 34 Wang, Personal Matters, 167–68. 35 Wang, Personal Matters, 167–200. 204 Field generation combined memories of traumatic childhood during the Cultural Revolution with narratives of sexual maturation, Yang Jiang packages a happy childhood in the late Republican period, maturation abroad and during the war, and exile during the Cultural Revolution as memories that refract a con- cern with impending death. Yang Jiang’s work seeks to find a new relationship with death, new visions of human bonds, or a new self. The risk she takes is that a repeated life story may becomes a simple answer to, in Lauren Berlant’s words, a consumerist “desire to be in proximity to okayness, without passing some test to prove it.”36 Much mass market literature of 1990s China, which Wang Lingzhen char- acterizes as approaching a logic of “total consumption,” avoided challenging the reader, or risked being marginalized. A summer 2010 episode of the CCTV television show “Dialogue” (Duihua 對話), which devoted its entire hour to We Three, shows that this market for superficial sentimentality is still alive. The show invited audience members to stand up and recite prepared responses to We Three.37 As lilting music played in the background, reader after reader praised the text for its representation of a comfortable domestic space and for making them feel good about themselves. Readers felt as if they were becom- ing intimate with Yang Jiang, even though they were far removed from the trau- matic past that, to Yang, helped to cultivate her character. The motif of family memory resonates with contemporary Chinese art. Zhang Xiaogang 張曉剛 (b. 1958), for example, highlights memory in his paint- ing series Bloodlines: The Big Family, which he began in 1993 and continued in many variations through at least 2005. He explains this theme as follows:

We all live “in a big family.” The first lesson we have to learn is how to protect ourselves and keep our experiences locked up in an inner cham- ber away from the prying eyes of others, while at the same time living in harmony as a member of this big family. In this sense, the “family” is a unit for the continuity of life and an idealized mechanism for procre- ation. It embodies power, hope, life, envy, lies, duty and love. The “family” becomes the standard model and the focus for the contradictions of life experiences. We interact and depend on each other for support and assurance.38

36 Berlant, The Female Complaint, 9. 37 The episode was broadcast July 2010 but is available on several websites, including: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMDkyODA (accessed 20 January 2012); also see the transcript of the program at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/11995838/ (accessed 20 January 2012). 38 Chang and Murray, et al., eds., Reckoning with the Past, 95. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 205

Figure 8.3 Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodlines: Big Family, 2003 series. Lithograph in an edition of 199, 27 1/2 × 32 1/2. Image courtesy of the artist and Michael Berger Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA.

Figure 8.4 Family photograph (ca. 1946) used for the frontispiece of the 2003 Beijing Sanlian We Three. 206 Field

Zhang envisions family as the controlling figure for idealized sociability, anticipating the political ideology of “harmony” (hexie 和諧) that President Hu Jintao’s administration began promoting in 2004. Yet, Zhang remains con- scious of the need to “protect ourselves.” His artworks presage the heavy use of old family portraits in book cover designs on a wide variety of life writing produced throughout the 2000s, including We Three. Comparing one image from the Big Family series with the 1940s family pho- tograph that graces the cover of We Three, we see remarkable similarities in composition. In both, the three-person nuclear family is the new face of har- mony. The color scheme is also similar, with smooth black and white tones in Zhang’s work acting like the sepia tones in the old photograph to evoke a nostalgic past. Whimsical seals, stains and Zhang’s coloring of the child distinguish an otherwise homogenous presentation, representing overlap- ping tensions between membership and individuality, and between social/ cultural and political notions of family. The cover photo of We Three preserves whimsy—and thus individualism—with the addition of Yuanyuan’s childlike writing. The subjects lack Communist-era clothing, and the photo is without the color politically-charged color red. The photograph thus takes the family figure into a nostalgic and cosmopolitan zone of valuation beyond the politi- cal; art speaks only obliquely to power. Yang Jiang’s late-life career involves an active set of publics—self-organiz- ing social entities that address each other through an ever-widening set of circulating texts. The agonistic framework of the intellectual versus the state characterizes this public in some parts of We Three and also in her earlier efforts to oppose the use of her husband’s memory to monumentalize modern Chinese history. But her turn towards the sagely position of a moral philoso- pher, beginning with Phaedo, steps away from her earlier persona as a voice from the margins. With Arriving at the Margins of Life, Yang Jiang also arrived at a new status: a role model recommended by the state. Her life philosophy, motivated by the search for purity and the soul’s control over material desire, becomes a convergence point for liberal individualism and the collectivism of the Chinese state.

Postscript

In late November 2014, Prime Minister Li Keqiang entered a bookstore in Zhejiang Province. As the owner explained that one of her bestsellers was a biography of current President of South Korea Park Geun-hye, the Prime Minister’s eyes fell on a copy of Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡; translated as “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 207

Baptism), Yang Jiang’s 1987 novel chronicling the nervous backbiting and love- making of a small circle of Beijing intellectuals in the early 1950s.39 Why, asked Li Keqiang, is such an early title still on the “recommended reads” shelves? Because, explained the store owner, Yang Jiang had recently issued a sequel to the work, After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou 洗澡之後). Emerging from the store, Prime Minister Li is reported to have left one of his handlers a hundred-yuan bill and instructions: “Buy both volumes.”40 Just as with all public actions of the Prime Minister, this stop at a bookshop was laden with carefully crafted symbolism. He listened to the store owner lament the challenge of making a living when the demand for printed books is on the decline, then encouraged her by saying that the printed book was a “cultural symbol” (wenhua de xiangzheng 文化的象徵) and would therefore always have a market.41 Li’s much-touted “attention to cultural innovation” is just one branch of a much larger strategy to manage slower economic growth by shifting the scale of banks and businesses from large and state-owned to small, mid-sized and privatized. The larger gesture of encouraging small busi- ness involves a smaller one signifying the commitment to cultural refinements that are best prepared in small batches. Published August 2014, After the Bath is the work of a very old woman indeed, a slim and airy text with crisp subplots about mostly-obedient children solving their problems practically and with the help of their elders (which comes to the same thing). Marriages are arranged, and one death is managed from last illness to getting the death certificate and cremation permits. But even as characters fill in all the necessary paperwork, they ardently aspire to eschew or simply ignore officialdom and to downplay revolutionary consciousness in favor of right mixture of family and personal skills to get by, which here means to buy back the family house and tend to one’s own private enterprise. In her author’s preface, Yang Jiang says she was appalled to learn that read- ers of Taking a Bath suspected the pretty young librarian Yao Mi of actually consummating her love affair with the married young professor Xu Yancheng.42 Yang Jiang returns us to their lives in scenes set in 1957 and 1958 because, she says, she needs to finish their story and preclude with finality any possibility for further sequels.43 The plot is neat as an Oscar Wilde comedy, with elderly

39 Zou, “Li Keqiang guang minying shudian.” 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Yang, Xizao zhi hou, 1–2. 43 Ibid. 208 Field women figures like Old Mrs. Yao and Auntie Lu who carry themselves with poise and cultivation reminiscent of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Even more shadowy elders, Ma Renzhi and Wang Zheng, appear spo- radically to supply advice on which friends to trust, which government slogans to ignore, and when to retire completely from government. While Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng may not technically have committed any “theft of passion” (touqing 偷情), Xu’s marriage with fellow academic Du Lilin is poisoned by his all-too-obvious preference for the younger woman. Fortunately, Professor Du, reputedly a good but firm instructor of spoken English who always seemed just a bit too glamorous to be revolutionary, was declared a Rightist in late 1957 and found herself sent to Anhui to undergo re- education by labor. There she found the time and space to fall in love with yet another academic, Ye Dan. The main plot of the short novel snaps shut with dead-pan ease after Du returns to Beijing and asks for a divorce. Delighted, Xu Yancheng cooks dinner for his wife and her new lover and toasts to their health and marriage, now secure in his own ability to marry Yao Mi. The friends all stay up late drinking at the apartment Xu will be yielding to his ex-wife and Ye Dan, and discuss their futures. Du Lilin declares that in the wake of the anti-Rightist campaign, she’s decided to abandon academic life and try instead to open a business with Ye Dan.44 Ye says he is thinking of opening a hotel, but his friends convince him that this would involve contact with the wrong sort of people, so he should open a photography shop, where he could serve other married couples and families. Even famous people and officials might be their patrons!45 Not all characters are paired off with new marriages; the theme of elder care goes together with the formation of alternative living arrangements. When Auntie Lu’s husband dies suddenly and the long-widowed Mrs. Yao gets a chance to buy back her previously state-occupied Beijing courtyard-style home, the two of them arrange to pool their pensions in the same home and so care for each other in their old age. Readers on douban.com evince significantly less enthusiasm for After the Bath than they did for Taking a Bath—the Chinese idiom “mink with a dog’s tail” (gou wei xu diao 狗尾續貂) is invoked, the short and clipped progress of the plot is spurned, and many readers take the work as yet another expression of mourning for Qian Zhongshu, a sign of a writer who cannot get out of the past.46

44 Ibid., 109. 45 Ibid., 110. 46 Douban reviews of After the Bath. “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three” 209

Stuck in the past Yang Jiang may well be, but something about her breezy Victorian approach to story and character, swiftly sketching life as a series of family struggles culminating in marriages and funerals and eschewing as much as possible any sense that politics or ideology ever actually make a deep impres- sion on life’s emotional and material core, is more than welcome to an official discourse searching for the mode of the slower-paced, more cultivated China they anticipate in future. The demotion of political and cultural difference in favor of putting first human nature and sentiment, a classic gesture of cosmo- politanism, animates both Yang Jiang and those who, like Prime Minister Li, hope to shape the moral health of China on the national level. CHAPTER 9 The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Qian Zhongshu and “World Literature”

Theodore Huters

The author of Jin Ping Mei is certainly a genius, but his learning is that of a Boddhisattva, not that of a Confucian sage, for his message is that every- thing is empty. If he had taken the further step to non-emptiness, he would have written a different book. — Zhang Zhupo, “How to Read Jin Ping Mei,” c. 16951

The story of China’s “long twentieth century” surely centers on the question of how that country adapted to the new world it had been forced reluctantly to join in the second half of the nineteenth. Now in the twenty-first century, many of the scientific, technical, and managerial issues that so bedeviled Chinese thinkers since 1860 have, arguably, been solved. Yet more general questions of values and intellectual orientation remain as much in suspense as ever. This seems to be all the more the case in the realm of aesthetics. In the domain of literature in particular, the search continues for a genuinely “Chinese voice” that represents the particulars of the Chinese situation, with all its internal tensions and complexities, while attaining universal aesthetic validity. The ideal remains as elusive as ever. During the twentieth century, prose fiction, for a variety of well-documented reasons, was the primary zone of engagement in the search for this new and apposite means of literary expression. This chapter examines the Chinese pur- suit of such literary cosmopolitanism by reexamining one work often nomi- nated for inclusion in the modern canon. Fifty years ago, the encyclopedic critic and historian of modern Chinese fiction, C.T. Hsia, had this to say about Qian Zhongshu’s novel Fortress Besieged (Weicheng 圍城, serialized 1946–1947), first published in Shanghai in the immediate post-war years: “The Besieged City is the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature; it is perhaps also its greatest novel.”2 Hsia’s judgment was seconded by many Chinese critics and seemingly also by the reading public when the novel was

1 Zhang, “How to Read Jin Ping Mei,” 94. 2 Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 441.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_011 The Cosmopolitan Imperative 211 republished in China in 1980,3 a generation after it first appeared. Fortress Besieged was one of the older works resurrected in the post-Mao “new period” as part of an effort on the part of those commissioned to restore cultural equi- librium in the years after the Cultural Revolution to demonstrate the continuity of modern Chinese culture. Hsia’s high praise was particularly resonant thanks to the centrality of the novel form to modern Chinese literature as an institu- tion. Qian’s creative writing lasted little more than one highly fraught decade, from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. Yang Jiang, his wife of sixty-plus years, who was the first to achieve success as a writer, has been engaged in creative writing for over seventy years now.4 Like Qian, Yang has written stories, a novel, prose essays and criticism, if in a rather more sedate register than her late hus- band. Also like Qian, she wrote only one full-length novel, Taking a Bath (Xizao 洗澡), published in 1987. For all the differences between the two texts—Taking a Bath, for instance, encompasses a much smaller spatial scale—both novels share a common tone that paradoxically both disputes and affirms the singularity of the modern Chinese experience. This voice poses a challenge to the ordinary ways that the modern Chinese experience has been expressed. Qian Zhongshu believed the Chinese literary realm to be characterized by a palpable universality. His contribution to the search for a modern means of expression was a powerful effort to juxtapose Chinese and Western aesthetic discourses using his profound erudition in both traditions, and to emerge with common themes. This goal, a veritable cliché in modern Chinese lit- erary studies—as expressed in the frequently uttered wish to join “world literature”—has proved difficult to put into practice for Qian’s contemporaries and successors. Qian went about this pursuit in an oblique fashion. For one, his deployment in the novel of a complex Chinese vernacular taking advantage of the wide range of possibilities for word-play in the language, has rendered it virtually impervious to successful translation, and thereby limited its appeal to an international audience. According to one oft-cited criterion for inclusion in the realm of “world literature,” “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, or wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.”5 Qian’s very success in working with the full

3 The first two post-1979 editions, published in November 1980 and September 1981, for instance, totaled 170,000 copies. See Qian, Weicheng, iv. 4 A widely circulated anecdote concerning Yang Jiang’s early success as a playwright testi- fies to her early eminence on the Shanghai literary stage: “When Qian’s . . . novel Fortress Besieged . . . appeared . . . a reader asked: ‘Who’s Qian Zhongshu?’ The reply: ‘Yang Jiang’s hus- band.’” Rea, “‘To Thine Own Self Be True’,” 7. 5 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. 212 Huters richness of vernacular Chinese, in other words, created a significant hurdle for his work to join the pantheon of world literature. For another, critics and literary historians have been frustrated by his deter- mination in his literary scholarship to underplay his conclusions, taking this tendency as evidence of the intractability of the overall enterprise. Intriguing questions concerning his oeuvre nevertheless remain. How, for instance, does Qian’s work fit into the larger pattern of China accommodating itself to world literature (a category that has kindled new interest in studies of literature in the West)? Did his literary scholarship merely continue a well-established tra- dition or did it carve out new territory? If unique, what has been his work’s legacy? Has his method of inquiry into a universal aesthetic endured, or was it in some way intransitive, unique to him? A related question is whether his aes- thetic predispositions changed significantly over the course of his long career. Is, for instance, the spirit animating On the Art of Poetry (Tan yi lu 談藝錄, 1948; rev. 1984) the same as that inspiring Limited Views (Guanzhui bian 管錐編, 1979–1980)? These questions are huge and probably unanswerable, but nev- ertheless essential to any assessment of Qian’s legacy and of modern Chinese literary culture as a whole. His narrative fiction, and in particular Fortress Besieged, is key both to his overall aesthetic project, and to modern Chinese letters as a whole. In this chapter, then, I argue for the novel’s core cultural significance. Before tackling the specifics of the narrative, I should clarify the sense in which I am using the word “cosmopolitan.” By this I mean a concern to reach literary “universals” and to resist being fettered by what C.T. Hsia called “the obsession with China” that has characterized so much of modern Chinese cultural production.6 The term exploded upon the critical scene at the begin- ning of the current century partly in response to the post-colonial theory that dominated literary theory in the 1990s. Tanya Agathocleous identifies as a turn- ing point Timothy Brennan 1997 At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Brennan’s book criticized a first-world post-colonial studies movement that, for all its surface anti-imperialism, has largely precluded actual political com- mitments. Agathocleous notes that “a basic ideological tension can be detected across [the] various meanings [of the term]: cosmopolitanism is locked in a tug of war between those, like [Martha] Nussbaum, who want to reclaim it from Enlightenment humanism and recast it as an ethos attentive to differ- ence, and those (like Timothy Brennan . . .) who see it as fatally tainted by the failures of universalism, the depravities of global capitalism and imperialism, and the elitism of aesthetic distance.” Beyond these is the larger and enduring

6 On “obsession with China,” see Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 533–54. The Cosmopolitan Imperative 213 issue of the question of aesthetic universality, which has, in turn, kindled the notion of “aesthetic ideology,” a term encapsulating the desire to open up the range of possibilities for aesthetic validity.7 Issues of an oppressively dominant global capitalism and the “elitism of aes- thetic distance” were equally pressing upon the Chinese literary scene Qian joined in the 1930s. Through the 1940s, these issues were not of merely literary or academic importance; they had powerful valences across a fiercely polar- ized political and social environment. Qian’s determination to pursue the cos- mopolitan universal, then, was made in the face of something very much like the binary Agathocleous outlines. In the context of China’s civil war, however, these issues were always front and center throughout society and the poten- tial consequences for choosing a particular literary course reached far beyond mere authorial groupings or the academic community. Thirty years ago I assessed Fortress Besieged as the tragedy of a well-meaning if perversely cranky educated young man, Fang Hongjian, who is invariably too late in realizing how events are going to develop in a collapsing society. This judgment, to me, still seems basically correct. In this view, the novel is first and foremost the chronicle of the dissolution of a desperate and inevitably out-maneuvered bourgeoisie, a class that had never achieved much stability even before it was confronted with the War against Japan that began in ear- nest in 1937. In this respect, Qian’s novel shares a theme with Mao Dun’s 茅盾 (Shen Yanbing 沈雁冰, 1896–1981) novel Midnight (Ziye 子夜, 1932), an epic account of the failure of an indigenous capitalism to establish itself in the face of Japanese financial might. My continued conviction of the import of Fortress Besieged testifies to the power with which it first struck me. It compelled me to think and write about literature with a new seriousness; only later did I develop the skills to appreciate fully Qian’s brilliant and enduring insights as a literary critic and theoretician. While I continue to regard the novel as being of profound significance to modern Chinese letters, I can no longer read it with what Lu Xun called “the enthusiasm and fervor of my youth.”8 I once reveled in the wit and mordant language with which characters are depicted and invariably found wanting. Now I find the authorial voice at times overbearing, harsh and intolerant. It is, perhaps, a young man’s novel—and I use gender here advisedly, speaking from

7 See, for instance, the discussion in Redfield, Phantom Formations, 1–38. The term “aes- thetic ideology” bespeaks an intention to put aesthetic concerns at the forefront of literary production. 8 Lu Xun, “Preface to the First Collection of Short Stories, ‘Call to Arms,’” Selected Works of Lu Xun, vol. 1, 4. 214 Huters the perspective of both author and reader9—one perfect for the perpetually anxious and angry young men of the same age as Fang Hongjian. I now even prefer the ten-episode 1990 television serialization to the original. In the tele- play the authorial voice, while partially preserved in voiceover, has its volume moderated by the voices of the actors, who provide elegant, full-bodied real- izations of the individual characters. For all these latter day reservations, how- ever, I remain convinced of the novel’s brilliance and its singularity in modern Chinese literature. It is my attitude toward the text’s unique virtuosity that has changed: if I once simply celebrated its distinctiveness, I now feel curiosity and even unease as to why it still strikes me as unique. This sense of the novel’s uniqueness leads back to the issues of cosmopolitanism and the universal that lie at the heart of Qian’s literary endeavors.10 How does Qian negotiate the frac- tures among the “elitism of aesthetic distance,” the need for social concern, and the diversity of cultural history? And why have no subsequent writers or scholars followed his path? Fortress Besieged is but one of a number of novels that describes the decline of the urban elite during the War. Ba Jin’s Cold Nights (Han ye 寒夜, 1947) and The Fourth Ward (Disi bingshi 第四病室, 1946), grim tales of wartime malaise symbolized by the grave illnesses afflicting the protagonists of both novels, are among the more prominent.11 What makes Qian’s work unique is not its theme of wartime decline, or even the fecklessness of the principal character—a fea- ture it shares with Ba Jin’s novels. It is, rather, the mocking narratorial tone and the ironic distance it maintains towards its characters, characteristics that put the novel firmly in the camp of a cosmopolitan aesthetic distant from local foible. An early indication of Fortress Besieged’s stylistic uniqueness appears in chapter one. On a ship carrying a group of Chinese students home from France in the fateful year of 1937, Miss Su Wenwan, a newly minted PhD in French literature, hears the young matron Mrs. Sun talk about how their male shipmates while away the long shipboard hours by gambling: “‘[Our child’s] father is down below gambling—what else can I say! I really don’t understand why men like to gamble so much, just look at all our shipmates, all of them

9 For a critique of the cavalier attitude toward women in the novel, see Ni Wenjian 倪文尖, “Nüren ‘wei’ de cheng yu wei nüren de ‘cheng’: Weicheng chaijie yizhong” 女人「圍」的 城與圍女人的「城」——《圍城》拆解一種 (The fortress “besieged” by women and the “fortress” besieging women—a dismantling of Fortress Besieged) in Li, Zuotian de gushi, 58–74. 10 For a nuanced discussion of the centrality of cosmopolitanism in Qian’s work, see Ronald Egan, “Introduction,” in Qian, Limited Views, 21–22. 11 Ba Jin, Cold Nights; Ba Jin, Disi bingshi. The Cosmopolitan Imperative 215 just crazy about it. It would be one thing if they made a little money at it, but my husband has lost a whole lot, and he still insists on going back—it’s just maddening!’” The comment prompts Miss Su, whose vanity had just been flat- tered by a few words of praise from Mrs. Sun, to return mentally to her earlier haughty contempt for Mrs. Sun: “Once Miss Su had heard the last few, vulgar (xiao jiazi qi 小家子氣) lines she couldn’t help being once again struck with a feeling of disdain, and said coldly: ‘But Mr. Fang doesn’t gamble.’”12 Before gauging the significance of this exchange, let us first be clear on what is not the source of friction between these two women: it is not jealousy over a man they are both pursuing, not a competition for who is most attractive, nor some sort of personal or principled political disagreement—all staples of female conflict in modern Chinese fiction. Instead, Mrs. Sun’s speech and manners remind Miss Su of the difference in affective disposition between the two of them. This difference, again, is not of the twentieth-century literature grand narrative senses of class, whether country vs. city, gentry vs. peasant, landlord vs. tenant, or capital vs. labor. The discord is very local and experien- tial. Even two educated, presumably urban women on their way home from Europe manifest sharp distinctions of manners, taste, and, above all, discern- ment. It is Mrs. Sun’s manners, her way of thinking and talking (not least, the revealing statement: “It would be one thing if they made a little money”), that cannot help rubbing Miss Su the wrong way. Miss Su’s negative assessment of her new acquaintance serves to introduce the reader to the habitus of the novel. The question of taste soon reveals itself to be not merely a set of affir- mations about individual predilection, but the fundamental value structure of the novel. From this exchange onwards, Fortress carefully observes and notes social behaviors, polite and otherwise. What makes the novel singular is how it sets these behavioral quirks against the grating continuo of the rapidly disintegrating social base on which they stand. We soon discover that the ultimate social observer and arbiter of taste in this fictional world is Fang Hongjian. He becomes the litmus test against whom people are judged. This role is reinforced by the substantial overlap between Fang’s way of thinking and the voice of the omniscient narrator. Through the narrator’s eyes, even the patrician Su Wenwan, who had led us into this arena of invidious distinction in the first place, is soon revealed to be a vulgar poseur, our first hint being the alacrity with which she had accepted Mrs. Sun’s hack- neyed praise.

12 Qian, Weicheng, 4. Subsequent references to this book will be made parenthetically in-text. 216 Huters

Events of the novel pivot on matters of taste. This brings up a vital point in the Western tradition of aesthetics, namely Kant’s anchoring of the whole notion of aesthetics in the question of disinterested taste. As Kant claims in his Critique of Judgment, “The judgment of taste, accompanied with the con- sciousness of separation from all interest, must claim validity for every man. . . . That is, there must be bound up with it a title to subjective universality.”13 It is important to note that judgments of taste in Fortress Besieged are invari- ably negative, with individual behavior inevitably falling short of the universal standard. In this sense, it certainly shares Kant’s austere demands. The novel’s insistence on and implacability regarding aesthetic taste brings to mind Kant’s stern invocation of its necessity: His hypothetical arbiter of taste

says “the thing is beautiful”; and he does not count on the agreement of others with this judgment of satisfaction, because he has found this agreement several times before, but he demands it of them. He blames them if they judge otherwise and denies them taste, which he neverthe- less requires from them. Here, then, we cannot say that each man has his own particular taste. For this would be as much to say that there is no taste whatever, i.e. no aesthetical judgment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.14

The locus of taste in Fang Hongjian and the narrator illustrates the interplay between the universality and singularity of taste. Fortress Besieged embodies another property of Kantian taste in linking judgments of taste to moral judg- ments. As Kant wrote: “Taste makes possible the transition, without any vio- lent leap, from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest. . . .”15 I discuss this property further below. Given that it makes distinctions of taste and social position on virtually every page, categorizing Fortress Besieged as a novel of manners seems theo- retically unproblematic. More difficult is the question of how it compares to other Chinese novels. More to the point, which Chinese novels can be justly described as novels of manners in the same sense? Besides The Story of the Stone, an eighteenth-century masterpiece up to the task of satisfying virtu- ally any generic definition, a scant few candidates present themselves. The Shanghai writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 張愛玲, 1920–1995) in her essays and drawings from the early 1940s exhibits the finely honed sense of urban

13 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 46 (sec. 6). 14 Ibid., 47 (sec. 7). 15 Ibid., 200 (sec. 59). The Cosmopolitan Imperative 217 taste and discernment that would make her the perfect candidate to be the pro- tagonist of any novel of manners. She nevertheless seems peculiarly reluctant to impart these qualities to the characters in her stories. The case of Bai Liusu, the patient heroine of “Love in a Fallen City” (“Qingcheng zhilian” 傾城之戀, 1944), is illustrative.16 A divorcee who returns to her natal family and is forced to endure stigma and endless verbal abuse from its members, Liusu remains sev- eral cuts above the vulgarians of the Bai household. She never, however, really pauses to pass judgment of social taste and moral discernment on those who render her life unendurable, preoccupied, no doubt, by her desperate personal struggle for survival. In her fiction Chang generally paints social distinctions with a broad brush. The character Cao Qiqiao, the protagonist of her cele- brated novella “The Golden Cangue” (“Jin suo ji” 金鎖記, 1943), for instance, would seem to provide an ideal vector for observing and passing judgment on Shanghai high society, to which she is an outsider. She marries into a family far above her own social standing and suffers continual discrimination during her early years in that household. Yet only rarely is there any deep consideration of the effects of social prejudice. Her own reminiscing about her own past is restricted to a brief and rather crude vignette of days working in an oil shop and her memories of the husky butcher slapping hunks of meat, a rather obvi- ous contrast to the bloodless invalid to whom she has been married off.17 There is no depiction of the fine gradations of social grace or lack thereof we see in Qian’s novel or in the nineteenth-century British novel of manners, from Jane Austen on. Other candidates for membership in the genre seem even farther removed. Mao Dun, for all his intelligence and keen awareness of Shanghai society, only occasionally offers us fully articulated social portraits in his characters. Any struggles for self-definition his characters might have undergone are notable by their absence. The great bourgeois tragic hero of Midnight, Wu Sunfu, for instance, is presented to us from the beginning quite full-grown. Mao Dun offers no clues as to what development process brought him to his current state, and Wu himself lacks any real self-conscious awareness of the problem- atic nature of his own status in the tentatively modern Shanghai of 1930. On a superficial level, the details to denote precise social status are all present—Wu eats Western lunches at an exclusive club, lives in a meticulously appointed house (described in great detail) and is married to an intensely romantic, if neglected, spouse. The focus of the narrative, however, is on his economic

16 See Karen Kingsbury’s translation in Chang, Love in a Fallen City, 109–68. 17 See Karen Kingsbury’s translation in Ibid., 169–234. 218 Huters activity and whether he will be able to hold his place as a successful domestic capitalist against rivals bank-rolled by Japanese imperialism. This sort of cataloguing runs into the obvious problems attendant upon claiming that China lacks such-and-such a literary genre. Quests like these have unmistakable whiff of invidiousness or even orientalism. This, in fact, is a major source of the discomfort attendant upon singling out a special posi- tion for Fortress in modern letters. This question, in turn, raises the issue of whether or not Qian’s novel is cosmopolitan merely in a myopic sense, in its focusing on that tiny fragment of the Chinese population struggling to live an easy life quite divorced from politics, and what is even more problematic, liv- ing in a way modeled as closely as possible on the European or American style. In other words, did Qian turn away from the diversity so readily at hand in Republican China and toward an assertion of a “universal,” foreign, standard? To answer this question, we must take a closer look at the protagonist and observer at the center of Qian’s novel, Fang Hongjian. Paradoxically, any sum- ming up of Fang’s personal characteristics would render him a highly unlikely candidate for an arbiter of social status and taste. The son of a self-satisfied and uncurious Qing dynasty mid-level degree holder ( juren 舉人) from a Jiangnan city just up the rail-line from Shanghai (the city referred to is conspic- uously based upon Qian’s hometown of Wuxi), Fang graduates from college and becomes engaged to the daughter of a parvenu banker who is, along with his bank, sojourning in Shanghai. When his fiancée dies not long before their scheduled marriage, Fang’s would-be in-laws use what would have been her dowry money to send the young man to Europe for four years in order for him to earn the coveted Ph.D. Thus far, then, there is little in his career to differenti- ate him from dozens of other scions of gentry families of high estate under the imperial regime now struggling to adapt to the harsh world of Chinese “semi- colonial modernity” by pursuing a Western education and earning a presti- gious degree. Neither does his subsequent failure to apply himself—the end of his stipendiary period finds him having frittered away his chance of earning a degree—mark him as unique. He decides at that point to buy a fraudulent degree from a diploma mill that soon proves itself unworthy of even that mod- est status. While a clear signal of moral lapse, this is by no means rare, at least in the world of the novel; Qian details the precedents. The episode is but one of a series of events showing the erosion of standards in modern China—a constant theme in twentieth-century Chinese fiction, and dating back to the late Qing novel—a process that encourages people to make false claims about themselves. What does set Fang Hongjian apart is the way in which he decides to ratio- nalize his action: he resolves to use the degree only to satisfy the expectations The Cosmopolitan Imperative 219 of his family and in-laws, but to make no mention of it in broader society. C.T. Hsia and other critics are correct in seeing in this decision the seeds of moral cowardice. It also carries, I think, broader implications. Here is a novel whose protagonist is determined at all points to pass devastating judgment but who is from the outset himself morally compromised. This would seem an ideal starting point for constructing a postmodern zone of vertiginous relativ- ity, but Fang quite self-consciously refuses to carry his deceit home (or, better to say, carry it away from home), in effect casting his first and most impor- tant negative judgment against himself. While this does lend a certain fixity to the novel’s moral perspective—it shows that Fang, if cowardly, at least has a conscience—it still leaves open the question of the origins of the implicit moral order upon which it bases its social critique. If nothing else, by giving Fang a conscience, Qian again asserts the unity between individual taste and universal morality—while Fang could easily claim the credit for the degree for himself, he insists on holding to a universal moral standard that seems to be honored only in the breech in the society to which he has returned. Fang Hongjian’s family has roots in traditional learning—Fang Dunweng, his father, is the only character of any significance in the novel who holds a degree from the old examination system—an old order that could serve as the source of Hongjian’s rectitude and judgment. This possibility, however, is ruled out even as it is raised. Fang Dunweng’s response to every problem that comes his way is utterly impractical and clichéd. Compounding this is the outright sil- liness of the books he gives Hongjian to read to prepare a homecoming speech at the local high school. (One choice maxim is “the hearts of the Chinese are sit- uated in the center, while those of Westerners diverge to the left.”) The speech itself, “A Review of the Influence of Western Culture on Chinese History,” ends up being a farce, as Fang misplaces his notes. In his panic he recalls nothing beyond fragments of nonsense, the most resonant being that the only true leg- acies of Western influence in China have been opium and syphilis. This reduc- tio ad absurdum undermines the possibility of constructive cultural exchange and mocks facile cultural universals. It should noted that Fortress Besieged’s derision of the past stands in pro- vocative contrast to the implicit attitude toward pre-modern China of several famous stories of modern “critical realism.” To cite just one example: the admi- rable, if outmoded, Lao Tongbao of Mao Dun’s “Spring Silkworms” (“Chuncan” 春蠶, 1932) is a man who has seen better days, having lived a full and satisfac- tory life in the old days. In the story, the advent of modern imperialism and capitalism transforms him from being someone in control of his own liveli- hood and intellectual life into an old man perpetually at a loss when confronted with a dizzying modernity. For all that May Fourth writers like Mao Dun were 220 Huters determined to break with the Chinese past, then, there is an underlying resi- due of nostalgia in some landmark May Fourth works that is missing from Qian Zhongshu’s tale. Moreover, when Fang Hongjian and his companions journey from Shanghai to a university deep in the interior, Fortress Besieged reveals a countryside that is oppressively and mindlessly traditional, little more than a negative backdrop. This rural China is no bastion of pastoral authenticity. One might even suggest that on this point the novel seems determined to counter Goethe’s famous 1827 remarks on China to Johann Peter Eckermann in their discussion of Weltliteratur: “the Chinese think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; as we soon find that we are perfectly like them, except that all they do is more clear, pure, and decorous, than with us.”18 Is it, then, a new “cosmopolitan” (and implicitly Western) moral scheme that supplies the framework of judgment on a Chinese society caught between old and new? The resemblance of Fortress Besieged to the British novel of man- ners of the 1930–1950 period would seem at first glance to lend credence to this possibility. For although Qian himself denied any influence from writers like Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh on his writing, the tone of his narrative is strikingly similar to that of his British contemporaries. The cultural milieu of Qian’s two years at Oxford—the same in which such novels were being produced—may explain the similarity. According to Qian, all the literary young men there, himself included, were reading Proust even as they looked askance at the vulgarity of the larger society in which they were situated. Yet Fortress Besieged’s similarity to its British contemporaries may be merely coin- cidental. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), for example, contains an episode in which the protagonist, Jim Dixon, gives a drunken speech strikingly similar in its effects to that given by Fang at the provincial high school. Amis’s novel can be ruled out as an influence for the simple reason that it was written and pub- lished several years after Qian’s. And in the absence of any evidence that Amis could read Chinese, influence the other way is implausible. A closer examination of the matter of moral grounding, however, suggests an essential uncertainty underlying Fortress Besieged’s fictional universe, which marks a crucial difference with its British contemporaries. The novel of manners may be defined as a conservative attempt to represent a universe of certainty founded on a firm capacity for character judgment, taste and gen- eral discernment, and therefore as an elite anchor point in a world of bewil- dering change. A number of British novels from that period admirably fill the bill. Perhaps the most famous and influential—a novel written at precisely the

18 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur,” in Damrosch, World Literature in Theory, 18. The Cosmopolitan Imperative 221 same time as Fortress Besieged—is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). The underlying context of Waugh’s work is the decline and imminent fall of a bet- ter English social order, and the text is suffused with the moral certainty and historicity of its Catholic background. This provides an ideal bulwark, however unreachable, against the moral squalor and vulgarity of modernity. The novel’s precisely contrived consonance between aesthetic and moral consciousness as exemplified by the idealized consummation of both in Roman Catholicism is striking. Amis’s Lucky Jim is even more explicit on the matter of social back- ground: after Jim Dixon’s drunken speech, the wealthy and aristocratic Gore- Urquhart presents himself as the deus ex machina rescuing the flailing and uncertain hero. Seeing through the younger man’s surface eccentricities and youthful foibles, Gore-Urquhart is able to recognize Jim’s essential taste and discernment. If the novel of manners is meant to be a guide in a troubled times, then, it seems paradoxically to be able to base itself only on some vision of a prior social stability and rectitude that can be nostalgically recalled clearly enough but brought to bear in the fallen present only imperfectly or partially. Fortress Besieged, in contrast, relentlessly negates all social precedents as mod- els for taste and behavior. If Fortress Besieged ridicules the Chinese past as a possible source of con- solation, it insistently represents illusions of and discontents with modernity to the same degree as it does the inadequacies of the past. Characters who return to China with authentic degrees from reputable foreign universities are ultimately no more to be relied upon as guides to behavior in a new society than Hongjian’s father and his father’s friends. These returnees includes the gullible Su Wenwan, the pretentious would-be politician Zhao Xinmei (who views Hongjian as his rival for Wenwan), the absurd poetaster Cao Yuanlang, or any of the participants in the boozy Shanghai salon in which Xinmei tries to embarrass Hongjian in front of Wenwan. The first time Hongjian pays a visit to Xinmei’s apartment, soon after both men had failed in their respective amorous pursuits, he hears the radio inside playing a song of “yellow” popular jazzy music, which causes him to pass a sharp judgment of taste on Xinmei, thus: “As he pushed the bell he thought, damn!, listening to songs like this is just like reading lewd books or looking at pornographic pictures, a sign of lapsed intellect or some kind of emotional upset—it’s hard to imagine that Zhao Xinmei’s heartbreak could have caused him to fall so far”(129)!19 While Hongjian’s harsh judgment is softened somewhat by its apologetic tone, his basic perception is akin to Su Wenwan’s judgment of the vulgarity of Mrs. Sun and to his own judgment of Miss Su—he feels superior based on distinctions

19 On “yellow music,” see Jones, Yellow Music. 222 Huters of taste. His leap to this moral conclusion demonstrates yet again the easy commerce between taste and morality. New ideas and attitudes brought in from the West, then, provide a no more reliable source of social wisdom than an atrophied past. This leaves stubbornly open the questions of what should serve as the basis for universalized judg- ments of taste. In the end the protagonist’s default position—quite an odd one for a social novel—seems to be one of resolute isolation: Fang finds no reli- able guides for behavior and discovers that overly enthusiastic participation in society brings the virtual certainty of losing one’s bearings. Fang Hongjian thus deliberately distances himself from the social whirl, and each of his interac- tions with others invariably leaves him further alienated from them. Fang’s iso- lation enables what accurate judgments as he can summon, even as it makes it harder and harder for him to interact with society in any meaningful way. Tang Xiaofu, an early love interest, is equally solitary. She is the only major character who can be thought of as being in any way genuine. She comes into the novel with only a vague familial connection to Su Wenwan, with her own family, personal history and social position all buried deep in the background. This background has evidently provided her with a rich capacity to discern the absurdities surrounding her, but while her acuity of taste is clearly repre- sented, its sources remain shrouded. She ends up being doubly the “girl who got away,” both from the diegetic frame and from Fang himself. Hongjian and Xiaofu’s social isolation is uncannily resonant with Qian’s own perceptions of the milieu in which he wrote and published his novel, Shanghai of the 1940s. The first two editions, published in three printings after the war, are headed by an author’s preface; all post-1979 editions I have seen carry a much shortened version. The later editions excise a long middle paragraph, which contains a list of names Qian thanks for their help in seeing the book published. The list is close to being a who’s who of the literary world of the time: the critic Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸, the critic and playwright Li Jianwu 李健吾, the editor Zhao Jiabi 趙家璧, as well as “good friends” Ke Ling 柯靈, an important publisher, Tang Tao, a prominent scholar, the writer Wu Zuxiang 吳組緗, and the poet Bian Zhilin 卞之琳. In 1980, all these names disappear from the preface. In a 1979 interview, Qian told me quite emphatically that they should not be included in any discussion of the novel, as they had not, in fact, been of any importance to it—the list had been added as a publishing “formality.”20 Just as Fortress Besieged relegates to social isolation those charac- ters capable of moral rectitude or authenticity of perception, Qian seemingly had much the same view of his own position in the literary world.

20 Interview with Qian Zhongshu, May 1979 at Stanford University. The Cosmopolitan Imperative 223

Fang Hongjian’s abrupt separation from the other characters and his other struggles with society suggest another narrative form at work: the novel of growth or education, or Bildungsroman. Unlike the novel of manners, the novel of education has been the subject of a good deal of scholarship.21 In a recent study of the genre, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco Moretti goes so far as to define the “classic,” or pre- 1820 form of that genre, as “the ‘symbolic from’ of modernity.”22 What Moretti means is that the Bildungsroman records a process of socialization that needs to be made explicit because the process of personal accommodation to soci- ety had been rendered increasingly problematic by the “new and destabiliz- ing forces of capitalism,” thus necessitating “an uncertain exploration of social space” which ends up being characterized by “mobility and interiority.” The problematic relationship with society in the Bildungsroman results in a defi- nite overlap with the novel of manners. The Bildungsroman’s focus on the pro- cess of individual development (as opposed to the fixed set of social values one finds in the novel of manners) is its definitive feature. After explaining the contentious relationship between the individual and the social space he or she seeks to inhabit, Moretti goes on to claim, somewhat surprisingly, that the Bildungsroman is “one of the most harmonious solutions ever offered to a dilemma conterminous with modern bourgeois civilization: the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization.”23 (emphasis in original) In explaining this “harmonious solution,” Moretti sees a vital social role for the Bildungsroman: it reconciles “the tendency toward individuality, which is the necessary fruit of a culture of self-determination . . . [with] the oppos- ing tendency to normality, the offspring, equally inevitable, of the mechanism of socialization.” (emphasis in original). He stipulates, moreover, the necessity that “as a ‘free individual,’ not as a fearful subject but as a convinced citizen, one perceives the social norms as one’s own. One must internalize them and fuse external compulsion and internal impulses into a new unity until the for- mer is no longer distinguishable from the latter. This fusion is what we usu- ally call ‘consent’ or ‘legitimation.’”24 (emphasis in original) Moretti posits an early end to this “harmonious solution” of self and society with the coming of

21 Some scholarly debate centers on the question of whether or not the form can even be said to exist. See, for instance, the discussion in Redfield, Phantom Formations, 38–62. 22 Moretti, The Way of the World, 4. 23 Moretti, The Way of the World, 15. 24 Moretti, The Way of the World, 16. 224 Huters an exploded social complexity that coincides with the Napoleonic wars.25 If the much later Lucky Jim fits almost perfectly into Moretti’s definition of the early Bildungsroman, with the hero ultimately finding a way to match his own sensibilities with a society he had initially found hostile, such a coincidence ironically bespeaks the decline of the form itself, which now subsists only as a minor form of comedy, or even farce. The ultimate collapse of Fang Hongjian’s world after his departure from Shanghai for the interior in 1938 would thus seem a good fit for Moretti’s description of the later, lapsed Bildungsroman, where the individual can longer merge with society so readily. If the European collapse into a world of strife represents a decline from an earlier, clearly perceived social totality, however, Qian’s version of the modern Chinese social order is one that has no such antecedents. It could never coalesce, even in the imagination, into the sort of society where it would make any sense to talk of stable social norms or urban customs. The struggles of Eileen Chang’s characters against outsized and hypertrophied challenges described above would seem to be the more apposite way for representing the painful exigencies of a modern and anar- chic Chinese urban society. Where does that leave Qian and Fortress Besieged? Qian’s fictional world ends up being even bleaker and narrower that Chang’s, forcing us to reinterpret the carefree play with social manners and insistent invocations of a universal taste that characterize much of the first half of the novel. This discord lies at the heart of the problem for critics who have faulted Fortress Besieged for failing to achieve organic wholeness. In superficially cleav- ing to the protocols of the novel of manners, however, what Qian has done is to construct a meticulously crafted illusion of a stable world in which enduring judgments of taste and value can be confidently rendered. As that world falls apart, he leads the reader to the utterly corrosive revelation that this world was weakly provisional to begin with. In other words, the abrupt shredding of the comfortable world Hongjian returned to in 1937, with the collapsed world he finds Shanghai has become two years later represented as a mirror-image of the initial world of stability, powerfully suggests the latter never had any substantial existence in the first place. Just at that point, Qian merges the con- flicting discourses of the cosmopolitan universal— “the depravities of global capitalism and imperialism, and the elitism of aesthetic distance”—offering at first a smooth surface of elite sensibility only to bring it crashing down into a world of irreducible and highly problematic multiplicity.

25 This seems to coincide with end of the heroic bourgeoisie described by Marx and explained in the Marxist literary tradition in greatest detail in the work of Georg Lukács. The Cosmopolitan Imperative 225

In discussing his novel in 1979, Qian said that his intent was to have “the war [of Resistance against Japan] at once remote and impinging, like the Napoleonic Wars in the novels of Jane Austen.”26 While I agree with this char- acterization, Qian was silent about a larger, and even more profound, “remote- ness” that hovers over the text. This is the huge gap between elite urban society and the rest of China, which remains largely outside the purview of the novel. Qian’s narrator makes no real effort made to reflect on the significance of the countryside, and this is surely a major reason why socially concerned critics of the late 1940s treated the work harshly. After the 1949 Communist takeover, the novel sank like a stone in a Chinese literary world that operated for thirty years under the auspices of Mao’s 1942 prescriptions about literature as exclusively a zone of social ameliorization.27 If anything, its picaresque episodes depicting Shanghai academics gingerly making their way into the interior, treats non- urban China even more cavalierly than its representations of traditional gentry and intellectuals returned from the West. Fortress Besieged represents a hol- lowed out world, but it leaves only that immense and inchoate social space outside the modern cities—one that is “poor and blank,” to use a phrase of Mao’s that reveals much about his actual views on the peasantry28—as the only alternative to the novel’s unyielding nihilism. In the final analysis, the novel is singular because it is a kind of “self-con- suming artifact,” which Stanley Fish defines as a work that constantly under- mines its own assumptions, or “becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment.”29 Fortress Besieged strictly delimits its own space, allowing nothing of the same sort to follow by undermining the very ground on which anything to come would be constructed. It is paradoxical in refusing to offer grounds for judg- ment or taste even as it mercilessly engages in just such judgments. The work is, in part, a cold exercise in demonstrating the problematics of literary impor- tation, a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the possibility of bringing the British novel to China—a kind of scorched earth of narrative possibility. Does it offer, then, something beyond thematic and structural nihilism? Did it clear space for anything else being erected on this burnt ground? Like the possibility suggested in Zhang Zhupo’s enigmatic comment used as the epigraph for this chapter, the question eludes any firm answer. In the strongest sense, however, this bleak novel does demonstrate in a variety of ways that the path to world

26 Huters, Qian Zhongshu, 118. 27 For the most complete account of Mao’s Talks, see McDougall, trans. Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art.” 28 Mao’s remark here is from his 1958 “Introducing A Co-operative.” 29 Fish, Self-consuming Artifacts, 3. 226 Huters literature can never be easy: what looks at first glance to be an easy accom- modation between the European and the Chinese novel proves in the end to be a powerful challenge to that very possibility. The ironic answer to the ques- tion of possible successors to Fortress Besieged is: the text “that got away.” Qian claimed that in the late 1940s he had virtually completed a novel entitled Baihe xin 百合心, to which he gave the French title Le Coeur d’artichaut (Heart of the Artichoke). But he lost the manuscript—perhaps a trifle too conveniently—in the family move from Shanghai to Beijing in the year of the founding the PRC, 1949. The title of this missing work contains a mischievous deconstruction, in that an artichoke vanishes in the process of seeking its heart. When taken with the fortuitous disappearance of the manuscript itself, the title produces a dou- ble absence, present and future: nothing more is to come, at least from Qian himself. Talking about the disappearance of Baihe xin back in 1979, Qian was quite open about the political background militating against another novel of manners being published in a new China which he had chosen not to leave, despite an offer to return to Oxford to teach. Only the vast social space left tantalizingly vacant in Fortress Besieged—to which Qian also gave the French title Foretresse assiégée—remains. He clearly signaled his readers he could not go there, although he may have meant to signal that the space is not closed to others. Qian’s “cosmopolitan imperative,” then, works both sides of an ideolog- ical tension between social critique and pure representation: Fortress Besieged presents an intricate representation of late-1930s elite China as a realm of difference, but it also ends up thoroughly deconstructing the very world it depicts. Qian’s complex cosmopolitanism, then, represents perhaps an aware- ness of the pitfalls hidden within the concept itself, something perhaps only a profound artistic imagination could keep in creative suspense. Epilogue: All Will Come Out in the Washing

Christopher Rea

todo saldrá en la colada all will come out in the washing 鹹碱水裏什麽髒都洗得掉 Don Quixote, Part II, ch. XXXVI Chinese translation by Yang Jiang1

The book is far from closed on Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. Qian is, of course, dead, and Yang just last year released her Complete Works. That nine- volume compendium includes a version of her latest work, After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou 洗澡之後), which was also published as a stand-alone volume in 2014. That novella, as mentioned in previous chapters, expresses the author’s strong desire for closure. Several archives nevertheless hold the promise of further discoveries. A 2014 conference about Qian Zhongshu co-sponsored by Jiangnan University and Exeter College of Oxford University, and held in Wuxi, offered new infor- mation about the couple from Oxford sources. Frances Cairncross (then the Rector of Exeter College) and Chen Li 陳立 revealed, for instance, that Qian in 1935 scored the highest mark on the examination on English literature for the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship in the three years the exam had been held; that he applied unsuccessfully for a lectureship at Oxford in 1937; and that he never supplicated for, and therefore may never have formally been conferred, an Oxford degree.2 These biographical details confirm existing impressions of Qian’s intellectual brilliance and indifference toward formal academic degrees. The second fact is a revelation, since biographical writings about Qian have invariably described him as being sought after by overseas universities, but never having sought such positions himself. Much work remains to be done to determine what institutional archives on the couple might exist from Soochow (where Yang studied), St. John’s College, Tsinghua University, Kwanghua University (where Qian taught), the Sorbonne, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (where they worked), Beijing Normal University (where their daughter, Qian Yuan, taught), their multiple publishers, and various organs of the Chinese Communist Party and the PRC government.

1 Tang Jiehede (xia) in YJWJ, vol. 6, 281. 2 Cairncross and Chen, “Qian Zhongshu and Oxford University.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299979_012 228 Rea

The couple’s letters have yet to be collected and published. They corre- sponded widely with friends and scholars inside and outside China, yet only a fraction of these materials are currently accessible to scholars. In 2013, a cache of sixty-six letters by Qian Zhongshu to a family friend was put up for auction, prompting protests from Yang Jiang and charges that some letters were fakes.3 Qian Zhongshu also wrote anonymous works that have yet to be identified. As early as middle school, he ghost-wrote private correspondences and public tributes for his father.4 How and how much he contributed to the English team- translation of Mao Zedong’s selected works remains unknown. But even pub- lished works, such as Guanzhui bian, bear re-reading for new insights. Thanks to Yang Jiang and various collaborators, Qian’s voluminous reading notes—in Chinese and other languages—from a lifetime of reading are also now being edited and published in Beijing in the Commercial Press’s series Manuscripts of Qian Zhongshu.5 These facsimile reprints of hundreds of Qian’s original note- books will be a treasure-trove for researchers for years to come. Other details about both writers likely await Yang’s passing. The Chinese saying holds that “the final word on a person follows the coffin’s close” (gai- guan lunding 蓋棺論定). But a more apt proverb may be found in the most famous novel Yang translated, Don Quixote: “All will come out in the washing.” Yang’s Chinese translation of this line refers to “washing out dirt,” an interpre- tation that calls to mind the dirt exposed by the moral scrubbing intellectuals undergo in her novel Taking a Bath. But Sancho Panza’s original words, todo saldrá en la colada, are more ambiguous, referring simply to “all” or “every- thing” (todo). Dirt might indeed come out in the washing, but so might the brilliance of the fabric’s colors. In the case of Qian, it seems likely that some scholars and friends have withheld information out of respect for his widow, who has worked so hard

3 For a sample of news reports and analysis of the controversy, see: Li, “Letters for auction despite widow’s protest”; An, “Auction cancelled for three controversial letters”; and You, “Is it illegal to auction off Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang’s letter manuscripts?” Yang Jiang’s ver- sion of events is recorded in the “Major Events” timeline she wrote for her Complete Works. See YJQJ, vol. 9, 508–18. 4 Yang, “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged,” 88. 5 The first three volumes of Qian Zhongshu shougao ji, subtitled Rong’anguan zhaji 容安館 札記 (Notes from the Hall of Modest Contentment), named after the couple’s Beijing apart- ment, appeared in 2003; twenty volumes of notes in Chinese appeared in 2011; and three of a planned fifty volumes of notes in foreign languages appeared in 2014. See Monika Motsch’s introduction (available in English, Chinese, and German) to first volume of the latter series for an account of how the project came together. For a brief news report in English, see: Li, “Manuscripts of Qian Zhongshu.” Epilogue: All Will Come Out in the Washing 229 to protect and shape his legacy. Yang acknowledges explicitly in After the Bath that to give her fictional characters a happy ending was—in a nod to her first stage play—her “heart’s desire” (chenxin ruyi 稱心如意).6 The same may be said of some of her efforts to shape public discourse about her family. Yang has sought to preempt readers’ imaginative responses to her work, such as by disal- lowing fan-fic sequels to her novel, or doing interviews in which she controls both sides of the conversation.7 Much of the recent biographical information about Yang and Qian has been filtered through Wu Xuezhao, Yang’s friend and de-facto literary agent, who has been intensely protective of her for at least a decade. Those actions, in my opinion, contrast with the open spirit of Yang’s releasing Qian’s manuscripts in facsimile form, which allows readers to make their own judgments. The interests of scholars aside, time will tell to what degree Qian’s and Yang’s cosmopolitan literary visions appeal to contemporary readers in general. In any event, cosmopolitanism will likely remain a pressing cultural imper- ative in China for some time yet. Nationalists fret about China’s persistent lack of “soft power”—namely, its charisma and influence, particularly in the realms of culture and ideas—despite its growing economic power. Foreigners may seek to profit off China, but they are not yet falling over themselves to live there or to emulate Chinese ways of thinking or living—an ardent wish of Chinese intellectuals expressed as early as 1902 in Liang Qichao’s futuristic novel The Future of New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中國未來記).8 Some artists have responded by making pop versions of Chinese cultural forms, as seen in the Zhang Yimou 張藝謀—designed Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics—a pageant of tai chi, zithers, and calligraphy. Another government-endorsed strategy has been to “go toward the world” (zou xiang shijie 走向世界), a slogan intended to mobilize the populace to close the gap between China and other countries, culturally as well as economically. For Chinese nationalists, Mo Yan’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012 represents, like the Beijing Olympics, another moment of Chinese arrival

6 Yang, Xizao zhi hou, 1–2. 7 At age 100, Yang allowed one newspaper interview in which questions were submitted in advance in writing and she chose which to answer. It is reprinted as: “Zuozai rensheng de bianshang: Yang Jiang xiansheng baisui wenda” 坐在人生的邊上：楊絳先生百歲問答 (Sitting on the Margins of Life: Q&A with Yang Jiang xiansheng at Age 100), in YJQJ, vol. 4, 339–355. On Yang choosing the questions, see YJQJ, vol. 9, 501. See also the self-dialogue in Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions. 8 On Liang’s novel, see chapter three of my book, The Age of Irreverence. 230 Rea on the global stage. The drama of figuring out how to make China more inter- national and cosmopolitan is sure to continue for years to come. The field of Chinese literary studies, meanwhile, continues to evolve its own cosmopolitan imperatives. “Sinophone studies,” to mention just one recent trend, has gained traction in North American academia as a way to move the field away from the mainland-centric, Han-chauvanistic, and nationalistic history of the discipline. Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, minority regions of the People’s Republic, and Chinese-language communities worldwide are coordi- nates of this new linguistic geography. Diaspora is passé—people settle and break the emotional tether to their mainland Chinese “origins,” becoming citi- zens of elsewhere. The Sinograph, or Chinese character, has also become a new object of scholarly attention as a living script worldwide that has both shaped and been shaped by modern technologies. The best of these efforts to make Chinese studies more cosmopolitan offer promising new directions. They expand the field’s geographic purview and aspire to an egalitarian critical ethos, which does not presume the moral supremacy of one writer over another based on his or her physical origins or racial/ethnic identity. At the same time, recent work by scholars such as Rudolf Wagner, Shuang Shen, and Nicolai Volland has shown that the literary land- scape within territorial China itself has often been more cosmopolitan than has generally been acknowledged. They advocate paying greater attention to foreign language publishing within China, as well as the internationalist ori- entation of literary production and cultural organizations during the Mao era. Cosmopolitanism, therefore, far from being merely an unfulfilled ideal of a bygone political era, remains a vital issue in the field of Chinese literary and cultural studies. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang are important to ongoing debates about cosmopolitanism for several reasons. They were multiliterate writers who trav- eled farther in their reading and writing than they did in person. Jia Zhangke’s 賈樟柯 acclaimed 2004 film The World (Shijie 世界) is set in a theme park containing miniature replicas of the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and Big Ben, whose slogan, “See the world without leaving Beijing” (buchu Beijing, zoubian shijie 不出北京，走遍世界), mocks the migrant worker-employees it con- fines. Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang (Beijing residents since the 1940s) real- ized the promise of that slogan in their own way. Their example challenges any theoretical paradigm of literary cosmopolitanism that privileges those who live outside their country of birth. They might have seen themselves as liv- ing and working on the margins of Chinese society, but they were never over- seas exiles. They also wrote primarily in Chinese, not in a non-native language Epilogue: All Will Come Out in the Washing 231 or the language of a colonial oppressor. These circumstances set them apart from the Nobokovs, Rushdies, and Ha Jins of the world. Qian and Yang’s devotion to literature also sets them apart from the lifestyle cosmopolitans so readily found in many places and ages. Only for brief periods during the Republican era were they members of a heady literary “scene” (Qian, as a writer for The China Critic in the 1930s; Yang as a playwright in the 1940s). Both, to be sure, used literature as a vehicle to express personal sensibility and self-image (Qian, the erudite bookworm; Yang, the modest, self-reflective observer). But literature, to them, was no mere ornament. Books stayed, for the most part in the library; reading notes adorned their home. Literature was not just another type of “cultural consumption” to complement movie, radio, and newspaper; it was their primary occupation, as well as being a pastime, a source of pleasure, and a terrain for intellectual exploration. Qian, in par- ticular, was exhilarated by similarities in figurative language, rhetorical tech- niques, and concepts found in disparate literary traditions, and he dedicated much of his career to identifying and analyzing them. Yang was and is a more conventional literary scholar, but her creative writing covers a wider range of forms, genres, and modes than Qian’s. Together, this pair of writers offers a new starting point for understanding the capacity and willingness of modern Chinese writers to navigate, interpret, and expand the world of letters.

Appendix: Works in English by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang

The following lists include both published translations into English and works origi- nally written in English. Works are in alphabetical order by title, with original Chinese title, if any, in brackets. I have corrected a number of citation errors appearing in A Collection of Qian Zhongshu’s English Essays. In some earlier works Qian’s name is given as Ch’ien Chung-shu or C.S. Ch’ien.

Qian Zhongshu

“A Chapter in the History of Chinese Translation.” The China Critic, VII:45 (8 Nov. 1934), pp. 1095–1097. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 37–42. A Collection of Qian Zhongshu’s English Essays 錢鍾書英文文集. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2005. [cited below as English Essays] “A Critical Study of Modern Aesthetics.” The China Critic, VII:14 (5 Apr. 1934), pp. 329– 330. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 31–33. “A Note on Mr. Wu Mi and His Poetry” (1937). English Essays, pp. 72–81. “A Note to the Second Chapter of Mr. Decadent.” Philobiblon, no. 2 (1948), pp. 8–14. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 388–397. Online at China Heritage Quarterly, no. 25 (March 2011): http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien-hsia.php?searchterm= 025_decadent.inc&issue=025. “An Early Chinese Version of Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’.” Philobiblon (Nanjing), no. 2 (March 1948): 10–17. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 374–87. “Book Note I: Selections of English Prose from Chaucer to Hardy.” Tsinghua Weekly, no. 35 (1931), pp. 761–762. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 7–8. “Book Note II: Selections from the Works of Su Tung-P’o.” Tsinghua Weekly, no. 36 (1932), pp. 747–748. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 9–11. Cat: A Translation and Critical Introduction [貓]. Yiran Mao, trans. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Ltd., 2001. “China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century.” Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography (Shanghai), I (1940), pp. 351–384. Thesis was submitted in 1937 for B. Litt degree at Oxford University. Reprinted in Adrian Hsia ed., The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998, pp. 29–68. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 82–140.

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“China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century.” Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography (Shanghai), 2.1–2.2 (1941), pp. 7–48; 2.3–2.4 (1941), pp. 113–52. Thesis was submitted in 1937 for B. Litt degree at Oxford University. Reprinted in Adrian Hsia, ed. The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998, pp. 117–214. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 141–280. China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Three Essays. Peking: s.n., 1945. “Chinese Literature.” Chapter 7 in The Chinese Year Book 1944–1945 (seventh issue). Tsao Wen-yan 曹文彥, ed. Shanghai: Chinese Year Book Publishing Company, 1946, pp. 115–128. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 281–304. “Correspondence: To the Editor of Philobiblon.” Philobiblon (Nanjing), no. 2 (1947), pp. 27–30. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 368–73. “Correspondence: To the Editor-in-Chief of T’ien Hsia.” T’ien Hsia Monthly, 4.4 (1937), pp. 424–427. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 66–71. “Critical Notice I: R.P. Henri Bernard, Le Père Matthieu Ricci et la Société Chinoise de son temps (1551–1610).” Philobiblon (Nanjing), no. 1 (June 1946), pp. 13–19. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 305–18. “Critical Notice II: Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Chinese: Their History and Culture.” Philobiblon (Nanjing), no. 1 (September 1946), pp. 30–37. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 319–32. “Critical Notice III: Clara M. Candlin Young, The Rapier of Lu, Patriot Poet of China.” Philobiblon, no. 1 (December 1946), pp. 40–49. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 333–49. “Epilogue.” Guoli Qinghua daxue niankan 國立清華大學年刊 (National Tsinghua University Yearbook). Peking, n.p., 1933. [An English essay appended to the college yearbook of which Qian was credited as “English editor”.] “Foreword.” Cyril Drummond Le Gros Clark, trans. The Prose Poetry of Su Tung-p’o. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1935, pp. xiii–xxii. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 43–52. “Foreword” [小引]. Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder,” by Yang Jiang. Howard Goldblatt, trans. Hong Kong: Renditions Books, Chinese University Press, 1984; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984, pp. 1–3. “Foreword” [小引]. A Cadre School Life, Six Chapters. Geremie Barmé, trans. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1982, pp. 11–13. Fortress Besieged [圍城]. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, trans. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1979; New York: New Directions, 2004; London: Allen Lane, 2005; London: Penguin Classics, 2006; Beijing: Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press, 2007. “Great European Novels and Novelists.” The China Critic, VI:20 (18 May 1933), p. 505. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 23–26. Appendix: Works in English by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang 235

Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays [人獸鬼；寫在人生邊上]. Christopher G. Rea, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters [管錐編]. Ronald C. Egan, ed. and trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998. “Myth, Nature and Individual.” The China Critic, VII:6 (8 Feb. 1934), p. 138. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 27–30. “On ‘Old Chinese Poetry’.” The China Critic, no. 6 (1933). Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 12–22. “On Writers” [論文人]. Phillip F. Williams, trans. In Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writing on Literature, 1893–1945. Kirk A. Denton, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 443–49. Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature [七綴集]. Duncan M. Campbell, trans. Leiden: Brill, 2014. “Poetry as a Vehicle of Grief” [詩可以怨]. Siu-kit Wong, trans. Renditions, nos. 21/22 (Spring/Autumn 1984), pp. 21–40. “Pragmatism and Potterism.” Tsinghua Weekly, no. 35 (1931), pp. 93–99. English Essays, pp. 1–6. “Souvenir” [紀念]. Dennis T. Hu, trans. In Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919– 1949. Joseph S. Lau, C.T. Hsia and Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 435–53. “Synaethesia” [通感]. Mark Bender and Xie Jianzhen, trans. Cowrie: A Chinese Journal of Comparative Literature, no. 1 (1983), pp. 1–20. The Besieged City [圍城]. Guangheng Shi and Shaoxin Wang, ed. Huizhu Han, trans. Beijing: Huayu jiaoxue chubanshe, 2008. “The Inspiration” [靈感]. Dennis T. Hu, trans. In Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919–1949. Joseph S. Lau, C.T. Hsia and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 418–34. “The Little Critic: Apropos of the ‘Shanghai Man’.” The China Critic, VII:44 (1 Nov. 1934), pp. 1077. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 34–36. “The Return of the Native.” Philobiblon (Nanjing), no. 4 (March 1947), pp. 17–26. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 350–67. “Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama.” T’ien Hsia Monthly, 1.1 (August 1935), pp. 37–46. Reprinted in English Essays, pp. 53–65; Renditions, no. 9 (Spring 1978), pp. 85–91. “Windows” [窗]. Martin Woesler, trans. 20th Century Chinese Essays in Translation. Martin Woesler, ed. Bochum: Bochum University Press, 2000, pp. 106–10. “Windows” [窗]. A Garden of One’s Own: A Collection of Modern Chinese Essays, 1922– 1945. King-fai Tam, ed. and trans. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2012, pp. 242–46. 236 Appendix: Works in English by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang

Yang Jiang

A Cadre School Life, Six Chapters [干校六記]. Geremie Barmé, trans. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1982; New York: Readers International, 1984. “Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions: Excerpt (‘The Value of Life’)” [走到人生邊上：自問自答 – 人生的價值]. Jesse Field, trans. Renditions, no. 76 (Autumn 2011), pp. 130–34. Baptism [洗澡]. Judith M. Amory and Yaohua Shi, trans. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007. “Cloak of Invisibility” [隱身衣]. David Pollard, trans. The Chinese Essay. David Pollard, ed. Hong Kong: Renditions Books, Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999, pp. 293–98. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 264–69. “Fang Wumei and Her ‘My Old Man’” [方五妹和她的“我老頭兒”]. Chinese Literature, no. 1 (1999), pp. 77–93. Forging the Truth [弄真成假]. Amy D. Dooling, trans. In: Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976. Amy D. Dooling, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 112–77. “Heart’s Desire: Act I” [稱心如意(第一幕）]. Christopher G. Rea, trans. Renditions, no. 76 (Autumn 2011), pp. 15–33. “Indian Summer” [小陽春]. Judith M. Amory and Yaohua Shi, trans. MCLC Resource Centre (June 2014). Online at: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/indian-summer/ Lost in the Crowd: A Cultural Revolution Memoir [陸沉]. Geremie R. Barmé, trans. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989. “My Translations” [記我的翻譯]. Judith M. Amory and Yaohua Shi, trans. Renditions, no. 76 (Autumn 2011), pp. 98–103. “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged” [記錢鍾書與《圍城》]. Jesse Field, trans. Renditions, no. 76 (Autumn 2011), pp. 68–97. “Preface.” A Collection Of Qian Zhongshu’s English Essays 錢鐘書英文文集. Beijing: Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press, 2005, pp. vii–viii. Six Chapters from my Life ‘Downunder’ [干校六記]. Howard Goldblatt, trans. Seattle: University of Washington Press; and Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1984. Reprinted 1988. Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School: Memoirs from China’s Cultural Revolution [干校 六記]. Djang Chu, trans. Boulder: Westview Press, 1986. “The Art of Listening” [聽話的藝術]. David Pollard, trans. The Chinese Essay. David Pollard, ed. Hong Kong: Renditions Books, Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999, pp. 289–298; New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 260–64. Appendix: Works in English by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang 237

“The Cloak of Invisibility” [隱身衣] Geremie Barmé, trans.China Heritage Quarterly, no. 28 (2011). Online at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien-hsia.php? searchterm=028_cloak.inc&issue=028. Toward Oblivion [將飲茶] (excerpts). Daniel Ngai, trans. Renditions, no. 38 (Autumn 1992), pp. 145–79. “We Three: Parts I and II” [《我們仨》第一部和第二部]. Jesse Field, trans. Renditions, no. 76 (Autumn 2011), pp. 104–29. “What a Joke” “大笑話”[ ] Christopher G. Rea, trans. Renditions, no. 76 (Autumn 2011), pp. 34–67. Windswept Blossoms [風絮]. Edward M. Gunn, Jr., trans. In: Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology. Edward M. Gunn, Jr., ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, pp. 228–75. Bibliography

Abbreviations

YJQJ Yang Jiang quanji 楊絳全集 (Complete Works of Yang Jiang). 9 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2014. YJWJ Yang Jiang 楊絳. Yang Jiang wenji 楊絳文集 (Yang Jiang Collected Works). 8 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004. YJZL Tian Huilan 田蕙蘭, Ma Guangyu 馬光裕, and Chen Keyu 陳珂玉, eds. Qian Zhongshu Yang Jiang yanjiu ziliao 錢鍾書楊絳研究資料 (Research Materials on Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang). Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010.

Books and Articles

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academic institutions Austin, John 97, 100 marriage compared with 166, 174–175 autobiography See also marriage and the academy Fortress Besieged viewed as 184–185 setting of Qian’s Fortress Besieged and public appreciation of Qian and (Weicheng) 160, 166–167 Yang’s work 157, 171–172, 179–180 setting of Yang’s Taking a Bath Qian’s scholarship as 49 (Xizao) 68, 72–73, 160, 166 Qian’s view of the prejudicial nature of setting of Yang’s “What a Joke” 173–174, 183–184, 184n10 (“Da xiaohua”) 68, 72–73, 167–168 tension between expressing and social atmosphere of 166–168 repressing political grievance in Yang’s The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane of memoirs 202–203 Alain-René Lesage of women in twentieth-century and the picaresque genre 96 China 157–158n2, 203–204 Qian’s reading to Qian Yuan 94–95 Yang and Qian’s experience reflected Yang Jiang’s translation of 92, 94–95, 96 in Taking a Bath 78, 137 After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou) of Yang 10 Yang’s 11–12, 176, 183–184, 187–188, filial piety and moral purity valorized in 203–204 138–139, 156 See also Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre marriage of Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng in School; We Three 86, 156, 176, 208 and Yang’s desire for closure 86, 156, Ba Jin 155, 214 207–208, 227, 229 Babbitt, Irving 137n9 Amis, Kingsley 220, 221 Barmé, Geremie R. 77n28 Amory, Judith M., 11, 92n9, 169n26 Berlant, Lauren 180, 181, 204 Anti-Rightist Campaign Boucher, Geoff 136n7 criticism of Qian Zhongshu in the British literature wake of 187 influence on Yang 21 and Du Lilin (fictional character) in PRC official-approved British authors in After the Bath 86, 156, 208 Yang’s Taking a Bath 142 intellectual persecution during 46–47, Qian’s two “handles” of metaphor 140 construction and 113–114 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 2, 6 See also Austen, Jane; Fielding, Henry; Aristotle Guanzhui bian; James, William; theories of 67, 68 Shakespeare, William; Shaw, George wife of 174 Bernard; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Wilde, Yang’s translation of Poetics by 108n30 Oscar Austen, Jane Buddhism 12, 58, 99, 117, 210 Chinese novels of manners compared Burrin, Philippe 135, 155 with 217 Emma 144 Cadre School. See Six Chapters of Life in a war setting as inspiration for setting Cadre School of Fortress Besieged 225 Cao Wuwei 179 Yang’s essay on 66, 68–69, 72, 197 Cao Yu 8n15, 21 Yang’s stories compared with 68–69, 77, Cairncross, Frances 227 78, 144 Cervantes, Miguel de Index 253

Flemish tapestry metaphor of the Western. See Aristotle; Phaedo of Plato translation process 87, 88–90 re-translated by Yang; Plato; Virgil See also Don Quixote comedies of manners Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing) 144n26, 158n4, Henry Fielding on “the comic” 67–68 159, 216–217, 224 and serious historical issues 26–29, Chen Linrui (penname Shi Huafu) 38–39, 145n29, 145–146 Evening Banquet (Wanyan) 19n15, 20 and Western eighteenth-century and the Tsinghua circle 21 fiction 67–69, 143 Yang’s essay, “Remembering Shi Huafu” Yang’s comic sensibility 14–15, 25–35, (“Huainian Shi Huafu”) 21n18 38–40, 138, 143–148 Yang’s playwriting encouraged by 19–20, Confucianism 24n23 Analects of Confucius 198 Chen Qiyuan 116 and Buddhist learning 99, 210 Chen Shidao 57, 60–61 character jing used multivalently by Chen, Theodore Hsi-en 139n12, 140nn15–16 Yang and 99 Chen Yuan 52 and Chinese intellectuals preference The China Critic (Zhongguo pinglun for the “truth” 149 zhoubao) classic texts of 99, 188 Liberal Cosmopolitan club of 6–7, 7n11 humanist values of 136–137, 137n9, Qian’s writing for 8, 8n15, 43n5, 231 188–189 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences manipulated Confucian matrimonial Hu Qiaomu 177, 177n51, 181 ritual in Forging the Truth 34 Qian and Yang as researchers at 5, 46 Neo-Confucianism 50 Qian as deputy head of 165, 172n34 thought and philosophy reflected in Qian’s restricted setting of 68 work 124 Chuan, T.K. 6, 7 thought and philosophy reflected in Yang’s Cicero on the role of comic drama 67, 68, work 9, 34, 136, 154, 188–189, 198 85, 85n41 Tu Weiming’s views and promotion classical tradition of 137n9 allusions used by Yang to express her loss cosmopolitanism of loved ones 191–193 as a cultural imperative in China 3, 64, Analects of Confucius 198 229–230 and civility 194–195 and domesticity 11, 176–178, 194–195 continued relevance of 64 See also We Three Laozi 121–123, 124 imperialist vision of the Greater East Mencius 127, 188 Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere 4 Qian on classical poetry 41–64, 124 literary. See literary cosmopolitanism See also Guanzhui bian; On the Art of “obsession with China” contrasted Poetry (Tan yi lu); Poems of the Song with 158, 158n4, 177, 212 Qian’s use of the language of classical of Qian’s Fortress Besieged 218–226 poetry 5, 110, 193 and relevance of the classical tradition and the Republican-era project of in the modern world 64, 206–209 producing intellectuals equal to their Cultural Revolution Western counterparts 3–4, 184 and Guanzhui bian 111, 120–123, 126–132 and the self-refinement of Yao Mi Qian and Yang sent to rural Henan during (fictional character from Taking a 78, 95, 120, 125–126, 129, 133, 134–135, 148 Bath) 8–9 See also Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre See also self-refinement School; We Three 254 Index

struggles of “sent down” academics and Yang’s “Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction” intellectuals 132, 138 (“Fei’erding guanyu xiaoshuo de and Western citations in Qian’s Art of lilun”) 66–68, 67nn6–7, 85n41, 197 Poetry 125–126, 128 Field, Jesse 10, 11, 43n6, 69n14, 136–137n8, in Yang’s 1966 and 1967: Dark Clouds and 165, 176n48, 176 Silver Linings (Bingwu dingwei nian Fish, Stanley 12, 225 jishi—wuyun yu jinbian) 48n14, 78, Forging the Truth (Nongzhen chengjia) of Yang 78n31, 148–149, 149nn32, 36 14, 14n1, 19n12, 19, 136–137, 161, 163n15, See also Anti-Rightist Campaign; Three 164 Antis and Five-Antis Campaigns marriage as an economic venture 26–35 Zhang Yanhua (fictional character) in Dai Wangshu 6, 7 26, 28–29, 31–35, 161, 163n15 Derrida, Jacques 2 Fortress Besieged (Weicheng) of Qian Dickens, Charles 3, 142 Zhongshu Ding Ling, “Shanghai Spring 1930” 25 as autobiography 184–185 Dinner at Eight by George S. Kaufman and Bildungsroman genre compared with Edna Ferber 19n15, 20 223–224 divorce cosmopolitanism of 218–226 in China since the market liberalizations Fang Hongjian (fictional character in) of the 1990s 175 11, 12, 160, 160n9, 221–224 China’s “Year of Divorce” (2004) 175 C.T. Hsia on 210–211 in Eileen Chang’s “Love in a Fallen City” marriage and the academy compared in (“Qingcheng zhilian”) 217 157, 157n1 and the New Marriage Law (1950) 159 and Taking a Bath by Yang 211 in Yang’s Taking a Bath and After the Tang Xiaofu (fictional character in) Bath 80, 86, 156, 208 12, 160n9, 222 Don Quixote fraud and deception “All will come out in the washing” 227, 228 academic and intellectual 161–162, Flemish tapestry metaphor for translation 163n15, 164, 171, 175, 175n44, 218 in 87, 88–90 contrasted with Qian’s and Yang’s Ormsby’s translation of 88n5 reputations for integrity 174–178 and the picaresque genre 96, 96n15 in courtship and marriage 79–81, Yang’s (Tang Jiehede) translation of 8n16, 162–164, 163n15 11, 89–91, 95, 96, 97–106, 133, 133–134n3, See also Forging the Truth 172 political 81–84 Dooling, Amy D., 11, 68n9, 144n26, 150 See also Taking a Bath Dream of the Red Chamber. See Story of the Stone in Qian’s Fortress Besieged 161, 171, 175, Du Fu 47n10, 114 218 Monika Motsch’s Mit Bambusrohr und in Yang’s Taking a Bath 79–84, 162–164 Ahle 130 See also self-deception; truth “Six Poems on Poetry” (“Xi wei liu jueju”) French literature 54n35, 54 Gil Blas. See The Adventures of Gil Blas of Dumas, Alexander 3, 87 Santillane Qian’s knowledge of 12, 111, 126 Egan, Ronald 11, 93 “well-made play” form 19n14, 23–24 Friedrich, Michael 11, 128, 128n44, Fielding, Henry 129n46 on “the comic” 67–68, 69 Fu, Poshek 18, 21 Index 255

German literature marriage as an economic venture 24–26 folksongs using the image of separation preface to first published edition of across deep waters 116 19–21 Goethe 12, 220 staging by Shanghai United Arts Theatre Qian’s essay, “Reading Laokoön” group 18–19 (“Du La’ao kong”) 124 Hockx, Michel 8n19, 8 Qian’s knowledge of 12, 111, 126 Honglou meng. See Story of the Stone Gewurtz, Margo 11, 149n33, 150 Hsia, C.T., 51–52n25, 176n47, 186–187, 219 Gil Blas. See The Adventures of Gil Blas obsession with China characterization of Santillane of modern Chinese cultural Glosser, Susan 27, 32n35 production 158n4, 177, 212 Goethe, Johanne Wolfgang von 12, 220 on Qian’s Fortress Besieged 210–211 Goldblatt, Howard 65, 66, 162n13, 171 on Yang’s We Three 200 Goldsmith, Oliver, She Stoops to Conquer Hu Qiaomu 177, 177n51, 181 68, 68n10 Hu Xiansu 137n9, 141, 141n19 Guanzhui bian (Limited Views) of Qian Huang Miaozi 201 Zhongshu Huang, Nicole 27n27 Art of Poetry (Tan yi lu) compared with Huang Tingjian 55, 110, 123–126 allusive style of 50–51 as the capstone of Qian’s scholarly and the Jiangxi School of Poetry 50n19, writings 109–111, 119 59–60 Chinese and Western ideas compared in “On Star Falling Temple” (“Ti Luoxing si”) 117–118 63n54 Cultural Revolution context of authorship Qian’s discussion of 60–61, 123 of 111, 120–123, 126–132 “Traveling Through Wu Mountain, figurative language of literary Chinese Song Maozong Dispatched a Rider linked to Western forms 112–114 to Bequeath a Rare Wine” (“Xingci See also Qian Zhongshu, essay, Wushan Song Maozong qian qi song “Synaesthesia” (“Tonggan”) zhehua chuyun”) 62n53 literary Chinese (wenyan) used for 5, 110 Huang Zuolin 18, 20, 24n23 motifs of literary Chinese linked to Kugan Theater troupe 19, 36n38 Western forms 115–117, 126 Huters, Theodore 12, 123n37 poetic devices of literary Chinese linked to Western forms 114–115 Ibsen, Henrik 4, 34n36 prefaces (“Xu”) written for 127–129, invisibility 129–130 and approbation of Yang by the state two “handles” of metaphor construction 201–203 discussed in 113–114 “Cloak of Invisibility” essay by Yang 165, Gunn, Edward 14, 22, 24, 26 176 domestic privacy 204, 206 Habermas, Jürgen 135–136, 137 evasion as a style of literary Hahn, Emily 7 cosmopolitanism 12, 12n23 Hazlitt, William 1–2 monumentalizing of Qian resisted by Heart’s Desire (Chenxin ruyi) of Yang 136 Yang 183, 185–186, 206 critical reviews of 18–19, 19n12 and philosophical contemplation 181 Lady Mao (fictional character) of private life made public in as caricature of a new woman autobiography 157, 196–197, 201 in 25–26 and surveillance 165 256 Index

James, William 115 literary cosmopolitanism Japan and the cases of Qian and Yang 2–3, 5, 8, Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere 12–13, 230–231 (Dai-tō-a kyōeiken) 4 defined 2–3 occupation of Shanghai 11, 14, 15–19 evasion as a type of style of 12, 12n23 Shinkankakuha (new sensationalist) See also invisibility writers 7 lifestyle cosmopolitanism contrasted with War of Resistance against 4, 225 6, 10, 231 Jia Zhangke 230 and the Nanjing decade 4, 6–7 Jia Zhifang 141, 141n19 and the prescriptive cultural policies of Jin Ping Mei 210 the Mao era 5, 11, 125–126, 146–147 Qian Zhongshu on life as a book in Larson, Wendy 11, 22n20 relation to 9–10n20 Lazarillo de Tormes. See The Life of Lazarillo shallow hypocrisy contrasted de Tormes and His Fortunes and Adversities with 24–26, 138, 141–142, 144–148, 152 Lessing, Gotthold, Laokoön 124 travel abroad not a requirement of 6–8, Li Chen 227 230–231 Li Jianwu 8n15 as type and aspiration 138 and cultural resistance in Shanghai 21 wen as a metaphor for 10 Qian Zhongshu’s novel writing See also classical tradition encouraged by 222 Yang’s intellectual model presented in and resistance drama in Shanghai 21 Cadre School and Taking a Bath 8–9, Rosy Clouds of Dawn (Yun cai xia; 11, 133–135, 137–139 adaptation of Scribe’s Adrienne Liu Kezhuang 19, 60 Lecouvreur) 19n14 Liu Meizhu, interview with Yang 179, 197 and the Shanghai Theater Arts Society Liu Na’ou 6, 7 (Shanghai juyishe) 23 Lu Ji 112 and Yang’s Heart’s Desire 18, 19–20 Lu Xun 19, 34, 159, 167n23, 213 Yang’s playwriting encouraged by 19–20, Lu You 51, 51n23, 57 24n23, 36 Lukács, Georg 224n25 Li Tonglu 137n9 Luo Hou (fictional character). See under Liang Qichao 3, 229 Taking a Bath (Xizao) of Yang Jiang Liang Shiqiu 137n9 The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and Mai Ye 19n12 His Fortunes and Adversities Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing) 219–220 foreign translations made during Midnight (Ziye) 213, 217–218 censorship in Spain 94 “Spring Silkworms” (“Chuncan”) 219 and the picaresque genre 96, 96n15 Mao Zedong Yang Jiang’s translation of 92, 94, 96–97 founding of the PRC (1949) 92 Limited Views. See Guanzhui bian on the peasantry 225 Lin Shu 3 Selected Works and poetry translated into collaborative translation process of English by Qian Zhongshu 5, 133n2, 87–88, 89, 95 177, 177n50, 228 La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Art and translated by 87 Literature” 51–52, 137, 225 Qian’s essay on translations by 88–89, 97 Maoism and the Mao era use of translation to assuage grief 87, 106 cosmopolitanism as a strategy for resisting Link, Perry 160 co-optation by 11 Index 257

cultural climate of 5, 133–156 Mei Guangdi 137n9 passim 140, 160 Mo Yan 178, 229–230 “public bath” required of intellectuals Monty Python’s Flying Circus 174 during political campaigns 77, 82 Moretti, Franco 223–224 marriage Motsch, Monika 11, 130–131 and the academy. See marriage and the Mu Shiying 6, 7 academy and intellectual autonomy 165–166 Nabokov, Vladimir 1, 12 marital strife 159, 166, 175 new women (xin nüxing) See also divorce Lady Mao (fictional character) in Yang’s New Marriage Law (1950) 159 Heart’s Desire 25–26 and the pursuit of economic portrayed by May Fourth writers 32–34, advantage 14–15, 24–35 34n36 of Qian and Yang 157, 158–159, 176–177 Shen Huilian (fictional character) in Western-inspired notions of 159 Yang’s Windswept Blossoms compared wives of philosophers 174 with 38 marriage and the academy Yanhua (fictional character) in Yang’s institutional mindset as the norm of Forging the Truth compared with 167–168 26, 31–35 institutional mindset embodied by Yang and Qian 158–159, 174–175 Ogawa Tamaki 53 and intellectual provincialism 158–159, On the Art of Poetry (Tan yi lu) of Qian 41, 176–177 54–60, 63–64, 110, 123, 125 and the politics of exceptionalism aesthetic predispositions of 54–55, 212 176–178 content of 41, 41n1, 57–58 as testing grounds for authenticity Huang Tingjian’s work in 57 161–164 preface to 126–127 as testing grounds for independence revision of 5, 42 165–169 Yuan Mei’s work discussed in 56, as twined institutions 157–160 58–59 Marvin, R.S., “Is Communism Inevitable?” 91–92, 92n9, 107–108 Pan, Quentin (Pan Guangdan) 6, 7, 141, Marxism 141n19 on the exchange value of People’s Daily 201–202, 202f8.2 commodities 101–102 Phaedo of Plato re-translated by Yang Karl Marx’s admiration of Henry Fielding’s 5, 93 novels 66 as a “literal” (siding) Chinese rendition Marxist literary tradition 224n25 of the “literal” English translation May Fourth 106–107 European concepts of the modern and and Yang’s personal concern with the 136, 159 death of her loved ones 107–108, and the international turn in Chinese 181–183 literary culture 3–4, 219–220 “Translator’s Postscript (“Yi hou ji”) 107, literature not mentioned in Guanzhui bian 182 120 Plato new women portrayed by writers of and comedy 68 32–34, 34n36 Phaedo. See Phaedo of Plato re-translated See also new women by Yang 258 Index pleasure essay, “Reading Laokoön” (“Du La’ao as fundamental to the nature of kong”) 124 intellectual work emphasized by essay, “Synaesthesia” (“Tonggan”) 63–64, Yang 11, 22, 39, 138, 148 64n55, 110, 112 hedonism of Wang Er (fictional character History of Song Poetry and Poets in Wang Xiaobo’s The Golden Years) (Song shi ji shi) 187 151–153, 154 interviewed by Theodore Huters 222 Poems of the Song (Songshi xuanzhu) Limited Views. See Guanzhui bian of Qian 41, 57, 63, 110 “Lin Shu’s Translations” (“Lin Shu de content of 50, 50n19 fanyi”) 88–89, 97 critical reviews of 53–54, 187 lost novel, Le Coeur d’artichaut Huang Tingjian and 50–51, 50n19, 51n23 (Baihe xin) 226 on the lack of “imagistic thinking” Manuscripts of Qian Zhongshu (Qian (xingxiang siwei) of Song poets 51–52 Zhongshu shougao ji) 228, 228n5 Lu You 51, 51n23 Mao’s Selected Works and poetry translated preface to 51–53 by 5, 133n2, 177, 177n50, 228 Qian’s writing of 47, 49–50 Patchwork (Qi zhui ji) 9n20, 10n21, 55–56, Tao Qian and 53 88n3, 89n6, 110n2 Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral Life (Huaiju poetry. See Poetic Remains of an Ephemeral shicun) of Qian 41, 43–44, 56, 63, 194 Life (Huaiju shicun) “Autumn Meditations” (“Qiuhuai”) posthumous public image of 183, 44–46, 47 185–186, 206 “On the Way to Hubei” “reeducation” in the countryside 78, 95, (“Fu E daozhong”) 46, 47–50 120, 125–126, 125–126, 129, 133, 134–135, 148 Qian Jibo (Qian Zhongshu’s father) 43n3 return to Shanghai after teaching in the Qian’s public tributes to 228 interior 16 Qian Yuan (daughter of Qian and Yang) Song shi xuanzhu. See Poems of the Song and Beijing Normal University 227 story, “Cat” (“Mao”) 8n14, 73, 166, 166n20 birth in England 190 story, “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit death of 5, 69, 157, 192–193 to Mr. Qian Zhongshu (“Mogui yefang malleable identities of 190–191, 199–200 Qian Zhongshu xiansheng”) Our Qian Yuan (Women de Qian Yuan) 173–174, 183–184n10, 184 173n39, 201 Tan yi lu. See On the Art of Poetry Qian’s playful teasing of 190–191 travels abroad 8n16, 172n34, 230 Yang’s relationship with 172 untitled forward in Motsch, Mit Qian Zhongshu Bambusrohr und Ahle 130–131 on biographical and autobiographical writing 173–174 Rea, Christopher 64 and the cultural climate of the Mao Ren Yuan 60–61 era 5, 132, 133–135 Republican era death of 5, 175 project of producing intellectuals equal as deputy head of the Chinese Academy of to their Western counterparts 3–4, Social Sciences 165, 172n34 7–8, 184, 218 essay, “A Blurry Bronze Mirror” (“Mohu de Qian’s Western-style education and tongjing”) 53–54 upbringing during 42–43, 181, 231 essay, “Explaining ‘Literary Blindness’ ” setting of Qian’s story, “Cat” (“Shi ‘wenmang’”) 119n30 (“Mao”) 8n14, 73, 166, 166n20 Index 259

setting of Yang’s “What a Joke” zhengjing (propriety) used by Yang 99, (“Da xiaohua”) 68–69, 72–73, 73n22, 100 77, 93, 167–168, 167n23 self-refinement sexism of literary sphere of 7n11 individual capacity for asserted by Western-inspired notions of Yang 65–66, 78, 85 marriage 159–160, 167 politically-coerced introspection as a in Yang’s memoir We Three 204 parody of 65–66 Yang’s publications during 69–72 of Yao Mi (fictional character) 8–9, 85, Rojas, Carlos 11, 133–134n3 141, 162 Russian-inspired literary criticism Shakespeare, William 21, 105, 105n26, 112, 142 ignored by Yang 67 Shanghai and Andrei Zhdanov (Ridan Nuofu) Japanese occupation of 11, 14, 15–19 130, 131 resistance drama 21 and the Shanghai Theater Arts Society Sartre, Jean-Paul 174 (Shanghai juyishe) 23 Scribe, Augustin Eugène 19n14 society depicted in the writing of Eileen self-centeredness Chang 216–217 classical poetic premise of 64 wartime deprivation 22–27 Yang’s mundane view of 22, 24, 39–40 Shao Xunmei (Sinmay Zau) 7 marriage as the pursuit of economic Shaw, George Bernard 4, 21 advantage 14–15, 24–35 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 114–115, 115n14 of romantic idealism portrayed by Yang in Shen Fu, Six Chapters of a Floating Life Windswept Blossoms 37–39 (Fusheng liuji) 150 self-criticism Shen Jiji 48 during the Cultural Revolution 133–135 Shen, Shuang 4n7, 7–8, 230 during the Three-Antis and Five Antis Shen Yanbing. See Mao Dun campaigns 140–141, 160 Shi Huafu. See Chen Linrui See also Taking a Bath Shi Rong 60 failure of coerced imposition of 77–78, Shi Zhecun 6, 7, 176 79 Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School true change arising from voluntary (Ganxiao liu ji, Yang’s Cultural Revolution self-examination 65–66, 79, 84, 85 memoir) self-deception on the pleasure of intellectual explored in Taking a Bath 79–85 work 22n20, 138, 148 as a theme in twentieth-century Chinese publication of 72 fiction 218 Qian and Yang’s devotion to each other in Yang and Qian’s writing in 171 compared 65–66, 77–78, 169–171 Qian’s forward to 132 self-possession and the revolutionary environment of a female guest at an inn in surrounding intellectuals 5, 11, Don Quixote 99 133–156 passim 160 of individuals in Yang’s Taking a Bath 138 and the tension between expressing as a pre-requisite to critical and moral and repressing political integrity 152, 177–178 grievance 149–151, 203 of Qian compared with the aloof and Windswept Blossoms (Fengxu) 38 philosophical life detailed in Yang’s prose style 150–151, 154–155, 176 Phaedo 187 Song Qi 64 Wang Er’s (fictional character in Wang Soviet Union, and the Chinese Communist Xiaobo’s The Golden Age) sense of 152 Party 4–5, 131, 139 260 Index

Spanish literature Tang Xianzu 105, 105n26 Qian’s knowledge of 12, 111, 126 Tao Qian 53 See also Don Quixote; The Life of Lazarillo Three Antis and Five-Antis campaigns de Tormes and His Fortunes and “public bath” required of Adversities intellectuals 77, 82 Sterne, Laurence 112–113 “The Denunciation Meeting” Story of the Stone (Shitou ji, also known (“Kongsu dahui”) of Yang 79 as Dream of the Red Chamber, Honglou T’ien Hsia Monthly (Tianxia yuekan) meng) 113, 216 and literary cosmopolitanism 6–7 Qian’s writing for 6, 8, 42n2 Taking a Bath (Xizao, translated as Baptism) translation process of Yang compared to turning over a piece of silk academic setting of 68, 72–73, 160, 166 brocade 88 as a comedy of manners in a revolutionary Flemish tapestry metaphor of Cervantes context 144–148 of 87, 88–90 and the cultural climate of the Mao era “joint translation” (liangren heyi) 5, 133–156 passim described by Yang 87 fictional characters in. See Taking a Lin Shu’s collaborative approach Bath (Xizao, translated as Baptism) to 87–89, 95, 97 of Yang—fictional characters and tuomeng (process of bringing the and Fortress Besieged compared 65n3, dead back to life) 104–106, 107 211 Yang on 89–90, 105–107, 182 metaphor of washing/moral scrubbing in Yang’s fictional character, Luo Hou, on 77, 82, 86, 228 87, 95 self-refinement treated in 8–9, 65–66, travel 78, 85, 141, 162 as an allegory for death 182, 191–192 truth and falsehood explored in 79–85, Chen Yuan’s travel poems 52 162–163 detachment of a sent-down youth in Wang Yang and Qian’s experience reflected in Xiaobo’s The Golden Years 151–153 78, 137 during the Nanjing decade 4 Taking a Bath (Xizao, translated as Baptism) and escape as a leitmotif in Qian’s Fortress of Yang—fictional characters Besieged 157, 160, 160n9, 221–224 Ding Baogui and Zhu Qianli 81–83 escapist mood of the Shanghai war Du Lilin 79–81, 83–84, 85–86, 142–143, years 18, 24 145, 156, 163, 208 Jianhou (fictional character) romance of Yao Mi and Xu writing a travelogue to prove his Yancheng 72–73, 80–81, 84, worldliness 166 141–145, 147, 153, 155, 162–163, 166, not a requirement of literary 207–208 cosmopolitanism 6–8, 230–231 Nina Shi 9, 81, 81n37 by Qian and Yang 8n16, 172n34, 230 Yao Mi and her mother 69, 80 “Sinophone studies” of citizens in Yao Mi and Xu Yancheng’s test of diaspora 230 self-criticism 147 truth Yao Mi’s self-refinement through artistic truth compared with objective fact reading 8–9, 141, 162 discussed by Qian 118 Yu Nan 79–80, 81, 83, 86, 160, 171n32 Chinese intellectuals’ Confucian Tang Geng 50 preference for 149 Index 261

and falsehood explored in Taking a Bath Listening to Yang Jiang Talk About the 79–85, 162–163 Past (Ting Yang Jiang tan tension between expressing and wangshi) 35, 65n2, 67n6, 71n17, repressing political grievance in Yang’s 85n40, 158n3, 172, 172n34, 176, 182 memoirs 149–151, 202–203 oral history-cum-biography of Yang 10, See also Forging the Truth; fraud and 158, 172, 172n36, 229 deception; self-deception on Taking a Bath and Fortress Besieged as Tu Weiming 137n9 “sister works” (jiemei pian) 35n2 on Yang as a “virtuous wife” U, Eddy 139n12, 140n13, 141n17 (xianqi) 175n45 “Yang Jiang’s Two Comedy Treasures” Virgil 116 (“Yang Jiang de xiju shuangbi”) 36, 36n38 Wakeman, Frederic 22 on Yang’s autonomy from Qian’s Walkowitz, Rebecca 7, 8, 12n23 reputation 168 Walpole, Horace 68 on Yang’s quoting of a quatrain by Walter Wang, Lingzhen 157–158n2, 203 Savage Landor 85n40 Wang Shizhen 12, 57, 58 Wu Zhongkuang 49 Wang Wenxian (a.k.a. Quincy Wong) Wuxi 8n15, 21 Qian Zhongshu Historic Home in Wang Xiaobo 138, 151–153, 154 185–186, 186f8.1 Wang Xueli and Ding Bangyong 140n34, and the setting of Qian’s novel Fortress 150–151 Besieged 218 Wang Yangming 174 Yang’s “I Start School at Qiming” (“Wo zai Waugh, Evelyn 220, 221 Qiming shangxue”) set in 188 We Three (Women Sa, Yang’s memoir) 93, 179–209 Xia Chengtao 53 and the anxiety of authoritarian state Xiao, Hui Faye 175 violence 165, 175, 183 and the Cultural Revolution 78 Yang Jiang deaths of Qian Zhongshu and Qian Yuan Arriving at the Margins of Life (Zoudao treated in 69, 191 rensheng bianshang) 93, 168–169, 181, frontispiece of 205f8.4, 206 197–199, 206, 229n7 on the occupation of Shanghai 17–18 autobiographical works of 11–12, 78, wen (pattern) 171–172 as a metaphor for literary See also Six Chapters of Life in a cosmopolitanism 10 Cadre School; We Three; See also classical tradition “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress markings left behind by birds and Besieged”; Yang Jiang, personal beasts 101, 101n22 life Yang’s pun on cuartos 100–101, 103 Baptism. See Taking a Bath Wen Yuanning 6, 8, 8n15 essay collection, On Fiction (Guanyu Wilde, Oscar 4, 21 xiaoshuo) 72 Importance of Being Earnest 207–208 essay collection, Random Recollections Women Sa. See We Three and Random Writings (Zayi yu Wu Jianren 3 zaxie) 78n32, 85n40, 188 Wu Mi 137n9, 171n32 essay collection, Toward Oblivion Wu Xuezhao (Jiang yin cha) 78n31, 191–193 262 Index

essay collection, Upside-down Reflections story, “Don’t Worry, Lulu!” (“Lulu, bu yong (Daoying ji) 72 chou!”) 69–70, 72, 164n17 essay, “My Translations” (“Ji wo de story, “Ghost” (“Gui”) 72, 74–76 fanyi”) 68n10, 82n38, 92n9 story, “God’s Dream” (“Shangdi de meng”) essay, “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress 170, 175 Besieged” (“Ji Qian Zhongshu yu story, “Indian Summer” (“Xiao Weicheng”) 171–172, 184–185, 193 yangchun”) 70–71, 73, 74, 169–170 essay, “On What Seem Like Dreams But story, “Jade Lady” (“Yuren”) 72, 74, 170 are Not” (“Si meng fei meng”) 193 story, “Life’s Work” (“Shiye”) 72, 76 essay, “The Qian Zhongshu who wrote story, “My First Time in the Countryside” Fortress Besieged” (“Xie Weicheng de (“Diyi ci xia xiang”) 78 Qian Zhongshu”) 43–44n6, 49n15 story, “ROMANESQUE” 70 essay, “Remembering Shi Huafu” story, “What a Joke” (“Da xiaohua”) (“Huainian Shi Huafu”) 21n18 68–69, 72–73, 73n22, 77, 93, 167–168, essay, “The Denunciation Meeting” 167n23 (“Kongsu dahui”) 79 translation of Aristotle’s Poetics 108n30 essay, “The Experience of Failure: translation of Marvin, “Is Communism Discussing Translation” (“Shibai de Inevitable?” 91–92, 92n9, 107–108 jingyan: shitan fanyi”) 106n28 Yang Jiang, personal life essay, “Translator’s Postscript” 1966 and 1967: Dark Clouds and Silver (“Yi hou ji”) 107, 107n29 Linings (Bingwu dingwei nian jishi: interviewed by Liu Meizhu 179, 197 wuyun yu jinbian) 78, 148–149, interviewed by Wu Xuezhao. See Wu 149nn32,36 Xuezhao, Listening to Yang Jiang Talk Communist party-state criticism of About the Past 66–68, 67nn6–7 interviews in which she controls both and the cultural climate of the Mao era sides of the conversation 229, 229n7 5, 133–135 novels. See After the Bath (Xizao zhi hou); See also Taking a Bath Taking a Bath (Xizao) Lost in the Crowd: A Cultural Revolution Our Qian Yuan (Women de Qian Memoir (Luchen) 236 Yuan) 173n39, 201 in occupied Shanghai 15–19, 17n7 picaresque spirit in the work of 35, “reeducation” in the countryside 78, 95, 95–96 120, 125–126, 125–126, 129, 133, 134–135, play, Chenxin ruyi. See Heart’s Desire 148 play, Nongzhen chengjia. See Forging travels after the Mao era by 8n16 the Truth Wu Xuezhao’s oral history-cum- plays as feminist comedies of biography of 10, 158, 172, 172n36, 229 manner 14–40passim 144n26 See also Wu Xuezhao, Listening to Yang play, Sporting with the World (Youxi Jiang Talk About the Past renjian) 19, 35 See also Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre play, Windswept Blossoms (Fengxu) 19, School; We Three 35–39 Ye Gongchao (a.k.a. George Yeh) 8n15, 91 pleasure as fundamental to the nature Ye Qisun 141, 141n19 of intellectual work 11, 22n20, 22, Yokomitsu Riichi 7 138, 148 political and moral significance of food Zan Ning 88 and writing 15, 22–23, 194–196 Zau, Sinmay (Shao Xunmei) 7 Index 263

Zhang Lixin 9–10n20, 11, 139, 146–147, 148, 150 Zhao Qi 127 Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodlines: Big Family 204, Zhdanov, Andrei (Ridan Nuofu) 130, 131 205f8.3, 206 Zhu Shengming (fictional character) 164 Zhang Yimou 229 Zhu Xi 50 Zhang Zhupo 210, 225 Zhuangzi 44–45, 48