Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2016 Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in Greater East Asia, 1937-1945 Chun-Yu Lu Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the Asian Studies Commons, East Asian Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Lu, Chun-Yu, "Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in Greater East Asia, 1937-1945" (2016). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 800. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/800 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Committee on Comparative Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Lingchei Letty Chen, Chair Robert E Hegel, Co-Chair Rebecca Copeland Diane Lewis Zhao Ma Marvin Marcus Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in “Greater East Asia,” 1937-1945 by Chun-yu Lu A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2016 St. Louis, Missouri © 2016, Chun-yu Lu Table of Content Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. iv Abstract of Dissertation ........................................................................................ vi Introduction: Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in "Greater East Asia" ....... 1 I. Research Scope, Questions and Main Argument II. Outline of Chapters Chapter 1: Lovable Foe: Re-negotiating the Morality of Love in Wartime Taiwan .......... 13 Introduction I. Desexualizing Love II. The Seduction of Maternal Love III. Love for “Asian” Mother Conclusion Chapter 2: Propagating Love in Enemy’s Tongues: Wu Mansha (1912-2005) and Sinophone Popular Romance in Wartime Taiwan ............................................. 49 Introduction: An Ambiguous “Chinese Alien” in Wartime Taiwan I. Constructing Utopia, with Love: Peach Blossom River II. Propagating Love in War: Dawn of East Asia/The Spring of the Earth III. Imperial Subject, Love, and War: The Song of Dawn and “Father’s Diary” Conclusion Chapter 3: The Utopia of Qing?: Mu Rugai (1885-1961), Loyalism and Popular Romance in Wartime Manchukuo ........................................................................................ 85 Introduction: A Loyalist in Manchukuo I. Paradise Broken: Post-Apocalyptic Republican Revolution II. Genuine Qing: the Remedy for Chaos III. Paradise Reconstructed?: Finding Qing in Manchukuo? ii Chapter 4: A Hysterical Romance: Begonia and Melodramatic Articulation of Victimhood in Wartime Shanghai ..................................................................... 125 Introduction I. Melodramatic Mode of Articulation II. A Romance of Victimhood III. Hysterical Protest Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 Chapter 5: Courtesan or Movie Star?: Eileen Chang and the Production of Intimacy in Occupied Shanghai .............................................................................................. 167 Introduction I. Fabricating Public Intimacy: Eileen Chang as Courtesan II. Interval: Eileen Chang as Accomplice in Making a Courtesan Persona III. Distant Intimacy across Media: Eileen Chang as Movie Star Conclusion Figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 Afterword ............................................................................................................. 213 Bibilography ......................................................................................................... 219 iii Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude goes to my advisors, Professors Lingchei Letty Chen and Robert Hegel. Professor Chen gave me invaluable advice on my research and always challenged me to think and rethink deeper. Professor Hegel read each of my chapters with assiduous comments and meticulous edits, and has been a great mentor supporting my research and my career. I also thank my dissertation examination committee members: Professors Rebecca Copeland, Diane Lewis, Zhao Ma and Marvin Marcus. All of them have spent significant time and efforts on reviewing my research and gave me constructive comments. Professor David Der-wei Wang gave me great insights when I started the project and introduced me to important scholars in the field, which I am most grateful for. I thank Professor Huang Ying-che and Dr. Li Wen-ching for their guidance to resources, archives and conferences and their generosity and friendship; I thank them for always having faith in me. Dr. Zhang Quan and Professor Zhang Juling helped me locate wartime publications when I conducted research in Beijing. The late woman writer, Mei Niang (Sun Jiarui, 1920-2013), who was a contemporary and counterpart of Eileen Chang, introduced me to Manchukuo literature. Dr. May-yi Shaw shared her cozy and beautiful apartments with me when I did my research in Tokyo and Shanghai. Professor Peng Hsiao-yen generously supported me when I was a Visiting Associate at Academia Sinica. Without their help and support, I cannot enjoy my journey when conducting this research. I also thank Professor Chang Hsiao-hung for her comments and kind words in the Nagoya conference, and thank Professor Hamada Maya for editing and publishing my Manchukuo chapter in Hyôhaku no joji: 1940 nendai no higashi Ajia niokeru bunretsu to sesshoku. The writing and research of this dissertation have been made possible by the generous financial support of China Times Cultural Foundation, Washington University in St. Louis and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. I would like to thank my colleagues at College of William and Mary, Yanfang Tang and Calvin Hui. They encouraged me to become a better scholar and teacher, and gave me iv tremendous emotional support. I thank Francie Arries-Cate, Michael Cronin and Jorge Terukina for their comments and feedback on the project. I also thank my friends at Washington University in St. Louis. I especially thank Wei Wang for being my mentor in teaching and a great friend. Finally, I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to my family, who is always supportive and encourages me to pursuit the doctoral degree. My mother and father, my sister, sister-in-law and brother, and my niece and nephew. Thier love and laguther accompany me through everthing. My utmost thanks are to my Ah Kong and Ah Ma, who shared their wartime stories and inspired this project. Ah Kong, chit-pun lunbun si sia ho li e. This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents. Chun-yu Lu April 2016 v Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in "Greater East Asia" Chun-yu Lu Abstract My dissertation examines Chinese popular romances produced and consumed in the Japanese colonized and occupied regions, including Taiwan, Manchukuo, and Shanghai, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. I investigate the complex relationships between emotion, representation, and consumption vis-à-vis wartime discourses and sociopolitical turmoil. Through extensive archival research in Taiwan, China and Japan, I (re)discovered and reevaluated five important wartime popular romance writers and their works. In addition to fiction, sequels, film and stage play adaptations, Japanese translation and readers/viewers’ responses all together create the cultural phenomena of the popular romance genre. In this dissertation I ask the following questions: How is emotion and love articulated vis-à-vis wartime politics? How does the popular romance genre engage with its environment? How could this genre demarcate, blur, cross or reinforce the boundaries between eroticism and patriotism, the individual and the state, and the private and the public? I argue that even though the wartime politics dictate that private emotions be devoted to the public needs (i.e., the War) and hence individual interests should be subjugated to the collective, Chinese writers and readers pursued individuality through the discourses of romantic love and the devotion to the opposite sex rather than to the nation or to the colonizer. Thus, paradoxically, popular romance, even though a mass production, is a collective channel for reaffirming individual existence under political pressure. vi vii Introduction: Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in “Greater East Asia” I. Research Scope, Questions and Main Argument This dissertation examines Chinese popular romances produced and consumed in the Japanese colonized and occupied regions, including Taiwan, Manchukuo, and Shanghai, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945. In this dissertation I investigate the complex relationships between emotion, representation, and consumption vis-à-vis wartime discourses and sociopolitical turmoil. Through investigating popular romance—a popular literary genre that specializes in emotions, feeling, love and human relationships—in the War, I ask the following questions: How are emotions and love